Out of Our Control

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When I was in my early 20s and living in Blacksburg, my best friend was working on his pilot’s license at the little Blacksburg airport.
One thing that most folks don’t realize about spaceflight is just how much of what happens in a rocket is out of the control of the astronauts who are onboard.
Once he got to a certain point in his training, my friend was able to take me up with him in the little single-engined Cessna airplane.
My job was very simple, and Bob made it clear to me that I was not to deviate from the simple set of duties he had assigned to me. I had two things to do: Sit still and shut up.
Now most of us wouldn’t allow most folks to talk to us that way, but you know how it is with friends: There’s a certain degree plainness of speech and behavior that we accept with our friends, a plainness that perhaps we even come to expect among those to whom we are closest.
So, those were my jobs: Sit still. And shut up.
Contrary to what you might think, I can do those two things, and I realized I could do them simultaneously as I looked out the window of an airplane that in those moments didn’t seem much larger than the little balsa-wood ones I used to wind up and toss into the air. And I could be especially quiet as I remembered the eventual fate of all of those fragile, little balsa-wood airplanes.
I was in the (hopefully) capable hands of my 21-year-old best friend, and he had literally minutes of flying experience. He was in complete control.
Now the thing about flying, whether it’s in a large airplane or a small one, is that generally things are OK as long as you are in the air. There are some exceptions to this rule, but for the most part, it’s the ground that will ruin your day in an airplane.
So once we got off the ground and into the air, I was able to enjoy looking down onto Blacksburg and the surrounding area and even revel in the excitement of being up in the sky.
When my friend said a few minutes later that he wanted to do some touch-and-goes, I can only imagine that my brain must have been affected by the thinner atmosphere up among the clouds. I said, “Sure!”
As I watched from the little windows, I could see the ground coming up to meet us. I could hear my friend calling for clearance from the little airport control room, and I could hear the sound of my breath.
And then I realized that I couldn’t hear my breath anymore, because I had stopped breathing, so I forced myself to exhale and then inhale, and suddenly our wheels had touched the tarmac, and Bob throttled the engine back up and pulled back on the controls, and then we were back in the air, just as nice as you please.
“Good job,” I said, forgetting for a moment that my jobs were to sit still and shut up.
And soon we were headed back around for another go, and I was thinking that this is all easy peasy, and so I wasn’t even staring wide-eyed at the ground coming up to meet us this time.
I was watching the scenery and thinking how cool it was to have a friend who could fly an airplane and wondering if my connection to an actual young pilot might help me meet girls, and then I heard Bob say, “Oh, no!”
Or at least words to that effect. I know it was two words, but the truth is that I’m paraphrasing what he actually said.
Bob said, “Oh no!” and I suddenly forgot both of my jobs, and yet somehow, in the midst of my rant about those not being words a young pilot should use in the presence of a passenger and in the midst of all the dramatic gestures I was using to punctuate this little tirade, we touched our wheels to the ground and then took off again without meeting our unfortunate end.
Bob was in control. I was not.
One of those Christian-y things that you hear during times of trouble is that God is in control. I have said this myself many times during the present coronavirus crisis, and I have probably said it in countless other contexts throughout my Christian life.
The reason I keep saying this is that I believe it to be true. And this belief is at the very core of what sets Christian apart from unbelievers.
The thing is that we all want to believe that we are in control. And the very thing that tends to cause so many people to turn their backs on the message of the gospel is this matter of control, this idea that we can create our own destiny and that the result will somehow be something good.
That’s the mistake the Adam and Eve made in the Garden of Eden. They had perfect communion and complete peace with the eternal and holy God who had created them in His own image, but they chose to create their own destiny by eating from the one tree that had been forbidden to them.
In the context of the story of creation, the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil represented the authority to define the very concepts of good and evil. So by eating this forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve were effectively trying to snatch from God Himself the authority for which only He is worthy.
Adam and Eve tried to take the controls of the airplane out of God’s hands, and things went very badly, very quickly.
Ever since that day, mankind has been under the illusion that we are in control.
The people of Babel built a tower to prove it, but God confused their language and scattered them across the earth. King Solomon of the Old Testament thought he had it all, but God showed him that it was all vanity.
The people of the Israel thought that, having entered the Promised Land, they could turn their backs on the God who had brought them there, so God then brought the Assyrians and the Babylonians to take them away into exile.
The Romans and the Pharisees of Israel thought they could hold onto their power by crucifying the very Son of God, but God raised Him from the dead and promised Him all the nations of the earth as His inheritance, and the ends of the earth as His possession.
