Sermon: Self Control and Freedom

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Self Control and Freedom

By Charles Rush

July 16, 2006

[ Audio (mp3, 3.2 Mb) ]

is morning I'm going to preach a sermon on temperance or self control. My wife called me from the beach this morning and said “Why don't you preach on something that you know something about?” It is true that this is all second-hand information, but it's good.

I'm reading from Galatians chapter 5. St. Paul took this idea up twice. He says that we are called to live lives of freedom. When he speaks of that he doesn't mean that we can do anything we want, but rather because we are free we live in God. This is what he says: It's absolutely clear that God has called us to a free life. Just make sure that you don't use this freedom as an excuse to do what you want and destroy your freedom. Rather use your freedom to serve one another in love, for that's how freedom grows. Everything we know about God's word is summed up in a single sentence – love others as you love yourself. That is an act of true freedom. If you bite and ravage each other, watch out! In no time at all you will be annihilating each other, and where will your precious freedom be then? So my counsel is this: live freely animated by God's spirit. Then you won't feed compulsions and selfishness, for there is a root of central self-interest in all of us that's at odds with the free spirit, just as the free spirit is incompatible with the selfish way of life. These two ways are antithetical. Live freely on every given day.

In the comic strip “The Wizard of Id” the Minister is waxing eloquent on the great virtue of moderation. He exclaims, “Moderation is the key to living. Follow the golden eat. Eat moderation, drink moderation, sleep moderation, work moderation, play moderation, live moderation.” On and on he went. After the service the King greets him at the back of the church, shakes his hand and says “I think you overdid it.”

Temperance has a bad name. When you think of temperance, you think of a nice elderly lady like Aunt Bea from Mayberry or Minnie Pearl, driving down the road, the price tag still on her hat, with a MADD bumper-sticker on her car, and a long train of cars behind her. Temperance might have to be tolerated out of politeness but it is nothing to long for night and day.

Certainly as a child this is what we were taught to assume about the spiritual life. It was not only temperate, it was abstemious. I had a Sunday School teacher that summed up the moral teaching of the Bible this way. “Don't drink, don't smoke, don't chew. Don't go with girls who do.” The problem was these were the only girls we wanted to be with. It produced a conflict for us boys in the South. We knew we didn't want to go to Hell but if Heaven was only populated with straight-laced teetotalers, who don't dance, we weren't sure we wanted to go there either.

First of all, let's get rid of the word temperance. It is a bad translation. Let's call it self-control. When the Greeks wanted to illustrate the virtue of self-control, they built a statue of a man or a woman in perfect proportion. Think of the statue of the spear thrower that everyone sees slides of in Art History 101 in college. In fact, all around Athens you could find statues of men in perfect athletic proportion- arms strong but not weighty, legs powerful but graceful, fat nowhere, tone everywhere, cheeks high with gaze upward, the grip of the hands sure and supple- almost gentle and artistic. All parts were properly balanced and there was a harmony to the piece. It was this kind of balance that the Greeks thought of as self-controlled. Self-control is the proper ordering and balancing of the individual, even as Justice is a proper ordering and balancing of powers in society.

Aristotle used to say that the self-controlled man was neither cowardly, nor foolhardy but courageous. He was neither gluttonous, nor fasting, but healthy in diet. She is neither ignorant, nor a bookworm, but learned. He is neither a drunkard, nor abstemious, but social. This is what self-control looks like.

Plato said that self-control was the rational ordering of the soul that kept it free. Our animal urges, what we might call our natural vitalities, must be governed, he said, or else they will produce “a feverish state in the soul, a city of pigs” which knows no limits. The ungoverned soul, he said is like the State being ruled by cooks, bakers, tap dancers, and flute-girls.”(… Something is lost in the translation there, isn't it? You always read about these flute girls in the ancient world in this context. They must have been fun). Many of us know friends and family members who have vividly illustrated this chaos in their personal lives- I just think of the combination of cocaine and alcohol that makes a wreck of the personal life of even the most successful, driven, and organized person.

Aristotle and Plato put a lot of stock in the importance of forming good habits for the development of self-control. They thought that self-control was largely imprinted upon us before we were old enough to know better. Their neighbors in Sparta made child development a rigorous formation of character and paid attention to minute details. One thing is clear is that a childhood that is surrounded by chaos, a lack of boundaries or controls, a childhood led by parents that lack self-control, is doomed. This we have seen time and time again.

