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.
In order to do that, we're going to jump into the first five verses of Philippians. In these verses, we're going to identify four things that we need to do first before we can touch the anxiety in verse 6. In other words, there's some things you have to do before you get to solving anxiety problems so that you're ready, you have the tools in order to do that. It's like an athlete doesn't just jump on the track. The athlete does some work in advance to prepare for the track before he or she gets there. We're talking about the very same thing here. We're talking about doing some precursors for anxiety work in our lives. These four things that we're going to share are things that we need to have kind of going on in advance in our lives before we get there.
There was one time a man asked me to help him to stop smoking. I agreed. But I said him, “Don't stop smoking today.”
He says, “Why not?”
I said, “Well, because you're not ready yet. You don't have what you need in order to stop smoking. We're going to work for at least a couple of weeks here to prepare you to stop smoking before you stop, you see.” It's the precursors we needed to do. He developed a verse card pack that he put in place of the cigarette pack in his pocket. He had different ways he was going to think about the stresses that he experienced in life. He had to prepare first before he actually stopped smoking.
In the same way today I want you to think about four things right from these first five verses in this passage that you will need in order to manage your anxiety. A very important piece of this.
As you know, I work with children through the National Center for Biblical Parenting, I work with parents to help parents help children. A parent will come regularly and say, “My child's having an anger problem or having an anxiety problem.”
I say to them, “Okay, I can help you. We're going to start the program. It's eight weeks long. And we're going to start on anxiety in week four.”
They go, “Whoa, we only got eight weeks. I got to wait till week four?” The answer is yes. Because in the first three weeks, we must deal with some of these basics that we need to develop.
In that same way, Paul is saying there's four things that we need to have going on in our lives if we're going to reduce or manage our anxiety. So are you ready for those four things? Let's go into the passage. Let's see what the Bible has to say. The Bible is going to speak to us today in this passage.
I want you to see in verse 1 it says – Therefore, my brothers, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm thus in the Lord, my beloved. Now I want you to look in those words for a moment and I want you to see how many of them are related to love.
Let's start. My brothers he's talking about, whom I love and I long for. Two different ideas about loving and longing for. He says – my joy and my crown. So he's to be speaking to them in this special way, like my pride and joy. They stand firm in the Lord. That's the other piece we're going to look at. But he says – my beloved. Do you see how many times he's talking about love here? Love is a very important part of what we want to be able to balance with this other word, firm. In fact, if I were you, I would circle the word love and I would circle the word firm because there must be a balance in our lives between love and firmness. And that's going to help us as we come and start facing some of the challenges of our lives when we experience anxiety. We must have this ability to comfort and this ability to be firm when it comes to our own lives and also relating to other people.
In fact, let me just circle those words love and firm. I would say this is going to be our first principle is to balance love and firmness in our lives. To balance these two things. When I talk about love, when you talk about yourself, I think about words like comfort and so on. Because there are ways that we comfort ourselves when we experience anxiety. I don't know what you do when you comfort yourself or how you do that, but we comfort ourselves when we're feeling upset. Some people go and sleep, take a nap. Other people have a bowl of ice cream. I don't know what you do and what you do when you're starting to feel anxious, but we comfort ourselves in various ways.
In fact, let's talk about these two ideas of love and firmness a little bit more and apply them then to ourselves and then apply them to other people as well as we work with other people who have anxiety around us. The word love I'm imagining things like comfort and patience and care and tolerance. The word firm there (and you can write this in your Bible) is the Greek word stekete. And the word stekete has this idea of plant your feet. In other words, I'm not going to move here or there. I'm going to plant my feet so that I'm being firm, in essence.
Now imagine that you're starting to experience some anxiety, and you're saying, okay, now I'm starting to get upset, I'm going to go comfort myself. Well that's not bad. But there has to be some sort of firmness in place, some sort of limit that we set in ourselves. So that we don't go get a cup of ice cream, we go and eat a gallon of ice cream – we got a problem. We don't go to sleep, take a nap, but we stay in bed for two days – we got a problem. So it has to be some comfort is okay, but firmness needs to be there at the same time.
So Paul is saying look, you people, I love you so much. You’re my crown and my joy, but you need to stand firm. You got those two ideas present there. The idea of standing firm is to set some limits, to be able to say no. It's the idea of self-discipline, setting some boundaries.
