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Beyond The Message is a weekly podcast that dives deeper into the weekend’s teaching. Released after each Sunday service, it offers thoughtful conversation, added insight, and practical reflection to help our community process and apply what they heard. Whether you're revisiting the message or catching up, this podcast is designed to help you go deeper throughout the week.
Welcome to Beyond the Message, the weekly podcast at Christ Community Chapel, where we look at that week's teaching from the weekend services. We talk about it, we break it down, and apply it to. To our daily lives. I'm Jimmy Kozy. I'm here today with Brooks Montgomery, Brent Blake, and Holly Diakandru. Hey, guys, how you guys doing? Great. Doing great. Great teaching. This week on, Proverbs 25:28, which says a man without self control is like a city broken into and left without walls. And so Pastor Joe had three points. The first was the dangers. This is the idea that in ancient times, walls represented a number of things for a city. It represented protection. You control who goes in and out. And it represented peace. And the analogy is the same in our lives. Self-control represents those same things for us. Talked about the cause. So, if a wall has a breach, it comes because of a good desire getting out of order. So the example he used in this was talking about Felicity Huffman and how she went and paid a proctor to give her daughter a better grade on the sat and he ended up going to prison saying that a desire at some point along the way had gotten out of order. But that resulted in that action and then finally the cure. And in this case, he said the fix to self control. The path to self control isn't just sheer willpower and becoming white, knuckling your way to self control, but rather changing your affections so that your desires are reordered to the things that God has for us. So that was the message. A starting question. sorry, I didn't start with an icebreaker. Doesn't matter. We're going into it. Got an icebreaker based on that sermon. And here's what it is. the question I have for you guys is, is there a food in your life before we get into content that really causes you to lose your self control? And if so, what is it and why? I mean, mine came to into my mind immediately, which is telling, pizza, pizza, good pizza. Like, good. Like if there's a. There's a large pizza. Not peaches, peach, Peach pizza. Peach pizza. Like eight to ten slices of pizza if I'm hungry. And you put it on eight to ten in one sitting. Yeah, but he rides like 40 miles on bike. What good pizza? Like, whatever. That's what I want to know. So sometimes good pizza is like small too. It's like. So my favorite pizza place is in Cleveland. No free promotions here, but it's a, Il Rion Massive pizzas. They're Incredible. It's the place of the pizza. Incredible. I could eat. That's the name of the place. Name of the place. How big is pizza? I would say you're talking like bigger. Bigger than a normal sized tablecloth. Like you're talking. What's your style pizza? I don't know. That's what I'm looking at right now. You style pizza. I don't usually measure things in restrictions. I can compare it to thin. Thin but low inches. Tablecloths, thin but large. Kind of like a New Haven style of pizza where you're not gonna have much flop to burn off a pizza. How many table costs do you need to. So the last, the last time. Funny you say this. The last time I had an unhealthy amount of pizza was about three weeks ago. I did the calories, I probably had around 3,300 calories worth of pizza. Self control. You just put that out on your head. What goes on in your head? Just pure bliss. Pure bliss. What does your wife have to say about this? Is she with you? When you consume this, it's. It's semiannually to annually. So semi annually. It's like the phases of the moon. Burps his metabolism still. But anyways, that's easy. I don't know that I can beat that. Well, you don't eat 10 pieces of cheese. Absolutely not. But I will tell you what sometimes gets me is thin mint Girl Scout cookies. Right where you just like, if you don't take them out of the package, you look down, you're like, I've eaten the whole roll. Something just went wrong. So yeah, Girl Scout cookies. Yeah. But I can only get those once a year, so I'm safe. Not a fan. Not a fan. To each his or her own. The pretzels. No, that's thin mint pretzels. Not the same, Brent. That's not the same. Okay. Absolutely not. All I said is not the same. What about you, Brent? I. I thought I was going to say candy and then I thought I'd say pizza. Welcome, welcome. welcome in. But I've had to do self control because I was a youth pastor for a long time and you eat a lot of pizza and that catches up with you quick. But I think I over pizza, it's bread. That's a great answer. A loaf of bread. Like literally I will like fresh baked warm bread or just like any I go out to eat, I will ask for the whole basket of bread. I'll be like, just keep bringing them. But like when you're at home, do you just go and say, hey, you know what? I'm gonna pull bread