Stress of Life

Tom Shrader addresses the universal experience of stress, briefly noting practical helps like sleep, diet, and exercise before turning to five scriptural truths that provide deeper grounding. Drawing from James 1, Psalm 139, 2 Corinthians 4, Romans 8:28, and Malachi 3:6, he walks through the assurance that God is in control, that He forgives sin, that life is temporary with eternal hope ahead, that all things work together for good, and that God does not change. The overarching theme is that lasting peace comes not from managing circumstances but from anchoring hope in the character, sovereignty, faithfulness, and promises of God.

“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: 2015 at East Valley Bible Church

Duration: 40 min

Themes: stress, anxiety, peace, hope, trust, sovereignty of god, forgiveness, eternal life, overwhelmed by life, dealing with health problems, feeling anxious, parent under pressure, college student, caregiver, facing uncertainty, grieving

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

Theological Themes: divine sovereignty, immutability of god, god does not change, providence, sanctification, biblical hope, romans 8:28, eschatology

Full Transcript

Introduction

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. So to come back is great.

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

What prompted the change was really a culmination of a couple of months of listening to people at all stages of life. People talking about finals they have to get out of the way, dissertations they have to finish, family members who are sick — just all of that stuff that is part of life and then seems to intensify around the holidays. The word that every person used to describe it was, "I have stress." So I thought I would talk about stress.

The Scope of Stress

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 are born. It hits everyone — there is no escaping it. Stress affects the apparently happy, healthy people, and he is left in no doubt that stress is the fastest growing disease in the Western world.

The AMA says, upon 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 that high blood pressure, cholesterol, lack of exercise, obesity, and cigarette smoking all contribute to heart disease, but more and more it is beginning to appear that the single greatest cause of heart attack is the stress of life. There is even an article in the Wall Street Journal discussing the stress of living produced in the lives of children ages one to four, based on the anxiety and stress of daycare. This is a topic that hits just about everybody.

Defining Stress

Definition is always important, so here is the definition we are going to use: stress is essentially the wear and tear of living. Stress is life — it is what you experience. We can think of the big things, but it starts with the little things. The other morning I got up, got everything set, put on clothes I liked, went out, and my K-Cup machine was not working right. Not a big thing, but it starts the day on the wrong trajectory. Then the light at McQueen and Elliott was red. And so it is all those things — big things, little things — essentially the wear and tear of living.

Three Common Remedies

Now, I will give you three things you can do about stress. You probably do not even need to write these down, because whether you go to your physician, talk to a friend at Starbucks, or see your homeopath, they are going to give you these same three things.

Number one: eat better. Quit at two donuts, do not go to three. Nothing radical, just eat better. Number two: sleep. You have to have your sleep. Do whatever it takes — get the right pillow, get your room dark or light, whatever works — but you have to sleep. Number three: exercise. And I know how it goes: you order P90X, you go at the highest intensity level the first day, and it is on eBay by Wednesday. You hurt yourself and find out what your co-pays are. So just walk. Do something. Get a Fitbit, count your steps, do something. These three things are indisputable, and they will help — eat better, sleep, and exercise.

A Different Direction: James 1:2

Where I am going, though, is a different direction. I had not been a Christian very long — I 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 brought nothing but common sense to it. I had no Greek, none of that. Just common sense.

I read James chapter one, verse two: *"Consider it all joy when you encounter various trials."* To intensify those words — "consider" is more than a passing glance. It means to really think, to meditate on something. Then reckon it as joy. And what is joyful? Encountering various trials. My first reaction has to be the same as yours: that is counterintuitive. Praise God, here comes a trial.

We could spend weeks on this single verse alone, but let me point out the obvious. When it says "when you encounter various trials," there is an inevitability to it — life will produce trials. And they are called "various," which in the Greek literally means multi-colored. There will be trials of all kinds. Some will be things that feel like nothing, and some will fall into the big bucket categories — relational trials, physical trials, spiritual challenges, economic challenges.

four-year sojourn, Bob Hage gave his life to Christ. The cleaning lady explained it to him. So here's the premise: God is in control.

