We live in a world awash in anxiety. We hear all the time about just how anxious everyone around us is. Kids are anxious. Teens are especially anxious. Women are anxious. Men are anxious. Young adults are anxious. Older adults are anxious. Everyone is anxious. And we’re miserable because of it. It seems like this is not how things should be. Well, that’s because they shouldn’t be like this. In the Scriptures we can find all sorts of wisdom and counsel for dealing with anxiety in our lives and in the world around us. For this and the next three weeks, we are going to be talking about just like. We’ll start today with the very first thing we should do when fear and anxiety make a play for our hearts.

Trust When All Else Fails

Let’s start with an informal survey this morning. By a show of hands, who in here likes to be scared? Okay, for all the rest of the normal people in the room, who doesn’t like to be scared? There are some folks—as indicated by our little survey—who enjoy being scared. These are the kinds of people who love scary movies or going to Scarowinds in the fall. Personally, I do not count myself among their number. I don’t typically watch scary movies, and I generally avoid the horror genre. I love you guys who do. I admire you. But I am perfectly content watching you intentionally put yourself in situations that will leave you losing your mind and looking really silly while you do it from the sidelines. I will give you two guarantees: I will support you, and I will also laugh at you. 

Since we’re talking about it, though, what really is fear anyway? Isn’t it mostly just the anxiety that comes when we are in a situation that is outside of our control? When you are walking through that haunted house, you can’t control when someone is going to jump out at you, and it puts you on edge. The master of fear, Stephen King, once wrote that it isn’t the thing hiding behind the door that causes us the most fear. It is actually the anticipation of what could be there that gets us. Until that door—metaphorical or literal—is opened, anything could be waiting for us on the other side of it, and our minds very naturally create visions of the most horrible and terrifying things we can imagine. That is, we assume the worst, and the worst is terrifying. Once the door actually opens, and whatever it is turns out not to be quite as bad as we imagined, there’s actually a bit of relief. The fear is abated some. We have a sense of control once again. 

There’s actually one more thing that contributes to our fear. When we are in one of those situations where we don’t have the kind of control we would prefer, there’s that little voice of insecurity—or perhaps yours is not so little—that tells us that even if we were in control of the situation, we still wouldn’t be able to handle it. Maybe it’s a voice that sounds very much like someone from your past—a parent, coach, or teacher. We would just mess it up and leave ourselves and the people around us in a worse place than when we started. As perhaps you know all too well, that kind of thinking can become a black hole from which escape is frightfully difficult. 

If I might be so bold: All of this is something that pretty much everybody has struggled with at one point or another. For some folks, it is a daily challenge. It manifests itself in a variety of different ways, and for some folks it can be more crippling in terms of their daily operation than others, but the fear itself is consistent regardless of the form it happens to take. And if surveys are accurate, in our culture today, this is a wildly common emotional experience. Even for followers of Jesus. What are we supposed to do with all of this? Well, for this and the next couple of weeks, that’s something I’d like to explore with you. 

This morning we are in the first part of a new teaching series called, When I Am Afraid. Fear and anxiety are something that can affect our lives in all sorts of different ways. They can manifest as something as simple as the butterflies we introverts get in our stomach at the thought of meeting someone new for the first time, to a paralyzing sense of indecision when we come to some sort of a major life crossroads. They can be as small as being nervous about a meeting later on in the day to as large as something genuinely clinical that is going to take the dedicated help of a counselor and even medication to fully address. 

Now, this last kind of anxiety is beyond what we are going to attempt to address in this series. This kind of clinical anxiety can stem from a sort of illness of the mind different from an illness of the body only in the area of its focus. The Scriptures are far from impotent in the face of this kind of a challenge, but getting a handle on it will require our seeking more help than only the Scriptures; or rather, it will require our seeking the help of the Scriptures, but not on our own. We need the guidance of trusted and trained professionals to aid us on the journey. In this series of conversations we are going to talk more about the kind of garden variety anxieties that we feel every day as we navigate life in a world broken by sin and as sinners ourselves. And, yes, sometimes we do still need help even with these from someone who is trained to provide that help, but if we’ll give careful thought to what the Scriptures say, we’ll find that they offer us a pretty powerful leg up in empowering us to stand firm when everything around us tells us we should be afraid. 