out of the. If I let myself out, I would eat an entire loaf of bread. If I let myself. That's a good answer. That's a good. Yeah. I mean, growing up, my grandpa, who was a firefighter, would literally every dinner, because I stayed with them a lot, would take, like, a quarter to a half of the loaf and just sit it there with a giant thing of country crock and just all day go to town. So I have two. my first is ice cream. I cannot help myself with ice cream. Like, keep ice cream in the freezer. And I don't, like, put it in a bowl. I just bring it out. That's a tough one. A little bit. That's a tough one. I don't know how much I'm actually eating, because it's like, I didn't put it in a bowl, so I don't know how much I actually ate. So this is a point of contention between my children and I because they will always think there's more ice cream in the freezer than there is because they remember putting the ice cream in the freezer. They don't remember eating it. It's heartbreaking. And then they will pull it out, and they're like, what happened to that ice cream the last eight hours? I don't know. I think a raccoon got into the house. I'm not sure what happened. What do you think of tufts ice cream? Toffs or toffs or toughs? I don't know. Whatever it is up by Sandusky, I don't care for it. That was in reference to Zach's story. Then. the other is, Costco has this big bag of skinny pop popcorn. Oh, yeah. I'm telling you, I could eat that whole bag in one sitting without even thinking. I think that's that unhealthy for you, though. an entire bag of popcorn. It's like this big. It's like a half a tablecloth. Massive. In case you're wondering what's worse. Pizza. Worst bag of popcorn. Okay, we're off the rails here. here's a question that I thought about. so if you thought. Think about, like, a spectrum between being a super regimented person and being a super spontaneous person, everybody falls somewhere on that spectrum. Where would you put yourself? If a 0 is I'm rigid as all get out, 10 is I'm the most spontaneous person. Where are you? And then I'm kind of curious how does that play out spiritually? And the reason I'm asking this question is because I think, coming into this message, sometimes I think I at least would have connected rigidity and discipline to self control. When in reality, I don't think that's the case. I'm just curious where you would locate yourself and then how you see that play out in your spiritual life. It's a great question. Yeah. I think even the idea that self control is not a habit, that is one thing that stands out to. Kind of contradicted how I probably would have described it beforehand. I'm someone who's quite disciplined. and I think the danger in that. I was thinking about, even when Jesus looks at the Pharisees and says that, you know, these people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. And even how often Joe all of a sudden links to say, if you want to start talking about self control, it's not a habitual thing that you work on and you grit your teeth and you white knuckle it through, but it's where's your affection located? Right. And that's one thing that was convicting, even thinking about, hey, how often can I do spiritual things with discipline and with a good rhythm, but do them in a way where my heart is honestly not involved at all in the process? That's something that's quite convicting, for me. Yeah. Something I wanna talk about in a little bit is kind of like the interplay between spiritual disciplines and affection. Because, you know, one way to hear this message is discipline doesn't matter at all. It's all about reordering your affection. But then my question to that is, well, what does that do with. Yeah, anyway, I'm. I'm probably on the other side of the spectrum. So I'm probably a 10 out of 10 on. On spontaneity, you know. You wanna go on a trip right now? Let's go. I packed. You wanna buy a duck? I've already bought it. I'll eat whatever, you know, like, how many ducks do you have left? We're not talking about that on our right now. but like, I wanna always move. I wanna do the next thing. It's always very exciting. And so I think what can happen to me is that the idea of, like, having to slow down and trust God's timing, you know, I just wanna keep moving. And sometimes self control isn't about saying no to a bad thing. It's about waiting for the best thing that he has for you. And that can sometimes be a tension for me that I have to kind of check myself on. Yeah, I'm. I'm, probably naturally more like Holly, but learned like Brooks. Okay. So I'm naturally very spontaneous. I mean, I lived in a van at one point, traveling down by the river, the whole thing traveling. You are the guy. We did not. We would become. but I'm naturally, probably spontaneous. But I have forced myself to learn to become disciplined because, I will get. I will accomplish nothing or I will just move from one thing to the next. So I've ordered my life where I'm very routined. So, I wake up and do the same thing. I ride the bike at the same time in the afternoon. I will. And when things throw off my discipline, I feel out of