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Christ Community Chapel is a church in Hudson, OH, that invites people to reimagine life because of Jesus. Learn more about us at ccchapel.com.
Hey everybody, welcome to Christ Community
Chapel.
My name is Joe, I'm
one of the pastors here,
and if you are seeing me on the screen
in East Hall or in the Gym, welcome.
I have to do that
because we are in the middle of remodeling
our sanctuary as part of our
Every Minute Matters campaign,
and that means we are displaced
for the time being.
We have all kinds of services,
everybody's going to a different service
they went to before.
And I just want you to know,
this isn't the first time that happened.
Back in 1997, when we were a church
of a little less than 600 people,
we sold our building to Seton Catholic
School up there on Stow Road,
and we moved into Cog Valley
Christian Academy for three years
while we built this building,
and for three years
we did what we called church out of a box.
We were displaced, we would pull up
a big truck in the back of the school
every Sunday, and we would unload
everything we needed to do church.
And then at the end of the services,
we would load it back in.
We did that rain or shine, snow or sleet
and we had a blast.
It was,
I remember laughing together
with guys in the middle of winter
when somebody threw a package
of baby wipes and they were frozen solid,
and we thought there were going to be some
chapped buns today, you know?
But we
grew not just in a number of people,
we grew closer together.
And that's what I want to encourage
you with now.
Church people are people of habit.
So you've been coming any length of time
usually sit in the same section
around the same people,
and now you're around different people.
So go ahead and ask them who they are,
how long they've been coming.
Lean into this time that we are displaced,
check out a different venue,
but just see what God does.
Because part of the thing
when I look back on the time we did
church out of the box,
is some of my favorite memories.
That's what I want for you.
When you look back on this summer of more,
that you will look back with
great memories of what God did in
and with and through you during this time.
All right.
Okay.
We are in a series on Proverbs
where we're looking for wisdom
and we're calling it More Wisdom.
More life.
Wisdom is what you need
for all those decisions
in life that are not right or wrong
decisions.
The right and wrong decisions in some ways
are the easy ones.
Because at least
you know what God has said when he gives
this clear instructions
about your sexuality, or about your money,
or about how to treat other people,
that's easy, because at least you know.
But then there are other decisions
where you
you just don't know exactly what to do.
That's when you need wisdom.
And one of the interesting things
about Proverbs is that Proverbs
doesn't tell us so much
how to make wise decisions as it does.
How to become the kind of person
who makes wise decisions.
And today
we come to the topic of self-control.
And this is the proverb.
This is Proverbs
chapter 28 verse or chapter 25, verse 28.
A man without self-control is like
a city broken into and left without walls.
A man without self-control is
like a city broken into and left
without walls.
A person without self-control
is not going to live their best life.
If you don't have self-control,
you're going to mess your life up,
and probably the lives of the people
that are around you.
Okay, so here are my three points
that I want to pull out.
Just cover.
In our time together,
I want to talk about the danger,
the cause and the cure.
That's it.
The danger, the cause and the cure.
First the danger.
So Solomon, who wrote this proverb,
says that a man without self-control
is like a city broken into
and without walls.
One of the great advantages,
if you lived in the ancient world,
was to live in a city with walls,
because walls meant safety,
it meant security, it meant peace.
And to live there
meant that you enjoyed those things.
Nehemiah.
In the book of Nehemiah,
Nehemiah is an exile.
Israel has been conquered by Babylon.
He has gone to Babylon.
He has risen to the place
of being the cupbearer for the king.
And he hears that
the walls of Jerusalem are rubble.
And he sits down and he weeps.
And then he does.
He kind of comes up with a plan to restore
Jerusalem, and his plan
isn't to have economic restoration.
He doesn't come with a like a temporary
government or anything like that.
What he comes with
is a plan to rebuild the walls,
because he realized that the walls
were the most important thing,
because the walls were protect anything
and everything that's valuable to you.
Solomon says.
Your soul, my soul, are just like that,
that we that self-control is what protects
what we think
and what we feel is valuable in our lives.
And without self-control.
We are like a city without walls.
All right.
So he has come to us
and told us this, this whole idea
that self-control is what we need in
self-control is the ability
to manage your desires,
to manage your longings.
It's actually the ability
to order your desires in the best order
possible, in order to have the best life
you can have.
I remember when my kids were teenagers,
and I was trying to talk to them
about self-control,
and they wanted me to give them
more freedom so they could make
their own decisions instead of me
making so many decisions for them.
And I don't know if they'd taken
a physiology course or what.
This is what I landed on, I said.
I said, self-control is like this.
