What causes anxiety in your life? What causes stress? What are the stressors that really make a difference? Now, one thing that I will disclose that I am, had obviously stressed me was after college, undergrad, it was years that I would have these recurring dreams. And the dreams were, I would go into the classroom and all of a sudden the test would be passed out. And I would be like, I am not ready for this test.
And then as I got older, I got smarter, and then I would tell myself, I’m ready for this test. And I could never get through the first question. The, for some reason, I took that so seriously that it was almost, it was literally years before I could have peace, before those dreams started being rarer and rarer and rarer.
Some things may come in dreams over and over again. Some things may just keep us up at night. Has anybody ever had a night like that where your mind is racing? You’re either thinking about the day, you’re thinking about the next day, you’re thinking about something that happened, you’re thinking about an incident you had with someone else and it’s just eating you up and it’s hard to get to sleep.
A lot of the things we have today are around having peace in our lives. There’s a bigger emphasis on our mental health, a bigger emphasis on how we take care of how we feel and how our minds can stop racing. And sometimes we’re so caught up in everything, we may miss God doing amazing things in our lives.
Or we just may not even be able to enjoy things during the day because we are so worked up. On that note, go with your stress. As we continue to talk about great minds, one of the things the Bible talks about is peace from Genesis to Revelation.
The goal is peace. Today we have many different definitions of peace, but the Bible has something to say and Paul has something big to say today about how we can have peace of mind. Who would love to walk away from church with peace of mind? It carries you through the whole week.
Where you stand as you are able. Note that the first word of this is very important to start with peace and that is the word rejoice. So why doesn’t everybody just say the word rejoice? Let’s say it like you mean it.
Yes. Yes. Peace starts with rejoicing.
Rejoice in the Lord always. Again, I will say rejoice. Let your reasonableness be known to everyone.
The Lord is at hand. Do not be anxious about anything but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving. Let your requests be made known to God and the peace of God which surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.
Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable. If there is any excellence or if there is anything praiseworthy, think about these things. What you have learned and received and heard and seen in me, practice these things and the God of peace will be with you.
The word of God. For the people of God. Amen.
You may be seated. There are many different ideas on how we can obtain peace. Paul has some ideas himself.
I think these are very connected to the transformation of our minds that we’ve been talking about from Romans 12. To be renewed by the transformation of your mind. One of the ways we can find peace is when we go to TV or movies, they say things to us to try to offer us peace.
Here’s a line from a movie from like 1979. Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water. That makes me feel it right here.
Anybody know the movie? Jaws 2. They apparently didn’t get the shark in the first one. You can finish this if you are maybe 45 or older. Calgon, take me.
Has that ever worked for anybody? Oh, and my favorite one comes from the TV show Seinfeld where there was some guru for something and Kramer kept repeating this over and over. Serenity now. Serenity now.
And he would get more and more anxious the more he’d say it because he was not getting serenity in the midst of it. And in every space alien movie from the dawn of time, we come in peace. Don’t know if that would give me peace.
And then there is the classic that if you want to block out anything you don’t want to hear, you put your finger. This was in several movies. You put your fingers in your ear and say, la, la, la, la, I can’t hear you.
That was in a classic intellectual movie called Dumb and Dumber. But we find many things. What we want to do is all those things that are on our minds that work us, that keep us up at night, that give us stress, that give us anxiety, that make us feel uncomfortable about certain situations or interacting with people at certain times or distract us from doing what is most important in our lives.
So there’s kind of two sides to this. One is practices that try to shut those things off in our minds. There are things like, aside from prayer, there are things like meditation where you try to calm your mind and you do certain things.
And some people delve into that deeper than others and they draw in some of those Middle East practices and the early roots of it. According to Ramesh Menaka, mental silence is at the early roots of that. And he said, perhaps surprisingly, the oldest known definition of meditation predates both Buddhism and mindfulness by thousands of years in the ancient Indian Maharatha.
And narrator states that a mediator is like a log. He doesn’t think. Seriously, is that your new goal in life? Become like a log.
