Peace for the Anxious

Porch, how are we doing tonight? Hey, is anybody here in Dallas glad that fall decided to show up tonight? Come on. Porch.Live locations, we hope fall is there as well, but it has been 90 here in Dallas. So, the jackets and sweaters are out. It's time. Hey, we're so glad you're here on a Tuesday night hanging out with us. Whether you're here in person or whether you're watching online, we're so, so glad you're here.

We want to give a special shout-out to our Porch.Live locations, specifically in Greater Lafayette, in Wheaton, and in Dayton. Can we give it up for them? Hey, before we get into the message tonight… We're talking about mental health. There's a lot we're going to process through, but I just want to spend some time and pray.

I know we've been praying, but I want to continue to pray. And not only pray for tonight (I definitely want to pray for that), but I know many of you know (maybe you don't) that right now, in Jamaica, a Category 5 hurricane is overwhelming that country. Many of you know people who are there. Some of you have been there. I know there's some anxiety about that.

They're saying this hurricane could radically change what Jamaica looks like into the future. We just want to stop before anything else and pray for them. We want to pray for Haiti. We want to pray for Cuba. We want to pray for the other countries that are going to be affected. So, we're just going to pray together for this hurricane that's hitting. Bow your heads.

God, we stop right now in the comfort of wherever we are, here in Dallas or wherever. We stop and turn our attention to what's happening right now in the Caribbean. God, we ask for your mercy, the one who controls the weather, the storm, the sky, and the sea. We ask you, God, would you show your mercy here? Would you calm the winds and the waves?

O Lord, we pray for our brothers and sisters whose world is shaking right now. We ask, God, would you be present with them? O Lord, would you be near? Would you bring quick aid? Lord, would the Christians around the world rise up and care for our brothers and sisters in Jamaica and the Caribbean? And would you come, Lord Jesus? Come.

Then, God, we pray for us tonight. Lord, I know coming into this room, or wherever we're watching, there are all kinds of emotions. Some of us are excited to be here. Some of us are nervous. But, Lord, we are all eager, desperate, hungry to hear from you. So, we say, come, Holy Spirit. Come, Holy Spirit. We long to encounter you. Would you speak to us tonight through your Word? We long to hear from you. In Jesus' name, amen.

Well, my senior year of high school, it was a Saturday morning, and I was sleeping in, as you do when you're a senior in high school. I was in that half-asleep state. All of a sudden… This is a true story. I'm in my room, asleep. Three masked men come into my room, jump on top of me, and put duct tape over my mouth. They tie my hands together and blindfold me.

Now, put yourself in that situation. I didn't even know how to think. Do I fight? Do I cry? Do I scream? In this moment, they pick me up out of my bed and start taking me out of my room. As they're taking me out of my room, they bump my head against the wall, and I hear the voice of my mom say, "Be careful with his head." I'm like, "What? My mom is colluding with these attackers?"

They carry me down the stairs and throw me into the back of a pickup truck. They close the pickup truck, and then they start talking, and I hear it's my friends. As I'm listening, I hear their voices. Kevin is there, Jacob is there, and Connor is there. Then it hits me. Uh-oh! Scott is not there. Now, here's the problem. Every friend group has that person who's kind of like the mom of the group. Right? They make sure you guys have fun but nobody dies. That was Scott.

Scott was a Boy Scout. Scott is now an ER doctor. We always knew with Scott we were going to have fun but no one was going to die. The problem was I was tied up in the back of the truck and Scott was not there. Then they start to pull out of my driveway, and they go onto the highway. Guys, 70 miles an hour… I'm tied in the back, rolling around, going, "Oh, Scott, where are you?"

Finally, they pull into a parking lot, they drag me out of the car into this establishment, they sit me down, they rip off the blindfold, and right in front of me is a girl holding a sign saying, "Will you go to Sadie Hawkins dance with me?" I'm like, "What?! Are you kidding me?" She thought it would be cute and fun to recruit my friends to kidnap me so she could ask me to the dance.

