We are the most modern, most advanced, and wealthiest civilization in human history. Our technological advances are astonishing. Our medical advances are life-giving and mind-altering. Our understanding of the psyche has never been richer.
And we are the most anxious we’ve ever been.
Our outer world is flourishing.
Our inner world is impoverished.
How do we find our way out?
Heart problems are always spiritual problems. The heart feels insecure in its place in the world, so it is anxious. Anxiety then, is a spiritual force. It sinks its claws into your inner world. The old divines counseled deeply about this. Proverbs, out of its depth of insight, directs us to stand guard over our heart—our inner world—because it is our life’s well-spring. All your depths are there and all your life.
Two forces tend to keep us away from a depth-level healing of anxiety. Religion as commonly practiced (next week) and culture as usually understood (below).
Culture as usually understood
Lesslie Newbigin and Tim Keller both recognized that the unspoken assumptions we carry as a culture load heavy freight onto our souls. Newbigin called it our “plausibility structures”—what we have subconsciously accepted as plausible about life. Keller called it our “unthought thoughts.”
These are unspoken cultural assumptions we share about what makes a person truly authentic.
These are the “of courses” and “well, duhs” about authentic living we think without thinking about them. They are the values, mindsets, and actions we accept without realizing we accept them.
And they are making us suffer.
Think about them like the rails of a train track. The train can want to go left, but if the rails go right, the train is going right no matter what it wants.
This is us. We want to go toward peace, but instead find ourselves going toward anxiety. If we are going to find peace, we have to see the rails before we can pull a different lever.
Here are our agreements about what makes an authentic person. I argue it’s killing us.
You are it.
You are somewhere here of your own doing.
You are your own source of light.
What you are pointing to with your life is in essence, you.
To be validated and valid, you must get people to believe in you.
So, I am the marketing department for my own life.
Spirituality, religion, and politics are props I use to further my own story.
It’s become a life script creating tremendous, unsustainable pressure on multiple generations.
As with all unthought thoughts, no one overtly articulates this, it’s simply what we subconsciously agree must be true to live an authentic life. I must initiate, generate, inaugurate, and perpetuate an authentic version of me. And if the one I create doesn't work, I must do it again. And again. And again.
Do you see the cultural recipe for anxiety?
All Swifties see it: "It's me. Hi, I'm the problem, it's me."
I can want to go left,
toward you,
toward sacrificial love,
toward purpose greater than myself,
toward God,
but the rails of my life take me right instead into an endless loop around myself, never arriving anywhere.
The culturally anxious life looks like this.
What’s a remedy?
In the opening lines of his gospel, John uses a literary device to point out something revelatory.
He wrote the gospel and understood he is a character in it.
That’s you and me. We are here. We have a role in life. We are characters in the story of life. But if our role is to establish ourselves by ourselves with reference only to ourselves (even if we do this unwittingly out of the script of our culture), we will be anxious.
Here is John’s insight: My life isn’t my own—it is sandwiched into Jesus’ life.
It’s a stunning literary device, so we have to pay attention to the text. John 1 is soaring rhetoric about the beauty and supremacy of Jesus Christ. If true, everything is changed.
Let’s summarize John 1:1-5
-Jesus is the great mind behind all we know and see.
-Jesus is the light of mankind, nothing dark can overcome him.
-Jesus is the source of life.
Let’s summarize John 1:9-14
-Jesus is the true light.
-Jesus gives life.
-Jesus came to us full of grace and truth (the implication being, we lack one or both).
-Jesus is God in flesh, God with us in our neighborhood of need.
If you were doing the math, you noticed it. We skipped verses 6-8. They are John’s summary of his life. This is not accidental.
John is saying, “I understand where my life sits. I see my place and my purpose. I was sent here. My life witnesses to what’s true. I do not have the pressure of being the light. I recognize where the meaning in the story comes from. I realize how to find my way into the heart of God. I am invited into God's life, a life that cannot be contained with human edges and boundaries.”
Your world in Christ then looks like this.
Beloved, your life is sandwiched into the new realities, the deeper basic assumptions, the new rails of Jesus’ life, taking you into the heart of God and away from the anxiety of establishing yourself in the world.
You were sent here, meaning you have purpose.
Your life is a testament about the light, for the healing of the nations.
You don't have the pressure of being the light.
Your life is here to reveal it.
There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify concerning that light, so that through him all might believe. He himself was not the light; he came only as a witness to the light. John 1:6-8
- Pastor Scott Marshall, Wichita First Church of the Nazarene