#Introduction

Despite being an unpopular opinion, the idea that anxiety is a sin is easily proved. Observe my premises and bask in the conclusion:

Premise One

It is a sin to do what God says not to do.

Premise Two

God says: “Do not be anxious about anything” in Philippians 4:6.

Conclusion

It is a sin to be anxious about anything.

#Really?

Yes, really. Allow me to stack the deck further against myself by acknowledging extremes of personal misfortune while standing upon my dig. Yes, even when the bone is sticking out or the finger dangling by a vein you ought not be anxious. Yes, even when the tyre pops, you barrel-roll seventeen times, and now you’re marooned hundreds of kilometres from phone reception on an abandoned desert road without a calculator (or anything else one typically needs in such situations—like food) you ought not be anxious. Yes, even when you are unjustly sitting on death row and the executioner is due to arrive tomorrow you ought not be anxious.

Why? Because the Bible says not to.

No one can serve two masters... For this reason I say to you, do not be worried about your life... Do not worry then, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear for clothing?’... So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will worry about itself.
Matthew 6:24-34

Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, 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

Do not fret; it leads only to evildoing.
For evildoers will be cut off,
But those who hope for Yahweh, they will inherit the land.
Psalm 37:8-9

It is perhaps due to the phrase, "Don't worry" becoming such a commonplace idiom in mundane english that statements such as we see in these passages do not strike us with more force as what they are: commandments. Anywhere else the Bible begins a statement so emphatically as "Do not..." our ears prick up and we take notice.

"Do not murder"? 'Ah, ah,' we nod in agreement.

"Do not commit adultery"? 'Why, of course not.'

But dare the scriptures venture further into "Do not be anxious"? Then, 'Huh?' we say, frowning at the impudence, 'Sure, thanks for the advice. But you don't know my life.'

The Bible, however, was written well before english idioms, and could scarcely care less whether you take offence at its commandments. It insists you do not worry, thus to do so is your duty, sir, or madam. Mine, too, in case this was not clear.

#Defining Terms

Despite my strident words, a claim such as 'anxiety is a sin' is susceptible of misinterpretation due to a wide array of miscategorised thoughts and emotions. It is not a sin, clearly, to feel the anguish of life's responsibilities, or even to have that weight become manifest externally. Observe our Lord of whom, remember, it was said that He had no sin, despite suffering all manner of temptations common to man:

And being in agony He was praying very fervently, and His sweat became like drops of blood, falling down upon the ground.
Luke 22:44

Further, remember these statements from Paul:

As sorrowful but always rejoicing.
2 Corinthians 6:10

There is the daily pressure on me of concern for all the churches.
2 Corinthians 11:28

[Timothy] will genuinely be concerned about your circumstances.
Philippians 2:20

It is necessary, then, to define two distinct ideas to which a multitude of diverse words often point:

1. Anxiety: any thought or emotion that seeks to wrestle with, control, or secure something presently beyond one’s rightful grasp.
   (Other words in this category include: worry, fretting, apprehension, doubting, despair.)
2. Stress: the physiological or emotional burden experienced by a finite creature bearing weight, responsibility, pain, danger, limitation, or sorrow.
   (Other words in this category include: concern, pressure, anguish, grief, sorrow, vigilance, caution, concentration.)

I must stress that when I say 'anxiety is sin' I do not include the second category in my denunciation for such would implicate the Lord. You are allowed to sweat. You are allowed to mourn. You may even ruminate on difficult things—inasmuch as those thoughts concern problems under your direct dominion. I will go further: sometimes these are not only necessary but good responses to the trials God takes you through.

However, chewing for thirty minutes over the best method to fix your bike is a different matter to replaying conversations in the shower—in which, no doubt, your every opponent finds himself a devastated ruin, simply cowering before the sharp edge of your biting eloquence. The bike-related thoughts, see, are just the way human beings act before fixing a bike—they are necessitated by finitude, and they involve a subject immediately under one's control. You can do something about the bike. Worries, however, by definition exist in the realms outside your jurisdiction of command. You cannot do anything about it—that's why you're worried.

#Miscategorised Thoughts

The difficulty is often found in distinguishing in your own conscience between stress and anxiety. Self-deception in this department is a menace.

He who trusts in his own heart is a fool.
Proverbs 28:26

Consider how often you observe an avid complainer conclude his frequent expostulations with the words, "I'm not worried, just concerned," or, "I'm just trying to be cautious." How much more do we all do this in the privacy of our hearts when it is only our conscience we have to deceive?

