Self-Control

Sermon planned for Sunday, August 28th 2011

Texts: Galatians 5:13-26; Titus 2:1-14

We’ve had a great summer – and this is the last Sunday of August… already! We’ve looked at the Fruit of the Spirit this summer. How has your garden been growing? What situations this summer have called for your patience? Who has challenged you to display kindness & gentleness? Is there joy in your heart? Have you been generous in some situation?

The Fruit of the Spirit grow in us because the Holy Spirit is at work in us. In what areas of your heart has the Spirit been at work this past week? Can you name some missed opportunities, where God gave you a chance to grow, but you walked by? Our Christian journey is all about being honest with ourselves. On the one hand, we make all kinds of mistakes, we fall to temptation, we struggle with this or that sin; and yet, we are new creations in Jesus Christ. His Spirit is making us new.

In the next part of my sermon I want to briefly look at how early Christians would have understood temperance and self-discipline, and how that would be different from the people around them in the Greek culture. My goal is to then help us understand Self-Control – both its moral and spiritual nature – and also learn some practical tips on how to become more self-controlled.

Self-Control is a habit & spiritual gift which strengthens a person to govern their natural appetites for pleasures of the senses by the rule of reason and faith. In other words, self-control is the steering wheel of the Christian’s moral activity. Greek philosophers and teachers spent a lot of time thinking about Temperance and Discipline. When Paul was writing to the Galatians, and when he was writing about the Fruit of the Spirit, its safe for us to assume that he had some training in Greek thought and moral philosophy. In fact, if you compare Paul’s letter to the Romans and Plato’s Republic you could make an argument that Paul was writing specifically to offer an alternative to Plato’s philosophical worldview. Plato argued that human reason could bring about a righteous and just society – if you spend your time thinking about goodness and virtue, this will strengthen & enable you to choose the good. Living the virtues will become a habit. For Paul, human reason is fallen. Humanity needs help from outside of itself. We need a ‘new Adam’ to overcome the brokenness left behind by the ‘old Adam’. This can happen only through the gift of grace. It is this gift of grace that repairs human society – and the Holy Spirit is transforming the Church as a prototype of this Kingdom society.

In short, the difference between Greek Philosophy and Paul’s theology is that Paul saw a deep need in the human soul – and that need could only be addressed by the God who created us. But despite the difference, there are also many similarities in how Paul and the Greeks understood Self-Control. The Greeks used the language of ‘virtue’, whereas Paul used the metaphor of Fruit; but both of these were meant to point at a person’s ability to act righteously in a given situation. For Paul, a person’s ability to act rightly is deeply connected to the Holy Spirit’s work in their life – that’s the big difference in my opinion. But both Paul and the Greeks saw Self-Control as a special virtue or Fruit.

Self-Control is an English word translated from the Greek “enkrateia” and “sophrosune”, both of which speak to this issue of being able to govern your moral actions well. Another way of looking at Self-Control is that it is the moral quality of someone who masters their desires and passions, especially the sensual passions. This would be a very Greek way of putting it, but it’s definitely in scripture too – just think of all the talk about living by the Spirit rather than living by the flesh. But Self-Control is a bit different than the other Fruit of the Spirit – it’s different than love, joy, peace, etc… It’s more like an umbrella concept.

Self-Control, like an umbrella, is a Fruit that holds all the other Fruit under it. Or at least this is how the Greeks understood it. Self-Control is the umbrella that keeps all the other Fruit in their proper order, especially when the storms of temptation come. The Greeks understood the human life as divided into three basic primal drives, needs or desires. According to the Greeks that Paul would have been familiar with, every person was faced with these three main drives. The first was the drive to survive as an individual human. Every person wants to survive – every person has a drive to eat and to drink.

The second drive that faces humans is connected to our life in community. When we find ourselves surrounded by others we are faced with the other basic human drive: the drive to survive as a human community. This social drive is deeply connected to our bodily desire for sex and the need for procreation. These first two drives were understood to be the most basic and also the most powerful.

The final drive that we deal with, according to the Greeks, is the drive to comfort and well-being. This is a secondary drive – not absolutely necessary – but it is a drive nonetheless. In fact, most of us talk about comforts as things we need, including running water, one or two vehicles, several pairs of shoes, numerous articles of clothing, etc… From the ancient Greek perspective, these are the basic three drives that we all face – they bring out the best and the worst in us. As an umbrella concept, Self-Control wasn’t specifically designed for just one of these areas – instead, self-control was the over-arching virtue that would keep these drives in check.