control. So, in a spiritual sense, I have forced myself to dig into disciplines. Otherwise I will like kick the can down the road, be like, well, I'll get to this eventually. But there's also like, I'm. I grew up in an environment where it was very spontaneous. So I can kind of like teeter between both things. But I am m. Naturally probably more like Holly. Yeah. So what got me thinking about this was Holly, something you said, I think on the podcast a couple of weeks ago, you said something like one, of the things you've been told or told your kids even, is that sometimes obedience comes before the feeling. Yeah. And I felt like when I thought about that in respect to this sermon, it was like, but affection needs to come before obedience, really. So I was trying to figure out, okay, like, what is the relationship between. If. If it's true that our self control ultimately comes from rightly ordered affections, which I think I agree with. but that's a feelings oriented thing. What then? What role do the spiritual just like consistency and spending time with Jesus. What's the role of that in that process? I think for me, I'm very ordered and rigid. and, I would say, like my. To use the language that Joe used in the sermon. My habits are my exoskeleton. It's like that keeps me from going off the rails. That's true in almost every area of my life. That's true in how I eat. That's true in how I approach my relationships. That's true in how I work is true in how I approach my relationship with Jesus, which has upsides and downsides. another thing I was curious about. So, we, you know the quote that he, that Joe referenced from Jonathan Edwards, I felt like that for me at least felt like a punch in the face. Because what he said was that Jonathan Edwards said that, I don't know, paraphrase it. So I probably won't get the quote 100% right. But the idea was that you will only ever do the thing that you most actually wanted to do in any situation. And I'm curious for your reaction to that, how that hit you, because it hit me like, oh, I don't know if I agree with. I think, I think now, having given it a thought, I might agree with it. But I'm curious how you. I don't want to agree with it because what that means is actually if you're going to agree with it, what Jonathan Edwards would say, that you wanted to agree all along. All along. It's interesting though, because what that means is I was trying to think of like a situation where like, okay, if I, I get out of control and I yell at my kids, right. What I want to say is I didn't want to yell at my kids. I didn't want to yell at my kids. They were so disobedient and quiet. And you wanted them to be obedient and that's what you wanted so much. Right. But when you really take that to the core, it's like, no, what I wanted was my way. And I wanted the behavior from them that I expected. And when I didn't get it, that caused an overreaction in me and I didn't parent the way that, you know, God has called me to parent. And I can kick that down the curb and say it was their fault. But think that quote kind of rings some truth to my heart of like, nope, you know, your desire is leaking out here. Yeah. I think the leaking is. That's interesting. It's leaking out. Yeah. There was kind of taking, I think, another quote that came to mind immediately throughout, all throughout Pastor Joe's sermons, specifically when he had that Jonathan Edwards quote. Augustine, a theologian, says that, the essence of sin is disordered loves. And kind of this whole idea, again, the same, I think, really vain a trajectory of what they're trying to communicate. But even to your point, okay, how do I know, how are my feelings involved to say, what are the orderings of my love? So I think quite simply to say this, like, there is one throne, one Lord in all of our lives. That's why Jesus says, you cannot serve God in money. Like, there's always going to be a categorical competition. I love how Joe said, you know, it's not. It's not us that we all of a sudden go from loving God to hating God. Well, we go from God being number one to God being number two. Right. And it's so. It's a slow drift into that. But I think the second. Maybe it's through the voice of others, maybe it's even just through the Holy Spirit's work of hearing a sermon. The second that we can locate that my loves are disordered. It's not that God's number 15 on my list, but is there something else in competition as my source of joy, my source of comfort? And in that moment, that's where all of a sudden you spend $15,000 and land in prison trying to love your daughter. That's 10 pieces of pizza in one sitting. A little too personal here, Jimmy. Yeah, I mean, really, it's a, It, like, at its core, it's idolatry. So, like, what are you. What. What is the idol in your life? And so I just think the. I. I've been reading this devotional every morning on conflict and just how you react to conflict and manage conflict and all those things. And, one of the chapters, they talk about, like, what are you thirsting for? Like, what are you thirsty for? And they related to Jesus at the well and saying, like, what are you truly desiring is what you're going to go seek out. So if you're looking for attention or you're looking for, If you're looking for reaction or whatever it is, you go and seek it. And so the desire of your heart is what drives your actions. And so that's interesting. when I was younger, I heard. I heard somebody talk about, Psalm 37. 