Is feeling anxious and worried a sin?

The short answer is ‘no’ but it can lead unto sin. None of our feelings are sinful in themselves. We can’t even control many of the feelings that come over us but we can learn to stop them controlling us quite so much. Anger, frustration, lust, worry, negativity, despair. Many feelings come upon us that are not sinful in themselves but can lead us away from the Lord rather than towards him if we let them.

This is a large, complex topic and I am only covering it in a very general sense. What I mean by ‘worrying’ or ‘feeling anxious’ is the worry and anxiety we all feel from time to time. There are mental health conditions that cause people to feel an inordinate amount of worry, stress and anxiety and I am not dealing with those.

I must acknowledge up front that the church has not been good at handling people who struggle with worry, anxiety and depression. We have even taught or implied that all worrying is down to a lack of faith, meaning that when Christians feel anxious they also then feel guilty which just enhances the problem.

Feeling worried is a perfectly natural and normal part of being human. Especially when we have lots of genuine things to worry about for ourselves and our loved ones. We are not to feel guilty because we worry, worry is a side-effect of caring, but nor are we to roll over and allow it to dominate us.

We are fallen human beings with broken bodies and broken minds. But that is God’s deliberate strategy, so that our very weaknesses may help draw us nearer to God to learn to trust him deeply, in a way we never would or could if we were strong.

Paul shows us how we should respond, in Philippians 4 verse 6 he says ‘do not be anxious about anything’ then immediately follows it with ‘but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgivings let your requests be made known to God’.

He is not saying:

don’t feel like this -> instead feel like this

He is saying:

when you feel like this -> do this!!!

Paul is teaching us how our very natural worries can become a trigger to drive us towards God. This is gospel, good news, the Lord can work in us to build up emotional strength so we are not ruled by our emotions, by using those very emotions to drive us towards himself.

Read Philippians 4:4-9and notice how much is in here regarding our emotional life.

The aim: becoming easy to work with

The aim is for our reasonableness to be known to everyone (v5). So that we have a reputation, individually and collectively, as people who are easy to work with. Not contentious or self-seeking, not easily offended or upset, with our emotions under control. If you were to come to my work and ask my team how easy I am to work with what would they say? Or the people I work with in church? Am I patient with everyone, emotionally robust and difficult to provoke to anger or enmity? Or is there a string of people I have fallen out with over the years?

When we are annoyed or mistreated we are not to retaliate or react, or even dwell on it in our minds, but to pass it all onto God. That’s what will give us inner peace even amidst difficult relationships. He reminds us that the Lord is at hand (v5). He is close by in two senses; right there to hear our prayers and soon returning as Judge of all the earth. We don’t need to stand up for ourselves, God will make it all right.

This obviously requires trust in and that trust needs to be built up slowly over time. It requires training.

As with our bodies so with our minds; good health requires exercise. Paul gives us some mental exercises we can do to seek to help our minds get into better shape than they are now.

Just as the body is prone to illness and infection when run down, the mind is prone to worry and sadness when run down. Paul is trying to teach us how to build strength and endurance in the mind.

Exercise one: rejoice

Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say rejoice – the most repeated command throughout Philippians. This is obviously not about feeling happy because it is a command. It means to deliberately exult or celebrate God’s victory no matter how you feel. To deliberately focus on Him and what He has done.

That’s why we teach every member that the Lord’s Supper is not optional. Because it isn’t!! The Lord commanded it for our good. Now of course it isn’t always possible to be here, but as a whole and in general we are all to treat it as a command from the Lord to each of us. We are not to give ourselves a choice as it’s a matter of obeying our Lord.

There are many good reasons for this, but think about the impact of that on us over the years. Imagine if we only remembered the Lord when we felt like it. I would give in to my feelings every other week and lie on in bed. Furthermore, it’s not just a command to turn up to the meeting, the actual command is to ‘remember’ him (1 Corinthians 11:24) which means to deliberately focus on the Lord and celebrate what he has done. What good would it do if we came together and didn’t discipline our minds to focus on him? I would think about all my issues and problems and that would do my mind more harm than good. This is a battle, a mental battle, but if we truly engage in it week-by-week the outcome over years is a mind that is less controlled by our natural emotions.

