Tomorrow is Labour day. Interesting isn’t it that Labour Day is a celebration of work yet we get the day off. Wouldn’t it make more sense for us to go work for free to celebrate the fact that we get to work? Anyway I’m not going to talk about Labour Day today, we’ll touch on work more next week, but I am going to talk about our final Fruit of the Spirit which is crucial to how we work – Self-Control. Our final fruit is Grapes.
This word self-control or temperance again has an interesting meaning in the Greek. Remember we can’t always perfectly articulate in our English language what words from other languages mean, so we lose things in the translation. But here the root of this Greek word means “strong in a thing” or “masterful”. Self-mastery or like a strength over oneself. None of us would argue that self-control requires a great deal of strength at times. The hardest person to say no to is yourself.
Scott Peck writes in his book "The Road Less Traveled: "I spent much of my ninth summer on a bicycle. About a mile from our house the road went down a steep hill and turned sharply at the bottom. Coasting down the hill one morning, I felt my gathering speed to be ecstatic. To give up this ecstasy by applying brakes seemed an absurd self-punishment. So I resolved to simultaneously retain my speed and negotiate the corner. My ecstasy ended seconds later when I was propelled a dozen feet off the road into the woods. I was badly scratched and bleeding, and the front wheel of my new bike was twisted beyond use from its impact against a tree. I had been unwilling to suffer the pain of giving up my ecstatic speed in the interest of maintaining my balance around the corner. I learned, however, that the loss of balance is ultimately more painful than the giving up required to maintain balance.”
We don’t want to hinder our enjoyment of life. We don’t want to reduce the pleasure we have in life. Who does, Christians are allowed to have fun too right? So, rather than tell ourselves to slow down, we head into life’s curves traveling too fast only to find ourselves scratched, bruised, and bleeding. How often have you chosen short term enjoyment over waiting, only to regret it later on?
Not only does self-control mean saying no to yourself, it also means doing what has to be done. There’s lots of talk about procrastination, but procrastination is usually a problem of self-control. We are afraid of the work required, or the possible results. We put off saying what needs to be said because we fear the other person’s response.
We put off making decisions because we have too high expectations and fear making the wrong choice. So instead of exercising self-control, we give into the fear, because often self-control involves taking risks.
Tom Landry the famous coach of the Dallas Cowboys in their hayday said: “The role of the coach is to make people do things they don’t want to do to achieve the results they want to achieve.” As soon as I heard that I thought of God. Isn’t that pretty much how he coaches us? If we want results we often have to do what we would rather not do.
The Apostle Paul was a great example of self-control and he says in 1 Corinthians 9:24-27: “Don’t you realize that in a race everyone runs, but only one person gets the prize? So run to win! 25 All athletes are disciplined in their training. They do it to win a prize that will fade away, but we do it for an eternal prize. 26 So I run with purpose in every step. I am not just shadowboxing. 27 I discipline my body like an athlete, training it to do what it should. Otherwise, I fear that after preaching to others I myself might be disqualified.”
Notice his motivation for self-control, to get the eternal prize, not the ones we can get here on earth, and to make sure he’s not a hypocrite.
Let’s look at the five qualities he mentions of a self-controlled life.
I. A Self-Controlled Life Has Positive Goals (v 24)
Everyone runs the race but only one wins the prize, why? Because they have the motivation and discipline that causes them to succeed. You can have great motivation, but without self-control, you lose because you make too many mistakes. You can have great self-control, but without motivation, you don’t have the energy to overcome obstacles. Discipline is pretty much the same as self-control and isn’t it interesting that the word comes from disciple?
When we have a goal that is extremely important to us, we do what it takes. We want to have lots of money, but we don’t stick to a spending and savings plan, we want to lose weight but we don’t stick to our diet or exercise plan, we want a good marriage but we don’t have a plan for that or the discipline to regularly practice what will make our marriage better. So we need to ask ourselves how important are these things to us, really?
Goals are just dreams if we don’t know the steps to get there and have the discipline to follow the plan. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have any worldly goals, but by far our greatest goal as Christians, above anything else is to see people be saved by Jesus Christ, and to grow in our own salvation. That is what will bring ultimate satisfaction.
