Zachary Conover: Rule Thyself | Proverbs 16:32

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Good afternoon, saints. It's very good to be here with you. Praise the Lord that I'm standing here at this moment.

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We're going to be in Proverbs. Two sections. Two verses really.

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Two sentences. First is in Proverbs 16. In Proverbs 16.

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Verse 32. And then Proverbs 25.

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Verse 28. Maybe you want to keep a finger. In Proverbs 16 and one in Proverbs 25 -28.

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This is the Word of the Lord. Whoever is slow to anger is better than the mighty.

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And he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city. Then Proverbs 25 -28.

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

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This is the Word of the Lord. Please join me in prayer. Our gracious Heavenly Father, we lift up to You this time now.

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We approach Your throne not on the basis of our own merit, but on the basis of Your mercy.

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On the basis of Christ's righteousness and His alone imputed to us. We thank

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You, God, that we are Your people, the sheep of Your pasture, and that,

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Lord, You have put a man in this pulpit today to feed Your flock. I pray that You would equip me for that task now.

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Holy Spirit, cause these words to not be the words of a mere man, but to be

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Your words, Lord, that give life and that eternal. I pray that as the

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Word is taught today, God, You would arrest our defenses. You would free us from any self -justification,

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Lord, at being corrected and taught by divine wisdom. And that You would allow us to be teachable sons and daughters, so that we may build the city of God and not the city of self.

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We thank You for Jesus, His Lordship, His Kingship, and it's in His blessed name we ask these things.

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Amen. This is one of those texts that I would much rather have preached to me than preach.

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And that is because when you look at these verses and you think about the topic of self -control, self -mastery, self -governance, self -rule, you realize how woefully far you fall short in all these different areas.

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And I was looking around for more qualified men before the message, but I couldn't find any, so here

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I am. But before we start, I just want to highlight something here, and that is one thing

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I prayed before we opened with the text. There's a tendency when we encounter the Word like this and we're corrected, to throw up that wall of self -justification and not realize that when we talk about self -control in a topic like this, like self -mastery, and we come face -to -face with our own shortcomings, we have to understand that we're not bringing

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God something in and of ourselves hoping that He will accept us as good enough. Our own discipline, our own rigid commitment to form or structure or code, if you will, or regiment or a

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Bible reading plan or what have you. No. God has already accepted us on the basis of His Son.

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He has already welcomed us by grace and through faith. And He means to work in us that which is good and pleasing to Him.

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And so be encouraged that when you hear these verses, the first thing that we should see is our need for Christ.

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That's the very first thing that we should notice as we lay eyes on these texts today, that we need

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Jesus, that God is not standing over us, and neither am

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I, by the way, as your brother, demanding that somehow because we have failed, we need to pull ourselves up and make up some kind of deficiency within Him.

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Because that's not the God that we worship. He doesn't need our self -control.

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He doesn't need our self -mastery. But He has created us, and He is recreating us in Christ.

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And He is ready to pour out mercy and grace upon us in our time of need.

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And so, by way of a definition here, let's talk about self -mastery and self -control and self -rule, shall we?

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The Bible paints a picture of our hearts, paints a picture of our wills, in which we have all of these different desires bubbling up within us, right?

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Some on the surface, some a little bit further pressed down more deeply. Could be anything from,

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I want to glorify God to I want a Dairy Queen blizzard, right? It's a spectrum, we'll say, right?

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It covers a wide gamut. And so we have all of these desires that are constantly bubbling up in our hearts, which is, as we know, the seat of our will, the seat of our personality.

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And what the Bible presents to us is that we will either discipline all of these lesser desires in the pursuit of what is ultimate, or we will be ruled by these lesser desires and not achieve what is ultimate.

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So, by way of example, you have the man who gets up early, who works hard, goes to bed on time, self -disciplined, he's working to save money to buy that house, and then in contrast, you have the man over here who doesn't go to bed on time, he sleeps in late, he doesn't put his hand to the plow, he's not working, he's not showing any kind of diligence or desire to be excellent in his work.

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Which of those two men does the Bible tell us will likely succeed in obtaining his goal?

