Are you the kind of person who is stubborn and willful, always has to be right? You know people like that who will argue about anything, who just simply have a compulsive need to be right. And this breeds divisions and contentiousness and broken relationships because we can't stand to have our view not be adopted. As R.C. Sproul has walked us through the biblical definition of love and the kind of love that should be evident in the life of a Christian, I suspect we've all fallen short.
I know I have. As Paul considers what love is and what love isn't, coming at love from different angles, it reminds us how much we need the work of the Spirit in our lives to produce this kind of love, this kind of fruit. And today on Renewing Your Mind, Dr. Sproul will return to Galatians 5 and consider self-control and how this relates to love. Before he concludes our study in this series, Keeping in Step with the Spirit, don't forget that today is the final day to own this entire 20-message series and receive a copy of our new 90-day devotional, Our Great Salvation.
Request both while there's still time at renewingyourmind.org. Well, here's Dr. Sproul on self-control. As we continue our understanding of Paul's great letter on love in 1 Corinthians chapter 13, we've been looking at how love is always in conflict with human pride and how devastating and destructive pride can be in the human heart. Americans pride themselves in being something of an egalitarian society. We say that we are all created equal, at least under the law, and we have historically repudiated a caste system by which people are frozen into particular socioeconomic levels, and whatever level they're born in, they have to stay in that level forever. I remember when I first enrolled in graduate school in the Free University in Amsterdam many, many years ago, and I had to fill out the entrance application, and I was filling out the form, and I came to this box on the form that said, state your father's station in life. And I said, my father's station in life?
What does that mean, the Pennsylvania station or Union Station in Chicago? And I had to ask somebody, what are they talking about? And they said, they want to know his class. And I said, his class?
You know, what socioeconomic class is your father in? And I realized that I had stepped into a different culture where all kinds of things were ordered by social class. And I discovered that there was an unwritten law on the highways in this part of Europe, that the right was supposed to have the right of way. There weren't traffic signals on every corner or stop signs, but they had this crazy method of controlling traffic that produced so many accidents, you couldn't count them. And people continuously refused to yield the right of way, and there were unwritten rules. And I learned very quickly that a Volkswagen had to give way to a Mercedes, and bicycles had to give way to automobiles. Once I saw a man driving a truck, and he was driving it slowly, but this bicyclist came out and took the right of way, which was his, and the truck driver didn't like it and just moved up behind him with his truck and nudged him until he hit the bike and knocked the bike and the fellow over onto the roadway. I watched it happen, and the truck driver was incensed that this bicyclist would take the right of way when he was merely riding a bike.
It's incredible, this sort of thing. And I remember when we enrolled at the university, they gave us a card that told us all of the appropriate ways of addressing a professor, and any correspondence that we sent to the professor, we had to address them with the proper title. And you began with daher, you know, mister. And if the professor was well-born, you'd say velchaborn. He's well-born, and he's a high class, or he's hochaborn would be high class, and upper class would be zer hochaborn, very high born, and how much education he had was to be put into these titles. If he was college educated, he was chalerda, he was learned. If he had a graduate degree, he was ho chalerda, and if he was a professor, he was zer ho chalerda, extremely highly learned. And the same thing with other officials of honor for professorships and so on. There was the chavardicht man, that's the worthy man, and then there's the very worthy, and then the supremely worthy, and you had to learn all these titles. And if I wrote a note to Professor Berkhauer, who was high born and very highly educated and very highly promoted, I had to string all these adjectives together, and then finally get the professor, Dr. G.C.
Berkhauer. I thought it was the craziest thing I ever heard of. And I lived in that culture for a while, and one day I walked into a little grocery store, and there was an aisle there with some things displayed, and I went over and picked something off the shelf like I would in an American store and to take it up to the counter. Well, over there you weren't allowed to do that.
You had to wait for somebody to come and get the article for you. And when I reached for it, the lady that was working there got incensed, and she rebuked me. And she looked at me and told me to put that thing right down, and when she was done ripping me up, she said to me, Mannerche, that's little man.
And I had this feeling coming from my socks all the way up through my body, little man, don't you know that I'm hochabord, hochalerda, and all the rest. And I was just absolutely infuriated that this woman would treat me below my level of dignity. And I realized that those people weren't any different from us, that we still struggle with these tiny little nuances of honor and respect and dignity that we demand.
