What is self-control and how does God relate to it? Pastor Jon Swerens preaches on a less-discussed fruit of the Spirit.

Listen above or download the audio file here.

This sermon explores the vital importance of self-control as both a fruit of the Spirit and a necessary foundation for Christian living. Drawing from over two years of experience as an elder, the speaker examines what Scripture teaches about self-control and why it appears alongside love, joy, and peace in Paul’s list of spiritual fruit.

The Elder’s Learning: Self-Control as Foundation

So, when trying to find a topic for this morning, I thought, well, I’ve been an elder for a little more than two years now. Some ways it feels like a long time, other ways it has galloped along. And I thought, well, I’ve learned some things being an elder and I thought it’d be good for me to share that with you.

And what have I learned in more than two years as an elder? A chief lesson for me is the importance of self-control. Self-control. As you see in Titus, it talks about the things that an overseer should be.

I’m looking at Titus 1, 7, and 8:

For an overseer is God’s steward, must be above reproach. He must not be arrogant or quick-tempered or drunkard or violent or greedy for gain, but hospitable, a lover of good, self-controlled, upright, holy, and disciplined.

And later in Titus, we read just in Titus 2:2, a similar instruction is given to older men, of which I am one.

Older men are to be sober-minded, dignified, self-controlled, sound in faith, in love, and in steadfastness.

A lot of solid words in these verses.

And we read this in Peter. Peter instructs this when he talks in 2 Peter, the first chapter, verses, I’ll just do five through seven. We heard a larger portion just a moment ago:

For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, virtue with knowledge, that’s not enough, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love.

And of course, we read Proverbs about this. We heard about he who rules the spirits, but also Proverbs 25:28 is another one:

A man without self-control is like a city broken into and left without walls.

Pakistan cities have walls. But unguarded, undefended.

The Foundation Text: Galatians 5

But for this sermon on self-control, I wanted to start with Galatians 5. I’m going to not read the entire section that I listed in the bulletin, but I’m going to start with Galatians 5, verse 19 through 23.

Hear the word of the Lord as written through his apostle Paul:

Now the works of the flesh are evident. Sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, he goes on, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these. I warn you as I warned you before that those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. But the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, against such things there is no law.

So for this sermon, I wanted to answer three questions. One is, what is self-control, really? And why is it in this passage? Second question is, what does God have to do with self-control? How does God relate to this virtue? And the third one is simply, how do we exercise better self-control? How do we get there? What does God demand of us?

Why Self-Control Stands Out

So let’s read this list again. The list of the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Now if you heard that list, and you didn’t know the scripture, and I said, which of these things doesn’t belong here? I would think the word you would probably pick is self-control.

What’s this doing in this list? These other fruit, oh, they’re sweet, they’re warm. Patience, kindness. Self-control feels hard and brittle. Why is self-control in this list of the fruit of the spirit?

Well, first let’s define it. Self-control is restraint that you exercise over your impulses, emotions, desires, or passions. Again, it’s restraint that you exercise over your impulses, emotions, desires, or passions.

Self-Control: The Essential Ingredient

So if we think about it like that, we realize that self-control is a necessary ingredient for the other fruit. Self-control is a necessary ingredient. In fact, it’s an ingredient at the very point where those fruit are tested.

So love, it’s easy to love when things are going well, but when your kid does it again, and you’re fighting off anger, that’s when love is necessary, that’s when you need to have self-control so love can come forth.

Joy is easy when things go well, but when things are hard, you need to have self-control so joy can stay with you, and this is the same with all of them.

Well, patience, what good is patience if at the very point you need it, it’s gone because you have no self-control? All these fruit need self-control if they’re going to live in your life. That’s why self-control is in this list.

The absence of self-control kills the other fruit.

The Works of the Flesh and Self-Control

But that’s not the only thing. The self-control is also in this passage where we talk about the works of the flesh. That’s a long list. It’s so long that even at the end, Paul just gives up and says things like these. You know what I’m talking about.