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The first one, right? He's pursuing the ultimate desire, and he's doing it in God's way, using

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God's means, and he is disciplining his lesser hungers and his cravings and his appetites in the service of something else.

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And that's really what the definition or the working definition is that I want to lay down here, is that we will either be mastered by our desires, our appetites, our cravings, our hungers, or we will discipline those things in service to an ultimate thing.

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That ultimate thing can be good or bad, right? How many of us know people that are very, very self -disciplined?

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Right? They're incredibly hard -working. They do all of the rigid commitment stuff that makes us cringe.

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But it's ultimately not serving them in an ultimate sense, in an eternal sense. So that's not really what we're after here.

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What we're after is the heart. Because that's where Proverbs starts.

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The book of Proverbs starts with the heart. That's where Solomon starts. He says, from the

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Father to the Son, guard your heart, for from it flow all the issues of life.

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That's the central thing here. See, it would be very, very dangerous as a preacher in talking about the topic of self -control, self -mastery, ruling your own spirit, to give you a bullet point checklist of how to be more disciplined and self -controlled.

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It would be dangerous to do that when the Bible begins with the heart because it begins with building a whole

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Christian from the ground up. It's very dangerous to give good advice to an unregenerate person.

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We have to begin with building a Christian from the ground up, building from the heart up.

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And that's why if you're not a Christian, if you're not regenerate, if your deepest desire isn't to glorify

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God, then you don't need more self -control. You need a new self.

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You need to be born again. Repent and believe the Gospel. That's the main issue.

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The Gospel has got to be our starting place. And so why self -rule?

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Well, the Bible tells us that there are four different types of governments. Can someone help me with what they are?

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What's the first one? What is it? Self. What's the next one? Family.

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Church. Civil government. Very good. Everyone has come to renew for the past several years

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I guess, huh? Self, family, church, and civil government. And we've seen in our nation especially that without self -government, without a compulsion from within directed towards a

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God -glorifying end, we get destruction. We get self -destruction of course, but we get destruction at the familial level, our relationships and our family.

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We get destruction at an ecclesiastical level. And then we get destruction at a civil level as well because I don't know if we've noticed, but self -restraint is not exactly a popular virtue right now.

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It's actually quite the opposite. It's pursuit of anything

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I believe I want or need that will give me the most fulfillment and make me the most happy without caring who gets in the way of that pursuit.

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And so you have men that are completely dominated by a power from within, but it's not the right power from within.

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It's not the Holy Spirit, which the Holy Spirit is the only one who can produce proper self -government.

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They're being led and ruled by their appetites, their passions, their base desires.

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And when that doesn't work and it produces anarchy and chaos in a land and it causes destruction at every single level, then what happens?

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What has to happen by necessity? There has to be an external force supplied from the outside in order to coerce compliance to some man -made standard.

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We know very, very well that a man who cannot govern himself will be made the subject of tyranny.

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But before this tyranny is exercised externally, men are first conquered from within by their own appetites, passions, and desires.

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You know, there are many misconceptions about self -government, self -rule.

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Unbelievers hear that kind of concept. They hear, yes, self -government is the basis for liberty.

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And they hear liberty and they think, you're just talking about the freedom to do whatever you please.

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Liberty, your rights. When, no, that's really a worldly definition.

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What liberty and the basis of self -government has to do with is not the right to do whatever

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I please, it's the freedom to do as I ought. And I can't do that if I am enslaved.

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Isn't it interesting that the people who shout most loudly about the fact that they're free are usually the most enslaved.

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They're usually the most shackled to their own guilt. They're usually the most shackled to their own debauchery, depravity.

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And they glory in that shame more often than not, all the while, and this is the part that produces a little bit of hilarity, they're touting that they're free.

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I'm free. I'm free. We live in a day, an age, where self -restraint is a despised virtue.

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Everyone is relentlessly pursuing their own self -destructive desires.

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And they view any kind of bridle on their flesh as restrictive. But this is the message of Proverbs.

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The one that rules his spirit that does not give full vent to his passions.

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The one who does restrain himself. The one who exercises mastery over these things and brings them, disciplines them in self -control.

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That man is greater than the one who would lay siege to a city and conquer it.

