11 Fruit of the Spirit: Self-control

Krisan Marotta: Welcome to Wednesday in the Word. I'm Krisan Marotta, and this is my podcast about what the Bible means and how we know. This is the 11th and penultimate talk in my series on the fruit of the Spirit. I'm glad you joined us. Today we're looking at the last of the fruits of the Spirit. We have been wandering through scripture on a quest to understand what the words on this list meant to Paul. He says that love, joy, peace, faith, and so forth are fruits of the Spirit. What kind of thing does he have in mind? One last time, I'll remind you of the context where we find this list. It's in the letter to the Galatians. Paul spends most of the letter to the Galatians refuting the argument of the Judaizers. He argues that we do not need to keep the law to be saved, that faith in Jesus is sufficient. In Galatians 5, Paul argues law-keeping does not make you a more holy or good person. Conversely, Paul argues faith in Jesus brings about a real moral transformation. Once we have been reconciled to God by the cross, he gives us his spirit, and his spirit changes us from the inside out, producing the things on this list. Today we're looking at the last item on the fruit of the spirit list, self-control. Self-control can be a scary concept because our gut reaction is that Paul means the ability to control ourselves at all times. We think that we must have the ability to always say and do the right thing in every situation. If that's what Paul means, then not only am I in deep trouble, all the believers I have ever known are in deep trouble. All of us find ourselves wrestling with ourselves. Part of us wants to do the right thing and wants to be a kind and compassionate person who follows God, but at the same time, part of us just wants to indulge our selfishness. Paul described this classic dilemma in Romans 7, where he argued that the law is a good thing because the law alerts us to our sinfulness. Without the law, we would never understand the depth of our sin, and we wouldn't know we need a savior. So just as God intended it, trying to keep the law reveals our problem with sin, so that we see our need for rescue and turn to faith in Jesus. In Romans 7.15, Paul says, For I do not understand my own actions, for I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Paul is describing a situation every believer runs into. The problem he had was simply ignorance or lack of willpower. He gives law keeping his best shot and finds it doesn't work. He resolved to clean up his act, to muster all his energy to avoid not only the sin, but the desire to sin and it doesn't work. The law teaches him he has a problem. Now what? He says he finds the principle of sin is present within himself. He agrees the law is good, he wants to keep the law, but when he tries to keep the law, he finds himself sinning again, and all of us face that very struggle. If by self-control Paul means the end of that struggle with sin in this life, then he's disqualified everyone I know, including himself, and he's contradicting what he says in Romans 7. That can't be what Paul means by self-control, but that leaves us with the question, well, what does he mean? In what sense is self-control a fruit of the Spirit? How do we reconcile self-control with the fact that believers continue to struggle with sin? Well, we're going to look at some passages to sort that out. The Greek word that's used here is not hard to understand, unlike gentleness or meekness, where we don't have a good English translation. Self-control is a decent translation. It captures the quality we're talking about. Many people across many cultures consider self-control a virtue and something that all human beings ought to pursue. Philosophers like Plato and Aristotle praised self-control as being foremost among the virtues. They thought no one could claim to be virtuous who wasn't in control of himself. For most of us, it's easy to see that there's something valuable about self-control. On the one hand, all human beings have this selfish desire to take what we want, put ourselves first, trample others to put ourselves forward, and make sure that our needs get met first. On the other hand, we humans have the ability to make moral judgments, to decide some actions are right and some actions are wrong. We have the ability to assess a situation, reason things out, and put a check on our selfish behavior. If we gave our passions free reign, society and civilization would rapidly degenerate into chaos and anarchy. Following unrestrained passion tends to destroy human life. We hurt other people, our relationships fall apart, we hurt ourselves, we spread disease and disaster. We think throwing away morality and ethics makes us free, but ironically, when we do that, we find we're not free at all. We are slaves of our passions. If you follow any celebrity biographies, you've probably run into that recurring plot. This story gets repeated over and over. A talented young musician slash actor slash athlete becomes famous too young. He indulges himself in sex, drugs, alcohol, and spending vast amounts of money. And what happens? His life falls apart. He ends up sick, destitute, poor, without friends, in the hospital or in jail. When he hits bottom, he finally admits that he's been going the wrong way. If he's going to survive, he needs to clean up his life, apologize to the people he stepped on, and begin exercising some self-control. Then he writes a