Flying cars, flight delays, and the path to “life and peace”

The world’s first mass-produced flying car prototype has made its public debut. It transforms from a car to an aircraft in under two minutes and will cost between $800,000 and $1 million. You can buy yours in the first quarter of next year.

With the way things are going at the nation’s airports, you may want one.

Flights to Newark Liberty International Airport were delayed yesterday by as much as seven hours. The airport’s problems first made headlines on April 28 when a technical outage caused more than a thousand flights to be canceled or delayed. Radios went dead for thirty seconds during the outage, giving air traffic controllers no way to tell pilots how to avoid crashing their planes into one another. More disruptions are expected, causing officials to reduce the number of flights in and out of Newark for the next several weeks.

In related news, hundreds of flights were delayed Sunday at Atlanta’s airport because of a runway equipment issue. In recent months, airplanes have bumped wings in San Francisco and Washington, DC. A number of commercial flights have aborted landings at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport as well.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy has announced plans for a new air traffic control system, which will take three to four years to build and cost billions. In the meantime, unless we own a flying car, those of us who fly will have little choice but to trust people we don’t know and never see. When we step onto a plane, we abandon all personal agency. We are in the hands of pilots who fly the plane, controllers who direct them, and those who maintain the equipment upon which we risk our lives.

There’s a principle here that applies not just to air travel but to every dimension of our lives.

“I do not do the good I want”

Why do I so readily trust people I don’t know with my life and yet struggle to trust the God I do know?

Lost people who don’t believe God exists would obviously not trust him any more than you and I would pray to Zeus for help. But I’m thinking of all the times I know the living Lord Jesus wants me to do something—or not do something—but I struggle to choose his will over my own.

Today’s article is motivated by a verse in Numbers 15 that struck me recently: “Remember all the commandments of the Lᴏʀᴅ, to do them, not to follow after your own heart and your own eyes, which you are inclined to whore after” (v. 39, my emphasis). When I “follow” my “heart” (internal inclinations) and “eyes” (external appearances) more than God’s loving heart and omniscient knowledge, he considers my decision to be spiritual adultery.

It’s not hard to see why.

The Bible says Christians are “married” to Christ as his “bride” (cf. Revelation 19:7; 21:2). Any time we choose to trust and serve someone else, it’s as if we have made them our spiritual spouse instead of Jesus. Imagine your feelings if someone were to treat you in this way. Now imagine if you gave up a heavenly throne to die on a Roman cross for them and they still rejected you for another.

Our problem is not that we don’t already know all of this. When we’re tempted, you and I know our sins will grieve our Savior. Why, then, are we sometimes “inclined to whore after” our desires rather than our Lord’s perfect will?

It’s as if the FAA has warned us that the airplane we’re about to board is going to crash, but we take our seats anyway. We would rather go down with the plane we choose than flourish on the flight God intends for us.

Paul understood our dilemma (Romans 7:14–23) and asked, “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” (v. 24).

Why we are “more than conquerors”

Now comes the good news: “Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (v. 25). Why? Because “the law of the Spirit of life has set you free in Christ Jesus from the law of sin and death” (Romans 8:2).

Christians have the indwelling power of the Spirit to free us from our own fallen inclinations and the sins into which they would lead us. Now we are “more than conquerors through him who loved us” (v. 37).

How do we experience this spiritual victory?

Paul explains: “To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace” (v. 6). We “set the mind on the Spirit” when we begin the morning by submitting to him (Ephesians 5:18), “long for the pure spiritual milk” of God’s word (1 Peter 2:2), commune with him in prayer (1 Thessalonians 5:17), and live in community with God’s people (Hebrews 10:25).

Then the Spirit changes the inclinations of our hearts, and we become the change our fallen culture desperately needs to see.

When God produces a “new kind of man”

In his first homily as pope, Leo XIV rightly noted that “there are many settings in which the Christian faith is considered absurd, meant for the weak and unintelligent. Settings where other securities are preferred, like technology, money, success, power, or pleasure.” He added that even many baptized Christians do not experience the risen Christ in transforming ways and thus “end up living, at this level, in a state of practical atheism.” (For more, see my website article, “My first pastoral sermon and Pope Leo XIV’s first homily.”)

If we want our skeptical post-Christian culture to believe Jesus makes a real difference in those who trust in him, we must demonstrate that difference in obvious ways. It’s not enough to be nicer and more moral than others. C. S. Lewis was right:

Mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always improves people even here and now and will, in the end, improve them to a degree we cannot yet imagine. God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man.

This “new kind of man” does not merely try harder to do better—he has a “new heart” and a “new spirit” (Ezekiel 36:26). The Spirit molds us into people who want what God wants more than what we want. Then we choose godliness because our hearts yearn for it. We love Jesus more than we love sin. And we manifest the living Lord Jesus as his “body” in the world and draw the world to him (1 Corinthians 12:27).

Jesus promised,

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God” (Matthew 5:8).

Will you “see God” today?

Quote for the day:

“I want to change my circumstances. God wants to change me.” —Rick Warren

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