Well, it seems like it's true for me that every time I prepare for a meditation, and I've heard other pastors say the same thing, that when they prepare for preaching of God's Word, that it seems like our attention, our senses, our heads are set in a special place because we're focused on what we're about to present. And that things happen to heighten those things in our lives. And our meditation this evening is on stress. And this morning started out with Priscilla, the Perez daughter, being sick. And our pianist wasn't able to come to church this morning. So all the music had to be changed. And the twinkling of an eye, so to speak, And we had all new music prepared and our sound team got this together in time for us to utilize it at worship. You didn't even notice the thing that was going on, but behind the scenes there was some stress. And certainly with that, then a few confusions on the words that went through in our music this morning and the flop or the foul up with the projector system as our brother was bringing his thoughts to us concerning what the Lord has done for him and his family and the way that those things all came together. I said, certainly this is a stressful time for our brother. But I learned this morning and I hope that you did too if you were here for Sunday school that certainly of all the people I know that have been through stressful times, I think the Castro family has been through stressful times. but as we'll see at the end of the meditation, that they are the victors as a result of it, in Christ Jesus our Lord. So before we begin, let's pray. All we can say, our Father in Heaven, is that we will glory in our Redeemer. You make our paths straight. We argue and we fuss with you, but you know what's best for us. And you set our path before us, and we will go down that path by your grace and in your mercy as we remain here and fight with these things that we fight with to be more like Christ. Lord, help us this evening as we listen to these words Certainly, Lord, it's always our prayer that the things of man will be stripped away and that the Holy Spirit will do the work, not the one talking, and that we each will be convinced and convicted of how we handle stress. Lord, won't you help us in that this evening, we ask. In Christ's name, amen. There was an email that went around that our brother Mike sent out. It was promoted and produced by the people at Sony. And it was called Do You Know? And I thought that I would take some of those notes from there as my first topic this evening, Sources of Stress in the World. And some of the things that we learned in there, as many of us watched that video, is that China will become the number one English-speaking country in the world very soon. If you're referred to as one in a million and you're in China, there are 1,300 other people just like you. The 25% of India's population with the highest IQ exceeds the number of people in the United States of America. And that the top 10 jobs that are in demand next year didn't exist five years ago. Our children are being prepared for jobs that don't even exist today. And they will be using technology that doesn't yet exist as well to solve problems that we don't even know are problems today. Our children will have between 10 and 14 jobs by the age of 38 years old. One in four employees have been with their current employer for less than four years, and one in five for less than two years. One out of eight couples that are married last year met while they were online. There are 31 billion searches on Google in 2008 per month. In the year 2002, there were only 3.8 billion. Technology is increasing on us. The total of text messages every day exceeds the total population of the world. It took 38 years for the radio to reach 50 million people. It took the iPod two years. There are five times more words in the English language today than Shakespeare had to play with when he was alive. We have a lot more to learn in that regard. Technology doubles every two years. And the college students entering college in the fall of this year, by their third year in college, the technology that they learn will be useless in their third year of college. By a single strand today, a single strand of fiber optic cables, that's just a little piece of cable with light going through it, will handle 210 million telephone calls per second. A supercomputer in the year 2013 will be able to out-compute the human brain. And by 2049, a $1,000 computer will have more computing power than the entire population of the Earth. That causes stress as we go through this life, and certainly for our children as well. People are stressed out. We have personal stresses. People are stressed out for personal reasons. There's a movie out called 2012. It's building on the fears of people that don't know that the Mayan calendar has ended and the earth is going to come to an end. There's a website that you can go to, and after you enter in a few personal pieces of data, they will predict when you will die. You go to work and you have stress in your traffic. You have stress at work. You have stress at home. You have stress in the family life. You have stress of others that are more gifted than you are in your place of employment. And they get the promotions. You find out that you didn't get a promotion. You're getting older. The young kids know a lot more than you know. Your eyes are failing. Your belly's going out. The arms aren't as strong as they used to be, the skin sags, and the memory is stretched out. I suffer from that as well. Divorce and separation, death, violence that we see, that our children see on TV and in video games, all these things come together to cause stress in our personal life. Stress can make us physically ill as well. We have stress in the church. The world says if things aren't happening fast enough, then make them happen. So what we have is we have secret friendly super churches that are unsatisfied with the