Welcome to the Food for Your Soul podcast, where we apply the Word of God to the hearts of men and women to stoke the fires of your delight in Christ. Usually when a writer uses a whole lot of words to say something that would normally be just said in one or two words, typically it's for the sake of emphasis. By throwing all these extra words, he's making it emphatic. He says, don't be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your request. Prayer, that's talking to God. Petition, that's asking God for stuff. Request, that's the stuff that you're asking God for in your petitions. Thanksgiving, that's another aspect of prayer. All these words to say one thing, prayer. When you have anxiety, the number one principle for getting from an anxious, worried heart to the peace of God guarding your heart is not just to pray, but to pray hard. Be passionate, be persistent in your prayer, be energetic and earnest and fervent in your prayer. Pray hard. When you have anxiety, just drop to your knees and pray your face off. You might be thinking, Pray hard, yeah. I mean all my whole Christian life I've been trying to get a handle on that. I've been trying to get myself to get serious about prayer. I just can't seem to do it with any consistency. It's like working out or dieting. I keep starting it and then it just doesn't go anywhere. And that's the one area of the Christian life I just keep getting shot down every single time. Prayer life, prayer is hard. It's really hard. Praying hard is even harder. It takes a huge amount of mental energy. And so we struggle with it. We don't get to it because we just don't have the emotional energy. Where are we going to get some more emotional energy? Anxiety. It's in the anxiety. Remember, that's the whole purpose of anxiety. Anxiety is energy. Use the emotional energy produced by your anxiety to enable you to really pray earnestly. If you have your normal daily prayer routine and it's handling your anxiety, then great. If you're having your normal daily prayer routine and the anxiety is still there, That's your spirit saying, okay, this is calling for something special, some special prayer. This is a situation where I need to step out of my normal daily routine of prayer and go off somewhere and with prayer and petition and thanksgiving, grabble to God, make my request known to Him in everything. You can't do that every day. I mean, we've got to work jobs, we've got to take care of response. You can't do it every day. And Jesus didn't do it every day. But on those days when your normal daily prayer routine isn't cutting it, and anxiety is staying in your bloodstream, that's when you need to do it. You need to pray hard. And what does it look like to pray hard? I mean, how do you pray hard? Okay, you say, God, please, just please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please, you know, and then what? You know, you're just like, what else do you do? And you're praying hard, you're trying to really just pray for something. What does it look like to pray hard? First, it'll help if you do what Jesus did and get away. Go to a different place where you don't normally go. Go somewhere alone where you're not gonna be interrupted. Get away from the normal routine. Go for a long drive or a long walk. If you can get in the mountains, That helps. You get away from the trails where there's no people, no one's going to hear you pray out loud and all that stuff. That helps. Bring your Bible, because that's the main way God's going to answer you, and just talk it over with God from every angle. Work, just wrestle through. And here's some sample questions that you can ask. First, start by seeking God's will in the matter. Father, what do you desire most in this situation? Jesus taught us, pray, thy will be done. Consider yourself with this will. God, what do you want? My family member is angry with me, and they never want to talk to me again, and they hung up the phone, and now I've got all this turmoil inside, and I don't know what to do. What do you want, God? What do you want to see happen? What do you want to see me do? What's your will for this whole thing? And when he reveals the answer to you, pray about that. Ask for it. He said, God, give me that. Let it happen. Another question, what would glorify you the most in this, God? In my response, their response, everything, what would just bring you glory? What would magnify, what would show you to be a desirable, wonderful, beautiful God? Wise and powerful. And then when He shows you the answer to that question, search the scripture. When you see the answer, pray for that, ask Him for that. Another question, Father, what are my heart attitudes about this? So all these feelings I'm having, God, what do they say about my values and priorities and loves? These feelings I'm having, what do they say about my values? What's important to me? What's valuable to me? My priorities? Which things are more important than other things? So my neighbor's going to hell and that doesn't bother me, but then my nuggets might not make the playoffs and I'm worked up. You know, value, priorities. And loves. What do I love? I lost that thing and it didn't bother me because I didn't love it much. I lost that thing and it really bothered me. That shows me something about what I really love. God, what does this show me about those things? The passions of my heart are powering this anxiety. God, the reason I'm up here on this mountaintop praying to you right now is because I'm all worked up. And I'm all worked up because I've got passions. God, are they the right passions? That's a good question to pray about. And when he shows you, ask him to enable you to conform any wrong values, wrong passions, wrong