November 25, 2024 • 63 mins
In this episode, we talk through one of the most prevalent themes running through society right now... anxiety. Christians are by no means immune to it. As a matter of fact, it's just as common inside the church as outside. Below, you'll find additional resources from Calvary Chapel and Deb's website about useful tools to help combat this overwhelming feeling.
https://subsplash.com/u/ccftl/media/l/59ry62b-dealing-with-anxiety
https://debmarsalisi.com/2024/03/anxieties-exchanged-for-assurance/
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Hey guys, welcome to another episode of detours.
(00:24):
I'm here with my gorgeous wife, Deb.
Oh, hi guys.
And we are here ready to talk to you about the issue of anxiety.
Yeah.
It has been overwhelming coming out of an election, all sorts of things on the backside
of a pandemic.
My goodness, where isn't there anxiety?
(00:46):
Yeah, that's true.
It's everywhere.
And it's easy to fall into that pattern.
And so I thought this would be a great topic for tonight.
Yeah.
It definitely is.
We don't have numbers since the pandemic at Calvary.
Maybe they're out there, but I don't know what they are.
But heading into the pandemic, 23% of church leaders had anxiety and 33% of Christians
(01:17):
had anxiety.
And that was going into, this was done in the study was done in about 2018.
And the pandemic hit early 2020.
I can't tell you what the numbers are.
I don't know what they are, but I do know that biblical counseling is up 300%.
So whatever that translates to, I'm not going to triple those prior numbers that I gave
(01:40):
you, but there's definitely going to be a correlation there.
So Christians are not immune to something like this, but we are told to put on the armor
of God and that can be used against anxiety.
Anxiety is a weapon that the enemy uses, but as we know, no weapon formed against us shall
(02:01):
prosper but we need to put on that armor of God in order to fight against anxiety.
Yeah, that's true.
The Bible talks about be anxious for nothing, fear not, and over and over.
It isn't just one or two scripture, it's over and over and over.
(02:22):
God reminds us to not fear, to not be anxious and He knows we need the constant reminder.
It's not like He's saying it once or twice and even once or twice would be something
that we could follow and go, okay, Lord, you said this, but it's constant.
And you know, even Him being a man, He experienced everything that we go through.
(02:46):
And although it doesn't talk about Jesus being anxious, you can see where if any one of us
walk through His trial and His life that we probably would have been anxious.
So He's a remarkable example of relying on prayer and relying on God to walk Him through
(03:09):
some of the hardest things any human being has ever faced.
Yeah, to just understand what Jesus' prayer life would have been like.
It actually didn't occur to me until I started watching The Chosen.
And in The Chosen, many times you see Jesus saying, hey, I'm going to go be with my Father.
(03:30):
And you think about it, if His ministry was a little over three years, the fact that the
Gospels are so short, I think it's Matthew tells us that, no, I think it's John that
tells us that there were so many other miracles that He performed that if they documented
them all that...
The books couldn't even contain them.
(03:50):
Yeah.
Yeah, I think it was the Gospel of John that ends that way.
But He does spend a tremendous amount of time in prayer.
Even in the Garden of Gethsemane, can you imagine the amount of pressure Jesus had to
have been under to bring Him to tears?
Well, He sweat drops of blood.
This is a real medical thing.
(04:11):
You can look it up.
It's just incredible.
The amount of stress that the body is under in order for your blood vessels to break through
the skin barrier and actually bleed is just remarkable.
Yeah.
So, that type of pressure is a tremendous cause for anxiety, significantly less pressure
(04:35):
than that.
Each one of us has mental capability to handle more or less pressure.
So to use Jesus, yeah, it's not even fair to use Him, but He is the measuring stick,
if you will, that we have to hold ourselves against to constantly see, are we walking
in a straight line or are we curved?
(04:56):
But it's also an encouragement to know that He's with us.
And He understands.
Yes.
He can relate.
We have a High Priest that can empathize, can feel what we feel.
And there's no condemnation in that, but He does encourage us to come back to Him.
And I think one of the things, I had an early morning walk, I don't know, months ago, and
(05:23):
I was very anxious and I was given an assignment to write a Devo on anxiety.
And God always uses my writing assignments to really hold up a mirror to what I'm writing
about and to hold me accountable to what I say.
And it was on anxiety and I felt so anxious that day.
(05:47):
And I'm walking around just in our cul-de-sac over and over again and I hear God say, you
can write about it, but the reality is you don't trust me.
Man, that hit me like a ton of bricks.
Oh gosh, Mike.
(06:08):
And I paused, I actually stopped walking for just a second and I paused and I said what
I think is probably the most incredibly honest and humble prayer in all of the Bible is,
I believe Lord, but help me with my unbelief.
Like, I believe.
(06:29):
And so I think that when I was confronted with that, I was dealing with a lot of medical
things for mom.
I was dealing with things not going my way and I guess in reality I was trusting my outcome
instead of God's outcome and His is always better.
(06:50):
His is always better.
But I think the root of some of the anxiety that I felt is I say I trust, but when the
rubber hits the road, why else would I feel anxious?
If I truly believed what I said I believed, then I wouldn't be half as anxious as I am.
(07:11):
And so it was very convicting, but in a loving way.
And it just kind of brought me back to what am I going to say about this now?
What can I say about how I actually feel?
Well, I have to tell myself the truth.
You're in control of mom and dad's medical.
You're in control and I'm not.
And you want better for them than I want.
(07:34):
And so I had to kind of preach to myself like, hey, this isn't in my hands.
This is in your hands.
Yeah, distrust.
I often think trust is peace.
If we fully trust in God, we will have peace.
So distrust means there's something off.
There's something ajar here.
(07:55):
And what's interesting is my trust score on a scale of one to ten, my trust towards God
changes depending on the topic.
It's really incredible.
I'll sit there and if I can be perfectly honest with finances, my trust is lower than, say,
(08:16):
things like my personal health or job security or this, that, and the other.
There are areas that God needs to work on with me.
One of the areas where I struggle, I work, I design websites and all sorts of digital
things.
And when something goes wrong, maybe a website goes down.
(08:42):
And we just had an incident lately where our calendar stopped working and just this time
kept ticking and the calendar's not working.
The anxiety level started to go up and up and up because we had a baptism coming up
that Saturday and no one could find the information for the baptism because it was on the calendar.
And that was a long day.
(09:02):
Yeah.
And what's more important than a baptism?
It was more than a day.
It was, you know, it was on my radar for longer than that.
But the day you're referencing was Friday when the baptism was Saturday.
That Friday was filled with a tremendous amount of stress for me going, how are these people
going to find this baptism?
And what's more important first is salvation and up there with that as baptism.
(09:26):
And so the stress and anxiety of getting it fixed and getting it back working again was
just tremendous.
And in reality, God's got to fight that spiritual battle.
I do believe that to have been a spiritual attack.
Oh, I agree.
With the website going down or with the calendar going down, the days leading into something
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so critically important.
And I needed to have better trust in God that he was going to help get this fixed and fight
that on a spiritual battlefield.
So it was a learning lesson for me.
Did you pray along the way on that Friday when things were starting to fall apart?
(10:09):
I did, but I didn't have the awareness to take myself out of the situation.
What needed to happen was I needed to maybe like you go on a walk.
I needed to, I do my best praying and all of that when I'm in the shower because of
the white noise of just the water.
So if I had just taken a quick 10, 15 minute shower just for the sole purpose of literally
(10:35):
going in there to pray, something along those lines, I think I would have dealt with it
significantly better, but I did not have the emotional intelligence because when you start
getting upset and the pressure starts getting applied more and more, wisdom comes when you're
calm, not when you're anxious.
(10:57):
That's true.
So I was not in the right state of mind.
Phone calls kept coming in, trying different solutions to get it to work, so on and so
forth and part of being a web guy is people call you when things go wrong and it's your
job to fix it.
I don't hear anything when everything's good and everything's working.
(11:20):
I really kind of only hear from people when things aren't working.
That's not fun.
No, and it became part of my identity.
I was the guy that fixes things because I never hear from anyone unless they need something
fixed.
Howie, can we stop, do you get mad that that's kind of where you're at, like that you're
(11:40):
the fix-it guy?
Is there any bit of you that's like, I don't want to be the fix-it guy.
I don't mind being the fix-it guy.
Everybody has a role that they have to play.
There are times where I have to be careful because I will get upset for things like a
(12:05):
lack of gratitude.
Everyone will come to me and say something's broken or they need something, they need a
new webpage, they need a new email.
We go through a tremendous amount of work and there's no gratitude on the other side
and I'll find myself getting a little upset.
That's where I have to go to God and go, hey, I'm working for you.
(12:25):
Amen, that's true.
I know that you're sitting up there and you're proud of me, but that is a discipline that
I have to hold myself accountable for, for sure.
No, I appreciate the honesty because that could really turn quickly into almost even
bitterness if you're not careful.
For sure.
Yeah.
(12:45):
For sure.
Yeah.
It's interesting working at a church.
I used to work for a company called Accenture and they're an agency, a very large agency.
I wasn't prepared for certain things working at a church and one of those things is just
sheer knowledge gap.
What I mean by that is somebody that comes in and they work in, let's say for example,
(13:09):
I don't know, men's ministry, their sole job is ministering and discipling men.
They know nothing about what it takes to digitally execute something.
Where if I walked into a meeting with Accenture, it was filled with all sorts of people from
Disney and Google and this, that and the other.
They all knew what it took.
(13:29):
So sometimes we get asked to do things and we're like, holy smokes, that's a lot of work.
Are we sure this is needed?
And this, that and the other, we get convinced that yeah, it's needed and we put in the effort
and on the other side of it, you can find yourself getting bitter when gratitude doesn't
come and that's when you have to absolutely go to Jesus and go, hey man, that was the
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website is my ministry and it's my ministry to you.
Please help my attitude improve because I know you have me here for a reason.
And that's really ultimately what it all boils down to is God having this very personal relationship
with us and everything that we do is played honestly on a stage for one, for Him.
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And it doesn't matter whether it's work or marriage or friendship or caregiving is ultimately
like, He really is who we're serving.
And when we put that into perspective, it really is, it gives us so much more purpose
and so much more desire to do well.
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And also there's this grace that comes with God that, you know, humans don't always give,
right?
It's like, God is willing to say, it's okay, son, go and rest, go and rest.
I see what you've done for me.
Go and rest, daughter.
I know what you're doing in your caregiving and He's just so gracious to us, honestly.
(15:04):
Yeah.
