Control has a price tag, and most of us don’t realize we’re already paying it. In week three of “Control Issues,” Pastor TJ McCormick shifts from why we control and how we control to a harder question: what does control actually cost us? He opens with a story from a family pool day in Marco Island — a toddler who lets go of the pool’s edge the instant her dad looks away, and the mom who comes flying in to snatch her back — and uses it to name something a lot of Christians feel but rarely say out loud: in the moments life feels chaotic, it’s tempting to assume God looked away, and to grab control back for ourselves.
The core of the message lays out what TJ calls the law of control: whatever we try to fix with control, we end up breaking even more. He walks through three specific costs. Control breaks us personally, fueling the exhaustion and anxiety so many people are quietly carrying (including a first-time guest at Coastal whose honest “I’m so worn out from trying to control everything” becomes a turning point in the message). Control breaks us relationally, illustrated through the story of Abraham and Sarah’s decision to force God’s promise onto their own timeline in Genesis 16 — a single act of control with generational consequences still visible in the world today. And control breaks us spiritually, leaving us with what TJ calls a powerless faith, the kind the disciples had when they couldn’t cast out a demon in Matthew 17 because they were trusting their own strength instead of God’s.
TJ closes by pointing back to Galatians 5 and John 15 — self-control isn’t something you manufacture, it’s fruit that only grows when you’re connected to the source, Jesus himself. And instead of grasping harder, the invitation is the opposite: open your hands. The message ends with the church praying the Serenity Prayer together as a physical act of surrender, followed by an invitation for anyone who needs to surrender their whole life to Jesus for the first time.
BIBLICAL REFERENCES
Philippians 4:6-7
Genesis 16:1-2
1 Peter 5:2-3
Galatians 5:22-23
John 15:5
Hebrews 11:6
Matthew 17:19-20