4, which says, delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. And that's a verse that, at least in the past, I've heard used to say, like, hey, if you follow Jesus, he's going to give you the things that you want, like the material things or whatever. But, what that the person I heard talking about this said was. He pointed out that, like, actually what this verse is really referring to is that if you delight yourself in the Lord, you're going to get the desires of your heart. They're not. They may not be what you think they're going to be going into the process, but what's going to happen is as your affection for Jesus becomes ordered appropriately, then the desires of your heart are going to change. And so you will get the desires of your heart, but you're going to get, desires that you didn't set out to get in the first place because you're going to have new ones that you ultimately will get in Jesus. And I just thought that what you were saying made me think of that. That like, yeah, something happens when we delight ourselves in Jesus, that when we stir our affection for him, that changes the things that we are interested in. This might not be the most philosophical thought. I feel like it's been just fun, this sermon of throwing around some big ideas. But even that is mind blowing, that we have a choice to love God. I can become so numb and default, almost like I'm in the market and I'm like, okay, do I want this cereal? Do I want that? Do I want this kind of 10 slices of pizza? Do I want that kind of 10 slices of pizza? The fact that we can be almost in a position where we can say, do we want to choose to love the God who is perfect, who is holy, who sent his Son to die on a cross, or do we want to put our loves elsewhere? Like even that extension of God's grace to let it be a choice. It's something that is, The more numb I become to that, the more forgetful I become to the gospel. I think to your point, the more distracted my delight is going to be found somewhere else. But in the goodness of the gospel, I don't want to lose sight, though, that. That's hard. I think sometimes circumstances are hard and it's so easy to say, like, these are my circumstances and it's stuck here and I would do this better or I would have more control in this area of my life, but I'm stuck here. And so I think it's great that we're like, yes, you have to change your perspective and you have to see where God is. But I, I just think it's hard. And I just think you should, like, acknowledge the fact that that's something that daily you have. We at least I have to wrestle with that daily. It's not something that's like a one and done of like, okay, and now every day I'm ordered the right way. It's like every day I wake up and somehow God still starts at number two and I gotta fight the way to put him back at number one every day. And if we don't engage in that battle, then he keeps, you know, we'll slip further and further down. Yeah, yeah. And I, I think for me, sometimes I. It's hard for me to get to what I'm really thirsting For. Because the easy grab is, like, you use the example of getting mad at your kids. So, like, oh, I got angry. And we think, like, well, anger is the thing that you're. Well, it's not really anger. Yeah, control. Right. Like, that's the symptom. And. Or maybe, like, for me, a lot of times it'll be like, pride. Like, if I don't feel like I'm, whatever I feel like my soul needs, then anger will come out or whatever. It's like, I've heard, Pastor Joe talk about this at time, at times past. He'll talk about. About the idea that there are secondary emotions and that often anger is a secondary emotion. So, like, if I punch Brooks right now, the first thing he's going to feel is pain. The secondary emotion that's going to come from that is he's going to get angry with me. And I think that one of the things I've heard Pastor Joe said that I think is really wise is that there are secondary sins as well. You know, like when you pop off at your children, on one hand, yeah, you shouldn't get angry like that. But on. On the other hand, that's a. That's a response to something that's become disordered on a deeper level. And part of following Jesus is figuring out, not just surface level, how do I obey the letter of the law as a follower of Jesus, but also what's going on in my heart. one of the things that I'm curious about is, maybe for us to get a little practical and maybe a little vulnerable for you. I thought Brooks, you referred to it, but Joe's statement about the fact that we don't often go from God being in first place to God being in last place in our lives, it's usually more like God goes from being number one to being number two, and something else usurps him and jumps up to number one. So for you guys, I'm curious