Trust God for Self-Control | More Wisdom, More Life | Pastor Joe Coffey

Hey everybody, welcome to Christ Community Chapel.

My name is Joe, I'm one of the pastors here,

and if you are seeing me on the screen

in East Hall or in the Gym, welcome.

I have to do that because we are in the middle of remodeling

our sanctuary as part of our Every Minute Matters campaign,

and that means we are displaced for the time being.

We have all kinds of services,

everybody's going to a different service they went to before.

And I just want you to know, this isn't the first time that happened.

Back in 1997, when we were a church of a little less than 600 people,

we sold our building to Seton Catholic

School up there on Stow Road, and we moved into Cog Valley

Christian Academy for three years while we built this building,

and for three years we did what we called church out of a box.

We were displaced, we would pull up a big truck in the back of the school

every Sunday, and we would unload everything we needed to do church.

And then at the end of the services, we would load it back in.

We did that rain or shine, snow or sleet and we had a blast.

It was,

I remember laughing together with guys in the middle of winter

when somebody threw a package of baby wipes and they were frozen solid,

and we thought there were going to be some chapped buns today, you know?

But we grew not just in a number of people,

we grew closer together.

And that's what I want to encourage you with now.

Church people are people of habit.

So you've been coming any length of time usually sit in the same section

around the same people, and now you're around different people.

So go ahead and ask them who they are, how long they've been coming.

Lean into this time that we are displaced,

check out a different venue, but just see what God does.

Because part of the thing when I look back on the time we did

church out of the box, is some of my favorite memories.

That's what I want for you.

When you look back on this summer of more, that you will look back with

great memories of what God did in and with and through you during this time.

All right.

Okay.

We are in a series on Proverbs

where we're looking for wisdom and we're calling it More Wisdom.

More life.

Wisdom is what you need for all those decisions

in life that are not right or wrong decisions.

The right and wrong decisions in some ways are the easy ones.

Because at least you know what God has said when he gives

this clear instructions about your sexuality, or about your money,

or about how to treat other people, that's easy, because at least you know.

But then there are other decisions where you

you just don't know exactly what to do.

That's when you need wisdom.

And one of the interesting things about Proverbs is that Proverbs

doesn't tell us so much how to make wise decisions as it does.

How to become the kind of person who makes wise decisions.

And today we come to the topic of self-control.

And this is the proverb.

This is Proverbs chapter 28 verse or chapter 25, verse 28.

Proverbs 28 · chapter mention

A man without self-control is like

a city broken into and left without walls.

A man without self-control is

like a city broken into and left without walls.

A person without self-control is not going to live their best life.

If you don't have self-control, you're going to mess your life up,

and probably the lives of the people that are around you.

Okay, so here are my three points that I want to pull out.

Just cover.

In our time together, I want to talk about the danger,

the cause and the cure.

That's it.

The danger, the cause and the cure.

First the danger.

So Solomon, who wrote this proverb, says that a man without self-control

is like a city broken into and without walls.

One of the great advantages, if you lived in the ancient world,

was to live in a city with walls,

because walls meant safety,

it meant security, it meant peace.

And to live there meant that you enjoyed those things.

Nehemiah.

In the book of Nehemiah, Nehemiah is an exile.

Israel has been conquered by Babylon.

He has gone to Babylon.

He has risen to the place of being the cupbearer for the king.

And he hears that the walls of Jerusalem are rubble.

And he sits down and he weeps.

And then he does.

He kind of comes up with a plan to restore

Jerusalem, and his plan isn't to have economic restoration.

He doesn't come with a like a temporary government or anything like that.

What he comes with is a plan to rebuild the walls,

because he realized that the walls were the most important thing,

because the walls were protect anything and everything that's valuable to you.

Solomon says.

Your soul, my soul, are just like that,

that we that self-control is what protects

what we think and what we feel is valuable in our lives.

And without self-control.

We are like a city without walls.

All right.

So he has come to us and told us this, this whole idea

that self-control is what we need in self-control is the ability

to manage your desires, to manage your longings.

It's actually the ability to order your desires in the best order

possible, in order to have the best life you can have.

I remember when my kids were teenagers, and I was trying to talk to them

about self-control,

and they wanted me to give them more freedom so they could make

their own decisions instead of me making so many decisions for them.

And I don't know if they'd taken a physiology course or what.

This is what I landed on, I said.

I said, self-control is like this.

There are two types of creatures.

