Dr. Ab Abercrombie
Anxiety can be a confounding and debilitating force in one’s life…and believers are not immune to its affect. Consequently, anxiety is often referenced as the reason for entering counseling. Most who become overwhelmed by this issue have tried numerous approaches before contacting a counselor including prayer, Bible study, and other Christian disciplines. Yet they enter biblical counseling discouraged, fearful, and filled with self-condemnation centered upon what many refer to as a lack of faith.
Other believers have taken a secular approach to anxiety, seeking relief through psychotherapy, medication, hypnosis, and other stress management approaches. Worldly approaches often focus upon external factors and circumstances rather than the fearful heart of an individual. And, there is a growing attitude that excessive anxiety is biochemical, and can only be the managed medically. And while these approaches can yield temporal relief, they offer nothing that is spiritually curative.
The biblical counselor must not be overtaken by the horizontal clutter surrounding this matter. Rather, we must receive the counselee in whatever state they arrive for this divine assignment. It is not our role to rebuke the counselee for a worldly orientation or for the use of secular remedies. At the same time, we must be very careful not to endorse or promote anything but a spiritual/biblical plan of care and counsel.
The frustration sufferers feel concerning anxiety is real, and very likely, lengthy in its history. To intervene biblically will require much perseverance, holding always to the sufficiency of Scripture as our foundation and guide. Transformation and not relief, is our objective…looking for the natural byproduct of God’s Word changing the nature of an individual, rather than providing a temporal respite that does not endure. As Jesus taught the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well:
“Everyone who drinks of this water will thirst again; but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never thirst; but the water that I will give him will become in him a well of water springing up to eternal life” (Jn 4:13b-14).
