The Problem of Anxiety
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Welcome to Gospel in Life. Our culture places so much faith in empirical reason, technology, and personal experience that it's easy to wonder, does something as old as Christianity have any relevance to the problems of modern life? This month, Tim Keller invites us to consider how Christianity is more relevant than ever in offering answers to the deepest longings of our hearts. We've been looking at the...

The book of Psalms in the fall, and we've been trying to bring them to bear on what we've been calling modern problems, which of course, if you can bring the Psalms with a 3,000-year-old book to bear on them, they're not that modern. But we always like to flatter ourselves that our problems are worse than anyone else's. I mean, every age has always felt that way. And so I'm pandering...

to our arrogance and suggesting that we do have modern problems yet which have solutions that are very ancient. Now let me read to you from Psalm 27, the whole Psalm. "The Lord is my light and my salvation. Whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life. Of whom shall I be afraid? When evil men advance against me to devour my flesh, when my enemies and my foes attack me, they will stumble and fall.

Though an army besiege me, my heart will not fear. Though war break out against me, even then will I be confident. One thing I ask of the Lord, this is what I seek, that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to gaze upon the beauty of the Lord and to seek him in his temple. For in the day of trouble he will keep me safe in his dwelling. He will hide me in the shelter of his tabernacle and set me high upon a rock. Then my head will be exalted above the enemies who surround me.

At his tabernacle will I sacrifice with shouts of joy. I will sing and make music to the Lord. Hear my voice when I call, O Lord. Be merciful to me and answer me. My heart says of you, seek his face. Your face, Lord, I will seek. Do not hide your face from me. Do not turn your servant away in anger. You have been my helper. Do not reject or forsake me, O God, my Savior. Though my father and mother forsake me,

the Lord will receive me. Teach me your way, O Lord. Lead me in a straight path because of my oppressors. Do not turn me over to the desire of my foes, for false witnesses rise up against me, breathing out violence. I am still confident of this. I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord. Be strong and take heart, and wait for the Lord. That's God's word. Now,

This psalm is all about fear, worry, anxiety, and how David, how the Bible tells us to deal with it. Now, when we look at the psalm, we're going to see a very refreshing realism, even though it's full of tremendous promises. Because

Well, the realism is important. I was just reading an author, a man named Ernest Becker, who said, I think taking life seriously means that whatever you do must be done in the lived truth of the evil and terror of life, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise, it is phony. Everything you do has to be done in the lived truth of the evil and terror of life, of the rumble of panic underneath everything.

Otherwise it's phony. He must have lived in New York. There's always this rumble of panic. It's really the subway, but you walk along and you feel this rumble of panic and you say, why do I feel so disconcerted? Then you realize you're on Park Avenue and the...

There goes the subway. But Ernst Becker is right. And here's why. So many of the articles and the books that I survey, and I constantly do it, whenever I see a book in a shopping market or a book or an article in a newspaper or a magazine, how to overcome worry, how to deal with anxiety. And almost always what they say to do is to, essentially they say, the things you're worried about may never happen.

What a waste of time it is to be worrying about things that may never happen. Instead, visualize a future that is satisfying and focus on that. Visualize that future. Focus on that. Don't sit around and visualize all the things that could go wrong. Is that the way David does it? No. No.

You know, for example, in verse 10, he says, though my mother and father forsake me. Now, there is no indication that David's mother and father had actually forsaken him. It says, though an entire army was encamped against me. He doesn't say it has encamped against me. It says, even if it did, what is David doing? He's doing the opposite of what the articles say.

He's actually imagining the worst things that could happen. He's visualizing the worst things that could happen. Why? Because he wants to have a strategy of life, a strategy of dealing with fears and anxieties that can stand up to anything. He doesn't listen to the advice that says, oh, maybe nothing of these things will ever happen, so don't think about them. Oh, no. As Ernest Becker says, that guy said, he says, any attitude toward life that minimizes the evil and terror of things

He's phony. Well, he would have been very happy with Psalm 27. David goes so far as to imagine the worst. The fierce realism of the Bible, the fierce realism of the Bible is seen right here. The Bible says we can give you, the prophets say we can give you, the Bible says you can have a way of dealing with anger and with anxiety and fear that assumes that the worst things may and can happen.

