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[Music] Singing in the Strain, a message by Dr. Bruce W. Thielman. The scripture reading of the evening is taken from three Gospels. Reading first from the Gospel according to Matthew, chapter 7, beginning at the verse number 24.

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Jesus is speaking. "Everyone who hears these words of mine and obeys them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain poured down, the rivers flooded over, and the winds blew hard against that house, but it did not fall because it had been built on the rock.

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Everyone who hears these words of mine and does not obey them will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. The rain poured down, the rivers flooded over, the winds blew hard against that house, and it fell. And what a terrible fall that was." And then from the Gospel according to Mark, reading from the fourth chapter, beginning at the 35th verse.

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"On the evening of that same day, Jesus said to his disciples, 'Let us go across to the other side of the lake.' So they left the crowd. The disciples got into the boat that Jesus was already in and took him with them. Other boats were there too. A very strong wind blew up and the waves began to spill over into the boat so that it was about to fill with water.

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Jesus was in the back of the boat, sleeping with his head on a pillow. The disciples woke him up and said, 'Teacher, don't you care that we are about to die?' Jesus got up and commanded the wind, 'Be quiet.' And said to the waves, 'Be muzzled.' And the wind died down and there was a great calm.

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Then Jesus said to them, 'Why are you so frightened? Are you still without faith?' They were terribly afraid and began to say to each other, 'Who is this man? Even the wind and the waves obey him.'" And finally, from the Gospel according to John, the sixth chapter, beginning at the 16th verse. "When evening came, his disciples went down to the lake, got into the boat, and went back across the lake toward Capernaum.

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Night came on and Jesus still had not come to them. By now a strong wind was blowing and stirring up the water. The disciples had rowed about three or four miles when they saw Jesus walking on the water, coming near the boat, and they were terrified. 'Don't be afraid,' Jesus told them. 'It is I.'

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They took him into the boat and immediately the boat reached land at the place they were heading for. And may the same God who inspired these words incline our hearts to their understanding. Will you pray with me? In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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I would like to talk with you for a little while tonight about something which will be important to you throughout all the course of your life. I would like to talk to you about the storms of the human experience, about stress and tension and pressure. You know, when they develop a new automobile in Detroit, before releasing it to the market, they always subject it to extreme testing procedures. Interestingly enough, the most severe of these tests is not over a piece of rough and broken road. Quite the contrary.

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The most intensive and demanding test is the driving of the automobile at a high speed over a smooth pavement for many, many, many miles. It seems that in the course of this high-speed driving over an unbroken pavement, there is set up within the car a series of force vibrations. And if anything can break down that automobile, it will be that repeated vibration rather than the isolated shocks that might be sustained on a rough piece of highway. Now, to this degree at least, human beings are very much like automobiles.

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What gets us, or at least gets many of us, is the high-speed way we live and the constant vibrations, the constant forces that are pulling at us, shaking us, blowing, twisting, bending us, so that often under the strain we fall apart. When our caveman ancestors were confronted by a hostile Tyrannosaurus rex or some other dinosaur, there were two alternatives which immediately presented themselves. They could stay and fight the beast, or they could run for cover. When we face the dinosaur tensions and pressures and stresses of our day, we don't have those same alternatives.

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As students, or as those employed in a business organization of one kind or another, or involved in all the pressures and strains of home life, it just isn't possible for us many times to start to fight. And it's equally impossible for us to turn our backs and to try to run away from the problem altogether. It's our livelihood, it's our family, it's our future. So instead of running, or instead of fighting, we sit in the midst of this vibrating tension, this tearing stress, this storm of our day, and sitting in the midst of it is a very destructive experience.

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There was an article two weeks ago in the Sunday New York Times, an extended article, on the effect of stress, especially as it's being noticed in American business. American businessmen have concluded that between $10 and $20 billion a year is lost in employees who have sustained physical difficulties and emotional difficulties from continued stress and pressure. This is so much the case that organizations like Mobil and Exxon, the Life Assurance Company of America, Time Incorporated, the Chase Manhattan Bank, companies like that have now set up meditation rooms in their buildings. Some organizations are paying for their employees to become involved in transcendental meditation.

