Overcoming Stress

On Monday of this week, God placed a powerful word in my spirit to share this coming Sunday with my congregation.  The title of the message, “All Stressed Up and No Place to Go.”  The message gives direction on how to move past stress by focusing upon Matthew 6:25, 2 Corinthians 10:5, and Philippians 4:8.  As God was leading me through this message, it became so marvelously clear that the ability to overcome stress is not found in how you relate to stress or stressful situations.  Indeed, overcoming stress is experienced through your relationship with God.  Isaiah 26:3 gives three key points for us to follow to experience a peaceful mind and heart.  1 – Be completely committed to the Lord.  2 – Lean on Him, and 3 – Confidently Hope in Him.

Now, let’s fast forward to this morning as I prepared to write this encouragement to you.  I was simply awestruck as I read the following devotional from Oswald Chambers which so forcefully expressed this same thought.

Situations around you may be pressing in on you, but do not be dismayed!  I pray for you to know God’s “perfect and constant peace” as you rest in Him today.

-Pastor Gary

One Of God’s Great Don’ts  – Oswald Chambers

“Do not fret;  it leads only to evil doing.” Psalms 37:8

Fretting means getting out at elbows mentally or spiritually. It is one thing to say “Fret not,” but a very different thing to have such a disposition that you find yourself able not to fret. It sounds so easy to talk about “resting in the Lord” and “waiting patiently for Him” until the nest is upset – until we live, as so many are doing, in tumult and anguish, is it possible then to rest in the Lord? If this “don’t” does not work there, it will work nowhere. This “don’t” must work in days of perplexity as well as in days of peace, or it never will work. And if it will not work in your particular case, it will not work in anyone else’s case. Resting in the Lord does not depend on external circumstances at all, but on your relationship to God Himself.

Fussing always ends in sin. We imagine that a little anxiety and worry are an indication of how really wise we are; it is much more an indication of how really wicked we are. Fretting springs from a determination to get our own way. Our Lord never worried and He was never anxious, because He was not “out” to realize His own ideas; He was “out” to realize God’s ideas. Fretting is wicked if you are a child of God.

Have you been bolstering up that soul of yours with the idea that your circumstances are too much for God? Put all “supposing” on one side and dwell in the shadow of the Almighty. Deliberately tell God that you will not fret about that thing. All our fret and worry is caused by calculating without God.

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