that your father and mother forsake you, that an army encamps against you. Think about it. Go ahead. It doesn't matter because you can use this on anything. So what is that strategy? I'll tell you, whatever it was, we ought to look at it because, you know, David had literal enemies and they had real weapons. And there were people who were literally after their lives. And most of you, most of you, that's probably not true. And therefore, if he was able to find a strategy that enabled him to

to deal with the fears of his life, don't you think it ought to work for most of us? So let's see what he says this great strategy is. And actually, it's all in verse 4. The reason he's got enough confidence... In verse 3, he says, I've got so much freedom from anxiety and fear that I've got enough left over that if an army came up, I'd be okay. I'd be able to handle it. That's what he says in verse 3. And then in verse 4, he tells us the secret. And there's three verbs. To dwell, to gaze, and to seek. Those are the three.

So, let's take a look. How can you have a strategy that will enable you to face any of the anxieties, the stresses of life? I don't know how you're doing right now with this, but I know you can improve. Take a look. Dwelling, gazing, seeking. Now, first, dwelling. In verse 4 he says, One thing I ask, to dwell in the house of the Lord forever. Now, what does that mean? What does it mean to dwell in the house of the Lord? Now, one of the things you have to think about is,

is that David is not thinking so much about a physical spot. First of all, he couldn't dwell in the house of the Lord, literally. You can't live in a temple. He wasn't asking for that. Only the Levites could live in there, and nobody could live right there in the Holy of Holies. What he's actually asking for is to experience the unbroken presence of God, because the thing that he's really after is the face of God. The face of

I want to gaze on your beauty. I want to be in your presence. The house of God or the temple of God was the place where God's panim, which is the Hebrew word for face, his presence dwelt. And what David says is, I want to be always in your presence. What's that mean? Now, people always ask this question at this point. What does that mean? I thought God was present everywhere. I thought God was present everywhere.

And the answer is always best given through an illustration, something like this. You know, Tammy, we're playing the piano, and Steve on the flute and the sax. You are in their presence, aren't you? I mean, you've already heard them playing. You're in their presence. Of course, you've listened to them and you're in their presence. And yet, nobody can say yet that you have met them unless after the service you walk on up and you come up what? Face to face.

Because you see, your face is the relational gate into your heart. From far away, you can't have a relationship. You actually have to come up face-to-face. And when you come up to somebody, you can't look at their kneecap or their shoulder. You've got to look in their face. If you want to have a personal transaction, a personal interaction. Because the face is the place where I see and hear you, and the place is the face where you see and hear me. So you have to come face-to-face. Now, why am I saying that? Look, last week we said, Psalm 19...

Psalm 19 says that the heavens are telling of the glory of God. Psalm 19 says that when you go out and see the stars, are you in God's presence? Sure. The Bible insists that you can't know God personally through nature. It insists on it. And we looked at that last week in some detail. But let me just put it out again this way. When you come into the presence, you see, of a pianist and you listen to her play,

As great as it is to be in her presence, you haven't had a friendship with her by that. You have to come up face to face. If you want to have a friendship with Henry Ford, you don't do it by putting your head under a Model T and saying, Henry, are you in there, Henry? To be in the presence of the handiwork, to be in the general presence of someone is not the same thing as to have a personal relationship. And the Bible says, therefore, what David is after here.

I don't want, he says, to know you distantly. I don't want to obey you in a general way. I don't want to have a kind of general inspirational belief in you. I want to know you personally and intimately. That's what I want. I want to know you personally and intimately. That's the whole secret to a fearless life. Now why? Why? Why does verse 4 answer and explain verse 3?

Why does verse 4, why would that be the answer to fear? Here it is. Listen. When David says, the one thing I want is to dwell in your house and gaze on your beauty and seek you in your temple. That's the secret right there. Let me put it this way and then we'll unpack it. What David is saying is, my fears are directly proportional to the vulnerability of the things that are my greatest joys.

And if the thing that is my greatest joy is God, I will live without fear. If the one thing, if my one thing, the thing I most want is God, I am safe. You see, David is not, when David says, I'll be safe in your dwelling place, you see in verse 5, he says, I'll be safe in the tabernacle, the tent of God. David's not thinking physically. He isn't.

