Episode 26 - Anxiety the Killer | Heal the Root, Not Just the Symptoms

Anxiety the Killer | Heal the Root, Not Just the Symptoms

Is anxiety destroying your peace? You may be treating the symptom, not the cause.

In this deeply honest and spiritually rich conversation, Mark joins Tectonic Ministries to uncover how anxiety and depression are often surface-level symptoms of much deeper wounds—like bitterness, unforgiveness, and unresolved trauma. This episode walks you through how to identify the root of your pain and experience true healing through faith, forgiveness, and the power of Christ.

If you’ve tried everything to fix your anxiety but still feel stuck, this could be the breakthrough you’ve been searching for.

📖 Scriptures Referenced:

Luke 17:6 – Faith uproots deep-rooted bitterness

Luke 2:52 – Jesus grew in wisdom and favor

Matthew 5 – The spiritually humble are blessed

Romans 16:20 – God’s peace will crush Satan

Philippians 4:6–8 – Be anxious for nothing; peace comes through prayer

Matthew 10:30 – God knows every detail about you

2 Corinthians 11:3 – Don’t be deceived from the simplicity of Christ

Isaiah 26:3 – Perfect peace comes to those who trust God

Galatians 2:20 – Crucified with Christ, living by His faith

Romans 3:23 – All have sinned and fall short of God’s glory

👉 Subscribe for more truth-filled conversations

Explore more about Mark’s ministry:
🔗 https://gamechangerintensive.com.au/

"Follow us for more discussions on faith, scripture, and prophecy.
https://tectonicministries.com/

Transcript

(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)

Anxiety is a symptom, isn't it, of something that's much deeper and much that's happening with inside of us, and depression becomes a symptom, something that's gone horribly wrong. It took me a long time to actually forgive my father, and then the Lord led me down this track. I needed to go to the cause, the word cause, of something.

When Jesus released me from that, I then found this incredible love for my father. The saying that if you let this bitterness get the better of you, it's going to be the death of you. And it had a very complex root system, and that's what, you know, bitterness is.

It really just gets its roots deep down in the part of our core. We can't seem to let it go. So, giving people, you say, I want to deal with the root cause of this here.

And what they don't even realise, they think it's the cause, they think this is the whole thing, not looking back on where you will take things to, I mean, what's really going on in your life? Hello, and welcome back to Tectonic Ministries. We're back here again with Mark, talking about some of the mental issues that plague us in today's society. It's a little bit of a different topic to what we've been speaking about previously, but poignant, very, very relevant nonetheless.

We've been speaking about, obviously, anxiety and depression and all the sorts of things that can cause that, and how to start dealing with that. And I was actually going to, we ran out of time in the last one, I was going to turn and ask if you had any questions, because you were being awfully quiet. So, I'm actually going to hand straight over to Dan, because he has got a little list of questions here, which I think would be great to start covering off with Mark.

Thanks, Isaac. Mark, a couple of the things, as I'm hearing you speak, and what you're addressing, which I think is ultra-importance in, I suppose, the medical world and the psychological world is now starting to discover as well, is for so many years, we've dealt with the symptoms. And so, if we've got a headache, someone gives us a headache, a tablet for a headache, they don't ask what's causing the headache.

So, what you're talking about is you're actually going to the cause. So, anxiety is a symptom, isn't it, of something that's much deeper and much that's happening with inside of us. And depression becomes a symptom of something that's gone horribly wrong.

So, I'd love to hear your thoughts more on that. The other, something that I struggled with personally, because I came from a very similar background to you. My father, I found great difficulty forgiving him for the way that he raised us, I was basically raised like a slave.

I was put to work when I was 10 and was woken up at 4 o'clock every morning and just worked and worked and worked and just treated this way. This is not stacking shelves in Woolworths either. This is training racehorses.

So, crack a dawn out in the cold. Yeah, hard work, until your fingers bleed, kind of. It was, where you actually, one of the places I rode track work was at a place called Cunabarabran, which is, if we know in Australia, it's a very cold place, Cunabarabran, and you'd ride a horse, you'd ride this horse track work and your hands would be frozen to the reins and your knuckles would split and bleed and you just, you couldn't take your hands off the reins, you'd take your hands off the horse's head and go and stand beside the fire so your hands could throw out, so you could get back on the next horse, you know, but I don't want to go into too much of that.

But it took me a long time to actually forgive my father. And then the Lord led me down this track. Again, what you're talking about, I needed to go to the cause, the root cause of something.

OK, it was terrible, it was horrible. But when Jesus released me from that, I then found this incredible love for my father and understanding that he really knew no better. He just, that was my tool, my instrument at that time.

I just used it and not to talk too much about what happened with me, but I'd love to hear just that forgiveness as well, because I think that is such a big key. And I'm sure you'll talk about that, but it's such a big key to getting released yourself. If you're forgiveness, unforgiveness is a real prison as well.

