Hi, my name is Pete Cazero.

I want to welcome you here today to the Emotionally Healthy Leader podcast, and I want to introduce you to the message you're going to listen to today, and it's called Actually Relax.

And it's based on John chapter 6, verses 16 to 21, and Jesus and the disciples, Jesus sends the disciples into this big storm and which he shows up as the great I am.

And it's a tremendous text. And it brings out a theme that is perhaps the most important theme or one of the most important themes of the whole gospel of John.

And that is relax. It's believing and trusting in Jesus. And in fact, a good modern translation of what

it means to believe and to trust in the gospel of John is to relax in. It's the goal of the gospel

of John to create this relaxation in Jesus. The source of keeping all the commands of Jesus is to trust him. Just imagine 98 times in the gospel of John to create this relaxation in Jesus, the source of keeping all the commands of

Jesus to trust him. Just imagine 98 times in the gospel of Johnny talks about believing and trusting

in Jesus. And so the invitation here for you is you listen to this, if you're like me,

you carry lots of stress, lots of anxiety, and how do I move from that into a place of relaxation?

And, you know, I grew up in an anxious family. I mean, many of us did. It's so deep in me.

It's so deep in our culture. What really began to change it for me was the slowdown spirituality that I drew from monasticism in 2003, and I began to enter

into silence and stillness for the first time in a serious way as a Christ follower.

Now, at that point, I'd been a pastor for, oh, my gosh, you know, 15, 16 years, and I preached

about things like silence and stillness and being,

but I never really experienced them in any profound way. I knew verses, be still before the

Lord and wait patiently for him. Psalm 377 didn't mean I actually lived it. And so it was entering the life over a four-month period

with monks and large chunks of time in silence and stillness that I discovered that, oh, man,

I have, along with every other human being in the face of the earth, a longing for silence

and stillness. And God, the Holy Spirit, is living inside silence and stillness and god the holy spirit's living

inside of me speaking and revealing himself and he's saying a lot uh and he really is inviting me to relax

not to rush uh because he's working the lord is building a house and as it says in psalm 127

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