The sermon outline from our worship service on November 29, 2015, by Pastor Lourey Savick, titled Get the Anxiety Gone!

Sermon Outline 11 29 2015 PDF

Sunday, November 29, 2015

Get the Anxiety Gone!

How Anxiety Affects Us

• Anxiety is not neutral. “Who among you by worrying can add a single moment to your life?…Therefore, don’t worry and say, ‘What are we going to eat?’ or ‘What are we going to drink?’ or ‘What are we going to wear?'” Matthew 6:27, 31
• “Experiencing a loss of control led participants to desire more structure and to perceive illusory patterns. The need to be and feel in control is so strong that individuals will produce a pattern from noise to return the world to a predictable state.” p117
• “Today marketers recognize that goods have magical powers that have nothing to do with ‘needs,’ and they have become magicians who transform mundane and abundant things into exotic valuables.” p305

What Can We Do About It?

• Lament: Rail, Remember, Request (Psalm 26)
• Practice Gratitude: “If the opposite of scarcity is enough, then practicing gratitude is how we acknowledge that there’s enough and that we’re enough.” p124
• Participate in social decision-making – Self-Affirmation: “Contemplate and affirm… important values.” p116

Does Our Anxiety Matter To God?

• Less choice means less God’s image
• “Take care that your hearts aren’t dulled by drinking parties, drunkenness, and the anxieties of day-to-day life.” Luke 21:34
• “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You must have no other Gods before me. Do not make an idol for yourself–no form whatsoever–of anything in the sky above or on the earth below or in the waters under the earth. Do not bow down to them or worship them, because I, the Lord your God, am a passionate God…” Exodus 20:2-5a

Sources

Brene Brown, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead, Gotham Books (London:2012).

Jennifer A Whitson and Adam Galinsky, ‘Lacking Control Increases Illusory Pattern Perception,’ Science 2009, 322, 115-117.

Richard Wilk, ‘Bottled Water: The Pure Commodity in the Age of Branding,’ 2006, 6 (3), 303-325.