The Fruit of the Holy Spirit - What is self-control?

Finally we come to self-control. This is translated "temperance" in the English Bible, but it really means to have mastery, and the one over which we are to have mastery, is ourselves. I fear that this is a very rare, but very precious fruit. How few there are who truly have mastery over their own bodies, and their own minds and thoughts. Paul could say of himself: "I keep under my body, and lead it away a slave." 1 Cor. 9:27. That is true self-control. Paul had mastery over himself. Let us remember that this is a fruit of the Spirit, and only God's Spirit can give this self-control.

Further, he was to be "temperate," an expression much narrowed and so far misapplied in our day. Self-control not in one respect but in all is its real meaning. It is the quality of having every way and expression of feeling, or inclination, checked in the Christian by his sense of God's presence, grace, and fear.

Finally, "faithfulness, gentleness, self control." These three are personal to ourselves. Do you have faith? "Have it to yourself before God" (Rom.14:22). We must neither act on the faith of another, nor press another to act on our faith, though we may give him the Word of God to encourage him to act on his own faith. Gentleness (or meekness) is that quality that simply submits to personal humiliation, if need be, without demanding our personal "rights" as we see them. Self-control is a great inner conquest, as Proverbs 16:32 reminds us: "He who is slow to anger is better than the mighty, and he who rules his spirit than he who takes a city." In contrast, "Whoever has no rule over his own spirit is like a city broken down, without walls" (Prov.25:28). "Against such there is no law." They are the spontaneous fruit of the Spirit, operating unquenched and ungrieved in our lives. Law neither produces or prohibits them.

This is a rare and admirable grace, diffusing its hallowed influence over one's entire course, character and conduct. It not only bears directly upon one or two or twenty selfish habits, but upon self in all the length and breadth of that comprehensive and most odious term. Many a one who would look with proud disdain upon a glutton or a drunkard, may himself fail every hour in exhibiting the grace of self-control. True it is that gluttony and drunkenness should be ranked with the very vilest and most demoralizing forms of selfishness. They must be regarded as among the most bitter clusters that grow on that widespread tree. But self is a tree and not a mere branch of a tree or a cluster on a branch, and we should not only judge self when it works, but control it that it may not work.

Then we are bidden to add temperance. Generally speaking temperance in our minds is connected with abstaining from spirituous liquors. But temperance here has a wider significance. It means self- restraint. “Every man that strives for the mastery is temperate in ALL things”. Not in one, but in all things. We are apt to go to extremes. We need to recognize the flesh in us, to curb our tempers, our egotism, our love of gain, to be a law to ourselves is divinely right.

"And to knowledge temperance." Not the mere external restraint, but the cultivation of the inward history of the soul day by day, governing ourselves, keeping ourselves in. order: and depend upon it if we cannot keep ourselves in order, we cannot keep any one else. Temperance is that quiet gravity of spirit, that is equable in every circumstance, like Christ, never upset by any trial, or anything that provokes.

Lastly, "temperance" is given as a fruit of the Spirit. The spiritual would not act rashly or hastily. "He that believeth shall not make haste." They would be preserved from excess. They, as to the feelings and judgment, would keep the mind evenly poised and unbiased. The loins of the mind being girded up, they would be sober. So Titus gives us, as needed for an overseer, "sober, temperate."

"Be sober," or self-restrained. What a truly needed word is this! How many there are who know deliverance from their sins, and deliverance from this scene, but who know not practical deliverance from dominant self. Self-allowance is closely akin to self-assertion. On the other hand, self-judgment is the parent and the power of self-restraint. Every germ of self-allowing or self-asserting is in principle disloyalty to Christ. The true heart loves to confess there is no word more true and few more comforting than this, that we are not our own, but bought with a price.

But of such conflicts I would not now write, but rather of the self-discipline that is necessary if we would carry on successfully the daily strife for holiness and truth. No one will deny that it is essential for holy living and for effective influence for good that a Christian man's natural powers and dispositions should be under perfect self-control.

This is a marked contrast with what has gone before. This is our new state, of course, in connection with the new nature, but under the control now of the Holy Spirit. There are not fruits, plural, there is onefruit, but it is a nine-fold fruit. It is wonderful to consider this fruit of the Spirit in its nine aspects. We have three categories. Love, joy and peace, in the first category; then longsuffering, kindness and goodness, in the second; and finally faithfulness, (or gentleness or fidelity) and meekness (a quality which controls the thought) and self-control, in the last. These three categories together are the nine-fold fruit of the Spirit. This is what God would like to see in our lives, individually and collectively. Paul says, almost in irony, “Against such things there is no law.”Here the question comes, “Do we cultivate this fruit?”Well, how can we do this? We have to learn many lessons with regard to the flesh. In the flesh there is no good (that is confirmed in many Scriptures in the New Testament) and God has condemned it. The positive point in verse 24 is that this fruit bearing is done by faith. In the power of the Holy Spirit we cultivate these qualities, we overcome, as we have mentioned earlier. “Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall in no way fulfill fleshly lusts”(verse 16). This is how to live victoriously. These points connected with the walk in the Spirit are really to help us to live lives of spiritual victory, to be overcomers. In this kind of atmosphere the fruit of the Spirit will be produced in us, and this is in the context of love, as we saw earlier (John would say, ‘first love’). All this goes together with practicing radical self-judgment, on an ongoing basis.