Dial In with Jonny Ardavanis - Supernatural Peace In The Age of Anxiety

Episode Date: August 13, 2024

In this new Dial In Ministries episode and series, Jonny Ardavanis and Hank Bowen discuss the reality that we live in an era that is often defined as “the age of anxiety.” So often our lives are a chronicle of pain, trouble, fear, and uncertainty - in that light, how does God respond to those like us in His word?In this episode, Jonny details his main burden to write his forthcoming book, “Consider The Lilies: Finding Perfect Peace In The Character of God” (Zondervan) and begins to explain the main ways God responds to the anxious in the Bible.If you are anxious, fearful, and despairing, this series is for you. Similarly, if you minister to those afflicted by anxiety and badgered by melancholy, our prayer is that this series would equip you to minister to those assigned to your care. You can pre-order Jonny’s book wherever books are sold! Releases October 8, 2024!Watch VideosVisit the Website Pre-order Consider the LiliesFollow on Instagram

A lot of people that are anxious, they want to look inward to evaluate why they are so anxious. But the Bible says to look upward. You know, modern psychology says to contemplate your inner child. But the scripture's remedy and prescription for those who are anxious is to consider the character of your heavenly father. And we're back. How was Michigan? You look somewhat tan.

I look very tan. Take it back. I look very tan, Johnny. It's the lighting. No, this is actually true. So first Sunday back, I walk in and a dear friend looks directly at me, looks down, looks back up and goes, I thought you'd be tanner. Nice. I thought six weeks away in Michigan on a sabbatical. And you said, depart from me. I never knew you. And that's all I get. I mean, I thought you'd be Tanner. Nice. I thought six weeks away in Michigan on a sabbatical.

And you said, depart from me. I never knew you. And that's all I get. I mean, I was stunned. But no, Michigan was fantastic. Spend some quality time with family. I'm of the mind there's only two groups of people out in the world. There are people who are in Michigan for the summertime, and there's everyone else's who wishes they were in Michigan. And for if you know, you know, but for those that don't know, I'm sorry that you don't know. But anyway, it's good to be back. It's good to be back in the chair. I'm glad you're here in the chair.

Absolutely. And how was your summer, Johnny? The summer's been, I would say it's good. The humidity was overemphasized. It's not as bad as everyone made it sound in Tennessee. I was about to say the exact opposite. No, it's not as bad. I think part of it is just my commitment.

It's tougher than most people. Yeah, it's my commitment to not be a whiner. My dad used to tell me everything is attitude, John. So I was never allowed to whine and it's just kind of persisted to this day. That's Reverend Scott Artavanis coming at you live. Yeah. Reverend Scott. No, but we're starting a new series here. I think it would be great if we could camp out. You've got a little bit of an exciting announcement in your life and you've got a book coming out in October. October 8th. And so it's called, Johnny, you're going to help me with the title, Consider the Lilies. Finding Perfect Peace in the Character of God. That's called the subtitle. Yeah. Okay. The book is called Consider the Lilies. I'll tighten it up. But that being said, so it's a book largely addressed towards Christians walking through

a period of anxiety or depression and you kind of marry the two together, and we can talk about that in a minute. But I thought it might be good just to tee up the conversation from the starting place, kind of why anxiety, or what prompted you, or kind of fill us in on the background to writing the book. Yeah, and I would say it's, I think even from what it's about, I think it is about anxiety and depression, but it's largely, and we'll talk about this in future episodes, about how God responds to the anxious or despairing within his word, and it's with the revelation of his character. I see, I cued you off there. Yeah, and we'll talk more about that in the upcoming episodes. But I think the initial heart behind it is, so when I graduated college, I was working in the business world for a few

years, and then I had an opportunity to go work and run a student camping ministry or be a part of that as a camp director at Hume Lake in my mid-20s. And I was there for about five years. And I loved it. I was excited about the possibility of being able to work with high school students. And I did about, I think, 22 to 26 weeks of camp, both domestically and internationally throughout the week, and then would travel throughout the year speaking elsewhere. And probably throughout those years, I was at Hume, was interacting with, I don't know, some 30 to 50,000 high school students a year, and then the counselors and the pastors that represented them within their own local churches. And even though there's this buzz of euphoria, you know, when you get off the bus at camp,

