Defeating the Sin of Anxiety

Matthew 6:24-34 and the Biblical Diagnosis of Anxiety

I'm going to start this morning with the reading from our main text, which is in Matthew 6, verses 24 through 34. The Word of God says, No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other.

You cannot serve God and wealth. For this reason I say to you, do not be worried about your life as to what you will eat or what you will drink, nor for your body as to what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?

Look at the birds of the air that they do not sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they? And who of you, by being worried, can add a single cubit to his lifespan?

And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow, that they do not toil nor do they spin. Yet I say to you, that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these.

But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will he not much more clothe you, you of little faith? Do not worry then, saying, what will we eat or what will we drink or what will we wear for clothing?

For all these things the Gentiles eagerly seek. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.

So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. We live in a country where, I think, last week I mentioned that a few of our national sins are lying and gluttony, and we love that kind of stuff, but I think anxiety is a sin that's a national sin for us that even the people that are gripped inside of anxiety don't know that they love it.

That's what makes it such a hard thing to deal with, is because no one will tell you that they want to feel anxiety and yet very few people want to fight the anxiety, or at least they don't want to dig it up at the source.

There's some statistics that I think set us in place today and tell us the enormity of the problem. Just a few, there's a lot. I went down the hole here, but there's a few to look at. One is that 40 .5 of people in America report medium or high levels of anxiety.

37 of women and 30 of men report high levels of anxiety. 13 .5 of Americans over 12 years old have used an illegal drug in the last month. 10 of Americans 12 and older have an alcohol use disorder right now.

Arkansas has one of the highest suicide rates in the nation. Suicides are largely age-independent, despite what people think. The rate of suicide is pretty consistent from teenagers through middle-aged into the elderly.

It's about the same for all of those, and Arkansas has one of the highest, and generally the higher suicide rates are in what we would call the Bible Belt, or areas that are called red states. In the midst of this cultural wave, we have a strong delusion that's come over us.

In the church, we can hardly imagine that we can sit and look outside the doors and say, well, that's what's going on out there, but that has no impact on what's going on in here. That's a foolish way to think, because when you live in a culture, we're like fish that are swimming through the water, and sometimes fish don't know that they're wet, and I think that can be the situation with anxiety, that a lot of times we can look out there and see these problems, and as an educator in public school, I can see those problems with a sharpened point.

The illegal drug use is crazy. The amount of anxiety and hopelessness is alarming, but for us, I know and I trust that there are many in this room who struggle with anxiety, who have sleepless nights, who have cycling thoughts going through their mind about what's going to happen to them.

It could be health problems within yourself. It could be health problems with family members. It could be fear for our children. It could be fear over job security. It could be fear over having enough money.

Sometimes it can even be fear over whether we're going to be able to get through the day and do what we need to do. We, I think, long have bought into the lie and culture that the Bible, it might have something to say about anxiety, but it doesn't give us practical steps to get to the root, and I hope one of the main goals of what I do as a preacher is try to bring the Word of God to bear and give us practical examples of what Scripture says so that we can kill sin at the root, and so that we can be free from the slavery of anxiety.

The Three Questions About Anxiety

So for us, I think this morning the biblical question for us is threefold, and what I'm going to do is really what I like to do is I'm going to give the argument of the culture, and then I'm going to give the counter argument of Scripture, and there's three questions that we're going to ask.

The first question is, what exactly is the cause of anxiety? The second question is, where do we look for help in conquering anxiety? And the third question is, how do we use this help to actually win?

A question got posed to me on Thursday night that was, hey, I thought we were doing fundamentals of the church. Where does anxiety come from? I think my first glance answer was, well, you know, this was kind of a free one floating around because we had said September 17th, and we're through, but the more I thought about this, as we think about what we want to do as a church, that we want to preach the gospel in Northwest Arkansas, that we want to raise up elders to plant churches in Northwest Arkansas, that we want to, as our website says, that we want to fearlessly exposit the Word.

If we're going to do that, then what's going to happen is there's going to be opposition. And I think anxiety is one of those things that takes people out of the game, and it takes people, and it makes them lack courage.

