What causes you to get stressed out? What causes you to feel the pressure?
When you are alone and all the noise is silenced what causes your nerves to vibrate and your resting heart rate beat 10 times a minute above average?
Control.
There are things in life that give a feeling of stressful urgency caused by the necessity of doing or achieving something. Most of the time this is useless emotion that is a counterfeit due to an illusion that you are in control.
Control.
It seems that the things that stress us out the most are things that we are not in control of. The opinions of others, a business pitch, a big exam, planting a church, raising money, you name it. But somehow we have this self-absorbed way of putting it all on ourselves don’t we? We think that we’re in control.
There’s an epic example of this in history. A King named Ahab who reigned in Israel. This King was pretty arrogant and the author of 1Kings says that Ahab did more to provoke the anger of God than all of his predecessors combined. He thought that he was in control.
There was this prophet. A man who spoke on behalf of God his name Elijah. He said this to Ahab, “There shall be neither dew nor rain these years, except by my word.”
Ok.
So what does that mean? Our God is the God of rain?
Yes.
But there’s so much more…
For all of those who stress or feel pressure from the need to take control of every situation and when things don’t go the way that you had predicted or wanted our God is the God of rain.
Control.
It was never yours in the first place.
God is in control. But not just in the generic way that the Clergy tells a cancer patient at a Catholic hospital.
It will not rain unless I say so. Not only will I control whether or not it rains but I am at the level of controlling condensation. A blade of grass will not even sweat unless I say so. God is not just at the level of rain, he is in every single very specific detail that you and I don’t even pay attention to.
Control.
It’s not ours.
We shouldn’t take what’s not ours.
That’s called stealing.
1 Kings 17.1-6