And I think people that wrestle with anxiety for the reasons, at least that I wrestle with
anxiety, the best passage that I've found, I know you have one, I think it's in the book
of Matthew that you'd like to read.
For me, I actually read Isaiah 53, and that may not make sense.
(15:29):
But pay attention to the pronouns.
When you read through Isaiah 53, and you'll notice all the pronouns are completely backwards.
Isaiah 53, you're talking about the passage of prophesying Messiah coming?
Yeah, believe it or not.
Wow.
Do tell.
(15:50):
Yeah, so if you're wrestling with anxiety, and you really probably don't understand what
grace is, if you're wrestling with anxiety.
So like, for example, I'll start in verse three, when I read the word he here, everything
(16:11):
is referring to Jesus and Isaiah 53.
I'll start in verse three, he is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and
acquainted with grief.
And we hit it as it were our faces from him.
He was despised, and we esteemed him not.
(16:34):
All of that should be the other way around.
Every place that I said he should be us, and every time that I said we, it should be him.
Really he hath bore our griefs and carried our sorrows.
Yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted.
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But he was wounded for our transgressions.
He was bruised for our iniquities.
The chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed.
It is not our stripes that heal us.
God has already done the work, and when you begin to understand what that means, you begin
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to understand the concept of grace.
Hallelujah.
And you know, it's one of the verses that always just baffles me in one sense, and yet
I'm so grateful.
And another sense in the Bible is Isaiah 53.10.
Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him.
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He hath put him to grief.
When thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed.
He shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.
So God took pleasure.
It pleased him to bruise Jesus for our iniquities.
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And when you begin to understand what that is, what grace is, that really helps ease
anxiety.
Well, unpack that for the person that's listening going, well, that doesn't even sound nice.
Like explain how much depth there is to that so that people who are just hearing that maybe
(18:28):
for the very first time can really grasp what that means.
It pleased him.
Why did it please him?
A price had to be paid.
And it was a price that we all know that we couldn't pay.
I don't have wallets deep enough.
Right.
You know, it's when I buy a house, I have to finance that house and pay that house over
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decades.
Jesus sat there and paid cash for every single one of his people.
And everything that I did wrong, it's the great exchange.
When you accept Jesus into your life, he rules over every single aspect.
He should rule over every single aspect of your life.
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And the great exchange is everywhere that you fall short, you were once uninvited, and
now you're invited.
Yes.
You were once an orphan and now you are in the family.
All of that, everything that Christ did for us, when you begin to look at that, there
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is nothing this world has to threaten us with.
Nothing.
And so, all the good aspects of Jesus was accounted to me and the worst of me, he became.
And the worst of me includes when something goes wrong with a website and my anxiety starts
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bubbling up or we've been at the hospital for three or four days with mom and we're
relaxing in horribly awkward chairs, eating really bad food and you're not sleeping and
you have a temper because you've been uncomfortable and you're completely exhausted.
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Whatever it is, whatever my shortcoming is today, he's exchanged that.
And when you meditate on that, meditation means become hyper aware, become hyper aware
of the great exchange that Jesus did in your life, the anxiety starts to fade away.
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Yeah, it's an exchange of anxiety for assurance, assurance that you're his and that he loves
us.
I think my go-to verse on anxiety and the one I was writing about when I actually had
my morning talk with the Lord was Matthew 6, 25 through 34.
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And it's going to be very familiar for people who have read this over and over in the gospel,
but it's one of those things where you're like, okay, I can read right past this because
I've read it so many times, but again, it's that meditating on it that really counts.
Therefore, I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat, what you will
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drink nor about your body, what you will put on.
Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?
Look at the birds of the air.
They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns and yet your heavenly father feeds them.
Are you not more valuable than they?
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And which of you being anxious can add a single hour to his lifespan?
Why are you anxious about clothing?
Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow.
They neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all of his glory was not arrayed
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like one of these.
But if God so clothe the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow thrown in
the oven, will he not much more clothe you?
Oh, ye of little faith.
Therefore, be not anxious saying, what shall we eat, what shall we drink, what shall we
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wear?
The Gentiles seek after these things and your heavenly father knows that you need them all.
But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all of these things will
be added to you.
Therefore, do not be anxious for tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself.
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Sufficient for the day is its own troubles.
And I just love that verse because he's talking about everyday anxieties, things that we are
consumed with every single day.
Not the big major things, but the small things that are just always creeping in the back
of your head.
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You know, your to-do list, your house, your home, your kids, your job.
It's not like he's even talking about big major life changes.
And I love that he invites us to really look at creation and the splendor of creation as
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his complete and utter control of things.
Like when you look at a sunset or when you look at the birds, and he's right, they don't
care, they don't think about where they're going to get their next meal.
And even the flowers, comparing them to Solomon's temple.
Solomon's temple was one of the most magnificent structures in human history.
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I mean, if anyone's ever curious, just go research Solomon's temple.
It was decked out in gold and gems and it was beautiful.
And he's saying even the lilies of the field are more beautiful because God created that.
And if he's capable of creating such a beautiful display of his glory, then he's capable of
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your everyday worries.
He's capable of your major, major worries.
Like he is capable.
He is the alpha and the omega.
He is the redeemer.
Like, and he's inviting us to take a look at that.
He's inviting us to be assured that we can be cared for just like all of creation has
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been cared for.
And he's asking, do you trust me in that?
And there are times where I have to remind myself I'm not trusting and I need to because
I have evidence all around me that he's powerful.
So much more powerful than anything I can wrap my brain around.
So I really don't have to worry.
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When I find myself when I'm worrying and in a ball of anxiety, what I've done is I've
made my situation bigger than I am.
And I have to get that back in the correct lens.
What's bigger, me or the situation?
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So whether it's, you know, again, just thinking through hospitals and mom's health and everything,
because that's been our chapter as of late, you know, if I'm in a hospital and I'm not
getting answers that I need, or you're calling insurance and just it's, you know, endless
phone calls and this, that and the other, you start getting filled with the anxiety
(26:04):
because you're tired.
You just want it to be over.
But you have to remind yourself what's bigger in this situation, me or the problem I'm facing.
And every single time, the answer is you're bigger than the situation.
But when I'm filled with anxiety, I'll make that situation bigger than what it is.
When the reality is God's not putting me in a situation to fix the situation.
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He's putting me in a situation to fix people.
So it's not, did I get this website built this, that or the other?
That's always, did I represent him well?
And did I love people?
Did I walk away?
And they said, Mike loved and Mike served, not did Mike fix the situation, like fix whatever
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issue was going on.
That's God's going to care about the other items first.
Far, far quicker than he's going to look at a calendar on a website and go, Hey, great
job.
You got that fixed.
I'm going to sit there because we're working with vendors that are unsaved people and so
on and so forth.
And they know the pressure of something not working.
(27:19):
And God's going, Hey, that's great.
You fixed the calendar, but did you love and did you serve?
And the answer is you can always love and you can always serve.
Mom and dad are our ministry.
There's you know, I used to serve in convalescent ministry.
Convalescent ministry was we would go to nursing homes on Sundays.
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And we would love on people, we would invite them to come to church.
We kind of had two teams.
One team was in the activity room doing a church service and the other team was going
around visiting people in their rooms for those that didn't want to come to church that
couldn't get out of bed, so on and so forth.
And they loved you.
They did.
And their face would light up when you walk in the room.
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And that's another story for another day.
But they were far more of a reward to me than I was to them at the end of the day.
And I didn't see that early and shame on me.
And you know, at the end of the day, they you can walk in and out of that place.
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And if they felt loved and they felt served, that's all God cared about.
And really, that's that's the way every interaction is with someone that, you know, calls on the
phone or, you know, we were talking about insurance earlier.
Is that insurance agent on the other end of the phone?
Does that person feel loved and do they feel served?
(28:40):
Well, that's very convicting.
Yeah.
Oh, believe me, I know.
I do not accomplish that well when I'm in the midst of anxiety.
And that's what I mean.
This is all easy for us to say.
But you have a Devo that you wrote on anxiety where you talk about arresting and replacing.
It's on DebMarcelese.com on your website.
(29:03):
Will you please link it in the notes?
I will try to do my very best to remember that.
I will.
But yeah, you talk about arresting and replacing.
That's where when you start to get overwhelmed and so on and so forth, you have to arrest
and replace.
Yeah, it's it's a preaching to yourself.
It's reminding yourself who's in charge, you know, and you can use scripture to do that.
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You can arrest a thought and say, no, no, no, that's not what the Bible says.
And you can you can give yourself a scripture.
But sometimes the scripture doesn't always come to mind.
And that's when you go back to like the basic of basics.
Who do I serve?
Who's in control?
How do I how do I give this over to you?
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Because I'm holding on way too tight and nothing is going my way.
And it's not supposed to.
It's supposed to go your way.
And it almost shifts you into it puts God in his proper place.
You're God and I'm not.
Your ways are not my ways.
And that's something that preaching to yourself is a spiritual discipline that really helps
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you get through some of the darkest things, because when you don't feed yourself the truth,
you are very susceptible to the devil's lies.
And the lies are always an indictment on who God is and who you are.
And they're becoming so prevalent these days.
My goodness, what percentage of of the posts that you read on social media or on Google
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or any of that do you think is the truth?
I mean, even even if it's even if it's got truth in it and it's worldly wisdom, it's
still worldly wisdom.
Right.
Worldly wisdom can be wise, but God is always wiser like worldly wisdom is, you know, man
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who laughs.
Yeah.
Who laughs last laughs best.
Right.
That that's the world's view of wisdom.
But God's view is, well, God always laughs last.
And you know, you can read things on social media, you can talk to people that have read
(31:19):
things on social media.
So many people get wound up.
They watch CNN all day or they watch Fox News all day and they just get wound up so tight.
Yeah, that'll make anyone go insane.
Who doesn't embellish one side or the other?
You know, there can be organizations out there that you absolutely love, but they're so many
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of them are just guilty of embellishing.
And it's so difficult to find that truth that God's word is that you always have to come
back to that.
So if you're feeling anxious, put down your phone, turn off your TV.
Yeah.
Because I think the things you feed yourself during your anxiety is going to make a big
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difference.
Oh, completely.
If you're trying to self soothe with distraction, and that's a go to for a lot of people, I'm
just going to turn on the TV, I'm going to veg out or I'm going to turn on the TV and
I'm going to fuel my fear with something that is telling me like, like the politics thing
is a great example.