He's not so stupid as to think that these people who are after him with their real knives and their real swords, if he runs into the tabernacle, that somehow if they come in after him in an Indiana Jones style kind of scene, the Ark of the Covenant will zap all the bad guys. That's not what he's thinking. What he is saying is, I'm only safe not when I'm physically inside the dwelling or the tabernacle or the temple. He's saying, I'm only safe when you are the one thing I want most of all. Then I'm safe. Then I'm fearless. Let me show you how that works.

Recently, there's a man over at Drew University named Thomas Oden. He's a great theological teacher, and he is an expert on the early church writers. It's called patristics, meaning the fathers, the church fathers.

And I was reading some of his work on St. Augustine. And St. Augustine had an amazingly relevant, especially for us today looking at Psalm 27, an amazingly relevant and intriguing way to understand anxiety. Augustine says, here's where anxiety comes from. All of us have good things in our lives. And we love them and we desire them. Good things.

Parents and children are good things. A career is a good thing. Romance is a good thing. Sex is a good thing. All sorts of things are good things. We have lots of good things in our lives. But Augustine says, when something which is finite becomes, in other words, when the good things become the one thing we think we've got to have in order to be happy, when the good things become the one thing

We gaze on them. We seek them. We gaze on their beauty. We adore them. And we believe that we cannot receive life joyfully unless we have it. So when good things become one things, when good desires become inordinate desires, disproportional to their being desires, Augustine says that's when anxiety comes. Why? Because anxiety is like the smoke of

And you can follow the smoke down to the fire. And the fire is this. Anxiety is always the result of the implosion or the collapse of a false god. When good things become one things, you see, when things that are good to have become things that you've got to have, when they become the central values of your life, that's where anxiety comes from, says Augustine. Because anxiety is always a sign of the collapse of

of a false god. Now let me tell you, one of the reasons that we squirm with this, and one of the reasons some of you may squirm, some of you may be eating up with worry and anxiety right now, and you think this is unfair, because you're worried about a person, or you're worried about how you're going to feed your family because of the finances. You're worried about a lot of things, and they're good things. You see, this is what's so hard. The things that turn into little idols in our lives are always good things.

They were created by God. They're wonderful. That's the reason they can slip into the center. Put it this way. A little anxiety is always a very good thing. Remember, there's a place where Paul says, I have on me the daily anxiety of all the churches. So if you, a little anxiety shows that you're a caring person, but debilitating anxiety and devastating anxiety shows that good things have become one things. And now you're gazing on their beauty.

And you're seeking them above all. And you think, unless I have that, I cannot be happy. And that is what creates debilitating anxiety and fear. And so you see what David is saying? What David's saying is, if you're my one thing, if you're the one thing I require, the one thing I ask for, to gaze on your beauty, to seek you in the temple, I'm fearless. Because, see, anything but God and his will is subject to the vicissitudes of time and life.

Anything but God and his will is vulnerable. Nothing can take God away from you. Nothing can take that away from you. And then you're fearless. But anything else that you set your heart on like this can be taken away. And when there's a threat to it, you go to pieces. Now, David gives us a great example of this. Let's just use one example. Though my father and mother forsake me, the Lord will receive me. Now, is there anything wrong with the love between parents and children? Of course not.

God invented love between parents and children. God commands love between parents and children. And therefore, for you to want, for example, the love of your parents is something good. For you to want it very deeply is something good. Not only is it something very good, it's something inevitable that you want it. And yet, what happens if your mother and father forsake you? Which, of course, happens, does it not? What happens? There are people that I've talked to, that you've talked to, and maybe some of you are,

There are people who say, my mother and father have forsaken me, and I will not be consoled. I will not. I will never forget what they did. I will never forget what they failed to do. I will never be okay. I will always feel worthless. I will always be unhappy. And you just refuse to be consoled. What is that? A good thing, parent love, has become the one thing. And you're gazing at its beauty, and you're longing for it, and you're seeking after it, and you're worshiping it in a temple. And as a result...

You will be anxious and fearful all of your life. Don't you see? If my father and mother forsake me, if my spouse forsakes me, if my career forsakes me, if romance forsakes me, if my looks forsake me, the Lord will receive me. The Lord will receive me. Unless you get that into your blood, unless you understand that the reason why you get anxious is because good things become one things and they slide into the center.

