Welcome to Speak the Truth, a podcast devoted to giving biblical truth for educating, equipping, and encouraging the individual in local church and counseling and discipleship. Hello. Hello. Hello. Yo, yo, yo. What's up? Oh, Jeremy. What's up? Brother Bert over there. Bert Reynolds. What's up? No, that isn't how he sounds at all.

Anyway, we are back with another episode of Speak the Truth and we are going to continue our conversation on anxiety. And last episode, we surveyed the diagnostic and statistical manual and sort of how our culture approaches anxiety. In this particular podcast, we want to focus on just a biblical perspective of anxiety and just a biblical framework for how we approach anxiety and those struggling with anxiety.

And so we have with us, like last episode, we've got Jeremy, who's going to dive into that. So Jeremy, let's get right into it, brother. All right. So if you remember last episode, we talked about a woman named Sally who had what we might call obsessive compulsive disorder. And for her the struggle was that she has what we call scrupulosity which is a term that just describes intrusive thoughts about God that create fear.

Oftentimes it comes in the form of committing the unpardonable sin, or if you have some sort of a doubt about God that that's a confirmation that you're not a Christian. It's a really tormenting struggle for people. And so we looked last time at how a psychiatric perspective might address this issue.

But this episode, I want to just start in a general sense how to answer the question, how would scripture conceptualize what this woman is going through. And I'd like to start with a passage that really has nothing to do with anxiety whatsoever, but it does capture the frailty of humanity and the true struggle with being in this body.

And it's Romans 7 15 through Chapter eight, verse two, we're all familiar with it. I'll just kind of, summarize it, but it's, it's where Paul is talking about his struggle with sin and There, there are arguments. Was he a Christian when he wrote this? Was he not a Christian? I don't know the answer to that.

But the point to highlight is the fact that this does capture the struggle with sin even for Christian people. Yeah. And I'm not saying that Sally is struggling with sin. I would put her struggle more in the realm of suffering. Now there may be sin involved in there somewhere. Obviously, the fallenness of her body is part of this, but I'm not reading this to point out.

Sally's a big sinner I'm reading it to just show the dilemma of, of our faith at times. And so this is where Paul talks about doing the things that he knows he should not be doing and not doing the things that he knows he should. You get the feel of a lot of discouragement, even despair in this because he, as he keeps talking about it or writing about it he says, Oh, wretched man that I am, who will save me from this body of death?

And that, that sentence right there captures. The thought process of many people that I've counseled with anxiety, you know, they just condemn themselves. They're just weak Christians They have this issue only because their faith isn't strong enough And so I often take them to this passage, you know, Paul wrestled with some things But his answer this is the key his answer wasn't to be a better Christian the answer to who will Save me from this body of death was not a formula.

It was a person. Yeah, it was Christ. Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ. And it's at that point he's able to then conclude there's therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. And so when I start working with folks with anxiety, I want to make sure that they are, that when we engage this process, that we're doing it in that same mindset.

Yeah. Yes. You feel like a wretched person. Yes. You feel terrible about not being able to just snap your fingers and have confidence in your salvation. But your answer isn't ultimately going to be having that confidence. Your answer is Christ and that you are secure, not because of your faithfulness or your level of faith, but because of his faithfulness.

And as a result, as we move through this, one of the main themes, cause you're going to wrestle, it's going to be two steps forward, maybe four steps backwards sometimes, but in that it's not about. doing better and being a better person. It's about diving deeper into the beauty of the gospel that holds us fast and holds us secure when we feel like everything's just going haywire.

No, that's good. Cause I think In that conversation with our counselees, but I think just in Christendom in general. And that is this idea that I want to be a better person, but not realizing that maybe being conformed to the image of Christ also includes those 10 steps back, you know, so we still sort of struggle with that self help.

thinking that means I'm going to make less mistakes. I'm not going to struggle as much. And life's going to be better. Yes. Not realizing that that's now what being conformed to the image of Christ in its fuller context really is about and what it looks like.

So that's a good distinction. you know, Paul also writes somewhere else that it's in our weakness that the grace of God thrives. And so that's a beautiful idea that. Scripture brings into a struggle like this that you're probably not going to find in a secular arena. It brings purpose to this whole thing.

It's not just a futile battle to, to try to win or get over. It's actually realizing part of the process, realizing that this is a weakness that I have. And in my weakness how am I engaging and drawing from the grace of God versus my own human efforts or my whatever solution I think needs to occur to make me feel better.

Yeah, that's good. That's really good. That's good. Yeah. Grace is something that, you know, we, we talk about, but I think oftentimes we don't realize the full impact of what it means to embrace grace. Yeah. You know, and it's fuller context, so. And Paul, we don't know what was going on with him there, but it was a thorn that he mentions.

Some people think it could have been a physical issue, but we don't really know. But anxiety can be a thorn. And we wanna, we wanna conceptualize it in that way. That this is a thorn, and we'll get into this in just a moment. Well, it's a thorn, and there's a sovereign God that's presiding over all of this.