Now, why do I tell you all of that? Because here's the reality. Right now, we're in a series called 20/20, where we are looking at mental health from the perspective of God and from his word as Creator, and tonight, we're talking about fear and anxiety. Now, here's what I know. Even when I say those kinds of terms, so many of us have in our minds different things that come up when we think about fear and anxiety, but I want to get to this book. "God, what do you say about fear and anxiety?"

So, if you have your Bible, go ahead and open to the book of Psalms. We're in Psalm 46 today. As you're turning there, I just want to get all on the same page of what anxiety is, because, again, we use that term, but we don't always know what it means. Anxiety is actually an emotion that's similar to fear, but it's not the same.

Fear is the response to an immediate, specific threat. You walk out into the woods, you see a snake, and you go, "There's a snake!" That's fear. Anxiety, though, is the response to a possible or anticipated threat. You walk out into the woods, and you go, "There could be a snake in here." That's anxiety. Anxiety is looking into the future and perceiving a possible threat.

Both of these are actually inherently good things. They've been hardwired into us as a survival method in order to survive, to not die. Both fear and anxiety are almost like a fire alarm. If you think about a fire alarm, a fire alarm primarily exists as a life-saving mechanism. Right? Yet oftentimes, a fire alarm goes off randomly when there's nothing there, or the fire alarm will just keep going after the fire has been put out. That's what anxiety disorder is.

So many times, when we think about anxiety, we originally think it's bad. No. Anxiety can be good. You can be anxious about, "I have a date coming up. I'm anxious. I should smell good." That's good. That's good anxiety. But anxiety disorder is when the fire alarm keeps going on, and that fire alarm wakes you up in the middle of the night for no reason. There's no smoke, there's no fire, but my heart is racing, my stomach is churning, and I cannot make it go away.

Here's the reality: our culture is in a moment where anxiety as a whole has skyrocketed. It's interesting. From 1938 (that was a long time ago) to 2010, there was marginally no statistical change in anxiety. There was a very slight positive increase. Just a little. From 2010 to 2015, for the ages of 26 to 34, anxiety increased by 103 percent…in five years. A marginal increase from 1938 to 2010, and in five years, 100 percent.

For ages 18 to 25, it increased 139 percent, to the degree where, a few years ago, a study was done of young adults that found that 37 percent (over a third) of young adults would say, "I always or most of the time feel anxious." You just think about a room like this one. A third of you would go, "Yeah. Most of the time or all the time, I'm feeling that 'heart racing' feeling."

On top of that, another 31 percent said they feel anxious about half the time. So, only about a third of young adults, if they were honest, would say, "I am anxious at least half the time or less or none at all." Two thirds would say, "The majority of my life, I'm anxious." Now, what in the world happened in 2010 to make it skyrocket?

I read a book called The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. Some of you have heard this. Jonathan Haidt is a researcher. He's an author. He labels 2010 to 2015 as the great rewiring, because two main things happened in 2010. Do you know what they are? The first is in 2010, the iPhone 4 came out, which had a front-facing camera for the first time. That's the first one. Before 2010, you had to take a selfie not knowing what it was going to look like.

The second thing is social media turned from primarily a networking tool to a platform in the creation of Instagram. Think about it. Social media before was, "Let me connect with all of my friends and find out where they are." Instagram came, and it was "I don't care who's following me; I just care that I have a following. I'm checking my 'likes,' and I'm checking my responses, and I'm creating content. It's all about a platform that's elevating my online, virtual life."

In 2010, only 23 percent of young adults had a smartphone. Five years later, in 2015, 79 percent had a smartphone, and now 97 percent have a smartphone. In 15 years, that's quite a change. Then, when it comes to social media and screen time, 50 percent of young adults say they are online almost constantly. The average screen time of a young adult is six to eight hours.

