D. Richard Ferguson's Blog, page 2

February 13, 2025

End Anxiety with Promised Peace

The most obvious miracle cure for anxiety is trust in God.

“Don’t let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God, and trust also in me” (John 14:1 NLT).“You keep him in perfect peace … because he trusts in you (Isaiah 26:3, ESV).“May the God of hope fill you with … peace as you trust in him” (Romans 15:13).

Trust is one of those biblical terms that is so common that it can lose its meaning. We often “trust” God in general, but not in particular. We trust him for the big things someday but not the little things right now. We entrust our eternal destiny to him, but we have no idea what it means to trust him today from noon to three.

When you’re racked with anxiety and someone says, “Just trust the Lord,” it can sound like a platitude. Indeed, it is a platitude if they don’t complete the sentence. Trust God … to do what? To make your troubles go away? To make life easy? To do your will?

These are important questions because counting on God to do something he hasn’t promised will bring disappointment and even worse anxiety. Peace comes when you trust God to do what he has promised.

The biblical word for promise refers to any affirmation God makes about the future. God gave us his great and precious promises to tether us to future blessing. And it’s that guarantee of future grace that can replace your fear of future trouble with peace when you trust in it.

Trusting God’s promises is not only the key to overcoming anxiety; it is the key to overcoming every sin. Every one of God’s promises reflects his nature, and each time you trust one of them, you become more like God.

“By his own glory and goodness … he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world” (2 Peter 1:3-4).

His promises rise out of his glory and goodness (moral excellence), and by trusting them, you share in God’s moral nature by escaping the world’s corruption. All spiritual growth, including overcoming anxiety, comes through faith. And Peter spells out specifically what living by faith looks like. It’s trusting God’s great and precious promises. A promise has its intended effect when the person receiving it trusts it.

Even Jesus used promises to motivate himself to endure suffering and persevere in the Father’s will.

“For the joy set before him he endured the cross” (Hebrews 12:2).

What was the joy set before him? It was all that the Father had promised. And we’re called to fix our eyes on him and follow his example.

Whenever you are plagued with worry or anxiety, ask yourself, “What promise am I failing to trust?” There are promises in God’s Word that counter every kind of anxiety you’ll ever face.

Think of one of your more troublesome anxieties. Which specific promise in Scripture are you striving to trust to overcome that anxiety? Until you can answer that question, it’s not likely you will find peace.

Here are some examples of promises for specific kinds of anxiety:

Anxiety Over Unfulfilled Desire

The anxiety that comes from unfulfilled desire can feel hopeless. If you never get that thing you want—a child, a spouse (or a better spouse), a better job, physical healing—you may have constant fear that a fulfilled, happy life will be out of your reach.

For the Christian, God promises that is never the case. You may never get the thing you feel you need, but you will always have access to that which will satisfy the cravings of your soul.

“Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart” (Psalm 37:4).

When you fall into the error of thinking you need more than what God will give you to be happy, trust the promise in Hebrews 13:5:

“Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, ‘Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.’” (Heb. 13:5 NIV)

You might have to study that promise for a few months. Examine it, meditate on it, look at it from every angle, listen to some sermons on it. But somewhere in that promise lies the key that will unleash diving power to free you up from the chains of greed and give you contentment.

Worry

If you’re stressed about tomorrow or your retirement years or any time later than right now, trust Jesus’s promises in Matthew 6:24-34.

“Do not worry … Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? … And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you– you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For … your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his 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” (Matthew 6:25).

God promises to care for you more than he cares for the trillions of animals that fill the earth because you’re more valuable to him than they are.

So if you’re afraid of tomorrow, don’t be. Tomorrow will take care of itself because God will be there. You can’t handle future trouble right now because God hasn’t provided future grace yet. But when the time arrives, so will his grace.

“My God will meet all your needs according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:19).

Do you think God might leave you high and dry in the future? Are your future needs too much to ask? Not by the logic of Romans 8:32:

“He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32).

Whatever you might need in the future, is it bigger than the gift of God sacrificing his Son for you? Will God ever say, “I gave my Son, but this other request you have—that’s asking too much”? No. If giving up his Son wasn’t too much, no gift is. Has he not proved his generosity?

Anxiety about Your Past

Maybe you were abused, suffered a terrible loss, or made some horrible decisions you wish you could have back. But whatever went wrong in your past, whether it was sixty years ago or last night, God makes promises about that too.

“You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good” (Genesis 50:20).

“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him” (Romans 8:28).

Your life is not ruined. God allowed what he allowed for a wonderful reason. Trust him.

Anxiety about Aging

“Even to your old age and gray hairs I am he, I am he who will sustain you. I have made you and I will carry you; I will sustain you and I will rescue you” (Isaiah 46:4).

How about the seven promises in Isaiah 58?

“If you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday. The LORD will guide you always; he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land and will strengthen your frame. You will be like a well-watered garden, like a spring whose waters never fail” (Isaiah 58:10).

You don’t have to be afraid of old age. God will be more than enough for you now matter how many physical difficulties you face. If he is with you, you will have access to just as much happiness as you had in your twenties—and more.

Anxiety about Suffering

Have you suffered some terrible loss or heartbreak? Or maybe it’s just the daily drip of one problem after another and you can’t catch a break. None of that trouble is going to waste.

“For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all” (2 Corinthians 4:17).

The troubles are like rain on farmland. They aren’t standing in the way of your well-being—they are bringing it about.

Anxiety about the Consequences of Your Sin

Do you feel you can’t ask God for relief because you’re getting what you deserve?

“Come, let us return to the LORD. He has torn us to pieces but he will heal us; he has injured us but he will bind up our wounds. After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will restore us, that we may live in his presence. Let us acknowledge the LORD; let us press on to acknowledge him. As surely as the sun rises, he will appear; he will come to us like the winter rains, like the spring rains that water the earth” (Hosea 6:1-3).

“I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten … my great army that I sent among you” (Joel 2:25).

Anxiety about the Ticking Clock

You’ve longed for something, and time is running out. Maybe it’s your biological clock or an issue related to your career. Sometimes when God says, “Wait,” it’s even harder than a clear “No.” But you can trust that God’s timing will ultimately be just as beautiful as his gifts.

“He has made everything beautiful in its time” (Ecclesiastes 3:11).

Relationship Anxieties

“The meek will … enjoy great peace” (Psalm 37:11).

When someone hurts you and you’re tempted to retaliate with some harsh words or a cold shoulder, recall this promise. The path to peace is a meek, gentle response. Trusting that promise will give you the power you need to resist the temptation to repay evil with evil.

Anxiety about Hard Decisions

Are you worried that you might be unable to find the right path when you face a complex decision? God promises guidance. He doesn’t promise to show you which option will have the most favorable outcome. But he does promise to reveal a godly path forward, which is all you need.

“Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, ‘This is the way; walk in it’” (Isaiah 30:21).

Anxiety about an Ineffective Life

It may not seem like your work for the Lord is doing any good. But we don’t live by how things seem. We live by God’s promises.

“Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up” (Galatians 6:9).

“Stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:58).

Anxiety about Loss

Has following Christ cost you something?

“No one who has left home or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields for me and the gospel will fail to receive a hundred times as much in this present age: homes, brothers, sisters, mothers, children and fields … and in the age to come eternal life” (Mark 10:29).

When You’re in Trouble

“Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need” (Hebrews 4:16).

The implied promise is that when you come boldly, you will indeed receive mercy and find the form of grace you need for that time of crisis.

Is this a time when you need God to show himself strong on your behalf?

“The eyes of Yahweh roam throughout the earth to show Himself strong for those whose hearts are completely His” (2 Chronicles 16:9 CSB).

This list of promises is the tip of the iceberg. You could spend the rest of your life discovering promises in God’s Word. And his promises, if you trust them, will be more than enough to free you from every trace of unhealthy anxiety.

My Favorite Promise

In my opinion, the greatest promise in the whole Bible is in Ezekiel 36:28:

“I will be your God.”

What does it mean for God to be your God? Well, what’s the difference between saying, “That man is a doctor” and “He’s my doctor”? Or “He’s a brilliant lawyer” versus “He’s my lawyer.” It means he will put his abilities to use for your benefit. So the promise “I will be your God” guarantees that whatever it means to be God, he will be that for you.

He won’t just be omnipotent; he’ll use his omnipotent for your benefit. He’ll be omnipresent and omniscient for you. His love, patience, wisdom, creativity, mercy, justice, perfection, holiness—God will put every one of his attributes to work for you. (An attribute is anything that is true about God.)

So this one promise, “I will be your God,” explodes into as many promises as there are attributes of God. It sets all of God’s attributes into motion for your benefit. Every promise is a window into God’s nature, and every attribute is a promise that God will be that way for you.

This means the search for promises related to your struggle is also a search for attributes of God. Your anxiety will fade when you trust God to exhibit his attributes in the situation you’re worried about.

If you are anxious, that is usually a sign that you have shifted your attention from God to your troubles—like Peter, who walked on water until he turned his eyes from Jesus to the storm. In that moment, he developed an instant anxiety disorder and sank (Matthew 14:30). More accurately, it was a faith disorder (verse 31) that gave the storm the power to swallow him up.

But what does it mean to fix your gaze on someone who is invisible? It means to turn your attention to God’s characteristics (attributes).

There are some who find comfort only in God’s love. Those are usually people who still struggle with anxiety, because one attribute of God is not enough to satisfy the needs of the soul. The deeper and wider our understanding of God, the greater the peace.

Would you like to know more about the other five “miracle cures” for anxiety in the Bible? You can find them in my new book, Anxiety and the Peace of God: Six Biblical Cures for Worry, Stress, and Inner Turmoil.

To go to the Amazon page, click here.

I have written a daily devotional focusing on 77 of those attributes titled Deeper Knowledge of God. To this day, I refer to the material in that book to help me draw near to God.

The post End Anxiety with Promised Peace appeared first on D. Richard Ferguson.

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Published on February 13, 2025 11:19

Overcome Anxiety by Trusting God’s Promises

The most obvious miracle cure for anxiety is trust in God.

Even Jesus used promises to motivate himself to endure suffering and persevere in the Father’s will.

“For the joy set before him he endured the cross” (Hebrews 12:2).

What was the joy set before him? It was all that the Father had promised. And we’re called to fix our eyes on him and follow his example.

Whenever you are plagued with worry or anxiety, ask yourself, “What promise am I failing to trust?” There are promises in God’s Word that counter every kind of anxiety you’ll ever face.

Here are some examples of promises for specific kinds of anxiety:

Anxiety Over Unfulfilled Desire

For the Christian, God promises that is never the case. You may never get the thing you feel you need, but you will always have access to that which will satisfy the cravings of your soul.

“Delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart” (Psalm 37:4).

When you fall into the error of thinking you need more than what God will give you to be happy, trust the promise in Hebrews 13:5:

“Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said, ‘Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.’” (Heb. 13:5 NIV)

Worry

If you’re stressed about tomorrow or your retirement years or any time later than right now, trust Jesus’s promises in Matthew 6:24-34.

God promises to care for you more than he cares for the trillions of animals that fill the earth because you’re more valuable to him than they are.

“My God will meet all your needs according to his glorious riches in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:19).

Do you think God might leave you high and dry in the future? Are your future needs too much to ask? Not by the logic of Romans 8:32:

“He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32).

Anxiety about Your Past

“You intended to harm me, but God intended it for good” (Genesis 50:20).

“And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him” (Romans 8:28).

Your life is not ruined. God allowed what he allowed for a wonderful reason. Trust him.

Anxiety about Aging

“Even to your old age and gray hairs I am he, I am he who will sustain you. I have made you and I will carry you; I will sustain you and I will rescue you” (Isaiah 46:4).

How about the seven promises in Isaiah 58?

Anxiety about Suffering

Have you suffered some terrible loss or heartbreak? Or maybe it’s just the daily drip of one problem after another and you can’t catch a break. None of that trouble is going to waste.

“For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all” (2 Corinthians 4:17).

The troubles are like rain on farmland. They aren’t standing in the way of your well-being—they are bringing it about.

Anxiety about the Consequences of Your Sin

Do you feel you can’t ask God for relief because you’re getting what you deserve?

“I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten … my great army that I sent among you” (Joel 2:25).

Anxiety about the Ticking Clock

“He has made everything beautiful in its time” (Ecclesiastes 3:11).

Relationship Anxieties

“The meek will … enjoy great peace” (Psalm 37:11).

Anxiety about Hard Decisions

“Whether you turn to the right or to the left, your ears will hear a voice behind you, saying, ‘This is the way; walk in it’” (Isaiah 30:21).

Anxiety about an Ineffective Life

It may not seem like your work for the Lord is doing any good. But we don’t live by how things seem. We live by God’s promises.

“Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up” (Galatians 6:9).

“Stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain” (1 Corinthians 15:58).

Anxiety about Loss

Has following Christ cost you something?

When You’re in Trouble

“Let us then approach God’s throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need” (Hebrews 4:16).

The implied promise is that when you come boldly, you will indeed receive mercy and find the form of grace you need for that time of crisis.

Is this a time when you need God to show himself strong on your behalf?

“The eyes of Yahweh roam throughout the earth to show Himself strong for those whose hearts are completely His” (2 Chronicles 16:9 CSB).

My Favorite Promise

In my opinion, the greatest promise in the whole Bible is in Ezekiel 36:28:

“I will be your God.”

But what does it mean to fix your gaze on someone who is invisible? It means to turn your attention to God’s characteristics (attributes).

To go to the Amazon page, click here.

I have written a daily devotional focusing on 77 of those attributes titled Deeper Knowledge of God. To this day, I refer to the material in that book to help me draw near to God.

The post Overcome Anxiety by Trusting God’s Promises appeared first on D. Richard Ferguson.

View more on D. Richard Ferguson's website »

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Published on February 13, 2025 11:19

October 22, 2023

Chapter 10 Seeing God’s Kindness

God showers us with thousands of blessings every day. So why are we so prone to miss those and fixate on the handful of hardships?
This post will reintroduce you to a thousand gestures of God’s love coming from every direction.
*****

Noticing God’s Love

The first step to enjoying God’s love is noticing it. This chapter will help you do that.

Adam and Eve failed to notice God’s generosity because they turned their attention from what God had given to what he had not. When that happened, God’s staggering generosity suddenly felt like stinginess. And from that perspective, they were vulnerable to the serpent’s message. God is withholding something you should have.

Was he? What does it mean to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and bad?

Adam and Eve already knew what God had said about what’s good and bad. I believe eating of that tree represented Adam and Eve taking it upon themselves to decide what’s good and bad for them rather than trusting what God had said.

The people of Israel ate from that tree when each man did what was right in his own eyes (Judges 17:6). We are all tempted to eat from that tree every time we think we know better than God how he should have expressed his love to us.

“No God. Not that gift. You should have given me something better.

I know better than you what’s good and bad for me. Brownies, not cookies.” This is what we say every time we complain.

And when you think that way, that attitude turns your shoulders bit by bit until you have your back to God’s love. All your attention is on what you think would be good and you become blind to God’s favor.

And the more oblivious you are to God’s moment-by-moment expressions of his love, the greater your anxiety. Without a God who loves you, you really do have a lot to worry about.

Gratitude Shifts Your Focus

Gratitude cures anxiety by shifting your attention from what you lack to God’s love. It turns the orientation of your soul 180 degrees away from anxiety back to God’s favor. This is why it’s impossible to feel anxiety and gratitude at the same time.

Anxiety is your soul guarding against a threat.Gratitude is your soul welcoming blessing.Anxiety is an expression of fear.Gratitude is enjoyment of favor.Anxiety is on the lookout for trouble.Gratitude’s eyes are pealed for God’s kindnesses.Anxiety frets about the evil that people intend.Gratitude rejoices that God meant those same actions for good (Genesis 50:20).

Not only does gratitude reverse the physical effects of anxiety, it undoes all the spiritual damage as well. Gratitude is the reversal of everything the bad kind of anxiety does.

Appreciating Common Gifts

Gratitude is a miracle cure, but we won’t be grateful for the blessings we don’t notice.

One reason we lose sight of God’s kindness is we’re distracted by our troubles. In the next chapter, we’ll learn to appreciate even our troubles as blessings from God. But it’s important to realize that the painful gifts are always outnumbered by pleasant ones. Always.

