Copyright © 2004 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
It was a family crisis. Our six year-old daughter was weeping. She couldn’t go to school without it. Her “Self-Manager” button was lost, probably in the wash. Wearing that button entitled her to small privileges like going to the head of the line out to recess. Now it was gone.
I remember the day she received her “Self-Manager” button. She had been so proud when she and twenty other first graders stood up to accept a paper certificate and their buttons as rewards for good behavior. She had done her homework, behaved on the playground and been quiet in class. Now she was being proclaimed a “Self-Manager.”
But Daddy the theologian and philosopher couldn’t help griping privately to Mommy, “But I don’t want her to be a self-manager. I want her to learn to obey her parents and her teachers and the Lord!” I was thinking of biblical passages and doctrine like what we read today. Look in verse 15 at what happened when Paul tried to manage himself: “For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” That’s what self-management gets you, a mess. You end up doing the opposite of what you wanted.
So I carried my mostly silent resentment of the “Self-Manager” award through ten years of first one daughter and then the other being schooled to prize this award and do one’s best to attain it. All along I maintained the whole notion was on the wrong track, another instance of secular education muddying the waters for people of faith.
Yet here I am now at the end of the list of the fruit of the Spirit and what do I find? How does Paul conclude this beautiful little catalogue of Christian virtues? Right there in Galatians 5:23 we read, “gentleness and self-control.” The final fruit is the secular virtue I’ve been quietly maligning for years. God does want us to be self-managers, to be self-controlled. It seems faith and educational philosophy aren’t so far apart.
Self-control is a generally appreciated virtue. This Friday the Olympic games will begin in Athens. For two weeks the world will watch and admire young men and women who have exercised amazing self-mastery. Many of them have trained and disciplined themselves for years so they can be there in Greece this month. Day after day they do not eat what they want or sleep as long as they want or stop training when they feel like it. Instead, they discipline their minds and their bodies to a single purpose, be it running, jumping, swimming or whatever sport. And now they hope to have their self-control rewarded with medals of bronze, silver or gold.
Self-control is admired in other areas as well. The first chapter in William Bennet’s The Book of Virtues is dedicated to self-discipline. We have great respect for the person who can control her passions and desires, who sticks to her diet, exercising the will-power to pass by nasty carbohydrates. We prayed this morning for my cousin’s husband to recover from his terrible accident. One bit of good news our family generally agrees upon is that Jeff went into his medical ordeal of multiple surgeries in good shape. This past year he lost eighty pounds. He was healthier and stronger than he was for some time, all because of self-control.
The ancient Greeks admired self-control. Plato prized it in The Republic, as a general virtue which keeps society running smoothly.[1] People are better citizens if self-control permeates society. Friday night Craig Enberg recalled to me how newspaper vending machines used to be completely on the “honor system.” No locks or coin-operated lids. You just dropped a dime in a little box and took a paper. No one ever took a paper without paying. No one ever stole the little box. Self-discipline made life more pleasant.
Despite the fact that self-control appears as one of the fruit of the Spirit, it’s hard to find in the Bible. Unlike patience or faithfulness or even gentleness, self-control gets little mention. The actual word, egkrateia is only used in Galatians and five other locations, never in the Gospels. It’s part of Paul’s sermon to Felix in Acts 24:25. He also uses it to call for sexual abstinence in I Corinthians 7:9 and in a metaphor comparing spiritual life to athletic training in I Corinthians 9:25. Titus 1:8 makes it one of the qualities of a church leader and II Peter 1:6 places it as a key link in developing Christian virtue. But that’s it. Jesus didn’t mention it, although in Matthew 23:25 He condemned the Pharisees of what might be seen as the opposite of self-control, “self-indulgence.”
In the Old Testament, self-control appears briefly in Proverbs 25:28 where it’s said that the person lacking self-control is like a city with broken down walls.
Overall, however, the Bible appears to have that same suspicion of the virtue of “self-control” which I described in my attitude toward Susan’s “self-manager” award. Paul here in Romans 7 is only too aware of how dangerous it is to rely on oneself to do what is right. He laments in verse 18, “I know that nothing good lives in me.” In Jeremiah 17:9, the prophet said, “The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked.”
According to Scripture, living under our own control is precisely the problem. Much more often than asking for self-control, the Bible asks us to deny our selves, to put off the “old self,” to bring ourselves under the rule and power of God. Paul talks frequently about dying to our selves and letting Christ live in and control us. What then, are we to make of self-control as one of the fruit of the Spirit?
