Hunt the Good Stuff
- Ashland Church of Christ
- Dec 29, 2024
- 16 min read
Guest Pastor Collin Brennan
December 29, 2024
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Transcribed by Turbo Scribe
I got up this morning on the way here, and I got the nod to jump up here and give the award. You met? Yeah. This is not my thing.
I'm not a public speaker. Bear with me. But I will get through it in the last one.
So today I'm going to talk about a bunch of good stuff. For the veterans in here, they've probably heard that a time or two. So these are the words I hear, and I mainly know when you grab a cup of coffee.
It's going to be a long day. It's going to be boring to read about it. There's something the military began using about ten years ago as part of their resiliency training.
The purpose is to counter negativity, bias, create positive emotions, and to notice and analyze the good in every situation. Find the good. There's always something there.
This sounds simple enough. There's nothing about sitting down and listening to an instructor drum on for hours about finding the good and making a bunch of lists. As I read through the Bible, I realized how important finding the good stuff is, and I constantly preach it to my younger soldiers.
So that's my intro, and that's what I want to discuss today. Merimando. It's Greek, and it means to be anxious.
That's what I want to talk about today. Anxiety, stress, just life in general. We'll do that by taking a look at Paul's letter to the Philippians.
A little background. Before we end on this, I want to provide some historical context. It's important that we not only read the word, but we know what's going on at that time, so we get the full meaning of God's word.
The year is 62 AD, and Paul wrote a letter to the church of Philippi. He's currently in prison at Rome. He was initially imprisoned in Jerusalem, but he's now been admitted.
There's four epistles that are in the presence. Three of them are things are going wrong in that city. However, this one here, things are going well, and he's writing out of gratitude.
Backing up a little bit, Philippi was established nearly 400 years prior to this letter. Originally, the city was called Cernaeus or Macedonia until King Philip II took over the city. He realized the geographical importance, along with the massive amount of gold, fortified the city and began to expand.
The city sat along the Via Egnatia, a Roman road connecting the Adriatic Sea and the Aegean Sea, and visited Byzantium. This road granted the city great economic possibilities, while also serving as a strategic military location. While under Macedonian rule, the Battle of Philippi broke out before you can even speak.
This was a civil war with some of the key leaders being Octavian, Mark Antony, and Louris, all people here in history class. The same people that were involved in Julius Caesar's assassination. While the battle was short, ultimately the results of the Philippi fall under Roman rule.
This victory leads many Roman soldiers to settle the city, beginning a cultural shift, and under Roman rule, the city begins to flourish. Large deposits of gold in the geographical location aid in boosting the economy. The city is now filled with war veterans, fortifying its battle ranks, creating a Roman military outpost.
Fast forward about 50 A.D. when reading Acts 16.9, and a vision appeared to Paul in the night. A man of Macedonia was standing there, urging him and saying, come over to Macedonia to help us. Along with Silas and Timothy, and later Luke, they set out for Macedonia.
At the time, Philippi was a leading city, and they stopped there, and thus we have the first Christian church in Europe. If you want to know more about that and how we got started, read Acts 16. Alright, so now we're up to speed, and we're going to take a look at the purpose of this letter.
While in prison, Paul received a generous gift from the Church of Philippi, brought to him by Epaphroditus. He's ready to give thanks and update everyone on his current situation. Unlike the other prisoners of this little mission, as a mission, this is a letter of encouragement.
So I'll read Philippians 4, 2-9, and read it on the screen. I entreat you, Judea, and I entreat Syntyche, to agree in the Lord. Yes, I ask you also, true companion, help these women who have labored side by side with me in the gospel together with Clement, and the rest of my fellow workers, whose names are in the book of life.
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 your 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, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. What have you learned and received and heard and seen in me? Practice these things, and the God of peace will be with you.
So trying to sum up what Paul felt as he felt the need to write this letter, it was more than just saying thanks. It was to reassure the church that God's plan was in the works. Imagine the scene.
The man who is responsible for starting a church is in prison. You're the first Christian church in Europe, and likely the only Christian church in the entire area. You live on a military post, where at any time things can go wrong.