So, I want to do something. This is risky, and I didn't run it by anybody. I'm sorry, team. But we're going to try it. If you have an iPhone, I want you to pull out your phone right now. Okay? Just pull it out. Remember, we're talking about anxiety, so don't get distracted. Pull out your iPhone. If you have an Android and you know how to do this, go for it.

Go to your settings. Then go down to "Screen Time." Then at Screen Time, go to "See all app and website activity." Then scroll down a little, and you're going to see "This week" with a blue arrow. Click back to last week. How many hours did you spend on your phone last week? The chatter is an indictment against you. Okay? Scroll down. How many pickups did you have? Then one more. Scroll down. How many notifications did you have last week?

All right. This is a safe place. How many of you were over six hours of screen time last week? Come on. Safe place. God knows if you're lying. All right. Put your hands down. Now put your phones away. Please, put your phones away. We're in an anxiety message. Put those things away. All right. Lock in. I know. You're judging your friends. You're either thinking you're awesome or you're terrible.

Here's the reality. Six to eight hours. Guys, that is close to a full-time job that we are sucked into our phones. And this is not a message about phones and technology. Here's what all this is trying to do. Jonathan Haidt calls your generation… He labels you. Three simple words: the anxious generation. Some of us hear that and go, "No, not me." Then you look at what's fueling you, and you go, "Maybe."

Not only your phones, and not only social media. Over Launch, we had young adults, the thousand people who were there, write cards, anonymously, of "What's the hardest thing you've gone through over the past year, and what's something you need to confess?" Every week, I've been reading some of those cards. In preparation for this sermon, I just read a couple, and here were some of the cards I read.

One said, "I struggle with anxiety, and I'm a severe overthinker. I struggle with daily thoughts and memories and nightmares from trauma in my past. I cannot help but think about it." Another one said, "I am so scared to be alone. Nobody knows how I feel. I hate myself. I hate my body. I hate my face. I hate my personality. I compare myself to everyone else. I am so insecure, and I don't trust God to let him take over my life."

Another one said, "I have deep, crippling anxiety from college. I feel inadequate, and I feel like I'm not enough." One more said, "I am so anxious. I feel unloved. I feel unlovable, fearful. I can't do this anymore." These weren't all of the cards I picked. This was a little stack. I was going, "Let me look if there are any with anxiety." I think if we were honest…like, gut-level honest…many of you in this room feel a lot like that. Put on the face, sing the songs, have the meet and greet, but deep down, we feel like that.

A few years ago, I was a pastor down in Houston. We were going through a series of hot-button things, and I was given the topic of sexuality and gender to preach on. It was my first time preaching on this, and I was so nervous, not because I was afraid of saying the truth but because I had a lot of friends who I knew… "I'm going to say the truth, and this is going to be really hard. God, I want to be faithful to you, but I want to be loving."

I remember for weeks, I'm prepping, prepping, prepping. Finally, Saturday night, I finish prepping, I go to bed, I lay my head on the pillow, and I can't fall asleep. My mind is racing. My heart is going. I'm like, "Ah!" Then one hour turned to two hours. Two hours turned to three hours. I mean, I'm about to preach the next morning, and I cannot get my mind to stop. Three hours, four, five, six, seven. Zero minutes of sleep. Zero. Have you had that? It was an all-nighter that I didn't want.

I get up the next morning, and I go to church and deliver that sermon. Praise God. It went well. It was good. I'm like, "Oh, thank you." Take a nap for, like, 20 years. Then the next week, I'm giving another sermon on something totally different. Not a hard topic…an easy one. I laid my head on the pillow Saturday night, and I had the thought, "Man, I hope I can fall asleep." Then, one hour turned to two hours, turned to three hours. I only got two hours of sleep that night. I'm like, "What is going on?"

