Anxiety: Its Antidote And Prevention

Philippians 4.6 The Apostle Paul writes, Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God. Following that, he says, And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Paul is concerned that the Philippians and us will fall prey to what is one of the most acceptable sins in Christianity, and that is being anxious.

I don't want to get into a long dissertation about it. I do believe that there are exceptions to this. There are instances where anxiety is involuntary and natural or normal. Involuntary does not necessarily make anxiety okay. There are people who will claim that they have involuntary passions for all sorts of evil. And what we acknowledge in those cases is that those desires are the result of our corrupt nature and must be mortified.

But I do believe there's anxiety that is, we'll say, natural. if you're walking into a store and a man walks in, pulls out a gun and threatens to shoot people if they don't give him their wallets. I think there's a natural God-given fight or flight response to those situations that is not the sinful form of anxiety. But what Paul is talking about here is the sinful form of anxiety.

The form of anxiety that is the opposite of faith, the form of anxiety that is not letting reasonableness be known to everyone, which is what Paul tells the Philippians in chapter 4 verse 5, they ought to be doing. and so as we talk about anxiety and I know this can be a heated topic I just want to encourage listeners that according to the scripture the peace of God which surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus if as the antidote to anxiety you are taking everything to the Lord in prayer making your supplications to him and professing your thanksgiving to him. And so the idea is, is that while you're anxious, while you are living in a state of worry, while you are living in a state of thinking about things that you cannot control, by going to the Lord and being thankful for what he has already provided, it takes your mind off of the thing you are coveting and it puts your mind on the things he's already given you. It allows you to express your contentment with what he's provided instead of think about what may or may not be your future.

That's generally what anxiety boils down to is there's something I want that I'm afraid I won't get or there's something I don't want that I'm now afraid I'm going to get. And so we live in a state of anxiety or fear about those situations. One of the key phrases in Philippians 4-7, I think, is that the peace of God will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.

Throughout the Bible, the heart is used as the center of all thought and emotion in a human being. We say the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately sick, who can know it? But in this passage, Paul is trying to address, I think, the whole man. He's saying the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, which is his own episode in itself, but the peace of God will guard your hearts and your minds.

So I think what Paul's telling us is that if you take your request to God with thanksgiving and you bring everything to him, not only will that help you if you are anxious, but it will prevent anxiety by guarding your heart, your center of emotion, the part of your being that is driven by, will say sensuality. And I don't mean that in a bad way, just that it senses things. And also it will guard your mind.

So you have this mind that is able to be reasonable. Verse five, let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand. So you have this mind that is able to reason and you have this heart that is capable of great emotion. You can rejoice in the Lord, like verse 4 says, you can also be despondent or despairing. And God's peace can guard both of those things.

And by guard them, I believe that we're not talking about healing after they've already fallen into, we'll say, the sin of anxiety. But by guarding it, you're actually protecting yourself from being there in the first place. So we guard things so that they don't even encounter the danger. And so when you think about the flow of the text here in Philippians 4, we're told not to be anxious after being told to be reasonable because of the Lord's presence and imminence in our lives We told that we ought to pray to him and prayer all by itself Even pagans know that prayer does something There something cathartic about simply voicing our concerns Oftentimes I think that makes them seem not so big to us, even people who are idolaters and don't pray to the one true God.

But in our case, once we've handed over to God and we've said, thy will be done and we've handed over our requests, we've made our requests known to him, there's a peace that can come to us whereby we know that God's will is actually what we want. We don't want God to prevent the bad thing that we're anxious about if that's what God knows is best for our sanctification. And we start to be sanctified through the effort of even bringing these requests to God.

Now Paul continues, he says, Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. So Paul tells us to think about the things that are true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, excellent, and worthy of praise. And if your mind has not already gone to the idea that you must think about Jesus Christ, the person, if you have not already gone there, I want to bring you there right now, that he is true.

Jesus Christ is honorable. Jesus Christ is just. Jesus Christ is pure, lovely, commendable, and excellent, and he is worthy of praise. And so when you think about these things, one of the things that Paul wants us to think about is just the glorious God-man, Jesus Christ. Think about his atoning death on your behalf. Think about his perfect life lived so that you could be accounted righteous in the sight of God.

Think about his virgin birth and the shame that he lived with. And yet he suffered the shame looking forward to the joy that he would be crowned with. He had his focus on something greater than his present circumstances that allowed him to be content with wherever God had him. If there was ever a person in the history of creation who had a right to complain that his circumstances were not what he deserved, it was Jesus Christ.

And yet Jesus Christ is the only one of us who has lived and not complained about his circumstances. And so we think about the perfections of Jesus. And we can think about other wonderful and true things. God's word is true. God's word is pure. And it's just.

There are things that are honorable in this world. Maybe not in the purest sense. but you may have an honorable father or an honorable boss, or maybe your wife is lovely or commendable or excellent. Certainly, oftentimes our children are worthy of praise. So there's things we can think about, blessings God has bestowed on us that in Philippians 4.8, Paul wants us to turn our mind to.

