Be Anxious for Nothing: Pray Through Everything

“Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God" (Philippians 4:6-7).

The simple application of this verse is this:

Being anxious for nothing by praying through everything.

Paul knows the anxious heart. In the believer, anxiety is a soulish symptom. It tells me that the weight of my trust has shifted. from God’s almightiness to my fleshly strength. From holy grounding, to unholy spiraling. When anxiety rises in my life, something has shifted from God’s power to mine. My soul now carries what it was never built to.

Anxiety is the mind rehearsing a future without God. Prayer becomes my soul’s conscious returning to the future’s Keeper. My flesh imagines outcomes. My spirit entrusts them to God.

Notice Paul’s totality. In every thing. There is no category too small, or ordinary, no fear too repetitive. The anxious heart often disqualifies itself to both faith and prayer by worry. I worry before prayer. I think I hear God saying, This is too petty. This again?! And I tell myself, I should be over this by now. But the Spirit through the pen of Paul says something quite different: If it troubles you, it belongs to Me. If it presses on your mind, it is already in My hand.

“Prayer, supplication, thanksgiving.” These three:

Prayer is the act of turning my cares Christ-ward.

Supplication is giving my need a voice.

Thanksgiving is the anchor that keeps prayer from shipwrecking against the rocks of despair.

All three tell my soul that the God who hears has already acted, already provided, already been faithful. It steadies my soul by firmly rooting my need into the soil of the character and promises of Christ.

For me, anxiety tends to be circular. It goes over the same ground again and again, never arriving. Prayer interrupts the cycle. Taking my cares to Christ is a linear line of direction. It moves outward from my soul, then upward to the Throne of Grace, away from the closed loop of my own mind. It interrupts anxiety’s endless rehearsal with a real audience, a living God, a listening Father.

What if I didn’t bring God to my anxiety, and stay where I am, in the swirl, in the tightening chest, my mind is spinning, inserting a thought about God into it. Almost like sprinkling holy water on a storm, and instead brought my anxieties to Christ my Mediator and Intercessor. There is One who stands between God and me, who has already opened the way by blood.

Now, if only I could take my own advice.

Being “careful or anxious for nothing” is an open hand in prayer. “Let your requests be made known unto God” is confessing my dependence. To speak my needs to God is to admit my weakness, confessing my creatureliness. I must not excuse my anxiety doing so. True prayer exposes my unbelief mixed with fear, or my fear mixed with unbelief. Gentle unbelief, perhaps, but unbelief nonetheless. Think of the father in Mark 9. “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”

And then there is the beautiful promise that follows, “And the peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Christ Jesus.” Instead of removing the question marks, peace turns them all into is the periods. It rests in loving Providences, both dark and light. Now peace stands watch over my concerns. Anxiety leaves the gates open. Prayer closes it, shutting my heart in with a merciful and sovereign God.

To be anxious for nothing is to fill my mouth with words to God. To pray through everything is to refuse to let a single fear seem too small, a single burden go unreleased. It is releasing what belongs to tomorrow, back into the Hands of Him who is the same yesterday, today, and forever.

The anxious man in me tries to see the whole path before I step. The peaceful man is asking for light, only upon the next step. The old man in me lives bent over the future. The praying man looks up to the Creator of heaven and earth, my Savior. And in looking, peace comes like a river.

Help LORD.