45. "Be Anxious for Nothing"? Can You Love God and Still Be This Anxious?

"Be anxious for nothing." If that verse has ever felt less like comfort and more like a command you keep failing, this episode is for you.

You're in the third row with your hands up and your heart racing for no reason you can name, and underneath the worship there's one quiet question: what is wrong with me? You love God. So why can't you make the anxiety stop? And why does the one verse everyone quotes seem to prove you're doing it wrong?

This episode is for the believer who's been fighting on two fronts, the anxiety itself, and the shame of being anxious at all. We look honestly at the data, including Gallup, the CDC, Barna, and a Baylor University study on how often the church dismisses real mental illness. Then we go back to Philippians 4:6 and read what Paul actually wrote, from a prison cell, possibly facing execution, and discover it was never a whip. It was a hand reaching out.

From there we go to Elijah, one of the greatest prophets who ever lived, collapsed under a tree asking God to let him die, and the startling tenderness of how God responded: not a rebuke, but bread, rest, and a hand on the shoulder. To the whisper on the mountain. And to Jesus in Gethsemane, the sinless Son of God in such anguish that He sweat blood. With help from theologian Soong-Chan Rah on the church's lost language of lament, this is a conversation about putting down the second arrow.

For the one who was told to just pray harder. For the one performing a peace they don't have. For anyone who needs to hear that "be anxious for nothing" was an invitation, not an accusation.

Scripture: Philippians 4:6-7, 1 Kings 18-19, Matthew 26, Isaiah 53, the Psalms of lament.

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Note: this episode discusses anxiety, depression, and suicidal thoughts. If you're struggling, you are not alone. In the U.S. you can call or text 988 anytime.

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Learn more about me at www.justindbelt.com

Transcript

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Third row, the worship is good, the lights are on, and everybody around you has their hands thrown up in as sincere physical demonstrations of worship as they can. It looks like they mean it. And you you're standing there with your heart going a million beats per second for no reason you can name. That tight band across your chest, your mind running the same loop and been running since three, four o'clock in the morning. And underneath all of it, there is a quiet question that you'd never say out loud. What's wrong with me? Because you love God, you're not faking the song, but you can't make it stop. And somewhere along the way, somebody taught you that those two things aren't supposed to live in the same chest. That if you really trusted Him, your hands wouldn't shake. That peace is the proof, and you don't have peace, so maybe you don't have the faith. So you do the only thing that you know how to do. You pray harder, you read more, you try to believe your way out of it, and when it doesn't lift, then you stack a second thing on top of the first thing, and the second thing is shame. So now you're anxious and you're ashamed of being anxious, and the shame pushes you farther away from God, and the distance makes it all worse. Now I want you to sit on this one. Because there's no rush. I think a lot of you have been fighting this on two fronts for a long time, and nobody ever told you the second fight was never yours. I'm Justin Belt. This is episode 45 of Faith Formed, and today there's just one question on the table. Can I love God and still be this anxious? I'll tell you where we land before we start. Spoiler alert, because I don't want you white knuckling it the whole episode. And the answer is yes, you can. And the Bible is not nearly as nervous about your anxiety as the church has made you feel. So let me tell you why I'm making this one. Because I don't just randomly kind of pick these out of the hat. Uh, it's because I keep meeting people. Uh, the believer in the third row that I described is not just a character that I invented, somebody that's that I've met over the course of my life. Um, there are so many people that I know who love God, who are faithful people, who show up and they serve and they sing, but they're quietly unraveling on the inside, and they're convinced that the coming apart is some sort of referendum about their faith. And the longer I I've watched it over my life, and even as I've dealt with um varying levels of anxiousness as I've gotten older, I've realized two things at once. One is that this is happening to a lot of us, especially today, especially in this society, especially across um, especially across different cultures, and two, almost nobody is talking about it from the pulpit. There are some. There definitely are some. I'm not saying nobody's doing it, but I'm not hearing a lot about it. And so I'm gonna say it. Yeah. So first I want to give you the lay of the land, and I want to be careful and honest with the numbers, because this is too important to exaggerate. I'm not here to scare you with the statistic. Rather, I'm here to show you that you're not the only one in the room. Alright, so start with the world that