So that kind of leads into this next idea when we're talking about conceptualizing anxiety biblically I think we have to start with the fundamental question of who are we? Yeah every single therapeutic approach including psychiatry has a worldview of anthropology What makes a person a person, which goes into motivational theories, 100%.

Yeah. And this is what distinguishes biblical counseling. Most profoundly from the secular arena is this question, who is man? And one of the, one of the things well, we'll get to that in a moment, but we'll start with And I'm taking this from our curriculum, Equipped to Counsel, written by Dr. John Henderson.

And I think he may have borrowed some of this from Dr. Michael Emlett at CCEF, but it's a really good grid for us as counselors because we need to pay attention to all of these domains. We, don't want to minimize any of these domains. We are targeting the heart. But, the heart is engaged in a lot of different dynamics that are important for us to consider.

And one of those is we are sovereignly enthroned and deeply loved. This idea that Sally's struggle is not occurring in an arbitrary universe. It's not perchance that this is where she finds herself. There is a God who Before the foundation of the world knew that this was going to be her situation.

And it's also very important for her to know that in that sovereignty, as a believer, this is not a form of punishment for her. That the most loving being in all of the universe is the one who is sovereign. So I always like to put together his sovereignty and his love, you know, when you look at Ephesians chapter two, when it talks about us being dead in our trespasses and sin and it's God alone who made us alive.

And why did he do that? Because he loved us. And so I want people to know that as we navigate OCD, we need to be thinking constantly of. how is God's sovereignty at work here as well as where can we find or,look for his love even in this place that feels so painful and difficult.

So that's the first, the first realm. The second one is that we, so we're sovereignly enthroned and deeply loved, but we're also creatures who are spiritually embattled. We are in a constant spiritual struggle. And I want to just read a quote here That that I have written kind of based on Galatians 6, 14 through 18, the armor of God.

Okay, so we kind of can look at this spiritual battle in this way. We want to continue to point people with these struggles. To God's truth, when we're talking about the spiritual battles, it's, it's constantly pointing them to God's truth verse 14 of Galatians six, while repeatedly reminding them that they are not defined by their weakness, but by Christ's righteousness, verse 14.

Remembering this throughout the journey, they will be encouraged to resist finding peace in a process and pursue their true peace in the gospel alone, the finished work of Jesus Christ, verse 15. They will be guided to exercise their faith in divine wisdom. Rather than their emotional and physiological experience by which they will extinguish the lies being thrown at them by the enemy, verse 16, all the while remembering that their salvation comes from the Lord alone, as they rely on God's word as the formidable weapon in the battle, and they will seek the spirit for continual guidance and strength on the battlefield.

So I think that's a good synopsis when we're talking about what does it look like in terms of the armor of God when we're working with anxiety or we're working specifically with something like OCD? Because that's really a major and core variable that needs to be a big part of the process.

Yeah, that's good. And what I appreciate about, what Henderson did, which for those of you level one folks, and it's maybe it's been a while since you've gone through level one, but using these paradigms, these illustrations, that's why these are so helpful because it does give us a biblical mapping of the soul and not just the domains, but the range of those domains and how they operate and just the dynamics in which we find ourself.

Yes, it's actually It allows us to take something very deep and complex and allows us to put borders on it, so to speak, or categories to think and process. So that's, it's super helpful. It's good. It's good. So, in addition to spiritually embattled, we're also socially embedded people and we cannot downplay the importance of this.

Particular domain. Our history has influenced us. You know, if a person is raised in a, an abusive home where if you make a mistake, the consequences are grave. Or if they are raised in a really legalistic religious home where there's no room For sin, like if you do that, you're a terrible person or controlling parents with OCD specifically there's some literature that would indicate that's associated with some trauma early in life.

So, the socially embedded is very important, and I think it's important to have people consider what kind of factors in their history may have impacted the struggle with anxiety. And then I often have them write out narratives from their family of origin or from experiences that they've had in their lives.

Maybe they were involved in some really scary. car accident. And that's when they started wrestling with anxiety. But narratives, like the heart is going to create narratives. And if we're listening to the narratives of just the fleshly heart, they're deceitful, they're skewed, they're upside down. And the narratives of anxiety tend to make us covet control.

They make the world very, very small and safety becomes our, our ultimate goal. And then as we process through those narratives, we want to help them create new narratives that are centered on scripture and how the scripture might conceptualize those narratives in a very, very different way.

You know, we're trying to look at the whole person and all of the influential variables that have contributed to where they find themselves. Yeah. and I think the good thing about that is, it's okay for biblical counselors to go into the past, it's absolutely, it's helpful because it helps us uncover the uns yes, unresolved sin all the uns there's several of them.

But. That helps us do that. Not to mention it helps to walk through that and apply the gospel because typically people have, you know, taken those traumatic things and sort of place those in ways that they just want to lock it up and put it over here and not deal with it, but not realizing it's actually impacting your current reality.

