8 Survival Skills for Changing Times – Part 2-2

August 21, 2012 by admin

Off-Load Stress – Part 2: Stress in Changing Times

Times of change are always stressful. That’s obviously true when a national resolution is in process. It’s also the case when a country’s basic values are later tested by an issue such as slavery—or, more recently, abortion.

Even in the personal realm, a change in circumstances, almost always adds an element of strain to life. For example, moving to a new location creates anxiety, as does losing a job or even taking on a new one. You might feel stress when you begin attending a different church, when you retire, or when you see rapid growth or steady decline in your business. Getting married, getting divorced, going for counseling to correct longstanding dysfunction, dealing with a serious illness in the family—all these situations add an element of stress. And the list could go on and on.

Stress seems to be a part of our American way of life. This is a fast-paced culture where changes come rapid-fire. So headaches are cared for with a couple of aspirin or Tylenol™ tablets. Chronic body symptoms can be suppressed with a swig of Pepto-Bismol™ or maybe a spoonful of Metamucil™. Do you relate at all to that word stress? Some say, “Ignore the pressures, forget the deadlines, let someone else do what you’re doing. So what if you kill yourself for that dream you hold so dear. The world will go right on.”

And suddenly you feel like John Adams walking the floor all alone, reviewing the facts and sensing there is no hope. You reread the emergency fax that came in that afternoon: “It’s imperative that you act now!” You’re sure there’s no way things could possibly work out the way they should, and that, unfortunately, this critical opportunity isn’t going to come around again for a long time.

When change is accompanied by stress, it needs to be offloaded daily onto Christ. Instead of venting feelings late at night in a room where no one can see you, as a Christian, learn how to “cast all your anxiety on Him because He cares for you.” That’s a promise from 1 Peter 5:7. Jesus really does care.

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Sunday’s coming. Do you have your sermon ready? Is it relevant? Will it effectively motivate your congregation to walk more in step with the Master? What about that Sermon Series you’ve been thinking about?

Or, if you’re someone who plans well ahead, have you asked yourself what you will preach for your Easter Sermon, your Advent Sermon, your Christmas Sermon?

David Mains and Mainstay Ministries can help. We offer a wide variety of Sermon Starters and Full Sermons that will give you Sermon Ideas to help you prepare for regular Saturday or Sunday sermons, Mid-week Bible Sermons, and Sermons for special occasions.

We also offer assistance as you create Topical Sermons, Sermons Series, and sermons for special times of the year. We have resources available to help you with Advent Celebrations, Advent Sermons, Christmas Sermons, Easter Sunday Sermons, Patriotic Sermons, and more.

For more information on how to create better Bible Sermons and how to turn Sermon Ideas into Sermon Outlines, and then into effective, meaningful Sunday Sermons, please click here to visit David Mains’ website.

You will also find a variety of resources for pastors and congregations at the Mainstay Ministries website. Just click here.

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8 Survival Skills for Changing Times – Part 2-1

August 20, 2012 by admin

Off-Load Stress – Part 1

A professional actor I know once invited me to see the play 1776. He had the role of Thomas Jefferson in this particular production.

The plot of 1776 actually centers around John Adams, as he attempts to get the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia to act decisively and declare independence from England. The times call for change. But certain members of this congress are painfully slow to move. The representatives lack imagination or are even self-serving. As you watch you wonder how in the world they will emerge with a united spirit.

Adams, seeing the issues clearly, struggles to gather support for what he believes in so strongly. Even though no colonies have ever before broken away from a mother country, these men must seize the hour and vote for independence. Unfortunately, John Dickenson from Pennsylvania gets a motion passed that in order to approve the declaration written by Thomas Jefferson of Virginia, the vote must be unanimous. All thirteen colonies must say yes. And it’s obvious there’s no way such agreement will ever be reached. Emergency dispatches continue to arrive from General George Washington, who was made chief of the continental forces a year earlier. He’s in New York where the British have just landed 25,000 crack troops. He writes that it’s imperative that action be taken.

I’ll never forget one scene in the play. It’s the night of July 3, 1776. The hall is empty save for John Adams, who reviews the facts as he sees them. South Carolina and Pennsylvania are opposed to the motion for independence. Delaware is undecided. New York’s representatives are awaiting further instructions. It looks hopeless.

Wrestling with a vision shared by only a few, Adams paces back and forth in the hall. We can feel the stress in his body as we watch. Suddenly he looks up and cries out dramatically into the void:

Is anybody there!
Does anybody care!
Does anybody see what I see!

I found that moment very moving. I was engrossed in the whole scenario: the magnitude of what was being decided, the frustration Adams must have felt, the rightness of the cause he believed in so strongly, and the anxiety as time was running out. It was all so real, I got caught up in the tension, forgetting momentarily that I knew what had to happen on the Fourth of July!

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Or, if you’re someone who plans well ahead, have you asked yourself what you will preach for your Easter Sermon, your Advent Sermon, your Christmas Sermon?

You will also find a variety of resources for pastors and congregations at the Mainstay Ministries website. Just click here.

