Our False Sense of Control
2 minute read
In the mornings when I first come in and the water is cold, what do I do? I cut the hot water faucet all the way open. What is happening there? The hot water from the hot water heater was slowly displacing the cold water that was sitting in the pipes, until eventually the pure heat from the source is all that was pushing through the line. I wasn’t doing anything more. What I had already done was just playing itself out.
You don’t realize this when you are dipping your hands in addiction and testing the waters, but the reality is that at the precise moment that you place that addiction over your relationship with Christ, you have taken your hand and pushed that hot valve all the way open. And you don’t even know it. You don’t realize what you have done.
But when you place this addiction over Christ, Satan realizes what you’ve done, and he says, “It’s on now”. Because you’ve lost control of it. You didn’t stay in the care and control of Christ, and now who’s gonna take control? Most likely Satan, because you are already playing ball in his park.
But Satan is crafty, once he has some control over that, he’s not going to all of the sudden throw scalding hot water on you. And it’s not because he cares about you, he would love nothing more than to destroy you right then, but he’s got to get even more control over you. If he was to give all the hot water to you at once, you would cry out in pain to God for help, and God would respond.
What he is going to do is slowly and incrementally replace your Holy Spirit thoughts and processes with his thoughts and processes. He wants you to think that YOU are the one who is controlling this process. You are the one who is walking “on the edge” but able to hold it all together. He wants you to be not dependent on Christ or yourself anymore, but dependent on something of his creation that you don’t even know you are placing your dependence on.
He wants you to enjoy this ride for a while. Why? So that you can bring as many along with you as you can. He wants you to think that at any moment you can reach up there and pull that hot lever down when it gets a little too hot. A little too risky. A little too illegal. Whatever you want to call it. You think you can. And he lets you think you can.
Photo by Sivani Bandaru on Unsplash