Never Alone

Message Transcription

Well, if you have your Bible invites you to open it to Philippians Chapter four, we'll get there in just a minute. We're launching into a series that I previewed a little bit last week as we had to pivot with the weather change. And I appreciate all the grace that you all showed and being a part of that one invite those of us who are here this morning. Those are online to to open up your Bibles to Philippians four, we're going to spend some time thinking together about what it means to not be anxious, to not have to live an anxious life, just to see the the epidemic of anxiety in our world. All you have to do is is travel over to your favorite News Feed, whether that's online or on the television. It seems like the most important goal they have is to strike fear in us because they know if they can make us afraid or if they can make us anxious, or if they can get us worried, then they have us. November of 2020 The National Bureau of Economic Research published a paper entitled Why Is All COVID 19 News Bad News? Kind of an interesting study that was done. A couple of researchers just noticed Why is it seem to be that all the news that we hear about, it's negative. In fact, as they did a deep dive, they went in and studied over 300 different news outlets, both in the U.S.

and around the world, and found that in the U.S., the national media, 87 percent of COVID coverage was negative. That includes your favorite news sources, I'm sure, right, if you're a Fox News watcher or MSNBC or any major U.S. retail retail news outlet, maybe they are a retail outlet sometimes. Eighty seven percent of their coverage was negative. Now compare that to 51 percent of international news outlets. Fifty three percent of U.S. regional news outlets kind of our local media and sixty four percent of scientific journals now, why all the negativity? Well, as it turns out, that's what we want, isn't it, when they continue to pursue in this research what they found the most read and most shared stories on Facebook are guess what? Negative. They tended to be the most negative. It's a little thing called consumer demand that the market is trying to meet the demand. Media outlets are simply responding to the customers that Facebook and and other news outlets, other social media, you know, have algorithms now. What they do is they follow and look at what you read and what you're looking at, and then they give you more of what you're looking at. But what's the cost to our souls? Is there any reminded us are are not our souls the most important part about us? What's the cost when we give ourselves to this negativity? In October 2020 or 2021, the American Psychiatric Association published this online opinion poll found that 62 percent of Americans feel more anxious today than they did a year ago.

According to the CDC, between August to 20 and February of 21, the percentage of adults with recent symptoms of anxiety, depression, those kinds of things increased from 36 to 41 percent. Anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness in the U.S., affecting 40 million adults, one in five roughly. Anxiety is a treatable. Disorder, but yet only about a third of those suffering from it ever receive treatment. Yeah, well, Carl, why are you participating in giving us the bad news about anxiety? Well, because the gospel and certainly the Bible has a lot to say about anxiety in our lives, a fear and worry. In fact, it's the most common command in scripture is found over 200 different times do not fear. We don't have to be afraid. We studied this in our last Lenten series, learning to live in the flow of the spirit of of the the dangers of mismanaged anxiety, how it cuts us off from the flow of God's spirit and it robs us of our joy. Preoccupies our minds and it makes us makes temptations seem attractive to us. Why? Because we want to do anything we can to get our mind off of whatever anxious anxiety worry fear is consuming us. But not only that anxiety mismanaged anxiety, it can poison our relationships because it paralyzes our ability to trust others and ultimately we find to trust God.

But the anxiety is not the life that's promised to us in scripture, it's not the life that Jesus called his followers to. In fact, we looked at this just for a minute last week. I want to invite you to turn over to Matthew six, if you have it available. Jesus says these words about dealing with worry and anxiety. He says, Don't worry about your life, what you'll eat or drink or about your body. What you wear is not life more than food in the body more than clothes. Can any one of you by worrying at a single hour to your life? And why do you worry about clothes? So don't worry, saying what will we eat or drink or what shall we wear for the pagans run after all these things? And your heavenly father knows that you need them, but seek first the kingdom and his righteousness and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. You know these nine verses, six different times Jesus says you don't have to worry. You don't have to spend your life consumed in worry. God's desire for us is never to live an anxious life, but to live a life that's actually marked by peace. It's always been his desire for us.

The writer of Ecclesiastes said it this way. What do people get for all the toil and anxious striving with which they labor under the sun? All their day's their work is grief and pain. And some of us say amen. Even at night, their minds do not rest. This, too, is meaningless. If you read through Ecclesiastes, you, you get the sense of the writer who's tried it all out and said, What I find is an anxious life where I spend so much time consuming my work chasing after that. What I find is at the end of the day, my mind is still racing and it's still meaningless. This almost would write these words Search me God. No, my heart. Test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there's any offensive way in me and lead me in the way everlasting. See a life filled with mismanaged anxiety in any form, whether it's our work or our thoughts or our emotions or our relationships, it's not the life that's truly life. See, the Kingdom Life, the one that Jesus calls us to, is a life led by his spirit. That bears peace, the psalmist would write in peace, I will lie down and sleep for you alone, Lord, make me dwell in safety. Her Jesus promised peace, I leave with you, my peace, I give you, I do not give to you as the world gives, do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.

