How to Handle Your Emotions (Counseling Through the Bible Series) (24 page)
Depression—Answers in God’s Word
Question:
“What should I do when I feel down?”
Answer:
“Why are you downcast, O my soul? Why so disturbed within me? Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise him, my Savior and my God” (Psalm 42:11).
Question:
“When I am depressed, in what can I put my hope?”
Answer:
“I wait for the L
ORD
, my soul waits, and in his word I put my hope” (Psalm 130:5).
Question:
“When I am depressed, will it really help to get counsel from others?”
Answer:
“Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers they succeed” (Proverbs 15:22).
Question:
“When I am depressed, who sustains me?”
Answer:
“Surely God is my help; the Lord is the one who sustains me” (Psalm 54:4).
Question:
“What must I remember as I pass through the waters of deep depression?”
Answer:
“When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze” (Isaiah 43:2).
Question:
“When I am depressed, what should I think about and focus on?”
Answer:
“Whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things” (Philippians 4:8).
Question:
“When I feel depressed with unrelenting pain, can I find any consolation or joy?”
Answer:
“Then I would still have this consolation—my joy in unrelenting pain—that I had not denied the words of the Holy One” (Job 6:10).
Question:
“When I am depressed, what will guard my heart and mind?”
Answer:
“Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the
peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 4:6-7).
Question:
“When I’ve lost all hope for the future, does the Lord still have any plans for me?”
Answer:
“‘For I know the plans I have for you,’” declares the L
ORD
, “‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future’” (Jeremiah 29:11).
Question:
“When I feel depressed, what will motivate me to persevere under this trial?”
Answer:
“Blessed is the man who perseveres under trial, because when he has stood the test, he will receive the crown of life that God has promised to those who love him” (James 1:12).
E. What Are Examples of Phobias?
II. Characteristics of Fearfulness
A. What Are Symptoms of
Normal
Versus
Abnormal
Fear?
B. What Are the Two Levels of Anxiety?
A. What Are the Common Causes of Fear?
B. What Are the Key Contributors to Fear?
C. What Are the Physical Causes of Fear and Anxiety?
D. What Are the Spiritual Causes of Excessive Fear?
E. What Is the Root Cause of Being Controlled by Fear?
B. Key Verse to Read and Reread
D. What to Do When You Feel Afraid
E. How to Move from Fear to Faith
F. How to Decrease Your Fear Through Desensitization
G. How to Counter Your Fears with Facts
H. Do’s and Don’ts for Family and Friends
I. The Result of Moving from Fear to Faith
Moving from Panic to Peace
I
magine being terrorized—your life continually threatened, your heart gripped with fear. Imagine every day waking to the thought,
This day could be my last day—the last for my family, the last for my friends!
Imagine living in the constant fear of being burglarized and brutalized…vandalized and victimized…mauled and murdered.
Suddenly, someone appears out of the blue instructing you to do the unthinkable—
take action and fight those whom you fear!
But such an idea is impossible—even preposterous—especially for Gideon, who is inclined to
flee
in the face of fear.
Now, imagine trying to thresh wheat in a
winepress
of all places! After the threshing, in order to separate the chaff from the wheat, a gentle outdoor breeze is needed. As both are thrown up into the air, the wind blows away the lightweight chaff and the heavier wheat falls to the ground. But…the center of a winepress is protected from the breeze by its surrounding walls. With little wind, your efforts yield only paultry results.
So here you are in hiding, fearing for your life, fighting an uphill battle, for a few grains of wheat. At this point, the angel of the Lord appears, saying, “The Lord is with you, mighty warrior.” He addresses you as…what?
A mighty warrior?
Who…you?
EFINITIONS OF
F
EAR
A. What Is Fear?
Imagine being asked to do something you know you can’t do. Like
Gideon, rather than attempting to meet the challenge, you find yourself responding, “Thanks, but no thanks. You’ve got the w-r-o-n-g person.”
However, the angel announces that
you
are to lead the battle against your greatest enemy—one vastly outnumbering your army, one greatly feared by your people, and feared for good reason! The mammoth Midianites ravage and ransack your nation at will, leaving death and destruction in their wake: “Whenever the Israelites planted their crops, the Midianites [and other enemies]…ruined the crops all the way to Gaza and did not spare a living thing for Israel, neither sheep nor cattle nor donkeys.”
1
Understandably, you feel terrorized and your heart is filled with fear.
•
Fear
is a strong emotional reaction to a perceived imminent danger characterized by a fight, flight, or freeze response.
2
•
Fear
can be real or imagined, rational or irrational, normal or abnormal.
•
Fear
acts as a protective reaction, placed in us by our Creator to activate all our physical defense systems when we face real danger. Fear triggers the release of adrenaline in the body, which both prepares and propels us to action, often called “fight or flight.”
•
Fear
is a natural emotion designed by God. However,
fearfulness
is not designed by God, for fearfulness means living in a state of fear.
•
Fear,
in Hebrew, is
yare,
3
which means “to be afraid, stand in awe or fear.” The Bible says about Gideon that
“he was afraid”
B. What Is Anxiety?(J
UDGES
6:27).
After the heavenly messenger delivers his initial instructions, Gideon begins to wonder:
If the Lord is really with us, why has all this evil happened?
And Gideon makes it most clear that if God wants a deliverer, the fragile farmer definitely is not the man for the job! After all, he is the
least
in his family, belonging to the
weakest
clan, in the
small
tribe of Manasseh. Cowering with the angst of anxiety, Gideon exclaims,
“
How can I save Israel?”
Gideon knows the monstrous Midianites have a new weapon that enables
them to make swift, long-range attacks against the Hebrews, rendering them virtually powerless. This terrible weapon is nothing other than
the camel!
Without food or water and with a heavy load, a camel can travel 300 miles in just three or four days. During Israel’s harvest time, the Midianites would ascend from the desert and quickly cover the land “like swarms of locusts.” The Midianite troops and their camels, both “impossible to count,” would strip Israel bare of everything edible. They would return to the desert with their plunder, and wait until the next harvest season to return.
Existing like this for seven years reduced Gideon and all the people to threshing meager amounts of grain in winepresses. They hid themselves and their food in mountain dens and caves. No wonder Gideon is fearfully anxious and fully persuaded “the L
ORD
has abandoned us and put us into the hand of Midian” (Judges 6:13).
Gideon’s fear has a “close cousin” called
anxiety.
•
Anxiety,
in the psychological/psychiatric world, is the umbrella word used to refer to varying degrees of worry and fear from mild to extreme.
•
Anxiety
is an uneasiness or distress over a real or perceived threat and is characterized by extreme worry or brooding fear.
•
Anxiety
stems from
uncertainty
—hoping something will happen but having no guarantee that it will, or fearing something will happen, but having no control over whether it will or not.
•
Anxiety
can lead to “catastrophic thinking” that overestimates the likelihood of danger or a negative outcome.
•
Anxiety
becomes a disorder when it becomes so intense that it dominates a person’s thoughts, feelings, and actions, thus preventing the person from living a normal life.
Anxiety Disorders
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