Ready for the Anxiety

Ready for the ride. That's the title of our series here in January. Good morning! Who's happy to be in church this morning? It's a beautiful day, wonderful worship. My name is René, another one of the pastors here at TLC.

So, you know, the pastors here in Santa Cruz, every month we get together for breakfast and there's about 20 of us. It's such a great fellowship time and Thursday I'm at this breakfast and Matt Valencia, who's a good friend of mine, who's the pastor at Regen Church in Scotts Valley, great church. He directs me to a news article that captured my attention. Here's the headline, "Man, Wheelchair on Wild Ride. Ben Carpenter Got the Ride of a Lifetime."

And here's the story and it's been on several news outlets from a couple years back. What happened was this 21-year-old man, Ben, small town in Michigan, Pawpaw, Michigan, and he starts crossing the street downtown in his motorized wheelchair. Crosswalk sign changes immediately though and Ben realizes he won't be able to cross in time. You know, that's happened to you before and so he starts turning around like this to go back to the curb.

At that moment he is directly in front of a huge 18-wheel semi-truck whose driver cannot see him over the front of the big rig. Mid-turn, his back is now to the semi, the light turns green, the truck starts, and the handles on the back of Ben's chair get stuck in the front grille of the truck. And Ben gets taken on a two-mile ride through downtown Pawpaw, Michigan.

People are honking at the driver who has no idea why he's waving and honking his horn back and police get 911 calls, finally some undercover cops who are going the other direction see this incredible thing happening and they pull the truck over and all was well. Ben wasn't even scratched although his chair did need new tires. He later said I couldn't help but laugh what else can you do?

I heard that story and I thought here's a question for you. Is that about what it feels like to live your life right now like you are hooked to the front of a semi-truck and it is pushing you faster than you want to go and in a direction you don't want to go? You're being pushed by the agendas and the provocations and the pace of other people. That's modern life and this morning I want to talk about how to get off the bat ride.

Ready for the ride as I say is what we call our January message series because I see gigantic waves headed our way in 2024. Culture war waves and partisan political waves and personal stress waves that you don't even know are coming yet and we need to get ready to ride these so they don't just swamp us. This morning let's talk about getting ready for the anxiety.

I want you to grab your message notes that look like this because these are gonna help you follow along and also they've got some great resources for you and if you're joining us on the live stream you can download these at TLC.org/notes.

So anxiety first of all I want to be very clear I'm talking today about what you could call common anxiety just sort of the worries and cares of this life and not clinical anxiety. Clinical anxiety is something that you want to seek professional help for that leads to depression and anxiety attacks and panic attacks and this is a big problem according to the CDC about 15% of the people in the United States have had symptoms of clinical anxiety again panic attacks depression and I'm one of those 15%.

In fact this Wednesday night as our midweek classes start back up again my wife Lori will be with me I'm going to be talking about my own experience with clinical anxiety and she'll be talking about what it's like to be the spouse of somebody going through a mental health crisis. Plus we always have ongoing mental health support groups here at church specifically geared for that. Details about those classes both of those classes and the support groups are on page three of your notes today.

So what I'm talking about today is much more common than clinical anxiety kind of the worries and stresses of everyday life. Here's how common this is right now currently 70% of US adults say they feel anxious or extremely anxious and it's not getting better. The trends going up like this 82% of US adults say they are more anxious or as anxious as they were last year and the group that's usually the most optimistic, the young people, Millennials, are more worried about the future than any other age group in America right now.

So what can we do about everybody feeling so worried and stressed and feeling like they're at the front of a semi truck that's just pushing them at 80 miles an hour? Well this year we're calling it the year of living Jesusly at TLC because we don't want to live like the world, the culture of the world with all of its anger. We want to live like Jesus.

So how did Jesus deal with this? I mean think about it Jesus was in constant demand always surrounded by people vying for his attention. He was under constant criticism, under constant threat, under a constant stream of provocation and incitement. There were semi trucks full of people very eager to push Jesus where they wanted him to go. Jesus always only ever goes where God wants him to go at the pace God wants him to go. He never seems hurried. How did he do that?

You know we like to say that we want the character of Jesus right? We want the love and the patience and the wisdom and the amazing power that he had to resist peer pressure. How did he do that? Obviously he was the Son of God but also he had some daily habits that clearly strengthened him as a human being. He experienced all of the same things that we experienced and he fortified himself with some daily habits.

