Seeing The Spirit: Self Control; July 26, 2026

speaker-0: Alright, our first reading is from 1 Corinthians. Do you not know that in a race the runners all compete, but only one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may win it. Athletes exercise self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we in an imperishable one. So I do not run aimlessly, nor do I box as though beating the air, but I punish my body and enslave it, so that after proclaiming to others, I myself should not be disqualified. The word of the Lord.

speaker-1: we have arrived at the final grape on the stem of this fruity series. My English teacher, in middle school taught us that most stories have a beginning, a rising dramatic tension, a climax, and then denouement, which is was The fanciest word that I knew. It might still be. I am from Johnstown, after all. if you don't remember your fancy school words, the denouma is sort of the letdown from the climax, the moment when all of the tension is resolved, the knots untied, final reveals sort of made smooth. It's supposed to allow things to settle, which is why those hidden credit scenes in Marvel movies are so cheeky, because they introduce Tension where it was supposed to be over. The truth is that our last fruit is, in fact, no denuma at all. Self-control might be one of the hardest virtues to attain. No ease attends this morning. My prayer then is that I can offer us self-control as in a way that makes sense, and in a way that doesn't have you simply white knuckling through your life together with Jesus and one another. So let's listen again for the word of the Lord, this time from the letter to Titus, chapter two, and verses one through fourteen. For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation to all, training us to renounce impiety and worldly passions, and in the present age to live lives that are self-controlled, upright, and godly, while we wait. For the blessed hope and the manifestation of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ. He it is who gave himself for us, that he might redeem us from all iniquity, and purify for himself a people of his own who are zealous for good deeds. The word of the Lord. Thanks be to God. Let us pray. Lord bless us this day with all your good gifts of the Spirit. Give us grace to receive and to cultivate self-control, and as we do, give us eyes to see your purposes for us, and your purposes for your good world as clearly as possible, that we might be people who are zealous for good deeds here and now. And now, O Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be pleasing and acceptable in your sight, O Christ, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen. I won't bury the lead this morning. I don't think self-control is important. And I'm not just saying that because I don't have any.

speaker-0: Yeah.

speaker-1: I suppose I should rephrase just a little bit. I don't think self-control is important on its own. I'm not sure how virtuous self-control is By itself. And I think this goes for a lot of things in life. I think context matters a great deal for most things. For instance, have you ever heard the story of Jephthah in the scriptures? Let me tell you about Jephthah. Jephthah shows up in Judges 11. He's just won a battle with the Ammonites and decides, like a real dingus, to promise the Lord that he is gonna sacrifice to God with thanksgiving whatever comes out of his front door next. I used to get in trouble a lot early in my marriage for not texting Colleen when I was gonna be late. I've gotten so much better at this. But never once was I out and just like forgot I had a family. Which seems as though what Jephthah has done here. Because much to his chagrin and to hers, the first thing that comes out of Jephthah's door is Jephthah's daughter, his only child, joyfully dancing to greet Jephthah. Her dad with singing and tambourine and with much wailing, Jephthah, because he is a man of his word, which is a virtue, keeps his vow. Now, accuse me of waxing up the rails on my sled down the slippery slope here, but meing being a man of your word is not always virtuous. Right? You made a mistake, Jephthah. Own up to the mistake, move on with your life, grace abounds. In the same way, not all self-control is made equal. It is a contextual good. Just because you refrained from eating Kit Kats during Lent does not, in fact, benefit you spiritually. Or because you go to gym, to the gym every day. This does not make you a virtuous human. This just means you're making the most out of your gym membership, which is good, but not necessarily a spiritual good. Self-control's context, however, matters. Is all of the other fruits that preceded it in Paul's list of fruits of the Spirit. This last fruit, self-control, is in fact important because it is necessary for us to keep and to cultivate every other fruit that God is manifesting in our lives. If we hope, for instance, to be gentle when everything in us would rather be harsh, Self-control. When hatred rises and love wanes and there is no clay to punch, self-control, right? When violence rears back and pushes peace aside, self-control. All these other fruits require self-control, which is an easy thing to say. And a hard thing to enact. How exactly does one get self-control? Now there are a million and one self-help books on the topic, and explicitly or not, most of them, all roads lead to willpower, essentially, right? Just like, let's do the thing. You can do it. We are called by God, in fact, to be co-laborers with God, co-creators in this world for good. Requires all that we can muster. Willpower included. God wants to include your will with His, right? And God wants your will to be shaped to God's own will. And at the same time, I think every single last one of you knows the feeling of. Like you are white knuckling your way through something, right? That it's not working, but you gotta do it anyway, so you just grip on tight and go. Like you couldn't maybe it was a class that you took when you were in school that did not interest you, but you needed to graduate. Like you couldn't figure out how you were ever gonna use that information outside of being a ringer at trivial pursuit. And you barely managed to drag yourself through it, but you did it, because you had to. But all of us also know that willpower and white knuckling has its limits. And we often find them sooner than we might imagine we would. Have you ever heard about the marshmallow test? Walter Michel put four-year-olds in a room and set a marshmallow in front of them. And he told them, kids, you can have one marshmallow right now. Or you can wait for 15 minutes and I will give you two marshmallows. How many of those kids do you think waited? The answer is only about a third of them. Only about a third of them could wait. Now, Michel went on to do some longer studies on these kids and made some rather bombastic claims. He said that willpower predicts children's success in life, and so you better get to gritting those teeth, ladies and gentlemen. Turns out though that the study didn't control for a whole host of other factors like family security and economic status. So it was like some of these kids were like hungry and they needed to eat a marshmallow, right? But on second look, what is most interesting? Interesting about this study isn't the outcomes, but the strategies. The kids who were able to wait for that second marshmallow didn't just sit there staring at the marshmallow. They didn't just white knuckle it, right? Instead, they turned their chairs around so they didn't have to look at the marshmallow. They covered their eyes so they couldn't see the marshmallow. Or maybe at four years old, are you still vanishing at four years old? I can't remember if you cover your eyes. They were singing songs to distract them from eating the marshmallow. They did almost anything they could to keep themselves from thinking about the fact. that there was a marshmallow sitting in front of them on the table. As someone who is still waiting on the branch of his life to create a bumper crop of self control, This is how I approach a great many things in my own life. If you've ever seen me, if you've ever seen me, including like this last week at our Wowie dinner, if you've ever seen me sort of prowling around the cookies at a community dinner, you know that I have a problem.