How many problems do you currently have? Ten? Twenty? Maybe fifty? And how many blessings? Less than 1000? I doubt it. So if that’s the ratio, why aren’t we overflowing with joy?

One reason is God’s gifts are so abundant, ubiquitous, and reliable that we take most of them for granted. Like Adam and Eve, we fail to see the countless fruit trees because we’re so used to them. We forget they’re even there.

Until you’re deprived of it, you forget what a delight it is to simply have air to breathe. The beauty of the creation, the stability of the laws of physics, paved roads, loved ones, functional limbs, air conditioning, comfortable chairs, transportation, cell phones, grocery stores, clothing, books, music, thunderstorms, pleasant memories—the list of good gifts you receive every hour is endless.

Our problem is not our problems. It’s our blindness to our blessings.

Adaptation

Part of it is the way we were created. It wouldn’t be healthy to live in a constant state of arousal, so God designed us to adapt to our circumstances. You have an emotion, positive or negative, and soon adapt to it so your emotions return to a neutral state. If you triple your salary and increase your standard of living, it’s amazing … until you get used to it. Then it’s just normal life. When the pipes in your dream home freeze or your late model Mercedes gets a flat tire, you’re just as prone to grumble as when you were in the studio apartment with a $500 car.

Emotional adaptation is a gift from God, but it can get in the way of gratitude. Remember the older brother in the Prodigal Son parable? How did he get such a bad attitude? He grew up in a wealthy, loving home, and everything his father owned was his (Luke 15:31). Yet he still felt deprived when his brother got something he didn’t get (Luke 15:29-30). He was so accustomed to his father’s love and all that came with it, he became blind to it.

For Granted or As Granted?

A good starting place for a grateful life is to reacquaint yourself with the common blessings you’ve gotten used to. And remember, the goal is not merely to enjoy them. It’s to become emotionally responsive to the love behind them.

Shift from taking them for granted to taking them as granted—granted as gestures of God’s love for you.

When you recognize each enjoyment is a gesture of God’s favor, and you are emotionally responsive to that favor, that’s gratitude. And it’s a dose of joy.

What if a dozen or more times a day you injected little bursts of happiness into your soul through gratitude? Notice the pleasantness of some fresh air, a tasty bite of food, shelter from the rain, a chance to bring a smile to someone’s face.

Imagine Unfolding Creation

Try this. When you’re driving or walking, imagine out ahead of you, just beyond your line of sight, there’s nothing but an empty void. But as you move, God creates everything ahead of you. Trees, roads, buildings, cell service, people, light, air to breathe—it all unfolds right in front of you as you progress forward. Imagine each item has a tag that says, “From God to [your name]. Enjoy!”

Sound like a bizarre thing to imagine? It’s not that far from reality. God did create all those things using people and natural processes as his tools. The only part that’s different is the timing. Rather than doing it spontaneously, he created it all ahead of time with this moment in mind.

But is the “from God to you” tag realistic? Did God really create all those things for your enjoyment? Yes.

“God … richly provides us with everything for our enjoyment” (1 Timothy 6:17).

The goal of this exercise is to rediscover the commonplace blessings that have blended into the backdrop of your life, and to transform them from meaningless white noise to surprising, delightful gifts from God. Let this spark a fountain of gratitude in your heart toward God.

Gratitude for Enjoyability

Enjoy not only the gifts, but your ability to enjoy them in the moment. Have you noticed how sometimes a smell, a breeze, or a drink is especially pleasing and other times that same smell or drink does nothing for you? That’s because you can’t enjoy anything unless God grants you the ability to enjoy it.

“When God gives any man wealth and possessions, and enables him to enjoy them, to accept his lot and be happy in his work–this is a gift of God” (Ecclesiastes 5:19).

Inability to enjoy life’s pleasures is a curse. Just ask any depressed person. It’s one thing to be deprived of blessings, but to have them and be unable to enjoy them—that’s like pulling the plug in your soul and draining your hope dry.

If God stopped giving you the ability to enjoy things, your world would drop into the blackest, most hopeless depression. Think back to the last ten experiences God enabled you to enjoy. Each one was a special gift from God to you expressing his love. Thank him!

Specific

Just as it’s important to be specific when making requests (see chapter 7), words of thanks should also be specific. The more generalized the thanks, the less meaningful. If you tell your spouse, “Thank you for everything you do,” it won’t mean much to you or to your mate. Far better to say, “When you touched my knee and smiled, it meant a lot.” It’s the same with God. If you say, “Thank you, God, for everything in the whole wide world” that’s not likely to move your heart like thanking him for a cool breeze you’re enjoying in the moment.

Detailed

Being specific forces you to think carefully about what God has given. And the more deeply you consider the gift, the greater your gratitude.

In one study, two groups were told to write five statements of gratitude. The first group was to write one thankful sentence for each of five blessings. The other group wrote five sentences about one blessing. After repeating this for ten weeks, the group making more statements about fewer blessings reported being happier, better rested, more alert, and more energetic than the other group.

It’s better to think deeply about one gift than to list many gifts in a shallow way.

Consider the Day of Your Death

One way to increase your gratitude is by imagining life without blessings you take for granted.

In gratitude studies, people who have lost limbs or suffered other tragic losses had the most emotional, heartfelt gratitude essays. Our minds make sense of things by comparisons. The clearer your view of life without a blessing, the easier it is to be grateful. Even watching a sad movie increases gratitude more than watching a comedy.

The most basic of all God’s gifts, and one of the easiest to take for granted, is life itself. To increase your gratitude, consider your mortality.

“It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, since that is the end of all mankind, and the living should take it to heart” (Ecclesiastes 7:2).

Go to a funeral, look at the casket, and remind yourself – “I am going to be in one of those.” Studies have shown that thinking about one’s own death or imagining a near-death experience increases feelings of happiness and gratitude.

When Your Mind Won’t Let Go of the ProblemAnxiety Glues Your Attention to the Problem

Every book on anxiety advises shifting your attention from the negative to the positive. But that’s difficult because the whole point of good anxiety is to keep your attention and energy fixed on the problem until you’ve done all you can do to solve it. So by design, anxiety glues your thinking to the issue at hand. Shifting your attention away feels next to impossible because it goes against the very design of the human soul.

It’s difficult, but it’s essential. When we blind ourselves to God’s kindness and love and stare intently at our problems, soon we become convinced that all we have are problems. That will so damage your affections that when you do finally acknowledge God’s love, you’ll accept it intellectually, but you won’t feel any joy or peace from it.

Cluster Gratitude Around the Anxiety

If your soul insists on obsessing about the problem, instead of fighting that, use it to your advantage. Use your thoughts about the problem to lead you into thanksgiving. Give thanks for everything you can think of that’s related to the problem.

In the next chapter, we’ll talk about giving thanks for the problem itself. But for now, give thanks to God for the pleasant blessings that surround the problem. Cluster your thanksgiving around your anxieties.

That way, you’re working with the natural flow of where your attention goes instead of against it. Your anxiety says, “I won’t let your attention drift from this issue.” So you say, “Fine. I’ll just cluster my thanksgiving around the issue.”

Your check engine light decides to make an appearance on your way to work. That needs attention, but you can’t do anything about it right now. You tell yourself that, but the anxiety won’t go away. What do you do?

Thank God for every blessing you can think of related to your car. That God gave you a car, the moments of pleasure you have enjoyed in that car, the sights you’ve seen while driving it, the ways you’ve been able to serve people with it, the warmth you’ve enjoyed from the heater, the music you’ve enjoyed from the radio, the shelter it has been from the rain. Anxiety won’t let you put the car out of your mind, so instead of trying to fight that, just turn your thoughts to car-related blessings.

Heartfelt Thanks

And remember, it’s not enough to simply rattle off the blessings. Gratitude is more than a feeling, but it isn’t less than a feeling. No emotion, no gratitude. Go beyond listing the blessings to the love behind them. The reason God gave you all those gifts was to express his love for you. Open your heart to be receptive and responsive to that love. Enjoy being loved like that.

It might take the rest of your commute to get your heart there, but it will be worth it. Make sure by the time you arrive at work, you’re delighted by countless gestures of God’s love related to your car rather than being stressed over the maintenance issue (and all the other stressors your heart would attach to it if you let anxiety run).

Enjoy Completed Gifts

In her book, Choosing Gratitude, Nancy Leigh DeMoss relays the account of a man who suffered the worst of all losses—the death of his teenage daughter, Karen.

The Johnson family was spending the weekend at a vacation cottage in the southern California desert. Mr. Johnson saw a friend, accompanied by two other men, approaching the cottage and went outside to find out what they wanted. They broke the news to him that Karen’s car was hit by a drunk driver and she had not survived the accident.

The men went with Mr. Johnson into the house where he gathered his wife and four younger children together in the living room. He began by saying, “Before we ask God why He took Karen home in a head-on collision a few hours ago, let’s thank Him for the seventeen years we had her.”

All God’s gifts in this world are temporary. He blesses you with a steak dinner, it’s a wonderful gift, but it’s not forever. In a matter of minutes, it’s gone. The temporary nature of his gifts in this world usually doesn’t bother us until there’s a gift that lasts a shorter time than we expected.

But is our trust in our expectations? Or in God’s goodness and wisdom? Would we dictate to the Giver the proper duration of an unearned, undeserved gift?

Remember, gratitude submits to the giver’s way of expressing love. This includes both the gift and the timing.

The Best Time for Gratitude

The moment we are most tempted with ingratitude is when we suffer a loss. But that’s actually the best time for gratitude, because it’s when you have the clearest view of the gift God gave you.

God gave me the gift of single life for twenty-two years. Then that gift ended. He replaced it with the gift of married life. How long do I get that one? I don’t know. I haven’t received the full gift yet. Maybe it will last a couple more decades. Maybe only a couple more minutes. Only God knows what he has in mind. I can give God thanks for part of it. But until it ends, I won’t know the full extent of this gift. As of now, it keeps on giving.

When is the best time to give thanks for a gift? When can you most appreciate its value? Isn’t it the moment you lose it?

Karen’s father may not have fully appreciated the gift of a teenage daughter the day before when she was in a foul mood or acted irresponsibly. Maybe he had taken her for granted. But at the moment he learned he would never see her again—isn’t that when he grasped most clearly the preciousness of that gift? Your perspective on the value of a gift is clearest when it concludes.

Big Losses and Small Losses

This principle applies to big gifts and small gifts. For the seven years we have lived in our current home, we’ve had an incredible view of the Rocky Mountains out our back window. Recently, they built houses there. No more mountain view.

My natural inclination would have been to grumble. Especially since they told us it would always be open space. But I was just learning this principle, so I gave it a try. I sized up the gift we had been given. And instead of imagining a view-less future, I savored the beautiful seven years.

After just a few minutes, I was floored by what a wonderful gift it had been. I recalled dinners where we marveled at gorgeous sunsets. Conversations we had had about the mountains. Storms we had watched. Even the golf balls I hit out into that space. So much pleasure! Seven years worth. What kind of colossal ingratitude would it take for me to shake my fist at God and say, “Seven years is the wrong number God. It should have been more”?

Take advantage of every loss, big or small, to amplify your gratitude. It’s the perfect time.

Godliness Training ExercisesWhen you are walking or driving, try the exercise of imagining creation unfolding just ahead of you. Consider how many gifts God placed in your path for your enjoyment and respond to those gestures of love.On two of the next seven days, write out your words of thanksgiving to God. Be specific and as detailed as possible. Attempt at least five sentences per blessing.Consider a few of the biggest blessings in your life. Think of how easily things could have been different, preventing those blessings. Imagine life without them.Each time you feel anxiety, cluster your expressions of thanks around the pleasant gifts related to that anxiety. Create some neural pathways that connect thoughts of the problem with related blessings.Each time you suffer a loss, no matter how small, thank God for the gift that was just brought to completion.Keep reviewing the verses you have memorized so far and add Matthew 6:32-34.

*****

Links

For the video of this session, click here.

Part 1 of this series Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9

*****

Footnotes

Cited by Robert A. Emmons, Gratitude Works! Audiobook, ch.2, Julian for Gratitude.

Robert A. Emmons, Gratitude Works! Audiobook, ch.1, The Challenge of Gratitude.

ibid.

Nancy Leigh DeMoss, Choosing Gratitude: Your Journey to Joy, 2011, 102.

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Published on October 22, 2023 03:21

October 16, 2023

36 Scriptures for Encouragement

What do you do when a friend is down but you just don’t know what to say? God knew what to say. Why not send a text once a day with some encouraging passage of Scripture? Here are 36 to choose from:

Job 38-42—God is awesome!Psalm 5—Protect me!Psalm 16—God is my only goodPsalm 18—God responds to my trouble with creation-rattling zealPsalm 23—The Lord is my ShepherdPsalm 25—I look to You for satisfaction, guidance, redemptionPsalm 32—Blessed is the forgiven sinner!Psalm 34—God is near to the brokenheartedPsalm 36—The Lord is the source of all goodPsalm 37—Do not fret over the successes of the wickedPsalm 42-43—I long for God, my soul is downcastPsalm 46—God is our refuge and is more powerful than any threatPsalm 51—Have mercy on me, a sinner!Psalm 62—My soul finds rest in God alonePsalm 63—I long for God in a dry and weary landPsalm 77—Comfort from recalling God’s past deedsPsalm 84—I long and faint to be in Your presencePsalm 90—You are our home, satisfy us with Your lovePsalm 91—God will protect youPsalm 93—The Lord reigns!Psalm 103—Praise Him for forgiving, redeeming, restoring love!Psalm 121—God will watch over youPsalm 125—The LORD preserves His peoplePsalm 131—I have stilled and quieted my soul hoping in YouPsalm 139—You know me thoroughlyLamentations 3—His mercies are new every morningIsaiah 40—Comfort for God’s peopleIsaiah 42—The Compassionate MessiahIsaiah 55—Come, all you who are thirsty!Isaiah 57:14-21—Comfort for the contriteMatthew 5:1-13—Blessed are the needy and persecutedMatthew 6:25-34—Don’t worry – look at how God cares for the birds!John 13-15—Let not your hearts be troubledRomans 8—Nothing can separate you from His love2 Corinthians 4:6-18—Our frailty glorifies Him, and our suffering accomplishes glory for us.Revelation 3:7-13—Hold on until I come!

Another great way to encourage someone is to remind him of God’s great and precious promises. For a list of promises for each of the common problems in life, click here.

For a deep dive into what Scripture says about how to encourage, see chapter three of the book Wise Counsel: Applying the Word of God to Life’s Problems.

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Published on October 16, 2023 17:05

October 15, 2023

Chapter 9 – What Is Gratitude?

Why does gratitude bring so much joy to some and not others? It’s because few people understand what gratitude is. Can you define the word “gratitude” without using a synonym like “thankfulness”? Gratitude will make anxiety a thing of the past in your life—but only if you grasp the meaning.

We might have expected Philippians 4:6 to say, “Present your requests with faith.” Instead, it’s “Present your requests with thanksgiving.”

“Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God” (Philippians 4:6).

Gratitude Reverses Anxiety

Faith is crucial, but without gratitude, it’s not enough. Anxiety is mainly an emotional problem, and it calls for an emotional cure. Gratitude touches not only your thoughts, words, and attitudes but also your emotions.

You cannot feel anxiety and gratitude at the same time for the same issue. One will drive out the other.

Clinical Studies

Research confirms this. In one study, subjects were asked to make a list of things for which they were thankful. After making the list, they reported higher levels of alertness, enthusiasm, determination, optimism, and energy than the control group. They were also less stressed and depressed and were more likely to help others.

The effect of gratitude on your body is the opposite of what anxiety does to you. It reverses the effects of stress hormones. The pleasure centers of your brain light up and release pleasure hormones such as dopamine and oxytocin. Your brain dishes out all kinds of neurological candy whenever you feel thankful.

And it’s good for you. According to the Mayo Clinic Health System, “Feeling thankful can improve sleep, mood, and immunity” and “decrease depression, anxiety, difficulties with chronic pain and risk of disease.”

Robert Emmons has written extensively on the benefits of gratitude. His studies have shown that thankfulness has one of the strongest links to mental health and satisfaction with life as any other trait. More than even positive thinking, hope, or compassion. Grateful people experience higher levels of joy, enthusiasm, love, happiness, and optimism. Gratitude prevents harmful attitudes such as envy, resentment, greed, and bitterness and increases one’s ability to handle everyday stress, to be resilient in the face of trauma-induced stress, and to recover from illness.

