Strategies for Dealing with Anxiety, Part 2

The earth-shattering cry went ‘round the world, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” This Easter weekend, Christians everywhere tremble at and celebrate this desperate plea from Jesus on the cross. What I hope to show you here is that this cry of Christ has profound implications for dealing with anxiety.

 

Several years ago, I spent a week in Nashville with other counseling professionals studying a theory called Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT). Up to that point I had been reading journal articles on EFT and could see some parallels to the Christian faith. I wanted to know more. In the simplest of terms, what I learned is that EFT is based on attachment theory—the understanding that each of us is created with an innate desire—craving, even—to be intimately connected to another.

 

Different marital researchers have their own language to describe the dynamics of attaching. For example, when one person desires to attach to another person, John Gottman would say that one person is “bidding” for a positive response from another. Sue Johnson, a leader in EFT, prefers to use the word “reaching” for another. The real kicker is what happens internally to a person when they “bid” or “reach” for someone, and then that someone denies them or looks away.

 

Just last week, news columnist David Brooks noted, “Anna Freud’s famous research found that during World War II the children left in London to endure the bombings suffered less trauma than the children who were sent away from their families to the country for their ‘safety.’ She determined that the physical injury is often not the harshest part of trauma; it’s the breakdown of relationships during and after.” As horrific as it must have been to try to survive the incessant bombing of one’s city, it’s horror of another kind to be separated from the one you love.

 

“Distress” is a word that EFT practitioners use to describe the physical and emotional reactions of someone being rejected. “Soothing” is a word that describes what the one in distress needs. To get a picture of this in action, take a look at this video clip of Ed Tronick, a research professor at the University of Massachusetts and Harvard University, explaining and illustrating attachment theory along with what distress and soothing look like:

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=apzXGEbZht0

 

Take that illustration now and apply it to Jesus crying, or “reaching” out on the cross. And then God “looking away.” What can we make of this? Fred Sanders, a contemporary theologian with  expertise on the doctrine of the Trinity, challenges our modern sensitivities by noting that this particular cry is not so much about the Father-Son relationship (as in, “Father, forgive them” and “Father, receive my spirit”) as it is Jesus crying “the name of God humanly from a human place.” When we hear Jesus crying, “My God, my God (not “my Father, my Father”), why have you forsaken me”, we should hear “the reality of the holy God dealing with sinful humanity. The man on the cross is God the Son incarnate, but he isn’t negotiating his sonship here. He is working out our salvation. [This] is how God atones for human sin.”    

 

Why would God do this? Scripture says the motive is love. “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3:16). Despite our denials and distractions, deep down we know there are things worse than dying. Things beyond our control. Like dying spiritually, and then, in that death, be left with God forever looking away from you.

 

To know, then, that you’re deeply loved by the one who is in control, by the one who’s promised to never look away from you, is a movement out of the grip of anxiety. As I said in my previous post on anxiety, one strategy for engaging and overcoming anxiety, sometimes moment by moment, is to match emotion with emotion. In this case, when the Apostle John says that “perfect love drives out fear” (1 John 4:18), he is not saying that God needs to love us more, but that we need to grow in our understanding, valuing, and internalizing of the stunning love that God already has for his children.

 

John got it. The Apostle of love, as he is sometimes called, refers to himself as “the one whom Jesus loved” (John 13:23; 20:2; 21:7, 20). I don’t think this means Jesus loved John more than the other disciples; I think John was totally captivated and overwhelmed by the awareness of God’s love for him. John couldn’t get over it. As in, can you believe this? Yes! Yes, I do! In light of all I know, and all God knows, about the dark recesses of my heart, God loves me!

 

Let me give you a way to wrap your head and heart around this. Arthur Pink, a British-American theologian and pastor who lived through the Spanish flu of 1918, wrote a number of articles on the attributes of God. When writing on the love of God, Pink lists seven characteristics of God’s love for us to set our hearts on:

 

1. The love of God is uninfluenced. Where we love others for what we see in them or what they can do for us, God’s love is not so conditioned. God’s love is free, spontaneous, and uncaused. “The Lord had his heart set on you, not because you were more numerous than all peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples. But because the Lord loved you” (Deuteronomy 7:7-8).  

 

2. It is eternal. God says, “I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore, I have continued to extend faithful love to you” (Jeremiah 31:3). Mind-blowing it is to meditate on the truth that before the heavens and the earth were created, God had already determined to love us. Pink writes, “How tranquilizing for the heart: since God’s love toward me had no beginning, it can have no ending!”

 

3. It is sovereign. God’s love cannot be manipulated or bargained for. The cause of his love lies in God himself, not in anything within the object of his love. A plain example is, “He chose us in him, before the foundation of the world, to be holy and blameless, in love before him. [God did this] according to the good pleasure of his will” (Ephesians 1:4-5). He initiates, and we respond.

 

4. It is infinite. Just as God’s power is unbounded, for there is nothing too hard for him, so God’s love is without limit. This is hinted at in Ephesians 2:4, “But God, who is rich in mercy, because of his great love that he had for us.” The word “great” here is parallel with the “God so loved” of John 3:16. It tells us that the love of God is so transcendent it cannot be estimated.

 

5. It is immutable. Consistent with God “who does not change like shifting shadows” (James 1:17), so his love does not change toward us—despite our wavering faith and sin. Jesus clearly shows us this love on the night in which he was forsaken by all his disciples. Still, despite such treatment by those closest to him, “Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end” (John 13:1).

 

6. It is holy. God’s love is not weak or soft or permissive. Because God’s love is pure, he does not wink at sin. Therefore, “those whom the Lord loves he disciplines” (Hebrews 12:6). But God disciplines us in love, not anger, because at the cross of Christ God’s justice (sin was paid for) and mercy (sinners were forgiven) were equally expressed and eternally reconciled.

 

7. It is gracious. The love and favor of God are inseparable. This is clearly seen in Romans 8:32-39, in which God promises that literally nothing can separate God’s child from God’s love. Whenever we are tempted to doubt the love of God, we need only to consider again the self-sacrificing and substituting work of Christ at Calvary. John Stott writes, “It takes a hard and stony heart to remain unmoved by love like that. It is more than love. Its proper name is ‘grace’, which is love to the undeserving.”

 

In light of the depth and riches of God’s love, it takes time and thought to apply such love to an anxious heart. Truths such as the ones listed above need to be rehearsed, meditated on, internalized, and experienced. The Apostle Paul calls it “training in righteousness” (1 Timothy 3:16). A heart that is nursed and trained on the love of God is a heart that can relax and be composed. As King David could say, “I have calmed and quieted myself, like a weaned child who no longer cries for its mother’s milk” (Psalm 131:2).

 

The Apostle Paul echoes David when he writes, “Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. And the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things” (Philippians 4:6-8).

 

If there’s anything worth thinking on today in order to dispel our fears and anxieties, it is the deep, deep love of God for us in Jesus.

 

Because there is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends (John 15:13).