We’re talking about another way we need to control ourselves – a way that many of us are completely unaware of, yet maybe the most important thing of all. It has everything to do with being tuned into God and His life and the next. So, let’s take our understanding of self-control to a deeper level. 

There’s a famous therapy line in the movie, Ordinary People. A teenager has been sent by his parents to see a therapist. He and his older brother earlier – I guess, during the summertime – it was a school year then – had been in a small sailboat, and they got caught in a storm. He survived, but his brother died. And some months later, this boy attempted suicide. That’s some background you won’t learn, if you watch the movie, until after he starts talking with the therapist. The therapist, after the usual pleasantries, asked him why he was there. He tells the therapist he doesn’t want to act weird or sad anymore so other people won’t be uncomfortable around him – you know, “not in control,” he says. And the therapist says to him, “Well, I’ll let you in on a little secret. I’m not big on control.” Now, why did he say that? Did he think that his client should do whatever he wanted without regard for consequences? You know, stay up late, get drunk, skip work, don’t do your homework, do whatever comes to you mind – just live an uncontrolled life – no need for control? No, that’s not what he meant at all. 

Those are the things that we usually think about when we think about self-control. So, the therapist is talking about the kind of control we want to discuss today. 

Look with me, for a minute, before we skip ahead, and let’s take a look at the boy’s situation. He didn’t know why he felt anxious and depressed, why he had bad dreams, why he couldn’t sleep, why he quit the swim team, why he had withdrawn from his friends, why his grades were tanking, and why he tried to kill himself. He only knew that he was acting irrationally and that frightened everyone – but not why. He and everyone else knew that it had something to do with his brother, but not exactly what. 

So, let’s look at a scripture commonly quoted – one that we all know. It’s in Jeremiah 17:9. I’m not going to put it up, because it’s so common. It says:

Jeremiah 17:9 – The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick. Who can understand it? 

Who can understand it? Well, none of us, really. And that’s because our hearts deceive us, even more than we try to deceive others. So, why do we do that? Why do we deceive ourselves? Let’s look at something John tells before we get into it.

1 John 1:8-9 – If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves – there’s that deceitful heart, right? We don’t want to believe that we have sin. We’re not acknowledging the truth about ourselves – and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness.

Self-deception comes into play when we want to feel strong and righteous – that is, without sin – just like our ancestors, Adam and Eve, wanted to feel good in God’s presence. Now, it’s important to understand with this question, “Why did they want that?” Well, because God created them that way, so that He could draw them into relationship. A relationship with God would be something wanted because it is innately built into them. They were created to be in relationship with God forever. And that desire is in all of us, even though some don’t believe God exists. So, for those who are cut off from God, they don’t recognize what that desire is. They have it, but they don’t know the object of their desire. They call it existential. I’ve heard it referred to as the existential void – this vague pull toward an unknown source that we can define any way we want to – if we don’t know God put that pull there for a reason. That’s exactly what humanity has done with it. Humanity has tried to fill that vague urge in every conceivable way – from humanitarianism – so-called – to eating too much to drinking human blood. But no matter what we do, it’s still there unrequited. 

But once we get connected with God, it all starts to make sense. We want God to approve of us, to love us. And that extends to the rest of the family – all the other children of God. But we still want everyone to see us as good, smart, righteous, kind, loyal, loving, strong, etcetera. 

Now, consider this: Did you know that a study of college students reveal that 90% of all college students in the United States believe that they’re in the top 10% of all college students intellectually – as far as IQ goes? So that would mean that at least 80% of all college students are self-deceived about their intelligence level. Now, I heard that study a long time ago – I’ve forgotten he exact percentages, but I think it was 90%. So, you can take the point from it. 

So, Adam and Eve immediately began, once they sinned, to try to convince God it wasn’t their fault. Now, there’s a real deception for you. Right? But not enough to admit they’d done something wrong. They wanted a good relationship with God, but were not willing to do what was needed to keep it. To God’s statement that we deceive ourselves about our sin, we don’t know God. That’s what He said – the truth isn’t in us. And our sin is what separates us from God. It drives a wedge between our God, who is holy and never sins – just as with Adam and Eve. So, why? Well, because we know God wants us a sin-free relationship with us and we’re not sin-free. 

