I must have been eight years old when I decided one day to hop on my much older neighbor’s road bike and take it for a spin. He had parked it outside. No one was around, and somehow, I was undaunted by the fact that my feet couldn’t touch the ground when I sat on the seat. I positioned the pedals, jumped up onto them and began moving down the street. Given how little I weighed, each turn of the gear caused me to accelerate quickly. For one rapidly fleeting moment, I was quite pleased with myself, flying down the street on my painted red Pegasus, free and fearless.

Then, suddenly, a terrible thought flashed across my mind: How was I going to stop? The street ahead turned to the left. I got a bit wobbly. Rather than turn, I applied the handbrake, but it was too late. I careened onto a neighbor’s driveway and flew into their open garage. Unable to stop completely, I rammed the back wall with my front tire, the back tire left the ground, and I was quickly dismounted but miraculously unharmed. I looked around and wondered if anyone had seen my astonishing achievement. Thankfully, but also a little regrettably (I was still pretty proud of myself), no one had. So, I walked the bike back down the street to my neighbor’s house. 

I think what I experienced that day, speeding down asphalt while teetering aboard something much too big for me, is an apt metaphor for the way life presents us with new challenges. New seasons and transitions confront us with anxieties and fears that give us the sense at times of losing control. Beginning a new job, studying for exams, going on a first date, fostering a healthy social life, being a newlywed, bringing home a newborn baby, moving to a new city, grappling with an unforeseen diagnosis, grieving loss, and so on — life has a way of getting going, causing us to feel uncertain, unprepared and anxious. We see the turn coming, get wobbly and risk veering off the road. We ask ourselves, “How am I going to get through this?” 

I can’t provide the precise answer to that question for every scenario above. But I can suggest that the single best thing you could do to cope with stress and overcome fear is to have saving faith in Jesus and be born again. Faith is a conviction or evidence of things not seen. Saving faith entails not merely a conviction of things not seen but also a trust or confidence that Jesus, as John Wesley says, “died for my sins, that he loved me, and gave himself for me.” Put another way, saving faith involves not just your head but also your heart. Having faith in Jesus means affirming not only that He died and lives, but also that He died and lives for you all because of His love for you. Our affirmation of His love, thus, moves beyond mere intellectual assent to a set of facts to trusting Him with our hearts, offering our emotional and affectional selves to Him, too. 

All people have sinned. That means we have all missed the mark and rejected God’s design for our lives. Ephesians 2 shows us that we are dead in our sins, spiritually lifeless and incapable of bringing ourselves back to life. Saving faith is the vehicle, the conduit that God works through to regenerate our souls, and He does so by grace. We cannot work our way into spiritual vitality. We cannot earn the new birth. God even supplies the faith we need to be saved. We say yes to His invitation to live, and He does the rest, giving us the gift of His Spirit. 

The Holy Spirit marks us, providing evidence of what God has done for us in Christ. We’ve already started discussing the first mark: faith — a conviction of things not seen and sure trust in Jesus. The Holy Spirit also gives us hope. “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead” (1 Peter 1:3 NIV). The Spirit of God testifies to our spirits that we are children of God. God gives us the Spirit of adoption. As His children, God gives us hope — hope through the darkest valleys and hope for that day when the old order of things will pass, the new will come, and Christ will be all in all. In this hope, there is abundant joy. While Christians experience suffering and pain, the joy God puts in our hearts persists through both tears and celebrations. Our joy, that feeling of contentment and happiness through trials that defies explanation, is built upon the bedrock of our hope in Jesus. 

When we’re born again, the Holy Spirit adds to our faith and hope the mark of love. “And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us” (Romans 5:5 NIV). Christians are known by their love for God and love for neighbors. Like Jesus, we find our delight in our Father. We derive our joy from Him, and we desire His will above all other wills or agendas. That also means we desire holiness — a life lived out of the abundance of His life in us and complete surrender to Him.  

The love God gives us is also not mere sentimentality. God in Christ did not suffer death on the cross so we could have a generally sunny demeanor. The love of God in our hearts motivates us to take up our crosses, follow Christ, and lay down our lives for others. We discover that living selflessly isn’t drudgery but freedom and peace. Life becomes far more livable when, with the Spirit’s help, we loosen our grip on our lives, let go, trust God, and join Him in selflessly loving the world. 

Yes, Christians can also feel at times like I did as a boy struggling to keep my balance that day. We can sometimes get far down the road and wonder how we got there, where we’re going, and when we’ll be able to slow down and rest. But Christians are never alone. Even when we lose control and everything seems to come crashing down, the Holy Spirit still gives us faith, hope, and love. The crucifixion of Jesus testifies to the resilient faith, hope and love we have in Christ. The Devil thought he’d knocked down Jesus for good. But then He rose, and, in Him, we can rise, too.

This article was originally titled “Over the Handlebars & Into His Hands” in the July 2025 issue of The War Cry. | Illustration by Matt Chinworth

In The Love of Jesus Series