The Bible reminds us that trials and temptations are a part of every believer’s life on planet earth. Todays’ episode lays a foundation for resiliency in the face of life’s challenges.

<p>The Bible reminds us that trials and temptations are a part of every believer’s life on planet earth. Todays’ episode lays a foundation for resiliency in the face of life’s challenges.</p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

Fort Wayne Seventh-day Adventist Church

Timeless Keys to Resilience

David DeRose

Building Resilience, Part 1

It is so great to have you joining us for today's episode because we're laying the foundation for a whole new series that we'll be beginning today.

We call it Bible Keys to Resilience or Timeless Keys to Resilience because after all, the Bible principles really are timeless.

As a physician, public health professional, and a Christian pastor, I'm going to help connect those dots in today's episode.

Zachary Wilson was the picture of success, at least on paper.

He was a lawyer, successful, hard driving.

But at the age of 55, he started having problems, weakness, lack of coordination.

And when he went to get diagnosed, finally the diagnosis came back.

He had amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, often simply referred to as ALS.

True story, some of the details are changed to protect confidentiality.

But Zachary Wilson seemingly having everything now with this diagnosis.

If you're not familiar with it, it's also called Lou Gehrig's disease.

It is a progressive nervous system disease.

It basically destroys nerve cells, including what we call the motor neurons, and particularly those motor neurons.

Over time, it impairs not only your ability to get around, but also your ability to speak, your ability to eat, and ultimately yes even your ability to breathe.

The only way you can survive is to be continuously on a ventilator.

The disease ultimately is a fatal disease.

How would you deal with ALS if you received that diagnosis?

Before even many of his friends and colleagues knew of the diagnosis, they heard 1 day that Zachary had taken his life.

If you're an IT professional and have roots in inter-america you may know of Otto.

Otto was a boy, an amazing person even at a relatively young age.

He was an IT professional and business leader in Guatemala.

Otto some 20 years ago was credited with being the 1 who revolutionized banking in the country of Guatemala.

He brought those now ubiquitous ATM machines.

You say, well we don't even need those anymore, we can just do it all online.

But that's what he did back years ago, modernizing the banking industry in Guatemala.

But you may have guessed it, at the age of 40, Otto Kenoke was diagnosed with what?

What is amazing is Otto dealt with it very differently.

He didn't take his life and recently I read this article about Otto.

It was titled, kind of a long title, Data Guru living with ALS modernizes industries by typing with his eyes.

Listen to some of what that article said.

He's looking into how he can advance technology and he's taking advantage of it himself as his ALS is progressing.

It mentions here some new eye tracking software that he was using at the time, being the first 1 in his country to adopt it.

His mind continues to overcome the restrictions of his body and what's happening to his business.

This is his wife who's quoted in the article.

The question is, what made the difference?

Well, a lot of people would say it boils down to resilience.

If you're looking in a dictionary, you'd find a definition like this.

Resilience is the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape.

Withstand or recover quickly from difficult conditions.

Well it literally comes from a root that means to leap back and it's this whole idea of being able to bounce back quickly even if something comes up that's very difficult.

If you were to read mental health or psychological literature, medical literature, you'd find definitions like this, psychological resilience is the role of mental processes and behavior in promoting personal assets and protecting an individual from the potential negative effects of stressors.

Or you might read this and you say I don't know if this is all that much simpler but in simpler terms psychological resilience exists in people who develop psychological and behavioral capabilities that do what?

It allows them to remain calm during crises and even chaos and to move on from the incident without long-term negative consequences.

How many of you would like to always be resilient?

The reality is bad things happen in life, right?

Jesus said, in the world you will have tribulation, but be of good cheer.

All that live godly in Christ Jesus shall suffer persecution.

You might get a difficult medical diagnosis.

Maybe you're dealing with the loss of a job, or maybe a job that you wish you had lost, but you're still in it and you don't have an alternative.

Maybe it's the loss of a child, maybe not from a death, but maybe you're disconnected.

I can't tell you how many times As a physician and as a pastor, I've heard people tell me things like, you know, I'm talking with them about their family.

Marriages, relationships fail, financial adversity, the list just goes on and on, right?

And when bad things happen, there's some short-term responses, some common ways that some of us respond 1 of them is denial this is a very common 1 if you've ever studied about grief something terrible happens okay And some people just live in denial.

You have a relative who dies in a military conflict, okay?