In the end, we control only the things that God allows us to control, and in these days of worry and fear over global pandemic, it is wise for us to understand that our very lives are in God’s hands and not in our own.
If you have your Bible, please turn with me to Luke, chapter 12. I want to read to you a parable that Jesus told in a lesson about greed, but I want to point out what we can learn from the parable about who controls the very days of our lives.
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Now, as I said, Jesus told this parable to answer a question that had revealed greed, one that showed the covetous heart of a man who had asked Jesus to intercede into a dispute the man had with his brother about their inheritance.
What we see in the parable is that the rich man had a year in which he had harvested a bumper crop, and so, thinking only of himself, he decided to build bigger barns to hold his harvest, with the intention of engaging in a life of ease and comfort.
This man thought he was in complete control of his destiny.
But God knew the number of the days of the man’s life, and so He knew that the man’s efforts to give himself all of the pleasures of life were to be in vain.
Luke 12:20 NASB95
“But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your soul is required of you; and now who will own what you have prepared?’
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Even before each of us was born, God knew us, and He has known from the beginning the days that He has ordained for us. David talked about this in .
Ps 139
Psalm 139:14 NASB95
I will give thanks to You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Wonderful are Your works, And my soul knows it very well.
Psalm 139:15 NASB95
My frame was not hidden from You, When I was made in secret, And skillfully wrought in the depths of the earth;
Psalm 139:16 NASB95
Your eyes have seen my unformed substance; And in Your book were all written The days that were ordained for me, When as yet there was not one of them.
So what are we to do with this? What does it mean to us?
David’s son, Solomon spent much of his life living as the fool in this parable in the Gospel of Luke. He pursued every hedonistic pleasure he could pursue, and his conclusion was that they were all vanity. Nothing gave him contentment.
So in the conclusion to the Book of Ecclesiastes, in which he gave an account of his pursuit of contentment in life, Solomon wrote the following:
Ecclesiastes 12:13 NASB95
The conclusion, when all has been heard, is: fear God and keep His commandments, because this applies to every person.
This is much the same lesson that Jesus was teaching in the parable we are studying today. Look back at verse 21.
Luke 12:21 NASB95
“So is the man who stores up treasure for himself, and is not rich toward God.”
You see, we were made to be rich toward God, to bring God glory by putting our faith in Him and not ourselves, by recognizing that He is in control and not us, by demonstrating our love for Him by loving one another.
In the context of this part of the Luke’s gospel, Jesus is saying that our task in life is not to build bigger barns to store up treasures for ourselves but to use the blessings we have been given — including our very lives — to honor God.
The rich man’s problem wasn’t so much what he had done but what he had failed to do.
When Jesus said that God had called this man a fool, he brought to His Jewish listeners’ minds the Old Testament context of the word. In the Old Testament, a fool was someone who disbelieved God, someone who held God in disregard.
And so the rich man here is someone who refused to believe that there would be a time when he would have to answer for his actions and for his disbelief.
What this means to us is that we are called, just as every person throughout history has been called, to turn to God in faith.
In the Old Testament, we see a picture of this faith in Abraham. You may recall that Abraham was 75, and his wife, Sarah, was barren when God promised that they would have a son through whom a nation would be born.
For the next 25 years, Abraham never stopped believing, and God ultimately fulfilled His promise with the birth of Isaac.
Scripture tells us that Abraham believed in the Lord, and God counted it to him as righteousness.
Here’s the thing: We all want to control our destinies. We want to believe that we can earn our way into heaven. We want to believe that we can be good enough, kind enough, or generous enough to justify ourselves before God.
But God is perfect. God is holy. God is just. And none of us — not even Abraham — could stand before God based on anything we have done.
We are all sinners. We inherited sin from our first parents, Adam and Eve, and because we are sinners, we have all sinned. We have fallen short of the standard set by the God who made us in His image. We have rebelled against Him in ways great and small, and even the smallest act of rebellion separates us from Him.
We have no way to save ourselves, no way to bring ourselves back into the fellowship with God for which we were created, and so we would be eternally lost without someone to save us.
And that’s why God sent His only Son, Jesus, into the world. Jesus took on our sins on a cross at Calvary. He paid the debt that we owe God for our sins, and He became the sacrifice to satisfy God’s justified wrath for our rebellion against Him.
God then demonstrated that He had accepted Jesus’ sacrifice as sufficient to pay our sin-debt by raising Him from the dead.
