Hi, I'm Dr. Ryan Delamater with Ocean Water. I'm stoked that you can join us for today's message. If you're new, we follow a simple tool on our phones each day of the week and each time we gather together at Ocean Water. It's called the YouVersion Bible Lab. Step one is you download it to your phone. Step two, you join our daily reading group. It takes about ten minutes a day to read the entire Bible in a year. Did you know the average person spends two hours a day in social media use?
If you spend ten minutes a day reading God's word and getting his thoughts, I promise you'll feel a lot better and it'll help your day be much more positive. Step three is each time I speak, we use the day's reading for our text. It's very simple. Today, we're in 3rd John, chapter one. If you'd like to join our daily group, you can just message me on Instagram at Ocean Water, or you can email me at ryan.oceanwater.gmail.com and I'll get that to you.
3 John, chapter one, verse two through four says, Dear friend, I pray that you may enjoy good health and that all may go well with you, even as your soul is getting along well. It gave me great joy when some believers came and testified about your faithfulness to the truth, telling you how to continue to walk in it. I have no greater joy than to hear that my children are walking in the truth. Today, I want to share with you how to enjoy life when everybody is stressed out.
Have you noticed that lately? Stress is a part of our 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 really anything. Stress is what gives us the energy, the effort, and the ability to actually accomplish things. You know, 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 can be bad for us. Sometimes we're stressed to the breaking point, like now. A lot of us are stressed. We feel like we're going to pop, explode. A lot of people feel like they're falling apart. We all have a breaking point. The Apostle Paul was familiar with this excessive kind of stress. He wrote about it in the Bible. It says in 2 Corinthians 1a,
I think you ought to know about the trouble that I went through. I was crushed, completely overwhelmed, and I thought that I would never live through it. The first thing I wanted to encourage you to do in this time is to release your frustrations. Stress creates all kinds of negative emotions in our lives. It creates anxiety, worry, fear, guilt, depression, and frustration.
We don't like to live with negative emotions. The most common thing that we do when we're under stress is rather than releasing our frustrations to God, we press them down. We sort of push them inside. Some of us are professionals at this. We're like professional stuffers. No matter how we feel, we push it down, swallow it, we pretend that it's not there, we wear a mask, we ignore the pain of what's going on, we keep pushing it down.
Some people think that that's the only way that they can live their life, and it's to push things down when we're feeling a certain way. Well, there is an alternative. And whatever you're feeling, you don't have to put on a smiley face or pretend to be happy. God's actually big enough to hear all of your concerns and your cares in your life. You don't have to manufacture how you're feeling to God.
Does God want us to be phony? Well, of course not. Does God want us to feel one way and act another? Not at all. Does He want us to be two different people? No. God wants us to be real. God understands those emotions. He created you and I and gave us the ability to feel those things. So God wants us to own our emotions, to own our frustrations. He wants us to express them to Him. The Bible says in Psalm 62a, pour out your heart to God, for He is our refuge. That means just lay it all out there.
God, here it is. Here's how I feel, the good, the bad, the ugly. I'm stressed, I'm frustrated, I'm irritated, I'm angry. However it is that you're feeling, the Bible says that we're supposed to pour out our heart to God. You know, if we don't deal with how we feel right now, eventually those feelings and frustrations pile up. If you just pile them up, eventually we all pop. It's like taking a Coke can or bottle when you were a kid and you shake it.
And then someday somebody's going to pull the tab and it just shoots up and makes a giant mess. In fact, maybe you've been on the receiving end of one of these experiences where you were just that person that just pulled the tab and somebody popped on you. And it was really completely unrelated to what was actually happening in the moment. That's what happens when we stuff down our feelings and our frustrations. A lot of us are accumulating those right now in our life.
So what do we do? How do you deal with how you feel? Well, you don't repress it, you don't ignore it or deny it or pretend that it doesn't exist or wear a mask. And you also don't rehearse it where you go over and over in your mind and you obsess about it. It just gets bigger and bigger. God says this, release it. Tell me about it. Pour out your heart to me. In my distress, God can't see me, but you heard my prayer when I cried out to you for your help.
