Fruits of the Spirit, Part 1

I don't know if you've been watching the wildfires, the Corzine and Gatlinburg, and I kept thinking about all those trees, all those beautiful... You know, what are those mountains going to look like? You see where mountains get at wildfires. It takes years for that to grow back sometimes. Depends on how many of the big trees...some of those big trees can come back, but it just depends on how much damage. There was a lot of dried leaves on the ground. So, I've been watching that and thinking about the people, thinking about the buildings, the Alamo Steakhouse...I think I've eaten there before, invert to the ground. They've had over 100...well, the numbers and the hundreds of structures, if you count the little structures... There was 150 homes or something. The last I heard to maybe more now have been basically destroyed, plus the ones that were damaged.

This is a major catastrophe. But I keep thinking about the trees, too. I love the Appalachian Mountains, the Smoky Mountains, and the Appalachian Mountains. I traveled that Blue Ridge Parkway all the way from the Smokies up to Shenandoah National Park. When my kids were young, we traveled from Texas to Pennsylvania, and Chattanooga, because we had family there. We'd always drive up through there. We'd stay at one of those parks on our trip.

I've met many a bear over the years. But I keep thinking about what did that park going to look like, and some of the Blue Ridge Parkway, and the trees. Now, when we first moved to Texas back years ago, I was working at a radio station in a town named Uvalde, Texas. It's a little town in West Texas. Uvalde doesn't have very many trees. There's trees in the town because there's water there. But you get out away from the town, and it's a sagebrush, mainly. And there's not a lot of trees. So when they would build the roads, if there was a tree in the way, they left the tree in the road, and built the road around it. Now, it's not there anymore, but when we moved there in the 80s, there was a four-lane highway running through town. And if you were headed west, or not head away at night, you'd be real careful, because right in the middle of the two lanes was a tree. They just, right in the middle of the road, came up out, they wouldn't cut the tree down. And finally, it caused enough accidents, they had to cut it down. But it wasn't unusual on the back roads of the town. You would still be driving along, and there in the middle of the road would be a tree. They'd build the road around it, right through the middle of it. Or it'd be in the middle, because trees were considered amazing things. I never remember when I first moved there. The first man I met, I was pumping gas, and he said, are you new here? And I said, yeah. And he said, I bet you're glad to be in a place with trees, aren't you? I said, what? He says, you know, he says, I traveled to Oklahoma one time, and all I saw was a place with no trees. And he says, I'm so glad to be in a place with trees. Well, most of the trees we call big bushes here. But anyways, the trees were important. Trees were important. You know, David compares a righteous person to a tree? Let's go to Psalm 1.

How is a godly person like a tree?

Verse 1. Blessed is a man who walks not in the counsel of the ungodly, but stands in the path of the sinners, or sits in the sea, and is escorted for. But his delight is in the law of the Lord, and in his law he meditates day and night. So he's saying, you know, to start with, we want to be blessed to life, we have to seek God's counsel. We have to seek God's law. We have to seek how God wants us to live. And then verse 3, he says, It's a fascinating idea. A man's like a tree planted by rivers of water, brings forth fruit in its season, does it wither, and he prospers. Are we talking spiritually here? How are we like a tree? Well, first of all, let's just look at this, because this is the beginning of a series of sermons, and I've been asked both here and in Nashville to give a series of sermons on the fruits of the Spirit. So, you know, last year, at the beginning of this year, we went through 11 sermons on the Ten Commandments, because a couple of people had asked for a series of the Ten Commandments. We'll be going through 9 sermons over the next 3 or 4 months on the fruits of the Spirit. We're going to be looking at those fruits and Galatians, we're looking at them one by one, because what we find here in these analogies, we'll also be going through a lot of analogies in the Old and New Testament that talks about bearing fruit that were like trees, that were like vines, using these agricultural analogies to teach us something. You know, the first thing you think about a tree is a tree has no choice where it's planted. It is planted where the owner of the tree plants it. One of the first lessons we learned from what David says here is that you and I are called where God calls us and when God calls us. How many times have you thought, and I've heard so many people say, if God would have just called me in a different time period, if God would have called me before I made so many mistakes, if God would have called me, then you fill in the blank. Or if God would have called me when I retired, then I wouldn't have to lose my job. I next had people say that. I wish He would have waited to call me. Of course, all of those statements are a misconception of what God is doing in your life. God calls you when He calls you for His purposes, and that's where you're planted. Now, as we go through these series of nine sermons, you also see there are times where He will replant you. He might pull you up and move you someplace else. They'll replant you someplace else. So the place and time is of God. God calls us and plants us where He wants us to be. Secondly, we are planted by a river of water. Anybody who's ever tried to grow anything knows that if you don't have enough water, plants die.

