Self-Control (Part 1 of 2)

When we commit a sin, it's often tempting for us to want to assign blame to someone or something else. It might feel better to attribute our actions to our past experiences or our current circumstances, the company we keep, or even to blame the devil. But today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg explains why, ultimately, every sin is an inside job.

Look. I, Paul, say to you that if you accept circumcision, Christ will be of no advantage to you. I testify again to every man who accepts circumcision that he is obligated to keep the whole law. You are severed from Christ. You, who would be justified by the law, you have fallen away from grace. For through the Spirit, by faith, we ourselves eagerly wait for the hope of righteousness. For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything but only faith working through love.

You were running well. Who hindered you from obeying the truth? This persuasion is not from him who calls you.

A little leaven leavens the whole lump. I have confidence in the Lord that you will take no other view, and the one who is troubling you will bear the penalty, whoever he is. But if I, brothers, still preach circumcision, why am I still being persecuted? In that case, the offense of the cross has been removed.

I wish those who unsettle you would emasculate themselves. That's pretty strong language, isn't it? So something was going on here of significance.

It wasn't that he just had a hang-up. It was that the very essence of the gospel was being challenged and set aside by these legalists who said, You have to do this, or you don't truly belong to Christ. And Paul is sorting that out. Verse 13, For you were called to freedom, brothers, only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another. For the whole law is fulfilled in one word, you shall love your neighbor as yourself.

But if you'd bite and devour one another, watch out that you're not consumed by one another. But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh.

For these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do. But if you are led by the Spirit, you're not under the law. Now, the works of the flesh are evident—sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you, as I warned you before, that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.

Against such things there is no law. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit. Let us not become conceited, provoking one another, envying one another. Amen. God our Father, we look away from ourselves again to you. We come in our need, in our need for understanding, in our need for grace and for forgiveness and for direction and for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon our lives as individuals and as a church family, so that the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ might be increasingly attractive as a result of your goodness and kindness to us and through us. And we pray in Jesus' name.

Amen. Well, we come to our final study in the fruit of the Spirit. We've been considering for these weeks essentially what is the lifestyle of those who are energized and indwelt by the Spirit of God. If somebody said, What is this fruit of the Spirit?

Where do we see this fruit produced? And the answer is, it is produced in the lives of those who are energized and indwelt by God the Holy Spirit. Each time that we've looked at an individual element of the fruit, we have made sure that we have said that this is fruit, that it is not produced by law, but it is produced as a result of life. It is the result of the work of God the Holy Spirit within our lives as God is making us the kind of people he designed us to be. So God has chosen us for himself, he has included us in his family, he pours out his Spirit upon us, he gives gifts to his church, and he places his fruit in our lives in order that we might become what he intended us to be. Now, in the course of that, it is important that we realize—and this is why we read all of Galatians 5, because I think if there's one thing that I've done amiss—there's one thing, there's probably many—but the one that comes to mind is not to have contextualized 22 and 23 each time that we've looked at it.

I think it would have taken far longer, and that's probably why I didn't. But tonight I think it's important at least to spend a moment or two recognizing the context in which this particular element of self-control is found. The Westminster Confession of Faith has been a help to many of us, and in the thirteenth chapter and in the second part of the chapter, which is on sanctification. And the writers of the Confession are explaining progressively the work of grace within the life of a Christian, pointing out that sanctification is a work of God and that it works in and through the lives of God's people. But it says this, this sanctification, although imperfect in this life—because we will never be what we're going to be—although imperfect in this life, is affected in every part of man's nature.

Some remnants of corruption still persist in every part. And so there arises a continual and irreconcilable war—the flesh warring against the Spirit and the Spirit against the flesh. So that within the framework of our lives, we understand what it is that Paul is saying here when, in verse 16 of the passage that we read, I say to you, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh.

The reason he says that is because we are a walking battleground. We face an internal battle all the way from here to eternity. And the battle takes place in this realm where the remaining corrupted elements of our fallen nature continue to gravitate towards that which is wrong, and the work of the Spirit of God within our lives is to say to us, Come on now, that is not the way that you should be living. God has made you an entirely new person. And if you're going to live by the Spirit, then you must keep in step with the Spirit.

Now, it's not only Paul here that mentions this. It runs throughout the New Testament. For example, James makes the same point, largely, when in verse 14 of chapter 1 he says, Each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. What desire? A desire to do the wrong thing.

