More Than Enough: Self Control
Pastor Rollan Fisher
Focus: God’s abundant grace gives you not only unmerited favor, but power over sin to live a victorious Christ-centered life.
Power Over the Darkness
God’s Abundant Grace
The Christ-Centered Life
Power Over the Darkness
God gives you more than enough power over the darkness.
Especially pertinent in the summer months is the good news that God has given you more than enough power to overcome lust, sexual temptation and other like sin.
The truth would have come as welcome news in light of the recent scandal revealed in the Illinois Catholic Church.
I’ve observed over and over again:
Those who are living in the light are winning.
Those who try to hide temptation and sin are covered in shame and condemnation.
Ephesians 5:1-21 ESV
“Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. But sexual immorality and all impurity or covetousness must not even be named among you, as is proper among saints. Let there be no filthiness nor foolish talk nor crude joking, which are out of place, but instead let there be thanksgiving. For you may be sure of this, that everyone who is sexually immoral or impure, or who is covetous (that is, an idolater), has no inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God. Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience. Therefore do not become partners with them; for at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light (for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true), and try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord. Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. For it is shameful even to speak of the things that they do in secret. But when anything is exposed by the light, it becomes visible, for anything that becomes visible is light. Therefore it says, “Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” Look carefully then how you walk, not as unwise but as wise, making the best use of the time, because the days are evil. Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is. And do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery, but be filled with the Spirit, addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with your heart, giving thanks always and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, submitting to one another out of reverence for Christ.”
People today are talking about where and what is your power.
*As you come into the light of Jesus, he literally sets you free from things that you once thought gave you power (and control of your life), but come to realize actually had power over you.
“To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.”
Lewis B. Smedes, Forgive and Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don't Deserve
God’s Abundant Grace
God gives you abundant grace to overcome the darkness while walking in his unmerited favor.
This means we have more than enough self control as a fruit and by the power of the Holy Spirit.
We need the grace of God to do what God said to do - to walk in love and obedience to him.
To refuse to live a life congruent with God’s commands and dependent on the Holy Spirit’s help to fulfill those mandates is to live a life of pride.
“Pride in the religious sense is the arrogant refusal to let God be God. It is to grab God’s status for one’s self. In the vivid language of the Bible, pride is puffing yourself up in God’s face. Pride is turning down God’s invitation to join the dance of life as a creature in his garden and wishing instead to be the Creator, Independent, reliant on one’s own resources. Never does pride want to pray for strength, ask for grace, plead for mercy, or give thanks to God. Pride is the grand illusion, the fantasy of fantasies, the cosmic put-on.
The fantasy that we can make it as little gods leaves us empty at the center. Once we decide we have to make it on our own, we are attacked by the demons of fear and anxiety. We are worried that we cannot keep our balance as long as we carry no more inside our empty heart than what we can put there. We suspect that we lack the power to become what our pride makes us think we are. So we learn to swagger, to bluff, to use symbols to cover up our fears that we lack substance. We force other people to act as buttresses for the shaky ego that pride created by emptying our soul of God. In the words of God’s love song, we become arrogant.
Vanity is emptiness. A person who is empty at the center of life is vain, and a vain person is almost always arrogant. Every new situation calls forth the questions: ‘What can I get out of this to support the need of my ego for power and applause?’ As he encounters new people, he wonders, ‘How can this person contribute to my need for applause and power?’ He projects his own anxieties onto other people, so when others come to him he wonders, ‘What is this person’s pitch? What does he want from me?’ Life becomes a campaign to use people to support oneself and a constant battle to avoid having others use oneself that way. Vanity creates the need to use people because we cannot keep our balance spiritually if we are empty at the center.”
— Lewis B. Smedes, Love Within Limits: Realizing Selfless Love in a Selfish World (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1978), pp. 34-35
As opposed to pride, humility and dependence on the grace of God enables us to overcome sin.
Titus 2:11-15 ESV
“For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ, who gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good works. Declare these things; exhort and rebuke with all authority. Let no one disregard you.”
God gives us this grace in abundance as not even day by day, but moment by moment, we look to Christ.
This is what it means to walk with God and keep in step with the Holy Spirit.
2 Peter 1:1-2 NIV
“Simon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ, To those who through the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ have received a faith as precious as ours: Grace and peace be yours in abundance through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord.”
You must know what you have available to you from God through his word and discipline yourself to continually walk in it by faith.
As was said, the recent Attorney General’s report of child sex abuse by Illinois Catholic clergy is said to have spanned the state for decades.
This is condemnable before God and was not authored by God.
2 Timothy 3:1-7 ESV
“But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty. For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having the appearance of godliness, but denying its power. Avoid such people. For among them are those who creep into households and capture weak women, burdened with sins and led astray by various passions, always learning and never able to arrive at a knowledge of the truth.”
If you or someone that you love has been affected by such sin, we are here to help - Jesus is able to comfort, restore and heal you.
A powerful picture of someone born again and being both healed and sanctified:
The Christ-Centered Life
The Christ-centered life is the key to living in this abundant life and power.
1 Peter 4:1-11 ESV
“Since therefore Christ suffered in the flesh, arm yourselves with the same way of thinking, for whoever has suffered in the flesh has ceased from sin, so as to live for the rest of the time in the flesh no longer for human passions but for the will of God. For the time that is past suffices for doing what the Gentiles want to do, living in sensuality, passions, drunkenness, orgies, drinking parties, and lawless idolatry. With respect to this they are surprised when you do not join them in the same flood of debauchery, and they malign you; but they will give account to him who is ready to judge the living and the dead. For this is why the gospel was preached even to those who are dead, that though judged in the flesh the way people are, they might live in the spirit the way God does. The end of all things is at hand; therefore be self-controlled and sober-minded for the sake of your prayers. Above all, keep loving one another earnestly, since love covers a multitude of sins. Show hospitality to one another without grumbling. As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace: whoever speaks, as one who speaks oracles of God; whoever serves, as one who serves by the strength that God supplies—in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ. To him belong glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen.”
This means that we have more than enough power to go to the nations and actually believe what Scripture says will happen.
“I believed, therefore I have spoken.”
As Titus says, Jesus is God in the flesh who lived the perfect, sinless life that everyone of us should have lived.
Jesus drove out demons and worked miracles showing the world that he has more than enough power to change circumstances and lives.
Jesus went to the cross to not only sacrificially take the wrath of God for the sins that we’ve committed, but also the punishment for those that have violated you and deserve such wrath.
The access to this same grace of God comes through the cross where all may repent of their sins, no matter how heinous, and beg forgiveness of the one who died and was raised again to make men and women new.
The truth is none of us deserve to be forgiven.
We are only forgiven because a price has been paid and grace has been given through the love of Christ.
“Any person who only sticks with Christianity as long as things are going his or her way, is a stranger to the cross.”
-Timothy Keller
The truth also is that no one can free their own hearts - it too is a supernatural work by the power and gospel of God.
All we have to do is repent, believe and ask.
When we do, we will have more than enough power to continually walk with God because he has already distributed his mercy through the cross of Christ through which he provides forgiveness and a second chance for us every time we come to him.
Second City Church - Pastor Rollan Fisher