So then, what do the Scriptures have to say for us here? Well, a lot. In fact, so much, that knowing where to start is the real challenge. About a year ago, though, I was reminded of a passage that has meant a lot to me for a long time. What it offers us is a foundation point, a place to start when thinking about tackling the various fears and anxieties we face in this life. And, given the emotional weight of the subject matter here, it is only appropriate that the passage is found in the most emotionally driven book we have in the Scriptures. I’m speaking, of course, about Psalms, and specifically Psalm 56. If you have your copy of the Scriptures handy, join me there, and let’s see what a young man named David, who was well acquainted with anxiety, had to say about the season he was facing. 

Now, if you are looking at Psalm 56, you will perhaps notice that there is a bunch of small, probably italicized print just under the heading that doesn’t seem like it’s part of the actual psalm. It seems that way because it’s not. Well, it is part of the original manuscript we have of the psalm, and in fact the Hebrew version of the psalm runs 14 verses instead of the 13 we have because all this chicken scratch is labeled as v. 1. But it is not part of the actual text of the psalm itself. Instead, it tells us who wrote the psalm, how it was intended to be sung, and what were some of the circumstances of its composition. Not every psalm gives us something like this, but the context here is helpful to know, so let’s talk about it for a second. 

This context information tells us this psalm is “a Miktam of David. When the Philistines seized him in Gath.” We’re not sure what a “miktam” was, but we think it was probably either a style of music or a specific type of song. More importantly is the designation that David wrote this piece “when the Philistines seized him in Gath.” So, when was that? 

Well, we’re not entirely sure, but there are only a couple of options, and both of them happen before David was king, while he was on the run from King Saul. One of these instances is recorded for us in 1 Samuel 21. This was a pretty dark and desperate time in David’s life. Things had just finally and truly come to a head with Saul. His best friend, Jonathan, who also happened to be Saul’s firstborn son and the man who would have been king after him but for Saul’s disobedience and God’s decision to shake things up, had tried to assure David that things were fine with his father, but Saul rather decidedly demonstrated otherwise by trying to kill Jonathan when he defended David to him. 

With Saul now publicly declared to be against him—and with murder on his mind—David had to flee. He had to leave his home, his family, and even his young wife, Michal, who also happened to be Saul’s daughter. He had a cadre of soldiers who were loyal to him who fled with him, but that was it. He first made a stop in Nob which is where a faithful priest he knew would be supportive of him against Saul, Ahimelech, was stationed to get some supplies. This also happened to be where the sword of Goliath was being kept. David took the supplies as well as the sword, and fled again. Yet because Saul was the king of Israel, there really wasn’t anywhere in Israel that was safe. 

The next closest place to go, then, was to the land of Israel’s closest neighbors, the Philistines, who also happened to be their mortal enemies. He was hoping the whole enemy-of-my-enemy thing would play in his favor, but the advisors of Achish, the Philistine King, quickly observed, “Isn’t this David, the king of the land? Don’t they sing about him during their dances: ‘Saul has killed his thousands, but David his tens of thousands?’” David was allowed to remain in Philistine land, safe from Saul’s reach, but only by pretending to be insane and thus not a threat, and under the exceedingly careful eye of Philistia’s finest. If he stepped out of line even once, he was deep within enemy territory, and there was no one to help him. 

And then, to top everything off, he got word that Saul had dispatched his agent, Doeg the Edomite, to Nob to investigate the reports that they had helped David after he had been declared an enemy of the state. Upon finding out that the reports were true, Saul told his soldiers to slay all of the priests stationed there. Courageously but at grave risk to their own lives, they refused to murder the priests of the Lord in cold blood. Doeg the Edoomite, who was not an Israelite, had no such inhibitions and did the evil deed for the evil king. Only Ahimelech’s son, Abiathar, managed to escape. He beelined for David, told him what happened, and sought protection from Saul which David assured him he would have. 

Now, put yourself in David’s shoes for a second. Do you think you might possibly be feeling a bit anxious? Maybe a little afraid? When he wrote, as he did in Psalm 56:1, “Be gracious to me, God, for a man is trampling me; he fights and oppresses me all day long. My adversaries trample me all day, for many arrogantly fight against me,” you get the sense he really meant it. When he wrote in v. 5, “They twist my words all day long; all their thoughts against me are evil. They stir up strife, they lurk; they watch my steps while they wait to take my life. Will they escape in spite of such sin? God, bring down the nations in wrath,” he knew exactly whereof he spoke. 