We have to do this with other people as well because I often as I'm working with families I find that the person with the most anxiety in the family controls the family. So now we can't go out because this person is uncomfortable being in a crowd, or we have a problem here because this person can’t get out the door because they get to wash their hands for a long period of time. It's okay to wash hands for fifteen seconds, but if you're washing them for fifteen minutes, maybe we have a problem here as it’s starting to cause problems on your skin. So do you see what I'm saying? There's got to be this comfort, there's also got to be the boundaries of the limits we set. My ideal picture of this is a mom holding a child, saying, “Okay, I love you so much. But we're not going to wash our hands anymore. We're going out the door.” So there's this love and there's this firmness both being applied in a situation so that we can balance the two ideas. Paul seems to be saying those are two very important things that are going on.
Now I want to tell you why this is so important. Now in order to do that, I want to take you a little bit more into my study of the heart that I've done so you understand a little bit more. Now the heart is this place where God has put a bunch of stuff. It's the processing unit of a person. So when you have these triggers and these problems and challenges in life, they come into the heart and we experience emotions. You could have, you know, the love, joy, and peace emotions, and you could have the anxiety and you could have the sadness and you could have the anger. We choose where we're going to focus in the midst of all of that. But one of the things that we find inside of the heart is that the heart is the wrestling place of the soul. When stuff comes into the heart, we have to wrestle with it.
We get this from three passages I put up here, just you could see that this is one of the purposes of the heart is to wrestle with things as they come in. So when Jesus was talking to the teachers of the law, who were upset that Jesus was healing someone on the Sabbath, that didn't make sense to them in their heart, that didn't work. That was like, how could this person be God or Jesus if He's not obeying what we think He should do? So they have to wrestle with that. So Jesus says these words: Why do you entertain evil thoughts in your heart? Do you see the wrestling with this inside of their hearts?
The Bible says about Mary, the mother of Jesus, that she pondered all these things in her heart. It was a place where she's wrestling. What does all this mean? All these things I'm learning about Jesus, she's pondering those inside of her heart.
The two men that were walking on the road to Emmaus, and Jesus appeared to them and revealed all the scriptures to them. And then they get to the meal and Jesus disappears. And they say to themselves – Were not our hearts burning within us while he talked with us on the road and open the scriptures to us? See, it's the place where we wrestle with things. It's very important for us to wrestle with things inside of our hearts.
Now here's what happens. When you say “no” to a child the child has to wrestle in their hearts. They may get upset about it, but they have to wrestle with their hearts in order to come to acceptance of where they are. When a person has anxiety, they have to wrestle in their hearts with what they're going to do with that and how they're going to proceed with life.
Now imagine a child that you never say “no” to, you always say “yes” because you want them to be happy. What happens in there? If you have a graph of where normal is… I don't know if we can define normal. Most of us aren't normal. Let's just imagine there is a normal and this is normal on the chart. What happens to a child when you never say “no” to them, you always say “yes” is their normal starts to move down the chart to become more demanding. Now they're expecting everybody to say “yes” to them. And when somebody doesn't say “yes,” they get very upset. You see, the wrestling in the heart needs to take place to keep us normal. Can I say that? And I would say normal being godly, being mature, being healthy. I want to use it in terms of godliness, not in terms of normal in some worldly context.
You see, when we wrestle in our hearts then we have to wrestle with is our heart moving in a direction. See, here's what happens. You know it. I know it. We start to feel anxious. And we say this is bad. And now we're wrestling in our hearts. We're laying in our beds wrestling in our hearts, trying to go to sleep, but we can't because we're anxious. Oh, this is bad. And if this bad thing happens, then this is going to happen. And if that thing happens, this is going to be terrible. And if that happens, this is going to be disastrous. Oh this is going to be the end of everything for me. Okay, that's the wrestling in our hearts going the wrong direction. But when we wrestle in our hearts the right direction, then we do what God says and we put the scriptures in our hearts. I will hide God's word in our hearts. When we do that it goes into the wrestling place. So that we're wrestling with things in a way that bring godliness into our emotions and our feelings so that we're not going, “Oh this is going to be terrible,” now we're saying “Okay, I'm going to trust the Lord in the midst of this.”
We must have a plan in our lives to balance the comfort and the firmness. Let's go back to that slide we were looking at this love and firmness in our lives are very important for us to have. There's this balance that must exist in order for us to be godly. There are times you'll know when the anxiety in your life isn't bad. We'll talk about that next week. Anxiety isn't all bad, but it crosses a line and when it crosses the line, you know it because now we got tension with other people in relationships. You've got challenges with other people. And so you need to set some limits on your own anxiety.
But let's talk about others for a moment. Because I think there's this perception, at least I find this in the lives of parents sometimes is that my job is to please my children so they don't get upset. And when that takes place, then bad things start happening inside of the child's heart. There must be some limits set on other people. There's even Christian teaching that sometimes motivates Christian parents to want to turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, you know. All those verses that are really good verses, but we must have the other verses do that talk about discipline and confronting. Those are also very important in a person's life.