Self-Control would be the habit that would respond whenever you faced a temptation in one of these areas. If people considered you to be self-controlled, it meant that you would eat the right amount of food, you wouldn’t get drunk, you’d be faithful to your spouse and not live a life of unbridled lust, and you would live a life of simplicity and modesty – not wasting money on all kinds of junk.

Self-Control was understood as the virtue that would put the other virtues to good use. If you faced an opportunity to over-eat or get drunk, a self-controlled person would express the virtue of abstinence. You would abstain from eating too much or getting drunk. When faced by an opportunity to commit adultery or to join a sexual orgy, the self-controlled Greek would express the virtue of chastity and would be sexually intimate with their appropriate partner. (Now mind you, the Greek culture had different views of who an appropriate partner was than the Christian perspective of that time) Similarly, if you had extra money and were passing through the marketplace, the self-controlled person would apply the virtue of modesty and they would resist buying stuff they didn’t need. They would dress modestly and speak simply rather than trying to impress others with extravagant speeches.

In this way, Self-Control was like the steering wheel of a ship that would guide a person through tricky moral situations by applying the right virtue at the right time and to the right amount. If you were at war, Self-Control would keep you from applying too much courage – otherwise you’d become foolish. It would keep you from applying too little courage – or you’d be a coward. Self-Control was all about knowing how, when, and how much of a virtue to practice in a given situation.

When Paul wrote down his understanding of God’s Kingdom, and how God’s righteousness works in the Christian’s life, he worked with some of the same concepts that he found in Greek philosophy. But he changed some things too. Some of the changes were small, and others were crucial. In several of his letters, Paul would give a list of virtues and in his letter to the Christians in Galatia, he spoke of them through the metaphor of Fruit – the Fruit of the Spirit.

One major difference, for Paul, is that the virtue of love is the most important of all of them. Without love we have nothing. Love is the key; and so, in his list of Fruit it comes first. That’s the way you write a sentence in Greek. No matter what the structure of your sentence, or where the verbs are, it’s the first word in a sentence or list that you want to pay most attention to. But this doesn’t mean that “self-control” is unimportant for Paul because it’s at the end – not at all. In the passage we heard from Titus, we heard Paul emphasizing Self-Control four times in the space of fourteen verses. Self-Control and discipline were crucial for Paul. In his favourite sports metaphor, Paul wrote that Christians should be self-controlled like an athlete.

In my opinion, the reason Paul puts Self-Control at the end of his list is to put a bracket around this list of Fruit. Love is first because its most important – and Self-Control is on the other end of the list because it follows up on all of these other virtues. For Paul, Self-Control is part of what it means to carry any of the Fruit. Cultivating the Fruit of the Spirit is all about rejecting a life according to the flesh. You either live in the Spirit or by the Flesh – because, for Paul, these two things have nothing to do with each other.

Just a few verses earlier, Paul commanded the Galatians: “16 Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. 17 For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh; for these are opposed to each other…” Flesh and Spirit are like the poles on a magnet – they do not meet. In my understanding, for Paul, Self-Control is the buffer zone between the Fruit of the Spirit and the vices that want to take over – you could say that Self-Control is the Round-Up that keeps the weeds out of the garden.

Another way you could put it is that Self-Control is like a boat; a boat that carries the other Fruit in it – keeps them dry from the waters of moral filth. Without Self-Control, the filthy habits will sink the ship. Recently, I read a news story that pointed out that there are an increasing amount of fatalities of people who are pet-owners of large tigers. It is a known fact that the older a tiger gets the more likely the tiger will revert back to its wild instincts. The older it gets, the more you look like a steak. The thing is, a young Tiger kitten is so cute. You see it, you want it, you want to pet it – right? It’s so cuddly and so you let it into your home and heart. The problem is – this kitten wasn’t meant to be tamed. It will grow into something quite dangerous and wild. And that’s what it is like for us to let filthy habits into our home and heart.

That’s what it is like to let lust come into our heart – it starts out as a kitten – a lasting gaze here, an innocent flirtation there – but that kitten is meant to grow and it will grow. And it kills you and your marriage. The same goes with anger or violence. That’s why Jesus forbids even anger towards our brother and sister – he knows that the kitten will grow into a ferocious tiger. An angry thought grows into Cain taking his brother Abel out onto the field and killing him with his own two hands. Which kittens are you welcoming into your home? Is there a leak in your boat? Is the water getting in?

