How to Calm Anxiety (For Us and Others) |09.24.23| Stress Free School Year Pt.2
Mark 14:32-42
Pastor Erik Anderson
My name is Eric, I’m one of the pastors here. You can join us. And yes, in fact, it is true. Drew and I did match this morning. So you may have noticed already, we have a beautiful old lady in our church. She’s in a nursing home. And as age comes along, sometimes there’s some confusion. You can’t keep something straight. And so she’ll oftentimes tell her son, who’s also very involved in our church, oh, the pastor came to visit me today. And he’ll go, well, which one? And she’ll go,(…) I can’t remember. He goes, is it beard or is it big?(…) And she goes, well, it was beard. Okay, then that’s pastor Drew, right? So that’s how you can tell us apart, even though we’re wearing the same clothes. This morning, we are gonna be in Mark chapter 14. We’re gonna hear from the word of the Lord in Mark chapter 14. If you want to, you can grab the Bible in the seat back in front of you. And I did not look up the page number before I got up here. So if you get to it, the first person to get to it, Mark chapter 14, it’s in the New Testament. I need you to holler it out. And there’s a prize. If you are the first person to get it, you can go have a cookie or a brownie or whatever’s out there out in the atrium. What page is it?(…) 39 is what I hear, 39. Your reward is gonna be out in the atrium as you head out today. We’re gonna be in Mark chapter 14, verses 32 through 42, where we are. And this is what it reads. They went to a place called Gethsemane. And he said to his disciples, sit here while I pray. He took with him Peter and James and John and began to be distressed and agitated. And he said to them, I am deeply grieved even to death. Remain here and keep awake. And going a little farther, he threw himself on the ground and prayed that if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. He said, Abba, Father, for you all things are possible. Remove this cup from me. Yet not what I want, but what you want. He came and found them sleeping. And he said to Peter, Simon, are you still asleep? Could you not keep awake one hour? Keep awake and pray that you may not come into the time of trial. The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.
(…)
And again, he went away and prayed, saying the same words. And once more, he came and found them sleeping, for their eyes were very heavy and they did not know what to say to him. He came a third time to them and said to them, are you still sleeping and taking your rest? Enough, the hour has come. The Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Get up, let us be going. See my betrayer is at hand. This is the word of the Lord.(…) Thanks be to God. Well, this last week, I was at Walmart or somewhere, I can’t remember where I was, but there was a gentleman who was at the checkout line and talking to the cashier. And I wasn’t eavesdropping, I promise, but as I passed by, I heard him clearly say one phrase. He goes, seems like everything’s going up right now, except for wages.
(…)
I think how true is that? We live in a state of our nation right now where it seems like all the prices for everything is going up. Have you tried to buy a double at McDonald’s? Now they’re like six bucks, they’re expensive.
(…)
Gas is almost $4 a gallon now. I don’t know if you’ve tried to shop for a used car, but they’re very expensive. Or if you have tried to purchase a home, the interest rates are insane. My wife and I bought this beautiful home five years ago, thinking it was a great starter home. We got 2.9 interest rate, and now we realize that our starter home is our forever home because we can’t afford to move because the interest rates are so high. We feel this tightness of the economy, but not only that, we also have this disruption and divide in our politics. Experts are saying that our country is more divided politically now than it was since the Civil War.
(…)
We have this impeachment inquiry into President Biden that Congress has announced recently.
(…)
President Trump is facing over 90 felony charges in several states, and nobody can agree about anything on anything.(…) There’s yelling, name calling,(…) dissension,(…) meanness. Many of us have sent our kids to school recently, and we hear about the things that they’re facing in school, the things that they’re hearing from other kids, hearing from the internet. There’s a lot to be worried about right now.
(…)
How you doing? Feeling okay?
(…)
Maybe you’ve been feeling that tightness in your stomach.
(…)
Maybe the heaviness on your chest, your breath has become shallow.
(…)
Anxiety and the things that we face affects us in many different ways, but one thing is for sure that not many of us feel at total peace right now,
(…)
which is why we’re going through this teaching series, talking about stress, anxiety,(…) and worry.(…) In our passage today, we actually read about a time that Jesus himself experienced anxiety. This is what we hear in verse 33. This is when they go to the Garden of Gethsemane to pray, and he brings with him Peter, James, and John, and he began to be distressed and agitated.