When we come to the issue of domestic violence, for example, I tell parents you must take a stand immediately. Because what happens with domestic violence when a teenager hits a parent, for example, and the parent just kind of sloughs it off, domestic violence gets worse unless it's checked. I'm continually telling parents, call the police. Or a husband and wife, call the police. In those kinds of situations, get help. Do not allow that to continue. The same thing is true in yours and my heart when it comes to anxiety. If we allow the anxiety to go on, it becomes a new normal. And now our normal is we worry a lot. We don't want to be worrying. But we don't want that to be our normal. We want our normal to be a godliness. And so we're wrestling in our hearts with God's teaching about who He is and we're bringing that into our lives at the moment. Very important first principle is to balance love and firmness.
Let's go to the second principle, which is found in the next two verses. And you can see the principle at the bottom. Resolve relational conflict. You can imagine that much of the anxiety that we experience in our lives has to do with relationships that we’re involved in. Those relationships are challenging and they cause us to feel anxious about life. So one of the things Paul is going to tell us here is to resolve those things. Resolve the relational conflict in your life. Let's read the verses.
He says in verse 2 – I entreat Euodia and I entreat Syntyche to agree in the Lord. Yes, I ask you also, true companion, help these women, who have labored side by side with me in the gospel together with Clement and the rest of my fellow workers, whose names are in the book of life.
Now we don't know who Euodia is and we don’t know who Syntyche is. This is the only place we have them mentioned in the Bible. We don't know what their problem is, but we do know this. It wasn't a theological problem. If it were a theological problem, Paul would have spoken like he does elsewhere in the scriptures about this is what's true about theology and deal with it. He doesn't do that. In this passage, it's something different than that. And we can also note that it's not a sin issue. Because when there's a sin issue, Paul speaks strongly to sin issues. So it's not a theological issue. It's not a sin issue. There is a disagreement of some kind about something in life, and a strong disagreement that's causing separation between them. The separation is causing a problem for other people too. Other people, obviously, in the church. Can you imagine this letter comes from Paul. “We got a letter from Paul. Let me read it in the church,” and your names are mentioned in it like this. I go, whoa, I don't think I want my name mentioned that way in the Bible for all of history to know that these two ladies had a problem.
And so it says to them, notice it says – I entreat you. He's talking to them independently. He doesn't say I want to entreat you two women together. He says – I entreat Euodia and I entreat Syntyche (to do what?) to agree. And you're saying, agree? But we disagree. How can we agree if we disagree? It doesn't just say agree. Notice what it says. Agree in the Lord. You see that? Agree in the Lord. Because the most important thing in this disagreement isn't what each of us think. It's that God is the most important thing and we're honoring Him. Agree in the Lord. And still, some of you are saying, “Well, the person I'm disagreeing with isn't even a Christian,” or “we can’t agree in the Lord.”
Let me just take you to a couple more verses that Paul has written or said. He's written it in Romans and said it in Acts 24. These are things that Paul says about conflict between other people. Now think, anxiety for many of us has to do with relational challenges. Paul says it this way in Romans 12:18 – If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. So you can't control the other person. You can't control how they're going to respond. You can only control how you respond in a given situation. And as far as it depends on you, live at peace. That's our key word here that we're going to help deal with anxiety. Live at peace with everyone. Do your part.
What does that mean? Well let's look at the next verse where Paul says himself in Acts 24 – I strive always to keep my conscience clear before God and man. I'm doing everything I can to make this relationship right. I want to deal with the conflict that exists.
So one of the things we want to do as we're preparing to manage anxiety in our lives, is we not only want to balance love and firmness, we also want to deal with any relational conflict as far as it depends on us. So that we can sleep well at night. It's often been said that the clear conscience is a soft pillow. Because there's this idea that if I've done everything I can, I don't have to worry about it. That's the idea here that Paul is mentioning.
Well, let's go to the third principle as we continue. Agree in the Lord we talked about. Let's go to the next principle, which is to practice joy. Now remember, we already talked about the word practice, because it's right in the text in verse 9. Do you remember that? Practice these things, he says, and the peace of God will be with you. But now in verse 4 he uses the word rejoice. It is a command in the present tense. In other words, continue to do this over and over again, which is to practice it. Practice this rejoicing. But it's not just rejoicing. It's rejoicing in the Lord. See, it's very important for us to understand that. But this is something that we're practicing. And he says it twice. Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice. And here's what happens. This is very important for us to understand, because this is the practice session when you get up and go to your anxiety-producing work session tomorrow or make that phone call tomorrow. This is what you want to do. You don't want to focus on the problem that generates worry. You want to focus on the solution, which is in the Lord God. When we're focusing on the solution, we're able to rejoice. If we're focusing on the problem, then we're worrying. A very important precursor to dealing with verse 6, which we're going to deal with next week, which is dealing with anxiety. So we must be able to move from the problem to the solution in our thinking. So when you're in bed at night, you're worrying about such-and-such and such-and-such, then you've got to change your thinking to work to focus on the solution, which is trusting the Lord or however God wants to work on this.