We've had a drought here. When we lived in Texas, in South Texas, if we didn't water the grass two or three times a week, it died in most summers. And everybody watered the grass, and the city would start to run out of water, so they would ration. You could only water your grass at three at night, three in the morning. A couple days a week, that was it. Because if you don't have water, things won't grow. Now, go ahead and leave a marker here. We'll come back to this. But let's go to John 7. John 7. Verse 37.

John 7.

And that's real important to understand. In the fruits of the Spirit, as being described in the Scripture, we can't do this ourselves. But we have to participate in its production. It is something God does through us, but includes our participation. That's why it's living water. God's Spirit has to come through us, into us, and produce something. Something comes out the other end. Something flows out of us because of God's Spirit.

When we begin to look at the fruits of the Spirit, there's something very important we have to understand here. God expects us, when we receive His Spirit, to begin to keep His law. We obey the Sabbath. We keep the Holy Days. We don't eat the unclean food. We look at the Ten Commandments as we went through those, and we try to keep those both in the letter, but more importantly, in the Spirit.

Because if we're keeping the Ten Commandments in the Spirit, you can't break them in the letter. If you don't hate anybody, you're not going to kill them or commit murder. So we understand that this brings us to all these acts of obedience. That Christianity is more than simple acts of obedience. It is having the fruit of the Spirit. In other words, we can do the acts of obedience, and that's the first stages of our conversion. Disobedience retards the conversion process.

Obedience moves it forward. But we can keep the law and not be moving forward in our conversion process. We are to bear fruits. Now, as we go through these, you will begin to see that when we really talk about conversion, we have to understand that this involves every aspect of who we are, every part of our being, our character, our personality, our thought process, the way we treat other people, everything. Real conversion involves not just taking an old person and cleaning them up. It takes an old person and making them a different person. So what we're talking about here is the conversion process the next stage.

Because we have to be very careful not to get smug in our obedience and say, well, I'm doing my obedience. And we're like the man who came to Jesus and said, but I keep all the commandments. Remember, he said, ah, but you're lacking something.

He didn't know he was covetous in this. He didn't know he was breaking the tenth one. Ah, but you're lacking something. Are we keeping the commandments and still lacking something? This is how we get into the Sermon on the Mount and we get into the fruits of the Spirit. So at some point we'll need to go through the Sermon on the Mount, too. That will be another tensor. Let's go on. He says, so remember, let me make another comment here. What God gives us is Spirit.

It is not to be dormant. God's Spirit is to flow through. It produces something that affects others, that comes through us, that changes who we are. So that it's like a river flowing through us, Jesus said here. Let's go back now to Psalm 1. So this living water produces good fruit. It produces good fruit. What is that fruit? Now David doesn't define it here because David has an idea of what that fruit is and so forth.

But he specifically begins to define the fruit of the Spirit. Now remember, I want to keep stressing, this is fruit we must help produce. We are interacting with God to produce this fruit. But it is not something that any of us can produce on our own. Because it is what? The fruit of the Spirit.

It doesn't say the fruit of the person. It is fruit produced in that person through our submission to God's Spirit. And this can get a whole lot harder than thou shalt not steal. Now, of course, if you have the fruits of the Spirit, you won't steal. You keep the law. So the law is firm in what God tells us to do. But the fruits of the Spirit take us into the next steps, if you will, of conversion. So let's go to Galatians 5.

And Paul introduces the fruits of the Spirit with the results of just living the way we live. So let's start in verse 19.

That is a really strong statement. If we hear God's call, we come along, we come into the church, we make some changes in our lives, we don't keep Christmas and Easter anymore because they're wrong, we keep the Sabbath and the Holy Days because it's right. But inside we're the same person we were 30 years ago. And these are the fruits of our lives, the works of our lives. Then he says, we won't inherit the kingdom of God.

And Paul tells the people in Galatians, I've told you before, you keep this up, because the church in Galatia had a number of problems. You keep this up and you're not going to enter the kingdom of God. Verse 22, But the fruit of the Spirit, this is what is produced, it comes out from us, it flows from us, it is a fruit that is born inside our very being. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. So this is it. This is what God's Spirit produces in us. Have you ever thought what the law is supposed to produce in us?

It's supposed to produce something. What is it supposed to produce? What is God's way supposed to produce? Once we receive God's Spirit, these are supposed to become elements of who we are. And it is the furtherance of the conversion process. Now you go through that list and that's pretty frightening. I mean, peace? I counsel people all the time that don't have peace. I struggle with peace in my life sometimes. Joy? Do we all struggle with that? Long-suffering? I hate the word. I've learned to try to be spiritual by saying, okay, I believe in suffering, but only short-suffering.

