All Scripture quotations are taken from the New American Standard Bible 1995 Ed. (NASB95) published by The Lockman Foundation

In western society today, there’s been an increasing movement in recent years for young people to master their personal worlds, and bring order to the mind-numbing chaos that surrounds them. Considering the distractions of social media, the innumerable options for ways to spend our time, and the confusing cacophony of voices that yell in our ears constantly, it’s no wonder that young people in their 30s or younger have grown sick of being pushed and pulled by countless influences, without knowing what’s true, right, or good. Many of them have sought to bring order out of the chaos by seeking to control that which they think they have most control over – themselves. You see this with the countless self-help podcasts, video’s, blogs, and books that are published on a regular basis. Think of all those popular figures that have such huge followings from people who want to know how to take control of themselves and their lives for their happiness – like Jordan Peterson, Andrew Huberman, and Andrew Tate.

This is even true among young believers in Jesus, as there is a growing movement among conservative young evangelicals to learn self-discipline, practical life skills, and the practical teachings of Scripture. However, there’ s a great danger when we are so focused on bringing our lives into order, that we lose sight of the reasons that we should do this, and the godly way this should come about. We run the risk of forgetting about the Center of the gravity of our lives, and the source of all that is good about us. Of course, this Center is none other than the Lord Jesus, the Son of God, the firstborn from the dead, the Redeemer of our souls, and the Ruler of all things.

Hence, I want to think with you about how controlling ourselves, and ordering our lives rightly, can only be done in a way pleasing to the Lord when we allow Him to do so through our understanding of what He’s done for and to us in His redemptive work. In sum, the only path to self-mastery is gorging your soul on the teachings of Jesus – those truths explained in the writings of the apostles and their disciples in the New Testament. In a phrase, this means we must be Gospel-gorged.

Although I began writing about unbelievers, I intend this as a lesson that only directly applies to believers. It’s only if you believe the message of Jesus and His apostles that the Word will give you the power to control yourself, walk in a way that’s pleasing to the Lord, and grow in your holiness.

The Word of Jesus Subdues the Disorder of Sin

The first truth about God’s Word, as summarized by the Gospel, I want to emphasize is that it is the main thing in this life that God has given us that can bring order out of our chaos. Without understanding this glorious message of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection to all authority, everyone is naturally in a state of wild, restless, and destructive opposition to God. It’s only the Word of the Gospel that can subdue the hostile, wicked, and evil hearts of people, and turn them from sin to righteousness, and from darkness to light.

Let me remind you of this Word, since we must be constantly reminding ourselves of this most powerful and wonderful message. God sent His eternal, infinite, Son to earth to become a man, Jesus of Nazareth. He lived a full adult life, during which He spent the last few years preaching the Gospel, performing miracles, and healing people of their afflictions. He was then given over by the predetermined plan and foreknowledge of God to sinful men who condemned Him, and then executed Him on a cross. He willingly did this to suffer the torment we deserve for our rebellion against God, experiencing the Father’s wrath and anger for the time before He caused Himself to die. God then raised Him from the dead, and took Him into heaven to rule over all things, until the time He chooses to send Him again to judge everyone, and establish the new heavens and new earth. He is now promising all who repent and depend on Jesus that they have His forgiveness, peace, blessing, and salvation, simply because of His undeserved love and mercy. All who do so are therefore treated as having the same human status as Jesus, given the life of God within, given an inheritance on the new earth, and given everything whatsoever that works for their eternal and spiritual joy and prosperity. In brief, Jesus died in our place, so that He can now be our eternal life and joy through our trust in Him, based solely on God’s undeserved love and kindness. He gave Himself to us, so that we could have all in Him!