I have a sneaking suspicion that you’ve never been on the run for your life from an evil king like David was. You’ve never had to hide out in enemy territory, pretending to be insane so that those very enemies don’t join with your enemies at home to bring an end to your story. You’ve almost certainly not been in the position of giving shelter to a young priest on the run for his own life against the very enemies who seek yours. But you’ve been through some stuff. Maybe you’ve been through a lot of stuff. When you look at the people around you, you’re sometimes tempted to look down on them a bit for having been through so little relative to what you’ve had to face. 

It could be that you are facing some scary stuff right now at this very moment. Anxiety is this dark cloud that is constantly hanging over your head, making everything you do just a little bit harder than it should have to be. And let me add this here: Some of that’s a personality thing. There are some personalities that are more prone toward anxiety than others. If that’s not your personality, you probably need to have a lot more compassion for and patience with the high anxiety people you know than you do. Usually folks with that particular type of personality are really high in empathy and compassion. They help bear the burdens that others are carrying really well. They are utterly indispensable in times of crisis. But in a world broken by sin, that particular gift from God can exact a heavy toll at times. 

Whatever the exact nature of your situation is, though, you have a pretty good understanding of the kind of anxiety and fear that David was facing. Again, it’s not mortal danger, but it doesn’t have to be to feel pretty intense. 

So then, how did David handle all of this? What did he do in the face of such incredible pressure and stress? He tells us here. In fact, he tells us twice. Look at this first in v. 3: “When I am afraid, I will trust in you.” Now, that kind of thinking is popular today thanks to the whole faith over fear meme that you see all over the place. I’d be willing to bet that at least some folks in here have it on a t-shirt at home. Maybe you even have it on a piece of wall art that you got at Hobby Lobby. And that’s good. But do we really believe it? When you are afraid, do you trust in God, or do you scramble for the control you don’t feel like you have? The one is not the same as the other. The tricky part here is that we can put on a pretty good show of trusting in God on the outside when on the inside we are an anxious wreck whose minds are spinning wildly trying to conceive of a way we can regain the control we feel like we’ve lost. So, when you are afraid, do you trust in God really? 

This trust, though, isn’t something we have to come up with all on our own, reaching down to the depths of our well of strength to draw it out. I don’t know about you, but my well isn’t often that deep. If I try to dig down deep, I’m just going to wind up wallowing in the mud of my soul rather than finding some hidden cache of faith. The world doesn’t think that way. The world tells us over and over that we are enough to figure out our problems and overcome all the challenges before us. After all, God won’t give us more than we can handle, right? Wrong. And as popular as that idea is, it has absolutely zero support in the Scriptures. In case that wasn’t clear enough, that’s zero with a capital zero on the front. Never are we given even the slightest indication that we should think God will somehow supernaturally limit our circumstances to what we can handle with our own strength. Instead, He promises to be with us no matter what it is we are facing. That’s different. And better. Because His strength is greater than ours. 

How do we know this? How does the song you learned when you were little put it? For the Bible tells me so. That’s where David draws the strength He needs for His own trust in the Lord. Look at this again now. “When I am afraid, I will trust in you. In God, whose word I praise…” Pause there. Do you see it? David didn’t come up with his trust in the Lord on his own. He drew it from God’s word, from the Scriptures. He took God’s word seriously. He invested time in it. He gave it regular attention and reflection. And because of that, He knew who God is. He knew His character. He could see the record of His faithfulness to those who trusted in Him in the past. He knew that his own trust was well placed. He knew personally what Isaiah and later Paul would proclaim, that those who trust in the Lord will never be put to shame. When David was afraid, he would trust in the Lord because of his praise of His word. 

“In God, whose word I praise, in God I trust; I will not be afraid. What can mere mortals do to me?” Indeed, if the immortal, invisible, God only wise had his back, what need was there to fear something mortal, visible, and foolish in this world? And before you object that mortals can do quite a lot to you, remember that David knew that even better than you do. Remember his circumstances. He was on the run for his life from a paranoid, power-hungry king who held the power of life and death over him but for the protection of the king of the people who were previously his mortal enemies. 

