Hi, my name is Angie. I am a wife and a mother of four here in Dallas, Texas. I've been a ministry partner with Desiring God for a year and a half. You are listening to the Ask Pastor John podcast with Jon Piper. We're going to talk more with Angie in a moment, but first up, today's episode.

Today's question comes to us from an anonymous young woman. Pastor John, I thoroughly enjoy listening to these podcasts and find them exceptionally helpful for dealing with life's challenges. My challenge is anxiety at work. I work in medicine. For some time, from school until now early in my career, I think I suffer from imposter syndrome, a phenomenon that commonly affects professionals, often females, with tendencies to be perfectionists, leading them to think they're a fraud at their job, not good enough, and any success is theirs by chance.

I don't trust my own talents and skills. Because of this, I experience significant anxiety before and during work to the extent that I feel like I need to quit. This is really affecting my mental health, not because I don't enjoy my job. I do. I pray to overcome this, asking for help and for healing.

Do you have any thoughts? Also, I recently came across a coach who specializes in imposter syndrome, and she overcame it herself. Would it be wrong for me to seek help from a non-Christian coach? I'm going to save that last part of the question for another time, because the more I thought about what she's dealing with, that's what I feel like I need to address here.

We can take up the issue of the proper or not proper use of secular counseling later. So here's the four traits that I see in her life that need a biblical perspective. Perfectionistic tendencies, a sense that really when she's competent at work, she's a fraud, she's an imposter. Third, her successes and competencies really are just owing to luck.

And fourth, anxiety that comes from all of this. So let me give what I see as a biblical perspective on those four traits of her experience and hope that this biblical perspective on each of these will bring some measure of liberation from a life of illusion. I would call the imposter syndrome a kind of professional anorexia.

In other words, what anorexia is to the body, the imposter syndrome is to your competence. With anorexia, a 90-pound, 80-pound, 25-year-old woman, might be a man, but it's almost always women, stands in front of a mirror and sees an overweight woman. With the imposter syndrome, a competent, successful, responsible, helpful person stands in front of the mirror and sees an incompetent, irresponsible, unhelpful, fraudulent employee.

The challenge in both cases is to overcome the illusions and live in reality with Jesus Christ at the center. So first, perfectionistic tendencies. Very often at the root of the felt need to always do better and to do more is the deep uncertainty of being loved and accepted and approved most deeply by God, but also by other significant people in our lives, like parents or friends or supervisors.

Now, the biblical response to such drive toward doing more, doing better, being perfect is not to discourage people from the pursuit of excellence, but to turn everything upside down. In other words, apart from Christ and his salvation and grace and friendship and forgiveness and acceptance, apart from Christ, we are constantly striving toward love, toward acceptance, toward forgiveness.

The gospel turns that upside down and puts acceptance and love at the bottom, from which we can then strive for excellence without the burden of "I've got to prove myself in order to get myself loved." By grace alone, through faith alone, on the basis of the work of Christ alone, we stand on the glorious rock of the forgiveness of our sins, our acceptance with God, the removal of our guilt, the canceling of our debts, all of it rooted in the love of God who chose us for himself before the foundation of the world.

That's where life and every day starts. And then there is, of course, varying degrees of passion for achievement and excellence, but we don't pursue it in order to get accepted or in order to get forgiven or in order to get love. So I would encourage and urge our friend to step back and make sure that she has a true and real and wonderful and restful and sweet grasp of the gospel of Jesus, what he did for her on the cross, what her salvation is by grace through faith.

Oh, it's a very, very liberating thing to realize I can still pursue excellence and yet not be strangled and anxious because of all the insecurity and fear that I can't do enough to be loved. Life has been turned upside down. It's been turned on its head. I'm free. So that's the biblical perspective on perfectionism.

Second, she refers to a sense that she may be a fraud, a fraud at work rather than truly competent, truly responsible and helpful. Well, here's what fraud means. Fraud is an intention to deceive a person or a group, usually for personal gain, which puts the other person at significant risk.

We don't call it fraud. When somebody thinks we have more competencies than we think we do, if we have no intention to deceive them and if there is no evidence that we lack competencies that they think we have. If you come into work every day with a goodwill, not a deceptive will, and at the end of the day you are perceived as competent, responsible and helpful because there's been no evidence to the contrary, you're not a fraud, no matter what your feelings are.

Number three, she says that people with this imposter syndrome are prone to chalk up their competencies and responsibility and helpfulness to luck. Now, the most natural response to this is to call it irrational, which it is. You go to work every day, week after week, month after month, year after year, and always perform at a level of competence and responsibility that causes your supervisors to approve.

And your mind says that those several thousand moments of competency were strokes of luck. You never had a bad hand in 3000 games of poker. That's irrational. But all destructive syndromes are irrational. So what good does it do to say that? She knows it's irrational. So here's an alternative to that response to this imposter syndrome and thinking, "Well, it's luck.

