Overcoming Anxiety With the Gospel

I had the joy of sharing a gospel devo today at Agape Moms Middle Tennessee and how Christ had helped me in my struggle with anxiety. I was so glad that my vulnerability helped other moms know they aren’t alone. Stay tuned for one each week from a Tiny Tribe leader or mentor mom, I’ll be sharing them afterwards as a recap!

I’m so excited to dive into Philippians! It is one of my favorite books and I have quite a few passages memorized from this book that help me combat my root sin issue of self-reliance which leads to anxiety. Yeah, I’m just gonna start by laying it all out there for ya and setting the bar nice and low. Can you relate? I know this is a very common mom-sin but it isn’t a cute sin. It has wreaked havoc in my life and I bet you can relate. Self-reliance and anxiety are connected, root to fruit, and they reveal that deep down we are trusting in ourselves instead of God, which is a gospel-issue.

I didn’t always know the gospel because I was raised in a non-Christian home. When I was in high school, I had a dramatic conversion- I truly went from death to life. Someone shared the gospel with me, and it was the best news I had ever heard. I spent my life striving in my own strength and relying on my performance as my worth. I was trusting in myself as a functional savior. When I heard Eph. 2:8-9, “for by grace you have been saved, through faith, and this is not of your own doing, this is a gift of God, not by works so no one can boast.” I knew this was what I had been searching for my whole life. I transferred my trust from myself to Christ and received salvation by grace and through faith alone!

So that was 24 years ago and I stand here today totally perfect! I’m kidding. Just because we become Christians doesn’t make our life easier, but as we struggle with our sin, we grow in Christ as we learn to continually transfer our trust from ourselves to God.

One of the ways I often forget the gospel is by stiving in my own strength, which leads to anxiety. Now, we are holistic human beings. God created our physical, mental and spiritual components and they’re all interconnected. Our physical and mental health can be out of wack because we live in a sinful and broken world. Often times these things make our spiritual issues worse, and we need to address them all, but no amount of therapy or “self-help” can ever fix our sin, which is our main problem.

This is perfectly highlighted by my lifelong gluten allergy. Take someone who naturally struggles with anxiety and performance-oriented living and then add a major food allergy that creates inflammation all over my body, especially in my brain which causes anxiety and depression. This affected me differently after every birth as hormones regulated, but one of the main ways I want to highlight was my driving anxiety.

Because of the inflammation in my brain from my gluten allergy, I was dizzy all the time. I grew up thinking it was a blood sugar issue, but food never fixed it. After I had my kids, it got worse. When I would drive over 45 mph, the dizziness felt like someone was shaking my brain, and I knew something was very wrong. It led to some panic attacks and not fun driving experiences. I got my eyes checked, tried upping my blood sugar with food, got a check up, blood work, ct scan for GI pain and even a colonoscopy at age 30.

It took years before they finally found my gluten allergy when the new doc in WA ran a basic food allergy panel. My inflammation was so bad at that time, and so was my anxiety due to a stressful cross country move that I couldn’t even balance on one foot. The doc gave me a card for my wallet that I couldn’t pass a sobriety test due to my balance issues. It took about 6 weeks for all the gluten to clear on the AIP diet and then the dizziness was totally gone and has never returned, along with my relationship with gluten! But what wasn’t gone was my anxiety and some driving PTSD that all the years with this issue had caused. My physical health was fixed but I still needed to address my mental and spiritual health.

This diagnosis was in 2018, so fast forward and I have grown a lot in my faith and have worked through my mental health as well. My kids have emerged from the tiny years, and I have had the capacity to spend more time diving deep into the Word and mediating on the attributes of God, specifically God’s sovereignty. Romans 8:28 says that God promises to work everything out for the good of those who love him and have been called according to his purpose. Psalm 139 tells us how God makes us and that we cannot add or take away one day from our book of life which Christ has already written for us. These truths melt anxiety away from the inside out as we release our grip and surrender everything to our Maker.