With the words that Mike Deaver read for us just a few moments ago, from Paul's letter to the church and Philip, I don't be anxious about anything. Now again, I know for some of us, those are kind of confusing words because we're living in a world where there seems to be a lot to be anxious about, a lot to be worried about. But the promise of those who follow Christ God's desire for those who are his is a life marked with peace, not mismanaged anxiety. And so I want us to spend a little time at the beginning of the year, especially in the midst of a crazy time of life to think about the role that anxiety mismanaged anxiety can play in our lives. You may have noticed I keep correcting myself if I misspeak, that it's mismanaged anxiety in our lives. I keep saying that. Why? Because we all deal with anxiety. Every single one of us. I know for some of us, given our personality styles and and just our own temperaments, our own brain chemistry, even we tend to deal with greater or lesser levels of anxiety. Some of us are prone to more, some to less. But no matter what anxiety is a part of the human experience, it's a naturally occurring phenomenon, if you will, and it's important that we talk about this because sometimes in church, this struggle with anxiety, especially those who struggle with it more than others, we tend to reduce it to well, it's just a lack of faith.

If you just trusted God more, if you just believed more, if you just prayed more or studied more and learned more than you would have less anxiety. And the hard part is there are many times in our life where we do need to pray more to read more, to study more to to serve. The research has taught us some important things that sometimes anxiety has a chemical root in our brains. That we can't by just praying about it or by thinking hard about it or by wanting it more produce more neurotransmitter gaba, the neurotransmitter that helps us feel calm. We we can't overcome our brains that way. And so God's gifted some pretty amazing researchers and scientists to develop some ways to help us regulate those levels. And sometimes we need that kind of help. Sometimes it's not our GABA levels, but but trauma. Other experiences in our life that have caused us to wrestle and struggle with anxiety. Unlike the ways that some people around us and we need to sit down with a trained Christian therapist who can help us sort through our anxiety, sort through the sometimes overwhelming emotions. Staff felt this kind of anxiety before, and I've sought counseling for these kinds of problems, why? Because I have felt the way to feeling overwhelmed by anxiousness and how to sort through it and understand it.

In fact, that's why we have a counseling center here at Broadway. We have a couple of counselors, Randy and Mackenzie, who are trained to help people deal with these kinds of questions and struggles. And so if that's you, I invite you to to get plugged in or come see me afterwards. I love to help you get connected with one of our Christian counselors say anxiety is a part of life. It's something we all have to deal with at varying levels. And so what we may need may look a little different based on our own temperament and and personalities. But yeah, we all need some help. Some of us just need a group. You need a group to belong to, to be a part of other folks who are who are wrestling with these hurts and habits and hang ups in our lives that have caused us to seek things that don't actually help. In fact, that's why we have celebrate recovery. When my favorite people here at Broadway Camille Allen, Camille Whitney, now I know her as Camille on our first newer glad dykes. Not in here. He'd have my height on that one. But just this week, Camille celebrated her brag on a little bit, Camille, 10 years of sobriety. Now, can we get an Amen church? That's a big deal. Now, what's interesting is Camille is not just said, well, that's I'm done with that.

What's next? She recognizes there's there's a life that I have to pursue because if not, I can feel overwhelmed and I could start to seek ways, behaviors, patterns of of interactions that aren't helpful. And anxiety is one of those things that causes us to go in that direction. So the goal of my series this, this beginning of the year is not. It's not just that it's some type of self-help ideology. My goal in helping us understand anxiety is to learn we don't have to feel ashamed or be embarrassed because we we struggle with it, it's actually a part of life. Life can be scary and unpredictable. There's a lot of things that are out of our control. Really, my my hope is that we've learned some of the purpose behind anxiety, like why is it there? What's the point of it? And how do I manage it well so that it doesn't overwhelm me and it doesn't steal my joy or preoccupy my mind or poisoned my relationship with people that I care about or even wreck my relationship with God? Wants to think about how we manage our anxiety, because I believe it's one of the main roadblocks for us really becoming a follower of Jesus, you know, we talked some last week about the difference between saying I am something versus I'm, I'm practicing becoming something. I think anxiety is one of those obstacles mismanaged anxiety that causes us to think we can't really do it.