There's a Roman city, so false teachings are everywhere. And as a Christian, you're constantly facing opposition and prosecution. It's safe to say these folks are experiencing a lot of stress, as I am right now.
While the stress is a little different, I'm sure it will sound similar today. Anxiety disorders are the most common mental illness in the United States. It's hitting one in five levels.
I would argue that never is even higher. Women are twice as likely to experience the disorder than men. I'm not going to argue that one.
I think the most staggering number, but not surprising, is that 60% of people with anxiety will not seek help. I mean, 6 in 10 folks are out there just wiping out their anxiety, because we've been made to believe that seeking help is a sign of weakness. So that's anxiety.
How about stress? Well, I've got some good news and some bad news. Stats show that 10 out of 10 people suffer from stress. That's the bad news.
The good news is 100% of us are in this together. So we know what we're all going through. When I was down in Alabama, I got dropped off in the woods for a land navigation test.
There's a whole lot of backstory to this, but I'm going to get through this one. After failing four consecutive times to find my first point and burning one hour or four hours on the other, one could say I was experiencing a little bit of stress. To add to the stress, I'd be a failure to kick out.
But more on this later. So I'm going to read Matthew 4, 3-10. And the tempter came and said to him, If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.
For the answer is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. But the devil took him to the holy city and set him on the pentacle of the temple and said to him, If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down. For it is written, He will command His angels concerning you, and on their hands they will bear you up, lest you strike your foot against a stone.
And Jesus said to him again, It is written, You shall not put the Lord your God to the test. Again the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory. And he said to him, All these things I will give to you, if you fall down and worship me.
Then Jesus said to him, Beyond Satan, for it is written, You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only shall you serve. For those that are familiar with scripted letters, I'm going to talk a little bit about that. For those that aren't, I recommend reading them.
To sum it up, the devil is constantly working in our lives, trying to distract and prevent God's inner light. As an illustrator, you can see this in one of his books, Screwtape Letters. It's written during the Second World War, obviously a great time of stress for all.
One could argue that we're heading in the same direction right now. It's a series of letters from Screwtape, a high-level bureaucrat in hell. Right now, he's writing to his nephew, Wormwood, mentoring him on ways to undermine God's Word and draw Christians away from relationships with Christ.
Here's a few excerpts. This is one of the letters from Screwtape to Wormwood. We want him to be in a maximum uncertainty so that his mind will be filled with contradictory pictures of the future, for everyone of which arouses hope or fear.
This is nothing like suspense and anxiety or barricading a human's mind against the enemy. He wants men to be concerned with what they do. Our business is to keep them thinking about what will happen to them.
Still not here. It is your business to see that the patient never thinks of the present fear as his appointed cross, but only as a thing that he is afraid of. Finally, an important spiritual level here is involved.
I've explained that you can weaken his prayers by diverting his attention from the enemy himself, to his own states of mind about the enemy. On the other hand, fear can become easier to master when the patient's mind is diverted from the thing-feared fear itself, considered as a present and undesirable state of his own mind. And when he regards the fear as his appointed cross, he will inevitably think of it as a state of mind.
With a world like this today, with forces constantly against us, it can start to seem dark and grim, and that's understandable. Jesus gives this very assurance in Matthew 6. Therefore, I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds in the air.
They do not sow nor reap or store or weigh in barns, and yet your Heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any of you, by worrying, add a single hour to your life? And why do you worry about your clothes? See how the flowers in the field grow? Do you not labor or spend? Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass in the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into a fire, will He not much more clothe you? You of little faith.
So do not worry, saying, What shall we eat? What shall we drink? What shall we wear? For the pagans are not for these things, and your Heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore, do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.
Each day has enough trouble of its own. So here we see Jesus talk about day-to-day life and all the stresses we face. We create unnecessary anxiety.
It is not an easy feat, but we can minimize these things because we as Christians have the tools to combat stress and anxiety. Here is what we must do next time. In Timothy we read, God gave us a spirit out of fear of power and love and self-control.
And in Hebrews we read, The Lord is my helper, I will not fear. What can man do to me? Man can do nothing for our life. Man can do nothing to us for our life is not of this world.
