Sermon Tone Analysis

BY PASTOR GLENN PEASE

Gipsy Smith was one of the great evangelists in England in the last half of the 19th century.

He had the largest congregation in England outside of London.

They met in a building that once housed the Imperial Circus.

One Sunday night the pre-service prayer group was meeting in a side room used by Circus people as a dressing room.

Three hundred people were there singing and praying.

All of the sudden the floor collapsed sending them sprawling into the stables below.

75 people were injured with broken arms, legs, and a few skulls were fractured.

All were bruised, but not a life was lost.

The people gathering in the large auditorium heard the loud crash and were terrified, but there was no panic.

Doctors were sent for, and the injured were taken home in cabs.

Gipsy Smith got himself out of the debris, and rushed back up to the platform to explain the accident, and assure people that all possible help was being rendered to the injured.

He begged them to keep calm.

Some urged him to cancel the service, for though he had no injuries his nerves were in a state of shock.

He was not alone.

When he asked for the lights to be turned up, the nervous caretaker turned them out, and there was a scene of fear and confusion.

A Mr. Brown saved the situation by starting to sing the hymn, Jesus, Lover Of My Soul.

The people calmed down and joined him in the hymn.

The lights came on and the service went on, but Gipsy Smith was so weakened by the stress of that evening that he had to be carried home.

For months after this he had after effects of fear and trembling, and many years later he wrote, "Even now, occasionally, when I am face to face with a large crowd, something of that feeling of that night comes back to me."

He went on to win thousands of people to Christ in England and America, but he never completely escaped the impact of that traumatic event.

The point is, just as Christians do not escape the storms of nature, so they do not escape the storms of their human nature: The storms stirred up by stress, tension, and anxiety.

The Christian is in the world with a physical body and nervous system just like everyone else.

When it is 99 in the shade the Christian body sweats.

When it is 30 below the Christian body freezes.

When it steps into an open elevator shaft the Christian body falls, and when the Christian feels the friction and grinding gears of a fallen world that will not run smooth, the Christian body and mind records the stress, just like everyone else.

Nobody escapes the reality of stress, and that all inclusive statement does cover our Lord as well.

In Matthew 26:38 Jesus said to His disciples in Gethsemane, "My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death."

His disciples did not say to Him what some Christians have said to others under great stress, "Christians never need to be under the circumstances, but can always live above them."

Such positive thinkers would have a hard time facing the reality that even the Son of God felt the crushing power of stress.

He was already feeling a foretaste of being forsaken by God.

Dr. Luke writes of this same scene of super stress in Luke 22:44, "And being in anguish, He prayed more earnestly, and His sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground."

If we saw a Christian brother or sister sweating with anxiety, we would be appalled by their little faith, and would feel compelled to rebuke them, even if their sweat was just normal body moisture and not blood.

But here we have such stress that blood vessels are broken, and blood is mixing with the sweat.

We are talking about a breaking point here.

The human body has limitations as to how much stress it can bear without breaking down, and Jesus was on the edge of that limit.

It makes sense that He would be, for He was facing a trial which makes all other human trials minor in comparison.

He was facing the burden of the world's sin and hell: That is separation from the Father, and He was innocent.

The only man ever to never deserve hell was going to endure it for all those who do deserve it.

We can understand that the cross puts stress on Jesus that was beyond anything we can imagine, but it is a mistake to think Jesus did not feel the stress of normal life as well, for he did.

We read in John 11:33, "When Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews that had come along with her also weeping, He was deeply moved in spirit and troubled."

The stress of the sad emotions around Him was more than He could bear, and two verses later comes the shortest verse in the Bible: Jesus wept.

It is short, but it speaks volumes about the stress of life and what is consistent with Christ-likeness.

You have two choices: Either stress is not a sin, or Jesus was a sinner, for He had stress.

If you are a Bible believer, you have only one choice, for Jesus was without sin, and yet He had stress, and so stress cannot be sinful.

The Bible is often a puzzle to us because we try to force a Biblical precept into places where it does not fit.

For example, we see a Christian friend in sorrow and we feel an obligation to cheer them up with a, "Rejoice in the Lord always and again I say rejoice."

But we forget that the man who said those words, Paul, was also a man who felt deep sorrow, and wept with a troubled heart over the problems of believers.

We forget he also said, "Weep with those who weep," as well as, "rejoice with those who rejoice."