And it just eats away at you. So that and I love what you said, like Oswald Chambers captured that. Look, I'm not a body with a spirit.

I'm actually a spirit that has a body. And we forget that. We live in this body.

99% of our thoughts and everything are on our bodies, where we give so little thought to our spirit, which could be this shriveled up beam that's dying and dead. And so, yeah, Mark, I'd just love to hear you talk more on the cause, the root causes, and then also I'd love to talk a little bit about forgiveness, that would be lovely. Yeah, thanks, Dan.

To answer the question as simply as I can, I think what hurts us the most is what we value the most. So some people won't grieve over losing a lost one because that person didn't mean much to them. But we all need a big person.

And we look to them, we rely on them, we receive from them. And so when they hurt us, it becomes very personal. And anything that's personal becomes very painful.

So the injustice of what someone does to us, and we don't know what to do with what we feel about what they've done, now becomes my problem. Your bad behaviour has now become my bad issue. And the blame that you want to place on someone else for what they've done for you is vengeful in nature.

So for me, I think the best way that I can say that I've been able to forgive is to deal with my memories and understand that like Jesus said on the cross, forgive them for they don't know what they're doing. Some people in our lives don't even know what they're doing. They don't even know why they're doing it.

They actually just dump on us their own pain. So they're handing on the pain. So when it comes to forgiveness, I would say that if you take things personally and you're not able to process that, I don't think deep down you're able to forgive because you're always based on how you feel.

Whenever you're triggered by that person's name, it comes with an emotion, which means I hate that person. I've judged that person. I don't trust that person.

So I think the difference is forgiving is different from trusting. You know, I can forgive you. Now I looked up in the dictionary one day, what does forgive mean? And it means stop blaming.

So that to me was the indication whether I had forgiven someone or I was still holding on to the offence. I could gauge where I was on the forgiveness continuum. So if someone's name was brought up and I could feel something, but I don't indulge it, I don't give myself to it, I've decided that it's best left at the cross.

Christ forgave me of my debt. Who am I to hold their debt against them? That was the beginning phases, but there was a teaching too by Rick Renner and he taught about Luke chapter 17 verse six in the King James version. And Jesus said, whoever says to this sycamore tree, be uprooted and cast into the sea.

So he's talking about having faith. So we read that verse, but we don't know contextually what he's actually speaking to. So a sycamore tree is similar to the molar gryphic tree.

But the difference is the sycamore tree is producing bitter fruit, whereas the molar gryphic produces beautiful sweet fruit. So the teaching around it really shifted my focus. So basically what happens is the sycamore tree only grew in valleys and it grew so ferociously that it was the preferred wood for caskets and coffins.

So what's the moral of the story? Jesus is saying that if you let this bitterness get the better of you, it's going to be the death of you. And it had a very complex root system. So it was so complex, the root system.

And that's what bitterness is. It really just gets its roots deep down in the part of our core. We can't seem to let it go.

And I think that's one of the key components to forgiveness is learning to let it go. Let go and let God. Get God's perspective on it more than your own perspective on it.

So when his belief system start penetrating into your spirit then your spirit becomes free of your own belief system. So that's why that transformation process is important to becoming more like Christ. So the third thing is that the fruit, the sycamore fruit was only eaten by poor people because they couldn't afford the molligrapheke.

So what the story is saying here is that when we stay bitter, we become not poor spiritually as Matthew five talks about because that means poor in pride, but we become poor spiritually and it affects us in maladaptive ways. But the fourth one was the can opener for me and it was a wasp would actually sting the heart of the fruit because it wouldn't actually pollinate. So the wasp sting would sting the fruit and then it would pollinate.

And that's what really bitterness and offense does. It gets you stuck on the pain, the injustice being victimized and I don't have any power and you took my power and look what you've done to me, you've abused my rights. So I think that's what I've done.

I've learned to take ownership for my life and realize I can become a big person and stop staying a small person. How did you forgive people? I become a bigger person. I didn't allow everyone else to define me.

I began to define my life by the truth. So my worth and value is not in your hands or anyone else for that matter. Therefore, what you say about me is not as important as what God says about me.

And so I would go and reassure myself and tell myself the truth in love. And I found that my spirit was building resilience. My spirit was becoming more like Christ because even here in Luke 2.52, he grew in wisdom, stature and favor with God and with man.

And I think half the reason that we're not growing in favor with man is because we've got these issues that we're not willing to deal with. It leaves a bitter taste in our mouth. It talks about bitterness, defiling many.

So I would say forgiveness in a nutshell is learning not to blame. And accepting that they were human, they were flawed, they were sinners, they made mistakes. I can't change it, but I can change if I place my life in the hands of my maker.

And ultimately, justice is his. He's the God of justice. He will reward each one according to their works.

