Addressing Anxiety Biblically
Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone. The Lord is at hand; do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
-Philippians 4:4-7, ESV
In a previous post, we saw how God’s response to Elijah’s depression gives us a model for how to deal with it in our lives. Along with depression often comes anxiety, which is equally important to address.[1] Just like depression, anxiety is prolific in our society and in our churches. Scripture explicitly mentions it several times, and since anxiety is a form of fear, the Bible is filled with teachings about it. Philippians 4 is just one of many passages explicitly commanding us not to be anxious. But is it really that simple? How can we avoid or escape anxiety? We will see that Scripture has an answer for anxiety just like depression.
Anxiety Defined
In order to address anxiety biblically, we need to define it biblically, starting with the most famous passage about anxiety: Jesus’s teaching from the Sermon on the Mount:
“Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith?
-Matthew 6:25-30, ESV
Here we see that the anxious person is worried about food and clothing, not trusting in God to provide them. Jesus bids us to look at nature to see evidence of God’s abundant providence, so anxiety overlooks that providence. Finally, Jesus equates anxiety with a lack of faith. From this, we find that anxiety is a persistent fear of the future.[2] This fear is the opposite of faith that trusts God with the future. When we consider Philippians 4, we see that anxiety is also the opposite of prayer and thanksgiving which we are commanded to do, so anxiety is usually sinful.
However, anxiety like fear is sometimes commanded in Scripture. As we discussed when dealing with singleness, single people are anxious about the things of God, whereas married people are anxious about pleasing their spouses (1 Corinthians 7:32-34). Both of these are good and necessary forms of anxiety, referring not to fear but to an intense and comprehensive focus. There are many good and necessary things that require such focus. When we talked about the beauty of God’s design for marriage, we saw the importance of everyone defining and pursuing their mission in advancing the Cultural Mandate and Great Commission. That certainly takes focus which could be described as anxiety. On top of that, the roles of the husband and wife require such intense and prolonged effort that they can become all-consuming, deriving from a love for God and others. Paul praises Timothy for having this kind of anxiety for the the churches (Philippians 2:20), so we are to have it for one another (1 Corinthians 12:25). This is what we were designed to do: to focus our thoughts and efforts on fulfilling our purpose. Therefore, the positive sense of anxiety is a diligent preoccupation with present duties, whereas sinful anxiety is a fixation on the future that distrusts God’s provision, instead trying to secure His provision in abundance through our own effort while He has only promised to give us what we need. This anxiety is always hungry for more information about the situation in an effort to manage it, distrusting the power and promises of God while denying the adequacy of what God has revealed to us in Scripture.[3]
Plan Your Way
Does this mean we shouldn’t plan for the future? By no means! Scripture is full of admonitions to plan for the future. Here’s an example: “The plans of the diligent lead surely to abundance, but everyone who is hasty comes only to poverty” (Proverbs 21:5). Jesus also exhorted people to count the cost before following Him by holding up the examples of planning before building a tower and going into battle (Luke 14:26-33). Furthermore, God being both omnipotent and omniscient plans everything to advance His purpose, so it naturally follows that we image Him by making plans of our own. Jesus was also very intentional about everything He did, orchestrating every aspect of His ministry to ultimately lead to its climax at the cross. Therefore it is no sin to plan. We need to look to the future, assess the risks, and mitigate them when appropriate.
In this way, we often sin when we don’t plan. Too many Americans in general and American Christians in particular focus on the present with little regard for the future. But building the Kingdom is a multi-generational effort. The successful Christian therefore has a long-term focus that requires significant planning. And we must be intentional in order to do everything to the glory of God (1 Corinthians 10:31), which necessitates planning. All too often, we “leave it in God’s hands” not out of faith but as an excuse to avoid the effort this type of planning requires. Another way we sin by fixating on potential future problems without actually planning how we might address them. It is this that Jesus is directly addressing in the Sermon on the Mount, stating that worrying is useless since God knows we need things like food, clothing, and shelter and has promised to provide them. By worrying, we are not seeking first His Kingdom.
While we must ultimately trust God with the outcome of all of our plans and actions, that does not alleviate the need to plan and act in the first place. To “let go and let God” or perpetually worry is to hold a fatalistic view that is incompatible with the doctrines of God’s sovereignty and providence as well as direct disobedience to His commands. Failure to plan is planning to fail in the Christian walk just as it is on the battlefield or in the workplace. Therefore, failure to adequately plan is sinful.
When Planning Becomes Sinful
But planning itself can become sinful. Scripture often pairs planning with trust in God’s sovereignty. Here’s one example: “The heart of man plans his way, but the LORD establishes his steps” (Proverbs 16:9). The point is clear: we need to make and carry out our plans but trust God with the results. Therefore, planning apart from that trust is sinful. This happens when we obsessively plan in an attempt to mitigate every possible contingency. As a strategic thinker and an engineer, I can easily fall prey to this. After all, risk management is a crucial function of engineering. In designing a system, we need to determine every way it could fail and plan appropriate steps to mitigate those risks. The importance of this was proven when OceanGate’s woefully inadequate risk management killed five people in a submersible implosion near Titanic. So risk management is one aspect of what Jesus called “counting the cost”.
