Elisabeth Elliot

“Called to be a mother,

entrusted with
 the holy task

 of cooperating with God

 in shaping
 the destinies of six people,

 she knew it was too heavy
 a burden to carry alone.

 She did not try.

She went to Him whose name is

 Wonderful Counsellor,
Mighty God,
Everlasting Father.

 She asked His help.”

Elisabeth Elliot (describing her mother’s faith)

Elisabeth Elliot's father

“The trouble with so many parents

is that they do not begin early enough to insist on

 obedience,

telling the truth,

and respect for parents;

and unfortunately many do not behave in the home

in ways that inspire respect.

 Love,

kindness,

cheerfulness,

 and good times

should abound in every Christian home,

but these are stifled where there is

disobedience,

disrespect,

and where the children’s will dominates.

Parents are God’s representatives in the home and,

like Him,

they should keep the right balance

 between Law and grace.”

Philip Howard (Elisabeth Elliot’s father)

Elisabeth Elliot's Mother

“Training

must come before teaching.

 [Teaching]

 is impossible

unless the children cooperate.

And they don’t cooperate

 unless they are disciplined

 from their earliest days.

This discipline

 lays the groundwork

 for teaching.”

Katherine Howard (Elisabeth Elliot’s mother)

Self-Control

Self-Control and the Power of Christ

David Mathis / October 7, 2014

It sounds so simple and straightforward, perhaps even commonplace.

It’s not a flashy concept or an especially attractive idea. It doesn’t turn heads or grab headlines. It can be as seemingly small as saying no to another Oreo, French fry, or milkshake — or another half hour on Netflix or Facebook — or it can feel as significant as living out a resounding yes to sobriety and sexual purity. It is at the height of Christian virtue in a fallen world, and its exercise is quite simply one of the most difficult things you can ever learn to do.

Self-control — our hyphenated English is frank and functional. There’s no cloak of imagery or euphemistic pretense. No punches pulled, no poetic twist, no endearing irony. Self-control is simply that important, impressive, and nearly impossible practice of learning to maintain control of the beast of one’s own sinful passions. It means remaining master of your own domain not only in the hunky-dory, but also when faced with trial or temptation. Self-control may be the epitome of “easier said than done.”

It Can Be Taught

“Marshmallow man” Walter Mischel is an Ivy League professor known for his experiments in self-control. Nearly 50 years ago, he created a test to see how various five-year-olds would respond to being left alone with a marshmallow for 15 minutes with instructions not to eat it — and with the promises that if they didn’t, they would be given two. The New York Times reports,

Famously, preschoolers who waited longest for the marshmallow went on to have higher SAT scores than the ones who couldn’t wait. In later years they were thinner, earned more advanced degrees, used less cocaine, and coped better with stress. As these first marshmallow kids now enter their 50s, Mr. Mischel and colleagues are investigating whether the good delayers are richer, too.

Now Mischel is an octogenarian and freshly wants to make sure that the nervous parents of self-indulgent children don’t miss his key finding: “Whether you eat the marshmallow at age 5 isn’t your destiny. Self-control can be taught.”

If It’s Christian

Alongside love and godliness, self-control serves as a major summary term for Christian conduct in full flower (2 Timothy 1:7; Titus 2:6, 12; 1 Peter 4:7; 2 Peter 1:6). It is the climactic “fruit of the Spirit” in the apostle’s famous list (Galatians 5:22–23) and one of the first things that must be characteristic of leaders in the church (1 Timothy 3:2; Titus 1:8). Acts summarizes the apostle’s reasoning about the Christian gospel and worldview as “righteousness and self-control and the coming judgment” (Acts 24:25). And Proverbs 25:28 likens “a man without self-control” to “a city broken into and left without walls.”

For starters, the idea of controlling one’s own self presumes at least two things: 1) the presence of something within us that needs to be bridled and 2) the possibility in us, or through us, for drawing on some source of power to restrain it. For the born-again, our hearts are new, but the poison of indwelling sin still courses through our veins. Not only are there evil desires to renounce altogether, but good desires to keep in check and indulge only in appropriate ways.