A self-controlled life then requires positive goals, and also involves:
II. Discipline (v 25)
“Every athlete exercises self-control in all things, every Christian practices self-control in all things to gain the imperishable prize”. We know the goal, and I am sure every goal you have ever accomplished involved some kind of self-control. Remember when you got your driver’s license? Did you get in the car, leave your seatbelt off, pop the car into gear and peel off, laying a nice piece of rubber? Maybe you wanted to, but you controlled yourself, you followed the rules that are required for you to get that valuable prize, your driver’s license. And it requires some self-control to keep it too.
The word disciple means learner or follower. Discipline means learning and following the instructions in order to accomplish something. This isn’t the word for discipline as in punishment. So rather than snubb our noses at the word discipline, we should embrace it, because it’s the gift or fruit that makes things happen. Christian disciplines like reading the Bible, praying, fasting and the like, are the things we do to get the results we want in our relationship with God. What could be better than that?
III. A Self-Controlled Life Demands Focus (v 25b-26)
This is related to the goal but is more than that. We are only able to do so many things at once. When Paul says he does not run aimlessly, he means he has a goal in his running, but he also realizes that he has to keep the goal in focus. If he is running and has a hundred things on his mind, and is trying to accomplish many things while he runs, his performance will be hampered.
When I was golfing competitively I had to be completely focused. I had a hard time chatting with my caddie, or other players and still maintaining my concentration. While walking to the ball I could chat a little, but as I approached it I had to get in the zone. You watch the pros on TV and they all have a very specific routine once they get close to the ball. If you watch a pro tournament live it’s almost like a choreographed dance that even the caddies are a part of. This routine focuses the player and you can’t be thinking about the last shot, what you are going to eat after the round, or anything else.
The important part of focus for the Christian life is not allowing distractions. We have goals to make it easier to say no to things that don’t help us reach that goal. But remaining focused on the goal in the midst of temptation and the desire for instant gratification is very difficult. It’s so easy to get sidetracked from our spiritual disciplines, or even to be thinking about other things while praying or reading the Word.
How easily do you get distracted? Do you find that you start a lot of things but finish few? Do you hear yourself saying often, “I had good intentions.” Do you allow unimportant things to interfere with the important ones? Success in anything demands focus and making the right things priorities.
IV. A Self-Controlled Life Includes the Whole Person (v 27)
Self-control like just about everything else, begins in the mind. Every decision, every action, every emotion comes from our mind. We must control our emotions, our bodies, and our minds. And I will suggest that until we have control of the mind, these other two – emotions and body - are very difficult to control.
Some days athletes are tired and sore, but they continue to play or train. Some days they don’t feel like training, but they do it anyway, and often those are the times they get the most benefit. I find that to be true of praying quite often. There are days when the athlete doubts their ability to perform, but they keep going.
In Romans 12 Paul gave us this insight: “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. 2 Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.”
Many of you know the story of Victor Frankl. He was a Jewish psychologist who spent time in a Nazi concentration camp. He talked about how they took everything from him, his clothes, his family, his possessions, but then he suddenly realized that they could not take away his freedom to choose how to respond. The mind is the most powerful thing God gave us, we need to learn how to use it for Him.
Are you training your whole being? Have you presented your body and your mind as living sacrifices so they can be renewed daily? We could all use a little work on transforming our mindsets, or our chronic ways of thinking.
V. A Self-Controlled Life Means Total Submission to the Coach and His Training Plan (Gal 5:22a)
Again back to Galatians, “But the fruit of the Spirit”. The Holy Spirit has to have control of our lives for self-control to fully manifest. He is the only way we can live a life of self-control. Sure we can try, and sometimes be successful, but how often have you sincerely tried to exercise self-control over the long run and failed. Any alcoholic knows that our own self-control is very unreliable. AA was founded on this principle and surrendering our will to a higher power.
The Holy Spirit is our coach, we cannot control ourselves without a coach. Even professional athletes need coaches. They observe, teach, train, correct, and encourage us just like the Holy Spirit. When we listen and yield to the coach we can live a life of self-control by His power, not our own.