(…)
And he said to them, “I am deeply grieved, even to death.(…) “Remain here and keep awake.” At this point in Jesus’ ministry, he knows that the next day, he is surely gonna be facing death.
(…)
He is gonna be facing brutal torture, brutal abuse, and that he will have to die.(…) He knows that this is coming. He knows that Judas has betrayed him. He confronted him at dinner the night before, and Judas left.(…) He knows what’s going to happen.
(…)
And it says that as they go to the Garden to pray,
(…)
he’s feeling distressed and agitated, and that kinda has this sense of like, you can’t sit still.
(…)
There’s this kind of irritability, this kind of anger that comes along with being agitated. And he’s feeling this sense of grief. He even tells his friends, “I’m deeply grieved, even to death.”
(…)
And many scholars think that this is Jesus communicating like it’s that feeling of, “I just wish we were all over.
(…)
“I wish I didn’t have to do this. “I wish I would just die now, “so I don’t have to go through what’s happening later. “I’m grieved deeply, even to death.”
(…)
We see here in this passage, Jesus experiencing anxiety.
(…)
Today, we’re going to talk about anxiety, what it is, how it affects us, and what Jesus did in response to this feeling of anxiety. And we’re actually gonna be helped by a wonderful lady over in Dixon named Jeanette Trotter, who is a licensed Christian counselor, and she just does amazing work over there. We have people here at New Life Friends that have benefited from her.
(…)
And a couple weeks ago, Pastor Drew sat down and had a conversation with her, and they recorded it. And he asked her several questions about stress and anxiety and those kinds of things. And at one point, he asks how she would define anxiety, and this is her response. Let’s listen in. How would you define anxiety? – I would say it is a sense of irritability.
(…)
Could be just one thing, but it could be several things in the fear of not being able to have control over it.
(…)
Some people have social anxiety,(…) that they walk into a room and they feel like people are looking at them or talking about them or,(…) which is usually not true.
(…)
But we do have those anxieties. People have them about different things. I mean, it could be specific to the way a parent spoke to them. It could be stuttering. It could be the anxieties of fitting in at school.
(…)
They’re just worried,
(…)
which behind that a lot of times is fear of not being accepted or fear that something’s gonna happen.(…) Awful might happen.
(…)
– Jeanette talks about how anxiety is a sense of irritability and a fear of not being able to control a situation,(…) a fear of not being able to handle something that you’re facing.
(…)
So when we’re talking about anxiety, we kind of talk about two things. Fear is kind of the core emotion. It’s the good thing that God has given us to help us survive. Fear is a good thing. It’s okay to be afraid of some things. As I was preparing this this week, I was thinking about fear and I was reminded of the story that happened when I was in late high school. And I had a really good friend during that time that we hung out all the time. He had an older brother who lived south of town, out in the country. And so we kind of ran around with him a little bit and hung out with him. Well, one time my buddy and I are hanging out and he gets a call and it’s his brother saying, dude, we caught a rattlesnake at my house. You need to come check it out. All right, so this is down in Kansas where they have rattlesnakes, yes. And his older brother and another friend whose name is Tim, they were out there walking past a bush and they heard the distinct rattle and they somehow had wrangled this rattlesnake out of the bush and covered it with a five gallon bucket. Now they had children in this kind of stuff. So really they needed to kill this rattlesnake. They needed to kill it. So by the time my friend and I got there, they had a piece of plywood or two by four, something like that, where they had notched out a little grooves, they could trap the snake and then they had a hatchet so they could chop its head off, right? So my buddy’s older brother had the two by four, Tim, his other friend had the hatchet and they were ready to go. So my buddy lifts up the bucket, the rattlesnake’s going, its tail’s going, it starts crawling around and my friend’s older brother loses it. He’s like, “I can’t do it, I can’t do it.” And Tim manned up and did what he needed to do and he’s like, “Give me that thing.” And he takes the two by four and catches the rattlesnake and then just takes its head off.(…) You should be afraid of snakes.
(…)
Snakes are scary.(…) Some of them are venomous, you should be afraid. Being afraid is okay. That is a gift that God has given us to help us survive.
(…)
Fear is okay.
(…)
Anxiety is the physical response that we have when we perceive a fear that we can’t control.
(…)
That’s what anxiety is. It’s the perception of a threat or lack of control,(…) something that we can’t handle.(…) So for example,(…) our kids going to school,
(…)
our kids are going to school and we know they will probably have friends.