Guys, for a year, every Saturday night before I would teach, I could not sleep. I was going mad, because I wasn't even nervous. I just had the thought of, "I hope I can fall asleep." I'm taking melatonin. I'm changing rooms. I'm listening to relaxing music. I'm doing everything to try to put me to sleep. Nothing is working, and I'm just so frustrated, until finally, after a year…

Guys, last night… So, I'm writing this message. I lay my head on the pillow and go, "Man, I remember when I couldn't fall asleep before a message." Then one hour turned to two hours, turned to three. I'm like, "No! That was younger me. I'm free of this." I was just like, "Oh," and all of those anxious thoughts… I mean, I'm about to preach on anxiety as I spent a night last night living in anxious thoughts. I'm coming to you a fellow struggler.

We need God's Word, not some person, to tell us how in the world to make it through this. That's why we're in Psalm 46. Psalm 46 is written by this group of worship leaders called the sons of Korah. Most scholars believe Psalm 46 was written in the midst of national crisis in Judah. The Assyrian army was coming against them. They kind of look up one day, and 185,000 Assyrian troops are surrounding them.

Hezekiah, the king of Israel, looks out and just cries out, "God, help us!" He literally gets in front of everyone and says, "God, we need your help. Help us. Just like you did in the past, help us." God sends one angel and, overnight, kills 185,000 Assyrian troops. They wake up in the morning to see God won the battle without a single arrow being shot. So, these worship leaders are walking through this battle that God fought on their behalf, and they write Psalm 46 to infuse courage into the heart of the anxious.

It's so interesting what they write. As we look at this, we're actually going to see three ways to fight anxiety from Psalm 46. Let's look at Psalm 46, starting in verse 1. It says, "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear though the earth gives way, though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble at its swelling." So, how do you fight anxiety from Psalm 46?

1. Be honest about what's shaking you. Did you catch what he said in verse 1? He said, "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble." Not to fight trouble, not to cure trouble…in the midst of it. He says, "Therefore, I'm not going to fear," and then he gives four "though" statements.

"…though the earth gives way, though the mountains be moved into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble…" They say, "God, we trust you are present, but if we're honest, our world is pretty shaky right now." They are real about what's going on. They don't pretend everything is fine.

I remember a few years ago, a buddy of mine was going through a really rough time. His job was on the line. He thought maybe he was going to get fired. He has four kids. They were all sick. Then a water line burst in his house and his house was flooded. So, I text him. I'm like, "Hey, man. How are you doing?" He just texts me back this picture. Have you ever seen this? I love it, because he's obviously making fun of it.

Just think of this picture for a second. For how many of you is this your life right now? Monday morning comes. People go, "Oh, how was the weekend? How are you doing?" "I'm fine." Right? You have meet and greet time. "Oh, how's life right now?" "It's fine." Your boss, your small group… "Fine. Fine." When I was a youth pastor, I used to tell students, "Do you know what 'fine' stands for? 'Feelings I'm not expressing.'" That's what fine is.

What are they saying here? "Look. We're going to be honest that our life is not fine." I'm curious. For you, where is your life shaking right now? Where are you not fine? Sometimes in church we like that, so we just vent. "Oh, here are all of the problems." But that's not necessarily what's happening here. The sons of Korah in the Psalms are trying to identify, "What is fueling my fear?"

When we feel anxious, so often the thing that's fueling our anxiety feels so stupid and silly and dumb that we never tell anybody, because it feels like, "If I tell you this, you're going to look down on me, because it's so silly. It's so irrational." Yet, did you see what they said is causing them to tremble, causing them to be scared? They said mountains would be moved into the sea.

They're like, "We're not going to fear, even though I don't know if that mountain is going to be moved into the sea." They're speaking in this hyperbolic kind of way of this ridiculous scenario, but they're going, "In my mind, that's what it feels like. It feels like the whole world is falling and mountains are falling into the sea." They're honest. They're honest about it, and they express it to God, because he can handle it.

I love what Kylen said last week about prayer. Hey, before you pray the right thing, how about you pray the real thing? How about you pray the thing that's really going on in your life rather than going, "God, thank you that it's such a good day and that everything is awesome and my life is great." Meanwhile, you're the dog with fire in the back. Right?