So, let’s observe that the urge to be loved by God is very good for us. If we know what it is, it can steer us in the right way. We have something concrete to go for – a relationship with God – a specific aim and the one God intended for us. And conversely, it’s utterly destructive to us and distracting – and also to those around us – sometimes dangerous and destructive – if we don’t recognize what it is – if we’re deceiving ourselves about that. For those folks, life becomes a free-for-all for all our desires – known and unknown. Whatever works. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. Lots of statements about it. This is a well-known issue in every corner of the world. And who, in the universe, more than anyone, would want us to lose sight of the fact that we are designed to become a member of God’s family – in relationship with Him. We know who, don’t we? 

It’s so interesting. The boy in the movie finally realizes – he clears away the deception – finally realizes that he thinks he’s a bad person because he didn’t save his brother’s life. After he acknowledges that to the therapist, the therapist said, “Well, that’s quite a secret you’ve been keeping to yourself.” See, he believed he had failed his brother. But it just wasn’t true. Why did he believe that? Why did he believe that he let go, rather in reality, he just wasn’t strong enough to hang on to his brother in that terrible storm? What was it that inclined him to believe he was defective or rotten – sinful? Well, I’ve talked to hundreds of people about that very issue – why they think there’s something wrong with them. And I learned that there is a very different unique set of reasons for each of us, but we all feel, not just weak and sinful, but defective – like there’s something wrong with us. Why is that? Well, often we’re not even aware that we feel that way – that we’re defective sometimes. 

So, when did that all start? Well, I mentioned that in Adam and Eve before. Let’s think about them. Let’s start in the beginning. God created them in His own image, we’re told – not just anatomically, but also with the potential to become Godlike – so, related to God’s image in every way – to become God like God is God, to be His children in a family with Him – eternal, with a different body. He designated us, specifically, so that could become possible. He made a plan – set it that it would be that way. He gave us a spirit so that He can connect us on a spiritual level, and so that He can influence us toward Him. And He gave us the capacity for language so that He can communicate with us in the thinking part of our brain. And He created us with the essential elements of the law built into us so that He could orient us toward righteousness and so that we would not kill each other off until there was no one left. And He gave us the ability to be part of a human family, so that we could have an in-built model for our potential. If we’re not a part of a family, as an adult, we can look at families and understand what’s going on there. We can understand what it means to have a father in the physical sphere and to understand that God wants to be our Father. So, there’s a connection there. He places a desire for relationship in us, so that once oriented toward Him, we would strive to go toward that relationship – to fulfill that urge – and knowing that sin drives a wedge then, to be rid of sin in our lives. 

This emptiness is felt by us as a desire to be approved of, to be seen as good, connected to something outside ourselves. Adam and Eve clearly found this emptiness filled with God, because they had this relationship with their Creator from the beginning. They loved God and He loved them. They had no desire to go against anything God wanted them to do, so they hadn’t committed any sin. But why would they? All they had to do was follow God’s lead and everything always turned into a blessing. He went along with their longing to be good and to be close to God. They must have felt incredibly peaceful.  All the boxes were checked. All their needs were met. All their longings were being satisfied. They were with God – under the shadow of His loving wings, blessed every which way. They had a great place to live, great weather. It doesn’t say that, but they didn’t need clothes, so we can assume that. Great food, great jobs, great marriage, etcetera. But then, enter the devil. And he convinced them that God was withholding good things from them. He didn’t say it out loud, but the implication was God didn’t really love them the way they thought He did, and He had withheld truth from them, restricting them from that tree that was causing them to miss out. So, again, he told them they wouldn’t die, whereas God told them they would. So, against God’s specific instructions – even though there was no codified law at that time, that was still His law when He said it – they ate of the fruit. And, almost immediately, things started to unravel for them. They no longer felt good about themselves. They felt guilty. And besides thinking God was not telling them everything, they started to feel guilty for going contrary to their own Creator. And they started hiding from God. They probably wondered what was wrong with them that they would do that. It didn’t make sense. They still wanted Him to love them, but they were afraid He would not love them because of the choice they made. 

