Philippians 4:6-7 (NIV) “Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.”
James 1:5-8 (NIV) “If any of you lacks wisdom, he should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to him. But when he asks, he must believe and not doubt, because he who doubts is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind. That man should not think he will receive anything from the Lord; he is a double-minded man, unstable in all he does.”
Anxiety is a tenacious opponent. It is always seeking access points into our hearts and minds. Yet, here we find good news – we have, like a giant guard dog, a protector against our incessant enemy. The peace of God stands like an impenetrable force against this malicious foe. How do we get there from here? Our first step is to recognize anxiety as the enemy that it is. Instead of accepting it as an inevitable part of our life, we need to treat it like a disease that we fight against. We need to realize that it is an intruder that is trespassing on ground that belongs to the Kingdom of God. We do not have to put up with anxiety. We need to put it under our feet where it belongs for those who have been bought and paid for by the blood of Jesus! We live in the Kingdom of the Prince of Peace, and we have the authority to never again tolerate fear and anxiety! Anxiety deserves a whooping from every believer in Jesus!
But we also remember that we fight according to the Spirit, not the human nature. Our second step involves prayer and petition. Our prayers must be to God who is able to do more than we ask or imagine. In every relationship, task, challenge, frustration, impossibility that we have, God is able to be the difference. When we pray, we must pray with expectation. This is the difference between faith and doubt. We don’t come with the expectation that God will do what we want but that He will be the solution to the problem. He has many ways of working in the world, and it is not our place to tell Him how to do it. We have the authority to believe, and that is a mighty weapon against anxiety. Our faith is not in ourselves but in the One who tramples all of our enemies under His feet. Our petitions likewise are mighty weapons. Yes, they are weapons. To petition is to make our needs known to God. Since He knows what we really need already, this is more about coming to grips with what our needs really are. For instance, when we are in a stressful situation do we need to get out of the situation or do we need grace to see things through? As we seek the Lord for what our needs truly are, He reveals them to us. It is this communion with the Lord that causes us to ask God for help with confidence and with thanksgiving because we know that His power will be at work. Then our thankfulness becomes gratitude for having a heavenly Father who listens and responds to our needs.
Our final step is to allow God’s peace to break through the ceiling of our understanding. Because the peace of God is a supernatural phenomenon, our natural tendency is to fall back to our own understanding. That is a mistake because His peace super-cedes our ability to explain it. When Jesus walked on the water, the laws of gravity did not stop existing. He transcended those natural laws. In the same way, the peace of God transcends our human understanding. In this way we don’t deny the reality of life around us, we simply live by a power that anxiety cannot master. To live in a constant state of peace is our birthright as children of the Most High God. Let’s not settle for less. The Lord has given us these tools for our benefit. We need to use them, and we need to pass them on and encourage each other to use them. We will be hampered from the business of God’s advancing kingdom if we don’t shut down anxiety and maintain our diligence against it through prayer and petition.
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