(32:22):
You can fuel all your anger and all of your anxiety just by, you know, watching the rhetoric
that's happened during, you know, this last three, four months of election season.
I mean, sometimes it takes just stepping away from the insanity, stepping away from the
things that don't feed your soul.
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Go take a walk, go take a shower, go sit by the ocean, whatever it is that like really
helps you to regroup and start to talk to God because even during this election year,
I was like, the world's going down in flames, babe.
And I'm really anxious about it.
I mean, there was that one day I must have like, I don't know, I rattled off like 15
(33:06):
minutes of just, this is all happening so badly.
And you're like, Deb, take a deep breath.
God's still on the throne.
God's still on the throne.
You almost had to shake me into reality.
I literally think you read me a poem.
I wrote about your anxiety and all the topics.
That's how bad it was is you literally went and wrote a poem about all the things that
(33:30):
were giving you anxiety.
Oh gosh.
You spent that amount of time thinking about it that you actually wrote a poem.
And yeah, I was just so upset.
You know, so many times our worth gets caught up in the situation going the way we want
it to or not.
(33:50):
When in reality, imagine the thing that's giving you the most amount of anxiety right
now.
Anyone in our audience, just imagine that item that is giving you the most amount of
anxiety.
Then I want you to imagine the absolute worst case scenario coming true.
Okay.
That's not fun.
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Now I want to know what impact does that have on you making it to heaven?
Oh, is that worst case scenario coming true?
If you walk up and you go to God, Hey God, you put me you entrusted this to me.
And the absolute worst case scenario came true.
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Am I getting into heaven?
Yes or no?
Do you think God's going to, he'll be more, God is not going to be confused.
I can't say he'll be confused, but I'm going to use that word.
He'll be so confused by that type of question.
And it's the, it's not the confusion on the answer.
It's the confusion of how did you get turned into this ball of yarn where your brain thinks
(34:56):
like that?
I am yours and you are mine.
Amen.
That has nothing to do with the outcome of the situation.
So even if when I was trying to fix a calendar on a website, even if I had broken the entire
website and the website, when you went to it, had a big under construction sign on it,
that had to absolutely, that would have had no impact as to whether or not God would have
(35:20):
said, Michael, I love you.
You are, you're a good and faithful servant.
It would have had nothing to do with it.
And so many times we just make these situations so much bigger than they are.
And we get caught up in that and it becomes such a huge priority.
Yeah.
You said worth.
And I think that's a lot of what we battle with is, you know, worthiness.
(35:45):
And when you've already gotten, you've already gotten God to say, I love you daughter.
I love you son.
Can't you see by the cross and the resurrection that I love you?
Yeah.
I think we can get caught up in performance for worthiness.
You know, I want to fix this or I want to accomplish that.
(36:06):
And we've already been given that worthiness because of the blood of the lamb, because
it's already been given to us.
It's the great exchange.
Like you said, I often think about, you know, little Mike that's three years old running
up to my dad and I have a, I used to love dinosaurs when I was a kid.
I'd take and I'd stuff toilet paper in the back of my, my, my diaper.
(36:31):
So it looked like I had a tail coming out and everything.
And I run around the yard.
I just, I love dinosaurs and love Godzilla.
And I would always just imagine myself like three, four years old, you know, running up
to my dad and tearing a page out of my coloring book where I've colored dinosaurs and I'm
nowhere in the lines.
Do you think it made any difference what the painting looked like or do you think all the
(36:56):
meaning was in who it was from?
Yeah, it's, it's a coloring that I may have painted, you know, pink and purple polka
dotted dinosaurs as a kid, but I was a child of God and I did it for him.
He cares about that heart.
He could care less about what that picture looked like.
(37:19):
You think of your son, if he would have run up to you and his diapers and he colored something
for you and it was his favorite car and he did it.
Do you think you care for one second?
How horrible that thing looked?
No, are you going to put it right on the fridge because of who?
And I'm going to tell them how proud I am of him.
And it would be real.
(37:39):
Yeah, it would be.
It would be, you would be absolutely proud and you would absolutely feel the love that
my goodness, my child thought enough of me that he did this for me.
And, you know, we have to, when we're, when we're messing up and we're going outside the
lines, we have to remember it's not what the picture looks like.
It's who's doing it.
(37:59):
God's, God's proud.
And it's those images that I'll play in my head that helps me with that anxiety.
That's sweet.
Yeah.
I mean, he is God the father.
We can look at him as, you know, savior and king and all the yes, yes, yes, and amen.
And one of those things is father.
Yeah.
(38:19):
You know, he, he just, he is proud and it has nothing to do with outcome.
He's in the, he's in the business of changing hearts.
Yeah.
And so, and I know that comes hard for someone who could say, well, I didn't have a good
earthly father.
Oh, a hundred percent.
It's it's one of those things that just, um, that's the, the walking by faith is because
(38:44):
there are plenty of people that can say that.
Like my dad never cared if I made him a pitcher or my dad wasn't there for me or my dad abandoned
me.
How do you want me to call him heavenly father?
But it's one of those things that I truly believe because, you know, I see it in my
own kid's life.
You know, it's one of those acts of faith that God, I know eventually I will see father
(39:12):
as a whole new meaning that I didn't get here on earth because of who you are.
And the only way to really do that is to continue to seek his face because once you start to
see the beauty and the love and the grace and the mercy all through scriptures painted
for us of his character, you can trust, you can trust.
(39:34):
It just takes a little faith to go, okay, I don't understand this father thing, but
I'm going to trust you, you say it and you're going to make me see it.
You're going to make me see it in ways that I can't even imagine.
And even, you know, you'll always hear in the Bible, grace comes before peace.
Well, if, if peace is fully trusting God, then grace has to be experienced prior to
(39:59):
you trusting God.
And so you have to, you really have to wrestle with understanding the concept of grace.
We'll say things like grace is not getting what you deserve and so on and so forth, but
(40:19):
to truly understand what grace is, just get into prayer and start looking at all the sins
that you commit throughout the day and repent of those sins, but just look at all the things
that you mess up on and how God chooses to forget that.
(40:43):
Can you imagine a sin is money that you don't have?
And at the end of the day, you count up all the sins, you count up all these credits that
are on your credit card that you don't have grace for.
American Express isn't in the business of grace.
Yeah, that's true.
You know, nobody out there is in the business of grace except Christ.
(41:06):
And when you understand how big our debt is to Him and the peace that He's offering, when
you begin to wrap your brain around that level of grace, then the peace comes because you
have grace for other people.
So when you're in a tough situation and someone doesn't behave the way you think they should,
(41:28):
they don't respond the way you think they should, God will sit there and remind you
of what you just repented of and He'll say, hey, remember when you got angry?
Well, you didn't respond the way I've taught you to respond.
That's true.
And yet I've forgiven you.
So why don't you cut this person some slack?
(41:50):
And all of that, just all these things adding up, putting things in perspective, what's
bigger, me or the situation?
What am I here to do?
Am I here to fix problems or am I here to fix people?
Or love people and serve them, like you said.
That really hit home for me.
That was good.
(42:11):
That's how the gospel gets out.
It's showing the gospel, not just speaking of it, but being the hands and feet of Jesus,
which is love and service.
That's the capital C church that needs to step up and understand that.
Not that they're not, but people that sit in that sanctuary, at Calvary we do altar
(42:37):
calls at the end of every service.
If I'm with someone and I invite them and they come with me and they go forward during
that service, you may sit there and think, well, the pastor or Calvary chapel or this,
that, and the other gets credit for it.
But the reality is you probably paid a price of admission in that person's life.
(42:58):
You probably discipled them, offered them perspective.
They said, what is it about this person that's different than me?
I have anxiety and they don't.
They have a bigger burden than I do and yet they're in complete peace.
What is it about them?
And you ask that question.
And when you ask that question to me, I say, well, I have Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.
(43:22):
And eventually the invite to church comes and it's all of that discipleship that slowly
happens.
You're paying admission to speak into someone's life by your character, by how you show up
to do life, by who you, who you are.
And if you're filled with anxiety, who's going to look at you and say, I want that.
(43:45):
Right.
Why would I want what you have?
You're not any better off than I am.
Yeah.
So anxiety is one of those things that you have to get under control and it's probably
not something that's going to happen under your power.
It isn't.
It's going to be something that, that God is going to have to work with you through
(44:07):
prayer, through scripture, through, like you mentioned, arresting and replacing.
Right.
Can God perform miracles?
And the day you get saved, your anxiety goes away.
Yes, I do believe that.
But chances are probably pretty good that he wants to work on that with you.
Oh, sure.
So that you understand you're dependent upon him.
(44:30):
And then he gets the glory.
Yeah.
He gets the glory.
He gets that testimony.
Yeah.
He's asking us to work with him and he's willing to show us and he's willing to be with us
and pick us up when we fall down and say, come on, let's go.
You got this.
We can do this again.
You know, and that's a beautiful relationship.
(44:54):
And that's the part that I'm always just so intrigued by is that God wants a relationship
with us, that it's real and genuine.
And it isn't just, I read about you in a book and I follow a set of rules and I look a certain
way and I dress a certain way and I say all the right Christian words.
Like none of that is what he's looking for.
(45:16):
He genuinely wants to be in a relationship with him.
And why me Lord of all people?
Like you want to be in a relationship with me?
It just fascinates me.
And yet he loves me and he protects me and he forgives me when I don't always trust him
(45:37):
and that I'm anxious and you know.
And relationship is conversation.
So if you need to wrestle with God, then wrestle with him.
Right.
It's completely fair to sit and ask questions of God.
(45:59):
It's not fair to sit and demand answers or anything, but he loves it when we ask him
questions and we turn to him for answers.
So if you turn to God and if you're truly struggling with anxiety, turn to God and say,
you know, God, what role do you want me to play in this situation?
(46:19):
Especially in my past, I would respond through anger and anxiety and all sorts of not good
things.
How do you want me to show up in this situation going forward?
And his answer will be peace, love, grace, and the spirit.
(46:39):
Patience, kindness, self-control.
Do you want me full of anxiety and anger or do you want me here showing up in grace and
peace?
And we already know what his answer will be, but wrestle with him over that question.
You know, whatever your doubt is, man, if you've suffered from anxiety your entire life,
(47:05):
you're going to be sitting there during this podcast listening to this going, man, there
ain't no way.
I've had this since I was a little kid.
I just don't get it.
It's not adding up to me.
Well, don't just sit and think that while you're listening to the podcast.
Take that to God and go, God, this doesn't add up to me.
Right.