But this list, I’ll read again, but think about the lack of self-control is a necessary condition for these works of flesh to happen. If you do not have self-control, you are more susceptible to these works of the flesh, sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, and all of them. You are more susceptible to all of them if you lack self-control.

Remember, self-control is restraint that you exercise over your impulses, your emotions, desires, and passions.

The Range of Passions We Must Control

Now, interestingly, it doesn’t just say anger. It’s passions. When you say, I lost control, I lost control of myself, typically, you’re thinking what? You got angry.

You got angry, and that’s one of the primary passions we have to watch for because we see that in the works of the flesh. It even says fits of anger is one of those, but also enmity, strife, dissensions, divisions, those are all fed by unbridled passion over which you do not have self-control.

But anger is not the only one. We also see that worry and anxiety, the cares of the world, as the Bible says, that’s another passion. That’s another emotion that can overwhelm you and cause you to sin.

We see that idolatry, I would say sorcery, would go in here. Why did people go after sorcerers? What were they doing? They were worried about the future. They were worried about what’s gonna happen, so they’d go and find someone who can give them the knowledge, the secret things that they need to know that they’re gonna be okay.

Hey, hey, we can do that. We don’t look for sorcerers, but we spend too much time doing research. I’m gonna keep looking, I’m gonna keep looking, I’m gonna keep looking until I find everything I need. You can’t do that, you’re immortal. At a certain point, you need to stop and trust God. Your worry and your anxiety is pushing you through.

Stop, trust in your Lord.

Another passion we need to watch for is happiness. Happiness, giddiness, feeling a little too full of yourself. Well, look at some of these works of the flesh. Drunkenness, have you known people who just like, I’m gonna go and I’m gonna have a great time, and they go and sin in tremendous ways. They’re feeling a little too good about themselves. They’re too giddy, too happy. That’s not joy. That’s a happiness which consumes them, which overwhelms them.

Sexual immorality, for example. But I’ll mention one here, and this is one that I would fall into more than any of them, I think. Melancholy, sadness.

Can that just overwhelm a person? Sure, yes it can, certainly does me. And the one work of the flesh I see in here which sadness can feed would be sensuality. Now, sensuality is not necessarily sexual. All kinds of things. It can be mindless entertainment. Anything you do for your senses to make you feel better.

I’m sad, so I go and doom scroll on Facebook. I go and do something to fill that sadness and try so I don’t feel sad anymore. That’s sensuality. Mindless entertainment would do the same thing.

Friends, you have to see these passions that we have which overwhelm us as evidence of your fallenness. It’s like, am I a sinner? Well, think of how often your emotions, unbidden, come over you and cause you to at least be tempted to sin. How often does it happen? Dozens of times a day for me, all the time.

So that’s self-control. Self-control is, again, restraint that you exercise over those passions, over those emotions and desires.

How Does God Relate to Self-Control?

So the second question is this. How does that, how does self-control relate to God? Because these are fruit of the spirit. It’s easier for us to say, well, God is love. He is the very definition of love. He doesn’t just have love for his people. He is love.

He is the definition for all these fruit of the spirit. But have I ever said God is self-control before? That sounds odd. Sounds unusual.

So I had to think, well, which of God’s attributes make that, we must think this in some way. Because these are fruit of the spirit, God himself must in some way exercise self-control. But what do we mean by that? Which of his attributes make sense when we look at that?

Well, there are some that we’ve heard of already. One is, it’s a weird word, but it’s short, aseity. Aseity. I’ll spell it for those who are trying to keep up with these weird words. Aseity is A-S-E-I-T-A. God’s aseity.

What does that mean? What do I mean when I say aseity? It means that God is not in any way needy or dependent on his creation or anything. He is self-sufficient. He needs nothing. Well, of course he needs nothing. He doesn’t need us for fulfillment. He is self-sufficient.

As the Apostle Paul preached in Acts 17, this is Acts 17, verse 25. He says this as though everyone knows this. And he’s talking about God:

He says, nor is he, nor is God served by human hands as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything.

He doesn’t need anything from us. So that’s helpful to think of. How can God have self-control? Not quite what I’m looking for. I think it’s helpful.