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The Life Assurance Company of America has established its own biofeedback laboratory. All kinds of methods are being used to assist people to combat the pressure, the stress, the harried hurrying, which is so much a part of our 20th century lifestyle. Plain fact of the matter is that the theme song played in most people's hearts these days is "Stormy Weather." What I'd like to talk about tonight is how that theme song can be changed, changed so that we can literally sing in the midst of the strain.

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The first thing I would suggest by way of a helpful thought is this. We need to recognize that all of us will know in life bad weather, weather or not. In the parable which I read just a moment ago, Jesus talks about two men who are building lives. He represents the lives by referring to their homes.

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One man builds a home on a rock. The other man builds a home on sand. Now the storm, the tension, the pressure comes. And the Greek is very interesting here.

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It suggests a series of repeated blows, first rain, then wind, then flood. And the interesting thing to me is that the rain and the wind and the flood hit both houses. In other words, the fact that one man has built upon rock while the other man has built upon sand does not mean that that first man gains any exemption from the storms of life.

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No matter what commitments we have made in life, we're going to experience the same tensions and pressures that other people know. Now this is so much the case that some have gone on to say, as an amplification of the point, that stress and tension are an important part of everybody's life, and that in fact we would not live full-orbed human experiences without that kind of thing.

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Dr. Hans Selye, who heads up the Institute of Stress at the University of Montreal, says that the absence of stress means death. That in fact all of us know stress and need to know it. But he goes on to point out that there are three steps in stress.

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First, there is alarm when it initially hits us. Then there is adjustment when our bodies and minds begin to combat it. And if that second step does not work out correctly, if we do not adjust as we should, then we move to the third step, which is destructive exhaustion.

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The fact then that each one of us feels stress is not in itself surprising. It's to be expected. The question is, do we adjust to it successfully, or do we move into that destructive exhaustion which breaks us down? Two doctors, a Dr. Rosenman and a Dr. Friedman, have developed over 20 years of research a picture of the individual who is breaking down under stress,

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of the person who is not combating and adjusting stress effectively. They call this kind of personality a "type A" personality. And I invite you in the next minute or two to a period of deep and honest self-examination. I'm going to tell you what the type A personality is like,

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and you can assess your own personality in the light of this very careful analysis. Ask yourself questions like these. Do you talk very rapidly? Do you speak almost explosively?

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Do the ends of your sentences always end in a hurry? Do you move rapidly? Do you walk quickly? Do you eat quickly? Do you become impatient with drivers who are not going according to the speed limit, that is, slower than the speed limit?

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Are you the kind of person who regularly, if you have the opportunity, runs through the orange light? Are you impatient? When people start to talk to you about things, do you find yourself trying to end their paragraphs for them?

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Do you think holophasically, that is, do you think of two things at the same time, so that, for example, when you're on a break, when you're out for an evening's entertainment, or when you're engaged in some form of relaxation, is one part of your mind still thinking of the responsibilities that are at home,

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the tests that are coming, the responsibilities and challenges which will soon be yours? When you take that kind of a break for entertainment and relaxation purposes, do you feel a little bit guilty about it? Have you developed an inability to observe?

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When you go into a room where there are some things that are especially attractive and lovely, do you find when you leave the room that you are unable to describe those things with any detail? Are you more interested in having things than in developing yourself into a significant personality? Do you live with a sense of chronic urgency, that is, are you always under the gun?

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When you meet other people who move in response to tension and pressure, do you find yourself responding to them not in terms of sympathy, but in terms of challenge, that is, you wonder if they're outproducing you? Do you want to see the other person's grades, not in order to be able to respond to how they're doing,

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but to measure how you're doing over against them? Do you find yourself repeating yourself in conversation, or repeating the same gestures again and again? Are you trying to produce more and more in less and less time?

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Do you measure your successes or failures in numbers? Is there a kind of scale you've established for yourself, a numerical scale by which you determine whether you're advancing in life or retreating? Is your sense of humor something that you use in order to gain particular goals which are yours,

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or do you have a genuine sense of the ludicrous so that you can laugh at yourself and laugh at others? Do you know what the real essence of your life is, or does that question utterly confuse you because you've never really thought about it at all? Now, I'm not trying to be alarmist in bringing up these things,

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but in what we're talking about tonight, especially at this time of the year, if you're not going to confront yourself really and analyze whether you're moving from this adjustment to this exhaustion stage in terms of stress, then there's going to be little value in our sharing.

