Self-Control: The Overlooked and Underestimated Fruit | 8/10/25
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In the stories of Violet Beauregard and Eustace, what parallels do you see to your own life?
How can “self-indulgence” or “self-absorption” change the way we relate to others?
Pastor Steve describes self-control as “a path to true freedom.”
How does this challenge or confirm your understanding of self-control?
What boundaries in your own life have actually brought you greater freedom?
Philippians 4:8 was shared as a personal guardrail.
What might be your own verse, phrase, or daily practice that helps keep your thoughts, words, and actions aligned with God’s will?
Self-control begins with “relinquishment of control.”
What might God be asking you to surrender so that His Spirit can work more fully in your life?
Transcript:
🎶Oompa Loompa, dupa dee doo. I've got another puzzle for you. Oompa Loompa, dupa dee dee. If you are wise, you will listen to me.🎶
Some of you, I see, are smiling. You recognize that from the classic children’s and family movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. So perhaps you remember the scene where Willy Wonka is telling the children about the new chewing gum that he is creating, that when you chew one little piece of gum, you get an entire multi-course meal out of it.
And as he's describing this to them, young Violet Beauregard rushes up to him and snatches the piece of gum out of his hand and starts to put it in her mouth when he says, "I wouldn't do that. We haven't worked out all the kinks yet." But Violet is not to be deterred or confined. She unwraps the gum, pops it in her mouth, and we all watch as her face first turns blue and matches her indigo dress.
And then we see, like helium, her body fill up and get bigger and bigger until she looks like a giant blueberry. Poor Violet. Or maybe you remember Eustace. Anybody read The Chronicles of Narnia at some point in your life by C.S. Lewis? One of the chronicles was entitled The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. And in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader… By the way, who here knew that years ago the bus that took children and youth from Trinity around for trips and retreats and different excursions was called the Dawn Treader?
A few of you long-timers. You've been around long enough to know that. Yeah. Anyway, in the book The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, in that particular chronicle, we learn—or we get introduced to a character whose name is Eustace. Eustace is just not a very likable boy. He's mean-spirited. He's all about himself. He doesn't really care about others. He's cantankerous.
And one day, Eustace wanders into a cave where he discovers that it is a dragon's lair and the dragon is gone. And here in the lair is all of this treasure. And Eustace begins to get excited and think about all the things that he could do with this treasure, and all the things that he could buy if he turned it into money. And so he takes one of the bracelets that he sees, and he slips it on his wrist. And then Eustace falls asleep on top of all of the stuff. And when he wakes up, he discovers that he has turned into a dragon.
These fanciful, magical, exaggerated tales, like Willy Wonka and The Chronicles of Narnia, and others, help communicate important truths to children and sometimes to adults.
As we watch Violet expand and blow up like a balloon, we realize that when we are too self-indulgent, life can blow up right in front of us, or when we become so absorbed with ourselves and what we want to happen, and we don't pay attention to anybody else around us and we are self-absorbed, we can become scaly creatures like Eustace and not very much fun to love.
You know, there's a paradox when it comes to freedom and what freedom really looks like. Sometimes the way in which we exercise our freedom becomes its own kind of prison. Paul the Apostle knew this very well. And in his letter to the Romans, he talks about two very different expressions of freedom, one that will ultimately bind us up and keep us always at odds with the freedom for which we were intended, the other of which leads to real freedom.
So I want to read for you an excerpt from the sixth chapter of Romans today, and I'm going to read it from the version known as The Message, because I think this particular version helps us hear what may be a very familiar passage in a fresh way, and maybe receive it differently than we have before.
So, since we are out from under the old tyranny, does that mean we can live any old way we want? Since we're free in the freedom of God, can we do anything that comes to mind? Hardly. You know well enough from your own experience that there are some acts of so-called freedom that destroy freedom.
Offer yourselves to sin, for instance, and it is your last free act. But offer yourselves to the ways of God and the freedom never quits. All your lives, you have let sin tell you what to do. But thank God you've started listening to a new master, one whose commands set you free to live openly in his freedom.
I'm using this freedom language because it is easy to picture. You can readily recall, can't you, how at one time, the more you did just what you felt like doing— not caring about others, not caring about God— the worse your life became and the less freedom you had. And how much different is it now as you live in God's freedom—your lives healed and expansive in holiness. As long as you did what you felt like doing, ignoring God, you didn't have to bother with right thinking or right living or right anything for that matter.
But do you call that a free life? What did you get out of it? Nothing you're proud of now. Where did it get you? A dead end. But now that you have found—you don't have to listen to sin tell you what to do—and have discovered the delight of listening to God telling you—what a surprise—a whole healed, put-together life right now, with more and more of life on the way.