way God is working in their church. And they create programs in order to push things along to make God happen faster in their congregations. We have business means being used in the church to cause church growth, to hurry up its process. We have members of the churches that are more astute than we are, perhaps, in the reading and the understanding of the scriptures. We all have different gifts that the Lord gave us. And so we have members that have these gifts that are different than ours and perhaps we would like to be that way as well. But it's not one that the Lord has given to us. So they can read the scriptures and understand them more easily than we can. We can be stressed because we're not in the right social group at the church. We can be stressed because we're single and everybody else is married, or we're married and the singles are having more fun than the married, or this group is having things going on that this group's not a part of, and we get in these little clicks and they cause stress in the church. So what does this all mean in the few minutes that we have for this meditation this evening? Stress is in our lives. But we may react to stress with distress. It's simple. The reason for this primarily is that we've taken our eyes off of the Lord. If we're suffering from stress, that's the number one reason. We've taken our eyes off of the Lord. We can react to this kind of stress that we have in our lives in one of two ways. We can think about the saints of old, all those great examples we have in the Bible of how the Lord worked in their lives, and we are amazed and bewildered as we see stories unfolded, especially in the Old Testament. but also in the New Testament. And we can think about Jesus and the way that God worked in the lives of the people that Jesus touched as well. Or we can shake off thinking about it. Stick our head in the sand and try not to react to the stress factors in the world. That's our natural tendency to want to do, stick our head in the sand. So I'll assume that since we're Christians here gathered this evening that we're interested in the first one that pertains to looking at those saints of old, thinking about what Jesus said, what the apostles have written. as to how we might control stress in our lives. So our reality is that God's word applies to the past, the present, and the future, no matter what else is happening in the world and in our lives. God's word is still valid. So it does not matter that the world's been changing. The application from his word is still good today. And it will be good tomorrow, even when everything else is changing around us, or seemingly changing. Now there's some things that we cannot have an impact on, and there's some things that we can have an impact on when it comes to stress. So we have to consider this. Number one, how do we react to the stress? And then understand what realization we must come to. And then third, get our head straight on how to deal with that stress. And so that's what we'll attempt to do in our meditation this evening, is cover those three topics, which I've entitled Reaction. And that's the first topic that we have. So we should understand how we must react to these pressures on our lives. So our first thing is to react. And for that, we'll look at Matthew 6. If you open your Bibles to Matthew 6, the most common, perhaps, passage of scripture to deal with anxiety or stress, we'll read verses 25 through 34. These are dealing with things that will impact our lives. Now, it's a different time era, but the facts still apply today. Verse 25, Jesus says, For this reason I say to you, do not be anxious for your life as to what you shall eat or what you shall drink, nor for your body as to what you shall put on. Is not life more than food in the body than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns, and yet your Heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they? And which one of you, being anxious, can add a single cubit to his life span? And why are you anxious about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow. They do not toil, nor do they spend. Yet I say to you that even Solomon, in all of his glory, did not clothe himself like one of these. But if God so raised the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, Will he not much more do so for you, O men of little faith? Do not be anxious then, saying, What shall we eat, or what shall we drink, or with what shall we clothe ourselves? For all these things the Gentiles eagerly seek, for your Heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you. Therefore do not be anxious for tomorrow, for tomorrow will take care of itself, each day has enough troubles of its own. So our meditation begins with our reaction. Verse 33 is the key verse in this particular passage of scripture for a meditation this evening in that it says, seek first the kingdom of God. That should be our reaction, our first thing that happens. Seek first the kingdom of God. Pray, meditate on his word, give thanks for what is being done for us rather than what is being done to us. Reconcile yourself to another person, a brother or sister in the church that you are in contact with and ask, have I done everything reasonably possible to help the situation that I'm in? If it's yes, then give it up. Don't stress out about it. Turn it over to the Lord. Seek him. In the United States last year, $100 billion were spent on health-related issues concerning stress. That's a lot of money for my pocket. Stress hinders our health. It injures our bodies. Our hearts race out, and they wear out faster. We get stomach aches. Our ability to make blood cells is reduced. It's hampered. Certain cancers are affected by stress. It keeps us from sleeping at night. It affects our relationships. It makes us feel angry and out of control and can bring on depression. We must make a decision to react first, to filter out, to filter everything that happens in our life according