Self Control

God is in the process in redeeming His people, Hebrews says, of bringing many sons to glory. You are a child of God, and again, that’s what verse 1 says, we are beloved children, and as beloved children, who bear the mark of God, who possess the divine nature, in whom Father, Son, and Holy Spirit dwell, we should imitate God. We have the power not in our own strength, but in the strength of the Spirit, and by the work of the Word through the Spirit, to walk in love. And that love will be like God’s love, again, sacrificial, unconditional, and continuously forgiving love.

One other text that I would lay before you is in 1 John chapter 4 and verse 7. Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. So if you know God, and you’re born of God, you love. The one who doesn’t love, doesn’t know God, for God is love. And by this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we love God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation, the satisfaction, for our sins.

Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has seen God at any time. If we love one another, God abides enough in us, and His love is perfected in us. Again, you’re never more like God than when you love sacrificially, unconditionally, and with forgiveness. And we have a model of that, a pattern. The plea is in verse 1, the pattern is in verse 2, and Christ, as we saw last week, is the one who loved us and gave Himself up for us as a satisfactory offering to God that arose from the cross as a sweet aroma.

That’s all so magnificent, so beautiful, so wondrous, so precious, that in a sense, I hate to descend into verse 3, but necessarily must, because it starts to turn here, and it turns very darkly, and it’s very ugly. But immorality or any impurity or greed must not even be named among you, as is proper among saints. There is an antinomian’s nightmare, that verse. If you think that somehow, because of the grace of God, and because of the forgiveness of sins, and because Christ has set you free from the punishment of the law, that you can live any way you want to live, then this verse will jerk the chain fast and get you back to reality.

This is the perversion of love. Paul goes so fast from the perfection of love to the perversion of love. This is the satanic deception. You see the word deceive down in verse 6. And I think we all understand that the world seeks love. If there’s any theme that seems to be the most ubiquitous theme in our culture, in terms of music and literature and media, it’s about love. The world wants love. They want to live in love. Loving, being loved, making love, is the ultimate high. It sensitizes life to all the emotional experiences, high and low, to all the emotional extremes that releases the highs and lows of human feeling more than anything else.

Love is the ultimate human experience, but what the world offers is a false form of love. It’s not the perfect love. That’s elusive. Oh, I think people are seeking for a love that is everything they could imagine love to be, but they never find it, because the only ones who can truly love are those who are in the knowledge of God and in whom God dwells. Endless songs and plays and films and books and television programs and all the rest are evidence of the chase for love. But love so fast descends into what is ugly.

Read an article some time back produced by Michigan State University Department of Science, and they came out with the fact that there are currently on the internet four million pornographic websites, four million being trafficked on a daily basis by 80 million people. More people are tuned into those websites than everybody on Netflix, Twitter and Amazon combined. What are they looking for? Well, if you ask them, they would be looking for some kind of gratification, some kind of love, some kind of meaningful relationship. It’s a fool’s paradise. They’re like Ponce de Leon, trying to find the fountain of youth.

It’s not there. They give themselves to a person for a little while. They give themselves to a certain behavior for a little while, and it comes up dry, it comes up empty, and they’re more deeply wounded than they were before they experienced that. And it just adds another scar to them and makes them a step more jaded toward the reality of ever finding true love. The point is this. Whatever God designs perfectly, Satan will counterfeit, and that’s the deception. If the love that God grants us is self-sacrificing and unconditional and relentlessly forgiving, the love that Satan offers will be a perversion of that.

It will be self-centered, self-indulgent, conditional and unforgiving. When the world talks about love, it usually really simply means self-love. I need you to fulfill my desire for my satisfaction. . Physical desire, personal passion, is by nature selfish. People love for what somebody provides for them, gives to them, does for them. That’s the satanic option. Paul says, this is not the kind of love I have in mind, in verse 3. But immorality or any impurity or greed must not be even named among you, as is proper among saints. It should never happen in the Church of Jesus that someone pursues an illicit love, whatever it is.

The Spirit of God vehemently denounces that kind of conduct. It is love’s perversion. And the term there, immorality, is the familiar word porneia in the Greek, which means sexual sin in the broadest sense, any kind of sexual sin. Anything other than the sexual relationship between a married man and a married woman constitutes pornography. There is a term in the Greek language, egrateia, which is the opposite of porneia, and it denotes control or self-discipline. Socrates used to say that self-control is the greatest of all virtues, and he himself confessed to having a difficult time experiencing it.

Plato said the same thing. Aristotle said the same thing. And of course, the Greeks were based in their paganism, and they talked about self-control, but never found any way to control their own lusts. This word egrateia is used in a very interesting conversation in the 24th chapter of the book of Acts, where the apostle Paul is having a conversation with Felix, who is a Roman governor, and Paul and Felix meet in verse 24 of Acts 24. Felix arrives with Drusilla, his wife, who was Jewish and was his wife by adultery.

He had basically had an adulterous affair with her and stolen her from her rightful husband, and so it was a sordid marriage. Felix sends for Paul to hear him speak about faith in Jesus Christ. This is a gospel opportunity, right? This is a gospel opportunity to speak to a very powerful politician about faith in Jesus Christ. And what did Paul do? Verse 25 says he was discussing righteousness, self-control, and there’s that word egrateia, and the judgment to come. Now, by today’s standards of evangelism, for so many people that you hear about, this would be to completely blow the opportunity.

Why would you confront a man about righteousness that you know is living in unrighteousness? Why would you confront the man about self-control when you know it was his inability to control himself that caused him to have the adulterous relationship he had? And then why would you tell him that all of this is leading to divine judgment? And the answer is because you would tell him the truth. You would tell him the truth. And Paul got exactly the desired response in verse 25. Felix became terrified. Paul was told that the terror of the Lord should cause us to persuade men.

It’s part of it. Paul went after this politician on the basis of his inability to control his lust, and therefore to violate God’s standard of righteousness, and therefore to be under judgment from God himself. That’s what Pornea is. The absence of that self-control. People don’t have much self-control, as we know. They can try mechanisms in their life to control the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life. But in the end, it’s going to win because it’s the truest expression of their fallen nature. Thank you for joining us in this exploration of self-control.

Until next time, remember to keep the faith, stay strong, and continue to shine your light in the world. To hear these daily devotions of your daily bread, please log on to goddessgovernment.com. Goodbye, and may your faith always lead the way. [tr:trw].