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Welcome to Message for the Moment, a cassette series containing the messages of Dr. Bruce W. Thielman. The message on this cassette is entitled "How to Triumph Over Tension." And now, here's Dr. Thielman. The scripture reading of the morning is Psalm 46. "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea,

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though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble with its tumult. There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the Most High. God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved. God will help her right early. The nations rage; the kingdoms totter. He utters his voice; the earth melts. The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. Come, behold the works of the Lord, how he has wrought desolations in the earth.

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He makes wars cease to the end of the earth; he breaks the bow and shatters the spear; he burns the chariots with fire. Be still and know that I am God. I am exalted among the nations; I am exalted in the earth. The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge." May God bless to us and to our hearts understanding this reading from his Word.

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Pray with me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. "And the Lord said unto them, Be ye in the midst of the city of God; and behold, the city of God is in the midst of the Lord. And the Lord said unto them, Be ye in the midst of the city of God; and behold, the city of God is in the midst of the Lord. And the Lord said unto them, Be ye in the midst of the city of God; and behold, the city of God is in the midst of the Lord.

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And after complimenting the boy on the sermon, he said, But why is it that you have been preaching the same sermon word for word, Sunday after Sunday? To which the youngster, with that naivete typical of seminary graduates, replied, Well, I have decided that when the congregation decides to do what I have told them to do in the first sermon, then I will move on to another subject. This story has been much in my mind this week, for I have thought of the fact that I have been in your midst for seventeen months now,

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and in that time I have preached within the walls of this church to one group or another a hundred seventy-one times. And in reviewing what I have said across those one hundred seventy-one times, I have discovered that I have talked about tension, or stress, or anxiety on eleven different occasions. And that has been so because it is an evident need among our people. I am trying to be your friend, and I see the evidences of tension and stress, and so I address myself to these things.

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And I have noted that some of you are still worried about a lot of things, and some of you are tense about a lot of things. And so I come to the subject again as we head into the busyness of the fall and the winter and the spring seasons. I want you to know all the peace and the poise and the power of God. So think with me for a few minutes about how to triumph over tension.

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Now, some tension or stress is necessary to life. A few years ago, Dr. Jay Shirley of the University of Oklahoma tried to construct a stress-free environment. He took individuals and had them immersed in water at body temperature. All sensory information was cut off. They could not see or hear or smell or taste anything.

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Air was fed to them through a mask at precisely seventy degrees Fahrenheit. They were almost in a womb-like existence. But he found that no person could stand that existence for longer than six hours. It seems that the absence of stress became very stressful.

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Freud talks about a stimulus hunger in us. We all have a need for a certain amount of excitement and tension in our lives. The difficulty is that many people have too much. From as long ago as the early 1800s, we know from the studies of a Dr. James Johnston in London,

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that stress, too much stress, can lead to disease and to emotional breakdown. The early years of this century, both Harvard and Johns Hopkins Universities presented distinguished studies on the negative effects of too much stress. We need a certain amount of tension to put zing into our lives,

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but too much of it can become distracting. Now Isaiah addressed the people who were terribly tense. He was writing to those who were caught up in a tremendous anxiety, worry, stress. And to those people, he addressed these words.

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They are the words of our text for this morning. And they are the words that I would ask us to think about. "Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee, because he trusteth in thee." Now the first thing this word says to us is that God's will for us is that we be at peace.

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God loves us. He wants us to know peace within our lives. The word "peace" means unity, to be joined together. You're familiar with the Latin word for peace, "pac." It's part of the word "pact" or "compact" in our English language.

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A compact, you know, is an agreement between two people where they are joined together. Peace, in the Old Testament sense, is to be joined together with God, to be in unity or in harmony with him. It's to have a sanctified synthesis between yourself and our God.

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It is to live in a harmonious relationship with him and with all others because of him. I think of it often in terms of the rainbow. You know what happens when we have a rainstorm. The rain acts prismatically on the light and breaks it down into its constituent colors of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.

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When the storm passes, however, the light is no longer broken down and we see it in all of its radiant purity. We see it in harmony. Now the Bible says God is light and in him is no darkness at all. We are to be in harmony with God, not to be broken down, not to be fractured, not to be torn apart,

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not to be sectionalized within ourselves or within our environment, but rather to be in harmony with him. Peace in the biblical sense is not cynicism, when you just go through life as if you were under anesthesia and allow nothing to bother you. And it's not self-satisfaction, which leads to pride and the breaking down of peace. And it's not passivity, just lying down and letting life roll over you.

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And it certainly is not the absence of trouble. A lot of people think that peace, as it's biblically defined, is the absence of difficulty, but that is not true. In the Bible, peace is not the absence of anything, it is the presence of God. It is the presence of unity with him.

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Peace and poise and power come in the scriptures not because the situation around you is easy, but because your heart is at ease with God. Look at the example of Jesus. Jesus ran into some very ugly people and very ugly circumstances in the course of his life, circumstances which in the end led to his crucifixion.

