Here’s the biggest secret that I have: I’m a pastor that deals with anxiety and panic disorder.

If you’re not familiar with the term, let me explain it to you: panic disorder is when you have reoccurring unexpected panic attacks. They are sudden periods of intense feelings that you simply can’t control. Your body goes into full-blown overdrive, and you feel like what I would think a heart attack feels like.

I thought having panic attacks were bad: the depression that followed was an entirely different story. Depression hits humans in various ways. For some people, depression is an everyday battle. For others, it comes and goes in waves.

Here’s the good news: through correct medication, proper mental awareness, honesty about my illness, and having the right support, I was able to battle anxiety and panic disorder, and ultimately take back my life from its controlling power. And ever since then, I’ve tried to keep this part of my life under the radar. It was as if letting people in on this guilt-ridden topic would in some way decline my value to them as a person. I spent years feeling like there this big stain on my integrity because of my illness.

While some of you may not deal with panic disorder and anxiety, I’m sure all of us deal with the monster of stress. In day three of our devotional,  we are going to look at one of the most hidden monsters that all of us face: stress. 

If there was one word to describe our modern culture, it would be pressure. This can easily stem from our social status, our work load, or our personal situations. We’re going to take a look at the type of stress David felt that we see in Psalm 31. 

We don’t know the exact situation David found himself, but we do know this: the dude was stressed out of his mind. The beautiful thing about this passage is that David shows us the most perfect example of what to do when we find ourselves in the midst of a life that we can’t control: we flock to Jesus.

Friends, the promise from Jesus is this: Our remedy for stress is to trust our source of life, not life itself.

If we were honest, we would all say that we use something in our lives to fill us up: whether that’s our bank account, food (this is for sure mine), relationships, or our social status; but here’s the thing about our life: our life is always in a constant state of change, and focusing only on fleeting items in our life will cause us to stress out. But if we focus on our source, and ONLY our source for our peace and satisfaction, we can have ultimate sustainment in our hearts.

Read through Psalm 31 today, and apply these verses to your life when the monster of stress can charging in.