The Blessed Controller of All Things

We're going to be continuing in our series that we started last week talking about what it means for us to have the knowledge of God by knowing Christ and not just knowing him by virtue of his salvation for us, which is fantastic, and we're excited about that and we praise him for that. But knowing who he is, because knowing who he is transforms how we live our lives. If we have just a slight, shallow, superficial understanding of who Jesus is, we may think that all he did was save us from sin without realizing that he called us to transform living as Christ lives in me through the power of the Holy Spirit. So last week we talked about Christ as a beloved one, and today we're going to be talking about him as the one who is the sovereign Lord. He is the blessed controller of all things.

And so I invite you to just read the Scriptures with me. Have a couple places you want to read this morning. One from First Corinthians, chapter two. And by the way, the Scriptures are not in nib in my text here. This is the new American standard.

Sorry about that, because you'll have to just translate as you go. You can do that, boys and girls, we can handle this. Okay? But let's look at the word together. First Corinthians, chapter two.

You're looking at verse 12. And through the end of the chapter, he says, now we have received not the Spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may know the things freely given to us by God. Which things? We also speak not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit, combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words. But a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him.

He cannot understand them because they're spiritually appraised. But he who is spiritual appraises all things, yet he himself is appraised by no one. For who has known the mind of the Lord that He will instruct him? But we have the mind of Christ. Then Romans, chapter 11, beginning in verse 3.

Oh, the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God, how unsearchable are his judgments, and unfathomable his ways. Again. For who has known the mind of the Lord who became his counselor, who was first given to him, that it might be paid back to him again? For from him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever.

Amen. Let's pray together as we look at these things.

Father, we ask today that this understanding of who you are as The Sovereign Lord, let that seep into our being so that we understand and that we have this knowledge of you that will transform our thinking in ways that few things ever could, that we will know that when we are fretting and worrying and concerned about so many things, Lord, you are the master who is the blessed controller of all those things. We don't have to be in control when you are. And, Lord, you really are. And so we bow before you now and ask you to teach us about what it means for us to know you as Sovereign Lord, in Christ's name. Amen.

One of the things that we do in our conversations with each other, we ask after each other's health. We ask, how are you doing? What's going on? And a lot of times, if somebody's going through a little difficult time, our first instinct, if we're the person's being asked, is, how's it going? You know, I know it's a tough time.

How's it going? And our response is, well, everything's under control.

No, it's not under control at all. And we're struggling with it. We're trying to figure out how to manage it. But something in us seems to indicate that we're supposed to be the captain of our faith, the master of our soul. But the Scriptures say, no, you're supposed to die to yourself and let Christ live through you.

So how do we reconcile these things? And so this whole idea of everything being under control, it's a different thing. It's not what we think. It's not a good thing. It's a human frailty that we've got to get over and let that be.

Christ has everything under control. And as I was thinking about how to explain this to you, well, here's what happens if you're an interim pastor somewhere. You get to tell embarrassing stories on yourself, and then you leave, and then you pray that people will forget about that. But then you remember that these things are now on the Internet and they're there forever. So the story is one of the most embarrassing moments in my life when I thought and pretended and acted like I had everything under control and nothing could have been further from the truth.

I was in high school. Some of you thinking, where is this going? Is that in the Bible? No, high school is not in the Bible, but my life is reflected here. And so what happened was I was at high school.

We had a basketball tournament, and it was at Elon College Gym. Back in those days, it was, you know, small gym. And we had our tournament there and our game was one of the early games. And so I had, I had been brazen enough to arrange for a date to go with me to the game.

Kathy knows about it, it's okay. And so as we go to this game, I come out and the parking lot, because it's a multi high school tournament going on, the parking lot is just jammed. I mean, there are people everywhere, cars parked in, double parked and all kinds of stuff. And it was ripping rain, I mean, just park pouring down. And so by the time my dad and I got to my little car, it was a cute little 1965 Mustang.

My cousins had at it and then it had been passed down the line and I was getting to drive it now. And it was a great looking car, wonderful to have there. But there were a couple of features that needed some help. One, the fact is that it was pouring down rain was not helped in any way by the fact that the wipers did. It didn't work that well.

