How Are You Doing With Self-Control?
"Nothing is possible without it and everything is enhanced by it."
One of the books I got for Christmas this year was the next book in Ryan Holiday’s “The Stoic Virtues Series.”
The first book in the series was about having the courage to do what’s right.
The second book - and the one I got this year - is about self-control and having the discipline to keep doing what’s right.
Some Bible verses about self-control.
As students of God’s Word, we know God has some things to say about self-control.
When Paul taught Felix the gospel, “he reasoned about righteousness, self-control, and the judgment to come” (Acts 24:25). Felix lived an out-of-control lifestyle, and Paul reasoned with him about that when presenting the truth of the gospel to him.
Among the list of behaviors Paul warned Timothy about are those who are “without self-control” (2 Timothy 3:3).
When Peter listed what we call “The Christian Graces,” self-control appeared very early.
But also for this very reason, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue, to virtue knowledge, to knowledge self-control, to self-control perseverance, to perseverance godliness, to godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness love. For if these things are yours and abound, you will be neither barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ. For he who lacks these things is shortsighted, even to blindness, and has forgotten that he was cleansed from his old sins. (2 Peter 1:5-9)
So preacher, how are you doing with self-control?
History is full of talented, likable people who were destroyed by their lack of self-control.
History is also full of people who practiced self-control and succeeded in what they did.
Lou Gehrig is one of the examples Ryan Holiday uses in his book. Lou Gehrig didn’t smoke, drink alcohol, or run around with women. Why didn’t Gehrig do what most other baseball players did? Because he had something else he wanted to do that mattered more. He wouldn’t allow anything or anyone else to have control over him because something else was more important to him.
Have we allowed other things to gain control over us? Have we been losing the battle with self-control?
Don’t lose sight of what is truly important to you.
Keep up the good fight, brothers!
Do you not know that those who run in a race all run, but one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may obtain it. And everyone who competes for the prize is temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a perishable crown, but we for an imperishable crown. Therefore I run thus: not with uncertainty. Thus I fight: not as one who beats the air. But I discipline my body and bring it into subjection, lest, when I have preached to others, I myself should become disqualified. (1 Corinthians 9:24-27)