Have you ever been so stressed out that you thought God's nowhere to be found? God's not even within like 50 miles of me. You know, he's on a vacation. He's off. I just feel super far and disconnected. Well, we've all felt like that at one time or another. But the Bible says that he sees and knows everything that's going on. He says if you want to get well, if you want to lower the stress level in your life, the first thing you've got to do is you've got to release your frustrations.
Now the second thing you've got to do is you've got to resist becoming bitter. Bitterness is often a byproduct of us finding ourselves stressed to the brink when we start to feel resentful. This shouldn't be happening to you. This isn't fair. Well, the fact is in life, a lot of circumstances, a lot of things and a lot of people are going to happen to us intentionally, and they're going to hurt us. And we're going to be hurt and frustrated by people.
But you can't stop them to hurt. You can't keep yourself from being hurt. You can't say I'm going to build a wall and I'm never going to let anyone around me hurt me again. It just doesn't work that way. You cannot prevent hurt from happening in your life. This is not heaven. And pain comes into your life quite frequently. Now although we can't control what happens to us, we can control how we respond, our reaction, how we choose to be in a particular circumstance or to a person that's hurt us.
You have to decide at some point in your life, and the earlier on you decide this, the better it's going to be for both you and I, that we're not going to become bitter people, that we're going to choose to be happy. Now these are choices that we can all make. We have a choice. We have to choose to be happy. It's a choice. But just like bitterness is a choice. You can hold on to hurt. You can hold on to grudges.
You can hold on to resentment. But you have to make the choice. You can't choose both. You're either going to be bitter or you're going to be happy. Now I've observed over the years that there's no correlation at all between circumstances and your happiness in life. But we don't believe that, but it's true. We like to think if I could just get a certain set of circumstances, then I would be happy. I'd get all my problems solved, then I would be happy.
If I could just get married, if I could just live at the beach, or if I could just have kids, then I would be happy. Or whatever it is that we put into our list. Or if we get a certain career, graduated from a certain school, or had a certain number of degrees, then we would be happy. But the fact is, we all know people who have it all and are really terribly unhappy. Obviously, it's not a matter of circumstances. It's happiness and a choice.
I've known many, many people who have gone through horrible, terrible, devastating crises. One problem after another, things that would wrench your heart out. One bad break after another. Yet in spite of that all, they've maintained a happy, cheerful, a smile, a good attitude, and a positive outlook on life in spite of the pain. In spite of the problems that they've gone through. On the other hand, I've met some people who had almost nothing major built bad in their lives,
yet they've complained at every drop of the hat. They gripe. They complain. Every moment they get up and it's kind of like rising wine. They really have nothing to whine about, but they're so petty and they have just a lot of whining going on. Some people suffer one heartache or one devastation after another, one tragedy, and yet they maintain a positive, cheerful, happy attitude. People who've had almost nothing go wrong in their lives, but they whine all the time.
The Bible doesn't really teach that. We have a lot of patience for that. The Bible tells us that bitterness is far more devastating to your life than stress is. In the long haul, bitterness will hurt you more than the actual problem that you're going through, that you get bitter about. It goes on. It's a cancer that eats you on the inside. Something like that takes over your body like a virus and eats you from the inside out.
The Bible is very clear about the danger of allowing bitterness to reside in our hearts. Hebrews 12.15 says, watch out that no bitterness takes root among you. It causes deep trouble, hurting many of their spiritual lives. Bitterness never changes anything. It's not going to change our past. It's not going to control our future, but it's going to mess us up someday.
What you have to do instead of being bitter is you have to learn to accept things in your life that you can't change and you'll never be able to change. It's called acceptance, accepting them. Then you have to start focusing on the things you can change and work on those things. Bitterness just doesn't do us any good. Is there an alternative to this in life when I'm stressed to the breaking point? Well, yeah, there is, and it's called gratitude. Gratitude is the antidote to bitterness.
