Stress Of Life

Tom Shrader addresses the universal experience of stress by examining James 1:2-4, where believers are called to consider trials as joy because testing produces endurance. He offers five foundational truths Christians can know when facing life's pressures: God is in control, God forgives sin, God is our only hope and life is temporary, God works all things together for good, and God doesn't change. These truths provide an eternal perspective that helps believers navigate the wear and tear of daily life.

“Our hope is rooted in the character of God, the sovereignty of God, the faithfulness of God, and the promises of God.”

— Tom Shrader

Series: Standalone Teachings

Recorded: 2014

Duration: 40 min

Themes: stress, trials, endurance, joy, hope, control, forgiveness, perspective, facing overwhelming pressure, dealing with anxiety, struggling with circumstances, feeling worn down, parent under stress, student facing finals, caregiver for sick family, overwhelmed believer

Scripture: James 1:2-4, 1 Corinthians 6, Psalm 139, 2 Corinthians 4:16-18, 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18, Romans 8:28, Malachi 3:6, Hebrews 13:8, Colossians 1:15-17

Theological Themes: sovereignty, god's control, perseverance, sanctification, providence, eternal perspective, testing, spiritual maturity

Full Transcript

About three months ago, Tim invited me to teach today, and I said yes. I used to do this almost every Sunday for 20 years, and I miss it a lot. Right away, well, that's nice. We should stop right now, because it's not going to get any better than that. That was the high point of the day. I miss it, and so to come back is great.

Then he did something that he doesn't often do. He gave me the topic of the day, and the topic was, "Hey, that thing that you do where you do the year in review, do that. What kind of year was it?" For those of you that have been around, we did it for 10 or 11 years. To put it in the context of now, we would say, what kind of year was 2014, and then we'd take another week: how to make 2015 the greatest year of your life. So I said, "Sure, perfect, I can do it, dust it off, I'll work on it, it'll be great."

Then Monday, I had a change of heart, and I figured I don't need to tell him. So he found out that I haven't seen him yet. But it was a culmination of a couple of months, really, of just listening to people at all stages of life talking about, "I've got tests I've got to get, I've got finals out of the way, graduate, and I've got to get my dissertation done, I've got family members who are sick." Just all of that stuff that is part of life and then seems to intensify around holidays. The word that every person used to describe it was, "I have stress." So I thought that I would talk about stress.

The Reality of Stress in Our World

The director of Britain's National Association of Mental Health says, "The whole Western world is under stress. Our mode of living produces continuous stress from the moment we're born. It hits everyone. There's no escaping it. Stress affects the apparently happy, healthy people. I'm left in no doubt that stress is the fastest growing disease in the Western world."

The AMA says, on research, that 50% of all visits by patients to physicians involve stress, which, as a health problem, makes stress more common than the common cold. Dr. Michael DeBakey said, "High blood pressure, cholesterol, lack of exercise, obesity, cigarette smoking all contribute to heart disease, but more and more, it's beginning to appear the single greatest cause of heart attack is the stress of life."

There's an article in the Wall Street Journal talking about stress of living that's produced in the lives of children one to four based on the anxiety and stress of daycare. So I thought this ought to be one of those topics that hits just about everybody. I'm pretty safe going down this road.

Defining Stress

Definition is always important. Here's the definition we're going to use for stress: Stress is essentially the wear and tear of living. Stress is life. It's what you experience. We can think of the big things, but it starts with the little things.

I got up the day before yesterday and went out, got everything set, got on my clothes I like, went out, and my K-cups not working right. Not a big thing, but starting the day on a wrong trajectory. McQueen and Elliott was red. I continue to suffer through that. So it's all those things. Big things, little things. It's essentially the wear and tear of living.

The Standard Advice

I'll give you three things you can do, and you probably don't even need to write these down. Because if you go to your physician, if you talk to a friend at Starbucks, if you go to your homeopath guy, they're going to give you these three things to do.

Number one, eat better. Quit at two donuts. Don't go to three. Don't get radical on us here. Just eat better.

Number two, sleep. You got to have your sleep. You got to do what it takes. You got to get my pillow. You got to get your bed. You got to get it dark. You got to get it light. Whatever it is, you got to sleep.

Three, exercise. Again, I know how you are. You're like me. You're going to go order PX90. You're going to just blow it out at the highest intensive level the first day, and it'll be on eBay by Wednesday. You're going to hurt yourself. You're going to find out what your co-pays are. Exercise doesn't mean flat. Walk. Just walk. Do something. Get a Fitbit. Count your steps. Do something.