So that was kind of a problem because they're getting in the car, can't see around because the rain is coming down so hard. And then I remembered the wipers don't work so well, but the defroster doesn't work at all. And so it's wintertime. And so you got all that rain building up on the windshield and fogging the windshield up. And then that other problem with cars everywhere blocking me in.

And I had no way to get out. But I've got a date in the car, I've got everything under control. I'm sure she's at that point looking for the nearest exit, trying to figure out if I get away with this crazy guy. But I'm thinking, okay, I can do this. And so I roll down my window, remember pouring down rain.

I roll down my window and stick my head out the window, getting pelted with the rain. And I've still got it under control. Don't forget that part. And so I look out there and I try one direction and it's blocked off. And I try another direction, it's blocked off and I try another way and I went, glory, I do have it under control.

There's a gravel road over there. And there was a new dorm built out beside the gym several hundred yards over there. And I'm thinking, there's a road that leads out to that dorm. This is fantastic. So I head that way, head out the window.

Young people do not drive that way. Dogs can, people can't. And so I'm heading out that way and turn onto that little gravel road, and there's two headlights coming the other direction, thinking, this is great, Got this figured out. And then that gravel road turned into a sidewalk.

And the two headlights of the car coming my way weren't headlights at all. They were the lights on either side of the doors of the dorm back there. And at about 15 yards, I'm thinking, I don't have it under control at all. But I can't admit it. And so I'm thinking, well, all I have to do is just turn back around.

Well, the field between the gym and the dorm had been freshly plowed and planted with nice grass seed and straw. So I turned off the sidewalk up to the axle in the mud. So you get the idea that I was impressing this girl. Not nearly as much as I had to impress my dad to come pick us up. There was no way to get out of that mud.

And not nearly as impressed as the university officials were the next morning to look out and think, hey, how drunk was that guy? What in the world? How. What is that car doing in the middle of that field? What?

You know, they had to wait a few days for the frost to harden the ground so that they could hook it up to a wrecker and pull it out of there without completely messing up the field.

I didn't have it under control. I did not. Now, question for you, nothing quite that dramatic, but are you pretending that you've got it under control right now in some area of your life, that you really don't have it under control at all? You'd want people to think you do. You want to convince yourself that you do.

You feel you're somewhat obligated because you're independent individual, you able to handle this yourself, but you know, deep in your heart, you don't know what's going to happen next. And the Lord Jesus comes into your world in a sermon and with a book full of illustrations at this point that, hey, you don't have to be in control because I am and you belong to me. Is that reassuring to you? Jesus is the blessed controller of all things. He is the sovereign Lord.

And when I understand that and when I know Jesus in that way, it revises the way I think about everything. It changes my perspective on what it is that I'm worried about, what it is that I'm fretting over, what it is that I'm praying about and what I'm anxiously trying to deal with or come up with solutions in my own life. And the Lord just comes into this whole world and says, look, there's various ways of dealing with all those things, but only one right way, and that is to yield completely to the sovereignty of God and allow Christ to be the Lord that he really is. And it may not be some silly thing like driving into the mud in the parking lot. It may be significant for you.

It may be a health issue. It may be the elders and pastors and deacons and folks here are trying to figure out how to. How do we maintain control of the ministry of this church in these months when we're without a lead pastor? How are we gonna keep things under control? You're not.

Relax. God doesn't want you to. He is what the sovereign Lord. And you can relax in his presence and let him be what he is, and you can become what he wants you to be. A follower, the blessed controller of all things.

Now, what are the responses we can give to that? Well, the first response is, well, that's. That's cute and everything, but I still want control.

I'm going to do it. I'm going to be controlling. Second is, not only do I still want to be in control, but I don't trust him to be in control the way I want him to be. It's okay in spiritual stuff, but this is real life here. And I don't trust him to handle this the way I think it ought to be handled.

The third is, I really like to do it, but preachers are always talking about stuff, but I don't know how to do what they're saying to do. So I want to trust him and I want to rely on the sovereign Lord, but I don't know how to do that.

And the fourth response is the biblical response, the one Christ asked for. He says, I just give him control. I surrender it all to him. I just give him control. Well, let's break these down and pick up the first one first.

I still want to be in control of my own life. I still want that. But you're a follower of Christ. Yes, but. And then you put in the exception clauses.

I still get to determine. And then you have a list of things that are not in the realm of things that are under the control of Christ. And you have all these ideas about what should and should not be there. Romans 11:34 and 35 says this. Who has known the mind of the Lord?

