The Antidote for Anxiety

Welcome to the Awakening Church podcast.

We pray this message encourages you and provides the hope and light of Jesus Christ.

Thanks for tuning in.

Well, good morning.

You can take a seat.

We're in a series called Presence.

God's Antidote for Hurry, Anxiety, and Loneliness.

And as we begin, I want to light a candle just to remind our souls that Jesus, the light of the world, has entered our world.

And he is present here with us now.

And so as we begin, can we begin just with a pause?

We did it last week.

Take a deep breath in.

Now, if you want, you can even close your eyes for a moment, settle your soul.

Do your best to put aside the hurry and the worry of the last week.

The concerns, the endless to-dos.

This is a holy moment.

Would you invite the Holy Spirit in this moment to meet with you?

Heavenly Father, we invite you to have your way in this moment.

Thank you that you to me and speak to every single one of us, and you set aside this space as a sacred space for us.

And so have your way.

In Jesus' name.

And all God's people said.

Amen.

My wife is a real estate agent.

And if you know anything about real estate the last year, it's been slow.

It's been really slow.

And we've been praying, God, would you provide, you know, the sale of a home before the end of the year?

And one of our dear friends reached out to Jenny's looking for a place.

And he's just like, oh my goodness, this feels like an answer to prayer, both for them and for us.

And uh she found this space and was like, oh, this is awesome.

And if you know anything about real estate, um, like for my wife, the minute a deal comes, like everything else is on pause.

This takes all energy, all focus.

Found the place on two Thursdays ago.

And so Thursday night, she literally pulled in all nighter getting the offer together, getting it in Friday, Saturday.

There's nonstop negotiations, you know, emails, text, phone calls, all the rest.

And then Sunday, it felt like, okay, we're coming to the finish line.

Um, and you know, thought, like, okay, the seller is gonna sign the offer.

Jenny even brought her computer to our awakening Christmas party.

You know, she's in the corner.

You know, this the glamorous life of a real estate agent, right?

Uh she's on her computer there.

And then um the seller told her, like, uh the agent for the seller said, Hey, he'll sign it by 10 tonight.

And so we get home from the party, and it's like, okay, trying to stay up till 10 because that's hard for us, you know?

And so she stayed up till 10, nothing.

Jenny stays up.

I couldn't stay up any later.

She stayed up till midnight, nothing.

Wake up in the morning, nothing.

Silence.

Later that day, gets news from the agent, hey, there's another negotiation.

This is like the fourth one, I think, or something at this point.

Wait, what?

I thought we had this nailed down.

All day Monday, most of the day Tuesday, final best offer.

Like, there's nothing more she can do.

And the agent says, we'll let you know by five.

It's early afternoon Tuesday.

I'm like, okay.

2 p.m., no word.

3 p.m., nothing.

Four, nothing.

And then I just have a sense of humor.

I don't know if it's a good one or not.

Um, probably not.

Um, but I was like, oh, isn't it great that I'm teaching on anxiety this week?

And she looked at me without a step miss.

She said, Why can't you teach on peace or joy?

And I was like, fair enough.

Fair enough.

445, an email comes through.

The seller signed the deal.

Oh, yeah.

Oh my goodness.

It's that in-between space, isn't it?

You know, that place of what you hope for, and then what you cannot control.

That space of not knowing.

Life is filled with uncertainty, isn't it?

Life is filled with not knowing.

I don't know if I'm gonna be a part of the next round of layoffs.

I don't know how AI is gonna shift or impact my career or my work.

I don't know what I'm gonna do after I graduate or what I'm even gonna do for my life.

I don't know if I'm gonna find my person.

I don't know if my kids are going to walk with Jesus or come back to Jesus.

I just don't know.

Not knowing is the soil where anxiety grows.

In fact, psychologists tell us this that people handle bad news better than uncertainty.

Not knowing is where anxiety grows, and anxiety is pretty much just worrying about what will happen.

It's our attempt, our effort to control what we don't know.

And here's what happens: anxiety doesn't just live in our thoughts, it shows up in our bodies, it tightens our chest, knots our stomach, and keeps us on edge.

And then we can even end up very much culturally, but some for personally, in a state of chronic anxiety.

Trains the body to live in constant alert, drains emotional resilience, shrinking our capacity for joy, narrowing the way we relate, risk, create, and trust.

Becomes less about living fully and more just about managing fears.

We're gonna delve into this time around anxiety, and just as we begin, I want to say what we're gonna talk about is really God's antidote for anxiety.

And in this, for some, there's a chronic state where you need some good help from a great therapist, or there might be a chemical imbalance where you need some good medication, just like you would take Advil for a headache, you may need that too.

