Handing Over the Controls (Friday Devotional)

“Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, so that He may exalt you in due time. Cast all your anxiety on Him, because He cares for you.”

- 1 Peter 5:6-7

I was struggling, but I didn’t want to show it.

For Christmas, my cousins and I had received remote-controlled cars from an uncle, so as soon as we were allowed, we headed outside to test them out on the dirt road in front of my grandparents’ house. The controls were simple—the joystick went forward, backward, left, and right, and one button accelerated while another braked—but they were far from intuitive if you’d never had a toy like this, as was the case for me. Not wanting to look silly in front of my cousins, I played it safe at first, sending my car up and down the straight road at top speed, but not trying anything too tricky.

But when one of my cousins drove his car off a small lift in the road and made it do a flip in the air before landing it safely on the ground, we all wanted to try too. Most of my cousins got it after two or three tries, but I couldn’t quite find the right combination on my controller—every time I tried, the car just drove straight off the lift and nosedived into the ground. After a few minutes, I was the only one who hadn’t figured out the trick yet, and I was getting frustrated.

“Let me show you how to do it,” offered one of my cousins, but I refused. “It’s easy; just let me show you!” she persisted. She reached for the controller, but I angrily pulled it away from her. I was determined to do this myself. She shrugged and walked away with the rest of my cousins. Twenty minutes later, when the adults called for us all to come inside, I stayed behind and kept trying to make my car flip, to no avail. By the time my dad came outside to fetch me, he found me sitting on the ground wiping away embarrassed tears—the batteries had run out, and I’d never figured out the trick.

From childhood through adulthood, you never quite lose the desire to do things yourself, to get full credit, to do all the work and get all the glory. Teams are fine, but nothing matches the personal satisfaction of accomplishing something singlehandedly. Being in complete control from beginning to end is intoxicating.

But the truth is, there are a lot of problems you can’t solve by yourself, whether because you don’t have the time, don’t possess the resources, or because the problem doesn’t have one simple solution. When faced with that kind of situation, you must make a choice—to ask for help, or continue going it alone, to hand over the controls or keep failing on your own until your batteries run out.

In 1 Peter 5:7, believers are told to cast our anxiety on God, a simple reiteration of Jesus’s command from the Sermon on the Mount not to worry. But it is the preceding verse that gets to the heart of the matter: in order to cast your anxiety on God, you have to humble yourself, you have to trust God with your situation more than you trust yourself. Giving your problems to God in prayer is about more than halfheartedly asking for a lifeline, it is about relinquishing control.

For some people, this is the hardest command the Bible ever gave—harder than not judging, harder than enduring persecution with joy, harder than loving your enemies. They love to worship, they love to serve, they love to teach, but their faith dulls when the time comes to hand the controls to the Lord. Life in Christ is fun and rewarding and even easy for them—so long as they’re the ones setting the agenda.

But if you want to know abundant life in Christ, if you would trust God not only with your future but with your present, it means turning over your cares and concerns to Him—not just hoping He will help you, but trusting that He will. It means humbling yourself and accepting that the Creator of all things may know something you haven’t figured out yet. Most of all, it means believing that He cares for you and will see you through. Casting your anxieties and your worries on the Lord, having the humility to hand over the controls, is never easy, but face it: God’s a better driver than you.