Don’t be anxious about anything, but in every circumstance, with thankful prayer and petition, make your needs known to God. And God’s peace, which transcends all understanding, will keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

Phil 4:6-7

Human culture has always suffered from a plethora of disease states, with each generation seeming to specialize in one or two of them. Some periods of history have exhibited tendencies to superstition, others to cruelty, and still others to rebellion and revolt. As the world ages, we appear to be capable of passing around multiple pathologies, displaying signs and symptoms of several disorders at once, and presenting manifestations of growing system failure. If what I’m saying is true, the question is, “What is the prevailing or predominant socio-spiritual illness plaguing our generation?”

The symptomatic array that I believe is our current bugaboo contains the factors fear, anxiety, and fretfulness, which I will combine under the truly scientific diagnostic heading of angst. It’s important to note, of course, that angst – like every form of human ailment – exists in every age. People have feared all sorts of things from wild animals to pillagers and marauders to solar eclipses to economic disaster. From its beginning to its end Scripture spends many verses encouraging God followers to put aside fear and disquiet and to trust him with every aspect of their existence.

Is it possible, then, that we face a greater intensity of anxiety than those who might well have fallen prey to a bear, a plague, or a Viking raid? Without a muti-millenium longitudinal study to prove me right or wrong, I am going to make a claim in favor of “yes.” My reasons for an affirmative answer are these: First, modern humans do not face only external threats, but are prone to suffering internally in ways that previous generations didn’t. Second, today’s media operate on a 24/7 basis and major in fear-mongering to a degree that most certainly would embarrass and shock Walter Cronkite and his colleagues. Third, listening to contemporary music, both secular and Christian, reveals an unprecedented emphasis on personal and social worry. And, fourth, the consequences of fear – a yearning for security (and spending on it), self-protection, etc. – are everywhere evident.

Ironically, large swaths of the world’s population are probably safer now than in any prior century. By every metric – health, life expectancy, crime, economic well-being – most of us enjoy a basic stability that would be the envy of people who lived a mere hundred years ago. When was the last time you feared meeting a bear or Hun outside your front door? On the other hand, how many minutes or hours has it been since you or I sensed that unease and disquiet that accompany our anxious thoughts? How is it that we don’t experience the promised peace that surpasses understanding?

The obvious answer to this “why?” is that we don’t believe or trust the divine nature or his promises. We struggle with doubt. We don’t engage our hearts with the Holy Spirit or with the Lord’s word. We are not acquainted enough with his presence and power. We forget to ask for faith and to apply it to our lives. We are proud and willful in our resistance. But all that simply raises another “Why?” Or a set of “Whys?” There are numerous catalysts that work in tandem with our self-will and unbelief …

First off, I am coming to believe that much of what ails us has to do with expectations. At the bottom of this is, of course, a failure to rightly expect from God. The claim of C.S. Lewis often rings true: We don’t ask too much of the Lord, but too little. What Lewis doesn’t elucidate much is that our asking and expecting deteriorates because we put God in a straight jacket with three arms (that’s how hard we work at protecting ourselves from his absolute claim on us). The first is what we believe he, or the world, or others owe us. The second is that we struggle with surrender and obedience to him – to his leading and purpose as paramount in our relationship with him. The third is the simple resistance to a love that makes no sense to our human standards.

Secondly, wound up in all of this is the deception that comes from what we expect life to be like. We express one of two tendencies in this regard. For some, there is a pot of gold mentality that cannot abide the existence of deprivation or suffering. For others, we are like Joe Btfsplk, the Al Capp character from L’il Abner who walked about with a perpetual cloud of darkness over his head. Most of us vacillate between the two perspectives. Regardless of our predispositions, neither personality trait comes from or serves faith. Instead, they keep us focused on circumstances by which we evaluate not only the quality of our lives, but the very nature of God himself.

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Third, our faith falls apart and anxiety gains the ascendancy as we passively or actively engage the world’s distractions and claims about life. This is a very powerful elixir that energizes our faulty expectations. If we are prone to the sunny deception of social media content, our culture has plenty of positive thinking to go around. If we are more the “cloud to hide every silver lining” type, there is a rainy headline or prediction for every occasion. Again, the world and its demonic architect are going full-bore to distract us from truth and to mire us in the futile and fatal game of “find someone (including God) to blame.”

And, fourth, we carry certain delusions about our ability to attain our and the world’s expectations. Unbelief goes in two directions. With respect to God, it denigrates the biblical description and narrative of his love and power. With respect to us – and sometimes to the world’s claims – it elevates us to divine status with a faith that defies our experience of reality. Such confidence is one of the great mysteries of our race. It is a confidence that consistently – not, constantly – disappoints. Whatever we are striving for, whether success, righteousness, the perfect relationship, a better image, we find a level of inadequacy and incompleteness even when it seems that we have “arrived.” But it’s not just that self-reliance doesn’t work, it’s simply not what we’re made for. In the end we find disquiet, anxiety, malaise. Finding them, we seek to banish them, often failing to let the Spirit bring our attention to the underlying sin and sins that are their breeding ground.

To this point, we are only in diagnostic mode. The question is, how do we move beyond detection to a possible cure? The passage from Philippians that I quoted in my heading is a beginning. And so that’s where we will start next time. Meanwhile, we can ask the Spirit to “test our anxious thoughts” and discover for us the offensive ways that inhabit our hearts and minds (Psalms 139:23-24) so that we can then have the Physician work his healing for us.