Who became his counselor? Which is a pretty indicting question, isn't it? Did. All of a sudden we become wiser than God and we get to advise him about what he's supposed to Be doing. Who has the mind of Christ?

We have the mind of Christ, but we don't have the brain, the. The aptitude, the understanding, the great wisdom of God himself. We don't have that. Who has known the mind of the Lord? Who has become his counselor?

Who was first given to him that it might be paid back to him again? He is the sovereign Lord. He tells us here. And therefore, because he is a sovereign Lord, he is the blessed controller of all those things that we think we have to control. And he's saying, no, you don't.

I never expected you to. I am the one who controls that. You need to yield control to me. But what happens if I still want control? The first thing I have to recognize is that God does not need my advice.

Have you ever thought about that? The way we pray sometimes. God, I've got this problem, and here's how I think you ought to solve it. And the Lord's going like, oh, excuse me. I thought I was God there for a moment.

It's you. You're the one who's in charge. No, we don't have to advise God about anything. He knows all things. Do we believe that or we don't believe that?

But if he knows all things, then I don't advise him about anything. Who has known the mind of the Lord? Chapter 2, verse 11. It says, who among men knows the thoughts of man except the spirit of the man which is in him? Even so, the thoughts of God, no one knows except the spirit of God.

How dare we frankly think that we're supposed to give God advice? God, I'll help you out with this one. Here's what I think you ought to do. In other words, kind of going like, aren't you cute? You know, we make these pronouncements, these declarations of what we will and won't do and what we can and can't do and how we're going to fix this and fix that, because we are in control, you know?

And the Lord says, you know, I don't need you to advise me. I'm okay. Even in your praying. You don't have to give me advice.

I'm the blessed controller of all things. Trust me in this. So he doesn't need advice, but he also doesn't need our assistance. We're gonna help God out. Isn't God blessed to have people like us?

Because we're just so wonderful and we're so trustworthy and we've got such capacity to do such great things? We can really help God out. I went To a funeral one time, and the person who was talking about the deceased was saying, like, oh, he had this capacity to always be helping. God did not know God needed help.

They were trying to say something nice, and they meant it as nice. But God doesn't need our assistance. What happens when we assist God? One of us is unnecessary.

It's not him. You remember when your kids were smaller and they come out to help you do a project, Whatever the project was, you count on being able to multiply the length of time it takes to do the project by at least four, because you're having to kind of. No, no, not that. Okay, let me. You know.

And then they're doing what they love to do. It's not making up their bed or helping with the dishes or, you know, doing anything like that. They want to pound nails into something or dig holes. I don't know. But anyway, that's.

That's what they want to do. And so you're trying to be nice to them and let them help you, but you know that they're getting in the way. And then you offer assistance to say, now let me show you how to do that. Let me show you how I do that. And their response is, what?

I can do it myself. I know none of you have ever had children say that to you, but that's the mentality that sometimes we, as followers of Christ and children of the King, we have that response to him. God, I know how to do this. Don't bother me. I'm doing it myself.

I'm helping you out. Could you just let me do that? God's going like, I don't really need your help, so I don't need your advice and I don't need your assistance. God doesn't need that. Now, what we have to also understand from man's perspective is that man never needs to interfere.

He never needs to get to the place where he's controlling things or he's doubting who God is and what he can do. And yet we find ourselves falling into all those traps. If you're managing a business or you're managing a ministry, what happens is, if you interfere in that which you are managing and you've delegated a project to someone on your team, if you're in a management position at a team, you delegate it to them, and then you come back in and say, no, no, no, let me show you. And then you do it for them. They're going like, ooh, I thought you delegated that to me.

Well, yeah, I did, but, you know, There's a certain way we've got to do it, and they're interfering and they're doing all this, and then they come back a second time and you're going like, okay, you know, you delegated to me. I tried to do it. You stepped in. I tried to do it, and you stepped in again. Well, here's what happens.

Leadership. People will tell you this. If you step in the third time as the manager there, you just reclaimed it. It's yours from that point forward. They're not going to touch it anymore.

