What Does Philippians Say about Anxiety?
You’ve heard it.
The most commonly cited verse about anxiety is Philippians 4:6:
Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.
Dr. Dan Allender, professor of counseling psychology at the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology, cautions the use of this verse in addressing anxiety. He says Philippians 4:6 can often be used by those who aren’t experiencing anxiety as a means of “‘clobbering’ those who are anxious.” Dr. Allender warns against “the idea of hearing Philippians 4 and assuming ‘my anxiety goes away.’”
I happen to like Philippians 4:6, but I also don’t like how it is used as a “clobber verse” to make anxious people feel like they’re doing something wrong or, even worse, that there is something wrong about them. As with most clobber verses, in this situation it is being used out of context.
The Theological Framework
To understand the verses in Philippians 4, you have to grasp the teachings of the previous chapter, which presents the theological core of the entire letter. Philippians 3 sets the overall context for Paul’s words in 4:6 about anxiety and, in fact, establishes a key framework for how Christians should understand all aspects of their life.
The framework of Philippians 3 is that Christians live as “Now and Not Yet” people. This is sadly undertaught in Christian circles, which is why anxiety is so often misunderstood and why many clobber verses are misused.
What is a “Now and Not Yet” person? This person is summarized by Philippians 3:21, which declares that
our current lowly bodies are being transformed to the body of Christ’s glory.
The Now and Not Yet life is defined by the life goal of becoming like Jesus.
This is the amazing promise of the gospel: God is at work to transform every bit of ourselves to conform to Jesus, the one who will give us His “glory.”
Glory is the biblical term describing the amazingly good way of life when we fully reflect God’s intentions for us. Jesus obtained His glory because He fully reflected God’s intentions in His life. Philippians 3:21 promises that as we become like Jesus, we will share in that same “glory.”
However, the same verse assumes that this glorious destiny requires an understanding of spiritual growth that allows for the struggles of our current “lowly bodies.” Note that lowly in Paul’s usage here means “incomplete” (it does not mean “sinful”). He is emphasizing that the full completion of our transformation awaits the future, the Not Yet when Jesus returns (Philippians 3:10).
In the Now, we will still struggle with experiences like complex physical and neurological misfirings. My current “lowly body” will still fall quite short of “glory.” Nevertheless, the Now and Not Yet are organically connected. This is what it means that our current lowly bodies are being transformed to the body of Christ’s glory. Our Not Yet body of glory grows out of our Now body of struggle.
Paul isn’t making up this Now and Not Yet dynamic. He gets it straight from Jesus. Jesus often used agricultural metaphors to convey this dynamic of spiritual growth. His favorite metaphor was to point to how a seed of some plant is growing in the present Now and still is on its way to becoming its fully completed self in the future Not Yet (see, for example, Matthew 13:3–8, 19–23; Mark 4:3–9, 14–32; Luke 8:4–8, 11–15; and more).
Because this is such a complex and crucial truth, Paul often adds to Jesus’ agricultural metaphors for the Now and Not Yet. In Philippians 3, for example, Paul draws on the metaphor of a runner in the middle of a race, who is “straining toward what is ahead” (3:13) at the finish line. He switches to the metaphor of dual citizenship to capture the duality of the two time frames — living as citizens of the present earthly reality while awaiting the future arrival of a heavenly citizenship (3:20).
