What is the opposite of anxiety or anxious thinking?
When I think about how I feel when anxiety is driving my emotions, the opposite emotion that I’m craving is peace. While anxiety feels insecure, unstable, and troubling, peace offers comfort, stillness, and security.
Our Lord wants us to experience peace. Does that surprise you? He knows we’ll face trouble and hardship in our time here on earth, but His desire for us is peace.
John 14:27 says, “Peace I leave with you; My peace I give to you; not as the world gives, do I give to you. Let not your heart be troubled, nor let it be fearful.”
Isn’t it interesting that Jesus doesn’t just offer peace, but He clearly tells us that His peace is nothing like the false peace offered by our world. His peace provides us with an untroubled and fearless life. I’m convinced that we can’t even imagine the marvelous nature of Jesus’ peace until we see Him face-to-face, and boy-oh-boy, I am excited for that day!
Now, we’re left with an important question. How do we attain that type of peace? When we’re struggling with anxiety, it’s hard even to imagine peace and rest. The Prophet Isaiah can help us answer this question. In Isaiah 26:3, he states, “You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you.”
In other words, our peace is directly linked to our trust in the Lord.
That sounds simple, doesn’t it? It almost sounds like something we can just DO to be less anxious and have more peace. However, as we’re reminded in John 14:27, peace is found in a person… not an action. Jesus promises to give us His peace. He doesn’t say Do this, attain that, reach this spiritual plateau, and have peace. Nope, He just says, “I’ll give it to you.”
In Proverbs, we’re told to “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make your paths straight” (Proverbs 3:5–6). Again, trust is the basis of security, and trust is found in a person.
If we want to study anxiety, we must begin by studying TRUST.
The key verses that will be the backbone of this study are found in Jeremiah 17:7–8. We’ll start there in this lesson and build on what we learn going forward.
Jeremiah 17:7–8
Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord
And whose trust is the Lord.
For he will be like a tree planted by the water
That extends its roots by a stream
And will not fear when the heat comes;
But its leaves will be green,
And it will not be anxious in a year of drought
Nor cease to yield fruit.
There is nothing that feels more like a ‘season of drought’ to me than when I’m mired in anxiety. When my whole focus is on anxiety-causing situations and relationships, I’m dry, crinkled, and fruitless. When the stress that comes from living in this lost and dying world has become a ‘total occupation and obsessive interest’ as we learned about in the last lesson, I’m useless to my family, friends, and the Kingdom of God.
We’ll talk about these ‘seasons of drought’ in future lessons, but for today, I want to focus on this issue of trust.
Verse seven presents a familiar concept. If we trust in the Lord, we will be blessed. I think every Christian would agree that we are to trust God. However, the second half of that verse provides clarifying information that may be more uncomfortable. To receive that ‘blessing,’ we can’t just trust in, we must make our entire trust the Lord.
What does that even mean??
Again, we would all agree that we must trust in the Lord. We remind each other to “Trust God” when trials are looming. However, too often, God is just one of the many things we trust in to ease our circumstances. Sometimes, we trust in money. Sometimes, we trust in relationships. We may trust in our reputation, social class, or skill set. Some people trust that time will take care of whatever they face. God is just one of the bullet points on our list of things we will ‘trust in.’ In a sense, He shares the space with the little gods from whom we seek peace and security.
When those normal stresses of life aren’t resolved by one of those little gods on our list, we think, “Where is God?” We begin to stare at our problems, and we’re well down the road to anxiety.
God is a jealous God, as seen throughout the Old Testament. He wants to be our peace and make our path straight, but He won’t compete with the other things we seek to find relief.
Worldly solutions are temporary solutions; only by making God our one-and-only trust can we find peace.
Making God our only trust requires mental and spiritual exercise. Every time we find ourselves leaning on something other than God for peace and security, we must remind ourselves that only He has the full and permanent help that we need. In our next lesson, we’ll see how trust and anxiety are linked. Understanding that link will help us make God our only trust, lean not on our own understanding, and replace anxious living with a peaceful life.
Until then, may I encourage you to grab a notebook and your Bible? Spend some time looking at the above verses and meditating on them. Then, make a list of those ‘things’ you have allowed to co-exist with the One True God as you are pursuing peace and seeking to avoid anxiety.
Unlike earthly substitutes, God is trustworthy. He wants us to trust Him to bring about good in every situation because He loves and watches over us.
Megan Scheibner 