Because if I say, I hate suffering, well, you must not be spiritual. Okay, well, I hate short-suffering. There. But this is what God wants to produce in your life. This isn't something, well, maybe one of these days I'll get one. No, these are the things that God wants to produce. This is what being planted by the living waters is to produce in us. And we are to put time and effort into the production of this fruit.

Now, what I'm going to do as we go through these series of sermons is I'm going to start and work from the list from the bottom up. There's a reason for that. When we get to love, when we understand it's of that word here, we're talking about the culmination of all the other fruits. They all come together, and this is sort of the crowning fruit of the tree. Now, at different times in our lives, we produce some of the fruit more than we do others. But what God wants is for all of these fruits, He wants to see you and say, look, all these fruits is inside this person's life.

Because this is what the Spirit of God, and remember, what is the Spirit of God? Mr. Pereman once again was talking about the argument over the Trinity. You know, our simple understanding of this is so important. The Spirit of God is not a distinct person like the Father and the Son.

It is God's mind. It is God's love. It is God's power. That's what comes into you and I. It's His mind. It is His love. It is His power. We can go to a scripture about that. That comes into us. What does that produce? It's supposed to produce His mind, His love, and His power in us.

As we submit to that, it flows through us. And something is produced out the other end. To have God's Spirit and not have it produce something in us is to retard and hold back what God wants to do in our lives. I don't think any of us really understand what God actually wants to achieve here. It may seem what He wants to achieve in every one of us. We have to have this understanding for this to be grown into us. So we're going to start on the reverse of these.

Let's start with self-control. And then we'll move upward through each one of these. What they mean, what we find in the scripture about it. Self-control, by the way, is very uncommon in our society. I can honestly say I can never remember going out and shopping any place on a Black Friday. But Thursday night after Thanksgiving dinner, and it was that evening, and we had all the family over, and we were talking.

And my son-in-law said, well, and I don't know what time it was, 8 o'clock or 9 o'clock, the Black Friday sales are starting. I said, even on Thanksgiving? He said, yep, and there's a computer you wanted to buy. So I went within the Walmart. What an experience! It was amazing!

It was absolutely amazing! People crammed in, you know, just, in fact, I saw Michael Keith there. I don't think he was there. Did you buy anything? No. He bought a computer. I bought the Eagles greatest hits. Two CDs. That's what I get. Anyways, he got a great deal on the computer. You know, it was. I had to admit it. But self-control was not evident that night in most people's things we're on.

We live in a kingdom of self, don't we? Immediate gratification. And that's one thing our entertainment does. There's been no group of people in history that lives like we do in this country and in Western Europe. Nobody. We live or we can have almost anything we want almost immediately. And so we are a people without self-control.

Leo Tolstoy, the famous Russian writer, he had a great story he wrote one time, How Much Land Does a Man Need? And he was making a point with it. The story is about a man in Russia. He was a peasant and saved up enough money to buy some land. And it excited him because he was a landowner, this whole piece of land. So he struggled and struggled. And after months and years, saved up enough to buy another piece of land, then another piece of land.

Until he was becoming quite wealthy. Then he heard about, out in the steppe, a tribe that sold land so cheap. So he went out and he went to where this tribe lived and the land was incredible land. Water, farmland. And he said, what? Wow! He says, how much can I buy? Well, he said, it's easy. It's a thousand rubles a day. A thousand rubles a day? Well, a thousand rubles, I guess, wasn't much money. He said, well, what does that mean?

You can start at this point, pick the point you want to start. And as far as you walk that day, as long as you end up at sundown at this point, it's your land. So it wasn't easy. You go two hours one way, two hours one way, two hours one way, two hours back, you get all your land. But you know, it was such great land.

So he went like three hours, three hours. At the end, he realized he wasn't going to make it. So he took off running. And he ran the last couple hours, got to the point, the starting point, right at sundown, and dropped over dead. Okay, this was a sorting tool because it wasn't true. But the moral of the story was, six feet from head to heels was all he needed. Lack of self-control.

This inability we have to control things. Now, all of us are slaves to a lack of self-control in one way or another. And it comes out in three primary ways that leads to actions. Our thoughts, our emotions, and our habits. And these all lead to actions of lack of self-control. He's all good. He's going to tell me how to have more willpower. No, I will not because this isn't a sermon about willpower. It is a sermon about the fruits of God's Spirit. Here's what makes this such an interesting concept in the way Paul put it. He didn't say the fruits of the Spirit is God-controlled.