It's conversational.
Show me.
(47:26):
Show me why I've had this my whole life.
Show me where the root of the pain is because there's something that has happened that causes
anxiety.
It's a fear.
It's a fear of loss, a fear of pain, a fear of whatever it is.
There's something there and God wants to reveal that.
And you can't get that without asking God questions.
(47:51):
And that's where wisdom comes from.
It's God revealing things to you.
Your nature as a human being.
You're going to have wounds.
You're going to have patterns.
You're going to have all kinds of blind spots that he can begin to unveil to you that he'll
help you tackle.
Yeah.
(48:11):
I mean, I said that this weekend.
Like we were talking about something and I kept saying, I'm the common denominator.
Like I, this pattern keeps showing up and I'm the only one that's, I'm the common denominator.
So what is it about me, Lord?
Like what is it?
Show me because I want to be well and I want to be whole and I want to not feel this way
(48:32):
because it's counter to how you want me to behave and feel.
Show me what is, what is it about me?
And I think when you ask God these honest questions and you take accountability for
like, okay, this anxiety has shown up this way for this long.
(48:53):
And no matter where I am, this anxiety shows up.
There's something in me that needs to be healed.
And that's, that's my go-to all the time.
Like what is in me that needs to be healed because this is not Godly behavior and feeling,
you know, disappointment and then letting that lead to maybe unrighteous thoughts or
(49:17):
victim mentality or whatever snowball it could turn into.
That's not what God wants from me at all.
And so if I'm the common denominator, show me Lord, what is it about me that gets anxious?
What is it about me that feels rejected?
Or just the situation, not just you being the common denominator, but the situation
(49:38):
for me, it's things getting out of control.
When I feel helpless, that's when anxiety gets ratcheted up for me.
So not just you being the common denominator, but also the situation can help you identify
that and begin to tackle that.
Right?
(49:58):
So there are situations when I can be completely in control and I don't even understand it.
When things really get bad, I tend to calm down.
But when pressure is in situations that I feel like I should be in control or the situation
itself should be in control, but for some reason I get the sense that it's not, that's
(50:23):
when anxiety starts to attack me.
So it's not just me being the common denominator, but also that identifying that trait here.
Okay, another situation is coming up again where it feels like it's out of control.
It should be in control.
Okay, I always react this way when situations like this arise.
(50:46):
So God, how do I handle this?
I need grace and peace in this moment so that you get the glory.
You can have situational awareness to that level that you can preemptive strike the anxiety
with those levels of prayer and meditation going into it.
(51:07):
It changes everything.
So yeah, just it can be a frustrating and scary thing.
It can be, I don't know, a long tunnel that feels like there's no light at the end when
you're wrestling with anxiety, especially these days.
My gosh, you turn on the television.
(51:27):
Who doesn't have anxiety?
Right.
Go visit my family or even your parents and they all have one of these news stations on.
The minute you walk in the house, the minute they wake up in the morning and you can't
escape it and you just start, I start filling up with anxiety because the news is just so
filled with it.
(51:47):
And okay, here we go.
What are you going to do?
You're in that situation.
Have that conversation with God so that anxiety, that situation is put in the proper perspective.
What's bigger?
What's the problem or the situation?
Let me ask you, what do you do?
Because I know sometimes I get this like visceral feeling like, you know, a heaviness in my
(52:12):
chest or it's a very tangible, you can feel anxiety.
It's not just a state of mind.
It's physiological.
What do you do?
Because I sometimes don't know what to do.
I mean, yeah, I can go take a walk and sometimes that helps.
What do you do?
I don't know.
Sometimes.
Yeah, I just when I'm on top of the situation and I recognize myself boiling up, yeah, it's
(52:38):
removing myself from the equation for five minutes, five hours, whatever it is, enough
time to get myself with God and have those conversations or go through the exercises
to get my mental state back to where it needs to be.
(53:00):
Sometimes again, when those situations get ratcheted up, I don't have, I'm not going
to walk in wisdom.
I'm going to walk in quick decisions, poor decisions, not calmness.
You know, when Navy SEALs get trained, pardon, even just police officers, they get put in
(53:21):
tremendous situations.
It even reminds me of a prayer.
Our mentor, Pastor Bill, will occasionally reference it.
I think it was like a Catholic priest.
Somebody came up with the prayer, God, God, don't, what is it?
Don't, don't take my burden, increase my strength in my back or something.
Don't lighten my burdens.
(53:42):
Give me a stronger back.
Help me carry more.
Help me have that emotional and spiritual strength that I don't have right now.
Help me build that.
Like you're breaking down muscles at a gym.
Right.
And that prayer is so, that's, those are dangerous prayers.
(54:02):
People like, not dangerous in a way that God isn't in control and God can't teach you,
but understand those are not light words.
Those are, those are heavy words.
Those are back busting words.
You know, when you pray something like that, understand that in order to get a stronger
(54:23):
back, there's going to be some bruises.
There's going to be like,
There's going to be a heavier burden.
It's not an easy thing to pray.
It's not an easy thing to receive the answer to that prayer.
What really puts things into perspective is the after I've gotten the stronger back, what
is the glory you get from it?
(54:43):
Because if you just look at the heavier load, it could be overwhelming.
It's where do you get the glory and how does this life skill that you've taught me from
carrying a heavy burden help someone else in the future or help me in the future?
Yeah.
What, there's a kink in me that you're working out God.
(55:06):
What is that kink?
Help me work on it.
And once we've gotten that behind us, what's the next kink?
Right.
When you go to the gym, again, you reach one set of goals.
What doesn't mean you stop.
Right.
What's next?
Yeah.
Are we doing more reps?
Are we doing heavier weight?
(55:27):
What's next?
Yeah.
You know, to reach all of your fitness goals.
And then once you get there, how you got to keep going to the gym.
Otherwise they fade immediately.
So yeah, just that, just the prayers of help me carry a heavier burden than I'm capable
of carrying right now on my own.
(55:48):
Yeah.
One of my favorite songs, it's an old hymn called Indelible Grace.
And it pretty much talks about, Lord, you know, I'm praying this prayer for grace and
faith.
And then the singer of the hymn talks about like, I just thought in some favored hour,
(56:08):
you just give me grace and peace.
But no, instead, I feel like I'm being tortured.
I mean, it doesn't say that.
Like, the way that it's written is like, you've crossed every fair scheme that I've had, and
you've laid me low.
And I just hear like that song playing in the back of my head.
(56:33):
And then at the end of the song, God replies, this is how I answer prayers of grace and
peace is I lay you low.
I get rid of the things that you're going to for earthly pleasures, and I give you me.
And man, I've played that song over and over and over again in some of my darkest hours,
(56:56):
because I know that prayer needs to be answered.
And I know that prayer hurts.
It's a beautiful pain, because at the end of it all, I've gotten more of Jesus.
And it's not easy.
Like I don't think the Christian walk is easy.
It's just it's it's worthy, but it's not easy.
(57:20):
And it's it's a marathon.
Yes.
And you can get worn out.
Yes.
Yes.
Yeah.
Some wise person somewhere once said the problem with life is it's so daily.
And isn't that true?
You know, we can we can sit and we can have a season working on anxiety.
(57:42):
But if you're not ready to run a marathon, you can put something to bed and it turn around
and be right back in your life.
If you're not pulling continue, if you don't continue to pull out the weeds.
Oh, yeah.
And anxiety is one of those things.
I you have to be at just complete peace with God and just full trust in him and the people
(58:07):
that you and I look up to the most walk in complete peace with God.
I don't see our mentor, Pastor Bill suffering from anxiety.
We met Pastor Joe Foch.
Pastor Brian.
Yeah, Pastor Brian.
Yeah, those guys, they just don't walk in anxiety.
(58:30):
Pastor Doug at Calvary, Fort Lauderdale.
Yeah, man.
What you see is what you get.
Oh, for sure.
He does not walk in anxiety.
For sure.
And they are all of these men that we're naming have tremendous prayer life.
They they do it and they're they're running a marathon.
And unfortunately, that's the game of anxiety is you got to be ready for a marathon because
(58:58):
if you sprint, you're going to you're going to run yourself out.
You're going to be exhausted.
And all of a sudden you don't have the energy and you're worse off in the anxiety than you
were at the beginning because you're so winded.
Well, yeah.
And I think a sprint is us in our own strength and a marathon is us being carried by God.
One hundred percent, one hundred percent, and you got to be ready for that because it
(59:20):
is daily.
How often do you take up your cross?
Every day.
Daily.
Right.
So the problem with life is it's so daily.
The problem with that saying is it is true.
And we do have to die to self every single day.
And anxiety is one of those things that if we do, it will.
(59:43):
It will go away because God will have that and our identity will be wrapped up in Christ
and who he created us to be and not in.
Why isn't the calendar on the website working?
Performance.
Why are all of a sudden my identity is caught up in a calendar on a website and I'm on conference
(01:00:03):
calls and it's not going the way I want and it's not fixed fast enough.
And my gosh, can people find the baptism tomorrow?
Yeah, God sitting there going, are you representing me in love and peace?
And are you serving even in the midst of all this chaos?
So that's that's the question that God's after.
And that's his perspective on changing us.
(01:00:26):
Yeah, it's not has nothing to do with the calendar on a website.
It's how are you representing me when a pressure is being applied when you used to be filled
with anxiety?
How are you now?
If that needle is not moved, right?
He's looking for transformation.
100% and he's willing to give us transformation.
We just need to be willing.
(01:00:47):
Yep.
100%.
Yeah.
So I'm glad we talked about this.
And really what you said about, you know, am I loving and am I serving that that's golden.
I'm taking that into my my daily life.
I I'm so glad we have microphones in front of us.
I mean, when else would I have heard that?
Who knows?
(01:01:08):
But I see you live that out, though.
So amen to that.
That minister to my heart, honey.
Good.
Glad to hear it.
Well, thank you guys for joining us.
Yeah, anxiety is one of those things.
It's one of the highest attended classes at Calvary Chapel these days.
I can't remember the exact name of the class.
It might just be dealing with anxiety, but the theme of it is for sure anxiety is one
(01:01:34):
of the highest attended classes we have offered right now and it has been since covid.
So we know that a lot of people are out there dealing with anxiety on one level or another.
So definitely something worth talking about.
It is.
Can people take that class online?
We do have it on our resources, kind of like our evergreen always their website, resources.calvaryftl.org.
(01:01:59):
We do have the anxiety class.
I might have to take that.
Yeah, recorded there for people as a resource.
