Self-Control as the Last Moral Apologetic

A few days back I posted a quote (and link) from NT Wright which said
(roughly) that “All of the fruit of the Spirit can be counterfeited by
happy, healthy young people, save one – self-control.”I’ve been thinking about that a lot over these days.  And I’ve been
thinking that there is another truism in our cultural context: “All of
the fruit of the Spirit have a counterfeit form which is valued by our
culture – save self-control.”

For every other virtue listed in Galatians 5, the culture has its own
counterfeit form.  And very often, the cultural counterfeit is carefully
chosen so that the true version – the one based on God and the Bible –
comes to look like a vice.  This leads people to believe, quite
reasonably, that Christians are among the most immoral people in modern
life.  Thus, all of our talk about sin rings not only hollow, but as
maddeningly hypocritical.

But the culture doesn’t love self-control.  The culture hates it,
actually.  Every counterfeit virtue hangs on this difference: Godly love
is self-controlled; the culture’s love is about self-fulfillment.  Godly
peace is about submission; the culture’s peace is about freedom from
restriction.  Godly faithfulness is a permanent covenant; the culture’s
faithfulness is transient, and motivated by the desires of the day.

Of course, it’s not absolutely correct to say that self-control has no
counterfeit: there is, of course, masochism.  But masochism is a very
niche virtue – and is mostly, in this culture, a sexual activity
grounded not in self-control but self-fulfillment through self-hate.  I
don’t think that there is much risk of confusion there.

(The key difference between Christian self-control and the denial of
self practiced by Eastern religions is that Christian self-control is
about submission.  Christian self-control is not control for the sake of
control; it is control for the sake of a higher value.  And so a
Christian can talk intelligibly about joy and self-control in the same
breath, whereas most other religious people cannot.)

I think that self-control may be our last moral apologetic.  It is the
virtue that we can practice, in private and in public, which is utterly
foreign to the culture.  The result will be twofold.  First, we will be
rejected – after all, we are living out the most fundamental vice of the
modern value system.  But second, I think that (some) people will see in
us something worth emulating – a long-lost virtue which they cannot find
anywhere in this culture. Just as our care for the poor and despised
drew people to Christianity in Roman times, self-control has the
potential to draw in new converts today.

I think that we need to think long and hard about this.  I think that it
is going to change how I will be preaching in the future, and how I want
to present the gospel.  I don’t yet know exactly what that will mean, or
what it will change.  But I strongly suspect that it’s going to become
something pretty core for me.  And I’d urge you to think about maybe
doing the same in your own churches.

Russ