Dennis Tuuri

Q1: Questioner:
It’s more of a comment. When I heard you start preaching about the shelter from the storm, it reminded me of a song—one of my very favorite songs of all time. For over a year, I haven’t been able to think of the name. I could remember the song by Bob Dylan, but not the title. And bless your heart, you said “shelter from the storm” a hundred times at least.

I wrote down something that happened in my life yesterday so I wouldn’t leave anything out. Last night I played the violin for about 50 people at a birthday party. I worked pretty hard on it and it went very well. Afterwards everybody was praising me for my violin playing, and I kept saying, in effect, “ah shucks.” I just didn’t feel like I deserved praise. I played almost perfectly as I had planned to, but I felt so inadequate. Everybody was telling me how great I was, but I felt inadequate.

I would say now that God sheltered me from the storm that tends to rage within me. In other words, He gave me that. I’m not feeling proud, but I know I played well and thanks be to Him.

Pastor Tuuri:
Amen. Praise God. Yes. And I did decide to preach this sermon because of Bob Dylan’s song. I’ve been interested in it for years. We played it the other day for Charlotte as we were driving into Portland just to show her the poetic imagery and its use. But the title comes from a verse or two in Isaiah. Dylan, in many ways an amoral man, but even before his Christian period had many influences from the scriptures. The scriptures were a big part of his songwriting, and he uses the imagery of scripture.

For instance, one of the verses goes: “little hilltop village. They gambled for my clothes. I bargained for salvation. She gave me a lethal dose.” There are always these allusions to Christianity—both the New Testament as well as the Old Testament. So I thought, well, let’s study that in Isaiah and find out what it’s really talking about. So anyway, someone found me out.

—

Q2: Sarah C.:
I really appreciate your sermon, especially after family camp and just finding shelter all week in community. We didn’t really have a shelter from the wind though, did we?

Pastor Tuuri:
No, not unless you’re sitting by the campfire.

Sarah C.:
The one thing I did think of though—when you’re talking about how we provide shelter for each other—I would have loved it if you’d expounded more beyond the simplistic idea of the wife providing shelter for her husband as he comes home from work. I think there would have been a lot more. You could probably preach a whole sermon on all the different ways we provide shelter to each other.

Pastor Tuuri:
Yeah, that’s the way I always feel bad after my sermons—I tend to want to talk about the verses a lot. But it might have been a good idea just to stay with the simple meaning of the first two verses, not going to the rest of the text, and then spend more specific time talking about the way homes, churches, and even businesses can be shelters from the storm. So I think you’re right—that could be a lot of information.

Sarah C.:
That could be the theme of women’s camp.

Pastor Tuuri:
Okay, good idea. I’ll write that on a piece of paper and suggest it to the committee. Yeah, just kidding.

—

Q3: Questioner:
I had a question for you. At the end of your message today, you talked about what the scriptures say in terms of being anxious for nothing, and you said it is sin. Then when you started your sermon, you talked about anxieties or feelings of dread, and I think you said they were a good thing.

Pastor Tuuri:
Well, yeah, because they bring us an awareness of our sin. A handful of times I have suffered severely from panic attacks. I didn’t have them for a number of years. I ended up training my mind. There are things you can do. But anyway, I have never had quite as complete a time of repentance as when I felt that.

And so these fears are used by God. Sometimes they’re sinful anxieties, but still they’re used by God to bring us to conviction. So frequently—well, not frequently, some of the time—it’s His Holy Spirit’s way of convicting us of sin and bringing us to healing from it. Does that make sense?

Questioner:
I think so. I guess I’m wondering—perhaps it’s just the worst way of using the word anxious.

Pastor Tuuri:
Yeah, or how we use the word anxiety. Because it sure seems like God could bring sin to our attention using those types of means in a manner that would be sinless. Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. All I know is that fear and dread are frequently kind of the ways that God brings people to himself—through that kind of conviction. It isn’t just a mental awareness, like “Oh, gee, I guess I made a mistake here.” No, you sinned. You sin grievously against God. Our consciences cover that over, but then sometimes the Spirit of God and His convicting power brings it up through all of that.

So yeah, I would separate out anxiety as it’s used in Philippians—that’s why I said it’s sin. I did not say this first. George Celsian did when he had a conference here. He said it’s probably the biggest sin that Christians regularly commit and don’t feel bad about, because the command is “be anxious for nothing.” So we’re commanded to do that.

Now God uses sin sinlessly. So He uses our anxiety sometimes to bring glory to himself through convicting us of sin or whatever it is. Anyway, does that help at all?

Questioner:
Probably not.

Pastor Tuuri:
This is Melody back. He’s tortured me enough. He was gracious and let me off the hook.

—

Q4: Michael L.:
Thank you, Pastor Tuuri. It’s serious.

Pastor Tuuri:
Yes. Who was it?

Michael L.:
Melody.

Pastor Tuuri:
Yeah. And I’m in the back.

—

Q5: Melody (back):
I just had a few more comments, kind of along with Sarah. I know you weren’t really able to extend on what you were saying about the shelter in the home. I think there’s a lot of young ladies and young moms that enter their marriage and childbearing years thinking that this haven is going to be peaceful. You were saying the men go out in the storm with sinners, but I think the women find out that they’re in the storm with sinners as well in a really big way. Yes. And it kind of takes us by surprise and shocks us to find out this isn’t easy, and it looks really bad when dad comes home because we’re all at our very worst.