Self-control isn’t actually talked about much in the Bible, but where it is, it’s usually mixed in with other qualities. Of course here in Galatians it’s with the other fruit that we have talked about this summer. We find self-control mentioned mostly in the letters to Timothy and Titus, in relation to what are considered Godly qualifications for leadership in the church.
For older men it’s mentioned with sober mindedness (which is mentioned in few other places as well, and literally means to be discreet, moderate in everything, and of sound mind), dignified, faith, love, and steadfastness. For women it’s paired up with purity, love, kindness, submissiveness, and modest dress. For elders and everyone who claims to be Christian it goes with all the above and also together with being respectable, hospitable, not quarrelsome, a lover of good, upright, holy, fearless, powerful, and disciplined.
My take on this is that all these other qualities to some degree or another require self-control. Maybe it was said best in Proverbs 25:28, “A person without self-control
is like a city broken into and left without walls.” In other words, lack of self-control leaves you extremely vulnerable and helpless.
Do you see how this is so? A person lacking self-control gets into endless trouble because they are impulsive, and very vulnerable to temptation. These are people Satan loves to use, because they are blown easily in the direction of selfishness and anger. The Bible talks about it in terms of sexuality, addiction, and verbal reactivity. People with bad tempers, who speak without thinking, who seek to gratify the flesh at all costs.
To put it in a nutshell, a lack of self-control leads us to sin, and the Devil knows it and uses that weakness.
But at the same time, all of the nine fruits or virtues including self-control, are not the result of our work, yes we can accomplish some of them some of the time through our own efforts, we can do our best to be aware and to build these virtues into our lives. But for them to become permanent traits in us, the Spirit must work in and through us.
So we ask, who is controlling your self? Self-control is not just when I control myself. Self-control is when the Holy Spirit is controlling my self. The self part here that we can do is getting out of the way. Not allowing our own thoughts and behaviours, and desires to interfere with the Spirit. So here’s the crux of the whole thing, self-control comes down to surrender, surrendering our self to Christ, and allowing the Holy Spirit to completely control us. Do you see how then there is no vulnerability?
It’s another one of those kind of biblical paradoxes, that in order to have complete self-control, we have to give up complete control and allow the Spirit to make us Christlike. Just as Jesus was one with the Father, he modeled this so that we could be one with the Holy Spirit. The more we accomplish that, the more the Spirit will lead us, and the more self-control we will have.
So how does one actually put this into practice. The first thing is to have a really good knowledge of the will of God. This way we can know the goals, and often God gives us through His word, the actual plan to achieve the goals as well. So we need to be heavily into Scripture. This could be called the receptive part of our relationship with Him.
The second part is praying way more than we do now. This is the giving part of our relationship with God. Yes we talk to him during prayer, but we also just spend time with Him and let him speak to us personally through the Holy Spirit. These two things will bring us into a closer relationship with God, and we will get more used to the Holy Spirit within us and how he works. These are the fundamentals.
So this really covers four of the five points I made today. We become clearer about the goals, we discipline ourselves to build the relationship, which includes surrendering to the coach and his will, and it helps us build focus.
The part that’s remaining is the discipline of our bodies and emotions. The answer here is denial of self. We need to get used to intentionally not giving into our own emotions and desires. Why do you think fasting is so prevalent in the Bible? I guarantee you it’s not for weight loss. Fasting is the practice of self control. Whether it be with food, TV, cigarettes, over working, anything, fasting gives us practice in saying no to ourselves. And it’s often during these times of fasting, that people report the Holy Spirit being most prevalent in their lives.
Same thing with emotions. We need to fast from reacting to anger. We need to say no to the need for satisfaction. Not necessarily all the time, but as times of practice. Practice saying no to your desires on a regular basis. God knows this isn’t natural and is very difficult for us, so he gave us instructions as our coach on how to train ourselves in this regard.
So this leads us to our action step for this week. For one week, it could be this week or another, attempt to say no to yourself, everytime you desire something that isn’t absolutely necessary. This could be an actual fast from something specific like food, or TV, or internet. Or it can just generally be saying no to everything you want to say, or do, or get, that you don’t absolutely need to say, do, or get. Have a week of not reacting, and seeing if the Spirit will take over. Pay attention to any interesting results or observations when you do this. I look forward to hearing about your experiences.
