Happy New Year!
Really! This is the first Sunday of Advent, the beginning of the Christian Year. Today we begin a four-week time of preparation, a time of waiting, a time when we get ready for the great festival time that is Christmas.
Turn to your neighbor and say, “Neighbor, what are you waiting for?”
Turn to your neighbor and say, “Neighbor, what are you waiting for?”
Have you ever noticed that in our lives, we are always waiting for something?
- When we are toddlers, we are waiting to go to kindergarten.
- When we get to kindergarten, we are waiting for real school.
- When we sit in school, we are waiting to get out of school.
- When we are home on break, we are waiting for school to begin.
- When we get older, we are waiting to be sixteen when we can drive.
- When we are seniors in school we are waiting to graduate.
- When we are single, we are waiting to marry.
- When we are working, we are waiting to retire.
- When we retire, we are waiting to die.
There is good reason. God designed the Universe that way.
Waiting is a necessary part of life. Life can be seen as a series of growth spurts divided by a series of resting times. The resting times are when we gather together our energy, our knowledge, and our wisdom which allows us to grow.
Our scriptures today talk of times of waiting. Isaiah wrote:
Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down,
that the mountains would tremble before you!
Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down,
that the mountains would tremble before you!
You can sense Isaiah’s great impatience for God to come down to visit. Even Isaiah, writing over 600 years before Christ, 2600 years ago, looks back to the dim past:
Since ancient times no one has heard,
no ear has perceived,
no eye has seen any God besides you,
who acts on behalf of those who wait for him.
no ear has perceived,
no eye has seen any God besides you,
who acts on behalf of those who wait for him.
Asaph, who wrote many of the Psalms, was also impatient as he sang to God:
Awaken your might;
come and save us.
Restore us, O God;
make your face shine on us,
that we may be saved.
How long, Lord God Almighty,
will your anger smolder
against the prayers of your people?
But Mark wrote that Jesus warned us about the return of God to earth, saying it would be a difficult time:
But in those days, following that distress,
'the sun will be darkened,
and the moon will not give its light;
the stars will fall from the sky,
and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.’
Even today, we still wait. People still wait for God to come and reclaim His world.
The interesting thing is that many people, even those who are not Christians, await God’s return – with their own distorted view of what that means. I remember a few years ago that a group of people in California were awaiting space aliens, whom they worshiped, to return following a comet. They all committed suicide in an attempt to join the space aliens. I don’t know if they did, but the aliens surely did not stop to let us know about it. And the comet went back into deep space.
As many of you are aware, men have arisen from time to time and predicted the end of the world, sometimes predicting a specific date. This is more common than we realize. My son Andy is fond of saying that he has personally lived through the end of the world five times. It seems that getting specific about the day the world will end is a great way to get attention, to sell books and movies, and to pack people into churches and lecture halls. Yet the Bible is clear that no one except Father God – not even Jesus – knows when the world will end.
Even a quick reading of the Bible tells us that one day Christ will return and this world will end. Gary Auvil’s Sunday School study of Revelation, which you can still join in, goes into some details about what will happen.
Yes, we are waiting for God’s return. But what is odd is that Christians are both terrified by what we understand is coming, and yet we can’t seem to wait for this world to end. Why is that? Why do we so desperately want the world to end?
As far as I can see, it is simply stress. We are stressed out with this life and want to join Christ in New Jerusalem tomorrow. We are tired, worn out, and filled with daily stress. We simply are not happy in this world – possibly because we were made for a different world?
Scientists have been studying stress in our world a considerable amount over the last twenty years or so. And they’ve found out some interesting things.
When we feel stressed, our body alerts our adrenal glands to produce adrenaline. That’s the same hormone in our bodies that allows small women to lift cars in emergencies, that allows you to outrun bears when the bear is chasing you, and allows a mother whose child is threatened to kick a wolf ten feet through the air. The scientists call it the “fight or flight” reflex and stress happens when you cannot fight or run appropriately. After all, when someone at work is constantly hiding your lunch pail, it just isn’t appropriate to quit your job, and you can’t just punch them out these days. Besides, punching someone out or worse would get you talked about on the evening news.
At appropriate times, adrenaline can save our lives by making us stronger, faster, and tougher. For example, adrenaline increases your heart rate and helps your blood clot faster, which is really useful if a mountain lion just raked your back with his claws.
But when we are under stress, we get a low dose of adrenaline all the time, even in the middle of the night. It wakes us up, keeps our heart pumping faster than it should, makes our blood clot easier – which can give us strokes and heart attacks – and makes us feel angry and worried all the time. Stress slowly kills us because our body cannot rest and relax. And so we look forward with dread and hope to a life in New Jerusalem.
So what are the causes of stress and how can we reduce stress in our lives?
Stress happens because of two reasons – physical and mental.