Unless we actually are happy. You know, Augustine said, anxiety is a very, very helpful thing. It tells you a lot about yourself because you can always follow your worries to those things which enslave you. You can always follow your worries. Anxiety is always the result of the collapse of a false God, the implosion. Do you understand that? Unless you're able to get this into your blood, you're going to live a fearful life. So the question then is, how do we make sure that God becomes our one thing? How do we do that?

And I would say that the text is actually telling us two ways. And the two ways are right there in verse 4. You see, when David says, there's only one thing I want, and then he says to dwell, to gaze, and to seek. Now, wait a minute, that's three things. So what does he mean? He's got to mean that dwelling and gazing and seeking are basically all the one thing.

In fact, I think that seeking and gazing are actually two ways that we dwell in the house. I think seeking and gazing is just a kind of breakdown of what it means to dwell in God's house. Do you want to live in his presence? Do you want him to be the one thing? Do you want that so you can live a fearless life?

The answer is how? You have to gaze on his beauty and you have to seek him in his temple. Now, the reason I think that's true, by the way, that these two things are the ways in which you dwell in the house, gazing on his beauty and seeking him in the temple, is because the rest of the psalm breaks into two parts. Starting in verse 8, he says, show me your face. Verse 8, 9, and 10 is show me your face. And then verse 11, 12, and 13 and 14 is teach me your way.

And those are the same two things. Showing your face is the same thing as gazing on his beauty. Teach me your way is the same thing as seeking him. Let me show you these two things. These are the two things you've got to do in order to make him your one thing. Why does God allow suffering in the world? How can one religion be right and the others wrong? Has science basically disproved Christianity?

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First of all, you have to gaze on his beauty. Now, if you don't mind, I'll just tip my hat to those of you who are here at the end of August because I gave a sermon once on this at the end of August in the evening. When David says, I've come to the temple to gaze on your beauty, do we think it means a literal vision, something he saw with his physical eyes? I doubt it.

Well, I'm not saying that David, being a prophet and being a great king and so on, could never have had a vision. But I doubt that very much that's what he's talking about. There's no indication it means that every time he goes in, he gets a vision. Oh, no. What does it mean to gaze on his beauty? This is what we've called communion with God. This is the difference between knowing about God and knowing God. This is the difference between knowing that he's holy and loving and experiencing his holiness and his love.

Let me go back to St. Augustine. Some of you might remember this from two months ago, this sermon in the evening. St. Augustine actually at one point laid out... St. Augustine was a great African theologian of the church. He lived in the 4th and 5th century A.D. Augustine actually lays out in one of his sets of writings, lays out what it really means...

to actually see God. He says there's three parts. He says there's retentio, contemplatio, and dialectio. Remember? Retentio, he says, is finding a truth, getting it out of the Bible. And retentio is the word for retain. You retain it, you distill the truth, and you say, there it is. And you see it, and you learn it, and you know it. Ah, but Augustine says, you don't stop there. Oh, no. You mustn't stop there. He says, once you get that truth...

You see that God's holy. You see that God's wise. You don't just close your book. You don't close your notebook and say, ah, now I know that. I know another attribute of God. I know it. Oh, no. Augustine says, now, secondly, you can move from attentio to contemplatio, which means you contemplate or you look at God through the truth. He says you gaze at God through the truth. That means you start to ask yourself questions. What does this verse tell me about God? What does it show me about God?

What does it show me about how marvelous he is, how holy he is, how loving he is? Do I really understand that he's holy? Do I really understand it? Am I living it out? What false attitudes and false emotions come when I forget this? And what Augustine means is this is a discipline of the mind in which you're reaching out and you're actually saying, I want to see you. You stretch every nerve out.

To not see him with the eyes of your eyes, but to see him, as Paul says in Ephesians 1, with the eyes of your heart. He's stretched out. And because we have the Holy Spirit, sometimes, to some degree or another, we move to the third of the three phases, delectio, which means to delight in him. Sometimes we find that if we really spend the time seeking to see him, to gaze on his beauty, ideas about him get very real.

His ideas about his holiness or his love, they begin to comfort us. They begin to disturb us. They begin to thrill us. Now, don't look at me like, what is all this? Don't you remember what we said, what Augustine said? Everybody does this with everything but God. We all gaze at the beauty of these good things that have become one things. You know what it means to gaze on something's beauty, on the beauty of something? You turn it over in your imagination, the thing you want. It may be a career. It may be a house at the beach.