Not that the Lord’s Supper is primarily a mental discipline, the overall purpose is that the truth that we focus on sinks in as the Holy Spirit applies it to our hearts and minds. So that we gradually learn to trust more in the goodness and sovereignty of God. We can’t strengthen our own minds through mental disciplines, for any real progress we depend on God to work in us through his Spirit.

Exercise two: pray

Then we come to verse 6 where Paul tells us how to respond when we feel worried and anxious. Worry and conflict are meant to trigger prayer.

However, we are not just to pray when worried or annoyed. Just like with bodily exercise, don’t wait to be in the mood or it won’t happen too often. Make prayer part of your routine.

Part of the weight of life is when we try to control everything, when we try to be god. Nowadays young people are encouraged to decide their gender, identity, purpose, worth, meaning, it is a crushing, impossible responsibility, and we are seeing the impact on their mental health. It is never the way life was meant to be. We are meant to have a God not be a god. As Christians it is relief to deliberately remember how small and weak we are and come before God to ask him to look after us.

And as part of our prayers we are to be thankful (v6). That is so good for our minds or we focus only on our problems and worries. It helps us trust that God really has looked after us well and will probably not change his mind this week.

Plus a healthy diet

Paul now switches to show us that there is something further we can do to help our minds. We can control what gets in.

The word used in verse 7 for guarding our hearts and minds is garrison, like the guards used at a Roman fort to carefully control access. Paul is saying we need to guard very carefully what comes into our minds.

For a healthy body we need to eat a balanced diet of fruit and veg. For a healthy mind we need to feed it healthy stuff. Our modern world understands the connection between food and the body but hasn’t made the same connection between thoughts and the mind. It feeds us a constant stream of immorality, sex, violence and depravity in the form of entertainment and then wonders where all societies problems come from.

Notice verse 8 is not saying “read your Bible”, the language is actually taken from the world of Greek culture and ethics. Nor is it saying only ever think high and noble thoughts – as if we could. Instead Paul seems to be encouraging us to select out what is praiseworthy and morally excellent from the surrounding culture. We are to take an interest in life, and embrace what is good wherever we find it. Culture is not all bad. Life is full of good wholesome things to learn and enjoy and that is healthy for our minds. Nature. Music. Art. Literature. Education. Science. Cooking. Enjoy it all, but do so in a very deliberate and discriminating way, check if there is any excellence.

As Bible Commentator Gordon Fee says “we are not to reject life but to approach the marketplace, media, arts and universities looking for what is uplifting and admirable – but to do so with a discriminating eye and heart, for which the Crucified One serves as a template. Indeed, if one does not “consider carefully,” and then discriminate on the basis of the gospel, what is rejected very often are the mere trappings, the more visible expressions of the “world” while its anti-gospel values (relativism, materialism, hedonism, nationalism, individualism, to name but a few) are absorbed into the believer through cultural osmosis.”

We can think as long as there are no sex scenes it’s fine to watch as many movies and box sets as we like when in reality the ideas and messages portrayed are entirely anti-Christian and are shaping our minds more than we realise.

I am not saying throw out your TV but maybe we should all watch a lot less than we do, especially because there are so many better things to do in life.

Paul is saying be very careful what we put in as it will have an impact. If we feed our minds on the news every day, we are going to end up worried as the news trades in fear.

3 2 1... get exercising

Paul finishes his advice on training our minds with the command to copy him in verse 9. Like a gym instructor. We have to ask “why should we Paul?” Your life is hardly working out well. You’ve been in prison for years now, on trial for your life, and many of the local Christians in Rome have turned against you. And yet… you are rejoicing. This is what we are aiming at: becoming someone who is not controlled by their circumstances and the natural emotions that come with those circumstances.

We often focus on changing our circumstances to be happy but Paul is trying to change us to be people who enjoy the Peace of God whatever circumstances we are in. Less dictated to by the natural emotions that arise out of life. People who experience the supernatural peace of God, and the presence of the God of Peace.

We can’t control our circumstances but we can follow the apostles in the practise of these things, as a route to building a healthy emotional life.