But this becomes a problem when proper risk management morphs into “analysis paralysis”. We cannot mitigate every risk, so any good strategy includes ways to accept and monitor risks that can’t be practically mitigated. Fixating on such risks prevents us from doing what we should be doing. That is the anxiety that is prohibited in Scripture: a fixation on mitigating every risk such that it distracts us from obeying God in other ways. We become obsessed with planning for every possible contingency, depending on ourselves and the robustness of our plans rather than on God. This is the opposite of trusting God with our plans. It is not done in faith and is therefore sinful (Romans 14:23). Thus, it is sinful to be obsessed with planning just as it is sinful to neglect it.
Addressing Anxiety
How then can we address anxiety? At what point does our diligent planning become anxious toil? Since anxiety comes from a focus on ourselves rather than God, any strategy against it must begin with trust in God’s sovereignty. When we are anxious, we make God far too small in our minds. But our God is powerful enough to meet all of our needs and loves us enough that He will do it.[4] God is sovereign over every atom in the universe and is directing each to fulfill His plan—and His plan is for our ultimate good. No matter how much we worry, stew, or strategize, we could never come up with a plan that could hold a candle to His. With God in control, anxiety is pointless. This is incredibly comforting, since all people want to trust that someone or something is in control. When we doubt the sovereignty of God, something else must fill that void. This is why godless societies accept and even celebrate ever-increasing government control. It is also a major contributing factor to conspiracy theories. If some secret society is ultimately in control, that thought gives people comfort and safety…even if that organization is malevolent. If we reject God, the malevolence of man is the only thing left to trust, so no wonder our increasingly godless society has an ever-increasing problem with anxiety. But as Christians, we have a much better hope in our sovereign and good God. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said to look at nature to see that God provides then remember God’s promise to provide for you. This should remind us of His amazing grace to us, which should dispel any practical belief in fate or karma that may fuel our anxiety.[5] Only in the sovereignty of God can we truly rest.
How does this look practically? Our opening passage gives us an answer: “do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God” (Philippians 4:6). We see the same from Peter: “Humble yourselves, therefore, under the mighty hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you, casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you” (1 Peter 5:6-7). From this, we see that when we face anxiety, we need to cast it on Christ in prayer, trusting not only in His sovereignty but also in His great care for us. We are to take every thought captive to obey Christ (2 Corinthians 10:5)—including anxious thoughts. To do this, Jay Adams recommends that when an anxious thought comes, we should limit ourselves to think about it for only two minutes then give it to God in prayer.[6] That prayer must include not only supplication (petition) but also thanksgiving. Thankfulness is a powerful weapon against anxiety, shifting our focus away from the calamity that might happen to all of the blessings God has already given us. This in turn increases our confidence that the God who provided us with all of these blessings already will be faithful to sustain us in the future no matter what may befall us. This produces contentment that is a powerful antidote to anxiety.
This habit of trustful and thankful prayer is an important step in overcoming anxiety, but it must not be left at that. Like depression, we need to fight anxiety with action. Instead of being anxious about ourselves and our future, we need to be anxious about serving God and others in the present. As we rest in the sovereignty of God, we need to replace the anxiety of fear with the anxiety of busyness building the Kingdom. This was the other aspect of Jesus’s exhortation: seek first the Kingdom as you trust in God to give you what you need. When we are busy doing the things God has called us to do, we won’t have the time or mental capacity to worry. And Christ’s most prolific command to us is to love both Him and others, especially our fellow believers. It is this love—an all-consuming action rather than an emotion—that drives out fear (1 John 4:18). Just as penicillium mold kills bacteria as it grows, love kills fear as it grows in us. To love God, we need to focus on trusting, worshipping, and serving Him, leading us to love others by similarly seeking to serve them.[7] But since busyness can come from fear, we must be careful to ensure ours comes instead from a love for God and others.[8]
The Root of Anxiety
Even this will not be enough to fully counter anxiety, for we also need to address its root. Like all forms of fear, anxiety is a response to something. The first cause of anxiety we should look for is fear of the final judgment of God. Though people often suppress it, God in His common grace has placed a fear of judgment in everyone as a way to both restrain evil and draw people to salvation in Christ (the only remedy for that judgment). For unbelievers, this means the first and necessary step to rooting out anxiety is to repent and believe the Gospel. For the believer, a lack of assurance of salvation (which is not uncommon) leads to anxiety about God’s judgment. When this is combined with a healthy doctrine of the final judgment—a vital but often overlooked component of the Gospel—it leads to anxiety. This is a major theme of 1 John, and forms the context of John’s statement that love drives out fear:
So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. By this is love perfected with us, so that we may have confidence for the day of judgment, because as he is so also are we in this world. There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, “I love God,” and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen.
