Learning to Trust
The Bible speaks to every human experience and emotion. When it speaks to anxiety, we need to understand that in our modern experience, there is anxiety that is a clinical diagnosis that requires medical and professional care. And then there is anxiety that everyone feels when we are confronted with our limits – i.e., generalized anxiety.
As a pastor, please let me offer this note of grace: Clinically diagnosed anxiety is not a spiritual failure. It’s often a complex mix of biology, environment, and experience. Christians struggling with clinical anxiety should be encouraged to seek professional help without shame while also receiving compassionate pastoral care and ongoing spiritual encouragement.
So, when the Bible speaks to anxiety, it is speaking to a condition familiar to every heart—whether it’s a quiet undercurrent or a strong sense of fear and uncertainty. In our hurried, performance-driven culture, many feel paralyzed by what might happen, what has gone wrong, or what remains out of their control. In the pastoral wisdom of Tim Keller, we are reminded that anxiety, while real and often deeply painful, can be a spiritual invitation—to reorder our hearts, renew our trust, and rest in God’s care.
Keller often pointed out that generalized anxiety reveals our disordered loves. We were made to love God supremely and center our lives on Him. But when good things—like work, family, approval, or security—become ultimate things, we set ourselves up for fear. These earthly loves are fragile and finite. “If you center your identity on your career, and you fail, it will crush you,” Keller warned. “If you center it on your children, and they disappoint you, you’ll be wracked with anxiety.” The solution, then, is not to suppress our anxiety but to trace it back to the altar of our hearts—and replace our fears with faith in the One who never fails.
Jesus’ words in Matthew 6 were a cornerstone in Keller’s teaching on anxiety. Christ says, “Do not worry,” but He does not stop there. He points to birds fed by the Father and lilies clothed in beauty—and assures us we are of more value than they. Keller emphasized that these illustrations are not sentimental; they are theological. Jesus is calling us to remember that God is both powerful and personal. “Faith in God’s fatherly care,” Keller said, “is the ultimate antidote to anxiety.”
But how do we move from anxiety to peace? Keller consistently returned to prayer as the bridge. In Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God, he reflects on Philippians 4, where Paul urges us not to be anxious but to present our requests to God. Keller writes, “God’s peace is not the absence of negative thoughts. It is the presence of God himself.” True peace comes not from having control over circumstances but from knowing the One who already does. In prayer, we do not simply unload our worries—we trade them for a deeper awareness of His presence.
Keller also reminded us that much of our anxiety comes from forgetting our eternal hope. In Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering, he offers this: “Because of the resurrection, we know this is not the end. That destroys anxiety at the root.” When we remember that our lives are hidden with Christ and our future is secure, even the unknown becomes bearable. This is why when we talk about faith, we routinely say that faith is not blind. Faith is, instead, a forward-looking trust that is rooted in God’s faithful provision in the past. God does not call us to live on this side of heaven in some totally unbothered and completely un-anxious way. Instead, he says that our worry and generalized anxiety do not have to dominate us or lead us into sin. And that is a gift of grace that we will all experience as we grow in learning to trust our Father in heaven, who loves us.