More than 50% of American admit to having greater stress now than when the Covid-19 pandemic began. Whether you are stressed due to covid, or the stress of everyday life the Bible gives you strategies to maintain or retain your sanity.

<p>More than 50% of American admit to having greater stress now than when the Covid-19 pandemic began. Whether you are stressed due to covid, or the stress of everyday life the Bible gives you strategies to maintain or retain your sanity.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Bay City SDA Church

Taylor Hinkle

Keys to Peace - Biblical Strategies to Regaining or Maintaining Your Sanity

It's a blessing to be together to study the Word of God.

This morning we're going to be looking at the topic of keys to peace, biblical strategies to regaining or maintaining your sanity.

And before we begin, why don't we ask the Lord to guide us and for His Spirit to give us wisdom as we study His Word.

Father in Heaven, we thank You so much for the privilege we have of gathering together as your people.

Father, we recognize that we are living in interesting times, times in which have not been seen at least in our lifetimes.

Lord, but we're also thankful that with every challenge and every struggle that we face, that you promise to be with us to the end of the age.

Lord, we're thankful that you can bring us peace in the midst of a storm, that you can give us hope and encouragement regardless of what we're facing.

And Father, as we take a little bit of time to meditate and to reflect upon your word and some of the principles that we can find.

Lord may you help us to find practical strategies to maintaining a connection with you regardless of what life throws at us.

Some interesting statistics have been coming out in the last little bit of time.

As you can see the headline of this article it says more than half of Americans say that they are more stressed than they were before the COVID-19 pandemic.

Now does that make a little bit of sense why people might be stressed today?

You understand that work has been disrupted.

Oftentimes the family cycle and schedule has been disrupted by children either studying at home or having interruptions in their schedule.

You recognize that the financial well-being of people has been disrupted or upset during this time.

The social environment and what people are allowed to do or want to do or being told to do is often different than what people desire to do.

And I don't think it's by accident that we recognize that there is a great deal of stress coming upon each person, but it makes a lot of logical sense that people are facing tangible challenges.

I know that there are people who are facing drastic decreases in their pay every month, maybe by 25% or 50% or some people even without a job.

And this isn't just affecting people out in the world, but we recognize even people who might even be here this morning are impacted by the very thing we're talking about.

Now, it's interesting what people state as their causes for stress during this pandemic.

So 66% of people reported being moderately to extremely stressed about that.

I'm glad I didn't include the first part, about catching the virus.

57% of people say that they were moderately to extremely stressed about their own health.

So the first 1, they're stressed about the health of others.

The second 1, they're stressed about their own health.

58% say they're frustrated about not being able to enjoy usual activities.

56% of people worry about the possible breakdown of society.

53% of people say they're concerned about their personal finances.

And this last 1, I guess, to me, doesn't shake me as much.

But 53% of people are just worried about being bored.

And I would say probably that's the least of the worry.

But you realize that there is worry all around, and people are being faced with all sorts of things.

Now let me compound that with 1 other article.

And this is something you can find statistically elsewhere.

Holidays is 1 of the greatest time of depression in the United States and suicide.

It says holidays stress out 88% of Americans' study claims.

You and I this week are getting ready to celebrate Thanksgiving, and you think, oh, everyone's heart is warm and happy during that time.

But there are others whose hearts are very hard and grieved during the holiday season.

Maybe they lost a loved 1 around the holidays and every time they come to that holiday they think of that person.

Maybe they come from a divided home and during the holidays the question is well do I go to mom's or dad's and the added stress of seeing the breakdown of your own family unit.

But whatever the situation might be, we recognize that we have a double hit for stress currently during the season we're going through.

We have the COVID-19 pandemic, plus we have the holiday season coming, which might be a blessing for you and it might be a curse for you.

But I think it's easy to say that many people today are struggling with stress in a proportion that is unusual to themselves.

Now there might be someone here who says, you know, I haven't been stressed at all about this whole thing.

And the encouragement to you, you might be tempted to think it's just now time to walk out of the church because you don't need a sermon that tells you how to deal with stress.

