Why do so many of us miss this? That's what our new sermon series is all about. For the next four sermons we are going to be looking at how to experience a deeper, fuller life.
This week we are going to look at the most important thing to experience life in it's fullest. In order to experience the abundant life, we must learn how to conquer stress. We often us the term stress management. But I can tell you that I am not interested in managing stress. I am interested in eradicating it! I don't want to learn how to live with stress. I want to learn how to live without it!
Research on stress indicates that its influence on our dopamine levels and brain activities cause a lot of things to happen. When we are stressed, food doesn't taste as good, the sun doesn't shine as bright, music doesn't sound as good, jokes are as funny, the air doesn't smell as fresh, and the pastor's sermon isn't nearly as good!
Stress is the deeper life's biggest enemy. The irony about stress is that, most of the time, its power is only imagined. The reality is, most of what we stress out about...really doesn't matter! Now obviously, if you are in a life-threatening situation, stress is warranted. I mean, if you are traveling on I-24 going down Monteagle Mountain and your brakes fail, you ought to stress a little.
The problem is though, many of us have conditioned ourselves to stress out in situations that are not dangerous, in fact, they are not really that important. Things as mundane as the traffic, food orders that are wrong, being interrupted at work, or the internet goes down.
Now really? In the grand scheme of things, do these things really warrant that much stress? Are they really worth a fight-or-flight mode? A tragically, some people live their entire lives in fight-or-flight. Unfortunately, you can't be in fight-or-flight mode and experience the abundant life at the same time.
That's what this sermon is all about, learning how to eradicate stress from our lives.
As I said earlier, most of our stress is caused by misperceptions. So if we want to eradicate it's power on our lives, we need to develop right thinking. So this week, we are going to look three principles from the Romans 8 that will enable us to overcome stress. But let me begin today by just reminding you of the greatst principle of all. 1 John 4:4 says, "Greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world." This verse reminds us that even when the world is falling apart all around you, you don't have to worry, because you have the Spirit of God living in you. And God's power is greater than any chaos that exists in the world.
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