Christian self-control is multifaceted. It involves both “control over one’s behavior and the impulses and emotions beneath it” (Philip Towner, Letters to Timothy and Titus, 252). It includes our minds and our emotions — not just our outward actions, but our internal state.

Heart, Mind, Body, Drink, and Sex

Biblically, self-control, or lack thereof, goes to the deepest part of us: the heart. It begins with control of our emotions, and then includes our minds as well. Self-control is often paired with “sober-mindedness” (1 Timothy 3:2; Titus 1:8; Titus 2:2; 1 Peter 4:7), and in several places the language of “self-control” applies especially to the mind. Mark 5:15 and Luke 8:35 characterize the healed demoniac as “clothed and in his right mind.” Paul uses similar language to speak of being in his right mind (2 Corinthians 5:13), as well as not being out of his mind (Acts 26:25). And Romans 12:3 exhorts every Christian “not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think,” but to exercise a form of self-control: thinking “with sober judgment.”

Self-control is bodily and external as well. The apostle disciplines his body to “keep it under control” (1 Corinthians 9:25–27). It can mean not being “slaves to much wine” (Titus 2:3–5). And in particular, the language of self-control often has sexual overtones. Paul instructs Christians to “abstain from sexual immorality; that each one of you know how to control his own body in holiness and honor, not in the passion of lust” (1 Thessalonians 4:3–5). In a charge to women in 1 Timothy 2:9, self-control relates to modesty. And 1 Corinthians 7 presumes some lack of self-control in married adults that might give Satan some foothold were they to unnecessarily deprive their spouse sexually for an extended time (1 Corinthians 7:5). God has given some the calling of singleness and with it, “having his desire under control” (1 Corinthians 7:37); others “burn with passion” and find it better to marry (1 Corinthians 7:9).

The question for the Christian, then, is this: If self-control is so significant — and if indeed it can be taught — then how do I go about pursuing it as a Christian?

Find Your Source Outside Your Self

Professor Mischel preaches a gospel of distraction and distancing:

The children who succeed turn their backs on the cookie, push it away, pretend it’s something nonedible like a piece of wood, or invent a song. Instead of staring down the cookie, they transform it into something with less of a throbbing pull on them. . . . If you change how you think about it, its impact on what you feel and do changes.

This may be a good place to start, but the Bible has more to teach than raw renunciation. Turn your eyes and attention, yes, but not to a mere diversion, but to the source of true change and real power that is outside yourself, where you can lawfully indulge. The key to self-control is not inward, but upward.

Gift and Duty

True self-control is a gift from above, produced in and through us by the Holy Spirit. Until we own that it is received from outside ourselves, rather than whipped up from within, the effort we give to control our own selves will redound to our praise, rather than God’s.

But we also need to note that self-control is not a gift we receive passively, but actively. We are not the source, but we are intimately involved. We open the gift and live it. Receiving the grace of self-control means taking it all the way in and then out into the actual exercise of the grace. “As the Hebrews were promised the land, but had to take it by force, one town at a time,” says Ed Welch, “so we are promised the gift of self-control, yet we also must take it by force” (“Self-Control: The Battle Against ‘One More’”).

You may be able to trick yourself into some semblance of true self-control. You may be able to drum up the willpower to just say no. But you alone get the glory for that — which will not prove satisfying enough for the Christian.

We want Jesus to get glory. We want to control ourselves in the power he supplies. We learn to say no, but we don’t just say no. We admit the inadequacy, and emptiness, of doing it on our own. We pray for Jesus’s help, secure accountability, and craft specific strategies (“Develop a clear, publicized plan,” counsels Welch). We trust God’s promises to supply the power for every good work (2 Corinthians 9:8; Philippians 4:19) and then act in faith that he will do it in and through us (Philippians 2:12–13). And then we thank him for every Spirit-supplied strain and success and step forward in self-control.

