Josh’s Thoughts

Facing the Unknown – Part #6, Step #4 July 20, 2007

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. Finally, brethren, 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. The things you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.
(Php 4:6-9 NASB)

Let me recap, for the final time, the four steps that Dr. Habermas gave for dealing with emotional pain or, as I am phrasing it, facing the unknown:

1. Pray (verse 6)
2. Give thanks and praise (verses 6 & 8)
3. Change our thoughts (verse 8)
4. Practice, practice, practice (verse 9)

In this final post I am dealing with the subject of practice, and then I will conclude the post and the series with some suggested Scriptures for further reading, along with a practical tip for dealing with worry.

The subject of practicing the three steps that I have already written about seems quite simple, right? You just practice! Nothing to it!

Well, in a way that is certainly true, but there is one very important point that I want to bring up about practicing these three steps. That point is as follows: When you have prayed about a situation, given thanksgiving to God, and changed your thoughts by locating the lies and replacing them with truth, then leave the situation with God!

Here’s what I mean: All too often (as Dr. Habermas pointed out in his lectures) we have a tendency to pray about a worry, a doubt, or a fear, and then continue to pray about the worry, doubt, or fear. And we continue to do it…and continue…and continue…all day, every day, until the situation is resolved. What happens when we do this is that our prayer and thanksgiving becomes a form of worry in itself. In other words, we’re still worrying about the situation–we’re still holding onto it. The only difference is that we’re talking to God and telling Him how much we’re worried about it!

The solution that I have found to this problem is to bring the situation that I am worrying about to God on a daily basis and then leave it there! I bring it to Him in prayer, I share my fears with Him, I thank Him for His promises and for the knowledge that He will work everything out for the best, and then I leave the situation with God. I cannot stress this point enough! A person will never find “the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension” if they are unwilling to let go of their worries and leave them at the feet of Jesus.

After all, isn’t God powerful enough to remember our petitions without us reminding Him of them every 30 seconds?

I do not mean to say that God minds us constantly praying, of course! He has all the time in eternity! But when we learn how to trust the situation to God and to leave it at His feet then we can truly begin to experience peace. When we leave the situations that we worry about with Him then we can rest assured that the most qualified Person in the Universe is dealing with the problem, and that He is going to deal with it in a way that is the best for us that it could possibly be! Of course, this does not mean that He will necessarily handle it the way that we in our finite, time-limited understanding would like Him to, but that’s where trust comes in!

Trust that He knows what is best for us.

Trust that He will work everything out for our good. Everything.

And that, in a nutshell, concludes this series on facing the unknown. Pray, give thanksgiving, change our thoughts, and practice leaving our worries, doubts, and fears at the feet of Jesus.

Before I conclude this post, though, I would like to give a practical tip for dealing with worry. I recommend making a list of Scriptures that speak about trusting God and to keep them on your person or accessible to you at all times. I keep a list on my computer and on my PDA, and whenever I start to worry I can read through those Scriptures and it helps me remember to trust God. If you would like my list of Scriptures then e-mail me at jmspiers@gmail.com and I will be happy to send them to you. I might make a 7th post in this series that includes the Scriptures in my list, but I have not decided yet.

Finally, I would like to give some Scripture references that I recommend reading if you are dealing with worry, doubt, or fear. These Scriptures are not from my list, they are from a list given by Dr. Habermas. They are very powerful, and I suggest spending some time meditating on them:

• Ps. 42:5–6 , 11, 43:5, 143:4–6
• Ps. 39:2, 55:4–8, 16–17, 56:3–4, 57:1–3, 94:19; Prov. 12:25, 15:15b
• Lam. 3:19–26 (one of my favorites!)
• 1 Pet. 5:7–9; Ps. 55:22
• Js. 4:7–10

And that, my friends, concludes this series on facing the unknown. It is my sincere hope and prayer that this series of posts will help people in the same way these steps helped me when Dr. Habermas taught them. If anyone who reads this has any questions or just needs someone to pray for them then please email me at jmspiers@gmail.com and I will add you to my prayer list! I firmly believe in the power of prayer, and it is something that I take very seriously. May God bless you today, and may He give you the strength that you need to pray, give thanksgiving, and change your thoughts no matter what you are facing!

Facing the Unknown – Part #5, Step #3 July 19, 2007

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. Finally, brethren, 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. The things you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.
(Php 4:6-9)

Let’s once again rehash the four steps that Dr. Habermas gave:

1. Pray (verse 6)
2. Give thanks and praise (verses 6 & 8)
3. Change our thoughts (verse 8)
4. Practice, practice, practice (verse 9)

In this post I am talking about step #3: Changing our thoughts. Dr. Habermas gave three steps for changing our thoughts, and I will go through each one of them in this post. (Note: Dr. Habermas gave the credit for these three steps to Buckus and Chapian’s book Telling Yourself the Truth.)