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This is not the time to make excuses. This is the time to face some very serious reality. Let me use an extreme illustration of what I mean. I had a friend who lived in the Northwest who was an extremely driven personality,

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always trying to outproduce everything he had always done before, and this concerned me. And I talked to him about it, and he resented my suggestion that he was under tension and pressure. He said it was necessary to get ahead.

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It was what made him creative and dynamic. He felt so deeply about it that after we parted sometime later, he wrote me an extended letter justifying the constant tension under which he kept himself, and which he allowed to direct his life.

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Two years ago, he took a butcher knife, slashed both his wrists and his throat. Even in the way he committed suicide, there was drive and challenge and urgency and determination. I've already admitted that that's a very extreme illustration. But there's more than one way to kill yourself.

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You can slay your own spirit of optimism. You can, with stress, strangle your own joy or the joy of other people. You can find yourself, because of tension and pressure, just ripping your relationships to other people into shreds.

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You turn to propping yourself up with pills. Or you try to drown your anxieties and your fears and your obsessions in a bottle. You know, when students say to me, as I've heard them say many, many times, that the reason they allow themselves to go a bit too far at a party on a Friday or Saturday night

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is because it's the only way, and this is a direct quote, "the only way in which they can forget about it all and escape for a while." When I hear that, it chills me. They're not coping effectively with the stress and tension which is theirs.

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So I ask you a very serious question tonight. If you scored high on that little examination I just offered, or if you feel all kinds of pressure and hurry on you, if you're convinced that you're not really driving your life,

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but that other circumstances are driving your life for you, if you're always in the middle of a storm, then you need some help. And I would suggest that the first place to go for help is to Jesus.

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Because I believe with all my heart that Jesus Christ is the Lord of storms. I sat once and I talked with a physician, a very noted physician. Oh, he wasn't internationally or nationally known, but he was very well known in his community and in his state.

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He was one of these old doctors who knew and knew that he knew, but wasn't at all uppity about it. He told me how he was disturbed at the fact that so many people were falling apart so early in life. He said, "I used to see it happen to people in their 80s.

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Then it was their 70s and 60s. Now it's the 50s and the 40s, and last week I had a fellow in the 30s. There's nothing I can do about it with pills or with liquids or with shots or with scalpels. It's an emotional thing."

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"As a matter of fact," he said, "as far as I know, there's only one doctor who can really deal with it. There's only one doctor who has healing in his hand so that when he puts his hand on your heart, there is a calmness and a strength there that no one else can equal."

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You know, there are people who call me a success as a doctor, but the only success in this that I know is by taking my patients to this other doctor. And his name, and here he spoke with a deep, deep reverence. He said, "His name is Dr. Jesus."

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Stress does have physical effects. Heart disease, renal failure, hypertension, migraine, headaches, ulcers, asthma, depression, alcoholism, addiction, all are traced in large measure to stress. And it's beautiful, I think, to speak of Jesus

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as the great physician who touches and heals that kind of stormy tension in life. I read a minute ago the scene of Jesus in Mark 4 when he and the disciples were going across the lake and he was asleep in the back of the boat.

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I think that's one of the most beautiful touches in the story. See, Jesus didn't find it necessary to be looking over the shoulders of his assistants all the time. This is one of the marks of a great leader. He not only led his people, he trusted them.

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He not only guided them, he loved them. So Jesus was asleep in the back of the boat, the storm comes up, and they go to him for help. And he does an amazing thing. In this pitching little boat out on the Sea of Galilee, he stands up.

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He stands up in a pitching boat. He grasps the mast. And in the lightning, you can see that the water has wet down his robe so that it sticks to his lean and muscular body.

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And in the light, his skin running with water, and dark brown in color as it is, looks like carved olive wood. And his black Jewish Middle Eastern hair is all twisted and blown in the wind. And he looks out over the sea, and he says, "Be muzzled!"

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Like he's speaking to some kind of enraged animal. And immediately, there was a great calm. He's the Lord of storms. A fellow with insomnia spoke to a friend of his who slept very well every night.