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But what was the legacy that he left to his disciples on the very night before the cross? He said to them, "Peace I leave with you, my peace give I unto you." You see, in spite of the ugliness of the surroundings and the vicissitudes that he encountered on every hand, there was still within him a deep peace because he was at one in harmony with the God of all battles, with his Father.

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You see, tension is not what happens to us, but how we respond to it. And when we are in unity with God, when we are in harmony and at one with him, when the light of his purity is filling us, then we can respond to tension in a poised and powerful way. Augustine, one of the greatest names in the parade of the faith, lived 1600 years ago, yet his experience parallels our own.

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He was the young man you remember who prayed, "Lord, save me," but not quite yet. Eventually he came to the place where he needed the peace of God, and he began to seek it. He tried first philosophy, became a Platonist, gave himself to the pursuit of the world of the ideal, and found no peace in that. Then he gave himself to religion.

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He became a Manichean and involved himself in the struggle between good and evil, as it is understood in the teachings of Mani, and he found no peace in that. And then he gave himself to disciplined living. He went off into the wilderness and tried to live an isolated life,

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figured if he could separate himself from all tension, he would know that peace, and he did not find peace in that. And then, because of the prayers of his mother, and because of the zeal of his own heart, and preeminently, of course, because of the grace of God, he found union with God through Jesus Christ. And how did he describe what happened to him then?

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He wrote these words, "The heart is restless until it rests in thee." Peace is to rest in God. It is reliance upon the God of all resources. And God wants each and every one of us to know that in our lives. Now, the way to know that in our lives is the focus of the second part of what Isaiah writes.

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He says, "Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee." In other words, it is thinking about, orienting one's life around God, that makes for peace. Now, I approach what I'm about to say with trepidation, because I look up here and I see one doctor, and I look over there and I see another doctor, and I look back there and I see two doctors.

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I'm going to say something medical here, and I don't pretend to have any medical understanding, but I've checked this out. Each of us has a cerebral cortex, a brain. Now, that cortex, or that brain, is the center of our conscious thought.

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This is where we do our intellectual activity. It's where we think. It's where we remember. It's where we dream. Where we imagine. And all of the data of our five senses comes into that cortex. Now, that cortex controls what is called the limbic system.

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And the limbic system is the emotional responses that go on in our body, and the instinctive responses. Things like our appetites and our drives and our breathing and our heartbeat and things of that kind. Now, part of this limbic system is a series of glands that are called the endocrine glands. And these glands, when stimulated by that limbic system, pump into our bloodstream certain chemicals

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which prepare us to meet stress. For example, if we confront some very tense or anxious situation, that information is received in the cortex. The cortex then goes on to what we might call red alerts. And that summons the limbic system into operation.

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The limbic system notifies the endocrine glands who pump neurotransmitters, chemicals, into the bloodstream, and they cause our hormone levels to rise, more cholesterol to be produced, our blood to clot more readily, our blood pressure goes up, our teeth clench, our muscles become tight. And there are circumstances where we need that kind of mechanism, but to live like that,

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to live under that kind of stress or tension all the time is very destructive. Now, what I want you to notice is that this process begins in the cortex with the conscious mind. Only after it has gone through the conscious mind does it move to the instinctive mind. And that means that we can control stress by having a converted cortex.

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What I'm saying is that God has given us a way to master stress. When we confront a stressful situation or circumstance, if our mind is so disciplined that it does not immediately go on red alerts, then the limbic system is not activated, the glands do not pump all of that stuff into our blood, and we do not become so tense.

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And the way, of course, to have your cortex so controlled is to have it focused on God. "Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee." It's the difference, you see, between trying to live as God and living under God. When you live as God, you try to manage your own life.

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This is the God complex. It's as old as the Garden of Eden. People who live this way are generally very dispensive. They have a tendency to be hostile and negative. They're almost always on red alerts.

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Once I was flying into the Newark airport, and we were coming in to land, and suddenly we stopped our approach and climbed again, and the pilot came on the public address and said that we had lost radio contact with the ground, and we could not land until that radio contact had been restored.

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Well, we flew around in circles for about 15 minutes, and then he said that it had been restored and we could land safely, and we did so. And as we were taxiing to our berth, he came over the public address again and said that what had happened was not that the plane's radio had gone defunct, but rather that the radio at the airport had stopped functioning.

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And here were all these planes going in circles over the Newark airport, none of them in contact with each other, and none of them in contact with the ground. Now, when an individual tries to be the god of his own life, that's what happens. He's out of touch with others, and he's out of touch with God, who is the ground of our being.

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And that kind of living is stress-filled. It's painful. Now, the other kind of living is to live under God. That's when you understand yourself not to be the creator, but the preacher. That's when you see everything with the eye of faith.

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That's when you remember promises of God like, "Be strong and of good courage, for the Lord your God goes with you," or, "Fear not, be not dismayed, I am with you," or, "Lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the age." Remembering those promises, focusing the mind upon them, that's the eye of faith. Now, that brings not stress, but peace.

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Dr. William S. Yule, who is the professor of pastoral counseling at Luther Northwestern Seminary, joined a martial arts class. And in that class, the members of the class were dividing into pairs. And one person in each pair was told to imagine that he had coming out of his abdomen a hose, like a garden hose,

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and he came right up and went down the inside of the arm and extended to the fingertips. Now the teacher said, "I want you to imagine that water is surging through that hose, and I want you to point it at a spot over there on the opposite wall, and I want you to keep that water hitting that spot.

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Just imagine it going over there. Look at the opposite wall and keep that water going at that spot." Then he said to the other member of each pair, "I want you to take hold of that arm and see if you can tip that person over. See if you can unbalance him." And it was very difficult to do so. As long as the person imagined that there was water coming out

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and hitting a spot over there and kept that water on the spot, they couldn't be tipped over. Then the teacher said, "All right, now imagine that the hose is gone. Hold your arm out. Just look at the ends of your own fingers. Just look at the tips of your own fingers."

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Now he said to the other person, "Try to tip them over." And they could tip them over very quickly. You try this for yourself and you see that it works. The fact of the matter is, when you're focusing on something no farther away

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than the ends of your own fingers, that is, when you're focusing on yourself, you can be easily upset. But when your perspective is on something a distance away, when as Christians we are focused upon God, when our focus is on the infinite, then it is very difficult to unbalance us.

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Jesus said, "Come unto me, all you that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." And his words are true. If you look at the waves about you, then things get rough. But if you focus on the maker of the sea, the one who is passing the ocean,

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then your way remains secure. That's what it is to have a converted cortex, to have your mind focused on him. The Bible describes that as "trusting God." That's how the verse concludes.

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"Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee, because he trusteth in thee." Trust is that relationship which grows up between two people when they've gone through things together and have discovered that they can rely on each other. And what Isaiah is saying is that the more you focus on God,

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the more reliable you are going to discover him to be. And that will make it easier for you to continue and develop that focus on him to an even greater degree. I always think of it in terms of that story in Matthew 14, when the disciples were in the boat and Jesus came walking to them on the water,

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and Peter says, "Master, did we come to you?" And Jesus says, "Come." And Peter gets out of the boat and starts to walk towards Jesus, and then he takes his eyes from Jesus and begins to look at the waves,

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and as soon as he does, he starts to sink. But notice this. When he starts to sink, it doesn't say that he began to flail about or that he scrambled back, trying to get back into the boat again.

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Instead of that, he addressed Jesus. He said, "Lord, save me." In other words, his focus slipped. He began to look at the water.

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But as soon as it slipped, there had already been enough of a relationship built up with Jesus that he pulled himself back again, focused again on Jesus, and said, "Lord, save me, and save me wise." We're all going to slip in this process of focusing upon God

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because we're weak and we're not as disciplined as we ought to be. But in those moments when that happens, the more we have focused on him, the more trustworthy we will find him to be, and that will make it easier for us to regain the focus once more.

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About seven years ago at Grove City, one afternoon, there was a terrible rainstorm. I was running around trying to close all the windows and running out in the back porch, and there was one tremendous weaning stream. I was trying to save things from the back porch, bringing them in, running up and down the hall.

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Then I began to notice that the big elm trees all around the house where I live, and oak trees, many of them as much as 100 feet tall, were really swaying in the wind, and I could hear them groaning and creaking. I ran inside to call the grounds crew to the collie to let them know what was happening

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and found out that the telephone lines were down, the phones were not functioning. I became very anxious as I heard all the agony of these trees, and sure enough, before the storm was over, 11 of them had fallen to the ground. I sat there in tremendous tension, sitting on the steps in the hallway, wondering what I could do.

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And then I looked up, and there was my grandfather's clock. And through all of this storm, you know what it was doing? It was just going pitch black. Pitch black.

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And suddenly it came to me what the scripture says, "Our times are in His hands." The very hairs of our heads are numbered, the very breath that we breathe is no closer to us than He is. Sure, there are times when the earth melts, but He says, "Be still and know that I am God." I lost my focus for a moment.

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I became tense and anxious about situations I could not alter. But when I got my focus back again, peace was there. Trust was restored. Saint Teresa of Avila could have just said, "Let nothing disturb you, let nothing strike you. Everything passes away except God, and God alone is sufficient."

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Well, a few weeks ago I was at a dinner at the Williamson Hotel, and I was taking part in a program, sitting up on the platform. And between two of the courses, a lady got up on the floor of the ballroom, and she came over to me, and she said, "We have never met." She introduced herself. But she said, "About eight years ago you came to preach in our church. It was an evening service."

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And I went to the service, and I was very tense, and I was very anxious, because I was trying to decide whether I could go back into the world of business or not. And she said, "I brought all of that with me to church, and that night, I don't know if you were talking to anybody else, but you certainly were talking to me, and you said, 'The thing to do is to go into whatever you go into focused upon God.'

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And I decided that was the right thing to do, and I did it, and here I am tonight." She got this big smile, and she made kind of a poster, and she said, "And I'm an executive with Allegheny International." "The same peace and poise and power that was hers can belong to you. I love you too much to tell you anything that was not hers.

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It can be yours if you'll do what she did. Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, since mine is laid on thee, because he trusted in thee." That's that. O God, strengthen our faith that we might triumph over Satan, for Jesus' sake and for our own.

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Amen.