Those are three things you can do. They're indisputable, and they will help. So eat better, sleep, exercise.

A Different Direction: What Scripture Says

Where I'm going to go is a little bit of a different direction. I had not been a Christian very long. Became a believer in 1980, and we were working our way through a study in the book of James. I came to a verse, and I just brought common sense to it. I didn't have any Greek or any of this. I didn't know any of this stuff. Common sense.

So I read James chapter 1, verse 2. Here's what it says: "Consider it all joy when you encounter various trials." Now, just to intensify the words, consider is more than a passing glance. It's to really think. We would say meditate on it. Think about it. And then reckon it as joy.

What's joyful? Encounter various trials. Now, immediately, my first reaction has to be, I would think, the same as yours. It has to be, wait, that's counterintuitive. Praise God, here comes a trial. We can break it down, and we don't want to do it. I've taught lessons that literally went a couple of weeks on this single verse.

But point out the obvious to you: when you encounter various trials, there's an inevitability to it, that life will produce trials, and they're called various. That word in the Greek means literally multi-colored. So there'll be trials of all ilk. There'll be things that are a trial to you that come into your life that are nothing deals. And they'll be in the big bucket categories. You'll have relational trials, and you'll have physical trials, and spiritual challenges.

God is in Control

Economic challenges present an interesting twist in our perspective. The Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle says, "For every hundred people that can handle the test of adversity, there's only one that can handle the test of prosperity." So when you think you're going to be challenged financially and you envision losing everything, consider this: it's just as big a trial to keep everything. How are you going to handle that?

I remember looking at James 1:2 and scratching my head, saying, "I don't get it. How can I count it all joy?" Well, it's verse 3: "knowing." Now we're getting into it—knowing something. I can count these trials as joy because I know that the testing of our faith produces endurance.

Spiritual Aerobics

The testing of our faith is what I call spiritual aerobics. Sandy swims, and there's a whole culture that's foreign to me—the swimmers, the runners, and that mentality. There's an annual tradition among the master swimmers that at the end of the year, the beginning of the new year, they swim 100 hundreds. So they swim six and a half miles. Apparently, no boats available, and they have to swim.

Yesterday, Sandy got up and swam her six and a half miles. Unless you get too carried away, she celebrated by going to Filiberto's for a breakfast burrito. Now we're talking. Last night I asked her what she was going to do today, and she said, "Well, P.F. Chang's is coming up, so I need to get a long run in." This morning, she ran 10 and a half miles. I have no file for this—this is all new stuff to me.

But the reason you do that is to strengthen yourself. The aerobic activity produces this endurance. You push yourself and push yourself. You test yourself, and you can go further, faster, healthier.

The Purpose of Testing

Here's what James is saying: The testing of your faith is spiritual aerobics. It tests you spiritually. You can count it all joy because you know something—you know that this testing will make you stronger. It produces endurance. Some of your translations will say perseverance.

When you hear that in your mind, I want you to hear "well done, good and faithful servant," "fought the good fight," "finished the race." That enduring quality, that perseverance, is produced through trials.

Five Things You Can Know

I gave you three things you can do to help you deal with stress in your life. Now I want to give you five things you can know. These are five things you can know that, as these incidents in life come—and it becomes really the overarching premise for all of life—as these incidents come, you take them and you lay them against these five things.

It may not happen instantaneously. Here's what I'm not saying: I'm not saying we're going to make life so it's not scary, not worrisome, not bothersome. What I'm saying is when you take a deep breath and you begin to survey the stuff around you, you go back to these five things.

Number one: God is in control.

A Lesson in Gravity

I was teaching on a Thursday morning when a guy by the name of Bob Hage came in. I didn't know him at the time. He was an interesting looking guy—one of those people who walks in a room and you look and think, "Hey, this looks like a cool guy." He was an older guy who reminded me a little bit of my father: little taller, little thinner, khaki slacks, light blue shirt, gray hair, combed. I thought, "You look like an interesting guy."

He was with another guy who said, "This is Bob." I said, "Let's have coffee." So we went, and this guy worked for McDonnell Douglas Corporation. He was in charge of the liaison between McDonnell Douglas, who was producing the original Mercury capsule, and the seven original astronauts.

When John Kennedy said, "We're going to place a man on the moon by the end of the decade and bring Him back safely," everybody looked at each other and said, "Well, how are we going to do that? We don't have a rocket. We don't have a capsule. We haven't invented Tang. We don't know anything." Today, they'd have a 10-year committee to try to figure out if they were okay. But they said, "No, we're going to do this." It was kind of cool vision.

