Stress and Spirituality

Spiritual and biological stress.

Is there really such a thing as stress management? I used to teach classes in my former job on how to manage stress. What I actually taught was how to manage your activities in relation to your time and how to control things you could, and how to deal with things you cannot. The term stress was first coined by an American psychologist to describe external factors that affected homeostasis (internal conditions remaining stable). The actual word was used to describe the forces put upon structures to determine their breaking point. Physics define stress as an internal resistance of an object to an external force that tends to deform it. However we define it, we have still experienced it.

Did you know that Christians are subject to spiritual stress? It can stem from spiritual warfare or it can stem from pride. Pride causes us to set our goals higher than we can reach. When we set our own standards for trying to please God we fail. The more we fail the harder we work to do better. The harder we work, the more we fail and the more discouraged we become. External forces from the enemy attribute to it but internal forces from “self” also contribute.

“Those who are in the flesh cannot please God” the Apostle Paul wrote in his letter to those in Rome, Jews and Gentiles, that believed in Jesus. The Holy Spirit used Paul to instruct them, and us, that physical attempts at salvation and pleasing God would not work. Dr. Billy Graham said, “No matter how good we are, we will never be good enough.” When we try to please God on our own we bring about spiritual stress. We are trying to “deform” our fallen human nature by putting “spiritual pressure” on it. There is a cure for spiritual stress; confessing our inability to please God on our own and then fully trusting in Jesus to be our “righteousness.” In his second letter to the church in Corinth Paul penned these words, “For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.”

Now when you add spiritual stress to your physical stress; you are a mess! So fix the spiritual stress first, and then you will have Divine help in resolving your physical stress.