Anxiety and the God Who Holds Tomorrow

Anxiety takes hold when a good thing like safety or approval is made ultimate, and it loosens as a Christian gathers his hopes onto the God who already stands in every tomorrow.

The I AM Goes Before His People

God met Moses at the burning bush with a name that holds every tense of time within it: “I AM WHO I AM” (Exodus 3:14). Preaching that passage, Chris drew out what the name means for anyone facing an unknown future: “we can know God is in all of time. Yes, he is here with us this moment and he is there in the future going before us.”^[1] The tomorrow that keeps an anxious man awake at two in the morning is a place God already occupies, and Chris has said the same of Christ: “Jesus knows everything that's coming down the pike. He actually does know what's coming tomorrow. More than that, He knows and He cares. He sympathizes and He extends fresh grace.”^[17]

Jesus spoke to his disciples' worry with that knowledge behind him: “Do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat, nor about your body, what you will put on. For life is more than food, and the body more than clothing” (Luke 12:22–23). He pointed them to ravens with no storehouse or barn and to lilies that neither toil nor spin, and he asked a question every worrier eventually has to answer: “And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to his span of life?” (Luke 12:25).^[17]

Anxiety Begins as a Problem of Worship

Chris has taught that worry and anxiety are, biblically, one problem with the same root causes,^[17] and he has traced those roots to what a person worships. Anxiety takes hold when we take “a subordinate end, like comfort or safety or control or success or approval, and we treat it like an ultimate end. And once that happens, failure becomes terrifying. Uncertainty itself feels like a threat… all the time, which is just untenable. You just can't live a productive life where uncertainty feels like a constant threat.”^[10] Each of those ends is a good gift, which is why each tempts so strongly, since a father ought to want his children safe and a worker ought to care whether his labor succeeds. The trouble starts when one of them is asked to carry weight only God can bear, and the mind then spends itself guarding whatever it has made ultimate.

Every anxious heart is afraid of something in particular. Chris told the church, “you're fearing something right now,” and he warned that the fear a person lives under “will dictate the outcome of your life.”^[2] Much of that fear hides inside our prayers, which quietly specify the outcome and set the deadline, and Chris has taught the church to pray with open hands: “God, I trust you that you will reward me for seeking you and that those rewards will be good, but they will be according to your timing and your type.”^[2] Money can become the thing a person has decided he cannot lose, and so can a child's future, a scan result, or the opinion of a colleague down the hall, and whichever it is, he has begun serving a god with no power to give him what it promises.

The Mind in a Dark House

Chris has described chronic anxiety as walking through an unfamiliar building with the lights out. The eyes supply nothing, so the brain goes on high alert and starts building a world in the dark, with a pit one step ahead or a wall about to give way, and in his words, “Your brain is so on.”^[14] The mind is doing what a mind does when it tries to manage a future it cannot see, and the cost comes due in the present, because “When we worry, we're living in fear. When we worry, we find no enjoyment in today.”^[17]

The anxious person reads the facts correctly, since the market could turn and a car could run the light at the next intersection. Chris grants the premise and then turns the mind toward a person: “None of us knows what tomorrow will hold. We can worry about what we do and don't know. Or we can look to Jesus.”^[17]

Peace for the Mind Stayed on God

Isaiah names where peace is found: “You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you” (Isaiah 26:3). Chris applied the verse to every anxious corner of life: “whenever you want peace in something, the way you get peace in something is to consolidate all your hopes on God.”^[16] Hopes scattered across a dozen outcomes leave a dozen places to be wounded, while hopes gathered onto God rest on the one object that cannot fail.

The God who receives those hopes has a history with his people. Charles Spurgeon wrote, “God is too good to be unkind, and he's too wise to be mistaken. And when we cannot trace his hand, we must trust his heart.”^[6] Joseph could trace nothing of God's hand from the bottom of a cistern or the floor of an Egyptian prison, and he lived to tell his brothers, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good” (Genesis 50:20).

Gratitude Reads the Past Forward

When God promised David a house that would stand forever, David sat before the LORD and asked, “Who am I, O Lord GOD, and what is my house, that you have brought me thus far?” (2 Samuel 7:18). Preaching that prayer, Chris said “it's only God-centered gratitude” that can steady a frightened heart, because it works like an algorithm in which a believer looks at what God did, recognizes it as God's character, remembers that it came as grace to someone who had earned nothing, and extends that character into the years ahead.^[14] Once a Christian reasons that way, Chris said, “The future doesn't become a place of dread anymore.”^[14]

Preaching Psalm 25, Chris offered the kind of testimony such gratitude collects: “I recall many times when I was at a crossroad, not knowing which way to turn… I couldn't see any hope from my predicament, any way out. And then as I cried out to God and placed my trust in him, he in his faithfulness made a way where there seemed to be no way.” The conclusion drawn from those crossroads was plain: “These things just don't happen. God was just showing me that He was trustworthy and He was reliable. He was teaching me I could rely on Him.”^[11] A remembered deliverance becomes evidence that the God being trusted in the dark has already proven himself there.

Faithful Work, With the Rest Left to God

Trust leaves room for effort, and Chris has said so directly: “You keep working, you keep doing the things you should do to change your circumstances. Absolutely nothing wrong with that.”^[3] He has also named the part anxious people skip: “do what you can to avoid hardship. But the anxious heart forgets to hear that one part there. The do what you can. And then after that, there's just a lot you can't do.”^[10] The work a person can do belongs to his faithfulness, and whatever lies past it he hands to God, “casting all your anxieties on him, because he cares for you” (1 Peter 5:7).

Chris preached this as a kind of courage, “resisting the impulse to retreat, worry, or flee in the face of hardship or simply the unknown, but instead to press forward into it with faithfulness to the Lord and anticipating God and his grace to meet us in it.”^[1] He has pictured the hardest days as open water, where the question becomes simple: “you're in the ocean and these huge breakers are hitting you. You've got this life raft and you're just asking yourself, Will I hold on to the raft or not?”^[12]

Footprints Through the Grave

The Son of God walked into the darkest unknown there is, praying in the garden, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done” (Luke 22:42), and he entrusted himself to his Father through death itself, “leaving you an example, so that you might follow in his steps” (1 Peter 2:21). Chris has pointed the church to the trail those steps left: “We can see the footprints. We can see them disappear at the cross. We can see them reappear outside the empty tomb.”^[4] The way of trust he walked “ultimately leads to glory and good and blessings,”^[4] and the anxious Christian who follows it goes into tomorrow behind a risen Savior who has already been there and who carries his people's cares as his own.