Tag Archives: work

I’ll Have A Slice of Self-Control Please

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Self-control is a fruit of the Spirit

Self-control can change your life.

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. How many times do we talk about love, joy, and peace? Kindness and goodness get thrown in for good measure, but how many times do we talk about self-control? Doesn’t sound that holy. How many times to you hear, ‘God really blessed me with self-control this week!’ Somehow we let that one slip past, like the other parts of scripture that convict us that we really don’t want to deal with.

Self-control would be a pretty good one to get a hold of. Our society is pretty messed up from domestic violence, gang violence, obesity, debt, abortion. Just think how self-control could change so much.  Self-control demands limits to our own wants. We usually know what those limits are, we just choose to ignore them. It’s hard. We feel a rush when we indulge in something that’s just outside our control. It’s a mixture of pleasure and guilt. If our conscious is still sensitive, we’ll feel terrible afterward, but will still be helpless to avoid doing it again.

God has a gift to help with that. It’s free. It’s available. All you have to do is ask for it. Don’t think you don’t need it, you’re human. God knows who we are and provided everything we need to live blessed and happy lives. It’s our responsibility to ask and receive those gifts. He wants us to be proactive in this. How much of Him do you want? I going for the full banquet. All the fruit looks pretty good to me. I want more. There’s only so much I can take in today, so I’m going back for more tomorrow.

I want self-control in my life. About that writing project, will I dedicate my time better to finish it? Yeah, I need help. Will I stop before saying something hurtful and negative? Need help. Will self-control help me walk in kindness and consideration for others? Youbetcha. If there’s a blessing from heaven that’s available to me, I want it, as much as I can take in.

Related Post: Go Ahead, Pray For Patience

 

Read the first chapter of my book Crucible Heart

 

Hoping It Won’t Be Work

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Hope. It’s a new year and new year’s always inspire hope for the future. It does sound a bit like wishing for world peace, but hope is alive and well, if we dare to believe. I have so much to hope for. I have personal hopes and hopes for other people. I have hopes based on promises from God and hopes I want Him to touch.

When I think of those hopes, it makes me think of dancing. Not just dancing, dancing, but ballet. I remember, back in the day, when I took ballet. The teacher would say, “You have a string tied to your wrist. At the other end of the string is a balloon, lifting your wrist light as air.” We would move our arms through first, second, third and fourth positions, trying very hard to have balloons tied to our wrists. Ninety-nine per cent of the time we were tied to anvils not balloons. The truth is, it was very hard to move that “effortlessly”, especially when equal concentration had to be made to moving our feet at the same time.

My point is that hope sounds wonderful and fluffy, but it comes with a good deal of hard work. We look forward to open doors to part before us, but it is our feet that move us through them. You can’t move across the floor with grace without putting in hours of practice to develop it. Hope is only hopeful when we put ourselves in position to grab it. And when there’s nothing in the world that we can do, we position our hearts to expect what we need. That takes work. Hope is not trusting that a fairy godmother will show up to take us out of our misery. Real hope is based on reality. Do you hope to be a great writer? Then work your craft. Do you hope to lose thirty pounds? Then knock off the cookies and go walk.

Hope is not a band-aid, it’s the carrot to get us working toward our own goals. I have a lot to hope for this year. That means I have a lot to do. The rest is up to God to bless. I’m so thankful that He puts those hopes in me because He does like to bless.