StudyGrowKnow

Sanctification: Anxiety’s Antidote

January 13, 2026 at 2:27 PM Leave a comment

Listen to this article

Human beings come in all shapes, sizes, and personalities. Some of us are too often, captured by our thoughts. For me, I have found that my thinking, if I’m not careful, can often lead to fear, then worry, which gives birth to anxiety, which then creates more of all three things. Much of what people worry about never comes to pass. Yet, we invest our emotions into those fearful and worrying thoughts because they tend to grab us, captivate us and ultimately imprison us into wrong thinking. So what can Christians do about this so that we are not guided or overcome by fear, leading to worry and ultimately to debilitating anxiety?

One of the things I’m enjoying is working through my biblical counseling certification program. It has opened my eyes in many ways to understand how Christians can fail in certain areas. Sometimes, these failures become habitual lifelong practices. We often feel powerless to really deal with them in a biblical way. I’d like to take a few moments to offer some insight from what I’ve learned and I’ll be borrowing from Tim Bryant’s work in the Foundations: Change that Sticks! book he wrote.

In Lesson 7: Controlling Fear, Worry and Anxiety, Tim presents a biblical definition of these things and then moves into ways to deal with it from a biblical standpoint. Let me quote a paragraph from his book that defines each issue.

Sinful fear is believing something to be more dangerous and powerful than God. Worry is thinking on that which you fear with the primary purpose of avoiding pain vs. discerning the will of God. Anxiety is the emotional and psychological result of worry.

I had never really never considered my fears as being more powerful than God, but in essence, that’s what’s happening within me. My fears take over my mind and then my emotions follow what my mind sees and thinks. That’s true enough isn’t it? Conversely, when we reminisce about some great memories we’ve enjoyed in the past, we tend to feel good; warm and even fuzzy, if you will. We tend to be calm and feel good as we remember those nostalgic times.

Conversely, we all probably have memories that are not so pleasant and when we think of those, we can become tense, upset, filled with anxiety over them and if that continues, we can become immobilized in our thinking, directed by negative thoughts that were not pleasant to originally live through. Remembering them brings back many of those negative feelings.

Who does not have to deal with things like this? Who goes through life never thinking a bad thought or a negative memory (and too often building on it)? As a Christian, it really does become my responsibility to do what I can to redirect my mind away from that negativity.

Tim talks about proper fear that is actually good for us. One of those fears is when we are in some type of real (not imagined) danger. Our fight or flight response to danger is always there to try to save us.

Another type of fear that is very good is having a healthy fear of God.[1] When we say to fear God, often we have the wrong impression. True Christians never have to worry about God’s judgment or wrath on us (Romans 8). Here, fearing God means understanding who He is, the power that He wields and the fact that He controls all things, including the things that come into our life (see the book of Job throughout). We might say fearing God is to have the utmost respect and awe for Him because of who He is. This fear should result in the Christian having a greater sense of reverence for God, which should increase within us over time. Here’s how Tim describes the fear of God.

To live in a constant awareness of the existence, attributes, and glories of God (His sovereignty, His goodness, His wisdom, and His holiness, etc.), to the point that His reality controls and directs my actions, words, thoughts and motives (affections, desires, feelings, etc.), in all of my circumstances, responsibilities, and relationships. My comprehension of God restrains me from doing evil and constrains me to do good in any situation, no matter what is happening. The glories of God both confront and comfort me! (emphasis in original, page 7-2, Foundations)

That’s a mouthful yet it is very true. If we endeavor to live in such a way, we will not engage in fearing people or situations. The reason we might fear people is because we idolize self or we give others more power than they have. In essence, this is what it all boils down to. We either worship and serve God or we worship and serve self. If we worship and serve self, we can easily become truly unhappy people. This is really idolatrous fear that causes us to see ourselves as the center of the universe even though at the same time, we feel helpless to be able to comfort ourselves. God has the answer for that.

Tim explains what he calls the “fear cycle” and its results. He prefaces this by telling us that when we fear, we are prevented from fulfilling God-given responsibilities because we think they’re too hard. This is the result of unsound and undisciplined thinking (2 Timothy 1:7).

With respect to the fear cycle, see if you can relate to this. Unfounded fears are often triggered by some circumstance or set of circumstances that come from outside ourselves. They place pressure on our thinking. If we succumb to that pressure to increase our thinking about them, the result is idolatrous thinking. This then quickly creates worry. From worry, anxiety is the result as an emotional and physical response. Our bodies begin to stiffen, we think we are undone, we believe we are overcome and there’s nothing we can do about it. This then creates more worry, with more anxiety and if left unchecked, wild worry to wild anxiety is the result of that. Then we’ll spend hours replaying certain things in our minds that we have no control over and all of that feeds the fear cycle. We are accomplishing nothing.

Has that ever happened to you? It has happened to me and I can clearly see how I was affected by it. I became somewhat withdrawn and unpleasant during those times, fully focused on what was happening in my mind. I felt I needed to do whatever I could to protect myself by trying to come up with a solution to the problem that had not even occurred yet! So many times I’ve tried to do that and never really got anywhere. Has that happened to you?