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He said, "How is it that you sleep well every night? Do you count sheep?" He said, "No, I talk to the shepherd." He understands, you see, who the Lord of the storm is. Last night, one of our seniors said to me, very lovingly and very gently,

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that my sermons were theologically infantile. And that, in fact, that I was not very theologically sophisticated. Well, I've thought about that. And I'm convinced it's true.

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The fact of the matter is, my faith is very simple. I just believe that we ought to trust Jesus. I believe that if we take him at his word, our lives will be transformed. Now, I try to practice the presence of Jesus.

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And that takes practice. Because it's very easy for us to forget that he said, "Lo, I am with you always." We get caught up in the storm and forget how close by he is. I think that I forget it so readily that I have to concentrate on remembering it.

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And so I do that. If I'm in a restaurant alone, I will imagine that he is seated in the chair to my right. As I walk across the quad, I sometimes will visualize him walking before me, listen for his footfalls, feel his shoulder touch mine.

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I talk with him from time to time. Not all the time. Probably not as often as I ought. You know how it is with your best friends.

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You don't have to talk all the time. Sometimes the deepest communion comes when there isn't a word. Now, you can sneer at that and call that a kind of unsophisticated psychological mechanism, if you will. All I know is that it makes Jesus very present and real to me.

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[bell rings] Please turn your cassette to the other side. Sometimes churches ask me to come and look over their program and their ministerial staff and help them analyze their problems.

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Kind of a troubleshooter for ecclesiastical situations. I was in a church in Indiana meeting with a minister and his staff, and as they shared their problems and their difficulties, a young seminarian there, who was even more ignorant than young seminarians are entitled to be,

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said some very offensive things to his boss. And it was obvious that this man was beginning to lose his temper. All of a sudden he got up, walked to the middle of the room, got down and stretched out flat on the floor.

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I thought he was having an attack of some kind. I said, "Are you all right?" He said, "Yes. I've just discovered that it's very hard to lose your temper when you're lying down."

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Now, you know, that's true. Now, you try that sometime. I mean, you're really getting hot, really boiling. Lie down.

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First of all, it'll get the attention in the room on you immediately. It leads to a lot of laughter and some critical comments, of course. It conveys to others exactly how you feel under the circumstances. It changes the subject.

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Of course, it wouldn't work so well at the corner of Pine and Broad. But as a technique, it's not a bad one. I asked him more about it, and he said that he was in a meeting on one occasion and some things came up which angered him, but he kept his temper.

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And one of his friends said to him afterwards, "Knowing how hot-headed you are, I expected you to lose your temper." And he said, "Oh, I didn't lose my temper because the bishop was there." And his friend said, "It's interesting.

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The bishop can lead you to hold on to your temper, but Jesus doesn't seem to be able to do it." That kind of shook him up, for he recognized that while the bishop wasn't always with him, Jesus always was.

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So he began thinking about the presence of Jesus in his life. And as he began to recognize and practice the presence of Jesus in the same terms which I outlined to you a moment ago, he began to get hold of his hostility and anger.

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Now, hostility and anger is one of the most evident displays of inordinate stress and tension and the inability to deal with it. If you're filled with a lot of temper, that's one of the things that shows that tension and pressure are not being adjusted too well to by you.

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And one of the ways that you can deal with this, I believe, is by practicing the presence of Christ. He maintains that it is his experience of Jesus that's led him to develop these methods which enable him to control the hostility which is his. The nearness of Jesus, the Jesus who says, "Peace I leave with you.

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My peace give I unto you." The Jesus who says, "Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." The Jesus who says, "Peace, be muzzled." The Jesus who says, "In the world you'll have tribulation, but be of good cheer.

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I have overcome the world." Jesus is the Lord of storms. And if you'll go to him, open yourself to him, he'll begin to teach you how to sing even in the midst of the strain.

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And I'd like to say one other thing about that and then I'm done. One of the first things it seems to me that Jesus does teach us when he enters into our lives is this, that we need to discover where we are in the storm, and that we're usually closer to the end of it than we are to its beginning.

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I read a couple of minutes ago a passage from John 6 about when the disciples were out on the water and a storm comes up and Jesus comes apparently walking on the water. I say apparently because the Greek is very vague here.

