Thank God For Stress – Part One
Jesus said don’t “have an anxious mind.” (Luke 12: 29)
Is that your personal profile? Does the concept of an anxious mind describe you? Are you stressed out?
If so, welcome to the human race, where everyone seems to lose. Speaking here in America, the Director of the National Institute of Mental Health of England said, “The whole Western world is under stress. It is one of the fastest growing diseases in the world.”
In studies made by the American Academy of Family Practitioners done over the last ten years, they concluded that two-thirds of all patients seen by general practitioners have problems that are stress-related.
Stress is a good God-given ability. Normal stress is motivating. It is a stimulus. If it were not for stress your heart wouldn’t keep beating overnight. You wouldn’t even wake up in the morning. Stress does that.
Dr. Hans Selye, director of the Institute of Experimental Medicine and Surgery at the University of Montreal and the father of some of the most extensive research on stress said: “Stress is the spice of life.” Stress is what keeps your heart beating, your lungs breathing, and your stomach digesting while you sleep. He adds, “Complete freedom from stress is death.”
Stress is good. It becomes bad when it develops into distress. The load in life is good. It is the overload that is bad. The overload can cause anxiety, depression, migraine headaches, peptic ulcers, strokes, and heart attacks.
Rudyard Kipling wrote about the ship “Dimbula.” Kipling wrote as though the ship were alive and had a personality. After 16 days of a stormy voyage this statement was made by Dimbula, “Now we have a great ship.”
“My master has taken me through the rough spots in which everything seemed to be coming apart, and I have become what I have been made to be.” This conclusion follows.
“Because I have a master, I am a ship.”
When you have Jesus as your Master and obey Him then and only then you can become the ship you were made to be. In dealing with stress remember:
“Consider the ravens, for they neither sow nor reap, which have neither storehouse nor barn; and God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds?” (Luke 12:24)
“If then God so clothes the grass, which today is in the field and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will He clothe you, O you of little faith?” (Luke 12:28)
“Therefore, we do not lose heart. Even though our outward man is perishing, yet the inward man is being renewed day by day.” (Vs. 16)
The Psalmist said it well: “He restores my soul…”
We often need God to bring back the springtime to our souls.
Pause and acknowledge your stress to the Lord, and ask for His renewal.