It's going like, you keep interfering. You want to do it, by all means, keep on doing it. What we do is we try to interfere with what God is trying to do, and we mess things up that way we get in the way of what he's trying to accomplish. Sometimes we do it with all the best intentions in the world, but our interference actually gets in the way of what God is trying to accomplish. We do it particularly when people are in trouble or when they're struggling with an issue and they come to us for counsel or help, and they're saying, I really prayed about this, and I believe God showed me to do this, and they announced some ungodly, unbiblical solution to their problem.

Then we have a choice. Support the team, support the individual, or support the Lord in his word. I've been praying about it, and I know that God wants me to divorce my spouse. Timeout. What?

God showed you something that he said no to? Here. How's that working? Well, I prayed about it, and I'm supposed to start giving more money of a stewardship nature. And I believe God's called me to give 1% of my income to the things of God.

You're a tenth of the way, right. You almost got it. But do we placate? Do we Molly coddle? Do we just kind of help people be disobedient by interfering with what God's trying to teach them?

By interfering and offering our advice, our perspective, and taking them off the track. And what will happen frequently, and you've seen it in church, I have, Is that people will go from person to person throughout the church to try to find somebody who will justify their disobedience to God. Don't be that person who helps them do that by interfering with what God's trying to teach them. A lot of times the message people get into are because they violated biblical principles or they complicated their lives by doing something that was disobedient to God's word. And then we come in to try to bail them out.

We're not helping them.

There's a book called When Hurting Helps. I mean, helping hurts. And we've got to be careful of that. We're interfering with what God's trying to do. So he says, we don't need to be interfering.

Let God be in control. Let him do what he's doing. We want to be there. If you empathetic. We want to love, we want to care, we want to sympathize, we want to be compassionate.

But we don't want to interfere with what lessons God's trying to teach us in terms of directing our paths. And then that next thing of that control thing. You know any control freaks? If you think, well, I don't know any, you might be him, you might be that control freak that. We keep trying to keep things under our control where we can reign them in as we want.

We. We have them where we like them, we like our lives. So we don't actually have to pray. Praying is just a privilege that we enjoy as a believer, but we don't. We want to get to the place where we don't have to pray anymore because we got everything else under control.

And the only time we really have to pray, have to pray, have to pray is when we don't have things under control. And then we cry out to God, and he's going like, no, no, no. You don't have control over most of the stuff you think you've got control over.

Let go of the reins. Let me be the one who doesn't cause you to lose control. Let me be the one who causes you to want to give up control. Because if we keep trying to control things, we want to control the narrative surrounding that thing.

You think it's an accident that the media is trying to control the narratives? We believe how they position pieces of information. Do you think the universities and academic institutions are just accidentally trying to control our way of thinking and shaping the way we process information? No. And the scriptures, God is saying, there's a way to do this.

There's a way to yield control to me, where you get my narrative, which is true truth, and therefore you can walk according to that truth. You don't have to control things around you. That's what I do. That's my job. I'm the Lord, you're not.

So you don't need to interfere. You don't need to control. And lastly, you don't need to doubt that I am able to do all things well. I believe most of what I know about God. But there's certain things I just.

My experience tells me that he's not going to come through because I want him to do A, B, C, or D. And he's doing F, G, and H. I don't want FG and H. I want A, B, and C. Why is he doing something I don't want him to do? Because he's God and you're not. He knows what you don't know.

And so we begin to doubt if it doesn't go the way we think it ought to go. And we place our will above his will and think we're in charge instead of him being in charge. We had staff meetings regularly when I was at Providence, and on Tuesday mornings we'd have a little devotional time with the staff. And we asked one of the guys with the maintenance team one time to do the devotions that morning, which scared the daylights out of him, frankly, because he's in a room with a bunch of pastors and other Christian leaders and stuff, and he's the guy that is doing maintenance. And he's thinking, I don't know what to do here.

We're going like, yeah, you do. Your perspectives are good. They're solid. So take this. And so he comes in and he has announced his text and his topic.

Today, he's going to be talking about the sovereignty of God. Something easy you're going to talk about. In 15 minutes, you're going to explain the sovereignty of God. This ought to be rich, friends. It was better than rich.

I'm still quoting him this 20 years later. He went through the Scriptures and talked about the various aspects of God's sovereignty. And the bottom line, he said, is this. He said, here's what it is. Here's how I understand sovereignty.

God knows stuff you don't know. I'm thinking like, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. That's the prize right there. He knows stuff you don't know. He has power you don't have.