Because another one of his attributes gets closer to the idea that God has self-control. And you’ve probably heard this, I would imagine, immutability. So I-M-M-U-T, ability. What does that mean? That God is immutable, immutability.

Well, that root word in there, if you recognize it from mutation, same root there, subject to change. Mutation is a change. God is unchanging.

God’s Unchangeable Nature

Bigger than that, he is unchangeable.

He cannot change. He is incapable of change. And the Malachi says this very directly in Malachi 3.6. This is the Lord speaking through his prophet, for I am the Lord, I do not change.

God doesn’t change. How does that relate to self-control? Well, getting closer, I feel like, getting closer. But downstream from these two attributes of his, aseity and immutability, here’s a word that was a little less common.

I wasn’t very familiar with it myself. This word is impassibility. Has anyone heard of God’s being impassible before? Anyone heard of that? Yes, a couple? Impassibility, what does that mean? Well, first of all, I’ll spell it for those who are taking notes.

It’s I-M, pass, P-A-S-S, I-B-I-L-I-T-A, impassibility. This is not the same word as like a road that’s flooded, so it’s impassible. It’s not that impassible.

Understanding God’s Impassibility

Impassibility, the word pass, it’s passion. As a writer at Ligonier Ministry said, God does not suffer. God cannot be acted upon or moved by any other source.

He cannot be compelled to do anything. Everything he does is from himself. He’s not forced by emotions.

He’s not forced by his passions to do anything. He does not have passions. Now, when I say passions, well, first of all, this is a part of our confession.

The Westminster Confession of Faith says this in the first chapter, I mean, the first sentence of chapter two, talking about who is God, who is the Holy Trinity. And it says it like this. There is but one holy, one only living and true God who is infinite in being and perfection, a most pure spirit, invisible without body, parts, or passions.

So what do they mean by passions there? What are we talking about? Well, the proof text that the writers of the Westminster Confession came up with is in Acts 14. This is the part where Paul and Barnabas are preaching in Lystra, and they healed a man who’s crippled in his feet. And the people thought, this is great.

You are God’s descendants from the mountains. We’re gonna come on with us. We’re gonna worship you now.

And we’re getting some, hey, bring those cattle and oxen. We’re gonna slay them and sacrifice something to you. And of course, Paul and Barnabas are appalled.

Say, what are you doing? But listen to what they say to say that they’re not gods, that they’re men like you and me. What do they say? Actually, I’m gonna use the King James Version for a reason. There’s a word that’s better translated here.

As Paul says, sirs, why do ye these things? We are also are men of like passions with you. Now, the ESV, I think, says, not passions, but nature. We are like nature with you.

But the Greek here really does mean like, well, the word’s pathos, like passions, like emotions. He says, the reason you know that we’re not gods is because we have passions like you do. Interesting defense that they’re saying that God is not like us.

God doesn’t have passions.

Defining Passions vs. Affections

Now, what do we mean when we say passions? A man over, called Derek Rishmawi, a Reformed theologian and thinker, he wrote it like this, I thought this was helpful. He said, God does not have passions, or, defined like this, unrestrained feelings, ungoverned by reason or will.

Passions are unrestrained feelings, ungoverned by reason or will. Now, you and I could sit here and think, boy, I’ve got those, I’ve got those in spades. Passions have come over me and they’re ungoverned.

I need to learn how to govern them better. And as a contrast, we can think of the pagan gods at the time, who sounded silly. They get angry and throw thunderbolts and then they get lustful and they take a bunch of women.

They had unrestrained feelings just taking them all over the place. Our God is not like that. He does not have passions.

Now, the modern use of the word passion is pretty muddled. And that could be on purpose. You might have heard people say things like, well, if you’re not angry, you’re just not paying attention.

You know, like that anger, the great passions that a man can feel actually is the moral compass. And a lot of the cultures like this. If you’re angry, it must mean something big.

And another way of, another corollary to this would be a man who says, I just fell out of love with her. What does he mean, he fell out of love? How do you fall out of love? Well, if love is only the passionate feelings that can come and go, well, then sure. Your passion cooled and you thought, well, I guess I’m not, I’m out of love now.

