Discovering Peace in Anxiety, Part I

Psalm 42

St. John’s United Church of Christ
Greeley, Colorado
April 7, 2024
Rev. Juvenal Cervantes

Following my tragic accident seventeen months ago, I have grown deeply in my respect and honor of the medical community. Surgeons, physicians, and other medical providers are skilled experts that tell us our options for healing and wellbeing.

I learned when we have physical ailments, we’re quick to get help. We can diagnose it rapidly. We say, “That hurts, and I don’t know what to do about it and it won’t go away.”

Yet when it comes to mental health and mental illness, and holistic health, when we struggle with anxiety, and depression, and these kinds of things, often we don’t know what to do.

There may be several reasons for this. It’s harder to diagnose. We wonder, if this normal or not, what I am going through. We struggle to diagnose, we ask, “Is this normal?” Folks in faith communities say, “I know Jesus, I should have enough faith, and I’m happy all the time” and that is not Christianity.

Christianity is not, “You come to Jesus and everything will go well with you.” That’s a prosperity gospel, but that’s not the gospel. The gospel is: You come to Jesus and whatever life brings you way, God is going to be with you and you are going to make it and even glorify Him through it. That’s the truth of the applied gospel.

Recent studies in our community indicate that mental health is a serious crisis. Our middle and high school counselors tell us that the problem in our community is silence, we don’t talk about it. Somehow, we think we should be okay and we often don’t talk to our own families, we don’t talk to our neighbors. Yet we need to talk about it.

Do you realize that the psalms don’t hold anything back when it comes to real life issues?

When it comes to anxiety, depression, mental health, we often try to fix things ourselves, which leads to all kinds of problems, for instance self-medication. Therefore, depression and addiction at times go together.

A couple of weeks ago, on Palm Sunday a group of folks gathered at Cornerstone Baptist Church, Windsor, CO, to host a memorial service for the husband of a woman pastor who took his life in the backyard of their house. His wife shared, “My husband’s addiction (alcoholism) was a like a cub grizzly bear that is cuddly and maybe will lightly scratch your face. Then the grizzly bear grows up and takes your life.”

My friends, especially in our faith communities, we want to normalize conversations around our struggles.

And our foundation is God’s word. A healthy understanding of God’s word and its application of this word to our lives is imperative for the follower of Christ. If you’re not in the word of God daily, I want to ask you, “Why not?” My friend, if you’re a Christian, at some point you are going to have to open your Bible. You’re going to have to dive in and know the word of God. Not just know it, like going to a class where someone gives you a download, but to be in it, because we’re seeking to know Jesus and to walk with him, daily.

Again, the psalmist does not hold back, suffering, grief, loneliness, anxiety, even what we call today “suicide ideation,” it’s all in the psalms.

In psalm 42 we want to talk about the problem, the solution and the hope.

THE PROBLEM: ALIANATION (Psalm 42:1-4)

The problem is alienation, not just isolation, but alienation. Alienation from God, and alienation from others.

As a deer pants for flowing streams,
so pants my soul for you, O God.                Psalms 41:1

The psalmist is saying here, “I’m the deer, God is the riverbank and the riverbed is completely dry. Have you ever been there? Some of you have come into this room today and you are there.

We all walk through spiritual drought. Depression can feel like spiritual drought. We feel like God is nowhere to be found.

This is not like Psalm 1 where his roots run deep, beside the streams of fluid water, it’s not the place where you are receiving life, where you’re planted by the steams of living water. This is alienation from the living God, a big part of depression.

So verse one is metaphorical, verse two is explicit. Look at this:

My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.
When shall I come and appear before God?

Notice how self-aware he is. First of all, he is expressing what is going on in his heart. He is saying it out loud, he is writing it down and he is depressed. And what he lacks is the presence of God.

He is not questioning the existence of God. You can be Christian and walk through seasons, in fact it is normal in the Christian life to go through season of spiritual drought.

Now, those who don’t know God, and it may be some of us, we all cry out to a God, everybody does so. And that can turn again to self-medication. Prescribed medication and therapy, that’s a good thing. But the psalmist knows, whichever avenue we take here, all healing comes from the Lord.

That’s why we turn to him and not to anything else alone. We turn to Him first because only God can satisfy the kind of thirst that the soul has, and this is in every area of life. Don’t waste your time seeking out those things that will not permanently satisfy you. Let me ask you, where do you go? Where do you run.

The Lord know, what kind of self-medication you run to. Are you binging on alcohol, Netflix, bad habits, bad relationships, unhealthy relationships? Turn to God, that’s a reminder for some of us today.

The last line of verse two he is literally asking, “When will I see, literally, the face of God again?” (in the Hebrew). He’s missing the countenance of God, not the reality of God, but the presence of God and again, this is normal in the Christian life.

Notice, the psalmist has done nothing wrong. Walking through times of spiritual deadness and drought is a normal part of the Christian life.

Look at verse three:

My tears have been my food day and night, while they say to me all the day long, “Where is your God?”

Mental illness can drive us to grief and to pain and anguish, always bring hard questions. But look at this, at the same time as we walk through grief there is signs of your faithfulness to God as he is faithful to you.

Rather that running from your emotions, and our feelings, we don’t ignore our struggles, he takes him to the Lord even when he feels distant. We struggle to know his presence, but we keep running to him. This is faithfulness: to walk through this season of darkness, we all go through them, but to continually come to God is a proclamation of faith.

You can be faithful, even as you feel that God is not present in your life. Now we don’t know who “they” are, it could be some voices, some taunting, but could it be that it is his own voice, that’s mostly the place where we live. The challenge is that we are often talking to ourselves, “Where is your God?” not the absence of his existence, but of his presence. He feels that God has abandoned him. Have you ever felt that way before?

Notice here that “tears are his food day and night,” that’s another sign, not eating, not sleeping. He’s made a determination, “tears are all I’ve got to sustain me and tears it will be.” This is faithfulness, my friends.

Because what happens is what we think that this will be never end. We’ve been in seasons when we feel it will never end, what we don’t want to hear is “It might not.” How can we be faithful through it all? We’re going to see this here.

Tim Keller is the one who said, “The opposite of joy is not sadness, it is hopelessness.” Have you been there?

Note that he is not turning to other forms of self-medication, he is not drinking, he did not enter into sexual sin, he’s not pursuing these things, it will not sustain him. This is real faith, to know that in times of crisis we can continue to pursue God. And others are watching, this is not to shame you or to heap guilt on you, but others are watching. Even if there are small steps of faithfulness, others can see this in your life and in your family.

Sometimes it is doing the next time, it’s just getting out of bed and that would be faithfulness for you.

Look at verse four:

These things I remember, as I pour out my soul: how I would go with the throng, and lead them in procession to the house of God with glad shouts and songs of praise, a multitude keeping festival.

He is remembering how things used to be. He was a leader. He is remembering when things were great, he is remembering the good old days. He is not in close proximity with God or His people.

This is how mental illness can function: it can alienate us from God and from others. Here is the challenge, if you’ve been there, the challenge of mental health is that we need people in our lives, but we don’t want people in our lives.

What do you do? How can I show myself in church when I’m not at 100%? Can we say it in mass confession, none of us are at 100% today? If you’re here are you’re at 20% and wonder how you were able to get here, that is faithfulness.

There are many people who have heighten anxiety who do not show up today, and you’ve been there before. What I want to challenge you with is this: It is a huge mistake for you to alienate yourself. When you don’t have faith, when you don’t feel like God is near to you, when you don’t want to worship, let us worship for you!

Let someone next to you worship for you. When you don’t want to sing, let someone around you sing. This is the body of Christ. Worship does not happen alone, corporate worship is the constant habit of every believer, it is not a legalistic thing, this is a deeply spiritual thing.

The psalms are telling us this morning that he cannot experience the faith that he has alone, he needs others to bolster this in his life. He is experiencing disruption of community.

Don’t be surprised when this happens in your life. We all go through seasons where we need to reconstruct our community, our common unity of believers in our lives. Some people say, “Well, I’m not in that group anymore” and we drift away and we don’t connect with another. Or a friend moves, our best friends move and we don’t know what to do and we go into loneliness and despair. We get divorced, we move to a new city, like Greeley, and we show up and we don’t know what to do.

Don’t be surprised when you have to reconstruct your friend group, constantly, during the seasons of life. You’ve got to stay faithful and reach out to others, this is God’s plan for you. We’re never meant to be alone and what happens with our mental illness and challenges that we face is that we tend to alienate and isolate ourselves. Don’t let it happen.

Alan Nobel who is a professor at Oklahoma University wrote a book entitled, “On getting out of bed.” He says, as he has struggled with mental illness and challenges, “Do the next thing.”

Therefore, I applaud you being here. For some of you Sunday morning is the most anxious time of the week and you are here. That is faithfulness.

Doing the next thing may just be getting out of bed, it might be going to visit a friend, or say, “I’m going to have breakfast now,” and you are glorifying God by doing so. You’re praising him and that would be enough. The problem is alienation.

I want to invite you to reflect on this question: In what ways have you found yourself alienate from God and others? What does Psalm 42 tell us about how God reacts in our times of alienation?