to the light and the sovereignty of God. God is sovereign. We can see from the beginning of God's word, starting in Genesis, that stressful circumstances are all so common. Cain and Abel, remember them? Who gave the more perfect sacrifice to the Lord. We have Noah. Can you imagine the stress he was under when it had never rained before? And people were mocking him and making fun of him as he was proclaiming to the people to repent and building an ark. We can remember Abram going to a new country that he didn't know. He didn't even understand the language. And he was all, you can imagine, we have people here that come to our church from other countries and they don't speak English. They don't understand our ways and our customs. And so they have to deal with those kind of things. And it was during a time of famine when you didn't know if you were going to eat tomorrow or not. So he was with the Egyptians. And then fear for his life because of a beautiful wife. We have Lot, who was living in a sexually immoral place and had a wife that was, in so many words, a scoffer and turned out to be a pillar of salt because of the way that she reacted. We have, again, the Lord asking you to sacrifice your only son to him as an offering. We have Joseph and Potiphar. Joseph was sold into slavery by his brothers. They were talking about killing him. And imagine that Joseph overheard all that. And that had to create a lot of stress in his life. And perhaps he didn't see it right then, but he saw it later on when he was number two to Pharaoh only. He gave God the glory as number two and said that the Lord knew all these things and was using him for the purpose of saving his people. And so that's a great providence that was in Joseph's life. But even though he didn't know about it, and it probably endured a lot of stress, In the end, he saw that the Lord was taking care of all these things. John 16, 33 says, where Jesus was telling the disciples of things to come, said that, These things I have spoken to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation, but take courage, I have overcome the world. Tribulation will be a part of our life. It will be a part of our life. We can't control all of it, but Jesus can be our comforter during these times. Paul writes to the Thessalonians in 1 Thessalonians 3, 6 through 8, that these things are going to be in our lives. And he writes, but now that Timothy has come to us from you and brought good news of your faith and love and that you always think kindly of us, longing to see us just as we also long to see you. For this reason, he writes, brethren, in all our distresses and affliction, we are comforted about you. How? Through your faith. Faith overcomes stress. Why does it seem to take God so long when we have stressful situations to answer our prayer relating to those situations? While the Lord does have perfect timing in answering prayers, He seeks His own glory and His answer to our prayers. Sometimes we ask for things that we don't understand enough about and He makes us wait. Or perhaps we're doing one of these genie things with Him when we pray and we ask Him to answer us upon demand and to be our slave and answer us in the way that we're asking. Give me what I want when I ask for it. God will always answer our prayers. He'll answer it yes, he'll answer it no, or he'll answer it wait. Perhaps he may be testing our faith with his words regarding our faith when he asks us to wait during these stressful times. One example I have is that unmarried people, young ladies or older ladies, Jesus loves you. He loved Lazarus. And we have a perfect example. Jesus said, I love Lazarus. And Mary and Martha were pleading for him to come to heal Lazarus because he was sick and dying on a bed. And what did the Lord do? He waited. Two days. What happened? Lazarus died. Now what was the purpose in all that? It was an answer to a request that was wait. What do you think would give God more glory? Go heal a man that's sick or raise a dead man? God wants his glory when he answers our prayers, when we ask him for things that are stressful in our life. Young ladies, perhaps you're unmarried, you're growing tired of waiting, you think that perhaps I'm getting an old maid, I'm becoming an old maid. And many young ladies start to lower their standards. The hemline comes up, the blouse goes down, the makeup goes on, and the social life increases at all the wrong places. Their scruples and their moral standards go down because they're not waiting on the Lord. They're stressed out that they're going to be single, perhaps. But we have a good example here that the Lord will remember those that seek him and answer our prayers if we wait for the right and opportune time. Ephesians 1, 11b and 12 says, having been predestined according to his purpose, who works all things after the counsel of his will, to that end that we who were the first to hope in Christ should be to the praise of his glory. So he wants us, in all of our stressful situations, to be the praise of his glory as he answers our prayers. God does all these things for his own glory. Our duty is to give our stress to him when we can't control it, when we can't do anything about it. We've done everything that we could to remove the stress. Our job is to give it to him and wait on his sovereignty. Number two, the number two thing we must do when we're facing stressful situations is we must come to the realization that some things are out of our control. From our text, Matthew 627 says, and which of you, by being anxious, can add a single cubit to his lifespan? People, we can't change the outcome. We can minimize stress in certain circumstances by the way that we react to the stressful situations, for example, we can't control the weather if a hurricane's coming, but we can reduce the stress by preparing for the hurricane and minimizing anything that might be a damaging, we hope to be a damaging event on the house or the apartment