I was just trying to think about you coming into this room. What do you need to be honest about tonight? I think some of you are looking at this season of your life, in your job, in your cubicle, and you feel like, "I've so settled on all of the dreams I had in my life. I was going to do great things. I was going to change the world. I was going to live a life of adventure. Now I'm stuck in this six-by-six cubicle, trying not to die." You're just anxious about it.

Some of you feel like you have the imposter syndrome at work. You landed that job that you're like, "Yeah!" and your family is excited. Your peers are excited. You get the job. You learn, like, "I'm not prepared for this. This is way outside of what I thought, so I'm just faking it all the time." People are like, "So, what are we going to do?" and you're like, "Let me come up with it right now." You're constantly feeling like you're an imposter, and you can't level with anybody or you might lose your job.

Maybe some of you are afraid that your sexual sin in the past will keep anyone from ever loving you despite what you've done. Others of you feel like you're not living up to the expectations people had in your life. Or maybe you're afraid of commitment. You were vulnerable with someone in the past, and they burned that bridge. They broke up with you. They stabbed you in the back, so now you're afraid. You lie awake at night, going, "I don't know if I can ever fully get there again."

Maybe you're terrified of being found out for the disgusting sin struggle that still has a hold on you. If anybody knew that that is still a part of your life, they wouldn't want to be a part of you. Maybe you don't feel like you're making enough money, so you have to get a side hustle or you have to work harder, but you're afraid you'll burn out. Maybe you're afraid of death. You lie awake at night thinking the next diagnosis that could come your way.

Or maybe you think God doesn't really love you or, if you're really honest (hard to say in a room like this), you don't know if God is even real. Now, how does God handle those kinds of honest thoughts? Remember verse 1. God says, "I am your refuge, I'm your strength, and I'm your very present help in trouble." God can handle your honesty.

Where is your world shaking right now? The first way to fight anxiety is to get honest about it. Get real. Look it right in the face, bring community in, and get real. That's the first thing. Something interesting happens, though, when you get to verse 4. In verse 4, there's actually a shift in Psalm 46. The shift is stunning, because he just said, "The world is shaking. The mountains are going into the sea." Then he says, starting in verse 4:

"There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the Most High. God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved; God will help her when morning dawns. The nations rage, the kingdoms totter; he utters his voice, the earth melts. The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our fortress. Come, behold the works of the Lord, how he has brought desolations on the earth. He makes wars cease to the end of the earth; he breaks the bow and shatters the spear; he burns the chariots with fire."

2. Behold the works of the Lord. Everything is shaking. He goes, "But there's a river whose streams make glad the city of God." The city of God was Jerusalem. This was the city that was surrounded by Assyrians, and he goes, "Oh, but there's a river here." Here's what's shocking. Look at a map of Jerusalem. There's no river in Jerusalem. There's not. It's a desert. It's literally a desert. So, these worship leaders are high on something, and they're going, "There's the river, bud. It's amazing!" They're like, "What river?"

What are they saying? They're going, "Look. I know it feels like a desert, and I know it feels like it's dried up, but there is a river, a rushing, wild river that's flowing with life and vitality that you can't see that's powerful, and it's flowing, and it's working." He says, "This God…" The river is his power and his presence. That's what it represents. He says, "This God is with us, and this God is for us. He's on our team. I know you can't see the river, but it's flowing. It doesn't matter what kind of desert or wilderness you find yourself in, there's a river. There's a river."

I told this story at Launch, but it just reminded me, as I was reading this, of when I went to San Francisco a few years ago. I went to go visit some church planters there. While in San Francisco, the last day we were there, these church planters said, "Hey, we want to take you out to the Tenderloin district of San Francisco." The Tenderloin district is the most populated area of homeless people in the whole country.

They gave us a pep talk. They said, "Hey, you need to know before we go out there, you guys are going to see some really dark things…needles everywhere, people shooting up, getting high." They said, "The demonic presence is thick in the Tenderloin district." He had a bunch of us from the suburbs kind of like, "Ooh." Like, "What?"