So, let’s look at something John said. They started feeling evil instead of good, weak and vulnerable without God’s protection. They tried to shift the blame away from themselves – Adam to Eve, and Eve to the serpent. Looking at their son, Cain, he didn’t want to admit he killed his brother. He hated to think of himself as a murderer of someone who loved him. He denied it to himself and, apparently, to God. He was in the grip of self-deception. So, attempted deception of others and of self about our sins, just like John’s statement here, is there for us to see – not willing to admit wrong, because they wanted to be seen as good so they could be close to God. But deceiving others about that, and deceiving ourselves, only complicates things and makes it worse. Like John says: 

1 John 1:9 – If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness. 

The way to get out of that trap is to be open about it, instead of self-deceiving and trying to hide it. So, Adam and Eve were caught in that. They felt so dirty they could not face Him. 

So, how did the devil pull this off? He lied. God wasn’t withholding anything from them that was good. But Adam and Eve believed him and that was the bridgehead he needed to spread his lies to the whole world for all human history. It’s like his Omaha Beach where, if he got just enough soldiers on to hold on to it, they were going to spread all the way to Berlin – which is what they did. And that’s what the devil has done with us. He got a bridgehead with Adam and Eve and they spread his lie down through the generations to us. 

If we look at the world’ literature, this issue of right and wrong, good and evil, truth and lies, conscience clean or corrupted is everywhere. It goes all the way down to every person – even in the most rudimentary and grossest terms in the movies. How many times have we seen two soldiers with smoking rifles, or the two bank robbers with smoking guns, or the two cowboys all suffering a moment of clarity, self-deception momentarily suspended, wondering if God would forgive them for the things they have done. So, that’s the elemental question of human existence – good or evil.

Okay, so we started out talking about self-control today. What is it that God wants us to control here? Well, let’s dig just a little deeper on this. The devil has told us two lies. One is that God doesn’t love you. And we know this is a lie. We discussed how God has created us in a way that perfectly equips us to relate to God. Not to mention the scriptures where He just says it out loud – outright – that He loves all of us – even the worst of us. Not to mention the universe – something He created to help us understand that He exists, and how much He loves us, and how beautiful His creation is. And yet, the devil has put this lie out into the world to keep us from seeing that we are loved and created to be with our God forever. His lie is that we are not loved and all the people in the world are taught that lie about God from the beginning. 

There’s another lie he tells us. That is, the reason God doesn’t love you is because you are unfit – defective – you can’t be good enough for God to love you. There’s something wrong with you. You’re, at base, defective. 

So, I’m going to give you two examples of this working in action. The first one is the ordinary boy from the movie, Ordinary People. The boy in the movie, the ordinary boy, who think like we do. Why did he assume he was evil because he couldn’t hang on to his brother? If we haul that out in the light of day and look at it, it’s crazy. And that’s what his belief was doing to him. It was driving him crazy – to suicide. So, the devil has a massive agenda to be actively pursued with each of us. And that is, not only does God not love us, but that we are unlovable by God. In fact, it’s not possible for Him to love us because of the way you are. 

Now, if we read our Bibles, we see that this is a crazy notion. Yet, it’s hard to stop thinking this way. Consequently, we have a need for self-control to stop believing the lies and start believing the truth. Since this boy is not connected to God, he cannot believe anything else. He was on his own with his deeply held, completely unconscious belief there was something wrong about him. He was right where the devil wanted him. That’s what he wants us to think, and to be discouraged, and maybe even suicidal. 