we're living in, because this is the air every one of us breathes. It's the common thing. We all breathe the same air. Gallup has tracked depression in America since 2015. And in their own reporting, they say it rather flatly. US depression rates have hit the highest levels they've ever recorded. By early 2023, more than a third of women, 36.7%, said they'd been diagnosed with depression at some point in their lives, compared to about 20% of men, and the rate among women has been climbing nearly twice as fast as men since 2017. Among younger adults, it's steeper. Still, Gallup found depression among adults under 30 doubled from 13% in 2017 to nearly 27% in 2025. The CDC tells the same story from but from another angle. From 2013 to 2023, depression in the US rose from about 8% to 13% of people in any given two-week window, and it ran higher among women and higher again as household income dropped. Now, I want you to sit with that last detail because it matters for some of you, it climbs as the money gets tighter, and I know personally that is definitely truth. So if you're a provider lying awake doing math at three in the morning, then you're not feeling some imaginary weight, but it's also not weakness because it's documented. You're standing in a measurable rising tide, not failing at something that you think that everybody else has figured out. I have those nights, man, where I wake up and I all I can think about is what we don't have in the account, and what can I do, you know, short of committing crimes, to shore up that account to a level that might allow me to go back to sleep at three o'clock in the morning. And I know you might be tempted to tell yourself that this is a problem out here in the world, but not in the church. But it trust me, man, it's in the church too. And I want to be precise because I've seen people throw around big scary numbers on this, and I'm not gonna do that to you, okay? I'm not gonna tell you that Christians are more anxious than everyone else because the honest data doesn't say that. What the honest data says is that we struggle at rates a lot, like a lot like everybody else, and we tend to handle it worse with more silence and more shame. Do you hear that, church people? Christians, people in the church are not suffering at a worse rate. We suffer at about the same rate whether you're in the church or not, but we tend to handle it worse. Us in the church, us who read our Bibles, us who are called by Christ's name, and trust me, I'm not saying this with uh I'm not saying this to convict anybody, because I'm in that number. But I just I found that so interesting that the data shows that we handle it worse in the church with more silence and more shame. So here's a number that I trust from an organization that I trust, Barna, which has studied faith and culture in America for gosh, 30 years or more, they found that anxiety and depression are among the most commonly named challenges to people's emotional and relational health. And that while 40% of all U.S. adults named it, about a third of practicing Christians, 34% y'all, named it too. That blew my absolute mind. That's crazy. Not nominal name on the roll Christians, not the folks who come on Thanksgiving or Christmas and Easter. No, no, no. Practicing ones, the ones who show up regardless for everything, the ones who are praying, who are serving, a third of them are telling researchers that anxiety and depression are among the heaviest things that they carry. And it reaches the front of the room, not just the seats. In 2020, one in five pastors rated their own mental and emotional health that's below average. And I know COVID played a role in that, but I also think that what COVID did was I think it removed a lot of the things that we would use to cover up those feelings. And so it left us to deal with these raw and uncovered things that really just it exposed us. So when you're sitting in that third row, feeling like the only one whose hands are shaking, there's a good chance that behind the pulpit, your pastor's hands might be shaking too. Like it's very possible that the person preaching to you may be carrying the exact the exact same shame and silence as you condemn yourselves for. And that silence is the part the church has to own, in my opinion, because it's the reason that this episode exists. You'd think that the place that's supposed to be the safest room in a person's life would be where, you know, this gets named and carried, but too often it's the opposite. Lifeway Research, a Christian research group, found that in 2018, 49% of pastors said they rarely or never speak to their congregation about mental illness. Nearly half, almost entirely silent on an epidemic in the pews, y'all. And when people do reach out, it can go worse than silence. Researchers at Baylor University, led by a psychology and neuroscience professor named Matthew Stanford, studied Christians who went to their own church for help with a mental illness that had already been diagnosed by a licensed professional. So more than 32% of these people who went to their church for help, were told by their pastor that they or their loved one did not really have a mental illness, but that the problem was purely spiritual. And here's Stanford's own warning. When clergy dismiss a real illness, people