And so, if that's where you're at, I just want to encourage you to lean into all the gifts that God's given us through his people and through one another.

Now, we are a culture that has embraced anxiety as a normal part of life, haven't we?

I mentioned last week um Jonathan Heid's book, The Anxious Generation, and we live in a world, this generation is more anxious than any generation in the history of the planet.

It's unprecedented.

There's a few reasons why.

First, is we live in a world of information overload.

We have way more information coming at us than we were ever designed to take in.

24-7 information, global crises in our pocket instantly.

And it's overwhelming.

As a result, we're constantly connected, we're never off, we're always on.

More now.

And when we get space and time, we just scroll.

And when we scroll, what happens is now we're in a comparison culture.

And the anxiety of feeling left behind, fear of missing out, feeling like you're not measuring up, you're not doing enough, because you look at everyone else's curated highlight reel and you feel like you're not enough.

And then it produces this relational isolation, doesn't it?

As our screen time goes up and our face time goes down.

Let me ask you.

Where are you anxious right now?

Where in your body do you feel anxiety?

What an uncertainty is stealing your peace.

You know, in this season, the Christmas Advent, we celebrate the greatest event in human history, Emmanuel.

What is Emmanuel?

Help me out.

God with us, yeah.

God with us, God stepping into the mess.

God seeing everything about us, you and me.

Instead of leaning away from it, he leans in.

Stepping into time, space, history, becoming one of us.

God who's for you, not against you, God who's attentive and not apathetic.

Think about this.

God is already, always present with you.

Right now, in this moment, God is already, always present with you.

And the question, especially Silicon Valley, the question and the her culture, the hustle, the grind that we live in that we have to ask, especially in this season, is are we present with him?

Are you present with him?

Am I present with him?

You see, the longing of your soul is actually found in just eight words.

The antidote for hurry, anxiety, and loneliness.

Found in eight words.

Psalm 46, 10 says it this way.

Now read it with me out loud, would you?

Be still and know that I am God.

One more time, okay?

Be still and know that I am God.

Is that?

Is it be still?

Last week we talked about hurry.

And no, we're gonna talk about this.

In in the age that we don't know, there's a lot we don't know about.

You can know something confidently about God.

That I am God.

Next week we're gonna talk about loneliness.

We said it this way: we must learn to be present to the presence of God in the presence.

We must learn to be present, stop the scroll, be present, attentive, give our attention, have our affection set on the presence of God, the God that's already present with us in this present moment.

So when it comes to anxiety, when it comes to uncertainty, when it comes to the not knowing, the worry, the concern, the stress, the fear, the things that you are just oh anxious about.

When you start spinning out, stop to zoom out.

When you start spinning out, stop.

It's like a signal, it's a sign to stop.

When you start to spin out, when your mind starts to race, when your heart starts to beat really fast, when your chest starts to tighten, when you start spinning out, stop.

It's like a it's a signal your body's telling you, stop, be still.

By the way, just the very act of being still decreases your cortisone level by like 10 to 30 percent.

Like God knew what he was doing thousands of years ago before we had science and psychologists.

Be still and know that I am God.

In his book, Managing Leadership Anxiety, Steve Cuss writes this.

He writes, the goal of managing anxiety is not simply for relief, it is to connect more fully with God and to raise awareness of what God is doing.

Anxiety blocks our awareness of God because it takes our subconscious attention.

This means that anxiety can be an early detection system that we're depending on something other than God for our well-being.

Notice the psalmist doesn't say be still and figure it out and fix it.

Be still and obsess over it, freak out, rehearse it over and over, the worst case scenarios.

I'm really good at all those, by the way.

Be still and know.

That word know is knowledge by way of experience.

It's not just intellectual knowledge, it is personal, relational, intimate knowledge that I'm God.

Anxiety grows in the places of not knowing.

What we want to spend the rest of our time together is talking about what you need to know about God in a world filled with uncertainty, in a world that's ever-changing, in a future you do not know.

What you need to know about God.

If you got your Bibles, would you turn to Psalm 121?

Now, Psalm 121 is a psalm of ascent.

A psalm of ascent is literally what uh the Israelite people, as they were pilgriming or journeying to Jerusalem for one of the festivals, these are songs that they would sing along the way.

Now, travel in the ancient day was a lot more precarious than it is today.

It was filled with danger, it was filled with weather that could totally interrupt your travel, terrain that was difficult to, you know, uh traverse, it was bandits along the way, illness that could totally sidetrack.

It was an incredibly precarious thing.

And they sing this song, Psalm 121.

And the first thing that you need to know, the first thing that we need to be still and know about God is that God is bigger than your problems.