(…)
They will almost certainly be safe
(…)
and everything will be okay.
(…)
But we have a lot of anxiety because we don’t know for sure what’s going to happen. We don’t know if they’re gonna be bullied or if they’re gonna find friends. We don’t know how well they’re gonna get along with their teacher. We don’t know these things and so then we have anxiety around it. We feel that shortness of breath, the knot in our stomach when you drop them off to school and then your child also feels that anxiety. The tantrums, the meltdowns, all that kind of stuff is them expressing their anxiety.
(…)
Jesus in this passage is experiencing this anxiety.
(…)
He knows this thing is going to happen. He knows he’s gonna face death. He knows he’s gonna face torture. He knows he’s gonna be brutalized. He knows it’s gonna be painful and difficult and ultimately he will have to die and really at the end of the day,(…) he can’t stop it from happening
(…)
because it’s all part of the plan. It’s what him and the father had decided to do before time. He knew this would have to happen, but he still felt the anxiety.(…) And Jesus actually makes an interesting point later on as he’s talking to his friends
(…)
and he says this in verse 38. He says, “Keep awake and pray(…) “that you may not come into the time of trial, “that they themselves may not have to face “what he has to face.(…) “The spirit indeed is willing,(…) but the flesh is weak.”
(…)
Jesus was fully God and fully man. That means he had a body like ours. He had flesh like ours. And he’s experiencing this anxiety and he actually notes here that it is the flesh that is weak.(…) It’s the flesh that is the problem. It’s not the spirit. It’s not the willpower or the drive that we have. It’s not the Holy Spirit filling us and giving us gifts, but it’s actually our flesh. And anxiety and stress oftentimes is stored in our bodies.(…) Our bodies have the response to fear. And that’s why we’re talking about when we feel that anxiety, that sense of irritability, it’s because our bodies don’t feel good.
(…)
We get tense and nervous and our stomachs don’t feel good and our chest don’t feel good. We can’t sleep. We just wanna lay around and not have to face what we have to face. That’s all a physical response to the stress and the fear that we’re facing.(…) I experienced this in a pretty big way when I was younger. This was right after Sarah and I were married and I had just finished school. I had gone through my schooling, my internship, and I got my first call, my first appointment as a pastor.(…) And this church, I don’t know
(…)
how they were foolish enough to do this, but they called a fresh-faced 23-year-old right out of college who knew nothing, right? So I roll into this church, 23 years old, thinking that I’m on top of the world, that I’m Superman, and I’m thrust into a leadership position at a church that is just rife with conflict.
(…)
This church was in Southwest Wisconsin, this little itty-bitty town. Everyone who lived there had been there for several generations. Most of the founding families of the church still had family members at the church. There was lots of power brokers relationally. There were also lots of power brokers financially.
(…)
And as I’m thrust into this conflict, it was like, it just felt like we were just like, like I was thrown into the middle of a fistfight.(…) There was always something going on, always some sort of drama. And this eventually led into blowups and confrontations in front of the church, these issues where we had to actually take our board and go into a secret session because we needed to protect the anonymity of the board of members because of the decisions that we were making. And this ultimately led to vague threats, the kind of you’ll be sorry type, and ultimately police presence at the church on Sunday mornings.
(…)
It was a rough, rough time. And you can ask my wife, for those two years, I was sick every day.(…) I was sick all the time.
(…)
I had GI issues, indigestion issues. I was always sick with cold. My allergies were going crazy.(…) For two years, I was running on adrenaline and stress with no rest and no respite.
(…)
And that’s what anxiety does to your body.
(…)
It makes you sick.(…) Your body can’t function like that for a long time or you get sick. And so it’s actually our flesh that is weak. It’s our flesh that has the response of anxiety. It’s our flesh that has this response of irritability and anger and not feeling good. And the flesh is weak because of the consequences of sin unleashing our world.(…) It’s kind of like how God did not design our world to have hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, these kinds of things. It is an unfortunate consequence of our world being broken(…) because of the sin that we all collectively engage in.(…) And just like we can’t say that someone sins and they’re punished, because we know that that’s not how that works, we just know that there’s just this unfortunate brokenness to life.(…) And all of us have to face it and our bodies have to face it too.
(…)
So sickness and weakness is actually just this unfortunate consequence. It’s an unfortunate brokenness that we have to deal with.
(…)
And so the question is what do we do?
