Where I live it is currently deep winter. There are about 18 inches of snow on the ground outside, and the temperature hasn’t risen above freezing all week. There is supposed to be more snow coming this weekend.
Now let me be clear: I very much enjoy winter. Snow is beautiful, and I think American life is so hopelessly busy that the slow-down of winter storms is a healthy thing. It’s also basketball season, to which I look forward all summer.
But it’s no secret that the short sunlight days, long hours inside, and relative isolation has a depressing and angst-producing effect on many people. Whether it’s some sort of seasonal anxiety or depression thing or whatever, the majority of winter, following Christmas, can be a hard time of peace for many.
So I was especially struck rereading through a section of John Piper’s monumental Future Grace today. I call the book “monumental,” because I think that if only one of his many books is still being read generations from now, if Jesus doesn’t return before, it might be this one. The chapter in which this section comes is entitled “Faith in Future Grace vs. Anxiety,” and in the chapter Piper does well to show the reality of fear and anxiousness all of our lives, and how it is in those moments that we learn God’s nearness.
For example, the psalmist says “When I am afraid, I trust in you” (Ps.56:3). As Piper shows it is not “So that I’m not afraid, I trust in you,” but “When I am afraid.” It is in the moment of fear that there can also be trust. Consider also Peter’s words, “Cast all your anxieties on him (Christ), because he cares for you” (1 Pet.5:7). There is never promised a time when there won’t be anxieties; but there is definitely promised the ever-present nearness of Christ in those times, so that we can cast our anxieties onto him.* Indeed, he is an ever-present help in time of trouble (Ps.46:1).
So, Piper concludes the chapter with an excellent list of Scriptures he recites to himself in times of particular anxiety. See, we’ll fight unbelief all the time: Abraham followed God despite his unbelief (note that no unbelief made him waiver in following God, Rom.4:20, which must mean that he had some unbelief in the first place. But he didn’t let it win). But we fight the unbelief with God’s promises, and therefore we “live not by bread alone, but by every word that comes from God’s mouth.” Here’s Piper’s helpful list for particular anxieties:
-For some risky new venture, Is.41:10: “Fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for
I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.”
-For the fear that ministry will be useless and empty, Is.55:11: “So shall my word be that goes out from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.”
-For weakness in work, 2 Cor.12:9: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.”
-For hard decisions, Ps.32:8: “I will instruct you and teach you in the way you in the way you should go; I will counsel you with my eye upon you.”
-For facing opponents, Rom.8:31: “If God is for us, who can be against us?”
-For our children’s well-being, Matt.7:10-11: “If you who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!”
-For fear of sickness, Ps.34:19: “Many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivers him out of them all,” and Rom.5:3-5, that “Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not put us to shame, for God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”
-For fear of getting old, Is.46:4: “Even to your old age I am he, and to gray hairs I will carry you. I have made, and I will bear; I will carry and will save.”
-For fear of dying, Rom.14:7-9: “None of us lives to himself, and none of us dies to himself. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living.”
-For fear of making shipwreck of faith and falling away from God, Phil.1:6: “He who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ,” and Heb.7:25: “He is able to save to the uttermost those who draw near to God through him, since he always lives to make intercession for them.”**
By such promises, Piper says, we make war with our own unbelief. Armed with God’s loving, Fatherly promises, we can be confident, because as Luther famously wrote, God “must win the battle.”
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*John Piper, Future Grace: The Purifying Power of the Promises of God, rev. ed. (New York: Multnomah, 2020), 54.
**Ibid., 58-59.