Studies have shown that gratitude is the healthiest emotion you can possibly have. You need to find something in your life that you can be thankful for. Count your blessings. That's important because you can't be grateful and bitter at the same time. When you invite gratitude in the front door of your heart, bitterness goes out the back. You can't be grateful and bitter at the same time.
The Bible says in 1 Thessalonians 5.18, no matter what happens, always be thankful, for this is God's will for you. Do you know what God's will is for your life? There it is. No matter what happens, be thankful. You don't have to understand it. You just have to be thankful. It doesn't say that you have to be thankful for all of it, but in it. You can be thankful no matter what happens. You can always find something to be thankful for even on the darkest day.
Even when you're stretched to the limit, pressed to the breaking point. Look for something that you can thank God for instead of being bitter. The third thing we can do is we can receive help from others. You know the temptation when we're stressed out like right now? It's to isolate, and we all feel isolated when we're in our homes. It's to build, it's to crawl, it's to pull away from people, put a shell around us.
We want to isolate, and we want to say I don't want anybody in my life, I'm stressed out. I can handle this all myself. That's a very big mistake. When you're at your breaking point, when you're stressed to the limit, you need people in your life. You need people that will give you support, strength, most of all, help you with your perspective. When you're stressed, you don't think straight. You don't see the whole picture.
You get a limited perspective. You need somebody who can help you see in a wider view. You need people when you're at your breaking point. That's why I always talk about being a part of a church or a family. Now, you can be a part of a snorkel. You can be a part of something online. Maybe you've never developed any friendships.
You need to build those friendships and find some godly people in your life that care about you and actually want to be around you, take part of your life on a weekly basis. Have you ever been so down that you couldn't even pray? Have you ever been gone through something that you just needed some friends and someone to help you? Because when you can't believe, you need someone to believe for you. You need someone to help you.
We need someone to have faith for us when we don't feel like having faith in ourselves. We need somebody who will stand up, walk beside us, walk alongside of us, even carry us at times. Those are our genuine friends and people that literally will carry us through the difficult. Can you name me the four or five people that you know you can count on that will give you good, godly, strong advice? A little pastorly advice. Set up those kinds of relationships before things like COVID-19 happen.
Once you're in it, it's a little harder to establish. That's why it's important today to reach out to a group of people that you can read God's word with, that you can get into some kind of Bible study during the week. And if you need help with that, I'll help you get it started. Count on it. In your life, you're going to hit the wall many times. It's called living.
And it's really important to have people around us so that when life starts to spin out of control, we don't go off the deep end with it. Galatians 6-2 says this, by helping each other in your troubles, this is the law of Christ. It's called the great commandment. It says, love your neighbor as yourself. When you love your neighbor as yourself, you're helping each other with your troubles. And we're obeying the great commandment, Christ's commandment of loving our neighbor as ourselves.
First Thessalonians 5-11 says, encourage each other. Never underestimate the power of an encouraging group. The Bible says we are to encourage each other and give each other strength. A turning point can be when we encourage someone else in our lives. Never underestimate the power of just a little word of encouragement. Today you might need to pick up a phone and send a text or call someone and just give them a little bit of encouragement in their life.
It doesn't have to be long. It just has to be thoughtful. We've all been the recipients of that in our lives. The fourth thing I want you to do is I want you to refocus on Christ. Because when we get under stress, we start looking at our problems and we stop looking to God. Like right now, everyone's stressed out. You can sense it. You can feel it. And I feel like God's telling us to relax and to look up.
Because right now people just see pain. They see loss of job, change in relationships, change in finances. This is the perfect time to let go and say, God, help me. So I want to encourage you to refocus back on God. Do you remember the story of Jonah? I mentioned it last week. Jonah did everything wrong. Right? God told him to do this. He went the opposite direction. He thumbed his nose at God. He said, I'm going to go my own way. I'm going to do my own thing.
It's like, forget you, God. God said, go east. Go as far west as he can possibly go. You know the story. He went down and found a ship going the opposite direction. He was supposed to go headed across the Mediterranean. A storm came up with the sailors and they thought this guy must be the problem. They threw him overboard. The Bible says that God had prepared a great fish to swallow in Jonah. Now, personally, I don't have a problem with that.
