Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Love | Part 3: Joy | Part 4: Peace | Part 5: Patience | Part 6: Kindness | Part 7: Goodness | Part 8: Faithfulness | Part 9: Gentleness

The last fruit on the tree of Spirit-empowered Christian character is self-control. Besides its appearance in this verse, it appears in only two other verses in the New Testament, and they don’t help us much with the meaning in context:

“And as [Paul] reasoned of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come, Felix trembled, and answered, Go thy way for this time; when I have a convenient season, I will call for thee” (Ac 24.25).

“And beside this, giving all diligence, add to your faith virtue; and to virtue knowledge; ⁶ And to knowledge temperance; and to temperance patience; and to patience godliness” (2P 1.5-6).

All of these occurrences are in lists, which are notoriously unhelpful in providing the kind of context that’s useful for drawing out the meaning of the word.

The adjectival form appears one time, in Titus 1.8, but that’s a list too:

“For a bishop must be blameless, as the steward of God; not selfwilled, not soon angry, not given to wine, no striker, not given to filthy lucre; ⁸ But a lover of hospitality, a lover of good men, sober, just, holy, temperate” (Ti 1.8).

But fortunately for us, the verb form appears in two verses in 1 Corinthians, both of which give us some helpful context:

“But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn” (1Co 7.9).

“And every man that striveth for the mastery is temperate in all things. Now they do it to obtain a corruptible crown; but we an incorruptible” (1Co 9.25).

The first is in a context of marriage, specifically as a sexual outlet. Paul says that if a young couple is unable to control themselves with regard to their sexual impulses, then they should get married.

The second is in an athletic context, specifically running a race (1Co 9.24). When an athlete is in training, he needs to exercise self-control over every area of his physical and mental life: he works out even when he doesn’t feel like it, he carefully controls his diet, he visualizes what he’ll need to do to be a winner.

In the Greek Old Testament (the Septuagint), the verb form appears once, when Moses tells Pharaoh,

“For if thou refuse to let them go, and wilt hold them still, ³ Behold, the hand of the LORD is upon thy cattle which is in the field, upon the horses, upon the asses, upon the camels, upon the oxen, and upon the sheep: there shall be a very grievous murrain” (Ex 9.2).

Here it speaks of an external restraint—Pharaoh not “letting my people go.” Similarly Herodotus writes of the Greek generals having an area “under their control” (Histories, 8.49). In a more spiritual sense, an OT apocryphal book speaks of someone who “takes hold of” the Law (Sir 15.1) and of one who “restrains himself” from lust (Sir 18.30)—which reinforces the use in 1Co 7.9 above.

Also in the Septuagint the verb form is used of Joseph “composing himself” before going before his brothers (Ge 43.31).

So “self-control” can include the sexual sense, but it’s broader than that; it speaks of personal discipline in general. So it includes our thoughts and plans, our goals, our words, our actions. It includes our responses to people we don’t like. It includes the way we drive.

In one of many ironies in the Christian life (dying is living, the servant is master, the first are last), our “self-control” emerges not from ourselves, but from the Spirit who empowers us.

Jesus said that we’ll be known by our fruits.

Who are you?

Photo by Gabriele Lässer on Unsplash

Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Love | Part 3: Joy | Part 4: Peace | Part 5: Patience | Part 6: Kindness | Part 7: Goodness | Part 8: Faithfulness

The eighth of the nine fruits of the Spirit is gentleness. The KJV uses the term “meekness..” The Greek lexicons include ideas such as meekness, mildness, even-temperedness, even friendliness and humility.

The Greek word is relatively rare in the New Testament—it appears just 11 times—but those few uses give us a fairly robust picture of it by their context—

• It’s used in parallel with compassion (Co 3.12), humility (Ep 4.2; Co 3.12), kindness (Co 3.12), patience (Ep 4.2; Co 3.12), peaceableness (Titus 3.2), reverence (1P 3.16), tolerance (Ep 4.2), and love (1Co 4.21; Ep 4.2).
• It’s used to describe the attitude of a believer who is
  • correcting those who have fallen into error, in hopes that they may be restored  (2Ti 2.25);
  • restoring a fellow believer who has fallen into sin (Ga 6.1)—and that word “restoring” is used in secular Greek literature of a doctor setting a broken bone;
  • “receiving” the Scripture (Jam 1.21);
  • doing good deeds (Jam 3.13).
• It’s contrasted with “boldness” (2Co 10.1) and with the attitude of a person intent on maligning someone (Titus 3.2) or disciplining someone for bad behavior (1Co 4.21).
• It’s said to be a characteristic of Christ (2Co 10.1).

