Not a Guest Blog: The Virtue of Self-Control

Dear Readers,

      It occurred to me that I have been having a lot of guests on my blog and very little me. I plan on changing that a bit at a time…so, once a month, I am going to write a blog post featuring my thoughts on a larger devotional book—titled, A Book of Virtues. I may have to change that title—any suggestions? Since I just did a search and found several books by that name. The idea is to merge my two worlds—science and faith working together to help each of us follow God’s intentions for our character. Let me know if you enjoy the posts!

A Book of Virtues: Self-Control

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. Against such things there is no law.” Galatians 5:22-23 (NIV)

In Positive Psychology, self-control is called the “master virtue” because this trait underlies all other virtues. You can’t be brave without controlling your fear. We can’t be generous without controlling our natural greed. We can’t be humble without conquering our pride.

Proverbs 25:28 “A man without self-control is like a city broken into and left without walls.”

So, Psychology, once again, is just re-discovering what the Bible already knew.

Now, the trick is, how does one exercise self-control?

2 Timothy 1:7 (NIV): “For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind (or self-discipline).”

The first order of business in developing any virtue is a sense of trust that things will work out. For Christians, that trust is in the Lord. For much of my life, I repeated, “Thy will be done,” grudgingly at best. Only recently have I realized that God’s will is always good. Why wouldn’t I want it to be done? This world gets in the way, I’m not fooling myself, but in the end, God’s will WILL be done. So, it is much easier to control one’s feelings and actions if we trust that all will be well. We don’t need to eat a whole bag of barbecue potato chips (cough, cough, side-eying my former self) if we trust that God will fix things.

2 Peter 1:5-7 (NIV): Make every effort to add to your faith goodness; and to goodness, knowledge, and to knowledge, self-control; and to self-control, perseverance…”

To me, this verse states that knowledge precedes self-control. Research indicates the more we know about something, the more comfortable we are and that lowers anxiety. Also, it is important to know that we can control our thoughts, feelings, and actions. We choose how we think. For example, when someone cuts us off in traffic, we can choose to be angry or we can realize that maybe the other driver has an emergency. Of course you could say, maybe they’re just a jerk. But that’s their problem, not yours. Let it go. 😊

Finally, take it one day at a time, or one hour, or five minutes. Maybe you can’t do without popcorn for the rest of your life (which I pretty much have to forego because of diverticulosis), but you can have crackers instead.  Ah, here’s a bonus, psychologically, it is much easier to replace rather than repress. Don’t tell yourself you can’t have popcorn. Tell yourself that you can have cheese puffs (or better yet, a yummy piece of fruit—oh, who am I kidding? Sometimes I need texture).

“Rather, he must be hospitable, one who loves what is good, who is self-controlled, upright, holy and disciplined.” Titus 1:8

So, dear readers, I hope this helps if you’ve been having trouble with your New Year’s resolutions—for me, even if I don’t need to work on a particular virtue, I can always learn, always grow closer to the Lord by seeking to be like Him.

I hope you have a blessed day!

PS. Please share tips that have helped you exercise self-control (or maybe, a funny example of when you didn’t). 😊