And that's what we're going to see in Matthew this morning, is that people who are anxious lack courage, and they will fold when the time comes. And so for us, I think this is extremely mission critical.

Wealth, Treasures, and the Heart as the Source of Anxiety

But back to the main road. We're first going to try to answer the question, what exactly is the cause of anxiety? Our culture has several explanations for the cause, and as with anything, there is some truth that's mixed in with some of these explanations.

So they have lots of them. You've probably heard a lot of them. One of the biggest scapegoats for anxiety today is the advent of cell phones and social media. Is that we suffered no anxiety, or really not the wide scale anxiety, until we had cell phones and social media.

We'll have to look at that and see does that comport with what the Bible says, and how often Scripture talks about anxiety. I think that that's not really an adequate explanation. It says that bad home lives cause anxiety.

That you are a product of your parents, and that you can't overcome anxiety if you've had a bad home life. It'll say that our widespread addiction to pornography causes anxiety because we can't have marriages.

Americans look at eight times as much pornography as the next highest country. There could be some truth in that, but what does the Bible say? It'll say that the world will tell us bad work conditions.

It'll say oppression of the group that you're a part of. It'll say that the political turmoil that we live in causes anxiety. If we could all just get along, then we would not be anxious. But overwhelmingly, I think the world's answer, and the culture's answer, and their diagnosis is this one.

Mental illness. We have to understand, out of the gate, that there is some mental illness that can explain anxiety problems. In my family, there's a few people that I know that have had mental illness, and this is a real thing.

It's not a thing where you say, well, you know, they're just faking it. You know, when someone who's acting normal all the time takes off down Main Street driving 160 miles an hour trying to jump out of a van, there's probably something going on disease-wise in their mind.

But that is not what is keeping Christians up at night, worrying about their food, worrying about what's going to happen. And so the Bible does not really take into account mental health diagnosis for the broad brush of anxiety, but it focuses on the heart.

It focuses on the heart. So that's what the world says. What does God say? Before the passage that we just read in Matthew 26, these five verses starting in verse 19, I think give us a window into some of the cause of anxiety and what we do.

Jesus says, do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in or steal.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. The eye is the lamp of the body. So then if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness.

If then the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness? No one can serve two masters. For either he will hate the one and love the other or he will be devoted to one and despise the other.

You cannot serve God and wealth. So right away, I think that we can see one of the worldly causes that they never talk about is that one of the key causes of anxiety in our culture is that we are very wealthy and that we love to serve the wealth.

That that is something that is a temptation for us and we sit outside of the Bible where Jesus says, he says it emphatically, you cannot serve two masters. We in the Christian Church for too long have thought, well, that was all well and good for them, but maybe we can serve two masters.

And so what we do is we try to amass up treasure for ourself. We try to trust in our 401k. We try to trust in storing up grain and barns for ourselves so that one day we can stop working and we can live the good life.

I saw a meme on the internet yesterday that was a picture of like a 96 year old woman driving a car that said, now I've paid off my debt, I can relax. Pretty interesting, but that gives a window into what we think about money and age and all of that stuff in America.

It also, in Romans 1, gives us an idea of why our culture does not look at the desires of the heart as being the cause for anxiety. Because in the world, in Romans 1, it says that unrighteous man suppresses truth in everything that he does.

The man who is in rebellion against his Creator suppresses truth and he will especially suppress any truth that reveals his sinful condition. Because most people walking around will admit to mistakes and will admit to brokenness and will admit to some failures, but it gets very caustic very quickly when you call people to task and say, you are a sinner who has offended a holy God.

That is a word that our world does not like to hear. And what has happened is, in our highly therapeutic culture, where we, in our scientism, in our medical prowess, think that we can solve everything through the right medical care.

Everything that's going on in our mind and our body just lacks the certain combination that we can unlock to solve the problem. And our culture is looking for a medical diagnosis to get us out of this anxiety stupor where we're killing ourselves, stoning ourselves with marijuana, and drinking ourselves to death, all the while worrying about our 401k so that we can stop the stress of working all the time.