speaker-0: Okay.

speaker-1: However, I do not eat cookies at home. I expected raucous clapping at that. I don't eat cookies at home, and they just don't tempt me at home. And do you know why that is? I don't buy cookies. That's right. My home is joyless and my children are sullen. But

speaker-0: Ha ha ha ha.

speaker-1: I am well aware that I can't stare at the marshmallow and not eat it. So I keep the dang marshmallow out of my house. I make structural changes to my life. To help me make better decisions. Right? I have a goal. And I make structural decisions to help me not have to white knuckle through my life. This is the thing that Paul in both Corinthians and in Titus is helping us to realize. To the Corinthians, Paul says, There is an imperishable crown that you are working toward. Keep your eyes on it. Do everything that you can to create a life around this great goal. Don't just try to keep yourself from impiety. Keep the big goal in front of you. In the same way, Paul reminds Titus and his crew that you aren't keeping self-controlled, upright, and godly for their own sake. Right? Self-control isn't a thing unto itself. You are called to self-control with all of its downstream effects that enable us to cultivate these other fruits of the Spirit because the grace of God has appeared to you. And you are Taken with this vision, and now in the interim, we are looking back to what Christ has done, and we are looking forward to what Christ will do in his return to put all things right. And in this interim space, you want to be a part of the solution rather than a problem. You want to embody what Christ is doing in the world. Self-control is goal-oriented. That's what I mean when I say that self-control is only important as a companion piece, but that what we are oriented toward means everything. If we've got a grasp Of the overwhelmingly good vision that God has for what the world can and will be, a world that looks like the kingdom of Jesus, that is dominated not by anger and vitriol and hatred and fear, but a life, but where life tastes like the good fruit of the Spirit of peace and joy and gentleness and generosity, then we will have something really to hang our lives on. And each of you are called to be the very first fruit. Of such a world in the middle of this age, so that when people think about a world dominated by joy and love and peace and gentleness, and they say, that's impossible, they'll have to look at your lives and our life together and the common reality of our life, where forgiveness and love and gentleness are the spirit of the thing, and reevaluate. That's the point of our common life together, is so that the rest of the world sees us and can consider, things don't actually have to be like this forever. There can be something different. And if, as a gift of the Holy Spirit, these holy hooks, this great vision, not only of the world for what, but but for what God can do within you, if these get these holy hooks get embedded in your heart, if this is the crown you seek, the imperishable crown that you seek, and the salvation that you are living into, then that is motivation enough to be the measure and rule by which we live. A yearning for such a world. can be enough to get us over the hill of self-control. Everyone needs such a motivator. Hunter Biden of Hunter Biden's laptop fame has been doing rounds on the podcasts. I don't know what he's about to try to sell, but that man's everywhere right now. And I decided to spend a bike ride listening to one of these podcasts just to hear what he had to say. And Hunter talked a lot about his years of addiction, but he also said some things. On the way to some other points that like kind of broke my heart for the man. Most of which gave me this impression that Hunter felt lost most of his life. I mean, I I don't know how much you know about Biden family history, but they've known a great deal of suffering as a family. early in Hunter's life in 1972, the family was in a car accident together that took the lives both of his mother and his sister. Later in life, and you probably know this, at the end of Joe Biden's vice presidency in 2015, Joe lost his son, Bo, Hunter's brother, to brain cancer. And several years later, as Joe is running for president, Hunter finds his way into the spotlight. And his entire life by means of that laptop comes into public knowledge. It gets registered on the news every day, a story and a half a day, pretty much, is what we averaged on Hunter Biden's laptop for the better part of two years. And his entire life. Every voicemail, every text message, every email, every Google search became ammunition in the hands of a campaign. And imagine what that must feel like, by the way, right? If all of your text message became public record for everybody to see. But reflecting