If you believe that God could create the whole world, you can believe that God can create a fish. They had a man-sized compartment in it. That's easy. It does not say a whale. It could have been a whale. But it just said a great fish was prepared to swallow this guy up. The fish could only stomach him for a few days though. As this disobedient guy would give even a fish indigestion. It would spit him up on the beach like I'm standing on right now.
Here is a guy who was literally swallowed by his problems. What do you do when you're swallowed by your problems? What do you do when you're so overwhelmed? You just feel engulfed by stress. Well, you do the same thing Jonah did. In Jonah 2-7 it says, When I had lost all hope, I turned my thoughts once more to the Lord. Some of us have lost hope right now. Finances and work and family and things are very confusing. But it's not a dead end. Don't get discouraged. Don't lose hope.
God is wanting to answer this prayer right now for you. Some of you feel like you've had an illness and you're not getting better. Or you've lost hope. So what do you do? Well, you do the same thing that Jonah did. He said, once again I turn my thoughts to the Lord and I focus on Him. Now that sounds good, but how do you do it? How do you refocus your life on Christ? Well, there's three practical ways to refocus on God today, right now, even as you're watching this. One is to read God's Word.
God's Word is a great stress reliever, particularly the book of Psalms. Go through and underline. Yes, this is a digital Bible that we use in our homes, but I encourage you to get a physical Bible. One thing you can underline, I have one at home. A lot of us turn to temporary things right now, like food, like alcohol. The problem with having enough food or having enough alcohol is they never change your problems. They're just little band-aids.
Some of us turn to TV. I know I watch Netflix, and I like that. But Netflix and TV doesn't make your problems go away either. They can give you a little bit of rest, but ultimately you've got to ask God to help us with everything that we're going through in our lives. So I want to encourage you to get a Bible, to read it, underline the verses that are encouraging to you so that when you're at the breaking point, you open it up and there it is. But again, do it before crisis has come.
You see our habits are revealed under stress. That's why it's so important to have good habits in our life. And to have those things built in so that when the storms come, we're ready. We need to do it in advance so that we're ready for the inevitable road, how it winds and it curves. Second thing is remember God's goodness. Psalms 27 said, I would have despaired unless I believed I would see the goodness of the Lord. Be strong. Take heart. Wait for the Lord.
We need to remember God's goodness because the problem is we're usually focusing on all the badness. And not only do we focus on the bad things in our life, but we tend to exaggerate it. And so our problems become bigger than they really are. The whole world is watching and wanting people of peace, people who can have that peace in the sense of a storm. And that's available for us today. You know, if you're having a difficulty or you feel like a failure, you're not.
Your problems are over-exaggerating. Extreme stress causes us to lose our perspective. Well, this is what happened to Elijah. I mentioned him last week as well. Elijah got burned out. He says, oh, God, I'm the only one who's living for you. God goes, Elijah, just wait a minute. There are 7000 other people who have never bowed their knee to a pagan God in the land of Israel. You're not the only one. But we think we are. What you need to remember is that God's got goodness and force in our life.
No matter how dark the day is, remember this. God is a good God. He's not changed from bad to good. God is a good God and he has our best interests to hurt. God has a purpose for our life that's bigger than all the problems that we're feeling and experiencing right now. No matter what other people do to you, what other experiences happen to you, it's a virus now. It'll be something else in the future. Just remember that God's purpose and plan for your life hasn't changed.
We want to move from panic to prayer. Luke 18 says this. Jesus said that we ought to pray always and not give up. I found in my own life I'm usually either praying or giving up. Praying or holding on. Praying or quitting. So the third thing we want to do is we want to rely on God's power. Second Corinthians says, we saw how powerless we were to help ourselves, but that was good. For then we put everything into the hands of God who alone can save us for even raise the dead.