Paul began his talk about life in the Spirit with a discussion about freedom. We were called to freedom, brothers and sisters, just don’t use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence. Use self-control. Keep the weeds out of your garden. Remember the children looking at that tasty marshmallow. How many times have you found yourself in a similar situation? I know I have. You face a temptation and you know it will be so good when you taste it. But Samuel Coleridge was right when he penned the famous quote: “How like herrings and onions our vices are in the morning after we have committed them.” When we bite into the marshmallow, what we end up getting is a mouthful of salty fish and onions. That’s what it is like when we succumb to temptation. The shiny brilliance of temptation turns into the sour bitterness of addiction, guilt and shame.

So how do we grow more self-controlled? How do we shore up our boat so that the filthy waters of sin don’t come sweeping in? There’s a whole variety of strategies that we, as Christians, need to add to our arsenal against temptation. But the first and most important of all of them is opening ourselves to the activity of God’s Spirit in our life. That’s the key difference between Paul’s view of the moral life and the view held by Greek philosophers. For the Greeks, its all about human effort and forming virtuous habits. This is crucial, but it is missing something important. The human soul and body is sick. It is evidenced by the way we fall apart both physically and emotionally. The Old Adam’s nature still clings to us, as Christians – and we experience the result of that sin… our bodies, our relationships fall apart.

It’s not enough to say that we can pull ourselves out of this mess by our own bootstraps, as the Greeks want it. Human history includes enough examples of failure. In theological terms, we call this the depravity of man. In Paul’s words – all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. But Paul points out the truth that in Jesus there is a new possibility. He lived a life of purity, self-control, love, joy, patience, etc… He is our kind and gentle shepherd. When I told my professor that Christians don’t seem to get better with age he told me I was exactly right – they don’t get better with age… people get better with Christ. With him there is a new possibility that opens up. Christ’s Spirit opens up a new hope. It puts a crack in the old shell that kept us enslaved to sin. Now, as Paul tells us, we are called to be enslaved to one another through love not sin.

But Jesus partners with us in pulling out the weeds in our heart. It’s not magic hocus pocus. Christ’s Spirit partners with us in growing love, joy and peace. Cultivating Self-Control begins by opening ourselves to the work of God’s Spirit – it means that we spend time with God in prayer, in silence, in worship and study. But we also cultivate Self-Control through practices that discipline our heart, mind and body. For example, I go to the gym in an effort to discipline my body. Some people fast on a regular basis as a way of aligning their body with their hearts desire – to be focused on God alone.

Another way of cultivating self-control is by being brutally honest about your weaknesses and most challenging temptations. When you know your weaknesses then you can battle against them. A key way to do this is to avoid the situations that tempt you. Is it the internet? Find some way of becoming accountable in this area. If you’re in a dating relationship, maybe the temptation is physical intimacy – why not avoid being in places with your girlfriend where things will go further? I’ve sometimes said that if you absolutely have to kiss your girlfriend – do it in public… public displays of affection may be awkward… but private displays of affection can be dangerous. God didn’t design us to get the motor running and then to turn it off just like that. Are you tempted to be greedy? Do you spend most of your week worried about money? I encourage you to find someone you can be accountable to with how you spend your money – so that money doesn’t become your master.

To close, I want to quickly summarize. Paul’s approach to the Fruit of Self-Control, and all the other Virtues, is that he puts God’s Spirit right at the heart of it all – because they are Fruits of the Spirit. Take time, this coming week – set aside twenty minutes a day – and take time to pray, to be silent before God, to invite the Spirit’s activity in your heart. But the Spirit’s work in our heart and life is a partnership. We need to practice disciplines that will shape our heart to be loving, joyful, kind, etc… Why not volunteer somewhere? Our youth program is looking for more youth mentors. What about setting up a car-pool to go and do prison visitation – I’d join in a heartbeat. What about a weekly time of fasting, where you discipline your heart and body to focus on Jesus for a larger chunk of time? Our hearts and bodies require regular practices and disciplines in order to cultivate the Fruit – and to grow in Self-Control.

May the Spirit of our Lord Jesus Christ guide each one of you; and may Jesus our Lord continue the revolution in your heart that is transforming you into a witness of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness and self-control. Amen.