It's probably work that's doing the most good to keep people from stress. And we know during COVID that the stress bumped up, and the reason why is because people were sitting in their home, notice the irony, already doing what they thought they were living their whole life to get ready to do.

To not go to work, to be able to recreate and to entertain themselves as much as possible. And what we saw is anxiety did not go down. Anxiety went way up. So what we have to understand is that the world's solution is a pipe dream, and it's not true.

Anxiety, in the broad brush, is not a medical diagnosis. But we observe our culture's desire to call everything that we struggle with a medical diagnosis. Just a few, right off the cuff. We call drunkenness the disease of alcoholism.

We call adultery and fornication sexual addiction. We call homosexuality sexual orientation. We call pharmakia or witchcraft, we call it drug addiction. Notice how if we make it an addiction, then we can make it a medical situation that needs to be cured.

Where we can go and find a medical professional, get some pills, and solve the problem that we have. And all the while what we've left out is the rotten root of what's going on that Jesus cuts right to the heart of.

And the reason that we are anxious is because we are trying to serve two masters. Why do you think Arkansas has one of the highest suicide rates? There could be a lot of reasons for that. But I think the biggest reason is probably because in Arkansas a lot of us know the gospel and we're trying to serve two masters.

And when we try to serve two masters, the anxiety level goes through the roof. And so people start considering killing themselves because they don't understand that they're the image of God. And they don't understand that through killing themselves, what they're doing is making a front to what God has called holy and what God has called valuable.

We've turned things upside down. But if we can make anxiety a medical condition, I suffer from generalized anxiety disorder. Then we can absolve ourselves of all the guilt. Because it's no one's responsibility to get the flu.

It's not a sin issue. If we are sitting at home because we have nausea, no one in our culture is asking who sinned, you or your mother. Because we look at sin as being, we look at sickness as being a medically diagnosable phenomena.

So professing to be wise, we have become fools. And the reason that in the church we struggle so much with the sin of anxiety is first and foremost because we don't call it sin. We call it a condition.

We call it a medical problem. We call it a struggle. We're suffering with it. So our diagnosis in the culture is simple. You're a victim of your circumstances, and it's not your fault. This mentality unfortunately has bled into the church significantly.

As what we do oftentimes with our anxiety is we look to clean the outside of the cup instead of looking at what's within. We look for any possible thing we can to solve the anxiety problem without dealing with the rotten fruit that's coming out from the roots inside of our heart that is trying to serve two masters.

Whenever we love the world, we are destined, we are asking for anxiety. So it's not a dietary problem. It's not a drug problem. It's not a financial problem. It's not that we don't have the right clothes.

It's not how other people think of us. It is trying to serve two masters, and even worse than that, it's the sin of unbelief. Look at what Jesus does. A lot of times in our culture, like our camp I think has rebelled against it, and I think rightfully brought some stuff in where we we look at the masculine Christ a lot.

But it strikes me in this passage that Jesus is profoundly countercultural, and I would guess that this section where he's preaching made a lot of people very angry. Because what Jesus says is he says the diagnosis is that we worry because we value earthly treasures, and we're worried about how long they're going to last.

And so he tells us they don't last at all. The moth's going to eat them, and the rust is going to ruin them. If you're putting your treasure in paper money, you've already seen where that hope's gotten you in the last couple of years.

Have you bought a case of Dr. Pepper recently? I remember buying it for $3 .99 not very long ago. I know I lived by myself, so I wasn't a kid. And today I think, what, $15 .99? That means that your paper money that we put so much value and security in is worth four times less than it was 10 or 15 years ago.

And yet we strive to get it. We strive to hold on to it. We strive to grow the bank account so that we can have more of it. The heart that troubles over that is trying to serve two masters, and what we have is that we get an outlook.

So what happens is we have a thing going on inside of our heart, and the heart is what we value, okay? So what you think about, what you sing about, what you talk about, and what you dream about is what's going on in your heart.

And sometimes we love to hide that, and we love to mask it so we don't put the proper diagnosis on what's going on in our heart. Jesus says, and it's a leading indicator, that out of our mouth flows the overflow of our heart.

