"If I Can Control Him I Don't Need Him"

If you're sitting at my desk it doesn’t take long to find out that I’m a Texas Tech fan. I have an awesome red coffee mug with a huge double T on it, and then I have another Texas Tech cup for reinforcement. At the foot of my desk is a Texas Tech floor mat (thanks to my sister who is a UT grad), and then the most prized of all my Tech things is hanging on the wall.

No, not the Texas Tech football shirt (which is pretty cool), but my diploma… I have my Bachelor of Business Administration in Marketing degree hanging up in all its glory.

Man, I’m proud of that thing. College was such a great time in life; but what they didn’t tell me in marketing was that there aren’t a lot of marketing jobs out there. Most marketing majors seem to end up in sales.

When I was in seminary I decided that I needed to have a job where I was making enough money to live. That ruled out most part time jobs. But I did find a part times sales job selling cars. I thought to myself, “Well I guess I do have a degree in marketing… how hard could sales be?” Big mistake!

I’ve always had a love for cars. When I was a kid I had a ton of hot wheels, and I used to go to car races with my dad all the time. Then when I turned 16 I started washing cars at a local car was called "The Wash Tub" in San Antonio.

Working at the Tub was a great job. Some people hated the heat, but I was making 10-12 dollars an hour… so the heat really didn’t bother me too bad as long as my pocket was stuffed with one dollar bills at the end of the day. My base pay was $5.50 and then we made tips on top of that. The harder you worked the more cars you would finish, and the more cars you would finish the more tips you would get. It was simple math to me. The more I worked the more money I made.

I continued this trend of working with cars once I entered the car sales business, but I ended up hating it! A little bit of the hate was routed in the fact that people just don’t like car sales man; but I worked at a really reputable company and I was paid a flat commission, which made me not the normal car sales man.

The reason I hated it was because you failed 90 percent of the time. If you sold a car to 1 out of every 10 costumers you were considered a success. But the thing was is that you could work 40 hours and make absolutely nothing, or you could work 8 hours and make a thousand dollars.

The amount of money you made did not directly correlate with the amount of hours you worked. This took its toll on me so many times. It didn't matter that you knew eventually things would pan out... when you were working a lot of hours and not making any money to show for it, it was just depressing.

While sales managers tell you that you need to be in control of the sale, ultimately it is the person buying that is making the call, and you can't control that.

The fact is that we like to be in control. We are control freaks (especially guys).

This last spring break some friends and I went from Kentucky to Florida. There were five of us, and two of them did not have cars. Then one of them had a jeep wrangler which just wouldn’t work for the trip. So it was between my F150 and a ford explorer. Of course I volunteered to drive. Some people might think I was doing everyone a service by sacrificing the miles on my truck for the trip, but the fact of the matter was that I wanted to drive.

I hate riding with people. Some people follow too close, other people multitask while driving, and some people are flat out bad drivers. I’d much rather be in the driver seat and be in control of the vehicle.

Let's face it, maybe it’s not driving, but everyone has something they want to be in control over.

I think this is why salvation is so hard for people to grasp.

We want to control God. If we do x,y,z then the outcome is (fill in the blank). So many people think that if their good deeds, which they can control, outweigh their bad deeds then they get into heaven. If you do good then God will bless you, and if you do bad then God will curse you… so as long as the good outweighs the bad then you’ll ultimately be blessed with heaven.

I can remember being in New York City and sitting down at the ESPN zone with a guy from Tennessee. We got to talking about life and he asked me what I was doing. I told him that I was in seminary and that I wanted to do church planting to reach the 20-somethings age group (that has since changed).

After he found out I was going to be a minister he started telling me about his lineage,\; how is grandma was a Christian and his mom was a Christian, and that when he died they’ll tell God to let him in; and because he tried to do good that God would let him in.

At this moment I was faced with a decision, do I want to talk to this guy about religion or do I want to get back to talking about college football? I’ll be honest, sometimes theological talk hurts me head and I need to talk about something light. I chose to take the rout of religion knowing that I might offend this guy and make things awkward.

I looked at him, my tone slightly changed, and I tried to make the gospel as simple as I could without robbing it of anything, and I told him, “Here’s the thing… you just said you ‘try to do good’, and that implies that you sometimes don’t. God doesn’t just want your good to outweigh your bad… he requires perfection.” At this moment you could see the wheels turning in his head… you could see it on his face… he might as well have said, “Then who can be saved?!”
After a short pause I continued, “But here’s the beauty of the gospel, what God requires, he’s provided.”

He was floored, he had never heard the gospel presented like that before.

Now that the conversation had taken a more serious turn, he looked back at me and said, “You know what… there’s a whole nother group that needs to hear that message and it’s the 40-somethings. I wouldn’t just tell that to 20-somethings, but I’d tell that to everyone.”

Our salvation isn’t something that we can control. God blows this idea, of us being able to control him, out of the water in the book of Job. Their thinking was the same as ours, if you do good God will bless you and if you do bad then God will curse you. Job was being cursed therefore he must be doing bad things; but that wasn’t the case.

God wants to make clear that we can’t control him by our actions.

Salvation is a tough thing to grasp because it is by Christ alone. Even if we completely fulfilled the law we couldn’t earn salvation. The law was never intended to save people… it was to point people to God. This means that the “good things we do” are not a means to salvation, but a result of the good work God is doing in our hearts.

What a beautiful place to be in… to know that no matter how many good things you do you will not be any closer to right standing with God; and no matter how many bad things you do you will not be any further from right standing with God. Our right standing with God comes from faith in Christ, and nothing else! We have no room to boast.

I think Derek Web said it best, “No more my God, I boast no more.”