Have Faith in Your Anxiety || Anxiety in Anxious Times || Week 3

Welcome back to our series, “Anxiety in Anxious Times.” This four-week series examines a biblical view of anxiety and how we can apply its teaching to our daily lives. 

In Week 1, we discussed Jesus’s reminder to not worry about what tomorrow has in store. He reminded us that we’re like birds and must go out and get what God provided. He reminded us of Solomon and the goal of gaining this wisdom by examining and understanding where we are currently. Jesus then reminded us that we are not alone in our battles with anxiety. 

In Week 2, we heard from Solomon and learned how to use God’s wisdom to overcome our anxiety. We shouldn’t trust what we know and instead lean on God’s wisdom. We should watch where we step by studying scripture and leaning into God’s plan for us and the path God creates for us. Fearing God and respecting God are the same and can shape how we view our anxious moments. God’s word nourishes and heals our souls at the deepest levels.

Before we dive into this, let’s review how the Bible defines “anxiety.” Anxiety, for this study, comes from the Greek word “merimnaó” (mer-im-nah-o). It translates to “being pulled apart in different directions.” As you observed the anxious moments of your week, did you feel like your life was pulling apart?

We move from fear to wisdom to today’s topic, faith! We pull from the unknown author of Hebrews to give us our definition and introduction to the topic.

Turn in your Bibles to Hebrews 11:1-3 (ERV):

Faith is what makes real the things we hope for. It is proof of what we cannot see. God was pleased with the people who lived a long time ago because they had faith like this. Faith helps us understand that God created the whole world by his command. This means that the things were made by something that cannot be seen. 

We’re going to break this down into three areas: 

1) Defining Faith:

We will create a universal definition of faith to guide our discussion and apply it to our lives. 

2) Feeling Faith

We’ll understand the process that comes with understanding and using faith. 

3) Applying Faith:

We’re going to look at the examples of past generations to see where their faith was and what we can learn from it. 

Point #1: Faith is what makes our hopes real. 

Before starting our discussion, I want you to know this is poetry. In verse one, we see a style similar to what Psalms use, where two nearly identical phrases state the same thing simultaneously. 

The same Greek word that translates to “what makes real the things we hope for” (some translations use the word “assurance”) gets translated to mean “perfect copy” in Hebrews 1:3 and “sure faith” in Hebrews 3:14. 

It’s the Greek Word “hupostasis” (hoop-os’-tas-is), meaning support, substance, steadiness, or assurance. For our context, it says that our faith supports our hopes. Let’s look at how Hebrews 1:3 and 3:14 uses this word because the definition of this is vast. By looking at these two verses, we can gain a bigger picture of this assurance. 

Turn in your Bibles to see what Hebrews 1:3 (ERV) says: 

The Son shows the glory of God. He is a perfect copy of God’s nature, and he holds everything together by his powerful command. The Son made people clean from their sins. Then he sat down at the right side of God, the Great One in heaven.”

The “hupostasis” shown here refers to an imprint made, such as an engraving on wood or a brand on animal hide. Jesus is the perfect imprint of the nature and essence of God. Jesus came to the world as God in the flesh, as a human. He came to show humanity what it meant to live according to God. People were to learn how to follow God’s will in what they said and did according to the teachings of Jesus.

Let’s continue this thought with Hebrews 3:14 (ERV):

We have the honor of sharing in all that Christ has if we continue until the end to have the sure faith we had in the beginning. 

When the author refers to this sure faith/hope, it’s talking about the fulfillment of God’s salvation promises that keep us safe during times of trouble. The promise came through Jesus, who cleansed us of our sins and paid the price of punishment in our place. It’s keeping the faith that this promise continues throughout all our lives. 

Our faith gives us hope because of what Jesus did for us. You and I never witnessed it firsthand, so how can we base our faith on something we never saw? Glad you asked. 

True faith is defined based on physical evidence. It leans more on this divine assurance that God gifts to his followers.

Listen to what Paul says in Ephesians 2:8 (ERV): 

I mean that you have been saved by grace because you believed. You did not save yourselves; it was a gift from God. 

Faith is a part of God’s gift of salvation. We cannot get saved by our own doing. Salvation comes from believing in God and keeping faith in what God has done for us. 

With all this in mind, how can we define faith going forward? Faith is a gift from God that gives us what Jesus has done for us, and it’s something we can hold on to and remember through all parts of our life. 

