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GLOBAL STRESS TEST! · Mental Health and the Mission of the Church

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Good morning, everybody.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, looking forward to talking to you today.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: I uh as you can tell, I'm experimenting again with this whole uh um technology thing.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: So hopefully I don't come off looking like a bozo.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: So we'll see about all that.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um but uh how many of you agree with all the COVID stuff that we've come through a global stress test?
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: You know what a stress test is, right?
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: You you uh you you hyper challenge a system.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh if it's a mechanical system, you might pump some liquid or something in, and and what you're doing is you want to increase the pressure beyond what's normal so that you can recognize where there's any cracks or weaknesses.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, a simple way to say it is this pressure reveals cracks, pressure reveals cracks, weaknesses, or areas that need attention, maybe is a better way to put it.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: So I would say that most of us would probably agree that we've just come through a stretch that you could call a global stress test.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, almost every area of our life has been um challenged, meaning put in situations that are beyond normal pressure.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: Your marriage, your parenting, your finances, maybe, your uh you know, your sanity, depending on whether you're an introvert, extrovert, and all that.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you know, with with all the political stuff and the racial stuff that's going on in our culture, we've been tested in lots of ways.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: Our compassion, our our uh, you know, our tolerance for conflict, you might say, our ability to have meaningful conversations with people we don't agree with, which I don't think we've done too well with, by the way.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_00: But um we've had this global stress test.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: And last week I talked, what I've been talking about lately is the whole triune brain.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: And last week we talked about the effect of uh what you might call chronic stress or hyper stress and its relationship to adrenaline.
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_00: And if you didn't catch that, you might want to go back and catch last week's episode uh because it'll help you connect to what we're saying.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: So we've been in this global stress test.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: Here's my question How did you do?
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, if you looked at different areas of your life, your marriage, your spiritual life, your parenting, you know, your friendships, your your ability to be uh compassionate and understanding, gracious, grace-filled toward uh the people, institutions, and authorities around you.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um, have we gotten quicker to judge?
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: Have we gotten uglier in our uh how we look at things?
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: So, just a quick thought that I think it'd be good for you to ponder.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: How do you feel like you did through this global stress test?
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: Here's an interesting scripture for you.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um it's Luke 11, and uh just to give credit to John uh Bevere, um, he played around with it and found that you know the word I there could be uh extrapolated, probably not exactly translated, as your perspective.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I like to say it this way perspective is the angle from which you view something.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: So if your perspective is like a lamp that provides light for your body.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: So when your perspective is healthy, in other words, when you're looking at things from the right angle, when you're when you're uh looking at things from God's perspective and not a self-centered, self-reliant, self-referencing perspective, your whole body's filled with light.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I'm I'm using this verse because of its connection to the body, and I want to connect it to adrenaline.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: Adrenaline's a chemical in your body that affects your brain, it affects your moods, it affects lots of things.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: So when your perspective's healthy, your whole body's filled with light.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um one person I read behind talked about how that light can have two meanings.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: One is obviously, you know, visibility, the other is the the weight or burden.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: So when your perspective's healthy, your whole body has more illumination and is lighter.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: But when your perspective, when you're looking at things from an improper angle, an unhealthy angle, an unhelpful angle, your body is filled with darkness.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_00: Now, what what we could say is when when you've lived in a place where you're looking at things from an unhealthy perspective, your your your darkness is great, you know, has come in, meaning you're not seeing things.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's kind of like stumbling around in a room with the lights off, right?
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, and there's a heaviness.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: When your perspective's not healthy, there's a heaviness, right?
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: So, what's the conclusion?
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: Make sure that the light you think you have is not actually darkness.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: Make sure that the perspective you're taking is uh a healthy one.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I don't think we can do that on our own.
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: I think we need people around us to help us with that.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: So um the whole adrenaline thing, what we talked about last week is the issue with stress is not necessarily that oh, stress is bad.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_00: Stress is stress is good for us.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: Stress, like we said at the beginning, it it reveals cracks and shows us where we need to work.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: But unabated stress, in other words, staying in a somewhat stressed state for long periods of time has bad effects on us.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: And we talked about that last week.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: You might want to again check it out.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: So, what's God's solution to that?
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_00: I believe God's solution is Sabbath.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_00: But I take a little bit different perspective of it because of the way, in my opinion, the church Christians have abused the concept.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: So let's just look at it for a few minutes.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: So there is a Sabbath rest still waiting, still waiting.
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, there's a Sabbath rest available, but it would appear the minority, it's a minority of people that are taking advantage of it.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a Sabbath rest still waiting for the people of God, for all who have entered into.
• 6:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's almost like Sabbath rest is a place, uh a room or something, and you enter it, you cross a threshold into it.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: For all who have entered into God's rest have rested from their labors.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my gosh, we could talk, chase these rabbits, just as God did after creating the world.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: So let us do our best to enter that rest.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: Let us do our best.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_00: One translation says, labor to enter rest.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, work to rest.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: Work at learning how to rest, work at figuring out why you don't rest, work at figuring out why your life is arranged in such a way that it doesn't accommodate a restfulness.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_00: And then it says, but if we disobey God, what does that mean?
• 7:17
  SPEAKER_00: If we don't learn to enter into rest, as the people of Israel did, we will fall.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: What does that mean?
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna have various types of trouble, challenge that we didn't necessarily need to have if we would have learned how to be stressed when it's appropriate and helpful, and then come down to a place that I would call Sabbath rest.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: And we're gonna talk more about that next week.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_00: And then where we land is we land in the middle in this effective, peaceful place.
• 7:57
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, let me say something while I'm thinking about it.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_00: Rest is not the absence of activity.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: Rest is an internal, quiet, peaceful place in the midst of activity.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: So, what we're talking about, we're still, believe it or not, we're still talking about the brain.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_00: But what we're talking about is how to have a healthy perspective of your brain and the effect life has and your rhythms in life, the effect they have on your brain, and the um balancing, probably not the best word, but but the balancing of the chemicals in your brain, and how that helps you to uh to just manage life better and feel better more consistently.
• 8:46
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_00: Next week we're gonna continue this and we're gonna connect the whole concept of Sabbath to the brain and its health.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: See you next week.