book and goes on all the talk shows to testify to the advantages of staying sober, being faithful to your wife, and living on a budget. If you stop and think about it, these stories are tragic experiments in testing the questions that the hippie generation raised in the 1960s and 1970s. The motto of the hippies was, if it feels good, do it. Wouldn't we all be better off if we indulged ourselves in freedom? Shouldn't we be free to do whatever we want when we want to do it and just live and let live? My friend Brad Wilcox at the National Marriage Project does all kinds of research into marriage, society, and what makes people happy. His work consistently proves that nothing predicts happiness better than a good marriage. Hollywood may tell us that acquiring wealth, remaining single, avoiding children, and indulging ourselves is the path to fulfillment, but statistics consistently, repeatedly, and overwhelmingly say otherwise. The happiest people are husbands and wives in a committed marriage. That verdict is coming back from everybody. Self-indulgence does not make you better off. Self-control has value. If you don't control yourself, you end up dead, sick, addicted, or depressed. Alright, so what is self-control? At its core, self-control is the recognition that just because I want to do something doesn't mean I should do it. Self-control is that acknowledgement that I need to restrain myself. I decide not to act on some desire, thought, or passion. It's about self-limitation. I draw a line and I say I will not go there. There may be reasons why I want to go there, but I am not going to go there. Let's look at a couple of passages. This word doesn't get used very much in the New Testament. It never appears in the Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Old Testament. It's only used three times in the New Testament, and one of those three is this list of the fruit of the Spirit. But this word is used a lot in classical Greek literature, so we do have a good sense in how it was used at the time of Paul. So we're going to start by looking at the other New Testament usages. We will start in Acts 24. This event we're about to read occurs at the end of Paul's missionary journeys. He went to Jerusalem intending to stay there for a short while, but the Jews in Jerusalem brought charges against him and got him arrested and held in protective custody. Paul is scheduled to be brought before the governor for a hearing. The Jews hear about it and plot to kill Paul while he's being transported. But Paul's nephew uncovers the plot. He warns the Roman tribune that the Jews plan to ambush Paul, so the tribune bundles Paul up and secretly moves him to Caesarea. At Caesarea, Paul endures these various hearings. The Jews make their case against him. Paul gets a chance to plead his case, and then the powers that be try to figure out what to do with Paul. Are they going to convict him, let him go, or send him on to someone else to decide? At this point, a Roman governor named Felix is hearing Paul's case. Let me give you a little background. Felix was the Roman governor of Judea. He was married to a Jewish woman named Drusilla, who was reportedly very beautiful. Felix was not an admirable character. Even though he started as a slave, he was freed and eventually got himself promoted to the office of governor and sent to Judea. The Roman historian Tacitus described Felix as quote, cruel, licentious, and base. Drusilla was the youngest daughter of Herod Agrippa I. Herod Agrippa I is the grandson of Herod the Great, and Herod the Great is the king we read about in the Christmas story. Drusilla was married off at the age of fourteen to a king. When Felix arrives in Judea, he meets Drusilla. The fact that she's married to someone else makes no difference to him. He convinces her to leave her husband and marry him, and they have been married about a year by the time they run into Paul. Drusilla is Felix's third wife, and they have a son who is also named Agrippa. When Felix heard that Paul's case involved questions of religion, he adjourned the hearing until the Roman commander who'd arrested Paul could be present. But then, we'll pick up the story, this is Acts 24, verses 24 through 27. After some days Felix came with his wife Drusilla, who was Jewish, and he sent for Paul and heard him speak about faith in Christ Jesus. And as he reasoned about righteousness and self-control and the coming judgment, Felix was alarmed and said, Go away for the present. When I get an opportunity I will summon you. At the same time he hoped that money would be given him by Paul, so he sent for him often and conversed with him. When two years had elapsed, Felix was succeeded by Portius Festus, and desiring to do the Jews a favor, Felix left Paul in prison. Paul must have intrigued Felix because he summons Paul to hear more and more of his teaching. Luke tells us both Felix and Drusilla listened to Paul. Since there was no legal reason for Drusilla to be present at the hearings, I can only assume she must have been intrigued by what Paul was saying. Paul's words must have convicted Felix because he orders Paul to stop talking. Although he allowed Paul's friends to attend to his needs, Felix kept Paul in jail for two more years, ostensibly waiting for a more convenient time to decide his case. In reality, Felix was hoping for a bribe, but Paul never offered one. And when Felix was replaced, he left Paul in jail for his successor to deal with. For