He has perspectives you'll never understand. And he sees the end from the beginning and everything in between. He's the Lord and we're not. We don't have to doubt Him. And so when we have this idea that I'm still in control, I do not want to yield that to the Lord.

He said, I am the blessed controller. Whether you yield to me or not doesn't change the fact that I'm still the Sovereign Lord and you're still not.

So the second response after saying that, well, I don't know. I still Want to be in control. The second is I don't trust him to be in control. Frankly, that's why I still want to be in control, because I don't want to let go of things because the wheels might fall off. I don't trust him to keep it in the road here.

What's happening here? Well, there's some reasons that we find ourselves confused and thinking, well, I don't think I can trust him. One is that he might not be as interested in my problem as I am.

I'm living this problem. I go to bed at night, it's on my mind. I'll wake up in the middle of the night, it's there. I finally get up in the morning, start my day, it's there. Middle of the day, having a cup of coffee, There it is again.

I talked to some friends, and what do I want to talk about? Boom, boom, boom. This is it. I got to talk about it. I don't think God has that same level of interest in this problem as I do.

I'm absorbed with it. And he's the sovereign God. He's got all this other stuff on his mind. He possibly could think about what I'm talking about, but I don't think he has as much interest in this as I do. You ever thought that way?

Probably not. Have you ever acted that way? Probably. So God is not as interested as I am. Are you kidding me?

He's not going to give this the priority that I would. So what's our solution? I just don't trust him to be in control because he doesn't care about this as much as I do. Friend, be assured, from him to him and for him are all things. Relax.

He's got more of a concern about it than you do. The difference is he's not wringing his hands and losing sleep over it. Because he is the Lord and He already knows how to control it in a way that brings the greatest glory to him and the greatest good in our lives. So we don't think he's interested as we want him to be. Second problem, we don't think he's as capable maybe as he needs to be.

I know God would love to help, but there's just some things even the Lord can't handle. Oh, really? Could you start naming some of them? What can God not handle? All things are possible with God, except for.

And then we have our short list of things that we don't believe God is capable of doing anything about. He may even want to in his goodness. He may desire to. But there's a limit to his power. He's omnipotent, but kind of almost omnipotent, not all the way.

And so there are some things that are limitations on him. And he can't do certain things. And this one thing that I'm trying to control myself is one of those areas I don't believe he can control. Cause he's not capable of doing it. Is God able.

Yeah, he is able to do all things. There's nothing impossible with him. And so when we say, well, I still wanna maintain control because I don't trust him. Part of what we're saying is he doesn't have the interest in it. He doesn't have the power to really do anything about it.

That's a crazy thing. And here's the killer. He might have something different in mind for the solution that I want him to have. He might want me to do this instead of that. And I don't want to do that.

I want to do this. And I want God to bless this and ignore that. What are you talking about? Well, what if God asks you to forgive somebody who really wounded you years ago and now every time you hear their name, the hair on the back of your neck stands up? God's going, like, you do understand you're in prison to them.

They don't know or even care that you are going through this. But you have locked yourself into. Let me give you a forgiving heart. Let's walk through this together and then be done with it. Let's get that image out of your mind.

Let's walk down the memory hall of your life and let's take that picture down and put it under the cross and let the blood of Christ cover it. Let's do that. Yeah, but God, I've nursed this grudge for so long, I wouldn't know how to walk without it. Let me be in control of that.

I don't want that solution, Lord. I want to be mad at him. Well, okay, but that's not letting me have control. What about the truth? Well, I don't trust that the truth is the best way to go about this.

I feel like we need to kind of shave off the edges of the truth and give a part of it, but, you know, protect myself by not telling the whole story here. So I know your solution is tell the truth, but I don't think that's the best way here, God. So I'm not sure I'm willing to pray about you taking control of that if it means me telling the Whole truth and nothing but the truth. So help me, sovereign Lord, what happens if God calls you to a ministry or calls you to a certain thing that he wants you to do and you're going like, I knew it. I knew if I gave my life to Christ and I said everything and anything and everything and wherever you go and whenever you want me to go, I knew it was going to come.

He's going to make me a missionary in Africa. I know it. No, but he might ask you to share Christ with your neighbor. He might ask you to be a mediator between two friends who are having a hard time and you didn't want to get involved. He might call you to teach a Bible study somewhere.