But Jesus taught and believed that we could overcome a life of anxiety. And so I want us to spend some time thinking together here at the beginning of the year about what that might look like for us as God's people, and if we were able to learn to manage it better, what what might happen in our lives, in our community, in our world if we live that way, I'm indebted to a man named Steve Kass, who wrote a book a couple of years ago called Managing Leadership Anxiety. It's a book that stretched me. I went to it for one purpose only to discover it was actually God was doing some different work on me, helping me face my own anxieties. Help me understand how to manage it better so that as I led or as I served, that I would do so in the spirit in which God has gifted me. One of the things that Steve says about anxiety is it's actually intended to be this early detection system in our lives. That's something standing in the way of her well-being. When this warning system is working properly. When anxiety is doing the job it was designed to do, it actually helps us respond appropriately. So if we see our child playing in an unsafe place, that warning system goes off. We feel a little anxious and and we're invited to respond in a specific way. So the problem comes when our warning system starts to over under function.

A couple of years ago, maybe this has happened to you. Caitlin and I were asleep, the kids were asleep in bed and about 2:30 in the morning, our home alarm goes off and I mean, it's going off big time. You'd have thought it was a nuclear bomb coming in. And so I burst out of bed. The kids open up their doors. What's going on? I've got I don't even remember what I had in my hand. I'm kind of walking through. I stay in your room. I'm going to go check it out, right? I look through the house and I'm looking out the windows, and I think maybe they broke into the garage. Maybe there's something going on. And normally what happens when the alarm goes off about a minute or so, however long you've programmed it in your alarm? The alarm company, cause I say, is everything OK? And you've got to give him that password. Otherwise they send the police. Well, no call came. Well, that was weird. So I get on my phone and I call up the Alaka, Hey, I just had a three alarm ring go off here. What's up? Well, Mr, if we don't see anything going on. Well, can you hear it in the background, I mean, it's it's going nutso. No, sir. We didn't know well, come to find out they had changed our system and oh, we sent you a letter about that.

Then you get our letter that you needed to buy this new equipment for your alarm to work. No, I didn't get that letter or that email, so my warning system was going off, but there was no appropriate response. I don't know about you, but when that warning goes off, when I heard that sound, it sparked in me this adrenaline rush. Anxiety has a way of doing that to us. And so how do we learn to manage that anxiety? One of the things that I appreciate most from Steve's book is anxiety is intended to be a signal, not a root cause. And it's a signal that a storm is coming. It's not the storm. It's designed to help us make a response, and I think that's an important distinction. Because when managing anxiety isn't simply about turning off the alarm, getting it silenced. It can actually help us learn to connect to God. You see, I think one of the things that I have learned recently about anxieties, it's actually a way to help us see how God is at work in our lives. That's why it's important for us to learn how to manage it. How to interpret the signal, because. His anxiety can actually be if if we'll let it a grace in our life. I don't know about you, but that's not how I often viewed or learned about anxiety as a gift of grace.

But Steve argues, and I tend to think he's right that it actually is a gift of grace and a couple of different ways. The first one, he says, it points us to where we think we need something that we actually don't need. Steve spent a lot of time as a chaplain early on in his ministry career, and he would go into a room not knowing what was going on. What was he walking into? And so he spent so much time thinking about, well, I just got to get the right thing to say. I just needed to know the right exact thing to do in this moment, he said. But what he found was he was responding to his own anxiety there. And he spent very little time actually connecting with the people in the room who actually had a need. Why? Because he was so worried about how he's going to respond to the person in need that he didn't respond to the person in need. Now I don't know about you, but that resonated with me, that there are times in my life where I'm so worried about something else that I just totally miss what's right in front of me. Anxiety has a way of pointing us to a need that we think we need, but we don't actually need. How often do we find ourselves in a work situation, a school situation or relationship where we feel exposed, maybe vulnerable, and I don't know what to do and so I can feel that weight coming.

And if you're like me, I spend a lot of time trying to quench that feeling only to discover when I do that, it takes my attention off of what God might be doing. And how he might be inviting me to participate in a situation, in a scenario, in an outcome. See, sometimes anxiety serves as a grace in that it points me to a need in my life that I don't really need, but I sure think I do. It sure feels like it. Only to find that my anxiety is blocking my capacity to notice and to trust God. To see what's going on. In life, the second way that I think anxiety can be a grace for us is as it reminds me, it points me to the places where I've been following a false gospel. This false gospel of self reliance. Now we're going to dig into this a little bit more next week and in the weeks to come about what this gospel looks like and how we get into it. But this gospel of self-reliance is bad news because if you're like me, what you find is my self is not very reliable. I usually end up messing something up, which only creates more anxiety and more stress. See, anxiety warns me that I'm trusting myself more than God, that I need something that I don't really need or that I'm trying to take control somewhere where I'm not supposed to be in control.

