The American Churchman: Anxiety and Thanksgiving

Welcome to the American Churchman podcast. It's been a hot minute since we've had an American Churchman podcast.

So we're grateful to be here and grateful to be in decent health. I have a little bit of a cold, but for the season,

I'm just really grateful that I'm able to do this. I generally get sick this time of year and I know

Matthew's been going through a lot. So we finally coordinated schedules. Here we are. We're gonna talk about Thanksgiving because this is

Thanksgiving week and also how people struggle with anxiety typically during this time of year and how to address that, especially if you're a

Christian. But before we get to that, just a few housekeeping things. We are sponsored by TruthScript.

TruthScript .com is where you can donate. Scroll down to the bottom. We are a 501C3. You can also submit articles.

And David has informed me, who's the president of TruthScript, my brother, that we have more article submissions than we've had in a long time, which is a real blessing.

And we've identified some really great authors who probably you wouldn't know about unless they contacted us.

And now there's a platform for them to be heard. So TruthScript is functioning in the way that we've envisioned it to function.

And we're really grateful for that. We have some great articles on Thanksgiving. And with that,

I don't even know if I introduced myself. I'm John. My co -host is Matthew Pearson. So Matthew, it's been a hot minute.

You've renewed the web. How's everything going? Things are going great. I have no complaints, very few, if any.

It's about everything that we went through, everything in premarital counseling. We talked about it before we got, and my wife and I talked about it before marriage.

And marriage is about everything that I expected. And so because of that, we are both happy campers, delighted to be joined together and praying together every night to live in a godly marriage.

So that's good. And then I won't go into too many details about this just because just how

I am with my personal life, but I'm very happy to say, got a new job. So things are looking much better financially for the both of us because things were a little bit tight before.

So that was part of the coordinating schedules is just recently getting into a new job. But the good thing is, is that,

John, we ought to have a more coherent schedule given I have a more normal work cycle now instead of working a bunch of shifts in the evening.

So we're good on that front. But let's just say, given the nature of this episode, I'm very thankful to have all of these blessings in our lives.

And I'm excited to go over this article as well. But I will also say that there were a bunch of Thanksgiving articles and I didn't read very thoroughly through all of them, but I did look through many of them.

And another one I did read, John, was actually from your dad. That one is very good. And I recommend everybody check that out.

You know, True Script is basically a family run thing. You got John, you got David, and you got Papa Harris.

So it's a big operation there. I think my mom even did an article once. So we believe in nepotism,

I suppose. But no, we've been praying for you. I know we've talked about it on the podcast, the need for work and all of that.

So I'm very grateful for that. And I think probably, realistically, January, February will enter probably a new normal with the schedule.

Holidays make things obviously more difficult. So appreciate everyone's patience. I know we had our regulars on Tuesday night who would always show up.

They wouldn't even show up for my live stream. So they would show up for the American Church and live stream. And I know it's been a little bit.

So we're hoping to get back to a normal schedule here soon. And yeah, that's about it, I suppose.

I think, how do we wanna do this, I guess? We'll just transition to the topic because that's what's right in front of us.

And we're on the precipice of Thanksgiving. I don't know about you, Matthew. I have four Thanksgivings.

And I know it's like, for families that have moved around and you've, especially with the Friendsgiving thing,

I don't know if that's still done, but a lot of millennials like to do Friendsgiving. It created this pressure of like,

I gotta be here for this and there for this. And I'm somewhat in that still. Like I had one with my wife's family, part of like one side of her family.

And then I had the church dinner yesterday and then we're hosting Thanksgiving on Thursday. And then my brother couldn't make it.

So he's hosting another Thanksgiving on Saturday. All these meals, I'm gonna be turkey'd out, but I'm grateful for it.

It also makes this time of year stressful though. And that's, I guess, the transition I wanted to make is that I think a lot of people feel the stress of the holidays in multiple ways.

That's just one of them. That's just your average person has that already going on. There's all these activities. And then of course, between Thanksgiving and Christmas, it's crazy.

You have to make sure you have all the right gifts and the right decorations and the right church or business related events that you have to attend.

And sometimes you're participating directly in those things. Like if you're singing in a choir or something like that.

And then you have just the food preparation and it's like jammed in this little window.

And it seems like everyone's screaming at you about like, here's a deal over here. You need to go over here right now and grab this.

And that's for like high functioning, just average ordinary people. I think it's a lot.

And so I didn't understand this when I was a kid, but now I do being an adult, especially having a family and a daughter now, it's like, well, it's a blessing.

I love seeing that sparkle in my daughter's eyes. I love the holidays. I really do. It's my favorite time of year probably in many ways.

But there is this sort of sigh of relief afterward. You're like, oh man, that was a lot. I don't know if you feel that yet, but I don't know.

I started feeling it maybe 10 years ago. And I think that's a high functioning person feels that, like someone who doesn't struggle with anxiety or depression.

But for someone who does struggle with those things, this is a challenging time of year. And I don't know to what extent the people listening have had these experiences.

I'll just read off some really quick stats though, before we get into the articles. 49 % of US adults report elevated stress from November to January, according to the

American Psychological Association. This increase in stress leads to depression and anxiety. Obviously 38 % of people feel stress rise during the holidays specifically.

So you could have like weather related seasonal affect type, you know, we're just not getting the vitamin

D. Of course you don't have that problem in Florida, but. No, no. Yeah, up here we do. But then there's just the stress related directly to the holidays.

And that creates these conditions. Financial strain, you gotta buy things.

Like 68 % of respondents on an NAMI survey of 755 people.