Physical stress is caused by too little sleep, too little exercise, and unhealthy eating, either too much or too little. The quickest, best cure for too much adrenaline in the body is hard exercise for a half an hour. Seriously. In fact, the reason our high schools began to put sports programs in place was because the teenagers who no longer lived on the farm weren’t getting enough heavy exercise. It helped for about fifty years, but then our schools grew so large that only a few kids could make it onto the sports teams and the rest had to deal with the physical stress in another way. Many choose drugs. Some choose fighting.
If you aren’t getting enough exercise, even if you’re seventy years old, you’ll show signs of stress. Your doctor will tell you to exercise. I’m telling you the same thing.
Mental stress occurs because our mind chooses to analyze the world around us, and we conclude that there are serious, real threats to our existence. There may not be a mountain lion in our office, but there are still people who threaten to harm our livelihood. There are stories on the evening news about scary diseases, wars that may spread, trouble in our government – and there are hundreds of advertisements telling you that really bad things can happen to you unless you use their product. And of course, the medical ads are no better – “Side effects include rapid breathing, nausea, stroke, heart attack, blindness, ears turning yellow, teeth falling out and, in rare cases, death.”
Plus, if the danger isn’t to us, it’s to our parents, our spouse, our children, our grandchildren, and our puppy dogs. If we just watch television, listen to the radio, and surf Facebook, the world can become a very scary place. Even when we realize that the disease is 6000 miles away, when we realize that the war is contained, and when we realize that we’ve never used a medicine for excessive hair on our elbows – the damage is done, because our brain is processing all that information and it is always getting the adrenal glands ready to pump out the adrenaline.
So how do we deal with mental stress?
There are a few ways to deal with it. Many people choose to drink alcohol or use drugs. Others choose chocolate. Others, like myself, prefer a nice macaroni-and-cheese dinner. Still others punch someone out or yell at someone in their family.
Some people go running or swimming, preferring to deal with the physical symptoms of stress by removing the adrenaline.
But none of these methods really deals with the mental stress long term. They just take care of the situation “for now”, and the stress comes back day-after-day. The drinker becomes an alcoholic, the drug user becomes an addict, the eater adds a hundred pounds, and the angry screamer destroys their family and/or goes to jail. The runner looks good, but becomes an exercise addict, never happy except when they are exercising.
But there is another way. There is another way to deal with stress.
It is difficult, though, for we have been trained our entire life to handle stress ourselves. We have been trained in how to self-medicate for our stress. We even have psychologists telling us to “punch pillows” or to “find a happy place” when the stress gets too much.
There are two ways that the godly people deal with stress.
The first way we learn is too difficult for most of us to begin with. But it is still the ultimate goal to shoot for.
When we encounter something stressful in our lives, we first have to recognize it for what it is – a real attack upon our very persons. Never try to ignore or hide from the cause of stress. Your deeper mind is very smart – the bully at work or school really does want to hurt you and they ARE hurting you. Your mind, the deep emotional mind, reacts with fear and turns open the adrenal glands. Don’t ignore what your mind and the Holy Spirit is telling you. You truly are under attack.
But instead of trying to ignore or hide from the cause of stress, turn about in your mind and face the stress. Reach out to your source of strength. Recognize that since you are in Christ you have nothing to fear in this world. Put on the helmet of salvation to protect your mind and counter the attack by drawing the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.
If you know that you are saved eternally, nothing can hurt your mind, nothing can truly hurt you, nothing can keep you from living eternally – and thus nothing should cause you stress. If you draw the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, you can mentally and spiritually combat the causes of stress.
“Vengence is mine, says the Lord.” Know that God will deal with your persecutor someday. Have a bit of patience and know that you win in the end.
“The gift of God is eternal life” Know that you will live forever. What can someone do to you today that will matter in a thousand years? Will it matter if the bank takes your home? Will it matter if the car is dented in the parking lot? Will it matter if John gets the promotion and you don’t? Will it matter if Ebola takes your life next month instead of viral pneumonia in forty years?
“I am convinced that nothing can separate us from the love of God…” God is standing there, loving you. He is awaiting your anger, your tears, your hurt, your disappointments.
Folks, I get tired. I get frustrated. I get depressed just like all people do. But I have learned this much through my walk with God – as soon as I turn back to God, I am ok. The times when I am most likely to have stress problems are the days when I have not been reading scripture. My sword, you see, is not sharp, and I cannot fight against the evil as well.
I’ve given several of you this advice, and today I’ll give it to everyone. When you are sad or frustrated or lonely or hurting, open up the Bible to the Book of Psalms. Start reading them aloud. It doesn’t matter whether you start at the beginning or somewhere in the middle. Just start reading the Psalms aloud and listen to them. The writers of the Psalms were people, just like you or I, and they had problems. God guided them to write these works of poetry to give us hope. If you will read the Psalms aloud, it may take five minutes or it may take an hour, but you will soon find yourself recovering from your bad mood.