Even the Greeks noticed that there is something paradoxical and difficult about the idea of self-control. Plato asked, “Is not ‘master of oneself’ an absurd expression? Anyone who is his own master is also his own slave, and vice versa.”[2] The very notion of controlling yourself seems inherently impossible.
Moreover, despite our admiration for the self-control and discipline of athletes and dieters, we are also deeply suspicious of it in many ways. Religious efforts at self-control are especially suspect. Christian people who aim at self-control are regarded as dangerous, deluded fanatics. In Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code there is a demeaning portrayal of the spiritual discipline of a Catholic organization known as Opus Dei. A character named Silas seeks self-control of his lust and violence through masochistic self-torture. He whips his back until it bleeds. Like most of The DaVinci Code, that image is both fabrication and distortion. Beth and I have a friend who belongs to Opus Dei. Nothing like that is part of her life or of the lives of her friends and partners in Opus Dei. Yet millions of people read it as confirmation of their belief that self-control is foolish and somehow perverted.
Still, there it is. Number nine on the list. “Faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” One aspect of the fruit of living in the Spirit of God through Jesus Christ is supposed to be self-control. The Lord knows we need it. We live in society overrun by indulgence and addiction. There are 14 million alcoholics in this country. One out of every two Americans has experienced an alcoholic in his or her family. A flood of diet books says it all concerning our addictions to food. And the Internet gave us a whole new set of addictions to e-mail and chat and downloaded pornography. We may look down on it, but we desperately need the self-control offered by the Holy Spirit.
Yet if the situation is what Paul describes here in Romans 7, what’s the use of self-control? How is it even possible? “For what I do is not the good I want to do; no the evil I do not want to do—this is what I keep on doing.” Control myself? What a joke! It’s like the old saw about being your own lawyer. “The man who represents himself has a fool for a client.” And trusting yourself to control yourself is just as foolish.
One answer to all this and one well-known interpretation of this passage is that Paul was talking about his experience before he became a Christian. Yes, sin is your master before you know Jesus Christ as Savior. You are ruled by your passions and desires and can’t help but do what is wrong. But once Jesus comes into your heart everything is changed. Suddenly all that struggle and failure to do what you really want to do is over. Christ delivers us from what Paul calls “the body of death” in verse 24.
I don’t know about you, but just about the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard was the claim that Paul was only describing here his life before Christ. One of my college professors insisted that was the way to understand it. I thought to myself, “But that’s me, that’s the way I feel right now! I’m always doing bad things I don’t want to do and failing to the good things I’d like to do. Does it mean I’m not a Christian?” I don’t think so.
Paul was talking about Christian experience. He was struggling with the fact that spiritual self-control is more than just pure will-power. Yes, we will hear stories of great feats of self-discipline in preparation for the Olympics. But there is also the news that 130,000 condoms will be distributed to athletes while they are in Athens. At the moment when our human capability for self-control is at its peak, it is all too plain how it really fails. With regard to what really matters, we cannot control ourselves.
There is one obvious and crucial fact about this last fruit of self-control. It is last. Self-control is not the place where we begin the life of the Spirit. It’s the end result. It’s a goal we are aiming for. It’s one outcome of cultivating all those other fruits.
You see, as Philip Kenneson alludes, we’ve gotten the notion that self-control is kind of like what Abraham Lincoln said government should be, “of the people, by the people and for the people.” So we think we should practice control of the self, by the self, and for the self.[3] It’s all for our own sake. Yet self-control for the self’s sake is always doomed.
I remember my first experience with a so-called “self-propelled” lawn mower. You didn’t have to push it. Slip a lever and a belt engaged and the mower took off under its own power. What progress! What relief from backbreaking effort! So as a 12 year-old boy during a workday at church I was thrilled when I was asked to take this fantastic machine out to the front lawn. I revved up the throttle and shoved that little lever forward. Ten seconds and twenty yards later, I wasn’t as thrilled. The machine dragged me hanging on for dear life across the yard and flower bed and into the street. “Self-propelled” didn’t mean self-guided. The mower had it’s own motivation, but it had no direction of its own.
It’s too long to explain his whole argument here, but I encourage you to read The Abolition of Man by C. S. Lewis. In it, he considers the possibility – which seems even more real today – that human beings through psychology, genetics and other sciences may one day be able to take themselves into their own hands and become whatever they want to be. Rejecting all tradition and law and morality, we may be able to decide for ourselves what our personalities and talents and characters will be like.
