Anxious No More #2 - Addressing Our Anxiety (Dr. Kurt Bjorklund)

Senior Pastor Dr. Kurt Bjorklund continues the message series entitled "Anxious No More," teaching about trusting God with all aspects of our lives.

Message Transcript - https://www.orchardhillchurch.com/blog-post/2024/8/12/anxious-no-more-2-addressing-our-anxiety

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Transcript

Good morning. Let us pray together. God as we gather together this weekend at Orchard Hill; Butler, Strip, South Point, Beaver, Online, and The Chapel, I pray that you would speak into our lives. God, if there are things that I've prepared that don't reflect you well, I pray that you would move me away from saying those. If there are needed by those of us who are gathered that I did not prepare, I pray, prompt me in this moment to speak directly to those things. We pray this in Jesus’ name, Amen.

A movie came out a few years back that was called Inside Out. Maybe you have seen it. If you have kids or grandkids, there is probably a chance you've seen it. Then Inside Out 2 came out just this year. Inside Out & Inside Out 2, are stories about this young girl who is has emotions. Inside Out 2 is about anxiety and how anxiety takes control of the control room. In taking control of the control room makes this little girl's life, suddenly, a little topsy turvy because she is giving in to her anxiety. It is a story that is common in our lives. Probably one of the reasons that the movie has done well is because kids, and adults alike, can relate very easily to this storyline.

You can hop online and try to find resources to tell you how to address anxiety. I found one such article. Let me just give you some of the nuggets of wisdom. Consider practicing slow breathing. Stay present in your current situation. Be healthy with all of your life choices. Practice small acts of bravery. Challenge your self-talk. Be kind to yourself and allow yourself to have some worry time.

Now I read that and obviously that is not the best of the advice that is out there, but I thought, is that really what we need? I mean, some of those techniques might be helpful in part, but is that really going to keep us from worrying? Because what worry is, again I just want to say we are not talking here about a chemical imbalance that leads to anxiety and anxiety disorder. We are talking about the routine stuff that we worry about. But what worry is, it is really when we start to play out the what if or what if not, scenarios in our minds. We say, if this happens or if this does not happen, then this is the result that I can expect.

When we move from a healthy anxiety to an unhealthy anxiety. We move from saying I am concerned about this, and my anxiety is a little bit of a sign to pay attention to, and an unhealthy anxiety where I start to basically obsess over the what if or what if not statements. Then I start to make catastrophe scenarios out of them so that those scenarios give me a general sense of dread in life. Now, that's anxiety.

What we are doing over these weeks is we are looking at some New Testament passages that address anxiety directly. Today we are looking at 1 Peter 5:5-7. You heard it read. In the context here was the local church. There is a passage about leadership in the church and the kind of character the leaders should have in the church. Then he says, likewise, in the same way those of you who are younger submit yourselves to the elders or be humble toward toward these people. Then he gives this principle, he says the idea is to humble yourself under the hand of God because God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. 

Next, he talks about anxiety. In the NIV translation, which we had read, He says cast your cares unto the Lord or your anxieties unto the Lord because he cares for you. And that translation is understandable, and it is not improper to translate that as an imperative cast. In other words, it is a command almost in the NIV. But if you look at other translations like the ESV or The New American Standard, it will say humble yourself under the mighty hand of God, and then it will say, casting your anxieties. And it is a participle in the original language. Now, I realize when I start to talk like this, some of you are going to gloss over ‘What are you talking about?’

So, here is the point that I want you to get. The difference between an imperative and a participle is an imperative here would be a command. Then you could read this as “humble yourself; cast your anxieties” as if the two are unrelated. But a participle is dependent on the verb before it, which is the imperative, “clothe yourselves in humility.” What that means is that anxiety and humility are tied together.

That may not be how we tend to think about anxiety. Because what we tend to do is think that our anxiety is legitimate and it is things that concern me, rather than saying I am anxious because of my pride. I can almost hear some of you saying, well, I am not anxious about anything that has to do with my pride, my anxieties are legitimate. You might be right, but I would encourage you to trace your anxiety further back. My guess is, at least some of the time, you will find that there is something else at work.

Let us just take a common anxiety. Some of you are parents here, and if you are a parent, you've probably, at least at some point in your life, had some anxiety about the well-being of your kids. Maybe you have it right now. Maybe it is around physical safety. Maybe it is around the path of life that they are on. Maybe it is around them finding a family and a spouse so they're not lonely. Maybe it is around their spiritual well-being. You might say, well, that is just a legitimate concern. It is a legitimate concern, but it could also be that part of why you are so anxious is you want to be the parent who has kids who do well. It might be tied to your pride.