So who knows how accurate this is, but apparently they feel financially strained by the holidays. I think that's accurate.

I think most people do feel financially strained during the holidays. 62 % according to a

Harvard Medical School study described stress as very or somewhat high during this time. So, I mean, I could go on and on.

It's all the same stuff, right? There's more suicides during this time of year, all that kind of stuff.

And it made me reflect a little bit on the Pilgrims and then also on Jamestown. Of course, the first Thanksgiving, at least in the

Anglo sphere of North America was in Jamestown in 1619. The one that we think of the most is the

Pilgrims, which was in 1621. And you think of both of those colonies and they had severe deprivation compared to today.

1607, when English colonies first arrived in North America, immediately they had a crisis on their hands because of the way that the colony was set up.

They came and they had certain members of the colony who weren't pulling their weight.

They had others who were doing too much work. And it was, you have winters, you have threats from the native populations, you have threats from disease, all of these things combined.

And it created what eventually became known as the Starving Time in 1609 to 1610.

They literally called it the Starving Time. And only 60 survivors of the 214 original were still alive, apparently by that time.

Now you have, again, this is a few years before the first supposed Thanksgiving, or not supposed, it was real, but we don't know a lot about it in Virginia in 1619.

Look at the Pilgrims and they arrive in 1620 and it's winter, right?

And I mean, there was some providential things that seemed to work out in their favor, including corn that had not been harvested because the

Indian tribe that had planted it had died of smallpox and these kinds of things. But still their first winter, they had a 50 % mortality rate.

Half the people died in their colony. And the next year they celebrate

Thanksgiving anyway. So I only sort of intro monologue to say this, the struggles we have,

I'm not trying to minimize them. I'm not trying to say they don't matter, I think they do. But people in our past, in our

Christian heritage past have suffered in great ways. And they've still been able to thank the

Lord. And that's the challenge I think I wanna pose to everyone out there is, how do we look at the big picture during the holidays, even despite stress, despite anxieties, despite potentially depression, and still manage to give thanks to God, to put our mindset in that frame.

And maybe reflecting on our Christian past can help us do that, to realize, man, we actually have it pretty easy in some ways.

And I'm not trying to minimize anything. Again, I just think that it's good to realize the world has always had troubles.

Be of good cheer, Jesus says, I've overcome the world. So anything to add to that, Matthew, before we get into some of these articles? I absolutely agree with everything you said.

Holidays can be particularly stressful, obviously because of financial reasons, having to set aside a lot of money to make these certain purchases for gifts and things like that.

And for those that aren't as wealthy as others, that may be a bit difficult to do, but you still budget for it.

But on the other hand, sort of what you said with bringing up the 50 % mortality rate, there are a lot of people that holidays are particularly harder for them because they realize it's like, what is the celebration of the holidays?

Oftentimes families coming together to celebrate with one another. And so when you experience a loss, that has, when you come to a holiday season, that permeates for a while, where you realize, oh, this person who's been here my whole life is no longer here.

And that makes people sad. It makes people depressed. And so part of trying to find joy in holidays is not just celebrating what they represent.

So Thanksgiving, being thankful for all that you have or all that you had or all that you will possibly have, but also

Christmas celebrating the incarnation of our Lord. But even then being thankful for those around you and not just feeling sadness at loss, but feeling thankfulness for the fact that they were there.

And a lot of people struggle with that. And like you said, it's not trying to minimize. People have always had loss and things like that, but it can be difficult during the holidays due to missing family members and things like that.

That's always going to be a struggle because somebody in the past or maybe someone even in the present will always have it harder than you in some sense.

That is true, but that doesn't negate that the struggles that we face in this fallen world are still real and they have ripple effects in your smaller circles and things like that.

I mean, just thinking of all the loss that we've had this year, just in the passing of Charlie Kirk, just imagine how his family feels not having him for the first Thanksgiving of this year.

And then fast forward to December, how they're going to feel no Charlie Kirk around at the

Christmas celebration. And that's just one example where people knew this person, like many people knew this person, like how his immediate family is feeling, but there's so many families out there that are missing a family member this year that they just had last year.

So these times are hard and sort of getting on the theme of what we're going to be talking about, anxiety and Thanksgiving.

It produces this feeling of anxiousness because you're stressing over loss. You're like, what if I lose somebody else?

And that's why I think this article that we're about to go into is timely in talking about the sin behind these anxious feelings, but how part of the grace of the gospel is that we have the gift of repentance.

And so that's part of it as well, is being able to be thankful for what you had and use your anxious feelings and turn them into feelings of Thanksgiving, so.

That was 100 % accurate. I totally agree with what you said. I think the only thing that I thought of that I would add is that I think there's an expectation that people have, especially in America, coming off of a time of so much blessing financially where Thanksgiving is the crescendo of the

American dream. Like this is the time when you reflect on all the gains that you've made during the year and you can enjoy those things, the bounty of those things with your family.

And it's been that way for a long time. Of course, there's family dysfunction and those kinds of things, but I mean, even the

Black Friday event is now attached to Thanksgiving and it just cries how much we have indulgence and material goods and all these kinds of, even if you're doing it on debt and a credit card, you can still get these things that are most of the time, not even necessary for life.

And I'm not judging. I'm just saying there's been a blessing on our country for so long and an ability to have these amazing feasts.

And the Pilgrims and the Jamestown settlers, I don't think they had those expectations.