But you go get some other woman or man and chase after that instead. That’s passions though, and our culture loves passions. In fact, our culture is not a big fan of self-control.

God’s Affections, Not Passions

But then we have to ask, okay, set aside the culture right now because we just said God does not have passions. Does that mean that God though is stoic? That he’s unfeeling or apathetic toward us? To the contrary. As theologians wrestled with this, they realized that God cannot have passions which overrule him, he can’t have that.

But yet the Bible talks about his love, his anger. All these are emotional things. But this, our church fathers way back wrestled with this through the medieval time.

And I’m gonna quote this Derek Rishmawi again because he said it well, that the church fathers made a distinction between passions and affections, passions and affections. And affection, he says, is a sort of a controlled emotion that is subject to the will and of the one having it. It’s a rational emotion that does not overcome the person but is in line with the will.

So God has affections such as kindness and anger which he can display. Now as I say that, I say that it’s an emotion that’s rational, the first thing that comes to my mind is that, that doesn’t sound very romantic. What kind of emotion is rational? Good emotions are irrational, they just do what they wanna do and flit about.

Now, no, that’s a modern notion. Our emotions, our passions should not be taking us over. God does not have passions, but does have great affection.

So like Matthew Barrett said this on the Gospel Coalition site, so he’s an old article, it’s fine. God is his attributes in infinite measure. He is, meaning he’s maximally alive.

He could not be more alive than he is currently, eternally. Or if so, if he could have passions, then you mean he wasn’t as passionate before? His love cooled and came back, that’s not true. What a horrible thing to think of God.

He’d be less than perfect. He is love. So he does not have passions, he has affections.

The Good News of God’s Impassibility

As saints, we have to see this as very good news. It’s very good news. God is not subject.

You can’t give God a bad day. You cannot affect God that way. You can’t, he was having a good time when you came along and sinned and ruined it.

No, God is not subject to passions. He has affections, though. And these affections mean that he is a very definition of he’s fruit of the spirit.

He is love, he is joy, he is peace. He is faithfulness, but he’s also self-control. Think of it like this.

Because, again, thinking of God not having passions but having affections, that’s hard to get my mind around. But God created stuff, our stuff, matter. And he created space for us to live in, for the planets to hang in.

He also created time. Is God subject to time? No. Time’s a created thing.

God’s over time. How does that work, John? Who in the world knows? We don’t know. But God is not subject to his own creation, including the creation of time.

But what’s a necessary thing for passion to happen? Time, up and down through time. God cannot have passions because he’s not even subject to time. He’s not subject to his creation in any way.

He’s unchangeable. So when he says that when his love is from beyond the creation of the world for you, that doesn’t even quite cover it. His love always was outside of time.

How do we even think of that? We can’t because we’re creatures and we’re bound to these things that he put us in, to time, to space, to matter. If we’re not, if we suddenly don’t have, if I’m subtly separated from my matter, I’m dead. If I’m suddenly separated from dimensionality, the fact that I’m walking around, well, I’m also dead.

But if we’re separated from time, that’s no good either. We are dead.

The Passion of Christ

Now when we talk about that God just don’t have passions, if you were like ready to raise your hand and say, okay, wait, wait, wait, I thought of something.

What about Jesus? We even call it the passion of Christ. How could a God without passions become incarnate and then suffer? Friends, this is part of the miracle. This is part of the incomprehensibility of it.

We cannot comprehend how in the world, how can Jesus do this? But one thing to keep in mind. Seeing it as a passion is a part of the miracle of the incarnation that the God man suffered. But in what way did he suffer? Remember that he’s fully God and fully man, meaning he had a human body and human spirit along with his divine nature.

Being human means you suffer. Being human means you are a part of this crazy world and you are subject to passions. Now he controlled them perfectly because he’s God.

He’s a perfect man, but that’s how he suffered. He took on flesh to suffer for you, but he didn’t set aside his divinity so that way it would actually mean something. So that way he could rescue us from our bodies of death.