But how many of you know it to be true that if you're not dealing with stress today, it will come.

There will be a time in life where an accident happens or an overwhelming flood of emotion, whatever difficulty comes, and the question is, does God give us keys?

Does he give us practical strategies to maintaining or also getting back, regaining the very sanity that we've lost.

You know, a Bible passage that comes to mind as I think about these things comes from Isaiah 26 and verse 3.

And tell me if you agree that this is not a powerful passage.

It says, you will keep him in what kind of peace?

How many of you would give about anything for perfect peace?

I mean, do you know millionaires today who would trade their life savings for a little bit of peace?

The reality is, is people are longing for the peace, and notice what it says, you will keep him in perfect peace, whose mind has stayed on you because he what he trusts in you now we need to process it's a little bit and we're gonna be understanding what are practical ways to do this in our life you see we might be here this morning You might have walked in with a little bit of stress, but as we've taken time to sing together as we've started to read some Promises from scripture you can begin to feel encouraged in an environment that fosters that have you ever experienced that before?

But what about when you leave this environment or you leave an environment?

That's spiritually focused and you go back into normal life.

How is it possible to keep our minds in perfect peace?

Well the Bible tells us that if our mind is stayed on you and you notice that's a capital U, it's talking about the Lord.

If our mind is fixed, if it's stayed, if it's focused on God, He can keep us in that if we trust Him through everyday reality.

Now this is really easy to talk about in a setting like this.

We're not facing any unknown stressors currently as we're talking, unless you're the presenter and you're afraid of stage and talking to people.

But you realize that we're in a fairly easy environment at this point.

But what happens when you walk out of here, say sundown's open, over and you open your mail and you realize that you just got a large unexpected bill?

How many of you have ever struggled with finding perfect peace in environments like that?

Can I give you a little bit more of a practical example?

You see this picture here, and we're in our house, we're currently installing, we have installed windows this summer.

And this is not a picture of our window, we don't have a view of the ocean from where we're at.

But this is a little bit nicer than our current installation, so I thought I'd show it to you.

Well, we installed the windows, and what you know with any installation or home remodel, there's time, there's money, there's effort, and all this goes into it.

So as I'm thinking about peace and stress, I was getting ready to go downstairs on my day off last week, getting ready to do some drywalling because that's the current process we're at.

As I walk over and I look at some of the windows, do you remember what happened on Sunday?

I don't know if it happened for you in your area.

We had strong winds and we had lots of rain.

Well, I was on the phone and I just walked around, was walking around the basement getting ready to do drywall and I walk over to 1 of the windows and I realized it's leaking.

Well, Then I walked to the second window and it was leaking.

And I walked to a third window and it was leaking.

And by the way, we did find the remedy, praise the Lord.

But the question is, what do you do in situations like that?

What do you do when you get a large bill?

What do you do when you realize that it seems frustrating when you're trying to do something and it seems like it's just 1 step back every time you try to take a step forward?

Can I share with you a couple practical things that the Lord brought to mind to help me manage that stressful scenario for me?

Now that might not be stressful in your situation, but it was a little bit of a stressor in our own lives.

There's a couple things that came to mind and come to mind frequently, and I wanna share with you a couple biblical strategies and things that practically affected me during that time period.

Number 1, the Bible tells us in 1 Thessalonians 5, verse 17, that we should pray without what?

What does it mean to pray without ceasing?

I remember as a kid or a teenager watching a person on the news and this person was talking about this verse and as he was talking to the person interviewing him he said look no I believe in praying without ceasing I'm currently praying while I'm even talking to you and I thought well that's kind of interesting I don't know how to do 2 things at once, you know.

I really, like tangibly, I don't understand how you pray and speak at the same time.

But what I do understand that this Bible talks about is that every person like Daniel should have set aside times for prayer.

We realize that Daniel, in his example that we find in Daniel chapter 3, he prayed morning, noon, and night.

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Keys to Peace - Biblical Strategies to Regaining or Maintaining Your Sanity

Transcript

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