to hear what is most likely to make that leap. How do you know when it happens, and then what do you do about it? Yeah, I think for me, I mean, whether it's a small thing, like the competition of do I go on my phone or do I spend time in prayer? Or even big things like saying, some of the greatest anxieties I have are my own worry about money, my own worry about, I don't know what people think of you, a reputation. Right. Versus just trusting in God and finding myself in that place. I think symptom, kind of the idea of symptomatically how do I tell I was trying to think about this? I think when I fail to have self control and my response is comparing myself to someone else who I'm doing it at least better at, or weighing myself to say, you know what, I failed in this area, or I'm not producing self control in that area, but at least I'm better than blank. Like the minute I start comparing, the minute pride starts kind of almost making excuses for the way I lose self control, I think is all of a sudden probably symptomatic that my. Or even justifying it, like I should have lost my control in that situation. Exactly. Like in those moments versus me saying, okay, Lord, wow, I need your forgiveness and grace in this. Right. It's me saying, man, I had a right to feel this way. I had a. Like, that's probably moments where something is disordered in my soul. It's like a sign that there's a breach. Yeah. Dashboards going, yeah, M. I think for me right now it would be, my kids, like, I desperately want them to make good choices and to love Jesus. And that's a good thing. But it becomes out of whack when I am trying to control a situation or manipulate or I become so upset by choices they make that are opposite of that, that I can feel like my anxiety, my stress, or you know, the need to like manipulate the situation and try to work this into here and there. And it's. Well, that's, that's not, that's not trusting God. Right. And so I have to have the self control, to be patient, to trust that he is who he says he is, that he loves them, that he's, you know, walking them through the journey. and so that can be really challenging. Yeah, Yeah. I think mine's changed with seasons. Like is my kids are getting older or, it's always. It always either goes back to pride or shame for me, one of those two things. but different things will trickle out in different seasons. I think right now the thing that God's been revealing to me is, for the last couple months I kept going back to the story of Joseph and I didn't understand why. And the way Joseph starts his life versus ending, like what we see in the book of Genesis is very different. The beginning of his life is like, look at me, I have these visions. You're going to worship me. And the end of his life, as we see in the book of Genesis is I never achieved this position of power, even though he had it. But he Was never the guy and he just kind of was content where God put him and God used him. And and so like what's interesting about that though is like the juxtaposition of his perspective with his. Because the fact of the matter is maybe he wasn't, he wasn't the guy, but he was pretty much yeah the guy. But he wasn't grabbing for it, right? Like he was content. Not where at the beginning he was telling his brothers like you're gonna worship me. That's right, you're gonna bow down. His parents, no wonder they threw him in a pit. yeah. He told his parents, you're gon, you're going to bow down to me. Like it's wild thing. Anyway, all that being said is like when I, when the thought I have mine is usually my mental state, like thoughts will start trickling into my head and I will rabbit hole down those thoughts where they're consuming me, where it's like I'm not getting this or I'm not whether it's getting enough respect for my kids or my wife hearing me or being heard enough, wherever, whatever I want my position, whatever. So that will derail me in many different ways. It will and I will. And it will, Holly said, start to leak out of me and I feel like I can manage it well but then like little blow ups will happen or I will just like spiral out. And so those are good reminders. When it's. My thought process is probably more because it always leads to a reaction in some way. So yeah, I think mine is probably my sense of success or at least my image of success in others eyes. And I can tell when things are sideways. Like for example, if I'm in a meeting and I can feel myself becoming agitated. I heard there was a guy who was a church planting coach. I work with our church planters and I've been to a few different church planting things and this guy was talking about how he coaches church planters when they are feeling that way. And he said like if ever you feel that way in a conversation or in a meeting, you should ask yourself three, three questions. The first one is what are you afraid of? Second one is what are you hiding? And then the third is what are you trying to prove? And to who? Because if you dig into those questions for a second, you're going to find something that has gotten you a disordered, you know, disordered in some way. And