The Search for Meaning

The guys at McDonnell Douglas got in the bidding, won, and started working on the capsule. So Bob was in charge of the liaison with these guys—John Glenn, Alan Shepard, all those guys—and McDonnell Douglas. They're working on this project and dealing with this thing called gravity. They understood it and it worked all the time, but they couldn't really explain it.

As Hage got into this work, it affected his personal life. He started asking, "What's the meaning of life? Why am I here? Where am I going?" Simultaneously with his job at McDonnell Douglas, he went on this personal journey that took him around the world. He ended up with Francis Schaeffer at L'Abri and spent a month with Schaeffer, talking to all these brilliant minds. But he came to no conclusion.

One day, he was in his house in St. Louis in his den on the phone—a conference call about gravity. "We go out, we can't explain it. I don't know." Von Braun and others were trying to figure it all out. They didn't know. He hung up, frustrated.

Wisdom from an Unexpected Source

The lady who was his cleaning lady said to him, "This is probably inappropriate, but I couldn't help but overhearing you. I can explain gravity." He said, "Well, sit down." She took him to Colossians 1:15: "He is the image of the invisible God. For by Him all things were created, heavens and earth, visible, invisible—all things are being created through Him and for Him. He's the one who spoke it."

God's Sovereignty in an Overwhelming World

The one who holds it together. And that day, after a two, three, four year worldwide search to find meaning in life, his cleaning lady led him to Christ. God's in control.

We sit on a planet—I don't know how they figure this stuff out, but I love to say it because I feel smarter saying it—that weighs 6,588,000,000,000 sextillion tons and spins on its axis at 1,000 miles an hour, moving in an orbit of 1,000 miles a minute. As part of this Milky Way, that if you could travel at the speed of light, 186,000 miles a second, it would take you 125,000 years to cross it. And it's just one of millions of these in this big old universe. That's so predictable that we can tell you when Halley's Comet will come again, when the sun will rise.

God holds all of this together, not in a macro view, but in a micro view. And sometimes in the wear and tear of living, it feels like things are out of control, doesn't it? You watch Greta, and then Bill, and then Megan, and then Sean, and you're having double scotches by the end of the night, going, "This is all falling apart." It's every night. It doesn't stop.

And you're out in the car, and rather than listen to something helpful, you listen to talk radio, and the world is falling apart, and we got Ebola. Remember Ebola crisis? We have all these people who are all gonna be sick. Twice as many women married Larry King as guys who got Ebola. That's an interesting thought. I don't know what to do, but it's true.

Focusing on What You Can Control

You got all this coming at you, and then on the country, the country's falling apart. $18 trillion, and William Devane is telling me, "Rosalind Capital, and buy gold and do this." Tomorrow we inaugurate a new governor. He has $750 million he's gotta come up with from somewhere, and you know it. And then you break it down, and then you look at your city, and then you look at your family, and you look at you, and you say, "This stuff is out of control."

So let me give you a couple of practical tips. One, don't be so overwhelmed by the things that are beyond your control that you don't address the things you can control. Sometimes that happens.

So I use myself. I can't control my height, but I can control my width. Now, I ought to be dealing with that. So you can't solve the $18 trillion debt, but you can manage your own finance. Don't be so overwhelmed by that, and understand this: that God is in control, and not just, again, on a macro view, on a personal view.

God's Personal Knowledge of You

Let me read to you from Psalm 139. The psalmist writes this. I'm gonna read from a paraphrase. I think it's The Message. Psalm 139, verse one:

"God, investigate my life. Get all the facts firsthand. I'm an open book to you. Even from a distance, you know what I'm thinking. You know when I leave and when I get back, and I'm never out of your sight. You know everything I'm gonna say before I say the first sentence. I look behind me, you're there. I look ahead of me, you're there. Your reassuring presence is coming and going. This is too much, too wonderful. I can't handle it all. You know me inside out. You know every bone in my body. You know exactly how I was made, bit by bit, how I was sculptured from nothing to something. Like an open book, you watched me grow from conception to birth. All the stages of my life were spread out before you. The days of my life all prepared before I'd even lived one day."

And here comes all this stuff at you. And what I need to remember is, it's beyond my control, but it's not out of His control. And I can take a deep breath and I can understand He's in charge.

