Worry is something all of us encounter from time to time. Our circumstances stances get hard, they start to slip out of our control, and our anxiety level starts rising. The harder we cling to a need for control, the faster our anxiety rises. But what if there was a way to keep this from happening in the first place? As we continue our series, Talking to God, today we are talking about one of the most powerful potential impacts of prayer in our life. This isn’t a clinical solution for anxiety that has grown beyond our ability to manage it, but for much of the everyday, garden variety anxiety we all face, there’s a lot of potential for impact here. Let’s talk about prayer, anxiety, and how one helps with the other.

A Cure for Anxiety

Have you ever had a God-experience that just stuck with you? Not all of them do. But every now and then, you have one that you just can’t shake. Depending on the circumstances, that may be a hard thing, but often these kinds of experiences serve as important markers in our hearts and minds of God’s character. I had one of these when I was in college. I can still vividly remember a great deal of the situation. One spring, I got my schedule for the fall semester. I was going to have a pretty large class load, so I had worked really hard to make sure everything coordinated just right. Then, I got a note from my advisor that one of the classes I signed up for wasn’t going to be available, throwing my entire schedule into chaos. This disruption of my nice, neat, perfectly organized plan wasn’t just a threat to the following semester, but had the potential of moving back my entire graduation date. I quickly went into a tailspin of doubt and anxiety. But it was going to be a couple of days before I could get in with my advisor to work out a solution. Until then, there wasn’t anything I could do. So, I did the only thing I could do: I prayed. 

I’m not sure that I had ever dedicated so much time and energy to praying for something before as I did that scheduling conflict. Looking back now, it seems rather silly to get all bent out of shape over something whose lasting impact on the rest of my life was going to be basically nonexistent, but it was a major issue for me at the time. It was all I could think about. Trying to do anything else was a waste of time. There was only this roadblock to my entire future. 

Then, on Thursday morning ahead of a scheduled meeting with my advisor on Friday, I was walking to class. It was a beautiful morning as I strolled down the brick sidewalk under a canopy of trees, probably barefoot as I really didn’t wear shoes very often in college. As I was walking past Blanton-Nason-Brewer Hall (we called it BNB, for short), praying as I went, God spoke. I mean, I experienced the moment as a thought popping into my head, but I knew it wasn’t from me. He reminded me of Jeremiah 29:11 and the fact that He knew what His plans for me were. I didn’t have to worry about it because He already had things well in hand. Now, I know that wasn’t a good exegetical interpretation of Jeremiah 29:11. I’ve preached against using that verse like that. But sometimes God can use even bad biblical interpretation to accomplish His good purposes. And in that moment, a peace came over me that did not reflect the anxiety I had been feeling only moments before. I said a quick prayer of thanks and kept going on to class. 

That night, the campus ministry I was a part of did a special service in the banquet room in the Student Union Building. It was basically an open mic night for students to come and share a song or a poem or a message that God had put on their heart. It was a very college-ministry kind of service to do. A friend of mine named Laura got up to sing a song called, The Hammer Holds, by Bebo Norman. It’s all about trusting God in times of uncertainty…kind of like I was in. Before she sang, though, she said she wanted to share a verse that God had laid on her heart while she was preparing for her performance. Want to take a guess at what she read? Jeremiah 29:11: “‘For I know the plans I have for you’—this is the Lord’s declaration—‘plans for your well-being, not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope.’” 

There are a lot of different ways this story could go—and this moment was significantly impactful for me that I’ve used it for many of them over the years—but can I tell you what a relief from anxiety it was? If I had started to settle in the peace of the Lord after hearing His voice that morning, after Laura sang, I was cooler than a cucumber. I still didn’t have any idea how the whole situation was going to be resolved, but that really didn’t matter anymore. I had the peace that passed all understanding. I was good. When I committed myself to prayer, God responded by giving me an experience of His peace that I still really can’t fully explain. I just knew things were going to be okay because they were in His faithful hands. I didn’t experience this because of anything special about me, but rather because this is one of the things faithful, persistent prayer can accomplish in our lives. It’s why prayer matters so much. 

This morning we are in the second part of our three-part reflection on the nature and impact of prayer called, Talking to God. The whole idea for this short journey is that prayer is something pretty much everybody does. Even people who don’t believe in God still report praying at least on occasion. I heard a testimony just this past week from a guy who went for a long period of his life when he would have looked you in the face and told you without blinking that there was no God…but he still prayed to Him every night. That most of us pray is really not a question. What is of far greater concern is how we can pray in a way that actually accomplishes something positive in our lives. 

