Tonight I am speaking at Riga 1 – One Way, about Gods calling on your life and how to find out what God wants you to do. And as I go over the subject in my mind I keep coming back to this wonderful thing self control.

Say the word self control to a bunch of teenagers and you will get a bunch of frowns back, it doesn’t quite bounce of the tounge like “Joy” or “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”. No it is a word we clamp down or teeth on and it tightens our jaws. The little ebel that lives in the back of your mind crys out in anguish, and you need only to add the word discipline to finish of the job and send the little rebel on a full scale assault on your mood.

But the fact is that self control is a lovely thing, not only, as I have written in this blog before, does it give us the oportunity to be joyful when the chips are down, to love when we don’t feel like it and to laugh in the face of whatever this world might throw at us. But also, if we are willing to state the obvious and realize that there is not only a forest but also a bunch of trees, we will realize that self control means the control of self.

This means that self control, a fruit of the Spirit, a fruit of Love, gives us back control over our lives. Having before been slaves under sin and this world we humble ourself and bow down in front of the glorious creater of this universe, the big boss. There at the throne we give over control of our lives to God and as we spend time with Him and we walk in the Spirit the fruits of the Spirit will manifest in our lives. One of these manifestations of The Holy Spirit in our lives is the fruit of self control and this is the awesome part. When we surrender our will to God he graciously gives control back to us and we are free to do what we want at any old time.

Self control then means that we actually have free will, we are free to create our own future, to change our stars. Self control means that we can be anything we want to be, do anything we want to do, become anything we want to become. As long as we walk in the Spirit and let our hearts be joined with Gods heart, He will direct our paths and give us our hearts desire! (Psalm 37:4)

Self control, what a great gift, what a glorious thing it is!

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Graeme

This is really challenging and refreshing thought! A couple of thoughts though. Whilst I do think that the idea is good, it suggests that only when we gain self-control from the Spirit can we truly have free will. I’m not sure, but I suspect that there is a danger in giving the Enemy too much credit.

The other thing is that as with any Fruit of the Spirit it needs to be a continuous process. Therefore, we need to surrender our control of self to the Lord, who generously gives it back so that we can surrender it over again so that we can receive it, and so on. As with all matters spiritual we need to constantly check where we are on the walk and be aware that having control of self, also requires constant surrender.

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