A Biblical Approach to Anxiety

Father, as we turn now to your Word, may we know it to be, in reality, the very Word of God. Our ears are tuned not to the voice of a man but to listen for the voice of God through your written Word. Speak to us, Lord, if you please, in the earthquake, in the wind, or in that still, small, unmistakable whisper[1] which is able to calm our lurking fears, to confront our deepest needs, to answer our greatest longings.

Speak, Lord, in the stillness
While we wait on thee;
Hush our hearts to listen
In expectancy.[2]

For the sake of your Son, Jesus. Amen.

I invite you to take your Bibles, and we’ll turn to 1 Peter chapter 5—1 Peter 5. Last Sunday morning, as we looked at verses 5 and 6, we were considering a lovely characteristic which we discovered needs to be increasingly displayed in our lives—namely, humility. And perhaps, in order to ascertain just how effective our study of the Scripture was last week, I should ask just for a show of hands of those who are increasingly humble since last Sunday. It may be that some of us are rather anxious because we’re not as humble as we should be, in which case, then, verse 7 is going to prove to us the aptness of the Word of God as we come to look at it now. Because if last week we were dealing with a characteristic which most of us would acknowledge needs to be increasingly displayed in our lives, this morning we’re looking at a characteristic which, if we were honest, needs to be progressively removed from most of our lives—namely, the matter of anxiety.

First Peter 5:7 reads, “Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.” Or, in the Phillips paraphrase: “You can throw the whole weight of your anxieties upon him, for you are his personal concern.” This morning, I want to trace the line through this verse by noticing, first of all, the anxiety itself; secondly, the action that we need to take in response to this anxiety; and thirdly, the assurance that we might have in taking that action.

The Anxiety Itself

First of all, then, let’s consider this whole matter of anxiety, earthing the text in the immediate environment of Peter’s first readership—a group of scattered Christians, we’ve noted throughout these studies, in various parts of Bithynia and Cappadocia and Asia, many of whom had only recently come to faith in Jesus Christ, like many in our congregation this morning. They were beginning to understand and wrestle with what the apostles were teaching, like each of us in our congregation this morning. And as they did so, they were surrounded by a political environment which was absolutely hostile to them. Indeed, the Christians were regarded as antisocial nuisances. They seemingly, unbeknown to the Romans and without understanding by the Romans, were going in rooms and conducting cannibalism. The Romans did not understand the nature of the breaking of bread and the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. And they were regarded as just a jolly nuisance in the fabric of their day.

And because that was the case, they lived with the impending possibility of persecution. You might say that these believers to whom Peter wrote initially were living on the equivalent of the San Andreas Fault, in the sense that as the people out on the West Coast live with the notion that one day, if the geologists are accurate, the big one is coming, so these believers lived with the daily thought: “One day, the big one is coming.” And, of course, it came, in the persecution of Nero and in the onslaught which was then to ensue over the coming 250, 300 years that their children and their grandchildren would experience.

And so, when we see the readers in our mind’s eye taking Peter’s letter and reading it and fastening on this seventh verse with its stirring call to set aside anxiety, we need to recognize that these early Christians were worried about things like their lives: whether they would be alive tomorrow. Their families: What would become of their children? they must have said to one another. They must have had breakfast of a morning and said, “You know, if this Roman environment gets any worse, I can’t imagine what it will be for our children. And God forbid that there should ever be grandchildren born into this horrible world!” Those who were engaged probably worried about whether they would live long enough to know the joys of marriage. Those who were single probably worried about whether they would ever find a life’s partner. Those who were in business probably worried about whether somebody would come and close them down and whether their lives would be changed.

So twenty centuries pass, and it all has a very contemporary ring. For here we sit in the twentieth century, and what do we worry about? Our lives, our families, our futures, our businesses, our hopes, our dreams, the future for our children, the potential for our grandchildren. We worry about almost everything. We worry about crowds—what it would be to be in a crowd. And we worry about what it means to be alone. We worry about failure and what it might do. We worry about success and its implications. We worry about change, and we worry about the fact that nothing changes. We worry about the dark. We worry about being up high. We worry about being down low. We worry about flying. We worry about not flying.