Students who received text reminders about gratitude reported sharper academic focus in class and greater ability to remain resilient when confronted with obstacles to learning.

In one study, people were asked to keep a gratitude journal. The result was they reported 25% higher levels of happiness than the control group. They also gained thirty minutes more sleep per night and exercised 33% more each week than those not journaling. People with hypertension achieved up to a 10% reduction in systolic blood pressure. They also had increased energy, alertness, and enthusiasm. They had a better sense of closure for traumatic memories, increased cardiac health, more satisfying relationships, and a greater sense of purpose.

If there were a pill that could do this, everyone would take it.

What Is Gratitude?

Gratitude is extremely healthy for your body, but all the physical and emotional benefits are the tip of the iceberg of the real value. Far more important are the spiritual rewards.

But to receive those, it’s crucial to understand what gratitude is. The studies on gratitude reflect averages, but in each study, there were subjects in the “gratitude” group that did not get the results. For example, gratitude journals work wonders for most people, but for some, they do nothing. If gratitude is really a miracle cure, why are the results so hit and miss?

It’s because not everyone who says, “Thank you” is truly grateful.

For such a commonplace experience, gratitude is surprisingly difficult to define. Dictionaries often provide a circular definition (gratitude is thankfulness, and thankfulness is gratitude). But without an understanding of what gratitude is, it’s no surprise that results would be hit and miss.

There is an entire chapter in the Bible designed to teach us about gratitude. Psalm 100 describes itself as a psalm for giving thanks.

“A psalm. For giving thanks. Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth. Worship the Lord with gladness; come before him with joyful songs. … Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise; give thanks to him and praise his name. For the Lord is good and his love endures forever” (Psalms 100:1-5).

That psalm shows three crucial components to gratitude. It is relational, emotional, and verbal.

Relational

The target of the psalmist’s gratitude is not the gift. It’s the Giver. The whole psalm is about giving thanks to the Lord.

Picture a family around a Thanksgiving table, taking turns expressing gratitude. “I’m thankful for my family.” “I’m thankful for my health.” “I’m thankful for my home.” Those are incomplete sentences. “Thankful for” is meaningless without “thankful to.”

Many people think they are being thankful when they acknowledge positive realities in their life. When they say, “I’m thankful for my family,” all they really mean is, “I like having my family.”

It’s healthy to think about the parts of your life you enjoy. But is it gratitude? Would you consider a child thankful if he grabbed a gift from your hands and enjoyed it with his back to you, never acknowledging you as the giver?

Remember when Jesus healed the ten lepers?

“As they went, they were cleansed. One of them, when he saw he was healed, came back, praising God in a loud voice. … Jesus asked, ‘Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine?’” (Luke 17:14-17)?

The implication is the other nine were not grateful. No doubt they thoroughly enjoyed not being lepers anymore. And they knew it was Jesus who gave them that gift. But until they do what leper number one did, it’s not gratitude. Gratitude is a personal, relational interaction.

“I’m thankful for good health.” “I’m thankful for my job.” Those are incomplete sentences. The question is, thankful to whom? If you can’t answer that, you aren’t thankful.

Grateful to the Universe?

There are Christian books on gratitude that say things like, “I’m in the Christian tradition, so I direct my thanksgiving to God. But if you’re not religious, it’s just as effective to say thanks to the universe or to nature.”

That’s nonsense. The universe doesn’t love you, and nature is not capable of personal interaction. Anyone who thinks he is grateful to a non-personal entity does not understand the meaning of gratitude.

And giving the creation credit for what God has done provokes God’s wrath.

“The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth … For they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him … They worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator” (Romans 1:18-25).

Ingratitude to God is mankind’s most fundamental sin, and it is at its worst when it gives the creation the credit for what God has done.

Suppose you heard I was in need, so you gave me your car as a gift. Imagine I called you the next day and said, “I love the car! I’m thankful to myself for it.” Would you consider me a grateful person? No. You would think I’d lost my mind. I’m not thankful for the gift unless I’m thankful to you for the gift.

More than Words

For most of the research studies on gratitude, the only criterion for someone being thankful was simply saying the words. Subjects were considered grateful if they kept a gratitude journal, wrote thank you notes, or expressed thanks verbally).

But is that all there is to gratitude? When we teach our kids to be polite, we train them to say the words, “thank you.” But if your child unwraps a present, mumbles “thanks,” tosses it aside, and walks away, do you consider him grateful? No.

When do you consider a child grateful? How about when you give a gift, he sees what it is, and he runs to give you the tightest hug he can muster? The genuineness of his gratitude is measured not by the number of his words or the enjoyment of the gift, but by the tightness of his hug. Gratitude is always relational. No hug, no gratitude.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be a literal hug. But it does have to be the emotional equivalent. Gratitude is personal and relational or it’s not gratitude.

The Love Behind the Gift

The reason gratitude must be relational is that the object of gratitude is not the gift, it’s the love or kindness that motivated the gift.

Let’s go back to our thanksgiving psalm.

“Give thanks to him and praise his name. For … his love endures forever” (Psalms 100:4-5).

That is one of twenty times in five different Old Testament books where we read the phrase, “Give thanks to the LORD. His love endures forever.” The object of gratitude is not the gift. It’s the love expressed in the gift.

If I gave you a car, but you found out I didn’t want to give it and was forced against my will, would you be thankful to me? What if you discovered I only gave it because I dislike you and hoped the car would cause you trouble? The object of gratitude is not the gift. It is the love or kindness expressed by the gift.

Don’t Be Distracted by the Gift

Imagine a little girl giving her daddy the tightest hug she can manage. You can even see the muscles in her little arms straining as she embraces him with all her might. At her feet is a gift from him she had just opened.

Beautiful scene, right? But why is she so happy? Sure, she got a gift—one gift. But how many wonderful things did she not receive? Billions. So if she lacks billions of wonderful gifts, why is she happy and not miserable?

It’s because her attention is on what she received, not on what she didn’t receive. Gratitude is receptivity and responsiveness to the giver’s love. That involves a kind of submissiveness to the way the giver chooses to express love.

If you move into a new home and your neighbor brings you a plate of cookies, to enjoy the gesture, you must submit to the way they wanted to express their kindness. They chose cookies. If you can’t appreciate it because you have your heart set on brownies, you’ll miss the joy of receiving their kindness. But if you accept the giver’s way of expressing kindness, the gift can make your day, even if you hate cookies.

If you ignore the giver and fixate on the gift, you’ll inevitably compare it to other gifts you might have liked more. This generates a greedy heart that can’t be satisfied because it’s always looking at what it doesn’t have instead of what it does have. Greed will make you miserable no matter how much God gives you, because there are always countless things you have not received.

Focusing on what has been given exposes you to God’s love. Focusing on what you haven’t received makes you feel unloved.

Adam and Eve

This points us back to the very origin of human sin. Wasn’t the first temptation to focus on deprivation and disregard abundance? The forbidden tree was in the middle of the garden, which means Adam and Eve had to walk past all the countless trees they were free to eat from to get to the one that hadn’t been given to them. When ingratitude invades your heart, it won’t matter how many blessings God showers on you. You’ll only be able to see the ones he didn’t give, which makes happiness impossible.

The serpent tempted Eve by turning her attention to what God hadn’t given her and suggesting it was because God didn’t want her to have something good. He was calling into question God’s love. Once that’s in doubt, we’re vulnerable to every kind of spiritual attack.

If Eve had turned her attention to all the other trees in the garden that she had been given, God’s favor would have been undeniable. Instead, she fixed her tunnel vision on what was forbidden, and became vulnerable to deception.

Emotional

The second component of gratitude that’s obvious in Psalm 100 is that it is emotional. Notice how much emotive language permeates the psalm.

“A psalm. For giving thanks. Shout for joy … Worship … with gladness; come before him with joyful songs. … Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise; give thanks to him and praise his name.” (Psalms 100:1-5).

This isn’t only in Psalm 100. Wherever thanksgiving appears in Scripture, it’s always in contexts of joy. Gratitude goes beyond mere acknowledgment of God’s love to enjoyment of his love.

If someone expresses love to you through a gift, the most significant thing they gave you wasn’t the gift. It was the love. If that love means nothing to you, you’re not grateful.

This is why counting your blessings or keeping a gratitude journal may or may not bring you joy. The joy comes not from merely knowing about God’s love, but from enjoying it.

Ingratitude is emotional deadness to the giver. Gratitude is emotional responsiveness to the giver. You can count your blessings until you’re blue in the face, but if you haven’t had a personal interaction between you and God involving your emotions, you’re not grateful.

Verbal

Gratitude is more than words, but it’s not less than words. It is not enough merely to enjoy God’s love. Gratitude is responsiveness to love. And the most basic way to respond is with words. This is why the terms “gratitude” and “thanksgiving” are so closely related. It matters what you say.

Notice the emphasis on the verbal response in Psalm 100.

“Shout for joy to the Lord, all the earth…. come before him with joyful songs. … Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise; give thanks to him and praise his name” (Psalms 100:1-4).

Complaining is Forbidden

The opposite of thanksgiving is complaining. And complaining is sin.

Philippians 2:14 Do everything without complaining or arguing.

There are times when it is necessary to speak about hardships. But when it comes from a griping, muttering, negative attitude, that’s complaining. And it infuriates God. The Lord once killed 14,700 Israelites for the sin of complaining (1 Corinthians 10:10). It infuriates him because complaining is the voice of ingratitude, which is one of mankind’s most fundamental evils (Romans 1:21).

God generously provides us with a car, and what happens? Someone cuts us off or we hit a traffic jam and we’re miserable. People in India are born and die on the same sidewalk. God puts us in large, comfortable, lavish homes and we grumble about cabinet space. We eat like kings and grouse about the waiter being slow to refill our drink. God gave us eternal life, and we complain about a stuck zipper. What do we think we deserve? Paradise? God promised that too. But we moan about too many commercials on TV.

Words Move the Heart

Out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks (Matthew 12:34). Grateful or grumbling words come out of your mouth because of grateful or grumbling attitudes.

But it works in the other direction as well. What comes out of your mouth amplifies and strengthens what’s in your heart. If something painful happens, it may spark a little fire of discontent. Speaking about it (complaining) pours gasoline on the flames. But when there is a glimmer of gratitude, expressing that with words of thanks to the giver strengthens that gratitude.

The mental energy required in formulating and speaking or writing words of thanks forces your attention onto God’s kindness. And the more time spent doing that, the greater your joy.

Maybe you were told growing up, “If you can’t think of anything good to say, don’t say anything at all.” But that’s not the solution. If you can’t think of anything good to say, think harder.

Godliness Training ExercisesEvery day, use words to express your gratitude to God, whether verbally or in writing.Be alert for instances where you might naturally miss a gesture of God’s love because you had your heart set on brownies when God gave cookies. Compile a list over the course of three days. And make an effort to enjoy the love expressed by those cookies.We often don’t even notice our own complaining. Ask the people around you what you tend to complain about. It may help to ask them to point it out each time it happens.Based on your complaining, make a list of areas of ingratitude in your heart. Give some thought to how you could replace those pockets of ingratitude with thankfulness.Keep reviewing the verses you have memorized so far and add Matthew 6:30-31.

*****

Links

For the video of this session, click here.

Part 1 of this series Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8

*****

Footnotes

Cited by Tamar Chansky in Freeing Yourself from Anxiety, Part 4, Shortcuts at the 8:08:12 mark.

The Neural Basis of Human Social Values: Evidence from Functional MRI, Zahn, 2008.

https://www.mayoclinichealthsystem.or....

Robert A. Emmons, Gratitude Works! Audiobook, ch.1, The Challenge of Gratitude.

Wilson, J. T. (2016). Brightening the Mind: The Impact of Practicing Gratitude on Focus and Resilience in Learning. Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 16(4), 1–13. https://doi.org/10.14434/josotl.v16i4....

Ibid.

1 Chronicles 16:34, 41; 2 Chronicles 5:13; 7:3,6; 20:21; Ezra 3:11; Psalms 106:1; 107:1,8,15,21,31; 118:1,29; 136:1-3, 26; Jeremiah 33:11.

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Published on October 15, 2023 13:04

September 14, 2023

Chapter 8 Self-Talk

How did the psalmists maintain their hope and joy even while being honest and realistic about their troubles? Their secret had to do with prayer and self-talk–what they said to themselves and what they said to God.

*****

Why Prayer Doesn’t Always Help

So far we’ve learned that anxiety is designed to drive you to take action. If there’s no action to take right now, throw the weight of the problem onto God’s shoulders.

“Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you” (1 Peter 5:7).

A good example of this is Hannah in 1 Samuel. This kind of prayer can calm your inner turmoil. Before Hannah prayed, she was so upset she couldn’t eat. After she prayed, her anxiety was gone and her appetite returned even though her hard circumstances hadn’t changed.

But it doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes you cast your cares on God and moments later they are right back on your shoulders. They are like double stick tape—hard to throw away.

So what’s the trick to praying in such a way that you actually feel the burden lift? The answer is in the psalms, and it rests in what kinds of things you say to God, and what kinds of things you say to your soul. The psalmists frequently alternate between prayer and self-talk.

Speaking to God:

“Vindicate me, O God … Why must I go about mourning, oppressed by the enemy? Send forth your light and your truth … let them bring me … to the place where you dwell” (Psalms 43:1-3).

Speaking to Self:

“Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God” (Psalms 43:5).

We all talk to ourselves—all day every day. And if you’re a believer, you speak to God many times a day. The key to praying in a way that calms your anxiety instead of making it worse has to do with which things you say to God and which things you say to yourself.

Our natural impulse with self-talk is to grumble to ourselves about our troubles, as if we needed a reminder of how many things are going wrong. No solutions, nothing constructive, only an ongoing rehearsal of all our problems.

Never talk to yourself about your troubles. Talk to God about your troubles and talk to yourself about God.

The author of Psalm 43 talks to God about how he was feeling, how he was being mistreated, and what he was suffering and makes his specific requests. Then he talks to his soul about God, directing himself to put his hope in God.

Psalms 102 and 103 provide a clinic on how to combine self-talk with prayer.

In Psalm 102, the psalmist talks to God about his troubles.

“My bones burn like glowing embers. My heart is blighted and withered like grass… I lie awake… my enemies taunt me” (Psalms 102:3-8).

And he makes a specific request.

“Do not hide your face from me when I am in distress” (Psalms 102:3-8).

In Psalm 103, he talks to his soul about God.

“Praise the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits–who forgives … and heals … who redeems … and crowns … who satisfies.” (Psalms 103:2-5).

The Importance of Self-Talk

There is a reason God included examples of self-talk in the inspired book of prayer (Psalms). Most of us underestimate the impact of what we say to ourselves.

A thousand voices constantly fight for your attention. Most you filter out. But one voice always gets through. Your own. We all listen to our own self-talk.

In the words of Paul Tripp, “No one is more influential in your life than you are because no one talks to you more than you do. You’re in an unending conversation with yourself … interpreting, organizing, and analyzing what’s going on inside you and around you.”

Self-talk is one of the primary ways your brain wires itself. What you say to yourself generates neural networks and builds the physical structure of your brain. Those networks solidify your beliefs and steer the direction of your life.

How Healthy Is Your Self-Talk?

So given how much is at stake, it’s worth asking, “How healthy is my self-talk?” Tripp goes on: “What do you regularly tell yourself about yourself, God, and your circumstances? Do your words to you inspire faith, hope, and courage? Or do they stimulate doubt, discouragement, and fear? … How wholesome, faith-driven, and Christ-centered is the conversation that you have with you every day?”

We would do well to take those words to heart, because the way you talk to yourself can do violence to the Holy Spirit’s work in you. Or it can be an instrument of his work.

Joy, peace, and hope are all the work of God.

“May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit” (Romans 15:13).

If the Spirit is working to produce joy in your heart, pouring any unnecessary cold water on your joy with your self-talk vandalizes the Spirit’s work. The same goes for hope, peace, or any other virtue the Holy Spirit is producing in you.

