Clicking to change object controls

I'm trying to figure out the best way to do this. I have several objcets on the screen and I want it to be that when you click on one the controls now affect that object, then when you click on another objcet the controls now work on the new object and don't affect the previous objet at all. For right now while I try to get this working all the objects come from the same resource and all share the same features, one of which is a timer call to update their movement. I'm pretty sure having them all work on the timers and having a global set to whatever the player clicks on and then having an if statement in the timer function to check if the objects match is probably not the best way to handle it. Although I'm pretty sure it would work, but I am going t have 30 or so of those objects on the screen at a time.

So any other ideas that I could work on?