I feel like that's been true for me. But what I'll find is that if I feel like my sense of success is threatened, then I'm gonna be. I'm gonna be sideways. I'm not gonna be in a good place. I'm not gonna contribute positively to those around me. I'm not gonna. Because it's like that. If I'm not careful, that becomes way more important to me than anything else in. In the entire world. And of course, like, I probably got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 before Jesus. I've got, like, my kids, I've got self control, I've got discipline, I've got so on and so forth. But, I can just. I can just tell when I'm in it, when it's like a. I don't know why that made me as frustrated as it made me, but it did. And so I need to think, okay, what am I really thinking about here? So it's interesting, everything we said, that it all kind of is like a different flavor of chocolate. Like, it's all kind of like the same thing. Cause there's, I think everybody said pride in some different way. Or. Or we kind. We sometimes feel isolated, which then makes you spiral out even worse. But when you realize, like, no one wants to share their dirty laundry or their wounds, but there is something like, okay, I'm not crazy to know, like, oh, you pop off of your kids too, and you love Jesus, and not that it's okay, but we're fighting the same battles or we're fighting the same struggles and, But the enemy, I mean, the enemy knows where those breaches in our walls are, right? So he knows what's going to get to me and what's going to get to you and cause you to lose control of your right. And just like Joe said in the sermon, he is like a lion looking for that hole. And as soon as he finds it, he's going at. And so, you know, we should be on guard of that and be able to see the symptoms. If we were where they're leaking, to say, like, oh, we got a breach here. We need to patch this up, you know? Yeah, that's where that wall analogy is, I think, helpful as well, because, like, a city that had walls, had people on those walls watching out, saying, that's good. This is what's going on. And I think that is a, you know, if you carry that, you can carry any analogy too far, but if you carry that analogy into our lives, we should be watchful on the walls of our city, so to speak, looking for the signs of those breaches. And then upon discovering them, figuring out what happened, where did my desires get ordered and get disordered? And why did that lead to a loss of self control? Yeah, I wonder if like. Oh, sorry, go ahead. No, please, please. Like, I don't. I was thinking about this as you were talking and going all the way back to the first question. And this idea that I wonder how often we try to plug the hole ourself. And we're just trying to like, it's like shoving. I'm walking down there with some putty and I'm trying. Yeah. And you're just trying to shove it in and it just is going to break whole. Like, like break free again. And we think like, well, I'm doing all the disciplines or the right things or whatever and I'm. And it's really just like temporarily patching the wall. Like that is the purpose of the Holy Spirit. Getting back to like the spiritual side, what you were talking about at the beginning is like the, the Holy Spirit was given to us to make up for the things that we can't fix for ourselves. Like to make us whole in a way that we, no matter how hard we can, and even to fix the things that we think we can fix, but we actually can't. And I think that hunger to like, say, God, I can't get over this. So I need a divine, like, intervention of your power and presence in my life to correct me and fill what is void in my life. To remind us to set our affection in the right place. Yeah, because when you're desiring his presence, it's gonna, that's gonna overflow into every area. It is the one. If you had to look at Galatians 5, you know, love, joy, peace, patience, those all sound like, yeah, that'd be fruits of the spirit. Self control just almost seems like, huh, huh. I don't know if I would immediately in my mind think that that is going to be a byproduct of God's spirit, like working in and through my life. Right, but to your point, exactly, I think we've all kind of talked about it, you know, self control is not being ticked off, at yourself when you fail. And saying, I'm going to be doing better next time. About having appropriately ordered desires that ultimately point us. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Yeah. Where are you rooted? Where, where are you hoping self control will be produced if it's out of your own strength, vigor, zeal, man, I'm not sure if that's the proper place God calls us to discover it. Yeah. Well, look, this has been great. Thanks, guys. Thanks for listening. If you missed the sermon, you can scroll down and you can find it here in the description of this podcast, you can go to our website, cccchapel.com you can find this podcast and all our other material, all our other podcasts, wherever you find podcasts. Apple, Spotify. If you made it this far without closing the app, thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.