Don’t think. In other words, the earliest definitions describe the key defining feature of meditation as an experience of mental silence. Many other explicit examples of this definition can be found in Eastern literature from virtually every historical period.
Lao Tzu, for example, urged us to empty the mind and thoughts in the Tao Te Ching. Western definitions of meditation have consistently failed to acknowledge its significance. Perhaps this is because of the predominance of the Cardassian dictum, cogito ergo sum, I think, therefore, I am.
That’s what we started this off with. And that he has come to known or characterize not only Western philosophy, but the psyche as well. This might explain why for most people in the West, including the academics and researchers on whom we rely to generate our scientific knowledge, mental silence represents both an alien concept and an illogical experience.
At the roots of meditation is something called mental silence. And maybe I’m too Western, but I don’t believe you can shut your minds off while you are conscious. You can’t stop yourself breathing, but you can control your breathing in different ways.
There are parts of it that can be helpful. When Paul talks about this, he talks about mental silence in the form of not thinking about things that make you anxious, but replacing it. When you move in meditation to something called centering prayer, you’re centering on something.
And there are different things you can do. When I was in seminary, we went to the Benedictine monastery and they were teaching us meditation. And the first time they had us in silence and we were there, and I was pretty chill, they rang that gong.
And it was like every goose bump in my body just went off, like this does not fit. And they kept teaching us stuff. They would use the early church fathers, but then interpret it through the Tao, through Middle Eastern things.
And I was, let’s just say the nuns were not fans of me when I questioned so much of what they were doing, trying to understand why what the church fathers said weren’t good enough, why it needed Middle Eastern interpretation, why it wasn’t at the center of Jesus. So each week as we’ve been going through this series, I have brought you great minds. Last week we talked about the church fathers.
The week before that, we talked about Lesbi Nubagen, who is a missionary and an apologist within the faith. And so today, I think it only appropriate as we are talking about this topic to talk about one of the greatest minds. No, let me say this again.
Confidently, I can say the greatest mind in history. And I can boldly say it even here in the sanctuary. Because today we’re gonna listen to Jesus.
Jesus had so much to say on this. And what he said would not be acceptable in a lot of ways today. In Matthew 7, what he said about anxiety, he said, do not be anxious about your life.
You know, I think we joked a couple weeks ago about the most ignorant thing a man can say to his wife is just calm down. But Jesus said, do not be anxious. So just use the word anxious instead of calm down.
I’m kidding. But Jesus says, do not be anxious about anything. About your life, that you will eat and what you will drink.
Not about your body, but what you put on. It is not life, it’s not life more than food and the body more than clothing. Look at the birds in the air.
They neither sow nor reap nor gather in barns, yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious? Here’s the, he’s using the intellect to help us understand how to deal with our anxiety. And which of you by being anxious can add a single hour to the span of his life? Does science tell you you can add any time to your life by being anxious? Does life experience tell you that anxiety brings any more life to you? See, he’s a good mind.
And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow, neither toil or spin. Yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the fields, which even today is alive and tomorrow is thrown in the oven, he will not, how much will he not much more clothe you? O you of little faith.
Now Jesus is connecting anxiety about these things, things we need, to our faith. O you of little faith. Therefore do not be anxious, saying, what shall we eat? What shall we drink? What shall we wear? For the Gentiles think after these things, and your Heavenly Father knows that you need them all.
This is key. This is Jesus’ intellectual guidance for a great mind to have peace of mind. He says, but seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.
Matthew 7-33. What do we seek first? Do we seek more clothing that matches in the right way, that’s made out of the right material? Shoes to go with every outfit? I actually have more shoes to go with every outfit now than I’ve ever had in my life. This is my confession Sunday.
What about the food? Are we content with what we have? I mean, unlike most of the world, we’re not worried about if we get our next meal, we’re worried about what our next meal will be. Why does that dominate our thought process and our life? What we need to seek first is the kingdom of God. When we are in a stressful situation, what we need to seek first is to say, serenity now.
Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness. They kind of go together. Seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and these things will be added unto you, meaning the needs in our lives, God’s going to make them happen.
We just have to have faith. And when we are in a situation that’s keeping us up at night and our heads are spinning, do we need to resolve, I’m not just talking to guys, do we need to resolve the problem immediately? Is that the biggest issue? Is the biggest issue whatever problem is on our mind? I’m getting blank faces on this one. It’s not the biggest issue.
The biggest issue goes back to the simplification of even what Christian said with his short thing. It was short so you can remember it. When you have the presence of Christ, you have peace.
I almost didn’t have to preach because he said that. But that’s not what you get today. So what’s on your mind? Are you thinking about the things that you need to solve? Are you thinking about the worries? Are you thinking about things that bring you anxiety? Paul says not just to empty your mind, which you gotta not let those things dominate your mind, but he says some more powerful words for you to have a great mind.
What are you thinking about? He says whatever is true, so there might not have been much to think about after watching all those campaign commercials. Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely. Some people take the time during the day to think about things that are lovely.
A lot of people don’t. God’s creation is beautiful, even though I struggled through it on the golf course yesterday. Creation is beautiful.
Whatever is commendable, anything that is of excellence, anything worthy of praise. We have someone called the enemy whose name actually means the accuser who wants us to think about where we fall short, wants us to think about what we can’t figure out, wants us to think about where we have messed up, and wants to play those over and over in our mind like a broken record. But Paul says put these positive things on your mind.
And he says whatever you have learned and received and heard in me, practice these things and the peace of God will be with you. Now another way to put it for the peace of God to be with you comes with in the Old Testament in Micah 5 when Micah prophesied about the Messiah who was to come. He said, and this man shall be the peace.
And Paul restated it in Ephesians 2.14 for he is our peace. Who is he? Okay, let’s say it like you really believe it. Who is our peace? Jesus is our peace who hath made both one and hath broken down the middle wall of partition between us.
That if Jesus is the center of our thoughts, of our conversations, the center when something bad or stressful or anxiety creeps up within us. When Jesus is the center that we focus on, we have a peace more powerful than you can even imagine. Paul says it surpasses all understanding, the peace of God.
Now how does it surpass all understanding? Because peace is actually Jesus. When we have Jesus in our hearts, that is our peace. John said in John 1 that when he came in the world, the world could not comprehend him.
So when they see peace within us because we have Christ within us, they can’t understand that. It doesn’t make any sense to have the kind of peace that Christ can give us because it is totally understandable to be anxious or worried or let it eat away at you to the world. But it doesn’t make any sense for you to have peace when we don’t understand Jesus.
Paul also said in 1 Corinthians 2.16 For who has understood the mind of the Lord is to instruct him, but we have the mind of Christ. Peace of mind comes when we are transformed and we have the mind of Christ. We have a mind that is within us that is the same one who came and gave everything for us.
The same one who loves us despite how we seem to have rejected God over and over and over again. If God wasn’t strong, then every one of us would probably have been smited for now. Oh, except one.
I’ll let you guess who the one is. I don’t know who it is. But in God we can have that same peace.
We can love even when it doesn’t make sense to love. We can reach out to others even when it doesn’t make sense because they don’t deserve it. We can bless others even when the world would curse them because it doesn’t make sense.
Because within us, with Jesus Christ, is the peace that passes all understanding because it guards our hearts and it guards our minds in Christ Jesus so we can have the peace of God. Amen. Let’s pray.
Almighty God, thank you. Thank you for Jesus. Thank you that even though we don’t deserve it, you give us that grace.
Help us turn our eyes to you when we’re feeling anxious. Help us center on Jesus Christ in everything. Help us think about what is good, what is commendable, what is righteous, what is holy, what is commendable, what is beautiful, what is lovely.
Help us think about Jesus. Give us great minds so that we can have the peace of God and have peace of mind in Jesus’ name.