Tag: Self-control

Staying on Track

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So, we know that being useful in our relationship with Jesus requires faith, virtue, and knowledge. But how do we consistently do anything positive with those? We need something else. In this fifth part of our series, Being Useful, we talked about what this next thing is. Thanks for reading.

Staying on Track

When I was growing up, I had the great fortune of going to a church with a whole bunch of godly men to watch as examples of how to do the Christian life well.  It was a gift that has kept on paying dividends in the years since.  There’s a call to our great men in there, but that’s for another sermon.  One of these men was named Martin Coleman.  Martin was an engineer and was one of those guys who could do or build pretty much anything.  My parents and his kids are about the same age and his grandkids are just a little bit younger than me.  We all grew up together as pieces and parts of one big church family.  That’s part of the reason I so love what we have here at First Baptist—which, incidentally, was the name of that church too. 

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Digging in Deeper: Galatians 5:22-23

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“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. The law is not against such things.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

The fruit of the Spirit. Even if you’re not a Jesus person you may have seen the phrase before on a piece of kitschy artwork in a store that tries to market to Jesus people. Even if you would consider yourself thoroughly secular in every regard, you have to at least admit it’s a pretty good list of attitudes or mindsets or character traits or whatever else you want to call them. 

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Morning Musing: 2 Peter 1:5-8

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“For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love.  For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.”  (ESV – Read the chapter)

Do you want to be effective?  We all do, don’t we?  We want to be able to have an impact on the people and environment around us.  Not only that, but we want to do so in a way that will last and have meaning.  The question, then, becomes: How do we do this?  How can we have an effective impact on our situations? Read the rest…