By suffering that body of death himself, but doing it perfectly and rising again from it. That’s a lot, and we’re talking about self-control. So we have to set that aside so we can get to the third question.

Applying God’s Impassibility to Our Lives

It’s a lot to consider. God is impassable. Well, how does that help us? I mean, there’s one sense that says so, okay, I feel passions, but it does help us in this way.

It’s how do we as Christians exercise self-control? Now of course we know that the world hates self-control and we see now why, because self-control is a fruit of the spirit. So the world of course hates self-control. Of course they do.

They think passion is what makes things happen because they get angry to get what they want.

Self-Control: Not Human Effort, But Spiritual Fruit

So how do we exercise self-control? The temptation is to use effort, to clench our fists, to push down the emotion, to build walls and to be invulnerable. That’s how we do it.

We’ll have self-control because no one is gonna get through. We’ll be tough. We’ll be just, you will not be able to reach us.

We stone. That’s not true because, if you’re taking notes, self-control is not a work of the flesh. Self-control is not a work of the flesh.

It is a fruit of the spirit. And how do we treat fruit of the spirit? Not thinking that the first place we need to begin is our own effort. Wrong.

Tending the Garden of the Spirit

We are gardeners. When you see fruit in the Bible, think okay, does Adam make sense as a metaphor for this? Being in a garden, it does. Adam was placed in a garden full of food.

What was his relationship to the fruit? Eat. Eat the fruit. Also, tend to it.

So what are we called to do? We’re called to tend to the fruit that God grows in his people. It starts there. Where does it start? Well, think of it.

It’s the fruit of the spirit. How does the spirit feed you? The spirit feeds you through his word. It feeds you through your study of the word and through the preaching of the word and through hearing and considering, not just you full of knowledge.

That’s not where it ends. It continues when you consider who God is. He’s a God of great love.

God’s Timeless Love and Unchanging Nature

Do you realize that love that isn’t bound by time, by space, by anything, what you said, does love stop? It’s not bound by anything you do. His love is constant. Well, he gets angry at my sin, right? Okay, but he’s not bound by time.

In a sense, he was always angry at your sin. In a sense, then, your sin was, that was taken care of by Christ if you believe in him. That’s why the sacrifice that happened 2,000 years ago could apply to you in Indiana in 2024 because God’s not bound by time.

This is good news. This is very good news. So self-control, though, is a fruit of the spirit.

So how do we grow any fruit? We feed on the word. And guess what? The supper. Yeah, he feeds us here, too.

It’s a subset of the word, I guess. But guess what is fruit? What is grapes? They’re a fruit of the vine. Even technically, the wheat is the fruit of the grass that grows.

Making the Picture Bigger

So you read the word and you learn about your father. And from knowing that, you know what it is. You realize that I get angry about something.

Someone slighted me online. And it bugs me for two hours. But instead, I need to be thinking, wait, who is God? Make the picture bigger so I can think about who is God? Who is God? He’s a God of great self-control.

His love is an everlasting waterfall. His justice is always, always flowing. His faithfulness never ends.

He didn’t even have a beginning. How can I? That’s how the apostles, when they were beaten, left there joyfully, saying, wow, we were counted as worthy of being beaten on behalf of Jesus. Isn’t that great? What did they know? They knew that God, his love, his faithfulness is always there for them.

They don’t need to defend themselves. So as you feed on the word, there are two things you’re going to be doing. One is that you’re trusting your father more.

You’re learning more about him. His love is bigger than you can imagine. His joy, even.

The Necessity of Pruning

But another thing that happens is pruning. What else do fruit trees need? What else do vines need? But pruning is good for them. I think, I don’t know if I shared this before, but one time I did prune a grape vine in the backyard.

It was big, went over a trellis, an arbor or something. And I was appalled. By how much I had to cut away to prune it.

I kept saying, is this enough, Mary? Keep going. Is this not enough? I pruned off 90% of it. I thought, this is what the people of the Bible know when it says to prune.

I have not been pruning myself seriously enough. So you prune yourself. And you think about it, how, in what way do you prune yourself so the fruit of the spirit can live in you better? Consider this, it’s sobering.