(…)
What do we do about this response that our body has? And even this response that Jesus’s body had where he was irritable in these kinds of things. What do we do with this? And Jesus actually walked this path.(…) And he did two things. One is he accepted it. He acknowledged and accepted it. And the second is that he prayed. This is his prayer.
(…)
He says Abba Father, and the word Abba is just, it’s almost like, it’s like a child’s way of saying dad.(…) Right? Abba Father, for you all things are possible.(…) Remove this cup from me. It’s a cup of suffering. It’s this thing that he has to go through, his crucifixion. But not what I want, but what you want.
(…)
Ultimately, Jesus’s anxiety led him to this point.
(…)
Not what I want, but what you want.
(…)
Jeanette Trotter actually had a couple of things to say about this very thing. So let’s listen to her. – And so if people are experiencing anxiety where they feel heightened, they feel on edge, they feel always certain that the other shoe is gonna drop. What are some maybe practical things that people could do to try and deal with that anxiety, process that anxiety, reduce that anxiety? – Yeah, I usually teach for that first session for people who have higher anxiety, generally teach deep breathing, breathing through your nose, filling up your lungs and your diaphragm. You can hold it or not, and then slowly exhale through the mouth. So that tends to help the body kind of center itself and the body’s getting all the oxygen that it needs. And to go along with that, I teach what we call thought stopping. We have to deal with not only what the body is doing as it’s experiencing the anxiety, we have to attend to what the mind is doing. But I caution people to not avoid troubling and overwhelming thoughts because what you do, it’s like sweeping it under a rug. And we all know what happens when there’s a lot of stuff swept under the rug, it creates a bump and we’re tripping over it at some point. And it actually increases the anxiety.(…) So I caution people, you use the thought stopping technique when you need it to focus on whatever you’re doing, but do not avoid it altogether.
(…)
– Jeanette Trotter advises that we do not sweep these feelings under the rug(…) and we do not avoid them. She does mention briefly this idea of thought stopping, but that’s just for the idea of trying to get through the day, trying to do what you need to do. But she says, don’t sweep it under the rug except you need to acknowledge your feelings. You need to work through them. You need to even accept them because if we cannot accept our anxiety, we actually end up creating more anxiety. We have anxiety about our anxious thoughts and this leads into a spiral. So this is why we see in verse 33, Jesus, when he takes Peter, James and John with him, he just acknowledges his feelings.
(…)
I am deeply grieved, even to death.
(…)
Jesus does not stand in judgment over his own feelings.
(…)
He acknowledges them, he accepts them.
(…)
Oftentimes we treat anxiety, these feelings of worry and these feelings of irritability, these kinds of things, we treat them as a weakness or a sin.(…) We tell our kids to toughen up and to stop crying and get in there and do what you need to do.
(…)
But anxiety is not a weakness.
(…)
Anxiety is not a moral failure.
(…)
Anxiety is not a character flaw.
(…)
Jesus does not sin.
(…)
Jesus is not immoral.
(…)
And he himself experienced this anxiety.
(…)
He himself experienced the distress and the agitation, the irritability. He himself experienced the grief and that feeling of I just wish it was over so I don’t have to deal with whatever it is. Anxiety is not a weakness. The physical effects of anxiety are not sin.
(…)
It is not a sin to be anxious.
(…)
It can’t be.(…) These physical effects that we feel, this worry, this response that our body has, this is not a sin.
(…)
Because Jesus experienced it too.
(…)
There was this family that I got to know the last couple of years and the matriarch of this family was this wonderful woman who was beloved by her family. I mean, she was the center of everyone’s lives.
(…)
And this was a couple of years ago. She wasn’t feeling very good, she was feeling sick and they found out that she had cancer.(…) And this devastated the family. I was connected to one of her adult daughters and so her daughter said, “Hey Pastor Eric, “can you come and visit my mom? “Can you come and talk to her a little bit? “She needs some help.” Everyone was devastated. Everyone was torn up by this.
(…)
She had to face this sickness. And many of you in this room also have had to face this.(…) As I visited her and met with her and prayed with her, they were processing as people normally do. And when the time came for her to get treatment and then ultimately to have surgery to remove the tumor from her abdomen, the doctors opened her abdomen up and they found cancer everywhere inside of her.
(…)
And they just sewed her back up because they knew that there was nothing they could do.
(…)
Afterwards they told the family that probably 30 to 90 days is all that she has.