Listen, the way most of us are living right now is producing the results that we are getting. Everybody freaked out and anxious and as Steph Curry said this week about the Warriors' travails quoting that famous parable in the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and over again and expecting different results. So why don't we try something different and let's see how Jesus did this life thing.

Today we're in what to me is a classic example, Mark 6. Now this chapter is famous for the story of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, right? Where Jesus feeds all these thousands of people with one child's basket lunch. But surrounding that story like a set of parentheses is another story and we can miss it but it shows how Jesus sets the tone of his life and doesn't let anybody else drive him. Let's start in Mark 6:31.

Then because so many people were coming and going that they, the disciples and Jesus, did not even have a chance to eat. That is a stressful life. He said to them in the next verse, "Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest." And so they went away by themselves in a boat to a solitary place.

And then what happens next? Look at the next verse. And the crowds understanding their need for a break eagerly followed the disciples along the shore and they got to kind of the private beach where they're heading and by the time Jesus and the disciples get to their getaway all these thousands of people are waiting for them.

So what happens? Well the Bible says that Jesus has compassion on these people and he teaches them and then he miraculously feeds them dinner. So you know he's like, okay you're here, let me teach you. But then don't miss this, Mark 6:45 says, "Immediately after this Jesus insisted that his disciples get back in the boat and head across the lake to Bethsaida while he sent the people away." He's like, okay we got the sabbatical thing, the little break that didn't work out for us, the little vacation, but we're not gonna say, oh well, you know, guess we're doomed to labor in this coal mine.

No, he said, okay let's get back to that and he realizes that part of what sabotaged this whole thing was that he was there and his celebrity presence attracted the crowds. So he fixes that. He sends the disciples off for their break and then after telling everybody goodbye he went up into the hills by himself to pray.

He dismisses the disciples, he does the closing comments, and then he takes off. I see in this story four habits that gave Jesus strength in the midst of stress and that he's teaching and modeling to the disciples here. I'm preaching to myself here by the way because I'm no expert on any of these things but I do want to be more like Jesus and being more like Jesus doesn't just mean obeying his teachings or reflecting his character. It also means the rhythms of life that Jesus lived in.

Here's four things you see in this story that he did not just in this story as I'll show you they're all throughout the ministry of Jesus. So number one, seclusion. You need alone time. Remember he says to them, "Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place." Constant practice of Jesus like in Luke 4:42 at daybreak Jesus went to a solitary place or Luke 5:16 but Jesus often withdrew to the wilderness for prayer.

Now it's interesting to me the words translated quiet place, solitary place, wilderness, sometimes it's translated desert in Greek is the same word, the word Aramos. Say that with me, Aramos. Now for most of my life when I read where Jesus went the Aramos, the wilderness, desert, quiet place, solitary place, lonely place, it's all the same word when it's translated that way in your English Bibles because we don't have quite the right word for this in English.

I always picture this bland dull flannel graph tan colored background some horrible desert because they usually film those Bible movies like in Morocco or Texas. So I'm always picturing this, that Jesus is like punishing himself by going to the wilderness. I didn't get it. People reading this in context here would have understood one of the things that surprised me most when I first visited Israel and it surprises me every time I go there is how beautiful the Aramos is there in Israel, especially up in Galilee where Jesus lived. It really is striking. There are wildflowers and there are lakes and there are waterfalls and there are cliffs and down in Judea where he went several times a year it's like the American Southwest.

I was just blown away when I realized, oh Jesus is going off to be in beautiful places like the Sea of Galilee. Don't miss that. I saw some research just this week, a study called get this, "Minimum Time Dose in Nature to Positively Impact the Mental Health of College-Age Students." And how to measure it, a scoping review. So that cracks me up because that's such an American thing, isn't it? Like what's the minimum time dose in nature I need? What's the minimum thing I need to do here to get the benefit?

So they measure and they measure all these studies but listen to their conclusion: as little as ten minutes of sitting or walking in natural settings significantly and positively impacted markers of mental well-being. That's amazing! Ten minutes significantly impacted people's well-being. The ideal time they found out, kind of the most efficient time, was 20 to 30 minutes three times a week. I mean this is doable, right?

And don't forget it says Jesus often did this. He loved the Aramos in Luke's gospel and alone it mentions this on nine different occasions that Jesus went off to these places and if he needed it, you and I really need it too. Lots of amazing Aramos around here, isn't there? I mean there's Nicene Marks, there's Henry Cowell, there's West Cliff, there's the harbor, there's Wilder Ranch. It's an embarrassment of riches.