And sometimes it reaches epidemic proportions, like the most cynical piece of work that I’ve seen for a while, by a lady called Wagner, who, following this line of worry to its kind of nth degree, puts in the words of the star of her play. She says, “I worry that if olive oil comes from olives and peanut oil comes from peanuts, where does baby oil come from? I worry,” she says, “I worry about my place in the Cosmic Scheme of things. I worry that there may be no Cosmic Scheme of things.”[3] And in 1981, in Side Effects, Woody Allen grabbed that one perfectly in these words: “More than [at] any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”[4]

Anxiety distracts us, it divides our minds, and it creates instability and uncertainty, which in turn adds fuel to our fears.

And when you think life through to those conclusions, you understand that anxiety is not something that we’re unfamiliar with. Indeed, history and philosophy merely chronicle the truth that each of us realize: that fear is not an unknown emotion to us. If you go to the library, as I did, and read psychological textbooks, as I’ve done, and read recent philosophy, as I try to, you discover this, amongst much more: that Sartre explained anxiety in terms of man’s concern about his past and about his parents; that Marx—that is, Karl, not Groucho—Karl explained anxiety in terms of his relationship to his future and to his neighbors; and that Kierkegaard explained anxiety in terms of man’s relationship to eternity and to God.

Now, all of that seems kind of out there, but it actually comes in here. Which is why a verse like this scratches beneath the surface of most of our conditions this morning. We find ourselves unable to live in the present because of the implications of our past, about which we worry, and because of the possibilities of our future, which also cause us anxiety. And the extent of the issue is broad in its implications.

However, what of the essence of the matter? What are we referring to? What is Peter wrestling with here as he uses this word? Well, the word which he actually uses comes from a verbal root which means “to divide.” And it describes, in certain ways, the inroads of anxiety to our lives, insofar as anxiety distracts us, it divides our minds, it creates instability and uncertainty, which in turn adds fuel to our fears.

We need say nothing more about anxiety. It’s not difficult for any of us to identify with it. The real issue is: How do you deal with it? If anxiety is present for any reason in any of our lives, how are we supposed to handle it?

The Action to Take

Well, that brings us, then, to the action that Peter calls upon us to take. “Cast all your anxiety on him,” he says.

Notice, first of all, what he doesn’t say to do with anxiety. He does not say to deny the existence of anxiety. This is not a call to suppression or to repression. It’s a call to realism. He does not suggest that we should ignore anxiety, either by the tactics of distraction or by the earnest longing just to run away from its implications. Instead, he uses a graphic word which means to hand over to or to place upon or to throw upon. You remember when Luke records for us the arrival of Jesus in Jerusalem on the occasion which we refer to on our Christian calendar as Palm Sunday, he talks about how Jesus came riding on the foal of a donkey and how the people began to place down in the streets palm branches. But before ever that happened, someone came and took coverings and threw it over the back of the donkey.[5] The word which is used there is the exact same word for throwing here, for hurling, and it is a very important, graphic one.

I was driving in the car the other evening with a young man, and he asked me if I knew what a good job was. And before I could answer, he said, “I’ll tell you a good job.” And I said, “What is that?” And he said, “It is a g-thrower.” Any of you familiar with this? A “g-thrower”?

So I was completely befuddled. I’d never heard of this in my life. I discovered that it is breaking into the contemporary scene in replace of a “sanitary engineer,” a “garbage man,” or, in my background, a “dust man” or a “bin man.” He is now a g-thrower. What does he do? He throws garbage on the truck. And, I was told, it’s a great job—plenty of fresh air; do it quickly, you can finish fast and get on with your life. And so throughout the week, I’ve been thinking about this and paying careful attention. And I noticed that it isn’t a bad job at all! And that’s exactly what they are: g-throwers! They throw the stuff on, and it crunches down. I haven’t seen too many of them just taking little pieces at a time and coming up and laying them in and then running back over, getting another, and they lay it in. No, not in our area! It just goes wham on. Wham!

Now, that is the word in 1 Peter 5:7. That is the action we’re to take with anxiety: to throw it! Not to throw it up in the air, not to throw it into oblivion, not to throw it onto somebody else, not to burden our wives or our children with it, but rather to throw it, to cast it, upon the Lord.