And as we start to think about these good things, as we start to think about truth, honor, justice, purity, loveliness, and commendability, we're now no longer thinking about the thing that was causing the anxiety. And so the analogy is that it is impossible for me to not think about something unless my focus is on something else. So let me try to repeat that.

Let me give you an analogy. If I tell you don't think about a purple horse, it's impossible. Because as soon as I just said purple horse, you're thinking about a purple horse. If you tell yourself, stop thinking about the purple horse, you're literally thinking about the purple horse in the effort to stop but if you change your focus if you just start thinking about literally anything else you will stop thinking about the thing that you couldn't not think about so if you start thinking about a green turkey you eventually thoughts of purple horses would fade away I think that's part of the goal in Philippians 4, 6 through 8, is you're thinking about something that's causing anxiety.

You are now worried about the future. You're coveting something you don't have, or you're afraid that something will happen that you have no control over, something that you're not trusting God will sovereignly have complete control over and will work for your best. And you can't pull yourself out of it by thinking about it more. You can't even think about the fact that I need to stop thinking about it.

You divert yourself to that which is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, excellent, and worthy of praise. And all of a sudden, these other things will fade away. the things of earth grow strangely dim in the light of his glory and grace. And so then what Paul says after telling you to think about these things in Philippians 4 9 Paul says what you have learned and received and heard and seen in me practice these things and the God of peace will be with you so first he tells us the peace of God will guard our hearts and minds because of the prayer and then I think he's repeating himself here because then we're thinking about the good things we're thinking about the things we should be thankful for and then he says in 9 what you've learned and received and heard and seen in me practice these things that which we think about will become our practice this is a tautology if you will or maybe it's an axiom maybe it's not a tautology excuse that God told us to think about some things, and then afterwards he's telling us we're going to practice some things.

And I think it's a truism that what we think about, we will do. Eventually, the longer we think about things, we'll do them. And so I think if we set our focus on things above us, I'll say, if we set our minds on these lovely and honorable things, we will start to practice those things as well. If we set our eyes on examples we have in Christ, you know, Paul calls himself an example in Christ.

We'll look at verse 3, 17, brothers join in imitating me, he says, and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example you have in us. So he exhorts the believers in Philippi that they're to keep their eyes on him and follow the example of other men like him. And so Paul knows if they keep their eyes on him, they'll eventually follow in the right direction.

They will eventually imitate him as he imitates Christ. And so he says in Philippians 4.9 to practice those things. And I think the practice will naturally follow. And he promises the God of peace will be with you. It's a reminder of the same promise from verse 7, the peace of God will guard your hearts and minds. The peace of God guards your hearts and minds.

That's almost the same as saying the God of peace is with you. An interesting word in verse 9 is he says what you have learned. What you have learned. He's not talking about what you felt. He's not talking about what you sensed. He's not talking about what it means to you.

You go to Ephesians 4, verse 17. Paul says, Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of their minds. So it's a warning. You're born again. Don't walk as the Gentiles. Their minds are futile.

Their foolish hearts are darkened. Okay, listen. He says they are darkened in their understanding. So basically they can't understand things. Their reasonableness cannot be made known to everyone. He says they're alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them.

He says due to the hardness of their heart. Now listen to how he describes these Gentiles. He says they become callous. So they're unfeeling, right? They're almost desensitized in a sense. He says, and have given themselves up to sensuality.

So they become so callous and desensitized to what's normal and to what our conscience bears witness to us is wrong, that they can actually go beyond what their senses should allow for. So sometimes because people are so callous, that's why they require excitement and more sensuality, because of their hardness of heart and their callousness. This is why for some people it's boring to read the Bible, but it's exciting to see naked people dance on a stage or partially naked people.

This is why the reading through the New Testament for people can be laborious, but they'd be happy to watch a pastor guy get up and try to give a funny message because they've become callous. and they need more sensuality to even feel it all and so they crave that and so if you keep your soft heart you may you may be able to still be pricked by the pure word of god and and enjoy the excitement that is god's revelation to you because your heart is not hard to it but but let me let me keep going ephesians 4 19 he says they're greedy to practice every kind of impurity so we have this impurity it's it's sensuality and then he says but that is not the way you learned christ and so it's the same concept as philippians 4 9 what you have learned in Philippians 4.9, and received and heard and seen in me practice these things. So Paul's reminding them that Christianity was not some blind leap of faith into the idiocy of believing supernatural things with no reason. This is something we learn.

We learn about a person. We learn about a reasonable and rational, intelligent, all-wise being. That is what we learn about in Christianity. It's not something we feel. No, there are feelings that come with it. There are senses that we have.

But what we can trust is what we have learned from God's revelation about himself in his word. and so we are told not to be anxious and then we are immediately given antidotes to it going to God by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving verse 6 And then we are given guardrails to prevent it verse 7 The peace of God which surpasses understanding is going to guard our hearts and our minds. Assuming we do what verse 8 says, focus on the pure and the just and the true things. and then if what we have learned is practiced if when jesus told his disciples go into the world and make disciples of all nations baptizing them in the name of the father and of the son of the holy spirit teaching them to obey all that i have commanded you if we receive that teaching if we learn that teaching and if we practice those things the god of peace will be with us It is this idea that we see it and hear it in others that helps us sometimes. That is why Christianity is not just a religion with a book and an individual.

