Defeating the Sin of Anxiety

Covenant Baptist Church iconCovenant Baptist Church

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Sermon by Josh Rice.

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I'm going to start this morning with the reading from our main text, which is in Matthew 6, verses 24 through 34.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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?
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And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow, that they do not toil nor do they spin.
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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?
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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
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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.
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So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
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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.
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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.
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There's some statistics that I think set us in place today and tell us the enormity of the problem.
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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
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% of people in America report medium or high levels of anxiety. 37 % of women and 30 % of men report high levels of anxiety.
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13 .5 % of Americans over 12 years old have used an illegal drug in the last month.
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10 % of Americans 12 and older have an alcohol use disorder right now.
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Arkansas has one of the highest suicide rates in the nation. Suicides are largely age -independent, despite what people think.
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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
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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.
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And 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.
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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.
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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,
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I can see those problems with a sharpened point. The illegal drug use is crazy. The amount of anxiety and hopelessness is alarming.
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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.
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It could be health problems within yourself. It could be health problems with family members. It could be fear for our children.
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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.
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We, I think, long have bought into the lie in 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.
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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
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Scripture says so that we can kill sin at the root and so that we can be free from the slavery of anxiety.
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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
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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.
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The first question is, what exactly is the cause of anxiety? The second question is, where do we look for help in conquering anxiety?
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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,
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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.
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And so for us, I think this is extremely mission critical. But back to the main road, we're first going to try to answer the question, what exactly is the cause of anxiety?
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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.
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And 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.
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We'll have to look at that and see, does that comport with what the Bible says and how often Scripture talks about anxiety?
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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.
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It'll say that our widespread addiction to pornography causes anxiety because we can't have marriages.
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Americans look at eight times as much pornography as the next highest country. There could be some truth in that.
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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.
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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.
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But overwhelmingly, I think the world's answer and the culture's answer and their diagnosis is this one, mental illness.
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We have to understand out of the gate that there is some mental illness that can explain anxiety problems.
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In my family, there's a few people that I know that have had mental illness and this is a real thing.
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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.
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But that is not what is keeping Christians up at night worrying about their food, worrying about what's going to happen.
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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.
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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 is starting in verse 19.
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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.
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But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in or steal.
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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.
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But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. If then the light that is in you is darkness.
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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.
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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.
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And that we love to serve the wealth, that that is something that is a temptation for us. And we sit outside of the
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Bible where Jesus says, he says it emphatically, you cannot serve two masters. We in the
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Christian church for too long have thought, well, that was all well and good for them, but maybe we can serve two masters.
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And so what we do is we try to amass up treasure for ourself. We try to trust in our 401k.
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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.
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I saw a meme on the Internet yesterday. There was a picture of like a 96 year old woman driving a car that said, now
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I've paid off my debt. I can relax. Pretty interesting. But that gives a that gives a window into what we think about money and age and all of that stuff in America.
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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.
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Because in the world, in Romans 1, it says that unrighteous man suppresses truth in everything that he does.
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The man who is in rebellion against his creator suppresses truth and he will especially suppress any truth that reveals his sinful condition.
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Because most people walking around will admit to mistakes and will admit to brokenness and will admit to some failures.
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But it gets very caustic very quickly when you call people to task and say, you are a sinner who has offended a holy
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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.
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Everything that's going on in our mind and our body just lacks the certain combination that we can unlock to solve the problem.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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We call drunkenness the disease of alcoholism. We call adultery and fornication sexual addiction.
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We call homosexuality sexual orientation. We call pharmacheia or witchcraft, we call it drug addiction.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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
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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,
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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.
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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 sickness as being a medically diagnosable phenomena.
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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.
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We call it a condition. We call it a medical problem.
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We call it a struggle. We're suffering with it. So our diagnosis in the culture is simple.
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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.
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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.
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Whenever we love the world, we are destined, we are asking for anxiety. So it's not a dietary problem.
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It's not a drug problem. It's not a financial problem. It's not that we don't have the right clothes.
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It's not how other people think of us. It is trying to serve two masters.
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And even worse than that, it's the sin of unbelief. Look at what Jesus does.
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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 look at the masculine
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Christ a lot. But it strikes me in this passage that Jesus is profoundly countercultural.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Have you bought a case of Dr. Pepper recently? I remember buying it for $3 .99 not very long ago.
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I know I live 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.
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10 or 15 years ago. And yet we strive to get it. We strive to hold on to it.
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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.
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And what we have is that we get an outlook. So what happens is we have a thing going on inside of our heart.