Here’s the second example: Mary, in The Chosen – let’s look here at that example – one of the most loving characters in the TV series is Mary Magdalene. In the very first episode, Jesus casts demons out of her. And He tells her that He called her by name – He called her Mary and everyone else knew her as Lilleth, which was a degraded name. By casting the demons out, He tells her He has redeemed her – pulled her back into His world – His grace and His love. Well, she responds very favorably to that and becomes a devoted follower and picks her Jewish faith up again – starts keeping Shabat and all that. Several episodes later, however, she becomes extremely frightened by an encounter by a demon-possessed man that they all meet. After that, she’s so terrified, she runs away back to where she came from, and begins drinking and gambling again. She backslides. And Jesus sent Peter and Matthew to go find her. And they did and they brought her back. So, once she’s back, she goes to Jesus and tells him with her down in discouragement that she can’t live up to His redemption – His calling. And she feels so rotten and weak and sinful that she doesn’t believe she can walk that road with Jesus and the others any longer. She’s not able to. And she’s let Him down and she feels guilty about that. And Jesus tells her, in her head down position, to look Him in the eye. She has a great deal of trouble with that, but when she finally does, He says, “I forgive you.” And later – Mary is restored again, right? – and later Mary is talking to another disciple, Tamara, and she told Tamara that she was a terrible person, and that when Jesus found her, she was in a bar drunk and possessed. And Tamara tells her she feels sorry for her – not because she had been in a bar drunk and possessed, but that she hadn’t yet accepted Christ’s forgiveness. She said to Mary, “Jesus forgave you and yet you still can’t let go of your past.” So, the unstated point was, “Why don’t you just let go of that belief – that lie – and believe what Jesus said to you – that you are forgiven?” So, more need for that kind of self-control is what we’re talking about today for each of us.

It’s a good question, isn’t it? Not just for Mary, but for all of us. What are you going to do with that? The kind of self-control we need is more than about brushing our teeth every day. So, let’s do the learning part of the sermon now. Let’s understand how we can stop thinking of ourselves as defective, but to admit that God allows us to become weak. But He has not made us defective or unlovable. Those are two different things. 

Now, the scripture we’re going to look at next is probably the most important one for this sermon. So, buckle up. 

Titus 2:11-12 – For the grace of God has appeared – Paul tells Titus – the grace of God has appeared – it just showed up. It’s almost like it was unseen. And that grace brings salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness – etcetera. 

So, it’s almost like it was a surprise. Well, it was, in a way. It was a total reset for everybody, for one thing, living and dead. It caught everybody flat-footed – even the angels in heaven – a game changer. Now, it was not that the angels in heaven didn’t know about Christ’s sacrifice, and that God had always been forgiving, but what they hadn’t seen before was, how that forgiveness would affect us – because there was no church yet. So, His death showed everyone in heaven and on earth that humans can enter into God’s eternal family, because all our sins can be removed – never to be remembered again. We don’t have to feel or act unforgiven, because Jesus Christ died to forgive us. And just as God raised Jesus from the dead, so also will He raise us, one, to a new kind of physical life with the power of God in the flesh, and another, to be born, literally, like Jesus was, to be resurrected from the dead. And all we have to do is accept it and believe it. But that’s hard, isn’t it? Because we started early with that one. Mary certainly was having trouble with it, and so was the ordinary boy, and so do all of us. And here is the place we need to exercise that spiritual self-control. We all need to stop believing that we can’t ever please God, that we are defective, that He won’t love us or help us overcome, or let us into His Kingdom, because we can never be – we’re all defective. 

Have you ever had the experience of being complimented for something that made you feel uncomfortable? Do you know why that happens? Because we don’t believe it’s true. When we catch ourselves thinking like that, we need to remember the reset. All the things that we have done wrong – all those sins – we can accept those things as true. And we would be terrible sinners except for what Christ has done for us – that is, forgive all our sins. If we have accepted that Christ has forgiven our sins, and that God doesn’t remember the sins anymore, then that’s all in the past. We’re not that way in God’s sight. 

Paul talked about a Christian being a new creation. Not the same old person plastered over, but a totally new creation. Do you believe it? If not, then you believe that God was lying. 