It's luck." I would suggest that you embrace this, think hard and long about it, and preach it to yourself. There is no such thing as luck, period. There is no such thing as luck. What the world calls luck is God's providence. So what you're dealing with is not several thousand professional instances of luck in which you lucked out and proved competent and responsible and helpful by accident.

That's not what's happening. There's no such thing as an accident or luck. God, not luck, brought about those thousands of moments of competency and responsibility and helpfulness. This is a pattern of divine sustaining, divine support, divine help, divine guidance, which bears all the marks of a calling, a vocation from God.

Therefore, when you wake up in the morning and you feel anxiety that your luck might run out today, one of the answers is to preach to yourself, "There's no such thing as luck. Stop thinking that way. It doesn't exist. God has sustained me in all these thousands of moments of competency that I've been calling luck.

God has sustained me, even if I am truly incompetent." I mean, imagine it. "Even if I am truly incompetent, truly irresponsible, truly unhelpful, God has chosen for thousands of opportunities to cause me to act as if I were competent and were helpful and were responsible, and he intends for me to see in this pattern a calling, a purpose, a design, because he's faithful.

It's not luck. It's God." So get up in the morning and say, "I will walk into this day not crossing my fingers that luck is going to run out or won't run out, but rejoicing, rejoicing in faith that my God is with me. He's faithful. He'll keep up his end of the calling." Which leads just to a brief statement about anxiety.

You can see the answer to anxiety is already built into the other three. Jesus said, "Do not be anxious," and then he gave eight reasons in Matthew 6, 25 to 34 for why not to be anxious. All of those reasons are rooted in this. Not that you are really competent.

That's not where they're rooted. They're rooted in this. You are of more value than the birds, and you are of more value than the lilies, and God is sovereign, and God is faithful. So good. Thank you, Pastor John. If you have an immediate question about Christians benefiting from non-Christian counselors and programs, we address that in episode 1435 of this podcast, talking there about AA in particular, but with relevance for many other areas.

Check out episode 1435 for more. Before we go, we're joined on the phone by my friend Angie, who lives in Dallas. You heard Angie's voice at the very beginning of this episode. Angie, thank you for your time. You're one of the precious saints who make this podcast possible, and it's an incredible honor for me to do this work, and I only get to do it because we have donors like you, Angie.

So thank you for making this podcast possible. Talk to us for a minute. What does this podcast in particular represent to you as a listener? The Ask Pastor John podcast, I think for me, has been an incredible daily opportunity to hear from Pastor John, literally, audibly, daily, however often, with moments of gospel-centered encouragement.

It's almost like a quick coffee with a dear friend that provides an opportunity to stir affections for Christ. And so in ten minutes, an opportunity to grow together and to grow in that affection for Christ. As a mom and a wife in the place that I'm at, and knowing how people listen to these podcasts and just in their car, in their carpool line, and just even as they're cleaning dishes in my sake, I respect that people listen, especially during these crazy days right now on so many levels.

I think it is just a constant encouragement to realize we have brothers and sisters who are helping to stir affections for Christ. So I just commend you guys on how steadfast and faithful and diligent you all are. I mean, every writer, every writer of articles, writer of books, we adore you all.

We are mutually thankful for each and every one of you. That's super encouraging. Thank you, Angie. Tell us a little bit more about your story and how you eventually became a ministry partner with us. Brad and I have been consumers, if you will, of Desiring God for about 20 years, meaning we first heard of Pastor John 20 years ago, the book Desiring God.

All that we learned about Pastor John kind of led us to the ministry of Desiring God. And with that, we consumed and were spectators and learners and listeners for years and years and years. And then about a year and a half ago, it dawned on us that we could take a next level step of becoming partners and really joining in, kind of taking more of a family ownership, if you will, of our relationship with the ministry and with everybody on staff with Desiring God.

And we really wanted that. Now that we had been partakers in so many ways for years, it felt like there was a missing step for us that just to complete that relationship and that partnership. And so it was a real natural desire of just wanting to jump in deeper in whatever capacity that we could.

And at that moment, it was to partner financially. But what it became more of for us was partnering relationally to journey together in a deeper way with Desiring God. Wow. We're so grateful to God for you and your husband. Thank you, Angie, for helping to make this podcast happen.

And if you're listening right now and you want to join Angie and become a ministry partner so we can make more DG resources and spread them all around the world, you can join us right now. Go to DesiringGod.org/donate. That's DesiringGod.org/donate. As we near the end of the year, we especially appreciate it if you want to join us, especially those of you who have never joined before.

I'm Tony Reinke. We will see you back here on Wednesday. Thanks for listening. © The Blue House of Congress 2016 The Blue House is a registered Trademark of U.S. Embassy in the Philippines.