(Psalms 2:1-5; 3:1-8)

(John 6:63-71)

One morning not long ago, I had to run an errand downtown. It was right at the rush hour — everyone was scurrying to work. Coming back into Main Street at a busy intersection I was held up for an unusually long time by the surging traffic. Men and women on their way to work drove past. I could see all their faces clearly. It was startling to notice how many had the same tense, set expression. The drive, drive, drive of an industrial community was etched in the tight drawn lines of each face. The passing traffic seemed to pulse with a tom tom’s rhythmic beat the city’s overtone — “Production, Production, Production.”

Then I thought of some of the people I know who have been broken or are breaking under the terrific tempo. We all feel it more or less. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, writing for Liberty magazine some weeks ago, said that “High tension is a prevailing American malady. A Scotch physician who analyzes us concludes, ‘You Americans wear too much expression on your faces. You are living with all your nerves in action.’” Someone else diagnoses our American tension by saying that the stomach ulcer has become the badge of our civilization.

But what’s to be done? Where can we get help to reduce the strain of modern life, to relax the tension, to slow down the destructive tempo? Has religion any word for us here?

My study of God’s word and His merciful dealing with His people proves conclusively to me that in our Christian religion there are to be found resources which can and will deliver us from strain and tension. The only question is whether or not we will take them and use them. Here, as elsewhere, it is he that seeketh who findeth help.

First of all, the Christian religion should give us a sense of direction in life and this is a sure antidote to high tension. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, out of an experience of many years in working with individuals who have cracked up under the high tempo of modern life, says: “A primary factor in tension is mental disorganization. The helter-skelter mind always feels over-burdened. Get the calm, selective ability to take up one thing at a time and concentrate upon it. Deal finally with it, if possible, before passing to the next matter. When you organize you mind, a sense of power will come to you and you will soon wonder at the ease with which you can handle responsibilities. Your capacity for work will increase; so will your pleasure in what you are doing. Strain and tension will subside.”

Our religion should give us, if it has any glimmer of reality in daily living, a sense of vocation. Whatever our work may be, we should do it for Christ’s sake. “Whether we eat or whether we drink, or whatsoever we do, we should do all to the glory of God.” As Elton Trueblood says, “The Christian doctor is not one who goes to the foreign field but one, anywhere, who places vocation above profession.” The same is true for other professions and jobs. Whatever our work, if it be honest, clean, and constructive, it can be a vocation — done all unto God. Our religion ought to provide us with a conviction of vocation. If it doesn’t something is wrong. We need either to change our religion or our job.

“This one thing I do,” said a famous saint, “forgetting those things which are behind and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press toward the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus. This one thing I do.” Religion can and should supply a sense of direction, a conviction of vocation in life which, if followed, delivers one from the helter-skelter mind and the philandering heart. Tension and strain vanish.

Take for example a physician who has many calls to make on his patients in the course of a day. There will be telephone interruptions from inconsiderate hypochondriacs, a steady stream of patients coming from his crowded waiting room, each with his own peculiar complaint. How can that physician meet the multitudinous demands made on him, do each bit of work well, and yet escape that feeling of pressure and tension?

Religious discipline offers a sure relief by giving direction to life and delivering from the helter-skelter mind. The physician who takes time for the daily discipline of prayer — “to get set in God,” as Dr. George Shaw Steward says, “will be swifter in diagnosis, surer and steadier in operation, more calm and decided in judgment, less wearied by the unreason of his patients and the drudgery of the day.” He will meet each perplexing problem, each upsetting interruption, each dangerous operation with but one purpose in mind: to follow Christ in sympathetic service. My, how that liberates one and directs the whole of life into one plain channel.

And then again our religion should help us escape modern man’s common malady of high tension by providing us with proper perspective for life. One expert on personality problems (Dr. Peale) finds that a great many people “suffer tension because they keep their minds fixed at the far level of their personal troubles and anxieties.” At one extreme there are the helter-skelter minds which suffer high tension because they lack direction. At the other extreme there are the folks who suffer tension because they keep their minds focused almost entirely upon themselves. These have direction, but it’s the wrong direction. They have an entirely erroneous idea of their personal importance. They think more highly, or more lowly, of themselves than they ought to think. But high or low, their thoughts are focused continually on self. They do not see themselves, their God, their fellow men in the proper perspective. Self crowds out all else.

What’s the result? A soul obsessed with thought of self-importance, self-righteousness, self-pity, is sure to suffer tension. It’s the fellow who’s straining too hard for effect, or for promotion, or for getting his share of the profits, who suffers the case of nerves.