that we live in. We can't control the reckless driver, but we can practice safe driving techniques in order to be able to spot a reckless driver perhaps more easily. We can't control how people are going to respond to us when we meet them or talk to them. They have their own way of thinking about things. But we can surely practice politeness and courtesy in conversation and rightful conversations with our neighbor in order to improve those results. But we can't control the results. We can't change facts, but we can control the way that we respond to the facts. We do spend much of our time fussing over a lot of things that we can't control ourselves. We need to learn how to leave them in God's hands. And rather than focus on things, and rather than worry about those things, focus on the ones that we can have an impact on or change. For example, in our text, we would look at the way God takes care of his creation in verses 28 through 30. And why are you anxious about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow. They do not toil, nor do they expend. Yet I say to you that even Solomon in all of his glory did not clothe himself like one of these. But if God so raised the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will he not much more do so for you, O men of little faith? Our life will not be out of control if God is directing our path. And certainly we believe, as his children, that he is directing our path and our steps. We can fret over something for years that the Lord just handles it, just like that, if he so wills to do so. He can remove that stressful situation in the twinkling of an eye. For him, it's no big deal. For us, perhaps our faith is being tested. He is sufficient for all of our needs. And that all is a capital A double L. He's sufficient for all of our needs. We need to realize that we have been do-it-yourself Christians for a very long time. We have been do-it-yourself Christians for a very long time. We rely upon our own strength to solve problems. And to a degree, that's the correct thing to do. We need to be prudent about how we do things. But we carry it too far. and we try to resolve all the problems that we have that cause stress in our lives. Men in particular are very susceptible to being Mr. Fix-It. And so it's peculiar, perhaps, to men that we want to fix everything and we take it upon ourselves and we bring stress, perhaps, into our life because we try to handle the matter that's come up. With that, disaster comes a lot of times and our faith can dry up. In 2 Chronicles chapter 20, Jehoshaphat was told that the Amoebites and the Minuites were coming to get him and he was just this little Israel and this was a mighty army that was coming to get him. He wasn't afraid to say, I'm afraid. But what did he do? He had a resolution. He came to the realization really fast and he turned to the Lord. That was bigger than he could handle. He turned to the Lord, proclaiming a fast in all of Judah, and prayed to God using a holy argument concerning God's promises to Judah, and asked God to handle it. He prayed, saying, we don't know what to do, but our eyes are on you. And how did God answer him? That's amazing. The enemies destroyed themselves. The Israelites didn't have to do a thing. They turned to him in faith, trusting in him. Another way to handle stress in our lives is to constantly think about things that we can be thankful for. That can be a very taxing thing to do, is try to think of things that I can be thankful for, especially when you're in a stressful situation. But with spiritual discipline and practice, we can become like a Paul or a David who practice that a lot, because we see that in the writings that we have in his word. This will help us by thinking of those joyful times that we have with the Lord and thanking Him for all the good things He's done for us. This will help us avoid those pitfalls of stress. We can read Philippians 4, 6 and know that we are doing the right thing before the Lord in taking our request to Him. We can look at Psalm 34 and bless the Lord at all times. His praise shall continually be in my mouth because we see the goodness of the Lord towards us. And even when we don't feel like it, we don't feel like doing it, we don't feel like doing these things, we should remember Psalm 147.1. Praise the Lord because it is good to sing praises to our God, for it is pleasant and praise is becoming. We must come to the realization that we're God's people. He's our Father. And fathers want to give their children all the good stuff. If you're a father, you take your family on vacation, you want not so much for your own relaxation, you want your family to have a good vacation, to relax and enjoy themselves. You want to be the provider in that particular situation. We have all the promises of God. We are the victors already in Jesus Christ. And it does not look Christian to be overcome by the stress of the world. We're his children. We should count it all joy when we face these trials of many kinds. So what do we have to do in order, after coming to the realization, we have to reposition our thinking. We have to reposition ourselves about how we're handling the stress. With the change of our thinking from the stressful situation to the providence of God, his sufficiency in that situation rather than our problem, his love rather than our own insecurity, his providence over our circumstance. We must cling to the promise that at all times he is working for our good. Circumstances of life can put us into a tailspin. Violating term. They can put us into a tailspin. That means we're out of control. We have difficulties all around us and about us. And in every area of our life, it seems like the world is heading our way at full speed. And all we have to do is reposition our thinking toward God. All things at all times means everything. Not just a few, but all things at all times are in His providence. Now if you're at the school of believers that