How often do your passions dictate what you do or what you say or what you think? Oh, it’s all the time for me. Oh, all the time. I have a little irritation, a little irritation.

And then a little sharpness in my voice. My family hears it. Maybe I can hide it from you.

But it’s a passion. It’s a passion that takes over and causes me to act differently. How wicked, how wicked are we? But the only way through is to trust in God who does not have passions, but has great, great affection for you.

Great affection. So trust your father. You need to know that your father has infinite love for you.

And infinite isn’t even a big enough word. He’s faithful, always faithful, and always has been faithful. Consider this, and I’ll end with this.

God IS the Fruit of the Spirit

So you read the fruit of the spirit. You need to see that God really is the name behind every one of these fruits. God is love.

He is love. He doesn’t just have love for you. That’s weak.

He is love. He always exists as love. He is joy.

See, the word says, I can’t remember the reference, but it says that God sings over his creation, over his people. I can’t remember what that is. But if he does that, he doesn’t do it only once.

He does it always. Because he doesn’t change. He doesn’t change.

He has peace. He is peace all the time. He’s never turbulent.

He is patient all the time. He is patient for you. I don’t know if I can pray.

God is patient. You can always pray. I don’t feel like it.

Who cares? Your feelings don’t matter. His affection for you matters. He is kindness.

He is goodness. He is faithfulness, and he is gentleness. He disciplines us.

Sometimes it feels really harsh. But his gentleness means it’s never an inch more than necessary. You can trust his discipline because he is gentleness.

And of course, he is self-control. He never loses control. He never flips his lid.

He never says, that’s it, I need a bigger stick. No, he’s always who he is all the time. You can trust him, saints.

In fact, you must trust him. But see how much he’s revealed to us, so that way it makes trusting him easier? That’s grace also. So I leave you with this.

The Call to Trust and Repent

Trust in God. Where do you get self-control? You flap the handle sometimes? Repentance. But remember, who are you repenting to? Repenting to the God who doesn’t have passions but has great affections for you and wishes you to be more like him, to set aside your passions, but not to become stone, not to become cold to the touch, but to have great affection, great love for the people here, great love, great peace, and great self-control.

Closing Prayer

Let’s pray. My dear Father, you are a great God. How can we even measure? We cannot measure how great and how good, how patient you are with your people.

Lord, we can only slightly appreciate how much you’ve revealed about yourself to us, your great impassibility. We are made of stuff. We are fallen.

But even if we weren’t fallen, we would still need you. We would still have nothing but need before you, but our sin just compounds it. So Lord, please look to us for people.

Please be kind to us. Please be faithful. We plead the promises you’ve given us, because we can give you nothing.

Please be kind to us, and please help us to grow these fruit of the spirit and to be more like you and more like your son. In the name of your son, Jesus Christ, we pray, amen. Amen.

Communion and Benediction

So here’s the supper provided for you by the Lord Jesus. How could he do this for us? It’s fruit. It’s food for us.

Combine this with the word that you hear, and remember that God is giving to you. God gives you all good things. This supper is for those who have repented of their sins and profess Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, have been baptized or members of your trinity or in good standing of another evangelical church, just so you’re not under church discipline, and are not harboring secret sins from which you are unwilling to repent.

This supper is for sinners. Brothers and sisters, what can we say but that we serve a God who is very much above us, but yet is condescended to us, and has brought us into his family. It’s every time you look at it, we get worse and he gets better.

We get smaller and he gets bigger. It’s amazing, but yet he’s still the same God forever and ever, even as we do not understand him very well. It’s like, I know, but he is love.

He is self-control forever, forever. We can trust him for all things. So let’s all trust him more as we go forward.

Here’s today’s benediction. This is from Hebrews 13, 20 and 21.

Now may the God of peace who brought again from the dead our Lord Jesus, the great shepherd of the sheep, by the blood of the eternal covenant equip you with everything good that you may do his will, working in us that which is pleasing in his sight through Jesus Christ, to whom be glory forever and ever.

Amen. Saints go in peace.

Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash