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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Gabriel Arruda Weekend

Gabriel Arruda

The Anxiety Relief Prayer

Father in Heaven, Lord, maybe someone came here burdened, maybe someone came here very stressed.

We're all going through different things in life.

And Lord, you have told us that you have power, and yet sometimes it seems hard, even impossible for us to access that power.

And I ask, would you do something special for us here this evening?

We know time is short, and what we need is a message from heaven that will burn in our hearts and make a great impact on our lives.

Lord, please use me as your speaker and have power to communicate to each child here what they need, in Jesus' name, amen.

Title of this message is the Anxiety Stress Relief prayer.

And so we're going to talk about a form of prayer that helps relieve stress as well as anxiety.

And so I'm gonna cover the stress relief prayer first, and then we'll follow it up with the anxiety relief prayer because the anxiety relief prayer kind of builds on the stress relief prayer.

But I want you to notice that Christ himself predicted that anxiety in particular would rise in the last days.

If you have your Bibles, please turn with me to Luke chapter 21, verse 26.

And this is gonna help us to understand as well what the difference between stress and anxiety is.

I'll read that, it says, well, let's back up to verse 25, gives us context, last day's stuff.

And there shall be signs in the sun and in the moon and in the stars and upon the earth distress of nations with perplexity and the sea and waves roaring.

Notice, man's hearts failing them for fear.

Key part here, for looking after those things which are coming on the earth.

For the powers of heaven shall be shaken.

And so Jesus predicted in the end time, anxiety would go up.

Current statistics are telling us that anxiety is going through the roof.

We could spend probably an hour just going over statistics showing that people are feeling more anxious now than they ever have since we've been taking polls.

And however, we are literally commanded by Jesus not to be anxious.

We are literally commanded not to be anxious.

Philippians chapter 4, verse 6, turn there with me.

Most of you probably know where we're going, but let's read it again.

I'm reading in the King James, which is not as clear.

It says, be careful or be anxious for how much, saints?

For nothing, but in everything, by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known unto God.

So we're literally commanded do not be anxious.

But have you ever tried not to be anxious but you're anxious anyways?

You know, not being anxious, it's not as easy as telling yourself, don't be anxious because Jesus told me not to.

Before we get into the prayer, the anxiety relief prayer, I want to first mention that anxiety can be caused by many things.

It's not a 1, you know, omnidirectional issue.

It could be coming from several different places.

For instance, many drugs and medications have a side effect of anxiety.

So it could be caused as a side effect from drugs and medications.

Childhood trauma can manifest anxiety later in life.

Did you know that there's a certain diet that you could eat that can increase your anxiety?

There's an anxiety diet that you could eat.

First of all, anxiety comes from your amygdala, the part of your brain.

This is the emotional processing area, especially fear.

And the way foods stimulate anxiety is they stimulate your amygdala.

They artificially stimulate your amygdala.

And by doing that, they bring on anxiety.

Artificial sweeteners, aspartame, equal, NutriSweet, some of the trade names, have been found in literature to artificially overstimulate the amygdala, leading to anxiety.

Saturated and trans-saturated fats, particularly from meat and processed vegetable oils, in particular corn and soy oil, were found in studies to also trigger anxiety.

High fructose corn syrup found to trigger anxiety.

And wheat, for those who react to wheat, through gut damage triggers anxiety.

And what happens in the gut eventually makes its way up to the brain.

Aside from all of these lifestyle interventions, however, I wanna give you a prayer that can help you with anxiety.

But I hope you saw from what I just shared that you may need to approach this.

If you struggle with anxiety, you may need to approach this from more than 1 direction.

And first, before I get into the prayer, I want to talk about what's the difference between stress and anxiety because it's important to understand that distinction.

Stress is when you're being crushed by the weight of existing circumstances.

So it's current burdens that you're dealing with.

Anxiety is a fear of what burdens may come.

Did you notice in Luke it says that men's hearts feeling them for fear, for looking forward to those things that were gonna come on the earth.

So stress has to do with what's currently happening in your life.

Anxiety has to do with things that you think might happen in your life.

Anxiety says, it's going to be all up to me.

Now, they work together, but it's important to understand the difference because you have to treat them differently and understanding that difference is very helpful.

And so the anxiety relief prayer, very similar to the stress relief prayer, but there's a twist that makes it specific to anxiety.

So what I wanna do, I wanna start off by covering the stress relief prayer, which I think most people here would also appreciate because stress is...

It's very real in pretty much all of our lives.

So, we want to talk about what is stress.

Let me give you, this is my simple formula for what I think stress is.

You have an hour to get to the airport, and your flight takes off in an hour, and you're an hour and 15 minutes away from the airport.