If you were to go to a secular psychologist, they would lead you to believe that you simply had certain “phobias” and the psychologist would then work to help you minimize those phobias so that they were no longer overwhelming. That’s not the way the God of the Bible wants us to deal with them. He has a far better way.

Jay Adams, who was a pioneer in biblical counseling way back in the 1970s has a chapter in one of his book, The Christian Counselor’s Manual called Helping Those Who Fear. Adams breaks things down into two opposing categories; love vs fear. We cannot do both. We can do one or the other.

Love looks for opportunities to give; it asks: “What can I do for another?” Fear keeps a wary eye on the possible consequences and asks: “What will he do for me?” Love “thinks no evil”; fear thinks of little else. Love labors doing today’s tasks and is so busy that it has no time to worry about tomorrow. Because it focuses upon tomorrow, fear fails to undertake responsibilities today. Love leads to great love – fulfilling one’s obligations brings joy and peace and satisfaction and greater love and devotion to the work. Fear, in turn, occasions greater fear, since failure to assume responsibilities brings additional fear of the consequences of acting irresponsibly. (emphasis added, page 413)

At another point in this same chapter, Adams makes this statement, which actually ties everything together in my opinion, making it easier to comprehend on a practical level.

The enemy of fear is love; the way to put off fear, then, is to put on love. (page 414)

Fear does everything it can to protect self. Love is self-giving. So in practical ways, how does a Christian who is dealing with fear, worry and anxiety, move away from those things? We need to actively replace fear that circumstances can generate in our minds, with actions of love that not only involve our bodies (in actions), but our minds in thought as well.

1 John 4:18-19 speaks of how love casts out perfect fear.

18 There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear, because fear involves punishment. The one who fears has not been perfected in love. 19 We love because He first loved us.

Fear consists of a fear of punishment. True believers will never be punished (in this or the next life), though God may offer corrective discipline at times. However, we will never experience His punishment/wrath. Certainly John is looking at the big picture here regarding our salvation. However, there is another point being made. If we pursue the love we have been called to imitate, our love for God and others will literally cast out the fear that seeks to captivate and control our minds and lives.

5 In my distress I called to the LORD, and He answered and set me free. 6 The LORD is on my side; I will not be afraid. What can man do to me? (Psalm 118:5-6 NKJV)

So recently, when I was dealing with negative, fearful thoughts that sought to control my thinking and outlook, I did something that is not necessarily habitual yet, but was certainly needed. I deliberately asked myself what I could do that would be loving someone else. If love (including acts of love), drives out fear, then I needed to turn my mind to acts of love. What did that look like at that point?

My wife works hard remotely from our home. She’s always dealing with paperwork and zoom meetings. When she is done, she often immediately starts dinner. What could I do to help? I’m not a cook by any stretch but I can make salads. So I spent time cutting everything up for salads and put together four salads that we would use over the next two evenings for dinner. This may not seem like much, but for me, it was an act of love that made fixing dinner easier for my wife.

What I’ve come to understand is that there is no convincing our fears, worries, and anxieties to simply go away on their own or using willpower to overcome. Those things need to be replaced. We need to actively stand against them by turning our backs on them and replacing them with acts of love. By the way, what I’m not talking about are the sometimes very real issues of life that we must face, but even there, we can and should approach those things with the understanding that God is in control. That truth should help us not to wallow in fear, worry or anxiety as if it’s all up to us to “fix” whatever problem exists. We should simply go on with life, continuing to offer acts of love to family members, our friends in church or even to the world in general, just as Jesus did.

Jesus was never captivated and controlled by fear, worry or anxiety. He had a completely different perspective than we often do and He simply continued on, loving people by doing loving things for them in spite of how He might have been tempted to think and feel.

I’m quite sure that Jesus was tempted time and time again to give into the fear of many circumstances (real or imagined) as we are today, yet He never followed the urges to protect self (Hebrews 4:15) by giving into fear leading to worry and anxiety. As believers, we need to act in a way that shows our love for God and others. We cannot do that and engage in fear, worry or anxiety. The two – love and fear – are opposed to one another. We can do one or the other, but not both at the same time.

I don’t know if this makes sense to you or not because of the way I’ve explained it. If not, that’s on me. We love because He first loved us (1 John 4:19). That is what we are called to do; live a life of love. The more we love people, reaching out to them with acts and words of love, the more we become like Jesus and the less we dwell on the fears life can throw at us.

The more we love, the less inclined we are to cater to and protect self. In fact, Jesus called us to deny self (Mark 8:34-35), something that is completely contrary to what this world (and our sin natures), demands. The only way to do that is to excel in loving God and others. By doing so, we move away from self and it’s desires. Isn’t that what being a Christian actually means because it is the main aspect of our sanctification?

[1] https://studygrowknowblog.com/2021/04/13/fear-god-and-live/

Entry filed under: christianity, Religious - Christian - Prophecy, salvation, sanctification. Tags: fear worry anxiety, self-centeredness.