our purposes, what's interesting is how Luke summarizes their discussion. Paul discussed the gospel with Felix, and Luke says this in Acts 24, 25. And as he reasoned about righteousness and self-control and the coming judgment, Felix was alarmed and said, Go away for the present. When I get an opportunity, I will summon you. Luke tells us they talked about righteousness, self-control, and that's our word, and judgment. Now, we don't have a lot to go on here, so we have to speculate on why these three words accurately summarized Paul's speech. Given what we know about Paul's other speeches, I speculate it was something like this. On the issue of judgment, I suspect Paul said something like, There is a God, and one day we will stand before him. Each of us as individuals will stand before the judgment seat of God, and our eternal destiny will depend on how God judges our lives. On the issue of righteousness, Paul probably spoke about the need to be right with God. If we're talking about the judgment of God, the next logical question is what will he say to me when I stand before him? Am I in God's favor or will I fall under his wrath? Am I right with him? Am I the sort of person who will be condemned or will I receive mercy? And Paul probably spoke of the need to put your faith in Jesus Christ in order to find mercy. And then the final clue we have is this word self-control. So, in the context of talking about judgment and righteousness, we must recognize that God has a standard of right and wrong and he will hold us accountable to it. One day he will ask for an accounting of our lives and he will measure by his standards of holiness, goodness, and justice. God's judgment implies that I had better consider carefully whether to freely indulge myself in everything I want to do. Once I acknowledge the reality that God exists and that he is coming as a judge, self-control makes a lot more sense. The wisdom of limiting myself becomes obvious. Knowing that I'm going to face judgment opens my eyes to the value of saying, I will not go there because I know God would find that action despicable. Now, Paul would certainly be aware of Felix and Drusilla's background. He knows what sort of man Felix is. Paul's words must have sent off the alarm bells, and Felix probably thought, hmm, maybe discarding wife number two to marry wife number three after seducing her from her husband was not such a good idea. Luke tells us after hearing Paul's words, Felix was alarmed. He doesn't want to hear anymore. Paul has confronted him with the truth, and Felix realizes his actions look pretty bad, so he doesn't want to listen anymore. So in this context, we can see self-control means choosing to go God's way instead of my way. When I face the choice to indulge my wants and needs and passions, I refrain because I know what God says about right and wrong. Self-control then is humbling myself before God, accepting his verdict on right and wrong, and trying to live within his boundaries. Self-control is denying myself something I want because God says I can't have it now or it would be wrong to take it. When I exercise self-control, I limit my actions so I don't do wrong or hurt other people. Fundamentally, I recognize God has the right to put limits on my life and I try to live within them. Let's go to another passage to get another piece of the puzzle. This is 1 Corinthians chapter 9. Let me set this passage up a bit. No church in the New Testament is more like our modern American churches than the Corinthian church. Corinth was a city of wealth and culture. It was a hub of trade and commerce for the Roman Empire. It was a beautiful resort city and also a city of great immorality. It was known throughout the ancient world as a city of great and widespread debauchery. Think Las Vegas or San Francisco. Paul stayed in Corinth about 18 months preaching the gospel and he founded a church there. Many became believers, but after Paul left Corinth, factions developed in the church. One of the many problems the church faced was the issue of eating meat that had been sacrificed to idols. Some felt very strongly that it was okay to eat such meat, and others felt very strongly that it was wrong. Corinth had various temples to various pagan gods where people would make offerings of meat. Some of the meat was burned during the process of making the offering. The rest of the meat was sold in the marketplace or in the temple dining rooms where members of the community could eat together, kind of like a restaurant. Before converting to Christianity, the Gentile believers in Corinth participated in these temple meals and bought temple meat at the marketplace. Now they've come to faith, and the question arises, should they stop eating such meat and attending these meals? And this issue is dividing the church. Some in Corinth, probably the Gentile believers, argue it's just meat. We have the freedom in Christ to eat it. And Paul will say in this letter, they are right. They do have the freedom to eat the meat sacrificed to idols. Others in Corinth, probably the Jewish believers, have a real problem with the idea that it's okay to eat this meat. To them, it's idolatry. And anyone who eats of such meat is an idolater. It's just wrong and immoral. Paul says those who understand the freedom we have in Christ are right. There's nothing necessarily idolatrous about eating a piece of meat. But what disturbs Paul is the fact that those who are indulging themselves