There are two types of creatures.
There are creatures with endoskeleton
and creatures with endoskeleton.
And in
creatures like a human
being, where your bones are in the inside.
And so your strength and structure
come from the inside out.
And then in skeletons like a crab, where
the strength comes from the outside in.
And I said to them, listen,
until I'm sure that you are formed
an end skeleton and you have strength
from within to manage your desires.
I will be your ecto skeleton,
and I will make those decisions for you
like you need to do your homework
before you watch the movie.
I wanted to find a way to see
if they could
order their desires
in the best possible way.
One of the dangers, by the way,
of growing up in a home like mine,
where the parent was responsible
for giving the structure,
is that sometimes
in, the child can go away to college
and then find out that all their structure
and strength came from outside of them,
and they get to college
and they become a city without walls,
and their lives are just run over.
And that's
what you hear about all the time.
So that's the danger.
That means my second point,
which is the cause
if you have no self-control,
then you're you're in a terrible trouble.
I mean, you'd be homeless
like, my my two year
old grandson has very little self-control.
But he's only he's only two,
but he can't live on his own.
That's what that means.
You know,
most of us have some self-control.
We have walls.
But we might have breaches in the walls.
Places that aren't completely solid.
You know, the Bible has a couple of images
for Satan.
One of them is in John chapter
ten, where Jesus says that Satan is
like a thief who comes in
to steal and kill and destroy.
And then in first Peter, he describes
Satan as a lion who is prowling around.
So if you think of you,
your soul being like a walled city,
you have Satan prowling around
looking for a breach that he can get into
in order to steal and kill and destroy.
Right.
And then the question is,
what causes a breach?
Well, if self-control is the ability
to order your desires
in the best possible order,
then a breach happens.
When an order gets
when a desire gets out of order,
when a teenager decides to watch the movie
and not do his homework,
and then he never gets around
to his homework,
that's a breach that there will be chaos
that happens.
After that.
He doesn't know exactly how much chaos.
There's a movie.
Years ago, starring Ted Danson
and Ethan Hawke.
And in that movie, Ethan Hawke as The Sun,
Ted Danson as the father, and Ted Danson
had left the family years ago,
and the family had kind of blown up.
And now Ethan Hawke was a young,
young man,
and he sits down with his father
and he says to him, what happened?
Why did you leave us?
Why did our family just disintegrate
and blow up?
And after some hemming and hawing
and Ted Danson said, well,
I guess when I was working and
I started making money,
I felt like a success.
So I wanted to work more.
And the more I worked, the more
I felt like I was failing at home,
and the more that made me want to work.
And then things just fell apart.
What happened?
I mean, there's nothing wrong
with wanting to be successful.
Nothing wrong with making money.
What happened with Ted Danson in that
movie is that it just got out of order,
and it caused a breach,
and then he lost everything.
Felicity Huffman, 2019.
She was the star of the sitcom Desperate
Housewives, and in 20 1817,
she was like a darling.
And then in 2019, she got arrested
because she got put in prison,
because she spent $15,000
to bribe a proctor of the SAT
to correct her daughter's answers
so that her daughter could get
into the college she wanted to get into.
What happened?
There's nothing wrong
with wanting your daughter
to get into the college that she wants.
Nothing wrong with loving your daughter.
What happened
was that desire got out of order
and became so important to her
that it caused a breach,
and she ended up in prison,
losing everything that she held dear.
So how do we create a life
where our soul is protected,
where we have walls
and no breaches in our walls?
And that brings me to my final
point, which is the cure.
A few weeks ago, I read a
novel about a terrorist,
and in that story, the mastermind
who recruited the terrorist was describing
how he got him to do everything.
And he said he was a young man
without self-control.
And somebody without self-control can
easily fall into the control of another.
It's like Bob Dylan
wrote a song back in the 60s and 70s.
Everybody serves somebody and he says, it
may be the devil,
it might be the Lord,
but you gotta serve somebody.
The reason that's so important is Felicity
Huffman didn't wake up one morning
and think, hey,
I'm going to try something that could
and will land me in prison,
which she got up that morning
and just said,
I love my daughter so much that she became
the servant of that desire.
There's a guy named Jonathan Edwards
who is an 18th century pastor,
theologian, thinker.
He's actually considered
one of the best minds
that ever came out of America.
And he said something that I think
is pretty profound.
He said that every human being always does
what they most want.
They always follow the deepest desire.
And I say, that sounds profound.
That's profound to me.
Because if that's true, that means
that the secret for self-control
is not willpower.
And I always thought it was always
thought like, I want something really bad.
I just have to will myself
to not get that.