God Forgives Sin

Number two. Second thing you need to know: God forgives sin. Much of that stress in our life comes from sin. "Restore the joy of my salvation," the psalmist cried.

How many—I love to do this, they used to do this about every six months, didn't do it first hour, just popped into my head, always dangerous—but how many of you became Christians after age 18? Raise your hand. Leave your hands up. Good chunk, good chunk of people.

Well, if you've lived 18 years apart from Christ, you've done a bunch of stuff. When they came to me and they started this plan of salvation that started with "you're a sinner," I said, "Well, here's the one thing I know: I got empirical data to support that."

The Weight of Guilt

So you got this guilt. I was born and raised Catholic—grade school, high school, college. We talked a lot about sin. And many of the people around me, I don't feel like this, but many people around me felt that guilt was poured on them and on them and on them. And I always felt that I responded by feeling guilty, but I felt guilty because I—yeah, what do I do with this?

Well, I go to confession and five of these and six of these, but I'm back there. I can't even get to the parking lot before I've tripped and fallen on this again, and I'm back in there. "No, Mother, was this girl in the back row." You can't—you're filled with this. And now He said, "I forgive you."

Complete Transformation

Look at 1 Corinthians chapter 6. Notice the tenses. He's writing to a church at Corinth. He's writing to believers, and he's talking about people who are sinful people. And he says, "Such were some of you"—that's what you used to be. You were washed and sanctified and justified. You are not that any longer.

You don't have to clean up your act to be acceptable to God. You could never clean it up enough. Some of you may still be here. We're in a way kind of like the gym—we see a little spike in attendance in January because there's some of you, you came at Christmas and we're glad you're here. It's great to have you here. And this is part of your New Year's resolution. And you're gonna clean up your act and you're gonna get it together. You're gonna try harder and you're gonna do better, and we applaud all of those things.

But you can never make yourself acceptable to God. I'm saved by grace through faith. Christ died. It's the last song you sang: "Jesus paid it all." He died in your place on the cross and now you're—

Finding Peace Through Forgiveness

Forgiven doesn't mean you won't sin, but it means as you sin you're forgiven in this process. It's not a license to sin, but it's a joy and understanding you were bought at a price. Paul tells us Romans 6, "Consider yourself dead to sin. Don't let sin reign in your body."

We meet people all the time and you could be one of them: "I can't forgive myself." Well, listen, if God forgave you, that's who you sinned against. You didn't sin against your spouse or your neighbor or yourself. You sinned against God and He says you're forgiven.

I have the date on the email. It's May 18, 2005. I can even give you the time. It's 10:26 in the morning. It's from Les Taylor and we were in a study or discussion or something that morning and Les read a prayer and I asked if he would send me a copy of it. See if this doesn't nail this cold. He said, "Tom, here's the prayer I shared this morning: Father, I find myself remembering what You've forgotten and condemning myself for what You've forgiven. Teach me never to forget Your forgiveness because I will only be at peace with myself when I'm at peace with You."

You're looking around at a place where you got a whole bunch of people that have the peace of God because we've experienced peace with God. Those of you that took communion, that's what your declaration in there was. I'm one of His. He died in my place.

The Temporary Nature of This Life

Here's the third thing: God is our only hope and life is temporary. There's one of those passages and I just keep going back to the same passages over and over again. But I remember again the first time I read it, I thought wow. I remember Larry teaching it and going that's amazing.

"Therefore don't lose heart. Don't quit. Don't give up. Though the outer man is decaying, the inner man is being renewed day by day. For momentary light affliction is producing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison while we look not at the things that are seen which are temporal, but the things that are not seen that are eternal." He's been talking in there, Paul about how they're crushed around them and affliction around them and persecution around them and stress all around them. But he said don't lose heart. The outer man is decaying.

I made this list yesterday beginning with January 10th last year. I had a heart bypass, kidney stones, a new eye prescription, new treatment for lupus, and last week got hearing aids. It's just falling apart. Nothing is working. I said hearing aids and three people went, "What do you say?" I love that.

It just is. You can't stop it. Well, you can lift and curl and shoot and take pills, but you can't stop the decay of this body. The statistics on death are impressive: one out of one people die. You are not the exception. I just sent myself the email last week: the oldest man in America just died. Okay, so not the oldest man in America. He's the newest dead guy.

Everything Around Us Is Decaying

It's just what it is. The outer man is decaying and it's not just us physically, it's everything around us. Everything is in decay. This room we're in, I don't remember the year we... if Neil was here he could... I don't know what year we built this room. Well, we already remodeled it and they probably got a meeting somewhere to blade it and build a high-rise somewhere I don't know. Everything is decaying.

