Here’s the video for Expedition 31 in Exploring the Bible. If you want to bookmark a page where all the videos are posted, you can find them on my blog, on YouTube, or the Facebook page for Exploring the Bible.

If you haven’t started your kids on the book yet, you can begin anytime and use it with any Bible version. Here are some sample pages.

You can get it at RHB, Westminster Books, Crossway, or Amazon. If you’re in Canada use Reformed Book Services. Some of these retailers have good discounts for bulk purchases by churches and schools.

Summary of Chapter Three in The End of Worry: Why We Worry and How to Stop by Will Van der Hart and Rob Waller. Will is a  pastor working in London and Rob is a Christian psychiatrist. Both are recovering worriers.

1. One of the way to stop a worry cycle is to control bodily symptoms.

2. Generalized anxiety order is characterized by:

• Excessive (out of proportion) worry that a person finds difficult to control.
• Lack of confinement to a particular problem, but more a tendency to worry.
• Accompanied by three or more of these symptoms: restlessness, fatigue, difficulty concentrating, irritability, muscular tension, and sleep disturbance
• Significant distress, meaning that the worrier can no longer perform as before.

3. The mind is very powerful and literally controls the body. But controlling the body can also help the mind. The two primary ways of using the body to control the mind are controlling breathing and maintaining sleep hygiene

4. Controlling breathing. Most people who worry chronically tend to breathe 20-30 times a minute whereas the norm is 10-15 breaths a minute. This adversely affects our blood chemistry and brain activity. This can be changed by practicing slowing down breathing twice a day.

5. Maintaining sleep hygiene. This is comprised of a number of elements but the most important is a regular bed-time and rise-time.

6. Three common worry cycles.

• What-if Worry: Thinking about all the possible things that could happen next. The more you think, the more worries arise, and the worse it gets. Because we are pro-actively scanning for every possible type of problem, we see lots more problems than the average person sees.
• The Worry Pendulum: Swinging from “Panic” to “Trying not to worry” with no time spent in the middle, the place of uncertainty (which is the place we must try to spend more time in so that we can tolerate uncertainty)
• Worry about worry: Will I spiral out of control if I stop monitoring my worry? However, this monitoring becomes extremely difficult and stressful itself.

 7. Worriers will do almost anything to avoid getting into worrying situations. 

The End of Worry: Why We Worry and How to Stop by Will Van der Hart and Rob Waller.

Blogs

Verses to Memorize for the Hospital
“Those of us struggling in the hospital need assurance of God’s goodness and steadfast love more than ever. But a hospital stay, or any ordeal with debilitating illness, doesn’t permit elaborate exegesis. We need verses to which we can cling when the waves of pain seize us and hope shrinks away. We need the power of God’s word to uplift our souls, in doses our disease-crippled minds can retain.”

Exploring Emotions
“All emotions must ultimately be brought under the authority of God’s Word; our fallen state makes them a fallible guide for life. But cultivating and identifying our emotions is an essential first step in sanctifying them.”

Natural Revelation Podcast
Excellent discussion on the place of natural theology in the Christian life and in apologetics with unbelievers.

The Duties Required by the Ninth Commandment in a Social Media World
“With the rise of modern communications technologies, and especially social media, I am convinced we need to diligently apply ourselves to a fresh consideration of all this commandment requires of us.”

Kindle Books

NIV, Cultural Backgrounds Study Bible: Bringing to Life the Ancient World of Scripture $2.99. Even if you don’t like the NIV, you’ll grt a ton of useful background info.

The Pastor’s Kid: Finding Your Own Faith and Identity by Barnabas Piper  $2.39.

New Book

Even Better than Eden: Nine Ways the Bible’s Story Changes Everything about Your Story by Nancy Guthrie.

Video

I Will Wait for You (Psalm 130)

Summary of Chapter Two in The End of Worry: Why We Worry and How to Stop by Will Van der Hart and Rob Waller. Will is a  pastor working in London and Rob is a Christian psychiatrist. Both are recovering worriers.

1. Bigger worries usually lie behind smaller worries. “Behind many apparently superficial worries lurk far more catastrophic threats and fears. Worriers very rarely get beyond the immediate worries to what lies behind them.”

 2. The most common areas that people worry about are relationships, finances, work, and health.

3. A major part of recovery from problem worry is resisting the urge to run away from fear. ”Worriers need to stay with the threats they perceive long enough to realize they don’t actually pose a risk…Tackling avoidance is essential in overcoming worry problems.” (34).

4. Worrying increases the significance of threats, strengthens them, and increases their frequency.

5. God works and we work. Although God can instantly cure people of worry, in the vast majority of cases that we see, God works alongside our efforts and intentions.

6. There are two main types of worry. Working out the difference between useful (solvable) worry and problem (floating) worry is the key to success. Solvable worry  has an underlying problem that responds to problem solving, whereas floating worry needs to be tackled in another way because there is no problem to solve.