The whole reason why I started this talk, why I even started thinking this direction is we're going to be doing a seminar and the community that I work with, I live in South Lake Tahoe.

I'm in charge of all the evangelism for the church there.

And we try a lot of different creative ways to reach our community.

And 1 of the things that we decided to do was to do a seminar specifically for people who have lost loved ones.

And so we were doing this grief recovery seminar, and we were hiring speakers to come in to do most of it.

I was gonna be giving 1 talk out of the whole weekend, just 1.

Eastern Meditation the Counterfeit Rest

I want to talk about a very important message, Eastern meditation and Satan's false rest.

But before we get into this, if you could please indulge me in another word of prayer.

Let's bow our heads together, let's ask the Lord to, to do something special here.

Father in heaven, Lord, I just want to say thank you for providing this space, this Sabbath day, this forum, this place.

Would the spirit of God hover above the congregation as you hovered upon the face of the waters at creation.

And would you recreate new life and power and strength in us.

And I pray that you would deliver someone, if someone needs deliverance this morning, that you would grant them whatever spiritual deliverance they need.

And I ask that you would just use me as your speaker and that it would be clear to each and every 1 of us.

So this is A topic I have been studying for a while.

But I tend to find that people like those topics and they need to be spoken about.

I wanna see who was here by, we had a part 1 last night by show of hands, who either was here or heard online last night's presentation just to get an understanding.

So if you didn't hear last night's presentation, I really encourage you to do that because last night is the truth, and this morning we're gonna talk about the counterfeit.

And so understanding the counterfeit doesn't benefit you a lot if you don't understand the truth, amen?

And so what we went over yesterday evening, we covered the stress and anxiety relief prayer.

It's a form of prayer that if you follow these 4 steps, delivers you from stress, delivers you from anxiety.

And Jesus twice in the passage gives us a 100% guarantee that it will deliver you if you do it.

And what a shame for us as God's people to be carrying stress, carrying anxiety when our Savior has provided a way out.

And so I just beseech you to look into that.

And we received that message from this passage of scripture.

Let's turn in our Bibles to Matthew 11, verse 28.

We'll just read through the passage briefly.

We're not gonna do that now, but I just want us to get familiar with this.

Matthew chapter 11, we'll start in verse 28 and we'll read through verse 30.

Come unto me, all you that labor, that stress and are heavy laden, that's depression.

I will, 100% guarantee, I will give you rest.

Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, for I am meek and lowly in heart.

For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.

And when you understand what Christ is saying in this passage, you'll find a four-step process where Jesus is showing us how to be delivered from stress as well as anxiety.

And this brings us, this whole process, it brings us into the state that the Bible calls spiritual rest.

So I want you to be a blessing for you to look at that message when you get a chance.

I want to show you right now that this is linked to the Sabbath.

Now at this point, when Jesus was saying these words, he could have used a lot of different words.

He could have said, come unto me, I will give you joy.

I will give you strength, or I will give you wisdom.

And in using the word rest, he's linking this experience of stress relief with the Sabbath day.

And when it comes to the Sabbath, there's something very important to understand about the Sabbath that we don't understand very often.

There's the day And then there's the way.

With a lot of other New Testament ordinances, such as baptism, communion, you had a physical side of it, right?

A physical ceremony that you actually do, but then you had a spiritual truth that Those ceremonies are trying to communicate, right?

It's actually, the Bible calls it an ordinance.

And I have a whole message where I go into that.

But suffice it for now to say, there's 2 parts of the Sabbath, the day and the way.

Or otherwise you wouldn't be here, we all understand that.

It's that experience of being delivered from stress and anxiety.

That beautiful experience where you feel the burden roll off your shoulder when you realize that the responsibility of results is on God, that he puts the responsibility on himself.

Again, I encourage you to listen to that message from last night.

So the Sabbath is really a celebration of the stress relief.

That's what we're supposed to be doing here.

Yeah, the counterfeit day we know to be Sunday, the counterfeit Sabbath.

In the fourth commandment, it says the seventh day, you look on your calendar, we know what day that is, that's the Sabbath day.

Now, if he set up a counterfeit day, do you think he set up a counterfeit way?

There's a counterfeit day, there's also a counterfeit way.

It's stress relief, such as the steps we went through in the stress relief prayer.

What's Satan's counterfeit to help us to have stress relief?

There's lots of ways people deal with stress in their life that are not beneficial.

But I want to talk about 1 huge 1 that has been taking the world by storm.

Yay, it's been taking the churches by storm, even some of our churches.

How to Stop Interpreting Scripture Through Your Trauma

Good to see everyone, thanks for coming back out.

And I'm guessing you're wanting to know how to stop interpreting scripture through your trauma.

So praise the Lord that you're here because I tell you, everybody does it and we need to understand how to overcome that.