are sometimes told to stop taking their medication. And that can be dangerous. And the study further found it happened more in conservative churches in that women were more likely than men to be dismissed. Huh. That's heavy. And I want to be gentle here because most of those pastors are not villains. I think in general they meant well, but they were undertrained and over certain. And they reached for a purely spiritual answer to a problem that was spiritual and physical and chemical all at once. But meaning well doesn't undo the harm. Somebody walked into the one place that was supposed to catch them and said, I'm not okay, and walked out, being told they're not okay was a sin or a lack of faith. And a lot of them never walked back in. And they also never told another soul. So that's why I'm doing this episode, because the tide is rising, uh, because it's in our pews and not just out there, uh, because the church has too often gone silent or gone wrong, and somebody needs to stand up and say from the pulpit the thing that Data and the Bible both already say. You can love God and still be anxious, and that is not a defect in your faith. So for the rest of our time, I want to take you to the book, the Bible, and show you that God Himself again and again refuses to fire the arrow that we keep firing at each other. So let me give you a picture that names exactly what's been happening to you because naming it takes away some of its power. There's an old idea that when you suffer, you actually get hit by two arrows. The first arrow is the thing itself. So in this case, the anxiety, the depression, the racing heart, the heaviness you can't argue your way out of. And that one hurts. And a lot of you, and a lot of it you didn't choose and can't simply will it away. The second arrow is the one that we fire at ourselves. It's the meaning you bolt into the first arrow. So the first arrow says, I feel anxious. But the second arrow says, and it's because my faith is weak, because I'm failing, because something is spiritually wrong with me. The first arrow is pain. The second arrow is shame about the pain. And here's what I've come to believe after sitting with both myself and a lot of people in hard seasons. For a Christian, the second arrow usually does more damage than the first. And here's the question that's worth asking: Where did we learn to fire that second arrow at ourselves? Because we weren't born doing it. We were taught. There is a theologian named Sung Chan Ra, Korean American. He planted a multi-ethnic church in Cambridge and he wrote a book on the book of Lamentations called Prophetic Lament. And his argument is one of the most important things I've read for understanding why so many of us are drowning in silence. Ra says the American church has lost the language of lament. He looked at the most sung worship songs in American churches and found that none of them are laments. They are overwhelmingly songs of celebration and triumph and victory. And so we've built a whole worship culture on the mountaintop and hurried to delete what happens in the valley. And Ra says that American Christianity runs on what he calls triumphalism, which is a story where success and victory are the whole point, and where suffering gets treated as a problem to be solved, or worse, a sign that something's gone wrong with your faith. And he draws this conclusion partly out of his own heritage. The Korean concept of what he calls han, which is a deep accumulated grief that the Western Church doesn't really have a category for. See, that's the second arrow with a chapter and a verse that is glued to it. But let's look at what Paul actually wrote because it's the opposite of a whip. He's writing this from prison, by the way, facing potential execution. So he's not lecturing comfortable people about their nerves. And the sentence doesn't stop at be anxious for nothing. It keeps going. But in everything, by prayer and supplication, present your requests to God. That word supplication means a desperate pleading. You don't plead when you're fine. Paul is assuming you'll come to God worried, and he's telling you what to do with the worry, which is not to bury it, to not be ashamed of it, but to bring it and to handle, hand it over. The verse isn't a door slammed in your face, it's a hand reaching out to you. And the promise on the other side isn't what you think either. It doesn't say that the anxiety will vanish the second you pray. It says, the peace of God will guard your heart. The word guard we know is a military word. It's a garrison of soldiers posted around something, in this case, you. Paul is not promising that the battle ends. He's promising you'll be guarded in the middle of it. So the one verse that has been used to shame so many people is actually saying that the is saying the same thing that I've been saying all along. Don't carry it alone. Don't carry the anxiety alone. Don't carry the depression alone. Bring it to God and trust Him to stand watch over you while you're still in the fight. Not only after it's over. The Bible never forgot how to hold this. A full third of the Psalms are laments. They're honest and raw, and they're sometimes these furious prayers that bring the pain straight to God without cleaning it up first. Because as we've said so many