| Anxiety attacked Phil 4. 6-7 20 February 05 pm |
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English Standard The Message God
exhorts us not to be anxious or to fret about anything.
He does not however suggest that we shouldn’t be concerned for
those in need around us. A
right sort of concern or compassion can shape our lives in positive ways so
that we respond in love to hurts that we see around us.
But anxiety is a different thing altogether.
It is destructive and always has a negative influence on our lives,
and the lives of others. Definition:
“Anxious” - to be pulled in different directions, literally
pulled apart! We
all know the physical side effects of anxiety e.g. headaches, poor
digestion, ulcers etc. If left
unchecked it can grip us and twist us up inside.
It always robs us of our joy in life and we must be careful not to
let it mould us into bitter/twisted people! Spiritual
anxiety is effectively wrong thinking and wrong feeling about the people
around us, and our circumstances. When
we are anxious then we have a wrong perspective on life.
It is the devils strategy always to attack a right perspective on
life. He works hard to make
mole hills look like mountains, he wants us to be self-reliant, to compare
ourselves unfavourably with others, to become despondent at our failures, to
give up because we feel worthless, to think we are alone in facing a problem
and to forget both God’s ability and desire to help us! Does any of this
ring bells with you? Sometimes
our anxiety wells up inside from our own feeling of worthlessness, but quite
often in life we are subjected to all sorts of external pressures and
warnings that can make us worry. It
is estimated that those of us who commute regularly in the southeast are
bombarded each day by up to 3,000 advertising messages clamouring for our
attention! Are we buying the
right magazines, do we have the latest gadgets, what about the type of
hair-shampoo, have we got sufficient insurance, are we taking the best
vitamin supplements? Etc etc. According to the advertisers I should use a
different balance of supplements now I am over 50! Does anyone agree with me
that life these days is just too complicated sometimes?
We
can even find that external warnings start us worrying about things that we
didn’t even know were there to worry about in the first place.
There is a classic and rather amusing example of this in respect of
some signs that the council have erected alongside a stretch of the river
Cray near where I live. A this
point the river runs in a man-made cutting alongside the road, the water is
all of 9” deep and about 8 or 9 feet below road level.
The cutting is well fenced and the pavement alongside the railings is
nice and even. Here
is the context of the signs… So
you can see that if you are walking along minding your own business but
happen to trip on the nice even pavement and fall over the fence, into the
river you must beware the underwater obstacles!!
Such signs to me seem both OTT and superfluous… So,
just how do we deal with anxiety in our lives?
The
world so often looks to drugs, such as tranquilisers or alcohol, to
alleviate anxiety. Or to wise
words, promising the secret to peace of mind through meditation and voyages
of inner discovery. Such things
fail however to provide lasting peace in the light of the harsh realities of
life, moreover they fail to deal with the problem of our sin, which can be
the root cause of much anxiety. They
may provide some sort of temporary respite but they do us more harm than
good, as they are ultimately little more than escapism. God’s
word exhorts us NOT to be anxious about ANYTHING…
It only takes one event or situation to make us worry and take away
our inner confidence and because of that God says quite clearly that we
should not therefore fret about anything – not even just one thing!!
How perverse we are sometimes, determined to hold onto something that
we know that we should really let go of. God’s
word exhorts us NOT to be anxious about ANYTHING…
BUT - and here is the key BUT - instead of worrying Paul says that we
should pray in the “right sort of way” about EVERYTHING in order that we
might know the peace of God in our hearts. Just
what is the “right sort of way” to pray? Well, we are told that our
prayer should: -
(a)
Firstly be about everything. Let
us look at these in turn. (a)
We are called to pray about EVERYTHING not just about the “big”
things! How easy it is to slip
into the sort of prayer life that is only awakened when we are facing some
sort of major problem. What a strange relationship it would be between
parents and children if the only time that they ever talked to one another
was when they were facing some sort of disaster!
Yet that is so often the way we treat our heavenly father.
Jesus exhorts us to pray for our daily bread - to talk to God about
everything. Remember that
little things, which are not dealt with, are apt to grow into big things. (b)
“By prayer” - here the emphasis is on us spending time with God,
for who he is. Worshipping Him
in adoration. It is by doing
this that we remind ourselves that God is big enough to solve the problems
that we can’t. Could it be
that one of the greatest problems in the church today is that Christians
just don’t pray. We don’t
communicate with the God that we claim to know – we teach, we preach, we
sing but we can’t spare God 5 minutes of our time.
Until we learn to truly pray we will have anxieties.
In order that we have a prayer life we must be comfortable in talking
to God, which means we must build a relationship with Him, we must learn to
trust Him and all of this takes TIME. You
won’t begin to get a right perspective on life unless and until you spend
time in His Word and talk with him… (c)
With thanksgiving… Well, just
what is the result of such praying?
The
firm promise of a “peace that surpasses all understanding” The first
thing to note however, is that this does not necessarily mean that God will
remove the problems which were the original cause of our anxiety.
On the other hand he may indeed do just that or grant us respite from
them. Joy, my sister-in-law provided me with a wonderful illustration of God’s answer to prayer in this area during a phone conversation I had with her last week! She works part-time for a few days each week but even this can be a real struggle in the light of her problems with neck and back. She is often in much pain and had got to the point recently when she just could not cope with work any more. Her “supplication” or “petition” was more of a cry from the heart in desperation - saying that she just could not see how to continue and asking God for some respite. Well the next day she had a telephone call at home from someone in the church who rang to ask her how many hours a week that she was currently working and how much she was being paid…. Joy answered and went on to ask why it was that this lady wanted to know such information. The answer, which stunned her, was that God had specifically spoken to this lady and told her that Joy needed a break for a couple of weeks from work in order to rest and more than that it was for her to pay the money that she would have earned in order to allow her to take the time away from work… WOW… The
peace that we are promised surpasses all understanding and is a peace that
the world cannot provide. Paul
tells us that such peace guards our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.
The picture here is of being guarded and protected from invasion like
a fortress garrison protects a castle. Our
hearts need to be guarded, for they are susceptible to wrong feelings and
our minds need to be guarded against wrong thinking.
It is when we are so guarded by the peace of God that we know a quiet
confidence within regardless of the circumstances, people or things that
would otherwise take away our joy. In
conclusion: - 1.
This wonderful peace, this freedom from anxiety, is the result of
letting our requests be known to God through the right kind of praying:
2. We need to note however that all of this is possible THROUGH Jesus Christ. He is the source of every spiritual blessing from God, including the peace that surpasses understanding. We must be “IN Christ” if we desire the peace that Paul writes about in Philippians. If we are, then we can indeed know the peace of God inside us no matter what is happening on the outside! Remember that Paul is well qualified to share such matters with us, as he was a man who had discovered true peace of mind notwithstanding that he was in prison at the time and might soon become a martyr! Application: Jay has impressed upon those of us who preach the importance of applying God’s word to our lives. Just how can we apply what we have considered tonight to our lives? Well simply by taking God at His word and acting accordingly. My challenge to you this coming week is therefore to prove that this promise of God works, by praying as you have been shown and allowing God to do the rest. Let us seek to put into practice the principles we have thought of tonight and, as we experience the joy that can only come through true peace of mind, then let us share this with others we meet. I challenge each one of us to take God at His word and to come back next week and share the results with one another…
© Jay Colwill |