Remember this, pray and rejoice in all situations. You see, anxiety is a secondary emotion. I went to a class and we had this emotion wheel, and there's only six primary emotions, and they all trigger off the smaller ones.
So if you look at it, fear stems from anxiety, which is often caused by a sense of feeling overwhelmed or worried. I think we can all agree there's plenty of things to worry about these days. But here's something interesting I want to share before I start to wrap this up.
It's the way God wired our brains. The neuroscience department at MIT have identified the neurons and the amygdala that control emotions and show us that we can express multiple emotions at one time. However, this is what I find fascinating, is that studies show we cannot process positive and negative emotions at one time.
In this article, the doctor says, this is exciting because it suggests that these populations engage in a push-pull interaction with each other, which makes sense, and seeing rewards and avoiding threats are often behaviors that present opposing forces. They found that the fear neurons protect, project to a part of the brain called the nucleus appendix. While reward neurons project to both the nucleus and another part of the amygdala, known as the central amygdala.
So that's a whole lot of science right there. I sound like I'm playing my field, but what this does is it makes configured stuff all that more important. You can literally kick out the negative emotions by focusing on the positive.
So there you have it. A place of fear with prayer. I can tell you a story every story, time goes stressed out, and just pray.
But I'm going to go back to that lieutenant lost in the woods, whose stomach hurting, just having a bad time. So, I'm lost in the woods. The woods, it's 30 degrees out.
We're not in Alabama, so it's thick. There's bushes with these huge thorns on it. It's not a good time.
And I shoot my ass with it. I run out. I can't find it in the background.
I can't find the appendix. I shoot another one. I go this direction.
I do it twice. I wasted an hour. I don't know what to do.
And then I realize, oh, I just need to say a quick prayer. So I do that, and I begin to pray. I say, Father, I need some help right here.
I thank you for this opportunity. I know you have a reason for me to come here, but I need some help, and I'm going to need it right now. So I'm running out of time.
I've never had a prayer in this space. I realize that there's a cemetery on my map, and there's a cemetery right now, but I wouldn't like to see it. I'm not supposed to be there.
The people that had taken me up to my point dropped us all off at the wrong spot. So we're a couple hundred meters off, but now I only have three hours to find these, and this building is a real fun. So I ended up finishing about six out of seven points.
I skipped that seventh one because I'm running out of time, but I only need four to pass. So my lesson learned very quickly there, like I said earlier, replace fear with prayer, because it works. So I'm going to talk about Paul today, so let's return to him and try to make sense of all of this.
Paul sits in a prison because he's baptized someone. Not murder, not theft, not tax evasion. He literally baptized a woman.
However, his spirits remain high. Now you might ask yourself, how can he sit there in his second prison for simply sharing the gospel and remaining in high spirits? Well, he gives us the answers in Philippians 1-6. And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.
Paul's confidence comes from the reminder that God has a plan for us all. This is told to us long before Paul's imprisonment at Jeremiah 29-11. For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope, that you will call upon me and come and pray to me, and I will hear you.
By comfort known, God has a plan just as Paul did. Paul's in a situation where one can be overwhelmed, full of anxiety, high and full of fear, and yet he's thankful, full of peace, and full of thanks. This is the beautiful part about God's plan.
Just like Paul, he's capable of finding peace in stressful situations by simply praying to God and giving thanks in all situations. Something we need to remember here, though, we're not in control. God fulfills His will, and His promise, and His time, for His purpose.
So when we look, so when we look at this, we must remember three things. It's God's will, not ours. It's God's timeline, not ours.
Finally, it's for His purpose, and not our purpose. You may not always get the answer you're looking for, but you will get an answer. I heard this once, and I think it fits nicely here.
Sometimes God puts us in bad situations just so we won't be able to help someone else get through it. I don't believe we were put in a bad situation, but certainly we'll often experience in life where we begin to question the purpose. This is evident in Paul's life.
He writes in Philippians 1.29, where it's been granted to you that for the sake of Christ you shall not only believe in Him, but also suffer for His sake. So I say to you, do not worry about worldly things, as many do, because their end is destruction, their God is their belly, and their glory in their shame. But our citizenship is in heaven, and from it we await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ, who will transform our lowly body to be like His glorious body.
