Pastor’s Note: Control

     We are in our third week of our summer sermon series titled, "The Seven Sins of Suburbia." In this series, we are diving into seven common temptations that face the modern Western Christian. The first week we looked at the temptation of consumerism, which is the belief that that things of this world can fully and finally satisfy us. Last week Pastor Dennis preached on conceit, better known as pride. This week we are going to explore the temptation of control. Control means to order, limit, or rule something, or someone's actions or behavior. Some synonyms for control would be power, authority, command, dominance, sovereignty, and supremacy.

      We may think we have control over many things, but life has a way of reminding us that we really cannot control much of anything, at all. The cold, hard truth is that most of us have some control issues. We long to be in control of our own lives and sometimes over the lives of others. Whether we desire to control other people, our families, our finances, our image, what other people think about us, whatever it may be, control, or as the apostle James points out, the perception of control, comes at a costly price. Afterall, this is exactly what we wanted in the Garden of Eden. We wanted sovereignty and we longed for control. But it cost us something. It cost us something so significant: our freedom. We traded living in complete freedom, perfection, joy, and glory for sin, shame, fear, and condemnation. Our desire for control resulted in us becoming slaves to sin.

      The apostle James is going to challenge us to consider how we live our lives. Are we living life in pursuit of control or in submission to the Lord? Are we leaning on and depending on ourselves or are we trusting in the Sovereign, Ever-Lasting God? The truth is that we serve a faithful God whose compassions never fail, who cares and provides for us, who gives us strength for today, and bright hope for tomorrow. Brothers and sisters, let’s surrender every facet of our lives, even the parts we desperately long to control, to Jesus Christ, who is the One we can truly count on, depend on, and trust fully.