7. Solvable worry.

“Solvable worry is typically about problems that are currently happening and have a solution that is required now or at some point in the near future. It is often a clearly understandable problem, one that we would all be anxious about. Solvable worry has concrete characteristics and is authentic in that the mind is seeking out a resolution to a problem that provokes appropriate anxiety. The litmus test for solvable worry is that, when shared with friends, they all begin offering sensible suggestions as to how the situation can be overcome.” (38-9)

“Solvable, normal worry is a useful catalyst for real action in response to a clear and present threat, and if we can channel it, it will make a difference.” (41)

8. Floating worry.

“Floating worry is not amenable to problem solving, because it is about problems that do not have answers, and when it comes to sharing them with friends, we generally shy away because we fear that they will think we are worrying about nothing. Floating worry is often oriented around problems that are less urgent and might or might not happen at some point in the future. The level of anxiety is usually less acute, and grumbles along in the background.” (40)

Here ”the worry issue lingers on, but there is absolutely no resolution. No action is taken other than worry.” (41)

The End of Worry: Why We Worry and How to Stop by Will Van der Hart and Rob Waller.

Blogs

8 Reasons Your Excuses for Not Practicing Church Discipline Don’t Work
“The question is not, “What does it say about the church if we exercise discipline?” but rather, “What does it say about the church if we neglect church discipline?” Paul says that our refusal to discipline unrepentant church members—by taking their names off the membership rolls, refusing to admit them to the Lord’s Supper, and helping them see that their sin calls their professed faith into question—says at least eight bad things about us. Ironically, these eight things are precisely what we’re afraid the world will think if we do exercise church discipline.”

10 Lessons I Learned from Preaching Revelation
“In June I concluded a series of 38 sermons in the book of Revelation. As I reflect on my time in this remarkable book, 10 truths stand out. Spoiler: the things that had the greatest effect on me had nothing to do with numerical symbolism or 666 or the Beast or the Great Prostitute or the millennium.”

12 Questions To Ask Ourselves In Conflict
“Usually our first impulse in conflict is to look at all the ways the other person is wrong. All the ways they hurt us or messed up or all the ways they are thinking incorrectly about an issue. But over the years I have found it helpful to examine myself before focusing on the other person. Here are 12 questions I have found helpful to ask myself when I find myself in conflict:”

Entertainment Choices and Compromise
“One of the ways compromise comes into our life is through our entertainment. We’re very willing to be entertained by things that Christ died for. We’re very willing to laugh at jokes where the punchline is something that required the blood of Christ to atone for that. So, we can be very, very flippant with our entertainment. We can be entertained by things that are actually dishonoring to God.”

As One with Authority: The Four Pillars of Authoritative Preaching
“Modern preaching has been described as “A mild-mannered man encouraging mild-mannered people to be more mild-mannered.” The church—and the world—needs the opposite. Bold, authoritative preaching is the urgent need of the hour. Such preaching will hasten revival in the church, and further the Great Commission.”

3 Ways the Gospel Changes the Way You Apologize
“Christians, of all people in the world, should be the best apologizers. Not because they necessarily have more to apologize for, but because the gospel frees us to apologize rightly, changing our apologies in at least these three ways:”

Kindle Books

Whose Money Is It Anyway? by John F. MacArthur $1.99.

God So Loved, He Gave: Entering the Movement of Divine Generosity by Kelly M. Kapic $2.99.

Conferences

Refresh and Reset Conference
“Finding Hope in the Midst of Burnout, Anxiety, and Depression.” September 28–29, 2018 With David and Shona Murray at New Covenant Bible Church, St. Charles, Illinois.

2018 Regional Conference
On October 5–6, 2018, Ligonier Ministries is hosting a conference in Belfast, Northern Ireland called “After Darkness, Light.” Drs. Sinclair Ferguson, Steven Lawson, Burk Parsons, Michael Reeves, and Derek Thomas will explore the history and legacy of the Reformation and explain how we must continue the work of the Reformers today.

Summary of Chapter One in The End of Worry: Why We Worry and How to Stop by Will Van der Hart and Rob Waller. Will is a  pastor working in London and Rob is a Christian psychiatrist. Both are recovering worriers.

1. Worriers think worrying is eventually productive. Most worriers will admit that although worrying about things does not actually help, they think it does. They think that ultimately it will produce something valuable and useful.

2. Understanding the processes and patterns of worry is the first step to overcoming worry.

3. Worry can be genetic. The fact that most worriers can trace their worries back to childhood and even to their parents indicates that it sometimes has a genetic component. Cautious kids and deep thinkers tend to be adult worriers.

4. Worry is a normal human emotion in a fallen world. There are situations such as having a child in hospital with a serious illness where worry is appropriate. But this can also mutate into cycles of worry.

5. Worry can protect us by ensuring that we prepare for danger.  It may be better to call this acute concern, but without it we’d be dead.

6. People with generalized anxiety disorder worry about 60% of the day. They are never really panicking but never really relaxing, draining their days of joy through living in the future.

7. Worriers tend not to share their worries and therefore slip into isolation.

8. Worriers give themselves a hard time for worrying often ending up in depression.

9. Worry can be changed. Part of the cure is undermining beliefs that are at the root of worry. There may be some truth in them but they need to be broken.

“This book focuses on the techniques of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), the approach for severe worry recommended by the latest scientific studies…Even more importantly, we have an amazing God who loves us and loves to help us. And finally we believe in the healing power of prayer and the community of the local church, and would encourage you all to get as much of these as possible.” (19-20).

10. God can make dealing with worry work for our good. It can actually make us more mature people, better appraisers of situations, and more compassionate friends.

The End of Worry: Why We Worry and How to Stop by Will Van der Hart and Rob Waller.