got stress?
Too much to do and too Little Time
Slide
Series intro
Are you facing any stress?
Do you feel like you can’t do all that is on your plate?
Do you wonder if there is enough to pay the bills this month?
Are you wondering if you will ever seem to get a break to breathe?
Well, you are not alone.
Stress is something that seems to be just part of the American life.
According to a national health interview survey
75% of the general population experiences at least "some stress"
(Healthy People 2000, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) (http://www.stresscure.com/hrn/facts.html)
There are lots of people out there suffering from stress.
Maybe you are dealing with stress. I know that I deal with stress.
I believe that most of us will have to deal with stress at some point, whether we are a Christian or not.
But I believe that suffering from stress is not supposed to be a way of life.
Instead, I believe it is an indicator that something is not right and something needs to change.
Peace
For those who trust in Christ, peace is supposed to be what we are experiencing as a normal part of life.
In the gospel of John, Jesus tells us, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.” (John 14:27)
Fear often brings about stress
Fear of the unknown
Fear that you won’t be able to get everything done that you need to get done.
Jesus told the disciples about some of the things that would happen in the future to him so when they did happen, they would not be afraid, but instead experience peace.
He says in John 16:33, "I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world."
The Lord wants us to live in peace, not stress
He does not want to worry about the future or about what will happen or about things that we can’t control.
Worrying about those things leads to stress in our lives.
Turn with me to Matthew 6:25-27.
Slide
We are going to read this section of Scripture this morning, as well as take a look at Jesus’ own life and teaching so that we might better be able to live in a Christ like manner, free from the stresses of life.
Let’s read.
Matthew 6:25-27
25 "Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes? 26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? 27 Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?
Pray
“Who of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life?”
Have you ever been so stressed that you felt like if you just had a few more hours during the week, or during the day, I would be able to get all that I have to do done?
A few more hours to study for that test
A few more hours to finish a work project
A few more hours to get things done around the house
A few more hours to finish a sermon (oh, wait, that’s me)
I am sure at points, each of us have felt this way and that is where I want to focus our attention this morning, because I think one of the primary causes of stress in our society is that we feel like we have
Too Much to do and Too Little Time
to do it
Slide
How do we deal with that?
It seems that we try to squeeze more hours into our day.
Now we can’t really add another hour to the day. We know the truth of what Jesus said.
Instead of adding an extra hour to the day, we try to take it from somewhere else.
I will get up earlier. I don’t need 6.5 hours of sleep, I can get by on 5.5 hours.
Or
I will multi task. Check email and phone messages on my way to work and return calls while I am coming home from work or in the car.
Then when we get home, we grab a fast food dinner with the family and eat in the car so we can get to our kid’s activities.
We DVR our favorite TV shows so we can fast forward through the commercials and cut down watching time to 22 minutes instead of 30 minutes.
We try to get a jump on the next day by checking our emails before we go to bed, so we aren’t behind in our work before we even get up.
Now all of these things aren’t bad, but I will say that none of them seem to eliminate the stress we are feeling, and some of them only seem to compound it and we find ourselves over tired, irritable toward those we love and still stressed out.
We know something is not right, but we often don’t know what to do about it.
Wasn’t all this hi tech gadgetry supposed to make our lives easier so we would have more time to relax? Instead, we are expected to do more and have it done faster.
Aargh! Will it never end?
It won’t if we don’t take some actions.
Jesus
When I read the gospel accounts, I find it interesting that Jesus, who had the most important work in the whole world and all of history, he never was stressed and He was never rushing or hurrying.
When He stepped into this world and put on flesh, he stepped into time and had the same 7 days each week, the same 24 hours each day, the same 60 minutes each hour that you and I have.
And He accomplished what He came to do without a car, an email account, a cell phone and without hurrying, rushing, or stressing.
Not only did he not rush and accomplish what He came to do, there were times, when He seemed to move slower than we would expect Him to move.
Lazarus was sick
For instance, when His friend Lazarus was sick, you would think, using human wisdom, that the Great Physician, the One Who was able to heal all ailments, would have hurried to be there. But John tells us that “when he heard that Lazarus was sick, he stayed where he was two more days.” (John 11:6)
There were even times he didn’t do what we would think should have been a priority for Him
Night of healing
We see in Mark 1:38 that after a night of healing people, we find that the next morning, everyone was looking for him again to continue healing people, but Jesus said, “Let us go somewhere else-to the nearby villages-so I can preach there also. That is why I have come." (Mark 1:38)
The fact is that God has given all of us the time that we need to accomplish what we need to.
