How to break free from the spirit of heaviness & anxiety!
Oftentimes in life, we find ourselves under what feels like a heavy weight from— loss, failure, sin, tragedy, missed dreams, life pressures, and more. Coming through a season that our whole globe has faced only intensifies everything we’re facing. I want to encourage you that you're not alone in feeling anxious, overwhelmed, and heavy-hearted. Depression symptoms are common when you face difficulty, but I want to remind you that it doesn’t have to overcome you.
I want to quickly highlight three forms of this heaviness we can feel to help encourage you.
First, I want to address the normal weight or pressure that we feel when we’re growing and expanding into new territory that we’ve never been in before. All growth in life is going to be a process of you saying yes or taking on new responsibilities that at first will feel difficult and overwhelming and give you feelings of wanting to even quit. If you’re trying to build muscle in the gym, you know that to build muscle you’ll have to push past the pain and difficulty. There’s no growth inside the comfort zone.
Secondly, feelings of anxiety, depression, and feeling like you want to just shut down, believe it or not, are more like indicators of a problem than they are a problem.
Therapist Brian Reiswig says it like this, “Feelings of Depression and anxiety are a healthy response to an unsustainable lifestyle.”
Oftentimes our current social perception is that anxiety is the problem but it’s more your God-given body’s way of trying to alert you that something needs to change. So, when you feel anxious and overwhelmed, you need to stop, pause and evaluate where this is originating. Maybe you need to figure out how to adjust your schedule, change your associations or change your career path, and maybe you just need more physical rest. If you feel depressed, you’re not broken, you just need to asses and maybe get a counselor or other people in your world to help you identify what needs to be adjusted.
Thirdly, sometimes a spirit of heaviness is exactly that, it’s a spirit. It’s the enemy coming to mess with and oppress your mind, body, and spirit. The enemy will do his best to lie to us and get us to retreat from life and back up. This area of feeling oppressed by a spirit isn’t a one size fits all, but before you assume you have some type of demonic activity, first consider if it’s the first two items I mentioned, if it’s not, then allow people to come and speak into your world and help you bust off this heaviness.
The good news is that you don't have to let it take you out! Two key things will help you break it off. First, ask your Jesus-following friends or pastors to pray with you and command that spirit to leave your life and home. And another great way to break free of this spirit of heaviness is through a refreshing time of worship. Worry and fear come when our eyes get off Jesus, but worship puts Jesus in his rightful place in our lives again and allows Him to recapture our heart; in that close and refreshing position, you can resist that heaviness and rise above with renewed strength!
“To give them beauty for ashes, The oil of joy for mourning, The garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness; That they may be called trees of righteousness, The planting of the LORD, that He may be glorified.””Isaiah 61:3 NKJV
