Self-Control and You: Here's the Beautiful Blueprint

A life has been lived that was supremely, perfectly, beautifully self-controlled. Self-control has been modelled for us by Jesus Christ. It’s worth reading through a Gospel account of his life with this theme of self-control in your mind. You see temptation under control (Matthew 4 v 1-11); fear under control (26 v 36-46); power under control (26 v 47-56); speech under control (27 v 11-14); and those are just a few snapshots from the life of Christ.

That’s the kind of man I want to be. How about you?

But… it’s tempting at this point to try to find some gaps in Jesus’ resumé:

“What about family? Jesus was never a dad, so what does he know about being pushed to the limit by sleepless babies, tantrum-throwing toddlers or hormone-crazed teenagers?”

“What about work? Jesus didn’t have a proper job, so surely he can’t relate to the demands of working a long day, the pressure of paying bills, or what it’s like to have a boss who does none of the work and takes all of the praise?”

“What about… (insert your issue here)?”

In other words: Jesus, if you faced what I face, you’d be a little less self-controlled.

But in fact, there are no gaps in his resumé, as this little nugget from Hebrews 4 v 15 informs us:

"For we do not have a high priest [ie: Jesus] who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin."

Jesus knew what it was to be tired, disappointed, betrayed, pressured, criticised and unfairly accused. He knew it all because he experienced it first-hand as a man, just like us.

Do you really think that in your life you face temptations like the ones he did in the desert? That you confront fear as he did in Gethsemane? You think your life is harder than his? No, Jesus has been tempted just as you and I are—and yet at every moment and in every way, Jesus exercised epic self-control.

Thrillingly, that means that, as we look at this man, we see what it means to live with self-control. Challengingly, it means that, as men like him, we have no excuse for not living with self-control. He was a man just as we are; if he could do it, we should do it too. This man is our blueprint:

"By this we may know that we are in [Christ]: whoever says he abides in him ought to walk in the same way in which he walked" (1 John 2 v 5-6).

Re-read that. That is huge! If I call myself a Christian, I ought to live just as Jesus did. That’s the standard. There’s the blueprint. This verse is crucial in helping us truly to come to grips with the scale of this building project. The reason that it is so pivotal is that it refuses to let us proceed any further with small ambition and a limited mindset. If you approach this book with the idea that what you would like is simply to gain a bit more control over your life, to curb your porn addiction, to get the discipline to diet, or to become a better man than you were before, then, in love, I want to suggest that you are setting your sights way too low.

You might be content with cobbling together a rickety garden fence, but God wants you to build massive city walls. He doesn’t want you to improve; he wants you to be perfect! He doesn’t want you to get a bit more self-controlled, but completely self-controlled.

Let’s not settle for merely becoming better men. Our blueprint is to be like Jesus, and nothing less will do.

That’s gospel ambition!

And I guess that’s where this book will differ significantly from most other books on the subject of self-control. Rather than providing you with seven simple steps to gain control over your life, I am daring you to take up the challenge of seeking to become a man like Jesus. Does that sound like mission impossible to you?

Good. Because it is!

There’s not a man on the planet who is capable of pulling this off. We have all fallen miserably short of his standards and, despite our best efforts, we continue to do so.

So how can this blueprint ever become reality? Surely this project is doomed to fail from the start?! The man you want to be is a man you cannot be, right? Your walls of self-control could never be rebuilt to that perfect standard... could they?

Well… no… at least, not if we’re the ones in charge. But “nothing is impossible with God” (Luke 1 v 37, NIV84). God is not calling you to do anything he is not equipping you to do.

Christ-like walls can be built, whoever you are and whatever your character and your past.

This is an edited excerpt from A Man's Greatest Challenge: How to build self-control that lasts, which is released on October 4.