and eating the meat are so ready to look down on those who refuse to eat it. He is appalled that they feel perfectly fine creating a stumbling block to their fellow believers. In their freedom, they are ignoring the impact their lives are having on these other people. And Paul says that's the bigger problem. Yes, you have the freedom to eat the meat, but there's a more important issue going on. You need to be more concerned with how you're impacting others than whether you are free to eat the meat. And to illustrate his point, Paul uses himself as an example. This is 1 Corinthians chapter 9, verses 19 through 22. For though I am free from all, I have made myself a servant to all that I might win more of them. To the Jews I became as a Jew in order to win Jews. To those under the law, I became as one under the law, though not being myself under the law, that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law, I became as one outside the law, not being outside the law of God, but under the law of Christ, that I might win those outside the law. To the weak, I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all people, that by all means I might save some. Paul explains that when he's proclaiming the gospel, sometimes he's talking to Jews, sometimes he's talking to Gentiles, sometimes he's talking to baby believers who are new to the faith. I think that's what he means by the weak. When Paul speaks to these different kinds of people, he limits himself. When he's with Jews, he lives like a Jew. He knows he has the freedom not to keep the rituals of the law. He's not required to keep them to be saved or please God, but he does keep them for the reason that he doesn't want to create confusion in the people he's teaching. When he's with Jews, he keeps those rituals. He accommodates them so his behavior is not a stumbling block and they're more likely to listen to him. When he's speaking to Gentiles, he feels free to abandon the Jewish rituals and freely associate with the Gentiles. And when he's with new believers, he doesn't engage in activities he might otherwise engage in so as not to confuse them. His point is he goes out of his way to avoid creating an obstacle to their faith and understanding. And he never encourages anyone to act against their conscience, even if what their conscience is telling them is wrong because their faith is still new. Now let me clarify, this accommodation has limits. Paul says with the Jews he lives like a Jew, but when the Judaizers said, Oh, these Gentiles need to live like Jews and be circumcised, Paul did not give in. With the Judaizers, Paul was debating a fundamental question of what does it take to be saved? And on that he refused to compromise. This issue of which meat to eat is not a fundamental question of salvation. No one is arguing that your salvation is on the line either way. It's just a question of how do we be obedient? What does obedience look like in this situation? We should never Compromise the gospel. For example, we are never to imply that salvation is dependent on keeping the law. When it's not, Paul would never compromise on such a thing. But if it's a question of eating a ham sandwich in the company of Jews, Paul refrains. There's nothing hypocritical about that. He's choosing in a specific situation to limit his freedom because of how his behavior might negatively impact others. He stands firm on the truth of the gospel, but if it's a question of confusing or offending or losing his hearing with people, he limits himself. For our purposes, what I want you to see is this is self-control. Self-control is this idea that we limit our choices and our behavior because of what we believe to be true. We choose not to do something we might otherwise want to do because we value something else more. Theologically, I might have the freedom to say eat the temple meat, but if my freedom hurts another person, I should refrain. Paul says, if I thought that eating meat was actually going to hinder the spiritual growth of others, then I would never do it. I just wouldn't eat the meat. He goes on, this is 1 Corinthians 9, 23 and 24. I do all for the sake of the gospel that I may share with them and its blessings. Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one receives the prize? So run that you may obtain it. Paul is a teacher of the gospel. It's his job to tell people about Jesus, about Jesus' death and resurrection. But he doesn't teach the gospel just because it's his job. Personally, he too wants to find forgiveness in Christ and enter the kingdom of heaven. He believes the gospel he proclaims. He wants to share in its blessings. Like everyone else, he needs the Spirit of God to give him wisdom and to strengthen his faith and his endurance. And he's looking for the hope of the gospel too. He wants to partake of the very thing he teaches. What is striking is that Paul connects his being a partaker of the gospel with his willingness to limit his freedom. In 923, he says, I do it all for the sake of the gospel. He's willing to limit his freedom so that others may learn. And then in 924, he starts this analogy of the people running the race. Paul is very careful to live out the gospel he preaches. When he comes into a new town, he doesn't demand a speaking fee. He doesn't expect to be wined and dined and housed at the best inn in town. He doesn't flaunt his authority as an apostle or demand to be treated like an ambassador. Instead, Paul tells us in his letters, even though he has the right to receive financial support, he doesn't exercise that right. He keeps his day job and he supports himself so that people like the Corinthians wouldn't think he's trying to profit from the gospel. He limits his freedom to increase the chance that his gospel will be heard. In deciding how to act, he exercises self-control. He considers more than just what he wants to do. He thinks about the spiritual welfare of others and adapts his behavior to benefit them. Then he goes on to use this analogy. This is 1 Corinthians 9, 25 to 27. And here he's going to use the verb form of the noun we're looking at. Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. So I do not run aimlessly. I do not box as one beating the air, but I discipline my body and keep it under control, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified. He says, in every race, everyone enters to win, but only one receives the prize. Run in such a way that you might win. And let's make sure we understand his analogy. The point here is not only one person will enter heaven, like only one person wins a foot race. The point he's making is many people participate in the race, but not everyone gets the laurel reef at the end. Not everyone finishes the race. Everyone who participates does not achieve the desired goal. You want to be the sort of person who's in it to win. You want to run this race in such a way that you arrive at the goal of crossing the finish line. In 925, he says, every athlete exercises self-control in all things. That's why we came to this passage. Everyone who competes in the games exercises self-control. Think about this analogy. Athletes train their bodies. They eat a particular diet. They do weightlifting. They make sure they're hydrated. They make sure they're sleeping well enough. They want to win the race, so they train themselves. They make specific choices about how and when to sleep, what to eat, and how to exercise to increase their odds of winning. They aren't sitting at a desk all day and drinking beer all night. They engage in a specific physical activity to train their bodies. They limit their freedom. They could have done any number of things on that Saturday afternoon. That might have been more fun, but they chose to work out and train for the race. And athletes do this to win an Olympic medal or a World Cup trophy or something that's going to burn in the end. They receive a perishable laurel wreath. But we believers are seeking a different kind of reward. We're seeking something eternal, imperishable. Paul's point is not the medieval picture of wearing sackcloth and whipping yourself and eating stale bread. That's not what he's talking about. He's in the middle of this analogy. He's talking about athletes. Athletes limit themselves, they train their bodies, they do things that maybe aren't fun in and of themselves because they want to reach this goal. What's the reality that corresponds to that? For Paul, he limits his freedom when he's with Jews or when he's with those who are young in the faith or when he's with Gentiles. He's not saying beat up your body and you'll become more spiritual. He's saying sometimes I choose not to do something I might want to do because my hope is in the gospel. I make choices because I believe what God has said is true. And at the end of this journey, I want to hear him say, You are forgiven because of the blood of Christ. Enter my kingdom. In the end, I want to be a partaker of the gospel. I'm proclaiming. I want God to grant me mercy and forgiveness because of the blood of Christ. Self-control is making choices about how, when, and whether to exercise our freedom. Paul's worried the Corinthians are too big on the freedom part and not concerned enough about how they're impacting other people. To be unconcerned about the impact of my behavior on other people is a troubling thing. How could I believe I need God's mercy and then be so casual about hindering others from finding that same mercy? Knowing how much I need forgiveness, why would I be so willing to confuse others and cause them to turn away from God? How could I value that for myself and be willing to sabotage others? That's the issue in the passage. Paul wants the Corinthians to exercise some self-control. Self-control is choosing to follow God. It means choosing to act in a way that furthers the gospel for myself and for others and to live in a way that's consistent with the gospel I claim to believe. We all have desires about all sorts of things. When one of my desires conflicts with what God says is right, then I limit myself and choose to follow God. Let's move on to 2 Peter. Peter is writing to an audience that has been taught by false teachers. He warns them these false teachers are deceiving them. These frauds are presenting themselves as the real deal, claiming they had the true gospel, but in fact they are teaching a false gospel. They don't really believe Jesus is returning to establish his kingdom, and their lives are committed to greed and sensuality. Peter opens the letter by saying, God has revealed everything required to gain eternal life and holiness. He gave that revelation through his son Jesus Christ, who in turn gave it to his apostles, and they had the authority to teach and proclaim that truth. Knowing and believing the truth of the apostolic gospel is what gains us holiness and life. This gospel calls for a response. It's not just a set of tasks to accomplish