This glorious Word of the Lord – the good news of our Lord and Savior – is God’s power for salvation to all who believe (Rom. 1:16). According to Paul in Romans 10, it produces faith in those who hear, since it’s the message through which God calls us out of darkness into light, thus changing our minds, and granting us repentance and faith in Him (2 Thess. 2:14). When the Lord so chooses, He uses His Word which brought the universe into existence to breathe life into our dead souls, and transform our obstinate hearts into humble hearts of love and obedience (Eph. 2). Through this Word, He shines the light of the glory of God in the face of Jesus into our hearts, granting us the knowledge of the beautiful and infinitely awesome God of our souls (2 Cor. 4).

Given this great power of God’s Word to change our hearts from those that are bent toward sin and death, to hearts that long to please God and glorify Him, it’s obvious that if we would control ourselves to righteous ends, the Scriptures must be the verbal instrument to empower us. That is, the Word isn’t only the beginning of our transformation into holy people, but is the ongoing means by which the Lord enables us to work and will for His good pleasure (Phil. 2:13).

Perhaps I haven’t been clear about the disorder and chaos that is constantly boiling within us. As people who have inherited a sinful bent to our flesh from our father Adam, even we as believers are in a constant war to bring our desires, affections, and wills in subjection to the Lord’s will (1 Pet. 2:12). Thankfully, as many Scriptures testify, we are no longer enslaved to our sinful flesh, so that we do nothing but sin (Rom. 6:17). Because God has cleansed and purified our hearts by persuading us through the Word, we now have an inward inclination to love and obey the Lord. In other words, our ultimate passion is to please our heavenly Father and our Lord Jesus. Yet, at the same time, we are encased in bodies that are riddled with sinful desires and affections in this life. Thus, it’s imperative that we fight and discipline our bodies and minds to obey the Lord Jesus. But this can only come through believing the teachings of God’s Word, and obeying His commands.

In sum, God has ordained that our self-mastery, which must be subjugated to the authority of Jesus, must come out of continual and increasing understanding and application of God’s Word. Our lives cannot be ordered rightly unless we know how the Lord would have us do so, and why we ought to do so. Therefore, continually learning, reflecting on, and applying Scripture in light of the gospel, is the only way we can ever hope to be good stewards of our minds, bodies, and possessions.

How to Learn God’s Word to Progressively Subject Yourself to God’s Will

The Sanctification Continuum

We’ve now established that the learning, believing, and obedience to, God’s Word, is the preeminent means God uses to empower us to subject ourselves and our lives to His standards for us. But how exactly does this happen? I want to give you a succinct explanation of how the Scriptures describe our growth in Christlikeness through submission to them. Although I’ll start generally, I intend to also explain what this practically looks like in everyday life.

To begin, we must understand the mechanisms that the Lord has given us to increasingly replace our sinful affections and desires with godly ones. Fundamentally, our thinking and behaviors come down to our beliefs and affections. Thanks to the gracious work of Jesus, we as believers, at our cores, have true beliefs and godly affections regarding the most basic elements of our lives. Basically, we as believers believe that the Lord Jesus is worthy of whole-hearted worship, love, obedience, and trust, and expressing these actions toward Him gives us the most delight in life. Although this is the root of our personalities, we still retain countless false beliefs, and loves for unworthy things. In growing in holiness, or sanctification, our duty is to continually convert our false beliefs to true ones, and in so doing, replace our sinful affections with their righteous alternatives.

Hence, in our growth efforts, the place we must start with is our mind, leading to our beliefs, then our affections, and finally our desires. This is a more mechanical way to think of what Paul summarizes in Romans 12:2, urging:

“. . . and do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds, so that you may prove what the will of God is; that which is good, and acceptable, and perfect.”

Notice the transformation engine – the renewal of the mind. What that means is that we’re continually enabling our minds to think in new ways about what’s true, right, and lovely. How does that happen?

The only way this can happen is if we let go of old ways of thinking because we’ve been persuaded that certain things are true now. This is the renewal of the mind that Paul is speaking of. As we increase in our understanding and application of Scripture, we’ll continually encounter truth claims that conflict with our current beliefs about reality, and we’ll have to admit we’re wrong, and embrace the truth that is new to us. Thus, we continually change in our beliefs, then our affections, then our desires, and finally our decisions.