(…)
And this devastated the family even more. So my visits became more frequent to talk with her and to pray with her. And the amazing thing is over time,
(…)
she experienced peace even in the face of death.
(…)
She knew her days were numbered. There was literally a ticking time bomb inside of her that was going to take her life.
(…)
And she learned to accept her own death.
(…)
Her husband didn’t accept her death at first.
(…)
For a while as I was visiting her, her husband was never around because he didn’t want to talk to me. He didn’t want to talk to the pastor. He was angry at God. He was angry at me. He was angry at cancer. He was just mad and he didn’t want to talk.
(…)
Finally, at one point it got so bad that he did agree to talk to me. And I’ll never forget it. We were sitting at their dinner table
(…)
and he just kind of starts going off, tearing into me about it. Why would God do this? I mean, this woman was his beloved. He would say she is the most beautiful and wonderful woman ever. And he just tore into me. Why would God do this? Why would God do that? Swearing up and down at me, at God, at everything. And once he finished, he said, “What are you gonna do about that?”
(…)
I just kind of leaned over and I said,
(…)
“Your wife is going to die(…) “and there’s nothing you can do to fix that.
(…)
“What are you going to do about that?”
(…)
He sat back and goes, “Well,(…) I don’t know.”
(…)
And that was the door.
(…)
That was all that I needed to get my foot in.(…) And I began to meet with him too, to visit him, to begin to talk through it. And would you know what a miracle happened?
(…)
God gave that family peace where there was no peace.
(…)
She experienced peace, the husband experienced peace, the whole family experienced peace. When there was no peace, there was only devastation.
(…)
All of them grew in their faith. All of them learned to accept what God had given their family. All of them learned to work within this and receiving even this death, ultimately as a gift to them.
(…)
And they learned not to hate her death,
(…)
but instead to find joy and hope in it.
(…)
Peace came to this household because they were willing to accept the thing that they couldn’t control.
(…)
Anxiety is not a sin.
(…)
They were not in sin for being anxious and devastated by what happened.
(…)
They found growth and found healing because they were able to recognize anxiety what it is. It’s not a sin, but it’s a signal.
(…)
It’s a signal to pray.
(…)
It’s a signal to turn ourselves to God, to throw ourselves upon Jesus.
(…)
There’s a pastor, Craig Groeschel, Pastor Drew mentioned him last week, and he had this great metaphor. It’s one of the best metaphors I’ve heard.
(…)
And he said that stress and anxiety and worry are like a check engine light. When your car’s check engine light comes on, the fact that that light is on is not the problem.(…) It’s telling you there’s a problem in the engine that needs to be addressed.
(…)
When our bodies are experiencing anxiety, that’s not the problem.
(…)
But it’s actually a signal to us(…) that we are fearful, that we are worried about something, and it’s actually can help us accept it, turn to our Lord and receive healing and receive power to face the days ahead.
(…)
That we can actually see, we can actually accept and receive the feelings as what they are, a signal to throw ourselves upon Jesus.
(…)
Because he himself lived in a body.
(…)
He himself experienced what we experience in our bodies.
(…)
And Jesus actually redeems these feelings of anxiety.(…) He actually redeems these feelings of worry because he went through it himself.
(…)
The divine went through anxiety.
(…)
The divine went through worry.
(…)
He turned toward his father in prayer.
(…)
And he accepted what God was giving to him.(…) Because I love this statement that Jesus says here.(…) He’s praying to God, with you all things are possible.(…) Remove this cup from me.(…) We were stopped to realize that this is Jesus, the God-man, the one who with the father had planned this whole thing.
(…)
Planned that he knew he was gonna have to die. That was the whole reason that he was sent to earth. That was the reason he was born in flesh. And yet here he is praying to the father to let it not happen.
(…)
The flesh is weak. That was the temptation that Jesus was facing in his flesh. And ultimately he leaves with this, not what I want, but what you want.(…) You see, prayer gets us out of our heads and it actually also gets us out of our bodies. It allows us to have rest and have respite. It allows us to receive peace when we don’t have peace because the Lord gives us the Holy Spirit. The Lord gives us the power to face the days ahead.
(…)
Even when our bodies are weak, the Holy Spirit is strong.
(…)
Anxiety is not a sin, but it helps point us to Jesus.
(…)
It helps us do exactly what Jesus did here, to throw ourselves onto our father(…) and pray not what I want, but what you want.
(…)
Amen.