My Daily Pause

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance (or self-control) – Gal 5:22-23

The underlying Greek egkrateia means self-control

Self Control is a Decision

Openly sinning is becoming a very popular activity these days. Better yet, we don’t even have to take responsibility for ourselves. We fail to train ourselves for suitable employment. We fail to maintain our health through exercise and diet. We fail to make good choices because we think we want something else. These are all simple decisions we make ourselves, but think the outcome is unfair when we don’t like it.

Dave Ramsey, the budget expert and radio show host, often says that “children do what feels good, adults devise a plan and follow it.”

Zig Ziglar, the original motivational speaker, says “overweight people got that way by choice because they never accidentally ate anything.”

Both of these ring true because self-control is the art of making good decisions and taking responsibility for them – even when they are not so good. Most of us have a “guilty pleasure” or a weakness that we know better than to entertain. Many of us simply choose to ignore the risks and do them anyway.

Peter urges us to maintain ourselves so even when we are railed against by sinners, they will know they are messing with Christians. (1 Peter 2:11-12) Our own self -control becomes very important when we are telling others about sin.

The more we avoid sin, the better we get at avoiding it. When this happens, we can present ourselves to God as his instruments for righteousness (Romans 6:11-14)

Daily Bible reading for July 16

Ecclesiastes 9:11-18
Joshua 16-17
Jeremiah 9:23-10:25
Matthew 24

Matthew 7:3-5 one of the most often quoted of Bible passages. Jesus had a knack for turning a phrase and here he made impact with a humorous impossibility. The Master Teacher sure could get an audience’s attention!

Even the smallest of sins have serious consequence (Romans 6:23) and it is important to help our friends recognize this. It is even more important to have ourselves in order before we turn our attention to others, or we risk being in the same comical situation that is described in our text. How can the person we are trying to correct and reprove take us seriously when we make no effort to correct our own obvious sin?

Part of our responsibility as members of the Lord’s church is to help each other get to heaven through teaching and admonishing (Col 3:16), but this is one occasion when we are authorized to put ourselves before others.

Those who do not control themselves are like a city whose walls are broken down. – Proverbs 25:28 NCV

This is a reference to self-control – A lack of discipline exposes one to all the problems the problems of life the same way an unprotected city was open to being sacked. The Proverb writer placed a lot of importance on rearing children with boundaries, this saying being the results of failing to do so.