The Business of Anxiety: Finding God’s Peace in a Culture That Sells Calm
The world hums with noise, but underneath it all, there is a tremor — soft yet unrelenting.
A woman stands in the checkout line, thumb hovering over her phone. It’s a small decision: which brand of vitamins to buy. Yet her pulse quickens as if the choice carries moral weight. “Clean ingredients,” “trusted sourcing,” “stress support,” “calming blend.” The labels speak her inner language — the liturgy of control in an uncontrollable age. Behind her, a teenager scrolls through ads for self-care kits and digital detox retreats. A father nearby compares reviews, his eyes darting between “value for money” and “reduces anxiety.”
We don’t simply buy products anymore; we purchase promises of peace. Every item whispers, You are safe here. You can breathe here. In a world saturated with crisis — wars, layoffs, climate, politics — anxiety has become the currency of attention. Brands no longer sell to minds but to nervous systems. The glow of every screen is a sermon about trust.
And yet, beneath the commerce and cortisol, another voice calls — quieter, older, sacred: “Be still and know that I am God.” (Psalm 46:10 NLT).
Anxiety is not new. It is as ancient as the human heart’s awareness that the world can wound. Yet in our time, anxiety has evolved into a public atmosphere—a shared emotional climate we all breathe. What was once a personal struggle has become the cultural water in which we swim. Economists track it, advertisers monetize it, and social media amplifies it. But Scripture does not treat anxiety as a statistical trend. It treats it as a spiritual temperature that rises when trust grows cold.
From the garden forward, humanity has sought to manage fear by control. Adam hides. Sarah schemes. Israel builds golden calves to feel secure when Moses lingers too long on the mountain. Each moment reveals the same reflex: when the future feels uncertain, we grasp for what we can see, touch, and own. Anxiety tempts us to make idols of stability. Yet these idols never still the trembling—they only echo it back.
In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus turns anxiety on its head. “Can all your worries add a single moment to your life?” he asks (Matthew 6:27 NLT). The question exposes the lie beneath our striving—that control can save us. Instead, Jesus redirects the gaze: “Seek the Kingdom of God above all else… and He will give you everything you need” (Matthew 6:33 NLT). Trust, not technique, is the posture of peace.
The church’s challenge in the age of anxiety is not to mirror the market’s calm aesthetic but to embody God’s non-anxious presence. Where the world sells serenity, the Spirit offers shalom—wholeness that flows not from certainty but from communion. In Christ, peace is not a product; it is a Person.
Our calling, then, is clear: to live as communities of divine steadiness in a culture addicted to fear’s momentum. To show that the deepest rest cannot be ordered online, but is received when we rest in the One who holds all things together.
The governing truth is this: An anxious age seeks peace through possession, but the peace of Christ is received through surrender.
Our culture teaches that security is a matter of management — that with enough planning, purchases, and data, we can silence the ache of uncertainty. Yet the gospel reorders that logic entirely. True peace is not built upon what we can control, but upon the One who holds control. Jesus does not promise that anxiety will vanish; He promises His presence within it: “I am leaving you with a gift—peace of mind and heart. And the peace I give is a gift the world cannot give” (John 14:27 NLT).
The world’s peace is transactional. It soothes for a moment, then demands renewal. God’s peace is covenantal — sustained by love that does not expire when the economy dips or the algorithm shifts.
When anxiety becomes the marketplace’s organizing principle, the church’s witness must be this alternative reality: we do not buy calm; we become calm by abiding. We do not brand trust; we build it through faithfulness. The call of the Christian leader in an anxious world is not to eliminate fear but to anchor it — to show that in Christ, the trembling heart can rest without numbing itself.
Illustration
It began with a simple observation. Pastor Maria noticed that her congregation was buying more wellness products than Bibles. Not out of neglect, but out of need. “Everyone’s tired,” one mother confessed during a prayer circle. “I just want something that works.” So Maria decided that her church’s next discipleship series would not be another study on doctrine, but a journey into rest.
On the first Sunday, she placed an empty chair at the front of the sanctuary. “This,” she said, “is for the One who calms storms, not for the one trying to manage them.” Each week, the chair remained—visible, unfilled, quietly confronting every anxious impulse in the room.
Midway through the series, she asked the congregation to fast from digital noise for a day. “We have to listen,” she said, “to what anxiety is trying to protect.” People fidgeted at first. Without phones, they realized how loud the world had become. One teenager admitted that the silence felt unbearable at first, “like waiting for something bad to happen.” But when she sat under a tree that afternoon, the stillness began to shift. “It felt like God was breathing again,” she whispered.
By the end of the series, something subtle had changed. Worship was slower, gentler. Conversations lingered longer. The church began offering “unhurried spaces”—open hours in the sanctuary for prayer and quiet. Attendance didn’t spike, but depth did. People started describing peace not as a mood, but as a Presence.