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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.
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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.
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Jesus says, and it's a leading indicator, that out of our mouth flows the overflow of our heart.
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So if we find ourselves constantly talking about worldly temporal things, that is what our heart treasures.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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So why would we worry about that? When we worry, can we add one 18 inch unit or cubit to our life?
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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.
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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.
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You're serving two masters. And then I think the hardest thing here, he says, the eyes see and they become dark.
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So when we treasure those things in our heart, our eyes only start to see and put value on those things.
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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.
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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.
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And our eyes start to see everything is what bad is going to happen to me. This is the situation.
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And I think the sharpest point, the whole thing is that Jesus says very explicitly to worry is to have little faith.
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Matthew 8, 23 through 27. You know the story, it's storming, right?
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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.
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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?
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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 obeyed him?
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The disciples in the boat, they feared for their lives and they had good reason to fear for their lives.
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The waves were crashing down about them. The winds were howling. It was a tempest. And they thought they were going to die.
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Which one of us would not be afraid? But the problem is, in their unbelief, they cry out.
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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.
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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.
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And this is what we often miss. When Peter sunk beneath the waves, when he was walking on the water, what did
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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?
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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.
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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.
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Ex nihilo, that means nothing existed and God spoke and it existed.
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And then what he did was he saw us in our sin as Adam rebelled and every generation after Adam rebelled.
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And as we sang this morning that they tested their Lord and they said, you gave us rock, you gave us water split from a rock.
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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.
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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,
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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.
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And we don't 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.
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He bled out his red blood and he was stabbed in the side. And he did that for our sins, because the
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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.
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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.
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Did you know that Christ is praying for us to stay in the will of the father every day?
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That's what he's doing. And we sit there and we look at that God, Christ, who saved me,
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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.
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And he knew the days of my life down to the second. And in my futility, I look at that God and I say,
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God, you have a lot of it, but you don't have my financial security in your mind.
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And Lord, I'm feeling pretty sick. And Lord, my knees hurt. And Lord, where am
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I going to get the right clothes? And Lord, what if I lose my job this week because the culture is turning against me?
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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?
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And I look at that and I worry. And Jesus, just like in the boat, he says, do you not know who
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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.
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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
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God. Because when Jesus calmed the water with his word, it scared them.
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They were afraid and they said, what kind of man is this? Why are we here this morning if we struggle with anxiety?
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We've forgotten who he is. We've forgotten who's inside of us.
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We've forgotten what he's done. Spurgeon, I think, said it well.
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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.
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The feeding of the physical frame engrosses much care, but the supply of spiritual food is often neglected. Yet, oh man, thou thyself art better than thy body.
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Thine immortal soul is worth far more than that poor carcass of thine, which will soon become food for worms.
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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
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God? So the diagnosis is this. When we're anxious, it's because we've forgotten who
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God is and we've tried to serve two masters. And if that's not a sin to be repented of, then
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I don't know what is. It's the sin, the sin of unbelief, the sin of looking at what
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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.
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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.
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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.
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So what do we do? Point number two, we look for help in all the wrong places. According to the
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Anxiety and Depression Association of America. So what do we do about this anxiety? They give four treatments, four techniques for anxiety.
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This is approved by the National Institute of Health and the CDC, by the way, those bastions of medical knowledge and trust.
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They say therapy, medication, integrative behaviors and transcranial magnetic stimulation, that's your way out.
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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.
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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.
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Medication prescribes drugs to change hormone levels or to change brain activity in order to reduce symptoms.
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Integrative behaviors mean to use meditation, yoga, acupuncture or stretching and relaxation techniques.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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That's why I have anxiety. Or it says I can find relief by searching the spirits to gain peace.
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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,
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I'm going to tell you, you're going to find them because they are out there. They are here. And if you are looking, you will find them.
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And that's where medication comes in, because often we need to open the gateway to find the spirits. Do you see the problem?
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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.
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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.
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And the prize is no anxiety. Once again, what does the Bible say about the cure for anxiety?
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I love this passage, but I'm going to read a few scattershot here. Luke 12, 29 through 34, it's a parallel passage to Matthew 6.
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It says, and do not seek what you will eat and what you will drink and do not keep worrying for all these things.
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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.
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Do not fear, little flock, for your father is well pleased to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions and give it as charity.
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Make yourselves money belts which do not wear out. An unfailing treasure in heaven where no thief comes near or moth destroys.
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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.
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He will never allow the righteous to be shaken. Proverbs 16, 3 says, commit your works to Yahweh and your plans will be established.
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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.