The fruit of the Spirit, in other words, you can't have this without God's Spirit, is self-control. This isn't about building up more willpower. This is about this kind of control. It's about submitting to God's Spirit. It's about submitting to the power of God, not resisting the power of God, not fighting back against the power of God. So we get a strange concept here. It is self-control through the act of giving up control.

Self-control by giving up control to God. It gets a strange concept, isn't it? Fruit of the Spirit, not fruit of your mind. But it is self-control. So we're participating in this fruit. We're participating by letting God develop in us what he wants to develop in us through his power. So let's look at these three ways. This is a broad concept here. Three ways that we really struggle with self-control that leads to actions. One is our thoughts. Remember, our behavior is ultimately determined by how we think. I've mentioned that many times.

What are we thinking most of the time? Now let's go to 2 Timothy 1. I've mentioned this already, but I want to go really read this verse to think about what we're talking about here. Self-control, an act of learning to control myself by giving up myself to God. So that I have access to his power in my life. I have access to his mind in my life.

In verse 6, 2 Timothy 1, Paul writes to Timothy, Therefore I remind you to stir up the gift of God which is in you through the laying out of my hands, for God has not given us a spirit of fear, but a power of love and a sound mind. Now, God's spirit is his spirit. So whose power is it? I can learn self-control through the power of God.

Whose love is it? It can't be my love because of the spirit. It's God's love in me that I now submit to. And a sound mind. I don't know about you, but half the time I live in this world, I think I'm going nuts. It's a crazy world we live in. So where does this sound mindness come from? It doesn't come from us. So whose sound mind is it? It's God's. This helps us understand the Holy Spirit.

You don't have to have a complicated book on explaining all this stuff. This is what it is. God's spirit is his love and his power and his mind, and that's what comes into us. And that's what's supposed to be produced in us. So how do I know I have that fruit? Well, Paul says, let me explain the fruit. Now he doesn't spend a lot of time going through this great detail, does he? He just lists the thine of them.

But it would be nice if he wrote a 300-page book simply on the fruits of the Spirit. We're supposed to search this out of the Scripture and then ask God to help us develop this. It's our thoughts. Okay, so a healthy thought comes from this. Somebody's a spiritually healthy thought. It looks like a 2 Corinthians 10. 2 Corinthians 10. You with me so far? I've got to learn self-control by giving up control. That's what makes this such a fascinating concept, and sometimes why we still struggle with having the fruits of God's Spirit in our lives.

2 Corinthians 10, verse 4. For the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, in other words, they're not fleshly, but mighty in God, this is where this comes from. This is where these fruits come from His water. We don't water ourselves. We don't plant ourselves. We're planted. We're watered all by Him. In pulling down strongholds. Now, these strongholds are spiritual strongholds in your life and my life. Casting down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God. Bringing every thought into captivity. Capturing every thought to the obedience of Christ. And being ready to punish all disobedience when your obedience is fulfilled.

Bringing every thought into the captivity of Christ. Self-control begins with, is this how Jesus thinks? It starts with that. And you've got to know Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and what's in those four Gospels even begin to understand that. Bringing every thought into the captivity of Christ. How did He live here? How did He show us how to think? It's interesting. Remember, He was with the Father, came to this earth, and when He was on this earth, He said, I can't do anything by myself. Yet you and I, one of the reasons we struggle with the fruits of the Spirit, we think we do it ourselves.

This is the Messiah. This is the Word who said, I don't do any of this by myself. He's here in the flesh. No, no, no. Look, folks, you think you're doing this by yourself. I don't do it by myself. It is my connection with my Father that is still in heaven.

This, and that Spirit that is me, He is the Spirit, because He and the Father are the Spirit, it says, that flows through me, and that Spirit came out and people saw it. They saw what He did through God's Spirit. So we have to bring it into captivity of Christ. Emotions. We have our thoughts, our emotions. Now, I've met people who think that self-control is to be without emotions.

You can't do that. Try to live your life. I'm going to control every emotion. I'm never going to cry. I'm never going to get angry. I'm never going to... No, no, no. That's not what this means. It means controlling the emotion. You have the emotion. There are times we're supposed to be angry, and there are times we're supposed to grieve.

There are times we're supposed to be sad, and then we're supposed to work through those with God's help. We control it. We still experience it. Now, there are negative emotions like resentment and envy. We have to get rid of those. So, self-control now means getting rid of certain emotions. But the showing of emotion or the feeling of an emotion isn't of itself what is wrong.