God Is in Control

Colossians 1:15 says He is the image of the invisible God, and by Him all things were created — heavens and earth, visible and invisible — all things have been created through Him and for Him. He is the one who holds it all together. That is the first thing you can know when stress comes into your life: God is in control.

The Testing of Faith Produces Endurance

Now let's back up to where James is taking us. The Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle said that for every hundred people who can handle the test of adversity, there is only one who can handle the test of prosperity. So when you think the trial is about losing everything financially, the point is that keeping everything is just as big a trial. How are you going to handle that?

When I first looked at that verse, I scratched my head and said, "I don't get it. How can I count it all joy?" The answer comes in verse three: "knowing." You can count these trials as joy because you know something. You know that the testing of your faith produces endurance.

I call this spiritual aerobics. My wife Sandy swims, and there is a whole culture around that — swimmers and runners and the mentality that goes with it. There is an annual tradition among the masters swimmers where, at the turn of the new year, they swim one hundred — meaning six and a half miles. Sandy got up yesterday and swam her six and a half miles, then celebrated with a breakfast burrito from Filiberto's. Then last night when we were coordinating the next day's plans, she told me that P.F. Chang's is coming up, so she needed to get a long run in. This morning she ran ten and a half miles.

The reason you do that is to strengthen yourself. The aerobic activity produces endurance. You push yourself and push yourself, you test yourself, and you can go further, faster, and healthier. That is exactly what James is saying: the testing of your faith is spiritual aerobics. It tests you spiritually, and you can count it all joy because you know this testing will make you stronger.

Some of your translations will say "perseverance" instead of "endurance." When you hear that word in your mind, think of "well done, good and faithful servant" — fought the good fight, finished the race. That enduring, persevering quality is produced through trials.

Five Things You Can Know

So here are five things you can know. As these incidents come into your life — and this really becomes the overarching premise for all of life — you take them and lay them against these five things. It may not happen instantaneously. I am not saying we are going to make life so it is not scary, not worrisome, not bothersome. What I am saying is that when you take a deep breath and begin to survey what is around you, you come back to these five things.

**Number one: God is in control.**

I was teaching on a Thursday morning when a man named Bob Hage came in. I didn't know him at the time, but he was an interesting-looking man — one of those people you notice when they walk into a room. He was an older man who reminded me a little of my father: a little taller, a little thinner, khaki slacks, a light blue shirt, gray hair combed neatly. We were introduced, and I said, "Let's have coffee."

It turned out this man had worked for McDonnell Douglas Corporation, where he was in charge of the liaison between the company and the seven original astronauts. McDonnell Douglas was producing the original Mercury capsule. When John Kennedy said we were going to place a man on the moon by the end of the decade and bring him back safely, everyone looked at each other and said, "How are we going to do that? We don't have a rocket. We don't have a capsule." But the vision was set, and they were going to do it.

McDonnell Douglas won the bidding and built the capsule. Hage was in charge of the liaison with men like John Glenn and Alan Shepard. In the course of that work, they were dealing with gravity — they understood it, it worked all the time, but they could not fully explain it. As Hage wrestled with that question, it spilled into his personal life. He began asking what the meaning of life was, why he was here, where he was going. So simultaneously with his work at McDonnell Douglas, he was on a personal sojourn that took him around the world. He ended up with Francis Schaeffer at L'Abri, spending a month there talking with brilliant minds — and still he found no conclusion.

Then one day he was in his den in St. Louis, on a conference call about gravity. They were frustrated — von Braun and the others were working through it, but no answers. He hung up the phone, and his cleaning lady said to him, "This is probably inappropriate, but I couldn't help overhearing you. I think I can explain gravity." He said, "Sit down."

She took him to Colossians 1:15 — that He is the image of the invisible God, that by Him all things were created, heavens and earth, visible and invisible, all things have been created through Him and for Him. He is the one who holds it all together. After a two- or three-year sojourn, Bob Hage gave his life to Christ that day. The cleaning lady explained it to him.

