Steve Massey: Desires, self-control at war in everyone

They tend to go together.

Not like friends, really. More like sparring partners.

Indulgence and a desire for self-control tend to go together.

I was reminded of this in a doctor’s waiting room last week. The magazine I was thumbing through had an odd mix of advertising. On this page, an ad for an expensive vacation. On that page, an ad for debt counseling services.

The contrast continued as I thumbed along: Here, an ad for high-end booze; there, an ad for a pricey recovery center.

Out of curiosity, I picked up another magazine. Then another.

Turns out, the advertising mix is not odd – it’s actually the norm.

Advertisers know something obvious about us: We all desire things. But we also long for lives in which we’re not such slaves to those desires.

Any of this sounding familiar?

We don’t have to look at magazine ads to illustrate the point. This sparring match between indulgence and self-control is epic, yet common to us all.

In Scripture, we get a glimpse at the sparring match raging in the will of the Apostle Paul.

“I want to do what is good, but I don’t,” Paul says in Romans 7:19. There’s the desire for self-control.

“I don’t want to do what is wrong, but I do it anyway.” There’s the indulgence.

I know many Christians who love the raw honesty of Romans 7, but for the wrong reason.

They’re comforted that an apostle would share their struggle. And they assume his admission is a call for us to relax a bit, to stop worrying about this relentless fight between indulgence and self-control.

That completely misses the point.

Paul goes on to encourage us that self-control can increasingly win over self-indulgence but only through faith in Jesus Christ.

Why spiritualize this? Because self-indulgence is natural to us. Self-control is not. It’s supernatural.

In other words, this is a spiritual thing, not merely psychological or even physiological.

Self-control is a God-given ability linked to faith in a Jesus who is not an ideology or a religion but a person who is God who loves us and died for us and whose presence increasingly reigns within us. That is, if we cooperate, in the form of faith and obedience to his will.

“Who will free me from this life that is dominated by sin…?” Paul asks. “Thank God! The answer is in Jesus Christ our Lord.”

In a Christian, self is deposed. Christ is king.

Let me clarify. Christians are not liberated once and for all from this battle of the will. It’s just that Christ enables us to have victories that are impossible without him.

Christ replaces our desire to serve self with the desire to serve him and others. The more we’re serving others, the less obsessed we are with indulging self.

Very frankly, there is very little hope in defeating self-indulgence by focusing on all the things we’re not supposed to desire so much.

Case in point: I keep thinking I shouldn’t eat all of the extra Halloween candy, but the bowl beckons and its contents are, well, disappearing.

Give me a rule and I want to break it. Don’t you?

So much the better to aim our lives at that which pleases God, and blesses others. Paul calls this life of obedience and blessing “walking in the Spirit.”

“So I say, let the Holy Spirit guide your lives,” says Galatians 5. “Then you won’t be doing what your sinful nature craves.”

Our hope is not only that we’ll enjoy more and more victories over self-indulgence as we follow Jesus. Our hope is that there is a day coming when the battle will be over.

Doesn’t that sound heavenly?