Maybe your anxiety around is a work situation. Perhaps you are in an employment role and you say, I just want to do well and get to the next place in the organization or get another role in another organization. It drives some anxiety that can be a legitimate desire to want to do well. But again, if you trace that, it could also be tied to your pride.

Now, the reason that I make a deal of this, is because anxiety is a signal. It is a sign. Healthy anxiety tells you; pay attention, do something. Unhealthy anxiety is when it becomes diffused, prolonged and takes over the control center of our minds. It starts to tell us to make decisions in a certain direction.

In 1 Peter 5, we see three things that are important. We see a principal, a prescription, and a promise. The principle is this, I previously mentioned it, God opposes the proud, but shows favor to the humble. If you are looking at your Bible, you will see the passage in quotes or parentheses or a kind of an indentation. Generally, that means it's a quote from the Old Testament. In this instance, it is a quote from Proverbs 3:34, “he mocks proud mockers, but shows favor to the humble and the oppressed". In the original Hebrew here, it is he mocks the mockers, the NIV supplies the proud, so that we get the idea of what he's talking about.

The principle is that when somebody is proud, they might make fun of things that are significant; wholly good in people and relationships, God doesn't like it very much. He reacts and then he is gracious and shows favor to the humble. Now, pride is something that C.S. Lewis once observed that we hate in other people but have a hard time identifying in ourselves. Meaning it is something that you know when you see it somewhere else but when it's your own life, it's hard to see. Where pride often manifests itself is in the things that we dislike or the things that disgust us. The reason I say that is not because there is not a legitimate place to be pointing out something that we dislike. When we dislike people, when we are disgusted by things, a lot of times it is our own pride of wanting to say we feel better. S Sometimes it is in our desires saying these are the things that I want, I long for, or I hope for. Karen Jobes in writing about this says about humility, “true humility, as opposed to a contrived, self degrading humiliation, flows from recognition of one's complete dependance on God and is expressed by the acceptance of one's role and position in God's economy. With such humility, one is freed from attempts to gain more power or prestige. Instead, humility expresses itself and a willingness to serve others even beyond one's self interest.” What that is pointing to is this idea that there is a principle at work and true humility says I can align myself with God in some significant ways.

Some of us, again, might say, ‘what does this have to do with my anxieties? I have these desires that are good.’ But sometimes our desire points us to something where we are saying, ‘this is what I absolutely need in my life.’ Maybe you are aging and the fear or anxiety of being alone in your old age is something that consumes your thinking. Maybe you are a young adult and you are starting to think about finding a spouse. It feels like it is not happening. You see what happens. You start saying, well, if I do not… if this happens then… and we start to fill in the line. Again, what is often behind it is ‘I know what I need’, ‘I know when I need it’ and ‘I must have it, or my life will not be…’ We catastrophize the situation with it. Here we are taught something very simple, that God opposes the proud, but he gives grace and favor to the humble.

That leads to the prescription. The prescription is in this phrase in 1 Peter 5:6, “Humble yourselves, therefore under God's mighty hand, that he may lift you up in due time. “Casting,” I am going to translate that the way the new American standard ESV does, because I think it's a better translation. “Casting all of your anxiety on him because he cares for you.” So, the humbling here is the the prescription. In 1 Peter 5:5, it says “Clothe yourselves with humility.” Charles Williams, in his translation of this, says that it basically refers to his servant’s apron. He says, put on the servant's apron. In other words, be willing to put your own agenda aside because you understand the principle. That is what he is talking about here.

Now, when it comes to our anxieties and how it is tied, this does not say just ignore your anxieties and say God's in charge. It also does not say go try and work to fix them. But the tie is, cast your anxieties on to the Lord because he cares for you. This word is used in Luke 19:35. Luke 19:33-34 says, “As they were untying the colt, its owners asked them, Why are you on tying the colt?” Luke 19:35, “The Lord needs it. And they brought it to Jesus and threw their cloaks on the colt and put Jesus on it.” The phrase that ‘they threw their cloaks on him’ is the same word that is used here to cast your cares. It was a word that was used to take your burden and put it on an animal that was assigned to carry a load. The image that Peter portrays is to take your anxieties and put them on, in a sense, a beast of burden who was designed to carry the load. 