The truth is that we don’t need to add more hours to the day or even do more in less time.
But we do need to make some changes and choices if we are going to overcome the stress we are feeling and live with the peace that Christ desires to give us.
What are the changes and choices that we need to make to free ourselves from the stress we are suffering due to the fact that we feel we have too much to do with too little time?
I believe the first thing we need to do if we are going to be free from stress,
We Need to Know our Priorities
Slide
Jesus knew the reason He was here and lived His life with that priority determining the things He did and didn’t do at particular times.
His purpose was to bring salvation into the world and to make sure people knew how they could have salvation by believing in Him, in who He is and what He did.
John 3:16-17
16 "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.
He was here to bring salvation and He communicated this to people through preaching, through performing miracles, through healing people.
But it is interesting to note, that He didn’t do one of these things to the exclusion of the others.
We just pointed out that He stopped healing people in one town because He needed to move on to fulfill His purpose.
“Let us go somewhere else-to the nearby villages-so I can preach there also. That is why I have come." (Mark 1:38)
His purpose was to provide salvation through His sacrifice and share that good news with people.
While healing people was a priority, it was only to help Him with His purpose.
Transition
I think if we keep in mind our purpose, it will help to establish our priorities and help us to make choices that lead to less stress in life.
Our purpose is to glorify God in this life. That purpose leads to some priorities in our life that each one of us will have.
I am going to talk about 4 priorities in our life that everyone of us have that will help us fulfill our purpose and then talk about ways we can make choices so we can live out those priorities without them becoming our purpose.
Our first priority in life should be our Relationship with
God
Slide
When Jesus was asked what the greatest commandment was, He said, ’Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. (Matthew 22:37-38)
I doubt this is new information to anyone here but doesn’t it seem like when things get busy in life, our relationship with God is the first thing to suffer?
When we are experiencing time issues, we remove time in God’s word and time for prayer, thinking that we can get more done during that time.
That is faulty thinking. Martin Luther said, “I have so much business I cannot get on without spending three hours daily in prayer.”
If we don’t grow in our relationship with the Lord our other priorities get out of whack and it leads to more stress, not less.
Another thing that is a priority is our relationship with
Family
Slide
The family, especially our immediate family, is what God has ordained to be the building block of all social order.
Right in the very beginning he said that a man will leave his father and mother and take a wife and have a family.
Family has got to be a priority for us.
In fact, Paul said in 1 Timothy 5:8 that when someone does not care for his family, “especially for his immediate family, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever.”
Another priority in our life has got to be our
Work
Slide
Jesus did the work that the Father sent Him to do (John 5:36).
Paul worked to support himself in the beginning until His full time work became the work of the ministry.
Paul also tells the church in Thessalonica that the people should work. He gave this rule when he was with them, “If a man will not work, he shall not eat." (2 Thessalonians 3:10)
So work needs to be a priority as well to help us glorify the Lord.
The last priority we have is to
Serve others
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One of the last things Jesus did was to wash the feet of the disciples. Then He said in
John 13:14-15 - Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. 15 I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you.
For those that call themselves Christians, serving others has got to be a priority.
Transition
Now Maybe you are saying, “I don’t have enough time for work and my family, let alone for God and for serving others too!”
“Throwing those things into my schedule will only make me more stressed.”
This is often where things breakdown for people.
We have to recognize what our purpose is, what the priorities that are going to help us fulfill our purpose and then make choices regarding how to manage those priorities.
This is where
We need to do some Planning
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Now realize that planning does not mean we aren’t flexible. But when we have plans, it helps us to make choices ahead of time.
Jesus recognized his purpose, knew the priorities that he had and had some plans that helped him manage those priorities.
This helped him decide what to do when.
For instance, when the people were looking for him after he healed many people and they wanted him to heal more people, he said that he needed to move on. (Mark 1:38)
In John 4, we find that he planned to go back to Galilee and it says he had to go through Samaria (John 4:4). He didn’t have to, as in someone forced Him to. He chose to because He knew He had to talk with the Samaritan woman.
He made plans to do some things and not to do others in accord with what was going to help Him fulfill His mission to glorify the Lord.
That is what we need to do. We need to think things through a bit sometimes and not just let circumstances dictate what we do. Yes we need to be flexible, but if we have our priorities set, we are going to have an easier time making wise choices.
