Posts Tagged ‘barriers’

Posted on February 1, 2009 - by Tim L

Fruits of the Spirit - self control

We watched a DVD clip from the film, Independence Day.  If you don’t know the film:  Basically, earth is about to be invaded and humankind destroyed by aliens.  There’s this massive mother ship in outer space and then there’s all these smaller space ships.  And they’re all surrounded by a force field which stops anything getting through.  The Americans have tried everything, even a nuclear bomb, but they can’t penetrate the force field.  However!  Where we are in the clip, America has managed to capture one of the smaller ships - it’s a long story and we haven’t got time to go into it now!  The ship is intact still surrounded by its force field.  In the clip one man thinks he has worked out a way of disarming the force field and is going to demonstrate to a group of very important people, how.

DVD clip- Independence Day (chapter 49)

We see self-control as something like happened in that clip.  He shoots the bullet and it goes off randomly in all directions and people are ducking to take cover so that they don’t get hurt.

I want to say that that’s how we see self-control.  If we lose it, anything can happen and we end up getting hurt, or we hurt others, or we all get hurt.

Self-control.  What is self-control?  Is it really as simple as I’m making out?

Well, I want to say yes because at the beginning of this series we said that the Fruit of the Spirit are about simple, ordinary everyday stuff of life, simple stuff given to us from God about who we are.  But I also want to say no.  No it’s not that simple because we make it complicated.  How can something from God be negative?  What’s going on?

Well, it’s all become about self; we’ve turned inwards looking.  It’s about self-control and not God-control.

You see when we’re only exercising self-control and not letting God get much of a look in, then we end up with a society as we’ve got today.
We can be very selfish:
It’s all about self and as long as I’m ok then it doesn’t really matter about anyone else.
We can be very consumer driven:
We want bigger and better things.  How big are our TV screens going to get!
We can be very disconnected from other people:
Relationships suffer because we communicate in the silence of the internet, Facebook, by texting.  And the sound we get is from the MP3 player that we’re plugged into.

The posh words for this are isolationism and individualism.

By exercising our human self-control over and above God’s control, we’ve actually shut God out and so inhibited ourselves.  We’ve made ourselves slaves to the consumer culture, the techno culture, the “me” culture, the culture that says that even though Mars Bars make me sick, I’m still going to eat them.

And yes, it does cause damage.  You see, on Tuesday evenings, I was all alone.  I knew that I wasn’t doing myself any favours eating so many Mars Bars but, in my mind, it didn’t matter because it was just me.  It didn’t affect anyone else and who was going to stop me anyway!  I was so selfish.  To start with it was total greed; we didn’t have a lot of money so I was wasting what little money we’d got; and I could have made myself ill and then who was going to look after the kids?

We have become people that we were not designed to be.  God didn’t design us to be isolated individuals.  He designed us to be in relationship with him and with each other.  It’s part of our human nature and that’s why, no matter how much we try to control our lives on our own and do the things that that leads us into, we will not be truly happy, we will not be fulfilled.

I want to suggest that too much self-control is not good for us.  In fact too much self-control can be harmful.  You know , it’s a bit like saying “grown men don’t cry.”  Well you know, it is good to cry.  It’s healing and it can take courage in our society because of this idea, that men shouldn’t cry.

So actually, too much self-control stops us being who we truly are.  And then what happens is that we can spend a lifetime trying to work out who we really are.  And because of the society that we live in that’s not easy!

Let’s listen to some Bible passages.  These come from a book called the Book of Acts.  It comes immediately after the Gospel stories about Jesus and Acts is basically about what happened after Jesus died.  These two readings are near the beginning of the book and they are describing what happened amongst the first ever Christians.

43 Everyone around was in awe-all those wonders and signs done through the apostles! 44 And all the believers lived in a wonderful harmony, holding everything in common. 45 They sold whatever they owned and pooled their resources so that each person’s need was met. 46 They followed a daily discipline of worship in the Temple followed by meals at home, every meal a celebration, exuberant and joyful, 47 as they praised God. People in general liked what they saw. Every day their number grew as God added those who were saved.

Acts 2:43-47 (The Message)

32 The whole congregation of believers was united as one-one heart, one mind! They didn’t even claim ownership of their own possessions. No one said, “That’s mine; you can’t have it.” They shared everything. 33 The apostles gave powerful witness to the resurrection of the Master Jesus, and grace was on all of them.
34 And so it turned out that not a person among them was needy. Those who owned fields or houses sold them and brought the price of the sale 35 to the apostles and made an offering of it. The apostles then distributed it according to each person’s need.

Acts 4:32-35 (The Message)

This is true community, this is true relationship living.  But this is not done because the people have been self-controlled.  Far from it.  They’ve been what some of us would call foolhardy.  Now I’m not suggesting that we all go off and live in some sort of commune, but can you see what I’m getting at?

Claire said last week that if we embrace this fruit in all that it is - love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control - then together we can change the world.  Bold words.  Bold words but true words.  They are true words because we’ve just witnessed the truth of them in our Bible readings.  These people showed all the aspects of the Fruit of the Spirit.  But.  But it meant letting go and letting God in.  God control not self-control.

In the end in the film, Independence Day, the whole world came together and defeated the aliens.  The nations of the world let down their barriers that were preventing true relationship with each other and things changed.

Like the segments in this orange (Terry’s chocolate orange used in illustration in all-age talk), they were still individual countries but now they were joined by something common to them all - they were still individuals but part of the whole.

By letting barriers down they discovered that it was possible to live in peace and harmony.  This was going to be true relationship.  They discovered something new about themselves and it was good.

If you and I want to find something new about ourselves, then we can only do that truly by letting go of self and letting God in.  Being in relationship with him and then being in relationship with others.  We don’t have to engage in a battle with aliens to do this, although we might have to struggle to let down our personal barriers that we put up between ourselves and God.

We definitely do have to engage in a battle against the norms of society.  A society that says self, self, self when God is saying not self but God the Father.  Not self but God the Son.  Not self but God the Holy Spirit.  God says that if we want to know true freedom then we have to abandon ourselves to him.  Then we will no longer be slaves to worldly wants

Do we want to break out of the straight jacket that we’ve somehow got ourselves into?  Do we want to break out and let God take control so that we can truly live a fruit filled life?  If we do then, well, then looking at the Church in Acts, in the Bible readings we heard, well then we will have nothing to fear.  But what we will have is an abundance of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, to look forward to.

Do we want to let God in?  It doesn’t matter who we are, what we’ve done or not, where we are in our relationship with God.  God wants to be in true relationship with us so that we can properly enjoy life and this world.  God is everything and more than any of us could ever want or need.  He is simply waiting for us to say “yes” to him.

You want to let go and let God in?  Give God a go and enjoy!