“Faith gives you an inner ballast without which work could destroy you.”
- Timothy Keller
Have you ever thought that faith alone would protect you from feeling overwhelmed, only to find yourself still weighed down by work-related stress? You’re not alone. Many high-performing Christian professionals feel they should be “too blessed to be stressed,” yet still find themselves exhausted, overworked, and wondering where their peace has gone.
This quote from Timothy Keller, really hits home for me. Without a strong foundation of faith - it is too easy to lose perspective of where work and health should fit in life priorities. If you’re feeling disconnected from the calm and joy that faith once gave you, maybe it’s time to look at how your relationship with God and your daily life intersect.
When Work Becomes a Driving Force, Faith Can Get Pushed Aside
Being in the fast lane often means focusing heavily on delivering results, building external value, and handling constant demands. It’s all too easy for faith to take a backseat. You may even find yourself tying your worth to your work achievements, so that every high or low in business impacts how you feel about yourself.
This drive to excel can lead to:
Perfectionism:
- Mistakes feel personal and the pressure to perform becomes intense. It increases the likelihood that you are worrying about what others are thinking about you and how you are being perceived and treated. This amplifies the stress & pressure within already challenging situations.
Worry About Outcomes:
- Constantly pushing for certain results and trying to control everything can leave you physically and mentally exhausted. It can become hard to turn off work thoughts or let go of anxious overthinking about work, even during personal time or as you are trying to sleep.
Work-Life Imbalance Affecting Relationships:
- Even though you work to ensure a successful and bright future for your loved ones, the urgent crises and significant issues have you skipping events or not staying in touch. Work becomes a distraction creating tension in relationships from not being fully present or having enough quality time.
Chronic Stress:
- Over time, the focus on avoiding failures and forcing results leaves little room for spiritual growth, self-care, or emotional peace. Ongoing stress leads to physical and mental fatigue, draining your energy and affecting your focus and mood.
When you are physically and mentally drained, it can be hard to maintain your spiritual health. Modern society makes it easy to slowly drift from your faith, without really noticing. In your busy & hectic life, you are doing the expected activities to lovingly support your family and living a moral life. At some point, work just started to consume most of your time, energy and focus. It's not like you stopped believing, it's just God may hear from you only on the holidays or when help is needed.
A Shift Back to Faith and Balance
When faith becomes the central pillar in your life your perspective shifts. Faith provides a borader perspective of scale and relativity. In the grand scheme of things - is this specific situation at work all that important? Through Holy Spirit, you'll see that a lot of work-related stress is unnecessary.
Making your relationship with God a daily priority creates a foundation from which you can navigate work and life with grace. Here’s how faith-centered habits can relieve work-related stress and restore your peace:
Reframe Your Identity
When your worth is anchored in God rather than your productivity, the pressure to achieve for validation eases. Colossians 3:23 reminds us to "work heartily, as for the Lord, and not for men." This shifts your focus from external validation to a purpose-driven perspective.
Turn Mistakes into Learning Opportunities
Instead of seeing mistakes as setbacks, view them as growth moments. God calls us to “cast all your anxieties on him” (1 Peter 5:7). Lean on Him for resilience and view each challenge as a chance to practice patience, compassion, and humility.
Clear Cognitive Distortions to See Truth
Instead of falling into common traps of negative thinking, you'll see them as deceptions, causing you to feel more stress. For example, you may be mindreading how someone feels about you or fortunetelling how a situation will turn out that fuels your stress. Or anytime you tell yourself that you are not enough or don't have enough. John 8:47 reminds us "whoever belongs to God hears what God says." Challenging the thoughts and perceptions of a stressful situation with prayer and Biblical inspiration helps you see reality and God's truth.
Transform Stress into Spiritual Strength
Chronic stress is emotionally draining, but when you replace worry with trust in God’s provision, you find an inner peace. Matthew 6:34 reminds us to “not be anxious about tomorrow.” Relinquishing control over outcomes can free you from the mental cycles of worry and doubt.
How can faith act as an inner ballast to counteract the stress and overcommitment you are making to work? How would your life be different if you let God in just a little bit more?