or answers to test questions we must memorize. It requires a change in worldview. Worldview is something we think with, not something we think about. Your worldview is like putting on a pair of contact lenses. You forget you have them on, but they shape how you see the world. When we put on the contact lenses of the gospel, we begin to live differently and pursue different goals. As we face the choices life throws us, we reveal our fundamental beliefs. We will make choices consistent with the gospel. Not that we will be perfectly obedient in every situation, but it will become obvious what goals we seek because our choices reveal our desire to follow God. Okay, that sets us up for where we are in 2 Peter. This is chapter 1, verses 5 through 8. For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. Now you may notice that this list that Peter gives is very similar to our fruits of the Spirit. It is a similar kind of issue. These virtues that Peter lists are not the kind of worldview choices advocated by the false teachers, but they are the kind of worldview choices that follow from believing the gospel. The false teachers have been denying the gospel and distorting its moral implications. Peter argues that one of the ways we know these folks are in fact false teachers is their lifestyle. They live ungodly lives and they promote ungodly behavior in others. What they teach about God can't be trusted because their lives show they don't understand who God is and what he values. When Peter says faith leads to a lifestyle filled with these kinds of virtues, his intention in this context is to warn his readers away from the teaching and the lifestyle of the false teachers. He reminds his readers what kind of lifestyle belief in the gospel promotes and that those beliefs which lead to a different lifestyle are not to be followed. Notice he says faith leads to virtue, virtue to knowledge, and knowledge to self-control. He's not giving us a checklist we can follow such that we gain eternal life if we check all the boxes. He's describing the sort of qualities that grow in a person who has saving faith. Faith will lead to these things on the list because these are the kinds of things the Spirit of God produces in us. Peter just said that the knowledge contained in the gospel leads to holiness and eternal life. Since the very purpose of the gospel is to free us from our sin, faith, by its very nature, leads to a pursuit of holiness. Why would I want to continue to live a life that pursues sin when that's the very thing I'm asking God to free me from? Like the fruits of the spirit, I would argue that these qualities are not optional add-ons. They're not bonus extras to help you become a nice person, nor are they something you pursue in order to grow in maturity. Like the fruit of the spirit, they do not cause spiritual maturity, rather, they result from spiritual maturity. These are the inevitable result of adopting a gospel worldview. When we come to believe the gospel, these qualities become the things we want to pursue and we seek in life. The first thing he puts on his list is virtue or moral excellence. The basic idea of this word is excellence or imminence. It describes not settling for average, but pursuing the highest, being the best human being you can be. The basic idea is being the best you can. The second thing he adds is knowledge. And throughout this series, we've been talking about how understanding precedes the fruit of the Spirit. It's the same thing here. The more the Spirit teaches us truth, the more that truth changes our worldview, and the more we live differently. Understanding or knowledge comes first. It's the foundation that changes everything else. From there, Peter adds self-control. And this is the word we've been talking about. As I understand it, the ancient Greeks valued self-mastery. They defined a self-controlled person as strong and free from his animal passions, in contrast to the person who acts as a slave to his passions. They saw something noble about being in control of your passions, having mastery over them, and they considered such people free. Now, Christians today tend to embrace that same idea. We're familiar with that sense of shame or the humiliation we feel when we fail to exercise self-control. We're familiar with the converse, the feeling of satisfaction when we do exercise self-control. But in this list, the focus is not on how our behavior makes us feel or how our behavior makes us nice people to be around. The focus is on this is a kind of behavior that results from a life of faith. God has revealed to us what is true and what is false, what is worthwhile and what is fleeting, what we should pursue and what we should avoid. Sometimes we say no to our desires so we can follow God. Self-control is connected to genuine saving faith. If I have faith, then I want what God wants and I value what God values. When his values and my values conflict, I say no to myself and I refuse to act on my desires. So more fundamentally, self-control is about the gap between my sinful desires and the truth. When I come to faith in Jesus Christ, I learn how deep that gap is. I learn that some desires are not in keeping with my new faith. They are not worthy of it, and I should flee them. I learn that other desires are in keeping with my new faith and those I pursue. And making those kind of choices is self-control. To summarize, self-control is not acting on all our desires or passions for