Well, because we aren’t going to pray with anything resembling effectiveness if we aren’t clear on what it is or what it is for, that’s where we started last week. Using some of Jesus’ teachings on prayer as our guide, we clarified together the fact that prayer is most fundamentally about building and maintaining a relationship with God in Christ. Yes, occasionally we are going to ask for things that we hope for God to give us, but that kind of thing is secondary to the first function: relationship building. Given this, the most effective prayers we pray will be ones rooted in a deep and rich understanding of just who God is. With all of this in mind, I told you to keep this one idea in mind about prayer more than anything else: Prayer is a conversation with a God who loves you. 

If that’s what prayer is, though, what we also need is a better understanding of what prayer actually does. Why pray in the first place? I mean, yes, it’s our primary means for building and deepening our relationship with God through Jesus. Okay, got that. But what does it do for us? What kind of practical things can it accomplish in our lives? And again, yes, a better, stronger relationship with God is something really practical, but that’s not what I’m getting at right now because if we’re being honest, that’s not the kind of thing we’re thinking when we ask this kind of a question. We can certainly point to positively answered prayers, but even that isn’t but so helpful. After all, given the number of things we pray for that we don’t see happen owning mostly to the fact that we pray for a bunch of things whose answer would entail an abrogation of our ability to make meaningful and consequential choices which God just isn’t going to do, positively answered prayer probably isn’t something we want to make our primary indicator of success here. So then, what else can prayer do? 

The apostle Paul offers us one really good answer near the end of his letter to the church in Philippi. If you have a copy of the Scriptures handy this morning, join me in Philippians 4. If you are flipping through the New Testament, you’re going to want to go past the four Gospels and Acts. From there you’ll be in Paul’s letters. Paul’s letters are organized in two groups: letters to churches and letters to individuals. These, then, are ordered simply from longest to shortest. Philippians is the second-to-last of his letters to churches. And now you’re ready for your next Bible Trivial Pursuit game. You’re welcome. 

Paul wrote Philippians near the end of his life. He was in Rome, under house arrest, and probably chained to at least one guard to make sure he didn’t try to escape. Rome didn’t care much about their prisoners, so making sure they had something to eat didn’t fall very high on their priority list. Paul’s care was provided by his still free ministry partners, and members of the churches he had planted on his previous missionary journeys who had heard about his plight. One of the most committed of these supporters was the Philippian church. Paul had a really strong relationship with this church. They had a special place in his heart which the language of the letter makes abundantly clear. It is Paul’s most joyful letter, focusing most of its attention on how to stand firm in faith during trying times. What makes this message especially poignant is that Paul knew his own demise at the hands of Rome was imminent. The joyfulness of his tone belies the seriousness of his circumstances. The Philippian believers as well had a pretty rough situation. They were a severely persecuted and impoverished congregation. And yet, they were incredibly faithful and generous in their outlook toward the people around them. They went way over and above to help care for Paul, and he was most grateful to them for it. 

Near the end of the letter, as he did in so many of his letters, Paul turned from doing theology to offering entirely more practical advice on how to pursue Jesus effectively and well in light of all the theology in the rest of the letter. When he gives attention to this effort, Paul says something that is absolutely world-shaping in terms of the impact it can have on us if we will let it. After dealing with a couple of interpersonal issues in the church, Paul shifts gears and says this starting in v. 4: “Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice!” 

Now, again, keep in mind Paul’s situation. If he were sitting on top of the world, that would be one thing. Such an exhortation as this would make sense. We would expect it then. But he wasn’t. He was in prison, literally chained to a guard or two, awaiting his hearing before Nero Caesar which he knew was going to result in his martyrdom. Not exactly sunshine and rainbows. Can you imagine the guard’s reaction when he dictated this to his scribe? Also, remember that he was giving this command to a bunch of people who were in a frightfully difficult set of circumstances that showed every sign of getting worse before any kind of meaningful improvement was going to come. 

Okay, but how are you supposed to rejoice when everything is falling apart around you? The answer to that question is a sermon unto itself, but for now, you shift your focus. Instead of fixating on what’s broken, you start intentionally seeking out points of gratitude. This doesn’t mean you ignore things that need to be addressed. Rather, you don’t let those crowd out everything else that’s good. There’s a lot more of that. You just have to learn to see it. 

