Imagine this scene with me for a moment.

It is little Jacob’s fifth birthday party. He is so excited. He has asked for a wide variety of toys. Some of the toys he asked for were obscure and didn’t really matter to him, he had seen them advertised on TV or one of his friends had one, and he quickly forgot he had even asked for them. But some of the toys he asked for were specific and he was very excited about. The thing he was most excited about was a blue and red bicycle.

Like all children, every time Jacob would go to the store he would ask his mom or dad if they could go the toy section. When he would get there, his parents would watch as he would always go straight to the bikes and to the blue and red one in particular. His eyes would get wide as he looked at its shiny paint. He seemed to get lost for a moment, as if he were daydreaming about riding it around his neighborhood.

Like all good parents, Jacob’s dad and mom wanted to make their son happy, so today, on the day of his birthday, they had a special surprise for him. Jacob had eyed all the gifts his friends had brought to the party suspiciously, but none of them had been big enough to fit a bike inside. Finally, after all the other gifts had been opened, Jacob’s dad told him to go look in the garage. Jacob bolted to the garage with a flurry of kids running behind him. He quickly threw the door open and flipped on the light switch. There it was; his blue and red bicycle, complete with a big red bow.

Jacob was so excited about the bike he would hardly let go of it long enough to go eat cake and ice cream. When all the other children had left, Jacob told his dad, “I want to go outside and ride my bike.”

“Okay, let’s go,” his father said, smiling at his sons enthusiasm.

“No, dad, I’ll go by myself, it’s my bike,” Jacob curtly responded.

“Well, I need to teach you how to ride it,” his father lovingly replied.

“No dad, it’s my bike,” and with that Jacob headed for the garage alone.

His father waited a while before going outside to see what progress his son had made trying to learn to ride the bike on his own. His shook his head and grinned as he saw his son walking beside the bike, pushing it up and down the street by the handle bars. Thinking that his son had figured out by now that learning to ride a bike required help, the father approached his son and tried again. “Hop on and I’ll make sure you don’t fall.”

Jacob scowled at his father and pulled the handle bars closer to him. “No, dad, it’s not your bike. It’s my bike.”

“But son,” his father tried, “I gave you the bike and I know how to use it. Let me help you so you can ride it instead of just pushing it around.”

But it was no use. Jacob only grunted at his father and stormed off, pushing his bike down the street.

Over the next few weeks, the father’s heart would sink as he came home from work to find his son pushing the bike up and down the street, too proud to have his father show him how to ride it.

What about us? Are we that different than Jacob? We have so much pride when it comes to our steps. We want to “be the masters of our own destiny.” We want to do things our own way. Instead of behaving like children of the Almighty God, we become the brats.

We become very audacious with this attitude. We even tell God that living for Him is fine and good, but it has to fit around whatever plan we already have for our life. We absolutely must take a step back from this mentality. Our heart posture should be the same as Jeremiah’s and how little Jacob’s should have been. “God, my life is not my own. You gave it to me. I humbly lay it down at your feet. Please show me how to use it.”