When Your Circumstances Make You Anxious: Part 2 — A ‘Time With God’ Audio Devotion

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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

Transcript

Good morning.

Well, I love these times in the morning because we open the Bible and see what God has to say to us and what we find is that God is so practical.

Sometimes you think, oh well, the Bible is just full of these airy fairy theological truths, and it doesn’t really have any bearing on life. But when we start reading the Bible every day, we just see how practical it is and how it really does impact on the everyday issues of life.

We’re talking all this week about what to do when your circumstances make you anxious.

We’re looking at a couple of verses out of Philippians chapter 4. Let me just read them again. 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.

Well, we looked yesterday at the idea that we need to bring God into these circumstances that are making us anxious. We’re anxious because we’re thinking about the situation as if God was not involved.

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But when you get God involved everything changes. I want to go on in the verse and see what it says next.

It says, do not be anxious about everything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. In every situation, the ones that make you anxious and the ones that don’t. By prayer and petition, make your requests to God.

Well, prayer affects your whole outlook on life.

It’s true. I love starting my day every day with prayer to God, you know. I’m not a morning person. I wake up very sleepy. It takes me a while to wake up. My mind is incoherent at first. I stumble into the shower. That has to be my first thing because that’s what wakes me up. And as the water hits me and I start waking up, I just start talking to God.

I always start off with good morning, Lord. It just puts in my mind that God’s with me. I’m in a conversation. I’m not just praying and then going on with life. I’m in an all-day conversation with God, and I just start talking to Him about the things that come to my mind. Well, when you start your day like that every day in every situation, it means that when you look at the circumstances of your life, you don’t look at them as if God were not going to be involved.

Everything in life comes at you then with the perspective of how it fits into what God is doing in your life and why God would allow this in my life and what He wants to show me about Himself and how He wants to be active in these circumstances of my life.

Let your requests be made known to God.

God doesn’t always say yes to everything we ask Him, does He? But He wants us to make our requests. He wants us in every circumstance of life, in every situation, the verse says, by prayer and petition to let our requests be made known to Him. Prayer affects your outlook on life, but it also affects the outcomes of life.

Because as you talk to God, God responds to your prayers.

And this is something I learned as a young man. I used to pray with my friends and we’d get together sometimes and have a prayer time or something and we’d pray about a bunch of things.

And I was committed to prayer, but I had never really noticed that prayer was affecting outcomes in my life at all.

And I heard someone suggest, why don’t you start a prayer notebook and just list all your prayers and tick a box on the right hand side when God answers that prayer.

So I started keeping a prayer notebook. I ended up with pages of just things I’d asked God about and things I’d prayed about. Never noticed that God was actually doing anything in response to those, but I was still enjoying my prayer times with God. And one day I went back and looked, and page after page I ticked off the prayers that God had answered.

Prayer affects your outlook on life because you see God is involved, and prayer affects the outcomes of life because God responds to our prayers.

Respond to anxiety by praying about everything.

I’m John North.

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