Children have a difficult time making the transition from immediate gratification to delayed gratification. Sigmund Freud called it the transition from the pleasure principle to the reality principle. Delayed gratification has to be learned by good habits and it is not easy because children are born with a strong desire for immediate gratification.

When one of my kids was one or maybe two, they loved ice cream, really loved ice cream. So at their birthday party, we served cake and chocolate ice cream. I love that age because they just dig in with such joyful relish, frosting smeared all over the face and hair. About mid-way through the feast, this child burst into tears. Turns out, she filled her mouth with so much ice cream that it hurt from the cold. But she wouldn't open her mouth to spit out the ice cream either.

Kids are like that. They want immediate gratification. Parents have to structure that for them don't they? I suppose every parent in Summit has to sneak in their child's room the day after Haloween and empty half to ¾'s of the bag after they have gone to sleep. It would make them ill. The vast majority of kids don't even notice it gone because candy is fun for a day or two and then they need another entertainment.

Aristotle used to say that the goal for the development of self-control was to feel the right amount of pleasure at the right things to the right degree. That is the challenge of raising children with good habits. The problems arise when they desire too much pleasure, pleasure at the wrong things, or when they have no fear of pain.

Too much pleasure is obvious enough. Pleasure at the wrong things I fear is going to be a bigger challenge for us in the coming generation. We are blessed with many choices in our world and that will also be our challenge. We now have a world of so many options that we will have to be more intentional about the reality and self-controls we construct for ourselves. We will have to choose the world that we want to inhabit.

I mention only new challenge for the coming generation: Pornography. Porno is widely accessible and accessibility is growing. For my generation, pornography could be found but you had to work at it and the vast majority of pornography was Playboy magazine, not much more lurid than the Sports Illustrated Swim Suit issue. The internet has rapidly changed not only the availability of porno, there is also truly weird stuff that is presented routinely. At present, it accounts for some huge percentage of internet sales (I believe around half), not to mention how much is out there you don't have to pay for.

Add to this a general social climate that sensationalizes sexuality. Sexual scenes are simply regular fare for nearly every movie, casual sexual encounters the regular subject of sitcoms. And then there is the Howard Stern phenomenon, who figured out that bored commuters will tune in to soft porn on the radio. In the process, he is living proof that it is possible to grow older every year and stay sexually fixated in a thirteen-year-old mindset. Then there is the talk show phenomenon. Jerry Springer “I'm sleeping with my boyfriends Father” that is shown, conveniently right after school is out. The line between sexuality, eroticism, and pornography will continue to blur. Avoiding the rocks in the midst of this Whitewater will be shoot our kids all have to paddle. My worry is that my generation has made is harder for your generation to connect sexuality with intimacy, we have made it harder for you to find sexual expression in the service of love.

In every generation, the challenge to connect the heart with the hips is as profound as it is important. It is profound because, as the Bible teaches us, sex needs to be in support of, and an expression of, our love. Sexuality is fundamentally spiritual… and also playful, fun, also a comfort in the midst of anxiety, and a lot of other things. I want to remind you that having a healthy sexual ethic is important because it is one of the pillars for solid families.

Our young teenagers have an increasingly difficult challenge. It is hard enough to learn how to become intimate and loving, left to ourselves. Now we introduce the sheer titillation of pornography, the fact that it is anonymous, the fact that it presents sexuality without the problems relationship, and instantly gratifying. It is easy to have pleasure associated with pornography in an unhealthy way, at this vulnerable, impressionable time of life. It is a time of life when you lack confidence in yourself to begin with, and intimacy is a challenge at that age even if you are confident. How tempting it is to box off sexuality over in one psychic quadrant (this is what I do over here for my own personal pleasure) and not have it connected to the quest for intimacy, relationship, love.