The first step in changing our thoughts is to locate the lies we tell ourselves. This point is most clearly made through an example. If you walk up to me and call me a pathetic loser then it will certainly hurt. The closer that you are to me emotionally the more that it will hurt. But if I internalize the words that you say to me and I begin to really think that I am a pathetic loser then the words become unbearable. In Dr. Habermas’ words, “The words from you hurt, but the agreement from myself cripples.“

I think that we have all had hurtful words said to us by someone that we cared deeply about. The exact situation will vary from person to person, but I am sure that everyone reading this has had at least one person who’s respect they desperately wanted and needed say things that hurt. Whether the person is a mother, a father, a guardian, or a lover, the point is the same. We needed their approval and instead of building us up they tore us down. We’ve all experienced that, and it is incredibly painful. But the real problem comes when we internalize the words that the person told us and we begin to repeat them to ourselves as truth. The first step in changing our thoughts is to begin to recognize the lies that we internalized as being just what they are: Lies.

Another type of lie that we tell ourselves is in the form of “what-if” scenarios. I’ve already mentioned this several times, but it’s a point that I want to stress. When we are worried about a situation and we begin to run through the maybes and what-ifs then all that we are doing is telling ourselves lies. None of us know the future, but we do know that if we love God then He will cause all things to work together for good!

With that said, the second step in changing our thoughts is to remove the lies by arguing against them. Once we have located a lie then we need to remove the lie by saying to ourselves, “That’s just a lie, and it’s not true because _______.” The key here is to focus on God’s promises and to replace the lies with truth (the third step). For instance, if I am worrying over the security of my job then it’s tempting to start obsessing over what might happen. Instead of doing that I should focus on the promises of God by reminding myself that everything works together for good. That means that even if I do lose my job (in this hypothetical scenario) then God would still work it out for the best! I have nothing to worry about!

Once I have reminded myself of the promises of God then I should replace the lies with truth. Earlier in this post I used the illustration of someone walking up to me and calling me a pathetic loser. While I am sure that there are people in the world who do think that I’m a pathetic loser, I know deep down that it’s really not true. Sure, I’m not perfect (no one is) but instead of internalizing the words that they say to me I can argue against them (in my own mind) by telling myself, for example, that I am a successful student, a good employee, and that God has blessed me with many wonderful friends and a wonderful family who think very highly of me.

Now, that would work for this example, but what if I was at a point where I was really down in life? What if I wasn’t a successful student and I was without a job? What if I really did feel like a pathetic loser? Well, in that case I can still argue against the lie and refuse to internalize it by reminding myself of one simple yet crucial fact: I am a child of God! No matter how down I am right now and no matter how bad things are I am still successful if I am a child of God. There is nothing that can separate me from His love, and I can reassure myself that He will work everything out for the best, regardless of how bad things look right now!

I am convinced that all four of the steps Dr. Habermas gives–prayer, thanksgiving, changing our thoughts, and practicing–go together; but if I had to pick the most important one from a purely natural, non-spiritual perspective, then changing our thoughts would be the one that I would choose. This can work for anyone, whether or not they are a Christian! However, I believe that being a Christian and understanding that God causes everything to work together for good empowers this step with the power to change a Christian in ways that it could not change a non-Christian.

In the next post I will give the final step: Practice. Until then I strongly encourage you to begin to practice these steps right here, right now, in whatever areas of your life that you are worrying about. If you struggle with insecurity and hurts from the past then you can begin to apply these three steps right now. If you are facing the unknown then I encourage you to stop running through the “what-ifs” right now, right this very second, and begin to pray, give thanksgiving, and change your thoughts by focusing on the promises of God!

Facing the Unknown – Part #4, Step #2 July 18, 2007

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. Finally, brethren, 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. The things you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.
(Php 4:6-9)

Let’s rehash the four steps that Dr. Habermas gave:

1. Pray (verse 6)
2. Give thanks and praise (verses 6 & 8)
3. Change our thoughts (verse 8)
4. Practice, practice, practice (verse 9)

In this post I’m talking about step #2: Giving thanks and praise. Praise is a difficult subject to talk about briefly because it can be so complex; a person can either say a whole lot or a whole little about it (I don’t know if “a whole little” is proper grammar or not, but it conveys the point)! Let’s just say that I’m going to do my best to say a “whole little” with a “whole lot” of meaning.

For those of you who were raised in the Pentecostal or Charismatic movements (as I was) then I will say that I do not believe that the praise and thanksgiving that Paul is talking about here is the sort of exuberant praise and worship that one finds in a Pentecostal or Charismatic service. I am not saying there is anything wrong with that type of worship, I’m just saying that I don’t think that’s what Paul is talking about right here! Of course, I could be wrong, so if anyone wants to disagree then that’s OK!