Practical Steps to Reconnect with Your Faith for Lasting Stress Relief
If you’ve been feeling the strain, it might be time to bring God back to the center. Here are three practical ways to reconnect and relieve stress:
Start a Gratitude Practice
There are so many ways to practice gratitude as part of reducing stress. Begin each day by writing down at least one thing you’re grateful for, asking God to open your eyes to blessings both big and small as you go through the day. At the end of the work day, find the goodness amidst a tough and stressful day. At the end of the day, recognize someone that brought a little light. This simple practice redirects your focus from pressures to gratitude, grounding you in faith.
Journal Prompt: What blessings did you experience today that you might have overlooked? Take a moment to thank God for them and to help you see how appreciating them can help bring contentment and calm.
Practice Forgiveness for Stress Relief
Holding onto anger, frustration, or resentment builds stress. Colossians 3:13 calls us to “forgive as the Lord forgave you.” Practicing forgiveness lightens your emotional load, allowing you to face each day with a renewed spirit. Sometimes it is not someone else you need to forgive, but yourself. Grant yourself some compassion and grace, even if it didn't turn out as expected, you made mistakes or disappointed people
Action Step: Reflect on one person you need to forgive—whether at work, home, or yourself. Pray for the strength to release that burden and experience peace.
Practice Breath Prayer for Calm & Peace
When you are feeling tension or distress within your body or your thoguhts running away with you due to stress, restore calm with just a few deep breaths. Pick a favorite verse for deep breathing - maybe a variant on Psalm 46:10. Inhale "Be Still." Hold for a count of 4. Exhale "so I can know you God." By connecting to God regularly, you bring calm and clarity to your day, reminding yourself that you’re not in this alone.
RELATED: Another Breath Prayer exercise
Concerned you don't have the time or energy for these, you can use faith-driven tiny habits to create the time. As you lean more into your faith and build out these healthy habits, you'll notice that with less stress there is more time.
From Hard Work to Higher Purpose
As you let God more into your life, it transforms not only how you approach work but how you see yourself and your purpose. When you are making your personal relationship with God a priority, so many of the trappings and overcommitments in the workplace begin to fade in comparison.
For those that need external validation of the benefits, there are dozens of scientific studies showing greater health and happiness when there is faith - more so when part of a supportive community of shared faith, morals and values.
Imagine living each day with more energy, greater compassion, and less stress. When you work “for the Lord” rather than to satisfy external demands, work becomes less about striving and more about serving. Work becomes more effortless and joyful when the priority is to maximize the value for the team, the customer, or the consumer through service or when value creation is based on seeing the higher purpose served by the team or organization.
As you reduce stress and improve work-life harmony, you'll be able to turn striving into thriving and flourishing as God intends.
My hope for you...
I pray that you realize that faith in God enriches your life in so many different ways, more thanwhat I've lined out. I am not here to evangelize. Yet I hope some of you that may have let the light of faith dim are willing to brighten it. Being motivated to getting better health outcomes and a more positive mental attitude is a good reason to start exploring your relationship with God (again).
Reconnecting with my faith was one of the major catalyst of change in my jourey of stress recovery. As I released the feelings I held about organized religion - I was able to recognize that these are constructs run by fallible and imperfect humans. A direct relationship with Christ and having my own personal practice has been key for re-centering my life priorities.
I willingly trade the underlying emotions that accompany chronic stress (fear, doubt, frustration, shame, guilt, anger, etc.) for connectedness, devotion, compassion, forgiveness, and gratitude. I am also willingly trading working harder for working higher.
Could prioritizing your faith bring a renewed sense of calm to your day? How would your choices, relationships, and health improve? Start with small steps, and remember that lasting change doesn’t happen overnight. Faith-driven transformation takes time, but the peace it brings is worth every effort.
If you're ready to take the next step in reclaiming your time, restoring your energy, regaining your focus and strengthening your faith-filled identity, download my free guide to building tiny habits. This guide will help you incorporate small but powerful habits rooted in Christian identity to find stress relief and greater work-life balance. Through small, actionable steps, in time you can thrive and flourish as God intends for you.