Then this guy Rob, one of the elders, stood up and went, "Hey, guys, look at me." He said, "We walk in with the power and the presence of Christ." He said, "The darkness shakes when the light of Christ walks in. Are you ready?" We were like, "We're ready." We were praying in the vans on the way there. We got out. Sure enough…darkness. Yet I watched it. There is a river. That river flows right through the desert of the Tenderloin district. We watched the presence of God go into the darkness there.

Guys, what Psalm 46 is saying is that there's a river. No matter what wilderness you feel like you're in, no matter how your mind is racing, there's a river. There's a river that flows through. The sons of Korah are saying, in the moment when the world is shaking, you need to remind yourself and those around you of what is true. You need to remember what we sang at the beginning: fixing our eyes on what's true.

I want to get practical for a second. Fellow struggler, fellow person who wrestles with anxious thoughts, there are two things we see the sons of Korah do that I've done in my life that have helped me in anxiety. I'm not saying they're the cure. I'm not saying it solves everything. I'm just saying it has helped me.

The first is in the midst of those anxious thoughts, you remember what God has done for you. Here's why. Did you know that scientists have studied the brain (this is data, not Christians) and saw that when the brain is experiencing gratitude, the frontal lobe where your emotions are begins to light up, your heart rate begins to slow down, and your amygdala where your fear goes out begins to weaken its effect on the rest of your brain.

When you're experiencing gratitude, anxiety begins to fade. I saw this last night. So, last night… "Oh, I hope I can fall asleep." Hour one. Hour two. Hour three. I'm sitting there. I'm mad, guys. I'm so mad. I need sleep! I'm processing with God. Then, all of a sudden, I think of this, convicted. I'm like, "Oh yeah. All right. God, what have you done that's good?"

It was random things. I'm looking at the fan spinning above me. I'm like, "Thank you for cool air." That was the first thing. "Lord, thank you for cool air." Then I look at my phone. It's 2:00 in the morning. The World Series went 18 innings, and I got to go through the whole thing. "Oh, I've got something to read." I thought about this past week. My daughter, my 5-year-old, lost her first tooth. I'm like, "Oh, how cool. That was so fun." She turned 6 on Saturday. I'm celebrating that. I'm just thinking of my wife, how grateful I am for her, thanking God for his grace.

Do you know what didn't happen? I didn't fall asleep right away. But do you know what did happen? The heart that was racing began to soften. I began to just, in gratitude, think of what God has done for me. That's the first thing. Remember what God has done for you. Have a heart of gratitude.

The second, though, is remind others around you of truth. Help other people. Here's what happens with anxiety. So often, you get tunnel vision, and all you can think about is you. You literally are so focused on you. "What's wrong with me? What's going on with me? How do I fix me?" Something happens when we look up and see other people.

I remember when I was a little guy… I grew up here for a few years in DFW and experienced a few tornadoes pretty close to my house and got this irrational fear of tornadoes. It went all through elementary school. Every time the tornado siren would go off, tornado warning, I was flipping out. Like, flipping out.

Something happened in fifth grade for me. I remember. I'm in class, fifth grade. The tornado siren goes off. I start flipping out. Then I look over, and I see my friend Tanner flipping out more than me, and I had the thought… It was a semi-rational thought for a fifth grader. I was like, "That's kind of crazy." Like, "We're probably not going to die." I'm having this kind of rational moment.

I go over to my buddy Tanner. I'm like, "Hey, man. I think it's going to be okay. Tornadoes don't kill that many people." You know, I'm counseling him. This wave of rationality flooded into my life. All of these years of irrational fear of tornadoes, and it just shifted. Literally, from that moment on… The next time a tornado siren… It wasn't that I didn't feel fear; it was just my brain started working again.