Point #2: We feel our faith through God’s word and works. 

What are some ways that you can feel your faith working? 

God created our ability to have faith in the first place. God’s creative ability has the end goal of fulfilling the purpose that God has for it. The concept of “create” has this idea of equipping through these five methods: 

• Adjusting
• Shaping
• Mending
• Restoring
• Preparing

(Slide 9 – Ways to Feel Faith)

Adjusting means adapting or becoming used to a new situation. Faith helps us know that we will overcome any adversities that our anxiety can bring. 

Shaping means determining the nature of or having a significant influence on something. Faith can help us look at our anxiety to see how it impacts our past and present. 

Mending means returning to health or healing. It can also mean repairing. Faith gives us clarity to see how we can heal from our anxiety. 

Restoring means returning something or someone to a former condition, place, or position. Faith knows that we can return to a pre-anxious state. 

Preparing means making someone ready or able to do or deal with something. Faith shows us that our anxiety is a positive thing that prepares our bodies to respond to a perceived danger. 

There are many examples of how these five areas can show up in our faith journey, but I encourage you to keep your eyes open for what area gets activated in your anxious moments. 

Faith is a gift from God that gives us what Jesus has done for us, and it’s something we can hold on to and remember through all parts of our life. We feel our faith in the adjusting, shaping, mending, restoring, and preparing moments. Let’s go deeper with this and see how we can apply our faith! 

Point #3: The examples of having faith in our anxious moments got paved by our ancestors. 

The rest of Hebrews 11 refers to all men and women saints from the Old Testament whose faith shined. God was pleased with these people because of their faith. 

We’ll spend the rest of this lesson talking about some of these saints and how they connect to the five ways we can feel our faith. 

Think about Noah from Genesis. What do you know about him? Noah received a warning from God about this flood that he couldn’t see coming. Noah had faith and respect for God, so he built the ark. Noah had to adjust and prepare, right? Noah had to adjust his life plans because I don’t believe he had plans to build an ark during his life. I don’t believe he knew the skills it took to build it, either. Yet, Noah adjusted because of his faith. He had to prepare himself and his family. Imagine the anxiousness in his house when he told his family what God told him. The amount of packing his family must have had to do. The work it took to round up the animals and gather all the resources God told Noah he needed. Noah’s faith was strong, and he did what God told him to do. Noah proved that the world was wrong and became one made right with God. If Noah’s situation happened to you today, do you think you could do it with the same faith and respect for God?

Look at Joseph, Jacob’s favorite son, from the book of Genesis. Joseph had moments of shaping and mending in his life. Joseph was almost dead at one point. He was treated horribly by his brothers, thrown into a pit, sold as an enslaved person, became a servant to Potiphar, was wrongly accused of adultery, was thrown into prison, and became Pharaoh’s, trusted helper. These moments had to have shaped Joseph in many different ways. His brothers probably messed up his views on how a family works because of how he got treated. Potiphar could have messed up his views on right and wrong after being imprisoned for doing nothing wrong. It would’ve been easy to believe God wasn’t there for him because “Why would God allow these bad things?” Yet, Joseph didn’t fall into that pit. Joseph kept reminding himself that God was going to use this for good.

How could one, who endured ALL of that, still have a cheerful, optimistic, and grateful attitude? It was his faith. Faith shaped his perspective to see gratitude in all these moments. He acknowledged his past, but instead of shedding blame or anger, he shared forgiveness with his brothers and invited them to live in Egypt with him. Faith mended his past. He didn’t dwell on the hurt, the confusion, the pain, the anxiety, and all those other complex and challenging emotions that come in these situations. Joseph reminded himself that God would use this for good and that it helped mend his heart and his soul from any malice. 

When we go through our anxious moments, we often feel like we’re the only one who has ever gone through them. While that has some truth, because you are the (most likely) only one who has gone through your specific circumstances that caused your anxiety, I want to remind you that others have dealt with it. It existed back to the days of Cain and Abel, and faith was the consistent thing that got them through it. When you struggle in your anxious moments, remember these stories. Talk to a trusted adult in your life. You’re not alone. 

What did we learn today? Faith is a gift from God that gives us what Jesus has done for us, and it’s something we can hold on to and remember through all parts of our life. We feel our faith in the adjusting, shaping, mending, restoring, and preparing moments. We see examples of how faith helped earlier generations through their anxious moments.