I said that there were two ways that godly people deal with stress. I’ll tell you now the second way, the way that most of actually master first. It is simply to remember these things:
Jesus Christ died for your sins so that you might be welcomed back into a relationship with God and live eternally. God resurrected Jesus from the dead so that we would pay careful attention to everything that Jesus said, especially His claim to be God Himself walking on this earth. And this is a wonderful thought, for it shows that God loves us tremendously.
But Jesus also walked on this world for over thirty years before His sacrifice upon the cross. And during those thirty years, He grew from being a tiny infant, born under less than ideal circumstances to being a somewhat nerdy teenager, to being a workman respected in His community, to being a spiritual teacher followed by crowds of thousands of people. He experienced life as we know it. He experienced the world as we know it. He experienced everything that this world throws at people – and in the end, He was beaten, tortured, and killed because He taught us a better way to reach God in the next life – and to live in this world.
When you feel stressed, remember that wherever you are, God was there before you were there. Wherever you go, God will be there before you arrive. If you climb to the tops of mountains, God will be sitting up there to greet you. If you walk through the deepest valley in the shadow of death, He is there with you. Where ever you go, there are always two persons there – where ever you go, there you are – and God will already be there, waiting for you, ready to bless you.
At the outbreak of World War II, Darlene Deibler Rose was a missionary in Indonesia and was captured and imprisoned by the Japanese. After many weeks in the prison, she was skin and bones. The guards regularly beat her – in particular the two guards on the cell block. But she had developed a craving for bananas – food that was denied the prisoners. So she prayed to God for bananas, working through every person who might smuggle her a banana, but crossing them off her list as she realized how impossible it was that any of these people could help her, including the Indonesian night watchman. It was just too dangerous for them. She later wrote:
“I bowed my head again and prayed, "Lord, there's no one here who could get a banana to me. There's no way for You to do it. Please don't think I'm not thankful for the rice porridge. It's just that--well, those bananas looked so delicious!"”
The next day, she heard the guard coming down the hallway. The door opened up, and one of the two guards threw something into the cell. She looked at what had come into the cell. It was not a banana. It was not a hand of bananas like we buy at the store. It was an entire bunch of bananas – ninety-two bananas in all!
She wrote
“In all my spiritual experience, I've never known such shame before my Lord. I pushed the bananas into a corner and wept before Him. "Lord, forgive me; I'm so ashamed. I couldn't trust You enough to get even one banana for me. Just look at them--there are almost a hundred."
"In the quiet of the shadowed cell, He answered back within my heart: "That's what I delight to do, the exceeding abundant above anything you ask or think." I knew in those moments that nothing is impossible to my God.”
The story was not finished. The next afternoon, the Indonesian night watchman whispered to her in her cell, “Do you like fried bananas?” “Oh, yes”, she answered. A little while later, he smuggled her a fried banana.
(Evidence Not Seen by Darlene Deibler Rose)
Where ever you are in your life, God is already there.
Even if you do not know God personally, God is already there, waiting for you.
Even if you have never known love, God is already loving you, waiting for you to look up and find Him.
Even if you have done the worst things imaginable, God is ready to hear your apology to Him, God is ready to forgive you, God is ready to help you put your life back together. Through Jesus Christ, He will lead you through the storms of life.
Even if you have been completely successful, independent and never needing another human being, God is there ready to be your friend, your guide, and ready to carry the burdens that you have carried for so long because you could never trust anyone enough to let them down. God is already there, ready to lead you because God has already gone before you.
What we often fail to understand when we look at the Infant Jesus in the manger, the infant who was God in a very complicated way, it that even before Mary and Joseph came to Bethlehem – God was already there.
And whether we await the arrival of the infant Christ, whether we await the end of the world with the Second Coming of Christ, or whether we simply await our death, God is there, God was there already, and God will be there – Before, during, and after we finally stop waiting and arrive. God is here.
You know, we are often afraid of what people will think if we come to the altar. But everyone here knows that this altar is a place where God is ready to bless you. Most of the people in this room have been here at one time or the other, speaking quietly or weeping, standing or kneeling. Coming to the altar is not a sign of our weakness but rather it is an acknowledgement of God’s strength.
Come to the altar and pray to the God Who is here. Come to the altar and pray for a friend or relative who needs God’s help. Come to the altar and pray for our country, for the lost souls of the world, for those who are even today suffering from Ebola. Come to the altar and ask the God Who is here to forgive you of all you have done wrong and accept you into His family. Come to the altar and let the God Who is here lift you up during our hymn.
So stand up, turn to your neighbor and say, “Neighbor, what are you waiting for?”
And say to your neighbor, “Neighbor, I am waiting no longer. ”
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