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Better than an Alexander. Better than a Caesar. Better than an Aragorn. The man that can bridle his own passions, that can bring his emotions, his thoughts, his desires under control.

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That is more impressive than a conquering war hero that can subdue and level an entire city.

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The Bible is not very impressed with that. The Bible is impressed God cares more for men that can subject themselves to His rule than they can subjugate others.

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Now, Proverbs does give us several characters if you will to flesh this out because there isn't really a direct definition of self -control in the wisdom literature book of Proverbs.

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But it does give us several characters to see. All the while, with this central idea at our feet here, that a person will either rule over their desires or they will be ruled by them.

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Which is, of course, what we always tell our children. Get your emotional horsies under control.

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Bring those feelings back down a notch. You need to make those feelings obey Jesus. Your feelings are not

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God. God is God. Your feelings are down here. Bring those emotions into captivity.

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Bring your thoughts into captivity is what we encourage each other with as brothers and sisters. What do we say? Take every thought captive and make it obey the

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Lord Jesus Christ. What are we saying? We're saying rule yourself. Govern your thoughts.

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Restrain yourself. Get yourself under control. Who remembers the sluggard?

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Quite a prominent character in the book of Proverbs, yes? What can't the sluggard be bothered to do?

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Right? You remember the picture, the verse, right? He's got his hand in the food bowl of the cake batter, right?

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And he can't even lift it out of the bowl to bring it back to his mouth. It's so heavy. He can't be bothered to rule over his love of comfort.

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He buries his hand in the dish. Can't lift it out, right?

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He's the person that just refuses to go to bed on time.

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He won't wake up early. He won't be diligent in his work. He won't put his hand to anything. Right?

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He won't master his own love of ease. And so, you see him being the man who has a wife that goes unloved and uncared for and uncherished and unwashed by the

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Word. And you see him having children that go undisciplined. And you see him being slack with his work.

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Not thorough in what he does. Not following through. Not keeping his Word. Not doing any of the things that diligence does because he can't be bothered.

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Or how about the man that is mastered by his love for alcohol?

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Proverbs 20. Verse 1. The man who is led astray by wine is not wise.

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And if you read that verse, the one about wine being a mocker, a strong brawler, the language there is the exact same.

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Rule. Led. He's led away. In other words, he's not in control of this.

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He has relinquished his autonomy and now he's being jerked around by a substance that he can no longer govern because he is a slave to it.

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And if you know about this sin, maybe if you don't have experience with it yourself and you understand what it does to families, what it's done to your own family, the destruction that maybe it's brought by being a slave to alcohol, right?

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The alcoholic. The drunkard. The man who will not bring his passions under control, he refuses to.

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He refuses to show moderation, which is where we get the word temperance, moderation.

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A man not given to excess. This is a man who knows how to bridle his appetites.

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To bring his desires under control. Moderation. Not given to excess. Not given to destructive excess.

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So the sluggard is one. The drunkard is one. The sexually undisciplined one.

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That was pretty much the beginning chapters of Proverbs from about 5 to 7 when it talks about the adulteress, the forbidden woman, and what is she doing?

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She's using all manner of enticements to get this young, gullible man to fall into her trap.

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And he's just wandering into her trap with all of her allurements and enticements. She's speaking very sweetly to him.

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She's dressed up. She looks fine. She's wearing makeup. Her hair is all nice and done. And she's saying, come take your fill of love.

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Come. And she leads him away. And he's wandering into that trap.

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And like a deer that doesn't see the trap before it's too late, he gets pierced through the heart with the arrow and he bleeds out and dies.

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The sexually undisciplined person. The sexually undisciplined man.

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The man who will not bring his passions under control and direct those towards a

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God -glorifying aim that is productive in the service of God's kingdom. He's undisciplined.

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He won't rule over his sexual desires, but he is ruled by them. Or how about the one who loves pleasure and possessions?

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The money lover, you might say. In Proverbs 21 .17

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He loves pleasure and possessions, but the text tells us that it leads to his financial ruin and poverty.

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This is the person that cannot get his thirst for stuff under control.

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He cannot bridle his love for the new thing. The new tool.