They didn't have something to look back on and say, it should look like this. And why doesn't it? For them,

I think, now they did have, obviously their lives in England. They did have the spices of Egypt, so to say, not to compare

England to Egypt, but they could look back and say, there were some better times. But as far as Thanksgiving itself as an

American holiday, I mean, they were the first and it was just, God, we're alive. Thank you, right?

And are we able to do that? Are we able to look at the important things, the things that actually you can't purchase?

They don't have a price tag. There are things that God has given us that if we didn't have any gifts at Christmas, if we didn't have a big turkey on Thanksgiving, will we still be able to be thankful that God has us alive, that he's put us in a place where we have a roof over our head, that we do have family to enjoy?

I mean, it's a hard thing to reflect on. And I think for me personally, that's a challenge. I would want to say that I would be able to adjust to that.

We can't purchase a big turkey, that's okay. We'll have something that's cheaper, but we're still gonna have a time of Thanksgiving and a reflection.

So anyway, that's my challenge and my comparison of today to back then.

The article that we're gonna give over is called the, oh,

I got the wrong one pulled up. It's by Tom Rush, here it is.

It's called Thanksgiving and the Principle of Praise. And I do wanna just highlight, as Matthew said, there are other articles about Thanksgiving we have in the past on TruthScript.

My dad wrote one, a brief American Thanksgiving history. Sean McGowan wrote, love Thanksgiving, thank

Virginia. And I think there's another one I don't have pulled up. So we have at least four articles on Thanksgiving.

And we'll probably have another one, I'm sure, coming out later this week. But we wanted to reflect on one from last year, which was published on November 28th.

So I think that was right, but that would have been, when is Thanksgiving? That would be the 20, this year it's the 27th.

At least this year it's the 27th, yes. So I don't know what it was last year. Maybe it was published on the day. So I don't think we had time to reflect on it on this podcast, but we will now.

Matthew, I know you read this. Do you wanna take it away and just highlight some of the things you found helpful in this? Yeah, sure.

Something which I found interesting was in his bad advice section. So literally right below the introduction, where he sort of notes about how he heard somebody quoting a scripture verse where, you know, we're encouraged to give thanks in everything, but this celebrity

Christian teacher, and he refers to it as a her. So I guess I have speculations on who it is. I didn't look into it, but instead of saying, give thanks for everything, she says, give thanks in everything, because, you know, there are bad things that happen.

You don't wanna give thanks for those things necessarily, but he, Tom, as he does, we love

Tom here, don't we? He said, he quotes later on Ephesians 5 .20,

which says, given thanks always for all things to God the Father in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.

And I just thought that this was something which is interesting to meditate on is that giving thanks for everything, it is difficult because there are bad things which do occur in the world, and it's not terrible to be able to look at something and say, this is bad, because there's this tendency that some have where it's like, okay, if God is sovereign over all things, if God ordaineth whatsoever cometh to pass, how can you posit that anything is bad?

But just human nature and scripture itself tells us that there are things which occur which are not good.

There sort of is this issue where somebody gets too into what they would consider a deep theology, which in reality is not that deep at all,

I would argue, but they would say, oh, well, God is sovereign. God ordains all things. Therefore, if God's not the author of evil and all things that happen, therefore, you can't really posit anything as bad.

But no, have your Sunday school intuition of, no, good things are good, bad things are bad, and it's okay to recognize that.

But in recognizing that, we have to remember also what scripture says about how, think of Genesis 50, 20, where Joseph is telling his brothers, what you intended for evil,

God intended for good. So all the bad things which come and occur and which we experience in our lives, the trials and the circumstances we are in, you're able to look at that and to say, this was objectively not a good thing.

This in and of itself was, it's not good that this happened, but you can still give thanks, not for the thing in and of itself for what it is, but for what it produced, the circumstance it put you in and the trials you underwent.

Why? Because scripture speaks about how the trials that we go through ultimately are for our good and they strengthen us.

And a good way to, I would say like a good analogy, a sort of think of this is, think of the crucifixion itself. I know we're in Thanksgiving and Christmas and Easter is way down the line, but we're not bound to just think in those categories.

The crucifixion itself, we can say Christ being killed was bad.

Why? Because an innocent man was slaughtered and identified as guilty.

That's, anybody can look at an innocent man being slaughtered and accused of being guilty as not a good thing.

But what came of it? The redemption of the world. And so we can look at that and we can say, this is bad, but it's also, there's a sense of good in it.

And there's, of course, there's multiple nuances in here. Christ was in the office of a mediator. He was our shorty, our pledge.

He himself voluntarily underwent the wrath owed to us such that we can be made partakers of the effects of his righteousness and things like that.

We can obviously nuance our way out of it, but the principle is something can be objectively bad, but from it comes good.

And like I already said, the crucifixion is a little bit different given that it was voluntary on Christ's part, but he still actually lamented it and he still underwent this against his own, like there's a sense in which according to his human will, he did not want to do this.

He prayed in the garden of Gethsemane, but his human will being united to his divine will ultimately submitted to that.

And this isn't really a Christological heresy or anything. We do acknowledge that there are two wills in Christ and they are harmonious.

But the point of that was to show that Christ underwent human struggles and he was fearful in a sense.

He did not want to undergo that happen. Sorry if there's knocking, I think maintenance is here. They can wait till later.

But yeah, so you can look at something which happens and still say, no, this was bad in one sense, but it also produced a good and especially if it was voluntary.

Yes. Yeah, that is a hard thing though. And I think that takes a lot of spiritual maturity to be quite honest, to thank

God sometimes for trials, not just in trials, but that the Lord has specifically providentially put a trial in your life.