Now, again, with a warning system of anxiety, one of the things we're going to learn to do is to recognize it, to name it, to try to discover, to look, into identify where is it? Source What's this coming from and how to move past it? But but as I do, as I learn to grow in that capacity, what I learn to encounter is God at work in my life. Got it. Work in the world. Actually, encounter the good news of Jesus, the gospel of grace, that life isn't dependent upon me in my ability. But upon God and his ability. That kind of life always leads to more freedom. In fact, the consistent witness of the New Testament is that freedom and life come when we deny and crucify and are wary of something inside of us. That shrinks the gospel. Now, what is it that gets in the way? Well, that's what we're going to look at the next couple of weeks together. But how are we able to do this? Well, this is where I want us to land this morning, and I hope it will be the point that we'll take with us. Is the way that we learn to be anxious for nothing is remembering we're not alone. That this are not a problem that I have to solve all on my own, in fact, the constant consistent witness of scripture is that God is with us.

He is always with us. We see it in the Old Testament and the new The Prophet Isaiah spoke about this one of many prophets to do this, but to Israel, who carried off in the Babylonian captivity in the midst of pain and sorrow and loss and grief unimaginable. The prophet Isaiah, and it's all, of course, come as a result of them choosing not to follow God but to follow their own way. And Isaiah speaks these words of hope in the midst of their pain. Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed, yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken, nor my covenant of peace be removed, says the Lord, who has compassion on you. And as I said, this is not the end of your story. They God has great compassion, a great love. He is with you, in fact, God's greatest promise, the evidence of his presence with us comes most notably in and through the life and presence of Jesus that not only did the incarnation demonstrate God's loving presence in flesh and blood, but also that promise of loving presence would never leave, Jesus said it to his disciples this way. On the top of that mountain at the end of Matthew's gospel, the challenge to go and make disciples of all nations baptizing them in the name of the father and of the son and the Holy Spirit.

And teaching them to obey everything I've commended you, and surely I am with you. I'm with you always. I am with you always to the very end. I am with you always to the very end of the age, you see, Jesus promises, not this, that I'm here in this moment, but I'm here and every moment I'm available to you at any time, at any place, in any relationship and any work circumstance or school scenario, no matter where or what or when we find ourselves, God is with us. What helps us face our anxiety, learn to manage it? All the uncertainty in a broken world is trusting in the promise that God is with us. The first step that that Paul gives to the church and Philip, he says, is do not be anxious. He doesn't say, do not feel anxious. Do not think anxious. He says, Do not be. Anxious, you may have an anxious thought you may have an anxious feeling, there may be some anxious scenarios that come up in your life. The challenge is how do we respond to that to live into the peace that God offers to us? Well, friends, that's what we're going to pursue these next few weeks together, learning how to be anxious for nothing. Now, no gift for some of us, those may be confusing words, my prayers over the next couple of weeks.

We'll demystify it a little bit. For some of us, it may be confusing because we don't know much about this person, this man, Jesus, and we want to know more about him and more about this life of living anxious for nothing. We'd love to help you take your next step on that journey of discovering and encountering a god who loves you and who is with you always even to the end of the age. God, my prayer for us as a church is in the coming days, we'll experience your presence with us in a powerful way that you would remind us, father. Through your word. Or through the encounter of your church. After an experience of your Holy Spirit that you are with us and that though there's much in our lives and our world around us these days that can cause great alarm. Other pandemic that seems to just not want to go away. The experience of losing people that we love and care about deeply. The challenges of work. Of school. Maybe it's a relationship, father, that just seems right on the the tip of her fingertips. And every time we try to lean in or reach out, it just pushes them further away. I got even in the midst of anxious times. They got we can live anxious for nothing. Not because there's not something to worry about, but God, because we don't have to be ruled by that worry, by that fear, by that anxiety.

So God, as we pursue your word together. As we learn from Jesus, as the master teacher, from his first disciples, as we watch and listen to them encounter challenges, overwhelming circumstances, God, maybe we learn from them. What it means to be a disciple to follow you. Not to get it perfect every single time. To learn to put our trust in you more and more. And I pray that you would help our warning systems this week to to function appropriately. As we sense that anxiety in us got it might prompt us to stop and ask what's going on? What's happening behind these emotions, this experience? God, what is it that you're trying to do in my life right now? Is there a way that this this warning might point me to something out in my life that that I think I need? I really believe it, but God, I don't need it. What I need is more of you. Ok, what is this anxiety prompting me to think about? Have I given myself to a lesser dream? Am I chasing after a lesser gospel? One that really is built upon self-reliance and not not God reliance. Oh, father, would you give us eyes to see and ears to hear that we might draw closer to you this week? Father, thank you that that anxiety can be a gift of grace in our lives. May it be so this week that we pray in Jesus name. Amen.