…for He will save His people from their sins [that is, prevent them from failing and missing the true end and scope of life, which is God]. – Matthew 1:21, Amplified Bible (AMP)

Remember, it’s not about you.

We experience emotional stress when something or someone makes us uncomfortable. An urgent or unwelcome circumstance may be the culprit, or perhaps some person is the villain. Whatever the cause, the result is that our convenient, perfect world has been destabilized, and that makes us very unhappy.

The real source of the stress, however, isn’t the unwelcome circumstance or the villainous person. It is our self-focus. We are so worried about protecting our convenient, perfect worlds, our reputations, and our possessions that we become VERY agitated when anything or anyone threatens them. We act as if our self-actualization is the true end and scope (object) of our lives, and we stress out when anything upsets our plans to mold our lives and our reputations into the images we have concocted for them.

Since self-focus is the cause of stress, God-focus is the cure for it. The more we grasp that the true end and scope of life is not self-fulfillment but the fulfilling of God’s purposes in and through us, the less we’ll care about our circumstances, our reputations, and our possessions. The less we care about these things, the less stress we’ll feel when circumstances threaten them because we won’t be worried about protecting what is ours; we’ll be worried about glorifying God, no matter what.

We’ll never be completely rid of stress in this life because we’ll never be completely rid of our selfish desires until we get to Heaven. But we can certainly eliminate a lot of our stress by facing each uncomfortable circumstance with this question in mind: “How can I glorify God through this?” By asking this question repeatedly during our painful times, we’ll remember that God is the true end and scope of life, and we’ll quit worrying so much about losing our comfort, our reputation, and our stuff.

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