This was sunset Friday night by the way. Did you guys see the sunset? It was amazing! If I were the devil I'd find a way to get your eyes off of all this. But the point is seclusion, alone time. I was talking to Curtis Reliford before church today and he said he's going through a tough time but I said where are you finding your strength? He said, well for the last three months I've started a new habit. He said every morning very early in the morning I go out to the beach and I just look at the waves for 30 to 60 minutes every day and he said it's amazing how that grounds me and puts me in touch with the Lord. Guess what? Jesus did that, the Aramos.

You know it's Martin Luther King Jr. weekend and there's a book that came out a few years ago, "Never Leave Us Alone: The Prayer Life of Martin Luther King Jr." This really fascinated me. I was surprised to learn that Dr. King usually took two to three days per week for prayer and meditation. Two to three days a week sometimes he would go away to a resort or a hotel room so he was undisturbed and he was a busy man, he was an effective man, he was a productive man. That really challenged me because sometimes I feel like I got so much to do.

You know, now for some of you that's not just a challenge. Solitude seems impossible. How do young parents do this? How do caregivers do this, right? Well first realize that there are seasons in life and this is just gonna look different in each season. And then second, I talked to some young parents this week and they told me, well here's what helps them: try audio Bible apps or podcasts maybe in the morning before the kids get up or during nap time because they give you little mental times of seclusion without leaving your house.

And then tag teaming break time, get friends with kids in similar ages to help you cover their kids for a while each week while you know they cover yours later and so on. You get the idea. When I was very little I watched my single mom put together sort of a co-op of single moms at our church Calvary over in Las Gatos specifically so they could all take turns and get breaks. Spouses, please do this for one another.

But you know you don't just need alone time. The second habit that helped Jesus deal with just the life, that stress, the semis of stress, right, is connection. You need friend time. In our story remember Jesus says, "Come with me." There's a social component that's essential. Look back at when Jesus chooses his disciples in Mark 3:14. It says he appointed 12 that they might be with him and that he might send them out to teach.

I always thought Jesus was just sort of hiring employees, you know, worker bees. But what he was doing was selecting friends. And in fact at the end of his ministry when he's in the Garden of Gethsemane he says, "My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me." Jesus, you know, you'd think Jesus was so powerful he was God in the flesh he didn't need anything. Well what he desired was his friends to be with him to help him make it through a time when he felt overwhelmed with sorrow.

He didn't just need seclusion, he also needed that sense of connection and friend time. In fact if you look at the ministry of Jesus Christ, I've said this before, the rhythms of his life he sort of zig zags between being alone and being in groups, right? He's got this balance. In the mornings he'll go find a quiet place and then he comes back to be with his people.

But I think if you looked at our lives they'd look more like this. We're almost afraid of real seclusion and we're afraid of real authentic, "My soul is overwhelmed with the point of death, please hang with me" community and we're afraid to go for the deep dive on either one. Yet again this is very doable. One of the things I love about church is that the whole word church, ecclesia in the Greek, means a gathering and that's why we're here to provide connection for you.

A lot of people tell me I don't need church, I can worship God in the forest. Well that's one part of the recipe, right? That's seclusion. But you also need the ecclesia, you need the connection. And church, I love how there's multiple ways to connect. So just this past Friday night I was at a couple of events, over 200 guys were here at the awesome men's barbecue and just across the parking lot packed house at the high school groups worship night the same exact night. Those are just two examples. This is what church is, gathering.

We have gatherings for moms of preschoolers, for caregivers, recovery groups, Bible studies and much, much more. Make connections. Then third, there's a part of this story that is so easy to miss. In fact I missed it until this week when I was studying this again even though it's right in front of my face right there in the text. It says, "So they went away by themselves in a boat." And then it says, "Jesus insisted that his disciples get back into the boat." He didn't just say let's go into that house and be alone in the dark. You know, it was a boat. They exercised, moved, rode, sailed.

Jesus did this many times with his disciples, teaching them while they walked. One time he takes them from Capernaum all the way up to Caesarea Philippi to make an object lesson point. That's a hike of 27 miles. I mean he could have just taught them in a home somewhere. He was moving, moving in motion. I'm not gonna dwell on this point much because it's not the main point in this text but there was value in that clearly for Jesus. What you might call recreation, you need action time.

