Sermon Notes, November 10, 2013
Fruit of the Spirit: Self-Control, Galatians 5:16-26
Self-control. Some people said, “Yeah, it’s the last of the fruit of the Spirit.” It comes last. And that’s my experience too. Yes, we know the love, the joy, the peace, but self-control … way down the list. But in a sense, it can’t be the last because as we’ve been saying all along, and I’ll show you again this morning, the fruit of the Spirit is a singular word, a singular noun. It doesn’t say the fruits of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, it says the fruit of the Spirit because there is one fruit, which is the holiness that comes to us out of God’s own nature when the Spirit comes into our lives.
The Spirit that we speak of is named the Holy Spirit, because that, above anything else, describes what it means to be a Christian. The holiness is a like a diamond and it has many facets and love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, and so on are all just aspects of holiness and they have to exist together. They all stimulate one another. One of them may be leading in your life and one of them may be lagging in your life, they have to all come together eventually.
That is so very important because, you know, you can manufacture self-control. You can have a kind of self-control that is nothing more than just willpower, which has nothing to do with love or joy or peace. We sometimes think of it like we did when we were young, we thought that self-control kind of existed by itself. We thought we could master it just by reaching down and pulling ourselves up by the proverbial bootstraps.
But you see, this self-control, which is a fruit of the Spirit, can’t grow without all the rest. It grows out of the love, out of the joy, out of the peace. It’s part and parcel with it.
For a moment, as we proceed, think about this. We all have a problem with self-control, right?Everybody here can think of some emotion you have trouble controlling.
The tongue you have trouble controlling.
A habit you have trouble controlling.
If you can’t think of anything that’s out of control, your pride is out of control.
What does the Bible mean when it says self-control?
This little word that we read here in Gal. 5 is the word self-control. In the old KJV it calls it temperance. What a great word, temperance. We’ve lost it almost completely, except we still have the word around, only in a shorter form. We talk about losing your temper, which of course means not being angry, necessarily, because you can be angry without losing your temper, as you know, but losing your temper means you’ve lost control.
It’s a Greek word, a very interesting and important word, egkrateia. It comes first of all from the Greek stem krat, which is the word for power, for strength, for dominion, and for lordship. You see the word krat is put together with the word ego, which is the ego, which means the self. So what we have here is a word that really means power, lordship … lordship over yourself, mastery over yourself.
Now this is important, because a lot of people who think they understand self-control, but the self-control that they’re thinking of is a self-control that is essentially a Stoic, not a Christian, but a Greek idea. For the Greeks, self-control was the ultimate virtue. It was the virtue out of which everything else flowed. It was of highest importance.
The Greeks, especially the Stoics, praised self-control as the highest virtue. Total self-control in the area of food, in the area of sex, in the area of the tongue, in the area of the passions. They believed in control for control’s sake. There’s a problem with that, as we’re going to see. It doesn’t work. People who aim for this will have morals without the heart. They have the external morals without the internal monitor—that is the work that God has done in one’s heart by the Spirit of God.
Now, in the New Testament, the two kinds of people Paul always had to deal with were the Stoics and Epicureans.
The Stoics said, “Because there is no real truth, there is no real God. We need to be self-controlled just so we can be authentic people.”
The Epicureans said, “Because there is no truth, get out there and have as good a time as you possibly can.”
And that’s where our culture is now. We are a culture of Epicureans.
“There is no God so let’s go and have as good a time as we possibly can!”
But quite often Epicureans go back to being religious because they realize after a while, “You know what, if I don’t have God, I don’t have me.”
You can’t really have a society without God.
You can’t really have morals without God.
You can’t have purpose without God.
I can’t even have a self without God, because the knowledge of God and the knowledge of self, as John Calvin says, they increase and they decrease or diminish together.
Now, biblical self-control is very different than pagan self-control. It’s the opposite of uncontrolled passion or uncontrolled bodies because, you see, the works of the flesh we read had bodily things like sexual immorality and drunkenness but it also had fits of rage, which is an emotional thing. Self-control is over against being completely out of control in either your emotions or your habits. In 1 Corinthians 9:25, Paul likens the believer to an athlete who is disciplined. Why? To win the prize. So Paul says his self-control is for his brethren’s sake.
Galatians 5 says it’s for Christ’s sake because it says here, “Those who belong to Jesus Christ have crucified their passions.”That means they’ve nailed them up on the cross.
Why are you crucifying the passions?
Why are you putting them up there?
Why are you putting them in their place?
For Jesus’ sake! I belong to Jesus.
The point is the Stoic approach doesn’t work in the end.
Let’s just put it this way. Luke 11:24–26 speaks to an interesting phenomenon.
In that passage Jesus says it’s possible for a person to have a demon cast out of him and then to come back with seven brothers and find the house cleaned and swept and ready for a party. In come the seven demons along with the brothers, and the man is worse off than before.
Have you heard that? It’s a parable. What does that mean? It means it’s quite possible to use the self as a way to gain self-control, but in the end, you’re buying a little bit of time, but you’re digging yourself in deeper.
You can’t get self-control, really, by appealing to yourself. It’s possible to get your habits under control and it’s possible to get your tongue under control by getting your pride out of control. To actually say, “All you need is to deal with your self-esteem. You need to get control of your life for you.”But in the end, it puts so much pressure on you that in the short run, maybe you’ll make some arbitrary goal, but in the long run, you will be crushed by it. Discipline doesn’t happen when you say, “You have to do it for you. Do it for nobody else but you.”
Look, the greatest deeds of courage are deeds of self-control. Heroes are people who forget themselves. Courage is the ability to say, “I don’t care about my fears, I don’t care about …” Heroism very often is tremendous deeds of discipline. But heroes forget about themselves, and that’s why they have such self-control. They’re not sitting there saying, “For me! For me! For me!” No.
As we’re going to see in one second, self-control comes when you want something more than yourself. The more you concentrate on yourself and the more you try to deal with discipline because you’re doing it for you, the less you’re going to be able to do it. Extremely practical.
Quick thing on self-control and culture. Never before have we had a society with so many problems with self-control. I’m positive many of the eating disorders we have now, we did not have 50 years ago, anywhere. Where is that coming from? The addictions, the drug addictions, the violence problem, people out of control. Isn’t it weird? We’ve never had a society where people are more concerned about discipline and getting it in shape and tucking it in and moving on out, you see, and never have we had more problems with it.
The reason is (as I’m saying) the Stoic approach, that means self-control without God, has fallen apart. We’re all Epicureans now, and we’re getting worse all the time.
Now, we’re going to have to stop here because of time, but just so we’re on the same page this needs to be said. We’ve been in this list of the fruit of the Spirit for some time now. It’s very, very important that you remember that this list is not intended to regulate Christian behavior by rules of conduct. True Christian ethics are not driven by law, or THE LAW, the Torah, but they are the product of walking and living in the Spirit.
The essential nature of the fruit of the Spirit is the reproduction of Christ in the life of the believer. The fruit of the Spirit is simply another way of talking about our being “predestined to be conformed to the likeness of God’s Son” (Rom. 8:29). The activities and attitudes of those who are led by the Spirit of God are designated as the Spirit’s fruit. They are the “product” of life in the Spirit. When we walk by the Spirit, the Spirit effectively produces in us the very character of God.