Noise - Week 3
Too Stressed To Be Blessed
In week three of our Noise sermon series, Lead Pastor Aeric Wallace walked us through a common mental health struggle: Stress.
It’s no secret that we all feel stress on some level. In fact, stress can feel inevitable. However, we tend to expect inevitable stress to be bad or dangerous — if we always expect it to feel this way, we will always live in a state of worry and fear.
Instead of creating inevitable stress to be worry inducing, we can learn to appreciate what we can anticipate (with God’s help, of course). Stress is unique in the fact that it weighs on each person individually. It is not a “copy and paste” type of emotion — some people wear their stress like a badge of honor, others refuse to admit it affects them, and many live in the in-between where stress can push or pull them in multiple directions.
No matter what, your stress is not others’ stress — be it a spouse, sibling, parent, friend, etc., how stress affects you and your reactions is 100% unique. You may choose a fight-induced response to stress while your friends and family may take flight, flop, freeze, or fawn.
When we prophetically speak over our stress, we will see the Lord’s promises come true again and again.
Despite the individuality of stress, the Bible has given us actionable stories about others who also experienced inevitable stress that we can learn from. We often see that stress follows when we disobey the Lord or choose to act in sinful ways. But if we choose to turn away from our sinful actions and toward our God, we can release our stress to his sovereignty and control.
The most frequently mentioned gift of the Spirit is prophesy. The core idea of this gift is to communicate to others what God is trying to show, or to see things that aren’t as if they were.
In Ezekiel 37:1-6, we see the Lord control the stress of the Israelites through the power of prophesy. Instead of providing an instantaneous miracle, He calls Ezekial to speak over the impossible again and again and again, until the valley of dry bones knit themselves back together and breathed the breath of life.
Much the same way in our own lives, when we speak over our stress, we will see the Lord’s promises come true again and again. There are three simple prophetic words to remember throughout your life:
He is going to do it
He will give it back to me
He will cover me
And with him, we will come to life.
Catch up with the rest of the series here!