I do, I mean, I don't think Tom fleshes this out in great detail. He jumps to the sin of anxiety next and why it is sinful to be anxious, but to pick an example, right?

So you have a death in the family. Maybe it's someone very close to you. If you thank

God for the trial, well, like what does that look like specifically? I don't know if you have thoughts on that, Matthew, because I'm trying to think through it in real time here.

I obviously don't thank God that the person I love is gone because I want them here, right?

And that's, I think, a desire God also gave us, but I can thank him for the time that, you mentioned this just a minute ago, the time that we had with that person and that I got to know that person and that's a blessing from God.

And so I can reflect on their life in that way. And I suppose I can also recognize that this trial is going to shape me in ways that I would not have been shaped otherwise.

And God knew, he knows the grand calculation. We can't see all of that. It's a tapestry that we are not privy to.

We're in the rat maze. He can see what's around the next corner. And I know the judge of all the earth shall do right.

So I can thank him for his character, for his sovereignty over this world that he has conquered sin and death ultimately.

I mean, those are the things I think I tend to wanna go towards when someone dies. I mean, what about you? Yeah, no,

I would say that in giving thanks, you don't have to say, oh, thank you, God, that this person is dead.

Like just point blank, you don't need to say that, but you can be thankful for the life that they had, the time that you had with them.

And especially if they're a Christian for the fact that they are now in glory, that they are beholding

God as he is, you can be thankful for that. So it's like, the thing is, is in theology, we have a lot of distinctions, but the reason we have these distinctions is not just a scholastic gobbledygook that you just come up with to cope your way into reading a passage this way or the other, but it's just like, not only does scripture make these sorts of distinctions all the time, but we do it in our life.

It's a very normal thing to do. And so you can very easily recognize the good, which comes from what appears to be tragic.

And even then too, you can also take rest in the fact of knowing the character of God and knowing that he has a purpose and reason behind everything that he does.

And sometimes you understand and you know the purpose and reason behind why he does what he does, but sometimes you'll go to the grave and you just won't know.

There are horrible things which occur, which in this life, you will never know why, but nevertheless, you would give thanks to God because even if you don't know, you know that God has a purpose on the basis of his character on the basis of who he is as God.

And I think that's a very difficult thing for some people to understand is that some people, their approach to Christianity is, unless I understand why this or that thing occurs, then there's no valid reason for it to have occurred.

But this sort of like takes me back to Paul's point in Romans. You know, he's like, who are you, old man, to say to the potter, why have you made me this way?

There's this sort of like, we as man cannot have this presumption as if we are entitled to know all these things.

And depending on your view of like who wrote Job, whether Job wrote it himself by revelation or whether somebody familiar with the scenario which occurred had this immediate revelation by God explaining what had happened.

But we can still say there's a chance that Job never found out the reason why he lost his family.

God in appearing to Job, he never gives a reason why he took his family away. He simply revealed to Job his character and his right to do such and to do such in a just manner.

And so we are not entitled with an explanation behind why all things happen. And again, like I said, this is very hard for people to understand.

And it's especially something that I would imagine pastors have to deal with a lot in pastoral counseling because a lot of these people in their grief, their grief drives them to seeking a why to this.

And that makes sense though, because in your grief, part of a way that you can get comfort in grief is knowing a why.

And we as finite creatures have to be able to wrestle with the fact that sometimes a why isn't going to be fully revealed to us, but what ought to be sufficient for us is understanding the character of God.

And so it's a difficult thing to do because we are humans in a fallen world and we have this desire to know these things.

And the desire to know certain things is not bad. God created us with rational minds, with an intellect and a will to search these things out.

But we have to have this sort of contentment with not being able to always know why God has made something happen this way.

Yeah, that's great. I think I was thinking as you were saying all of that, which is a hundred percent true that there's a lot of guys right now, and I'm specifically right -wing guys who rightfully care about the civilization that they've inherited that they feel is dying.

And I'm one of those people. I want to protect, preserve. I want to pass down something.

My wife and I, I've expressed this on my other podcasts. We've had barriers to having children and we've tried to overcome those barriers in every way that we know how ethically.

And part of it is not, obviously we want children, but we also want a civilization. We also want to continue what we've been given.

And I think there is a sense right now, and I am sensing this. I don't know if you're sensing this, Matthew, that there's a frustration with the

Trump administration, the deportations aren't happening fast enough, the birth rate is collapsing. Like, am

I in a death spiral? And this is where, like in previous civilizations, just as a student of history, there's usually some kind of a cope you try to find.

Like for the, oh, what tribe was it? The Lakota tribe, right?

It was like, we're going to have ghost shirts. These ghost shirts are going to stop the bullets. We'll win. You kind of like tell yourself we're going to win.

But the reason you're telling yourself that is because you know that you're dying. And I don't know, there's other civilizations

I can think of that have done similar things where it's like, you know, they're in sort of the last strains in a way.

And I don't know if that's true for Americans or Europeans more broadly. I just know that there's a lot of metrics to look at that are kind of depressing.

And this plays into, I think, even our holidays, which are mediated through traditions.

I mean, Thanksgiving is a quintessentially American holiday. It is an Anglo -Protestant holiday, okay?

If you're not that and you're celebrating it, that's great. But that's the origination of it. It is Protestants who came to this country who were thanking the

God of scripture for his preservation of them and really his blessing on what they intended to do, which was pass down their theology, their culture, all of those things.

Christmas, obviously a Christian holiday. And then I think during these times, there's this sense that I'm participating in a civilizational wide effort.