So here is the first thing you can know when stress comes: God is in control.

God's Control Over a Chaotic World

After a four-year worldwide search to find meaning in life, his cleaning lady led him to Christ. God is in control. We sit on a planet that weighs 6,588,000,000,000,000 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 the Milky Way, 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 is just one of millions of galaxies in this vast universe, so predictable that we can tell you when Halley's Comet will come again and when the sun will rise.

God holds all of this together — not just 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 are having double scotches by the end of the night, thinking this is all falling apart. It is every night and it does not stop.

You get in the car, and rather than listen to something helpful, you listen to talk radio, and the world is falling apart. Remember the Ebola crisis? Everyone was convinced we were all going to be sick. Twice as many women married Larry King as the number of men who got Ebola — that is an interesting thought. But you have all of this coming at you.

Then there is the country falling apart — $18 trillion in debt, and William Devane is telling you to buy gold. Tomorrow we inaugurate a new governor who has $750 million he has to come up with from somewhere. You break it all down — the country, your city, your family, yourself — and you say, this stuff is out of control.

Practical Tips for Regaining Perspective

So let me give you a couple of practical tips. First, do not be so overwhelmed by the things that are beyond your control that you fail to address the things you can control. I will use myself as an example: I cannot control my height, but I can control my width — and I ought to be dealing with that. You cannot solve the $18 trillion debt, but you can manage your own finances. Do not be so overwhelmed by what you cannot change that you neglect what you can.

And understand this: God is in control — not just on a macro level, but on a deeply personal level. Listen to what the psalmist writes in Psalm 139, beginning at verse one. I am reading from a paraphrase, I believe the Message:

> "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."

With all of this coming at you, what you need to remember is: it may be beyond your control, but it is not out of His control. You can take a deep breath and understand that He is in charge.

God Forgives Sin

The second thing you need to know is that God forgives sin. Much of the stress in our lives comes from sin. As the psalmist cried, "Restore the joy of my salvation."

How many of you became Christians after the age of 18? Raise your hand. Good — a good chunk of people. Well, if you lived 18 years apart from Christ, you have done a bunch of things. When someone first shared the plan of salvation with me and started with "you're a sinner," I said, well, that is the one thing I know — I have empirical data to support that.

So you carry this guilt. I was born and raised Catholic — grade school, high school, college — and we talked a lot about sin. Many of the people around me felt that guilt was simply poured on them, again and again. I felt guilty because I was guilty. And I would wonder, what do I do with this? I would go to confession — five of these, six of those — but I could not even make it to the parking lot before I had tripped and fallen again and needed to go back. You are filled with this weight, and yet He says, "I forgive you."

Washed, Sanctified, Justified

Look at 1 Corinthians chapter 6. Notice the tenses. Paul is writing to the church at Corinth — he is writing to believers — and he is describing people who had been sinful. He says, "Such were some of you." That is what you used to be. You were washed, and sanctified, and justified. You are not that any longer.

You do not have to clean up your act to be acceptable to God. You could never clean it up enough. Some of you may still be working on that. We see a little spike in attendance in January — some of you came at Christmas and we are glad you are here. This is part of your New Year's resolution. You are going to clean up your act, get it together, try harder, and do better — and we applaud all of those things. But you can never make yourself acceptable to God.

We are saved by grace through faith. Christ died. As the last song you sang put it, Jesus paid it all — He died in your place on the cross, and now you are forgiven. It does not mean you will not sin, but it means that as you

Forgiveness and Peace with God

Sin, you're forgiven in this process. It's not a license to sin, but it's a joy and understanding that you were bought at a price. Paul tells us in Romans 6 to consider yourself dead to sin and not to let sin reign in your body. We meet people all the time — and you could be one of them — who say, "I can't forgive myself." But listen: if God forgave you, He is the one you sinned against. You didn't ultimately sin against your spouse, your neighbor, or yourself. You sinned against God, and He says you're forgiven.