That's the ultimate expression of God's power. If he can raise a dead person, he can raise a dead marriage, raise a dead career, raise a dead anything, and certainly a dead job situation or a dead business. What God wants us to do is literally today to put our problems in his hands. He's telling us to remind ourselves of what he is capable of doing. That's the key to Christ's control is to let Christ control. So today say to God, God take this. You have more power than I do.
Now that's good news because frequently we have power outages in our life. We run out of steam and energy. We feel like giving up even though we know the right thing to do. We just think I'm tired. I'm worn out. I've tried and I don't want to keep going right now. God understands. If he's just one ask away today, we'll just do that. So what do you do when you feel like giving up? What do you do when you feel like you've run out of energy? You refocus on Christ.
Stop focusing on your problems and start focusing on God's power. You stop focusing on your situation and start focusing on your Savior. These things release your frustrations, resist becoming bitter, receive help from others, refocus on Christ and then the last thing is this you guys, refuse to give up. Paul talked about this in 2 Corinthians. He says, I have worked harder, been put in jail more often, then whipped more times, without number and faced death again and again.
Five times I was given 39 lashes, a whipping. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked. Once I spent a whole night and day adrift at sea. I traveled many weary miles. I faced dangers from rivers, floods, robbers and from my own people as well as from the Gentiles. I faced dangers in cities and deserts and storms from men, from people who claim to be Christians but aren't. I lived in weariness, pain, sleepless nights.
I've gone hungry. I've gone thirsty. I've gone without food. And often I've shivered with cold without enough clothing to keep me warm. Besides all this, I had the daily burden of knowing how all the churches are getting along, the ones he started. That was Paul's experience. Now look at Paul's perspective in 2 Corinthians 4. He says, surely God has let us generously keep on doing what he's doing, not about to throw our hands and walk off the job just because we run into occasional hard times.
Wow. What a perspective. He calls them occasional hard times. That didn't sound like occasional hard times to me. So even though on the outside looking in and things are falling apart, for us on the inside, God can be giving us a new life. Not a day goes by without his grace helping us. These hard times are small compared to the coming good times that God has prepared for us. The things we see now are here today and gone tomorrow. That's the problems and the pressures.
But the things we can't see are relationship to Christ and our character. That's going to last forever. So what do you do when you've done all you can that seems like it's not enough? What do you say when your friends or your circumstances are very difficult like they are right now? Well, that's easy. God. He's here to help. You just stand. When there's nothing left to do, you just ask for help. I do it every single day. I ask for God's help. How do I deal with my past? I ask for God's help.
How do I deal with shame? I ask for God's help. How do you deal when you had a dream and an idea and it didn't go the way that you wanted? You ask for God's help. We always ask for God's help. When there's nothing left to do, we just simply say one word, God will help. God will you help me. I interviewed Adam Watts this past week and he said the difference between a white belt and a black belt is a black belt is a white belt that never quit. That was so good.
Are you at the breaking point today or you feel overwhelmed? Well, God has some answers. You might be thinking, well, Ryan, you have no idea what I'm going through right now. But God does. God is aware of the stress in your life and the cares and the worries and the problems that you have. And he will take it from you. Just ask for Jesus' help. Jesus said it like this. Are you tired and worn out, burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you'll recover your life.
I'll show you how to take a real rest. Walk with me and work with me. Watch how I do and learn the unforced rhythms and grace. Would you pray with me? I invite you to pray this prayer with me. Say, Dear God, you know the level of stress in my heart and life right now. You know that I'm going through a lot of difficulty. I've been struggling with doubt, bitterness, wondering how things are going to turn out. Today I need you to help me be refocused on you instead of my problems.
Help me to be grateful for the things that you've done in my life. Help me to read your word for strength. Help me to rely on your power today. Jesus putting everything in your hands today. I can't do it. And I'm asking you to help me today. With your help and by your power, I'm going to keep standing. I'm going to keep persevering. I look to you and I ask you to help me today in Jesus' name. I hope that you've enjoyed today's message. I hope it's been a blessing to you.
I hope you have a wonderful week. If you need anything from me, please reach out. I'm here for you. Have a wonderful day. Thank you so much.