And I lost you there, Matthew. I'm gonna make my screen. I'm here, don't worry. Okay. There's a civilizational wide effort that like everything stops and it's kind of a beautiful thing.

I was reflecting on this just like two days ago that the Sabbath, okay, used to be like a holiday every week.

Every week, the culture around you stopped what they were doing. You couldn't sell alcohol.

You couldn't sell anything in some places during the Sabbath. You were forced to rest.

There were noise ordinances in some towns. Like you couldn't engage in even the kind of recreational activities if they were loud and disturbed others from their contemplation.

I was just in a beautiful old congregational church that goes back to the, I think early 1700s in Connecticut.

And while we were in the service, I heard outside lawnmowers going.

It was kind of distracting, right? And it's like, and I was like, this is kind of depressing actually. Like everyone should be stopping what they're doing and participating in this.

Well, that's the last vestige of that we still have as a civilization is Thanksgiving, Christmas, basically.

And even those things are being trampled upon. But like Christmas day, you go out, nothing's open.

You can't actually, like everyone's participating in this event, celebrating the birth of our Lord, at least they should be.

And I think that's sort of a reminder of like we're part of a corporate thing. We're part of a civilization.

And we know now through events of the last few years, that civilization is in a struggle, whether it will continue.

And this is something Christians should be aware of and we need to be encouraging younger people.

We need to be having kids. We need to be doing everything we can to pass down our culture.

I think that's just a natural human thing. But specifically for us as American churchmen, pass down our religious history, pass down our theology, pass down the good, true, beautiful things that we know about the

God we serve. Thanksgiving and Christmas are embodiments of that. And so where was

I going with this? I think that the point I'm trying to make is this, that I think that it's hard during this time in a broader cultural sense to celebrate these unique Anglo -Protestant, or in Christmas, it's

Christian holidays, when you feel like things are kind of crumbling around you.

But the answer to that is to trust in God even harder, to celebrate these holidays with more reverence, to lean into it as much as possible, to say

Merry Christmas. I think it's to celebrate those things and expand those things as much as you possibly can.

It's not to retreat. It's not to sulk. And you don't know what's right around the corner.

You really don't. You don't know what God has in store. And so the pilgrims didn't know that they were going to even survive the voyage to the new world.

It looked pretty hairy at some points. And here we are hundreds of years later celebrating the fact that they made it and they established a civilization.

And I think you and I, Matthew, we're pioneers too, even though we don't feel like it sometimes because we don't have the wilderness to contend with, we do have things like technology and AI and pornography and just social degradation and so many things that work against us.

DEI, all of these things are the forces that we are fighting against. Forces, frankly,

I think the devil uses. You and I are pioneers. You and I can celebrate Thanksgiving as pioneers and say, hey,

God still has us here for a reason. Even given this social, civilizational -wide significance that you have, you may not feel it, but you have it.

And I just feel like I needed to say that, especially for right -wing men out there. You are important.

And celebrating these holidays is part of that. So I was kind of drifting from the article, but that's it.

Sin of anxiety. So is anxiety a sin, Matthew? Well, I think it sort of depends on your disposition and your anxiety, but I would say generally and for the most part, yes, but there's certain feelings of anxiousness in which there is sort of still a full trusting in God throughout the anxiety.

And the only reason I'm inclined to say that is it's hard for me to say that Christ in the

Garden of Gethsemane was not having certain feelings of anxiety there.

And the reason why I don't wanna call it sin in that circumstance, of course, is because we all know, per the words of scripture, which are infallible and inerrant, that Christ was without sin.

But I would say though that what Christ does is not always, you can't suppose that you will always do that which he did, but without sin, because we as believers, we still have a sinful nature.

Our sinful nature has been redeemed, is being changed. We have the supernatural virtues.

We have faith, hope, and love. We have the spirit renovating us, making us anew.

But nevertheless, we still have concupiscence. We have sinful inclinations and desires. And so while Christ might've had these feelings of anxiety, he had them without concupiscence.

He had them without a sin nature. And so he was able to do it without the sin which we incur, but I would say for the most part, it would be sinful because it would be lack of trust in what

God has in store for us, which Christ, even in his sorrow in the garden, he was not without that trust in God.

He was not without knowing that which was to occur. It was simply, it was

Christ, according to his human nature, you know, having these passions on him and feeling sorrow for the suffering that he would have to undergo because Christ did not just suffer in the body, but he suffered in his soul.

You know, he had to undergo the immense weight of the sins of humanity.

He had to undergo God's judicial decree and his wrath.

And of course we can parse that in many different senses. It's not as if God the Father abandoned the divine person of the

Son. Rather, it's that Christ the Son voluntarily undertook on himself the judgment owed to man in the stead of sinners such that we may become partakers of the effects of his righteousness.

But yeah, I mean, I think that Tom's good in citing Matthew 6, 25 through 34, the short part of it where it says, the

Lord Jesus speaks, "'Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, "'what you will eat or what you will drink, "'nor about your body, what you will put on.

"'It is not life more than food "'and the body more than clothing.'" At the end of the day, no matter how tough things get, it really is important to just trust in God.

And it's really funny because I will talk to some people as a newlywed and they're just like, so when are the kids getting here?

And I'm just like, oh, I don't know. We're in a really rough financial spot. I don't know if that's gonna be happening anytime soon.

And then they're like, well, just read the Gospel of Matthew read Matthew 6,

God provides. And I'm just like, yes, that's true. But even then, even knowing that, I still have that sort of anxiety of, oh shoot, what if one day

I get a text and it's a picture of a pregnancy test and it's positive. I know for sure that I'm going to experience joy.

