Praying for others helps our anxieties

If you turn on the TV, read the paper, or look at your iPhone’s latest headlines there’s much reason for us to be anxious.  Job loss, defaulting on mortgages, foreclosure, bad credit all lead to our anxiety.  I know I become anxious when I think about those things.  Yesterday I found a helpful illustration by Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones where he explains how greater anxieties get rid of the lesser anxieties. 

Before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, in Barcelona, Madrid and other places, there were psychological clinics with large numbers of neurotics undergoing drug treatment and others attending regularly for psychoanalysis and such like.  They had their personal problems, their worries, their anxieties, their temptations, having to go back week after week, month after month, to the clinics in order to be kept going.
Then came the Civil War; and one of the first and most striking effects of that War was that it virtually emptied the psychological and psychiatric clinics.  These neurotic people were suddenly cured by a greater anxiety, the anxiety about their whole position, whether their homes would still be there, whether their husbands would still be alive, whether their children would be killed.  The greater anxieties got rid of the lesser ones.  In having to give attention to the bigger problem they forgot their own personal and somewhat petty problems.

How can Christians apply this?  Lloyd-Jones continues

A greater fear drives out lesser fears; and I am applying that principle to this whole question of prayer.  When you feel that you are in a kind of vortex, and you cannot forget yourslef; when you are sorry for yourself and feeling that you are having an unusually hard time with everything agaisnt you and it’s almost enough to drive you to despair, one of the best remedies is to sit down and say, “What about so-and-so?  What about this person, what about that person, what about Christians in other countries?”  Get down on your knees and pray for them, and you will soon get up finding that you have forgotten yourself.

Paul said to the Ephesians that we are to pray for “all the saints” in Eph 6:18.  One way to apply this would be to take on the burdens and anxieties of other saints and forget our own anxieties.  It appears that if Christians are to be anxious it should be anxiety for the advancement of the Kingdom of God.  Anxiety for the concerns of Christ is what we are to take on.  Praying for others will help our own anxieties.