What do you say to yourself when you do something dumb? When someone in your family hurts you? Or your boss is unfair? When you suffer a loss? Get sick? Fail at something? Do you say things that fortify your faith? Do you affirm biblical truths and remind yourself of crucial attributes of God? Or do you stoke the fires of anxiety?

Toxic Positivity

The importance of self-talk is no secret. Authors like Norman Vincent Peale and Tony Robbins sold millions of books about the power of positive thinking. But what is it, exactly, that you should say to yourself? Is it as simple as “Don’t worry, be happy”? Should you just try to look at the bright side of everything? “I got hit by a car. At least it wasn’t a bus!”

The positive thinking movement was big for a while, but it faded when people discovered it wasn’t the miracle cure it was billed to be. Researchers began pointing out flaws in the positive psychology research. New research showed that if you are artificially positive and you don’t face the reality of negative things, that does more harm than good. The term “toxic positivity” is gaining popularity. In some contexts, negative thoughts serve you better than positive ones.

The Warm Blanket of Sorrow

Again—science catching up to Scripture.

“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven … a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance” (Ecclesiastes 3:1-4).

“Like one who takes away a garment on a cold day … is one who sings songs to a heavy heart” (Proverbs 25:20).

There is a time to cheer people up, and there is a time to weep with those who weep. And notice the analogy in Proverbs 25. Trying to cheer up a heavy heart is like taking away warm clothing on a cold day.

Sometimes sadness and negative thoughts can be like a warm blanket you can wrap up in for a time to nurse your wounds. Have you ever been upset and someone tried to get a smile out of you by telling jokes or tickling you? Not helpful.

There will be a time to lay down the blanket and face life again, but that doesn’t happen through artificial positivity. It comes through hope. The sad, worried, or anxious person doesn’t need a pep talk. But he does need words of hope. Especially when the person you’re talking to is you.

Facing Reality

We must resist oversimplified solutions. Can negative emotions cause physical and spiritual harm? Yes. Let them run unchecked, and they can kill you. But they can also be a warm blanket in a frigid storm. Optimism is good. But phony, unrealistic positivism is superficial and denies reality. Even Jesus wept (John 11:35).

God doesn’t want us to ignore reality. We must face our troubles. But there is a way to do it that will drag you down into despair and there is a way that will keep your joy intact.

Again, our guide is the psalms. Did the psalmists talk about their troubles? Did they ever! Many times in the darkest, most graphic detail. Yet so often, they were full of hope because of how they used self-talk.

Don’t Talk to Yourself About Your Troubles

The wrong kind of self-talk is also the most natural—talking to yourself about your troubles in ways that destroy faith, hope, and joy.

Something in us wants to grumble when things go wrong. It may be self-pity, anger, or a desire to excuse our failures, but complaining is the natural human response to hardship.

And for our complaining to be impressive, our troubles have to be big. So we exaggerate them in our own minds. Have you ever noticed how when something goes wrong, your mind immediately tries to connect it with something else that went wrong? You misplace your keys, that makes you late for work, and you think, That dumb barking dog woke me up early, I’m dead tired, my knee is acting up, now I’m late. This is shaping up to be some day.

What value is there in amassing evidence that we’re having a hard day? None. It just makes us miserable. But that’s what happens when you talk to yourself about your troubles. The inner dialogue tends to snowball into catastrophism, self-pity, discontent, envy, ingratitude, and a host of other soul-destroying, hope-killing, anxiety-producing attitudes.

Talk to God About Your Troubles

So should you just put negative thoughts out of your mind? No. Face reality and work through it. Go ahead and talk about your troubles. Just talk to God about them, not to yourself. It changes what you say.

Prevents Exaggeration

When you talk to yourself, you tend to exaggerate how bad things are. But you feel pretty silly overstating the matter to God when he saw the whole thing.

Keeps Perspective

When you talk to yourself, it’s easy to lose perspective. But when you talk to God, it puts your problem against the backdrop of the spiritual world and you see it in context.

“God, this problem is the biggest issue in the world! … Oh, except for your kingdom … and the work of the gospel … and spiritual warfare and eternal life and heaven and hell. I guess this problem isn’t as big as I thought.”

Anxiety narrows our vision so all we can see are our troubles. Talking to God about your troubles widens your vision back out to see the full picture.

Prevents Giving Up

When you talk to yourself, your problems seem hopeless. But not when you talk to God. You can’t very well tell God, “This situation is hopeless. Not even you can handle this one.”

Cognitive Restructuring

Talking to God about your troubles protects you from all the cognitive distortions that anxiety typically causes.

So talking to God about your troubles will win half the battle. It will keep you from the kind of thinking that destroys hope. But it’s not enough to just avoid destroying hope. We need something that will increase our hope, joy, faith, and inner peace.

That’s where self-talk comes in. Talk to God about your troubles and talk to yourself about God.

Talk to Yourself About God

When you isolate an anxiety and bring it before the Lord, ask yourself, “What are two or three truths about God’s nature that are relevant to this problem?” Then use your imagination to contemplate those attributes. This will shift your attention from your problem to your Father.

But don’t stop there. Imagine yourself having an experience of those attributes that fills you with joy. Or hope. Or peace. Imagining that will create neural pathways that will make those responses easier when you experience the attributes you considered. The more vivid your imagination, and the more frequently you do it, the stronger the neural connections.

Shift from Inward to Upward

The instruction manual for how to pray in times of stress, the Psalms, teaches us to shift from inward thinking to upward thinking. No book of the Bible speaks more about human sorrows than Psalms. And no book in the Bible is more densely packed with statements about what God is like. Pick any psalm and list every truth about God stated or implied. You’ll rarely have less than ten and often more than twenty.

Compare that to your own prayers. How many attributes of God do you mention in a typical prayer? No wonder the psalmists were so full of hope.

It’s fine to talk to God about your problems, but never without giving yourself plenty of reminders about what God is like. Try this. For every one thought about your troubles, five thoughts about God.

Psalm 103

The author of Psalm 103 gives a clinic on how to talk to yourself about God.

“Praise the Lord, O my soul; all my inmost being, praise his holy name” (verse 1).

No matter what kind of self-talk is creating anxiety, if you shift from that to praising God, it will shut off the spigot of stress hormones.

“Praise the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits” (verse 2).

Much of our anxiety comes from forgetting God’s benefits. So the psalmist reminds his soul of several of them.

Do you have thoughts of self-condemnation? What attribute will help with that?

“he forgives all your sins and heals all your diseases” (verse 3).

Thoughts that your life is hopelessly ruined?

“redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion” (verse 4).

Afraid you won’t be happy because of some loss?

“satisfies your desires with good things” (verse 5).

Thoughts that your best days are behind you?

“so that your youth is renewed like the eagle’s” (verse 5).

Thoughts about how life is unfair?

“The Lord works righteousness and justice for all the oppressed” (verse 6).

Thoughts about God being mad at you?

“The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love. He will not always accuse, nor will he harbor his anger forever. He does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him; as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us. As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him; for he knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust” (verses 8-14).

Use Your Imagination

So you use your imagination to contemplate the fact that God forgives sins and heals. And imagine yourself feeling crushing guilt to the point of despair, and then feeling forgiven, clean, and 100% certain everything is now okay between you and God.

Imagine it until you feel it.

Then the next one. Imagine yourself feeling like you’ve ruined your life beyond repair. Then envision God lifting you from that pit and restoring your life better than it was before.

Imagine it until you feel it.

Keep going through the list. That’s how you talk to your soul about God. The stronger the anxiety, the more of God’s glory your soul needs to see. It’s great to affirm, “God is good all the time.” But don’t be satisfied with just one attribute.

Hard Work

None of this will be easy. Everything in your natural anxiety response will resist this. It’s a wrestling match.

“How long must I wrestle with my thoughts?” (Psalms 13:2).

A literal translation would be, “How long must I set counsel in my soul?” When your mind insists on flying off into irrational fretting and you constantly have to impose counsel on it to rein it in, it can be exhausting. The psalmist asked God how much longer he would have to wrestle. That’s a question you ask when it seems like it’s going on longer than you can handle.

Difficult as it is, the wrestling match is worth it. By the end, the anxious psalmist is full of joy.

“But I trust in your unfailing love; my heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing to the Lord, for he has been good to me” (Psalms 13:5-6).

Has Your Counselor Perished?

Your problems are real. And they may be huge. But they are not the whole story. Anxiety narrows our vision so all we can see are our troubles. Talking to yourself about God widens your vision back out to see the full picture. You never have the full story until you’ve considered God.

The psalmist said, “My soul is downcast within me, therefore I will remember you” (Psalms 42:6). Much of our anxiety comes from simply forgetting about God.

“Why do you now cry aloud—have you no king? Has your counselor perished, that pain seizes you like that of a woman in labor?” (Micah 4:9)

What would it do to your perspective if you caught yourself during out-of-control anxiety and asked yourself, “What’s the matter, soul? Has your Savior died?”

We all go through times that trouble our souls. But does your reaction suggest God is dead, or that he’s more real than ever?

The less you understand why this hardship is happening, the more important it is to fix your attention on God’s nature. As the saying goes, “When you can’t trace God’s hand, you must trust his heart.” When you can’t make heads or tails out of what God is doing with his hand, trust his kind, fatherly affections.

If your thoughts are running away with you and you can’t get them to stop, try thinking of one attribute of God for each letter of the alphabet. And after each letter, stop and thank God for being that way toward you.

Inspiring Hope

The author of Psalms 42 and 43 wrote in a state of severe anxiety. Three times he states that his soul is “disturbed.” The Hebrew word is hamah, which refers to a commotion, disturbance, or uproar. It’s used of snarling dogs and the roiling, foaming tumult of a stormy sea. And all three times he directed his soul to hope in God.

You can’t reason with your nervous system. It doesn’t work to tell yourself, “Stop being so stressed. This shouldn’t bother you so much. Just chill.” What does work is to tell yourself truths that inspire hope and joy. The goal is not positive thinking. The goal is inspirational thinking—thinking that sets your soul on a track that leads to hope.

You know what kinds of thoughts trigger anxiety. But causing anxiety isn’t the worst of it. Those thoughts also damage your soul.

“This will probably be a disaster.”

“I’m such an idiot.”

“This situation is hopeless.”

“What’s wrong with me?”

“Everything’s going wrong today.”

“My life is a dumpster fire.”

Those thoughts are like hitting your head against the wall. Keep doing it, and eventually you’ll get brain damage. And you’ll weaken your soul’s ability to trust God.

Hope-inspiring self-talk has the opposite effect.

“His mercies are new every morning.”

“You have laid your hand upon me.”

“God’s grace will be sufficient for me.”

“If God didn’t withhold his own Son from me, surely he’ll help me with this.”

Each time you have thoughts like that, you strengthen your spirit and prepare it for joy. That’s the sort of thing the writer of Psalms 42-43 was talking about when he told his soul, “Put your hope in God.”

Hope in God

Are you stressed about an upcoming event? Maybe a visit to family or a hard meeting at work? Something coming up that’s got your stomach in knots? Anxiety is telling you, “Something bad is about to happen.”

But if you’re a believer, you can say, “Something good is about to happen to me.” And that’s not wishful thinking. It’s always true. For the child of God, every event is a good gift from God. Not always pleasant. But definitely good because God only does good things.

“All the ways of the LORD are loving and faithful for those who keep the demands of his covenant” (Psalms 25:10).

From Anxiety to Hope

The book of Lamentations describes how the author when from the extremes of anxiety to joy and hope.

The author believes peace itself had rejected his soul.

“My soul has been rejected from peace” (Lamentations 3:17 NAS).

Anxiety and depression are often companions.

He has driven me away and made me walk in darkness rather than light … surrounded me with bitterness … He has walled me in so I cannot escape; he has weighed me down with chains. Even when I call out or cry for help, he shuts out my prayer. He has barred my way with blocks of stone … So I say, ‘All that I had hoped from the Lord [is gone].’ my soul is downcast within me” (Lamentations 3:2-20).

After two and a half chapters of that, he goes from the extremes of anxiety and depression to being full of hope. How? By calling to mind truth about God.

“Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning” (Lamentations 3:21-23).

He called to mind the creativity of God’s love—new every morning. The phrase translated “call to mind” is literally “I bring back into my heart.” He contemplated it and meditated on it until it penetrated his heart and gave him hope.

Give It A Try

Try contemplating that attribute when you’re worried about the future. New every morning, every month, every year—God never runs out of new ideas.

Isn’t it true that over this past year, God gave you some gifts that he never gave you before? Hasn’t he given you new insights? New experiences with a friend? Sunsets and sunrises different from anything you’ve seen before? New appreciation of foods, new restaurants? We probably can’t even remember 99% of the mercies we received for the first time this year.

From a Bad Day to Loving God

Apply these principles all through the day. Remember the day that started with a bad night’s sleep, a sore knee, and dropped toast? How would you apply these principles on a morning like that?

First, resist the impulse to connect your problems together. Keep them separate and deal with them one at a time.

The thought process should be, I’m late for work, and my knee is … wait a minute. Being late and my bum knee have nothing to do with each other. They are completely separate problems with separate solutions.

Even if the problems are related, they might have different solutions. If you combine different problems with different solutions together, then they have no solution.

Example: Problem #1

For each hardship, pinpoint the core problem, talk to God about it, tell him how you feel, and then request something specific.

“Father, I’m late for work. I’m worried about what my boss will say. My request is that you would prepare me for the difficulties I’ll face when I show up late.”

Then you talk to your soul about how God is close by when his people face trouble and that he controls whether you have favor in the eyes of men.

Now you’ve worked through it, made your request, and you turned your attention to what God is like. The ball is in God’s court, you feel like you can trust him with it—the issue is resolved. At least for now. Your brain doesn’t think it has to hold you in a state of anxiety over that problem.

Problem #2

On to the next issue—your lack of sleep.

Speak to your soul.

Soul, consider these attributes:
1) God can supply all the strength I need regardless of little sleep.

2) He intentionally allowed me to be tired today for his purposes.

3) His purposes are always good for me.

4) He’s worthy of my wholehearted service even when it’s hard.

5) He’s full of compassion. He’s the only one who understands how hard this is for me today, and he cares.

Now talk to God about it and make your requests.

“Father, thank you for promising the grace to go through this day tired. I look forward to receiving that grace. My request is that you enable me to be receptive to it and to enjoy you through it.”

Fatigue problem addressed. It’s off your plate.

Problem #3

Next issue—the toast. Imagine God saying, “What do you want me to do about the toast problem, specifically?” You chuckle to yourself and realize that one’s not quite the catastrophe it felt like. “Never mind about that one, God.”

You realize it’s a non-issue and there’s no need to give it another moment’s thought. It sounds silly, but this is important. If you don’t go through this process, it stays in the back of your mind as part of your conglomeration of problems. Every item in your list must be handled.

Can you see the difference this will make for your anxiety?

BEFORE:
Lingering pressure of having a terrible day where “everything” is going wrong with no possible solution.

AFTER:
You had three issues that have been dealt with and now you love the Lord a little more than you did yesterday. No need for anxiety.

Godliness Training ExercisesSpeak to God in the style of Psalm 102 and to yourself in the style of Psalm 103 about three anxieties.

If you’re not sure which attributes of God are relevant, ask friends for help.

Make a goal of speaking truth to yourself about God as an automatic, habitual response whenever anxiety hits.

Choose a psalm at random and list every attribute of God stated or implied. Use your imagination to daydream about experiencing several of those attributes.Imagine yourself feeling intense joy, hope, or peace in that experience.Keep reviewing your memory verses and add the next verse in Matthew 6.

*****

Links

For the video of this session, click here.

Part 1 of this series Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7

*****

Footnotes

https://www.paultripp.com/wednesdays-....

Wood JV, Perunovic WQ, Lee JW. Positive self-statements: power for some, peril for others. Psychol Sci. 2009 Jul;20(7):860-6. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02370.x. Epub 2009 May 21. PMID: 19493324.

An attribute is anything that is true about God.

Psalms 42:6; 12; 43:5.

This is the case with most sins we struggle with. If you have a temper problem, chances are your inner monologue is dominated by angry thoughts. The same is true for greed, vengeance/unforgiveness, lust, sadness, or people-pleasing. Each unchecked thought in one of those categories pushes you further in that direction.

