Fighting Anxiety with Humility

Learning to humble ourselves under God's mighty hand

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Photo by Cosiela Borta on Unsplash

Has someone ever sent 1 Peter 5:7 your way in response to your anxiety? Have you ever texted that verse someone who was struggling with fear, with anxious thoughts, with the cares of life? Don’t get me wrong: I think that’s wonderful. People should read and meditate on God’s Word and allow it to restore their soul during difficult moments.

But this particular verse has an exhortation that perhaps leaves us wondering, “Okay . . . but how?”

And that’s not a bad question to ask. Actually, it’s quite smart. So let’s ask it. How do we cast all our cares, all our anxieties, all our fears on God?

We must cast our fears, anxieties, and cares on the Lord, for he cares for us. That’s beautiful news, but again, how do we do that? We humble ourselves. We remember who we are in relation to God and swallow our pride.

You’ll notice that before the exhortation in verse 7, we have verse 6, “Humble yourselves, therefore, under the might hand of God so that at the proper time he may exalt you” (emphasis added). Much of our anxieties and fears stem from the subconscious belief that we have it all together, that we can do things on our own, that we are more than sufficient for the task at hand.

David Mathis wrote,

“Humble yourselves” is the reminder that our anxieties often rise with our pride and sense of self-sufficiency. To lose sight of God is to decline in humility. It’s a timeless summons to the anxious: humble yourself. You can’t control this. Your anxiety is rising with a swollen view of self, and a diminished view of God.

The tendency to swell up with supposed self-sufficiency is intricately connected with taking our gaze off of God. We humble ourselves by admitting we don’t have it all together—in fact we don’t have it together at all—and that we can’t live our lives on our own strength. We need God’s grace; we need God’s strength; we need God’s guidance and care and love to get through life. And yet we time and time again attempt to functionally live independently from God’s grace, strength, guidance, care, and love. And when we do that, anxiety swarms us. We feel ourselves drowning with the cares of this world. We must humble ourselves and look up to see the grandeur and majesty of God and know that he cares for us.

We must admit that we can’t do it.

We have to realize that we can’t pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.

We need to understand that we’re not smart enough to live independently from God.

We need God; the moment we remember that is the moment we humble ourselves and fight back against anxiety. The instant we humble ourselves, we “allow” God to take control of our lives, to not feel as though we need to be in control of every little detail, to try to figure everything out on our own. When we take our eyes off ourselves, anxiety flees.

That’s what we want, isn’t it? We want to be rid of anxiety; we want it to go away. We want to slam that anxious door shut. In order to do that, though, we must fall to our knees at God’s throne.

We need to continually look to 1 Peter 5:6-7 and remember that we must humble ourselves under God’s mighty hand. Because, again, if we act as if we’re in control that’s when things go haywire; that’s when our world falls apart because, well, we think we’re in charge. Anxiety runs rampant in the mind of the one who feels in control. We’ve all felt that. But that’s not how God designed us. He created us to live under his mighty hand, to humble ourselves before him so that we can live anxiety-free.

Believing that God is in control and that he is directing our entire lives should give our minds and hearts rest. Anxiety shouldn’t consume us when we’re meditating on God’s righteous reign. Anxiety shouldn’t have a foothold when we are realizing who we are in relation to our sovereign God. So let’s humble ourselves and let God be God, and be free from anxiety.

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