You know, research has shown that even brief exercise can help reduce anxiety and stress. So I read another study this week, ready for this title: "Effects of High-Intensity Interval Training and Moderate Intensity Training on Stress, Depression, Anxiety and Resilience in Healthy Adults During Coronavirus Disease 2019 Confinement: A Randomized Controlled Trial." Better son included testimonials, not typical, your actual mileage may vary. You know these academic titles but it was good. The bottom line of this study was results showed exercise significantly reduced stress, anxiety and depression.

Get out there and move! Go swimming, hiking, surfing, walking, whatever it is for you. My mother-in-law June, who is in her mid to late eighties, I won't describe the exact age, can I say that? Mid to late eighties. She never had gone swimming in her life. She didn't know how to swim. Well guess what? She picked it up this past year. She even bought a wetsuit so she can swim in the winter. She swims at least three times a week and it's benefited her mental and physical health so much. The doctor told her, I don't know what you're doing but keep doing it because it's had remarkable effects on you.

Even if what I bring that up because even if you haven't been doing this you can change. Imagine Jesus saying to you, I see you're stressed, I see that semi pushing you, let's get out from in front of that thing. Come with me by yourselves to a quiet place, get some rest. And so they went away. You go away by yourself with some kind of physical activity involved to a solitary place.

Okay, so far so good. But all of that is really affecting something. It's pointing toward a goal. Here's the reason that we're doing these things and that's point number four, meditation. You need quiet time. You're doing those things to get back in touch with God and his love for you and his plan for you in the whole world. Remember the story? It says after telling everybody goodbye Jesus went up into the hills by himself to pray.

This is again a common thing that he did at the very beginning of the Gospel of Mark 1:35. Before daybreak the next morning Jesus got up, went out to an isolated place to pray, just have quiet time with God. Now you might be thinking, oh yeah that's good, I know that I need that but what do I do when I do that? What do I think about? What do I pray about? How do I meditate? What do I meditate on?

I think it's interesting that over 30 times in the gospel Jesus says, "It is written." And he doesn't have to look it up in his Bible, he just knows scripture. I think it went beyond memorization, he's just internal, he's soaked in scripture. That's where he gets wisdom and that's where he gets responses and that must have been because he was ruminating on scripture so much it just became a part of him deep down.

So how do you and I do this? Well we've got some resources out at our little lobby bookstore that I listed on the top of page two in your notes, books about how to do quiet times and free daily devotion books. But do you want to know what I think is the single biggest obstacle to getting up as Jesus did early in the morning for prayer and meditation? The biggest obstacle is this: look at this stat, 75% of us now sleep next to our phones and even worse, 90% of us check our phones immediately upon waking.

And I'm guilty of this often myself and honestly is there a worst way to start the day? I don't think so because what that is is it's going out in the road and making sure your chair's handles line up with the grills on the semi and saying start your engines, take me away. As John Mark Comer says, don't let your phone set your emotional equilibrium for the rest of the day.

To use another analogy, think of the alarm system at your home, your fire alarm. Right? So the other night this past week our fire alarm goes off blaring at 3am. I'm in my pajamas, I'm half asleep, I run through the house, there doesn't seem to be a fire and it's nothing else because none of the other alarms, we have one in every room, none of them is going. So of course I get, you've probably been here, I get on a wobbly chair, the reset button's not working, now I'm smashing it with my fist, finally I'm yanking it off the ceiling and I'm waving it around so it stops.

And it stops and so I put it up in the kitchen, go back to sleep. An hour later it's going off again and Lori's like, make it stop! So I go up there and it stops and then I decide on a whim, I'm half asleep, I put it outside. Early in the morning it goes off again, now the neighbors are mad at me. That alarm is now bits of plastic in our driveway.

Honestly, here's the thing: alarms are made for actual threats. Then they make you feel secure. If they never stop, they're less than useless. Listen, God gave you an alarm system for actual threats. It's called the reticular activating system in your brain. That's something that tells you what's that rustling? Perhaps there's a bear outside your tent and so you get up and check to see if there's a threat. That's fine. The problem is when the alarm never shuts off for a lot of us by priming the alarm, looking at the news all the time, it's as if your home fire alarm was tuned to every fire on the entire planet.

Your home fire alarm would never stop blaring if it was alarming you about every single fire because there's always a fire somewhere, many fires. Well this is what the alarm system in your brain is doing right now. It's no wonder you're stressed, it's no wonder you can't sleep, your alarms are always blaring. So what can you do to shut it off? You know what? I hate to break it to you because I need this myself, you might need a tech detox to really get to that place where you can have meditation.