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The new clothes. The better house. The better vacation. The better car. And because he cannot bridle his desires, because he cannot bring those things under mastery, one of the things he makes himself is broke.

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And because of that, he cannot give. He cannot be useful in that sense to his family.

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And he even becomes a burden on the community as well because of his own doing in many ways.

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The money lover. Or how about the one that is mastered by his hot temper?

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Or, not just temper, not just rage, but even annoyance. Does anybody know that person?

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They wake up, and they're just annoyed with the world. Are you that person?

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And you're just afraid to admit it sometimes. Proverbs 14 .29

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The one with a hasty temper that exalts folly. The one who cannot discipline his emotions, and so he worships foolishness.

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The guy that blows up at work on his wife, on his kids.

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This is the guy that you thought you weren't until you had kids. Right?

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We all thought that we were really kind and gentle people, and then we had these little miracles from heaven come into our lives and ask us a million questions a minute and say,

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I'm hurt. Take care of me. Do this for me. I need this. I need this. I fell down. Pick me up here and then pick me up here.

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And then you realize that you weren't as kind of a person as you thought you were.

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You realize that you weren't as gentle as you thought you were. You found yourself actually starting to be mastered by annoyance and rage, right?

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And you become the kind of person that your wife has to tell the kids, don't talk to Daddy before he has coffee.

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Don't ask him questions before he goes to the kitchen and gets his coffee, right? I'm telling you right now,

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I'm preaching to myself too, that this hurts. But it's the kind of wife whose husband can't speak a certain word around her or he won't hear the end of it for two weeks.

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Right? It's the kind of husband whose wife is walking on eggshells afraid to correct him about anything or even speak into his life at all and say you might want to look at this because this might be a blind spot of sin because he might blow up and have a reaction and not want to hear it.

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It's the man or woman who will not rule over their emotions.

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They just let it all in. Rather than bridle themselves, rather than control themselves, rather than take those emotions and make them obey

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King Jesus, they just give full vent to it. And like the

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Proverbs tell us in this second verse here, and these character sketches bear witness,

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Proverbs 25 -28, a man without self -control is like a city broken into and left without walls.

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Now there's part of us that doesn't really appreciate the gravity of living in this time especially.

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Like living in the time of the ancient world and how essential it was to have walls.

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You know, when you talk about what it meant to live in a constant state of uneasiness and anxiety, because really the only thing that was keeping you and your family safe from being killed and your family abused or subjugated was this wall.

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The only thing that protected you was this thing. And when that's gone, you are vulnerable.

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You are exposed. You are in trouble. Anything can get to you.

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You are out in the open. Walls in Scripture represented how fortified a city was and how strong was its refuge and safety.

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If there were no walls, then there was nothing to prevent an enemy attack. If you turn with me here quickly to Nehemiah 1,

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I want to show you something. Nehemiah 1.

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The words of Nehemiah the son of Hekeliah, Now it happened in the month of Chislev in the twentieth year, as I was in Susa the citadel, that Hanani, one of my brothers, came with certain men from Judah, and I asked them concerning the

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Jews who escaped, who had survived the exile, and concerning Jerusalem.

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And they said to me, the remnant there in the province who had survived the exile is in great trouble and shame.

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The wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates are destroyed by fire.

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I think it's interesting there not only noticing the fact that walls are a protective covering, but there's also an element of when they're missing, there's shamefulness.

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Now I think part of that too, you have to also take into consideration the exile and the shamefulness of being in exile.

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But being restored to that and having the Lord restore their fortunes, there is very much an uncovering.

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They are vulnerable. They're exposed without walls. And the Bible says in Proverbs that a man without self -control, a man who will not bring his desires under control and discipline them, is like a city broken into and left without anything.

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Anyone can come and take anything they want at any time. You are completely exposed and vulnerable.

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And how many of us feel that when we lose self -control in a variety of areas?

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It's almost like we forfeited our walls. We're sitting there in shame over our sin, and we are completely open to the attacks of the enemy.

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Completely open to his poisonous and flaming darts. And we need to think of ourselves as a fortified city that the enemy is constantly trying to attack.

