Overcoming Anxiety
My first significant experience with anxiety occurred In 1993. I was just 19 years old, I had been married less than a year and my wife and I were starting a church. We had someone move to town with “the desire to help us”, after a few months of his help, we had a church walk out. We had twenty eight one Sunday and two the next. I was devastated.
I began to experience severe anxiety. I was so nervous all the time that I was unable to keep down food for several months. I had never experienced this before. I had trouble sleeping, and couldn’t shake the feeling that the world was falling in around me. You may be experiencing some of the same symptoms that I did.
At the time, I didn’t know how to deal with the problem biblically. Thankfully, God brought me through the incident.
The Bible does give an answer as to how to deal with anxiety. It is with great assurance that I tell you that you do not have to live with the problem of anxiety. God has peace for you and the Scripture provides a step-by-step solution that if you put it into practice you can live free from fear. Anxiety is defined by the Webster’s 1828 dictionary as concern respecting some event, which disturbs the mind, and keeps it in a state of painful uneasiness. It involves suspense respecting an event, and often a perplexity of mind to know how to shape our conduct.
It is important when you look at a problem to define it in the way that the scriptures do. The Bible use several words to describe anxiety such as “careful”, that is, being full of care over something. It also uses the words troubled, doubtful, take thought, and fret. These words describe different aspects of what we commonly call anxiety. Let’s begin our look at this topic by examining what some of the spiritual results of anxiety are.
