In the movie Flight, Denzel Washington plays a troubled-but-talented airline pilot who manages to successfully land a crashing commercial jetliner despite being under the influence of more substances than you could count and whose alleged inebriation causes his heroism to be called into question.

Flight spends most of its time painting a graphic, realistic, and relentless picture of the life of an addict and, therefore, of the life of a human person. It echoes Paul's words from Roman 7, "For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do - this I keep on doing" (v. 19), but with one important difference: Washington's character thinks he knows what he's doing! It's always worked out before, and even when things seemed to be going tragically wrong, he was able to perform in ways that no other pilot (even a sober one) could.

In the film's most powerful scene, a fellow addict (played by Kelly Reilly) tells Washington's character that she's worried about him. "Worried about me?" he responds indignantly. "Worry about you! We're not the same... I choose to drink!" "It doesn't seem much like a choice to me," she replies. Reilly's character has added the "I do not understand what I do" of Romans 7:15 and tears the blinders from Washington's flight from himself.

For every scene in which Washington promises sobriety (When it is in his obvious legal interest to remain sober), there is a companion scene, showing us his continued spiral toward bottom. In the end, it is the bottoming out that leads to freedom. "I might be a chump," he says in a final scene, "But I couldn't tell any more lies."

The most common lie we tell is one to ourselves - that we have it all together, that we know what we're doing, and that we're in control. It takes bottoming out to lead us the the Promised Land. "My grace is sufficient for you," the tagline might as well read, "for my power is made perfect in weakness" (2 Corinthians 12:9).

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