He might call you to something that you'd be very uncomfortable with. And he's going like, let me control. And why don't you just follow where I'm leading you? Let's do that. And so the people who are basically saying, I don't trust God to be in control the way I want him to be in control, they find themselves in a dilemma.

What if I don't like the way he wants to do it, so therefore I don't trust him? I've got to hold on to that one man. Do we see that happen in our lives? Well, there's a third thing that happens in the response to his sovereignty, and that is I really want to, but I don't know how. I don't know how to give him control.

So I guess my only option is because I don't know how, I just keep it to myself, I'll just hold on to that control because I know how I can manage it. I don't know how to give it to him so he can manage it. So I'll just keep managing it by saying I've got it under control. And he knows, and I know that that's not true.

And so we say, well, what am I supposed to do? I don't know actually how to do that. Well, he says, I've addressed that issue in the Word, haven't I? Probably. I think there'd be something in the Bible about that somewhere.

Yeah. How about James. Let's start with James, chapter one, verse five. How about this one? If any of you lacks wisdom, what are you supposed to do?

Just give up? No. If any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God.

What do you mean, ask? That means, why not pray? If anyone of you lacks wisdom, do you lack the wisdom to know how to give him control? I don't know how to do that? Ask him.

He'll show you. It may not be a full blown 10 page outline of what that looks like, but it'll be the lamp in your feet, the light into your path. You'll know what to do next and why that's important. The rest of the verse says, you ask of God and he will give to all men generously and without reproach. It'll be given to Him.

He's not gonna make fun of you, he's not gonna mock you, he's not gonna reproach you for not knowing. He's saying, what I wanna do is give generously to you. I want you to have all the wisdom you need. I'm the sovereign God. I want you to know that about me.

And know that I'm the blessed controller of all things, not the autocratic, mean spirited controller of all things who's gonna smash you into a wall. And I am the blessed controller who wants to bring joy into your life as one who is being transformed into the image of Christ. And you need to know him. And this is what you need to know about Him. He is the blessed controller of all things.

You remember Jehoshaphat a few weeks ago when I was here, he said he was seeing the enemy coming and he didn't know what to do. Lord, we have seen the enemy. We don't know what to do, but our eyes are on you.

How does that, frankly, work out for us, Lord, when I don't know what to do, I know what to do. Pray, ask and he will give you that wisdom. And so there's that group that will say, yes, the Lord, I know you're sovereign, but I don't know how to yield to you. We'll ask him and he'll show you how to do it. Then there's that fourth response, which is the biblical response, and that is, I give him control.

That sounds so simple, doesn't it? I just give him control. Okay, sermon done. No, I mean, what, how much? How much what?

Ask him what he tells us in this passage. He says, listen, the depth of the riches. This is Romans 11:33. The depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and the knowledge of God. How unsearchable are his judgments, how unfathomable is his way.

He has so much more than we know, so much more. And so what he wants us to understand. I want you trusting that when your confidence is in me and your knowledge is about me, that I am the only true and sovereign Lord. What that means is that you get access to my riches. All the depth of the riches of God, they're available to be able to be brought into the work that God's looking to do in your life.

What does he need to do to control it? He, he just brings all the depth of his riches to bear. Well, it's gonna be a costly process. God's got riches that you never heard of. The depth of his riches is there for you.

Then he also says, his perspective is there for you. You have the mind of Christ. You can think Christianly, you can think biblically. You can think in a manner that is pleasing to the Father who has given you the mind of Christ so that you can discern spiritual issues according to His Word. And, and he says, therefore I want you to rely on the perspective God has through Christ.

He has given you his wisdom, his knowledge, his judgment, and those are the things that drive the perspective of Christ. Therefore I can rely on what his perspective is and not be stuck with the tiny pea brained perspective that I have. I get more when I get Christ than I ever could get by being in control of myself. He says, recognize this unsearchable wisdom, the richness of wisdom and knowledge in Christ available for you. And then he says, my ways are there for you, and those ways are good ways.

Who can legitimately question the ways of the Lord Jesus, who says, I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except by Me. He is the way we can trust. His ways are unfathomable. We can't plumb the depths of them.