there's the, you know, the scrambling to offload the luggage and the people getting into the rec teams and the, who am I going to date at camp? I became quickly accustomed with terms that were foreign, largely foreign to me, like panic attacks and self-harm and anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts. And it was alarming to me because a lot of these students were beaming with joy from all appearances, and yet behind the posturing of their smiles, there was some really deep issues regarding their anxiety and their depression.

Really just even largely speaking, you know, one third of teenagers are clinically diagnosed with some sort of anxiety disorder. One fourth of young adults in the last several years have had the thought, should I take my life? But I even wanna begin to correct the perception at the beginning of the episode that anxiety is not just something

young people are struggling with. And we'll talk about this more, but I went from a high school camp to a Christian university, and now I'm a pastor of a church. And whether someone is 16 or 63, this is a prevalent problem that really is persisting even amongst the people of God today. In fact, the most likely demographic of individual to take antidepressants is a 60-year-old white woman. They're actually twice as likely to consume antidepressants as a 60-year-old white woman. They're actually twice as likely to consume antidepressants as someone that is 19 to 39. And so as much as we say, oh, the anxious

generation that's growing up behind us, boomers are just as anxious and fearful about the future. What does this hold for my 401k as a young teenager? And I would talk to students and I would ask them, hey, what makes you anxious? And the answers would really have a diversity of responses. One of which would be, you know, if I fail AP US history, I'll never get into Stanford. And then you'd have another conversation with another girl who would say, I've, I'm 16 and I've had three abortions. Will God ever forgive me? And so there is a large demographic. And I think that began to just ultimately break my heart because you're looking for people

that are really starving for hope and they're gasping for peace and they're looking to vaping or their active sexuality beginning in high school to try to suppress some of the anxiety that they have and whatever it may be there's a number of different factors um it could have been academics it could have been athletics it could have been because of the factors of growing up in a rough foster care system or it could be because they don't want to disappoint their sunday school

teachers and the parents that have raised them up in the truth. And so there's a wide demographics. And so at camp, I began to host an optional seminar during free time that was called, What Does God Say About Anxiety? And it started with a few main points. And even though it was conflicting with paintball and paddleboarding and whatever else it may be. Flirting. Flirting, yeah, lots of that.

The students wanted to come hear just what the Bible said. And I think there was two main questions in the mind of a high school student that was coming, or a counselor or a pastor, because if they weren't struggling with it themselves, they were looking for answers to be able to minister to those who had been assigned to their care. The two questions being, one, does the Bible speak to this prevalent issue? And two, if it does so, does it do it in a way that doesn't merely leave me feeling condemned because of my anxiety, but gives me hope and peace and a word that's well known that is very seldomly displayed, that being joy. How can I have joy? And so it started with just a few points about

how Jesus responds, what he says are some of the root causes, and then how God responds to those who are anxious and despairing in his word and the different attributes that are featured in the Bible. And it began with just a few different, one, two, three different ways God responds. And then Katie, my wife, took a photo of me probably six or so years ago. And it was me just kind of my sermon outline that was all these different points about who God is and his character, that buoy anxious hearts with peace and joy and stability in a world of chaos. And after giving away kind of a Google Doc for a matter of years, I went, I'd love to turn this into a resource that I can give the students. And so obviously at that point, I transitioned from going to the master's university.

From Hume to master's. Yeah, I got it. And was thankful to do so. And you would think that maybe the problem would be very different in a scripturally staunch environment. Or at camp, there were students that they went to camp because it was their one week to get out of the house. Not all of them had grown up in the church. There was definitely unbelievers at camp.