And we consider people rude who do not treat us with the respect that we think that we deserve. Now, when Paul continues his discussion here in 1 Corinthians, he says, love is not only not puffed up, it does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil, etc., does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth. I want to jump again back to Galatians and see the link between 1 Corinthians and the list of the fruits of the Spirit that Paul gives us in the Galatian correspondence. Again, he says in chapter 5, verse 22, but the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Now, if you look above that, and I remind you that Paul just prior to giving his list of the fruit of the Spirit gives a contrasting list of the works of the flesh. And the works of the flesh are enumerated beginning in verse 19 of chapter 5 of Galatians, now the works of the flesh are evident which are adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, and so on. Notice how contentiousness, conflict, dissension, outbursts of wrath are included in this list, whereas in the list of the fruit of the Spirit, there is the fruit of self-control, self-control. Now, in our next series, we're going to be looking at one human emotion that is extremely important that we understand as Christians, and that is the emotion and the behavioral pattern of anger.
But for now, I want to talk about outbursts of anger, dissensions, tempestuous behavior, contentiousness, and argumentative spirits that are considered here by Paul to be part of the works of the flesh as opposed to self-control. Part of the meaning of love, of gentleness, of kindness, and long-suffering is, as Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians, we do not seek our own. Seeking our own all the time is manifestation of pride and selfishness. And how many times do we get in conflict because the pursuit of our own runs counter to somebody else's pursuit? We disagree with somebody else, and that disagreement leads to anger and upheaval and conflict and dissension.
Now, we are to prefer other people over ourselves. What does that mean with regard to other people's opinions and other people's thoughts? You're in a meeting. You're in a group discussion. You're trying to plan a strategy, and you don't agree on what is the wisest course of action. How do you behave in that kind of an environment? Are you the kind of person who is stubborn and willful, always has to be right, always pressing your own view and your own preference?
You know people like that who will who will argue about anything, who just simply have a compulsive need to be right. And this breeds divisions and contentiousness and broken relationships because we can't stand to have our view not be adopted. Now, we are to prefer other people above ourselves. It's not important when a group is working together who gets the credit. When you have a corporate task to perform, the mission is to achieve the goal.
What difference does it make who gets the credit if the goal is achieved? I mean, we're supposed to learn that in the arena of sports, where we're supposed to learn the idea of team play for the purpose of the mission. I remember when I was just a junior high student and was playing basketball, and we had a volatile coach.
He had an Irish temper, and he used to climb our trees, as it were, with his explosive tirades, paroxysms of fury when things were not going the way he wanted them to go. And one of the things that he absolutely despised was ball hogging. If you threw the ball to certain people, it was like throwing it into a bottomless pit.
It never came back to you. Once you threw it, it was gone, and that person wouldn't release the ball until they had an opportunity to shoot and try to make the score. And so early on, we had this drummed into our heads that we were not to be glory hounds or ball hogs, but that we were to learn the art of teamwork and to pass the ball off to the player who had the better opportunity or the better shot. Well, I took that very seriously, and so I kept passing the ball off. And I remember on one occasion—this actually happened—we were in the locker room at halftime. We were behind against a team that we should have been beating handily, and I hadn't shot the ball in the whole first half. And at halftime, the coach came over and grabbed me by the shirt and scrunched it up so that he was about to choke the life out of me. And he said, R.C., he said, in this half, he said, when you get the ball, shoot it!
And he screamed at me. And I was thinking, well, that's wonderful that he wants me to shoot, but haven't I been a good boy? I have been absolutely—nobody can accuse me of being a ball hog or a glory hound. Now, the reason why I didn't shoot was pride, not humility.
It was a false humility. The reason I didn't gun or shoot the ball is not because I didn't want the glory or because I just wanted to win the game, but I didn't want anybody to think of me badly. And so I conformed to the coach's rule of not gunning to a fault. I still missed the point of teamwork. I was also part of the team, and it was my responsibility to shoot when my shot was there, and I should have been taking it.
But I wasn't taking it because I didn't want to be accused of ball hogging or being a glory hound. Do you see how insidious this is and how this works against us when we allow our pride and our selfishness to create all kinds of false impressions? But the person who has the quality of self-control behaves in a way that is appropriate to the situation, that is appropriate to the circumstances in which they find themselves. Now, Paul says that we ought not to be contentious and that we ought to prefer other people's opinions to our own in the sense that we recognize we can learn from anybody. One of the fruits of the Spirit is the fruit of being teachable and that every Christian as a Christian needs to be a teachable person.
And I don't mean just being able to be taught by your professors or by your minister or by your parents, but also to be taught by your children and to be taught by your friends and to be taught by your enemies. There are certain things that I know to a higher degree of mastery than other people, some other people do. But I've never met a person in my whole life who doesn't know something in far superior mastery than I do. I can learn an insight into living. I can learn a craft. I can learn a skill. I can get an idea that I've never had in my own mind from every human being I ever met.
In fact, every person that we meet is a veritable fountain of knowledge for us, if we'll only listen. One of the pleasures of my life was having the opportunity to write a novel many years ago. It was a fun thing.