Christ-Control

Ultimately, our controlling ourselves is about being controlled by Christ. When “the love of Christ controls us” (2 Corinthians 5:14), when we embrace the truth that he is our sovereign, and God has “left nothing outside his control” (Hebrews 2:8), we can bask in the freedom that we need not muster our own strength to exercise self-control, but we can find strength in the strength of another. In the person of Jesus, “the grace of God has appeared . . . training us” — not just “to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions,” but “to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age” (Titus 2:11–12). Christian self-control is not finally about bringing our bodily passions under our own control, but under the control of Christ by the power of his Spirit.

Because self-control is a gift, produced in and through us by God’s Spirit, Christians can and should be the people on the planet most hopeful about growing in self-control. We are, after all, brothers of the most self-controlled man in the history of the world.

All his life he was “without sin” (Hebrews 4:15). “He committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth” (1 Peter 2:22). He stayed the course even when sweat came like drops of blood (Luke 22:44). He could have called twelve legions of angels (Matthew 26:53), but he had the wherewithal to not rebut the false charges (Matthew 27:14) or defend himself (Luke 23:9). When reviled, he did not revile in return (1 Peter 2:23). They spit in his face and struck him; some slapped him (Matthew 26:67). They scourged him (Matthew 27:26). In every trial and temptation, “he learned obedience through what he suffered” (Hebrews 5:8), and at the pinnacle of his self-control he was “obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:8). And he is the one who strengthens us (1 Timothy 1:12; Philippians 4:13).

In Jesus, we have a source for true self-control far beyond that of our feeble selves.

from DESIRING GOD post

Kindness

Kindness

is a behavior marked by ethical characteristics,

a pleasant disposition,

and concern for others.

It is known as a virtue,

and recognized as a value

in many cultures and religions.

It is defined as being

"helpfulness towards someone in need,

not in return for anything,

nor for the advantage of the helper himself,

but for that of the person helped".

The Importance of Kindness

The Pursuit of Happiness

The World’s Joy-Tragedy

Tony Reinke / August 29, 2014

In his classic book Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis delivers a profound insight into the psychological engine that pulls along the drama of history. “All that we call human history — money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery — is the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.”

Yes. Or to say this even more foundationally: the driving motive in history is the desire for happiness. Think of it, everything from slavery to prostitution to racism to terrorism to extortion to abortion to the ignition of world wars — it’s all driven by a desire for happiness apart from God.

Here Lewis jabs a steel dental probe into the raw unmedicated nerve of atheism. The serious problem with atheism is not intellectual atheism, denying God’s existence. The real problem is affectional atheism, finding God to be an obstruction in the path of personal joy. This practical atheism is the fundamental root problem of humanity and it plagues the hearts of atheists, agnostics, and even professing deists alike.

Atheists to the Core

Such a cancer in the heart can only bring massive social consequences. By turning away from God, our pursuit of godless joy must come at the expense of others (Psalm 14:1–4). The problem is not that there are atheists in the world; the problem is that we all universally identify with this atheism at the core of our motives. Every one of us is born with a twisted desire for happiness, and that desire must come at the cost of others.

So what happens when we seek joy and must use someone to get it? You must oppress. You must step on toes. You must wound and offend. And you come face-to-face and eye-to-eye with other such atheists seeking personal happiness at your expense. You get used. Paradoxically, these desires attract us to one another, making the impact even harder, like an inevitable head-on collision between freight trains.

The single man who idolizes sex is motivated to date to that end. The single woman who idolizes the attention of men to fund her sense of self-worth is also motivated to date. When they meet, they will use each other for their own selfish ends. It will cost a man his flattery, it will cost the woman her body, but in the moment both seem to be a small price to feed their own personal idols. So far everything seems peaceful.

But this idol-feeding cannot be sustained. Eventually the man’s eyes are drawn to other bodies of other women and un-drawn to the woman he sits across from the table right now. The flattery will eventually be exposed to be a sham, and the woman’s body will be shown to have been merely an object of a man’s lust. If you look deeper than the surface, you find in this relationship two isolated sinners, atheists whose affections are disconnected from God, and who are using one another to fill in the gap. It will end in war.