The deeper God’s truths penetrated my heart, the more I saw gospel-fruit in my life, but I was still allowing my driving anxiety to win. While it had improved, I was trying to beat it by partially using my own strength with things like “exposure therapy,” which does have a lot of success in the mental health realm. I would have Matt ride with me and do short stints on the freeway where speeds were high. Usually I’d start to feel anxiety rise up and while I didn’t have a panic attack, I’d pull off at an exit and wasn’t seeing much progression. I was still trusting in myself and my methods to beat my struggle, wasn’t I? This was something I was so embarrassed about and didn’t tell many people. It kept me from doing certain things if I wasn’t comfortable making the drive. Our sin is never private, it always affects others.

I’ll never forget the day about 2 years ago when I was on the way to pick my kids up from school in Mt. Juliet. I was waiting at the light and had to decide to take 40 or go the back road. I knew 40 was faster, but I always opted to take the less anxiety ridden route. The Lord prompted me in my heart and asked me, “Laura, have you ever surrendered your anxiety to me fully and asked ME to take it away, instead of trying to fix it yourself?” My answer was a sort of, but in all honesty, no. I hadn’t fully surrendered it. At the root of our anxiety is a trust in ourselves instead of God.

I put on my worship music, turned onto 40 and I transferred my trust from myself to God in that moment. My driving anxiety was totally gone and it has never returned. Everyday I take 40 at least twice to get my kids, and I often thank God for setting me free from the trap of anxiety, sometimes with tears. Now I’m not saying that this is what happens every time we surrender our sins to God, I had continually done this over years, allowed the Word to transform my heart, addressed my mental & physical brokenness with gluten, and came to a point where my trust in myself was what was holding me back from releasing my fear. Confessing our sin to God and others brings freedom.

However, I still really struggle with anxiety in other ways, and this week was particularly bad. Why is it when our husbands go out of town for a week that everything goes wrong? I forgot the gospel a lot this week. I transferred my trust from God to myself and anxiety took over in a way it hasn’t in a while. I felt inadequate to share this devo with you this morning, but in God’s sovereignty, I think that perfectly highlights the point of the gospel. I’m not perfect, and we can’t be perfect on this side of heaven. I have some victories to share with you, but I still struggle, just like you do. Our struggles are good in that they deepen our dependance on Christ Instead of ourselves. One of my favorite verses from John 15:5 says “I am the vine, you are the branches, whoever abides In me bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do NOTHING.” Not even a little bit. We can’t accomplish anything through worry and control.

I know this is a common mom struggle, and we want you to “bring your mess” to Agape Moms, but we promise not to leave you in it or let it define who you are. We won’t justify anxiety as “just another mom-struggle” or just a mental health issue, while there is a place for medical help here, anxiety is also a spiritual issue and the ultimate remedy is in Christ.

As I close in prayer, I’m going to pray for the two moms in the room, those who have never placed their trust in Christ, and those who have but still struggle to rely on God instead of ourselves, just like I do. If you do pray to trust Christ for your salvation by grace and through faith for the first time, please come tell me the good news so we can follow up with you and gift you some things to jumpstart your faith. Let’s pray.

Laura DiLeonardi

Laura DiLeonardi is the founder of Agape Moms, a national network of missional communities for mothers that launched in 2016. Since early 2022, she’s served as the Director of Community at The Journey Church in Lebanon, TN where she oversees Life Groups, the Women’s Ministry and where she planted her third Agape Moms chapter. Laura is a writer, speaker and mobilizer for women of all ages to live on mission for Jesus in their everyday lives. She is married to her Moody Bible Institute sweetheart, Matt since 2009 and they have three kids, Jack, Selah and Lucy, and two fur babies, Bear and Lady. In her free time she enjoys hiking with the family, running, and good conversation over a cup of coffee. Laura's passion is seeing lives continually transformed by the gospel of Jesus Christ.