My prediction, and I hope I'm wrong, is that pornography will become for the rising generation what Turkish delight was for Edmund in The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe. The Witch used to give young Edmund his favorite candy, Turkish delight. But the more he ate, the more he wanted, until it became a craving, then a compulsion. But there is far more at stake with our sexual integration than there is with candy and you can be weaned from candy but pornographic images get imprinted in a deep way that are very hard to write over, at some point impossible to write over or erase. Pornography certainly has the potential to be compulsive, not only in terms of frequency, but also in the sense that purience requires kinkier and kinkier images to get the same effect, so it also tends to pull you in deeper and deeper, changing your character as you evolve with it. It is volatile. It is dangerous. And our culture is increasingly acting as though it is innocuous.

People asked Plato and Aristotle, why people choose pleasurable things that are bad for them. Why is it that they continue down a path they know is going to hurt them, even if it is momentarily intoxicating. They both had the same answer. They said it was because people didn't understand the nature of the Good Life or we might say the Life Well Lived. This is why philosophy is so important. It gives you a chance to reflect on the well ordered life and then to use reason to properly develop the right habits to attain the right goals.

The answer is inadequate. Our problem is not simply a rational one. It is not simply a case of not knowing. Likewise, while knowledge and education have their place, they are not simply enough on their own right. Christians understand that the problem is spiritual. It involves not only the rational faculty but also the will, our character.

Plato said that when we are not self-controlled, our life is like a pig-sty. We are out of control. The Bible has a little different answer. You may be interested to know that the word for demons in the bible, daemonia, means ‘to be controlled by another'. That is not a bad description of compulsions. In the ancient world, people assumed that there was an individual spirit that attended every temptation to indulge in pleasure, so they tended to see demonic possession in a lot of forms. We no longer believe that but their insight was right about the transcendent spiritual dimension to cravings that become compulsions. At some point in that migration, they begin to control us. At some point, our character becomes misshaped and misaligned in order adjust itself to increasing demands our compulsions put on us. We are no longer free, but are driven by our compulsions. The Biblical insight is right that these forces become bigger than us which is why we need to be intentional about them. Proverbs 25:28 says that “A person without self-control is like a city broken into and left without walls.

Jesus understood the need for a positive orientation towards God. He said “Seek ye first the kingdom of God… and all these things will be added unto you” (Mt. 6:33). He also said, “no one can serve two masters” (Mt. 6:24). What does that mean for sexuality? Negatively, it means you don't follow your sexual drives down every path. Positively, it means that you keep focused on love, on intimate, vulnerable relationships of love. First God, second love of others, third sex in pursuit of love. In our passage this morning St. Paul says that the Spirit of God produces wholeness, and that this Spirit brings self-control. In our passage, Paul says that when we are walking in the Spirit, we have a well-ordered soul, an ego oriented towards wholeness, a person organized for love. Evidences of this grace are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Spiritually speaking that is what it means to be in good shape. Spiritually speaking, that is good proportion.

He has this curious phrase that follows this list. He says, “Against such, there is no law” (v. 23).[1] He means that these qualities of character can't really be enforced by a set of rules. You can't make somebody be kind. They either want to do that themselves or they don't. They open themselves to becoming kind or they don't.

These are the higher spiritual characteristics for which we live. No one would ever outlaw gentleness. You want to encourage that wherever you can, whenever you can. The bible says that in a very tangible way, we can't even exactly generate these virtues. In some ways, they have to be bestowed upon us by God. They come to us as a grace.

On the other hand, a large part of what it means to be a church, is to come together and practice these things together: Grace, love, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness- These can't be done alone. You have to have community to develop these virtues. Christianity is relational. The church is a place where we come to form relationships with other people in the hope that we might become authentically human. We encourage one another to live out of our more noble selves in the awareness that there are powerful forces all around us in our world which would make us inauthentic to ourselves and manipulative of one another. We heal one another from the mangled images that we have absorbed and grown into in the past and we help one another to start over in grace and to become stronger.

Self-control is like that as well. It is something that we practice individually. But it is not something we develop in isolation. We actually become properly attuned by opening ourselves to other people that are trying to become properly attuned. We become part of a community whose ethic encourages self-control, not in some legalistic way. That is just what we want to be when we are with these people. It is a grace. It is a grace to be found by God. It is a grace to be loved by others. Sexual expression in that context is a grace too. Fragile, beautiful, gracious. And that is what we hope for you. Keep focused on the most important things. Amen

[1] The previous several lines come from Stephen Shoemaker's chapter on this subject in The Jekyll and Hyde Syndrome (Broadman Press, ), p. 155,156.