Fight Club

Exploiting one another for personal happiness, however subtly it appears, eventually leads to vicious personal conflict in all of our lives. James 4:1–12 helps us understand why this happens by asking us point blank: What causes fights and quarrels in our lives? What fuels the flames of anger, bitterness, and wrath you feel in your heart?

The answer is not complicated. We war against one another because our passions claw and cry for God-less joys. We lust for the pleasures we think will bring us happiness, but we cannot have those desires. So we murder. We covet and idolize the pleasure we think will satisfy our soul — sex, power, wealth, fame, you name it — but we don’t get them, they remain elusive from our clutches, and so we kill one another. We use. We get used. We covet. We become enemies of one another. We become enemies of God. We reject the abundant supplies God offers us for personal satisfaction. Welcome to the fight club.

Puritan Richard Sibbes explains the simple reason why all this holds true: “Before the heart be changed, our judgment is depraved in regard of our last end; we seek our happiness where it is not to be found.” In our lives, this is the tragic root problem behind the conflicts. We are blind to what will bring our hearts the satisfaction it longs for. We cannot see God’s beauty or enjoy the pleasures of God, so we seek to substitute it with the pleasures of the flesh. Our hearts are so backwards they are dead. We end up chasing the wrong end of the wrong end.

But we all chase something. That’s Lewis’s point.

So what is a “last end”? What is my “last end”? Puritan Richard Baxter explains. Our last end is our pleasure, our treasure, our chief good, what we use everything else in our lives to obtain. Our “last end” is whatever we perceive to be the best thing in the world for us, what we principally seek in life, what we think would make us happiest to have, what would make us most miserable to miss. It could be sex or attention or power or fame or wealth — each of these ultimate ends exposes the practical atheism of our hearts. Therefore, Baxter explains, “the chief part of man’s corruption in his depraved natural state, consists in a wrong chief good, a wrong treasure, a wrong security.”

No diagnostic question gets down deeper into us: What’s the one thing I cannot live without?

At root, sin is not wrongdoing, it’s wrong adoring. Sin is riveting our hearts on any treasure or security that replaces the treasure and security we can only find in God.

Idols

Because we’re all atheists in the root sense (blind to the abundant pleasures of God), our eyes are easily led from one idol to another in a chase of spiritual adultery. John Calvin explains, “Adulterers by their wandering glances, generate the flames of lust, and so their heart is set on fire” (Ezekiel 6:9). That’s how the heart works. By ignoring invisible God, we set our eyes on a chase for whatever we see in this visible world. What we see around us, we hunt, and what we hunt further inflames the lust in our heart for what we see.

This explains why idols take so many different forms in every century or culture. An idol is sometimes a tree carved into a lizard, gold molded into a calf, ivory shaped into a household idol, or a magazine cover printed with an airbrushed model. Like a rock climber, our eyes look around to find the next handhold in reach, each new hold further inflaming the lust in our heart and propelling us toward the summit of godless satisfaction we are drawn to pursue, but that will never actually be found. The climb is futile because the end never arrives. The aim was wrong from the beginning — it was the wrong mountain. And all the while, with each step, we’re only increasing the height from which eventually we will fall.

Here we find the unending cycle of sin. It’s ultimately deadness and blindness, seeking for worldly joys that turn out to be futile and lead only to deeper despairs in search for new promises of fulfillment in new forms of sexual expression or in more money or in newer gadgets.

Totally Depraved

This clawing of a dead soul for satisfaction in pleasures of the flesh, where lasting pleasure cannot be found, is what Calvinists call total depravity, the first letter in the acronym TULIP. This definition was perceived in Scripture by Calvin himself and many before, and since in the Puritans, the Princetonians, and Calvinists today. As John Piper says, “Total depravity is not just badness, but blindness to beauty and deadness to joy.”

We’re not all destined to be Adolf Hitlers, casting out suffocating oppression. For the majority of us, our powers are too small to feed off the self-centered pleasures we can squeeze from a nation. The degree of how depravity gets expressed varies for all of us. In many cases, this depravity in the affections leads more to disordered thoughts and dreams than in actual behavior. The scale of devastation differs, but our hearts are the same.

