Humbled by God's Love

I admit that I had a hard time getting my head around "self-control" as a fruit of the Spirit... Why wasn't it called "Spirit-control" anyway, if it was from the Holy Spirit? Then there was "Deception"... Was that really my problem? Do I tell lies? Maybe it is self-deception?

Christian Schwarz's definition talks about "Disciplined Love", "consistency" and "having power over yourself". His summary definition: "Self-control means sobriety and moderation in all areas of life. It's always targeted at achieving a specific goal". I gather the goal is to "serve other people better".

It is in the red (Truth) section, so relates to steadfastness and reliability. 

Now I don't know about you but to me this seemed just as fuzzy as some of the definitions of love that the book rails against. What did all this have to do with love?

It all looked too hard until last Sabbath afternoon when I decided to open the 3 Colors of Love book after several months. It opened to page 60, "1 Corinthians 13 and the spiritual color wheel" (wheel is the picture above).

Christian states in the first sentence that "Paul made it crystal clear... that even the most committed life is worth nothing without the fruit of the Spirit". I summarised it as: If my motive is not Love, any spiritual accomplishment is nothing. 

Then to test how strongly my life is driven by love, I took Christian's challenge of making my own personal version of 1 Corinthians 13:1.

So I sat down and wrote out a list of all the dreams and hopes I have, all the plans and all the projects that I'm working on. Then to each one I added a kicker, like Paul did.

It looked like this, in the only example I'm willing to share:

If I through NCD, helped Toronto church become so strong and healthy that we had have multiple sermons and plant another church to fit everyone in, if I'm not motivated by love for the church members and love for the lost, then it is worthless, pointless egomania.

And so on through all my dreams (there are four other big ones).

It was a God-moment. I sat back in my seat at the realisation of my great lack of love, my lostness and my total inability to do anything about it all.

I saw that all my busy-ness was a cover for my problems. I'm doing all these things for myself. I saw the depth of my sin and knew I was in a deep hole.

Suddenly my dreams looked unattractive and, to tell the truth, I just didn't want them any more. 

That probably sounds dramatic but that was the way it happened.

Suddenly I'm praying earnestly for God's love, because I just don't have it. I want to love Him with all my heart and soul. And I want to love people too.

The next morning I prayed earnestly before my Bible reading and God came through. My OT chapters included Deuteronomy 13:3-5,9. 

Wow did that hit home! My "dreams" were a test of my love for God and I had to be the first to strike the first blow.

Now I'm memorising Deut. 13:4 because, like all the commandments, it is a promise that I will be able to follow God and fear Him etc. because He has the power to do it. Now this is my aim, not all the other stuff.

I want to find out exactly what Self-control is and stop the deception. Time to start letting the Spirit love through me.