Good Morning! It's Monday, October 21.
Today our focus is on the subject of control.
What do you say when you answer the phone? I guess there's more than one way to do it, but I'm 99% sure you say "hello". In 1876 Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, and he decided on the word that people should use when they used his invention. He decided we should say "ahoy!". If that had caught on, we'd all sound like sailors every time we got a phone call.
So, even the man who created the phone didn't have complete control of it. I'm thinking that Bell was probably annoyed by that. It can be annoying, frustrating, even terrifying when we lose a sense of control. Have you ever been driving in winter and suddenly started skidding on a patch of ice? Not a nice feeling. Control - of our health, our finances, our time, our lives - is important to us.
God's Word, however, urges us to lose control or, rather, to relinquish control to someone else. That can be a very difficult thing to do. I'm thinking it was very difficult for one particular New Testament character. He was an ambitious guy, some might say driven. He was a builder, a motivator, a leader. God gave Paul all those characteristics so that He could be the man to grow the new, young church. But those same characteristics would have made Paul a man who valued a sense of control. And yet he wrote in Galatians 2:20 -
"I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me."
Meet you back here tomorrow,
David
cindertex50@yahoo.com