There are creatures with endoskeleton and creatures with endoskeleton.

And in

creatures like a human being, where your bones are in the inside.

And so your strength and structure come from the inside out.

And then in skeletons like a crab, where the strength comes from the outside in.

And I said to them, listen, until I'm sure that you are formed

an end skeleton and you have strength from within to manage your desires.

I will be your ecto skeleton, and I will make those decisions for you

like you need to do your homework before you watch the movie.

I wanted to find a way to see if they could

order their desires in the best possible way.

One of the dangers, by the way, of growing up in a home like mine,

where the parent was responsible for giving the structure,

is that sometimes in, the child can go away to college

and then find out that all their structure and strength came from outside of them,

and they get to college and they become a city without walls,

and their lives are just run over.

And that's what you hear about all the time.

So that's the danger.

That means my second point, which is the cause

if you have no self-control, then you're you're in a terrible trouble.

I mean, you'd be homeless

like, my my two year old grandson has very little self-control.

But he's only he's only two, but he can't live on his own.

That's what that means.

You know, most of us have some self-control.

We have walls.

But we might have breaches in the walls.

Places that aren't completely solid.

You know, the Bible has a couple of images for Satan.

One of them is in John chapter ten, where Jesus says that Satan is

like a thief who comes in to steal and kill and destroy.

And then in first Peter, he describes Satan as a lion who is prowling around.

So if you think of you, your soul being like a walled city,

you have Satan prowling around looking for a breach that he can get into

in order to steal and kill and destroy.

Right.

And then the question is, what causes a breach?

Well, if self-control is the ability to order your desires

in the best possible order, then a breach happens.

When an order gets when a desire gets out of order,

when a teenager decides to watch the movie and not do his homework,

and then he never gets around to his homework,

that's a breach that there will be chaos that happens.

After that.

He doesn't know exactly how much chaos.

There's a movie.

Years ago, starring Ted Danson and Ethan Hawke.

And in that movie, Ethan Hawke as The Sun, Ted Danson as the father, and Ted Danson

had left the family years ago, and the family had kind of blown up.

And now Ethan Hawke was a young, young man,

and he sits down with his father and he says to him, what happened?

Why did you leave us?

Why did our family just disintegrate and blow up?

And after some hemming and hawing and Ted Danson said, well,

I guess when I was working and

I started making money, I felt like a success.

So I wanted to work more.

And the more I worked, the more I felt like I was failing at home,

and the more that made me want to work.

And then things just fell apart.

What happened?

I mean, there's nothing wrong with wanting to be successful.

Nothing wrong with making money.

What happened with Ted Danson in that movie is that it just got out of order,

and it caused a breach, and then he lost everything.

Felicity Huffman, 2019.

She was the star of the sitcom Desperate

Housewives, and in 20 1817, she was like a darling.

And then in 2019, she got arrested because she got put in prison,

because she spent $15,000

to bribe a proctor of the SAT to correct her daughter's answers

so that her daughter could get into the college she wanted to get into.

What happened?

There's nothing wrong

with wanting your daughter to get into the college that she wants.

Nothing wrong with loving your daughter.

What happened was that desire got out of order

and became so important to her that it caused a breach,

and she ended up in prison, losing everything that she held dear.

So how do we create a life

where our soul is protected,

where we have walls and no breaches in our walls?

And that brings me to my final point, which is the cure.

A few weeks ago, I read a

novel about a terrorist, and in that story, the mastermind

who recruited the terrorist was describing how he got him to do everything.

And he said he was a young man without self-control.

And somebody without self-control can easily fall into the control of another.

It's like Bob Dylan wrote a song back in the 60s and 70s.

Everybody serves somebody and he says, it may be the devil,

it might be the Lord, but you gotta serve somebody.

The reason that's so important is Felicity Huffman didn't wake up one morning

and think, hey, I'm going to try something that could

and will land me in prison, which she got up that morning

and just said, I love my daughter so much that she became

the servant of that desire.

There's a guy named Jonathan Edwards who is an 18th century pastor,

theologian, thinker.

He's actually considered one of the best minds

that ever came out of America.

And he said something that I think is pretty profound.

He said that every human being always does what they most want.

They always follow the deepest desire.

And I say, that sounds profound.

That's profound to me.

Because if that's true, that means

that the secret for self-control is not willpower.

And I always thought it was always thought like, I want something really bad.

I just have to will myself to not get that.