It’s one thing to be bad; it’s wholly another thing to be blind to good. We all experience this. This is the essence of total depravity — it’s what makes the depravity so holistically total — we cannot begin to imagine how that any real sense of pleasure or joy can be found in God!

Again, back to the old Puritans, who understood how depravity works. They said it is to have heart affections that are “vitiated” — an arcane way of saying the affections are royally screwed up. Depravity spoils the heart of what it was created to be and do. It’s the thirsty man drinking down saltwater. The natural heart desires only what dishonors God and ultimately ruins itself.

The sinner’s greatest sadness is that “he cannot get his wicked will gratified, or his carnal affections satisfied.” When the natural world can offer no more delights, the unnatural are pursued (Romans 1:18–32). His lusts are insatiable, and his sinful desires are never satisfied.

Thus, the reality of total depravity lands us here. We love what destroys us; we are blind to what satisfies us. Total depravity is the full screwing up of the soul’s affections. It is full blindness to God’s beauty. It is full resistance of joy in God. It is the essence of all sin.

Guilty Pleasures

The real tragedy is that it’s all a matter of preference. “Men prefer carnal sweets before communion with God,” writes William Bates of depravity. Talking truffles is no trifle. To be total depraved is not to be an innocent victim of sin. And it’s not merely forgetting God, a problem remedied by iPhone alarms or weekly church attendance. Depravity is volitional and intentional and rebellious ignoring of God, and as such it warrants God’s judgment. To enjoy the pleasures of the flesh over the pleasures of God is “a sin of astonishing guilt, and not less odious to God, and damning in its nature.”

To grab a handful of fleshly pleasure “is death” (Romans 8:6). And there’s only one remedy to this hopeless depravity. Rather than pursue the natural leadings of our flesh, we must pursue the promise of eternal joy in fellowship with God (Hebrews 11:24–26).

Sin is joy poisoned. Holiness is joy postposed and pursued. If I am to escape my lostness, God must become my greatest treasure.

Now What?

That’s where the storyline will stop. For now, we must simply recognize this practical atheism is quicksand. We all must have happiness. And for sinners, we choose sin over God. Total depravity is this desperate helplessness.

And yet, “The Lord doesn’t talk about your sin so you’ll think your trash,” writes one modern-day Calvinist. “He talks about it just because you’re not. He talks about it because he made you in his own image, with an infinitely higher and brighter plan for you than the one you chose for yourself.”

This is the plot twist. God reveals depravity to break those he is leading to true joy. But in light of the human tragedy called total depravity, such a brighter plan seems rather impossible apart from some kind of bold divine infringement on my pursuits. If I am to life, something or someone must override me. Someone must break me.

Calvinists throughout the centuries know, to find joy, someone must batter my heart and ravish my affections. Someone must turn my gaze away from idols and overwhelm me with a greater beauty.

Posts in the “Happy Calvinist” series:

• 1: The Van Gogh that Breaks My Heart
• 2: The World’s Joy-Tragedy (Total Depravity)

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Sources: C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (HarperCollins: 2001), 49. Richard Sibbes, The Complete Works of Richard Sibbes (Edinburgh: 1862), 1:181. Richard Baxter, The Practical Works of the Rev. Richard Baxter (London: 1830), 7:39. John Calvin, Commentary on the First Twenty Chapters of the Book of the Prophet Ezekiel (Edinburgh: 1849), 231. Ralph Erskine, The Practical Works of the Reverend Ralph Erskine (Glasgow: 1777), 1:390. George Swinnock, The Works of George Swinnock (1868), 4:486. William Bates, The Whole Works of the Rev. William Bates (Harrisonburg, VA: 1990), 2:221, 2:258. D. Clair Davis, “Personal Salvation,” in The Practical Calvinist: An Introduction to the Presbyterian and Reformed Heritage In Honor of Dr. D. Clair Davis, Peter A. Lillback, ed. (Mentor, 2002), 28.