I like you keep it up, keep those amens going.

We're gonna we're we're gonna we're gonna get all of us going there too.

Psalm 121 says this I lift my eyes to the mountains.

Where does my help come from?

I lift my eyes to the mountains, where does my help come from?

My help comes from the Maker, the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth.

Now, when we're talking about the eyes, it's that which has our attention, the things that we focus on.

Let me ask you, what are the things that you're focused on that has your attention?

I lift my eyes to the mountains.

Now, when we think about mountains, we look at them and go, oh, how beautiful, how majestic, how inspiring.

Oh, I love the mountains.

Actually, I'm a beach guy.

But you know, some people love the mountains.

In the ancient world, the mountains were actually an obstacle.

If you're traveling and you see a mountain in the distance that you gotta cover, you're like, oh boy.

The mountains were a problem.

In fact, the mountains were a place of danger.

It was often where bandits and those that uh were out to get you would hide because there was great places for that.

It was also a place for the of idolatry.

It would be the high places where you begin to usurp God and worship, and you know, idolatry is this idea.

If only I had blank, then I would be.

If only I could solve this, then my life would be figured out.

If only this issue would be resolved, then everything else.

See, I lift my eyes to the mountains.

My eyes are fixed on the mountains, my eyes are set on the problems.

And here's what I want you to do with me.

Would you just take your hands right here, put them right by your eyes?

There we go.

I can see you, by the way.

Okay, and then just go, and you got to do the sound.

Yeah, that's good.

All right, you ready?

All right, I lift my eyes to the mountains.

Where does my help come from?

Like it's this, I'm doing that, I know it's silly, but it but it's this shift.

Like, like I'm so focused on my problems, I'm so focused on the issues, I'm so focused on my worries, my concerns, the things that are going, and they they're real.

I don't know if I'm gonna get the job.

I don't know how this is gonna turn out, I don't know, and I've got my attention and my focus, and when I start spinning out to the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth.

I'm shift my focus just one notch up.

I shift my focus up.

I'm gonna look to the God who's actually bigger than my problems.

Let me help you zoom out for a little bit.

Okay, you're sitting in here, you're sitting on your chair, you solid, you there, good, okay.

You're in your chair.

We're on this planet.

Currently, right now, it is spinning a thousand miles an hour on its axis.

Did you know that?

We don't even notice it.

It's spinning a thousand miles an hour and it's orbiting around the sun at a thousand miles or at a 67,000 miles an hour.

Did you know we're moving that fast right now?

That's insane.

And we're orbiting around the sun at 67,000 miles an hour, yet we're 93 million miles away from the sun.

Scientists tell us that that distance is known as the habitable zone.

A little bit closer, water would evaporate, life as we know could not exist.

A little bit further, water would uh freeze, life as we know it wouldn't exist.

We live in this space, finely balanced window that God has placed this spinning rock a thousand miles an hour and traveling at 67,000 miles an hour.

93 million miles away from the sun.

The God who placed the earth at just the right distance from the sun is the same God who knows exactly where you're at right now.

And then it gets better than this.

You show this next slide.

This, by the way, and there will be a quiz.

This is Spiral Galaxy NGC 6744.

I hope you got that.

Spiral galaxy NGC 6744.

Uh, the reason I show it to you is Chinese tell us this is basically a twin of our galaxy.

We can't really see our galaxy, but they say this is a twin of our galaxy.

It's actually much bigger than the Milky Way galaxy.

Now, when we think about the Sun that we're whirling around in all this, the Sun is one of approximately a hundred billion other stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

Okay.

And if we were to try to traverse the Milky Way galaxy, it looks something like that, it would take us a hundred thousand light years to cross.

Now, light, I know you know this, so I apologize for you know everyone who's, you know, like, okay, Ryan, we know how fast light travels.

Light travels at 186,000 miles per second.

I think he drove a little slower here.

At the speed, at that speed, think about this.

It takes a hundred thousand years at a hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second just to cross our soul Milky Way galaxy.

And there are hundred to two hundred billion other galaxies in the universe.

And God spoke, and everything came into existence, and he holds all things together, and he can hold you in this moment.

The God who named the stars knows your name.

See, when you start to spin out, stop to zoom out, the first thing, be still and know that I am God.

Yeah.

God is bigger than AI.

God is bigger than the political world.

God is bigger than the economic reality.

God is bigger than whatever you're walking through.

God is bigger than the uncertainty of the season.

God is bigger than that family issue, that drama.

God is bigger.

God is got you.

And if we keep our eyes focused on our problems, I understand it because they're big, they're overwhelming.