I have the date on the email. It's May 18th, 2005 — I can even give you the time, 10:26 in the morning. It's from Les Taylor. We were in a study or discussion 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 it 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.'"

Look around this place — you've got a whole bunch of people who have the peace of God because they've experienced peace with God. Those of you who took communion, that was your declaration: I am one of His. He died in my place.

God Is Our Only Hope, and Life Is Temporary

Here's the third thing: God is our only hope, and life is temporary. There's one of those passages I just keep going back to again and again. I remember the first time I ever read it I thought, "Wow." I remember Larry teaching it and thinking, "That's amazing."

"Therefore do not 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 at the things that are not seen, that are eternal." Paul is talking there about how affliction and persecution and stress are all around them, and yet he says, "Don't lose heart."

The outer man is decaying. I made a list yesterday beginning with January 10th of last year: a heart bypass, kidney stones, a new eye prescription, new treatment for lupus, and last week I got hearing aids. It's just falling apart. I said "hearing aids" and three people leaned over and said, "What did you say?" It just is what it is. You can't stop it. You can lift and curl and take pills, but you cannot 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 an email last week: the oldest man in America just died. So we're not the oldest man in America — he's the newest dead guy. 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 a state of change. This very room we're in, I don't remember the year we built it, but we've already remodeled it, and they've probably got a meeting somewhere to demolish it and build a high-rise. Everything is decaying. But we are renewed internally day by day through communication with God, communion with God — being His child, living for Him, listening to Him, talking to Him, pursuing Him.

Eternal Perspective on Momentary Affliction

"Momentary light affliction" — all that stress, whatever that stress is, he calls it momentary light affliction. When you put it on a balance scale, you put your momentary light affliction on one side, and the eternal weight of glory is all on the other. Paul says we don't look at the things that are seen; we look at the things that are unseen. The stuff we see is deceiving — it's temporary, it's passing away. We need 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," and I thought, "That's cool." She said, "You look so tall in this picture." Really? I thought we ought to get this out as a new Facebook picture. She said it was on the desk, so I went and took a look at it. I really did look tall — it was a picture of me standing with my eight and nine year old little girls, and I was taller than all but two of them. Pretty impressive.

From that perspective I look tall. But am I tall standing next to the average high school girl in America? No. Am I tall next to Shaq? No. It's all about perspective. And this whole competitive comparison starts within minutes of your birth — within minutes of the time you're born, they take the baby away and evaluate: can they hear, on a scale of one to ten? What kind of alertness do they have, one to ten? Two minutes old and they're already grading and comparing you. That body is beginning to decay, and we look at everything around us. He says: it's all temporary.

The Hope of Being with the Lord

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 who have fallen asleep." He's talking about the end times. "For this we say to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive and remain until the coming of the Lord will not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive and remain shall 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 debates — I don't know all the details about the Rapture, this or that. Here's what I know. What he's saying is there's a day when I'm going to be with

Eternal Perspective in the Midst of Stress

Jesus forever. That's the perspective He's trying to get across, 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. All I know is that 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.

I hope no one thinks that's insensitive, because it's not. I know there is 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 held in an eternal perspective.

I need to understand that the things I'm engaged in are important. I mean, it kills me — we are within eight days of the end of the college football season. Saturday morning, I put out my little Iowa flag, go in and get a cup of coffee, sit down, step away for a moment, come back, and we're behind 28 to nothing. Is it important? Yeah, it really is, but it's not crucial. Sports are great things, but they need to be kept in perspective. Work is really important. The deal tomorrow, the meeting you have — all of that is really important — but it needs to be in its proper place.

Our Hope Is in Him: Romans 8:28

That brings me to the big point, which is that our hope is in Him. The fourth thing is simply Romans 8:28: "And we know" — there's that word again — "that God causes all things to work together for good." As all that stress is coming, and all those feelings are overwhelming us, there is this thing that we know.

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. And notice this: it is not a universal promise. It is to those who love God and to those who are called according to His purpose — those who are Christians, followers of Christ, those of you who by your own admission took communion and would say, "I'm a Christian."

It never ceases to amaze me, because I'm in a lot of settings where the conversation turns to spiritual things and I'll ask, "Are you a Christian?" I have heard what feels like every answer. I've heard "I pay my taxes," "I was born in Kansas," "I drive a Chevy" — that simply makes you a farmer, by the way; it doesn't make you a Christian. My all-time favorite answer came from someone sitting in my office. I asked, "Are you a Christian?" and he said, "Not in the biblical sense." That is my favorite answer of all time. I remember going, "Well, not in the biblical sense — there isn't any other sense." There's no other sense. Are you a follower of Christ by the definition He gives us in this book? Because He is the one who determines what a Christian is.

If you are — if you love Him and are called according to His purpose — it's all going to work out. Sandy and I had a meeting last week with a ministry couple here in town. They drove out so we could talk about their strategy for the coming year. It was a great meeting, and there were question marks after question marks. I said, "I know I need to qualify this because of how lame it sounds, but I know it's true: it always works out. It may not work out exactly like I planned, but it always works out."

One of those moments happened last year. I was at a Bible study and asked a guy, "How are you doing this morning?" He said, "Well, better than the alternative." I stopped and thought — really? The alternative is heaven. This is better? You're here for a Bible study, and this is better than being with Jesus? No matter how bad it gets, it can only last a lifetime. It's going to work out.

Sienna and I were talking about this — it was a year ago yesterday that we met with Dr. Robert Riley and he said we were going to do this surgery. I said fine, and he said, "You don't seem too concerned." I said, "Why? You're good, aren't you?" He said, "Yeah, I'm really good. One of the best." I said, "Well, okay, fine." We just looked at it and asked: what's the worst thing that can happen here? And it's life. It's what it is. 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 we encounter.

God Does Not Change

Here's the fifth thing, and Neil really touched on it last week: God doesn't change. If we go through the attributes of God, right away we're going to get love, all-knowing, all those. Here's one that rarely hits the list, but it's a big one: immutable. God doesn't change. Malachi 3:6 says exactly that: "I the Lord do not change." Hebrews 13:8: "Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever." All these things we've been talking about that were written almost 2,000 years ago — many of them longer — those things are true today. God doesn't change.

Our Hope Is Rooted in God

Our hope is rooted in the character of God, the sovereignty of God, the faithfulness of God, and the promises of God. When we talk about an idol, we are talking about something we put our faith, trust, and hope in. Our hope as followers of Christ is rooted in God's character, His sovereignty, His control, His faithfulness, and His promises.

A promise is only as good as the one who makes it. I love watching infomercials, and there are certain phrases in them that get me. One of them is this: "These knives come with a limited lifetime warranty." I never quite understood what that meant. Then there is the garden hose that stretches a thousand feet, collapses so you can put it in your pocket, and comes with a lifetime warranty. Are you telling me that twenty-five years from now I am going to find Jack the hose guy and he is going to replace it? Haven't you had that experience where you bought something, went back to find the seller, and were told, "He skipped town — he's working in Fresno now"?

God promises it. He is the one who says it, and He does not change. The wear and tear of life comes pouring at you, and I understand that it is wearisome and hard. There are at least five things you can know, and you could add to this list: He is in control, He forgives sin, He is our hope, this life is temporary, He causes all things to work together for good, and He does not change.

Closing Prayer

Father, thank You for those amazing truths. In the wear and tear of life, the moment these doors open, we are going to experience some level of 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 are in control. Let us experience the peace You have for us, because we are forgiven and You are our only hope. Give us that eternal perspective. Thank You that You work things together for good — and we do not even need to understand how that works.

God, thank You that You do not change. I pray for those here today who are really hurting and really struggling, that You would give them a sense of encouragement and that these are not just words, but that You transform our lives. God, do that work. We ask it of You in Christ's name, amen.