Every Sunday after church I am so inspired to act or react to the message but I rarely know what direction to seek. I believe God wants me to share His word, so here goes!
We have been talking about virtues through our recent series called "Virtuous Reality". This week, we were focusing on self-control. Now I know this topic speaks to all of us! Our pastor illustrated the idea of self-control with a driving story and how he got stuck at not one, but two railroad tracks in the same day. His wife reminded him not to "go loosing his religion" just because a train was holding him up. Perhaps God stopped them so they wouldn't be somewhere else. We just never know why we are put where we are when we are, but we have to trust that it's right where we need to be at that moment. We got into Galatians 5:19-21 discussing the temptations. Pastor made two observations: 1. You are on the list and 2. You're not in good company! Read it, you'll see! Self-control is when we "get a grip" on ourselves. See, we can't control temptation, we can only control how we will respond to it. With sin, the Holy Spirit comes to help us see things the way God sees them. This is why when we're deep in sin, we start to feel guilty or ashamed. We are seeing what God sees.
Only God can set us free from the confines of sin. Then we can portray the true fruit of the spirit (Galatians 5:22). We can embody what love, gentleness, kindness, goodness, and so on, look like and shine a light of hope in this world.
3 comments:
That is such a great message, I would like to share it with the prayer group. Is that ok with you?
It's fantastic! It's not my message :)
Great idea! http://www.biblegateway.com/ is a fantastic website you can use to link directly to the scripture you reference (for all of us lazy people without a Bible near by.)
Thanks for sharing!
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