There's relationships we have in the church with one another where we actually see God's sanctification played out in somebody else's life. And we learn and receive that by hearing it and seeing it in others. and we imitate others who are imitating Christ. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's not dangerous. It just needs to be done with caution. And we shouldn't do it in a vacuum.

You shouldn't have just a single person you're always emulating. You should have multiple Christians around you. That's what the church is. The church is a body of believers that come together and edify one another with their variety of gifts. And so that is the antidote to your anxiety. Stop.

Stop focusing on the anxiety. Don't make excuses for it. Don't call it something it's not. Don't make it like it's an affliction that you've received. It's not a cross you're bearing. the biblical concept of anxiety is that you are in sin and you are sinful in your flesh and in your nature. And you need to mortify that.

You need to mortify these deeds of the flesh that are opposed to the desires of your spirit. And God tells us ways to do this. And people throughout Christian history have testified that these things help. And a lot of times, God does not deliver people quickly. It seems that there are forms of anxiety or depression that people are afflicted by at times.

But I think that we would do well to take very seriously that there is sin involved, even if the sin is deep-rooted and it's not, we'll say, voluntary. so I just want to conclude just by looking really quickly at the way this letter ends Paul finishes this portion from Philippians 4.10 to 4.13 he finishes this portion about anxiety and contentment reminding us that no matter what the situation we can be content with God and then he kind of talks about how the Philippians were very helpful to him financially and he praises them for that and after praising them for that he goes to Philippians 4 20 and he says to our God and Father be glory forever and ever amen so he's he's quick to ascribe the glory to God and then he closes the letter by saying greet every saint in Christ Jesus not just your buddies Jesus said for if for if you greet only your brothers what more are you doing than others Do not even the Gentiles do the same thing. Greet every saint in Christ Jesus. This should be a purposeful effort on your part at church on Sunday and in other environments to greet people, especially the Christians.

He says the brothers who are with him greet you. So this is Paul and Timothy, and there was more brothers with him, Epaphroditus. And then he says all the saints greet you. so not only does Paul greet them and Timothy and the ones that are with them but all the saints greet them especially those of Caesar's household so there was someone's house who was saying hey make sure the Philippians know make sure the Philippians know that we love them and Paul says the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit so he wants to confer upon them grace he wants to wish them God's grace and so he ends the letter by thanking them for the gifts they've received giving them a loving greeting and wishing grace upon them I want you to turn to Philippians 1 look at how he begins the letter this is a really neat almost a chiasm I'm not a Greek or a Hebrew scholar but I know the word chiasm.

Look at Philippians 1. He says, Paul and Timothy, servants of Christ Jesus, to all the saints in Christ Jesus who are at Philippi with the overseers and deacons. So there's his greeting, his introduction. And he says, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. So he began the letter by wishing upon them the very things that the letter concluded reminding them about.

Grace to you, greetings from us, and the peace from God our Father. that surpasses all understanding, the peace of God. That is what he's wishing upon them. Remember in chapter 4, he thanked them for their gifts. He says in Philippians 1, I thank my God in all my remembrance of you, always in every prayer of mine for you all, making my prayer with joy.

So he prays with joy. He prays with thanksgiving, verse 3. He's rejoicing, verse 4. and then in verse 5 he says because of your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now I think that at least in part that's a reference to their financial gifts that they provided not only their participation in the gospel and maybe even their own preaching of it.

I just think it was kind of neat when I saw that the letter opened and closed with rejoicing in the God of peace, greetings and wishes of grace to each other, and thankfulness for a monetary gift. And so I hope this was edifying, I hope it was interesting. I certainly found this to be a wonderful book to study for all of 2018. I studied this book, and I've been going through it, just this last month with my children in our devotions.

And it's amazing how much more I'm seeing as we go verse by verse through it. It's a wonderful little book. It is I don like to say easy but it relatively easy to memorize this entire book I think it only 104 verses You can do two verses a week You can get it done in a year. Four verses a week, you can get it done in six months. It flows very well. It flows logically, and the language is not difficult.

And there's already a number of passages that you probably are familiar with and it wouldn't take you long to work on and memorize. And so this is my exhortation to you is to study the book of Philippians. Do the John MacArthur thing. Read it every day for a month. It won't even take you 10 minutes. At the end of a month, you'll probably have half of it memorized if you do that anyway.

Commit to memorizing this book. if it sounds like a lot to you it's probably something you should try I can't even explain the blessing that this book has been to my family and so I hope that you will heed that advice I hope that you will think about Paul's wisdom in dealing with anxiety in your life and I hope that I will see you again next time thank you for listening to Be a Berean with your host Michael Poglin I am a writer at thingsabove.us and I also have a personal website, michaelcoghlan.net You can contact me by emailing me, michael at thingsabove.us I hope that you have been encouraged to search the scriptures.