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Published on September 14, 2023 09:58

September 4, 2023

The Benefits of Suffering – 23 Reasons to Count It all Joy

The Benefits of SufferingWhen we suffer, Scripture calls us to count it all joy (Jas.1:2), rejoice (Ro.5:3), and leap for joy (Lk.6:23) because of all the amazing benefits that we receive through suffering. For the believer, suffering is always good (Ps.119:75). Unbelievers suffer in ways that do not benefit them, but all our suffering as believers is beneficial in at least twenty-three ways (no doubt there are others I haven’t thought of). These benefits are enjoyed in greater or lesser degrees depending upon the person’s response to the suffering, but the benefits are always available to believers when we suffer.Since the benefits of suffering, in great measure, depend on having the right response to the suffering, it’s essential that we understand how to respond in ways to gain these benefits. For each of the following benefits I will give a description of the benefit, and then a brief statement on the right way to respond in order to gain that benefit.1. Suffering Accomplishes God’s Perfect PurposesRomans 8:28 And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.Deuteronomy 32:4 He is the Rock, his works are perfect, and all his ways are just. A faithful God who does no wrong, upright and just is he.Everything God does, He does for a reason—an infinitely good reason. He does not waste His time and He does nothing arbitrarily. God only does good things (Dt.32:4). Oh, what a blessing it is to know that absolutely everything that ever happens to us—down to the smallest detail—is a purposeful, intentional, loving, wise, beneficial step in a grand, glorious design! Every moment of every day you are experiencing the unfolding of the great drama of God’s perfect providential plan. The Giant MachineFrom an earthly perspective it is a frightening thing to be in the midst of the huge, massive powers that seem to determine what happens to us (like the weather, or the millions of people around us, or a hundred other threats that are beyond our control). The temptation is to feel like a mouse in the midst of some giant machinery, running around trying to avoid being crushed in the gears.We are indeed inside a giant machine, but the machine is God’s, and you are not a mouse, but a cog. The heavy, steel gears that are turning you are doing so by God’s design and under His control. This truth alone should make all our suffering and everything else that happens to us exceedingly precious in our sight.Respond to all suffering with the 1:5 principle. For every one thought about your hard circumstances, think five thoughts about God’s purposes. Think about His purposes for as long as it takes for your heart to begin to rejoice in them.2. God’s Tool for the Advance of the GospelPhilippians 1:12 Now I want you to know, brothers, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel. 13 As a result, it has become clear throughout the whole palace guard and to everyone else that I am in chains for Christ. 14 Because of my chains, most of the brothers in the Lord have been encouraged to speak the word of God more courageously and fearlessly.2 Timothy 1:8 join with me in suffering for the gospel, by the power of God … 11 of this gospel I was appointed a herald and an apostle and a teacher. 12 That is why I am suffering as I am.In His wisdom, God has chosen suffering as one of the primary tools He uses for the effective spread of the gospel and the encouragement of the saints.Gain this benefit by considering how much more important the work of the kingdom is than temporal comfort. And rejoice in God’s ability to bring about eternal fruit through your suffering even when you cannot see how your suffering will accomplish anything.3. PurificationJob 23:10 When he has tested me, I will come forth as gold.Psalm 119:67 Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I obey your word.God uses suffering in countless different ways to increase our holiness and obedience. Even Jesus learned obedience through suffering (Heb.5:8). Some examples of godliness that can be gained from suffering are perseverance (Jas.1:2-3, Ro.5:3), character (Ro.5:3-4), hope (Ro.5:3-4), and humility (2 Cor.12:7). Suffering increases our sense of dependence on God and protects us from becoming puffed up with self-reliance, which is our greatest enemy. Our suffering is training from our Father in heaven. When it is chastisement for sin it teaches us to forsake sin. When it is not related to a particular sin, it trains us in other ways. Either way, it is training that results in “a harvest of righteousness” (Heb.12:7,11).Respond to suffering by reminding your soul how weak, needy, and helpless it is, and strive to increase your sense of dependence on God. Let your suffering humble you. The humbling is not automatic; so cooperate with it.4. Increased Power from God2 Corinthians 12:7 To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger of Satan, to torment me. 8 Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. 9 But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. 10 That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.When we realize that our suffering opens up greater possibilities for God to demonstrate His power in our lives, we will delight in our sufferings. Lack of suffering tends toward self-reliance which reduces the level of divine power at work in your life.The way Paul responded to his suffering in a way that caused the power of Christ to rest upon him was by boasting all the more gladly in his weaknesses and sufferings. To boast means to regard them as a badge of honor and to think about them as being of great value.5. Exposure of Faith and UnbeliefLuke 8:13 They believe for a while, but in the time of testing they fall away.1 Peter 1:6 now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. 7 These have come so that your faith … may be proved genuineJames 1:2 Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, 3 because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance.All suffering is a test. Each trial exposes the genuineness or lack of genuineness of our faith. When a trial pushes a person away from God, that exposes the fact that faith, in that area, is not real. When suffering drives a person toward God, that exposes the fact that his faith is real. The prime example of this is Job. God sent intense and relentless suffering into Job’s life for the purpose of demonstrating that Job’s faith was indeed real.Regardless of the outcome of the test, the test itself is a priceless gift. When suffering exposes a lack of faith, that alerts us to a very important reality (like discovering cancer in the early stages so it can be cured). When suffering exposes genuine faith, that glorifies God.Gain this benefit from suffering by looking carefully at the test results. Did it drive you toward or away from God? Did you respond in a way consistent with faith? If so, rejoice! If not, be glad that the deadly disease was spotted in time, and strive to shore up that area of weak faith.6. Ability to Glorify God Through Faith1 Peter 1:6 now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. 7 These have come so that your faith … may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed.The book of Job begins with a conversation between God and Satan in which the Devil questions the validity of Job’s worship. He claims that Job only worships God because God has bought him off, and that if God took away the blessings, Job would curse God. In essence, Satan is saying that God is not really worthy to be worshipped apart from bribing that worship out of people. When Job lost everything and still worshipped God, that showed God to be worthy of worship and honored Him before Satan and all the angels and demons, as well as anyone who has ever read the book of Job.The greater a person’s suffering, the greater that person’s ability to glorify God. The only way to please God is by faith (Heb.11:6), and faith is never so God-honoring as when it is in the midst of suffering. Anyone can say, “Praise the Lord” when there is blessing. But when a person remains devoted to the Lord even in severe pain—oh, how that honors God! When we suffer, we have a means of honoring God that the angels can never experience.Furthermore, the more we suffer and remain faithful in this life, the more honor and glory Jesus will receive from our lives on the Day He returns (1 Pe.1:7). Be FaithfulGain this benefit simply by continuing to be faithful to God—especially in those times when the suffering seems so baffling, and in your wildest imagination you cannot see a good purpose for it. Memorize Job’s responses:Job 1:20 Then he fell to the ground in worship 21 and said: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised.” 22 In all this, Job did not sin by charging God with wrongdoing.Job 2:10 “Shall we accept good from God, and not trouble?”Respond that way and then sit back and enjoy God’s smile on your faith.7. Greater Ability to Experience Various Attributes of God1 Peter 4:13 rejoice that you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed.Note carefully, it is not our suffering that results in being overjoyed at the Second Coming—it is our rejoicing in that suffering. Those who have rejoiced in their suffering for Christ more in this life will have greater joy. Those who have rejoiced less in their suffering for Christ will have lesser joy.One of the reasons for our increased capacity for joy on that Day is the fact that our suffering enables us to experience all the attributes of God that can only be experienced in the midst of pain. There is no greater thing than to have a favorable experience of an attribute of God. Experiencing what God is like is the greatest thing in the universe. The angels in heaven get to experience many of the aspects of God’s glory firsthand. But think of how many attributes of God they can never experience. No angel will ever experience what it is like to be forgiven. None of them will ever feel God’s compassion or pity or mercy. Those attributes of God cannot be experienced apart from suffering. The fact that we are subjected to sin and suffering places us in a position to experience God’s tenderness, restoration, refreshment, guidance, companionship in the midst of loneliness, rescue from danger, peace in the midst of turmoil, and so many other marvelous facets of His glory. ExampleOne example of this is God’s compassion and pity. Think of a child who gets a scrape and runs into the house crying, and then stops crying and goes on his merry way after mom gives it a kiss. What happened? Is there less physical pain? No. The pain is exactly the same after the kiss. The reason he ran in crying, and the reason he stops crying after the kiss is because compassion is such a delightful thing to experience. And as sweet as it is to receive it from mom, it is far more wonderful to receive it from God. In fact, it is better to suffer and receive God’s pity than to never have suffered at all. Oh, how important it is that we learn to enjoy God’s compassion and pity when we suffer.Gain this benefit by seeking God as your refuge, comforter, healer, guide, counselor, redeemer, restorer, shield, fortress, and rock.8. Increased Understanding of the Goodness of the Presence of GodPsalms 13:1 How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?One of our greatest problems is our inability to appreciate what is so wonderful about the presence of God. We can read about it in Scripture, but often our emotions and desires don’t get on board with what we know intellectually. But when we suffer, and we say to our soul, “See, the presence of God is so good; this is a sample of what it’s like to be a little further from that presence”—that trains the soul to appreciate (with mind, heart, and soul) how wonderful the presence of God is.9. Increased Thirst for God’s PresenceIn Psalm 63 David was going through horrible suffering. The person he probably loved most in the world had turned against him. His own son had rebelled against him, taken his throne by force, and was hunting David down to kill him. David was in unbelievable agony over this. He had been the greatest king of the world, and now he was in the desert running for his life from his son. The physical suffering of being out there in the desert combined with the emotional agony felt unbearable.He wrote about it in Psalm 63 while he was in the desert.Psalm 63:1 O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek __________; my soul thirsts for ________, my body longs for _________, in a dry and weary land where there is no water.When you read that, what would you naturally expect a person in David’s position (and yours) to put in those spaces? “My soul thirsts for…my son to come to his senses”? My soul longs for…restoration of my family and vindication and the return to my throne”? Earnestly I seek…to recover what was lost”? That’s what most people would say because most people think that’s what would restore happiness. But that’s not what David said. One DesireHe had one desire:Psalm 63:1 O God, you are my God, earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you, my body longs for you, in a dry and weary land where there is no water.Respond to agonizing pain by using that pain to increase your thirst for God’s presence, because only His presence can restore joy. This is a wonderful truth, because God said we will not experience His presence unless we seek Him with all our heart and all our soul (Jer.29:13). Most people are unable to enjoy deep, rich, satisfying experiences of His presence because they never get thirsty enough to really seek with all that is in them. But one thing intense suffering can do (if it’s interpreted properly) is increase our thirst to a level that we ARE able to seek God with all our heart and soul. So always use suffering and pain to increase your thirst for God. Look at the pain and interpret that pain as thirst for the presence of God.10. Drives Us to God, Intensifies PrayerLuke 22:44 And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestlyIsn’t it true that your best prayers–your most intense, heartfelt, passionate prayers, have been in times of anguish or desperation? We have all experienced the calamity of having a dry, dull heart toward God that results in passionless, weak prayer. In some cases, when we were passionate in our prayers without suffering, there was no need for God to send suffering. But where passion is lacking, it is worth suffering some pain if it restores our zeal in seeking God. Passionate prayer is of infinite worth, but it is hard to come by. Praise be to God for supplying the suffering we need to drive us to pray with passion! Gain this benefit by pouring out your heart in passionate, earnest prayer when you suffer.11. Makes Us Long for Heaven2 Corinthians 5:8 We are confident, I say, and would prefer to be away from the body and at home with the Lord.The greater our hope for heaven the more we honor God. Suffering increases that hope. Respond to suffering by thinking more about heaven.12. Increased Hope for the Second ComingRevelation 21:4 He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”Oh, the glory Jesus will receive on that Day that He puts a permanent end to all suffering. The shouts of the angels on that Day will be one thing, but nothing compared to the praises of those who have endured suffering and death. Let suffering turn your thinking to that glorious Day.13. Snaps Us out of the Fog of TriviaPsalm 102:4 My heart is blighted and withered like grass; I forget to eat my food.Suffering—especially severe suffering, has a way of awakening us to what is truly important. We get so caught up in the trivia of life that tiny, little things get us worked up, then some major trial comes along and opens our eyes to how meaningless all those things are compared to eternal realities.Take advantage of this benefit by seizing on the prime opportunity to preach to your soul about what is important and what isn’t.14. Teaches Us to Understand God’s WordPsalm 119:71 It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees.Very often the key to understanding God’s Word comes only through suffering. A painful ordeal breaks into your life, and the agony of it drives you to seek a solution from Scripture with an intensity you would not otherwise have. When you listen to sermons your ears are alert to principles that would address your problem. And when they come, you hear what no one else hears, and you have insights into how to apply that Scripture that no one else picks up on because they aren’t going through what you are going through.Gain this benefit by seeking answers from God’s Word when you suffer. And don’t give up until you find them![1]15. Teaches Us the Horror of SinRomans 8:19 The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. 20 For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. 22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.Not all of your suffering is due to sin in your life. But all your suffering is due to sin. It is sin that caused the Fall and the curse. All pain exists because of sin and is designed to teach us how horrible sin really is. None of us hate sin enough, but suffering, if we use it right, can train us to hate sin more. Let all your distress over suffering feed your hatred for sin and increase your love for righteousness.16. The Privilege of Participation in the Sufferings of Christ1 Peter 4:12 Dear friends, do not be surprised at the painful trial you are suffering, as though something strange were happening to you. 13 But rejoice that you participate in the sufferings of ChristPhilippians 3:10 I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his deathActs 5:41 The apostles left the Sanhedrin, rejoicing because they had been counted worthy of suffering disgrace for the Name.Philippians 1:29 For it has been granted to you on behalf of Christ … to suffer for himWhen an employee is injured on the job, it is the employer’s responsibility to cover the medical bills. In a similar way, when a Christian suffers any hardship while on the clock for Jesus, that is considered suffering for Jesus. EpaphroditusEpaphroditus was to be honored because he almost died for Christ (Php.2:30). What happened? Was he scourged like Paul? Beaten by an angry mob for preaching the gospel? Threatened by government officials? No. He got sick while en route to delivering a financial gift to Paul (Php.2:27). Somewhere along the line he inhaled a germ and became ill, and God considered that suffering for Christ, because it happened while on the job for Christ.If your spouse or boss mistreats you, if you are in that job or marriage because you are seeking to follow God’s will for your life, then ALL suffering in that job or marriage counts as suffering while on the job for Christ.Gain this benefit first by making sure your suffering is for Christ’s sake, and not because of unrepentant sin or folly on your part. We can rejoice over suffering that is the consequence of sin (see #3), but if the sin or foolishness is currently ongoing, put a stop to it.Secondly, spend time thinking about the grand honor of suffering for His name.17. RewardLuke 6:22 Blessed are you when men hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil, because of the Son of Man. 23 Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, because great is your reward in heaven.Suffering for Christ is a grand and glorious privilege, and will be richly rewarded. No matter what you go through in following Christ, He will make it worth your while—times ten billion! Respond to suffering by thinking about the wealth and generosity of the one who is going to repay you for all that you have lost in His service.18. Motivation to ChangePsalm 119:67 Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I obey your word.Psalm 119:71 It was good for me to be afflicted so that I might learn your decrees.The reason lepers lose their limbs is not because the leprosy destroys them; it is because the lepers themselves destroy them because of their lack of sensation. They lose the feeling in their skin, so every time they grab something that is hot, or sharp, or they have a rock in their shoe—things like that destroy their hands and feet because they feel no pain, so they don’t know to stop doing what is causing harm. Pain is a gift. It motivates us to stop what we are doing and figure out what is wrong so we can avoid doing damage to ourselves.Emotional pain is the same way. It is a gift from God that motivates us to take action to solve problems in the soul. When our pain is due to a pattern of wrong thinking or behavior or attitudes, when the pain becomes intense enough it drives us to find answers about the cause of that pain. If God had designed us in such a way that we could wander from Him and not suffer any pain as a result, that would be unloving. We would most certainly wander far from Him.Use emotional pain to drive you to examine the complex inner workings of your heart and fix what is wrong.19. Enables CompassionHebrews 2:18 Because he himself suffered when he was tempted, he is able to help those who are being tempted.Compassion is a crucial component of Christ-likeness, but it is impossible apart from suffering. You cannot feel for someone who is suffering if you have no idea what it is like to suffer. And the closer your suffering is to that of the other person, the greater your ability to have compassion. So the greater the intensity and variety of your sufferings, the better!And not only does suffering help you have compassion, but when you have suffered, that also helps the other person to take comfort in the fact that you can empathize with what he is going through. In His omniscience, God the Son could have fully understood what our suffering was like without experiencing it Himself, but He went through it anyway in order to help us take comfort in the fact that He has felt the sting of what we are feeling and is therefore a compassionate High Priest. The more you suffer, the greater a commodity you are in the Church.Gain this benefit by remembering your pain so you can bear the burden of others when they suffer.20. Enables Us to Help Others2 Corinthians 1:3 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, 4 who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.This verse does not say that you will automatically be able to comfort people just because you went through suffering. It only works if, in your suffering, you succeeded in finding comfort from God. But if you do suffer and find comfort from God, you now have the ability to show others how it’s done.21. Increased Glory2 Corinthians 4:17 our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal weight of glory.[2]The promise is not simply that once our troubles are over we will receive glory. The promise is that the troubles themselves are accomplishing that glory. That is, the greater your suffering now, the greater the glory of heaven for you when Jesus comes.22. Footsteps of JesusPhilippians 3:10 I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of sharing in his sufferings, becoming like him in his deathHebrews 2:10 In bringing many sons to glory, it was fitting that God, for whom and through whom everything exists, should make the author of their salvation perfect through suffering. 11 Both the one who makes men holy and those who are made holy are of the same family. So Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers.1 Peter 2:19 For it is commendable if a man bears up under the pain of unjust suffering because he is conscious of God. … 21 To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps.We exist to be conformed to the image of Christ. That is the goal of our predestination (Ro.8:29). So every time we suffer and respond like Jesus responded, we are following in His glorious steps. When warning the Disciples about the suffering they would experience Jesus said, “A servant is not greater than his master” (Mt.10:24). If our Master wasn’t exempt from suffering; we certainly shouldn’t expect to be exempt. Gain this benefit by following Jesus’ example in the way He embraced and responded to suffering.23. Enables Sacrificial Giving and Deeper Expressions of Love2 Corinthians 1:6 If we are distressed, it is for your comfort1 John 4:9 This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.Something about love compels the lover to give sacrificially to the beloved. Like David, who refused to offer God that which cost him nothing (2 Sam.24:24), we all desire to give something valuable—something that costs us a lot, to those we love. Giving in a way that causes us suffering is the most costly gift we can give. That is the way God gave to us. Suffering enables us to give precious, priceless gifts even when we are penniless.Gain this benefit by giving generously—and by rejoicing whenever a gift costs you something.*****For the audio version of this post, click here.For a related post, click here.Benefits of suffering A-ZAttributes of God experienced. Job 42:5, 1 Pet. 4:13.
Beliefs exposed. Luke 8:13, 1 Pet. 1:6
Compassion towards others. Heb. 2:18, 2 Cor. 1:3-4.
Dependence on God. 2 Cor. 1:8-9. Disciplines us. Heb.12:9-11.
Evangelism opportunities. Phil. 1:12, 1 Pet. 3:15.
Fellowship with others. Rev. 1:9, 1 Cor. 12:26. Fear of God. Ex. 20:20
Glory. 1 Pet. 1:6. Rom. 8:18. 2 Cor. 4:17. Glorify God. Job 1:20-22.
Horror of sin. Rom. 8:19-22. Hope. Rom. 5:4. Humility. 2 Cor. 12:7.
Intensifies prayer. Luke 22:44.
Joy. Jas. 1:2-4, Isa. 57:17-19.
Knowing God personally. Job 42:5, Phil. 3:10.
Longs for heaven. 2 Cor. 5:8.
Motivation to change. Psa. 119:67, 71 Mature and complete. Jas. 1:2-4.
Near to God. Jas. 4:8. Isa. 43:2.
Others to serve. 1 Cor. 13-4, 2 Cor. 1:6.
Power of God. 2 Cor. 12:9, Perfect purposes. Rom. 8:28, Perseverance. Jas 1:2-4
Qualifies to comfort. 2 Cor. 1:3-4.
Rewards. Luke 6:22. Restores. 1 Pet. 5:10.
Sanctifies. Job 23:10, 1 Pet. 4:1. Strengthens. 1 Pet. 5:10.
Trust deepens. Psa. 23:4, Psa. 56:3-4. Psa. 16:8.
Understands God’s Word. Psa. 119:71.
Values/Priorities changed. Psa. 102:4.
Wisdom. Prov. 15:31-32.
Xerox copy of Christ. 1 Pet. 2:19-21. Rom. 8:28-29.
Yearns for God. Psa. 63.
Zealous for God and good works. Tit. 2:14.