So you can certainly head over there and check that out.
But for now, we appreciate you guys tuning in.
Yeah, thanks, guys.
Thanks so much.
We will see you in the next episode.
(01:02:20):
Bye now.
Hey guys, welcome to another episode of detours.
(00:24):
I'm here with my gorgeous wife, Deb.
Oh, hi guys.
And we are here ready to talk to you about the issue of anxiety.
Yeah.
It has been overwhelming coming out of an election, all sorts of things on the backside
of a pandemic.
My goodness, where isn't there anxiety?
(00:46):
Yeah, that's true.
It's everywhere.
And it's easy to fall into that pattern.
And so I thought this would be a great topic for tonight.
Yeah.
It definitely is.
We don't have numbers since the pandemic at Calvary.
Maybe they're out there, but I don't know what they are.
But heading into the pandemic, 23% of church leaders had anxiety and 33% of Christians
(01:17):
had anxiety.
And that was going into, this was done in the study was done in about 2018.
And the pandemic hit early 2020.
I can't tell you what the numbers are.
I don't know what they are, but I do know that biblical counseling is up 300%.
So whatever that translates to, I'm not going to triple those prior numbers that I gave
(01:40):
you, but there's definitely going to be a correlation there.
So Christians are not immune to something like this, but we are told to put on the armor
of God and that can be used against anxiety.
Anxiety is a weapon that the enemy uses, but as we know, no weapon formed against us shall
(02:01):
prosper but we need to put on that armor of God in order to fight against anxiety.
Yeah, that's true.
The Bible talks about be anxious for nothing, fear not, and over and over.
It isn't just one or two scripture, it's over and over and over.
(02:22):
God reminds us to not fear, to not be anxious and He knows we need the constant reminder.
It's not like He's saying it once or twice and even once or twice would be something
that we could follow and go, okay, Lord, you said this, but it's constant.
And you know, even Him being a man, He experienced everything that we go through.
(02:46):
And although it doesn't talk about Jesus being anxious, you can see where if any one of us
walk through His trial and His life that we probably would have been anxious.
So He's a remarkable example of relying on prayer and relying on God to walk Him through
(03:09):
some of the hardest things any human being has ever faced.
Yeah, to just understand what Jesus' prayer life would have been like.
It actually didn't occur to me until I started watching The Chosen.
And in The Chosen, many times you see Jesus saying, hey, I'm going to go be with my Father.
(03:30):
And you think about it, if His ministry was a little over three years, the fact that the
Gospels are so short, I think it's Matthew tells us that, no, I think it's John that
tells us that there were so many other miracles that He performed that if they documented
them all that...
The books couldn't even contain them.
(03:50):
Yeah.
Yeah, I think it was the Gospel of John that ends that way.
But He does spend a tremendous amount of time in prayer.
Even in the Garden of Gethsemane, can you imagine the amount of pressure Jesus had to
have been under to bring Him to tears?
Well, He sweat drops of blood.
This is a real medical thing.
(04:11):
You can look it up.
It's just incredible.
The amount of stress that the body is under in order for your blood vessels to break through
the skin barrier and actually bleed is just remarkable.
Yeah.
So, that type of pressure is a tremendous cause for anxiety, significantly less pressure
(04:35):
than that.
Each one of us has mental capability to handle more or less pressure.
So to use Jesus, yeah, it's not even fair to use Him, but He is the measuring stick,
if you will, that we have to hold ourselves against to constantly see, are we walking
in a straight line or are we curved?
(04:56):
But it's also an encouragement to know that He's with us.
And He understands.
Yes.
He can relate.
We have a High Priest that can empathize, can feel what we feel.
And there's no condemnation in that, but He does encourage us to come back to Him.
And I think one of the things, I had an early morning walk, I don't know, months ago, and
(05:23):
I was very anxious and I was given an assignment to write a Devo on anxiety.
And God always uses my writing assignments to really hold up a mirror to what I'm writing
about and to hold me accountable to what I say.
And it was on anxiety and I felt so anxious that day.
(05:47):
And I'm walking around just in our cul-de-sac over and over again and I hear God say, you
can write about it, but the reality is you don't trust me.
Man, that hit me like a ton of bricks.
Oh gosh, Mike.
(06:08):
And I paused, I actually stopped walking for just a second and I paused and I said what
I think is probably the most incredibly honest and humble prayer in all of the Bible is,
I believe Lord, but help me with my unbelief.
Like, I believe.
(06:29):
And so I think that when I was confronted with that, I was dealing with a lot of medical
things for mom.
I was dealing with things not going my way and I guess in reality I was trusting my outcome
instead of God's outcome and His is always better.
(06:50):
His is always better.
But I think the root of some of the anxiety that I felt is I say I trust, but when the
rubber hits the road, why else would I feel anxious?
If I truly believed what I said I believed, then I wouldn't be half as anxious as I am.
(07:11):
And so it was very convicting, but in a loving way.
And it just kind of brought me back to what am I going to say about this now?
What can I say about how I actually feel?
Well, I have to tell myself the truth.
You're in control of mom and dad's medical.
You're in control and I'm not.
And you want better for them than I want.
(07:34):
And so I had to kind of preach to myself like, hey, this isn't in my hands.
This is in your hands.
Yeah, distrust.
I often think trust is peace.
If we fully trust in God, we will have peace.
So distrust means there's something off.
There's something ajar here.
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And what's interesting is my trust score on a scale of one to ten, my trust towards God
changes depending on the topic.
It's really incredible.
I'll sit there and if I can be perfectly honest with finances, my trust is lower than, say,
(08:16):
things like my personal health or job security or this, that, and the other.
There are areas that God needs to work on with me.
One of the areas where I struggle, I work, I design websites and all sorts of digital
things.
And when something goes wrong, maybe a website goes down.
(08:42):
And we just had an incident lately where our calendar stopped working and just this time
kept ticking and the calendar's not working.
The anxiety level started to go up and up and up because we had a baptism coming up
that Saturday and no one could find the information for the baptism because it was on the calendar.
And that was a long day.
(09:02):
Yeah.
And what's more important than a baptism?
It was more than a day.
It was, you know, it was on my radar for longer than that.
But the day you're referencing was Friday when the baptism was Saturday.
That Friday was filled with a tremendous amount of stress for me going, how are these people
going to find this baptism?
And what's more important first is salvation and up there with that as baptism.
(09:26):
And so the stress and anxiety of getting it fixed and getting it back working again was
just tremendous.
And in reality, God's got to fight that spiritual battle.
I do believe that to have been a spiritual attack.
Oh, I agree.
With the website going down or with the calendar going down, the days leading into something
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so critically important.
And I needed to have better trust in God that he was going to help get this fixed and fight
that on a spiritual battlefield.
So it was a learning lesson for me.
Did you pray along the way on that Friday when things were starting to fall apart?
(10:09):
I did, but I didn't have the awareness to take myself out of the situation.
What needed to happen was I needed to maybe like you go on a walk.
I needed to, I do my best praying and all of that when I'm in the shower because of
the white noise of just the water.
So if I had just taken a quick 10, 15 minute shower just for the sole purpose of literally
(10:35):
going in there to pray, something along those lines, I think I would have dealt with it
significantly better, but I did not have the emotional intelligence because when you start
getting upset and the pressure starts getting applied more and more, wisdom comes when you're
calm, not when you're anxious.
(10:57):
That's true.
So I was not in the right state of mind.
Phone calls kept coming in, trying different solutions to get it to work, so on and so
forth and part of being a web guy is people call you when things go wrong and it's your
job to fix it.
I don't hear anything when everything's good and everything's working.
(11:20):
I really kind of only hear from people when things aren't working.
That's not fun.
No, and it became part of my identity.
I was the guy that fixes things because I never hear from anyone unless they need something
fixed.
Howie, can we stop, do you get mad that that's kind of where you're at, like that you're
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the fix-it guy?
Is there any bit of you that's like, I don't want to be the fix-it guy.
I don't mind being the fix-it guy.
Everybody has a role that they have to play.
There are times where I have to be careful because I will get upset for things like a
(12:05):
lack of gratitude.
Everyone will come to me and say something's broken or they need something, they need a
new webpage, they need a new email.
We go through a tremendous amount of work and there's no gratitude on the other side
and I'll find myself getting a little upset.
That's where I have to go to God and go, hey, I'm working for you.
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Amen, that's true.
I know that you're sitting up there and you're proud of me, but that is a discipline that
I have to hold myself accountable for, for sure.
No, I appreciate the honesty because that could really turn quickly into almost even
bitterness if you're not careful.
For sure.
Yeah.
(12:45):
For sure.
Yeah.
It's interesting working at a church.
I used to work for a company called Accenture and they're an agency, a very large agency.
I wasn't prepared for certain things working at a church and one of those things is just
sheer knowledge gap.
What I mean by that is somebody that comes in and they work in, let's say for example,
(13:09):
I don't know, men's ministry, their sole job is ministering and discipling men.
They know nothing about what it takes to digitally execute something.
Where if I walked into a meeting with Accenture, it was filled with all sorts of people from
Disney and Google and this, that and the other.
They all knew what it took.
(13:29):
So sometimes we get asked to do things and we're like, holy smokes, that's a lot of work.
Are we sure this is needed?
And this, that and the other, we get convinced that yeah, it's needed and we put in the effort
and on the other side of it, you can find yourself getting bitter when gratitude doesn't
come and that's when you have to absolutely go to Jesus and go, hey man, that was the
(13:55):
website is my ministry and it's my ministry to you.
Please help my attitude improve because I know you have me here for a reason.
And that's really ultimately what it all boils down to is God having this very personal relationship
with us and everything that we do is played honestly on a stage for one, for Him.
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And it doesn't matter whether it's work or marriage or friendship or caregiving is ultimately
like, He really is who we're serving.
And when we put that into perspective, it really is, it gives us so much more purpose
and so much more desire to do well.
(14:41):
And also there's this grace that comes with God that, you know, humans don't always give,
right?
It's like, God is willing to say, it's okay, son, go and rest, go and rest.
I see what you've done for me.
Go and rest, daughter.
I know what you're doing in your caregiving and He's just so gracious to us, honestly.
(15:04):
Yeah.
And I think people that wrestle with anxiety for the reasons, at least that I wrestle with
anxiety, the best passage that I've found, I know you have one, I think it's in the book
of Matthew that you'd like to read.
For me, I actually read Isaiah 53, and that may not make sense.
(15:29):
But pay attention to the pronouns.