A desire to please myself. A desire to worship myself rather than to worship God. Peter encourages his readers, on similar lines, abstain from the passions of the flesh—this is 1 Peter 2 11—abstain from the passions of the flesh which do what? Which war against the soul. So this is the battleground in which we live our Christian lives. And Paul, similarly in Ephesians 4, says to the Ephesians, Put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life, and is corrupt through deceitful desires. So any idea that you ever got from anybody who told you that you're now perfect—and you may smile at that, but I had someone come and talk to me after a service in the last month or five weeks, and the young fellow said to me, I've been attending a church where the minister has told me that absolute perfection is God's purpose for me, and I know I am not perfect, and it's killing me. And I said, Well, of course it will actually kill you if you stay there.

And you need to understand the gospel. And we talked a little bit about it at that time. Now, we begin in that way because what we have here sets the context for self-control.

Therefore that's the element we're considering now. Self-control. Get a grip of yourself. Get a hold of yourself.

Get yourself under control. We may see these things to one another. We understand what it means. Derek Prime, our good friend, says, Self is one of the toughest weeds that grows in the garden of our lives.

And it's true, isn't it? Who do you have the most trouble with in your entire Christian life? Be honest. Yourself. You see your biggest problem every morning when you wash your face.

He or she is looking back at you. You might want to say that it's your spouse or the lady up the street, but in actual fact, the biggest problem is ourselves. Consider how easily we are caught up in self-centeredness or in self-deception, deceiving ourselves that we're actually better than we are, or in self-importance, or in self-centeredness, or in self-pity. So when we think in terms of self-control and we think of this weed, as Derek Putz said, then we realize how desperately we are in need of the work of the Holy Spirit to conform us to the image of Jesus. Let's think about it on three lines.

And I'll take longer on the first than I will on the remaining two so that you'll be okay. First of all, considering the fact that the need for self-control is clear. There's nothing like stating the obvious. But the need for self-control is clear. The reason the Bible has so much to say about it is because God knows that his children are tempted to overindulge, that we as his children are tempted to live outside the boundaries that he has established for our good. He loves us as a father loves his children. He establishes boundaries for his children for their protection, for their well-being, for their good, and for his glory. And he knows that there is a perversion within each of us, that somehow or another is prepared to step beyond that boundary. As C. S. Lewis puts it in Screwtape Letters, and we often quote this—remember, Screwtape says to one of his nephews, he says, All that we can really hope to do is encourage our enemies—that is, the Christians—will try and encourage our enemies to take the good things that our ultimate enemy has given them—that is, the things that God has given—to encourage them to take the good things at the wrong time or in the wrong quantity or with the wrong person. Right? Now, you can apply that for yourself.

You're sensible. We live in a self-indulgent culture, one that has been too successful too often in pressing its ideology and its thought forms into the church. One of the questions about contemporary evangelicalism in our day at this point in the twenty-first century is to ask, How does it compare to, for example, even twenty-five years ago, and certainly fifty years ago, in terms of life and lifestyle, in terms of convictions about holiness and about the gospel and about the nature of belonging to God and about the issues of self-control? Remember, in Ecclesiastes—the writer to Ecclesiastes says quite proudly in the middle of chapter 2, I denied myself nothing that my heart desired. I just did whatever I wanted to do, he said. Well, that's largely the approach of Western culture.

Enjoy yourself, please yourself, satisfy yourself, do whatever you want to do. Now, the Christian lives in that world. And that world easily bleeds into the church. Remember, we always say that the boat is supposed to be in the water, but the water isn't supposed to be in the boat. But when this water gets in the boat, this is the kind of thing you'll come up against. You'll begin to hear professing Christians saying things like this, You know, we have all been set free so we can live as we choose.

The approach is kind of like, We bought the fire insurance, so now we can strike matches in the house. That's the kind of mentality. People who say these things, I don't think I've ever understood the nature of the gospel. How can anybody ever say this after singing, And can it be that I should gain an interest in the Savior's blood? Died he for me. Did he die for you so that you can do whatever you want to do? Did he die for you in order that you can please yourself? Did he bear all your sin in order that you and I may go out and just sin gratuitously? Clearly not.

God forbid. That's what Paul says in Romans 6, isn't it? Now, as a result of that kind of mentality, I'm free, therefore I can just do as I choose, anybody who does what I'm doing for you now—and that is, that says that progress in sanctification involves effort or work on our part—is almost inevitably branded as a legalist. Because in the minds of people, the idea is that any attempt on our part to do anything at all must surely be that we are depending on ourselves. Not so.

No. It is the Spirit of God that works within us in order that he might put the willing desire within us to do what we're supposed to do. And a careful reading of Paul makes that absolutely clear, that true freedom is not a license to do as you please, but it is a liberty to do as we ought.

James does the same thing. In James 1.25, he says, here you have the perfect law of liberty. He says you can fall in on the one side to license, you can fall in on the other side to legalism, but he says this is the perfect law that gives you liberty. Here is the freedom. What is the freedom? It's captured in the hymn. Make me a captive lord, and then I shall be free.