But at some point we just gotta zoom out and go, okay, in the middle of this, and it's real and it's hard and it's difficult and it's painful.

Yes, and and God is bigger than whatever you're going through.

And it gets better than that.

Because he's not only bigger than your problem, he's attentive to your needs.

You notice what it says next.

It says, He will not let your foot slip.

Foot slippage is such a problem in our world, isn't it?

He who watches over you will not slumber.

Indeed, he who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.

That whole idea of not allowing your foot to slip is not that you're not going to experience hardship, not that you're not going to experience pain or trials or go through difficult things.

What it is is simply echoing or what the Apostle Paul would say later in Romans 8, that nothing can ever separate you from the love of God.

Neither height nor depth nor angels nor principalities, nothing and all created thing will ever be able to separate you.

He will not allow you to slip from his loving grasp.

It's interesting that word watch.

In your English translation, for many you have it there, it's in there five times.

In Hebrew, this word watch is in there eight times.

He is attentive.

He is got you.

It says he won't slumber.

In the ancient Near East, the gods conquered the chaos monsters.

These were the stories they told, and then they slept.

But in sleeping, a sleeping God is a problem because you cannot wake them or wake them when you need them.

And it says, God is attentive, he is watching, he's got you.

Um I'm at this stage in life where our kids come home for Christmas.

It's kind of a weird new world that we're living in.

My daughter just came home from France.

She hopped on a plane, plane from France to Germany, and then from Germany to San Francisco, got home Friday night.

Praise the Lord.

It's like Christmas for parents.

It's the best ever.

It's awesome.

I love it.

And then I just had this thought.

Like, do you remember?

Do you remember the first time like you traveled by yourself?

The fear, the anxiety, the stuff you never thought about?

Some of you had this experience.

I've had this experience.

Like I grew up and I got to travel with my parents, my mom or my dad.

I didn't really think about anything, especially what to pack.

But you know, I just like you show up and you just kind of go.

Why?

Because mom's got you.

Dad's got you.

When you travel with mom and dad, you don't think about what time you need to leave for the airport, whether there'll be traffic, how much time it will take to get through security, where is your gate, whether you'll have overhead space for your carry-on or not.

Um one of my great pet fees, by the way.

Uh, what if your flight is delayed, or whether you'll make your connection or not?

You don't! Why?

Because mom and dad is watching over you.

And God says, I'm watching over you.

God of the universe says, if you when you go and you fix your eyes on God, you realize that God's eyes have already been fixed on you.

That his loving gaze is already upon you, that he's attentive to your needs.

God is bigger than your problems.

The first thing we need to know, he's attentive to your needs.

Third thing we need to know is God is a shelter in the storm.

He's a shelter in the storm.

The Lord watches over you.

The Lord is your shade at your right hand.

The sun will not harm you by day, nor the moon by night.

In the ancient world, the sun uh symbolized visible external danger, heat, exhaustion, exposure, threats that you could see coming.

What exhausts you?

What's burning you out?

God wants to be your shelter.

The night represents invisible danger, fear, anxiety, disorientation, the way the mind can unravel in the darkness.

In the ancient Near East associated the moon with mental and emotional issues.

We get our words.

Even today we use the word lunacy, luna, moon, moonsickness, lunatic.

They observe that fear, despair, and anxiety often intensified at night.

What's internally affecting you?

I find in my life that my first response isn't to fix my eyes on God, but try to fix it myself.

And so I spin out.

And so I wrestle.

I freak out.

I have sleepless nights.

Over all the stuff I cannot control and I have no power to change.

All the while I have a God who says, God, Ryan, I'm bigger than whatever you're going through.

And I'm attentive.

I actually I'm involved.

I'm watchful over your life the way a good father or mother is.

Would you run to me?

Would you turn to me to be your shelter, your strength in a storm?

And finally.

God is in control of the future.

The psalmist is using the present tense all the way through, and then in verse 7 shifts to the future tense.

The Lord watches presently, right now, actively watching, and then verse 7 says, The Lord will keep you from all harm.

The Lord will watch over your life.

The Lord will watch over your coming and going, both now and how long?

Forevermore.

This future tense means that God will never stop watching over your life for the totality of your life.

I mean, I'm uh if I'm honest, I've really struggled with anxiety over the course of my life.

Especially when my kids were born, oh my goodness.

In their early days, I mean, I think I just scarred them with my anxiety so much.

I did, I did.

You know, and I mean I'd have nights, many, many nights, I was so like wrapped up with anxiety.

Like I couldn't sleep because I was afraid, like, is somebody gonna break into my house?

I had no evidence that somebody would, but I would stare into the backyard, into the night abyss, looking for signs of somebody.

