Stressed

Stress is a part of life. If you don’t have any stress in your life, you’re dead. You need a certain amount of stress in your life to accomplish anything. Stress is what gives you the energy, the effort, the ability to actually accomplish things. If you take a violin, you have to put stress on the strings to make music. If you stress it just the right amount, it creates beautiful music. On the other hand, if you tighten it too tight, the strings snap.

We all know that too much stress is bad for you. You’re stressed to the point you feel like, "I’m ready to pop. I’m going to explode. I’m going to fall apart." You’re stretched to the breaking point.

Paul was familiar with this kind of excessive stress and he writes about it in the Bible.

2 Corinthians 1:8 says, "I think you ought to know about the troubles we went through. We were crushed and completely overwhelmed [that means stressed to the breaking point] and we thought we would never live through it."

What do you do when you’re stressed and stretched to the breaking point?

-Release your frustration.

Stress always creates all kinds of negative emotions in our life. It creates anxiety, worry, fear, guilt, shame, and depression. It can certainly create frustration. We do not like negative emotions and often we do not know what to do with them. The most common thing we do is press them down or push them down inside, rather than releasing our frustrations to God.

Some of you are professional stuffers. No matter how you feel, you push it down in your heart. You push it down, swallow it, pretend that it’s not there. You wear a mask, ignore the pain that’s going on. Some people think this is the Christian way to handle it. When you’re angry, push it down, when you’re irritated, push it down, when you’re depressed or lonely or whatever negative emotion you’re feeling, keep pushing it down. Put a happy face on your face and everything will be great and then Jesus is proud of you. You just have to walk around saying, "Praise the Lord!" all the time and that’s what God wants.

God wants you to be real. God understands those emotions. He created you and gave you the ability to feel those things. So God wants you to own up to your emotions, own up to your frustrations. He wants you to express them to Him.

Psalms 62:8 "Pour out your heart to God, for He is our refuge."

Hebrews 4:13-16 "And there is no creature hidden from His sight, but all things are naked and open to the eyes of Him to whom we must give account. Seeing then that we have a great High Priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need."

The writer is proclaiming that we should just lay it all out. "God, here it is! Here’s how I feel, the good, the bad and the ugly. I’m stressed. I’m frustrated. I’m irritated. I’m angry. I’m depressed." Whatever you’re feeling, the Bible says, "Pour out your heart to God."

If you don’t deal with how you feel right now, you will eventually. We like to think that we have pushed things under the rug, but what really happens is that as we push things under the rug, a lump builds. When we least expect it, we trip over the lump. It is the person that seems quiet, but suddenly explodes. God wants you to deal with how you feel.

So what do you do? How do you deal with how you feel? You don’t repress it. You don’t ignore it, deny it, pretend it doesn’t exist and wear a mask, and you also don’t rehearse it, the idea of going over and over it in your mind which allows it to get bigger and bigger. God says, "Release it. Tell Me about it. Pour it out to Me."

Psalm 31:22 "In my distress I said, God can’t see me. But You heard my prayer when I cried out to You for help."

Have you ever been so stressed out you have wondered if God could be found? You may not feel very close to Him, but He has never left you. He sees and knows everything that’s going on. He says that if you want to get well, if you want to lower the stress level in your life, release your frustration.