loves, wrong priorities to match his passions and his loves and his priorities. Ask him this, God, what does your word say about things like this, situations like this? God, what does persevering look like in this ordeal? What would perseverance look like? What does humility look like in this ordeal? What does it look like to love my neighbor as myself in a situation like this? Show me, God. Lord, what have you done in the past when your people faced similar things? What did you do in the scriptures? What kinds of things did you do in these situations? Pray about that. Pray through a psalm, or two, or three, or several, and adjust the psalm, the wording of the psalm to fit your situation. Instead of the psalm of the situation, you just put your situation in there, but then pray the rest of the psalm about that. You'll be amazed what that'll do. And then, okay, Lord, what's the next step in this situation for me? I don't know what all the steps are. I'm assuming you're not gonna tell me all the steps right now, just what's the next step? What do I do now? And then when you've wrestled through all those things with God, wrap it up by casting each one of your cares on the Lord and seeking His comfort. When asked how he could handle all the stresses of the massive responsibilities that were on him, George Mueller said, I do not carry the burden. It is not only permission, but positive command that He gives to cast the burdens upon Him. Oh, let us do it. My beloved brothers and sisters in Christ, cast thy burden upon the Lord and He shall sustain thee. Day by day I do it. This morning, 60 matters in connection with the church of which I'm a pastor, I brought before the Lord." So that morning in his prayer time, one at a time, he didn't just say, Lord, let this whole mess work out. Right? 60 different times, like, okay, Lord. And just give it a try, try that. Carve out some special time alone with God, undistracted, to lay your burdens one by one, by name, before the Lord. So it's not just, Lord, let it work out. It's, Lord, I roll this concern about my child, who's got this problem, onto your shoulders, now it's yours. This situation at work, now, it's on you. I've done what I can do for today, I've taken the action that I can take. Tomorrow, I'll take the action I need to take tomorrow, but right now, it's bedtime, or it's not time to mess with that. There's no other actions for me to take right now other than prayer, and so I am rolling this boulder off of me onto you. Now, God, it's yours. It's yours. Until I need to act again, I'm offloading it. The fact that my wife is mad at me, my husband's mad at me right now, rolling that onto you, Lord, take it. This noise in my transmission, just take the weight of that. The fact that I'm not measuring up to what I thought I would be at this point in my life. My failing knees, my wrinkles, all these signs of aging. The fact that the gal the other day at Savers asked me if I was senior. this distressing thing I heard on the news, you know, whatever it is, just each thing rolling onto the Lord, rolling onto the Lord. Spurgeon said, agitated Christians, do not dishonor your religion by always wearing a brow of care. Come, cast your burden upon the Lord. What seems to you a crushing burden would be to him as the smallest dust on a balance. See, the Almighty bends his shoulders and he says, here, put thy troubles here. Come to me and I will give you rest. Psalm 91.1, he who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will rest in the shadow of the Almighty. Oh, Lord, help us to do this. We've got this anxiety we're carrying. We don't want it. We don't want ongoing bowling alley anxiety. And yet we're holding on to it. We need to be enabled to let go of it, it seems. Help us to do that and help us to show you to be mighty and powerful and loving and compassionate, the God whose shoulders are strong enough to take it so that we can rest at night. Lord, make us eager to use our anxiety for the purpose of this kind of prayer. We ask it in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, amen. Well, if you're like me, you probably can't remember nine things to ask God in times of great anxiety. In fact, times of great anxiety, you probably can't remember any. So you might want to print this list out. I've made it available on the treasuringgod.com website. So all you have to do is go to the articles page under resources and look up praying over a great anxiety. That's the title of the article. You can print it out and maybe tuck it in your Bible for times when you're really wrestling over something. And how are you doing on the memorization? Hopefully you're keeping up with that. I'm not gonna add a new verse today. I'd like you to just really make sure you have the three down that you've already memorized. So just keep reviewing Matthew 6, 25 through 27 multiple times a day. Make sure you can get it so it just comes out smooth as silk. You don't have to concentrate because in times when you need this passage, you need to quote it to yourself. you're not gonna wanna have to strain to remember the wording, so get it real smooth. You can work on that today and tomorrow and through the weekend, and then on Monday we'll add another verse. Tomorrow's episode is an important one. We're gonna see the connection that scripture draws between anxiety and pride. This is a key principle because in order to get rid of certain kinds of anxiety, you've got to find the pride that's behind them, and so I hope you can make it back tomorrow. Thank you for listening! We pray these principles from the Word of God are helping you find the peace of God as you draw near to the God of peace. 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