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He might have been walking through the water. It's difficult to tell. In any case, when they see him, they're astonished. He comes on board and then there's this significant sentence. It says that he came aboard and immediately they were at the point on the shore where they'd wanted to go.

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You see, what happened is that all excited by the storm, the disciples forgot where they were. They didn't recognize that they were already very close to their goal. When Jesus came on board, when Jesus entered into the experience, he so calmed them that they discovered they were a lot closer to the end of their problems

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than they had initially realized. Now, one of the things that happens to us when we get caught up in stress and tension is we start to hurry. We start to paddle like crazy. And if you think about it very long, that's obviously not a good thing to do.

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I mean, I've never in all my life heard of a person losing a job because they missed a deadline. I've never heard of an attorney losing a case or losing a client because he spent too much time preparing that case for delivery in court. I've never known an individual to fail at what they were doing because they did what they were doing too well.

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The creative in people is destroyed by repetitive urgency. And our friends don't like us just because we go faster than anybody else. They tolerate that in us. It is not what attracts them to us.

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If you think about it for a moment, hurrying is not a wise course. But when we're caught in a storm, almost invariably, what we do is increase the tempo of our lives. When we invite Christ to move into the course of our days, he teaches us that that is the course of foolishness.

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One of the things I have learned from my Savior is this, that life is unfinished. I didn't believe that for many years. Now I say it to myself every day of my life.

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Life is unfinished. You're never going to be done in life until life itself comes to an end. I think it very significant to notice that there was only once in his life that Jesus said, "It is finished."

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And that was at the moment of his death. And you're not going to be able to say about anything significant in your life that it's finished. One minute sooner than he did. So why hurry?

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A month ago, I was out in Missouri. A bunch of Presbyterians got together out there, and they needed a big place to have their meeting, and the biggest place was in Missouri. And they invited me to come and give the address.

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And there were some churches in Kansas that heard I was coming out, so they asked me if I'd speak at the churches. That was a very busy day. I flew out on Saturday.

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I began the day by preaching in Pittsburgh, Kansas. And then after that, we rushed over to a little restaurant and ate much too quickly. Then jumped in a car, drove three and a half hours through a terrific rainstorm to the Reorganized Church of the Latter-day Saints,

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a big Mormon auditorium in Independence, Missouri. It's a huge thing. It holds 10,000 people. When I walked up the steps to the place, and I was running through the rain, the committee met me.

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God deliver us from committees. And they wanted immediately to go into a meeting to tell me all the things that we were going to do. And they said, "And we've made arrangements to have dinner served while we're meeting." Oh, bad.

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And there were six families that I knew, some of them professionally and some personally. There's a girl there that I dated in junior high. That's really true.

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And her family. Six families wanted me to go and spend time in their homes. And there was a group of students from Kansas State University who had traveled 200 miles over, and they told me they wanted to meet with me as soon as the meeting was over.

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And suddenly, I became aware of the fact that I was in a storm, that everything was moving around me, hurrying, harrying, and nothing else. So I said no. I said to the committee, "No, I will not meet with you.

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You know what you're going to do. You do it. Tell me what I'm to do. I'll do it.

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No, I'm the last person that needs another dinner. I'll skip the dinner. You people are wonderful to invite me to your home, but no, no, no, no, no, and no." And as far as you kids from the college are concerned, we'll talk about that later.

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And I turned around, and I walked back to the back row of the auditorium where it was dark, and I sat down, and I said, "Jesus, settle me." I had a choir for the program that night, 800 voices, accompanied by a full orchestra and a magnificent organ,

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and they were rehearsing in the front of the auditorium. And with God as my witness, as I prayed that prayer, they began to sing, "Oh God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come, our shelter from the stormy blast, and our eternal home."

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You see, I had to stop thinking about everything that was coming and just settle down, get still at the center of myself, take Jesus on board. And very soon, we were at precisely the place on the shore where we wanted to go. I guess you know that it rains here in Grove City.

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This last summer when you weren't here, we had two terrible storms. One happened the day before the freshmen arrived, the other about a month earlier. When the storms come from the north, you know they're going to be very bad, and this one came from the north.