Colleagues saw the person go down, DNA evidence, maybe even a corpse, maybe a burial, everything, and you say, no, it's not them.

You know something cataclysmic is happening around you.

Some people are angry, other people are in denial, And some people are just frozen.

You know, you've heard, you hear this in great catastrophes, you know, why, you know, what are people doing?

Some of them are just, you know, they're just frozen.

Something bad happens, and they're thinking positively about solutions.

So if you were to choose, you might say well it's not hard to know which 1 you should choose, but we don't always get to choose in the moment of adversity.

The Resiliency Mindset, Part 1

But things can change overnight in a person's life.

She was a patient of mine, And she was telling me her story, how she lost everything overnight in 1 of those devastating California wildfires.

That's right, she went from a home and Basically comfortable surroundings to living in a small corner if you will in a school gymnasium Rachel there everything changed her privacy is gone her home is gone displaced by fire And as Rachel told me her story, she was a spiritual woman and she was relating just what she had been through.

She was saying how she was numb from the whole ordeal.

And you may remember, as we began this series on resiliency, that is 1 of the ways that sometimes people respond to those acute stressors that come into our lives.

Sure, Some get angry, some are in denial, but others, they say they're numb.

And she told me that she was actually struggling with hopelessness.

Maybe you haven't been through a wildfire, but you're relating to what Rachel is describing.

Something cataclysmic happened in your life.

And as Rachel is telling me this story, it doesn't end on a note of hopelessness, because she says, as she's talking with me, that she was suddenly overcome by faith.

Her words went something like this, God gave me the gift of faith.

I didn't just have the assurance that everything would be okay in the future, I knew that everything was okay now.

She's still in the same gymnasium, house is still burned, but she goes from someone who was hopeless to someone who is hopeful.

I would like to suggest to you that Rachel's story indicates another spiritual key.

It illustrates a key to resiliency and that is the power of mindset.

Now perhaps you've heard that term before, mindset, and if you were to look it up in a dictionary you'd read something like a way of thinking, a mental attitude or disposition that predetermines a person's responses to and interpretations of situations.

You have this framework for assessing things.

If you studied mindset perhaps in a psychology class, maybe in a health behavior class, maybe you have a master's in public health or similar training, you may have heard of things like locus of control.

Carol Dweck and her emphasis on fixed versus growth mindsets.

But in the context of what we're looking at with resiliency and Bible keys, I want to focus on 2 items in particular.

1 is this context of trauma that we've already seen in Rachel's life, and people can either perceive themselves as victims or as survivors.

That's language that's used in the secular research literature.

In the biblical worldview, we may not hear words like victim and survivor, we may, but we may hear things like cursed versus blessed.

She goes from someone who could have perceived herself and did perceive herself as a victim to 1 who sees herself as a survivor.

From a biblical standpoint, she could well have said, How come I am cursed with this terrible disaster?

But as her mindset changes, her perspective, her framework for evaluating things changes, She speaks about how she was blessed.

So this difference in perspective and what was it that changed Rachel's perspective?

That's what we want to look at in special detail in this presentation because we are looking at keys to resiliency.

And we have found that medical research is showing us that there are specific things that can make it more likely that if you go through a difficult experience, if you face some of life's most challenging stressors, you can bounce back, you can be resilient.

There are some things that increase the likelihood of that.

We saw that 1 of them is accepting your situation as opposed to denying it.

We found another 1 was, that's right, stronger social support networks.

The stronger the connections that you have with other people, the more supportive those connections are, the more likely it is that you will weather the storms of those stressors that come into your life.

And then we saw that optimism, we could say hopefulness, expectations of future growth, future thriving, this helps you as you're going through the stressors.

But 1 that has often been neglected, at least in secular research, is the dimension of spirituality.

And that's where we're paying special attention in this series, especially to Bible keys to resilience.

Now, it's very important as we're talking about this perspective, a Bible-based spirituality, that we recognize that what we're looking at in this presentation is something that is vital.

It is foundational to an understanding and acceptance of scriptures, and it is exercising faith in God.

And we really want to see that not only in Rachel's life, after going through that devastating California wildfire, but in the lives of every 1 of us, we can harness this resource that God has entrusted to us.

So we're gonna focus today on exercising faith in God.

And just to kind of walk you through this mnemonic 1 more time, we presented it last time we were together and I know some folks said to me, wow, that slide just went up so quickly.

I didn't get all those 10 Bible keys to resilience.

