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Our anxiety cannot overcome Christ

Luther Statue

For the last couple of weeks, Emily and I have been working through an issue that has been causing a tremendous amount of anxiety in our home (which is made more difficult by the fact that I’m off traveling at the time of this writing). Since the issue came to our attention, we’ve been working to get it resolved. We’ve done all we can, and now it’s in the government’s hands. All we can do now is wait, and pray.

This kind of anxiety is what we’ve been living with on and off for about two years, but never to this degree. It’s what we’re probably going to be dealing with for the next two years or more as we consider our options for our future here in America. At times, it can be crippling. It creates a constant sense of fear, of dread, even despair. It is exactly the kind of thing that we don’t want or need, because it keeps our minds off of what’s most important. It makes it hard to see all Christ has done for us.

While doing a bit of reading on Saturday night, I found this quote from Martin Luther particularly helpful. He said,

Christ’s victory … is the overcoming of the law, of sin, our flesh, the world, the devil, death, hell and all evils; and this his victory he has given to us. Although, then, these tyrants and these enemies of ours accuse us and make us afraid, yet they cannot drive us to despair, nor condemn us; for Christ, whom God the Father has raised up from the dead, is our righteousness and victory.

This is a simple truth that I need to be reminded of. One that, when I’m experiencing fear and anxiety, I’m tempted to forget. Whatever comes to accuse us and make us afraid cannot supplant that. And no source of anxiety—no government, no amount of paperwork, no nothing—can ever overcome Him. He has defeated everything that exists to condemn us. He is our victory.

Don’t stop questioning until you’ve questioned your questioning

I’m reading a book by a popular young author who grew up in the Bible belt. From her account, she was part of a fairly easy-going family of believers. As she grew, she became uncomfortable with the fundamentalist beliefs of the denomination of her youth. This discomfort led her on a journey of questioning those beliefs, and, eventually, that journey led her to come to conclusions that were, largely, the opposite of those she heard growing up.

Today, this author would say that it is “naïve” to believe that the account of the creation of the world, the flood and so many other aspects of the Bible—”must be literal to be true.”[1. This is, of course, Rachel Held Evans in Searching for Sunday.] This author isn’t alone in this sentiment, of course. Many in our day—and many in the preceding 150 years—deeply feel the tension particularly between the Christian story and that of scientific naturalism. And many choose to double down on one side or the other.

And I get that. Something that’s helpful for people to keep in mind is that I didn’t grow up with any real knowledge of the Christian story. I didn’t have a category for it beyond a vague reference in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn. So if you’re one who wrestles with this tension, please know I am not unsympathetic. And regardless of the discomfort, we should wrestle with it. We should allow it to be uncomfortable and continue to be so until we are fully convinced.

So, I hope it’s clear that I am all for asking good questions. But good questions do more than question truth claims—they question our questioning, too. And that’s what’s troubling about the notion that it must be naïve to believe certain things. To me, that strikes me as dangerously close-minded thinking in that it doesn’t go far enough to ask deeper questions.

This post isn’t a slam on this particular author (I hope). Instead, I really do just want to consider the kinds of questions we need to ask when we are confronted with a statement like that above—because it’s one we do get all the time, including from ourselves. I find it helpful to consider four questions when dealing with the charge of naïvity:

  • Why? Why would it make one naïve to believe these things must have happened in order to be true? Is it because we live in a naturalistic culture, one that tells us that only what is measurable, verifiable and repeatable is true (unless it’s inconvenenient, of course)? Couldn’t one equally argue that it is naïve to believe that these things couldn’t possibly have happened? That water didn’t actually come pouring out from a rock? Or the Red Sea didn’t really part, or that everyone who is described as being possessed by a demon is really just epileptic? (Which, by the way, is incredibly disrespectful to anyone who has epilepsy…)
  • What? What does it mean to say that believing this or that actually happened is a sign of naïvity? What are the implications of saying that Genesis 1-2 never happened? What does it mean to say that Jesus didn’t bodily rise from the dead, or wasn’t really born of a virgin? What does it do to the foundation of the Christian faith, and what is left standing?
  • When? When does it stop being naïve to believe something is true? When is it that this is no longer applied to earliest chapters of Genesis or the miracles of Exodus through to the end of the Prophets, but to the person of Jesus himself? When does it become naïve to believe in the incarnation and the resurrection? When does it become naïve to believe anything in Scripture at all?
  • How? How will I respond? Ultimately, this comes down to two options: will I respond in faith and believe, or will I respond in unbelief and reject?