So if we find ourselves constantly talking about worldly temporal things, that is what our heart treasures. That thing that we're talking about could even be our own well-being. When we talk about our health incessantly, that's what we value.

And you know what's going to happen to your health? It's going to be gone. It's just like the gold's going to outlast your health. So you'd be better to store up your treasure in gold than you would in your own well-being, because your well-being is guaranteed to go six feet under in the ground.

So why would we worry about that? When we worry, can we add one 18-inch unit or cubit to our life? Jesus says, no. We cannot, and yet we think we can. Just the proper amount of exercise, the proper amount of eating, the proper amount of saving, the right kind of house with climate controlled conditions.

If we can just keep the black mold out of our walls, then we will add cubits to our life. And Jesus says, that's foolish. You're serving two masters. And then I think the hardest thing here. He says, the eyes see and they become dark.

So when we treasure those things in our heart, our eyes only start to see and put value on those things. That's all we even look at, and that's the blindness of the sin of anxiety, is that a lot of times we'll have those sleepless nights, but when we don't have the sleepless night, and we think, praise God, I'm not anxious, what we don't understand is that it just went covert for a while, and it's still growing deeper and deeper roots in our heart, and our eyes start to see everything as, what bad is going to happen to me?

This is the situation. And I think the sharpest point of the whole thing is that Jesus says very explicitly, to worry is to have little faith. Matthew 8, 23 through 27. You know the story. It's storming, right?

They're out on the boat, and it says, when he got onto the boat, his disciples followed him, and behold, there arose a great storm on the sea, so that the boat was being covered with the waves. But Jesus himself was sleeping, and they came to him and got up saying, save us Lord, we are perishing.

And he said to them, why are you so cowardly, you men of little faith? Then he got up and rebuked the wind and the seas, and it became perfectly calm, and the men marveled and said, what kind of man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey them?

The disciples in the boat, they feared for their lives, and they had good reason to fear for their lives. The waves were crashing down about them, the winds were howling, it was a tempest, and they thought they were going to die.

Which one of us would not be afraid? But the problem is, in their unbelief, they cry out. But Jesus knows their hearts, and Jesus knows that their anxiety and their fear was for their own lives, and that they didn't realize who was in the boat with them.

Think of the insane nature of believing that this boat is going to capsize with the author of all creation sitting in the boat with them. This is what we often miss. When Peter sunk beneath the waves, when he was walking on the water, what did Jesus tell him?

Why do you have so little faith? Can I not break all the rules of nature because I spoke it into being? Yeah, we can. And so it's easy for us with anxiety to bury the lead, and that is this. This is the insanity of what we believe in our hearts, and that is this.

On the one side, we are Orthodox Christians, and what we believe is that God spoke the universe into existence in six days. Ex nihilo. That means nothing existed, and God spoke, and it existed. And then what he did was he saw us in our sin as Adam rebelled, and every generation after Adam rebelled, and as we sang this morning, that they tested their Lord.

And they said, you gave us water split from a rock, but can you give us meat? We don't think you can. You gave us manna from heaven, but we don't think that you're going to make it last, so we're going to store it up in our tent so that we have enough for tomorrow.

That's what we do time and time again, is we look at this Creator, and we say, I got to gather for myself because who knows what's going to happen tomorrow. And then on top of all that, the insanity of our anxiety today is this, and we don't even have the excuse that the disciples had, is that this King of creation, that he came, and he set his face toward Jerusalem.

And he was murdered on the cross by wicked men, all according to the foreknowledge and the foreplanning of the Father, that he died on the cross of Calvary. He bled out his red blood, and he was stabbed in the side, and he did that for our sins, because the Bible says that while we were yet enemies, Christ died for us.

He who knew no sin became sin, so that we might have the righteousness of God. And then he didn't stay in the grave, he rose again. And now he rose again, and he ascended to rule on high, and he makes intercession for us.

Did you know that Christ is praying for us to stay in the will of the Father every day? That's what he's doing. And we sit there, and we look at that God, Christ who saved me, Christ who saw me, and he thought of me on the cross, and he thought of every ugly, dirty sin that I was ever going to commit.