Footnotes[1] By “answers” I do not mean answers to questions God doesn’t address, like “Why did God let this happen at this time?” I’m referring to answers to the question, “What does God’s Word say about this?”[2] Author’s translation.

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Published on September 04, 2023 15:29

August 14, 2023

Chapter 7 Spiritual Executive Function

Left to themselves, anxious feelings and thoughts will rage out of control. But God has given us a secret weapon to reign them in. Spiritual executive function.

Executive Function

In chapter five we discussed the executive function of the brain, which has power to regulate emotions and the body’s anxiety response. In a crisis, God designed your emotional brain to take over. But when the crisis passes, executive function must be regained to restore calm.

One strategy therapists recommend for restoring executive function is prayer or meditation. Multiple secular studies observing brain activity show that the executive regions of the brain light up during prayer. When you pray, you use the medial prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and insula. And when those regions of the brain all activate together, they regulate the activity of the emotion and anxieties centers in the brain.

Praying forces you to use your brain in such a way that strengthens your body’s ability to recover from anxiety.

The Right Kind of Prayer

This is another example of a physical remedy being built in to one of the Bible’s spiritual remedies. The parts of your brain you use combined with the act itself—sitting still, closing your eyes, physical calmness—it all reduces the anxiety response.

But if all these benefits come from the mere act of praying, why is it so important that we pray according to the biblical formula in times of anxiety? It’s because while all prayer can calm your brain and body, not all prayer can calm your spirit.

Worldly prayers, yoga, or mindless meditation: Calms the mind and body.

Biblical prayer: – Calms the mind and body.

– Draws you near to God.

– Accesses power from the Holy Spirit.

– Cures the causes of spiritual anxiety by exercising your faith, deepening your humility, and increasing your gratitude.

– Moves God to respond.

The problem of anxiety extends far beyond the body and brain.

The Executive Function of the Spirit

Neurologists speak of the executive function of the brain, but there is more to it than just the brain part. Your brain can calm physical anxiety, but what about anxiety in your soul? Is there a higher executive function that can calm your soul? Yes.

“I have stilled and quieted my soul” (Psalms 131:2).

Who is the “I” and who is the “soul”? The soul, in this context, is the part of you that experiences anxiety and needs to be stilled and quieted. And the “I” is the part of you that does the stilling and quieting—your spiritual executive function.

“Do not let your hearts be troubled” (John 14:1).

The part of you that obeys this command is your executive function. The “heart,” in this verse, is the part that becomes troubled.

“Above all else, guard your heart, for it is the wellspring of life” (Proverbs 4:23).

Again, the part of you that does the guarding is your executive function. And the heart is the part of you that your executive function must protect.

Despising Feelings

Jesus gave us an example of this spiritual executive function in the way he handled the emotion of shame while he was on the cross. Hebrews 12:2 says he despised it. The word translated “despised” does not mean “to hate.” It means “to think little of.”

Crucifixion was designed to be the most shameful, humiliating, dehumanizing form of execution possible. That’s why they stripped them naked and you had all the spitting and mockery and all the rest. Jesus deserved the highest honor and instead he was humiliated.

How did he handle that feeling? By thinking little of it. Jesus used his executive function to determine how much space that feeling of humiliation would take up in his affections. And he assigned it a small space.

Use the Tools God Gave You

In times of stress, if you let anxious feelings take up whatever space in your heart they naturally take, it will be a grossly outsized portion. And it will grow like a wildfire until it takes up all your attention and energy.

But that doesn’t have to happen. The more you strengthen your executive function, the more control you will have over the boundaries of your feelings.

Prayer

And prayer is a key component to strengthening your spiritual executive capabilities. How was Jesus able to relegate that massive amount of shame to a small space in his heart? Think of his prayers the night before. That’s when he gave room for emotions to run, when he was safe in the presence of God. He faced his fears, wrestled in prayer, pleaded with the Father, and worked through it until he came to the place of fully embracing the Father’s will, no matter how bitter the cup. That night of prayer gave him the executive function he needed the next day on the cross.

In the next chapter, we’ll learn specifics on how to release the extremes of emotion in prayer without triggering an unstoppable wildfire of anxiety.

For now, just be aware of the fact that executive function exists. When emotions begin to roil, remind yourself, “This is just a feeling. It has no sovereignty over me. I decide what role it will play. It may or may not reflect reality. I will check it against the truth and decide whether I should listen to it or ignore it.” When feelings try to take control, demote them to their proper place.

By the power of the Holy Spirit, you can gain mastery over your body (Romans 8:13). The more you seek God in prayer, the more you keep in step with the Spirit, which gives you power over your flesh (Galatians 5:16).

Grounding

Another method for regaining executive function in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is grounding This is done by attending to what you currently feel, smell, hear, taste, and see.

When you worry, your mind wanders into unreality—tomorrow’s hardships that may or may not come to pass. But your nervous system has no perception of time, so your body thinks that trouble is happening right now. Your emotional brain releases stress hormones because it thinks the trouble is real.

Grounding brings your brain and body back to the present. You feel the chair you’re sitting in, hear the sounds, smell the smells, and your body realizes, “Oh, that trouble isn’t real. This is reality.”

Jesus taught his own method of restoring your mind back to the present.

“Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own” (Matthew 6:34).

Trouble Greed

The anxious heart has a strange propensity to be greedy for more trouble. Even tomorrow’s trouble. Jesus returns us to the present, not through grounding exercises, but by teaching us to use our executive function to consciously distinguish between today and tomorrow.

And that’s especially effective when you do it in times of prayer. Jesus taught us to pray, “Give us this day our daily bread,” not “Give me right now my annual bread.” God gives us what we need right now. Tomorrow’s grace will come tomorrow. That’s the force of the line “tomorrow will worry about itself.” You’ll be able to handle tomorrow’s trouble with tomorrow’s grace, but not with today’s grace.

What if You Need to Prepare?

If you see a problem looming on the horizon, you may need to think it through so you can prepare. If so, that planning process is part of today’s trouble. Go ahead and handle it. But Jesus places all the rest of tomorrow’s trouble off limits.

So when you start to worry, ground yourself in the present by asking, “What portion of this problem needs to be handled right now?” Does the entire problem need to be taken care of today? If so, roll up your sleeves and get it done. But if it’s a problem you’ll have to deal with over a period of time, then focus only on the part that needs immediate attention.

Even if part of doesn’t need your attention until later today, if you can’t do anything about it right this minute, it’s still off limits. Carve out only the part that needs attention at the present moment and ask God for your daily allotment of grace for that portion.

When you do that, most of the time you’ll find the portion of your problems that needs immediate attention is quite small. And that little burden is all God requires of you right now. Take comfort in that.

Pray Specifically

It’s wise to keep tomorrow’s trouble separate from today’s. It’s also wise to keep today’s problems separate from each other.

Much of our anxiety comes from worrying about multiple problems at once. Instead of handling them one at a time, we allow our mind to jump from one to another to another without ever solving any of them. That’s how Jesus diagnosed Martha’s anxiety.

“’Martha, Martha,’ the Lord answered, ‘you are worried and upset about many things.” (Luke 10:41).

The word translated “upset” means to be agitated, disturbed, or troubled—inner turmoil. If you focus on one problem, you can usually handle it. But worrying about multiple problems at the same time just roils your insides. That’s what Martha was doing, and that’s what we naturally do when we’re stressed.

And the solution, according to the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy experts, is chunking, labeling, and cognitive restructuring.

Chunking: dividing the big problem into its individual component parts so you can put each part into the smallest possible box.Labeling: putting the problem into words.Cognitive restructuring: challenging irrational thoughts.

Biblical prayer accomplishes all three at once.

Specific Requests

In Philippians 4:6, when God gives us instruction on exactly how to pray in times of anxiety, notice emphasis on individual requests.

“Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God” (Philippians 4:6).

Petition is the act of requesting, and the requests are the particular actions we are asking God to take. To make specific requests, you must isolate particular issues, define what is needed, and put it into words.

One mistake we often make when we feel overwhelmed is we come to God with a huge, undefined problem, but we make no specific requests. If you come to God with an amorphous conglomeration of issues and say, “Help me, God,” ask yourself—is that even a prayer? Imagine God saying, “Okay. So what would you like me to do, exactly?” If your answer is, “I don’t know,” then do the words of your prayer have any meaning?

When Paul tells us to give specific requests, it forces us to sort through the problem. What do you want? Comfort? Strength? Money? Healing? For God to change someone’s heart? Or your heart? Guidance to know what would please God? Skill to accomplish something? Patience? Faith? Joy?

Example

Before you can figure out exactly what you want, you must isolate the specific problem. Instead of, “God, fix my disastrous marriage,” you’re forced to think through each aspect of the marriage that is bothering you.

What is one part of that big problem that can’t be broken down any smaller? Maybe your spouse keeps doing something that drives you crazy. Now that you have that one piece in a box by itself, consider what you want God to do.

“Father, give me wisdom to know how to talk to my spouse about this in a way that will draw both of our hearts toward godliness.”

Problem number two: There’s another thing your spouse keeps doing that bothers you. But when you get this part in a box by itself you realize this one really shouldn’t bother you so much. So for this box, your request is different. “Father, please help me change my attitude about this.”

Problem number three: arguments about finances. Specific request: “Help us see areas where we may be overspending. And help us trust you for provision.” Or maybe it’s, “Help us listen to each other and tackle this problem as a team instead of opponents.”

Problem number four: lack of intimacy. Request: “Help us find some resources that could teach us ways to reignite passion.”

Those are not one problem called our lousy marriage. They are four separate challenges, all very common, and all with workable solutions. If you go to bed at night thinking, “My marriage is a hopeless mess,” you will have untamable anxiety. But if you go to bed thinking, “We have four problems, and I know what I need from God for each one,” instead of feeling buried under a mountain of impossible problems, you’ll have hope.

This may feel like hard work. It is. But this is the kind of thinking that restores executive function and regulates the anxiety response.

Defining

An unknown sage once said, “If I had an hour to save the world, I’d spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem and five minutes solving it.” That may be a little overstated, but you get the point. Haven’t you had times in your life where a problem went unsolved because it was so massive and complex that you didn’t know where to start?

Ill-defined problems are terrifying. Our fear of the problem combines with our fear of the unknown, creating a dark, deadly monster. But when you break the problem into its component parts and put them into words, much of the anxiety evaporates. Most of the parts end up being quite manageable.

And once defined, there is a clear path forward, which also reduces anxiety.

Cognitive Restructuring

When you carry out the defining process in conversation with God, cognitive restructuring (challenging irrational thoughts) happens automatically because you won’t be inclined to speak your irrational, exaggerated thoughts to God. As soon as a thought arises that you know isn’t true, you won’t want to say it to God.

The writer of Psalm 131 put it this way—“I have stilled and quieted my soul.” The word translated “stilled” means to smooth out or make level. He considered the wild ups and downs of his anxious thoughts and smoothed them out. He trimmed off the exaggerations and ideas that bounced outside the bounds of logic. We do this naturally when we present our problems to God.

Behavioral Activation

Specific requests also help with behavioral activation. When you ask God for something specific in relation to your problem, it clarifies in your mind what needs to be done. The more you ask God for that, the more inclined you will be to behave in ways that lead toward that desired outcome.

And again, prayer goes beyond the mere psychological dimension because it’s a personal interaction. You’re speaking to a person, asking him for specific help. And when you do that, it keeps you from behaving in ways that contradict those requests. When you plead with a person for something, you are more likely to cooperate with that person as he grants the request.

And the more specific your requests, the more likely you are to notice when God answers. This sooths your soul even more because of the feeling of being heard, loved, and cared for by God.

