Anxious: Fighting Anxiety with the Word of Godنموونە

Day Two: Doeg Is Not Cool

Read Psalm 27.

When the LORD is your light, salvation, and stronghold, there is nothing else to fear. “LORD,” or Jehovah, is the proper name of the one and only God of the universe. LORD means “The Existing One.”2 That means God doesn’t just exist, but that He must exist. The LORD is the One from whom everything else that exists gets its existence. We may have enemies, but we also have the LORD. The ENT office receptionist who said you talked too fast, or the hurricane headed toward your coast, or even the hotdog you are scared to eat because your esophagus seems to be hotdog-shaped—everything and everyone is at the mercy of The Existing One. Your enemies are never more powerful than your LORD.

He is the stronghold of our lives. He is our light and our salvation. He is our source of true protection. We don’t get to finish reading this page in this book without Him giving us the breath in our lungs, the sight in our eyes, and the clarity of our minds to do it. The Bible, the Old and New Testaments alike are about the work of Jesus. When we read the first four verses of this psalm, as Christians living after the resurrection, we can see Jesus as the ultimate fulfillment of David’s hope and the ultimate reason our enemies shouldn’t cause anxieties. Through the work of Christ on the cross, we have received salvation forever. At the cross, our greatest enemies stumbled and fell. We can be confident, as David was because we have a Jehovah who is also our Rescuer and proves our enemies are no match for Him.

Our Lord, the conqueror of enemies, isn’t just “The Existing One.” He is our good Father and the giver of joy.

The last verse in Psalm 27 says, “Wait for the LORD; be strong, and let your heart be courageous. Wait for the LORD” (v. 14). The word wait, in the original Hebrew, means “to wait, look for, hope, expect.”3 When we look for, hope in, and expect our God to come through, we can be people of courage, even those of us (Hi!) who tend to lean more into worry.