Curiosity and a hunger for truth are absolutely essential. That’s what motivates us to ask good questions. But good questions don’t let us stop asking questions of a subject, they question our questions. And there’s nothing naïve about that.

The only lasting cure for anxiety

run-to-father

I’ve gotten a lot of advice over the years about how to deal with anxiety and worry. On the advice of an older Christian (one who probably had a bit too much prosperity in his gospel) Emily and I once had a “worry box.” What we were encouraged to do with it was write down whatever it was that we were worried about and put it in the box to symbolically represent “giving it God.” Any time we were tempted to worry about such-and-such a thing, we were to point to the box, and thus we were not allowed to worry about it.

Now, maybe some people find things like that helpful, but… Yeah, that didn’t go so well for us.

The challenge of the box was it was just your garden variety white-knuckle religiosity. It was an attempt to use human effort to address the sign of a problem rather than addressing the real issue itself—that proneness we all feel to wander from God. So we run to ideas like this, and we rebuke people for not having faith, rather than encouraging them to pray as we should: “Lord, I believe—help my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24)

Reflecting on Philippians 4:6-7, and Paul’s encouragement to be anxious over nothing, Charles Spurgeon wrote:

Carry your desires to the Lord of your life, the guardian of your soul. Go to Him with two portions of prayer and one of fragrant praise. Do not pray doubtfully but thankfully. Consider that you have your petitions, and therefore thank God for His grace. He is giving you grace; give Him thanks. Hide nothing. Allow no want to lie rankling in your bosom; “make known your requests.” Run not to man. Go only to your God, the Father of Jesus, who loves you in Him.

This shall bring you God’s own peace. You shall not be able to understand the peace which you shall enjoy. It will enfold you in its infinite embrace. Heart and mind through Christ Jesus shall be steeped in a sea of rest. Come life or death, poverty, pain, slander, you shall dwell in Jesus above every rolling wind or darkening cloud. Will you not obey this dear command?

Yes, Lord, I do believe thee; but, I beseech thee, help mine unbelief.[1. From Faith’s Checkbook]

The key to dealing with worry—the only lasting cure for anxiety—comes from bringing the reality of your anxiety before God. Not that he doesn’t already know it, but because in doing so, you are echoing that prayer, “I believe, help my unbelief.” It is an act of obedience, trusting the Lord will do as he has promised—not simply to provide for the needs of the day, but that when we lay our burdens before him, he will indeed give all who are weary and heavy-laden rest (Matthew 11:28).


Photo credit: chains via photopin (license). Designed with Canva.

There is faith in asking

psalm-10

I love the Psalms, but they kind of freak me out. They’re shockingly honest about what life following the Lord is really like–and not every day is a Friday. Sometimes it seems like everyone’s got a perpetual case of the Mondays.

Psalm 10 is like this, right from the opening verse, opening with the question no one wants to admit they ask:

Why, O LORD, do you stand far away?
Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble? (Psalm 10:1)

But we all ask it, don’t we? Somewhere along the way, we’re all going to have a moment where we’ll be asking, “God, where are you? What’s going on here? Why is this world a giant mess and you don’t seem to be doing anything about it?”

Many of us shy away from admitting it, simply because we’ve been told not that that’s not what faithful Christians say. But in the Psalms and in the prophets, we keep seeing the authors of Scripture asking this sort of question.