What I think Paul is talking about is just thanksgiving. Nothing more, nothing less. Two words compounded into one: Thanks + giving. Giving thanks. Giving of thanks. Giving thanks to God.

There’s nothing magical about giving thanks to God. There’s no right or one wrong way to do it. If a Pentecostal or Charismatic person wants to give thanks through exuberant praise and worship then that is certainly fine, but a person can also give thanks at all times in their own mind without ever saying a word.

The question that we must ask, though, is, “What should we give thanks about?”

Well, Paul didn’t tell us what to pray about, he just told us to pray. And the same thing goes for thanksgiving: He didn’t say what to give thanksgiving about, he just said to give it. I do believe that we find a key to what we should give thanks about in the eighth verse, though, when he writes, “If there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things.”

I think that the things we should give thanksgiving about are the things that God has done for us in the past; the things that are excellent and worthy of praise. When we do this it takes our thoughts off of the current problem and causes us to think about the faithfulness of God and about how excellent and worthy of praise He truly is! Then instead of worrying about our current situation we find ourselves excited about it because we are eagerly waiting to see what God is going to do through it!

That’s my take on giving thanks, but there are lots of other things that we can give thanks to God for. We can give thanks to Him for our current situation, with faith that He is going to turn it into something marvelous. We can even thank Him for the opportunity to be counted worthy to suffer for His sake. The problem with these forms of thanksgiving is that it’s very, very hard to give them sincerely. We often find ourselves doing it because we want God to see how tough we are and how much dedication we have for Him! In other words, it’s easy to get tricked into trying to manipulate God in the same way that a child will try to manipulate their parents.

Remember, God is unwilling to be manipulated!! He knows your heart. There’s nothing wrong with thanking God for the current situation (whatever it may be) but be careful to not try to manipulate the Almighty.

With that said, I really do not think that there is any right or wrong way to give thanksgiving, or any right or wrong thing to give thanksgiving for. What matters is that we give thanksgiving! One thing that might be nice to do is to sit down and start making a list of all the things that we have to be thankful for. When we do that our attention quickly fades from our current problems and it focuses on God and on how blessed we really are.

Facing the Unknown – Part #3, Step #1 July 17, 2007

The four steps that Dr. Habermas gives are based on Philippians 4:6-9, which says:

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. Finally, brethren, 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. The things you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.
(Php 4:6-9)

Dr. Habermas pointed out at the start of his lecture that there is nothing “sacred” about these four steps or about the order in which they are applied. In reality they should all be applied together. In other words, there is nothing magical about these four steps. They are not a magic formula, they are just practical biblical advice applied to our lives. With that in mind, I will give the four steps, and then I will expound on the first one:

1. Pray (verse 6)
2. Give thanks and praise (verses 6 & 8)
3. Change our thoughts (verse 8)
4. Practice, practice, practice (verse 9)

In this blog entry I want to deal with the first step: Prayer. But before I do that I want to share a couple of things that Dr. Habermas said. They profoundly affected me, and I recorded them word for word:

If someone says something to me that’s hurtful, then it hurts. But if I internalize it and buy into that, and say it to myself, then it hurts far more. The logic is, “I would never lie to myself.” We must change the way that we think.

Your circumstances may not change right now. But what you tell yourself about your circumstances can begin to change right now, and what we tell ourselves is what causes the hurt.

I think that Dr. Habermas makes a very, very powerful point in these two quotes. Emotional pain and worry is caused by us running through all of the “what-if” scenarios in our head (just like I talked about in part #1 of this series). See, we cannot change our circumstances, but we can change our response to our circumstances! Whenever we face the unknown our tendency is to worry about all of the things that might happen. Needless to say, all of those things are worst-case scenarios! So the best thing that we can do is to change what we tell ourselves about our circumstances.

In other words, instead of running through the worst-case scenarios, remind ourselves that everything–everything!–works together for the good of those who love God! Everything! Period! Nothing works for bad to a child of God! No matter how dreadful things seem right now, they will work together for good!

See, the natural human tendency when facing the unknown is to imagine how dreadful it is, but as Christians we need to look at the unknown and try to imagine how wonderful it will be.

With that in mind let’s talk about prayer for just a moment.

Paul says “in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God,” but Paul does not say what we should pray! He just says to pray. So what should we pray? Well, everyone’s circumstances are different, so everyone needs to pray about whatever it is that they are facing.

One thing that I should say at this point is that I do not believe that there is any magic button that a person can press with God to get a desired response. God refuses to be manipulated. It’s just the way that He is. However, He always does respond to our prayers with one of three answers:

1. Not right now, just wait on Me and let me renew your strength (Isaiah 40:31)
2. No, My child, because I have something better planned for you; something better than anything that you can imagine right now
3. Yes

Sometimes those answers vary a little in form, but the essence of them is always the same.