I go to that a lot. He will reward them. No one's getting away with anything.

Yeah, I find that's one of the most beautiful things about the Christian faith and the truth in Christianity is that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And so we're all on a level playing field. So then I can sit here and say, Mark, you rotten pig, look at what you've done to me.

And you go, yeah, well, you've probably done just as bad, if not worse, to anyone else. You go, oh, okay, yeah, fair enough. Puts us all on that level playing field.

And like you're saying, it's up to us to be in communion with God and just deal with it with God. It's for us to just be in the truth of who he's made us to be. Everyone else is gonna make their mistakes.

We're gonna let that go because we can be judged on anything that we've done just as much as the next guy. And forgiveness releases you. So they say, you know, business is like drinking a bottle of poison and expecting a person to die.

So it's just learning that I'm freeing myself by, for example, bless those who curse you. Do you know what I've found? If you get upset about people cursing, you get more upset. So what do you do with it? You're blessing, I don't wanna bless them.

I actually did that to someone. I did that to someone in the car one time. I have this pet peeve.

It's like it sets off something in me when someone's sitting in the right lane. So for anyone overseas, it would be the left lane for you. So the fast lane, anyone sitting in the fast lane, there's no one beside them and I'm coming up behind them and I need to get past and they refuse to pull over.

Quick tap on the horn. And this guy just threw up the middle finger just instantly and I just went, oh, you're the one in the wrong. And I was like, come on buddy, just a quick tap, come on, move over.

He eventually moved over, slammed on his brakes and he's like out the window at me. And I just went, oink, thumbs up and a big smile. I felt great afterwards and he just got more infuriated.

And it just so happened that I was on my way to church. So I was like, I'm glad that I did throw up the thumb and give him a smile because now I can come and just enjoy the rest of my day and the poor guy in his angst and whatever else has to stew in it for the rest of the day. But victim is a big part of being able to let go.

Got to get out of the victim state. For me, I'm helpless, powerless. What happened to me? No one understands, that is the worst place to go.

This again, ties back into what we were speaking about earlier with this, the Marxist worldview, this oppressor and oppressed. And everyone's trying to find how, well, we can't, if that's all the world is, oppressor and oppressed, then well, you don't wanna be the oppressor. So I must be oppressed.

I must find a way to find that I am the victim. I must find some reason that someone's done me wrong because then if someone's done me wrong, well, I can't be the bad guy. Whereas again, coming back to what we look at in scripture is that no, no, all have sinned.

We all need to just stand before God and just ask for his forgiveness. That's what it comes to. 100%.

I believe Satan wants you to be stuck in unforgiveness. So you say, well, why is it so difficult? Because I believe Satan is the instigator. He incites memories, thoughts, impressions to keep you in bondage.

Because God says, do not forgive them. I will not forgive you. You didn't say, I'll change my mind.

Let me think about it. I said, I'll wait to give you if you don't forgive them. That's a good enough reason for me.

And if you love Jesus, you really love God? Okay, I'll trust your word over my experience. Like you said earlier, if Christ living the perfect blameless sinless life can be on the cross, suffering the agony of crucifixion, can say, Father forgive them, all the more so we should be able to in our petty, whatever it is that. And then obviously not everything we go through is petty.

Some things are big, some things are very heavy and they hurt a lot. But if Christ in that position can say, Father forgive them, then surely we can too. Dan, was there anything else that you wanted to ask Mark on this one? Did you have it? No, I loved what I said at the start.

I'd love to hear Mark's almost bullet point on so anxiety, symptom, cause. There's symptom, cause. I think that would be for viewers, particularly going forward because a lot of people will come either to our website or your website with questions and be able to give them, you know, I love simplicity.

And it's okay, if I can, if I've got this symptom in my life of what's happening in my life, instead of me trying to deal with that all the time because I'm never gonna solve the problem, I'm just gonna put a band-aid over this thing. And this is what you're doing, Mark. You're actually giving people, you're saying, no, I want to deal with the root cause of this here.

So I'd love to see something as we continue and get you on and do podcasts with you. Those simple points of reference people can go to and they can come to you and again, get onto your website and that looks like, I've got this, and what they don't even realise, they think it's the cause. They think this is the whole thing, not looking back and where you will take them is to hang on, what's really going on in your life that this symptom is manifesting, you know? So I'd love to sort of hear more of that from you and I'm sure people watching would again, would love the same sort of thing because how many symptoms are there? Like a million of what's going wrong in life and everything like that.

And everyone's looking to try and how to fix it, you know? Like the root cause of why there's no peace on the earth is very, very simple, you know? And everyone's wanting an answer for peace and then we keep throwing the Prince of Peace out the door and out of our church and out of our life and out of our countries and out of our families and all that and you go, well, but you want peace, you know? So instead of looking at Jesus Christ as the Prince of Peace, we put him in, all these other symptoms, warfare goes and all of that, you imagine if they just, the two sides in any conflict said, well, let's just seek Jesus Christ about this. There'd be no such thing as war. We talked a little bit about this before so I love your way of doing that, getting to the core.