We can't even get to the bottom, thinking, what in the world has he done and how has he done it? We'll never know until we get to heaven and see that time when you were so bent out of shape because the light went through two cycles and you're sitting there, just praise the Lord, you know, and then you didn't realize that God saw something you didn't see. It was a tractor trailer that was out of control and would have plowed right through you if you had gone in that first cycle. You didn't see that. You didn't know anything about it.

You never will until you get to heaven. You say, wow, that would have been a mess. You never know a lot of the stuff that God's protected you from in his ways, walking in his ways, confidently recognizing, lord, I will trust in you. Even when life looks unfair and unjust and it looks mean and looks crazy, I will trust you. You, not my own perspective.

Your ways, Lord, praise God, they're not my Ways your thoughts are not my thoughts. Isaiah says, how do I yield these things to you? And so what he wants us to recognize is that he has the depths of his reason working behind what he does and when he does it and how he does it. And we don't have access to any of that until he shows it to us. So we're going to trust our eyes and walk by sight, or are we going to trust his eyes and perspective and walk by faith?

Well, we know the answer to that. So here's what he wants us to see.

He is in control.

And everything that touches him and everything that he has the hand upon is under his control. Which is how much? All of it.

All of it. And so with our eyes on him, what does he give us? The privilege of being able to say, Jesus, if you're in control, I don't have to be.

I can do what it says in the Scriptures. I can, like Peter says, cast all my anxieties on you because I know you care for me. I can take all the burdens that I've been carrying, and it's wearing me out. And I can say, lord, you don't intend for me to carry this. This is for you.

He says, there's no burden to me. I will carry it. When I was a kid, we used to go on family vacations. I had three brothers, and we'd be in the car, and my parents figured out that it's better with four boys to drive through the night to get to where you're going. And so we'd all get in our jammies and get in the car, which seemed very exciting, I guess.

And we'd be in the car and we'd have our pillows and blankets and stuff, and we'd go off in the night, and before very long, all four of us would be sound asleep. But there was also that moment when in the middle of the night, you wake up and you're disoriented. You ever had that happen? Where am I? You know, you're trying to sort out what's going on, and you wake up and you recognize, these are my brothers.

They still all smell bad. And they're right here, and they're all around me. They're not supposed to be in my room, in my bed. Why am I sleeping? What's going on?

And then you kind of start getting your bearings on things, and you realize what's happening around me. And then it dawns on. You don't have any control over where you are and what you're doing. And then you look up and there's your dad behind the wheel driving, and it's like, oh, back to sleep. Why?

I don't need to be in control if my daddy's at the wheel. I don't have to worry about where we're going or how we're going to get there or who's going to drive or whether we need to get gas or how much the food's going to cost when we stop. I don't have to worry about any of that because my daddy's in control. Jesus says to each one of us today, you don't have to worry because your Abba Father is in control. And he has allowed me to reveal that control to you because I am the blessed controller of all things and I am the one that you're to know and you are to know this very thing.

I am the Sovereign Lord and there is nothing too great for me. Is that assuring? That's encouraging. Word. When we leave here today, there's a.

There should be. There's offering boxes in the box. There should be a dumping ground in the back for burdens. It's kind of hard to see them. Just.

I'm dumping my burdens when I leave this room because I don't need to carry them because Christ is lifted them up. There's an old hymn, burdens are lifted at Calvary. What a great truth that Christ has relieved us and now he's saying, trust me, I, the Sovereign Lord, will be with you and will carry you. And I will be the blessed controller so that you don't have to worry about having anything under control, because it's under my control. Let's pray.

Father, with all humility, we do bow before you as men and women and boys and girls who are at a place where we've been taught by the world around us and by our own experience and by our own nature that we better be in control of our own destiny or else we're going to be losers and we will always be behind and we'll never be able to catch up. And so we fight to get control and then hold onto it. Lord, you're calling us to something radical and that is to be crucified with Christ so that it is no longer I who live with all my control issues. It's no longer I who live, but Christ living in me that matters. The one living in me is my blessed controller of all things in my life.

You are the Sovereign Lord. May we learn that this day is a day of freedom for us, release for us and joy, unabounding. I mean, abounding in every way. Because you are the one who has made it possible for us to walk in the security of knowing that we're in the arms of our Father. We thank you for all of this and praise you for those who will be released this very day because of the truth that's here in your word about these things.

In Christ's name, amen.