Really it’s ridiculous how far we can get from a true perspective. The Psalmist says that the Lord is amused at the frantic raging of the heathen against His righteous rule in His moral universe: “He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh; the Lord shall have them in derision.” If the heathen’s raging amuses the Lord, how He must laugh at some of the fretting and stewing of His so-called saints who are all in a dither, not because, as they think, life is so grim for them, but actually because they have lost the proper perspective and are thinking of themselves and their troubles and worries out of all reasonable proportions.

How does our religion help us keep a proper perspective in life and so escape tension? Look at Jesus. In the 13^th chapter of John, which some scholars call “the watershed of the gospel,” we read these amazing words: “Jesus, knowing that the Father had given all things unto His hands — that His hour was at hand — that He was come from God and went to God — took a towel … and a basin … and began to wash the disciples’ feet.” At the very moment when our Lord was most conscious of His divine origin and His eternal destiny — when He knew that He came from God and went to God — what did He do? Did He call His disciples about Him and invite them to prostrate themselves in respectful homage before the very Son of God? Did He issue a proclamation of how all His earthly subjects should henceforth honor His name and revere His person? No! He took a towel and a basin of water and began to wash His disciples’ feet — to perform a humble, loving service. That’s what Jesus thought it like to be God. That is what the Son of God did when He had a crystal clear consciousness of His divine origin and eternal destiny.

What does that mean for us? Just this: our religion ought to give us a proper perspective for life — it should help us to see that we come forth from God and that we go to God, and that in the interval of these earthly years we are to give proof of this royal origin and eternal destiny, not by seeking honor and prestige, power or pity for self, which gets for us only strain and tension — but rather by performing humble loving service for others after the example of Christ which rewards us with His peace.

Finally, our religion should deliver us from the high tension and strain of modern life by supplying us with an abiding faith in God who is at once the creator, the eternal, almighty ruler of the universe, and also the loving Heavenly Father of each one of us as revealed by Jesus Christ.

The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews said: “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” A friend called to my attention the other day Dr. James Moffatt’s beautiful and more understandable translation of this famous verse: “Now faith means we are confident of what we hope for, convinced of what we do not see.” People who actually live by such a faith in God are delivered from the tensions and strains which destroy the faithless.

What an implicit faith in the goodness and power of Almighty God, who is also our loving Heavenly Father, can do to relax tension and relieve strain in life was wonderfully illustrated by Dr. W. E. Sangster, a London clergyman back during the days of the Nazi air Blitz. The people of London were then living under terrific tension. Every night the bombers roared over and dropped their deadly cargoes. Dr. Sangster wondered at the amazing stability of the faithful Christian people in his congregation, who, day after day and night after night, went through nerve-racking experiences without any show of nerves.

Then one day, as he walked with his little dog in a London park, he understood the reason. The playful pup would dash at the flocks of feeding pigeons on the park walks. The pigeons would calmly continue their feeding, watching the dog with wobbling eyes, until he was almost on them, then the pigeons would spread their wings and quickly spring to safety. Why were the pigeons calm and unruffled before danger and threat? Why, they had wings. Why is the genuine Christian calm without tension in the midst of a tense and on-edge world? Why, the Christian has the wings of faith. In the teeth of the gale, in the cross currents and storms of life, the Christians sings:

Jesus, Lover of my soul,

Let me to Thy bosom fly,

While the nearer waters roll,

While the Tempest still is High!

Hide me, O my Savior, hide,

Till the storm of life is past:

Safe into the haven guide;

O receive my soul at last!

“The Eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms.”

 

PASTORAL PRAYER

Led by our Lord Jesus Christ, O God, we would enter into this Upper Room of worship and fellowship. We would withdraw for a while from the busy world to think with Thee upon the problems, sorrows, temptations, and opportunities which are ever before us. Give us Thy light of divine wisdom and leading. Help us to know whose we are, and whence we’ve come, and where we are going, that we may act in character and not out of character: that we may adore and serve rather than deny and betray our Lord.

Dispel our chill shivers of loneliness by the assurance of Thy all-encompassing love and never-failing care. Help us to open our hearts to those who would be friendly towards us and those who longingly turn to us for friendship. Deepen our capacity for receiving Thy divine love and for loving our brethren with the love which Thou dost create within our hearts. May the loving fellowship of the Upper Room ever be the mark of Thy church: “By this may they know that we are His disciples, that we love one another.”

When our worship is done send us forth from this holy place to spend ourselves in loving service in that same spirit of our Lord who took water and a towel to wash the disciples’ feet. O, deliver us from the folly and fruitlessness of living divided lives — of attending to holy things on Sunday, and then during the week going through work and play untouched by the directing and sanctifying power of Thy loving spirit. In Jesus name, we pray …