Work hard for your whole life, and your pension is death. But God's gift is real life. Eternal life delivered by Jesus, our Master.
This is the Word of God for the people of God, and God's people say, "Thanks be to God."
Would you pray with me? Come, Holy Spirit, and breathe life into the words that I speak, that they might carry a word from you into our hearts and lives this morning. Amen.
We're talking today about self-control—the last in a series of messages this summer about the fruit of the Spirit. And several weeks ago, you may recall that on Pentecost Sunday, we celebrated the gift of the Holy Spirit and the way in which it shapes and changes life for us and among us. And then the following week, we began working our way through the fruit that we read about in Galatians 5:22–23.
We started with love, the one that's identified first in the list. And if you were here that week, you may remember that I mentioned that love is correctly at the beginning of the list, because it is an overarching characteristic that is necessary in order for us to live out all the other fruit. It is evident in all the other expressions of the fruit of the Spirit.
Well, today, as we come to the end of the list, I might say that self-control is an undergirding characteristic that is also necessary in order for us to display all of the other characteristics of the fruit. Think about it with me for a moment: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, and gentleness. There are times when we will not feel like displaying one or more of those characteristics.
There are times when you don't necessarily feel very loving toward another person, or you don't want to be patient, or you're not in a particular mood to be kind. And so in those moments, we need the self-control—the self-control that the Spirit grants us—in order to still be able to practice the fruit, because the fruit of the Spirit does not depend on when we feel like it or when we don't feel like it.
It is meant to be our consistent choice and decision. Which leads me to the first thing that I want to say about self-control today, as we think about how we might practice that in our lives as a fruit of the Spirit. And it begins by realizing that self-control is all about choices. One of the gifts that God gives us is the ability to make choices every day, all day.
We are a cluster of choices. Now, some of the choices we make don't have a significant impact on the long-term trajectory of our lives, or even the short term. What we might particularly choose to eat for breakfast one morning, or some other choices that we make along the way. But every day, there are choices that we make that take us down one of two paths.
We make a choice that either moves us in the direction of sin, or what I might say, living out our lives in such a way that we act against God's will for us, or takes us down the path of living into the blessing of God's will and following the ways of God. The way we hear it put in the Scripture reading this morning that I read is the way Eugene Peterson translates. It is to say that we have a choice to offer ourselves to sin, or to offer ourselves to God, and the choices that we make have implications. David Bartlett, in his commentary on this particular passage and looking at that last verse, puts it this way: he says, "Sin deals in wages. God deals in gifts." Isn't that a wonderful way to think about it?
Sin deals in wages. God deals in gifts. When we choose the first path, the wages will eventually run out and we will get what we paid for. And the long-term trajectory of that heads us toward emptiness and ultimately death. But when we begin to live into the ways of God, when we choose that path, we realize that it is full of gifts along the way, gifts that are for the well-being of ourselves and for the well-being of others around us.
And those gifts are inexhaustible. They never run out. So this series of making choices that we are always in the midst of in this life, we might think of in terms of a difference between having a mindset of being "free to," or a mindset of being "free for." When we choose the "free to" path—free to do whatever I want, whenever I want, because I feel like it—that often ends up having destructive consequences for us and for the people around us. When we choose the "free for" path, as in the words that we hear in the traditional communion liturgy of the church, "Free us, God, for joyful obedience," we discover that a life that is "free for" is one that becomes really free, one that brings joy and a sense of lightness to our bodies and to our lives.
Because it feels good to make good choices, doesn't it? It feels good to live into the ways and the will of God. And so as we begin to practice these choices, we realize that self-control is actually a path to true freedom. Now, maybe that sounds a little strange to our ears. But let me offer an example or two, if you will.
One of the things, one of the examples that I think about from my own life and experience is the gift of marriage in my life. When I said “yes” to a particular marriage covenant, when I said “yes” to living out that covenant with a particular person, I said “yes” to a set of boundaries and commitments that would be a part of that marriage.
And as I live within those boundaries, I discover this wonderful freedom to be who I am fully, and to love another person fully, and to grow in that love over time, over the course of a lifetime. Healthy boundaries help set us free. I see a similar parallel in the practice of parenting. Good parenting. Healthy parenting sets boundaries. It's not a free-for-all with the kids, right?
We set healthy boundaries, and within those healthy boundaries, children recognize that there is a freedom to explore and to learn and to grow and to discover who they are. As a child of God, self-control and boundaries all help us in terms of finding true freedom. Self-control is also a way in which we express our love for our neighbors—all of our neighbors.