Did you know God gives grace for us to deal with our problems? He does not give us grace to deal with the potential problems we're thinking about. So as we're trying to work on these potential problems that might come (and that's what a lot of worry is – potential problems), God doesn't give us the grace for those things. He gives us the grace for today because tomorrow has enough problems of its own (we're going to see in the passage next week as we look at Matthew 6 comparing Matthew 6 to Philippians 4). But what I want you to see here is that we're focusing on the solution, not the problem. This is practice. Rejoicing in the Lord. We're going to focus on the joy that we can have in the Lord. Okay, that's the third and very important principle as we're preparing ourselves to deal directly with anxiety.
The next one, the last one I want to share with you is to lower the intensity. Lower the intensity. Think about your life. Some of us get angry and our intensity is too high or when we start getting frustrated our intensity increases. You just got to lower the intensity a little bit. Practice lowering the intensity. Why do I say that? Well, let's look at the verse. In verse 5 it says – Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. Now the reasonableness word is we're in the English Standard Version because that's what our workbooks are in. But if you were to look at the King James Version, the word there is the word gentle. If you were to look at the New International Version, the word there is translated gentle.
Now what is gentleness? Gentleness is lower the intensity a little bit. Reasonableness. Don't be unreasonable. You’re kind of out there. Be more reasonable. Lower the intensity a little bit. If you're going to deal with anxiety in your life, you want to lower the intensity. Just lower the intensity, just practice. That's the idea, right? Practice being more gentle. Practice not going over the top. There's some people who comfort themselves by blowing up at other people, comfort themselves by getting all upset. Let's set some limits, balance the firmness and the love, by pulling ourselves down a little bit here so that we can lower the intensity.
Well those are the four principles that we're starting with. Next week a lot more as we dig into anxiety itself. But let's just look at those again. Verse 1 talks about balancing the love and the firmness, something we need to practice in our lives. Secondly, to resolve relational conflict, as it says in verses 2-3. Thirdly, practice joy, which takes place in verse 4, focusing on the solution. And number four, lower the intensity. That's what's in verse 5. Now if we start practicing those things, then when we get to verse 6 and it says don't be anxious about anything, we have some handles that we can start working on in order to move there.
But the biggest secret of this passage is on the next slide. As I circle parts of the scriptures, I want you to see four things we talked about today. Look at this next slide. All of them talk about being in the Lord. Each one of the principles I shared with you today are not worldly psychological ideas. The key to managing anxiety in its strongest form is found in the Lord. So stand firm in the Lord. Agree in the Lord. Rejoice in the Lord. And lastly, the Lord is at hand. This idea of the Lord being at hand when it comes to gentleness is lower the intensity a little bit. Okay? God's here, it's okay. Now you might think the Lord is at hand means the Lord's coming soon. Maybe that's what it means. Or it could mean the Lord is present here. He's just near. That's how the New International Version translates it. The Lord is near. He's nearby. So lower the intensity a little bit. It’s going to be okay. God is here.
That's the biggest solution that we can find when it comes to anxiety is to recognize that we are in the Lord. We need to keep focusing ourselves in the Lord, focusing ourselves in the relationship with God that He is near. Because when we do, we're able to give up some of our control, we're able to let it go because the Lord is nearby. We can give it to Him, we can allow Him to control our lives. Oh this is good stuff. I need this in my life and I need to practice this more in my own heart. I trust that God will use this this week in your life. So you’ve got three weeks-worth of practice work to do before we introduce the next session next week. We're going to talk about going right into anxiety and what the scripture says about the suitcase idea. That's what we're going to talk about next week as we move further into this the depth of this passage as it talks about anxiety.
The reason I referenced this in the Lord is because all of us, I believe every one of us as we experience anxiety need to learn how to move closer to the Lord. If you're here today and you've never accepted Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior, you're going, “Whoa, I experience anxiety. I need help here.” Yes, you do. And having Jesus Christ inside of your heart, accepting Him as your personal Savior is so important, so valuable in your life in order to allow you to be close to the Lord. And then of course, all of us who are already Christian, sometimes we're not as close to the Lord as we should be and our anxiety starts to increase. So we want to be in the Lord, we want to be near the Lord, and that's what's going to empower us to manage our anxiety effectively.