times on this podcast, lament is not the absence of faith. Lament is faith with its eyes open, faith honest enough to say this hurts, and faithful enough to say it to God. So the cure for the second arrow starts with recovering the thing the church has seemingly misplaced. Permission to grieve in the presence of God without assuming the grief disqualifies you. So before we get, before we go one more step deeper in this, I want to take that arrow out of your hands. If you have been told out loud or just in the air that you breathe that your anxiety means that your faith is broken, hear me, okay? A guy with just the heart to see people, God's people, thriving in relationship with him and others. That is not true. And it was never yours to carry. And watch now, because the Bible keeps pulling that exact arrow out of people's hands, standing with one of its greatest heroes. So let me show you a man in scripture who on his worst day wanted to die. He wasn't a villain or a backslider, but he was one of the greatest prophets who ever lived. And I think you know where I'm going with this. The prophet Elijah, 1 Kings 19. And what makes it almost hard to believe is when it happens, right? We meet Elijah at the lowest point of his life in chapter 19, and it lands immediately after the highest point of his life in chapter 18. That sounds like my life. Does it sound like yours? I could do something incredible, and I'm on the top of the world. Then in the next moment, I am deep, neck deep in the valley. But I want you to feel this whiplash with me. In chapter 18, Elijah is having a face-off with the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel. He built an altar, drenches it in water, prays, you know, he he he taunts the prophets of Baal, and then he prays, and fire comes down and consumes the whole thing in front of an entire nation. It is a mountaintop experience in the most literal sense that there is. There is total victory. There is flawless victory. The crowd is on their faces. God has shown himself in his full power. And then chapter 19 happens. Queen Jezebel sends one threat. And this man who's just defeated 450. The prophets of Baal, having called fire down from heaven, runs for his life into the desert, collapses under a broom tree, and asks God to kill him. His actual words, okay, I have had enough, Lord, take my life, for I am no better than my ancestors. Then he lies down and falls asleep. And listen, uh, the people who study this passage for a living don't soften it. Commentators look at Elijah under that tree and say, a psychologist today would see the textbook signs of severe depression and exhaustion from years of stress, no energy left, no zeal, barely eating, sleeping, and then sleeping again, isolation. He leaves his servants behind and goes off alone, and a loss of hope so complete that he asks to die. Somebody who read this in the middle of their own depression and said it the way a lot of us have felt it. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Prophets can feel this way? And the answer the text gives us is yes, this man who has committed his life to the work of Yahweh feels this way. And he is never described as faithless. He was human, and God didn't condemn him for it. So can we let that kill a lie that you've been operating from? The lie that says spiritual maturity and mental anguish can't share a body. Yes, they can. The closer you walk with God, the more automatic your peace gets. But Elijah ends that argument. The mountaintop doesn't vaccinate him. The fire from heaven brought him about a chapter of reprieve. He went from the highest high to wanting to die in the space of a few verses. And he was no less God's prophet under that tree than he was on the mountaintop. See, your your evidence is your anxiety, rather, is not evidence that you've drifted. The most faithful people in the Bible sat down exactly where you're sitting. And here's the part I really want you to catch, because this is where you find out what God really thinks about your struggle, as opposed to what you've been told that he thinks. I want you to watch what God does next. So Elijah's under the broom tree, he's asking to die, and God shows up. And God doesn't say, bro, get up, you're embarrassing yourself, or you're embarrassing me. He doesn't say, after everything I just did on the mountaintop, after I just showed you my power, bro, this is the thanks I get. God also doesn't say, you of all people should have more faith. There's no rebuke. There is no verse fired across the bow. There is no just pray harder, fast more, offer sacrifice. No, here's the text. Okay? An angel touches him and says, Get up and eat. And there's a fresh loaf of baked bread on hot stones and a jar of water right there by his head. Elijah eats, lays back down. And the angel comes a second time, touches him again, and says, This get up and eat. Get this. For the journey is too much for you. Can we sit with that for a minute? Because God's response to a suicidal prophet was not a sermon. It was a nap and a meal. Sleep, then food, then more sleep, then more food, and a hand on his shoulder. Rest, food, and a gentle touch from an angel. God tended his body before he ever spoke to his soul. God looked at his depleted, despairing prophet, and his opening move was tender