Friday, April 28, 2017
So prepare your minds for action and exercise
self-control. Put all your hope in the
gracious salvation that will come to you when Jesus Christ is revealed to the
world. So you must live as God’s
obedient children. Don’t slip back into
your old ways of living to satisfy your own desires. You didn’t know any better then. But now you must be holy in everything you
do, just as God who chose you is holy. For
the Scriptures say, “You must be holy because I am holy.” 1 Peter 1:13-16(NLT)
The apostle
Peter is a most ironic choice by God to be a teacher of self-control. If you consider his track record, every time
Peter opened his mouth he seemed to wander off the reservation and insert his
foot:
·
Peter
said he would die for Jesus; in the end he denied he even knew him.
·
Peter’s
immediate response when the soldiers came for Jesus in Gethsemane was to whip
out a sword to fight for the one who had said turn the other cheek.
·
Peter
promised a lot; he even proclaimed a correct answer to Jesus’ question that he
was Messiah, but when crunch time came he wimped like the rest of us.
So much for
self-control!
Yet, on
Pentecost Day we find Peter preaching to at least 5,000 at the Temple, and
becoming the little rock
Jesus nick-named him. Peter was to be
the de-facto leader of the early church; a man with little self-control became
one of the most dramatic examples of putting all in the hands of God. Tradition has it that he was crucified as
Jesus was, but thought it was improper to take the same position as his Lord, and
asked to be placed on his cross upside-down.
Two
quotations I’ve come to love may offer some of the best advice I’ve ever heard
when it comes to being disciplined, or having self-control, and how to go about it:
Maxie Dunnam:
Spiritual formation is that
dynamic process of receiving through faith and appropriating through
commitment, discipline, and action.[ii]
Faith
happens between the ears and heart; appropriating what faith tells you to do is
a matter of putting it into action in your life. It may start small, but ends up big as
commitment, discipline and action.
Charles Reade:
Sow an act and you reap a
habit. Sow a habit and you reap a
character. Sow a character and you reap
a destiny.[iii]
Peter’s
disciplined friend Paul simply said that we reap what we sow (Galatians
6:7). The “acts” Charles Reade
held up are those areas of self-discipline you want to cultivate. It begins with an intentional step, based on
the faith conviction that you must live a certain way. That sown seed of faith becomes a habit,
which eventually becomes your character, where you don’t think about it anymore,
you simply continue. That character is
your destiny or legacy.
For You Today
If
there is a problem with self-discipline in your life, turn it upside down and
crucify whatever is preventing you from giving glory to God. Your character and legacy depend on what you
will do with your first step today.
NOTES
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