We're gonna be going through these as we go through the series, but let me just kind of walk you through them.

We'll build on this framework as we go through this entire series.

The R stands for repentance and forgiveness.

The E that we're focusing on today has to do with exercising faith in God.

Then we have another I, that is inspiration or insight.

E is for encouragement, positive expectancy.

N is for not compromising, not forgetting the good.

C is for contentment and Y is for yearning.

So with that framework, let's go to our focus in this presentation, Exercising Faith in God.

Now, faith, like I mentioned, is foundational to all of the things we've been talking about.

You can't pull faith out of any of these Bible keys because in order for the Bible keys to work for you, you have to accept them and appropriate them by faith.

But with that background, I want to look with you at 5 Bible keys to faith.

And here's an overview of where we're going in our time together.

Number 2, every person is given some measure of faith.

Number 3, faith grows by hearing the Word of God.

And number 5, God is the great personal trainer when it comes to faith.

These are all biblical principles about faith.

The first 1 is a familiar 1 to many people, and that is that faith is a gift.

Paul, as he was writing his letter to the church of Ephesus, He wrote it in these words, for it is by grace you have been saved through faith, and this, not of yourselves, it is the gift of God.

Now, as we're talking about faith, I want to shed some light on this, not only from my perspective, but on the perspective of others that have tried to make this more tangible for us.

1 of the people that we're going to be relying on to help us on our journey to understand faith better is someone by the name of John Stott.

Now any of you who know anything about Dr.

Stott realize that he passed away about a decade ago.

Stott, a noted British evangelical scholar, writer, leader.

At 1 point he was named 1 of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine.

And I've had the privilege over the years of reading many things written by John Stott.

Now I'll be perfectly frank with you, there are some things I've read by John Stott that I didn't agree with.

And so when I share from different authors as we're going through this series, it's because often I feel that some individuals, and often I believe that God was guiding them to give us insights that can really help us to engage with his word.

And I believe as we'll look at some of the statements from John Stott that you'll find that God used him, I believe, to make some of these things clear and to help us.

But I don't share his name or share his writings to say that somehow I think everything he wrote was inspired.

So as we talk about this on this journey, I'm going to be drawing from a lot of experts.

The Resiliency Mindset, Part 2

It's great to have you joining us, whether you're viewing for the first time or whether you've been watching this entire series.

We're trying to put in your hands timeless Bible keys to resilience, things that can help you thrive in the midst of difficulties.

After all, the Bible is a practical book.

It's not just an old dusty book on a bookshelf.

Sure, in some homes it may be, but God is wanting to make these principles practical for you.

We continue our series with this important message, drawing Bible keys for you.

We are on a journey to increasing our resiliency, increasing our ability to bounce back using Bible strategies, Bible keys to resiliency.

We say they're timeless because the Bible, although it was written, what, centuries ago, is still relevant for us today.

Timeless keys to resiliency, Timeless Bible keys, that's what we're looking at.

And as we're going through this series, I promised you that we would look at the lives of different people throughout the scriptures because the Bible is given to us in a relational context.

God doesn't want us just to idolize the Bible, he wants us to use the Bible to come into relationship with him.

So let's look as we begin today at the story of Abraham.

We're talking about faith and how important faith is as 1 of the keys, 1 of the Bible keys to resiliency.

Abraham is a man whose faith grew in the context of test and trial.

Here's how Abraham is described by the Apostle Paul as he's writing to the Church of Galatia, he says those who rely on faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith.

How would you like that to be said of you?

So basically what we're seeing, the Bible is saying if you want to see what faith looks like in a human life, 1 of the places you can look is at the man of faith, Abraham.

We want to look at 4 aspects of Abraham's life that have to do with faith.

Things that can teach us how to have more faith and give us that a greater measure of this important key to resiliency that I would suggest to you really all of the Bible keys are based on.

And yes, Abraham had faith in God's commands.

This is not an exclusive documentation of all the aspects of Abraham's faith, but these 4 elements if you focus on them I believe that God can bless you with a deeper faith walk.

If we're to open up the story of Abraham, the place where the Bible gives us this first focus on the life of this man of faith, we find it in Genesis chapter 12.

It says, get out of your country, from your family, and from your father's house to a land that I will show you.

I will bless you and make your name great, and you shall be a blessing.

I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.

So God is calling Abraham out from, as you study your Bibles, a place called Ur of the Chaldees.

