Grace Community Christian Church

 

Archived Things Above

Take Your Hands Off the Controls (12/3/01)

Christmas is coming up, & for a lot of people, it's a pretty hectic time of year in the best of times. Throw in a war, a slumpish economy, a few relational disasters & some serious health problems, & you've got the makings of a major panic! Let the story below remind you of Who's always in control, & may your faith factor be at least as high as your hecticity factor!

Susan Smart wrote in Campus Life about an experience she had in her third solo flight ever as a young pilot. Her instructor had asked her to practice recovering from stalls (very important in learning to fly) because she always panicked. So this time she was determined to hang tough. But she was in the stall too long, and the next thing she knew, her Cessna 150 was spinning wing over wing as she hurtled toward earth. As she wrestled with the controls, she remembered her instructor's words: "If you ever get into a spin in a Cessna 150, just let go of the controls. It's built to pull out of a spin on its own."

Susan had been fighting the controls with all her strength, and she would not let herself release her hands. She shouted to herself, "Let go!" but her hands still clutched the controls. Calling on God and using every ounce of willpower, she finally threw her hands up in the air and held them there. After some wild yawing and pitching, the aircraft straightened out and returned to level flight. She had fallen nearly half a mile, but she was safe --because she had let go.

In her article, Susan Smart pointed out that her experience is a picture of how it is between us and God. He has instructed us to trust Him. But we find it so very difficult to take our hands off the controls and let Him fulfill His promises to us. That's hard enough to do when things are going well, and next to impossible when everything seems to be spinning wildly out of control. We want to wrestle circumstances into submission and solve our problems our own way. We want to override God and keep the controls in our own hands.

It won't work. Like Susan in her Cessna, we have to let go!

Don't wait until you lose control to let God take over.



(From The Thought for the Day, an outreach ministry of Florence Christian Church, Florence, OR) www.florencechurch.com


Jim Dewar --