Now, it is an interesting thing—at least to me, and I hope in part to you—that although the NIV translates this verb with an imperative, in actuality, in the Greek, it is a present participle. “My, my!” you say. “Now isn’t that an interesting thing.” Well, it is an interesting thing. Because if you see it as a present participle—i.e., “casting all your anxiety on him,” which is how the King James Version has it, I think—then it helps us not to disengage verse 7 from verses 5 and 6.

Let me explain. The imperative is in verse 6: “Humble yourselves.” Okay? What happens when you humble yourself under God’s mighty hand? Well, it transforms the way you deal with everything, including the way we deal with anxiety. So as we humble ourselves before God, then we are to be casting all our anxiety upon him. It is not so much a new departure, a new instruction, as it is correlative to the wider instruction which Peter is supplying—namely, the necessity for us as individuals to live under God’s mighty hand.

Now, think this through for a little minute. If you fly on an aeroplane and you are anxious all the time, in the midst of everything that is taking place, at least this is taking place in part: that somehow, as you or I sit back there on that seat, we are making some kind of tacit assumption that the person who is the pilot may not really know what he’s doing. Despite the fact that we know nothing about what is going on, we can spend the whole journey anxiety-ridden on the basis of the fact that we are not prepared to humble ourselves to the point where we say, “This matter is beyond me. This journey is far-reaching. This individual has had all the training, and I must do what he said.” What did he say? He said, “Ladies and gentlemen, we have now reached our climbing altitude of twenty-nine thousand feet. We will speak to you later in the journey, but for now, we want you to sit back, relax, and enjoy the flight.” Okay, so what are you going to do? Are you going to fly it from 23B yourself? Or are you going to humble yourself under the pilot’s instructions?

Now, the analogy breaks down—I recognize that—but in part, it is an illustration of what God is saying to us as we live our lives. He is saying to us, “Listen! I am the one who cares for you. I know who your children are. I know where you live, and I know about your neighbors. I know about your boss. I know about your singleness. I know about your fears of illness. I know all of that,” he says. “And my instruction to you is this: that you would humble yourself.” Because our unwillingness to humble ourselves means that we seek to take matters into our own hands. And when we take matters into our own hands and when we consume ourselves with worry, then we reveal, at least to our own hearts, that we are concerned with ourselves rather than concerned with him. Oh, we may want to give the impression that we are concerned with him, but in actual fact, many of our deepest concerns have to do with our pride rather than making progress in his kingdom.

Let me illustrate this from Luke chapter 10, if you turn to it for a moment—a well-known story concerning two sisters who loved the Lord Jesus, and equally so. And in verse 38 we read,

As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. [And] she had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to what he said. But Martha was distracted—

notice that word, like divided—

by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!”

“Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you[’re] worried and upset about many things.”

Maybe that is a word to somebody’s heart this morning. You put your name in there. The Lord speaks through his Word; he says, “You know, you’re worried. You’re upset about many things.”

“But only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”

Now, what is Jesus saying there? Is he saying that there’s no place for the productivity of a Martha? Is it a call to passivity—to all be like Mary and sit around all day and all evening? No. What he is saying is this: that the posture of Mary needs to be the heart of Martha in the activity of service. Otherwise, our preoccupations with what we do for Jesus may rob us of time spent with Jesus, of the enjoyment of the companionship of Jesus, and so create in our spirits a bitterness, that we will then resent the humble spirits of others who have chosen a less frantic way of life.

Perhaps we could lay it down, then, as almost a maxim. I put it tentatively, because I haven’t fully thought it out, but maybe you can think it out along with me. The maxim would be like this: the presence of anxiety is directly related to the absence of humility. The presence of anxiety is directly related to the absence of humility.

Now, that’s not saying everything, but it is saying something. Think about it in relation to our world today—a world which largely, in the Western culture, has denigrated and disregarded God. Oh yeah, we have God, who is around. We can rub a magic lamp and summon him up every so often. But we don’t have a God who is transcendent in the heavens, recognizing that our times are in his hands, that every baby that is born is according to his purposes, that he is in control of the ebb and flow of all of our lives.

