Do you think your life is more stressful today than it was a year ago? Many people do. Life is getting more complex and the pace of change continues to accelerate. Try as we might, we can’t avoid major stresses in life or the multiplication of minor stresses that add up to major stress. Actually stress is a mentally or emotionally upsetting condition that occurs in response to adverse external circumstances. There are many adverse external circumstances that we can’t do anything about. So, we must learn to handle our response to them.
I am going to give you a simple three step approach to handling stress for a believer. If you are not yet a believer, this won’t work for you until you become one. The first step is simply to know you are a child of God. What I mean is to know, really know, just not in your head, but deep down in the core of your being that you are first and foremost a child of God. God, our Father, takes care of His children. If you identify mainly with your job, what happens to your stress level when you lose that job? If you identify first and foremost with another person, what happens to your stress level when that relationship is strained or broken? Only a deep understanding of what it means to be a child of God will keep you going in stressful situations.
The second step is to live to please God. Live to please God first and foremost and find your ultimate fulfillment in pleasing Him. If you live to please people first, you will not be able to do it. None of us can please even one other person all the time, let alone all the people who are in our lives. Some people get stressed out because they can never please themselves. Living to please God does not mean being perfect, it simply means that you live in faith, seeking to do what God wants above what anyone else may be pressuring you to do. When you please Him, it doesn’t really matter if others are not pleased. This is a great stress reliever.
The third and final step is to know what God wants you to accomplish. In order to please God, you’ve got to know specifically what He wants you to do with your life. You can find the general principles of what God wants you to accomplish with your life in the Bible. We talk a lot about this at Life Church, God’s five purposes for every believer’s life. But even more than that, God wants you to discover specifically and uniquely what He created you to do with your life. God designed you with a purpose in mind. When you increasingly discover that purpose, it helps you focus and simplify your life. Knowing what you must accomplish frees you to say “No” to people who are pressuring you in the wrong direction and it helps you say “Yes” to what God wants.
Three simple but profound steps to handling stress in your life and making your life be everything that God intended for it to be.
NLT Matthew 11:28 Jesus said, “Come to me, all of you who are weary and carry heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.”