In Psalm 55, David the great king of Israel, the man the Bible calls the man after God’s own heart, cried out, “Give ear to my prayer, O God, and hide not yourself from my plea for mercy!”

Habbakuk’s book opens with these words:

O LORD, how long shall I cry for help,
and you will not hear?
Or cry to you “Violence!”
and you will not save?

Jeremiah, likewise, experienced so much turmoil in his ministry that he even went so far as to suggest that God had tricked him! (Jeremiah 20:7).

But those are not the only places we see it: Psalm 44:24, Psalm 88:14, Psalm 89:46… Over and over and over again, God’s people keep asking this question when they are so overwhelmed in the midst of trials and suffering, when they are overcome by unrelenting injustice: Where are you, God?

So what do we do with this?

There is faith in asking

Now, one of the things Christians really struggle with is being honest about the difficulties we face. We seem to have bought into this idea that if we don’t understand what God is doing, or opening up about what’s going on and how we’re feeling—to say that it feels like God is absent from our lives—that we’re denying him. We’re abandoning the faith or on the road to apostasy.

And to be perfectly clear, there is a kind of questioning God that is absolutely rooted in unbelief. It is presumptuous. And it is arrogant. When we do this, we’re really just trying to placate ourselves as if to say, “Well, God isn’t paying attention anyway, so I’ll just go do what I want.”

But what we need to recognize is that the author of Psalm 10 is not asking out of unbelief, any more than David, Habbakuk or Jeremiah did. He’s not looking for an out. He’s at the end of his rope. He knows what God has said about justice and mercy and compassion, and he knows the commands of God—that he is to love the Lord with all of his heart and to love his neighbor as himself—but he looks around and sees something other than that. He asks because in all of it, he feels the apparent absence of God, and for the person for whom the presence of the Lord is their greatest and all-consuming joy, that is a terrifying thing.

His question is an act of faith, and it can be one for us, too.

This is something I’ve had to learn and relearn numerous times over the last few years. When we lost a baby—and Emily nearly lost her life—during a difficult miscarriage in 2009, it was hard to understand what God was doing there, despite some of the good we saw from it. When Emily developed epilepsy three years ago, neither of us jumped for joy because we had a new opportunity to glorify God in our circumstances. When I was in a place where every single night I would come home from work begging and pleading for it to be okay for me to go in the next day and resign, and the answer was always no, I didn’t just shrug my shoulders and say, “Well, the Lord’s will be done.”

Life doesn’t work that way, and it’s okay to admit it.

But the point of asking the question isn’t to allow us to wallow in our despair. We ask not out of unbelief, but to help our unbelief. We ask because we need to be reminded, as the author of Psalm 10 did, of the sovereignty of God. He asked because he needed to remind himself that God would indeed act, that justice would be done.

The Lord is king forever and ever;
the nations perish from his land.
O Lord, you hear the desire of the afflicted;
you will strengthen their heart; you will incline your ear
to do justice to the fatherless and the oppressed,
so that man who is of the earth may strike terror no more. (Psalm 10:16-18)

He gives thanks to the Lord, who is king forever and ever—Jesus, the Son of God, the heir to the throne of David, the One through whom and for whom all things exist. The one who even now holds all the universe together and has promised that a day is coming when justice will be fully and finally served. Sin and sadness and death will be no more. There will be no more tyranny or tears. The fatherless and oppressed will rejoice and be strengthened. No man will strike terror ever again. Evil will perish. All the accounting will be done.

That’s what we all need, isn’t it? And the good news is, when we see the injustices in this world that seem to go unmet, we can have hope. No matter how frustrating things are, we need not despair. No matter what circumstances we face, we need not believe God has abandoned us. We need to remind ourselves of this, even as we plead with him to act and call on him to help the humble and oppressed. His is here. He is with us. He is good. And he is faithful to answer your call. He will do justice and man will strike terror no more.

So don’t think asking is an act of unbelief—there is faith in asking.