This morning's message is a message to the people of Bethlehem, which I hope will be an encouragement and a help to those of you who are guests with us today.

It's a kind of milestone message in the life of our church, I believe,

at least I'm praying that it will be in some significant ways. It has to do about managing stress and pressure in the life of a church.

There are two wholesome ways, at least two, for handling multiple stresses in your life and in the life of a church.

One way is to reduce the number of stresses.

Somehow get some of them out of your life.

Now that's not always possible and sometimes it's not desirable either, especially in wartime or crisis time in a person's life, where you simply have to cope, you have to learn a way of dealing with manifold pressures and multiple stresses

that combine to press on you.

And so the second way, besides diminishing the number of stresses, to managing, enduring,

and even flourishing and delighting under stress, is to see a design in the stresses. To see the good hand of God putting pieces

together in your life so that they're not chaos. They're not absurd. They don't just pop up willy-nilly and confusingly. But rather they seem to take on a pattern and the seeing of the pattern and the seeing of the design

causes a coping power to arise.

Now I've learned this somewhat from experience but I've seen it in scripture. I want to illustrate

it from the life of the apostle Paul first. Let me describe for you multiple stresses. I believe Paul lived almost constantly under stresses

that most of us never taste. Listen to this, three times I have been beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I have

been shipwrecked, a night and a day I have been adrift at sea on frequent journeys in danger from rivers, danger from robbers,

danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from

false brethren in toil and hardship through many a sleepless night in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure,

and apart from all other things, there is the daily pressure upon me of my anxiety for all the churches.

So let's not feel too sorry for ourselves at Bethlehem.

Now how did he do that? How did he survive? How did he not just cave in or run away to

where do you go? Morocco or why didn't why didn't he just throw in the towel mid life like so many have

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