It's what we do with it. We cannot live under the control of negative emotions. You know what's funny about this concept of self-control, by giving control to God, is you actually have more freedom. As human beings, we think, well, if I have to self-control everything, I don't get to do what I want. The truth is, what we really want, what we really need, happens in us because of the self-control as a product of God's Spirit. And we fight that. But can you imagine going a whole day without wrong anger, without envy, without resentment, without greed?

Can you imagine going a whole day without those things? Well, that's self-control through the control of God's Spirit that allows us to do that. Look at Proverbs 25-28. Proverbs 25. Verse 28. Whoever has no rule over his own spirit is like a city broken down without walls. That doesn't mean much to us today. But in a day of walled cities, that was an important metaphor. Because if you had an unwalled city, that means any army that goes through, any band of better ones that go through, any group of, if you have a small town without a city, any group of gang of thugs can come through. And they can steal and kill and rape and just so you had to have walls around your cities.

Or your city was under constant attack. He says, if we don't have control over our own spirit, and here he means control over our own thoughts and emotions, if we don't have control over that, we're like an unwalled city. We're constantly controlled by attacking forces. And this is sometimes feel like your life's like that. I'm just controlled by all this stuff. And it just makes me feel this way that I'm controlled by all the ways I feel. Now, this is a struggle. The fruits of the spirit, remember, come from God's help.

But with God's spirit, we can begin to learn to have control over our spirit. To the spirit of man. This is such an important truth. That's the reason why I didn't start with love on the list. We can't even talk about that yet. We can be working on this at first. Now, they all fit together. It's not like you work with one and go to the next. But when you start to work with one, it begins to open doors to the other fruits.

But if I'm constantly controlled by my thoughts and emotions that are not godly, how can I have peace? How can I have gentleness? How can I have faithfulness? I can't even reach those points yet. So this is the first of the fruits. Emotional control. We've all met people like this, and we're all automatically drawn to them. Emotional self-control is being able to express the right emotions at the right time to the right reason. Sometimes you don't express your emotion. You say, no, this one is not right. And you learn to get it under control. It doesn't mean you don't feel it.

Understand that. People say, I try not to feel these things. Well, sometimes we work, I don't know, feelings are feelings. They're chemical reactions to a great extent. What we have to learn to do is what we do with them once we get them. And this is going to God and saying, give me self-control.

I want to submit to your control, and your control says what? Your control says, I can't feel this hatred towards this person. That's what your control. But I can't do that myself. I wish to bear that fruit. This is where you and I participate. I wish to not feel hatred against this person. I know what they did was wrong, but I don't want to feel hatred. And so you will go to God and you will have to ask. I give control to you to control this emotion. And the answer you're going to get almost immediately is, forgive him.

Well, I don't know how to forgive him. They need to be punished. And the next thing you're going to get is, I'll take care of that. And usually at that point, the next thing is, oh, wait a minute, I'm not asking you to kill him or anything. I just don't want to feel, yeah, God says, I will take care of the punishment part of this. You let it go. Now, where do I get those from? Those thoughts don't just come. They're not natural to me. They may be to you, but that's not my natural thoughts.

No, my natural thoughts are, they've done something bad to me, go kill everybody in the village. And that's not God's thoughts, okay? That is not how God is at all. God's thoughts are, no, no, no, no, no. Now, we have to give up control to have self-control. Okay, help me to forgive, help me to work this through. Then you find yourself praying for your enemies. Well, God, please don't, you know, bring them to repentance. Don't destroy them. And that's when you're, oh, you've brought your thoughts into captivity of Christ. Isn't that what Christ prayed? See what's happened? This whole process becomes real.

But you have to go ask for it, and it's not easy. It is never easy, because it's not our natural tendencies. The last in this group here is habits. Habits are behaviors that are done over and over again until they become, they actually become ingrained in your brain functions. You know, why do you do that? I don't know. I just do it. It's actually imprinted upon our brains. So, many things we do, that's good. When you get up in the morning, you get dressed.

That's a good thing. You do that by habit. But we also have a lot of bad habits. Remember this, because we have corrupted human nature, which Adam did not have at first, he did later, soon as he had corrupted human nature, he got all messed up.

Soon as he had corrupted human nature, he didn't get along with his wife anymore, and he didn't get along with God anymore. And he had to get kicked out of Eden, the only place where the kingdom of God was on the earth at the time. What happened to him? I keep going back to him, because I was thinking about some of this stuff this week.

And God's kingdom was there. He got kicked out of it. We've been trying to get back to it ever since. We've been trying to get back to the kingdom of God ever since. This is what God wants to build in us for that kingdom. We have to remember, we enjoy sin, we don't enjoy the consequences. And when we don't repent of bad habits or bad behaviors, they become habits.

