Week four of “Control Issues,” titled Responsibility vs. Surrender, brings a different voice to the stage: Pastor Shayla McCormick, TJ’s wife and co-pastor, who opens by admitting she’s “the queen of control issues” (just ask her about the imaginary brake pedal on her side of the car). But her honesty sets up the message’s biggest turn in the series so far — most of us are trying to control the wrong things entirely. We spend our energy managing circumstances, people, outcomes, and other people’s opinions of us, all things we were never designed to control, while giving up on the one thing God actually invited us to govern: ourselves.
Shayla builds the message around a single tension — the space between responsibility and surrender — anchored in Proverbs 19:21: “Many are the plans in a man’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails.” From there she lays out three practical steps. First, make the plan — intentionality, she argues, is what most people skip, and it’s actually a form of responsibility, not control. She shares the story of planting their church in South Florida with a Sunday attendance of 63 people (including an unborn baby and a paid janitor) and having to decide what surrender looked like in that moment. Second, live a principled life — walking through Romans 12’s call to bless, forgive, and “as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone,” which she frames as controlling the one thing that’s actually yours: your own response. Third, surrender the outcome, using Abraham and Sarah’s decision in Genesis 16 to “help God out” as a picture of what happens when we stop trusting God with the results.
The most personal part of the message comes when Shayla shares her and TJ’s experience fostering a five-day-old baby boy named Alexander, loving him for eighteen months, and then having to release him back to his biological father by court order — and the counseling exercise that taught her to place his hand in Jesus’s hand when she couldn’t control what came next. It’s a raw, honest picture of what surrendering an outcome actually costs, and where the peace on the other side of it actually comes from.
BIBLICAL REFERENCES
Galatians 5:22-23
Proverbs 19:21
Proverbs 21:5
Proverbs 24:27
Luke 14:28-30
Romans 12:11-12
Romans 12:18
Romans 12:19
Genesis 16:1-2
Romans 5:8
Genesis 50:20
