Living By The Spirit - 3

Here comes Chapter 3. Let me know if you have trouble copying and pasting it to your file.



3 - SELF-CONTROL

This is not the first on Paul’s list; it’s the last. The reason for starting at the end of the list may come clear as we proceed and perhaps not until the very end of our journey together.

The King James’ Version of 1611 used temperance to translate the Greek word for this fruit. Most 20th century versions have switched to self-control. Do you suppose that is because temperance has become an uncomfortable word for us? The 19th century Temperance Movement used it as a euphemism for total abstinence from alcohol that ended with Prohibition Era of the 1920s. Temperance created a bad image for many people. Perhaps self-control helps raise our self image a notch or two.

The word has another connotation which may say more to us. Did you ever get caught in a lineup for the washrooms at some crowded public event or on a long flight across the continent or overseas? That’s when you need what the Greeks called enkrateia! Continence. Self-control.

Stoic Philosophy

The Greeks didn’t use enkrateia very much. Many of those who did had adopted the Stoic philosophy of life. Stoics believed in a law of nature to which they must always conform. Life must never get out of control. When things did get unmanageable, the Stoic adopted an attitude of total apathy. His motto became: "If I can’t do what I want, I shall do what I can." That usually wasn’t much help. But after all, he was the captain of his own soul. He always tried to control his anger because anger was passion; and passion had power he could not control.

Now doesn’t that all sound familiar? A colleague of mine once told me that he felt that he was more Stoic than Christian. He had been born in England the son of a rear-admiral in the British navy who was absent from home most of the time. Educated in the English public school system, classical Greek and Latin had been drilled into him in the old fashioned way - with the master’s cane. As an adult, he had struggled to be in touch with his feelings, but found that he lost control of them much too often.

Paul probably knew a lot of Stoics. They had originated in Cyprus and Cilicia about three centuries BCE. Zeno and Antipater, two of their greatest teachers came from Tarsus, Paul’s home city. The four cardinal virtues of the Stoic philosophy were wisdom, courage, justice, and self-control (enkrateia), a classification they had derived from the teachings of Plato.

Paul Differed With the Stoics

Paul certainly did not share the Stoics’ view of the self-made person who could always control what goes on in his or her life. He had already tried that and failed miserably. The list of addictions to "works of the flesh" against which he contrasted the "fruit of the Spirit" shows how much he recognized human frailty, especially his own.

He himself had been addicted to the Pharisaism of his early years (Galatians 1:13-14). His fervor for the Jewish law had convinced him that these Jewish heretics, as the first Christians were known, were dangerous and had to be stamped out. Because of this passion, he had been given a secret mission in Damascus to arrest any Christians he found there and bring them back to Jerusalem as prisoners. They were to be tried before the Sanhedrin, the Jewish supreme court, as Jesus Christ and the early apostles had been tried. Then on the road to Damascus he had met the risen Christ. Everything had changed for him after that mystical experience. The Book of Acts symbolizes this dramatic change by changing his name from Saul to Paul.

As he grew in faith and began his witness to Jesus as the Christ/Messiah of both Jews and Gentiles, Paul found a new set of controls for his life. He felt that his experience of Jesus involved something as deep and mysterious as sharing in that same crucifixion and resurrection. (Galatians 3:19-20.) So, as he said in his correspondence with the Corinthians, he had committed himself to know and to proclaim only Christ crucified. (1 Cor. 2:2) He knew instinctively that whatever spiritual gifts he might have after his conversion was the risen Christ living in him. Or, as he also put it, he and all other Christians were living in the resurrection body of Christ. The Spirit of the living God was the powerful, vital force in that Body.

So what of enkrateia, self-control? Near the end of his life Paul wrote to another Christian community in Philippi, "Let this mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus." (Philippians 2:5-8.) To live in Christ, Paul knew, the mind of Christ and Spirit of God determine how one is to live, not one’s own self-centred desires. From the various bits and pieces of his correspondence and the record of The Acts of the Apostles, we know how long it had taken him to learn this. He was never satisfied that he had reached the goal of being totally Christ-centred. (Philippians 3:12-16) While he struggled with the new rule of life he had accepted in Damascus, he gave us a great deal to think about. Sixty or more generations have been spiritually fed on his letters and sought to share a similar mystical experience of having the mind of Jesus Christ.

How Jesus Exercised Self-control

Did Jesus always make the right decisions and do the right thing so that his life fulfilled the will and purpose of God? Or was life a struggle for him too as it is for us?