Proverbs 25. Proverbs 25, 16. Man, this is only one of nine. We have a long ways to go, don't we? Proverbs 29. I'm sorry, 25. Proverbs 25 verse 16. Have you found honey? Eat only as much as you need, lest you be filled with it and vomit. What is he saying? These things have self-control. A little bit of honey is good for you. You eat too much honey, you make you sick. That's his point.

Don't control your behaviors, control your habits. You know, the best way to avoid building habits, bad habits, the Bible tells us, is called fleeing. You don't play around with the situation, you flee it. We're told in the Scripture to flee a teacher of lies. We're told to flee sexual immorality, just like Joseph did. Flee from idolatry. We're told to flee all kinds of evil. In 1 Timothy, the apostle Paul tells Timothy to flee the love of money.

He'll run away from it because the more you sort of play with this, it becomes habitual. It tells what you are. So we have to understand, self-control requires running away. And we think, here's where the thing comes, oh, I know I have self-control. I can handle this. You know, what would happen if Joseph would have said, oh, I have self-control. I know Potiphar is the wife, is the most beautiful woman around. And I know I'm a young guy and not married. And I know that she really smells good right now.

And I know, oh, don't kiss me. Go ahead, I'll take it. I have self-control. What would have happened? Right? He understood. Run away. Then he ran away. The not developing habits or the getting away of bad habits is to run away. Change the situation. Move yourself out of the habitual situation. Literally, move. Go. I don't mean move to a different state or something, but move from where you are at that moment. Go away. 1 Corinthians 9. 1 Corinthians 9, here, going back to the Apostle Paul. And with this analogy, he's used all the time in sermons and sermonettes, and this passage is read, but once again, it's so powerful.

Do you not know that those who run a race, in a race, all run, but one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may obtain it.

And everyone who competes with the prize is temperate in all things. What's he talking about? It's the fruit of the Spirit. The self-control. Now, you can have... I've met some people that just have an enormous amount of self-control. Have you ever met people... and any people that don't have God's Spirit, you know, they never had a weight problem.

They never even eat sugar, you know. I mean, these people, they just... everything they eat, they don't drink coffee. They eat perfectly... I mean, food that is perfectly balanced, take all the right nutrients. And he's had this enormous self-control. Never had more than one beer. A enormous self-control. But he's talking about more than that. Of course, then they'd step out one day and get hit by a car. Right? But I'm saying we should, you know, have control of what we eat and do, but that's not all the entirely... you know, just self-control and physical things he's talking about here. He's talking about our self-control and physical things. Now, they do it to obtain a perishable crown, but we, for an imperishable crown, therefore I run, not with uncertainty, thus I fight.

Now, remember boxing... I mean fights. Boxing and wrestling were part of the Grecian games, the Olympics. So coming from a Greek culture, as he was, remember he was both... came from a Jewish and Greek culture, and he was talking to a city in Corinth. He says, you've seen guys wrestle, you've seen guys box?

He says, I don't box like I'm just boxing shadows. Thus I fight, not as one who beats the air. But I discipline my body and bring it into subjection. Thus, when I appreciate the others, I myself should become disqualified. That is, we must participate. God doesn't possess us, and then it's His self-will. We submit through Him, through His power, it becomes our will.

It's what we want. What we want to do is what He wants to do to become so great that it's ours. Because we're submitting to His Spirit that is flowing through us like rivers of living water. He says, we must participate too. We must discipline ourselves. This part, all of these truths, take some work on our part. As we get into some of them, you'll see why some of the Scriptures, where they use these analogies in the Old and New Testament about agriculture, how important it is, you'll see why trees and bushes in the Bible and spiritual analogies constantly get dung, thrown on them.

It is why sometimes you think you're up to your neck and dung in your life. You are. According to the Scripture, there are times God puts it there. He puts it there. Why? I need more fruit. I need more fruit. Let me center in just a little bit now on how to make this practical, this concept of self-control. And then the freedom we get from it. I was going to show this on a slide presentation, but I always have so many people email me and say, can you send me that because I couldn't write it down fast enough?

So, I have handouts. All my slides are just on handouts now. So, let's make this practical. We're going to try to make all these fruits practical and also understanding the steps we must take to participate with God so that He bears this fruit in us. This is why, by the way, whenever you, through sin or neglect, find that you're cut off from God and you don't feel as close to God and His Spirit is flowing through you. This is why when that happens, your life gets all messed up. You ever notice that? Yeah, your life is messed up because you can't bear these fruits. It's not the circumstances many times, it's the fruits that matter. We get locked into the circumstances. We're all locked in the circumstances.