Having dispensed with that God, having exalted ourselves in our pride, we then have to fill in the blanks. And as we scramble to fill in the blanks, we are a neurotic society. We are full of neuroses, full of anxieties, stressed out, burdened, fractured, divided, crushed, debilitated, paralyzed—because we’re not humble enough to bow before God and say, “You know, my heart is restless. It will never find rest until it finds its rest in thee.”[6] That’s Augustine in the fourth century. He was humble enough to acknowledge it. Until our culture is humble enough to bow before God and say, “You know, we can’t make sense of our lives without you, heavenly Father,” then we will continue to be increasingly unstable and riddled with anxiety.

The presence of anxiety is directly related to the absence of humility.

You think about so many things that we do, just as individuals living in our world, to try and deal with the anxiousness: the “eighty-six proof anesthetic crutches”[7] that are provided to help us with our fear of flying and everything else; the possibilities of entertainment in the excess to try and drive away the blues and fill in the blanks and give us a little bit of hope and a lift. It’s in the ’60s, now—it’s thirty years ago—that Joan Baez, writing of the generation that was around Vietnam, she writes, “[We] are the orphans in an age of no tomorrows.”[8] And one generation sang it, a subsequent generation believed it, and a third generation now lives it! You only need to speak with those who are in the primary care of adolescent schoolchildren to find out how much anxiety and worry and fear wracks and riddles the lives of children in our land. And if we had at our disposal, externally, the answers to those dilemmas, then we would be seeing these bright and joyful youngsters running out amongst the streets and declaring their stability rather than their uncertainty.

And so as Christians reading 1 Peter 5:7 this morning, we’re responsible to challenge that kind of Joan Baez assertion, not with false cries of bravado but in the example of humbling ourselves before God and declaring how powerful we believe his hand to be—and that simply not by saying it but by living it. And that’s where it gets hard, isn’t it? It’s very easy to be verbally free of worry. It’s very difficult to be experientially free of worry. We might talk a good talk without living a good life.

Now, there’s something we mustn’t mistake here, and it’s this: that we’re not called to cast all our trouble on him, all the causes of our anxiety on him, but to cast the anxiety which the troubles cause.

Let me illustrate in this way: Some of us may be particularly anxious because of a physical characteristic of our lives—something that is a problem medically, perhaps, about which, we know now, we can do nothing, nor can medical science. So we cannot alleviate that physical condition. That physical condition causes anxiety in our lives. But we can, says the Bible, be free of the anxiety which the condition causes. We may have reached a point in our days where life has taken a dramatic turn, over which we now have no control, or little control. We cannot change the condition. The condition produces anxiety. We wake in the night. We rise early in the morning. We are consumed with it. The promise of Scripture is that God is able to deal with the anxiety. That is, we can refuse to be burdened by the care which weighs us down, which disturbs our peace, which distracts our minds.

The Assurance We Find

And why can we be so sure of this? Because not only is there an anxiety we face and an action we take, but there is an assurance that we find. And there it is in the final phrase of the verse: you can do this, says Peter, “because he cares for you.” Or, to quote Phillips once again, “You are his personal concern.” Actually, in the original, the language is round this way, so that it reads in straightforward translation, “To him, it is a care concerning you.”

This morning, if you are in Christ, if you know the reality of sins forgiven, if you know the joy of forgiveness, the presence of the Spirit within your life, then the promise of God’s Word is that you are his personal concern. Therefore, to throw our cares upon God is not misplaced confidence. Rather, it is acknowledging that he knows us better than we know ourselves. And we should recognize that this is a distinctive of Christianity. The readers, as they received Peter’s letter, were surrounded by folks whose religious activity in sacrifice and in prayer was so much of the time given over to try to waken up the slumbering deities, like the prophets of Baal in the Old Testament.[9] But this morning, the promise is, for the Christian: we don’t have to waken up God. He never sleeps, he never slumbers.[10] Read the 121st Psalm:

The Lord watches over you—
 the Lord is your shade [on] your right hand [and on your left];
the sun will not harm you by day,
 nor the moon by night.

The Lord …
 … will watch over your life.
the Lord [watches] over your coming and [your] going
 [from this time forth and even] forevermore.[11]

You don’t have to put in an early-morning wake-up call for God, if I might say so reverently. There’s never a morning at which we waken to a day full of challenge and potential anxiety that God was not up long before us. And there is never a night when we toss upon our beds when we may fear that he has gone to sleep. For you are his personal concern.