So I don't know, you know, we've got another few minutes and then we'll wind this one up and I'd love to over the time, you know, have that as a, yeah. Yeah, no, it's wonderful and I think just in wrapping up, you know, it's been the Garden of Eden issue right from the get-go. You look at today and think it's got to do with everything today.

Actually, it's got everything to do with the Garden. So Satan deceived Eve and we know it was in her mind because 2 Corinthians 11.3 says, I feel as somehow as the certain deceived Eve in her mind that you'd be deceived from the simplicity that's in Christ. So I think, you know, when you look at Isaiah 26.3, it says those who keep their mind on him will be in perfect peace.

Why that's important because you talked about warfare, you talked about all these different things that we're focused on and I think that's the point. We're not going to the Prince of Peace. We're actually so focused on principalities and powers, not realizing that the Prince of Peace is superior to principalities and powers, that no one's ever really made that connection.

We think power when we think principalities and powers, but we never think Prince of Peace. We think, you know, it's peace, love and mung beans and here's Jesus, the Prince of Peace floating on the clouds. No, he is extremely threatening to Satan.

Like look at Romans 16.20, it says, the peace of God will come shortly and crush Satan. What, the peace is going to crush him? Yeah, so when you look at, say, Philippians, and I'll finish here, chapter four, verse six, and it goes on, it says, don't be anxious about anything, which is not a suggestion, but in everything, we're praying this obligation. Now, where we've got to get this correct and this is the missing link as to why we're not feeling peace after we're being anxious and talking to God about what's going on is because we're not detailed enough.

Oh, God doesn't need the details. Yes, he does. God's into the details.

It says that he knows whenever he falls from your head. I know, right? So that's important. I wasn't looking at you, Dan.

Sorry, I was just triggered, but. So, yeah, I think that's in Matthew chapter 10, verse 30. So when we look at this, it means detailed prayer.

I know you're anxious, Mark. What are you anxious about? You need to get specific with me because how I meant to connect with you and you with me unless we're talking about really what's going on, getting beneath the surface. And then it talks about the peace of God which surpasses our understanding.

It means over, above, and beyond. It's way beyond our understanding. And that has the power to guard our mind in the heart and Christ Jesus.

Now, this word peace changed my life because it changed my whole concept about what am I really aiming for in this relationship with Jesus? And now it's peace. Look at any conflict, doesn't matter what it is. The goal is peace.

So that word peace there is a Greek word, irini. It means, one of the meanings is cessation of war. Because what we're teaching people is in verse eight, whatever's true, pure, lovely, good report, virtuous and praiseworthy, meditate on those things.

We're actually putting the cart before the horse. We're teaching people to think on positive things but they're not dealing with the anxious things first. They're not getting themselves in a place of peace where the war can cease so they can start thinking the way God wants them to think.

That is the missing link. Because I've never met an anxious, overwhelmed person to think on whatever's true. If you are, love you, I've got good report versus praiseworthy.

I've never seen it. Have you? What they do is they catastrophize, they exaggerate, they make a mountain out of a molehill. The whole world's going to fall apart.

Everything's going bad. Oh, well, it was us. But there's no sense of thinking on things above.

Peace will cause you to think on the right things. Anxiety won't. That's, I think that's a great place to wrap it up.

I'll actually just, I think one of the great ways in which you can actually have that peace. May grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord. So in the knowledge, in the true and right understanding of Jesus, grace and peace can be multiplied unto you.

So it's in that relationship with Christ that we can experience true peace. 100%. And that grace is undeserved, unmerited.

There's nothing we can do to earn that. It's just relationship with and knowledge of Jesus Christ. Yeah, I say in my book, it's either anxiety or the almighty.

Which one would it be? You want to go to the all grand great anxiety or do you want to go to the almighty? Oh, should I? Is it the great I am or the great how I feel? Yeah, the great am I. Yeah. Great am I. Can I just share one thought on this on the I? Yes, yes. Look at this.

What's the middle letter of anxiety? I. That's the problem. I'm in the middle of it all. Middle letter of pride? I, middle letter of sin? I, middle letter of Lucifer? And I will be lifted up five times.

It's all about I. That's why Galatians 2.20. I, that's what Paul said. My importance, my worth, my value in this world, I am crucified with Christ. It is no longer I, the ego that lives, but now I live for Christ.

And the life that I live for, I live by the faith of the Son of God. It changes from I, my importance, to how important it is. No, I don't.

Amen. That's over there. Thanks for joining us.

Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks, Mark.

May it please you. No worries. Expect it again soon.

See ya.

(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)