Here's what the experts say helps: turn off notifications instead of allowing yourself to get interrupted five times every half hour. Designate tech-free hours like when you're eating lunch. Put it away during meals, make your bedroom a no-tech zone. You know most people use their phone for an alarm clock but when you reach for your phone to switch the alarm off it's so easy to just lay in bed and start scrolling for an hour and waste that time.

Instead, use your watch for your alarm or maybe dig out that old non-smart alarm clock that's in your garage in a box somewhere, right? Limit yourself to one screen at a time, like watch TV or look at your socials or play a game. Just don't do everything all at once because that's all affecting your attention span. Ration or delete apps that you're addicted to: social media apps, news apps, games, Facebook, whatever it is for you.

You know what I did one day this week? This may scandalize you. I turned it off. I didn't really know you could do that. They have off switches! I checked some stuff in the morning, turned it off all day long and only turned it on to check it again like after dinner that night and it was awesome!

Now I am NOT saying all tech is harmful, far from it. In fact, I asked our pastors here how do you meditate and many of them told me that they enjoy meditation apps like abide and dwell and let do 365. The thing what I'm saying is you can't just add this. You're already being pushed around by that semi-truck, you already are going at a pace you can't, you can't add this unless you subtract other things first. You only have 24 hours in a day and that's the hard part.

In fact, that's the problem with this whole sermon. None of these things are new. We've all heard these things many, many times, right? And we usually say, oh yes, that sounds so good, so true, René, and many of us, nothing ever changes. Why not? Specific, not measurable, not attainable.

I never got this until, as I've shared many times with you, in 2020 I said, okay, the moment I wake up every day I'm gonna pray through the Lord's Prayer. Then I gotta pray for five specific people. Guess what? I've been doing it ever since. That's specific, easily attainable and it's measurable. Or at least twice a week I'm gonna take a half an hour walk just to think and be with God and not listen to a podcast or something. That is specific, it's very attainable and it's measurable.

Please remember we're not, and by the way, at the end in the back of your notes under the discussion questions, I think it's on page 2, the very last question asks you what is something specific, attainable and measurable you can do to improve these things in your life just to kind of get you thinking. And remember we're not talking about perfection, we're talking about progress. This is about gently taking small steps in a healthy direction.

God loves you whether you do any of this stuff or not. God saves you by grace, not by works. It's by the gift of God, right? So that nobody can boast. These are not works that get God to bless you more or love you more or save you. But God does want to give you abundant life and these are healthy steps in that direction.

You might know that every morning at 7 we send out daily video devotions from me or one of our other pastors. You can sign up to get those, there's details in your notes, they're free, TLC.org/devo. But this past week in one of my devos I asked this question: what is distracting you from a pure and simple devotion to Jesus and what can you do about it?

Well, must have touched a nerve because I was flooded with responses that I shared this past Friday. But I got a really insightful email from Sue Crocker in response and I'm gonna close with this. She wrote, well my biggest distraction from Jesus is fear and anxiety. I have a big imagination and what ifs can grow into mountains. Focus on God is key.

However, I used to think if I do quiet times in the morning I'll be good and then I added night quiet time, then added before my feet hit the floor think of things I'm grateful for. Then I added memorizing scripture and on and on. I have to be careful it's not about me doing, it's about me being in the presence of my Lord Jesus. Even though all of this is good, it can become ritualistic and just another distraction from what's most important: a pure and simple devotion to Jesus.

I need to remember God is with me. I'm not the one who makes that happen, he is in the perfect tense. He is with me, past, present and future, through it all, using it for his good. I just need to take time to be with him. That is so good. These four habits are how to get out from in front of that barreling semi-truck of other people's expectations and demands and society's paranoia trying to push you around and into the green pastures and still waters where your good shepherd wants to lead you to just be still, know God.

And so let's take some time to do that right now. Let's pray. Lord, thank you that you love us. Help us to take time to allow ourselves to be loved, to just soak in your love and to love you back. And Lord, I pray for anybody who's anxious here today that they would have the peace that comes from knowing that they are secure, their eternal destiny is secure, that they would pray, "Lord Jesus, I trust in you for my eternal life and my daily life. I put my life entirely in your hands as my Lord and as my Savior." Amen.