But we're renewed internally day by day through communication with God, communion with God, being His kid, living for Him, listening to Him, talking to Him, pursuing Him. For momentary light affliction... okay, all that stress, whatever that stress is, He goes momentary light affliction.

When you put it on a scale, when those balance scales, you put your momentary light affliction here, the eternal weight of glory is all here because He said we don't look at the things that are seen. We look at the things that are unseen. This stuff that we see, it's deceiving. It's temporary. It's passing away. We need perspective.

The Importance of Perspective

I came home one day and Sandy said, "I found a great picture of you." Well, that's encouraging. I don't take a very good picture. I don't smile. I never know what to do. I'm a doofus in a picture. So she said, "I found a great picture of you." I said that's cool. She said, "You look so tall in this picture." I said really? Well, we ought to get this baby. I got a new Facebook picture and get this out.

So she said it's in there on the desk, go and take a look at it. It's a picture and I looked at it and I said I really do look tall. Okay, it's a picture of me standing with my eight and nine year old little lady. And I'm taller than all but two of them. Okay, I mean, it's pretty impressive.

And so from that perspective I look tall. Now am I tall standing next to the average high school girl in America? No. Am I tall next to Shaq? No. It's perspective. And this whole competitive thing starts within minutes of your birth. Within minutes at the time you're born, they take the baby away and evaluate: can they hear? How do they hear on one to ten? What kind of alertness do they have, one to ten? Two minutes old and they're already grading you and comparing you.

Our Eternal Hope

And that body is beginning to decay and we look at everything that's around us and He said here's the thing: it's all temporary. Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians chapter 4, "For we believe that Jesus died and rose again and even so God will bring with Him those that have fallen asleep." He's talking about end times.

"For this we say to you by the word of the Lord that we are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will not proceed those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with the shout, with the voice of the Archangel, with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise. Then we who are alive and remain should be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air." Here's the point: "So we shall always be with the Lord."

Now I don't want to get into end times and I don't know rapture, this, that. I don't know.

Here's what I know. What He's saying is there's a day when I'm going to be with Jesus forever. That's the perspective He's trying to get. And that's not just some dogmatic study. Verse 18 gives you the payoff. Therefore comfort one another with these words.

I'm in the midst of whatever it is that's producing this stress. Big, small, real, imagined, I don't know. All I know is no matter how bad it gets, it can only last a lifetime. That's what I know. That's what He's telling me. And I need that perspective.

And that doesn't mean... I hope, I don't think, I don't see how you could think that that's insensitive. It's not. I know. I got real struggle. I can look out and see it. I can hold up a mirror and see it. I'm not saying the struggle isn't real. I'm saying it needs to be in some eternal perspective.

Keeping Things in Proper Perspective

I need to understand that the stuff I'm engaged in is important. I mean, it kills me. We are within eight days of the end of the college football season. This is unbelievable. Is it important? I don't know. Friday morning, it's the Tax Slayer Bowl. I put up my little Iowa flag and I go in and get a cup of coffee and I sit down and I say, I got to go to the bathroom and I come back and we're behind 28 to nothing.

Is it important? Yeah, it really is. But it's not crucial. See, what it needs, sports are great things. In perspective, work is really important. The deal tomorrow, the meeting you have, that's all really important. But it needs to be in its place.

Our Hope is in Him

It gets me to the big point, which is our hope is in Him. Here's number four. It's just Romans 8:28. And we know. There's the word again. And we know. So as all that stress and all that stuff is coming and we have these feelings that overwhelm us, we have this thing that we know.

What do we know? That God causes all things to work together for good. It doesn't say God causes all things. He doesn't cause sin. But He takes all these things and works them together for good. But look at this. It's not a universal promise. It's to those who love God and to those who are called according to His purpose. To those that are Christians. To those that are followers of Christ. To those of you who by your own admission, you took communion and you would say, I'm a Christian.

I know I've told it and it never ceases to amaze me because I'm in a lot of settings because of what I do and how I do it and where I travel where they'll talk about what do you do and this and that and we'll get talking about spiritual things and I'll say, are you a Christian? And I have heard what feels like every answer. I'm sure I haven't. But I've heard I pay my taxes. I was born in Kansas. I drive a Chevy. That just simply makes you a farmer, by the way. That doesn't make you a Christian.