And so, I'm looking at the fruits. The fruits of the Spirit are self-controlled. Here's the first thing you can do. Here's how you make this practical. Whether you have a problem with pornography or gluttony or anger or envy or anything that we all wrestle with. This is an issue of self-control. We can't control what we're doing. Alcohol, drug abuse. And by the way, as we go through these fruits of the Spirit, these are the most important issues in helping you deal with family issues, personal issues. Because a lot of times in counseling, we help give you biblical steps you can take. But those biblical steps, the power to actually do them comes from God. Which means it's from the God Spirit that we have the power to do the steps. So having these fruits are the most important things that we have to have in our lives to deal with any of our personal problems. I mean, if everybody in the church had all nine of these fruits being born in the way that God wants, I would not have a job. I wouldn't have a job except to keep things organized. That's all you have to do is keep things organized. First of all, that first slide you'll see, be honest with yourself and admit your lack of self-control. You know, it's interesting in AA meetings, what do they do? The first thing you do, you have to get up and say, I'm an alcoholic.

I cannot control this. I don't care what your sin is. You have to go before God and say, you know, sins of self-control. I can't control this. It's out of my control.

I need more self-control. Give me more willpower. God says, I have a better idea. Submit to my spirit and let me help work this out. Submit to me and let me do this.

So, we have to learn to do that. Secondly, confess to God in prayer and fasting. Be specific in asking God for help. Ask Him to give you the power to overcome. You're being very specific in your prayers. Overcoming issues of self-control can take extended periods of time. You didn't get there overnight. Even with God's help, a lot of times we don't get over it overnight. It is a process of being developed in us. For this fruit to grow, sometimes it starts real small, right? Look, I get a little bloom on the tree. I want the full fruit. I want this giant pear. I get the little bloom. The fruit's starting. So, we have to be very committed to confessing to prayer and asking for His power.

Number three, study what the Bible says about self-control and your specific issues, your specific problems. So, I have a problem with envy. I just envy everybody else that has things I don't have. Do a study on envy. Go through the Scripture as you're going through this process. Get your concords out and read everything there is about envy. Well, it's more fun to read about everything there is about the resurrections. I agree. I have no problem with the resurrections. I look forward to the resurrections. I don't want to study envy because I may find out I have it.

Now, it doesn't mean we shouldn't study the resurrections.

We should not do the one and leave the other undone. That's the issue.

You have to do all of it. Because the resurrections, the understanding of the resurrections, are part of our conversion process.

I can understand the resurrections that are filled with hatred and not even obtain the resurrection.

Number four, analyze what character and personality traits and past experiences led to this lack of self-control.

I've talked to people who are just hopelessly, it seems like, addicted to tobacco.

Only to find out that the first time they smoked a cigarette, they were six years old and dad stuck a cigarette in their mouth and lit it.

We know where it came from. We know why your body and mind needs it.

Now, let's go to the only source that you can get to help you do it.

The power of God.

You still have to throw away the cigarettes. It's like, God, please help me. God, please help me. God, please help me. We got the smoke. A couple came to me one time and said, we don't understand.

We met each other just a few months ago.

We started making out. Pretty soon we were having sex. So we would just pray together.

God, please let us not have sex today. And we would. And now they're pregnant, not married.

Well, you've got to flee. You've got to flee. You've got to look at what's causing this.

Number five. Analyze what you must do to change both your thinking and behavior.

How do I now apply these scriptures? This comes down to using scripture as a way to think.

I gave that as a seminar in Oceanside at the feast this year. It's about a two-hour seminar.

Maybe I'll do it here sometime. We'll just do a Sabbath sermon Bible study and combine them together.

Using the scripture is teaching us how to think.

Six, make a plan and measure your progress.

You know, it's amazing when you talk to someone who has an addiction problem and they'll look at you and say, This is my, you know, 875th day without using heroin.

You're keeping progress. Because that keeps them moving forward.

And then the seventh one is give support from others.

It's one reason God gives us congregations. We're not supposed to do this alone. We're really not supposed to do this alone.

Congregations of a group of people, all with our own set of problems, isn't it?

We all do them our own set of problems we bring together, and we're here to help each other. We're here to help each other.

We're here to support each other. We're here sometimes to look at somebody and say, Why in the world are you doing that? That's wrong. We're here to pray with each other.

We're here to help each other through this mess.

So we have to have a support group. Now sometimes it's not in the congregation. Sometimes it's a family member. Sometimes it is a group like AA. Although sometimes AA groups could be not so good.

Sometimes they're not so good. Sometimes they are. You have to be real careful about it.

So now we have this...OK, here's how we break this down. Now you start to see that even though God gives us the power, we have to do certain things. We have to go confess it. We have to keep bringing it before God. We have to keep asking forgiveness. We have to study the Scripture, let the Scripture guide us. This is the Word. This is the mind of God coming into us.