It was excruciating, but it was also fun. And I was talking at one time with some people who were asking me about writing this novel, and they said, how did you come up with an idea for a novel? A novel has to be dramatic and in gripping and interesting and so on. And I said, well, I followed the advice of my publisher who said, write out of your own experience.
And he said, but you know, we don't have experiences like Perry Mason had and the kind Alistair MacLean writes about and some of these people who have been in all these great adventures. And I said, look, go out in the street and go up to the first person you meet. I don't care who that person is. And just ask them about the experience that they've had as a human being in the last week of their life, and you have more than enough material to write a best-selling novel because the drama contained in every individual life is worthy of our learning, of our attention, and of our interest. But if we're all caught up in ourselves and miss the beauty that God has put in every other creature, we won't be able to learn anything from them. Jonathan Edwards, in speaking this, says that there are two places where we are not to yield to other people, and that is if integrity is at stake and if truth is at stake. But even then, when we will not yield on the point of the truth, that refusal to compromise and the refusal to compromise with respect to personal integrity should also be a good place to be.
And that is if integrity is at stake and if truth is at stake and if truth is at stake and if truth is at stake, then the refusal to compromise with respect to personal integrity should also be done from a humble spirit and a humble heart, not out of a position of not being able to be taught or just being fractious or argumentative by nature. Now, one of the most fascinating things in America, and it's called How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. And I had heard about that book for decades, and I thought, well, who cares about some popular, homespun philosophy like this? And I was too proud to learn from it, but I decided to read it and see what everybody else was looking at.
And I found a book called How to Win Friends, and it's called How to Win Friends, and it's called How to Win Friends, and it's about understanding of human behavior. And one of the incidents that happened in this particular book was Carnegie tells the story of a man who was giving a speech at a banquet, and he made some mistake as a matter of historical citation. He said something was said about the error, and he corrected the error, and the man thanked him and walked away. The same man then was seated around the table, and somebody else made an error, which this man knew was an error, and he didn't mention it. And Carnegie said, why didn't he mention this man's error? He said it wasn't that important. It wasn't that significant, and why would he embarrass this person for his error when there was no need to?
There was no point of truth that was at stake. Boy, that hit me right between the eyes when I read that, and I've seen that happen time after. In fact, I'll let you in on a little insight I had. I was in a formal debate once with a theologian over a significant point, and I was using an illustration from the Old Testament about Job and the work of his enemies, and I happened to mention in passing the Chaldeans that were part of the narrative. And this professor in front of all the people who were there insisted to me that Job never had anything to do with the Chaldeans. It was somebody else, and I knew it was the Chaldeans. But I said to him, okay, doesn't matter, Chaldeans or whoever, you know, and I let it go. The next day, tons of students who had been at debate ran up to me and said, we went home and looked it up, and you were right. And they wanted to know, why didn't you just open up the text and show it to them? I said, because it wasn't important. And why would I want to do that and embarrass him in front of the students? And the students couldn't get over that. They said, but he made you look bad at that point when you backed off of the point and said it doesn't matter and accepted his critique.
And I thought, you know, when he did that in the debate, I thought about Dale Carnegie. I said, I was trying to persuade. I wasn't trying to humiliate. And what good is it if you win the debate and lose your friend or lose the person? All of this has to do with having self-control. Self-control and being teachable by those with whom we meet and associate. I told you a story about an occasion where I was able to refrain from correcting a man in the midst of a public arena when I knew he was wrong. And I suspect the reason why I remembered that moment of self-control is that it stands out in my mind because it's so rare.
I don't normally do that. But I guess my point is that if even it happens to me from time to time, all of us may have that opportunity. But isn't it amazing how much hatred and violence and strife and even warfare there is in the world because we are so bent on seeking our own and not demonstrating the love and the care and the concern for the other person? That was R.C. Sproul on this Friday edition of Renewing Your Mind. It's great to have you with us. As we live the Christian life pursuing growth and spiritual maturity, one evidence of the Spirit's work in our life is the fruit he produces.
R.C. Sproul recorded this series, Keeping in Step with the Spirit, to aid Christians in that pursuit of Christian character and holiness. For the final day, we'll give you lifetime digital access to the series when you give a gift of any amount at renewingyourmind.org or when you call us at 800 435 4343.
Work through all 20 messages at your own pace as you listen to them in the free Ligonier app. We'll also send you 90 days of biblical reflections on the Christian life in a new devotional that we just released titled Our Great Salvation. Only hours remain for this offer so give your gift at renewingyourmind.org or by clicking the link in the podcast show notes. Jesus told Nicodemus that to see the kingdom of God, a person needs to be born again. Next week, Stephen Lawson will join us to explore the work of the Spirit in the new birth. That's beginning Monday here on Renewing Your Mind. you
