Tabernacle Church Penarth

We all experience anxiety from time to time. Anxiety is part of the body’s natural response to perceived danger – a means of alerting the mind to impending threat and ensuring we stay out of its way. It usually rises up when people feel out of control of some part of their life, or uncertain about the immediate future. Often it will pass in due course, and we wonder what all the fuss was about. For some people, however, anxiety can become overwhelming, continuing for prolonged periods of time and seriously affecting their ability to get on with everyday things. It’s estimated that more than one in ten people are likely to have a ‘disabling anxiety disorder’ at some point in their lives.

It is important to remember that however spiritual or mature we are as a Christian, we all worry or get anxious about something to some degree or another from time to time. For some in our community at Tabs it is short lived and specifically related to one situation which may be going on at the moment. For others anxiety is severe, long term and socially crippling. We worry about public speaking (doing a reading or leading prayers, or maybe speaking at a church meeting). We worry about meeting new people (or being forced to speak to them when we are broken down into small prayer groups!). We worry about ministries we are responsible for; about money; about our homes; about our family and children; about our health; about our jobs and about losing our jobs. We live in a world shot through with worry and anxiety, angst in the deepest and most pervasive sense. We worry about yesterday. We worry about today. We worry about tomorrow. We just worry!

In this series of Bible studies and sermons which will take us through to half term we will be thinking about what the Bible says about worry and how we can cope with it.  We will look at what the Bible has to say about the things that we get anxious about, and hopefully we will have the opportunities to share in prayer those things which trouble us. And, by the grace of God, we will start to understand a little more about the God who has all our tomorrows in his hand – and begin to trust in his unfailing love just a little more!