and personal and physical. The journey is too much for you. Now I don't know how you've ever read that before, but this is not a man that's being scolded for a moment of weakness. This is a man that is being cared for by a God who loves him, a God who is naming the weight that he's been carrying. And he's like, of course you're empty. Look at what you've been hauling all these years. And do you feel what that means for you and for me? If your gut reaction when you fall apart is to assume God is up there disappointed, then you've got his character backwards. His first response to a man who wanted to die was to feed him and let him sleep. And here's the gentle implication of this that I think churches miss so often. Sometimes what feels like a spiritual crisis is also partly a spirit a physical one. Elijah needed rest and food. Some of you have been praying for deliverance from something that also just needs a full night's sleep, a doctor, a therapist, a body that isn't running on fumes. Pardon me, but that's not faithlessness. God himself started with the body. Getting help for your mind is not the opposite of trusting God. Sometimes the help is the bread he baked on hot stones and set right next to your head while you slept. And remember, those people from the first movement, the ones told just to pray it off, remember those. Getting a counselor or a therapist is not a failure of faith. I've had one myself. It's a huge share of how people with depression actually get better. The bread on the ground next to a lot of believers who've been told it's a sin is to wait, back up, back up. The bread is on the ground next to a lot of believers who've been told it's a sin to reach for it. In other words, the therapy, the counseling, that's the bread on the ground. And so many of us are told, don't reach for that. Dig in your word. Fast and pray. But in this sense, God told Elijah, don't fast, don't pray, just eat. And the story doesn't end under a tree. That bread carries Elijah 40 days to a mountain, to a cave, and there God meets him again. And how God shows up here is I think the whole point. Elijah's at the mouth of a cave, and a great wind tears through. It's strong enough to break rocks, but the text says the Lord was not in the wind. And then an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake, then a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire. And again, after all the spectacle comes the old comes what old translations call the still small voice. The Hebrew is gorgeous and strange. It's close to the sound of a thin silence. That's beautiful. In other words, a gentle whisper. And it was there that God spoke. Not in the wind or the earthquake or the fire, but in the whisper. Here's why that should be healing to an anxious heart. Elijah had just seen God in the fire on Carmel. That was big and loud and undeniable. And maybe that's part of what's wrecking him now is that he's bracing for God to show up like that in the spectacle, right? And God says, no, that's not what you need right now. You don't need the wind or the fire. This time, what you need is to whisper. And a lot of you are anxious because, in part, you've been listening for God at the wrong volume. You figure if he really loved you, he'd come loud, he'd fix it fast, he'd send the fire, and the noise in your own head is so loud that it's apparent quiet reads to you like absence. But God comes so often, more often than not, God comes in the whisper. Under the roar of the anxiety, there's a thin, quiet space where God actually is, and the practice of faith isn't working yourself into a frenzy to summon the fire. It's getting still. Many times with help to hear the whisper that was there the whole time. And notice, even in the whisper, he doesn't shame Elijah. He asks a question what are you doing here? God is giving Elijah an invitation to be honest, not snap out of it, not you should be ashamed, running away like this, nyam nyam nah. You should have had more faith, you should have fasted more, you should have prayed harder, you should have memorized more script. No. God just asks him a question. And then he gently draws the truth out of him. That the God that I believe that I am coming to know, as a 45, almost 46-year-old man, I believe that is how God comes to us as well. Not as the roar, but as the gentle question underneath it all. So there's one more place that we're gonna go, and this is the one that should settle it for good. So we carry around this picture of Jesus as unbothered, serene, gliding six inches above humans, you know, as if none of none of this life stuff stuck to him. But that's not the Jesus that we read about in the Gospels. In the Garden of Gethsemane, the night before the cross, the Bible says Jesus was overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Mark says he began to be deeply distressed and troubled. Luke, who was a physician and noticed bodies, writes that his sweat became like drops of blood falling to the ground. Jesus threw himself on the dirt. He begged the Father to take the cup three times. Now, to me, that sounds like somebody who was in a great deal of anguish. That's a body in extremity, and it it's the sinless this is the sinless son of God. So nobody ever again gets to tell you that deep emotional distress is proof of