Let’s read more of this verse:

V-12 – training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled – see, now he’s talking the brush your teeth stuff and not sinning stuff – upright, and godly lives in the present age, 

So, this is why this is a total reset for us. God’s grace – His forgiving and forgetting of our past sins – teaches us to think differently about ourselves. Who do you know that has lived out this scripture perfectly in this life? Not us. Not you, not me. Jesus is the only one. And why is it important to know that – besides paying for our sins with His perfect life? Well, it’s important because He knows how to do it. He’s lived the perfect life. And He knows how to help us do that too. And, if we have given ourselves to Him, He’s in us right now to change us. And He knows how to do that. What does Paul say about this? Well, let me read this scripture – I keep coming back to this scripture because it explains how grace works on us. It teaches us how to do it. Paul said: 

Romans 12:1 – I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. 

Spiritual worship. How do you define that? It’s kind of a diffuse term – not too specific, right? Spiritual worship. Well, okay. So, we’re going to look into Louw & Nida for this one. It says that that term could  be translated, your logic or rational service. In other words, when you submit yourself to God – present your bodies a living sacrifice – you’re doing it because it’s a logical reaction to what He did for you. We submit to Him because He submitted for us. He suffered for us. And for those of us who are in relationship with Jesus Christ, it only makes sense that we would want, with all our hearts, to live like He lived – just like we read, “To renounce all ungodliness and worldly passions,” and to live self-controlled, upright and Godly lives in the present age. 

Yeah, so it’s hard to think this way. And what is underneath all that difficulty? Well, it’s the lie the devil taught us from our first days – that there’s something wrong with us, something defective at base – not just that we’ve sinned, but that we are wrong, we’re unlovable. Guilt is when we have sinned. Shame is when we believe there’s something defective in us – incapable of loving God, or being loved by Him. We wonder how we came to believe that way. 

I met a man once who knew where it came from in his life. He overheard his stepfather telling his mother that she could get $40,000 for her son if she didn’t want him anymore. So, to hm, that translated that it was impossible for anyone to love him. It doesn’t help that mainstream Christianity holds, as a doctrine, that we are born evil. If you don’t believe that, they think you’re a heretic. But that’s a lie! God made us – designed us – to be in His family. And He plainly says He is going to be successful in that effort. 

So, where will the application of self-control help us the most? Well, Paul said that we should discipline ourselves to always be praying to God – always be looking up to the things God teaches us – instead of at the lies the devil tells us. And, as we look up to God, and think about God’s plan for us, and remember every day that He created us for that purpose – that He is in our minds already with His Spirit to help us learn to live Godly lives. 

But it’s hard to do that, right? So, one solution, for example, to this – one way God trains us through grace – is to realize that Jesus, in both Testaments, is called the Sun of Righteousness – S-U-N, not S-O-N (He’s called both, actually) – but the reference to the sun is in reference to every day is a new day when Christ comes up in our life to greet us, and we’re to remember that we are forgiven by His death – that we have a fresh start every day. The past is forgiven and we need to move beyond that. Paul used the term praying always in another verse. That takes self-control. And we need to become poor in spirit and believe God instead of the devil – especially about what God believes about us. It doesn’t feel right for us, but it is right. So, that’s what we go with. So, we have to exert self-control about how we believe about ourselves and how God believes about us. 

Yes, we are weak. We do sin, but we are not defective – but instead created to be with God and He is going to have His way in this regard. Believe Jesus Christ, with His grace, and it changes everything – it erases everything that separates us from the love of God. Paul spoke directly about this powerfully in Romans 8:35. 

Romans 8:35-39 – Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord. Amen. Amen to that! 

So, our job is to apply self-control to believe the truth rather than the lie about who we are and where we’re going. And one way we can do that is to look at the sunshine every morning and remember that we’re free, and then keep our eyes up all day long, living like we’re forgiven, because we are! And we can be thankful to God for Christ’s sacrifice for us. It’s so good to wake up every morning, knowing that we have a fresh start. But some day – near or distant – a day will come when we will never have to be forgiven again, because we won’t have committed more sins. And, in that day, we will know that God has given us our heart’s desire.