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For he himself has said, I will never desert you, nor will I ever forsake you, so that we confidently say, the
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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.
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I think there's one thing that should be clear from all of those scriptures, and that is what we do.
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Look, sometimes, sometimes it's okay to talk to someone. We're going to get into that with the practical stuff.
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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.
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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.
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But that's not where our hope is, okay? Our hope is here. We trust the
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Lord and we're content. Now, I already know the problem because I've heard this a million times.
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If I was to ask any one of you individually, how do you defeat the sin of anxiety? I know what
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I would get. Pray to the Lord, trust the Lord, hope in the
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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?
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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,
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I have a big problem. And somebody tells you, pray and be content. We have to help each other.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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And he's going to be afraid. Because we know, we know what the path of righteousness is on that.
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But I think with anxiety, what we're able to do oftentimes is because, and that's how we know the sin is culturally acceptable, right?
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Anxiety is a culturally acceptable sin. So what will happen is that someone will come to you and they will say, hey,
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I felt so anxious. I haven't been sleeping. And what is the response far too often?
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The response is simply this. Oh, I'm so sorry, brother. Like, man, that's really tough.
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Look, I've been guilty of that. I've been really tough. Let's think through it. Like, and let's pray together.
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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.
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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.
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Just do the opposite of what our culture is doing. Just look at what they do and do the exact opposite.
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So instead of hiding behind rationalization of our medical diagnosis, take responsibility. I am sinfully anxious.
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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.
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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.
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As John Owen says, we need to get to work killing sin or it's going to be busy killing us.
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So what else does our culture do? They say we're individualistic. You have to be alone.
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You're in this. And what we should do is we should be in community. Don't be alone. Be in community.
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Talk to each other. Isolation breeds anxiety because when you're alone, all you have to think about is yourself.
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And that's where when we start valuing ourself, that's where anxiety thrives. Because now what we start doing is we start being afraid for our life.
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Number three, what does the world say? It says relaxation is really going to be what you need. You just need some time to relax.
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What I say is do the opposite of that. Work. Work daily. Work hard. If you're a man, at least once or twice a week, work till sweat is pouring off your brow.
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It will help. I promise it will. Because there's dignity in work and God has called us to work.
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And it's one of the methods that God uses. It's one of his means of grace. The culture says you need to relax.
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I say work. The culture says we need to worry about inflation.
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We need to worry about our jobs. We need to worry about what's going to happen in the world. We need to worry about our food.
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What does the Bible say, what are we supposed to do? We're supposed to, like Spurgeon said, we're supposed to feed spiritually.
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Whatever your passion talking about this time of year for a lot of people, it's football. It could be trucks. That hurts a little.
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It could be pizza. It could be the Lord of the Rings. If you're a nerd, it could be the music that you like to listen to.
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What you think about, what you talk about is what your heart treasures. What you spend your money on is the spiritual foods you're eating.
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If you're spending your money on things that feed the passion of your heart, which you are going to do, that gives a good window into what it is that we actually are treasuring and valuing.
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We have to know the word of God and we have to meditate on it. Memorize it. There's some practical advice.
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Memorize scripture. The Bible passage of my life in Psalm 1, it gives promises.
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And one of the promises it says is that the man of God, that he meditates on God's law day and night.
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And then the promise that's attached to that is that he will stand before the assembly of the righteous.
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That means that we're going to be with our people. Right. The promise is that if we meditate on the law of God, if we meditate on his word, then we're going to stand before God and we're going to be unashamed.
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And the reason that we're going to be unashamed is a mystery that the psalmist could not have dreamed of. And that is that the king has given us his own righteous robe.
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But he also says that we'll be like a tree firmly planted by streams of water. That tree is properly fed.
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That tree's roots are growing deep. That tree is not knocked over by the winds of cultural change. That tree is not knocked over by drought seasons because that tree has a lot of nutrients stored up.
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I thought about preaching on Psalm 1 this week. I think I think it would have gone really well. But I think the cure for anxiety is that we feed ourselves the right diet.
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And that has nothing to do with the food that we're putting in our mouth. It has to do with treasuring the word of God.
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Because when we treasure the word of God, the word of God tells us that we're going to be transformed in our mind, not for nothing, so that we would conform to the image of Christ.
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Did Christ have anxiety? How insane would it have been for Christ to have anxiety?
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Christ grieved for his people. He grieved over Jerusalem. And it's right to have godly grief.
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When we lose someone, when tragic things happen, it's right and proper that we grieve over them.
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When we see God's name being disparaged in the world, it's right and proper for us to grieve over that.
