Finding Peace in an Anxious Age: How Faith Transforms Fear into Rest
- Jack Selcher
- Feb 12, 2025
- 5 min read
Updated: 7 hours ago
Summary
This article explores the growing anxiety crisis and explains how fear harms both body and soul when left unchecked. While some anxiety can motivate, chronic anxiety flows from believing lies about God’s care and our strength. Scripture offers a better path, trust, prayer, loving community, and obedience. As believers rely on God’s love and truth, anxiety is transformed into peace, confidence, and spiritual rest.
Anxiety in the United States Is Increasing
Anxious people are characterized by extreme mental uneasiness or brooding fear about some contingency.1
If you are anxious, you are not alone—the U.S. is experiencing an anxiety crisis. Anxiety is highest among adults ages 18–29 and decreases with age, and is higher among women than men.2 It is also higher among those with low income and less education. In 2024, 43% of adults say they feel more anxious than in the previous year, up from 37% in 2023 and 32% in 2022.3 Anxiety is most serious for U.S. youth younger than 18.
Based on the percentage of 9th-12th graders reporting hopelessness or sadness lasting every day for 2 or more consecutive weeks that prevented them from doing some of their usual activities, U.S. youth are more anxious than 99 percent of youth in other middle- and high-income countries.
For all ages, the U.S. is in the bottom 11 percent in depression and anxiety, worst of all in fatal overdoses, and in the bottom 16 percent in suicides among these countries.4
Some Anxiety Adds Spice to Life
Some anxiety can be beneficial. It’s like adding salt to food. Too little of it and life can be boring and tasteless. In school, I would have studied less and scored lower on tests without the helpful anxiety of failing that motivated me to prepare for them.
Chronic Anxiety Negatively Affects Our Health
Too much anxiety threatens our health. An overdose of anxiety negatively affects our physical well-being. Our back, stomach, and head hurt, and ulcers join our team uninvited. A skin rash erupts. We feel a sense of doom, and our hearts pound. We become irritable.
As a teenager, I made a phone call for a school project to a person I didn’t know, and ended the evening with a bright red rash on my neck. I would have chosen a cold shower instead of the call, but that wasn’t an option.
Anxiety interferes with our sleep, increases our tiredness and trips to the bathroom, and steals our appetite.
We might not notice our blood pressure and muscle tension increasing or chemical changes in our blood occurring. If anxiety persists, our health invariably suffers sooner or later, although no virus or bacteria are involved.
Anxiety clouds thought processes, diminishes memory, hampers productivity, and hurts our ability to relate to others.
Believing Lies Causes Anxiety
Anxiety is often a symptom that we believe the devil’s lies. God’s will for us is peace. Identifying why we are anxious is important. For example, if we fear unforeseen changes will send life spiraling out of control, we don’t believe a loving, trustworthy God is sovereignly in charge of all that happens to us.
We don’t believe we can do whatever God asks of us through Christ, who strengthens us moment by moment (Philippians 4:13). Instead, we believe the lie that we are too weak and scared to do what God requires.
The key that unlocks the prison door of our self-imposed prison is to obey God when we are afraid. Replacing negative with positive thinking bathes our minds with I can instead of I can’t.
The Bible Helps Us Deal with Anxiety
Let’s consider the Bible on anxiety. We will explore how a healthy relationship with God and others reduces anxiety.
Finding Peace in an Anxious Age
How do we find peace in an anxious age? Trusting in God’s faithful care of His own greatly reduces anxiety. “It is useless for you to work so hard from early morning until late at night, anxiously working for food to eat; for God gives rest to his loved ones” (Psalm 127:2 NLT).
That verse doesn’t excuse us from working. It tells us not to worry while we work. Whistling is better!
Anxiety weighs us down like a discharged soldier needlessly carrying 80 pounds in a backpack daily after leaving the Army. God never meant us to bear such emotional loads.
The Apostle Peter wrote, “Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you” (1 Peter 5:7 NIV). Like UPS and FedEx workers, we should continually deliver our emotionally heavy packages to God’s doorstep.
The Apostle Paul wrote, “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 NIV).
Every summer, I turn many of the tomatoes I grow into soup. Likewise, we must turn our anxieties into peace through prayer.
Our Emotional Stewing and Worrying Offends God
Psalm 139:23-24 suggests that holding on to our anxieties offends God, perhaps because we aren’t trusting Him. We repeat Adam and Eve’s original sin. They believed the serpent’s lie that God couldn’t be trusted.
The serpent made their living independently of God seem attractive. Such living is dangerous. Jesus suggested His return to earth would surprise the careless, weighed down “with carousing, drunkenness, and the anxieties of life” (Luke 21:34 NIV).
God will not help those living independently of Him even though they anxiously search for him when they are in trouble (Proverbs 1:28, 31). Part of the curse of disobedience for Israel was suffering an anxious mind, a despairing heart, and eyes weary with longing (Deuteronomy 28:65).
Believers Help One Another Find Peace
“Anxiety weighs down the heart, but a kind word cheers it up” (Proverbs 12:25 NIV). Unkind words magnify existing anxiety, whereas kind, loving words buoy fear-oppressed hearts.
Demonstrating kindness to others significantly reduces our anxiety. It takes our focus away from ourselves and our troubles.
The positive influence we can have on anxious believers is another reason to love them as Jesus loves us (John 13:34-35). Loving words and deeds can lift others from emotional torture toward God’s peace. God’s consolation for those with great anxiety brings joy (Psalm 94:19).
Love Conquers Fear and Anxiety of God’s Judgment
God’s love replaces and conquers fear of judgment. “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love” (1 John 4:18 NIV).
Love is self-giving, whereas fear is self-protecting. As our love grows, our fear of judgment shrinks, like water displacing air in a glass. It shrinks because we see the growing love within that can only come from God, reassuring us that we belong to Him and He will not condemn us.
How Our Love Grows
Love grows by feeding on and applying God’s word to our lives and trusting the Holy Spirit to produce His love through us (Galatians 5:22). Hearing God’s word without acting on it only increases our anxiety because His Spirit in us constantly reminds us that we are disobeying Him.
3. Psychiatry.org - American Adults Express Increasing Anxiousness in Annual Poll; Stress and Sleep are Key Factors Imp
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