FIGHTING THE BRIDLE

Isaiah 6:1-7:25; 2 Corinthians 11:16-33; Psalm 54:1-7; Proverbs 23:1-3

“You will listen and listen, but never understand. You will look and look, but never see.”

“If I must boast, I would rather boast about the things that show how weak I am.”

“Come with great power, O God, and rescue me! Defend me with your might. Listen to my prayer, O God. Pay attention to my plea. …But God is my helper. The Lord keeps me alive!”

Smarter people than me have noticed that God seldom thinks or acts like we would, or like we expect. It is His very unpredictability, and the fact that He is not accountable to us, than makes Him God. He is sovereign. We are not. It’s not a fair fight. Nevertheless, most of us spend most of our lives tussling with the Lord for the right to control our own destinies. We fight His bridle, never understanding it is really just a sign of our Master’s love.

The trouble with fighting the bridle is, when we decide to act independently of the Holy Spirit, we necessarily act without His power and guidance as well. We run off course. We get lost. We cannot find our own way home. Of course, most of us immediately respond by blaming God for abandoning us in our hour of need. The reality is usually far different. We do not want to believe our actions separate us from Christ. We may not even intend to throw off the bridle. But like wild mustangs, we are seduced by our freedom to run wild. We want to chart our own course, run our own race. We just want God to train us the way we think we need to be trained (often meaning “not at all”). Yet that is the one thing our Creator is most unlikely to do. He is our groom. He insists on His care being accepted on its own terms – in His own way and His own time – or not at all. Simply, we either decide to let Him be Lord, or we give up the right to claim Him as Savior. We give Him the reigns, or we have no claim to His corral, or the safety and security of it.

It is this truth, probably more than any other, that stands as a major stumbling block between us and Christ. Yet, if we would have the Spirit save us, we first have to let Him be God. That means, among other things, that He calls the shots and their timing. We don’t. We no more get to dictate to our Father how to answer the crises in our lives than we get to tell Him who lives and who dies. But that, unfortunately, does not keep us from trying, or from exhausting ourselves in the process.

Our incessant attempts to throw the bridle are plain trespasses on our Father’s sovereignty. We should not be surprised when He reigns us in. He is not like us, and when we try to buck Him, our thirst for independence becomes our worst enemy. Worse, when we demand He come at us in a particular way or at a particular time or do a particular thing, we are essentially asking God to quit being God and instead accept the bridle (i.e., limitations) we want to place on Him (usually, so we can assume the reigns of control over our own lives).

The horse does not tell its groom how to care for it. Neither should we be telling the Spirit how to manage the affairs of His Creation, including us. Still, the first temptation mankind ever faced remains the greatest and toughest to resist: “You can be just like God, knowing everything, good and evil.” The difficulty with taking God’s place and assuming sovereignty over our own lives is simply that we are ill-equipped to handle it. We are certainly prideful enough to attempt to do so, but the end result always culminates in failure and frustration. As the stallion can never be its own groom, so we just aren’t cut out to be God.

We should be very glad the Lord is not like us. He is way better and greater and smarter and wiser. We ought to give thanks that He, like the groom, knows more about what His charges need than we know about ourselves. We also should understand that, when we try to buck Him, truly, we engage in a fool’s errand.

I have no problem accepting Jesus Christ as my Savior. It is when He asserts His right to be Lord over my life that we most often come to blows, and I have to fight my natural tendency to turn away. Like a wild mustang, my soul is not inclined to allow anyone else to tame it or care for it. The wild mustang lifestyle looks pretty darn good to anyone who feels trapped in or bound to a life they neither asked for nor wanted. As we gallop through life, it is extremely difficult to appreciate having a spiritual bridle between our teeth to break us of our independence. But God desperately wants to keep us from hurting ourselves. His only desire is to turn us away from trouble and toward Him. We fight the bridle because we do not understand that it is actually the first step toward complete security and eternal safety. We don’t always understand what God is doing in our lives. We waste an awful lot of time, though, when we fight that which is, in fact, in our very best interest.