It may be a particular person. And you think what life will be like if you get it. You gaze on the beauty of it. You fill your mind with it. You taste it. You rest in it. We do it with everything else, but God, not do it with him. That's the only way to make the real one thing the one thing. Gaze on his beauty. Do you know how to do that? Do you take time to do that? David says unless you do that, you'll not be dwelling in his house and you'll have a fearful life.

But then secondly, the second thing is to seek him. He doesn't just say, I want to gaze on your beauty, but I want to seek him. Now, the word seek is a very, very specific Hebrew word. It actually means to get advice. It's a word that actually means to go and get counsel. And so what it means is that when I come to you, I'm trying to find out what your will is, O Lord. He wants to obey. He wants to find out God's will, and he wants to submit to it.

And boy, this is extremely important. This is the two parts of what it really means to be a Christian. This is the parts of two religions, gazing on the beauty and seeking God's will. If you only seek God's will to obey, to find out what he teaches and just obey it day in and day out, if that's all you do without gazing on the beauty, it'll be all Phariseeism and legalism. But on the other hand, if you just try to gaze on his beauty...

Just to have this great experience, but you don't want to find out his will and do daily obedience. Well, it won't work either, and I'll show you why. Just think of marriage. Marriage is a wonderful thing, a good marriage, because you can fall in each other's arms every so often. And you have, you see, you gaze on each other's beauty. You have intimate fellowship.

But you can't walk around all the time in each other's arms. There's life to live. You've got to go to work and so on. And let me tell you what 95% of what marriage is. 95% of what marriage is is finding out how to serve the other person and how to do for them. Because if you want to experience the other person's love and yet the other person says, hey, would you do this and this and this for me? And you say, oh no, that's too inconvenient. I don't like to do that. If you live like a selfish person,

If you don't learn what the other person's wishes are, if you don't serve that other person in the little things, day in and day out, it'll be the end of intimacy. Don't you see? You can't just live selfishly. You can't just walk around and do anything you want, not trying to find out how to serve that person, not making sacrifices to that person, not obeying the needs and the wishes of that person, and then expect to just jump in bed and have a wonderful, wonderful time of gazing on her beauty or his beauty. If you think that's going to work, it doesn't. It never works.

A human being is not a computer. There's not an entrance sequence that you just poke in and then you get everything you want. In a relationship, if you want intimacy, if you want to gaze on the beauty of the other person, if you want to commune with that person in love, you've also got to find out that person's will and do it. That's just the way it works. And what does that mean? I'll tell you what this means. A lot of people have wanted desperately...

to gaze on God's beauty and get these experiences that I'm talking about. You know, I was reading the other day, here's a guy who wrote a friend. Near the end of his life, there was a minister who prayed every day but began to really get a breakthrough, began to gaze on God's beauty almost every week. He began to just have these breakthroughs. He wrote a friend and he says, almost every week, a measure of his great love comes down upon my heart.

What is that? He's in the temple. He's dwelling in the house of the Lord. He's gazing on the beauty. And all of his fears are going. Ah, somebody says, I want that so much. A lot of us go to churches seeking that.

A lot of us try to find church that will give us this great sense of highness, you know, that we've touched God during the worship services. And that's good. That's fine. But I tell you this, to gaze on his beauty without seeking his will will never work. You want to gaze on his beauty? There's a way to do that. Blind Bartimaeus. Remember Blind Bartimaeus? He knew that Jesus was going to come by on a certain road, so he pitched his tent there. And he just cried out, Lord, have mercy on me.

Do you want to experience the beauty of God? Do you want to gaze on his beauty? Do you want to have this sense of love that these great people that I always am reading from their journals have? Do you want that? Of course you want that. Well, how do you get it? You don't get it by running around trying to get it. You pitch your tent on the road that Jesus inevitably will come down, and that road is the road of obedience, seeking him.

There's disciplines to seeking his will. You read the Bible, you pray, you meditate, you take the sacraments at church. Those are the inner disciplines. Then you have the outer disciplines. Be simple in your lifestyle instead of materialistic. Be chaste in your lifestyle instead of impure. Be forgiving in your lifestyle instead of bitter. Have a servant heart instead of an ambitious and selfish heart. These are disciplines. Obey. Seek him and you'll gaze on his beauty.

