Helping Children with Anxiety
Feeling anxious is part of living in a broken world, and God weaves those feelings into his providential plan for our spiritual growth. As we mature, our feelings of anxiety may abate, or they may swell. What runs constant is God’s call to trust him and act in the context of our feelings. Simply listening to our kids express their feelings is a great way to ease their burden by assuring them of our non-judgmental presence.
It takes time for us to realize we aren’t made of glass, that shattering isn’t imminent, that God can always bring us through to the other side—no matter what hellish things we experience. Time teaches us. In fact, for any person of faith, time is the only tutor.
But kids don’t have time yet—at least, they have more ahead than behind. Each day holds out threats without the assurance of safety, let alone the promise of strength for having weathered hard things. And so, for kids, fragility comes naturally. They see their smallness in a wild world. A tiny scratch demands a Band Aid. The sidewalk cracks threaten their bicycle tires. Honey bees have daggers attached to their abdomens. The world is big. Children are small. Dangers abound.
As parents, with more time behind than ahead, we go through seasons when we feel confident in God’s sovereign care, maybe even impervious to harm (or at least ignorant of it). But the longer we live, the more quickly we spot this feeling as a momentary illusion. We lose a parent. Our highschool friend dies of spinal cancer at thirty-one. A Yellowstone mudslide wipes out a bridge as if it were built of toothpicks and glue. Health issues crop up like weeds in everyday conversations. The world is uncontrollable. And though we’re more confident in God’s control than we used to be, we’re still small. And dangers abound.
Maybe that’s why nearly 20% of the American population battles an anxiety disorder, including yours truly for the last 16 years.1 I’ve written about my own anxiety war in Struck Down but Not Destroyed. But I’ve also had the joy of being a parent for nearly 9 years, which means I’ve had to take what God has shown me about anxiety and use it to help my own children. I approach them with deep empathy, as one whom the Lord has shattered and put back together many times. Let me offer what I’ve learned so far and then point you to some resources I’ve found helpful along the way.
What I’ve Learned
1. Kids are very perceptive.
While children deal with their own fears and worries, they’re also watching you, taking cues on how they should respond. As parents, we tend to think it’s best to shield our children from our anxiety, and there are times when that’s appropriate. But shielding them and denying the presence of anxiety teaches them to do the same. That’s unhealthy, and it’s unbiblical. The psalmists didn’t bottle things up; they poured everything out. That doesn’t mean you should pour out your soul before your kids each day. But it does mean they should see it’s okay that you deal with fear and anxiety, too, and you do something about it: you turn to your heavenly Father in prayer. You read his word. You walk by faith. You believe. Showing them what to do with anxiety is much healthier than modeling denial.
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What We Miss When We Skip the Book of Ezra
Ezra connects to the overarching story of the Bible. We were made to worship God, but our rebellion means that we need a pure high priest to make our worship possible. Ezra reminds us of this central activity of the community of God and our dependence on him to draw us near.
The book of Ezra is an odd duck. It bears the name of a man who doesn’t appear in its first half. Though titled like a minor prophet, this is a book of history, one far shorter than most historical books in Scripture. And it is one of the few portions of God’s word set after the Babylonian exile.
I couldn’t find any data to justify this suspicion, but I would guess that Ezra is not commonly read or studied by modern Christians. I get it—among other barriers, there are long lists of names in chapters 2, 8, and 10.
Yet, this little book has much to offer!
God Works in the Hearts of Kings
God rules over kingdoms and kings—this is true everywhere and at all times. But it is made explicit with surprising frequency in the book of Ezra.
We see this in the very first verse of the book: “…the Lord stirred up the spirit of Cyrus king of Persia, so that he made a proclamation throughout all his kingdom and also put it in writing …” (Ezra 1:1)
We also read that the Lord “had turned the heart of the king of Assyria” toward the Israelites (Ezra 6:22). The author of the book blesses God “who put such a thing as this into the heart of the king, to beautify the house of the Lord that is in Jerusalem, and who extended to me his steadfast love before the king and his counselors, and before all the king’s mighty officers” (Ezra 7:27–28). Finally, as part of his confession, Ezra thanks God that he “has extended to us his steadfast love before the kings of Persia, to grant us some reviving to set up the house of our God, to repair its ruins, and to give us protection in Judea and Jerusalem” (Ezra 9:9).
In Ezra a group of Israelites journeyed from Babylon to Jerusalem to rebuild the temple of God. Since they left captivity, traveled through dangeous territories, and settled in an occupied land, these people needed the approval, help, and protection of the local and central rulers.
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There Is Something Greater Than The Great Commandment
Don’t try to obey the Great Commandment without first receiving God’s great salvation. He always loves first. Our love is merely a response to His great love toward sinners. Let us behold the cross of Jesus and love it more and more. Let us be moved by His amazing grace. And let us love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, and mind.
The lawyer stopped Jesus and asked, “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law” (Matt 22:36)? Jesus responded, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind”
Matt 22:37
When the lawyer asked Jesus which commandment was the greatest, Jesus gave Him the perfect answer. We call it “The Great Commandment,” and as we read the impeccable wisdom of Jesus, we are encouraged, challenged, and humbled. Christians throughout all time have been, rightly, energized to love God more through this high calling. But I have to say this: There is something greater than the Great Commandment. Before you strike me off as a heretic, hear me out.
The Great Commandment is truly great. Jesus says that this commandment, with the second greatest commandment to love your neighbor, is the summation of the entirety of God’s Law. In other words, if you perfectly love God and perfectly love your neighbor, then you will find yourself in perfect obedience to the requirements of all of God’s commandments. Wow. As Christians, we rightly pursue a great love for God and neighbor in order to better please our God.
And yet, we don’t love God as we ought.
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The Basics: The Deity of Jesus Christ
The coming Messiah is repeatedly identified as the almighty God and eternal father, the wisdom of God, righteous, highly exalted, yet to be born of a lowly virgin. These prophetic verses can only be speaking of one person, Israel’s coming Redeemer, Jesus Christ, who is the God of Abraham (cf. John 8:58).
Like Jews and Muslims, Christians are monotheists. But unlike Jews and Muslims, Christians are also Trinitarians. We believe that the one God is triune, and is revealed as three distinct persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. When it comes to the Son (Jesus Christ), the Bible everywhere affirms that Jesus is true and eternal God, uncreated, without beginning or end.
Given Jesus’s central place in Christian theology and his importance in the history of Western Civilization, non-Christian religions often attempt to co-opt Jesus and make him one of their own. But this is not easy to do since the doctrine of the deity of Jesus Christ differentiates Christianity from all other religions. If Jesus is true and eternal God as taught in Scripture, then the Christian doctrine of God is unique among world religions. The irony is that while virtually all religions honor Jesus as a prophet or teacher, nevertheless they all reject (implicitly or explicitly) the key points the New Testament makes about Jesus–that he is the second person of the Trinity, and that he is the eternal Son, and he possesses the same divine attributes as the Father and the Holy Spirit. Jesus is God in human flesh, something Jesus personally believed and proclaimed about himself (and a matter to which we will return in a subsequent essay in this series when we discuss Christ’s incarnation).
That the doctrine of the deity of Jesus Christ is not the invention of the early church as often claimed, can be seen by merely scanning the pages of Holy Scripture, with its substantial teaching regarding the deity of Jesus in both testaments. One of the most powerful lines of evidence for the deity of Jesus are those texts in the Old Testament, such as the well-known messianic prophecy in Isaiah 7:14 written hundreds of years before Jesus’ birth. “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Immanuel.” The Messiah will be miraculously conceived, and given the title “God with us.”
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