And he knew the days of my life down to the second. And in my futility, I look at that God, and I say, God, you have a lot of it, but you don't have my financial security in your mind. And Lord, I'm feeling pretty sick.

And Lord, my knees hurt. And Lord, where am I going to get the right clothes? And Lord, what if I lose my job this week because the culture is turning against me? And Lord, what if no one comes in the church?

And Lord, what if I disqualify myself and fall and bring dishonor to the gospel? And I look at that, and I worry. And Jesus, just like in the boat, he says, do you not know who I am? Do you not remember who I am?

And to the disciples' credit, their eyes were opened after the storm, because look what they did. They had the right kind of fear then. Do you see what they did? In one small moment, they went from fearing for their lives, to fearing God.

Because when Jesus calmed the water with his word, it scared them. They were afraid. And they said, what kind of man is this? Why are we here this morning, if we struggle with anxiety? We've forgotten who he is.

We've forgotten who's inside of us. We've forgotten what he's done. Spurgeon, I think, said it well. He said, many persons think a great deal about the adorning of the body, but do not think anything about the ornaments of the soul.

The feeding of the physical frame engrosses much care, but the supply of spiritual food is often neglected. Yet, O man, thou thyself art better than thy body. Thine immortal soul is worth far more than that poor carcass of thine, which will soon become food for worms.

And all the things that thou hast, what are they compared with thine inner self, thy real self, thy heart, thy soul, thy spirit, that's been made by God to worship God? So the diagnosis is this. When we're anxious, it's because we've forgotten who God is, and we've tried to serve two masters.

And if that's not a sin to be repented of, then I don't know what is. It's the sin. The sin of unbelief. The sin of looking at what Christ has done and thinking, well, that may be good enough for the church, but it's not good enough for me.

What arrogance and hubris we have in our anxiety, while the contradiction is while we feel so low because we're so afraid and we're so vulnerable, which is a key word in churches today, we feel this way, but we're arrogant in thinking that we are somehow beyond his grace.

That we are so down and out that the blood of Christ on Calvary can't cure us of the anxiety we have. So what do we do? Point number two, we look for help in all the wrong places. According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, so what do we do about this anxiety?

They give four treatments, four techniques for anxiety. This is approved by the National Institute of Health and the CDC, by the way, those bastions of medical knowledge and trust. They say therapy, medication, integrative behaviors, and transcranial magnetic stimulation, that's your way out.

So let's look at them really quickly. Therapy, that focuses largely on examining thought patterns and feelings in an attempt to release poor patterns and grab more control over one's life. In other words, we simply need to understand anxiety better so that we can figure out the right words to say in the right thought patterns and just let them go.

Medication prescribes drugs to change hormone levels or to change brain activity in order to reduce symptoms. Integrative behaviors mean to use meditation, yoga, acupuncture, or stretching and relaxation techniques.

And then transcranial magnetic stimulation, I mean, you put your head in magnets and you try to induce small currents in specific parts of the brain. And you might be a racist at the end of that, I don't know.

It sounds like, I don't know what that thing's called. That's a wild one. We know already though that these things are appealing because what we're often trying to do is we're trying to find quick fix solutions to our problems.

And that's why it's so so tempting to just go to talk to someone, to just try to figure it out, to try to get the right combination. These treatments fall into one of two camps, sometimes both. This is the worldview.

The treatment says my physical body is broken and it needs to be fixed. That's why I have anxiety. Or it says I can find relief by searching the spirits to gain peace. That's yoga, meditation, mindfulness therapy.

And sometimes there will be an element of temporary relief in that because when you search the spirits, friends, I'm gonna tell you, you're gonna find them. Because they are out there. They are here. And if you are looking, you will find them.

And that's where medication comes in because often we need to open the gateway to find the spirits. Do you see the problem? The problem with the therapeutic method here is that I am both the problem and the answer.

I just need to introspect or find the right combination to unlock my health. The health is like the prize that's hidden in the middle of a maze. And what I need to do is find the right way through the maze to get the prize.