Otherwise, nah. Okay, you want to dwell in his house? There's the discipline of gazing on his beauty, and there's the discipline of seeking his will. Now, let me close this way. For some of you, some of you are probably finding this a pretty odd thing, gazing on God's beauty, and you're thinking, well, that's great. I'd love to have an experience like that. How do I do it? Here's how you do it. You have to seek him in his temple. You have to gaze on his beauty in his temple. Ah, but what is his temple?

It says in John chapter 2, Jesus Christ looked at the temple and he said to the religious leaders, tear this temple down and I will build it up again in three days. And they all looked at him and said, you're crazy. It took 40 years to build this temple. You're going to build it up in three days? And the text tells us he was referring to himself. Jesus is the temple. Now let me explain what I mean. Let me show you what I mean. David...

gazed at the beauty of God. Now remember we said, Augustine says, Augustine says the way you gaze at God is you take certain truths and you look at God through the truths. You look at God through them. So when we're told that David gazed on the beauty of God at the temple, what did that mean? We said he probably didn't have a vision. It means he went and he watched the temple ritual, the temple ritual, and he saw God through it, the beauty of God through it. How did that happen? Well, like this. You know what happened in the temple ritual? What happened? Do you know what happened?

Animals were constantly getting slaughtered on the block and sacrificed up to God. And David saw the beauty of the Lord. He gazed on the beauty of the Lord through the sacrifices. How could that happen? Well, when he saw the animals being slain, he saw the beauty of God's justice and holiness. He said, here's a God.

that requires that sin be paid for. Here's a God who is so good and so holy, he cannot countenance sin. Here's a God who can't overlook it. Here's a God that must deal with evil. What a good God, what a just God, what a holy God. But on the other hand...

When he looked at the sacrifices, he also saw a merciful God. Here's a God who wants to deal with our sins so we can still approach him. Here's a God who wants to forgive us our sins. Here's a God who wants to find us a way to himself. Now, if David, here's the point, if David was able to gaze at the beauty of God through the tabernacle and the temple worship, how much more of the beauty of God will we see if we gaze at God through the face of Jesus?

You see, when we look at God today, we don't have to look at him through a bull being slaughtered on the block. We see the face of a human being, the most loving human being ever, dying for us, suffocating on the cross, his ribs snapping as he suffocates. See, the blood and the sweat flowing down on his face, looking at us and saying, you don't know what you're doing. Looking at us and saying, I've been forsaken for you.

Now let me tell you something. If David saw so much of the beauty of God in the temple, so much of the beauty of God that it turned him into a great heart so that he could handle an army, how much more of the beauty of God do you think you and I can see? If we do what Paul said. What did Paul say? He says, we are beholding with unveiled faces the light of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. That's what we look at.

Gaze on him. Look at him. Look at what he's doing. Look at him dying for you. Gaze on the beauty of God. If the beauty that David saw could turn him into someone who could handle an army, what do you think it's going to turn you into? How much more of the beauty of God can we see? How much more are we going to be able to look at God and say, you're my one thing. I see your beauty. It fills me up. So I'm afraid of nothing anymore. I've got the only thing that I need. Listen, this is what it means to seek him.

You have to seek the Father. You have to seek the Father. You have to gaze at his beauty through Jesus. It says in John 1.12, As many as received him has believed on his name. He gave power to become sons of God. He gave authority to become children of God. Number one. So if you want him, if you want all the things we're talking about, it's not an abstract thing. It's not a technique. You have to go to God through Jesus. That's how you gaze on his beauty. Now secondly, to Christians...

Christian friends, just think about this. We're just about ready to wrap up, but there's a number of you that are saying, okay, this is very interesting. In fact, this is very moving. This is very powerful. But I'm scared right now about something that's going to happen on Thursday. Thursday, okay? That's four days away. What do I do until then? Maybe? Listen, it's true that the Bible gives you this tremendous solution to anxiety.