I'm gonna experience happiness. I'm like, oh wow, I have an heir. But I'm also gonna be like, oh no,

I'm gonna have to make some decisions and some moves in my life now.

And they're gonna be a bit different than they would have been before. And it will incur stress in me. But yeah, no,

I think that it's good to sort of, that Tom speaks about this sort of sin of anxiety because in our world today, and this is nothing new.

Of course, people went through harder times before, but you just see so much anxiety in people.

You constantly see people that are stressed and worrying about their jobs, about bills, about all these different things.

And social media sort of exacerbates that because our brains have been so dopamine fried that you're just constantly hooked on a screen looking for more dopamine.

And then you pull up the Twitter timeline and you're getting all this information coming at you all at once.

And it's crazy. Are we thinking it was man -made to have all this information just at his fingertips?

It's kind of crazy because even if I'm like studying a certain theological subject or whatever, like, oh, there's this thing

I have to read, this thing, this thing. And I just get overwhelmed because I'm like, I have to read all these different things. And it's just wild.

We have a lot of anxiety in the world and things like that. And we have to go to the scriptures.

And that's why I like how Tom, at the last paragraph of the sin of anxiety section, he cites Paul in Philippians 4, 6, where he states, the apostle

Paul also weighs in on the issue. Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God.

So Paul is saying, don't be anxious. Instead, through prayer and supplication and with thanksgiving, make your requests known to God.

So when you're having those feelings of anxiety, we can almost identify like looking at those feelings, going to the

Lord in prayer and supplication with a heart of thanksgiving. We can almost see that as a sort of repentance from those anxious feelings that we have as a turning from the sin to God.

Because what is repentance if not turning from sin to Christ with a spirit of God, I failed to meet the standard of your law, but I will obey.

So I don't know how exegetically strong that is. I sort of just came up with it on the spot, but there is a sense in which you can say, turn from your anxiety to the

Lord and with thanksgiving, and that could be a sort of repentance from your anxious feelings.

I think that's 100 % right, yes. I think, and that produces contentment. That's the end result of that.

And when you have contentment, you are not the kind of person that is going to be manipulative and try to arrange things in a favorable manner using sinful techniques.

You aren't gonna try to game the system or take shortcuts. You actually are, you are living in a way that is satisfied with God's, or the way he's arranged the circumstances.

And you just live within those boundaries, which is a hard thing, I think, for especially guys, but I mean, women too, right?

It's a hard thing for everyone to do because especially when you think circumstances should be different, and there's never been a time in human history when circumstances should not have been at least in a fallen world, different in some way, you have to give that to God and say,

I only have so much bandwidth. I can only do so much. He's only given me so much responsibility. Am I gonna be faithful with the things that he's given me?

And the return for that faithfulness is he allows you to live, have a roof over your head, enjoy the blessings of life, which none of them are things we actually deserve at the end of the day.

These are all actually grace gifts to us. Or I mean, I know the word common grace gets thrown around a lot, but I look at it as just providence, things he's provided out of his loving kindness to us, as his chesed love.

So yeah, and what you said earlier about having kids, my dad always said, you can never afford kids, they just come.

So, and I've learned that firsthand. I just, I have stories to tell. Hopefully one day

I'll tell them in greater detail about God's blessing to my wife and I and just providing financially when we did not have the money specifically for children and the

Lord had just been so good. So yeah, I know there's anxiety about that, but just realize

God's gonna come through in those moments in ways that you sometimes don't even expect. And then one quick comment before we move on, on anxiety,

I really do like how you brought in the sort of the issue of contentment with being content with what the

Lord has provided for you, because especially in this day and age, like kind of hearkening back to the social media thing, especially if you're like looking at all the crypto bros, going to all these foreign countries or whatever, or you're seeing, oh yeah,

I'm a 21 year old and I made this much money from drop shipping or this or that, there's a lot of guys.

And cause there's so many Gen Z young men that work their butt off for the degree, get out of college and then nothing.

They don't have anything, all their connections just fizzled out and there's a sort of discontentment.

And so what I would say too is we ought not confuse, don't confuse contentment with passivity in current circumstances, because there is a sort of strive that is, it's in men and women, but it's especially

I would say is in men where you want to build, you want to expand, you want to go higher, you want to shoot higher.

And there's this drive and motivation that you have in yourself. And if you don't really have that drive and motivation, there's some spiritual things you may want to look into.

There's even some, perhaps some biological factors at play there, I don't know. But there's this drive that we have where it's like,

I don't want to just stay in this forever. And so we need to be able to differentiate contentment and understanding the

Lord has me in this circumstance at this moment. And I ought not to be a mopey little, I don't want to say that word.

I shouldn't be mopey about it. I shouldn't be whiny about my circumstances because you could do that while being passive.

But there is a sense in which you can be content with the circumstance that you're in, understand that God and his providence has you here for this purpose while simultaneously striving to achieve higher ends and to shoot higher, because chances are, if you have a father who has done well for himself and has built, like, so for example, my father, my father was very poor growing up.

My dad dropped out of college, went to hair school, and now he owns two hair salons.

He co -owns a hair school. He does all these things. He has his hands in all these little places. And I just look at him and I'm just, you know,

I have a lot of respect for my father because he really did build himself up with very little help.

And just now he's living very comfortably. He's, you know, he loves his Tesla. He does all these things.

And it's just like, he was probably, like, I don't wanna read into the state of my dad. I might have to ask him about this.

