Tag: Anxiety

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Anxiety, Pride, & Redemption: The Story of Hagar, Sarah, and Abraham

According to the Christian faith, the fundamental human problem is not lack of money, better government, or more education. It is that our relationship with God is broken. Out of that brokenness—what the Bible calls sin—flow addictions, injustices, and abuses of every sort.

Sin is not just doing bad things. It is living out of sync with what we ought to be and do before God. It deserves condemnation, but it also calls forth sympathy, because sin is tangled up with something all of us know well: anxiety.

American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr suggested that sin is rooted in anxiety. We can see the dangers and pressures of this world, but we can’t control them. That anxiety is not sin in itself, but it becomes the occasion for sin. Under pressure, we either trust the Lord or try to take control. That second response is pride.

Genesis 16 shows this pattern clearly in the story of Sarah, Abraham, and Hagar.

Anxiety: When Waiting Hurts
Sarah’s story begins with a simple but painful statement: “She had borne him no children.” In her world, a woman’s honor and identity were tightly connected to childbearing. On top of that, Abraham carried a promise from God that he would have descendants, but years had passed and nothing had happened. No children. No clarity about Sarah’s role. No visible progress.

That is a perfect breeding ground for anxiety.

When we feel out of control, we want to do something—anything—to relieve the tension. Sarah did what was common in her culture: she offered her servant Hagar to Abraham so that she might “obtain children by her” (Gen. 16:2). It was a logical, socially approved solution.

But it was also a violation of God’s design for marriage: one man, one woman, one flesh. It was a common-sense solution that was completely wrong. Continue reading “Anxiety, Pride, & Redemption: The Story of Hagar, Sarah, and Abraham”

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Cicero: Clear Your Head So You Can Serve the Community

We do not exist for ourselves. We are made to serve the community. This service is not always easy, and it is not always appreciated. Yet we must be willing to bear hardships and toil for the sake of others. As Cicero put it, “justice is the single virtue which is mistress and queen of all virtues” (On Obligations, 93). He lays out this vision in his book On Obligations or On Duties.

The key to understanding our obligations is realizing that we are not isolated individuals. We are created for community and for service:

I have often made the point earlier, but it must be repeated again and again: there is a bond of fellowship which in its widest sense exists between all members of the entire human race, an inner link between those of the same nation, and a still closer connection between those of the same state (107).

We are made for one another. Our destiny is not private. It is to use our resources in service of those around us. As Cicero says, the interest of the individual is bound up with the interest of the community. Continue reading “Cicero: Clear Your Head So You Can Serve the Community”

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Loving God the Most: Making God Our Emotional Refuge

“Trust in him at all times, you people; pour out your hearts to him, for God is our refuge.” – Psalm 62:8

Where do you go with your strong emotions? A lof of times, they just run around in our head. They keep us from important duties, people, and fun. They cause problems with our health, our relationships, and our work.

Emotions need an outlet. We often seek an outlet in other people: withdrawing from them, attacking them, or complaining to them. We often seek outlets in busy-ness, trying to getour mind off of these things or solve them. We sometimes seek an outlet in trying to escape our issues, like endless hours of Netflix or alcohol. We often seek outlets in stres-reducers such as eating, exercise, sleep, planning, and so on.

Sometimes these things help. Sometimes they do not. Sometimes things gets worse. Sometimes our attempt to deal with our emotions hurts the people around us.

The Right Refuge for Our Emtions
The Psalms in the Bible give us a different picture of how to deal with our emotions. What the Psalms teach us is that emotions are not intended to remain on the horizontal plane. They are meant to go vertical. We are meant to resolve them in God.

The Psalms have a word for this. God is our refuge. God is an emotional refuge: “pour out your hearts to him, for God is our refuge” (Psalm 62:8). Continue reading “Loving God the Most: Making God Our Emotional Refuge”

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Anxiety, Pride, and Relationships, Part 2: Pride as Response to Anxiety

[Note: this is a four part series based on the story of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar, looking at the way sin affects our relationships in the family and how the presence of God can bring redemption to them. You can read the first part, looking at anxiety here]

Life is full of problems that we can’t solve. We can’t solve what people will do or how they might treat us. We can’t ensure that people will think well of us. We can’t ensure that we will have enough. We can’t ensure that we will know everything or see everything we need to. We can’t ensure that we will be able to get done all things we need to get done.