My favorite all-time answer is, we're sitting here in my office and I said, are you a Christian? And He said, not in the biblical sense. That's my all-time favorite answer. And I remember going, what? Well, not in the biblical... well, there isn't any other sense. There's no other sense. Are you a follower of Christ by the definition that He gives us in this book? Because He's the one who determines what a Christian is.

Well, if you are, you love Him, you're called according to His purpose, it's all going to work out. Sandy and I had a meeting last week with a couple that are a ministry couple here in town and they drove out so that we could talk about their strategy and their year that's coming up. It was a great meeting. And there's a lot... I mean, it was question mark after question mark after question mark. I mean, it was a lot. And I said, I know I need to qualify this and say how lame it sounds, but I know it's true. It always works out. It always works out. It may not work out exactly like I planned, but it always works out.

One of those incidents last year, it happens all the time, where I'm meeting some guy and I'm at a Bible study and, how are you doing this morning? He said, well, better than the alternative. And I'm going, really? The alternative is heaven. This is better? This is better. Honestly, you're here for a Bible study and this is better? You'd rather listen to me than be with Jesus? Wow, I must be good. I mean, I don't think you've thought this through, buddy.

It Can Only Last a Lifetime

This, no matter how bad it gets, it can only last a lifetime. It's going to work out. What's the worst thing? Sienna and I were talking about it. It was a year ago yesterday that we met with Dr. Robert Riley, and he said, we're going to do this surgery. I said, fine. And he said, you don't seem too concerned about it. And I said, well, you're good, aren't you? And he said, yeah, I'm really good. One of the best. And I said, well, okay, fine.

And we just looked at it and it wasn't anything super. It was like, what's the worst thing that can happen here? And it's life. It's what it is. And it's not some super spiritual thing. It's a reality. If what we say every week is true, then it ought to translate to how we live day-to-day in the things that we encounter.

God Doesn't Change

Here's the fifth thing, and Neil really touched on it last week, and that is that God doesn't change. If we do the attributes of God, and I go, oh, let's do the attributes of God. What are God's attributes? Well, right away we're going to get love, all-knowing, all those. Here's the one that rarely hits the list, but it's a big one: immutable. God doesn't change.

Malachi chapter 3, verse 6, that's exactly what the verse says. I, the Lord, do not change. Hebrews 13:8. Jesus is the same yesterday, today, forever. All these things that we're talking about that were written almost 2,000 years ago, plenty of them, longer, some of them, those things were written. Those are true today. God doesn't change.

Our hope is rooted in the character of God, the sovereignty of God, the faithfulness of God, and the promises of God. We talk a lot about idols. When we're talking about an idol, we're talking about something we're putting our faith, trust, and hope in. Our hope as followers of Christ, as Christians, is rooted in the character of God, His sovereignty, His control, His faithfulness, and His promise.

The Foundation of Promise

The promise you get is only as good as the one who makes it. I love infomercials, and there are certain phrases in infomercials that get me. One of them is this: "These knives come with a limited lifetime warranty." I never understood what that means. Here's what I hear: everything that breaks for you is not covered under this warranty.

Our garden hose goes 1,000 feet long, and you turn it off, and you can put it in your pocket. It comes with a lifetime warranty. Are you telling me 25 years from now, I'm going to find Jack the hose guy, and he's going to replace this? I don't know. Here's what I know: a promise is only as good as the one who makes it.

Haven't you done that, where you bought something, and you go back to the guy, and he skipped town? He's working Fresno now. But God promises it. He's the one who says it. He doesn't change.

Standing Strong in Life's Storms

The wear and tear of life comes pouring at you. I get that it's wearisome, and it's hard. There are three things you can do, and they're really helpful. But here are at least five things you can know, and you could add to this.

He's in control, and He forgives sin, and He's our hope. This is temporary. He causes all things to work together for good, and He doesn't change.

Let's pray. Father, thank You for those amazing truths. The minute these doors open, we're going to experience some level of that stress, wear and tear, and anxiousness. God, calm us, settle us. Fill us with Your Spirit, and remind us what we know.

God, remind us You're in control. Let us experience the peace that You have for us because we're forgiven, and that You're our only hope. God, give us that eternal perspective. Thank You that You work things together for good, even if we don't even need to understand how that works. God, thank You that You don't change.

I pray for those that are here today that are really hurting, really struggling, that You'd give them a sense of encouragement. God, these aren't just words, but You transform our life. God, do that work. We ask it of You, in Christ's name, amen.