And each time God grants one of the requests, anxiety is reduced still further because that part of the problem is removed.

Godliness Training ExercisesThink of an anxiety-producing problem in your life. Divide it into the smallest possible boxes. Then write down exactly what you want to ask God to do for each one.Spend some time in prayer each day making those requests.Give some thought to what actions would be appropriate for you to take to participate in God’s answers to your requests. Write them down.Think through which of your feelings are taking up an outsized position in your heart. Remind yourself that they are only feelings, and they don’t deserve such a prominent place in your heart.Keep reviewing your memory verses and add the next verse in Matthew 6.

*****

Links

For the video of this session, click here.

Part 1 of this series here
Part 2 of this series here
Part 3 of this series here
Part 4 of this series here
Part 5 of this series here
Part 6 of this series here

*****

Footnotes

For example, Newberg, A. B. (2011). Spirituality and the Aging Brain. Journal of the American Society on Aging, 35(2), 83-91. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26555779.

Dr. David Spiegel, associate chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and medical director of the center for integrative medicine at Stanford University School of Medicine, cited by Nicole Spector, https://www.nbcnews.com/better/health....

van der Kolk, 55-56.

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Published on August 14, 2023 12:59

August 13, 2023

Chapter 6 Train Your Emotions

Use the gift of imagination to train your emotions and gain success in especially difficult areas of the Christian life using biblical imagery.

Visualization

The quieting techniques discussed in chapter five are proven to be effective in calming physical anxiety. But to calm spiritual anxiety, you must still and quiet not only your body, but your whole being.

“I have stilled and quieted my soul” (Psalms 131:2).

One strategy for physical calming is visualization. Does that also have a role in calming the soul? Yes. Consider the imagery the psalmist employs in quieting his soul.

“I have stilled and quieted my soul; like a weaned child with its mother, like a weaned child is my soul within me” (Psalms 131:2).

The significance of the child being weaned is that it’s a healthy child. Because of the high rate of infant mortality, it was a significant milestone if a baby reached the age of weaning (around the third birthday). The ancient Israelites often had a celebration on that day to celebrate that the child had dodged the infant mortality bullet. So imagery employed by the psalmist is of a healthy, thriving little three-year-old being held by his mother, safe and at rest.

Why the word picture? Why not just state it plainly—“I have made myself calm”? It’s because imagining the child in his mother’s arms has a far greater impact on your soul than the bare abstract thought. God gives us beautiful imagery because he designed us to need imagery to quiet our anxiety.

Imagination

Clinical studies have shown visualization to be highly effective in calming physical anxiety. It’s not surprising. It’s often negative visualization that makes us anxious to begin with. Isn’t that what worry is—visualizing future trouble?

Imagining trouble triggers the body’s anxiety response. Daydream about the death of a loved one for several minutes and tears will form in your eyes. If your teenager is late coming home, imagine him in a horrific car accident, and your stomach will be in knots. This is your body responding as if the event were really happening.

So is it any surprise that it would work in the opposite direction as well? Daydream about a delightful vacation, and your brain will release pleasure hormones. In both negative and positive ways, God designed the emotional brain to respond to imagery. The psalmist stilled and quieted his soul by imagining a healthy child in his mother’s arms.

We didn’t have to wait for 20th century neuroscience to discover the importance of imagination for calming anxiety. Think of all the amazing imagery in God’s Word.

Imagery in ScriptureInstead of, “God will meet your needs”Scripture says, “The Lord is my shepherd … he leads me beside quiet waters.”

Instead of, “Divine providence will prevent unnecessary hardships from occurring”Scripture says, “The LORD is your shade at your right hand” (Psalm 121:5).

Instead of “God expresses his goodwill toward you”Scripture says, “He gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them close to his heart” (Isaiah 40:11).

Instead of telling the thief on the cross, “Soon you will be in a state devoid of suffering”Jesus said, “This day you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43).

Instead of “You will have good health and success”Scripture says you will be “like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither” (Psalms 1:3).

Instead of “God is everywhere”Scripture says, “If I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.” (Psalms 139:8-10).

Instead of “I will meet your needs in an ongoing manner”Jesus said, “Whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:14).

Why did God give us all those word pictures? So that we would imagine them. God didn’t give humanity the gift of imagination just to keep children amused. It’s a useful tool for steering our emotions and helping us believe what we can’t see. It’s a way to tap in to your emotional brain.

Train Your Emotions

God designed your nervous system and body to learn from experience. But your body doesn’t know the difference between what you actually experience and what you imagine. So you can use imagination to teach your body and nervous system and soul what’s really true.

The more focused you are on the external world, the more it seems like what you see defines reality. The more focused you are on your internal world, the more your thoughts and feelings seem to define reality. So when the external world isn’t telling the truth about reality, revert to the inner world of your imagination guided by the truth of Scripture.

So when you pray in times of anxiety, use your imagination. Transport yourself to the quiet waters. Feel your Shepherd carrying you. Smell the garden paradise. Hear the rippling brook that nourishes the thriving, fruitful tree. Experience the cool stream on your feet. Daydream about a spring of living water welling up inside you to eternal life. Close your eyes and place yourself in those settings, and your body will respond. It’s good for your body and healthy for your brain and it strengthens your faith.

Dangerous Visualization

Yet again, science catches up to Scripture. But has it caught all the way up? Will the world’s methods of visualization and guided imagery calm your troubled spirit? No.

For that, you need the biblical word pictures because it isn’t just the imagery. It’s also the meaning conveyed by the imagery. That’s what will get to the root of the spiritual causes of anxiety.

Suppose you have stress because of a stubborn refusal to accept hardships in your life. Imagining yourself swinging in a hammock on a Caribbean beach will do nothing about the spiritual dimension of the problem. In fact, it might make it worse. You’ll have even less tolerance of hardships because you’ll wish you were on that beach.

But contemplating the good Shepherd who leads you to quiet waters can inspire trust. And when you trust the Shepherd, you can accept those times when he leads you through the dark valley. That trust and humility will calm your spirit while imagining the green pastures and quiet waters calms your body.

Visualization that isn’t guided by Scripture can do more harm than good. Suppose you have anxiety because of a guilty conscience. Your blood pressure is through the roof, so your therapist tells you to breathe deeply and visualize yourself in a cozy, warm, mountain cabin. Now your body is relaxed. Your anxiety is gone.

The problem is, it was good anxiety. It was God-given anxiety designed to bring you to repentance. But now it’s gone. You feel better, but that sin in your life will destroy you.

Imagination moves your emotions. Imagination guided by Scripture moves your emotions in the right direction. It will calm unfounded fears and bad anxiety while at the same time increasing good anxiety.

Variety

And the comfort we receive from biblical imagery is deeper and more profound than our own ideas. If you imagine your “happy place,” it may be the same place every time, which will eventually become boring. But Scripture has endless variety. Streets of gold, drinking from God’s river of delights, eating from the tree of life, smoke, fire, thunder and awesome creatures surrounding God’s throne, a sea of glass, a lavish banquet, toddlers playing with cobras and being perfectly safe, rising on the wings of the dawn, a baby in her mother’s arms. Every one of those images, when studied in context, explodes with spiritual truth.

Only imagining your happy place won’t prepare you for hard places. Psalm 139:8 teaches us to imagine ourselves in a hopeless, dark pit, but still happy because God is with us even there.

In Psalm 23:4 we imagine ourselves in the terrifying dark valley. But we’re comforted because we know the Shepherd is only taking us through that valley to get us to the next green pasture. When you imagine yourself responding the right way to a hardship, you create a neural pathway that will activate when that hardship arrives.

Every time you come across a comforting word picture in Scripture, jot down the reference in the back of your Bible with a word or two about the image. In times of anxiety, you will probably only be able to call to mind a handful of them from memory. So it’s good to have a list recorded somewhere handy.

The Language of the Body

If your faith is in Christ, God promises he will be with you. He will be your shepherd, your father, your caretaker, and your protector. He will supply all the grace you need, and there’s nothing to fear. So why do we still have anxiety? Because we accept those truths intellectually, but our nervous system doesn’t get the memo.

So how do you convince your body? Speak to it in its own language. Thoughts are the language of the mind; feelings are the language of the body. Whenever you feel something, you’ve just logged in to your body’s operating system. Use imagination to generate feelings that align with the truth of God’s Word.

Your body will “believe” something is real when it experiences that thing—whether in reality or through imagination. To help yourself really believe truths you’re finding hard to believe, activate your emotional brain with biblical imagination. Imagine vivid scenes in which the truth you want to believe plays out dramatically.

And imagine yourself responding with strong emotion. It’s the thought processes combined with strong emotions that build neural pathways. And those pathways will be activated and strengthened each time those spiritual truths prove true in future experiences.

Stir Up Good Anxiety

The gift of imagination is also helpful for generating the good kind of anxiety where it is lacking. Use the negative imagery in Scripture to convince your soul that an unseen spiritual danger is real.

It should tell us something that our first introduction to Satan in Scripture portrays him as a snake. What fear is more hard-wired into the human amygdala than the fear of snakes? Instead of presenting evil as an abstraction, God gives us an image that, if we use our imagination for its intended purpose, can help us fear deadly threats as we should.

If you have thought deeply about biblical imagery, stumbling across a poisonous snake slithering through the weeds can teach you more about spiritual warfare than ten pages of doctrinal instruction from a theology text. The emotions stimulated by seeing the snake can move your soul to digest the biblical warnings about evil in way abstract principles can’t.

If you struggle with temptation in an area, a vivid daydream of a viper striking at you from your computer screen or refrigerator or wherever the temptation comes from might fortify you against temptation more than all the rational arguments you can think of.

Godliness Training ExercisesPick a place to keep your list of comforting biblical images. Get the list started with the images mentioned in this chapter. Meditate on Matthew 6:25-30 and add the images from that passage to your list.Each day this week, find a quiet place alone where you can use your imagination to daydream about some of those comforting images. Imagine yourself in the scene responding with strong emotions.Keep reviewing the verses you have memorized so far and add the next verse in Matthew 6.

*****

Links

For the video of this session, click here.

Part 1 of this series here
Part 2 of this series here
Part 3 of this series here
Part 4 of this series here
Part 5 of this series here

*****

Footnotes

See Genesis 21:8.

Menzies V, Lyon DE, Elswick RK Jr, McCain NL, Gray DP. Effects of guided imagery on biobehavioral factors in women with fibromyalgia. J Behav Med. 2014 Feb;37(1):70-80. doi: 10.1007/s10865-012-9464-7. PMID: 23124538; PMCID: PMC3610859.

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Published on August 13, 2023 14:46

July 21, 2023

Chapter 5 Brain Chemistry & the Human Soul: How to Rewire Your Brain

Modern research has proven techniques for calming the anxiety centers in the brain and nervous system.
Should we stick with biblical remedies, take advantage of the findings of science, or a combination of both?

This book is about how to overcome spiritual anxiety.

Secular books on anxiety focus on the physical and mental aspects but neglect the spiritual aspect altogether. In the chapters ahead, I will show that treating the physical part alone does nothing for the spiritual. However, treating the spiritual causes of anxiety also cures the physical, mental, and emotional aspects.

So why a chapter on physical anxiety and the remedies discovered by modern studies? I include this material in combination with chapter six to show how the biblical instructions regarding anxiety heal both spirit and body.

The physical, neurological, mental, and spiritual components of anxiety each play a role, and each affects the others. You can’t just treat one while ignoring the others. The only remedy that will work long term is one that touches all the components at the same time.

Physical AnxietyThe Body’s Smoke Detector

The headquarters for the body’s anxiety and fear response is a part of the brain called the amygdala, two small clusters deep inside your brain, one behind each optic nerve.

The amygdala works like a smoke detector. When it senses danger, it sets off the body’s red-alert system. It does that by releasing stress hormones (like cortisol and adrenaline) to prepare your body to respond to a threat.

Cortisol increases your blood sugar and cranks up your metabolism to give you quick energy. Adrenaline increases your heart rate and blood pressure, gives more oxygen to your muscles and brain, speeds up your breathing, heightens your senses, dilates your pupils, increases your mental alertness, and can even keep you from feeling pain.

And it all happens in an instant, before your mind even realizes anything is happening. All those responses happen in your body in less time that it takes for you to think a single thought.

And the amygdala senses a lot more than your conscious brain notices. When viewing photos of people with various emotional expressions, the amygdala lights up when there is an angry face. Even when they cycle through the images so fast that the test subject can’t even register the faces, the amygdala still activates when the angry face flashes. Your emotional brain catches far more than your conscious mind.

How Does It Know?

But how does the amygdala know what is dangerous and what isn’t? It doesn’t. The amygdala doesn’t really “know” anything. It’s not part of the conscious brain, so it is not capable of thought, reason, or logic.

Any cue associated with danger activates the amygdala. The neural networks that make those associations have nothing to do with logic—only the fact that something happened at the same time as something else. You smelled this odor, you heard that sound, and disaster happened. The neurons connected with the smell, the sound, and the disaster all fired at the same time, so they became linked.

In 1949, neuropsychologist Donald Hebb summarized his work in associative learning with the saying, “Neurons that fire together wire together.” That statement has become an axiom in neuroscience.

It’s the reason Pavlov’s dogs salivated at the sound of a bell. When neurons associated with food fire at the same moment the “I hear a bell sound” neurons fire, those two areas wire together. After that, when one of those areas is stimulated, the other will also activate.

Sensation Memories

In the book, Rewire Your Anxious Brain, Catherine Pittman and Elizabeth Karle describe an incident involving a woman suffering from memory loss in a hospital. As an experiment, one doctor shook her hand but had a pin in his palm that pricked her.

The next day, because of her condition, she had no memory of that doctor at all. But when he extended his hand to shake, she withdrew. They asked her why, and she had no idea. Her emotional brain stored the cue of that doctor’s handshake as a sensation memory associated with danger. But the thinking part of her brain forgot it completely.

This kind of memory is not recalled the way we normally think of memory. It’s not a visual snapshot or even an idea you can think about. Rather, the way the amygdala “remembers” a sensation memory is simply by activating that feeling or emotion again. You feel the same sensations you felt when the trauma happened—that’s your amygdala “remembering.”

Pittman and Karle tell another story of a girl who became panicky in some social situations but not others. She was baffled as to why until someone quizzed her and helped her realize it only happened when people were seated in a circle. Finally, she remembered a time when she was a child and was humiliated at school in a circle of students. Her amygdala had wired the feeling of humiliation with the circular setting. So that circular arrangement became a trigger to the amygdala without the cortex knowing it.

Neural NetworksSuppose you were in a traumatic car crash. Your subconscious brain makes neural connections between the emotional memories and danger. The sound of a blaring horn and squealing tires, the smell of rubber, the taste of Dr. Pepper you sipped just before the impact, and Frank Sinatra singing Fly Me to the Moon on the radio. Your amygdala has now associated each of those sensations with danger.

Soon after the accident, you routinely drink Dr. Pepper without incident. This breaks the neural pathway connecting the delicious drink with danger. Your amygdala learns that Dr. Pepper isn’t dangerous, and so it deletes that association.

But ten years pass before the next time you hear Fly Me to the Moon. By this time, your conscious mind has completely forgotten that song was playing at the time of the accident. One day, you walk into a store and suddenly go into a panic attack. You have no idea why. You were just fine when you walked in, you weren’t thinking about anything stressful, but now your heart is racing, you can’t catch your breath, and you wonder if you’re having a heart attack.

The fact that Ol’ Blue Eyes is crooning over the store’s sound system is the farthest thing from your mind. You didn’t even notice.

But your amygdala did. That neural connection between that sound and danger was never broken.

Panic Attacks

This explains why panic attacks are so often unexplainable.

A panic attack is a sudden episode of intense anxiety accompanied by a feeling of impending doom and frightening physical symptoms, such as:

Sudden and overwhelming feelings of intense fear or apprehension.Rapid heart rate.Chest pain.Shortness of breath or a feeling of being smothered.Sweating or chills.Sensations of choking or difficulty swallowing.Nausea or abdominal distress.Dizziness, lightheadedness, or feeling faint.Tingling or numbness in the extremities.Hot flashes.Fear of losing control or going crazy.Fear of dying.A sense of detachment from reality or feeling like you’re in a dream.A strong urge to escape or leave the situation.A sense that the world is too bright (because your pupils are dilated).