When you read through Isaiah 53, and you'll notice all the pronouns are completely backwards.
Isaiah 53, you're talking about the passage of prophesying Messiah coming?
Yeah, believe it or not.
Wow.
Do tell.
(15:50):
Yeah, so if you're wrestling with anxiety, and you really probably don't understand what
grace is, if you're wrestling with anxiety.
So like, for example, I'll start in verse three, when I read the word he here, everything
(16:11):
is referring to Jesus and Isaiah 53.
I'll start in verse three, he is despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and
acquainted with grief.
And we hit it as it were our faces from him.
He was despised, and we esteemed him not.
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All of that should be the other way around.
Every place that I said he should be us, and every time that I said we, it should be him.
Really he hath bore our griefs and carried our sorrows.
Yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God and afflicted.
(16:56):
But he was wounded for our transgressions.
He was bruised for our iniquities.
The chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes we are healed.
It is not our stripes that heal us.
God has already done the work, and when you begin to understand what that means, you begin
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to understand the concept of grace.
Hallelujah.
And you know, it's one of the verses that always just baffles me in one sense, and yet
I'm so grateful.
And another sense in the Bible is Isaiah 53.10.
Yet it pleased the Lord to bruise him.
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He hath put him to grief.
When thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall see his seed.
He shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand.
So God took pleasure.
It pleased him to bruise Jesus for our iniquities.
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And when you begin to understand what that is, what grace is, that really helps ease
anxiety.
Well, unpack that for the person that's listening going, well, that doesn't even sound nice.
Like explain how much depth there is to that so that people who are just hearing that maybe
(18:28):
for the very first time can really grasp what that means.
It pleased him.
Why did it please him?
A price had to be paid.
And it was a price that we all know that we couldn't pay.
I don't have wallets deep enough.
Right.
You know, it's when I buy a house, I have to finance that house and pay that house over
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decades.
Jesus sat there and paid cash for every single one of his people.
And everything that I did wrong, it's the great exchange.
When you accept Jesus into your life, he rules over every single aspect.
He should rule over every single aspect of your life.
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And the great exchange is everywhere that you fall short, you were once uninvited, and
now you're invited.
Yes.
You were once an orphan and now you are in the family.
All of that, everything that Christ did for us, when you begin to look at that, there
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is nothing this world has to threaten us with.
Nothing.
And so, all the good aspects of Jesus was accounted to me and the worst of me, he became.
And the worst of me includes when something goes wrong with a website and my anxiety starts
(20:05):
bubbling up or we've been at the hospital for three or four days with mom and we're
relaxing in horribly awkward chairs, eating really bad food and you're not sleeping and
you have a temper because you've been uncomfortable and you're completely exhausted.
(20:31):
Whatever it is, whatever my shortcoming is today, he's exchanged that.
And when you meditate on that, meditation means become hyper aware, become hyper aware
of the great exchange that Jesus did in your life, the anxiety starts to fade away.
(20:54):
Yeah, it's an exchange of anxiety for assurance, assurance that you're his and that he loves
us.
I think my go-to verse on anxiety and the one I was writing about when I actually had
my morning talk with the Lord was Matthew 6, 25 through 34.
(21:18):
And it's going to be very familiar for people who have read this over and over in the gospel,
but it's one of those things where you're like, okay, I can read right past this because
I've read it so many times, but again, it's that meditating on it that really counts.
Therefore, I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat, what you will
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drink nor about your body, what you will put on.
Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?
Look at the birds of the air.
They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns and yet your heavenly father feeds them.
Are you not more valuable than they?
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And which of you being anxious can add a single hour to his lifespan?
Why are you anxious about clothing?
Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow.
They neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all of his glory was not arrayed
(22:23):
like one of these.
But if God so clothe the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow thrown in
the oven, will he not much more clothe you?
Oh, ye of little faith.
Therefore, be not anxious saying, what shall we eat, what shall we drink, what shall we
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wear?
The Gentiles seek after these things and your heavenly father knows that you need them all.
But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness and all of these things will
be added to you.
Therefore, do not be anxious for tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself.
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Sufficient for the day is its own troubles.
And I just love that verse because he's talking about everyday anxieties, things that we are
consumed with every single day.
Not the big major things, but the small things that are just always creeping in the back
of your head.
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You know, your to-do list, your house, your home, your kids, your job.
It's not like he's even talking about big major life changes.
And I love that he invites us to really look at creation and the splendor of creation as
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his complete and utter control of things.
Like when you look at a sunset or when you look at the birds, and he's right, they don't
care, they don't think about where they're going to get their next meal.
And even the flowers, comparing them to Solomon's temple.
Solomon's temple was one of the most magnificent structures in human history.
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I mean, if anyone's ever curious, just go research Solomon's temple.
It was decked out in gold and gems and it was beautiful.
And he's saying even the lilies of the field are more beautiful because God created that.
And if he's capable of creating such a beautiful display of his glory, then he's capable of
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your everyday worries.
He's capable of your major, major worries.
Like he is capable.
He is the alpha and the omega.
He is the redeemer.
Like, and he's inviting us to take a look at that.
He's inviting us to be assured that we can be cared for just like all of creation has
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been cared for.
And he's asking, do you trust me in that?
And there are times where I have to remind myself I'm not trusting and I need to because
I have evidence all around me that he's powerful.
So much more powerful than anything I can wrap my brain around.
So I really don't have to worry.
(25:19):
When I find myself when I'm worrying and in a ball of anxiety, what I've done is I've
made my situation bigger than I am.
And I have to get that back in the correct lens.
What's bigger, me or the situation?
(25:42):
So whether it's, you know, again, just thinking through hospitals and mom's health and everything,
because that's been our chapter as of late, you know, if I'm in a hospital and I'm not
getting answers that I need, or you're calling insurance and just it's, you know, endless
phone calls and this, that and the other, you start getting filled with the anxiety
(26:04):
because you're tired.
You just want it to be over.
But you have to remind yourself what's bigger in this situation, me or the problem I'm facing.
And every single time, the answer is you're bigger than the situation.
But when I'm filled with anxiety, I'll make that situation bigger than what it is.
When the reality is God's not putting me in a situation to fix the situation.
(26:30):
He's putting me in a situation to fix people.
So it's not, did I get this website built this, that or the other?
That's always, did I represent him well?
And did I love people?
Did I walk away?
And they said, Mike loved and Mike served, not did Mike fix the situation, like fix whatever
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issue was going on.
That's God's going to care about the other items first.
Far, far quicker than he's going to look at a calendar on a website and go, Hey, great
job.
You got that fixed.
I'm going to sit there because we're working with vendors that are unsaved people and so
on and so forth.
And they know the pressure of something not working.
(27:19):
And God's going, Hey, that's great.
You fixed the calendar, but did you love and did you serve?
And the answer is you can always love and you can always serve.
Mom and dad are our ministry.
There's you know, I used to serve in convalescent ministry.
Convalescent ministry was we would go to nursing homes on Sundays.
(27:39):
And we would love on people, we would invite them to come to church.
We kind of had two teams.
One team was in the activity room doing a church service and the other team was going
around visiting people in their rooms for those that didn't want to come to church that
couldn't get out of bed, so on and so forth.
And they loved you.
They did.
And their face would light up when you walk in the room.
(27:59):
And that's another story for another day.
But they were far more of a reward to me than I was to them at the end of the day.
And I didn't see that early and shame on me.
And you know, at the end of the day, they you can walk in and out of that place.
(28:19):
And if they felt loved and they felt served, that's all God cared about.
And really, that's that's the way every interaction is with someone that, you know, calls on the
phone or, you know, we were talking about insurance earlier.
Is that insurance agent on the other end of the phone?
Does that person feel loved and do they feel served?
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Well, that's very convicting.
Yeah.
Oh, believe me, I know.
I do not accomplish that well when I'm in the midst of anxiety.
And that's what I mean.
This is all easy for us to say.
But you have a Devo that you wrote on anxiety where you talk about arresting and replacing.
It's on DebMarcelese.com on your website.
(29:03):
Will you please link it in the notes?
I will try to do my very best to remember that.
I will.
But yeah, you talk about arresting and replacing.
That's where when you start to get overwhelmed and so on and so forth, you have to arrest
and replace.
Yeah, it's it's a preaching to yourself.
It's reminding yourself who's in charge, you know, and you can use scripture to do that.
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You can arrest a thought and say, no, no, no, that's not what the Bible says.
And you can you can give yourself a scripture.
But sometimes the scripture doesn't always come to mind.
And that's when you go back to like the basic of basics.
Who do I serve?
Who's in control?
How do I how do I give this over to you?
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Because I'm holding on way too tight and nothing is going my way.
And it's not supposed to.
It's supposed to go your way.
And it almost shifts you into it puts God in his proper place.
You're God and I'm not.
Your ways are not my ways.
And that's something that preaching to yourself is a spiritual discipline that really helps
(30:15):
you get through some of the darkest things, because when you don't feed yourself the truth,
you are very susceptible to the devil's lies.
And the lies are always an indictment on who God is and who you are.
And they're becoming so prevalent these days.
My goodness, what percentage of of the posts that you read on social media or on Google
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or any of that do you think is the truth?
I mean, even even if it's even if it's got truth in it and it's worldly wisdom, it's
still worldly wisdom.
Right.
Worldly wisdom can be wise, but God is always wiser like worldly wisdom is, you know, man
(30:58):
who laughs.
Yeah.
Who laughs last laughs best.
Right.
That that's the world's view of wisdom.
But God's view is, well, God always laughs last.
And you know, you can read things on social media, you can talk to people that have read
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things on social media.
So many people get wound up.
They watch CNN all day or they watch Fox News all day and they just get wound up so tight.
Yeah, that'll make anyone go insane.
Who doesn't embellish one side or the other?
You know, there can be organizations out there that you absolutely love, but they're so many
(31:40):
of them are just guilty of embellishing.
And it's so difficult to find that truth that God's word is that you always have to come
back to that.
So if you're feeling anxious, put down your phone, turn off your TV.
Yeah.
Because I think the things you feed yourself during your anxiety is going to make a big
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difference.
Oh, completely.
If you're trying to self soothe with distraction, and that's a go to for a lot of people, I'm
just going to turn on the TV, I'm going to veg out or I'm going to turn on the TV and
I'm going to fuel my fear with something that is telling me like, like the politics thing
is a great example.
(32:22):
You can fuel all your anger and all of your anxiety just by, you know, watching the rhetoric
that's happened during, you know, this last three, four months of election season.