It's a largely evangelistic ministry. It's one of your friends are going. Your friends are going and all dominate at recreation or whatever it may be. The Christian University at Masters was different because those are students that had signed up to go to Bible classes, Bible chapels, and to go to Bible preaching churches. And you would think that, oh, anxiety and depression would be more foreign amongst this rigorously biblical environment. And the reality is it's not because this is a problem that mankind faces. And I'll explain why as we continue. But

I began to kind of even think and pray through it and nothing official at that point, but just begin to kind of do different iterations of kind of some of the seminars that I had done at Hume, even as I would travel and preach at other churches and in other spaces and places. And then you fast forward today, and obviously, you know that I'm a pastor at Stone Bridge Bible Church in Franklin, Tennessee, minister to the 13-year-olds, but we have a very multi-generational church. And amongst the people of God, there is a vulnerability and temptation to be anxious. I mean, all you have to do is look at the news. I don't know on what day you are watching or listening to this episode, but all you have to do is open your phone and you're immediately hit with an onslaught of things that would cultivate

anxiety and despair. Is World War III looming? What about the economy? Even today, if you open up your phone, it's just red, red, red. The stock market's crashing. Is this the end? Will it ever recover? Those different things in regards to, in regards to is, are my children safe? Gas prices are soaring, you know, an enemy nation is test firing nuclear weapons. And then on top of that, my washing machine is broken, and I have a mole on my neck is a cancerous. There are certain times in our life where the anxieties that we're facing, Jerry Bridges used to say, are like a flash flood, meaning you're just getting pounded by things that would contribute to your anxiety. And at other times, it's like a slow leak that just drips, drips, drips.

And over time, it just exacerbates and it really begins to affect you because of the compounding little things that cultivate your anxiety. And so I think part of the different demographics that I've been privileged to minister in have contributed to the way that I begin to write this book. And I'm hoping that it's able to minister to both a 65-year-old and a 15-year-old because it's not so much my opinion, but it's just about how does God respond to the anxious? Absolutely. And back to, I mean, to your point, I think as I've been reading through it, it struck me as someone who hasn't necessarily struggled with anxiety as kind of a defining feature of my journey. I'm surrounded by dear friends, dear family members who do, and there's, I'm just underlining different portions where it literally feels like the words you wrote are speaking into specific situations in which we

face, but you open out the book. And you actually start. In hindsight, it seems fairly obvious now that I'm four and a half chapters in, but it surprised me when I opened the book is that you open up considering anxiety first by saying kind of today, psychologists would say to look inward. And yet in the rest of the book, we're going to be looking elsewhere, maybe tee up for a second. I mean, how you even thought about structuring the response? Yeah, you know, I think one of the realities that you see in the world today is, well,

I guess I would start by first of all saying that one of the realities that you see in the world today is, well, I guess I would start by first of all saying that one of the main contributing factors to how I wanted to go about this is for a long time when people were struggling with anxiety and they were looking for a trusted resource outside of the scripture, of course, that would help them in their anxiety. The first book that I would give to them was Knowing God by J.I. Packer, which is interesting because Knowing God by Packer is not a book on anxiety or depression at all. It's a book on the character of God. But J.I. Packer has a line within Knowing God that says something along the lines of, this world is a strange, mad, and confusing place and life in it troubling when you strip and starve

your own life of a deep knowledge of the character of God. He just began to extrapolate on that and saying, of course, if your life isn't rooted in the character of God in the way that he has revealed himself in his word, of course, you're going to be anxious. Of course, you don't have peace. You can say, oh, God's in control. But if you're not rooting your mind in the control that God is constantly wielding as the supreme king in the universe, of course, you're going to be anxious. And so I begin to kind of think, well, actually, if someone says they're anxious, it's only rational in the world in which we live. What's truly irrational is peace. And that's why Paul says it's peace that surpasses all understanding because it doesn't make sense.