• The father who sits at his own dinner table with a sullen frown is not concentrating; he is fretting about his work.
• The teenager who lies awake for an hour wondering if Bettie was offended at her shirt is not 'socially concerned'; she is anxious.
• The man who cannot laugh the day before his cancer diagnosis results is not being vigilant; he's worried.

Be careful, then, not to miscategorise your sin as mere weakness; nor, conversely, to miscategorise your finitude as morally stained. Repenting of that which is not sin is no virtue.

#Victimising the Anxious

The three examples of anxiety listed above are given in order of least to most offensive. We happily sit in judgement of the joyless father. We have more sympathy for the insecure teenager. But the potential cancer patient? Surely I would draw the line there. Why must I blame the victim?

And so we breach another common objection to the sinfulness of anxiety:

Premise One

We sin because we 'get something out of it.'

Premise Two

We don't seem to get anything out of anxiety.

Conclusion

We do not sin in being anxious because we don't like it.

This framing is a bid to cast the anxious one as a victim. Anxiety, it claims, is the villain that attacked you, poor old you, who is simply lying there receiving blows without power to change what is going on. And if this is truly the case, then we really do have no right to call for confession of sin. The man who has been mugged ought not to confess the knuckles of his assailant—”Lord, forgive me for their arthritic bulk!”

But if it were the case that anxiety presents an assailant-victim scenario utterly beyond your power to change, it would be entirely inappropriate for Scripture to command against it with such unyielding ‘do nots.’ And yet Scripture does.

I would also like to point out that if anxiety were truly beyond our control, many poor souls would find themselves in a vicious cycle of being anxious about being anxious about being anxious about being anxious. (After all, anxiety, to repeat, concerns that which is beyond one’s control.) But an infinite regression like this in your own mind, I fear, could not physically occur. A fuse would short, or something.

The anxious man, therefore, is not victimised by his anxiety. He does, in fact, get something out of entertaining worrisome thoughts: the illusion of control. And the fact that it makes him feel bad is the price he is willing to pay for that control. This objection is void.

#Why is it Sin?

Framing the issue in the way the most recent paragraph does removes some of the mystery behind the above question. Once the feigned ‘I can’t help it’ is unmasked for ’I won’t let go of control’, the problem elucidates itself as no more than idolatry of the self—a refusal to acknowledge that God is in the driver’s seat, not you.

In his sermon, The Sinfulness of Worry, Pastor Douglas Wilson put it this way:

You're not driving the car of your life. You don't have the steering wheel. You're in the back seat, and that's somebody's headrest… I hate to break it to you, but that headrest is not connected to any of the driving mechanism of the car.

Examine your own mind and acknowledge the truth of this metaphor. When an anxious thought next arises, look at it. Where does it wish to place you? Does it not seek to seat you in heaven, presiding authoritatively over every nook and cranny of your life, even those that God in his wisdom has placed beyond your grasp? Are you not reaching for forbidden fruit? Are you not aiming, however unconsciously, for a modicum of omnipotence?

You shall have no other gods before me
Exodus 20:3

Attempting to place yourself in the driver’s seat of your own life is one of man’s most basic errors. And if, through anxious thoughts, you attempt to mentally grasp something that is beyond your control, this is what you are doing. How could this not be sin?

#How to Deal With Anxiety

If you find yourself lying awake in bed, your mind whirring away at some insoluble problem, there is a simple process to follow:

1. Confess the anxiety as sin.
2. Ask yourself: is there something I can do about this problem right now?
3. If so, do it. Set the reminder, send the text, write the email. Actually do it.
4. If not, let go of the steering wheel. (And remember it’s a fake steering wheel, anyway. One of those colourful kids' ones that starts singing about traffic jams if you push the right button.)
5. Replace your thoughts with “whatever is true, whatever is dignified, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable” (Phil 4:8).

Why are you reluctant to relinquish your anxiety? As mentioned before, anxiety is the emotional equivalent of a backseat driver holding onto the driver’s headrest as though it were the steering wheel. You are reluctant to let go because “What if the car drives into a ditch?” All the while, you fail to realise that whether or not the car drives into a ditch, holding onto the headrest does nothing. By the same token, worrying about the problem does nothing to solve it. No matter how hard you tug at the headrest, the car’s going wherever the Driver decides.

So stop trying to turn yourself into God—a being who can solve real world problems by just thinking about them. (Usually at 11pm.) You can’t. Sorry.

#Why Not Include a LotR Illustration?