So as you hand-beat your way through this life, remember this, the world is not a fashion line. We belong somewhere else. And when life gets difficult, and we start to feel the pressures of this world, remember this, rejoice in the Lord always, again I say rejoice.
Prayer for me is very difficult. I don't do it often as I should, and I don't always have the right words to say. In my head I can do it because I'm not speaking English while I'm here in America.
But here's a nice little acronym I saw once, and I think it helps pretty good. And the acronym is pray. So, P is praise.
Thank God for all that He's done. And for this I'll read Psalms to you. Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth.
Serve the Lord with gladness. Come into His presence with singing. Know that the Lord, He is God.
It is He who made us, and we are His. We are His people and a sheep of His pasture. Enter His gates for thanksgiving, and His courts will be praised.
Give thanks to Him, bless His name, for the Lord is good. His steadfast love endures forever, and His faithfulness to all generations. And always repent.
Then I turn my face to the Lord God, seeking Him by prayer, and please for mercy with fasting and sackcloth and ashes. I pray to the Lord, my God, and make confession, saying, O Lord, the great and awesome God, who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love Him and keep His commandments. We have sinned and done wrong and acted wickedly and rebelled, turning aside from Your commandments and rules.
We have not listened to Your servants, the prophets, who spoke in Your name to our kings, our princes, and our fathers, and to all the people of the land. To You, O Lord, belongs righteousness, but to us opens shame, as at this day to the men of Judah, to the inhabitants of Jerusalem, and to all Israel, those who are near and those who are far away, and all the lands to which You have driven them, because of the treachery that they have committed against You. To us, O Lord, belongs open shame to our kings, to our princes, and to our fathers, because we have sinned against You.
To the Lord, our God, belong mercy and forgiveness, for we have rebelled against Him. 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 or thanksgiving, let your request be made known to God.
And finally, yield. Surrender your will to God. Be still before the Lord and wait patiently for Him.
Threaten not yourself over the one who prospers in His way, over the man who carries out evil devices. Refrain from anger and forsake wrath. Threaten not yourself that tends only to evil.
For the evil doers shall be cut off, but those who wait for the Lord shall inherit the land. All right, I want to end this with a song. But I'm going to give you a little backstory because another way to rejoice is through a song and not just a prayer.
You've all heard this song but you may not know the story behind it. It's a wonderful example of rejoicing always. Horatio Spafford lost his son at four years old.
One year later, the Chicago Fire wiped out the city, including many of Spafford's properties. Instead of sulking, he began assisting with those in need. Two years later, he planned a family trip to England to hear a fellow Christian preach.
He sent his family ahead in order to finish up some business. On the way, a ship was struck and sank, killing 226 people, including his four daughters. His wife sent a telegram to say good luck.
He jumped on the nearest ship and took off for England. On the way, the captain pulled him aside and told him this is where his daughter would drown. Spafford immediately returned to his cabin and wrote, This is well with my soul.
When peace like a river Attended my way When sorrow like sea Filled the road You have taught me to say It is well, It is well With my soul The sky, not the grave Is our goal Of the angels Blessing hope Of my soul It is well It is well With my soul Though Satan Should burn Though trials should come Let his blessed assurance Control That Christ has Regardless of state And has shed His own blood For my soul My sin Oh the bliss Of this glorious fight My sin Not in part But the whole Is there to the cross And I there Would haste the day When the faith Shall be sight The cloud The trump shall resound And the Lord shall descend Even so it is well With my soul All right, everybody stand. Remember what Rick said earlier. God did not send His Son to condemn us, but to save us.
All we have to do is talk to Him. Do the prayer, spend five minutes a day. That seems a lot, and it will be hard at first, but the more you do it, it will make it a part of your life easier to get.
God, we thank You for this day. This was not a Christmas message, it is not an end-of-the-year message, but it is something we can take with us next year. New Year's Resolution.
Start praying every day. Watch over the cooks, and get him healed up, so you can get back up here. Watch over Joe, and heal his ankle up, so you can get back to church as well.
Let us end in the last few days of this year, honoring you, and start off new next year. Amen.
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