It doesn't check out in the world in which we live. And so I wanted to really write a book on the character of God as the antidote to specifically anxiety. And so, yeah, you mentioned it, but yeah, a lot of people that are anxious, they want to look inward to evaluate why they are so anxious. But the Bible says to look upward. You know, modern psychology says to contemplate your inner child, but the scripture's remedy and prescription for those who are anxious

is to consider the character of your heavenly father. And that's the main theme of this book. And it's walking through the character of God and how those specific attributes in particular go to ground us with stability in a world of chaos, regardless of the circumstance. And so a lot of that, as we'll talk about in future episodes, have to do with the way we're grounding our mind in truth. One of the main verses that I begin with and the main verse with which I end is Isaiah 26, 3 and 4, which says,

you will keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you because he trusts in you. And so, yeah, it's not about looking inward. It's not about considering or contemplating our inner child. Maybe there's some things to unravel there but the fundamental prescription that jesus as the great physician gives is to know god deeply and then to meditate on who he is actively because that is the essence of faith it's fantastic maybe just let's tee up for a second where we're going in the coming weeks so real briefly first we're going to address you're going going to address who's coming to the book and kind of who's it for, for the most part. And then also, I think I'd be amiss if I didn't say, I think a lot of people tuning in are going to be biased towards probably one of two ditches on the side of the road. One is

maybe the overly like, just give me the tactics, pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Are you kind of monitoring what you're eating, what you're eating what you're thinking you know tick tick tick tick tick and then on the other side might be the overly kind of hyper spiritualized you know when in doubt pray it out but it strikes me with this book you've tried to i don't know if anyone's ever said that we should have put that one in the book yeah trademark it added zondervan yeah um but practically i think you do a good job of balancing between the two of, we're going to consider the characteristics of God. That's the plumb line through which we're going to make sense of the entire rest of the conversation. Thank you for saying plumb line.

When in doubt, pray it out. And yet you say very plainly, I mean, God's gifted us with biblical counselors. He's gifted us with physicians. And so it is a supremely practical, supremely practical guide for, I think, a lot of folks to at least begin their journey in walking through a resource if they're walking with someone who's struggling with anxiety. Yeah. You mentioned kind of a few things in regards to like specific tactics. You know, there are definitely different things that you could say to go like, hey, five steps to overcome your anxiety if you're, you know, you forced me to.

But here, yeah, but by and large, the Bible offers no compartmentalized victory over any type of sin, which I'll explain in the book that worry is sin. And I'll explain what that means and what the definition of worry even is and how it maybe differentiates or is similar to that of anxiety. And how that actually might be encouraging as opposed to... Yeah. And how that offers us freedom. Yeah, exactly. But Jesus isn't saying,

hey, here's five steps. And that's what one of the main things I repeat throughout the book is A.W. Tozer says, it takes a whole Bible to make a whole Christian because you're going to look at certain passages where Jesus is really tender towards the anxious. He's always tender because he knows that we're bruised reeds. But then he's also at times going to rebuke four times throughout the gospels, O ye of little faith is towards those, to his disciples in the moment of their anxiety and their fear. And that's the number one negative prohibition in all of scripture is do not fear. And so you're gonna see both sides in the book because I think Jesus articulates his response in both ways.

It's immensely tender and yet there's a sternness to his rebuke. And then there's the ample reasoning, not just snap out of it. What are you doing? Don't be anxious. It's the ample reasoning for why the Christian and only the Christian has all of the reasons in the world to have peace.

And that's why I called it finding perfect peace. And really, as we examine it, peace is not so much something that we find. It's actually something we receive as we gaze at the character of god it's not something that just falls into our laps it's something that comes to the person whose mind is stayed on god and really in the next episode i want to just talk about god's uniform response in both the old and new testament to different anxious creatures which would be men and women and then the following episodes after that, we want to look at the spiritual and physical root causes of anxiety. And Martin Lloyd-Jones says that you cannot separate the body from the spirit,

you know, because we are body, soul, and mind. We're Trinitarian creatures, not like God, but that we are body, soul, and spirit, and you can't demarcate those realities. And then after that, begin to look at further the remedy that God provides and really the depth of his character. So awesome. Well, I think I'm really excited. I'm anxious to dive in.

Yeah, no, but honestly, I'm really excited to dive in over the coming weeks and it's going to be, it's going to be a lot of fun. All right. Well, thank you, brother. Me too. Absolutely.