Deep in the Land of Shadow, suffering conditions more torturous than can be quantified, Samwise Gamgee found the ability to choose hope over fear, sleep over anxiety:

Far above the Ephel Dúath in the West the night-sky was still dim and pale. There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above the dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach. His song in the Tower had been defiance rather than hope; for then he was thinking of himself. Now, for a moment, his own fate, even his master’s, ceased to trouble him. He crawled back into the brambles and laid himself by Frodo’s side, and putting away all fear he cast himself into a deep untroubled sleep.
The Lord of the Rings, p. 922

It was in the act of releasing his troubles from his grasp, surrendering himself to whatever would come, and “putting away all fear” that Sam could fall asleep. It was a mental shift triggered by observing the eternal height of light, untouchable by the Shadow.

In the real world, however, the equivalent must be the parallel realisation of what the everlasting stars seem to point to: that God is in His heaven, the Lord is on His throne, and He works all things together for good for those who love Him. No shadow of anxious thought ought to draw shade over this reality. No depth of despair should even attempt to quench it. Every cloud of fear must disperse before the light and warmth of this joyful truth.

Is this not what the psalmist does in Psalm 131?

#Psalm 131

A Song of Ascents.
Of David
1. O Yahweh, my heart is not exalted, and my eyes are not raised high;
And I do not involve myself in great matters,
Or in matters too marvelous for me.
2. Surely I have soothed and quieted my soul,
Like a weaned child with his mother,
Like a weaned child is my soul within me.
3. O Israel, wait for Yahweh
From now until forever.

This Psalm depicts the posture of a man surrendered to the hand of God, deeply tethered to His sovereignty. He does not make anxious attempts to grasp at what he cannot reach (v1); rather, he soothes himself with waiting on the Lord, committing to this practice forever (v2-3).

It is worth considering why “waiting” is the antidote to the disquieted soul. Examine your own heart and note the truth of this. When you are anxious, the one verb perhaps most antithetical to your current emotions is “wait.” You want solutions now; you want to follow up with Dave, CEO now; you want to confirm with Bettie that your shirt was fine now; you want to know what will happen on Saturday now. But again, Jesus says:

Do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough troubles of its own.
Matthew 6:34

#Why Does it Matter?

Of all the sins I could spend many hundreds of words addressing, why do I focus on anxiety?

If this article concerned the sins of gossip, slander, or envy, it would take little imagination to deduce what would prompt my writing. Perhaps I was slandered. Perhaps I’ve seen too much envy in my community and the feel of it disgusts me. Motivated by these reactionary emotions, I would in a fever of eloquent retribution erupt my thoughts onto this page and ‘show them’.

But there seems no obvious reason to address the sin of anxiety. The anxiety of others does not stand on my doorstep, afflicting me at all hours of the day. My attention is drawn here not out of complaint but of zealousness for obedience to the Lord. Anxiety is an extremely private sin, yet it is potent. It is a direct violation of the First Commandment, as argued above.

Yet Christians—usually the ‘judge-not-so-you-won’t-be-judged’ sort—daily indulge worrisome thoughts, even affirming each other in their sin without a qualm, thereby actively disobeying their Lord who forbad such behaviour in the very verse prior to their favourite (see Matthew 6:34-7:1).

If we ought not be concerned with worry, why did Christ spend almost ten percent of the Sermon on the Mount discussing it?

Another reason for addressing anxiety is that it produces the sort of men described in Proverbs like these:

The sluggard says, “There is a lion outside;
I will be killed in the streets!”
Proverbs 22:13

Worrying about the possibility of street-inhabiting lions, to speak metaphorically, causes men to be weak, effeminate, neurotic, and inward-focused. Does that not sound exactly like the modern ‘man’?

It is the men deeply tethered to the sovereign God of Scripture who will lead the charge in battle. It is the men with backbones—those who do not lie awake for hours worrying about everything from their car to their job—who will rest in the Lord and wait patiently for Him. In fact, those who do not assume the throne of omnipotence in their thoughts, who “do not fret” (Psalm 37:1), are the “meek” who will inherit the land (Psalm 37:11).

#Conclusion

Anxiety, or worry, is the mind’s attempt at the throne of omnipotence, the soul’s refusal to wait, the heart’s intoxication on its own emotions. Not only is it blatantly disobedient to Scripture; it is also utter folly. It amounts to the futility of trying to direct a car by wrestling the headrest. It is the type of sin about which Proverbs might have said: “Like a child grasping for the kitchen sink stream, so is a fool in his thoughts.” (Proverbs hypothetical:imagined).

Obey Scripture. Confess your anxiety as sin. Reclaim the hour of 10-11pm!