Philippians And Stress 2: The 3 C's For Handling Stress Series

PHILIPPIANS AND STRESS: 3 C’s—Philippians 1:12-26

You fall asleep on the couch on a Sunday afternoon, and you dream. In your dream, you are a quarterback, looking out from an NFL helmet, to see 3000 pounds of raw human emotion mixing it up in front of you. Half of those huge men have one goal: to bury you! That’s stress!

How does a QB handle stress? 3C’s:

- Confidence: He has taken thousands of snaps, and he can depend upon superior speed, instincts and

skills. He has a strong offensive line to protect him. If something should go wrong, he has the best

medical team available to help him.

-Control: He has called the play, and once the ball is in hands, he knows exactly what he wants to do.

-Commitment: This is what he chooses to do. Once the game starts, any second thoughts about whether

risking his body are forgotten. He is 100% committed to executing the game plan.

The QB is facing huge stress, but it is manageable. In fact, he loves it. He has Confidence, Control, and Commitment.

How do you handle stress? We might try to tell ourselves, “Just relax,” but that seldom works, because the causes of stress don’t go away.

To deal with stress, we need to utilize the 3 C’s. Yet that is easier said than done:

-We might not be real Confident. We don’t know what will happen to our health, or the economy.

We aren’t sure about our own abilities, or whether things will work out as we hoped.

-We struggle to maintain Control. We can’t control sickness, a bad economy, or natural disasters.

We can’t control our kids, our boss, even our own emotions.

-We might question our Commitment. We second-guess our choices. We look for shortcuts.

When things get hard, we wonder whether the benefits are worth the cost.

The 3 C’s can help us with stress, but how do we get confidence, control and commitment? How does our faith help us?

HOW DOES TRUSTING IN JESUS CHRIST HELP US DEAL WITH THE 3 C’s?

Paul wrote the letter to the Philippians from a prison, or perhaps house arrest, in Rome. He was concerned for his life, because he could be sentenced to death any day. He was concerned for the gospel, to which he has committed his life; false teachers were filling the void of his absence in the churches. He was concerned about the church in Philippi, as he had heard that there was conflict and dissension.

Yet Paul is Confident, Committed, and in certain respects in Control, because he trusts in Christ.

Read Philippians 1:12-20.

-Trusting Christ gives CONFIDENCE.

Philippians 1:19 “for I know that through your prayers and God’s provision of the Spirit of Jesus Christ what has happened to me will turn out for my deliverance.” Is he confident that he will be released from prison? No, in fact he probably wasn’t going to be released from prison. However, the footnote tells us that the Greek word translated “deliverance” is the word for “salvation”; it can also mean “vindication.” Paul has a lot of confidence, because he believes God will vindicate and save him, even if he dies!

His confidence is further explained in the next verse: “I eagerly expect and hope that I will in no way be ashamed, but will have sufficient courage so that now as always Christ will be exalted in my body, whether by life or by death.”

All through this letter, Paul is confident, not in himself, but in God using him for his glory. In verse 12, he says, “What has happened to me has actually served to advance the gospel.” In verse 6, he is confident that “he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion in Jesus Christ.”

Paul’s confidence is in God, and he realizes that he doesn’t have to win all the battles, but merely keep the faith and live with courage.

Faith changes a lot about the things that stress us out. We don’t have to be confident we can beat cancer to face it with confident hope. We don’t have to know how our kids and grandkids will turn out to be confident in how we deal with them. We don’t have to know whether ethical behavior will pay off to confidently do what is right.

Will things always turn out as we hope? No. Cheaters do prosper sometimes, as least for a while. Life can be unfair. Christians get sick and even die.

Yet in the end, Christ will win. In these 15 short verses, Paul refers to “Christ” 9 times! Paul believes, and we can believe, that Christ will win in the end. Because Christ will win in the end, we will win in the end, if we live with courage and hope.