It says, learn to gaze on his beauty and seek him in his temple. And eventually you develop a habit of the heart. You develop a whole orientation toward God. And of course that's not something that happens real quickly. So the fact of the matter is I can't give you something that real quickly will overcome all of your anxiety between now and Thursday. The

The books in the bookstores do. The magazines in the grocery store, that's what they do. They give you these little behavior modification grids and they give you these little rational motive techniques on thought control. And they teach you how to turn away from the negative thoughts and put on the positive thoughts. Let me tell you something. The Bible is giving you an antidote to anxiety too, but it's not a patch. It's not a band-aid. It's regeneration. It's a new heart, a new way of life, a new way of doing everything.

So I admit that this is something that takes a long time to develop. This is not a quick fix. But you can start right now. You know, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, right? You know that cliche? Okay, let's use it. You know what the first step is today? You know what you can say? You can say, one thing. Finally, Lord God, I'm going to make you the one thing. One thing. I'm going to make you my highest priority. I'm going to, I today, determine that gazing on your beauty and seeking you

I can no longer let other things crowd it out in my schedule. I can no longer let other things crowd it out of my energy. I can no longer let other things crowd it out of my creativity. Today, you're the one thing. Finally, I ditch all other competition. I ditch all other competing concerns. I ditch everything else. I insist on this. I will make time for it. I will do it. That's the first step. So do it. Last of all, let me just give you a quick read of something. You know, the last hymn that we're about to sing...

Not yet. I mean, in a minute. But the last thing we're going to sing, we rest on thee, our shield and our defender. Do you remember several years ago we had a woman here named Betty Elliott who was a missionary? She tells us that her husband, Jim Elliott, 30 years ago now or so, 40 I guess, he and six other missionaries...

they were going to go into the jungles of Ecuador and make contact with a very primitive tribe that they were going to try to meet, try to live with, try to learn their language, try to give them a written version of their language, bring in literacy, and give them a copy of the Bible in their own language. They were going to do literacy work and Bible translation. And they knew it was dangerous. So the night before they were to contact these Indians, they sat around a table and they sang this hymn together. We rest on thee, our shield and our defender. We go not forth alone against the foe,

The next day they were all spared to death by the Indians. Remember that story? And Elizabeth Elliot, a friend of ours now, will say, that's interesting. We rest on thee, they sang.

Strong in thy strength and safe in thy keeping. And the next day they were spirits. So does it not work? Of course it works, she said. They also sang, Jesus, our righteousness, our sure foundation, our prince of glory, and our king of love. You see, if the one thing that's non-negotiable in your life, if the one thing you really want, if the one thing you really need, if the one thing is to gaze on the beauty of God, you're absolutely safe.

Because the worst thing that can happen to you is a spear gets thrown through your heart, which is exactly what happened. In which case, you gaze on the beauty of the Lord in a way you never have before. Or there's a guy named Alan. There was an English missionary named Alan Gardner in 1851. He was on his way to South America to start a new mission. And he was shipwrecked.

on a very remote island and he and his companions tried their very best to stay alive until somebody came to find them but nobody did. And finally he died, far away from everybody, far away from his loved ones, far away from his family, dying of thirst, dying of hunger, a horrible, horrible way to go. And when they discovered his body, they finally did, they found right next to his body was his quiet time notebook.

And they opened up and they saw on the very last page, he had written out Psalm 34, verse 10. And this is what it says. The young lions do lack and suffer hunger, but those that seek the Lord shall lack no good thing. And right underneath it, the last words he penned was this. I am overwhelmed with a sense of the goodness of God. Huh? What do you mean I'm overwhelmed with a sense of the goodness of God? No.

Why wasn't he mad? Why wasn't he angry? Why wasn't he scared? Because he had one thing, and there was nothing to be afraid of. Don't you see? It's your only hope. Come and get it. Dwell. Gaze. Seek. Let's pray. Father, now we pray that everybody in this room might be enabled to say, the one thing I want is to dwell in your house and gaze on your beauty and seek you in your temple. Father, for some of us, that's going to mean actually to get ourselves converted to say that.

For a lot of the rest of us, it means we're going to have to reshuffle our priorities around and realize that we're living like pagans, many, many good things having become our one things, and we're being just jerked around by them. I pray that today you will enable, by the power of your Spirit, to let everybody in this room say, one thing I ask, one thing only will I seek. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.

Thank you for joining us today. If you were encouraged by today's teaching, please rate and review it so more people can discover the Gospel in Life podcast. This month's sermons were recorded in 1993. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel in Life podcast were preached from 1989 to 2017 while Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church.