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Paul, Paul had stress for his churches that he loved. He longed to be with them.
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He wanted to come back to be with them. He had the pastoral heart. That's not sinful anxiety.
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That is loving God's kingdom and trying to store up your treasures there. The world says that we build security in our saving accounts, in our retirement accounts.
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What do we do? We don't put our hope there. We trust that the Lord will meet our needs.
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And I want to put a point to that, because that sounds like a pietistic spiritual platitude there. It'll be good, man.
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Just trust the Lord. There are means that God has given. We are in a culture right now to where if you stand strong for Christ, you can lose your job.
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If you lose your job, it is on us, Acts 2, it is on us in this church to help you.
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We are going to be here for you. We as the body are going to take care of you, because the
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Bible tells us two things. The Bible tells us that a man who does not work should not eat. But the
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Bible also tells us that the people in Acts, that they shared everything in common, and that's because when they didn't have food and they didn't have a place to stay and they didn't have clothes, the church took care of them.
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And I think we've lost that in our day, that your tithes and offerings here are not to build the church's savings account.
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It's not so that we can have really nice sound equipment and super awesome smoke machines and strobe lights and so that I can have
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Armani suits up here to preach. It's not for that. This is a 25 cent potter's house. Hey, thank
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God for that. It's not for that. The reason the reason that tithes and offerings go through the church is to further the progress of the gospel.
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That means that we equip people. That means that we do keep the lights on. But it also means that we plan to plant other churches and to bless other churches.
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But it also means that we are ready to help courageous men and women who are going to fall on hard times because they are preaching the word of God into the teeth of a gospel, into the teeth of a culture that hates them.
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I think people can get back on their feet and get to work again, but we can help and we should.
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And it needs to be said, we're not going to be like James and say, go now and be fed and do nothing.
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That's dead faith. What we're going to do is we're going to help our people. And we are a generous people here. The world says that you should be numbed and pacified by drugs.
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The pain's too hard. I understand. I understand that it's hard.
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I understand that people are in really rough situations. But the answer is not to be pacified by drugs.
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Instead, what the Bible says is that we're to be sober minded and active. That we don't sit in a drug stupor, but we are sober, clear in our thought and that we act.
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So that's one. Do the opposite of what the world says. Number two, how do we practically do this? Be about the mission of God.
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Anxiety is about sitting there thinking about stuff. The sin of anxiety is a sin of idleness also.
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It's when we're sitting around just in our own thoughts. When we're working, it goes away.
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So one of the things that we can practically do is be on the forward path of the mission of God. So what we have to do is we have to confess, repent and get serious.
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Call it what it is. Repent of it. When someone is confessing their anxious thoughts to you, you as a loving brother or sister in Christ is to say, hey, it sounds to me like you have some sinful anxiety here.
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Are you going to wallow around in that sin? Or are you going to repent of it? Are we going to get serious about the business?
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Now, look, I don't think I don't think that you have to throw the bludgeon down the first time it's ever happened to somebody. I think there can be warning shots in here.
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But this sin is one that grows and it gets worse and it gets harder to weed out. What we have to do is anxiety says you'll never get it done.
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It's doomed. But what we're supposed to do in the Word of God is we're to work daily on the small things, be faithful in the small things.
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And that what we do is what we're supposed to do. We know that. We go to work. We raise our kids. We glorify
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God. We get with each other. We have to train ourselves to fear God and not manner circumstances. Fear the one who is the only one to be feared.
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And that is God, because he is who he is. And we need to know who he is. Finally, we have to remember this, and this made a huge impact on my life in the last month.
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Nate Wilson said it. He said that the fall of every institution is that they try to survive. That when your goal is to survive.
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You will do anything you can to just try to stay breathing. And what that entails is a bunch of compromise.
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And you keep asking the question, how do conservative Christians keep losing all their institutions? The answer is really simple.
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They're trying to survive. And when you deem that the time is wrong and that to be stand faithful for the
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Word of God is going to lose you your spot, you're trying to survive whenever you give in and you bow to that.
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And so here, if we as a church, that our goal is not to survive, that should be your goal as the people of this church.
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Our goal is not to survive. Our goal is to spend all that we have in order to secure heavenly treasures.
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Is that what Jesus said in Luke and in Matthew? Seek the kingdom of God that we bank our hopes on the assurance of things that are unseen.
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Look, if you believe in a God who created everything with his words and sent his own son who was divine to embody the flesh of a human being that was his creation and die on a cross and that he rose again and that he now sits at the right hand of the father.