Let me illustrate how this should work in the case of a specific sinful practice. Say that I believe it’s permissible to satisfy my sexual desire by using pornography. Because I believe this, I have a sinful affection for using pornography. Obviously, there are many places in Scripture that clearly condemn sexual activity outside of marriage, such as Matthew 5 and 1 Thessalonians 4. When I read one of these passages, and am convinced by God’s Word that lusting after images is wrong, then I repent of my former belief, my affection, and my outward sin. Now that I believe that this sin is hindering my joy and satisfaction in life, I actually hate it, and have a love for purity and self-control in this area. Therefore, I have a burning desire to cut off lust and pornography from my behavior, so I take specific actions to do something good instead. For example, I may now decide that I want to live in such a way that I’m prepared and worthy to take a wife, so my sexual desire can be fulfilled righteously. But notice the progression – first the belief(s) is changed, then the affections, then my desires, and finally my decisions based on those desires change my lifestyle.

Take any area of living, and this process works about the same way in our spiritual growth. This can even be the process for beliefs that aren’t outrightly sinful. That is, I might have a belief about an issue that Scripture doesn’t specifically address. These are what are known as “gray areas”. They are issues of life that must be dealt with based on each believer’s own conscience. However, beliefs about them can still be changed as we grow in our understanding and application of Scripture.

To circle back to the theme of this lesson, our journey to increasingly bring our thinking and actions in subjection to God’s will is basically a repeated process of discovering the errors in our thinking, repenting, and then adopting the truth about that subject, and living appropriately. Since all of us have countless issues in our beliefs and affections that are still out of alignment with the truth, this is a lifelong process, which won’t be completed until we are finally perfected at our deaths, or the Lord’s return. Such growth, according to many places in Scripture, requires our constant attention, diligence, and discipline, as we constantly oppose and replace sinful beliefs, affections, and desires through faith in God’s Word.

The Gospel of Our Identity is the Key to Our Excellence

A good word to describe the trait that many young believers are seeking to embody is “excellence”. This is a good translation of the term Peter uses to describe godly living in 2 Peter 1:5-7. In this passage, he urges his audience to add “excellence” to “faith”, then lists several other traits that believers must pursue. However, he begins the passage by giving the basis for our self-discipline in holiness:

“. . . seeing that His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence. For by these He has granted to us His precious and magnificent promises, so that by them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust.” – 2 Pet. 1:3-4

These sentences serve as a good summary statement for what must be at the back of our minds at all times, if we want to take control of ourselves to please the Lord. It’s the good news. Notice the declaration of the first verse – we have everything we need for life and godliness because we know the One who called us. And how, and to what end did He call us? Through “His precious and magnificent promises”! These are the promises of the gospel!

Almost all the New Testament epistles follow this pattern. First, the author describes what God has done for and to us through Jesus. Then, based on who we are as His redeemed, sanctified, reborn children, he explains how we must live. This is precisely the pattern for all our living. The famous Christian author Jerry Bridges famously called this “preaching the gospel to yourself”.

In other words, each day as we pursue growth in good understanding, love for God, and godliness, we must remind ourselves of who we are, since we are encased in sinful flesh, and surrounded by constant temptations. We must remind ourselves that God now treats us as innocent, holy, blameless, and right in His all-knowing sight. Further, our hearts are now holy and righteous, and our greatest joy is to bring pleasure to our God and Savior by obeying Him. Moreover, God Himself lives inside of us to empower, teach, and change us. Therefore, we have every reason to improve our thinking, affections, and behavior.

In conclusion, if you want to continually master yourself and your resources, you must see yourself, as Paul says in Romans 6, as a slave of God and of righteousness. This will motivate you to continually and increasingly yield yourself to the will of our King Jesus in the Scriptures, and to bring yourself more into subjection to that divine, perfect, and joy-giving teaching. You can take dominion over your life by being dominated by the all-powerful Word of Jesus!