When you are really stressed, your mind bounces all around. You can't focus or stay on task. You actually end up wasting a lot of time trying to remember what you were doing or where you left off on a project. Or you might say the winds of life are pushing you all around and you are feeling beaten up by the waves of problems that are crashing into you.
During these times it is helpful to remember that we are a spirit, we have a soul (your mind, will and emotions) and we live in a body. It's the soul that is being battered in life. It's the soul that needs renewed. It's the soul that needs help.
The Bible tells us in several places that we are to talk to our soul and tell it how to feel. Psalm 103: 1-2 "Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name! Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits."
The song It Is Well, has a line in it, "So let go my soul and trust in Him, the waves and wind still know His name." It's another example of talking to your soul. When you feel like life is overwhelming and you are getting beaten up by the waves of life, when water is coming into your boat from the storms of life and it seems hopeless, talk to your soul.
The reason you can tell your soul to let go and relax into God is that you have an anchor in Jesus for your soul. The hope we have in Jesus will anchor us and keep us from being swept out into the sea, out into the realm of depression and despair.
Hebrews 6:13-20 MSG, "When God made his promise to Abraham, he backed it to the hilt, putting his own reputation on the line. He said, 'I promise that I’ll bless you with everything I have—bless and bless and bless!' Abraham stuck it out and got everything that had been promised to him. When people make promises, they guarantee them by appeal to some authority above them so that if there is any question that they’ll make good on the promise, the authority will back them up. When God wanted to guarantee his promises, he gave his word, a rock-solid guarantee—God can’t break his word. And because his word cannot change, the promise is likewise unchangeable.
We who have run for our very lives to God have every reason to grab the promised hope with both hands and never let go. It’s an unbreakable spiritual lifeline, reaching past all appearances right to the very presence of God where Jesus, running on ahead of us, has taken up his permanent post as high priest for us, in the order of Melchizedek."
There is nothing stable about worldly hope that is just a wish. But hope in God's word is unbreakable. If you are feeling stressed, then you need to work on your hope. It will keep you from being thrown around with the waves of life. It will bring stability to your mind.
Want to go deeper? I invite you to watch the video I've included with this blog post to hear more about this topic in detail. It was a Facebook live I did earlier this year and was one of my most-watched videos of the year. The video goes on to say why you may have been exercising your faith to receive the promises of the Bible but didn't receive them. What were you missing? I give you two things to look at in the video.
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