Why?

I don't know.

We we'd go to, you know, we had a fun trip to go to Disneyland.

I would be anxious, having nightmares about what could happen, what might happen to them.

If we went to a pool or went somewhere, I'd have night, like the anxiety was crippling.

And anxiety is contagious too.

And then as I was studying, you remember that passage Jeremiah 29, 11, for I know the plans I have for you to carry as the Lord, plans for your welfare and not your calamity to give you a future and a hope.

This line that became my anthem started to settle my soul.

I don't know the future.

Would you say that with me?

I don't know the future.

And it's true, we don't.

But I know the one who knows.

Front rows on it.

I don't know the future, but I know the one who knows, and that's enough for me.

Like, I don't know how this job's gonna turn out.

I don't know whether they're gonna come to know Jesus.

I don't know, you know, if my marriage is gonna make it.

I don't know if my kids are gonna be okay.

I don't know what's gonna happen to my parents.

I don't know, but here's what I do know, here's where I stand confident, here's where my focus and attention, I know the one who knows, and that's enough for me.

Tim Keller, when he was diagnosed with cancer and the uncertainty of what does this mean?

Wrestling with, you know, is this gonna take his life?

In the conversation with his wife, he got to this settled assurance.

In conversation, he says this if Jesus Christ was actually raised from the dead, if he really got up, walked out, was seen by hundreds of people, talked to them, if he was raised from the dead, then you know what?

Everything's gonna be okay.

Whatever you're worried about right now, whatever you're afraid of, everything's going to be okay.

If the tomb is empty, then anything's possible.

You know what's fascinating?

We do not have more uncertainty than generations past.

Did you realize that?

Like, just think about childbirth.

It was way more uncertain a hundred years to give birth than it is today.

You get an illness like the flu or the cold, your future was way more uncertain a hundred years ago than today.

We do not have more uncertainty.

What we have is we try to control our future more than generations past.

I don't know the future.

But I do know personally that the one who knows.

And he's bigger than my problem, he's attentive to my needs, he's a shelter in the storm, and he's in control of the future, and in that fact I will rest.

Let me ask you, do you know God personally?

Not just information about God, details.

So you can have been coming to church for a while and know things about God, but do you know him personally in a way like a father or a mother that is watching over your life where you go, I know that he's got me.

I know that he's attentive, I know that he's watching.

Because today can be your day.

Maybe you've never said yes to Jesus, and you say yes to him.

He wants to bring you into a personal relationship with him that brings hope and life and peace.

And it's just simply the cry of the heart, Jesus, I want to know you.

Would you come into my life?

Here's the amazing part because God is infinite, there's no limit to the depth of knowing Him.

My dad just recently had a back surgery, his third in like a decade.

Major, major reconstructive.

Thank God it went really well.

He's recovering great.

But he told me this interesting thing after the surgery.

He's 71 years old.

He's been preaching for 40 plus years.

He's even written a book on the attributes of God.

He knows God.

He's walked with Jesus for a long time.

And he's helped many, many people walk with Jesus.

And he had this great line.

I just love this.

He said when we talk about the presence, God's presence, or Jesus' promise to be with us, just prior to surgery, in some way, I realized it's a real person who's going to be with me.

It's not just in a general presence sense.

And it's kind of changed how I've prayed.

It's been very encouraging.

I love that.

Because at 71, he's experiencing the personalness of Jesus in a fresh way.

And there's some in this room, I have to say many in this room, you need to experience the personalness of Jesus in a fresh way.

That's why we have the table set at communion.

As we turn to worship, this is this invitation.

Do you know?

Do you know God?

Maybe for the first time you cry out, Jesus, would you come into my life?

I want to know you.

Or maybe you've just gone through the emotions.

This is just another Christmas season.

And there is a depth and a beauty and a knowing of God that He longs for you to experience in a fresh way.

And you would allow that to be the cry of your heart, God, I want to know you.

I want to know you personally.

And so as we close, just take a moment.

Again, settle back down.

That deep breath.

And would you just allow the cry of your heart, the longing of your soul, Jesus, I want to know you.

In a deep, personal way.

For some, would you just even begin to take your hands and move them over your heart?

Because you know a lot of head information about God.

But you're inviting him, would you move that head information to heart relation?

Holy Spirit, in this moment, we invite you to have your way to work and to move.

Breathe new life.

Draw our hearts close to us.

Bring salvation to those who are calling out to you right now.

Bring healing and wholeness and hope.

But I pray that friends that would encounter you personally and profoundly.

And hey, we'd love to connect with you.

Take a next step by filling out our virtual connection card at awakeningchurch.com slash card.