a reason. It's not a blanket denial of the body like the medieval monks used to do. It's not that all desires are wrong and all pleasures are wrong. God made us with desires. Sometimes enjoying those desires is a very good thing. Desire in and of itself is not necessarily wrong. Rather, we believe what God says is true, we recognize He has a time and place for those desires, and we seek to live within the boundaries he has established. So we prioritize our desires underneath God. This is different than the self-control of non-believers. Many in the world recognize that self-control is a good thing. Some of us don't recognize it until we have destroyed our lives through addiction and self-indulgence, but some of us get the idea earlier there is a payoff to self-control. Look at the biographies of almost any famous rock band, and they will tell you they learned the hard way that unrestrained freedom leads to illness, heartache, and despair. That kind of self-control may be a hard lesson learned, but it's not a fruit of the spirit. There is also a kind of self-control that is valued for religious reasons. The Pharisees are a great example of that. They denied themselves in various ways for religious purposes. They didn't eat certain things, they tithed certain ways, they observed many rules and rituals. The Pharisees were proud of how religious and how self-controlled they were. Being a religious person that way has its own sort of reward. But that kind of try harder, legalistic self-control is also not a fruit of the spirit. Self-control as a fruit of the spirit is based on our understanding of the gospel. We are motivated to exercise self-control because the spirit is convicting us of what is true. We have put on the contact lenses of the gospel and we see the world more clearly. The passions and desires we have are not as compelling as the truth of the gospel. We recognize sin for what it is, and sin no longer motivates us like it used to. We are becoming people who want what God values and believe what God says is true, so we turn away from selfishness. Jesus says in the Beatitudes that blessed is the one who hungers and thirsts after righteousness. That's the kind of limitation we're talking about here. We long for holiness and righteousness. We are willing to limit ourselves to restrict our desires to gain it. We understand the restrictions God has put upon us are not slavery, rather, they lead to true freedom, and we choose to restrict ourselves because we choose to follow God. Paul is not saying that we should expect to be free from all temptation at some point in our lives. Paul is not saying eventually we will never lose control or get angry or do something wrong. He's not suggesting that. Ultimately, they want to belong to God, so they choose to limit themselves. Now we will all still struggle with temptation. We will all still face the classic dilemma of Romans 7, where part of us wants to sin and part of us recognizes that it's wrong, and we may find ourselves sinning even when we don't want to. In my life, I still struggle with a lot of the same sins I did 20 years ago, but I also see this conviction growing stronger that that's not what I want my life to be about. My worldview has changed and grown more solid and firm. I see this increased understanding of the value of holiness, the magnitude of God's mercy, and the greatness of the hope of the gospel. In light of that, my selfish desires and the temptations of the moment, they seem relatively insignificant. To continue my contact Linz analogy, I still struggle, but my vision is clearing. I'm more sure what I want my life to be about and how I want my behavior to change as a result. When Paul talks about sexuality in 1 Corinthians, at one point he says, you are not your own, you have been bought with a price. As believers, we cannot treat our lives as if somehow God has no say in the matter. We can't act as if life is ours to live independent of what God says. The fact is, Jesus died on the cross to buy us a place in his kingdom. He has a right now to tell us what's right and what's wrong and how to act. Left to ourselves, we deserve to be found guilty and condemned, but because of Jesus, we can find mercy. There's a very real sense in which he bought us and redeemed us, and we belong to him. He is our master. We are not free to ignore what he says is true. That kind of self-control is the road to true freedom in Christ. You've been listening to the Wednesday in the Word podcast. My mission is to explain not only what a passage means, but how we figure it out. The blog post version of this podcast is at WednesdayInTheWord.com slash fruit-spirit-self-control. While I have no ads on my website, I do love your ratings and reviews. If you can, please leave me a positive rating and review wherever you listen to your podcast, and drop me an email. I read every one of them and I try to answer as many as I can, and I love hearing what you've learned and how you applied it to your life. But most importantly, tell a friend what you learned, and if you can, tell him where you learned it. Our theme music is graciously provided by Reggie Coates. You can find his music on heartfeltmusic.org. You can find all the episodes in this series on my website, Wednesdayintheword.com, along with lots of references and materials to help you improve your Bible study. Thank you for joining me today. I'm Krisan Marotta, and I'll see you next week at Wednesday in the Word.