-1 John 4:16-20, ESV
John specifically says that future punishment leads to fear, but as our confidence in Christ’s atonement grows, it will alleviate those fears. So we must look for evidence that we are in Christ. This comes as we abide in Him, as evidenced by the presence of the Holy Spirit (1 John 4:13), our confession that Christ is Lord (1 John 4:15), our love for Him and others (1 John 2:11, 3:10-18), a pattern of obedience to His Word (1 John 2:3, 3:24), and a commitment to listen to and heed Scripture (1 John 4:5). As we are sanctified, our growing confidence in our salvation displaces anxiety regrading judgment, which is how perfect love casts out fear. Sanctification is not complete until death, so in this life we will struggle with fears.
But judgment is just one of the many calamities that cause anxiety. Normally we can readily identify these calamities, but we often focus on mitigating them rather than looking at why we fear them in the first place. Since they threaten us in specific ways, our fears reveal what we treasure. The more we obsess over them, the more we treasure whatever they are threatening. What we treasure then is what we think we need: material possessions, safety, security, comfort, success, belonging, reputation, love, acceptance, etc. It is not wrong to value these things, but we must treasure Christ infinitely more than these. If our desire for any of these competes at all with our desire for Him, then they have become our idols: we have placed our trust in them rather than God. Therefore, when we identify these idols we must repent of them and return to seeking first His Kingdom.[9] We must remember that God has promised to give us everything we need when we need it, so whatever He has withheld from us we do not really need. We can therefore rest in Him as we continue to trust in Him, repenting of the idols our anxiety reveals, continually casting our cares on Him who cares for us, and focusing on serving Him in the present. That is how we combat anxiety biblically.
In the end, anxiety is a common experience of mankind, which afflicts both believers and unbelievers. While we are wise to diligently plan our steps in order to mitigate risks, we can never anticipate, much less mitigate, every possible calamity. Therefore, we must trust our sovereign and good God who knows everything that will happen, has promised to provide us with everything we need, and cares for us more deeply than we can imagine. His love for us steadily drives out our fears as we bring them to Him in prayer, repent of the idols they reveal, and focus on serving Him and others in the present. Through diligently taking every anxious thought captive and redirecting it to trust in God, we can be free of the anxiety that can be so crippling. This is certainly easier said than done, and for those in the midst of anxiety it can seem overwhelming. But like all issues we face, we were never meant to face them alone but in community. So bearing one another’s burdens through discipleship and biblical counseling can help people overcome anxiety and redirect their thoughts to what God has commanded.
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. What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me—practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.
-Philippians 4:8-9, ESV
Additional Resources
In addition to the those already mentioned, here are a few helpful books:
Richard Caldwell, Answering Anxiety
Elyse Fitzpatrick, Overcoming Fear, Worry and Anxiety
John MacArthur, Anxious for Nothing
Wayne Mack, Courage: Fighting Fear with Faith
Edward T. Welch, When People are Big and God is Small
NOTES
[1] Edward T. Welch, Depression: Looking Up from the Stubborn Darkness, Greensboro, NC: New Growth Press: 2011: 128; Edward T. Welch, Running Scared: Fear, Worry, and the God of Rest, Greensboro, NC: New Growth Press: 2007: 32-33
[2] Edward T. Welch, Running Scared: Fear, Worry, and the God of Rest, Greensboro, NC: New Growth Press: 2007: 50.
[3] Edward T. Welch, Running Scared: Fear, Worry, and the God of Rest, Greensboro, NC: New Growth Press: 2007: 137-138.
[4] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion: Translated from the First French Edition of 1541 by Robert White, Edinburgh, UK: Banner of Truth Trust: 2014: 797; Edward T. Welch, Running Scared: Fear, Worry, and the God of Rest, Greensboro, NC: New Growth Press: 2007: 105-111, 131.
[5] Edward T. Welch, Running Scared: Fear, Worry, and the God of Rest, Greensboro, NC: New Growth Press: 2007: 142-143.
[6] Jay E. Adams, The Christian Counselor’s Manual: The Practice of Nouthetic Counseling, Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan: 1973: 372-374.
[7] Jay E. Adams, The Christian Counselor’s Manual: The Practice of Nouthetic Counseling, Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan: 1973: 416.
[8] Edward T. Welch, Running Scared: Fear, Worry, and the God of Rest, Greensboro, NC: New Growth Press: 2007: 32.
[9] Edward T. Welch, Running Scared: Fear, Worry, and the God of Rest, Greensboro, NC: New Growth Press: 2007: 161-185.