Panic attacks typically last between one and thirty minutes. They are extraordinarily uncomfortable, but they won’t hurt you. You might feel like you’re dying, but those symptoms simply mean something set off your amygdala. It’s just a feeling, and it will pass.

While it’s happening, you may wonder if you’re losing your mind. More likely, your brain is working just fine. The sensations you are feeling are signs of a healthy, reactive body. Your amygdala is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do when it senses something associated with danger.

If the smoke alarm goes off at your house, you don’t worry about whether there’s something wrong with the house. You might even be glad to know your smoke detector is functional. When it goes off, you simply look around to discover if there is a real fire or if it was set off by the candles you just blew out or the dinner you’re frying on the stove.

If you have a random panic attack, thank God that your body’s emergency alert system is working. The only thing that’s wrong is your amygdala has associated some non-dangerous cue with danger.

So what can be done about that unnecessary trigger? Especially if you don’t even know what it is?

How to Rewire Your Brain

The good news is, while your amygdala can’t think, it can learn.

You’re never stuck with the brain you have. Traditionally, it was believed that the brain’s structure and function were relatively fixed when a person reached adulthood. However, research in the latter half of the 20th century showed that’s not the case. Neurologists discovered adult neuroplasticity—the ability of your brain to reorganize itself in response to your thoughts, actions, and experiences. You can rewire your own brain.

God equipped us not only with the ability to renew our minds (Romans 12:2), but also our brains.

A Smart Smoke Detector

Imagine a smoke detector in your house that could observe your responses. At first, it goes off whenever there is any smoke. But over time, it notices that when the smoke is from a fire, everyone runs out of the house. But when the smoke is from cooking some bacon for breakfast, no one reacts to the alarm. Everyone remains calm and waits for the alarm to shut off. Eventually, it learns not to set off the alarm for burnt bacon—only real fires.

Your amygdala can do that. When it sets off anxiety alarms for situations that shouldn’t call for it, you can retrain it by remaining calm and relaxed. When it activates anxiety responses in your nervous system but you don’t act in a way that reflects an emergency, it eventually learns, “Oh, I guess that kind of situation doesn’t call for stress hormones after all.”

And that’s true for extreme anxiety like a panic attack, or for mild anxiety, where you just feal uneasy for no apparent reason.

In some ways, you teach the amygdala like you teach a child. A very young child may not understand a logical reasoning process about why he has nothing to fear. But when he sees mom and dad aren’t rattled, it shows him this situation is not an emergency.

Relaxation Techniques

This is why experts always suggest slow, deep breathing for panic attacks. It sounds simplistic, but it’s backed by a large body of research. When you breathe in ways associated with relaxation, that teaches your amygdala, “This isn’t an emergency. See how relaxed I am?”

It helps to not only breathe slow and deep, but to expand your whole torso, not just your chest. The movement of the diaphragm can have the effect of massaging your liver, stomach, and heart. This type of breathing is thought to have beneficial effects on many internal organs.

Other ways to signal calmness to the amygdala include:

Progressive muscle relaxation (intentionally relaxing each muscle in your body one at a time from head to toe).Visualization (imagining yourself in a pleasant, relaxing place or imagining yourself responding in a calm and rational manner).Positive social interactions.Calm, reassuring thoughts.

If you use those techniques each time anxiety is triggered, over time, it will disconnect the neural networks that were connecting a false trigger to danger signals.

It’s not necessary to discover what caused the negative memory. If people sitting in a circle triggers panic attacks, it doesn’t matter how that association was created. The retraining will work just as well regardless of whether you are aware of how the association was made.

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)

These insights into how to retrain the amygdala are also helpful in overcoming obsessive-compulsive disorder. When you feel the urge to re-check something you already double checked or perform some useless ritual out of habit, giving in to that urge reinforces the brain’s misconception that it needs to be done. But each time you resist the urge and find that your world doesn’t fall apart, you take another step in retraining your brain. And over time, you will no longer feel that compulsion.

Courage

Whenever unnecessary anxiety is triggered, it’s important to resist the urge to flee the situation. Fleeing may give some relief in the moment, but it will reinforce the neural networks that associate the trigger with danger. When you run away, your amygdala says, “I was right. This really is a dangerous situation.”

The difficult part of rewiring the emotional brain is the fact that a neural network can only be changed while it is active. If you’re afraid of flying, the network connecting sitting on the plane with danger can only be changed while those neurons are firing. You have to get on the plane, feel the fear, and respond with calmness.

Psychologists call this exposure therapy. The Bible calls it courage. Whatever the name, we must face our fears to defeat them.

And one reason this requires courage is it only works if we don’t treat the experience as an emergency. If you have a fear of crowds and you want to desensitize your amygdala to that fear, you might visit a mall. But if you bring a support animal or clutch a soothing object to comfort yourself, your brain won’t rewire. Just the opposite. Using that support aid only confirms to your amygdala, “This is indeed a dangerous situation.” You may feel temporary comfort, but you have only strengthened the faulty wiring in your brain.

It takes courage, but it is necessary to remain in the frightening situation until the feelings of anxiety subside. Leaving while you still feel anxious tells the amygdala that you escaped danger and only solidifies the fear.

Anxiety Medications

This principle is important to remember when using anxiety medication. The two most common prescriptions are benzodiazepines and SSRIs.

Common Benzodiazepines: Xanax, Valium, Ativan, Klonopin

Common SSRIs: Lexapro, Zoloft, Prozac, Paxil, Celexa

Benzodiazepines sedate the amygdala. This calms the body, but it also interferes with the rewiring process. While sedated, the amygdala cannot relearn anything. You can only rewire a neural network while the neurons are in an active state—while you’re feeling the anxiety.

On the other hand, SSRIs can assist in the retraining process, as they promote growth and change in neurons. But be careful. The SSRI drugs will strengthen whatever activity is taking place in the brain. They promote plasticity (changeability), which means when you are on those medications, the structure of your brain is more easily changed—in either direction. If you are thinking in good ways, SSRIs can strengthen those neural pathways. However, if you are thinking in bad ways (such as worrying, fretting, or negativity) it strengthens those bad pathways.

The more often you follow the path of a negative thought process, the more you dig deep ruts in your brain in that direction. As a result, future thought processes fall into those ruts more easily. And if you think that way while using SSRIs, the ruts go even deeper.

Exercise

Another way to calm physical anxiety is with exercise or hard work. Anxiety can have a freezing effect on some people, especially when combined with depression. Anxiety activates the fight/flight/freeze response in your nervous system. For some, the fight response is prominent and they become aggressive when they are anxious. Others flee. And others become immobilized.

But it’s important to keep moving. Physical activity increases metabolism, allowing the body to utilize the excess adrenaline and return to a more balanced state. Exercise can also trigger the release of endorphins, which are natural mood-boosting chemicals in the brain. Endorphins can help counteract the stress response, reduce anxiety, and promote a sense of well-being.

Working or engaging in exercise can also divert your attention away from anxious thoughts and redirect your focus to the activity at hand.

Self-Talk

Yet another method of calming the amygdala is self-talk. We all know you can create anxiety by what you say to yourself. Dwell on everything that’s going wrong or that might go wrong, and very soon all your anxiety responses will activate.

The reverse is also true. The right self-talk can reduce anxiety. No one has more influence on how you feel than you do because no one talks to you more than you do. And what you say to yourself is very important. It will steer the direction of your life.

However, it’s not merely a matter of positive thinking. Not all positive thinking reduces anxiety. In chapter seven, I will provide detail on exactly what kinds of self-talk alleviate anxiety.

The Executive Function of the Brain

One final way to recover from anxiety—restoring the executive function of the brain.

God designed us as emotional beings. But he also gave us the ability to regulate our emotions through what neurologists call executive function.

During an emergency, the executive function is weakened. If the crisis is extreme, the emotional brain overrides the executive function completely. The emotion centers in your brain take over 100% and you can’t think at all.

This is a gift from God. Your nervous system can react much faster than your cortex can think. The moment before a car crash, you stop talking and your body has dozens of responses, none of which are under your conscious control. You didn’t decide to stop talking. Your emotional brain took over. The ability of your emotional brain to react this way has probably saved your life more than once.

But when it’s time to calm down, executive function must regain control to regulate your anxiety. The weaker your executive, the more anxiety and other emotions can rage out of control.

Grounding

One method of restoring executive function is known as grounding. The goal here is to become as aware as possible of what you can see, hear, smell, taste, or feel in your surroundings.

And not only your surroundings, but your own body as well. Do a mental body scan, focusing on the physical sensations you have from head to toe. This kind of attending to the present moment activates executive function and moderates anxiety.

Labeling

One of the simplest ways to restore executive function is to put the object of your anxiety into words. Name it.

In one study, thirty test subjects were shown photos of faces with various emotional expressions. When an angry face came up, scans showed activity in the amygdala, preparing the body for danger.

One group of test subjects was asked to select from two names under each picture, one male and the other female. The other group was to choose between two emotions.

Those who saw a picture of an angry man and chose the male label had the normal anxiety response in the brain that people have when they see an angry face. But those who labeled it as “angry” had a reduced anxiety response. Labeling the person as male was accurate, but it didn’t name the potential threat. Putting words to the problem is what calmed the anxiety response.

When you put a problem into words, it helps restore the executive brain’s ability to regulate anxiety.

Studies have also shown that labeling your emotions reduces the body’s anxiety reaction.

This isn’t always easy because anxiety can disrupt your ability to put thoughts into words, but even if it’s unsuccessful, the very effort of trying to do so will help activate executive function.

Analysis

Beyond labeling, any form of analysis of the problem restores executive control. Our natural tendency is to lump all our problems together into one giant blob. Then we stress about it because there’s no solution to a giant blob. There’s no place to begin. And there’s no clear way forward because anything you do to deal with one part of the blob won’t do anything to solve the rest of the blob.

The obvious solution is to break the problem into its component parts. Place each aspect in the smallest, simplest box possible. You’ll find that most of the problems, seen by themselves, are quite manageable. But aside from that, the very act of attempting to particularize the various issues, even if you don’t succeed, still activates the brain’s executive function.

This isn’t easy it times of anxiety, but you don’t have to do it alone. Discussing your situation with someone else also stimulates executive function.

Spiritual Anxiety

All the techniques described in this chapter are useful for calming the physical and mental components of anxiety. But by themselves, they are worthless. None of them will do anything to address the spiritual aspect of anxiety.

Ridding yourself of physical and mental symptoms while leaving spiritual causes untouched is like mopping up water without fixing the leaky pipe.

Michael’s anxiety comes from an inability to trust in God’s promises to provide. He takes some Paxil, feels much better, but the next bill that comes in the mail sends him right back into distress.Jennifer has anxiety every day over her marriage. She comforts herself with eating, but the comfort only lasts a few moments.Jason’s stress comes from envy. He sees men with better jobs, higher salaries, prettier wives, or more respect, and it drives him crazy. He practices meditation and distracts himself with recreation and feels better … until the next time he sees his neighbor’s car.

Michael’s anxiety will keep returning until he learns to trust God. Jennifer will remain stressed until she learns to find comfort in God alone. Jason will make no progress until he overcomes envy with gratitude. Only God’s remedies can cure spiritual anxiety. And as long as the spiritual cause of anxiety remains, it will keep reactivating mental and physical anxiety no matter how many physical remedies you apply.

There is no lasting value in healing your mind and body while leaving your soul to wither on the vine.

What About Anxiety with Physical Causes?

But what about anxiety caused by physical problems, such as hormonal changes or an overactive amygdala?

The Body Affects the Spirit

While they may not have a spiritual cause, they still have a spiritual component, because everything that happens to your body affects your spirit.

Every hardship you ever face is a spiritual issue. According to James 1:3, all hardships are spiritual tests. Your response to every difficulty, whether it be the discomfort of menopause, a bad night’s sleep, pressure at work, a random panic attack, or the struggles of puberty—your response will either honor God or displease God. It will either strengthen your faith or undermine it. There are spiritual issues that are not physical, but there are no physical problems that are not spiritual.

Biblical Remedies Will Cure Physical Anxiety

So suppose you have anxiety caused by a physical problem. That has a spiritual impact. Maybe you’re tempted with anger or discontent. And you deal with that temptation using biblical principles. But what about the anxiety? If it had a physical cause, doesn’t it require a physical cure?

It does, but not in the same way other physical ailments do. If you have an infection, they can give you a drug to kill the infection. If you have a clogged artery, a surgeon can unclog it. But if you have anxiety, a surgeon can’t simply open up your brain and repair your amygdala.

There are drugs that can sedate it, but that’s not a long-term solution because your amygdala also plays a role in positive emotions. Suppose you feel overwhelmed because your anxiety level is at a nine and your hope and joy levels are at a six. So you take a drug that sedates your amygdala, and it brings your anxiety level from a nine down to a four. But it also brings your hope and joy levels from a six down to a one. So you still feel overwhelmed with anxiety.

So instead of drugs or surgery, the most effective treatments for physical anxiety are those described above in this chapter—relaxing the body and controlling the thoughts. Do that, and your body will do the rest.

Biblical Remedies Heal the Whole Person

The good news is this—almost all those physical remedies are included in the spiritual remedies God gives us in the Bible. The physical cures are baked in with the spiritual cures. God’s prescriptions for anxiety not only fix the leaky pipe, but at the same time also mop up the mess. God heals your whole being.

In chapter four, we looked at the first of God’s remedies (prayer) and saw how it fireproofs your heart against anxiety. In chapter six, I’ll point out how biblical prayer not only addresses spiritual anxiety, but also includes physical solutions.

This is to reassure you that the Bible is all you need. If all you have is a Bible, you don’t have to worry about missing out on the benefits of modern research. And that’s no big surprise, since the Author of the Bible is also the Designer and Creator of the human body.

*****

Links

For the video of this session, click here.

Part 1 of this series here
Part 2 of this series here
Part 3 of this series here
Part 4 of this series here

*****

Footnotes

Although there are two amygdales, they are traditionally referred to in the singular, like one might refer to “the human eye.”

Whalen PJ, Rauch SL, Etcoff NL, McInerney SC, Lee MB, Jenike MA. Masked presentations of emotional facial expressions modulate amygdala activity without explicit knowledge. J Neurosci. 1998 Jan 1;18(1):411-8. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.18-01-00411.1998. PMID: 9412517; PMCID: PMC6793390.

Catherine Pittman and Elizabeth Karle, Rewire Your Anxious Brain: How to Use the Neuroscience of Fear to End Anxiety, Panic, and Worry, 2015, audiobook, chapter 1.

Ibid.

LeDoux’s ground breaking research on fear responses in the brain are credited for this understanding of the plasticity (changeability) of the amygdala. See especially his book The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life (1996).

See also Roozendaal B, McEwen BS, Chattarji S. Stress, memory and the amygdala. Nat Rev Neurosci. 2009 Jun;10(6):423-33. doi: 10.1038/nrn2651. PMID: 19469026.

Ma X, Yue ZQ, Gong ZQ, Zhang H, Duan NY, Shi YT, Wei GX, Li YF. The Effect of Diaphragmatic Breathing on Attention, Negative Affect and Stress in Healthy Adults. Front Psychol. 2017 Jun 6;8:874. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00874. PMID: 28626434; PMCID: PMC5455070.

Rewire Your Anxious Brain, chapter 6, 9:40 mark.

Grounding For Anxiety: Evidence Based Practice And Practice-Based Evidence, https://www.counsellingconnection.com...

Cited by Robert Emmons in Gratitude Works!, 2013, audiobook, chapter 3.

Lieberman, M. D., Eisenberger, N. I., Crockett, M.J., Tom, S. M., Pfeiffer, J. H., & Way, B. M. (2007). Putting feelings into words: Affect labeling disrupts amygdala activity in response to affective stimuli. Psychological Science, 18, 421-427 and Vago, D. R. & Silbersweig, D. A. (2012). Self-awareness, self-regulation, and self-transcendence (S-ART): A framework for understanding the neurobiological mechanisms of mindfulness. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6. doi: 10.3389/fnhuum.2012.00296.

For detailed study on methods for restoring executive function, see The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life by Joseph LeDoux and Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy for Depression by Zindel V. Segal, Mark Williams, and John D. Teasdale.

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Published on July 21, 2023 10:40

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