What Does God Say About Stress?

Sunday, July 18, 2004 at 9:30 A.M.

Pastor Ron Burcham

Typed from audio transcript

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

This past week, I was feeling a little bit anxious about the sermon, a little bit stressful. So I thought maybe I'd get some help. I went to Goggle.com and I just typed in stress. I had 20 million pages to choose from to write about stress. Well, that's no good. I was starting to get a little upset about that. How could I even get through maybe 10 million pages before this week, so I thought maybe I'd just read a good book on stress. So I went to Amazon.com and I typed in stress and thought maybe that would help me there. There are 117,000 titles at Amazon.com dealing with stress. Now I'm starting to get really anxious about all this. Maybe I could get through one book but 117,000? I know, I'll whittle it down. Stress management, subcategory. Punched on that subcategory. There are 78,000 books on stress management on Amazon.com.

If there is one thing I learned from my little adventure, stress is a part of our society and it is a major part of our lives. Countless studies have been done about the effects of stress, about what causes stress, about how it affects us mentally, physically, spiritually. All kinds of talk around the workforce about stress and how do we relieve stress. Research has shown to us that more and more people are affected by it and younger and younger people are being affected by stress. Our adolescents and our teenagers are more affected by stress than they ever were before. Of course, that means double trouble for them, because they don't have the maturity to know how to handle that stress so they end up acting out in inappropriate ways. We don't need to even begin to talk about the physical ill effects of stress and what it has to do on us. I read one place that five billion tranquilizers are prescribed each year because of stress. One hundred and sixteen thousand tons of aspirin are consumed in North America because of stress. And some studies would even suggest that upwards to 60% of the visits to the doctor can be traced back to stress.

Stress has become so prevalent in our society that it's almost as if we expect it and we accept it. But one quick look at God's Word and we find out that God does not accept stress. God never intended for us to be anxious, for us to be full of worry, for us to be stressed out. When we ask the question of God's Word, “God, what do you say about stress?” we find out that God actually has quite a bit that He says to us. Jesus, just a few moments ago was read to us, did a long dissertation about how we shouldn't worry, that our Father in heaven takes care of us. Peter, in addressing his first letter, talks about, “Cast all your anxieties upon God.” Paul talks about stress. All places in scripture have to deal with anxiety, worry, stress.

Well, at the risk of being too simplistic, I'd like to summarize all of it in this statement, “What does God say about stress? God says it's not about you. It's about Him.” It's not all about you, but it's all about Him. It's not about you. It's about Him. It's not about how much you can handle, but it's about how much God can handle. If there's one thing I've learned, when I start getting anxious and when I start getting stressed, all of a sudden I decide it's my job to carry the weight of the entire world upon my shoulders and no one else is around to help me. I think something that happens when we start getting stressed is, all of a sudden, our thinking becomes distorted. And all of a sudden we start suffering from this “me, myself, and I syndrome.” And what I mean by that is that it's all up to you to handle everything. It's all on your shoulders. And so you start asking the inappropriate question. You start asking, “How in the world am I going to get everything done? How in the world am I going to get the kids to every place they need to be, also get the groceries bought, also clean the house, and also, by the way, work a full-time job? How am I going to get the big project done? How am I going to be able to travel out of town and yet still make it over to the commitment I had in the community and still get to church on Sunday morning? How am I going to do everything that has to be done?” Our thinking becomes distorted, almost irrational at times. We say to ourselves, “If I don't do it, it won't get done.” Or better yet, “If I don't do it, it won't get done right.” Then we start saying to ourself, “Why doesn't anyone else care about this project I'm worrying about? Why am I the only one who's working on it?” The me, myself, and I syndrome. All of a sudden, you have the weight of the world on your shoulders, and there's only one person who can accomplish it all and that's you. So it's up to you to figure out how you're going to do it. It's up to you to carry the load. It's up to you to get everything done. That's when stress goes right out the roof.

God says it's not about you. It's about Him. It's not about what you can accomplish. It's about what God can accomplish. Peter, in his first letter, says, “Humble yourselves, therefore, before God and wait for Him to lift you up.” Humble yourselves before God. Humble yourselves in the admission that you can't do it all, to freely admit you cannot handle everything in life because that's not how God intended it. God did not intend for you to carry the weight of the world on your shoulders. God intended that He would walk beside you every step along the way. The question is not, “What can you handle?” but “What can God handle?” And that calls upon us to humble ourselves before God and to admit to Him we can't do it all. We are dependent upon Him, His strength, and His power in our lives. It's the same thing as when we're dealing with God in our relationship with Him. In our relationship with God, you know we're lost. We cannot please God on our own. We all are aware of the fact that we cannot make up for the sins we have done, that we can't somehow earn God's favor and that's why, in His book Ephesians 2, He says to us, “How are you saved? It's by grace that you've been saved through faith.” This is not something you've done, scripture says, it's a gift from God. We know salvation is God's gift to us because we can't save ourselves. We're unable to do that, so God gives it to us. In the same way, God says, “You can't handle life on your own and why would you want to?” It's not about what you can handle. It's about what God can handle.

So Peter says, “Cast all your anxieties on Him. Put the weight of the world off your shoulders and onto God's shoulders.” Instead of asking, “How am I going to get all this done?” look up to heaven and say, “God, how are you going to do this one?” How is God going to accomplish it? Who is God going to bring into my life to help me carry this load? What skills is God going to equip me with so I can get everything done? What insight is God going to give me so, as I look at the list of all the things I have to do, I have the discernment to say, “You know what, this one's unimportant and so is this one and so is this one and so is this one. Now that's what I'm supposed to do.” It's not about you. It's about God. It's not about what you can handle. It's about what God can handle.