Force me to render up my sword, and I shall conquer her be. It's a paradox. And yet it's at the heart of the gospel story. We put it like this. We are held in bounds, but we are not held in bonds.

Okay? The difference a vowel can make. You who play Scrabble, you understand this.

We are held in bounds, but we're not held in bonds. We're battling, the Bible tells us, on three fronts—against the world, against the flesh, and against the devil. Every day, all day in our lives, we battle internal desires that are cultivated by external pressures and attractions. And our inclination will often be to indulge in temporary pleasures. Remember who said of Moses that he chose to suffer affliction with the people of God rather than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season. There's something about sin that is pleasurable. And the allure of sin and the enticement has then to be addressed, enabled by the Spirit, guided by the Scriptures, producing within us the fruit of self-control. When we do sin and fall, we're tempted, many of us, to say things like, Well, I couldn't help myself.

Well, yes, you could. The fact is that when we sinned like that, whatever was the object of our mistaken pleasure, we loved that more than we love God. So, in essence, it is idolatry. It's all about who you're worshipping. Either we are worshipping at the shrine of our own appetites and desires, or we're worshipping at the foot of the cross where Jesus bore our punishment in order that we might live in that kind of freedom. When we do that, what we're declaring is that God is not enough for us, that God is not enough for us. And therefore, we've decided that we're going to have to find our satisfaction somewhere or in someone other than God. Every time that I sin, willfully sin, I'm saying that. Whether it's in the forefront of my mind, whether I acknowledge it or not, what I'm really saying is, I cannot be satisfied in you, God. I've got to find satisfaction somewhere else. The boundaries that you've established for me are restricting boundaries. That's what goes on inside your heart.

Therefore, I know that you would like this, but… And it's the challenge that every one of us faces with these men this weekend. One said, I used to think that Christians weren't tempted. And when I wasn't a Christian, I thought, Well, maybe if I become a Christian, then I won't have to be tempted. And then I became a Christian, and he said it was even worse.

Well, he's absolutely right. I remember years ago, and I may have told you this, I was listening when I was a teenager to a talk by a minister, and he used an illustration of a break-in in a post office where they took a lot of money in the United Kingdom. And the way that it happened was that they put somebody in there, in the post office, toward the end of the day, and before the post office was locked, the person hid in a closet.

And then in the darkness of the night, he came to the door, and he opened the door, and he let his fellow thieves in, and so they robbed the place entirely. And the minister said, You see, it was an inside job. And then he paused and he said, And sin is just like that.

Every sin is an inside job. I've discovered a few things in my life. I haven't really made many discoveries, but I discovered one.

Actually, two. One great discovery is, junk is junk. And the other discovery is, people do what they want to do.

And when we sin, it would be much better if we just were honest about it and said, You know, I did that because I wanted to. I did that because I enjoy that. That was good. I think I'll do that again. I'll just have one more. Just one more, and then I'll stop.

Everybody who's been addicted knows that story. I'll just have one more. And one more leads to one more. I'll just have one more look. I'll just have one more visit.

Just one more. In Proverbs, Solomon says, Like a city whose walls are broken down is a man who lacks self-control. In other words, the picture is so clear, strong walls were necessary for the inhabitants to live in safety.

And strong walls are necessary for you and me if we're going to live in safety. You know, we hope the teaching you hear on Truth for Life challenges your thinking and inspires you to open the Bible and reflect on God's Word. Our current study on the fruit of the Spirit prompts us to assess our spiritual growth, and it points us to God's grace and the necessity of the Holy Spirit's enabling power in our sanctification.

I hope you're finding this study helpful. Now today, we want to recommend to you a book titled Honor, Loving Your Church By Building Up One Another. Honor is not a word we use often these days, particularly when it comes to church relationships. So what does it mean to honor one another in the local church? Here's a challenging book that calls us to take seriously the assignment to honor God through a right posture of reverence and loving one another in a way that makes less of ourselves and more of others. Now I think, like me, you'll find this is a book that forces some self-reflection and explains why honor should be at the very heart of worship and should be woven into every encounter we have. In fact, I think as you read this book, you'll be compelled to take seriously the instruction of scripture to put others above yourself, not easy to do in a culture of selfies and self-promotion. Ask for your copy of the book Honor today when you donate to the Bible Teaching Ministry of Truth for Life. You can give through our mobile app or online at truthforlife.org slash donate. Or you can call us at 888-588-7884. I'm Bob Lapine. Thanks for joining us today. Tomorrow we'll learn why, when it comes to sin, just saying no is just not enough. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.