And the prize is no anxiety. Once again, what does the Bible say about the cure for anxiety? I love this passage, but I'm gonna read a few scatter shot here. Luke 12, 29 through 34. It's a parallel passage to Matthew 6.

It says, and do not seek what you will eat and what you will drink, and do not keep worrying. For all these things the nations of the world eagerly seek. But your father knows that you need these things.

But seek his kingdom and these things will be added to you. Do not fear, little flock, for your father is well pleased to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions and give it as charity. Make yourselves money belts which do not wear out.

An unfailing treasure in heaven where no thief comes near or moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. Psalm 55, 22 says, cast your burden upon Yahweh and he will sustain you.

He will never allow the righteous to be shaken. Proverbs 16, 3 says, commit your works to Yahweh and your plans will be established. Jeremiah 17, 7. Blessed is the man who trusts in Yahweh and whose trust is Yahweh.

Hebrews 13, 5 and 6. Make sure that your way of life is free from the love of money, being content with what you have. For he himself has said, I will never desert you nor will I ever forsake you. So that we confidently say, the Lord is my helper.

I will not be afraid. What will man do to me? First Peter 5, 6 through 7 says, therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God. That he may exalt you at the proper time, casting all your anxiety on him because he cares for you.

I think there's one thing that should be clear from all of those scriptures and that is what we do. Look, sometimes it's okay to talk to someone. We're gonna get into that with the practical stuff. Sometimes it's okay to change some things about what we're doing physically.

Look, I will tell you that exercising is a good thing. Paul himself says that it's a benefit. There are things that are of greater benefit, but there are things we can do with our health that lead to conditions that make anxiety less of a dragon.

But that's not where our hope is, okay? Our hope is here. We trust the Lord and we're content. Now, I already know the problem because I've heard this a million times. If I was to ask any one of you individually, how do you defeat the sin of anxiety?

I know what I would get. Pray to the Lord, trust the Lord, hope in the Lord, be content. Those things are all true, but I don't think that they get us to the third question we have to ask and that's how do we actually do that?

How do we do that? Because I know I've been there. It's not super helpful when we're sitting there and we say, man, I have a big problem and somebody tells you, pray and be content. We have to help each other.

That's great advice, but we have to help each other to put those things into place. And I think that is the third point, and I would put it this way. We know what God has done in our head. We know what God has said through his word about anxiety, and I think oftentimes we don't act like we know what he said because what we do is we do not treat anxiety like the sin that it is.

I gave this example to Brady this week. If Brady came to me and he had engaged in a grievous sin, let's say that hypothetically he didn't, but let's say that he committed adultery and he was going to come talk to me about it and confess it, right?

I think Brady has some idea of what I'm going to say to him and what that kind of counseling is going to be like, and he's going to be afraid because we know what the path of righteousness is on that.

But I think with anxiety what we're able to do oftentimes, and that's how we know the sin is culturally acceptable, right? Anxiety is a culturally acceptable sin. So what will happen is that someone will come to you and they will say, hey, I've felt so anxious, I haven't been sleeping.

And what is the response far too often? The response is simply this, oh, I'm so sorry, brother. Like, man, that's really tough. Look, I've been guilty of that. I've been really tough. Let's think through it, like, and let's pray together.

That's good stuff. But what it's not doing is it's not acting like this is a mortal enemy that needs to be defeated. So how can we practically gain victory over anxiety? This is the last point today. Number one, it's pretty simple.

Pretty simple to understand. Just do the opposite of what our culture is doing. Just look at what they do and do the exact opposite. So instead of hiding behind rationalization of our medical diagnosis, take responsibility.

I am sinfully anxious. Man, it helps to say that. You know, in the last couple of weeks, I had to say to myself, I said it out loud, I am sinfully bitter. I am sinfully bitter. And what can happen is when we take responsibility, when we quit hiding behind all of the webs that we try to blind ourselves to sin so that we can protect that thing we treasure in our heart, when we lay it right out there and we look at it, then we can start attacking the real enemy.