It's not about your plans. It's about God's plans. You see, it's not about you. It's about God. And it's not about the plans you have for your life, but it's about the plans God has for your life. To me, the Number 2 stressor in life is when things don't go the way I want them to go. I have plans. I have ambitions. I have things all set out on how I'd like my life to go, thank you very much. And if things don't happen according to my plan, I tend to get a little bit upset. In fact, I tend to get a little bit stressed. In fact, I think all of us have plans, have ambitions. We have sort of set out that this is the path we're going to follow. And as soon as things start going south, as soon as things don't start going according to our plan, what's our first reaction? Well, we just sit back and accept that, don't we? No. We hold on even tighter. We grab onto it even more. All of a sudden, we just become more resolute in our conviction. Things will happen the way I want to see them happen. And we work harder and we think about it more and pretty soon we're asking ourselves, “Now how in the world am I going to get this thing back on track?” As soon as we start sensing we're losing control and things aren't going the way we want to, we hold on and try to gain even greater control. And the more we try to control life, the less we're able. And our stress just skyrockets because things aren't going the way we want them to go. And we can't make them go the way we want them to go.

But it's not about you. It's about God. It's not about your plans. It's about God's plans. Peter, when he was writing this first letter, seems like he jumps subjects in the next paragraph. And he says to them, “You know about your brothers who are suffering all kinds of trials and temptations, so why are you worried about these things?” What he's saying is, “Why are you surprised when things don't happen according to your plans?” God has never promised life would be wonderful and rosy from beginning to end. In fact, God has gone to great lengths in His book to tell you things are not going to go according to plan. God has taken a lot of effort to show you that, because we live in a fallen world and we live in a sinful world, things will not always go right. In fact, He says things will go so bad sometimes that it is going to cause you a lot of pain and a lot of consternation. So why are you surprised when things go south? Peter is saying in his letter if you're throwing a pity party for yourself, put away the decorations because I don't want to hear about it. Why are you surprised when things don't go the way you want them to go? God never promised that. What God did promise, though, is that He had plans for you. Through the prophet Jeremiah, He says, “I know the plans I have for you.” Speaking through Paul to the Church at Romans 8, He says, “For all things work together for the good of those who love him.”

Plans don't always happen the way we want them to. In fact, sometimes plans don't happen the way God wants them to because God doesn't like it when pain comes into your life. God doesn't like it when things go south and your life falls apart. But what God has promised is that He'll even take the worst circumstance and turn it around to be the best thing that ever happened to you. What God says is that He has a plan for your life and He'll use the good things in your life and He'll use the bad things in your life. He'll use everything in your life to accomplish that plan. You want to reduce stress in your life, turn it over to God. Realize it's not your plans but it's God's plans and learn to accept that when things start going to the right or to the left maybe this is where God is leading you. This is where God wants to take you. It's not your plans. It's His plans. It's not all about you. It's about Him. And it's not about your priorities, but it's about His priorities.

We get ourselves into trouble when we start putting our own priorities in place. We start listening to the world and society around us, and we let them set the agenda for us. We let the world set the priorities for us. Well, the priorities of the world are power, money, strength. That's what its priorities are. So the priorities of the world are that you have to get a job that's going to make you a lot of money and you have to make sure you make even more money than that so you can live in the house you want to live in, you can buy the clothes you want to buy, you can drive the cars you want to drive, and you can go on vacations where you want to go. All of a sudden, your priorities are all skewed. Your priority now is to make sure you are dressed in the proper way so you look cool with everyone else, to make sure you're driving the proper car so you fit in when you pull into the parking lot at work, to make sure you're climbing the corporate ladder so you can get a better position and you can make more money. Now don't get me wrong. I'm not saying you should walk around in rags and you should drive an old, beat-up car. But where is the priority? If you let the world set the agenda, you'll be stressed to the max because you're going to scratch and claw and try to get after things.

And once you attain it, you'll find out there's something else. You'll go off and you'll buy yourself a big SUV and then all of a sudden a Hummer will come by. And you'll say, “Gee, I want one of those.” And then you'll buy yourself an H2 and all of a sudden you say, “Well, gee, I want to full-sized one.” Where you go from there, I don't know. There's always something more. God says it's not your priorities. It's His priorities. Jesus said, “Seek first His kingdom and His righteousness and the rest will be added to you.” Your Father knows you need clothes. He knows you need a car. You need a home to live in. He even knows you'd like a nice car and a nice home. And most of us live in nice homes and drive nice cars. But that's not the priority. The priority is our relationship with God, our relationship with God the Father and His Son, Jesus. And when that relationship is Number 1, then that relationship sets the agenda for the rest of our lives and it sets the rest of the priorities for us. That's a life free of stress and worry because that's God's priorities, not my priorities.

You know, it's pretty easy for me to stand up here and talk about stress, talk about how you should be stress free. Well, just don't talk to my family because this boy ain't stress free. And it's real easy for you to listen to me for about 15 minutes about stress and say, “Well, okay, maybe that makes sense.” But you know, by this afternoon you may have forgotten everything I've said. If you forget everything else, maybe you can remember one thing, so when you walk into work tomorrow morning or you get up and you're trying to take care of all the kids and all of a sudden the tension level starts to rise, just remember one thing. It's not about me. It's about Him. Amen.

Copyright 2004 Gloria Dei Lutheran Church