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And the target, of course, is our hearts. A lack of walls equals shame and dishonor.

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Failing to govern ourselves brings sin, and sin brings shame, which weighs down our hearts.

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If we don't have clean hearts, then we can't have hearts filled with faith that complete the mission that God has given to us as a people.

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The principle of self -government, it's interesting if you look at this in Scripture, is actually virtually identical with the concept of meekness.

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Jesus says in the Sermon on the Mount, Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.

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Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. I want to read to you something that Matthew Henry's commentary says on that verse.

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The meek are happy. Blessed are the meek. The meek are those who quietly submit themselves to God, to His Word and to His rod, who follow

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His directions and comply with His designs, and are gentle towards all men, who can bear provocation without being inflamed by it, are either silent or return a soft answer, and who can show their displeasure when there is occasion for it without being transported into any indecencies, who can be cool when others are hot, and in their patience keep possession of their own souls.

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When they can scarcely keep possession of anything else, they are the meek, who are rarely and hardly provoked, but quickly and easily pacified, and who would rather forgive 20 injuries than revenge one, having the rule of their own spirits.

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Matthew Henry also comments on this verse here. The nature of meekness is to be slow to anger, not easily put into passion, nor apt to resent provocation, taking time to consider before we suffer our passion to break out that it may not transgress due bounds, so slow in our motions towards anger that we may be quickly stopped and pacified.

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It is to have the rule of our own spirits, our appetites and affections, and all our inclinations, but particularly our passions, our anger, keeping that under direction and check and the strict government of religion and right reason.

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We must be lords of our anger as God is. So, meekness, right?

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Self -control, self -governance is not weakness or timidity.

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The Bible says we have not been given a spirit of timidity, right? 2

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Timothy. We have not been given a spirit of timidity. Meekness is humble strength under control.

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Humble strength under control. And it is indispensable for the mission that God has given us.

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He made us to be His priest kings, to rule the world for Him and exercise servant dominion.

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And this tells us about the flow of authority for our mission, but it also tells us about the source of power needed to carry out that mission.

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We cannot rule ourselves by our own strength. The reason?

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The problem of our own sin. We can't rule rightly. And the glory of our mission and our inheritance was lost by our first father

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Adam in the garden, but in Jesus Christ, we are restored to being able to rule rightly, and that includes first and foremost to rule ourselves rightly.

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A self -ruled man or woman is ruled by the power of God's Spirit and is therefore able to rule

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His own Spirit. This is the key to freedom.

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If you can master yourself, your desires, passions, appetites, you will be dangerous in all the right ways.

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And that's what we want to be, right? We want to be dangerous in all the right ways to the enemy.

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Of course, not to our friends, our family, our loved ones. We want to be dangerous to the enemy, but we can't do that if we're an enemy to ourselves.

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So, we've defined this, and we've talked about four or five ways that we all fall short.

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So, how do we get it, though? We see what it looks like when it goes off the tracks, right?

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When we don't have self -mastery, when we don't have self -control. But how do we actually get it?

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How do we cultivate it? And again, this is where I absolutely refuse to give you

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Zach's bullet -point list of how to be more disciplined, because I promise you wouldn't want it anyways. It would just be a waste of time.

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Rather, I would ask you to think for a moment and try this. Ask yourself, right?

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Because we talked about this. Self -control is disciplining all of the desires of your heart in the service of an ultimate desire, right?

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That thing that you want most. That's ultimately what you're going to serve, is what you want most.

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What has a hold of your heart the most? Remember, we're talking about the heart. We're talking about building someone from the ground up here.

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We're talking about how foolish it is to just give good advice when we don't have a new heart.

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If you're a Christian, ask yourself, what do you want most?

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What is the deepest desire of your heart? If you mine down past all the other desires, past all the other lesser desires, and you get down to the foundation, do you find that when you get down to the very, very bottom, that what you want the very most is not to sin?

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Do you wrestle when you do lose mastery over yourself?

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When you do fail, and you face plant, and you fall short? Do you find that the deepest desire of your heart is to be holy?

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Do you find that even when you do sin, and even though it might feel good in the moment, it might be instantaneously rewarding in some sense, that ultimately it's not the real thing that you really want, it's not the ultimate thing that you want to live your life in the service of, do you find that that's your ultimate desire?