In v. 5, Paul tells them to “let your graciousness be known to everyone. The Lord is near.” The word “graciousness” there is a tricky word to translate into English because it has a pretty wide range of meanings. A quick survey of other major translations yields moderation, gentleness, reasonableness, unselfishness, mercy, tolerance, patience, forbearance, and considerateness. That’s ten possibilities if you are counting with me. If the Greek word here (which is epieikes in case you were interested) has at least ten possible acceptable English translations, it would seem that trying to force ourselves to commit to just one of them doesn’t make a lot of sense. I get that translations have to make a choice for the sake of readability, but can I suggest what may be a better option here? What Paul is calling the Philippian believers here to is not simply a single character trait to display in their lives, but rather for them to reflect the full character of God in their circumstances. 

So, in the midst of hard circumstances, we are to rejoice and be more like Jesus. In other words, we are to do just the opposite of what likely comes naturally to us. And we are to do this because “the Lord is near.” That phrase is most often used in a very much apocalyptic sense of God’s imminent return. But I think there’s another way we can understand Paul here. We are to take this counterintuitive and counterculture path in the face of difficult situations with the full knowledge that our God will be near to help us when we struggle with it. We don’t have to walk the path of Christ alone. In fact, if we try that, we’ll probably fail. 

Sure, but our circumstances are still hard. Putting on a positive face doesn’t make that hard magically go away. The emotional drag, the social pressure, the crippling anxiety is still there. I know that. You know that. Paul doesn’t seem to know it. Or at least, that might be an understandable conclusion but for what comes next. Paul goes on to offer another command. Look at this with me in v. 6 now: “Don’t worry about anything, but in everything, through prayer and petition with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.”

Here’s that asking God for stuff thing we said was still okay to do last week in spite of the fact that this isn’t the primary purpose of prayer. Do you know what worry is? It is an attempt to grab control of something over which we don’t actually have any control. Because of our actual lack of control, we can’t do anything ourselves to impact the situation in any way. So instead, we just fret over it. We worry about it. We let ourselves get all eaten up with anxiety because of it. And do you know what that accomplishes? Of course you do because you’ve been down this road before just like I have. It accomplishes nothing. 

What Paul tells us to do instead is to pray about it. More specifically he tells us to “present your requests to God.” Let me remind all of us again that Paul had the moral authority to say this because his circumstances were worse than ours. He wasn’t just blowing hopeful smoke from his cozy perch in some cushy situation. He was deeper in the trenches than you or I will probably ever be. And from way down there he was saying that this is the best thing to do about a situation that is beyond our control. We give up our futile attempts to wrest control of it for ourselves, and instead entrust ourselves into the hands of the God who actually is sovereign over all of His creation. We say, “God, help me with this.” 

But look at how he tells us to do this, because that’s important. How are we to present our requests to God? Through prayer and petition. Through prayer—that is, in active pursuit of a relationship with Him since prayer is a conversation with a God who loves you.. And through petition—that is, with an acknowledgment that He is greater and stronger and higher than we are. You don’t petition someone you outrank. You command them. You petition someone who outranks you in hopes of receiving their help or permission. So, when we present our requests to God rather than giving into anxiety’s empty promise that this time we’ll be able to actually do something about the situation ourselves, we turn our attention and the substance of the situation over to the God who loves us with a full recognition that He is the one who actually can meaningfully help us in it. 

Those two weren’t the only parts of the formula here, though. Don’t miss this third part, because it may be the most important of all. We are to present our requests “with thanksgiving.” Why does this matter? It matters for two reasons. On our side of the equation, a mindset of gratitude focuses our attention on something other than ourselves and our issues. It’s amazing how much more clearly we can see when we take a minute to look up from our brokenness and out at the incredible world around us that God successfully manages each and every day. 

In addition to this, gratitude is a directional mindset. You can’t be just generally grateful. If you are grateful, you are grateful for something and to the one who made that something available to you. Secularism limits opportunities to be grateful, which in turn keeps us focused on ourselves and our problems, trapping us in our misery. Similarly, you can’t be grateful to the universe because the universe is inanimate. The universe doesn’t care about you and can’t do anything for you. Gratitude, on the other hand, points us naturally toward the God who does and who can in acknowledgment, celebration, and participation of who He is. That is, gratitude points us toward worship. And when we are worshiping the God who can make a meaningful difference in our hardest situations, we position ourselves to be far more likely to be able to receive that help. 

