Welcome to the In Touch Podcast with Charles Stanley for Monday, August 26th.

Do you wrestle with stress and worry?

If so, then today's podcast begins a series of messages that point to the scriptures to find relief and help for healing damaged emotions.

Our emotions are a gift from God and they carry a lot of influence in our life. We exercise

our emotions, continue in our life and oftentimes we're not very pleased at how we express them.

We can express them with joy and happiness and peace and kindness and goodness

toward others.

Or we can be brutal and we can be unforgiving and caustic and harsh and we can be very hurtful to people.

This thing of emotions is a big deal because the truth is we control them or they control us and

God gave us emotions for a number of reasons and he gave them so that you and I

could enjoy life and express our inner being with other people.

And so when I think about that and think about the fact that all through the scriptures, we see people

expressing those emotions. For example when it comes to

Saul he was very jealous of David and you read in the Psalms that David oftentimes

would say something about he felt so dejected,

that is he was depressed.

And here's Elijah who's supposed to be so powerful and a man of great faith and courage being afraid.

And of course when you come to the sermon on the mount and Jesus in that sixth chapter

three times he says don't be anxious, don't be anxious, don't be anxious don't be anxious don't be anxious and so when

we think about all of these emotions we took a survey to find out what emotion was the most prominent in people's thinking and by far

anxiety was number one and we live in an anxious age if you'll think about all the things that are going on around us that cause us to feel so uncertain.

And that word is the key word when it comes to anxiety, uncertain about what's going on in front of me, what's going on in the future,

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