Saw him yesterday, didn't ask him about this. But I'm sure that he may have had contentment in hard situations, but that didn't stop him from shooting higher.

And so all of that to say, to end my monologue here, you can be content with your circumstances while not using that as an excuse for not shooting higher.

And in your contentment, be thankful for what you have and say, with what I have, I'm going to aim higher.

So I think that's a big one because I've, with personal conversations with people, I've heard that sort of struggle of them trying to shoot higher, being like, am

I discontent with what the Lord has for me? And it's like, no, with what the Lord has for you and what circumstances you're in, you're given all these tools and materials and you use that to go higher.

And that actually is being content with what you have. So I think James addresses this in James three, because he talks about selfish ambition, but it's right alongside the idea that you're not trusting in God's providence.

We're going to go to this city. We're going to make all this money. And it's like, well, hold on. If the Lord wills, you should say, that's what you should say.

We'll go and do this. The selfish ambition comes in with, it's like God becomes distant from the equation.

And it's like, you're not going to submit to the circumstances that he's arranged. Even if those circumstances are for you to be like Paul and get shipwrecked and have to go to Crete, which may happen, that's in the realm of possibility.

And are we able to roll with that when it comes? I think that's a test for being a man.

You had these plans, they didn't work out, and you thought they were going to adjust your circumstances.

Well, guess what? God actually adjusted. He stepped in. Are you able to cope with that?

And also in the midst of that, see it as a blessing. Because this is what I think, the Christian life is mostly a struggle with yourself, actually.

You have circumstances around you, but these are actually testing grounds to make you the kind of person that is godly and more like Christ.

My enemy, my biggest enemy is actually, I mean, I have political enemies. I have enemies all out there, but like the biggest thing that I can change, the biggest barrier

I'm up against is in me. Like, that's a hard pill to swallow,

I think. And that's something that's uniquely Christian because every other religion that I know of, they all see the problem is out there somewhere.

You know, and in political philosophies too, it's always out there. And of course there's problems out there, but like seeing that the main problem emanates from a sin that you have, that's humbling, man.

That's, oof. So. Yeah, definitely. Let's finish the article here. Obviously, we've already talked about giving thanks, and Tom Rush talks about the principle of praise, giving

God thanks for everything that happens in your life, whether good or bad, or indifferent from the human point of view. And then he talks about what the

Bible says about thanking God, Ephesians 5, 15 through 21. We were instructed to redeem the time.

We are not to be unwise, to understand what the will of the Lord is. And so giving thanks should always be for all things to God, the

Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. So he has sovereignty over time. I kind of mentioned that from James.

James makes a similar point. He says that we should learn to take seriously and believe the instruction we have from God's word, which in Romans 8, 28 says, we know that all things work together for good to those who love

God and are called according to his purpose. So he arranges the circumstances. And Psalm 34 is the last one he quotes.

He says, it says in one through three, I will bless the Lord at all times. His praise shall continually be in my mouth.

My soul shall make its boast in the Lord. The humble shall hear of it and be glad. Oh, magnify the Lord with me and let us exalt his name together.

So any thoughts on that, Matthew? No, that's good, that's good.

I guess I would say too is sort of like riffing off this. In your prayer life,

Thanksgiving ought to be central. And so I think of the Acts model, the adoration, confession,

Thanksgiving, supplication. It's always a great model because you have

Thanksgiving right in there. And then you follow that with supplication, which I would say sort of harkens back to what

I was just saying about how in contentment, that doesn't mean you can't strive for other things because what is supplication, if not asking

God for things. Now it could be the healing of a sick person. It could just be praying for somebody, but you could also be like,

God, please allow me to get this job that I applied for. God, please allow my wife to be able to get healthier in this area, she's been sick or something like that.

And so the Acts model is always good because even in a lot of prayer book traditions,

I think of the Book of Common Prayer, all of those sorts of things are always in there, even if it's arranged somewhat differently.

Like I know that the morning and evening office of most all the Book of Common Prayer is pretty sure,

I don't know, I've only read 62, 28 and the modern one from the

ACNA, but they have like all those little things scattered throughout. It's just that the repentance part is prior to the adoration and all that.

But it's good to thank the Lord always at all times.

It's not just for Thanksgiving. The Thanksgiving is to just draw you to a greater focus during that time. But no,

I thought that this article from Tom, even though it's from last year, it's still very timely. It's, there's a lot that we ought to take into account and not just to remember around Thanksgiving, but to remember always.

So in your prayers daily, always thank the Lord for all that you have because God is,

He's worthy to not just be praised, but to be thanked. And Thanksgiving in and of itself is somewhat of an act of praise.

You praise God, not just for the temporal things of this life, but for His unconditional love for you, for the life, death, and resurrection of His Son, for the fact that Jesus Christ was your mediator who took upon Himself what was owed to you so that He could give to us that which

He won on our behalf. And so there's a lot to be thankful for, not just in this life, but for the things that God has decreed to occur throughout eternity for our spiritual good.

A hundred percent. I actually, I'll just add this. I used to pray cats, right?

Confession first. I'm actually a big fan of Acts now. And I realized recently that actually follows a traditional liturgy in a

Protestant church where you are confronted with God and then you confess in light of that character of God.

And that confession though, leads you to thanking God that He hasn't, He didn't blow you away because of your sin.

And He's actually given you good things. And then of course, finally giving Him the requests. And by the time you get to the requests,

I think that you're of a better mindset to ask God for things than you are if you started with requests.

If you just walked into the throne room saying, I want this, this, and this. I mean, He's a father. He wants to give good gifts to His children.

