It is human nature to control. In that, you are not alone.

We control in different ways. Some of us domineer, manipulate, grasp, and effort ourselves – active means. Others of us withdraw, deny ourselves, and count ourselves noble for it. That would be my lean, personally. It’s actually just risk management. Fear. A different way of controlling our life.

But God.

God rescues us. In love, he refuses to let us control our lives.

But his rescue does not come in obvious ways, or in ways that reward or entrench our control.

Like many rescues, it starts by acknowledging there is a problem. And for that, God has designed a diabolical mechanism, a glorious Matthew 16:25 trap, into the nature of human control to help us recognize and diagnose the problem:

He who controls is himself controlled.

Prove me wrong. When Jesus comes into unhealed places in our lives and asks us to give them to him, are we able to do so? If not, we are controlled. It’s just that simple. When Jesus asks us to open our hands, we experience compulsion, impotence, hesitation. We often simply double down on the grasping. And thus we see that it is we who are controlled. The grasping was reciprocal. The moment we latched onto something, it latched onto us.

And that is why the giving up, the surrender, the seeming loss, is in reality a rescue.

Admit it – are you really actually enjoying the endless fear of losing something? Are you finding joy and goodness in the preoccupation, the constant worrying, the mental games, the burning of holes in your ceiling at night? Does it feel like life?

Mercifully, God rescues us. He pries our fingers open, undoes our death grip on the things we’re grabbing, and takes our reddened and cracked hands in his own.

And that is where we learn how much better his control is. If we can get there – and it is a lifelong process – we will inevitably find the darkness and garbage that we once counted gain burned in the Kidron Valley by a generous Savior. We will find the things that truly do matter to be cherished, nurtured, and protected far better in his care than in our own. And we will find a great number of things we valued not, which were actually of great value the entire time. Another layer of control – how we value things – stripped back and exposed to Jesus’ light to be healed.

I’m finding the process…daunting.

But God pushes us forward nevertheless, our hearts swept along irresistibly by his imputed righteousness.

And when I reach the other side of each adventure, yet another area swept clean and made new by Christ’s love, I am reminded again that the freedom is worth it.