All these issues become a basis for anxiety. I call anxiety an awareness of the gap between our ability to see problems and our inability to do anything about them.

What do we do when we have this awareness? We can exalt ourselves thinking we can get a handle on all these problems; or we can accept our limits, work where we can, and trust God with the rest.

In the last article, we considered how anxiety becomes the occasion for sin. In this article, I want to consider the shape and form of sin, which is pride. Our pride is where we take that which is good and significant about us and make it much bigger than it is. The result of this is the common dissolutions, destructions, addictions, and injustices of life. There is really no limit to pride or the temtpation to pride. No matter how much we solve, there are still new problems. Greater heights; greater falls.

In the story of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar, we have three anxious people who also believe that they can solve their own problems. They take good things about themselves and make them much bigger than they are. This is the tragedy of the story and the sin of the story. Let’s look at Hagar, Sarah, and Abraham in turn to see how pride is a response to anxiety.

Hagar’s Pride
The pride of Hagar is rather obvious. “And [Abraham] went in to Hagar, and she conceived. And when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress” (Gen. 16:4). Hagar conceived the first child of Master Abraham, and she let it go to her head. She does what we often do when we have success. She looked down on others.

Let’s look at her pride a little more closely. When I was in Louisiana at the Evergreen Plantation, the tour guide gave us an explanation of how those eating dinner would keep cool. A slave boy would wave a giant fan during the supper. I thought that would be strange to have someone standing right next to you like that, but then I realized something. They would not see the slave. He would just be part of the scenery. He would be virtually invisible. That’s how slaves are: unseen. They are just part of the machinery of the household. Continue reading “Anxiety, Pride, and Relationships, Part 2: Pride as Response to Anxiety”

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Anxiety, Pride, Relationships, and Redemption: A Tale of Sarah, Abraham, and Hagar

According to the Christian faith, the fundamental human problem is not lack of material resources, unjust government, or lack of education. It is the disruption of the relationship between God and human beings. Out of this disruption, flow all of the addictions, injustices, and abuses of human life.

The Bible gives this fundamental problem a name. It calls it sin. Sin is the conditions and actions of being out of accord with what we ought to be and what we ought to do. It is first and foremost about a wrong relationship with God, but it disrupts human relationships as well.

Sin is worthy of condemnation, but when we look at it more closely, we often feel sympathy for those in sin. Why is this? Because sin is complex, not simple.

An insight I received from the study of American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was that sin is rooted in anxiety. He said, anxiety arises out of our ability to see the world and its threats to our well-being combined with our inability to do much about them. This is not sin in itself, but it becomes the occasion for sin.

A quick perusal of the sins of the Bible will show you that this is the case. Sin arises out of people’s anxious response to threats. Cain has anxiety about his standing with God, and so he kills Abel. Joseph’s brothers have anxiety over their relationship with their father, and so they sell their favored brother into slavery. Pharaoh has anxiety over the growth of the children of Israel and so enslaves them. The people of Israel have anxiety over Pharaoh, provision, and status and so complain against the Lord. And on and on it goes.

There are two responses to the threats of this world. We can trust the Lord, or we can try to come up with our own solution. This latter response is pride. This pride that we can solve our own problems and are bigger than we are leads to disruption and dissolution.

In this series, I am going to look at one example of this. We will see how sin grows out of anxiety. The prideful response to anxiety leads to choices and actions that disrupt the family. But the good news is that God does not leave Sarah, Abraham, or Hagar in sin. He makes Himself known, and this brings a healing element into the relationship.

Sarah’s Anxiety
“She had borne him no children.” Some people do not want children, but for those who do, how painful it is to go through this experience! Continue reading “Anxiety, Pride, Relationships, and Redemption: A Tale of Sarah, Abraham, and Hagar”

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