I’ve been going to dentists since I was a boy. My first dentist practiced in an age when the profession didn’t give a lot of thought to the pain involved; pain was just kind of understood to be a part of the experience. He didn’t use a topical anesthetic before he came at me with that 9-foot-long needle that had the real stuff in it. It never occurred to him during a filling that the patient might like a little break 20 minutes in. I learned to just tough it out or focus my thoughts on my happy place (which was most certainly not the dentist’s chair).

As an adult, in another part of the country, I had to establish a relationship with a new dentist. The one I ended up with was, shall we say, enlightened. His training had included some simple techniques that would significantly lower the pain inflicted. A decade or two later, when he retired and sold his practice to a young guy right out of dental school, I realized that by then the training was focusing even more on techniques to lower or even eliminate the pain.

Just had a crown done last week. Piece of cake.

Good for dentistry.

Now.

Dentists are dealing with tiny fragments of bone in our heads, and their motivation derives from the simple desire to have their patients come back, so the practice can be profitable and therefore stable. (And yes, I’m sure that many dentists, and others in health care, have an altruistic motive as well.)

Most of us, though, are not dealing with tiny bone fragments. We’re dealing with the souls of men and women in the image of God, who are going to live somewhere forever, and in the case of fellow members of the body of Christ, are going to live with us forever—and who, as members of Christ, are deeply treasured by him.

We ought to think seriously, then, about the pain we inflict. Some pain is necessary, no doubt; but much of the pain we inflict with our words and actions, even when confrontation is called for, is unnecessary. Some of the pain we inflict comes from our own impatience, or frustration, or self-focus. I’ve done that, many more times than I’d like to admit. And recently.

That’s not a result of the Spirit’s work in us.

We all—all who follow Christ—have within us an omnipotent  person who is influencing us to be gentle. We can do this.

And we ought to.

Part 10: Self-Control

Photo by Gabriele Lässer on Unsplash

Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Love | Part 3: Joy | Part 4: Peace | Part 5: Patience | Part 6: Kindness | Part 7: Goodness

The seventh fruit is the Greek word for “faith.” This is a common word, with two distinct meanings. The more common, as you might expect, is “faith”—which is simply trust, believing someone or something. The other is “faithfulness,” or trustworthiness, or reliability—someone who can be believed.

In this passage, the KJV has “faith,” while all the modern versions except the HCSB have “faithfulness.”

Why are they so confident? I suspect because it seems odd to say that “faith” is a product of sanctification after you’re saved, if “faith” is the key to how you got saved in the first place. But faithfulness, trustworthiness, as a result of sanctification makes perfect sense; in Ephesians Paul makes it a specific example of how Christ’s followers differ from the kind of people they were before:

Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another (Ep 4.25).

So something the Spirit of God works in us is faithfulness:

• We tell the truth.
• We keep our promises.
• Our word is our bond.
• We show up when we said we would.

Why is that important? Paul gives us one reason in the Ephesians passage: “for we are members one of another.” It wouldn’t make any sense for the hand to lie to the eye, or to ignore its responsibilities to the eye, because they’re parts of the same body, and all the parts want the whole body to prosper. Have you ever noticed that when you get something in your eye, your finger doesn’t hurt? But it knows that because it’s articulated, and pointy, and reinforced at the tip with the backing of a fingernail, it can help your eye out with things that the eye can’t do for itself. I’ve noticed that my mouth, even though there’s nothing it can do, still wants to help—try getting something out of your eye with your mouth closed. :-)

So how moronic is it to lie to another member of the body of Christ? or to make a promise you don’t intend to keep?

When my older daughter was about 10, I had the opportunity to take her on a two-week fossil-digging trip out West with a friend. At the time, my younger daughter was too young to come along, but since it appeared that such trips would be likely in the future, I told her that when she was 10, I’d take her on a trip too.

You know how it goes. Complications came along, and 4 years later the trip just wasn’t possible. I had to tell my little girl that I had made her a promise I couldn’t keep. I have never felt lower than in that moment. (Fortunately, she seems to have handled it well, avoiding prison time and other evidences of sociopathy.)

