Handling Anxiety (Part 1) – Philippians 4:1-9 Series

This is the first week of three weeks that we're going to be talking about anxiety. The problem of anxiety. It's been suggested that the research shows that 18% of all adults have some kind of an anxiety disorder. We're talking about generalized anxiety disorder, or obsessive-compulsive disorder, or panic attack disorder, or all kinds of fears or phobias. There's all kinds of different disorders that people experience. 18% of the adult population experiences some form of a disorder regarding anxiety. That's a lot of people. But even more stunning than that to me is that young people ages thirteen to eighteen have a high level of anxiety. 25% of young people experienced some form of anxiety disorder. But here's an even a bigger statistic that you need to know. 100% of the people who are alive experience anxiety. You might not have a disorder. But everyone experiences anxiety unless you live in a cemetery. It is a reality that we all must have a plan for. And over the next three weeks, I'm going to take you into the most potent passage of scripture that helps us deal with these challenges.

I would suggest there's a lot of solutions out there for anxiety. People try to find those solutions. I'm not suggesting any other of those solutions are necessarily bad. But I'm going to tell you the strongest one you'll ever find is in God's word in the passage of Philippians 4:1-9.

Now as we look at this passage together over the next three weeks, you're going to see several very important things that will help you. I'd encourage you to take notes, write down some principles that you learn from these things. Because if you don't need it at the moment, you're going to need it tomorrow, you're going to need it soon. So let's look at the passage.

Now what I've done in this first nine verses is I made it really small with the text because I want you to look at all of the nine verses we're going to look at over the next three weeks. In this first slide, I just want to point out all of the emotions, words that exist in these first nine verses. You can see the word love in the first line. And then joy and rejoice is mentioned three times. Peace is mentioned twice. Love, joy, peace. You know those. You are familiar with those emotions. And we're going to see more about anxiety. In fact, let's go to the next slide. You see right in the middle there the word do not be anxious about anything. That's right in the middle of the whole passage that we're looking at. And so we're going to have some solutions about dealing with this.

Look at the very last verse on this page on this slide. I'm going to read it to you. Verse 9 says – What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me–practice these things. I just got to tell you right off the bat here is that what we're going to talk about today requires practice. Practice a new way of thinking. Practice a new way of acting. It’s going to require practice in our lives.

And notice what it says when you practice these things – and the God of peace will be with you. This is the solution for us. In the midst of our anxiety challenges that we have in our lives, we need the peace of God in our hearts. And that peace of God sometimes supernaturally just flows over us. But a lot of the times it's the work of sanctification, day-to-day work, where we're starting to live a new way of thinking. So that life becomes therapy. Every time you get up in the morning, you're thinking differently about life. So that you can learn how to trust the Lord and this God of peace will be with you. Every time you go to work where you experience some anxiety, you will now have to practice to do the things we're going to talk about over the next three weeks so that the God of peace will be with you. Every time you get on an airplane, or get into a crowd, or you experience germs, whatever the issue is that you might have with your anxiety, I want you to know that God of peace will be with you. And we're going to talk about what that looks like in a lot of very small pieces over the course of our time together. But I just got to tell you, it's going to take practice. So whenever you go to work… You ever make that phone call? You know that phone call you got to make sometimes and you feel anxious about it. That's practice. And we're going to talk about what that looks like in very practical terms.