Jesus prayed a lot. Mark makes a special point of that in his description of a typical day in Jesus’ early ministry. (Mark 1:21-39) On more than one occasion, Jesus led his disciples away from the crowds that followed him everywhere so that they could have some quiet time for recreation and prayer. One of the great spiritual moments of his life, called the transfiguration, occurred on top of a high mountain away from all the crowds. At the crucial point of decision in the Garden of Gethsemane, facing imminent betrayal and death, he sought to know God’s will in an extremely intense prayer.

I have often wondered how difficult it was for Jesus to wait in the garden for Judas to come with the temple guards to arrest him. It would have been perfectly easy for him to slip away through the olive trees in the darkness, make his way up the Mount of Olives and escape into the wilderness of Judea to the southeast. He must have felt the greatest temptation to run away. Strengthened by his prayers, he knew he had no other choice than to wait for Judas to come and betray him.

Jesus also studied the Jewish scriptures. He frequently went to the synagogue in the towns he visited. The local synagogue was a place for prayer, praise and the study of the Jewish scriptures. In essence, our church services today are modeled on the weekly sabbath services conducted in the synagogues of that era.

It would appear that he asked his disciples for their counsel on more than one occasion. Was that not what he was doing as John indicates in John 6:5-6? Mark tells the story differently. The disciples were concerned about feeding the people and Jesus challenged them to do something about it. (Mark 6:34-44) Did he really know how he was going to satisfy the hunger of so many or was he asking for their advice?

Jesus always showed genuine caring for the people he was with or who came to him for help. There came a point in his ministry, however, where he had to stop caring for the people who crowded around to hear him and have him heal them. He had to move to a totally different level of doing the will of God. He retired to Caesarea Philippi, a holiday venue far to the north of Galilee at one of the main sources of the Jordan River near Mount Lebanon. His opponents had been hounding him. He needed to know what his next move should be. While there, on vacation we can presume, he asked his disciples what people were saying about him and who they thought he was.

I don’t see this question as a ruse to bring out Peter’s declaration, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." Rather, I see it as a genuine search for answers about what he should do next. Peter did give him a straight answer: He was the Messiah, the Son of the living God. This obviously became a turning point for Jesus. What he did next depended on who he really was. As Messiah/Christ, his demonstration of the infinite love of God had to take on a whole new context. He had the face death at the hands of his opponents and leave the outcome to God.

In his book, The Mind of Jesus, the late Scottish scholar William Barclay summed up who Jesus is and why he did what he did. It amounts to a single word or phrase that occurs over 600 times in the New Testament, half of those in the letters attributed to the apostle Paul: "Jesus is Lord."
Barclay pointed out that the word Lord is like a one-word creed. It expressed complete devotion. Professor Barclay claimed that our greatest need is to recover it as a statement of our faith.

Whatever the word may convey to some people as a stereotype of male dominance, Lord is still a good English word. To New Testament authors, its Greek counterpart, kurios, meant living under the control of Jesus Christ. Many of the early Christians were slaves; others were Roman citizens who paid supreme loyalty to the emperor. Instead of belonging to a slave master like so much property or paying obeisance to the Roman emperor, their kurios was Jesus. He whom they had come to know through faith was in control of their lives.

Exercising Self-Control Now

Enkrateia - self-control - means that the way we live is determined by who Jesus Christ is for us. To live by "the Rule of the Spirit" is to be open to the leading of the Spirit of Christ. That comes about through reading and studying the scriptures, prayer, asking counsel from other believers, and being prepared to tell others why we believe and do what we do.

That may sound like a very pious way to live, but it really isn’t. We search for information and ask for this kind of guidance every day in other areas of life and we don’t even think about doing it. Here are a few examples of people who have succeeded in living this way, often after many failures.

A hospital chaplain sent this message about exercising creative self-control in a delicate patient care situation.

"Over the years I have experienced what I have called spiritual terrorism with some of our patients. Often this comes at a very vulnerable time as they approached their death. I remember finding cards on the chests of patients coming out of a post-operative situation asking the person if they were saved. We would then post an alert for the entire hospital that this 'minister' was loose in the hospital and fan out to see if there were other patients also 'ministered to' that day."

The following prayer expresses the same spirit of self-control.

"Lord, even though other believers may not agree with me on every issue, help me to extend to them patience, understanding, and grace. I will not criticize them, nor will I hurt them with my words, for we are all one body in Christ Jesus. Instead, help me to pray for them and support them in love, knowing that I too may need that same grace and understanding extended to me. In Jesus' name. Amen."

Puzzling about the inability of the church to reach out to young people, a woman serving a Disciples of Christ congregation in Oregon sent along this advice.

"My 23-year-old cousin grew up going to church but isn't going now because he has trouble buying into a lot of the stuff he was taught there. He found the idea of looking for Christ in everyday interactions with people very intriguing, and I pray that some seeds have been planted through that.