Do you recall the biblical story of Joshua and the Gibeonites? The Lord had commanded Israel to exterminate the Canaanite tribes. The Gibeonites tricked Joshua into believing that they were from far away and therefore not included in the decree, and Joshua promised—with an oath on the name of YHWH (Jos 9.18)—that he would not harm them.

Shortly later, of course, he found out that they had lied.

And he still kept his promise (Jos 9.1-27).

In our day, any such fraudulent contract would be legally void. But Joshua didn’t see it that way.

And centuries later, when King Saul went after the Gibeonites, in violation of Joshua’s oath, apparently God didn’t see it that way either (2S 21.1-9).

I don’t know about you, but I notice when people don’t keep their word, and if it happens repeatedly, I remember. And then I don’t count on them. And sometimes that has consequences for them—they don’t get a position of responsibility that they might otherwise have gotten.

Keeping your word matters.

Jesus said that people will know us by our fruit.

Who are you?

Part 9: Gentleness | Part 10: Self-Control

Photo by Gabriele Lässer on Unsplash

Part 1: Introduction | Part 2: Love | Part 3: Joy | Part 4: Peace | Part 5: Patience | Part 6: Kindness

The sixth fruit that the Spirit grows in the developing character of a Christian is “goodness.” Pretty much all the English translations translate the word this way (though NRSV has “generosity”). There are lots of Greek words that involve the idea of goodness, but the two most common generally involve qualitative goodness (“He’s a good musician”—that’s καλος [kalos] for you Greek bodies) and moral goodness (“He’s a good person”—αγαθος [agathos]). (As in all languages, there’s considerable overlap as well.) Here we have the noun form of the latter. Paul is talking about being the sort of person who is prompted by his internal moral character to act morally, to do the good as distinguished from the evil.

This is a tricky business, for a couple of reasons. Most obviously, we’re not only in the image of God, but we’re also corrupted by sin, and that corruption has affected every part of us. So we all have in us a strong tendency to evil, and that tendency never goes away completely; in fact, most of us are dissatisfied that we haven’t made better progress, especially since the standard is “the glory of God” (Ro 3.23). We think of all kinds of things that we shouldn’t do, and often the motivation to go ahead and do those things—disgust, revenge, logistical desperation (as in “how am I going to pay the rent?”) is quite strong.

Most people control their evil inclinations for social reasons, among others; it just wouldn’t be acceptable to kill that guy who cut in front of us in the checkout line at the store, even though he’s acting and speaking rudely and remorselessly, right in front of the children. People would look down on me for doing what I’m thinking, and there might even be more drastic (legal) ramifications, and what would the folks in town think if I got carted off to prison?

We find such social constraints powerful, and they help keep us in line. But we know the evil inclinations are in there. If you’re a Christian, exercising the means of grace and growing thereby, you see progress (sanctification) over time; the inner darkness lifts, and the victories get more frequent. But you still wish you were doing better.

A second complicating factor is our tendency to justify ourselves, to see our situation as an exception. We’re all really good at that. Much of the evil that others see in us, we don’t see as evil, because we have perfectly good reasons for what we did. There’s a reason that the defendant is not allowed to sit on his own jury.

So for this character quality, we’re not very good at evaluating our own progress.

But progress is there, certainly and irrepressibly, if we belong to Christ, because

• we are in Christ (Ro 8.1), who is perfectly and pervasively good;
• the Spirit of God is in us (Ro 8.9), bringing this character change to fruition.

Writing to the first church he planted in Europe, Paul assures them of his prayer that God will “fulfill every desire for goodness and the work of faith with power” (2Th 1.11). And why is Paul so confident that God will answer this prayer? Because, as he will write later to what is likely the last church he ever visited, God has “predestinated” those he knows “to be conformed to the image of his Son” (Ro 8.29)—a determination so certain that Paul speaks of their future glorification as already accomplished: “them he also glorified” (Ro 8.30).

All who belong to Christ are being changed, from the inside out, to think and say and do the right thing, to treat their neighbors, and the people who cut in line in front of them, and the drivers who wave just one of their fingers at them, and the people they didn’t vote for, as genuine image-bearers of the Creator God himself, of infinite value and worthy of their time, care, and respect.

One of my friends posted recently, “Joe Biden wasn’t elected. He was installed. Like a toilet.”

Nope. Wrong fruit.

Jesus said that people will know us by our fruit.

Who are you?

Part 8: Faithfulness | Part 9: Gentleness | Part 10: Self-Control

Photo by Gabriele Lässer on Unsplash