Everytime I teach on Love, Joy and or passion I run into the same thing, someone comes up and tells me that, while it is true that love is joy and passion, love is also self control and you could surely use some.
Many times I just take that as just criticism and get really sad that whomever listened to my sermon had to put a stopper on the flow of joy and passion by that.
However yesterday out of the blue it dawned on me that the whole issue of self-control will look very different depending on what perspective you look at it from. The people criticising me for being to exuberant on the plattform are clearly a bit uncomfortable with the seeming lack of self-control displayed in their church. If they only know how much self-control I have to exert to be joyful and exuberant in the face of a crowd that looks like they have been sucking on lemons for a month while bathing in vinegar.
It takes self-control to worship when you do not feel like it, to praise God in a world that is in a vice, to loudly proclaim the victory of Jesus Christ when it looks like we are loosing the battle.
The question we should ask ourselves may be, does it take self-control to just be whom I am by default, or could it be true that I should exert self-control to get out of my comfort zone and into the God zone, the zone that Paul talks about when he sais rejoice in the Lord always.
