Stress Free Living

     I am beginning to understand that it is not God that puts pressure on us. It's either ourselves, someone else, or the enemy. Pharoah was a type of the enemy, and his mantra was "one more brick, one more brick, one more brick" causing stress and hardship for the emprisoned Israelites. And that is what we become if we succumb to these weighty orders, either in our heads or even outwardly.
    Well, what if we have an oppressive boss or spouse or someone else in our lives that trys and puts this on us? I believe that if we surrender ourselves and it to God, then He will either supply us with a place of rest so we are not affected by these externals, or he moves the person out of the way somehow, or sometimes He even asks us to make a change by being bold and addressing the person head-on. By the power of the Holy Spirit, this usually breaks the power we've allowed the oppressive person to have over us as we bring it out into the light and assert ourselves. In the case of it being the enemy who has successfully driven us to perform, possibly due to a weakness we have of being accepted or measuring up; once we recognize that, we can point to Jesus and His acceptance and love for us, and end it there, by the power of His blood. If we ourselves put this pressure on ourselves, perhaps due to oppressive people in our past who did that to us, (and now these voices are resident in us); once we recognize this, we can bathe our hearts and minds with the truth of the word of God who accepts us totally even if we are not productive one day of our lives!!!! Once we embrace His unconditional love and acceptance, we can immediately reject any interfering voices which tries to contradict these eternal truths. Overtime, they will get so soft we can barely hear them, and then if they do try and raise their heads after that, we can ignore them unabated.
    To really chew on what unconditional love is can bring freedom from the stress to perform and produce. Before the Fall of man, Adam labored with God in peace and rest. I believe we can be restored to that, if we allow God's love to permeate our hearts and minds. We can produce, but it will be from a place of being loved and forgiven and accepted, and not from a place of stressful fear and driveness.
     "My yoke is easy and My burden is light" Jesus said. Oppression coming from anywhere is not from Him. He calls us back to walk in the cool of the evening with Him; to bask in His love and grace, with freedom to be ourselves, and to receive acceptance for who we are because we are who He created us to be.