How To Handle Stress - Jesus (Part 2) Series

TEXT: various

TITLE: Jesus - How to Handle Stress - Part 2

SERIES: When Life Gets Messy

TOPIC: Stress

OCCASION: Burnside Christian Church, October 11, 2009

PROP.: Jesus was constantly under pressure and yet remained cool, calm and collected. Here are last 4 of 8 principles we learn from His life!

INTRODUCTION: Good morning! I want to start today’s sermon by showing you a video that took place at MYM a couple weeks ago…

Last week we started a sermon series called, “When Life Gets Messy…”

Because when life gets messy, life becomes difficult.

And for some of you, your life is like eating pudding without hands.

All throughout this series, we are going to learn how to clean up the mess by looking at the lives of different people!

The beautiful thing about the Bible is that God teaches us using a lot of different people to bring about His eternal truth and principles.

Today I want to talk to you about stress. Stress makes life messy. Listen to the health problems associated with stress that we talked about last week:

Depression Heart Disease Obesity

Pain of any kind Digestive problems Autoimmune diseases

Sleep Problems Skin conditions such as eczema

Anxiety

The list goes on and on…

What is stress exactly? Websters dictionary defines stress this way:

stress /strɛs/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [stres]

the physical pressure, pull, or other force exerted on one thing by another; strain.

I think Bilbo Baggins (from Lord of the Rings), said it well:

“I feel like butter scraped thinly over too much bread…”

Is that how you feel?

Last week, I asked you to

write down the one thing that stresses you out the most!

Stress makes a mess out of many people’s lives.

And what we are doing is we are learning from

Jesus Christ

On how to handle stress.

And remember we told you that Jesus Christ was constantly under pressure. There were grueling demands on his time; he rarely had any personal privacy; he was constantly interrupted. People repeatedly misunderstood him, criticized him, and ridiculed him. He had enormous stress which would have caused any of us to cave in.

But as we take an overview of the entire life of Christ, it becomes clear that not only did Christ stand strong - he lived life with grace and peace.

And believe me, I know the danger of using the life of Christ as an example. As soon as I said “let’s look at what we can learn from Jesus about how to live our lives” some of you checked out mentally.

You are gone. Why? Because you have it in your mind that, “well, that’s Jesus! He’s God! I can never live like Jesus lived.”

And you’re right. You are not going to live a sinless, perfect life like Jesus did! And it’s true that Jesus is special and unique! He lived his life free from the mistakes of sin…that’s what qualified Him to be a sacrifice on our behalf.

But what I think we tend to forget is that just as true as it is that Jesus was fully God, it’s also just as true that Jesus was fully human!

Just like you, Jesus could only be in one place at one time. Just like you, Jesus had emotions that needed to be kept in check. Just like you, Jesus became tired, hungry, hot, cold. And yet, Jesus handled His stress in the right way!

Have you ever wondered why Jesus never used his miraculous power to serve himself? It’s true! Jesus, even though He had miraculous power at his finger tips, never used his power to make life easy or less complicated for Himself. And I believe the reason why Jesus spent 33 years on this earth was to show us how to live. To give us instructions on how to live this life.

And so

T.S. Today, I want to give you the final four principles for handling stress that we learn from Jesus.

Last week, I gave you the first 4 principles of stress management that we learn from Jesus…they were:

I. Identification: Know Who You Are -

If you don’t confidently know who you are, you will have stress trying to be what other people want you to be. All too often stress is caused by us living double lives, wearing masks and not being who God created us to be!

Jesus knew exactly who he was! He had no problems declaring to others so there would be no confusion on the matter.

Second principle I gave you last week was…

II. Dedication: Know who you are trying to please

If you are a people pleaser, then you know how much stress it can cause trying to please everyone! You don’t like it when a someone is upset with you and because it’s impossible to please everyone all the time, you will be stressed out trying to please everyone!