But that's not what he says.
That's not the way it works.
And somebody challenged him
and he said, no, I've had to do things
I don't want to do.
Like I got robbed
and I gave the guy my money.
I didn't want to give him my money.
And what Jonathan Edwards said was,
oh no, no, you
your desire was for your life
more than money.
Your your greatest desire always wins.
And of course, the kicker with that is
sometimes if something gets out of order,
then the thing we desire
the most is what we lose.
I read an article
about the Godfather movies
because that was really interesting.
And and this article said that one of the
that the whole Godfather one and two was,
was designed to bring you
to the very end of Godfather two,
because Godfather one, the way
the reason The Godfather became
the Godfather was all because the family,
everything was about the family.
The family was close.
The family was to be protected.
The family was.
You were loyal to the family
at the end of Godfather two,
Michael Corleone,
who's the godfather, is sitting.
This is the last scene.
He's sitting in a garden, alone
in a chair.
The wind is blowing and he has nobody.
He has no family left.
And the reason is because
of self-control that his desires were out.
It created a breach.
And what he held dear was the story.
So how do we make sure?
How do we make sure our desires
are in the proper order?
Whenever I ask a question like that. What?
How are things supposed to be?
I always go back to the Garden of Eden
and in the Garden of Eden.
I don't think Adam and Eve had they.
I don't think they struggled
with self-control, at least not at first.
I think they loved being with God.
They loved to walk with God.
I don't think they wanted anything
too much.
I don't think they wanted food too much.
I don't think they wanted success
too much.
I don't think they wanted sex too much.
I don't think I think everything was in
the order that it was supposed to be in.
And then Satan comes and Satan tempts
them to want something more than God.
And what's interesting
is that Satan didn't tempt them to go
from loving God to hating God.
What Satan did was all.
All he needed to do
was get God from being number one
to big number two.
That's it.
And that caused enough of a breach
for Satan to come into our world,
to steal and kill and destroy everything.
There's a reason in the Gospel of Matthew
that Jesus says
that the greatest commandment is to love
the Lord your God with all your heart,
soul, and mind.
Because loving God is the secret
to everything.
The secret to self-control is not
willpower, it's affection.
So the question is,
then how do we love God?
How do we get to the place
where we love him with all our heart
and our soul and our mind?
Now there's a story I read years ago.
It's a great story.
Story about a man was riding a train
and there were two men on the train.
He was watching them.
They seemed like
they had a kind of a special relationship.
And all of a sudden
one of those guys went into a seizure,
and his friend picked him up
and laid him in the aisle of the train
and cradled his head in his lap
and tried to comfort and soothe him
until the seizure was over
and his friend fell asleep.
And the guy who was witnessing this
said to him, tell me about your friend.
Tell me what's going on.
And the man said, well,
my friend and I were.
We served in the war together,
and one time
we were in a firefight in the jungle,
and I got shot in my legs, and
I was there in the jungle, and I couldn't,
I couldn't walk, and I was going to die.
He came back for me and he put me
on his shoulders and he carried me out.
He saved me.
Five years ago,
I found out he had this condition.
And so I sold my house
and I've come to care for him.
And then he said this because Mr..
After what he did for me, there
isn't anything I wouldn't do for him.
We take communion every week here at.
The reason we do
that is to remind ourselves
that's what Jesus did for us.
First, John four says that we love
because he first loved us.
The secret to self-control
is not willpower, it's affection.
The more I will love God
with all my heart, soul, mind,
the more I realize how much he has loved
me, the easier
it will be for me to have desires
in their proper
order and be protected.
You know, there's another proverb.
I mean, this proverb was a man
without self-control.
It's like a city broken into and left
without walls.
There's a proverb in Proverbs chapter 18
that says,
the name of the Lord is a strong tower.
The righteous
man runs into it and is safe.
That's the thing.
What I want to encourage you to do today.
If you want to keep all that,
keep your soul protected,
then figure out
how to make Jesus front and center,
how to make communion a reminder
how every day remind yourself
of how much you are loved
so that your affection goes to him.
Because the secret of self-control
will always be what you love
and who you love.
Run to God.
Let him be your strong tower and build
the walls that will keep your soul safe.
Would you pray with me?
Our father in Heaven.
Thank you for your grace to us.
Thanks. That
self-control
that it is based on our affection
and our love, and that you have given us
the greatest reason
to really love you.
And so I pray that you would help
all of us hearing, help me to love you
in such a way.
We're all my desires
fall into the proper order.
So I become like a city with walls
with the most precious things protected
because they're protected by you.
Thanks.
We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.