This past weekend I used an illustration in my sermon. It was about worry. I tend to worry when things are out of my control. For instance, when someone else is driving and I’m stuck in the passenger seat. I always like to be the driver. I’m never really worried as long as I’m driving, even when the weather is a tad treacherous. I still feel pretty much okay. It’s when someone else is driving and the weather turns nasty that I get nervous. Several of my friends have received bad news lately. One father just wrote me and said simply, “I feel helpless.” Things are completely out of his control. Someone else is driving.

This weekend when I talked about worry I said it is a statement about the competency of the driver. In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus makes one of his characteristic pithy statements with truth packed so succinctly and so powerfully that is almost takes one’s breath away. He says,

For this reason I say to you, do not be anxious for your life, as to what you shall eat, or what you shall drink; nor for your body, as to what you shall put on. Is not life more than food and the body than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, neither do they gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they?

In my sermon I talked about the size of the universe. It is enormous. I simply pointed out that the Bible says that God holds the universe in the palm of his hand. If that is really so, is he not competent to steer my life when I feel like it is out of my control?

This week I had a friend email me this set of pictures under the caption of “Who’s Driving?”  It is a great reminder.

I don’t know what you are going through today. This is what I know. Life is more than food or drink or your job or your health or whatever else is going on. The weather outside might be frightful and you might feel absolutely helpless.

But the God who created the universe knows every hair on your head and loves you more than you love yourself. He is competent. So, do not be anxious. Instead rest in the hands of the One who created and redeemed you, and calls you by name today.