What a word it is in our generation, as well. You know, I noticed in the newspaper this week, as the weather goes back and forth, and you got a good day and then an unbelievable day—one day it looks like Cleveland, lovely blue sky and crisp, and the next day it looks like Glasgow, clouds down to a hundred feet and bucketing with rain—and you open your newspaper, and then it says on the front, “Mother Nature has been kind to us,” or “Mother Nature has been cruel to us.” You see, until man bows in humility and recognizes that God orders the sun to shine and the rain to fall and the stars in place and the planets in orbit, and recognizes that a God who can control the whole universe is interested in the details of his life—until a man or a woman bows in that posture of humility—there is ultimately no hope for their neurotic, anxiety-filled lives. Anything else may deal with symptoms, may prove to be palliative, but only in God is there this tremendous experience.

There’s never a morning at which we waken to a day full of challenge and potential anxiety that God was not up long before us.

Well, what of us this morning as we take this and think about it? Would we doubt the care of God? The care of God for us is ultimately expressed and can be seen on a cross, sending his Son to die. The care of God is ultimately heard in a cry: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what [to] do.”[12] And the care of God may be discovered in a moment: “Today you will be with me in paradise.”[13]

Well, it’s going to be Monday real fast, right? We’re going to go back out into the battle. Most of us fight this battle in secret! That’s the problem. We don’t tell our wives. We don’t tell our children. I mean, you can’t tell your kids you’re worried. You can’t be worried! You’re their father. You can’t tell your roommate. He’s so worried, if he finds out your worried, he’ll be even more worried than he was before he found out that you’re worried. So we live in a silent cave of our own creating, and we can’t tell the person next to us. We’re afraid to let our guard down. We don’t know what to do with it. And we face another Monday saying, “I don’t think anyone understands, and I don’t know if anyone cares, and I don’t know if there’s a living soul with whom I can share this.” And 1 Peter 5:7 says, “Yes, there is.”

Standing somewhere in the shadows you’ll find Jesus;
He’s the only one who cares and understands;
[And] standing somewhere in the shadows you will find him,
And you’ll know him by the nail prints in his hand[s].[14]

Casting all of our anxiety onto him, because he makes us his personal concern.

Shall we bow together in prayer?

Let us take a moment and just respond to God’s Word as we prepare to sing this final hymn, once again as a response to God’s Word—just, in the silence of your own heart, asking God to show you areas that perhaps are so embedded in your life that you don’t realize how much they thwart your days; resting in the assurance that God has made us, in Christ, his personal concern; asking him that we might experience it not simply for our own selfish interest but in order that we might express it to our friends so that they in turn might discover God in this way.

We used to sing a little chorus in Sunday school, I remember from childhood. It went like this:

All your anxiety, all your care,
Bring to the mercy seat, leave it there;
Never a burden [that] he cannot bear,
Never a friend like Jesus![15]

Just where you sit, in your mind’s eye, throw that anxious, doubtful worry dimension upon the Lord, who cares for you, and then refuse every intimidating cry of the Evil One to immediately pick it back up again and worry about it all over.

[1] See 1 Kings 19:11–12.

[2] Emily Crawford, “Speak, Lord, in the Stillness” (1920). Lyrics lightly altered.

[3] Jane Wagner, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe (New York: Harper & Row, 1986), 25–26. Paraphrased.

[4] Woody Allen, Side Effects (New York: Ballantine, 1975), 81.

[5] See Luke 19:35.

[6] See Augustine, Confessions 1.1.

[7] Ray Stevens, “Mr. Businessman” (1968).

[8] Joan Baez, “The Hitchhikers’ Song” (1971).

[9] See 1 Kings 18:25–29.

[10] See Psalm 121:4.

[11] Psalm 121:5–8 (NIV 1984).

[12] Luke 23:34 (KJV).

[13] Luke 23:43 (NIV 1984).

[14] E. J. Rollings, “Standing Somewhere in the Shadows” (1943).

[15] Edward H. Joy, “All Your Anxiety (1920).