Struck Down but Not Destroyed: Living Faithfully with Anxiety

by Pierce Taylor Hibbs

I can tell you with certainty that there is hope and healing—found in an ever-deepening relationship with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But the sort of hope and healing we want immediately is very different from the sort of hope and healing we need eternally.

As creatures of God in a fallen world, we find hope and healing through process and relationship.

The goal of modern medicine is not first and foremost to learn about what God is teaching us through anxiety. Its goal is to eliminate it, or at least to dull our awareness of it.

Possessiveness is a clear mark of someone who has no awareness of or concern for God’s purposes.

Remember: we always need a context to interpret our behavior. If we don’t have the context of the Great Story, then we have some other context, perhaps the context of modern medicine and psychology.

like anxiety, weakness and suffering can be long-term guests from whom we learn, not because they’re intrinsically good, but because they will always be used by an intrinsically good God. In fact, this is almost always how Scripture treats weakness and suffering.

God governs all things according to his divine purposes. So, anything that comes to pass is fully in his willful control. God has ordained not only what comes to be but how it comes to be. He intended that Paul would embrace the truth of the gospel after tormenting followers of Christ, after persecuting Christ himself (Acts 9:5).

God, you see, is ultimately concerned with relationships. In fact, God in himself is relationship: the Father loving and glorifying the Son, the Son loving and glorifying the Father, the Spirit loving and glorifying the Father and the Son.

relationships in a sinful world require time and patience. They also require unimaginable sacrifice, for God would even give himself to have an eternal relationship with us.

For God, relationship is primary, not problem solving.

if relationship is primary for God, if love is primary (1 John 4:8), then we must change the way we think about God interacting with a broken world.

true and lasting strength is only found in God, and when we are overwhelmed by weakness, we have no confusion about that basic fact.

Weakness tethered to hope—that’s the way to relationship with God. I know that’s a bitter pill to swallow for anxiety sufferers. But it’s the only pill we have, and we must trust that God has good things in store for us not in spite of this but because of it. God makes no mistakes; he has divine purposes for our bitter pill.

David Powlison even goes so far as to say that “suffering is a means of grace.”[27] Grace! And why is that? Because it’s been ordained by God to draw us closer to Christ himself, and it does that by making us like Christ in his suffering, even in his death (Phil. 3:10).

Here’s my point (and Paul’s . . . and Gaffin’s): whenever we suffer as Christians, that suffering is the means through which God has chosen to manifest the resurrection life of Christ. And this whole process is encapsulated in the word conformity.

for Christians, the purpose of all spiritual and physical suffering is conformity to Christ’s death and—through that alone—the ushering in of Christ’s resurrection life.

As we saw in the last chapter, relationship is primary for God. He doesn’t bring about fear because he loves to wield power; he brings about fear because he loves his people.

As the Exodus story implies, God has a history of using our fear to lead us into relationship with himself. But know this: ultimately, faith overcomes the second kind of fear—the fear of terror, judgement and death—for that kind of fear is from the fallen world, and Christ has overcome the world (John 16:33).

It’s painfully difficult for us to let what we know affect how we feel.

Fear is not detached from God’s purposes; nothing is. Fear is always a stage in the divinely governed process that builds our faith.

Anxiety cannot—please hear this—it cannot ultimately destroy you. It has only the potency to strike you down, but that will just make you stronger in your faith. For the Christian, faith will always follow fear.

Anything with behavior-shaping power that brings us more joy and passion than our relationship with God is an idol.

There is no greater joy and motivation than that which comes from walking with God, from acting in accordance with our identity as followers of Christ. This is not only because when we do so, we’re walking in the truth (2 John 1:4), living according to the way things really are, but because we’re focused on a relationship that is eternal.

In short, anxiety is a spiritual directive in the sense that it has great power to push us in a Godward direction, the end of which is unending communion with him.

The same feelings in one person can evoke remarkably different responses in another. Why? Because of how we interpret them! Interpretation is huge. We talk about hermeneutics as a biblical discipline, but it’s also a life discipline. Everything in our world needs interpreting, and God has given us the interpretation in his word. Thank God for his speech!

Everyday we have to ask ourselves, how do I understand and cope with my anxiety in light of the Great Story? Take some time right now to write out your answer to that question.

it’s not just a matter of asking why; it’s a matter of asking why in light of what we know about God’s purposes for our suffering—suffering as a spiritual directive, suffering as Christ conformity, suffering as a means for manifesting the resurrection life of God’s Son in our bodies.

when rationality offers no insight, rationalists often become empiricists. In other words, if reason can’t solve the problem for us, then something else measurable, and often physical, can.

With pure rationality, faith is, at best, marginalized and, at worst, completely ignored. The spiritual component of anxiety is left by the wayside.

To be ignorant of our spiritual war is to be most open to attack and destruction. This is our position if we treat spiritual warfare as an outdated myth. This is our position if we take the way of pure rationality.

The way of pure rationality—the use of bare reason without conscious attention to what God has said in Scripture—can’t be our approach to anxiety if we want to grow closer to God.

There’s that clear but disconcerting truth that life is not about comfort and happiness, because these things end at some point.

If happiness is a right, then we immediately feel jaded when we don’t have it.

But if happiness is a blessing, then it’s not a right; it’s a gift. Gifts are not required.

Every instance of happiness in our lives is but a reflection of the eternal happiness we find in the presence of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Communion with God is the wellspring of our happiness because communion with God is highest purpose for living.

We’re bent on blessing. But if you’re bent on blessing, you’ll always be predisposed to hold a grudge against whatever is keeping it from you, including God himself.

Things start to change when we realize that our higher purpose of communion with God is attained by one means in the Great Story, and only one: Christ-conformity.

Resigning is resolving, in all circumstances, to the truth that God knows what’s better, both for his eternal plan and for your little place within it.

If we desire to be conformed to Christ through our anxiety, we have to be resolved to resign. That’s the path that Jesus himself stomped out for us in the grass of Gethsemane. It’s not a path of comfort. It’s not a path of ease. But comfort and ease are not the aims of a person walking through the Great Story. Christ is. Christ-conformity is our aim because communion with God is our aim.

When we resign ourselves to let God work through our feelings, we also situate our souls to enter into deeper communion with him.

Language is effective because of who God is and who he made us to be. Words work because the fabric of all things is geared towards communion.

Prayer is a continuous dialogue with God. It is an ongoing, intimate, honest, faith-based conversation between you and the Lord of all things.

The paradox of anxiety-induced weakness is that weakness leads to communion and strength, not to isolation and hopelessness. But for this to happen, we must commune with God through prayer . . . regularly. We have to make prayer a holy habit, not an occasional occurrence.

The ultimate “good” for those who love God is deeper communion with him. And we need prayer to have that.

we can’t assume that what we do to and with our bodies is detached from our spiritual well-being and development.

Doing his Father’s will and accomplishing his work might not, at first glance, appear related to God’s presence. But the presence of God is manifested among creatures by obedience and holiness.

We live ultimately on God, not on food. But food is meant to be a reflection, a pointer, to the ultimate truth of our eternal sustenance: God’s presence.

The point of this chapter is just to highlight what many of us know but often ignore: what you eat, what you do with your body, and how much you sleep matters. For people with anxiety, it matters a lot. Making some significant changes in one or more of these areas may have a major impact on your symptoms.

Rest is not just healthy or a physical necessity; it’s a spiritual tool for sanctification. In your rest, God is showing you that he is the one who will sanctify you. He will slow you down so that you can see him working.