Christians and Anxiety — What the Older Voices Said (and Still Say)
⏱ 12 min read
You have been told the verse for about forty years now. Do not be anxious about anything. You have been told it from pulpits, on coffee mugs, on the bookmarks the women in the bible study group hand out, in the inside front cover of every devotional you have ever opened. You have been told it kindly, and you have been told it sternly, and you have been told it as a verse to throw at the anxiety until the anxiety leaves, the way you’d throw water at a small fire.
The anxiety has not left. You have been throwing the verse at it for years. The anxiety, in fact, has often gotten worse on the weeks you tried hardest to obey the verse, because the failure to feel un-anxious added a layer of spiritual failure on top of the anxiety that was there already. You started, somewhere in the third or fourth or tenth year of this, to wonder quietly whether the verse meant what the loud voices said it meant — or whether the Christians of older centuries, who lived more honest interior lives than the Instagram theology has time for, would have read it differently.
This is a slow read with one of them. Andrew Murray, a Dutch Reformed pastor who wrote in the long evening of the nineteenth century, gave us a small book called Abide in Christ that has, in plain Edwardian English, the answer the throwing-verses-at-anxiety culture cannot find. The 140-day companion to the practice this article walks — the Devotionals on Anxiety — is built on the same reading of the older voices, made into a daily page so the practice has a home and a shape and a chair to sit down in. We are going to slow down with Murray now, and then with the verse you have been told to throw.
What the loud voices have done with the verse
Do not be anxious about anything. The way the verse has been used — for decades, in the cheerful Christian publishing — is as a command performed by willpower. The anxious woman reads it, decides to obey it, attempts to not be anxious, fails, and concludes the failure was hers. That reading is everywhere. It is also wrong.
The verse, in its own context, is a clause inside a longer sentence. Do not be anxious about anything, 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 understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus. The verse is not a command followed by silence. It is the first half of a substitution. You do not stop being anxious by willing yourself to stop. You stop by bringing the anxiety somewhere. The verse is a relocation, not a deletion.
The older voices knew this. Andrew Murray knew this. The reason the verse has not been working for you is that the popular Christian culture stripped the second half off, kept the command, and told you to obey it alone. You have been trying to perform a substitution with one of the two pieces missing. (For the daytime companion read on the same observation — the verse as a chair, not a hammer — prayer for anxiety and overthinking is the slow walk through what the bringing actually looks like.)
Murray’s first answer — the abiding, not the achieving
Open Abide in Christ at almost any page and you find the same posture. Listen to him here:
“Let this truth, accepted under the teaching of the Spirit in faith, remove every vestige of fear, as if abiding in Christ were a burden and a work. In the light of His life in the Father, let it henceforth be to you a blessed rest in the union with Him, an overflowing fountain of joy and strength. To abide in His love, His mighty, saving, keeping, satisfying love, even as He abode in the Father’s love — surely the very greatness of our calling teaches us that it never can be a work we have to perform; it must be with us as with Him, the result of the spontaneous outflowing of a life from within, and the mighty inworking of the love from above.” — Andrew Murray, Abide in Christ
Read that sentence twice. It never can be a work we have to perform. That clause is the single most important thing the modern anxious Christian has not been told.
The whole architecture of the popular do not be anxious culture has been the architecture of perform. Perform the calm. Perform the trust. Perform the surrender. Murray cuts straight through it. It never can be a work we have to perform. The abiding is not something you generate by effort. It is something you receive by remaining. The verb is rest, not achieve. The posture is bow, not brace. The whole anxiety project the contemporary Christian woman has been handed — try harder to trust — is the very project Murray, in 1882, was warning the church to stop running.
What Murray does ask is small and almost embarrassingly slow. Take time and study the divine image of this life of love set before us in Christ. We need to have our souls still unto God, gazing upon that life of Christ in the Father until the light from heaven falls on it, and we hear the living voice of our Beloved whispering gently to us personally the teaching He gave to the disciples.
Take time. Be still. Gaze. Hear. No hammers. No striving. The anxiety is not addressed by being commanded to leave. The anxiety is addressed by the soul being placed, slowly, somewhere it can be received. The verse you have been throwing at the anxiety is the relocation verse. Murray is the older voice telling you what the relocation actually looks like in real time. Sit. Be still. Let the light from heaven fall on the image of Christ in the Father. The anxiety may still be in the room. The abiding can be happening anyway.
A pause, here. The chest. Where you are carrying the anxiety this evening — the small upper chest tightness, the breath that has not gone fully down for hours — let that be there. Let one slow inhale come down past it. Let one slow exhale go out. You are not asked to remove the tightness. You are asked to abide while it is there. Murray would have said the same.
Murray’s second answer — the still soul before the still small voice
There is a second passage in Murray that the anxious Christian needs and almost never hears. It is from Waiting on God, his small companion volume, written in the same decade. He writes about Elijah on the mountain — the wind, the earthquake, the fire, and the still small voice — and he turns the story sideways and asks what kind of soul can actually hear the still small voice when it comes:
“If we are to have our whole heart turned towards God, we must have it turned away from the creature, from all that occupies and interests, whether of joy or sorrow. God is a being of such infinite greatness and glory, and our nature has become so estranged from Him, that it needs our whole heart and desires set upon Him, even in some little measure to know and receive Him. Everything that is not God, that excites our fears, or stirs our efforts, or awakens our hopes, or makes us glad, hinders us in our perfect waiting on Him. The message is one of deep meaning: ‘Take heed and be quiet;’ ‘In quietness shall be your strength;’ ‘It is good that a man should quietly wait.’” — Andrew Murray, Waiting on God
Read the middle sentence again. Everything that is not God, that excites our fears, or stirs our efforts, or awakens our hopes, or makes us glad, hinders us in our perfect waiting on Him.