So Abraham gets this call vision, and a lot of people as they read through it with their limited understanding of antiquity, and believe me, mine is limited as well, but I have had the privilege of studying archeology at the seminary level, and I will tell you it is amazing to learn what archeology has discovered about Ur of the Chaldees.

Ur of the Chaldees was, if you will, the city of its day.

Now, I don't know in your minds what the city is.

Maybe it's San Francisco or maybe it's New York.

In fact I've lived in parts of the country where people said we're going to the city today And depending on where you were living, the city was a different place.

Ur of the Chaldees was amazing, extremely wealthy, excelling in art.

Several years ago, I was invited to give a series of lectures in England and while we were there my wife and I spent some time at the British Museum, an amazing museum, and among the collections at the British Museum is, you guessed it, art treasures uncovered from Ur of the Chaldees, presumably dating back to the time of Abraham and as my wife and I were looking at these exquisite gold jewelry Beautifully handcrafted we were saying wow because I mean I've seen plenty of other things in museums from antiquity, and I mean, I'm not an art critic, but I mean it looks like maybe it came from the kindergarten room.

I mean this was a master artist, a metalsmith today.

Couldn't have crafted more beautiful gold leaves, actually looking like perfect tree leaves, only out of gold.

It was amazing to see what they had crafted.

What I'm trying to help you see, Ur of the Chaldees was not just another place to pitch a tent.

The record archaeologically suggests that people were living opulently in Ur.

They had 2 story homes, they had tiled courtyards open to the air as well as and covered rooms with kitchens and bathrooms, beautiful dwelling places.

So when someone says, oh well what's the big deal?

Abrams called from his home and errr just to go somewhere else well who cares will you pitch your tent the Middle East all looks the same to me well it's not that way at all Abraham was being asked to make a huge sacrifice from a secular standpoint it was a sacrifice from a social standpoint and even some people would say from a spiritual standpoint.

If you've never read it, I look at it basically as a narrative commentary on much of the original chapters, the early part of the Bible, Patriarchs and Prophets walks you through in narrative format, really giving you insights into these lives of the early Patriarchs and Prophets in the Bible.

Let's read what it has to say on page 125.

Abraham had grown up in the midst of superstition and heathenism.

Even his father's household, by whom the knowledge of God had been preserved, were yielding to the seductive influences surrounding them, and they served other gods than Jehovah." It's actually a quote from the Bible.

The message of God in that context came to Abraham, get thee out of thy country, away from thy kindred, away from your father's house, unto a land that I will show you." It was no light test that was thus brought upon Abraham.

We might say today it was a big thing God asked Abraham to do.

And you know if we talk about this in the context that we've already presented in this series, God is remember I use this metaphor and I hope you allow me to use it, God is the great personal trainer.

He's going to often ask you to do things that are uncomfortable, that are stressful, just like that trainer in the gym.

No small sacrifice being required of him.

There were strong ties that bound him to his country, his kindred, and his home.

I mean, how would it be for you if God just showed up at your door or appeared in your bedroom and said it's time to leave tomorrow pack your bags and leave where Lord just leave I'll make it clear after you're all packed and on your way that's what it was like for Abraham And the account is such that Abraham did not hesitate to obey the call.

He didn't have any question about what the land of promise was going to be like.

Is the soil going to be healthful, fertile?

Surroundings that would help me amass wealth.

I like this way that Patriarchs and Prophets puts it.

God has spoken and his servant must obey.

Faith is acting on God's Word and and we're seeing that Abraham is being faithful to God's calling.

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Series

Timeless Keys to Resilience

The Resiliency Mindset, Part 1

Transcript

Description

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

Workshop: Dealing with Conflicts In Ministry

Dealing with Conflict and Adversity in Personal Liberty

1h 1m

Morning Devotional

Sexual Purity: Lost and Found

46m

Practical Considerations

2. Following True Education: Success, Failure, and the God Who is Faithful

40m

Sabbath School 4th Quarter 2023: God's Mission My Mission

07 Mission to My Neighbor

20m

Acts

Acts: Baptized By the Spirit

40m

The Grasshopper Syndrome

36m

Sabbath School 4th Quarter 2024: Themes in the Gospel of John

09 The Source of Life

25m

Understanding Difficult Topics

3. The 1000 Years of Peace

1h 10m

Hindered Prayers

35m

The Faces of the Wicked

51m

Driving While Under the Influence

48m

Sound Doctrine