When we don’t plan, we end up letting other people set our priorities and our schedules. When we do that, the things that aren’t really priorities that help us fulfill our purpose, start filling up our time so that we are stressed out because we can’t then find time for those things that are priorities.
There is a great illustration that was popularized by Stephen Covey but is a valuable tool to help people do some planning.
Is the Jar full?
Imagine that you have a wide mouth jar and you have some bigger rocks that represent priorities and a pile of pebbles that represent other good things that you like to do, and then a pile of sand that are much less important things that or ok and maybe even good, but they are not necessarily a help in fulfilling your purpose.
Well if you put the sand in first, and then the pebbles, you won’t be able to fit the big rocks, the priorities in and you are going to live a stressful life.
But if you put the big rocks in first, plan out, roughly, when you will spend time on those things, then you can sprinkle the pebbles in after that and then let the sand fill up around that.
If your schedule fills up and there is no room for some of the sand, that is ok. That is not what is going to stress you out.
Now, in Stephen Covey’s example, when the presenter did this, he filled up the jar with the big rocks and asked if the jar was full.
People said yes, then he poured in the pebbles, and asked if the jar was full.
People said probably not and then he poured in the sand and filled the jar.
He asked, “what was the moral of the story” and someone said, that “you could always fit more things into your life if you work really hard at it.”
That is not the moral. The moral is that if you don’t put the big rocks in first, you will never get them in.
If you know your purpose and the priorities that will help you fulfill your purpose, then you can plan those priorities into your life and not let others dictate your schedule.
Other people wanted to dictate Jesus’ schedule and the things He did.
They wanted him to
Do more healings
Miraculously feed more people
Make my brother divide my inheritance
Give us a sign Rabbi
Jesus said no to some of these things at particular times because in those instances they were not helping him fulfill His purpose.
“Wait. Weren’t miracles and healings and signs part of what helped him show who he was and weren’t they priorities in fulfilling His purpose?”
I believe they were, but none of them were done to the exclusion of the other priorities. Jesus managed them all perfectly.
There are going to be times when we have to say no to one priority because it is interfering with other priorities.
We may at times have to say no to work because we need to be with family.
There will be times when we say no to more time with our family because we need to serve others.
There will be times when we need to spend time with the Lord and say no to other things.
And there are going to be times when we say no to people in regards to what they may want us to do because it is not helpful in fulfilling our purpose.
To make those decisions, we not only need to plan, but
We need to also keep our Perspective
Slide
In Matthew 6:33 at the end of this section where He was telling us not to worry, He said to “seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.”
When we are keeping our perspective and focus on glorifying the Lord and seeking his kingdom and righteousness, it will help us in making choices in the other things that come into our lives that seek to overtake our schedules and stress us out.
This will help us know when to say no to even things that are priorities normally.
Work
When our work seeks to control us and we worry that we have to do what they say or we will lose our job, we can keep our perspective that the Lord is in control and that he will provide as we follow Him.
This doesn’t mean that we don’t work overtime ever, or put in extra time sometimes. It means that we don’t let it be continual. We say no, I can’t stay tonight.
We do not even always need to explain ourselves. No, can be a complete sentence.
Family
It also means that for some family activities we say no.
Serving
It may mean that you say no to some serving opportunity. I can’t do more. It may mean that you need to do more serving.
When we are keeping our perspective, it helps us make those decisions.
The situation where Jesus healed people all day and then the next morning said they needed to move on to preach elsewhere, well right before they found Him, he was praying.
That is how we are going to keep our perspective, through our continual time with God, praying and reading and keeping our focus on Him.
That will help us to not let time we should focus on priorities get swallowed up by nonessentials like TV, Facebook, surfing the internet, other people’s plans for us.
It is when we are keeping our perspective on the Lord that we will be able to make the right choices to live a life that is free from stress and full of peace.
Conclusion
Understand you purpose is to glorify the Lord
Know that some of your priorities need to be
Your relationship with God
Your time with family
Your time working
Your time serving
Make plans to put those in your schedule
Keep your perspective on the Lord to help you in making choices that want to derail your life and stress you out.
Worship team
To help us keep that perspective on loving the Lord, the worship team is going to come up and we are going to close singing Love the Lord.
Make this a priority to help you prioritize and live free from the stresses of a world that wants to overload you.
Let’s worship.