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Or do you find that you're not really bothered by the destruction that a lack of self -control is causing in your life?

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Do you think it's just sufficient to make peace with it, to come to church, as long as you have a little bit of a taste of spirituality in your life, but you're not really bothered by the sin that you commit?

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You're not really bothered by the fact that you don't have mastery over your life in these many different areas?

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You know, take an inventory, right? Your marriage, right?

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The way that you father and mother your children, your work, your physical body, all of these things.

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Do you find, or what do you define, what do you find your greatest desire to be?

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Because here's what we ultimately need to understand here, and this is really what makes the Gospel so glorious in all of this, is that self -mastery is not a decision of the will.

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Self -mastery is the fruit of God's work in us. It's something not done by you to present before God to gain an audience or acceptance before God.

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It is the fruit of God working within you to bring about that which pleases

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Him. Jesus Christ is the author of all good things in His people. He's the one that does this.

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You know, I don't think that we take this verse seriously enough sometimes when Jesus compares

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Himself to the vine and we're the branches. What happens without the life -giving source that gives nourishment to the branches?

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They fall off and die. Jesus says, apart from Me, you can do nothing. Do you believe that?

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Like, not get halfway and then sputter out. He means, if you don't start with Me, if you don't build your life on My root, you go nowhere.

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You go nowhere. You have nothing. The good news is that if you're in Christ, it wasn't you that made a decision of the will.

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It's because God raised you to new life, gave you a new heart, traded your sin for His righteousness, raised you from death to life, and is bringing you to glory, and in that process,

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He is renovating you completely by the work and power of His Holy Spirit to look more like Jesus.

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If you identify the deepest longing of your heart to be for holiness, to do what pleases

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God above all else, you know what the next step is?

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Once you've identified that, once you say, yes, Lord, that's what I want. I want to please

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You above all else. I don't want to be mastered by these lesser things.

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I don't want to be controlled. I don't want to be a slave. You say I'm not a slave. Help my unbelief.

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I don't want to be a slave. Once you've identified that that's your deepest longing, the answer is to run as hard as you can towards your deepest joy.

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And don't look back. And you might think that sounds awfully theoretical, but nothing could be more practical if you just start there.

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Because if you do this, when you find that your deepest joy isn't God and that sin doesn't bother you very much, and that you don't need to be self -controlled, then you probably do need to be born again.

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And there's always a danger in saying something like that because there's usually a small percentage of people that feel conviction.

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They're like, am I saved? Am I not saved? Do you wrestle with sin? I always think it's a little bit funny when you listen to believers sometimes that are really wrestling with sin.

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They're struggling with it. They are in the midst of death throes and deep conviction.

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They know they messed up. They're crying. They're weeping over their sin. I don't want to do this anymore.

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I feel so much guilt. I feel so much shame before God over what I've done. I just want to please

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God. And also, I don't even think I'm saved. But the thing is, everything you just said, those are

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Christian desires. Only Christians talk that way. You understand that, right?

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Unbelievers, unregenerate people who don't know God, they're not sitting around saying, wow, I hate this sin.

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I really don't want to do it anymore. My biggest desire is actually to please God. That's how

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Christians talk. That's not how unbelievers think through these things. So be encouraged.

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If you're out there and you understand, you know you wrestle with sin every day. And even if you have to come back to the throne of grace day after day, guess what?

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The good news is His mercies are new every morning. And there's always more to get. It is an endless supply of grace that God has to give to you.

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And He is ready to pour it out. He restrained His anger in order to unleash it in full on His Son so that His mercy to you would be so readily available and so ready to be just lavished upon you so that you would receive the mercy and the grace that you need to help you in your time of need where you struggle.

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What is your deepest desire for your marriage? What is your deepest desire for your children?

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Right? Do you want to be the kind of spouse that loves your wife and that washes her with the

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Word and that lays your life down for her completely in service to her and leads her well?

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Do you want to be the kind of wife that respects and honors her husband and seeks to uplift him and serve him and serve the mission that God has given him?

