Self-Control: Laying Down Our Lives

Self-control means laying down our desires and saying no to our impulses. We practice self-control because Jesus modeled it for us. At any moment in His time on earth, Jesus could have called down fire from Heaven to solve arguments or get Him out of situations. When Satan tempted Jesus to make bread out of rocks, Jesus demonstrated self-control. Jesus was hungry, and it wouldn’t have been a great sin if Jesus had turned some rocks into bread, but that was a simple test to show and grow Jesus’ self-control. Likewise, Paul was a Romans citizen and was thereby immune from public floggings. At any point in any of his beatings, he could have mentioned his citizenship and the beating would have stopped immediately. Yet, Paul exercised tremendous self-control and didn’t use his citizenship for personal, physical comfort. When he was ready, he used his Roman citizen card as a mechanism to bring the gospel to Rome. exercising self-control and determining when was the right time to mention his citizenship was key to Paul’s ministry. Paul, like Jesus, laid down his physical comfort and eventually his life for the sake of the lost.

Another word for self-control could simply be love.

Love is putting others before ourselves, which predicates us controlling our natural desire to preserve and improve ourselves first. “By this, we know love because He laid down His life for us. And we also ought to lay down our lives for the brethren.” (1 John 3:16 NKJV). We can control our desire for self-preservation; we can lay down our lives for others. We simply have to decide to do it. Self-control doesn’t happen by accident. And the easiest time to lose self-control is when we think we have it all together.

Exercising self-control enables us to become the best person we were meant to be. In other words, loving others benefits our life as much as it benefits the person we love. The self-control and self-sacrifice that accompany love make us more like Christ as we follow His example of denying Himself. “God is love” (1 John 4:8), so anything that helps us exercise and grow in love makes us more like Christ, which is the goal of being a Christian. Self-control might be seen as the first step to help us become more loving, and it might be the first step to making us more Christ-like.

Self-control is necessary to allow God to be in control.

Even when we are serving God, we have to lay down our life. We have to be aware of our tendency to figure out how to do something, and mindlessly doing it that way. Once we figure out our way of serving God, we can try to continue serving Him in the same way, mindlessly, without listening to the spirit. While God is never changing, He is always new. Each day, as we approach God, we should approach Him with an expectation of a new experience of Him. Bible reading and prayer will still be the ways we approach God for a fresh relational experience, but we can try a new translation or setting to read and pray through as we exercise control of our desire to speak and listen to His voice. Self-control often is controlling our voice and thoughts. We do this so we can be filled more with God than our own concerns as we listen more than we speak.