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If you believe that you've done the hard part already, because did you know the miracle of regeneration already happened in you, that you have a new heart and God has done a miracle in you?
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And so what we need to do is remember what he's done. And when we remember what he's done, we start to understand that everything we can do is to spend our treasure for the thing that's never going to rust and never going to be eaten and the thing that's going to be there for us together.
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When we have anti -anxiety in my life, when I want to get away from anxiety, one of the things I think about is
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I'm going to be around all these people that I love so much and there will be no end to the amount of time that I'm with them.
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We have pizza night every Friday night and I love my family and I love that time.
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And I think, you know, we're going to be eating pizza together forever. I love working in the shop with Chad.
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He's much better at it than I am. And so it humbles me and it makes me learn and it pushes me.
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And I think that, you know, Chad and I are going to be doing projects, building things forever.
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That we are going to be together and that we're going to sing gloriously to our king. And we're going to do that forever.
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Forever. We're not going to be tired. We're not going to have anxiety. We're going to see the lamb who was slain.
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And so what Jesus tells us is, did you catch it? He says to seek the kingdom.
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But then what does he say? That's not a Rubik's Cube we're trying to solve. He says, the
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Lord is pleased to give it to you. Do you understand? The Lord's not pleased to give you scraps from his table.
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The Lord is not pleased to give you enough food for today. The Lord is pleased to give you the whole thing.
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What is the kingdom of God? Where is the kingdom of God? If he exists, his kingdom is everywhere.
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It's all time, all space. If he exists, that's what we have to spend our time on.
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And so to close out a series on fundamentals of the church plant, nuts and bolts, I think it's this.
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If we at Covenant are to accomplish our mission and vision, then we have to be comprised of fearless, faithful people who are bound together and willing to sacrifice everything for the prize.
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The great hope that we have is that we go in the name of Jesus, who has all authority and ultimate victory is assured.
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You're fighting a battle that you're going to win. We are making spiritual friends here and we're storing up our treasures in eternity, and we should have an element of wanting to spend it all there.
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That's really important to us. And that in the meantime, what we need to do is we need to get there with a clear eyes and a righteous heart.
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I want to leave you with this one picture. I have to do it. So at the end of Lewis's book,
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The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, we've been we've been introduced to this character named Reepacheve. He's this valiant mouse who's big and he talks a lot and he's squeaky and he's always wanting to rush in and he's wanting to fight.
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He's wanting to fight a dragon. And the king tells him back. But what Reepacheve does at the end of the story is that he wants to get to Aslan's country.
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And so as they as they sail to the end of the world, there's this huge wave that comes up and the boat can't go that far because it's too big.
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And what Reepacheve does is that he gets in his own little coracle and he sails out, not knowing what he's going to find, but he sails over the edge of the world.
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And the reason he does that is because to him, one second of seeing
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Aslan's country was greater than his whole life of seeing the rest of the world. That's what it means to live with no anxiety, that we have a proper picture of what this is all for and what we're here for.
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Let's pray. Lord, if we ask as your people.
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We know that you are you are going to give us everything that you've promised if we abide in you and more to abide in you is to be free from anxiety or as we know that when we abide in you, that you are the king of all creation.
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But Lord, you are also our father. And Jesus says that he is our friend and our brother.
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Lord, what a mystery it is that we're not only subjects of the great king, but we're also his his children.
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And Lord, far beyond that. How is it that the one who holds all things together through his thought calls himself our friend?
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Lord, what a friend we have in you. Forgive us, Lord, for our unbelief.
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Forgive us when we are people of little faith. Forgive us when we're cowards. Who have our eyes focused on the circumstances of this world and forget who you are.
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Lord, we confess with our lips today that you are great, that you are mighty, that you are awesome, that you are holy or that you love us.
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That you control everything. Lord, help us to be a church that does not put you to the test. You've given us the miracle of resurrection.
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And we ask in our pride and our arrogance for assurances of the next paycheck.
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Lord, forgive us. Forgive us and let us not walk that way. Let us be a church that's bold and faithful, that we know the steps you've laid out before us.
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Lord, help us to be courageous to take them. Lord, forgive me for the times that I've sat as people sought my pastoral counsel.
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And that I did not bring to light the sin of anxiety, Lord, so that they could have the gift of repentance.
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People who follow you, Lord, forgive me for that. Help me to grow in that. Help me to be a better man of God so that I would give help to your people.
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Be with us now, Lord, as we sing and as we remember everything that you've done, protect us from this sin, help us to keep short accounts with it and to trust that you have forgiven it,