Stress Management – Part One

Luke 12: 22 – 29

Jesus said don’t “have an anxious mind” (Luke 12: 29).

Is that your personal profile?  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.”

We must learn to live with it. Fortunately we can.

If you can’t flee it or fight it you must learn to flow with it.

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.

It is essential to know how to handle stress.

Jesus said, “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).

Rudyard Kipling in writing about the ship “Dimbula.” Kipling wrote as though the ship had a personality. After 16 days of a stormy voyage this statement was made by “Dimbula” observed, “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. Then you can enjoy the benefits of stress while evading the distress.

Physically Jesus calmed the storm for His disciples. He can oo the same for you. He said don’t “have an anxious mind”(Luke 12: 29).