One night, Maria received a message from that same teenager. “I kept thinking about the empty chair,” she wrote. “It’s not really empty, is it?”
Maria smiled. She knew then that her congregation was learning the one thing anxiety cannot teach—trust.
Semiotic Turn
The empty chair became more than a prop—it became a parable. Its silence preached a sermon words could not. In a sanctuary filled with hurried hearts, it stood as a sign: God’s presence does not compete for attention; it waits.
Every generation crafts symbols for its fears. In our own, the smartphone screen glows like a modern altar, its light promising connection, knowledge, and relief. Yet each swipe deepens the hunger. The empty chair in Maria’s church inverted that ritual. It was absence as invitation—emptiness that made space for fullness. Where anxiety clamors for more—more control, more content, more calm—the chair announced the gospel’s contradiction: peace begins where striving ends.
In Scripture, the seat or throne often signals both authority and rest. God “sits enthroned above the circle of the earth” (Isaiah 40:22 NLT). Christ “is seated at the right hand of the Father,” not pacing heaven’s halls in worry (Ephesians 1:20–21). When we sit, we cease movement; we embody trust. The empty chair, then, was a semiotic echo of divine stillness—a reminder that leadership in anxious times begins not with busyness but with abiding.
There is irony here too. Anxiety’s language is acceleration. It measures value by velocity. Everything must move faster: shipping, data, decisions. But in the gospel, God slows time. “He makes me lie down in green pastures; He leads me beside peaceful streams” (Psalm 23:2 NLT). Notice the verbs: makes, leads. Peace is not achieved; it is received.
The chair also names a subtle idolatry—the illusion that if we just “fill the seat,” if we keep performing, the world will hold together. But the kingdom’s paradox is that fullness is born in surrender. The empty seat proclaims a theology of relinquishment. It reminds the anxious disciple: You are not holding the universe in place. God already is.
To see that truth is to re-learn worship. The empty chair becomes a mirror. It reflects both our fear of absence and our invitation into Presence. It asks, Can you sit long enough for love to lead?
Application
The church cannot compete with the marketplace’s glittering promises of calm, nor should it try. Our calling is to embody a different kind of peace — the kind that restores rather than distracts, that steadies rather than sedates. To live faithfully in the age of anxiety, we must cultivate practices that retrain the heart to trust the God who sits when the world shakes.
1. Practice Stillness as Resistance
Set aside time each day not to be productive, but to be present. Whether it’s five minutes of silent prayer or a quiet walk, stillness becomes a form of spiritual protest. In stillness, we renounce the myth that motion equals meaning. The psalmist’s command — “Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10 NLT) — is not passive; it’s defiant faith in motionless form. It is an act of rebellion against the tyranny of urgency.
2. Reframe Sabbath as Sanctuary, Not Schedule
Sabbath is not a day off from anxiety; it’s a day within which anxiety is re-narrated by God’s presence. The ancient command to rest (Exodus 20:8–11) was not meant as luxury but liberation. In an empire that defined identity by output, God invited His people to stop, to remember that their worth was not in what they produced but in who held them. Today, Sabbath reminds us that the world spins fine without our hands on the wheel.
3. Tell the Truth About Fear in Community
Anxiety feeds on isolation. Churches that trade in platitudes only deepen it. The early church “shared their burdens” (Galatians 6:2 NLT), which means they named them out loud. Create spaces — small groups, pastoral conversations, moments in worship — where people can speak their fears without shame. Truth-telling defangs fear’s dominion. When the anxious story is spoken among the faithful, it becomes part of a larger, redemptive narrative.
4. Lead by Presence, Not Performance
Pastors, leaders, parents — our first duty is not to calm every storm but to stand steady in the midst of it. The shepherd’s rod does not remove the valley’s shadow; it reassures the sheep of guidance within it (Psalm 23:4). Leadership, then, becomes the ministry of presence: showing up, unhurried and unguarded, so that others may remember what trust feels like.
Each of these practices teaches the same posture: the courage to stop clutching. The anxious world promises peace through control; Christ invites peace through release. The work of the Spirit is to loosen the white-knuckled grip until open hands can again receive grace.
Benediction
The chair still sits there. Empty. Waiting. The light through the stained-glass window shifts across its seat as the day grows long. Some Sundays, no one mentions it anymore—but that’s the point. Its quiet presence has become part of the room, part of the rhythm. It does not call attention to itself; it simply is.
So, too, is God.
In a culture that sells calm while deepening unrest, the gospel offers something quieter and infinitely more real—a peace that does not need packaging. The empty chair whispers that we are not alone, that stillness is not absence, that the God who governs the galaxies still attends to trembling hearts.
May we, the anxious and beloved, learn again to sit.
May we breathe without fear of losing our place.
May our presence, like that empty chair, become a living sign that Christ still reigns and that His rest is enough.
And when the world hurries past, may someone see the calm in us and whisper, “It’s not empty after all.”