on that, he said that the fact of the matter was that nobody really cared about him. They were just trying to use him to hurt his dad's campaign, which is true. But also can you imagine how that feels? Like having the shame of your life, having the shame of your life's indiscretions and your addictions waved around in public, used as a weapon for reasons that actually have nothing to do with you. But in the midst of all this, Hunter is an active addiction. A real active addiction spiral, actually. Having a prodigal son-like highlight reel that picks up a full head of steam after Bo's death in 2015. Self-control, not a virtue for Hunter during these years. He struggled most of his life. with addiction. He was, for reasons of trauma and addiction and causes of his own making, really made a mess of his life. As Paul says in the Galatians passage that precedes his list of fruit of the spirits, he says this. Now the works of flesh are obvious sexual immorality, impurity, debauchery, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like this. Now I'm not sure that Hunter was doing sorcery, but the rest of them I think hold for those years. How does one How do we get pulled from that sort of cycle of living by a vision of something compelling? A crown worth winning, a salvation worth tasting, right? So in 2019, Hunter is invited by some friends in the middle of his act of addiction to meet a woman that they think would be a good match for him. So they meet and they make an introduction, and Hunter sees Melissa. And for the first time, first time he's ever laid eyes on this woman, he says to her, Listen, I know that this isn't the way to start a date. But I love you. Crazy, right? And she doesn't leave the table, which is insane also. And he goes on, and I gotta be honest with you, like I've got a big problem. I am addicted to crack cocaine. Real talk. And Melissa's response to him was, well that stops today. And they got married ten days later. And he has been sober ever since. It's an insane story. Like, can you imagine if somebody came up to you and they said, Hey, you know, I've been addicted to like very serious drugs for the better part of thirty years and I'm in a active addiction right now, but I just got I met somebody and I got married to them ten days a ten days ago. You'd suggest that both of them go to rehab, like immediately. Both of them. But it worked, man.

speaker-0: C

speaker-1: Hunter describes it as magic. I would describe it as divine intervention. Somehow Hunter sensed that Melissa could see him and love him for who he was, like even in the midst of his deep, dark brokenness. And that vision of somebody that could really see him and love him, that dream, that opportunity. Was worth making any change and every possible change that he could in his life. He could somehow in this moment garner the self-control to be flung out of the vicious cycles of the works of the flesh because finally, after so many years of pain, self-inflicted and otherwise, he stumbled onto someone, something truly beautiful. Such is a life with Jesus, my friends. And that isn't to say that it will always be easy, or that you won't ever have moments that you want to shove that marshmallow into your mouth immediately, or that you'll be endlessly motivated, or that you'll never experience dry seasons of feeling like you're just going through the motions. But when God plants a truly good vision in your soul, it is something worth holding on to through all of that. The author Ann Lamotte gives advice to writers with writing block, writer's block. And do you know what it is? But in seat. But in seat. If you're a writer, you sit and you write. Doesn't have to be perfect, but your vocation is to sit and to write. So do it. Perfectly or imperfectly. And our vocation, your vocation, the life that God is calling you to, is to be a person who bears God's own image into the world so that all of these fruits of the Spirit flow out of your life and into your life. So let the world see your good deeds and praise the Lord, perfectly or imperfectly. We exercise self-control on good days and on bad because we trust that putting our butts in the seat of a life lived with God will put us in a position then to receive the gifts from God that we need for holy, self-controlled, and upright living. Because where else are we gonna go? There's nothing as good or motivating or lovely as Jesus. You want to be loved unconditionally for who you really are? Jesus. You want to love others in that way? Jesus. You want joy and peace and to live in a world of justice, equality, and gentleness? Jesus. So may the Lord's presence abound within you. So that you might look in the mirror and see a veritable fruit tray. So that you can be part of making God's presence known in the world. Thanks be to God. Amen.