But that's not what he says.

That's not the way it works.

And somebody challenged him and he said, no, I've had to do things

I don't want to do.

Like I got robbed and I gave the guy my money.

I didn't want to give him my money.

And what Jonathan Edwards said was, oh no, no, you

your desire was for your life more than money.

Your your greatest desire always wins.

And of course, the kicker with that is sometimes if something gets out of order,

then the thing we desire the most is what we lose.

I read an article

about the Godfather movies because that was really interesting.

And and this article said that one of the that the whole Godfather one and two was,

was designed to bring you to the very end of Godfather two,

because Godfather one, the way the reason The Godfather became

the Godfather was all because the family, everything was about the family.

The family was close.

The family was to be protected.

The family was.

You were loyal to the family at the end of Godfather two,

Michael Corleone, who's the godfather, is sitting.

This is the last scene.

He's sitting in a garden, alone in a chair.

The wind is blowing and he has nobody.

He has no family left.

And the reason is because

of self-control that his desires were out.

It created a breach.

And what he held dear was the story.

So how do we make sure?

How do we make sure our desires are in the proper order?

Whenever I ask a question like that. What?

How are things supposed to be?

I always go back to the Garden of Eden and in the Garden of Eden.

I don't think Adam and Eve had they.

I don't think they struggled with self-control, at least not at first.

I think they loved being with God.

They loved to walk with God.

I don't think they wanted anything too much.

I don't think they wanted food too much.

I don't think they wanted success too much.

I don't think they wanted sex too much.

I don't think I think everything was in the order that it was supposed to be in.

And then Satan comes and Satan tempts

them to want something more than God.

And what's interesting is that Satan didn't tempt them to go

from loving God to hating God.

What Satan did was all.

All he needed to do was get God from being number one

to big number two.

That's it.

And that caused enough of a breach for Satan to come into our world,

to steal and kill and destroy everything.

There's a reason in the Gospel of Matthew

that Jesus says that the greatest commandment is to love

the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind.

Because loving God is the secret to everything.

The secret to self-control is not

willpower, it's affection.

So the question is, then how do we love God?

How do we get to the place where we love him with all our heart

and our soul and our mind?

Now there's a story I read years ago.

It's a great story.

Story about a man was riding a train and there were two men on the train.

He was watching them.

They seemed like they had a kind of a special relationship.

And all of a sudden one of those guys went into a seizure,

and his friend picked him up and laid him in the aisle of the train

and cradled his head in his lap and tried to comfort and soothe him

until the seizure was over and his friend fell asleep.

And the guy who was witnessing this said to him, tell me about your friend.

Tell me what's going on.

And the man said, well, my friend and I were.

We served in the war together, and one time

we were in a firefight in the jungle, and I got shot in my legs, and

I was there in the jungle, and I couldn't, I couldn't walk, and I was going to die.

He came back for me and he put me on his shoulders and he carried me out.

He saved me.

Five years ago, I found out he had this condition.

And so I sold my house and I've come to care for him.

And then he said this because Mr..

After what he did for me, there isn't anything I wouldn't do for him.

We take communion every week here at.

The reason we do that is to remind ourselves

that's what Jesus did for us.

First, John four says that we love

because he first loved us.

The secret to self-control is not willpower, it's affection.

The more I will love God with all my heart, soul, mind,

the more I realize how much he has loved me, the easier

it will be for me to have desires in their proper

order and be protected.

You know, there's another proverb.

I mean, this proverb was a man without self-control.

It's like a city broken into and left without walls.

There's a proverb in Proverbs chapter 18

Proverbs 18 · chapter mention

that says, the name of the Lord is a strong tower.

The righteous man runs into it and is safe.

That's the thing.

What I want to encourage you to do today.

If you want to keep all that, keep your soul protected,

then figure out

how to make Jesus front and center,

how to make communion a reminder how every day remind yourself

of how much you are loved so that your affection goes to him.

Because the secret of self-control

will always be what you love and who you love.

Run to God.

Let him be your strong tower and build the walls that will keep your soul safe.

Would you pray with me?

Our father in Heaven.

Thank you for your grace to us.

Thanks. That

self-control that it is based on our affection

and our love, and that you have given us the greatest reason

to really love you.

And so I pray that you would help all of us hearing, help me to love you

in such a way.

We're all my desires fall into the proper order.

So I become like a city with walls

with the most precious things protected because they're protected by you.

Thanks.

We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.