Replacing it with trust in God

Submit to God, and you will have peace; then things will go well for you. (Job 22:21 NLT)

Stress is one of the big “joy killers” that God wants to help us minimize. Stress makes it difficult to operate and is a cause of terrible unhappiness, illness, and even death.

Faith is an antidote for stress. Faith and trust that everything is in God’s hands, that He is in control, and that He is able to bring about something good from even the worst situations, automatically eliminates a lot of stress from our lives.

Each of us is able to trust in God for certain things, but there are always aspects of our lives that we feel we need to worry about or burdens we feel we need to carry, instead of giving them to God and trusting that He can take care of them better than we can. And if we let those burdens settle on us, whether physical, emotional, mental, or spiritual, eventually they will cause stress, which can have devastating effects on both body and spirit in the long term.

Even though we will probably never attain a once-and-for-all victory over stress because we’re human, we can learn to overcome or reduce its negative effects each time it comes around by replacing it with trust in God, which brings peace. [1]

Our dependence upon God ought to be so entire and absolute that we should never think it necessary, in any kind of distress, to have recourse to human consolations. - Thomas à Kempis

[1] Activated Living Without Stress