When OCD Robs You of Your Peace

I clutched the pew in front of me for dear life. My knuckles were white and my heart was pounding. It was the last night of revival and the visiting preacher had already extended the altar call three times when he loudly declared, “If you can’t remember the moment you asked the Lord into your heart, then I don’t believe you are truly saved.”

A cold and terrifying sensation crawled from my feet, up my spine, to the top of my head, which was spinning. I was twelve years old and like a lot of kids who were raised in Christian families, I didn’t remember a time when I didn’t believe the gospel. I closed my eyes and scanned for the memory of the first time I asked Jesus into my heart, but I came up empty. Did this mean I wasn’t a Christian? Was the relationship I thought I had with Jesus a farce? It felt like the ground beneath me was crumbling. After the service, I knelt with my parents by their bedside and said the sinner’s prayer, just in case. But I was doubting my salvation again before the word “amen” even left my lips.

The incident triggered a long and difficult struggle with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, but it took many years to identify my doubts and futile attempts to quell them as a disorder. I, like many others, mistakenly thought OCD meant you liked things to be clean and organized. That definitely did not describe me. Rather than a proclivity toward tidiness, I learned through experience that OCD is an agonizing mental health disorder made up of obsessions (unwanted and repeated distressing thoughts) and compulsions the sufferer performs to alleviate their distress. OCD can attach itself to anything, and more often than not, it clings to what the sufferer holds dear. I loved Jesus fiercely, so it’s no wonder OCD latched itself onto my faith. For years I was tormented with an obsessive fear that I was not truly forgiven of my sins. I was a slave to compulsions, like saying the sinner’s prayer over and over again, excessive introspection, and hours upon hours of searching the internet for what it had to say about eternal security. 

There were many factors that kept me trapped for too long in the cycle of OCD. One of them was that I trusted my feelings more than I trusted the Bible. I treated my feelings as a gauge to let me know whether or not I was right with God. It didn’t matter to me that 1 John 1:9 says, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (ESV). I still felt stained by my sin and unrighteousness, so I would confess and confess—and confess again for good measure—until I felt right enough with God. But the feeling was fleeting, and soon I’d be riddled with guilt and frenetically ask for forgiveness again. By God’s grace, I eventually began to notice how constantly I teetered between peace and anxiety. Noticing my fluctuating feelings grew a healthy distrust in them and highlighted something that never changes: God’s Word.

Feelings are shaky. Uncertain. They change on a dime. Like the man in Matthew’s gospel who built his house on the sand, how foolish are we to build the house of our assurance on the shaky foundation of our ephemeral feelings. God’s Word is a much steadier foundation. Jesus tells us that heaven and earth will pass away but his words will not (Matthew 24:35). They are fixed. Final. They will endure forever. They are infinitely more trustworthy than our emotions. But we live in a “follow your heart” culture where how we feel is elevated to the utmost importance. It’s easy to operate as if we have no choice but to believe our feelings and to obey them without ever questioning whether or not we should.

We all struggle with the temptation to be controlled by our feelings. This is especially true for OCD sufferers. It can feel as if someone has hijacked our brains threatening us to do this compulsion now, or else! At the height of my struggle with OCD, my fears were intense. They were loud. They threw tantrums and begged for attention. They told me that if I didn’t say a prayer the right way or if I didn’t mean it enough, then I was doomed for hell and nothing was going to change that. But God’s Word said something different. It said that whoever believes in the Son has life (John 3:36). It said that no one can snatch God’s people from his hand (John 10:28). It said that I can know that I have eternal life (1 John 5:13) because my salvation is based on Jesus’s merits, not my own. He has become my righteousness (2 Corinthians 5:21). It is not easy to ignore the clamorous demands of OCD. But when I chose to listen to God’s Word instead of my fears screaming in the background, they finally began to subside, and I finally began to find peace. 

Interestingly enough, choosing to ignore the demands of fear to embrace objective truth accords with secular OCD therapies like Exposure and Response Prevention (ERP). ERP teaches OCD sufferers to resist compulsions when exposed to their fears. So when I feared that I was not saved, instead of giving in to the compulsion to say the sinner’s prayer, I would remember that my standing before God is dependent on Christ, not myself, and I would try to move on even if doing so made me feel reckless and in danger. This method of managing OCD gave much relief to Christendom’s most famous OCD sufferer, Martin Luther. In a letter written to a woman plagued with doubts about her standing before God, he wrote, 

[I]f there are such thoughts that come to your mind, and they bite you like fiery snakes, then don’t listen to your thoughts and do not look at the snakes, take your eyes away from them and look to the brazen serpent, that is: Christ surrendered for us.¹

Don’t try to reason with the fears OCD hurls at you. Do not make feelings the gauge that tells you where you stand with God. Feelings change and they lie. Instead, look to Christ. He never changes, and he cannot lie. Your standing before God is dependent upon him, not yourself. Do not ask, am I righteous enough? Have I done enough to merit God’s favor? Look to the perfect, righteous Son of God who lived, died, and rose on your behalf. He is our righteousness. And where do we learn these truths about Jesus? In God’s Word. 

Psalm 119:71 says, “It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I might learn your statutes.” OCD was (and sometimes still is) an excruciatingly painful affliction. It’s something I never would have chosen for myself. But God, in his all-wise sovereignty, brought it into my life for my good (Romans 8:28). We aren’t always privy to the good God promises to do in the lives of believers through the trials they walk through. But I can clearly see at least one good thing he did in me through OCD. OCD made me love God’s Word. It became my lifeline. When I couldn’t trust my feelings, I could trust Scripture, and I learned to cling to both it and its author for dear life. Scripture illuminated the truth of who God is and who I am in him. It shined through the darkness and gave me hope. I love the Bible and its author more because I suffered through OCD. 

Yes. It was good for me that I was afflicted. 

Reflection Questions

• What would it look like for you to believe Scripture over what you feel, especially if your feelings contradict what Scripture says?
• In what ways are you tempted to trust your feelings more than Scripture?

Notes

1. “A Letter Showing Martin Luther’s Compassionate Pastoral Heart,” World Reformed Fellowship (blog), August 8, 2016, https://wrf.global/blog/blog-2/history/prayer-showing-martin-luthers-compassionate-pastoral-heart. ↩︎

Photo credit: Emilee Carpenter

Andrea Mathews

Andrea Mathews teaches Spanish and English as a second language at a public high school in Western North Carolina. She is a member of Main Street Baptist Church in Hendersonville, NC where her husband serves as lead pastor. She’s pursuing an MA in ministry to women with biblical counseling at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. You can connect with her on Instagram.

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