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Anxiety (What is your anxiety struggle: pressure from parents/teachers/fri…
Anxiety
What is your anxiety struggle: pressure from parents/teachers/friends - guilt from sin - social media - not being satisfied with who you are - performance - social anxiety
I want to share something that I've learned during my struggle with anxiety: There is no magic formula to cure anxiety. There are no special sequence of words that you can pray that will release you from every feeling anxious.
I'm going to sum months of counselling up in 5 minutes. Besides prayer, the #1 thing we can do to help with our struggle with anxiety is taking a look at how we are thinking about ourselves.
Paul says to fix your thoughts on good things, not things that tell you what a failure you are.
This is how it used to work: A certain event or circumstance would cause me to feel anxious. The more that I thought about it the more anxious I got. It was just a bad spiral where I would continue to get more and more anxious. This was because I thought that it was up to me to get over it and figure out the special formula to stop myself from being anxious.
This is how it works now: A certain event will take place that will cause me to feel anxious. So I pray about it. Not using some special prayer. But simply saying, You are God and I am not. I release some of the pressure that I feel on myself because I know that you are the one that is in control and that you love me and that you have a good plan for my life.
I want to share with you the 2 things that have helped me the most. And they come from this famous quote that this guy said who lived a really long time ago. He said: Pray like it's all up to God, and live like it's all up to you.
So the 2 things are, pray like it's all up to god, and live like it's all up to you. So let's start by focussing on the prayer one.
So here's the 2nd one. When you are feeling anxious you absolutely should pray and ask God to give you his peace that is so beyond us it doesn't make sense. But I want to read verse 8 of the passage
Paul is telling us that after praying, what we need to do, is take a look at how we are thinking.
Intro: My experience with anxiety. Performance driven. Trying to earn God's love. Emotionally driven.
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God doesn't even promise to take away your anxiety. But he does promise to give us something in return for turning to him and praying - PEACE
The things that used to cause me anxiety haven't gone anywhere. Most of the situations are still exactly the same. And many of them still cause me anxiety to this day. But what has changed, is my ability to trust in the peace that God gives me
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We all have an internal dialogue going on. And this drastically affects how we are doing mentally and emotionally
So we need to identify the lies that we are speaking to ourselves and speak truth about them. We need to replace the negative thoughts with positive ones.
I want to end with this. Even in our attempt to change the way we think, we will fail. The greatest part? God is greater than our feelings and knows us better than we know ourselves.
1 John 3:20 God is greater than our feelings. God knows you better than you know yourself and can speak truth over your fears and anxieties.
So go to sleep meditating on God's truths about you. Wake up meditating on them. Fill your mind with them and I promise you will begin to feel some of the anxieties fall away.