I mean, sometimes it takes just stepping away from the insanity, stepping away from the
things that don't feed your soul.
(32:43):
Go take a walk, go take a shower, go sit by the ocean, whatever it is that like really
helps you to regroup and start to talk to God because even during this election year,
I was like, the world's going down in flames, babe.
And I'm really anxious about it.
I mean, there was that one day I must have like, I don't know, I rattled off like 15
(33:06):
minutes of just, this is all happening so badly.
And you're like, Deb, take a deep breath.
God's still on the throne.
God's still on the throne.
You almost had to shake me into reality.
I literally think you read me a poem.
I wrote about your anxiety and all the topics.
That's how bad it was is you literally went and wrote a poem about all the things that
(33:30):
were giving you anxiety.
Oh gosh.
You spent that amount of time thinking about it that you actually wrote a poem.
And yeah, I was just so upset.
You know, so many times our worth gets caught up in the situation going the way we want
it to or not.
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When in reality, imagine the thing that's giving you the most amount of anxiety right
now.
Anyone in our audience, just imagine that item that is giving you the most amount of
anxiety.
Then I want you to imagine the absolute worst case scenario coming true.
Okay.
That's not fun.
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Now I want to know what impact does that have on you making it to heaven?
Oh, is that worst case scenario coming true?
If you walk up and you go to God, Hey God, you put me you entrusted this to me.
And the absolute worst case scenario came true.
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Am I getting into heaven?
Yes or no?
Do you think God's going to, he'll be more, God is not going to be confused.
I can't say he'll be confused, but I'm going to use that word.
He'll be so confused by that type of question.
And it's the, it's not the confusion on the answer.
It's the confusion of how did you get turned into this ball of yarn where your brain thinks
(34:56):
like that?
I am yours and you are mine.
Amen.
That has nothing to do with the outcome of the situation.
So even if when I was trying to fix a calendar on a website, even if I had broken the entire
website and the website, when you went to it, had a big under construction sign on it,
that had to absolutely, that would have had no impact as to whether or not God would have
(35:20):
said, Michael, I love you.
You are, you're a good and faithful servant.
It would have had nothing to do with it.
And so many times we just make these situations so much bigger than they are.
And we get caught up in that and it becomes such a huge priority.
Yeah.
You said worth.
And I think that's a lot of what we battle with is, you know, worthiness.
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And when you've already gotten, you've already gotten God to say, I love you daughter.
I love you son.
Can't you see by the cross and the resurrection that I love you?
Yeah.
I think we can get caught up in performance for worthiness.
You know, I want to fix this or I want to accomplish that.
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And we've already been given that worthiness because of the blood of the lamb, because
it's already been given to us.
It's the great exchange.
Like you said, I often think about, you know, little Mike that's three years old running
up to my dad and I have a, I used to love dinosaurs when I was a kid.
I'd take and I'd stuff toilet paper in the back of my, my, my diaper.
(36:31):
So it looked like I had a tail coming out and everything.
And I run around the yard.
I just, I love dinosaurs and love Godzilla.
And I would always just imagine myself like three, four years old, you know, running up
to my dad and tearing a page out of my coloring book where I've colored dinosaurs and I'm
nowhere in the lines.
Do you think it made any difference what the painting looked like or do you think all the
(36:56):
meaning was in who it was from?
Yeah, it's, it's a coloring that I may have painted, you know, pink and purple polka
dotted dinosaurs as a kid, but I was a child of God and I did it for him.
He cares about that heart.
He could care less about what that picture looked like.
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You think of your son, if he would have run up to you and his diapers and he colored something
for you and it was his favorite car and he did it.
Do you think you care for one second?
How horrible that thing looked?
No, are you going to put it right on the fridge because of who?
And I'm going to tell them how proud I am of him.
And it would be real.
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Yeah, it would be.
It would be, you would be absolutely proud and you would absolutely feel the love that
my goodness, my child thought enough of me that he did this for me.
And, you know, we have to, when we're, when we're messing up and we're going outside the
lines, we have to remember it's not what the picture looks like.
It's who's doing it.
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God's, God's proud.
And it's those images that I'll play in my head that helps me with that anxiety.
That's sweet.
Yeah.
I mean, he is God the father.
We can look at him as, you know, savior and king and all the yes, yes, yes, and amen.
And one of those things is father.
Yeah.
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You know, he, he just, he is proud and it has nothing to do with outcome.
He's in the, he's in the business of changing hearts.
Yeah.
And so, and I know that comes hard for someone who could say, well, I didn't have a good
earthly father.
Oh, a hundred percent.
It's it's one of those things that just, um, that's the, the walking by faith is because
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there are plenty of people that can say that.
Like my dad never cared if I made him a pitcher or my dad wasn't there for me or my dad abandoned
me.
How do you want me to call him heavenly father?
But it's one of those things that I truly believe because, you know, I see it in my
own kid's life.
You know, it's one of those acts of faith that God, I know eventually I will see father
(39:12):
as a whole new meaning that I didn't get here on earth because of who you are.
And the only way to really do that is to continue to seek his face because once you start to
see the beauty and the love and the grace and the mercy all through scriptures painted
for us of his character, you can trust, you can trust.
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It just takes a little faith to go, okay, I don't understand this father thing, but
I'm going to trust you, you say it and you're going to make me see it.
You're going to make me see it in ways that I can't even imagine.
And even, you know, you'll always hear in the Bible, grace comes before peace.
Well, if, if peace is fully trusting God, then grace has to be experienced prior to
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you trusting God.
And so you have to, you really have to wrestle with understanding the concept of grace.
We'll say things like grace is not getting what you deserve and so on and so forth, but
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to truly understand what grace is, just get into prayer and start looking at all the sins
that you commit throughout the day and repent of those sins, but just look at all the things
that you mess up on and how God chooses to forget that.
(40:43):
Can you imagine a sin is money that you don't have?
And at the end of the day, you count up all the sins, you count up all these credits that
are on your credit card that you don't have grace for.
American Express isn't in the business of grace.
Yeah, that's true.
You know, nobody out there is in the business of grace except Christ.
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And when you understand how big our debt is to Him and the peace that He's offering, when
you begin to wrap your brain around that level of grace, then the peace comes because you
have grace for other people.
So when you're in a tough situation and someone doesn't behave the way you think they should,
(41:28):
they don't respond the way you think they should, God will sit there and remind you
of what you just repented of and He'll say, hey, remember when you got angry?
Well, you didn't respond the way I've taught you to respond.
That's true.
And yet I've forgiven you.
So why don't you cut this person some slack?
(41:50):
And all of that, just all these things adding up, putting things in perspective, what's
bigger, me or the situation?
What am I here to do?
Am I here to fix problems or am I here to fix people?
Or love people and serve them, like you said.
That really hit home for me.
That was good.
(42:11):
That's how the gospel gets out.
It's showing the gospel, not just speaking of it, but being the hands and feet of Jesus,
which is love and service.
That's the capital C church that needs to step up and understand that.
Not that they're not, but people that sit in that sanctuary, at Calvary we do altar
(42:37):
calls at the end of every service.
If I'm with someone and I invite them and they come with me and they go forward during
that service, you may sit there and think, well, the pastor or Calvary chapel or this,
that, and the other gets credit for it.
But the reality is you probably paid a price of admission in that person's life.
(42:58):
You probably discipled them, offered them perspective.
They said, what is it about this person that's different than me?
I have anxiety and they don't.
They have a bigger burden than I do and yet they're in complete peace.
What is it about them?
And you ask that question.
And when you ask that question to me, I say, well, I have Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior.
(43:22):
And eventually the invite to church comes and it's all of that discipleship that slowly
happens.
You're paying admission to speak into someone's life by your character, by how you show up
to do life, by who you, who you are.
And if you're filled with anxiety, who's going to look at you and say, I want that.
(43:45):
Right.
Why would I want what you have?
You're not any better off than I am.
Yeah.
So anxiety is one of those things that you have to get under control and it's probably
not something that's going to happen under your power.
It isn't.
It's going to be something that, that God is going to have to work with you through
(44:07):
prayer, through scripture, through, like you mentioned, arresting and replacing.
Right.
Can God perform miracles?
And the day you get saved, your anxiety goes away.
Yes, I do believe that.
But chances are probably pretty good that he wants to work on that with you.
Oh, sure.
So that you understand you're dependent upon him.
(44:30):
And then he gets the glory.
Yeah.
He gets the glory.
He gets that testimony.
Yeah.
He's asking us to work with him and he's willing to show us and he's willing to be with us
and pick us up when we fall down and say, come on, let's go.
You got this.
We can do this again.
You know, and that's a beautiful relationship.
(44:54):
And that's the part that I'm always just so intrigued by is that God wants a relationship
with us, that it's real and genuine.
And it isn't just, I read about you in a book and I follow a set of rules and I look a certain
way and I dress a certain way and I say all the right Christian words.
Like none of that is what he's looking for.
(45:16):
He genuinely wants to be in a relationship with him.
And why me Lord of all people?
Like you want to be in a relationship with me?
It just fascinates me.
And yet he loves me and he protects me and he forgives me when I don't always trust him
(45:37):
and that I'm anxious and you know.
And relationship is conversation.
So if you need to wrestle with God, then wrestle with him.
Right.
It's completely fair to sit and ask questions of God.
(45:59):
It's not fair to sit and demand answers or anything, but he loves it when we ask him
questions and we turn to him for answers.
So if you turn to God and if you're truly struggling with anxiety, turn to God and say,
you know, God, what role do you want me to play in this situation?
(46:19):
Especially in my past, I would respond through anger and anxiety and all sorts of not good
things.
How do you want me to show up in this situation going forward?
And his answer will be peace, love, grace, and the spirit.
(46:39):
Patience, kindness, self-control.
Do you want me full of anxiety and anger or do you want me here showing up in grace and
peace?
And we already know what his answer will be, but wrestle with him over that question.
You know, whatever your doubt is, man, if you've suffered from anxiety your entire life,
(47:05):
you're going to be sitting there during this podcast listening to this going, man, there
ain't no way.
I've had this since I was a little kid.
I just don't get it.
It's not adding up to me.
Well, don't just sit and think that while you're listening to the podcast.
Take that to God and go, God, this doesn't add up to me.
Right.
It's conversational.
Show me.
(47:26):
Show me why I've had this my whole life.
Show me where the root of the pain is because there's something that has happened that causes
anxiety.
It's a fear.
It's a fear of loss, a fear of pain, a fear of whatever it is.