think that God permits things to happen, or if you're in the school that says God ordains things to happen, it doesn't really matter. Because we have, in Matthew 10, 29, we see that God works all things in accordance with His own will. all things in accordance to his own will. Matthew 10, 29. A sparrow does not die apart from God willing it. He wills it. This is further proof that God is vitally concerned with everything that happens to his children. Psalm 103, 19. The Lord has established his throne in the heavens and his sovereignty rules over all. That didn't say people. It didn't say land, didn't say animal, all. He controls everything. Daniel 4, 34 and 35, Nebuchadnezzar raised his eyes to heaven after his reason returned to him. And he said, I blessed the most high and praised and honored him who lives forever, forever and ever. For his dominion is an everlasting dominion. And his kingdom endures from generation to generation. And all the inhabitants of the earth are accounted as nothing. But he does according to his will in the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth. And no one can ward off his hand or say to him, what have you done? No one can challenge God by his actions or his purposes. And he causes all things to work together for the good and for the praise of his own glory. Nothing happens by chance or because the world is closing in on us. We learn that from Romans 8.28 and Psalm 37.23 and 24. If God doesn't make something good happen for his children out of what we perceive to be calamity or dark providence, then this verse of scripture would essentially nullify all of God's word. It would make it invalid. God causes all things to work together for the good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose. Where is children? We're called according to His purpose. Are you one of these? Then reposition your thinking. God is for you, not against you. No stress can overcome you if you turn it over to Him. Joseph's brothers plotted to kill him. As I said earlier, he was sold into slavery, rejected Potiphar's wife, and ended up number two as Pharaoh. He interpreted dreams, got into that position, and the Lord used him in that response. His response, that I went over earlier, is that Joseph had come to realize God's hand at work and repositioned himself to be submitted to God's will and providence in his life. And it was only after, towards the end of all this, that he realized that the Lord was using him, and he harbored no ill feelings against his brothers. So I'd like to give you some things to remember during stressful times in the last two or three minutes here. With a story, first of all, about two porcupines. People are like porcupines, by the way. And a lot of our stress comes from people. But there were two porcupines living in Alaska. And it's terribly cold in Alaska. And each one of them individually was having difficulty keeping warm. So they thought that if the two of them could get together, that they would be kept warm by huddling together. So they tried it. And they discovered that they were needling one another. rather than keeping warm. The moral to this story is that the closer we get to people, the more we get needled. People are a source of our stress, but they're all within God's providence as well. Remember these five points, if you will, that God is in control and has a purpose. Consider, did I do everything I could do to remove the stress in a responsible manner? Number three, stress causes problems that cascade into other areas of your life. Have I become unbecoming as a child of God by showing my lack of faith in the Lord's handling of the situation? Number four, have I mistreated my spouse? Have I not forgiven others? Have I gotten physically sick over my troubles? Number five, have I searched the scriptures for answers to my stress? Have I prayed? Have I turned it over to the Lord, like so many examples of the saints before me? And when stress does come into your life, and it certainly will, because it's talked about in so many different areas of the Bible, We need to remember James 1, 2. James writes, to consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect results, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing. In 1 Thessalonians 3, 3, Paul writes that we are destined to have these afflictions. So don't get disturbed by them. Peter writes concerning the persecution that we come under because of our faith in 1 Peter 4, 7. The end of all things is at hand. Therefore be of sound judgment and sober spirit for the purpose of prayer. Above all, keep fervent in your love for one another because love covers a multitude of sins. And then again in verse 12. Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal among you which comes upon you for your testing. as though some strange thing were happening to you. But to the degree that you share in the sufferings of Christ, cry? No. Keep on rejoicing, so that at the revelation of his glory, you may rejoice with exaltation, with great joy. So with this short devotion, how will you handle stress from now on? We can only cover just the top of the mountain. How will you handle stress from now on? Will you become an unbecoming Christian or will you take it to the Lord? Trust Him and let Him handle it. Let's pray. Father, you are mindful that we are just like dust. And our spirits are often thwarted by the devices of the evil one and the things that we let creep in. Lord, help us to remember You first, to turn our eyes upon the Lord, and remember all of His promises of victory. and all of the words that we have of comfort that you are our Father and you want good things for us. Lord, may we not become unbecoming in our life and our walk with you. People are watching us. Our lives are a demonstration of your effectual saving grace and are with us. Help us, Lord, to be that light and salt that penetrates the earth and those that are yet to be called. We ask for this in Christ's name. Amen.