And then God took Jesus back into heaven, where He sits at His Father’s right hand, awaiting the day when He will be sent back to gather those who have followed Him in faith and take them home to live with Him as adopted sons and daughters of God.
The faith to which we are called is the same faith to which Abraham was called — faith that God will do what He said through His Son that He would do. You all have heard the verse, but let’s read it together:
John 3:16 ESV
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
We want to believe that we are in control of everything in our lives. But each of us at various times in our lives is confronted with the fact that not only is our physical death inescapable, it often comes when we least expect it.
A young person dies in a motorcycle accident. A father of young children is killed on his way to work. A mother dies during childbirth. A friend succumbs to a virus for which there is no cure.
In his teaching after telling the parable of the rich fool, Jesus asked a question that should remind each of us just how little control we have over our lives.
Luke 12:25 NASB95
“And which of you by worrying can add a single hour to his life’s span?
We are a people consumed with the idea that we can somehow cheat death — or at least put it off indefinitely — with rigid diets and exercise regimes.
We hide the natural progression of aging from ourselves with cosmetics and plastic surgery.
We build larger barns for ourselves with the intention of living the life of pleasure and comfort, not recognizing that the cancer diagnosis comes next year, that a heart attack can end the life of even those who had thought themselves to be healthy, that some new virus can sweep the globe before science even understands its origins.
When Adam and Eve ate from the forbidden tree, they brought death into the world. God had warned them it would be so. And death reigned from that moment. The Book of Genesis makes the point vividly.
It starts with son, Cain, killing his brother, Abel. And then, in the next chapter we see a long list of Adam’s descendants, and what’s repeated for each of them (with the exception of one who walked with God) is that they died.
Genesis 5:5 NASB95
So all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years, and he died.
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Genesis 5:7 NASB95
Then Seth lived eight hundred and seven years after he became the father of Enosh, and he had other sons and daughters.
Genesis 5:8 NASB95
So all the days of Seth were nine hundred and twelve years, and he died.
Genesis 5:11 NASB95
So all the days of Enosh were nine hundred and five years, and he died.
Genesis 5:14 NASB95
So all the days of Kenan were nine hundred and ten years, and he died.
And it goes on from there.
Death reigned. But then Jesus came, and He lived a sinless life to show us the character of His Father and to show us how we had been made to live.
And then, at the climax of His story, Jesus was nailed to a cross made from another tree. He was the Lamb of God, sent to make Himself a sacrifice through which our sins could be forgiven.
A tree that had been cut and shaped into an instrument of death became the tree of life for those who would come and give themselves to Jesus there.
None of us can add a single hour to our lives, but by placing your faith in Jesus Christ as the one who can save you from the penalty you owe for your sins, you can have ETERNAL life — life in God’s kingdom the way it was meant to be.
Folks, this world was never meant to have viruses or cancer or heart attacks or wars or suffering. All of those things are the result of our rebellion against the holy God who made us to be like Him. WE brought death into the world, and no matter how we try to eradicate it, we continue to fail.
“Oh, no!” Those are the words of the driver who runs the red light and smashes into another vehicle. Those are the words of the diplomat who fails to stop the war. Those are the words of the scientist who discovers a powerful new source of energy that is then turned into the ultimate weapon.
“Oh, no!” Those are the words of rich fools who build bigger barns and then find that they have lost everything when they stand before God.
As He hung on that cross on Calvary, we might have expected Jesus to utter those same words. “Oh, no! This wasn’t how it was supposed to end.”
But His words were these: “It is finished.”
He had completed the work that He had been sent to do. All had gone as His Father had planned from before the foundation of time. Jesus had obediently offered Himself as a sacrifice for mankind, and He would be raised from the dead on the third day.
All that remained — all that remains for you today — is for you to choose: Will you accept His sacrifice on your behalf and follow Him in faith that only HIS righteousness can save you?
In the end, the choice is yours. This is what you control. Right here. Right now.
You cannot add a single hour to your life, but you CAN choose eternal life with the one who gave His life for you, the One who will rule over heaven and earth. You CAN choose to put your faith in Him. You CAN choose to give Him the controls and let Him fly the airplane.
Some who hear this message will never choose to follow Jesus in faith, and when they stand before God one day, I imagine that what will go through their minds is this: “Oh, no!”
But for those who do follow Jesus in faith, there will be different words. There will be a great chorus in heaven, one “like the voice of a great multitude and like the sound of many waters and like the sound of mighty peals of thunder, saying,”
“Hallelujah! For the Lord our God, the Almighty, reigns.”
You have control over this, now. What will you choose?
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