But before we do this, would you please indulge me in another word of prayer together?

Father in heaven, Lord, thank you so much for stooping down to rescue perishing, helpless sinners like us.

Where you've told us that God commended his love towards us and that while we are yet sinners, Christ died for us.

Lord, I pray that you would please give us your spirit.

We know that this presentation will not be practical, it will not be powerful if you're not here ministering through me and to each heart.

And I pray that your spirit would just come and help us, Lord, what we wanna see, We wanna see who you are.

We don't wanna see you through our biases.

We don't wanna see you through our lenses.

And I know people who have come here this afternoon desire that.

And so would you please give us tools to get a clearer picture of who you are.

How to stop interpreting scripture through your trauma.

So I was at a prayer service 1 evening, and During this prayer service, we got into discussion and somehow the judgments of God came up.

You know, when God judges and executes judgment on people and places.

And we were discussing it and the individual that was kind of driving the conversation you know, was discussing, you know, about natural phenomena and so forth, but she kept interjecting, but God doesn't get angry with us, but God doesn't get angry with us.

Conversation kept going and just a few minutes later, we were just discussing similar topics and again she interjected, but God doesn't get angry with us.

Conversation goes on just a few minutes later, again the same thing, but God doesn't get angry with us, but God doesn't get angry with us.

And I thought, I heard that the first time, this is interesting.

And it kept coming up over and over, and as I was thinking about this, I thought, As I walked away from that meeting, I thought, I'm pretty sure there's a verse or 2 in the Bible that talks about God getting angry.

And I'm not here to discuss the anger of God, that's a whole sermon in of itself, but God's anger is qualitatively different than our anger.

The motives are completely different and there's a lot of differences to it.

But as I went, I looked it up in my Bible study computer program.

And you know how many references I found to God and anger?

And the person who was mentioning this was a person who had been a lifelong Adventist and they were older.

And I thought, how have you spent your whole life in church and yet you don't believe something that you find over 200 to 300 references in scripture?

And again, God's anger is different than our anger, but God does get angry.

That's 1 thing that's very clear from scripture.

His anger is different than ours, but it's there.

And that got me thinking about this topic, and it just led to a train of thoughts that eventually resulted in this message.

And I want to share a quote from someone called Anayas Nin.

Now I kind of, you know, shared information that was like, hey, you know, you really don't want to pay attention to, you know, Eastern mysticism and stuff like that.

This person happens to be like a Buddhist, but this quote is really good.

You know, there's truth mixed in with error, right?

And I don't know if you've heard of this individual, but this is profound.

Listen, we don't see things as they are, we see things as we are.

And that includes our understanding of scripture.

That includes our understanding of God and who he is.

And the idea is that we read the Bible through the lenses of our experiences, period.

And you know, we'd like to think, you know, how do we arrive at the theology that we do?

Well, I studied, I prayed, I used logic, I used reason, the Holy Spirit led, there were divine confirmations.

To a certain degree, yes, but to another degree, that's not entirely how it happens.

There's something running in the background that has a bigger effect on your theology than perhaps any of those things.

And so, let me give you this tier structure.

I wish I had a whiteboard here, I would write it out for you, but You have theology, right?

And out of your theology, what's upstream from that is your behavior.

Your theology dictates how you, what your values are, what's right, what's wrong.

That's your theology, then behavior up here.

But there's something below theology that dictates what kind of theology you arrive to, and that is philosophy, your philosophy on life.

Those are primarily belief systems that you have.

But then with your philosophy, your beliefs, there's something that determines how you come to that philosophy, how you come to those beliefs to begin with, and that is experience, your experiences.

And there's even something that undergirds experience and that's your nature.

Your nature kind of gives you a, it's a spiritual principle that gives you a bent in what direction you're gonna kind of see things.

And you know we have a sinful nature and so that's problematic.

But with theology, you know, this is your religious convictions, you know, right and wrong, philosophy and beliefs.

I call these core beliefs or true beliefs.

Now beliefs are tricky because a lot of times we think what our beliefs are is what I profess.

Because I know people who profess a lot of things and don't do those very things.

Beliefs, you wanna know how you could tell what your real belief system is.

It's not by what you say, it's what you do.

I know people who believe in being generous but are not generous.

I know people who believe that gossip is wrong and gossip plenty.

So what your real beliefs are are not determined by what you profess, what you say, but actually how you live your life.

That's how you identify what your true beliefs are.

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Series

Gabriel Arruda Weekend

Eastern Meditation the Counterfeit Rest

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

Recorded

Parts

The Anxiety Relief Prayer

1h

Eastern Meditation the Counterfeit Rest

48m

How to Stop Interpreting Scripture Through Your Trauma

40m

Sound Doctrine