But David knew God’s word. And because he knew His word, he knew His character. This allowed him to declare as he does in v. 8: “You yourself have recorded my wanderings.” That is, you know the journey that I’m on. You are aware of what I’m facing even when it doesn’t feel like it. “Put my tears in your bottle. Are they not in your book?” You know the pain and anguish I am going through. You know the fears and anxieties that are dogging my steps. And because God knew, David could trust in Him. He could trust Him enough to declare with confidence in v. 9, “Then my enemies will retreat on the day when I call.” They’ll retreat when I call, because when I call, you will show up. You will show up because “this I know: God is for me.” 

Do you know that? That God is for you? He’s not against you. He hasn’t forgotten you. He won’t leave or forsake you. Even when things get hard—really hard—He has still not turned His back on you. If you are seeking Him, He will be found by you. Now, you may have to pay attention to be able to recognize His support. Sometimes He comes with a still, small voice, or in ways that are so mundane that we overlook them at first. But He will come. It may be a word from the Scriptures that simply captures your attention. It may be a word from a fellow member of the church that gives you just the lift you need. It could be an inexpressible feeling that comes during a time of prayer. Or He may express His support for you in some other way, but know this with David: God is for you. 

This is all what leads David to declare his trust in God yet again: “In God, whose word I praise, in the Lord, whose word I praise, in God I trust; I will not be afraid. What can mere humans do to me?” The answer to the question is: nothing that will last beyond the limits of this life. 

So, don’t be afraid. Don’t let the anxiety dictate how you think or the ways you respond to your situation. Turn instead to your trust in the God who is trustworthy. When you are afraid, put your trust in God. Demonstrate that trust by leaning into gratitude for God’s action on your behalf as David does here at the end even before it has come. “I am obligated by vows to you, God; I will make my thank offerings to you. For you rescued me from death, even my feet from stumbling, to walk before God in the light of life.” When you are afraid, put your trust in God. 

Now, let’s state what should be obvious but sometimes gets left out of conversations like this one. Putting our trust in God in times of fear and anxiety like this is not a cure-all. Just because we are trusting in God doesn’t mean hard, scary times aren’t still going to come. It doesn’t mean we aren’t going to be tempted toward forgetting who God is and His love for us in Christ. We will. Sometimes intensely so. So, when you turn to trust and are still tempted by fear or anxiety, or go on to face even harder circumstances, that doesn’t mean your trust has failed. That doesn’t mean the God in whom you have placed your trust has failed. It means you are living in a world broken by sin and that you need to cling all the harder to what’s true. 

Okay, but how? Well, we start with what David himself did. Remember where he drew his trust from? Not himself. Don’t look within. You won’t like what you find. Don’t look to someone else. They will inevitably let you down. Look to God in His word. David praised God’s word. That is, He knew it. He trusted it. He was committed to it. And because God’s word reveals His character, he learned to trust in Him. David was in God’s word. Are you? If you’re not, this source of help in the face of the variety of fears and anxieties you face won’t be available to you like it could be. When you are afraid, put your trust in God. Your investment in His word will help you do that. 

While putting yourself regularly in God’s word is good, doing that entirely on your own is not. The battle against fear and anxiety is not something you can win on your own. You need help, and not just from God. Or rather, you need to be prepared to accept the fact that God’s help often comes through other people. In other words, you need community. You need to be fully and intentionally engaged in the church community so that you are surrounded by people who can strengthen and encourage and help equip you to stand firm and put your trust in God when you are otherwise tempted toward fear. And while being here like this is good, it’s not enough. If this is all you are getting, you are selling yourself short and leaving yourself less than fully equipped to face the challenges that are coming your way. When you are afraid, put your trust in God. Being fully engaged in a community of faith will help you do that. 

Above all else—and those other two things will help mightily with this one—don’t lose sight of God’s character. The God in whom David was willing to put his own trust because of all he had come to know and trust and love about His character is the same God who is available for you to put your trust in. When you are afraid, put your trust in God. He hasn’t changed. He doesn’t change. And because of that, your trust in Him will never be misplaced. Oh, you’ll be tempted to think that it is. Your circumstances will conspire to convince you otherwise. But it won’t be. When you are afraid, you can confidently put your trust in God and let Him strengthen you to stand in the face of fear and anxiety and live out of the ethos of His kingdom anyway. 

He will strengthen you to be at peace when the world is not. He will enable you to experience joy when all around you is despair and depression. He will fuel the substance of your hope so that you can see beyond the ugly horizon. And He will suffuse you with His love so that you can love others, sharing with them the trust that you have experienced for yourself. When you are afraid, put your trust in God. Nothing else makes any sense.