I was thinking about this a little bit, this is my bag that I carry back and forth when I go to work. It is not the most impressive bag, but my everyday carry bag gets stuffed with all the details of my life. I have a folder in here containing church stuff. I have a folder for personal stuff. The backpack goes back and forth with me so that if I have a have an immediate need, I can always say, “oh yeah, I've got that.” When this bag starts to get full and to the point of overflowing, it is an indicator that it is time for me to do something with it, other than what I am doing.

Here is the illustration however, what casting your anxieties is saying, this may represent everything that you are carrying, and I need to have it. To cast your anxieties is a quite simple thing of saying take them and put them somewhere else so that it isn't your burden anymore, that you're not having to carry it.

The other day, I was trying to move a bed out of one of our upstairs bedrooms. I was trying to do it by myself. It was getting stuck trying to go around a corner because it needed a little more leverage. I went out in my neighborhood. I started to walk down the street just looking for any neighbor who was outside, who I could say, “hey, you want to help me for a minute?” One of my neighbors, unfortunately, was outside. I stopped and said, “hey, you want to help me for a minute?” He happily obliged. When he came inside and helped me carry, suddenly what was what was difficult and demanding became easy, when the two of us moved it together. And that is not even really a good analogy because I was still carrying part of this. The image here is to say, take what feels impossible to you, what feels difficult to you, feels demanding to you and cast it on to the Lord because he cares for you. The prescription is to say, take what it is that you are concerned about in your life and cast it on to Jesus. 

In Psalm 13, we see David struggling with his plight. Here is how it starts, Psalm 13:1-4, “How long, Lord, will you forget me? How long will you hide from me? How long must I wrestle with these thoughts? And day after day I have sorrow in my heart. How long will my enemy triumph over me?” Does that sound like anxiety? Probably. And then he says this “Look on me and answer me, Lord God, give light to my eyes or I will sleep this in death and my enemy will say ‘I have overcome him’, and my foes will rejoice over me when I fall.” So here he is taking his situation when he was probably in distress for his life. And he is saying, God, I am asking you to work. He is in a sense, casting it on to him, Psalm 13:5. “But I trust in your unfailing love. My heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing of the Lord's praise for God has been good to me.”

Casting your anxieties on to God does not mean that you do not feel them. It means the exact opposite. It means that you identify them, you address them. But instead of saying, I am carrying this with me everywhere I go and I am obsessing over it. You can say I can put it somewhere else.

Martin Lloyd Jones once said this about the way that we think about things. He said the great mistake we make is that we listen to ourselves rather than talking to ourselves. In other words, we let the control room get filled with all of these ‘what if’ scenarios. All these scenarios that make us say it is going to be bad, instead of saying I am telling God about it and God is in charge.

What happens a lot of times is we say, okay, I am going to try to cast my burden, my cares, my anxieties to the Lord. Then we do not really like how God's dealing with that. So, we say, I am going to take this back because I am not sure the way that you are resolving it, God, is the way that I would resolve it. I have a better idea than how you are doing it. I am just going to keep this right now instead of giving it to you. Because if I give it to you, you may not get the outcome that I want. You see, when that is true, what we are doing in many ways in that moment, we are saying I will choose to carry my burden rather than having the humility to entrust myself to God.

Now, there is also a promise here, and the promise is the most important thing to understand, because it is easy just to say, okay, God opposes the proud gives grace to the humble. So, casting your cares on the Lord is how you show your humility, how you are not prideful and saying, I must have the control of how this is resolved.

But the reason that you and I can do that is because there is basically a promise here. It is threefold, in a sense. It says this, casting all your anxiety on him because he cares for you. But the verse before it says, “Humble yourselves, therefore under God's mighty hand that he may lift you up in due time.” So, what are the three parts of this?

God chooses when to lift us up, in his time and his level. God has a mighty hand. He has enough to take care of us and he cares for us. Three different elements of this. When it says that he lifts us up in due time, it's actually an allusion to Psalm 55:22, that says that if we cast our cares unto the Lord that he won't let the righteous be shaken or fall. The idea here is he is saying that God holds things in his hand and in due time he will lift you up. He will do what it is that you might think you need. Psalm 73:3-5,13,14, NLT, we read just a little bit about what it feels like sometimes when people who do not humble themselves before God seem to get ahead. Here is what it says, “For I envied the proud when I saw them prosper despite their wickedness, they seem to live such a painless life; their bodies are strong and healthy. They do not have troubles like other people. Was it for nothing that I kept myself pure and I kept myself from doing wrong? All I get is trouble. All day long, every morning brings me pain.”

