Self-control in All Things

Everyone who competes in the games exercises self-control in all things. They then do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable. 1 Corinthians 9:25

This verse has been poking at me for a while. One wonderful consequence of designing products with verses like this one is that it makes you dwell on them more and more (which is kind of the point), but it also makes you consistently uncomfortable with your life and how far you are from where you should be. Do I exercise self-control in all things? Seriously, He expects us to do that? Yes, He does, and if we are serious about running to win the race, we should want to be disciplined and self-controlled in all things. An elite athlete is very particular about his diet, his training, his sleep, even what he allows to enter his mind. How much more disciplined do we have to be if we want to please the one who enlisted us (2 Timothy 2:3) in a lifelong war? We will not buy what we want, watch what we want to watch, parent the easy way, serve the church when we feel like it. We won’t wake up when we have to wake up, we won’t fast when we want to fast, or pray “when we have time”. 

Other religions of the world that are works-based salvation have much higher commitment levels than the majority of Christians. They have to earn their ticket to paradise, ours has already been paid for. But yet, all over scripture, we are commanded to do things, commanded to take action, to show discipline in all aspects of our life, yet we prefer to treat His commands as suggestions. Matthew 25 is just an example, right Lord? You don’t really expect your sheep to do all that feeding and clothing and hospitality, right? Why don’t you just divide people up by who said the sinner's prayer, not based on what they did on earth? Doesn’t Jesus know we don’t have a works based religion? Didn’t He get that memo? 

And so I preach to myself - self-control in all things. If you want to have time to do that which matters, stop doing what doesn’t matter. Filter every decision through the framework of this verse and keep working on it until it becomes a godly decision matrix.