But what kind of father wants their kid to come to them demanding things or asking for things before, reinforcing the fact that this beautiful relationship exists and I don't know, you're not a spoiled child when you do it that way.

So yeah, I recommend that. Acts is a great way to pray. We do have some comments coming in.

So if you have comments, this is the time to get to them because we won't have an opportunity here because we're about to end the podcast.

But beautifully, Berserk says, all things work together for good for them. We love God and are called according to His purpose.

We can thank Him that we know that He is faithful and He will make all things new. And Veritox has a series of comments.

Some of the best Bible stories, biblical or otherwise, are that they emerge from people who have fallen into some kind of crisis and maybe there's no obvious way out.

And if somehow they find a way through it, what makes those types of stories powerful, what makes

Job powerful, for example, is that he not only comes out of it, but he comes out of it and receives even more blessing afterward.

There are a lot of people that say that God predetermines everything, which means God protects us from not doing things and that He thinks would be negative for us.

But I'm not of that belief. And sometimes God allows us to make choices that aren't as good because He knows what happens when we go through that choice, that we can use that choice to do something in our lives.

He finally ends with this. And without that, there are many things we might never learn, might never experience, we might not be able to grow in certain ways without it.

Can I make one addendum to this, Matthew? Maybe you have another thought. The only thing that I would say is God does not, how do

I phrase this? God is not in His perfect will, His moral will,

He does not desire us to sin. So if we make a choice and it's a sinful choice and we suffer the consequences of that sinful choice, that may be the occasion for God to grow us.

That's true. That particular choice is not something that God has, God has ordained it in His sovereign will, but in His perfect will, that was not something that He intended or certainly arranged for us to do.

I don't know if you have a finer way to say that. You usually do, Matthew, on these things. No, I mean,

I would say that God, whatsoever comes to pass, God ordains.

But also, God also ordains that man has a will, which is free, and that's not just Arminian nonsense.

That is in the Westminster Confession of Faith, chapter nine. But because of our fall into sin, we're unable to will any spiritual good, of course.

You will in accordance with your nature because the nature is the means by which you will through.

But God, He still allows us to be rational agents which make decisions, which are sometimes influenced by other circumstances.

But it's a very difficult thing to kind of think of is this idea of providence, sovereignty, free will, foreknowledge, and all these fun things.

And I actually was planning on reading a bit more into this. So I'll hold my tongue a little bit and just say all of my beliefs can be found regarding the nature of the will in the

Westminster Confession of Faith. Okay, this is Javier. Javier says, interesting to me that when

Job was deeply depressed and wished that he had never been born, it says, in all this, Job did not sin or charge God with wrongdoing.

Sabbath as a day of rest and contemplation for Christians was from a bygone era unless you are in a very small homogenous community.

So those are actually two separate comments, I think. But yes to Job and also yes to the bygone era.

I do think we can recultivate these things, which is part of, this is the thing, before it wasn't a choice.

Society just, there was a collective amount of Christians who believed in the

Sabbath rest that they were able to force the rest of society to abide by this. Now it's a choice in the current condition.

So will you choose to abide by that? And what does that actually look like? And I've actually struggled with this.

Maybe that's for a future podcast. What does that look like? For example, if I forget something from the store,

I have this one ingredient, right? Well, I don't really cook, so that's not an accurate thing. My wife might forget something from, she needs this one ingredient or I just need this one thing.

And it's like, oh, I could just go out right now and get it Sunday afternoon. Do I do it? Well, sometimes

I have. And I've wondered at the time, like, is that a violation? Should I be doing this?

Should I be encouraging that these businesses remain open? I do try in general not to go out on a

Sunday. Are there circumstances where, since it's available, should you? And there was a time in the past you couldn't, you didn't have the choice, but I guess.

Well, what I'll say about that sort of thing is part of what's really nice about being a practicing

Sabbatarian, I say this as somebody who does fall short at times.

I'm not trying to claim that I'm the perfect Sabbath keeper and I'm the Pharisee telling you all that you're all really bad and dumb for not doing it as I do it.

But what, especially going into marriage, what Sabbath keeping has kind of taught me is to better schedule my time and to better prepare for the days ahead instead of just doing everything on a whim.

So it's like, oh, I know that if my wife is making this ingredient or is making this, using this recipe, that she'll need this ingredient.

And I'll be like, honey, we gotta go to the store either Friday or Saturday to do that because we're not going out on Sunday.

So yeah, it's good to prepare. I try, I try, I'm not a better man than you.

We're actually in a really tough circumstance right now because my wife works at a coffee shop and it's a fairly small one.

And so whenever somebody takes off, they always schedule her to work on Sunday mornings.

And so that's definitely very tough. Like yesterday, I was at church without my wife because they made her work.

And so sort of thinking through that, it's like a bit difficult and being like, okay, trying to get the, and we're both convicted on this.

And so it's hard though. It is difficult to do, especially in the modern world. But if you wanna look at more interesting, the history of the

Sabbath in America, you should go look at James Baird's timeline because he always has some good stuff about the laws in America regarding the

Sabbath, so. Yeah, he's been doing great work. Well, we could talk about it more, but we're actually up because we've been going about an hour.

I appreciate everyone who tuned in to the American Churchmen this week. We'll try to have one up for you next week, if possible.

We'll see. I know the holidays make the schedules crazy, but we just are really grateful and thankful as we should be this

Thanksgiving week for all the blessings the Lord's given us, including the technology to come to you and to share what the word of God says and hopefully apply it in a good way to not just our lives, but maybe from that overflow into your lives as well.