Murray puts the fears and the efforts and the hopes and the glad-makings into one category — the things that are not God, that pull the soul off the still centre. The anxious Christian usually thinks the anxiety is the problem and the efforts to fix it are the solution. Murray reads both as the same problem. The fear pulls the soul off the centre. The effort to stop fearing also pulls the soul off the centre. Both move the soul into the surface noise. Both are the wind and the earthquake. Neither is the still small voice.
The practice Murray is naming is one most anxious Christians have never been offered. Take heed and be quiet. The quieting is not the result of having defeated the anxiety. The quieting is the thing itself — the soul stilled, by an act of slow turning, while the anxiety and the efforts and the hopes and the glad-makings continue to move around outside it. The still soul is not a soul without a storm in the room. It is a soul that has, by Murray’s grammar, set itself at His feet.
This is the part the loud piety cannot hold. It wants the absence of anxiety to prove the presence of God. Murray, slow and old and patient, says the still soul does not require the storm to stop. The still soul requires the turning — the daily, deliberate, almost embarrassingly small act of setting yourself at His feet in spite of the noise. (The page-a-day version of this practice is the spine of the Devotionals on Anxiety. One short passage. One small structure. Built for the night the anxiety is loud and the soul is too tired to invent the structure for itself. Murray’s voice — and the other older voices — is in the seasoning of every page.)
The verse you have been throwing — re-read
Now read it back. Do not be anxious about anything, 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 understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.
Read it the way Murray would have read it — slowly, with the second half attached, without the willpower script.
Do not be anxious about anything is not a command to feel un-anxious. It is the first half of a relocation. The anxiety is not to be fought. It is to be carried somewhere. In everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. The carrying is the work. The bringing of the anxiety into the room with God — naming it, holding it up, leaving it there, sometimes for a long time — is the obedience the verse is actually asking for.
And then — and this is the part the loud piety strips off — the peace of God will guard. Not you will guard yourself. Not you will produce the peace by trying. He guards. The peace is His verb, not yours. The substitution is His, not yours. You bring the anxiety. He gives the peace. The two halves of the verse are the two halves of the practice. The Christian who has been trying for years to do the verse with only the first half has been trying to perform a relocation with no destination.
Murray’s Abide in Christ is, the whole book through, the destination. The place the anxiety is brought to. The room you stay in while He guards. The chair Murray keeps inviting the reader into, in language that — even in the Edwardian phrasing — has the soft, slow patience of a man who knew what the anxious soul actually needed and was unwilling to bully it.
A second pause. The jaw, now. The shoulders. Notice how often, in reading even a slow article, the body has tightened again under the surface. Let it lower by a small amount. Let the next breath be the next breath. The body does not learn the abiding in a single sitting; the body learns it by the repeated small permission to lower. Take heed, and be quiet.
What “what does the Bible say about anxiety” actually answers
It answers more than the loud voices have allowed. The Bible says God meets the anxious where they are. That is Hannah at the temple, weeping into her sleeve. That is David asking why are you cast down, O my soul. That is the disciples in the boat, the apostles in the storm, Jesus in the garden sweating drops of blood and asking if the cup can pass. The Bible does not pretend the anxiety away. The Bible has it all over the page.
What the Bible also says — and what Murray translates so patiently — is that the anxious soul is not asked to defeat the anxiety alone. The anxious soul is asked to abide. To bring. To wait. To be still. To set itself at His feet. To let the peace of God guard the heart and the mind, when the peace comes, in the time He gives it.
That is the older answer. It has not been on the coffee mug. It is not what the loud Christian publishing has wanted to sell you, because abiding does not look like winning and does not feel like victory and does not photograph well for the Instagram tile. It looks like a woman in a chair at the end of a long Tuesday, with a verse in her lap and a slow breath in her chest and the anxiety still humming faintly under everything, and her eyes closed, and her heart turned toward God anyway. That is the practice. That is the whole thing.
If the daily companion to this practice has been the missing piece — the page that already has a shape, the verse already chosen, the small structure for the still soul on a tired evening — the Devotionals on Anxiety is the 140-day form. Built around the older voices. Murray, Spurgeon, Fenelon, Brother Lawrence. Not as quotations to admire. As companions to abide with. (For the prompts-based version of the same practice — the journal prompts that hold the day’s anxieties as they arise — christian journal prompts for anxiety is the thirty-prompt walk. And for the holding-both-at-once version, an anxiety and faith journal — how to hold both at once is the companion that gives the anxiety and the faith a single page to live on, slowly. The page-a-day shape for the woman in the long stretch is a faith journal for the anxious Christian woman, built for the months when the anxiety has been loud for longer than anyone expected.)
For the wider sibling reading from a different older voice — Augustine, on the why underneath all of this — see why does God allow suffering — Augustine’s answer in City of God and why does God feel so distant — the restless heart of Augustine. Augustine, like Murray, refused the loud piety. He is good slow company.
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Closing
The older voices have been there the whole time. Murray was writing Abide in Christ in the same decade Spurgeon was writing Lectures to My Students. They wrote slowly, for an anxious people, in a language that did not yet have the word stress and did not need it. The relocation they describe is the same one the verse describes, and it is the one the loud piety stripped down to a command and a guilt trip. We are slowly getting it back.
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Devotionals on Anxiety. One page per evening. The older voices in plain English. The chair you sit in while the peace of God guards.