We have gotten it into our heads that the Christian is not to feel the negative side of life, and have the down emotions that come with the stress of life.

We quote our Lord in John 14:1, "Do not let your hearts be troubled.

Trust in God, trust also in me."

We take this out of its context of rejoicing in our hope of life forever with Christ in that place where He has gone to prepare for us, and try to apply it to the Christian who is distressed over a problem in this life, and by so doing, we are going against the grain of Scripture.

The Greek word for troubled is the same word used by Jesus back in 12:27 to describe His own emotions.

"Now my heart is troubled, and what shall I say, Father save me from this hour?

No, it was for this very reason I came to this hour.

Father glorify your name."

John uses the same word to describe Jesus in John 13:21.

"Jesus was troubled in spirit and testified, I tell you the truth one of you is going to betray me."

We take the words of Jesus, to not be troubled, which apply to worrying where we will spend eternity, and make it say, don't be troubled about anything, and that is folly, for Jesus was troubled about plenty.

What all this means is that to be troubled and disturbed because you are full of anxiety about your heavenly destination is to be in a state of disbelief in the promises of Christ, and therefore, under the impact of sinful stress.

On the other hand, if you are working with a boss who is godless, and who is just looking for an excuse to fire you if you try to have a Christian perspective about life-style, and you have a troubled spirit-this is not sinful anxiety and satanic stress, it is the normal reaction to life's frustrating pressure.

It is not good to have such stress, just as it did nothing good for Jesus to have it, but it was not sinful, and is not sinful for us.

The point I am establishing is, life is full of stress that is not sinful, and there is no need for a Christian to feel guilty for having it.

Jesus did the will of God on earth as it is in heaven, but while on earth He suffered the same stresses and anxieties that trouble us.

This is important to see so that we do not get involved in the foolish effort of trying to persuade ourselves and others that we should never feel the stresses of life.

When we do this, we only add more stress to our lives, for we are trying to do something that even our Lord could not do.

To pretend we can escape the stress of life is to put ourselves above our Lord.

It is sinful to think God expects us to be more than Christ-like.

God's goal is that we be Christ-like, and in a fallen world that means being subject to stress that must be manifested in a appropriate manner.

It is nothing but sinful pride that makes a Christian try to pretend they do not feel the normal stresses of life like Jesus did.

He got exhausted to the point of collapse.

He was heart-broken with sinners who rejected Him, and walked away into darkness.

He was deeply disturbed by those who betrayed Him.

He wept over the sadness that sickness and death inflicted on people.

A Christian who does not feel these things is like a Pharisee who stands in the temple and says, "I thank God that I am not as other men."

It is sinful not to feel the stress of compassion for the fallenness of man.

When Jesus said, "Let not your heart be troubled," He was not saying that we should cease to be caring persons, and to get our heads so far above the clouds that we can't feel the stress of this world.

Jesus came into the world to feel these very things, and to taste to the depth the reality of human stress.

There is nothing Christ-like at all about escape from life's stress.

Jesus sought it, and so did Paul.

Paul gave his life to reach the Gentiles with the Gospel, and in so doing, he went through every negative emotion and stress we can imagine.

Those who preach that the Christian life can be stress free are preaching a message not found in the New Testament.

And that brings us to our text finally.

I know this has been a long introduction.

It is like building a five room entry way to a four room house, but all of this is important as the foundation for a valid study of stress.

In this home in Bethany we find three of the favorite people in the life of Jesus.

They were all single like himself.

The setting shatters the idea that only brothers fight and live in conflict.

Cain killed Abel, and Joseph brothers sold him into slavery, and the elder brother would not even go in to say hello to his long lost younger prodigal brother.

These and other brothers in conflict blind us to the fact that sisters have conflict as well, and they add stress to each others life also.

It makes clear that being single is not a stress free way of living.

No family in the New Testament had to endure more tension than did this lovely trio of singles.

Lazarus was sick unto death, and the two sisters were frantic, for they knew Jesus loved him, and they knew He could heal him.

But they could not reach Jesus and persuade Him to come.

You talk about frustration and anxiety and super stress.

There is more weeping recorded in that home than any other in the New Testament.

But before this major crisis, we see the minor crisis of our text where it is revealed that they had to deal with the same old stresses of life everyone else has to deal with.

The stress of work, cooking, cleaning, and entertaining of guests.

The tension of different values and goals within the family.