As we learn self-control by giving up control so that we can draw on God's power. And we do it because we want to. We do it because we need to. We do it because we love Him.

Now, what happens when we begin to actually experience this kind of self-control as a fruit of the Spirit? You give more freedom. If I give more freedom...yeah, look at the list. Freedom from selfishness and being controlled by our emotions of anger, hatred, resentment, jealousy, and feelings of worthlessness. What do you like to not have those things?

The more we have the self-control of God in us, and as we go through all these...it's not just self-control. It's all these fruits. The more these fruits are born in us by God, the less of these things we have.

You look at that works of the flesh, we begin to lose those things. Those fruits begin to dry up and drop off our tree. They die. These fruits kill everything else. Just like I had some kind of ground cover come into my lawn this year and kill everything. Almost the whole neighborhood.

I was in a whole neighborhood, killed almost every yard in the neighborhood. But at least we all look equally bad now. As my son-in-law said when he was busy over Thanksgiving, he came out and looked around and said, Man, I've never seen one of your yards look this bad. But then I look around and, you're old. They were in it this way. I said, Yeah, when you just fit in, you just get like everybody else, it's okay.

These things begin to dry up and die. As the other fruits, there's no room on our tree to bear equal amounts of the works of the flesh and the fruits of the Spirit. There's no... In your life, one of those things takes over.

So we begin to bear these fruits. Other things will begin to happen to us.

Freedom from despair, because we know our present suffering is necessary for the great rewards Christ will bring with Him when we return. When we get the long suffering, we'll show that. One of the fruits of God's Spirit is we can get discouraged, we can feel worn out, we can sometimes go to God and say, I have nothing left. That's okay. That's as well. I knew you were going to get to that place sooner or later. That's why you needed my Spirit.

Of course you have nothing left. You gave all you could. Now, let me do more. Get out of the way and let me do more.

Freedom from hatred, a proper authority, because we accept God's ownership.

Freedom from oppression, from proper...or hatred of proper authority.

Not freedom from oppression from authority, and there's all kinds of Iran authority.

But we don't always have to be fighting authority. You know, if I look down and go to H.R. Block this year and they say, wow, you really owe more money for taxes. I won't like it, but I will pay my taxes, and I'll get over it. Why? Because the Scripture tells me to. See? That's not a control issue. I would like to say, no, I'll just not pay my taxes. I dare the government take this much taxes. Mr. Trump said our taxes would go down. The money went up.

Now, why? Because the emotion is overwhelmed by the Word of God and the Spirit of God. And I hear, pay your taxes.

Jesus said it!

And now I have to bring every thought into obedience to Christ. That means I have to go pay my taxes.

See how this becomes very practical? This is practical Christianity.

But it's also very difficult.

Freedom from broken relationships. We learn how relationships work as these fruits are built in us. That's why this is the single most important thing we can do for our marriages and families.

Is, as people with God's Spirit, submit to the growth of this in us. The growth of these fruits.

Freedom from the bondage of being controlled by our bodies, including immoral sexual practices and gluttony and all kinds of things, problems we have.

Freedom from compulsive entertainment, where we enjoy vicarious sin.

Freedom from the need to control others.

The closer we are to having God's control, which builds a self-control in us, we don't have to always control everything. You know why?

And God's in control.

Now you and I have things we're supposed to control in our lives. These fruits actually show us that. But this need to constantly control everything goes away as we learn God's self-control.

That's God's job, not mine. There are times when it's just God's job.

And so we have to learn that through the self-control. Freedom from the bondage of chemicals like alcohol, tobacco and drugs. And freedom from the bondage of the wrong use of time.

This list can go on and on.

I just wanted to show that if we do, if we submit to God's direction in our lives, so that this fruit is being born in us, we begin to have freedom.

We begin to be free from all the stuff that holds us back. And as we bear this fruit, we now become open to the other fruits.

All the other fruits now, we begin to grow at all the other fruits.

As we head towards this concept of agape, the very love of God is at the top of the fruit list.

Human nature believes that self-control keeps us from doing what we really want.

Human nature believes that submission to God's rule in our lives, to His law, brings us slavery.

The truth is that self-control through the Spirit of God, which is the discipline to put ourselves under God's rule, to let God guide our lives.

That's one of the fruits of God's Spirit.

It is one of the character traits He demands us to grow in.

The fruits of God's Spirit are not options in our lives.

They're not options.

This is where God wants to take us.

It is one of the most important traits we can have for having a sound mind.

So, next sermon, we'll take on the fruit number two.