Then Lewis makes the point that if human beings are going to be responsible for deciding what human beings will be, that means some of them must be in control. But for those in control, the Conditioners, as he calls them, there will be no one else to control them. In the end, he says, “The Conditioners, therefore, must come to be motivated simply by their own pleasure.”[4] Setting human life free from every control but self-control, those in charge become slaves to their own passions. They will be like self-propelled lawnmowers with no one hanging on.
So the Holy Spirit’s fruit of self-control comes after all the other fruits. It is not control merely for the sake of the self, but for the sake of all the other fruits. It is control with a direction provided by purposes outside ourselves. Self-control is only Christian if it is self-control aimed at love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness and gentleness. The only self-control worth having is that control which firmly places us under the control of a stronger hand than our own, which directs us toward the purposes of God.
That’s why we must arrive at Paul’s own answer to his personal dilemma with self-control. Yes, he does what he does not want to do, and fails to do what he wants. As verse 23 says, he feels a law of sin working within him, making him a prisoner. Self-control is an illusion. The man with his self for a master is a slave. So he cries out in verse 24, “What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?” There is only one answer. It’s in verse 25, “Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord.”
It is only in Jesus Christ that we receive direction for our lives. It’s only by submitting control to Jesus that we gain self-control. The only way to master yourself is by making Christ your Lord and Master.
All of which, does not let us off the hook. The impossibility of self-control without Jesus doesn’t excuse us from seeking it once we know Christ. It may not be mentioned very often in the Bible, but it’s clearly part of the message. Under the lordship of Christ, you and I are meant to cultivate a healthy, humble lordship of our own unruly selves.
Spiritual self-control means addressing our addictions and dealing with those moments when our emotions and desires overcome us. For some of us that may mean a twelve-step program or an anger management course. For all of us it means owning up to whatever pleasures or passions regularly get the best of us. Such constant failure of self-control needs to be brought out to our conscious attention, confessed and repented.
Spiritual self-control also means cultivating godly habits, so that we become disciples with discipline. Worship, prayer, Bible reading, giving, times of solitude, and fasting ought to have a regular place in every Christian life. We need to submit our lives to the direction of the Lord through other Christians in some way, by a small group to which we are accountable or by meetings with a spiritual director or prayer partner.
Far from making us proud, self-control by the Spirit and for the Spirit should do as Paul suggests as he closes his thoughts on the fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:26, “Let us not become conceited.” As we control ourselves more and more by Christ’s Spirit working in us, we will become more and more aware of the horrible conflict Paul described here in Romans 7. It’s only when you have a little self-control that you think it’s easy. The person who truly struggles with controlling passion and sin knows how hard it is. It drives us always back to Christ Jesus for our ultimate deliverance. Self-control demands humility.
There is at least one good story in the Self-Discipline section of William Bennet’s Book of Virtues. It’s taken from James Baldwin’s Fifty Famous Stories. About a hundred years after Alfred the Great, Canute, though he was Danish, was king of England. His men and officers were always praising him.
“You are the greatest man that ever lived,” one would say. Then another would say, “O king! there can never be another man so mighty as you.” And another would say, “Great Canute, there is nothing in the world that dares to disobey you.”
The king was a man of sense, and he grew very tired of hearing such foolish speeches. One day he was by the seashore, and his officers were with him. They were praising him, as they were in the habit of doing. He thought that now he would teach them a lesson, and so he bade them set his chair on the beach close by the edge of the water.
“Am I the greatest man in the world?” he asked.
“O king!” they cried, “there is no one so mighty as you.”
“Do all things obey me?” he asked.
“There is nothing that dares to disobey you, O king!”
“Will the sea obey me?” he asked; and he looked down at the little waves which were lapping the sand at his feet…
“Command it, O king! and it will obey,” said one.
“Sea,” cried Canute, “I command you to come no farther! Waves, stop your rolling, and do not dare to touch my feet!”
But the tide came in, just as it always did. The water rose higher and higher. It came up around the king’s chair, and wet not only his feet, but also his robe. His officers stood about him, alarmed, and wondering whether he was not mad.
Then Canute took off his crown, and threw it down upon the sand.
“I shall never wear it again,” he said. “And do you, my men, learn a lesson from what you have seen. There is only one King who is all-powerful; and it is he who rules the sea, and holds the ocean in the hollow of his hand. It is he whom you ought to praise and serve above all others.”[5]
None of us can rule the ocean and none of us can rule ourselves. We must quit trying to rule our own lives. Let us take off our crowns and throw them down before the King of Kings. It is by humbling ourselves to Him that we will finally in control of ourselves, guided by the most powerful and gracious Hands in all the world.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2004 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj