Handling Anxiety (Part 3) – Philippians 4:8-9 Series

Sharon was twenty years old when she went to her physician because she felt like she just needed to make a change in her life. She felt like she was overweight, she felt like she was tired all the time. She felt like she was getting sick more than she needed to get sick. And she just knew she needed to make some changes. So she went to her doctor and the doctor said, “Okay, let's do some tests. Let's do some evaluations. Why don't you do a food journal where you keep track of what you eat. Why don’t you do an exercise journal. Why don't you track how much water you're drinking. Why don't you track your sleep. We'll do some blood tests and that kind of thing. Let’s see where you're at.”

So a couple of weeks later, she comes back in and the doctor says to her, “Look, one of the things we need to work on here is we need to help you change your diet because your diet has a lot of junk food in it.” Now this is kind of new for Sharon. She's trying to adjust. Junk food. Let's talk about what junk food really is. And so the doctor defined it. Junk food is high in calories, high in sugar, fat, salt, it's low in nutrients (that is, things that would be good for you). So you want to avoid these kinds of things. And she looks at the list. And she says, “If I'm going to avoid those things, what am I going to eat?” Okay. Now I know you've been in that experience, like many of us have. You go, “If I have to cut out all those things, what am I going to eat instead?” And so the doctor helped her find these things that she could eat. I know that many of you who have gone through that experience as well. You've come to the fact that I've got to change my diet. And when I change my diet, I need to focus on eating different things in order to be healthy to strengthen my immune system.

We're going to take that same analogy and I want to apply it to our mental health today, not just our physical health. But I want to talk about spiritual junk food. I want to talk about junk food for the mind. But I don't really want to talk about just the junk food because Paul is going to help us know what to focus on. If we focus on what we can't think about, we're going to spend time thinking about those things. We want to focus on what God wants us to focus on. And when we do, that's going to help us deal with our anxiety. It's going to help us deal with any of the challenges that we have. We want to turn our thinking to some healthy thinking. That's the idea today. What do we do in the way of thinking that's healthy.

If we're going to deal with anxiety in our lives, there's a lot of solutions. You can google “solutions for anxiety” and you will find millions of websites that talk about this. There are a lot of solutions out there for dealing with anxiety. But the greatest solutions that you will ever find for dealing with anxiety in your life are the ones that have to do with spiritual health. If we can embrace this idea of understanding our spirituality ties into our emotions, we will have made a significant difference in our own mental, spiritual, and emotional health.

Now I want to take the nine verses that we've been looking at for the last three weeks. I'm going to throw them up as I've done each week. Notice right in the center it says – Do not be anxious about anything. This is a passage dealing with anxiety. All nine verses are really helpful. We looked last week at five different principles that we can apply to our lives about anxiety for the week before. And today we're going to look at verses 8 and 9 to finish off this particular passage, to try to understand what it means and what we're talking about in the midst of this whole subject of anxiety.

But before I go to the other parts of this passage and zero in, look at the whole passage for a moment, because what I wanted to do was circle all of the parts that reference God. God, Lord, Jesus. Eight times in nine verses Paul references the Lord. I think we could stop right there and we can just say, look, there's there is a tendency for us to exclude the Lord when it comes to our emotions. And if we would include him more, we would have better emotional health. That's the first observation I would make just as the big picture of this passage.