spiritual failure because if it were, you'd have to put Jesus in the dock for the garden, and you can't. Isaiah calls him a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief, not above the sorrows, well acquainted, well-versed with it, on a first name basis with it. Which means that when you're on the floor, when it's physical and it's too much, and you can barely get the words out, you are not somewhere Jesus never inhabited. You're in the garden right with him, and he's not standing over you with his arms crossed, disappointed, he's on the ground next to you. Because he's been exactly there on purpose, partly, so you would never have to be alone or anxious alone or lonely or ashamed of being lonely or depressed or ashamed of being depressed ever again. The peace that he promised was never the absence of distress. Jesus felt distress. The peace he promised is his presence inside of it. Not a life with no garden, a garden that you would never have to kneel in by yourself anymore. So here's your charge, and I want you to take it out of this episode with you. I want you to put down the second arrow. The anxiety may be yours to carry for a season, but the shame stacked on top of it was never yours. It was never intended to piggyback on it. And so I'm telling you right now to set it down. Stop reading your distress as a verdict of your faith. The prophet who called down fire was asked to die under a tree, and God fed him. The Son of God sweat blood like blood in the desert, and the father didn't love him one ounce less for it. Your racing heart is not proof of a weak faith. It's proof you're a human who's carrying something heavy, and you serve a God who answers that not with a lecture, but with bread, with rest, with the hand on the shoulder, with the whisper under the noise. So listen to me. Get the help. Many pastors have not gone through therapist courses. They may have had a course in sociology or psychology in college or Bible school, but they're not they're not often equipped. Go see a doctor. They may have to medicate you for a season. It's okay. Go see a counselor. If you have a friend who won't flinch in the face of what you're going through, talk to that friend. Rest the body that he gave you. If you need to call off of work just to sleep all day, do it. If you need to call off work just because you just you need a just do it. If you need to not show up for church that Sunday morning because it's just too much, just do it. Take Paul and his actual word and bring God the worry instead of hiding it. Learn the language of lament that your church may have never taught you. And quit waiting for God in the fire when he's been in the whisper the whole time. You can love God and be this anxious. You can love God and be as anxious as you are. Both are true. And it's time to let one of them stop condemning the other. Let's pray. Father, we come to you the way we actually are, not the way that we perform on Sundays. Some of us are so tired. Some of us are anxious in ways we can't explain and ashamed in ways we can't shake, and we've been fighting on two fronts for so long that we've forgotten what rest even feels like. So for the believer in the third row, hands up, heart heavy, asking what's wrong with them, show them that their anxiety is not an absence of you. Show them you're in the whisper and that you're under all of it. For the one who was told just to pray more, who did pray more and is still going under, send them bread. Real help. A counselor, a therapist, a doctor, a friend, and teach us as your church to hand out bread instead of arrows, and to relearn the language of grief that we never should have lost. For the one who, like Elijah, has wondered if it would just not be easier to not wake up. Do for them what you did for him. Be tender with their body, be gentle with their soul. Touch them and say the journey has been too much, and I am here, so you're no longer carrying this alone. And for all of us, God, remind us of the garden. That you knelt in the dirt and sweat blood and were not loved any less for it. Meet us there. We're on the ground. Help us to know that you're on the ground right beside us. In Jesus' name. Amen. Hey, if this one reached something in you, I promise it will reach someone that you love too. Somebody who's been performing a piece that they don't actually have, and that they're quietly drowning in it. Send this to them. You might be the only one who takes the second arrow out of their hands. And if Faithform keeps meeting you where you're where you are, where you actually live, behind the concrete, behind the walls, do me a favor. It would bless me if you would leave a rating and a five-star review wherever you listen. It takes a moment, and it's it's how this podcast gets elevated above the noise. Then follow or subscribe so the next one comes right to you. And the last thing, and I mean this gently, we talked today about anxiety, depression, loneliness, and the wish to not be there. If any of that is heavier than you can carry right now, please don't carry it alone. Find a trusted therapist or doctor. If you're in real crisis in the U.S., you can call or text 988 at any time, day or night. There's no shame in it. The bread that God gives you is always meant to be eaten. I will see you next week. Be blessed.