For some of you, the number one thing you need to do is start caring about your roommates. Right now, you care about yourself. "My mental health. My problems. My struggle." It's an issue. I'm just saying. When you flip and start caring about other people… It is amazing what God will do to your health, to your anxiety, when you begin to get your eyes off yourself and start caring about other people. Where is God inviting you, in the midst of your anxiety, to behold the works of God by reminding yourself of what he's done for you and reminding others? That's the second thing.

So, how do you fight anxiety? Be honest, behold, and then let's do the last one quickly. Look at verse 10. If you've been in church at all, you know this. Your mom has it on her fridge. Verse 10: "'Be still, and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted in the earth!' The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our fortress."

3. Be still and know who is God and who is not God. It's interesting. Be still in Hebrew is a Hebrew word raphah, which means cease striving. He says, "Cease striving and know." I was thinking… Again, if you've been in church, you know this verse, and we filled in the blanks. Our culture loves the first half of this verse right now. "Hey, cease striving. Be still. Meditate. Hey, mindfulness, unplug, solitude."

We love this right now. The problem is what we choose to know in the midst of our stillness. What does our culture say? "Be still and know yourself. Just dive deeper into you and know all your upbringing and your problems and your first wound and what happened to you. Your great-grandma had this, so now…" I'm not saying those things are wrong. It's just that's what our culture says to know. "Once you know that…"

"Be still and know your diagnosis." Be on WebMD or whatever the cool thing is now…TikTok. Like, "Oh, what is it?" Chasing the minutiae. Know it. "Be still and know the universe. Plug in with the deeper powers and energy that are at work." "Be still and know nothing. Turn off your brain completely and just empty yourself." But none of those are what this says. It says, "Be still and know that I am God."

What does that mean? To be still and know that God is God means there is a God and you are not him. That's what it means. So, all of a sudden, the "coffee cup/fridge/mama" verse that's so sweet and nice becomes a bit of an affront to all the selfishness in us that just wants to think about us. It forces us to go back to the core struggle of humanity, which is to not seize the fruit from the tree and, instead, trust in God.

I mean, think about God creating at the very beginning of Genesis. "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth." It says in verse 2, "The earth was without form and void…" What does that mean? It was chaotic at the beginning. It was chaos. Verse 3: "And God said, 'Let there be light…'"

God spoke into chaos beauty, order, and life. He did that for six days. Do you know what he did on the sixth day? He created you and me, human beings, Adam and Eve. He created humanity, and he said, "I'm going to make you in my image to do what I do. I'm literally going to put you in a garden full of potential, and I'm going to say, 'Bring order and beauty and life into that which is chaotic.'" So, a key to being a human is to look out at chaos and bring order to it.

He says one command: "Don't be god." It's signified in the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. "Don't eat the fruit, seize autonomy, and order right and wrong for yourself. Trust my definition of good and evil and submit to me." What do they do? The snake slithers up, and they go, "I want to be god." The core of every sin in your life starts with that decision: "I want to be god."

Now, I want to be clear. What I'm not saying is that anxiety is a sin. I'm not, because it's not. Anxiety is an emotion, like fear is an emotion, like anger is an emotion, like sadness is an emotion. Those aren't sins, but they're indicator lights of something. So often, the anxiety indicator light is that you, in your life, think you are the one who's ultimately in control.

Anxiety, that indicator light, that "check engine" light, that flare, is saying something in you thinks, "If I just…then I will, and I can manage my life." So, the number one step to start (it doesn't cure everything; it's just the start) is to say these simple words: "You are God, and I am not god. You are God, and I am not god."

I just want to end with this story. If you've been at The Porch for a while, I actually told this the first time I was here. I want to tell an abbreviated version. There was a time in my life when, maybe for the first time, I had to say that. It was regarding the birth of my second child, my first son Ty. I think we have a picture of him and me. Yeah, he's my buddy. I call him my best buddy. This was at a Rangers game when we went at The Porch. I just love this guy with all my heart.

