FRUIT OF THE SPIRIT - SELF CONTOL
Gal. 5: 16-26
Today were looking at the fruit of the spirit—Self control
Now who here today would not like- a little more Self control,
or Self discipline in your life?
How about you parents of small children
How about you business managers with a lot of employees?
Or you Teachers with a classroom full of students?
Or you young people with all that peer pressures.
Friday someone asked me what I was preaching on.
I said “Self-control” He said: “I don’t have any problem with self.
It’s the control part that bothers.”
E.Stanley Jones was in Madras India and watched a man
driving a cow and a calf from door to door
and milking the cow in the presence of the housewives.
Why did he have to trudge in the hot sun day after day
And bother moving the cow and her calf in this way to
Sell and deliver his milk?
Simple reason…he could not be trusted by the housewives..
He had watered down the milk in the past and his dishonesty doomed him
to this drudgery of milking the cow in their presence.
9 out of 10 people owe their success to self disciplines.
Those who have failures in marriages, business, finances,
Usually lack self control.
God is committed by sending the Holy Spirit
To transforming us into totally disciplined persons.
able to discern between good and evil
Paul writes: And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ, (Phil 19).
so to live a life of Self control : We must learn to :
I. PAY BEFORE WE PLAY.
Paul writes I Cor. 9:25-26 Everyone who competes in the game goes into training… I do not fight like a man beating the air. No I beat my body and make it my slave so that after I have preached to others. I myself will not be disqualified for the prize.
Any athlete knows he had better pay the price
Before he competes in the race.
You can’t expect a muscle to do on the field of competition
what it was unwilling to do in the practice arena.
So we must pay before we play.
You can’t ride the Go Carts at Thunder road
Until you pay for the rides.
This is “not a charge and ride” business.
You “Pay before you play.”
Parents must teach this lesson to their children
If they want them to grow up as self controlled adults.
One of the rules my father had on the farm was
“Get your work done first before you play.”
Every year they would decide which chores each of us kids would do.
I never wanted to do any chores.
But I never got a vote.
My Dad believed the scriptures: “If you teach a child to be faithful in a little things he can be trust in the larger things. Luke 19: 17 (Paraphrase)
Chores were our responsibility.
My father never milked my cow.
My brothers never milked my cow.
I would have to milk my own cow.
I had often wished my father might have been irresponsible or more undisciplined.
I would have made a great sparodic milker.
Course the cow would have gone dry by then.
I really wanted the chicken chores.
Getting the eggs and feeding the chickens.
They had self feeders.
You only had to fill them up once a week.
You could leave the eggs in the nest overnight.
Sure the Chicken would crack a few eggs and get a little careless about others.
But If your parents didn’t know it.
You could get them the next day.
You might have to wash and scrub them a bit more.
One day I remember taking care of the chickens for my sister.
And placing the eggs in that wire basket we had.
I was learning about the laws of gravity and centrifugal force in school at that time.
And that gravity on the earth is related to that spinning motion
That if you spin something
The centrifugal force will hold it into place.
I had already discovered that you could do that with a pail of milk.
I don’t know why I was thinking about that in the chicken house.
But I decided to demonstrate this theory of centrifugal force with an egg basket.
So I swung the egg bucket in a great circle of my arm.
I discovered at that time another law at work.
Some guy by the name of Murphy.
He must have been a looser.
To have a law named after him that if it can go wrong it will.
The problem with my centrifugal force experiment
was that I hadn’t calculated the length of my arm connected to the length of the pail handle and the distance of the cross beam of the chicken house
And when I swung the pail. It stopped in mid air
Upside down over me.
Maybe that’s why I have always liked my Eggs over hard.
Not slimy in the pan.
We must pay before we play.
I should have calculated the distance before I Swung the pail.
It the same in relationships.
You can live together before you make the commitment to marry,
But it will cost you. Divorce is higher with cohabitators.