Psalm 75:7 NLT says it this way “It is God who judges. He decides who will rise and who will fall.” Here is what this means for your anxieties and for mine, when we start to say, what if this happens? What if this does not happen? Here is all the bad things that can happen. God is the one in his time, due time, meaning when he sees fit, to the level he sees fit, who causes us to rise or fall. If that is something that you can wrap your head around, something I can wrap my head around, then we are able to say, I do not need to insist on it right now because there's a God who's at work.

Then he says under his mighty hand, as well. So, God can address what concerns us. Not only is he able, but then we are told that he cares, as well. Any failure to cast our burdens onto the Lord is in part tied to either, I do not trust that God is wise enough to know when I should rise or fall, I don't believe God is capable or I don't believe God cares about me, on some level.

Again, here is what happens in this in this moment, we come to God with our bag and we say, God, I know you have a lot of people up there to take care of, and I know this might seem small to you, but if you wouldn't mind thinking about this little concern, I have, do you think you could pay attention? Just maybe? We try to hand it off. We will come and say, I do not know if you can do anything about this. I am not sure that you have the power, because frankly, this world feels out of control. So you could take it? We come and we say, you have the power. You say you care, but it still feels like you are not showing up in the places where it seems important to me that you show up and so we don't want to hand this off. In many ways our view of God determines whether we will trust God.

One author put it this way, “To some, God is a benevolent grandfather or grandmother whose love excludes any discipline. To some, God is a blessing dispenser who gives people everything they want if they pray with enough faith. To still others, he is a cosmic policeman, ready to pounce on anyone who makes a mistake. If you can say God is in charge and he will bring into my life, at the right time, exactly what I need. If he has the power, and he has the ability, then I can say I can cast my cares onto him.

Here is the irony for some of us, if you are a follower of Jesus, you've come to a point where you say, I trust Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior for my eternity. At one time in your life, you at least said I am anxious about my future enough to cast my cares on to Jesus. My sin goes to Jesus. Now I can believe God for the ultimate future. Then what we do is we say, ‘Yeah, but with like the timing of a spouse, having a child, not so much, with my career, with my current marriage. No, I do not think I can trust you. Instead of being able to say you have shown your care for me, ultimately in the cross of Jesus Christ, so why wouldn't I trust you with the things that are current in my life?

If you are here today and you are somebody who says, you know, I am not really a church person. I have some anxiety, but a lot of my life is pretty good. I am not sure how God really factors in? The truth is that God cares about the details of your life, which is what Scripture teaches us. If we want to not cede control of the control room to our anxiety, then the way that we can get there is saying there is a God who cares, who is powerful, who in due time will exalt.

To drive this point home a little more, the way again, that our anxieties work with our pride is we start to say, “I cannot trust God to control the future. God is not able, I have a better idea than God.” Humility does not mean that we do not want something, or we don't work for its good outcome. What it means is we say, God, I can trust you with it.

Some of us might be here and we might say, “well, my anxiety right now is around a health scare for me or for somebody in my life. How is that pride?” It is not pride to say I want to be healthy and I am going to take every step I can to be healthy. It is not pride to say I want a good marriage and I am going to take every step I can to improve my marriage. But it's prideful to demand that God's solve it the way we want him to, on our time.

The way we address our anxiety is to say, “I will do what I can to change my situation. I'll let anxiety tell me there's something to pay attention to, but when it starts to become a long, diffused fear of the future, I need to cast it to the Lord and simply say I'm humble enough to say I don't know the future and so I can trust God that he is at work even when it doesn't seem like it. I want God to carry the bag of all my anxieties.”

I want to ask you just bow your head in prayer, close your eyes, and take a moment to respond. Give us a chance to respond in prayer. So, wherever you are, if you just right now, just articulate to God what anxieties you're carrying in your bag today. As you articulate that anxiety, I want you to just take a moment, if you are able, and say, God, I know that you care about this situation, and I know that you are powerful enough to address it. I affirm that in due time you will work in this situation. As a result, God, I am casting my anxiety onto you and choosing to live in the humility that says God, you are God, and I am not God. There are anxieties that all of us have, and I pray today that you will help us to understand what 1 Peter 5 teaches and know that there's freedom in giving you our burdens to carry. And we pray this in Jesus’ name, Amen.