Faith or Stress

“You are not a candidate for a Heart Attack, you are not over weight, as a farmer you spend your time in the open air, and get plenty of exercise: For you to have had a heart attack you must have had a lot of stress”. This was the Cardiologist at St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney talking to me. How ashamed he made me feel, a professing Christian, having a heart attack through stress, of all things: how faithless

and ridiculous.

 Said the robin to the sparrow, I should really like to know, why these anxious human beings rush about and worry so. Said the sparrow to the robin, friend, I think it must be, that they have no Heavenly Father, such as cares for you and me.

But we do have a Heavenly Father who cares about us, only, we have our priorities wrong: In Matthew 6: 24 to 34, Jesus said: “You cannot serve both God and Money…. That is why I tell you not to worry about every-day life…. Look at the birds…your heavenly Father feeds them. And aren’t you far more valuable to him than they are? Can all your worries add a single moment to your life.... Look at the lilies of the field

how they grow…. Solomon in all his glory was not dressed as beautifully as they are…. Your heavenly Father already knows all your needs. Seek the Kingdom of God above all else, and live righteously, and he will give you everything you need. (New Living Translation).

Does this mean then, that we don’t have to work but just trust God and all our needs will be supplied? No! it certainly doesn’t, if he did that for us it wouldn’t be long before we would be bored out of our minds. If he had meant that, he wouldn’t have designed the world with all the wonderful supply of commodities for us to use to build things and so on. Nor would he have given us the natural abilities like carpentry, mechanics, engineering etc. Certainly he gave us a world supplied with fruit and vegetables and foods of many types and in the Garden of Eden we had all these without the weeds and thistles. If people had not sinned it could have been Heaven on earth. However, in a sense we pawned our birthright of fellowship with God by yielding to the temptations of Satan, who is “the god of this world”, (2 Corinthians 4:4), and we are under his influence. If you visit a Pawn Broker and pawn some jewellery or the like, that item is his until you return with the money, plus interest, and “Redeem” it, at which time it is legally yours again. This is exactly what God did for us: he sent Jesus to pay the price of our “Redemption”: We were “Redeemed by the blood of the lamb” of God, or as Ephesians 1:7 and Colossians 1:14 put it: “in whom we have Redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace”. 1 Peter chapter five verses six and seven says: “Humble yourselves therefore, under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you in due time: casting all your care upon him; for He careth for you.” If God has offered to take all my care upon Him, why was I foolish enough to carry it myself?  To do that was very stupid of me, (of course you wouldn’t do that, would you?)

 The fact of the matter is that when we accept God’s forgiveness through that “Redemptive” act we are automatically reinstated as “children of God” and citizens of His Kingdom with “Passport and Visa” ready so that when we finish our time here we can return home to God where our names are in “the Book of Life” (Revelation 20:12). Meanwhile, like any citizen of another Kingdom, we can work here and enjoy ourselves and if we put God’s directions first in everything we plan, think, and do we can then expect that “He will give His Angels charge over us to keep us in all our way” (Psalm 91).  We can then go forward in quiet confidence that no matter what happens “All things work together for good for those that love God, the called

according to His purpose”. We need to take a lesson from the eagles: they hardly ever flap their wings, instead they make use of the thermal up-drafts of air provided by God’s design, whilst some other birds flap constantly and wear themselves out. So we must not ‘flap’ too much, instead we must do as Proverbs 3:5 says and “Trust in the Lord with all our heart and lean not to our own understanding; in all our ways acknowledge Him and He shall direct our paths”.(Proverbs 3:5). Best wishes with that, Tom.

The alternative: “He rushed through life, people said ‘he’s a wizzard’ but he died at 40 with a burned out gizzard”. (Now that’s not really a good way to live or die, is it?)