On God’s side of the equation, gratitude makes Him more inclined to help us. You’re the same way. When your kids need something, but are perpetually ungrateful and surly about it, you may still do it for them because you area good parent, but you’re not really happy about it. And you might just make them go without so they learn to be more content with and grateful for what they already do have. God is a good and loving father, and sometimes being a good and loving father means saying no to kids who need to learn the lesson of gratitude. Coming to Him having already learned that lesson and actively practicing it avoids the potential roadblock there. 

So then, when we are in hard, anxiety-inducing situations of all shapes and sizes, the right response is not to lean into that anxiety, fruitlessly trying to grab control of something we will never control. The right response is to pray. But what does this praying actually do for us? Look with me at v. 7 where Paul gives us the answer: “And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” 

The opposite of anxiety is peace. If anxiety is an attempt to grab hold of something we cannot ultimately control—and, by the way, pride fuels anxiety because it leaves us convinced that we can control something that in reality we can’t—peace is a hopeful contentedness with leaving the outcome of a situation in the faithful hands of the God who is good and focusing our attention instead on pursuing Him and His kingdom by following the command of Christ to love one another with the abiding help of the Holy Spirit. And when we are willing to turn to prayer—that is, to pursuing God relationally—instead of leaning into anxiety—which is ultimately nothing more than an outworking of a misplaced trust in ourselves—the result of our efforts will be an experience of God’s peace. 

And here’s the thing about the peace of God: it often doesn’t make any sense given the shape of our circumstances. There’s a reason Paul calls this the peace “which surpasses understanding.” When our circumstances seem to be flying apart around us, every natural instinct we have tells us we should try to grab and hold control of them all the more tightly because who can we trust more than ourselves? The world thinks the same thing. Someone who is totally at peace in the midst of terrifying circumstances is a disturbing fascination to the world. That kind of thing goes against nature. It doesn’t make any sense. But the world wants it. Think of how many different ways our culture tells us we can find peace in the midst of conflict, and think of just how many of those ways fail to deliver on their promise. This way won’t. Prayer with a grateful heart brings God’s peace. 

Now, we have to be sure we are praying to the right God. Praying for peace to a god who doesn’t actually exist because we don’t understand very well the nature of the God who does won’t do us much good. But when we pray to the God who does exist, His peace will be the result. Prayer with a grateful heart brings God’s peace. 

Okay, but what about that one time when you were really stressed out about a hard situation, and you prayed hard about it, and the situation didn’t change at all? Isn’t that clear evidence of the emptiness of what Paul is promising here? Not at all. At least, not when we take stock of what he’s actually promising. Look again at what Paul said. Did he say this peace of God which surpasses understanding will make your situation all better? Did he say it will solve all your problems and bring your sinking ship back to buoyancy? No, he did not. He said it “will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.” Prayer with a grateful heart brings God’s peace not by necessarily changing your circumstances, but by giving you the ability to find contentment and wholeness from within them. 

How does that work? Well, when we pursue a deeper and richer relationship with God—that is, when we pray—we gradually come to know Him more. We come to better appreciate His power and wisdom. We come to trust in His ability to redeem what is broken and bring good out of what we see as only bad. The greater our knowledge, appreciation, and trust grow, the more we will find ourselves able to focus our energy on being faithful to Christ’s command to love one another after the pattern of His own example for us in whatever our circumstances happen to be instead of focusing on what’s broken. We still take wise steps as He directs to fix what’s broken when the opportunity presents itself, but until then, we leave things in His hands and focus on love. The less we try to wrest control that isn’t ours in the first place, the less anxiety we’ll have. The less anxiety we have, the more space for trust we will have. The more we trust, the more peace we will experience. Prayer grows trust which leads to peace. Prayer with a grateful heart brings God’s peace. 

And if you’re sitting there thinking, “Yeah, but how do I know exactly what to pray in order to gain access to all this good stuff?” you’re asking the right question. Next time, as we wrap up this series, we’ll tackle that very thing. 

By the way, are you wondering at all about the rest of the story from earlier? The scheduling conflict worked out fine. The next morning I met with my advisor, and he was puzzled why I wanted to meet. He had already put me in another class (with a better professor) that worked better in my overall schedule than the one I had signed up for in the first place. 

God really did have things in hand better than I did. When I tried to control things on my own, anxiety was the result. When I stepped back and turned to prayer, letting God take the lead in making things right with an eye toward gratitude, He did just that. And I experienced the peace that passed all understanding. But make no mistake: the peace came before the resolution. Prayer with a grateful heart brings God’s peace. Every other path just leads to more anxiety. If you want peace, prayer with gratitude is the way to go. Prayer with a grateful heart brings God’s peace. Let’s do that together.