Yet 60% of high school senior think it’s a good idea to live together before marriage. Even though cohabitating women are twice as likely as married women to be physically abused and three time as likely to be depressed.
In 1960 430,000 couples lived together.
In 1998 4,236,000 lived together.
It the same with finances:
You can play and charge yourself into financial bondage.
It’s the same with raising children.
2 ½ million children from ages ten to seventeen have a police record.
85% of all our criminals are under 25 years of age.
Excess demands greater excess and only the disciplined of the spirit can break the circle of selfishness. P.123 FRUIT OF THE SPIRIT Ron Hembree.
We can not let our children determine what is good for them.
They don’t know.
That’s why we parents are given to them by God.
Sign said: If you kick the person who was responsible for most of your troubles you wouldn’t be able to sit down for a week.
To Learn self-control we must:
I. PAY BEFORE WE PLAY.
II. PLAN BEFORE WE PROCEED.
Jesus said: “Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Will he not first sit down and estimate the cost to see if he has enough money to complete it? Luke 14:28
To have the fruit of self control one must plan before he proceeds.
Decide before we get into the situation wha our actions will be.
I can’t wait until I go into the doughnut shop to choose my doughnut..
You nose and eyes will pick the doughnut for me.
And my taste buds will be in control.
Those wonderful smells of fresh baked doughnuts.
Will lead me away from the generic, sugarfree, aftertaste cake donut on the shelf
To the chocolate covered cream filled Bavarian.
Maybe two.
If I go to a ball game.
I must decide ahead of time healthy eating.
I love those wolf dogs.
Many of you have seen me eat wolf dogs.
But My prearranged choice was the walking taco.
We must Plan before we proceed.
I need to exercise for my heart.
I can’t wait until I walk out the door to decide how far I’m going to walk.
Otherwise when I get out to the street.
My feet and leg start talking to me.
Hey its wet out here.
That gets my calf muscles riled up they say:
Can’t you read a thermometer.
Its below zero.
Were freezing down here.
Pretty soon their all talking
I hate to pass anybody with all this conversation going on.
The first thing I know is I’m back inside the house.
Apostle Pauls says: I punish ‘my body.I subdue it.
Pay before you play:
Financially you must decide ahead of time what you will spend.
Stick to your budget or you will spent yourself into debt.
Donna does all our grocery shopping from a preplanned list.
When I go.
I’m like a kid in a candy store.
I see all kinds of things I like.
I come home
She says: Why did you buy that?
I don’t know it told me too.
It’s the same way in the spirit.
Friends if you don’t plan to put church into your schedule.
You will never go.
It’s too rainy today.
It’s too icy
It’s too cold.
It’s too hot
It’s too windy.
Or too busy.
Self control is deciding ahead of time.
I must say something about sexuality?
Men we must plan before we proceed.
God made men with a pleasure satisfaction overdrive.
Women may not like that in men, but that just what is.
But that doesn’t’ mean it has to control us.
If you get on the internex and look at pron sites.
You will get hooked..
You and I must plan ahead what our eyes should see.
What our ears should hear.
Or we lose the ability to exercise self control.
Now we all struggle with self control in certain areas of our lives.
So Men lets start to work on just three areas.
Now if you don’t know what your areas are?
Ask your spouse.
She knows.
She wants to tell you.
Remember wives only in three areas.
Then began to work on those three.
Now for women its not physical satisfaction,
It words.
Its gossip.
Psychologist say:
Women use 15,000 words more then men every day.
Gossip is the name of your game.
When you go to coffee group or bible study.
You must plan before you proceed.
You must make a decision up front to not let your words get out of control.
Because at your Bible study and its prayer time
Someone always says; “What are the Prayer request”?
Everyone sits up. This is our time.
We have to pray for Jack and Jill.
Its so sad about their seperation.
She always was a little spacy.
They were never in sinck.
Why just the other day.
You know they were talking to ….
Its unbelieveable, I knew it was coming….