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And be faithful. Be faithful to one another. Do you want to be the kind of father that imperfectly, that faithfully shows an accurate picture of the

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Father in Heaven to your children? Do you want to be the kind of son or daughter that is quick and cheerful to obey?

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That honors your parents? That submits to authority? That's diligent and eager to receive correction?

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What kind of church member do you want to be? Is that the kind of church member you want to be as well? Belonging to this body.

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Eager to learn. Eager to grow. Eager to serve. Eager to receive correction. Eager to receive teaching, be taught.

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What would it look like, I guess what I'm getting at there, and asking and doing the inventory of all these different areas in your life, what would it look like for God's grace to be flourishing in all those different areas where you've asked yourself, what's my greatest desire in this area?

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Is it God glorifying? Then I'm going to run after it with all my might. That's what

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I'm running for. That's what I'm going after. And you come to God and you say,

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Lord, I want to please You. I want to do what's honoring to You, but I'm stuck. I'm stuck.

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I'm stuck in my emotions. I'm stuck in my anger. I'm stuck by the enemy.

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I'm trapped in my flesh. I can't do it. Please help me. God will answer that prayer.

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Jesus is eager to answer that prayer. 2

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Timothy 1 -7. I'll end on this. Just a few words in parting to help hopefully give you tools as you leave here today.

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2 Timothy 1 -7 says that we have not been given a spirit of fear, but of power, love, and self -control.

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Some translations say discipline. Once again, focus on this.

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This is something that God has to do in us. That's what I'm trying to highlight here is rather than give you a list,

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I want to show you, and what I need to hear most of all is that this is not something we can produce in ourselves.

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God must work it in us. And so we need to cry out for mercy in order for God to do it. Galatians 5 .19

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Now the works of the flesh are evident, sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, orgies, and things like these.

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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

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Spirit. This is what the Spirit does. It's love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self -control.

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Against such things there is no law. Ephesians 1 .3

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Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.

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He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before Him.

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He has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places.

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He has given it to us. He has equipped us. He will equip us for this.

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Also, in Peter's epistle as well, He's granted to us all things pertaining to life and godliness.

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All things. Not all things if you can get it together first and master yourself, then you'll have all things pertaining to life and godliness.

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No, you have all things now, saints, pertaining to life and godliness now. Right now.

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And then, Galatians 3 .2 Let me ask you only this, did you receive the

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Spirit by works of the law or by hearing with faith? Are you so foolish, having begun by the

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Spirit, are you now being perfected by the flesh? Did you suffer so many things in vain, if indeed it was in vain?

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It is He who supplies the Spirit to you and works miracles among you.

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Do so by works of the law or by hearing with faith. Right?

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So two paths. Flesh. Law. Word.

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Spirit. How did you receive the Spirit of God? Did you receive it by works of the law or did you receive it by hearing with faith?

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And this is talking about how you were made a Christian. How were you made a believer in Jesus Christ?

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Is it because of what you performed or was it because of the word that you heard that made you so?

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That you were united to by the gift of faith. The same is true for every other area of life that you walk as a

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Christian. How will you be brought to glory?

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Will it be by your performance or will it be by hearing with faith?

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As you, of course, walk in the good works that God has prepared for you to do so. Once again, this has to be by grace that any of us master ourselves.

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So, are you weak? Do you feel hopeless?

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Do you lack self -control? Good. Same here.

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The good news is that Jesus is ready and willing to pour

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His mercy out on us and author in us that which pleases Him. So trust

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Him. Go to Him on your knees in prayer. And it is a prayer that He delights to answer.

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Amen? Please pray with me. Father in Heaven, thank

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You for Your Word. Thank You for its power. Thank You for the power of Your Gospel, Lord.

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I pray that we would be people that hear the Word with faith and believe and are changed,

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God. I pray that You would make us the kind of men and women that govern ourselves to Your glory, that bring our appetites under control in the service of Your Kingdom.

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And we pray, God, against the enemy that he would make no further progress in our lives to ensnare us to the things that hold us captive.

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Lord Jesus, just set us free. Set us free that we may run straight and true after what we desire most.

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Lord, what we desire most is You. And it's in Your name we pray. Amen.