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And there was a bit of hail, slashing rain, a lot of wind, and thunder and lightning. Not the kind of thunder that rolls, but the kind that thuds, and then it just hits, and then it's gone. I was sitting on my back porch watching this display, and all of a sudden, I heard very clearly the chime on the grandfather's clock inside the house.

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And some words of Robert Louis Stevenson came to my mind. He said, "Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened, but go, in fortune or in misfortune, at their own private pace, like the ticking of a clock in a thunderstorm." So the rain was raining, and the wind was winding, and the thunder was thundering,

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and the lightning was lighteninging, and the clock was going tick-tock, tick-tock. It was as if the clock thought, "The storm will pass, but time will still be here. I will direct my attention to the eternal, and then relax." And that's exactly what Jesus leads us to do.

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Tonight, if you feel driven, instead of like the one who's driving, if you feel stress and tension, I invite you to practice the presence of Jesus. Remember, he said, "Lo, I am with you always." I invite you to listen to the voice of Jesus.

00:41:34.000 - 00:41:50.000

He said, "Peace, be still." I invite you to follow the practice of Jesus. "Take no thought for tomorrow," he said. "Sufficient to the day are the problems thereof."

00:41:50.000 - 00:42:12.000

I invite you to focus on Jesus, and you'll find yourself at the shore, exactly where you want it to go. And in the course of all the storm of the next few days, don't forget that this place is here.

00:42:12.000 - 00:42:37.000

Come in. Let those big oak doors close behind you. Breathe the atmosphere of this place, hallowed by ten thousand times ten thousand prayers, prayed by people every bit as anxious as yourself. And think about him.

00:42:37.000 - 00:43:01.000

Fill yourself with him, till your cup runs over. And if you can't get here, then just go someplace alone. Talk to him for a moment. Open the Bible to the Gospels, and let his story insert itself into your consciousness.

00:43:01.000 - 00:43:33.000

Take a moment to sit down with a friend, and love that friend. Make yourself vulnerable enough in the Spirit of Jesus to let that friend love you. And the storm clouds will begin to part, and you will find a new peace. It's kind of like that lady in Minneapolis I met two weeks ago.

00:43:33.000 - 00:43:51.000

She was an old lady. She was trying to turn on the light in a phone booth, and she couldn't find the switch. After a while, she decided she'd take the telephone book out into the lobby and read it, but it was chained to the wall.

00:43:51.000 - 00:44:48.000

So she went back to looking for the switch again. As I looked at her, I thought about you, and I thought about me. And then I got up, and I went over, and I said, "Madam, if you'll close the door, the light will go on." Most people I know who sing even in the stream are the people who close the door long enough for the light to go on.

00:44:48.000 - 00:45:19.000

Let us pray. Our loving and gracious Heavenly Father, we praise you because you have made your presence known to our lives, even now as we worship you. But we especially praise you for the peace that you and only you show us when our lives are troubled.

00:45:19.000 - 00:45:58.000

We praise you for your mercy and your love made known to us through Jesus Christ, which gives us strength and faith to depend totally on you when we face life's stormy moments. When we cry out for help, we can always know that you will be there to bring quiet and peace into our lives. Forgive us, Father, for at times it seems that we only call out to you when our lives have become rough.

00:45:58.000 - 00:46:35.000

We neglect our faith in you until a struggle or a storm comes about. Forgive us, Lord, because even when we do come to you with our struggles and problems, we don't always have the faith to believe and know that you can and will bring calm to our lives. Help us to realize that only a sincere faith in you will keep us from being swept up in a storm or swallowed up by rough waters.

00:46:35.000 - 00:47:17.000

Guide us in our faith, Lord, so that we may know your presence, even in the struggles and the stress which we face right now. Help us to look to you for strength and calmness as we begin to prepare for finals, as we finish up the semester with papers and tests, and as we look ahead to where you will want us next in this life. O Lord, we need you. Only you can fill our needs. You are the bread of life.

00:47:17.000 - 00:47:58.000

You are the one who can sustain our feeble spirits. We come to you. We yield ourselves to you and lay ourselves before you. Make us whole again. Fill us up. Fill us up with more of thee. Lord, we continue our prayer as the psalmist of old, as our thoughts are set to music. [BLANK_AUDIO]