You see, true freedom is never just about what's good for me or good for the people in my little circle or the people that are in my tribe. True freedom is lived out in such a way that we recognize our connectedness to all of God's children, and we desire the freedom that we seek for ourselves to also be the freedom that others might experience as well.
Friends, this is a truth that we are in desperate need of remembering in our world today. Our words and our actions matter. Remember what I said earlier about the fruit of the Spirit being something that we live out, not dependent on how we are feeling toward anybody at any given moment, but they are meant to be the constant. If we are going to represent Christ in the world, then we should be seeking to constantly display the fruit of the Spirit to others. And self-control can help keep us from harming our neighbors with our words and our actions by guiding us to the right choices, even when we don't feel like it, or when we don't think they deserve it, right?
So let me give you one helpful mechanism for myself in my life. One of my favorite verses is Philippians 4:8, and I sometimes refer to it in short as "P48." That verse has provided, if you will, kind of a set of guardrails—healthy boundaries—for me that I try to pay attention to every day.
So every morning that verse is in my head, because I want to pay attention to what it has to say to me about how God is asking me to show up in the world with others around me. Here's what that verse says:
Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable. If there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise—focus your thoughts on these things.
And I would add to that not just your thoughts, but focus your words and your actions on those things that are good and right and true and just and honorable. Let those things be your guide in the world, and let the fruit of self-control be practiced in a way that you show up that way, even when you may not be feeling like it.
Now, maybe you're shaking your head and going, "Man, that is too hard." You're right. It is. Which leads us to the last thing I would say about this. And that is that self-control is a work of the Holy Spirit. This is not a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps kind of practice or work. We can't just try hard enough and expect that it's going to happen.
We collaborate with the Holy Spirit at work in our lives. We invite the Holy Spirit in to be present and working in us. And this is true not only with this last expression of the fruit, but with all of them. If we are going to practice any of the fruit, we will need the Holy Spirit at work. That's why they're called the fruit of the Spirit, right?
The irony in this particular case, though, as we look at self-control today, is that self-control begins with relinquishment of control. Self-control begins with relinquishment of control. Remember with me for a moment some of Jesus' last moments on earth.
He has just shared his last meal with his closest friends, and he goes out to the Garden of Gethsemane to pray. There in the garden, he begins to pray. In the early part of his prayer, he is pleading. He knows what's coming, but he pleads that if there is any way for it not to happen the way he sees it coming—that he is going to have to die—to let that be the case. But he ends the prayer with the words, "Not my will, but yours."
This is the relinquishment that we are invited into, that we might allow the Spirit to come in and be at work in our lives, so that the choices that we make, the words that we say and the actions, the things that we do might be guided by the Holy Spirit, and that they might be according not to my will, but to God's will.
So, back to Eustace, that boy who, when we last saw him earlier in the service, he was a dragon. So when Eustace wakes up and discovers that he is a dragon, he is terrified and he is brokenhearted and he starts to sob uncontrollably—giant dragon tears falling to the ground—and Eustace longs to be just a boy again.
As he is wondering what has happened to him and as he is experiencing this brokenheartedness, Aslan—the lion, the Christ figure in The Chronicles of Narnia—shows up. Aslan calls to Eustace and invites him to come to a pool where there is water. At the edge of the pool, Eustace begins to scratch and claw at the dragon-skin that now covers him, and every time he scratches and claws, he makes a break in the surface. But every time he does, he just discovers that there's another knobby layer of dragonness to him. He is again mourning this thing that he has become, and doesn't know how he can possibly ever get back to who he now wants to be, as he thinks of all the ways in which he has regretted the choices that he has made along the way.
And Aslan, after watching him claw at himself for a while, looks at him and says, "You'll have to let me do it." And then Aslan begins to do the work of taking the dragon skin off of Eustace, until—plunged in the waters of the pool—he is indeed restored to the boy that he was intended to be, and given a new chance at new life.
Friends, if we are going to live out the fruit of the Spirit—whether it is the fruit of self-control, or of love or joy or peace, or patience, or kindness, or goodness, or faithfulness, or gentleness—it will happen as we let the Spirit in and we allow that Spirit to be at work in our lives, to cultivate the gifts of the fruit.
So as we close this morning, I want to offer a prayer that comes from a little book that I keep close at hand called Celtic Benediction. I want to offer one of the morning prayers from this book, and I invite you to just close your eyes and receive this prayer, and I hope that it might speak into your life this morning as it speaks into mine.
In the beginning, O God, your Spirit swept over the chaotic deep like a wild wind. And creation was born. In the turbulence of my own life and the unsettled waters of the world today, let there be new birth—things of your Spirit. In the currents of my own heart and the upheavals of the world today, let there be new birth—things of your mighty Spirit.
Amen.