Yes. And so that is purposeful to help, all right, let's find the point of origination, not to avoid anything like in the Freudian things, but just being able to go back and so that you can find it and like, okay, let's traverse this so that we can actually apply the gospel to it. That's right. Yeah. That's good.

That's good. And so after that. You know, we then look at physically embodied as people. This is a big one for anxiety because what makes anxiety most uncomfortable is the physiological feelings. that people get when they experience anxiety.

Sweaty palms, heavy breathing, you name it. It's happening. Heart racing. Yeah. Butterflies in the stomach. Yeah, it can be very intense. And a lot of times people, you know, have a panic attack. That's all physiological and I can't tell you how many Almost every one of my clients who have had a panic attack in the past have gone to the ER because they think they're having a heart attack.

So it's really scary. And so what happens there when, and I'm going to speak in very general terms, I'm acknowledging that the brain is the most complex organ in the universe. I mean, you can't, we do not understand the brain fully at all. But we can talk in a general sense just to have some understanding on how we can recognize The body's impact and influence in the experience of anxiety.

So what happens when a person feels a certain threat is one of one of the. Components of the brain is the amygdala and the amygdala when it senses a threat and it's, it's constantly on the lookout for something. It's the watchdog. It's the watchdog. Yeah. If it, if it senses something that's threatening, then it begins to pour all kinds of chemicals throughout the body, cortisol, adrenaline, et cetera.

And when those chemicals are being poured into the body, that's what creates the sweaty palms and the heart race because that's helping the body say you either need to get ready to fight right now or run. So a person can be walking in the woods on a trail and see a stick and the amygdala sort of thinks it's a snake and suddenly there they are and they've got these, all of these uncomfortable feelings.

When that happens, physiologically, when the amygdala senses danger and then you start feeling all these physical symptoms. Another phenomenon that occurs is something we might call cognitive fusion. So whatever thoughts or beliefs are prompted. When that, those feelings happen, those become fused.

So your thoughts and your feelings become fused. So, for a person that may have a phobia of elevators, they, they begin to approach elevators, all of these feelings start happening, and now they're just thinking the danger of an elevator. I think in the church, often we've talked about How do we put it?

Head knowledge and heart knowledge. Yeah. And so a lot of times when we're giving biblical counsel and we're starting to give them alternatives for their belief systems, alternatives for their thought processes. Very often those beliefs that are in the scriptures, okay, and when they're not anxious they may say absolutely I believe God is sovereign, absolutely I believe that that God is protecting me or he's watching over me or good or bad whatever occurs I can trust in the plans of God.

When they're not anxious they might really feel that in the heart. But when you get anxious, the fuse thoughts become the thoughts that are most convincing. That's the one that they're grappling with. No, I'm actually not safe right now. So we have to allow, there's another concept called cognitive dissonance, which is simply the distance between what I'm trying to believe and what my feelings are telling me.

Yeah. That's a common thing with anxiety. So we need to encourage people in the perseverance process that as you try to begin to, access biblical truth in the in the midst of an anxiety moment, you may feel dissonance. The beliefs of scripture may not feel as close to you as the fearful beliefs. But what you want to do is continue to exercise those beliefs, even if you're not feeling them, because over time that dissonance will dissipate and The Holy Spirit can just bring profound transformation in your capacity to believe at the gut level what the scripture tells you, even when you're feeling symptoms of anxiety.

That's what I call replacement theology. It's good. That's funny. Awesome. All right. Well, is this does this conclude? Well, or we got a little bit more here because this is, this is heavy. This is good. We got the, the core, the target. Ultimately, we got to hit that one real quick. The active heart of worship.

I said earlier, there's one thing that separates biblical counseling from every single theoretical approach, and it's this, the heart of worship. Theologically. I believe, and I think biblical counseling embraces the idea that every human on the planet is a being of worship. And at the end of the day, it's, it's that which guides and propels our motivations, our thought processes.

So those false thoughts that are coming out are coming out of a heart of worship. And things that we can worship are things like control and safety and security, et cetera. And we want to highlight. to people, those aren't bad desires. So when you think biblically, worship comes in the form of desire or affections.

But when those affections become the treasure, when they become the ultimate, that's when we can find ourself in the weeds. That's where we can find ourselves consumed by anxiety, consumed by sin. And leaning on our own reason and tactics to overcome that anxiety, which really would just make the whole thing worse.

The, the most critical issue there is that when we're when we are participating in idolatry, which is what we'd call that experientially, in the moment, functionally, God is not our center. And when that happens, there's no peace to be found at that point. So, active heart of worship is definitely where biblical counseling aims its primary focus.

Yeah. It's that self ruled versus Christ ruled heart. That's right. Yeah. It's good. That's good. Well, thank you guys for listening. That'll conclude this episode of speak the truth. We'll see you guys next time.