Tesla Faith

I recently took my first ride in a Tesla on full self-driving mode. I'd been in plenty of Uber rides in one, but those were all backseat, with human drivers in charge…. or so I thought. This time was different. A friend picked me up from an event I was speaking at, excited to finally show me the "magic car" he'd been telling me about.

As we sat there in the cockpit, him in the driver's seat, me riding shotgun, he went into full David Copperfield mode. No human interaction whatsoever, other than telling it where to go. I was truly amazed, and a little freaked out. Amazed at how smooth the ride was, and at the car's ability to do everything a human driver could do, and in some ways, better than I could. Freaked out because we actually trusted it.

It occurred to me: we trust a Tesla with our lives more than we trust God.

Think about that for a second. A car. A machine built by engineers, running on software written by fallible people, powered by sensors that can be fooled by fog, glare, or a smudged lens, and we hand it the wheel. Literally. We let it merge us into seventy-mile-an-hour traffic, brake for us, read the lane lines for us. And most of us do it without a second thought.

We've done this before, actually. In 1912, the White Star Line built a ship they called unsinkable. Sixteen watertight compartments, the best engineering money could buy. Passengers boarded the Titanic with total confidence, not in God, but in steel and rivets and human ingenuity. We know how that story ends. It's not that the engineering was bad. It's that the confidence was misplaced. Pointed at the creation instead of the Creator.

I'm not anti-technology. What that car could do was remarkable… a gift, honestly, from the minds God gave the people who built it. But somewhere between the marveling and the freaking out, I realized my gut-level trust in that dashboard was more immediate, more automatic, than my gut-level trust in the God who actually holds my life in His hands. That's backwards.

Scripture doesn't tiptoe around this. Psalm 115 draws the line plainly:

"Not to us, LORD, not to us but to your name be the glory, because of your love and faithfulness... But their idols are silver and gold, made by human hands... Those who make them will be like them, and so will all who trust in them. All you Israelites, trust in the LORD—he is their help and shield." (Psalm 115:1, 4, 8-9)

That word "idols" makes us think of statues. But an idol is just anything we trust to do for us what only God can do. Anything we lean on for safety, provision, or control that quietly displaces Him. A Tesla isn't an idol. My confidence in it, over my confidence in the God who numbers my days, is a small window into where the idol actually lives. Not in the machine, but in my heart.

Here's the thing, though, the answer isn't less trust in the ability God gave us. It's more trust in God alongside it. Fierce faith doesn't mean unplugging the autopilot and driving blind out of piety. It means holding the gift and the Giver in the right order. God gave engineers the mind to build that car. He gave you the capability sitting in your own hands right now. Faith isn't the absence of using what He's given you, it's refusing to let what He's given you become the thing you ultimately trust. When you're operating in step with the Holy Spirit, you can move with a boldness that no piece of software will ever match, because you're not trusting the sensor, you're trusting the One who sees everything the sensor never will.

Where in your life has trust in a system, a process, or your own ability quietly moved into the seat that belongs to God alone?

Today, before you lean on the tool, the plan, or your own competence, pause and name out loud who you're actually trusting. Let that be the first move, not an afterthought. Have faith in the creator, more than the creation.