I once read an article on prayer that was written by a rabbi. I would like to quote him directly, but I lost the link to the article so I will have to paraphrase what he said. In his explanation of prayer he said that God loves to give His children the desires of our hearts; He promised to (Ps. 37:4). But the problem, according to this rabbi, is that we are all too often like teenagers who want the keys to the car. A good parent wants their child to be able to drive and to go out with their friends, but if they recognize that their child is not responsible enough to take the keys and go out for a night on the town then they will say no. But, this rabbi says, the good parent will work to make the child mature enough so that the answer can eventually be yes.

Isn’t that such a beautiful concept? God looks on us as children, and so many times He does things that we cannot understand because He is preparing us for what He has for us further down the road. The problem is, we’re often not spiritually mature enough for what God wants to do for us and through us, so He has to temporarily give us “no” answers until He can prepare us for what He wants to do.

I think that is a wonderful example of how God works with His children, but the point that Paul makes is simply that we should pray and bring our supplications before God. Let God know what we want, but trust Him to do what is best for us even if His answer is one that we do not understand.

That involves entrusting everything to God (and that’s not easy!), but let me ask this question: What better place could we put our trust than in the hands of God?

Facing The Unknown – Part #1 July 15, 2007

Have you ever thought about where the roots of our fears come from? I was thinking about it the other day, and I am convinced that the root of most of our fears lies in the unknown.

For instance, I used to have a terrible fear of spiders. If I got close to a spider then I became almost paralyzed with fear. If I found a little tiny spider in my house or apartment then it would take me hours–literally!–to work up the courage to get close enough to it to kill it. The problem was, as more and more people found out about my fear I got more and more embarrassed!

So one day I decided to break the phobia. The way that I did it was to get on the Internet and research all the poisonous spiders in the United States. I learned what they looked like, what happened when they bit you, where they were usually found, whether or not they could jump, and whether or not they were aggressive. I found out every detail that I could dig up.

And you know what happened? It broke my phobia of them almost overnight.

That was when I first started to understand that my phobia was not really of spiders. My phobia was about what might happen if a spider bit me. I became paralyzed with fear because as soon as I saw a spider my mind started running through all the imagined possibilities. What if it could jump? What if it was aggressive? What if it charged me and jumped on me and bit me 30,000 times???

Those fears sound ridiculous now, but at the time they were very real. The problem was that I was afraid of what might happen. I was running through all the “what-ifs” in my head. “What-if” this happened? “What-if” that happened?

And you know what happens when we run through the “what-ifs”? Our mind immediately goes to the worst case scenario. Every single time. That’s just the way that the human mind works.

Now I think that most people in the world suffer from some form of irrational fear. Perhaps it’s a fear of heights, of snakes, or of spiders. But there is another type of fear that affects us all from time to time. Every single one of us. It’s the fear of the unknown. It’s emotional fear.

It’s the fear that comes upon us when a family member goes for a routine check-up and finds out that they might have cancer. It’s the fear that comes upon us when a child stays out late and doesn’t answer their cell phone and we wonder what might have happened. It’s the fear that comes upon us when we care about someone and we think that they might not return the feelings. It’s the fear that comes upon us when we’re involved in any sort of emotionally tense situation and we don’t know what might happen.

Whenever we face these fears our minds do what my mind used to do when I saw a spider: We immediately imagine the worst-case scenario. And then our mind starts to run rampant with worry as we imagine what might happen. We run through the “what-ifs”…and every single one of them is bad.

This spring semester I took a course by a man named Dr. Gary Habermas. He is an extraordinary man, and I enjoyed his course for a lot of reasons. One reason that I liked the class was because he was very practical. At one point in the lectures he told us that his first wife had developed terminal stomach cancer and died several years ago. From diagnosis to death was just four months; they had almost no time to prepare. When she died he was left with three children and a lot of doubt.

After he told us that he spent several lectures talking about what “applying theology to our emotions.” Basically what he was talking about was how to re-focus our emotions and overcome worry by using Biblical principles. He didn’t give a magic “self-help” formula or anything like that. He just took a Bible passage and broke it down into four steps that a person can use to change the way that they view their problems and to live with the “peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension” (Php. 4:7).

In the next five blog posts I am going to give each of the four steps that he gave. They’re not very long, but they can change a person’s life. I know, because they changed mine. It will be five posts because in one of them (the next one) I am going to lay a little more foundation for the four steps.

I have already written the blogs and set them to post over the next five days, so just check back daily either here at https://joshspiers.wordpress.com or on my Facebook notes if that’s where you’re reading this.

It is my prayer that the principles that Dr. Habermas gave will change your life and the way that you view your worries, doubts, and fears in the same way that they changed me.