And I just think it’s good to remember the spiritual warfare that’s going on there in the home. It’s pretty epic, really.

Pastor Tuuri:
Yes. And well, if you put those two things together—what you’re talking about and then that you would like this home to be as much as possible a shelter from the storm—then the implication is that’s going to provide more impetus to work through the sinful parts of it.

You know, Tim and Janet Murray’s talk on preparing kids for worship at home. One of the things that came up both in terms of preparation and then in terms of coming to church on Sunday mornings is that the demeanor of the parents—their calmness or anxiety or whatever it is—kids pick up on that. So yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. I didn’t mean to make it sound like a shangri-la at home or anything.

Melody:
No, I didn’t take it that way. But yeah, it is. It’s easiest for us to expect that it is just a calm shelter. But it takes a lot of diligence and faith to see the long range—the family and the effects of that—and to stay steady and firm with our eyes on Christ. And I think that’s why we value having a mom at home or having our kids at home in a homeschool or day school situation, because they’re going to be pointed to Christ when they do sin—not if they sin. Because we’re all sinners and we need constant direction and models of how to deal with our sin.

Pastor Tuuri:
Yeah. Well, yeah. And of course, I would probably want to add to what I said earlier—that the husband is responsible to try to help achieve a shelter from the storm for the mother at the end of the day. I mean, there’s that aspect too. And of course, he’s trying to provide leadership and assist the wife in doing all that. So I didn’t mean to put it all on the wife or anything.

You know, another nice imagery I used to like—I don’t remember where I read it—but the idea of when men in the time of knights and coats of armor would have to have someone dress them, right? Because that stuff was heavy and complicated. And so somebody else actually had to put it on them. And to the degree that the person who helps them does it well or does it poorly, it can actually be a matter of life or death for the knight who goes out to joust or whatever it is.

So the illustration was that wives, when the man’s going off to work, try to help equip him for the day ahead through various means. The significance that the wife has in helping prepare her husband for the battle he’s about to face has that kind of life and death quality to it. I just like the image.

—

Q6: Lauren:
I know Michael let you off the hook, but I’m going to put you back on for a minute. It seems to me that there is a kind of anxiety that is almost being tormented by fear—that’s actually a medical issue or trauma-induced, that sort of thing. Yeah. Where it doesn’t seem like there’s sin involved. It’s more of a physical suffering. So when I hear you say deep-seated anxiety is sin, when I think of deep-seated anxiety, that’s the kind of thing I think of. So I was wondering if you can clarify, because I didn’t really get much clarification.

Pastor Tuuri:
Yes, of course. The scriptures say, “be anxious for nothing.” So yeah, I recently listened to a book called *Shrinks*, which is a history of psychiatry. Fascinating book. It starts in World War I, and the advances in brain scanning, pharmacological elements—all that stuff is really good. That’s why I wanted to quickly say after the Xanax comment that I’m not saying you shouldn’t take Xanax sometimes. But he talks about this, and it’s interesting—post-traumatic stress is a major element of what is now being worked on to try to figure out how the brain and brain patterns relate to that. And he gives some experiences from his own life. One in which he was robbed and nearly killed. No stress afterwards. Another where he almost pushed a TV out his window—he did actually push it out. He was trying to move his television from the window and it fell out, crashing down three floors, and didn’t hit anybody. But it was so stressful for him that he thought it might hit somebody. It created problems for a long, long time. He would dream about this and stuff. Yeah.

So there’s definitely post-traumatic stuff that produces stress or anxiety that’s of a different nature, I think, than what Philippians is talking about. I think Philippians is talking about things we normally worry about that we should be trusting God for. But even with the post-traumatic stress, I would think that even though we don’t have to characterize it as sinful, the remedies—that’s why I read through, I think, to verse 9—mean that we normally take that verse out. “It’s sin to be anxious.” So we just try to work on our will and not be anxious. But you know, the whole prayer thing, what we do with our minds, thinking on what’s good—all that stuff that follows—then the peace of God will be with you. So it has a command that we’re not supposed to violate. And it also has instructions, I think, for how to do that. That probably would be very worthwhile to study and think about, even in terms of post-traumatic stresses that are not sinfully based. Does that help?

Lauren:
Yes. I mean, I’ve seen tracts maybe by Jay Adams or somebody where they take the Philippians passage—maybe even more of the context—and they produce counseling kind of homework for people who struggle with anxiety. And I’ve used this successfully in counseling. So it just seems like I have heard things before from other places that say all anxiety is sin. If you have post-traumatic stress, that is sin and you just need to pray it away. That sort of thing. And I was really hoping that’s not what you were going with.

Pastor Tuuri:
No. But probably what we would want to do is make it better. No, that’s not where I was going. And of course, from my perspective, 99 times out of a hundred, the anxiety probably is simple, right? But I don’t want to make a blanket statement that would not address those kinds of things. So thank you for giving me the opportunity to correct that.

—

Well, should we go have our meal? Thank you.