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8 Survival Skills for Changing Times – Part 1-10

August 17, 2012 by admin

Downscaling – Part 10: Readings – 5

Even with a good budget, the ends never seem to meet. But that’s the point! Budgets aren’t for making ends meet. Money isn’t an end. Budgets are for making means fall into line! The ends we want are what Paul calls the fruits of the Spirit: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control” (Galatians 5:22-23). A budget won’t buy them, but governing our money wisely may free us to find them.

Let’s begin with what we’ll give away. If you wait until you have paid for everything else and then start looking for leftovers to share, there won’t be any. But if you start with your gifts, by an amazing miracle you will almost always find that there is enough left over to meet the necessities. (I didn’t believe that either until I tried it on a dare with myself, but it does work.) Okay, what percentage of my money shall I give?

All Christians know the word tithe, which simply means 10 percent. But to some the word has a hateful sound. Let’s face it, a tithe from one person is harder than a tithe from another. If you made three thousand dollars a year—which is thirty times as much as most of the world’s people make!—a tithe of three hundred dollars might mean shoes or beans for children who otherwise might go hungry or barefoot. But if you made $300,000 a year you could probably squeak by fairly well on the $270,000.00 left over after the tithe. In fact, taxwise, you would be better off to increase your giving to charitable causes. So we just can’t say: Make it an automatic 10 percent and let it go.

What do you do then? Why not take a hard look at what you are actually giving now. What is it? Two percent of your gross income? Five percent? You know a lot of us got into the habit of putting a quarter into the plate when our parents gave it to us as children, and we’re still operating at that level. Now set yourself a goal of increasing it a little (maybe one or two percentage points a year) until you get to a place that you honestly consider a sacrificial level. Don’t stop at 10 percent. I know a family that puts aside 30 percent of their income into a special bank account each month. At the end of the month, they take pleasure in writing a check for 10 percent to their church, another 10 percent to regular causes in their community, and (here’s the best part), they save the third portion to build up interest until something really special comes along. Then they have a family council and decide how to spend it.

Can you imagine how much more fun it is to decide what to do with a surplus than to have the usual squabble over what to trim? But never mind about what the Joneses are doing. You and I have to establish our own budgets, not somebody else’s. And no simple formula will work. The tithe means 10 percent.

But is that 10 percent to the church, or 10 percent to all charitable causes? And do I take it off before or after income taxes? The answer is none of these things. That figure of 10 percent which used to be a legal obligation on the ancient Hebrews, is still a good starting point for Christian giving, but it isn’t the end we seek. To give the whole tithe to the church, after taxes would merely be a duty fulfilled and no grounds for glory (see Luke 17:10). We can’t stop there. Like the rich young man, we have to go the whole way (Mark 10:21).
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Traveling Light, Pat McGeachy, Abingdon Press, pages 87-89.

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Or, if you’re someone who plans well ahead, have you asked yourself what you will preach for your Easter Sermon, your Advent Sermon, your Christmas Sermon?

You will also find a variety of resources for pastors and congregations at the Mainstay Ministries website. Just click here.

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8 Survival Skills for Changing Times – Part 1-9

August 16, 2012 by admin

Downscaling – Part 9: Readings – 4

A Journey Toward Simplicity: Walter and Virginia Hearn

A few years ago we sensed that God wanted us to do something different with our lives, but we didn’t realize how radical a change it would be.

The competitive professional rat race left us little time to think and write. We had seen what happens to families when a husband spends himself and all his time at a demanding job. Even with two children to support and Ginny’s elderly mother to care for, we felt there must be another way for us. We were willing to trust God and “count the cost” of trying something different, some way of working together in a new kind of life. So we kept careful records and deliberately pared our cost of living down to half our income. By saving the other half, each year on the payroll “bought” us a year to experiment. We stayed two years, then took the plunge and moved to Berkeley.

Our family enterprise (writing and editing) doesn’t support us yet, but we seldom panic. God has been teaching us how much we can do without. He has reinforced our basic decision in various ways, and provided bits of income to keep us in “bread” and hope. We think he intends for us to survive. So now we have made another decision: Whenever we do begin to earn more money, we are resolved not to let our “standard of living” rise along with our income. We are beginning to feel liberated.

Cutting down doesn’t come easy in our society. Possessions have become the measure of everything, even of spiritual worth, and commercial interests control or dominate most channels of communication. What we have done goes against the American grain.

We think that deliberately lowering our standard of living in obedience to God is part of what Jesus meant by being “poor in spirit.” The amazing thing is that the quality of our life seems higher than before.

Of course, we have to beware of the reverse snobbery of spiritual one-upmanship. No matter how little one learns to live on, even that comes at the expense of someone else. What each of us has is a gift, no matter how we stand financially. Greed tempts the poor as well as the rich. Christians need not put down people who are wealthy, wasteful, extravagant or stingy, as long as we don’t follow their ways. God is their judge, and ours. We ought rather to put our energy into being examples of a better way, just as Jesus Christ is ours. Each person must live his or her own life as God leads them. We don’t want to overgeneralize from our experience. Our Father seems to love variety.
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Living More Simply, edited by Ronald J. Sider, InterVarsity Press, pages 73-75.

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Or, if you’re someone who plans well ahead, have you asked yourself what you will preach for your Easter Sermon, your Advent Sermon, your Christmas Sermon?

You will also find a variety of resources for pastors and congregations at the Mainstay Ministries website. Just click here.

Share and Enjoy

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