When Ty was born, he had a healthy pregnancy, a healthy birth. Everything was fine. A few hours after he was born, he started turning blue. We found out he was having apnea spells, which means you stop breathing for at least 20 seconds. So, they rushed him to the NICU (the neonatal ICU), and they came back and said, "Hey, he's having these. We don't know why, but we need to keep him in the NICU for five days to monitor him."

This was in the midst of COVID, so they said, "Hey, you can come visit him, but we're actually kicking you out. You have to go home." I just remember that. I remember being so mad. I was mad at everybody. I was mad at the hospital. I was mad at God. I was mad at me. I was mad. I'm just seeing my son there.

We made it four days. Finally, we're right at the cusp of being able to take him home, and he has another apnea spell. We go up to the hospital. I'm so mad. I remember the nurse practitioner looking me in the eyes and going, "Mr. Moffett, you need to know…" Because I was mad. I'm like, "We're just taking him home." She's like, "You need to know your son could be very sick, and your son could die." She left, and I lost it. I'd been a pastor, been a Christian for a number of years, but I realized, deep down in there somewhere, I was still god.

I remember going home that night, so frustrated, and waking up in the morning. My wife went to the hospital, and I just got on my face before God. I did all three of these things. I was so mad at God. Just angry. "God, you made me his dad, and it feels like he's outside of my control, fading away. What's going on?" I'm just angry with God and processing with him and crying. Finally, this song plays in the background. It's called "Sovereign Over Us." I just remember the words that were so crazy.

You are working in our waiting,

You're sanctifying us,

When beyond our understanding,

You're teaching us to trust.

I broke. For the first time in my life, I looked at God and said, "You are God, and I'm not god. God, even if Ty never gets better, I will still trust you. Even if Ty dies, you are still God, and I'm not god." Something broke in me in that moment. I remember driving to the hospital a few hours later and just worshiping God. Nothing had changed in the circumstance. I just really believed in God, and I wasn't him. Then, as the days continued, just really trusting God, but not even for the outcome. Just, "You're good, and I can trust you."

It's so cool. After five days, we got to go home, and they never gave me the control I wanted. They never said, "Here's what went wrong. Here's how to fix it." They went, "We don't know what happened. I hope it works out." For four years, Ty has been good. But the craziest part, I think, is my wife and me realizing, "We're not god; you are, and we trust you with every aspect." Since then, there has been a lot of, "You're God; I'm not god."

I'm just curious. Where in your life are you still god? Where are you still trusting in yourself rather than trusting the one who has angel armies at his beck and call; the one who makes wars to cease, even the war in your own mind; the one who, in an instant, could heal you if he wanted, but he's doing a plan you can't see? Do you trust him? The beauty of the gospel is that God is not just some distant God. He entered in. He knows every aspect of what it's like to be human.

He entered in, and on that cross, he took our infirmities, our sin, our fear, our anxiety on himself, and he said, "I will bear this for you. I'm going to be placed into that grave, and I'm going to come out in three days, beating sin, hell, death, and the Devil so you don't have to. If you will trust me, I'm working a plan you can't see, but I'm your God, not you." So, what is faith? "You are God. I'm not god. There's nothing I can do to earn. I just receive by faith life in you." Let's pray together.

Lord, I just know, in a room like this, there are some anxious thoughts that are beyond tornadoes and a night of no sleep. There are people in this room who have contemplated, "I no longer belong on this planet." There are some who literally can't even think rationally for a minute because their mind is racing so much. There are people who doubt your existence, God. They doubt your love, despite all of the sermons they've been in. That gnawing thought is wrestling them day and night. Yet, as we just read, the God of Jacob, the God of the wrestler, is on my side.

Lord, you don't promise that in this life all the healing we want will happen, but you do promise the Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is on our side. So, God, be near. Help us feel you. Lord, whatever it takes in our minds, fill us with your Spirit such that your nearness is closer than our anxiety. God, help us to say the hard but true words, "You are God; I am not god." We love you, and we trust you. In Jesus' name, amen.