Its so sad for the kids.
20 minutes later were still on the first prayer request.
And its getting better and better with each passing minute.
Can’t even recognize the initial request.
Its like one Lady said to the other.
I have already told you more then I know.
Betty, the town gossip and self-appointed guardian of the town’s morals,
kept sticking her nose into other people’s business.
Most people feared her enough to maintain their silence.
However, she made a mistake when she recently accused Ted,
a local man, of being an alcoholic because she saw his pickup truck
parked outside the town’s only bar one afternoon.
Ted, a man of few words, stared at her for a moment
and just walked away without saying a word.
For the next week he parked his pickup truck in her
driveway and left it there all night.
You should have heard her bible study group praying for her!
To Learn self-control we must: .
I. PAY BEFORE WE PLAY.
II. PLAN BEFORE WE PROCEED.
III. PRAY BEFORE WE PRACTICE
Gal 5: 16-18 “So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature.” For the sinful nature desires what is contrary to the Spirit, and the Spirit what is contrary to the sinful nature.
You must get the spirit of the living God.
Before you will have victory over the sinful nature.
God spirit was sent to help us.
John 14: 26 But the Counselor, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.”
God wants us to get tough.
God wants us to live tough.
To have Spiritual stability.
Did you know that Spiritual stability is closely related to emotional stability
There is a close connection between the body, mind, and Spirit
They are all tied together as component of this life.
Mind, body and Spirit
One usually catches the ills of the other.
People know the mind and body interact
If you have emotional problems you are likely to have physical problems
Ulcer, colitis, high blood preasure.
If you have physical problems, you likely to have emotional problems.
Everyone knows the mind and body interacts in their problems..
But what we fail to recognize in the church, is that the Spirit is right in there too.
.
What’s the first thing a person say when he get depressed?
Where is God?, Why did He do this thing to me.
What the first thing a person say when he hit with a catastrophic disease
Why would God do this? Why doesn’t he heal me? Where is he.
Spiritual problems develop out of emotional and physical weakness
And if your soft and weak and blown over by the circumstance of life
It will affect you spiritually as well.
Gods wants strength from us.
Nothing impresses us more then to see someone crawl out of tragedy or
Adversity with their faith intact.
You and I must PRAY BEFORE WE PRACTICE.
WE MUST HAVE THE INNER SPIRITUAL DISCIPLINES OF
SELF CONTROL TO BE ABLE TO FACE THE WORLD
God gives us the Holy Spirit to control our eye, and ears.
To control our tongue and our mind.
Because when were Born again.
God Sends us the controlling Holy Spirit to live within us.
So that there is no temptation taken us that is not common to man
But when were tempted we shall have a way of escape. I Corinthians 10:13
That is why Jesus was ABLE TO SAY AT THE CROSS
FATHER FORGIVE THEM FOR THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO.
I have heard PEOPLE say at the grave of a loved one.
Its so hard, but I know that my loved one is in Gods hand.
We don’t become a spiritual giant overnight.
We do it by reading maybe a verse at a time.
And saying a sentence prayer.
It’s Self discipline.
Self control in our daily walk with God
And soon were into a loving relationship with God.
If we are faithful in the little things,
God will reward us in the big things.
Jesus exhibited self control throughout the whole farce of his trail and sentencing.
He didn’t rail out.
He didn’t abuse or accuse.
He said: Father forgive them.
He gave his mother away to another’s care.
Even on the cross the self- control of Jesus spirit was evident.
To the thief who had abused and hurt and brought hardship and agony on those
He had robbed and beaten.
Jesus didn’t says: No you deserve hell.
Can’t you see I’m suffering here too.And IM’ innocent.
No he said: “Today you shall be with me in Paradise.”
Give God your life.
Accept your responsibility for your life.
And let God give you His Spirit to overcome
And find a self controlled life.
When you Pay before you Play
Plan before you Proceed
Pray before you Practice