"As I understand it, many 'postmodern' folks are turned off by religious people who say one thing and do another. They're less concerned about what our beliefs are and whether they're correct or not and more concerned about how the faith we have influences the life we live. They don't have a whole lot of use for people who don't ‘walk their talk.’

"So if we were to behave as though any person we encounter might be Christ, how does that affect the way we treat one another? What kind of an example would we set? And might this be the key to reaching younger folks who have left church (or never found it), rather than concentrating all our energy on externalities such as worship style?"

These people can "walk the talk" because their lives are under Jesus’ control. To know the mind of Christ and to let that experience control our daily living, we have to do as the apostle Paul did. From the moment of meeting Jesus on the Damascus road to the end of his days as Nero’s prisoner in Rome, he lived in the presence of Jesus Christ and knew him as Lord. We need to do the same without pretense. Doing it faithfully brings its own reward, a sense of intimate fellowship with Jesus himself and with God.

Corporate Self-Control

Corporate bodies and institutions also need to exercise self-control. Countless times in its two thousand year history, the church has failed that test. In the Crusades, for instance, European Christians with intense religious fervor wasted countless lives and a great amount of treasure over two centuries to seek glory and salvation in wresting the Holy Land from the hands of Moslem Turks.

Many historians today believe that the basic issue in that long conflict was not religious at all. It was the control of trade from the Far East to Europe then in its early stages of development from nearly a millennium of tribal barbarism to a civilized future.

In the 20th century, Christians prayed and fought heroically for victory on both sides in the two World Wars. Not many stood in the lonely ranks of pacifists and conscientious objectors. When Canada declared war on Germany in September 1939, 75 ministers of The United Church of Canada signed and published a manifesto declaring their pacifism. They were immediately repudiated by the Sub-Executive of the General Council and Moderator of the church in a letter to Prime Minister Mackenzie King.

At the beginning of the 20th century, hundreds and perhaps thousands of sincere, convinced young men and women flocked to the ranks of the church’s overseas missions in response to the clarion call of recruiters trumpeting, "The world for Christ in this century." They were the products of Christendom that had lasted from the time of Roman Emperor Constantine in the 4th century. That kind of enthusiasm died before the 20th century ended. At the beginning of the 21st century in a pluralistic world where Christians are outnumbered 4 or 5 to 1 by followers of other religious traditions whose faith is equally sincere, we need to exercise self-control in the way we carry out our biblical mandate to evangelize the world.

To a small group of Jewish men in the 1st century, Jesus of Nazareth said, "You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you; but whoever wishes to be great among you, must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave; just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many." (Matthew 20:25-28) He might just as well have been speaking to the present generation of Christians about our world mission today. It requires a great deal of self-control for the church to avoid the errors of triumphalism that have so marred our past.

There are signs that even the most profit-driven multinational corporations are beginning to show at least some degree of self-control in their corporate relations with the people on whom they depend for business.

In Seattle in the late fall of 1999, the World Trade Organization (WTO) had to abandon its agenda to dominate the global economy in the face of determined street protests. Two months later in Davos, Switzerland, a meeting of thousands of business and political leaders revealed a modest change of attitude. Said Klaus Schwab, president of the Davos assembly, "Seattle may have been a turning point." Lewis B. Campbell, chairman of the massive Textron Corporation, agreed. "After Seattle we may have to rethink our assumptions."

In 1999 the Coca Cola Corporation had to deal with some severe environmental and political problems some of its international subsidiaries had caused. It has now adopted a policy of performing as a "valued citizen" in some of its major markets. It is going to set up research centres in Europe, Asia and Latin America. In Africa, it has given a substantial sum of money to combat AIDS. To direct these new relationships, it has set up a global public and governmental affairs unit of top managers.

In Montreal in late January 2000, another gathering of political leaders sought a solution to the increasingly critical problem of genetically modified products. The results were astonishing. In the face of determined criticism and protest from environmentalists and civic activists from all over the world, the Montreal Biosafety Protocol took a few small steps toward controlling the trade of genetically engineered materials. If this protocol is ratified by at least 50 nations, it becomes binding on all. Representatives from seventy-seven nations have already indicated their support.

The foregoing reports may be nothing more than the cloud Elijah saw that was no bigger than a man’s hand. Eventually, the cloud became a drought-ending rainstorm before which King Ahab had to flee (1 Kings 18:44-46). Self-control is an ethical principle without religious boundaries. The church is bound by no less a principle in all its actions. In so doing, as individual believers and as a church bearing the name of Christ, we are committed to exercise similar self-control.