There's something there and God wants to reveal that.
And you can't get that without asking God questions.
(47:51):
And that's where wisdom comes from.
It's God revealing things to you.
Your nature as a human being.
You're going to have wounds.
You're going to have patterns.
You're going to have all kinds of blind spots that he can begin to unveil to you that he'll
help you tackle.
Yeah.
(48:11):
I mean, I said that this weekend.
Like we were talking about something and I kept saying, I'm the common denominator.
Like I, this pattern keeps showing up and I'm the only one that's, I'm the common denominator.
So what is it about me, Lord?
Like what is it?
Show me because I want to be well and I want to be whole and I want to not feel this way
(48:32):
because it's counter to how you want me to behave and feel.
Show me what is, what is it about me?
And I think when you ask God these honest questions and you take accountability for
like, okay, this anxiety has shown up this way for this long.
(48:53):
And no matter where I am, this anxiety shows up.
There's something in me that needs to be healed.
And that's, that's my go-to all the time.
Like what is in me that needs to be healed because this is not Godly behavior and feeling,
you know, disappointment and then letting that lead to maybe unrighteous thoughts or
(49:17):
victim mentality or whatever snowball it could turn into.
That's not what God wants from me at all.
And so if I'm the common denominator, show me Lord, what is it about me that gets anxious?
What is it about me that feels rejected?
Or just the situation, not just you being the common denominator, but the situation
(49:38):
for me, it's things getting out of control.
When I feel helpless, that's when anxiety gets ratcheted up for me.
So not just you being the common denominator, but also the situation can help you identify
that and begin to tackle that.
Right?
(49:58):
So there are situations when I can be completely in control and I don't even understand it.
When things really get bad, I tend to calm down.
But when pressure is in situations that I feel like I should be in control or the situation
itself should be in control, but for some reason I get the sense that it's not, that's
(50:23):
when anxiety starts to attack me.
So it's not just me being the common denominator, but also that identifying that trait here.
Okay, another situation is coming up again where it feels like it's out of control.
It should be in control.
Okay, I always react this way when situations like this arise.
(50:46):
So God, how do I handle this?
I need grace and peace in this moment so that you get the glory.
You can have situational awareness to that level that you can preemptive strike the anxiety
with those levels of prayer and meditation going into it.
(51:07):
It changes everything.
So yeah, just it can be a frustrating and scary thing.
It can be, I don't know, a long tunnel that feels like there's no light at the end when
you're wrestling with anxiety, especially these days.
My gosh, you turn on the television.
(51:27):
Who doesn't have anxiety?
Right.
Go visit my family or even your parents and they all have one of these news stations on.
The minute you walk in the house, the minute they wake up in the morning and you can't
escape it and you just start, I start filling up with anxiety because the news is just so
filled with it.
(51:47):
And okay, here we go.
What are you going to do?
You're in that situation.
Have that conversation with God so that anxiety, that situation is put in the proper perspective.
What's bigger?
What's the problem or the situation?
Let me ask you, what do you do?
Because I know sometimes I get this like visceral feeling like, you know, a heaviness in my
(52:12):
chest or it's a very tangible, you can feel anxiety.
It's not just a state of mind.
It's physiological.
What do you do?
Because I sometimes don't know what to do.
I mean, yeah, I can go take a walk and sometimes that helps.
What do you do?
I don't know.
Sometimes.
Yeah, I just when I'm on top of the situation and I recognize myself boiling up, yeah, it's
(52:38):
removing myself from the equation for five minutes, five hours, whatever it is, enough
time to get myself with God and have those conversations or go through the exercises
to get my mental state back to where it needs to be.
(53:00):
Sometimes again, when those situations get ratcheted up, I don't have, I'm not going
to walk in wisdom.
I'm going to walk in quick decisions, poor decisions, not calmness.
You know, when Navy SEALs get trained, pardon, even just police officers, they get put in
(53:21):
tremendous situations.
It even reminds me of a prayer.
Our mentor, Pastor Bill, will occasionally reference it.
I think it was like a Catholic priest.
Somebody came up with the prayer, God, God, don't, what is it?
Don't, don't take my burden, increase my strength in my back or something.
Don't lighten my burdens.
(53:42):
Give me a stronger back.
Help me carry more.
Help me have that emotional and spiritual strength that I don't have right now.
Help me build that.
Like you're breaking down muscles at a gym.
Right.
And that prayer is so, that's, those are dangerous prayers.
(54:02):
People like, not dangerous in a way that God isn't in control and God can't teach you,
but understand those are not light words.
Those are, those are heavy words.
Those are back busting words.
You know, when you pray something like that, understand that in order to get a stronger
(54:23):
back, there's going to be some bruises.
There's going to be like,
There's going to be a heavier burden.
It's not an easy thing to pray.
It's not an easy thing to receive the answer to that prayer.
What really puts things into perspective is the after I've gotten the stronger back, what
is the glory you get from it?
(54:43):
Because if you just look at the heavier load, it could be overwhelming.
It's where do you get the glory and how does this life skill that you've taught me from
carrying a heavy burden help someone else in the future or help me in the future?
Yeah.
What, there's a kink in me that you're working out God.
(55:06):
What is that kink?
Help me work on it.
And once we've gotten that behind us, what's the next kink?
Right.
When you go to the gym, again, you reach one set of goals.
What doesn't mean you stop.
Right.
What's next?
Yeah.
Are we doing more reps?
Are we doing heavier weight?
(55:27):
What's next?
Yeah.
You know, to reach all of your fitness goals.
And then once you get there, how you got to keep going to the gym.
Otherwise they fade immediately.
So yeah, just that, just the prayers of help me carry a heavier burden than I'm capable
of carrying right now on my own.
(55:48):
Yeah.
One of my favorite songs, it's an old hymn called Indelible Grace.
And it pretty much talks about, Lord, you know, I'm praying this prayer for grace and
faith.
And then the singer of the hymn talks about like, I just thought in some favored hour,
(56:08):
you just give me grace and peace.
But no, instead, I feel like I'm being tortured.
I mean, it doesn't say that.
Like, the way that it's written is like, you've crossed every fair scheme that I've had, and
you've laid me low.
And I just hear like that song playing in the back of my head.
(56:33):
And then at the end of the song, God replies, this is how I answer prayers of grace and
peace is I lay you low.
I get rid of the things that you're going to for earthly pleasures, and I give you me.
And man, I've played that song over and over and over again in some of my darkest hours,
(56:56):
because I know that prayer needs to be answered.
And I know that prayer hurts.
It's a beautiful pain, because at the end of it all, I've gotten more of Jesus.
And it's not easy.
Like I don't think the Christian walk is easy.
It's just it's it's worthy, but it's not easy.
(57:20):
And it's it's a marathon.
Yes.
And you can get worn out.
Yes.
Yes.
Yeah.
Some wise person somewhere once said the problem with life is it's so daily.
And isn't that true?
You know, we can we can sit and we can have a season working on anxiety.
(57:42):
But if you're not ready to run a marathon, you can put something to bed and it turn around
and be right back in your life.
If you're not pulling continue, if you don't continue to pull out the weeds.
Oh, yeah.
And anxiety is one of those things.
I you have to be at just complete peace with God and just full trust in him and the people
(58:07):
that you and I look up to the most walk in complete peace with God.
I don't see our mentor, Pastor Bill suffering from anxiety.
We met Pastor Joe Foch.
Pastor Brian.
Yeah, Pastor Brian.
Yeah, those guys, they just don't walk in anxiety.
(58:30):
Pastor Doug at Calvary, Fort Lauderdale.
Yeah, man.
What you see is what you get.
Oh, for sure.
He does not walk in anxiety.
For sure.
And they are all of these men that we're naming have tremendous prayer life.
They they do it and they're they're running a marathon.
And unfortunately, that's the game of anxiety is you got to be ready for a marathon because
(58:58):
if you sprint, you're going to you're going to run yourself out.
You're going to be exhausted.
And all of a sudden you don't have the energy and you're worse off in the anxiety than you
were at the beginning because you're so winded.
Well, yeah.
And I think a sprint is us in our own strength and a marathon is us being carried by God.
One hundred percent, one hundred percent, and you got to be ready for that because it
(59:20):
is daily.
How often do you take up your cross?
Every day.
Daily.
Right.
So the problem with life is it's so daily.
The problem with that saying is it is true.
And we do have to die to self every single day.
And anxiety is one of those things that if we do, it will.
(59:43):
It will go away because God will have that and our identity will be wrapped up in Christ
and who he created us to be and not in.
Why isn't the calendar on the website working?
Performance.
Why are all of a sudden my identity is caught up in a calendar on a website and I'm on conference
(01:00:03):
calls and it's not going the way I want and it's not fixed fast enough.
And my gosh, can people find the baptism tomorrow?
Yeah, God sitting there going, are you representing me in love and peace?
And are you serving even in the midst of all this chaos?
So that's that's the question that God's after.
And that's his perspective on changing us.
(01:00:26):
Yeah, it's not has nothing to do with the calendar on a website.
It's how are you representing me when a pressure is being applied when you used to be filled
with anxiety?
How are you now?
If that needle is not moved, right?
He's looking for transformation.
100% and he's willing to give us transformation.
We just need to be willing.
(01:00:47):
Yep.
100%.
Yeah.
So I'm glad we talked about this.
And really what you said about, you know, am I loving and am I serving that that's golden.
I'm taking that into my my daily life.
I I'm so glad we have microphones in front of us.
I mean, when else would I have heard that?
Who knows?
(01:01:08):
But I see you live that out, though.
So amen to that.
That minister to my heart, honey.
Good.
Glad to hear it.
Well, thank you guys for joining us.
Yeah, anxiety is one of those things.
It's one of the highest attended classes at Calvary Chapel these days.
I can't remember the exact name of the class.
It might just be dealing with anxiety, but the theme of it is for sure anxiety is one
(01:01:34):
of the highest attended classes we have offered right now and it has been since covid.
So we know that a lot of people are out there dealing with anxiety on one level or another.
So definitely something worth talking about.
It is.
Can people take that class online?
We do have it on our resources, kind of like our evergreen always their website, resources.calvaryftl.org.
(01:01:59):
We do have the anxiety class.
I might have to take that.
Yeah, recorded there for people as a resource.
So you can certainly head over there and check that out.
But for now, we appreciate you guys tuning in.
Yeah, thanks, guys.
Thanks so much.
We will see you in the next episode.
(01:02:20):
Bye now.
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