Titus 2 "Good Hygiene: Self-Control" Scott Hoezee

If you were at the church picnic ten days ago, then you know that the first trivia question for which a door prize was given was, "How many times has Rev. Hoezee said the word 'grace' in his sermons so far this year?" The answer was something like 278, which I later calculated means I've averaged 8.3 grace references per sermon (which is probably about right, theologically!).

It's nice to know people pay such close attention! And if you've paid close attention these past seven years, then you know that in addition to assailing you with grace, I've also spent a fair amount of time tilting against the rampant individualism of our self-centered, me-first, "I want it my way right away" culture. The gospel whose central figure is the self-giving Jesus Christ is about reaching out to others and not an exercise in self-fulfillment, self-actualization, and all of the other navel-gazing pastimes of our loopy culture.

The fruit of the Spirit bear out this emphasis on serving our neighbors. Indeed, basically all of these fruit have to do with how we treat other people. Compassion calls us to identify with the hurting. Faithfulness touches on our ability to keep the promises we make. Kindness and gentleness bear directly on how we interact with others. Of course, the juicy fruit which is the center of our spiritual fruit salad is love.

Yet nestled among all those other fruit is the seemingly out-of-place fruit of self-control. Here's the one fruit which seems to focus on me instead of on other folks. This is about what I do (or don't do) for myself. This is the one fruit that I could conceivably exercise when I'm the only person in the house. I can't love other people or have compassion on them or be kind and gentle with them if there is nobody else around. But I can exercise self-control by myself--in fact, sometimes the hidden, private moments when no one else is looking is precisely when I need self-control the most.

So this fruit seems different from the others. But is it? In truth if we properly exercise the fruit of self-control, it will have a very great effect on others after all. Much of this fruit's activity may indeed have to do with how we think on the inside, but if we really do get good at self-control, it will benefit all of the other people in our lives, too.

Let's begin with what is probably the New Testament's premiere passage on self-control: Titus 2. The young pastor Titus did not have an easy assignment. Fresh out of "seminary" young Rev. Titus got rather quickly thrust into the real world on the island of Crete. Crete, as Paul makes clear, was well-known for being home to a lot of rough and tumble characters. The whole island was a kind of seaport town, riddled with saloons and touted throughout the Greek world as a kind of "party place."

A few weeks ago I saw a news report on what has become the #1 Spring Break destination for American college students: Cancun, Mexico. You can't believe what goes on in Cancun during Spring Break. But suffice it to say that very few of the kids go there to soak up beautiful scenery or enjoy snorkeling over the reefs. The hotels and resorts actually promote themselves in travel brochures as the place to go for lots of drinking games, lots of sexual activity and on-the-beach nude games. And that's what happens during the light of day. You're on your own for the carousings of the night, but the overt drunkenness and wanton sexuality of the daytime provide plenty of room for young imaginations to roam.

From what we can gather, Crete was like that. It was a party place populated by people whom Paul describes in chapter 1 as liars, evil brutes, and lazy gluttons. Temptations abounded there, and all the more so for the new Christians with whom Titus worked in the Cretan congregation. These were people who had been pulled out of that raucous world and who probably had not a few non-Christian friends still participating in the orgies and drunken parties for which Crete was famous. This was not an easy place to gain converts for Christ nor was it an easy place to keep in check those who had committed their lives to Jesus.

So it is no surprise to find Paul's letter to Titus studded with admonitions for self-control. This is a short letter and yet five times Paul urges the fruit of self-control on Titus and his people. Chapter 2 covers various age groups within the church as well as various social stations in life but the bottom line advice is the same for all. Young and old, male and female, slave or master: all are called to self-control.

But what is this fruit? Well, a hint is provided by the wider context. Throughout Titus Paul says that what must occupy the Christian person's mind is "sound teaching." The Greek word there is "hugiene," from which we get our English word "hygiene." Titus needed to present healthy doctrines; teachings that would promote good spiritual hygiene and so lead to health and an overall sense of well-being in God's kingdom.

Yet when you think about it, a lot of good health is really common sense. Most sane people know enough not to eat dirt or drink turpentine. Most sane people know better than to shove sharp objects up their noses. The school of hard knocks tells you that eating a whole bag of Oreo cookies or guzzling an entire liter of Coca-Cola does not exactly leave you feeling very good. Good health requires paying attention to a few basic rules of nutrition, it requires common sense to avoid things that will make you bleed, it requires you wash your hands after cleaning out the horse's stall, and to brush your teeth before bed. Good health depends on balance, level-headedness, and common sense.

That is basically what the Greek word which we translate as "self-control" means. The word is sophrono which basically means "to be in your right mind." The opposite would be to act crazy. Those who pay no attention to the limits of life, who over-indulge, who eat or drink whatever they feel like, whenever they feel like it and however much they want are "out of their minds!" Living that way is nuts (and anyway is a formula for disaster). Self-control is all about living within your right mind. It's simple sanity. It's common sense. It's taking a level-headed approach to life by figuring out first what the right thing to do in a situation is and then doing it.

But being self-controlled requires being able to check yourself before you go too far. This ability to check yourself, to reign yourself in, likewise requires at least two other things: it requires motivation for doing so and it requires some guidelines or reference points so that you'll know when you're coming close to stepping over the line. You've got to know where the lines are if you're going to avoid transgressing those boundaries.

For instance, if you're dieting, you need both motivation and guidelines. The motivation is your goal of losing weight (as well as remembering that the bathroom scale is waiting for you every day). The guidelines may be the daily calorie intake which your doctor has determined for you. Your goal of seeing the scale tip lower in the future motivates you. Your doctor's list of calories and food groups is your reference every day as you keep track of how much you eat. A set of guidelines without motivation to follow it is not enough. Then again, motivation without anything to pursue is also not going to do much. Ironically, when I began working on this sermon last Tuesday, my daily cartoon calendar from The New Yorker showed a store called "Ed's Dry Goods." In the front window of the store was hanging a big banner: "Lost Our Motivation: Everything Must Go." Just so.

In the Christian life what is our motivation and what are our guidelines? Paul tells us in verse 11: it is the epiphany of grace. The grace of God that both forgives sins and renews our hearts has now appeared to us in Jesus Christ. We can be better people now. Somebody gave himself for us, died for us. In the light of God's grace epiphany we can see a better way to live even as we have the voice of God's Spirit helpfully saying, "No!" to us like an in-house tutor. We've got both motivation and guidance. The question is whether we'll nurture the self-control needed to pay attention to both.

The Spirit of God's grace is with us to help us check ourselves when we're tempted to live in ways that cut against the grain of creation. How does that work? Well, allow me to make a grammatical analogy. When I was learning German in high school and then college, one of the first orders of business was memorizing charts. You have to learn the patterns. In German, unlike English, you need to do a lot of work to keep straight all the different forms of the word "the." For instance, the German word for table is "Tisch" but it can have four different words for "the" depending on where it occurs in a sentence. "Der Tisch, den Tisch, dem Tisch, or des Tisches" all mean the same thing--the spelling of the word "the" depends on the part of speech where "Tisch" occurs.

It's a lot to keep straight. But when I was in college my professor, Jim Lamse, once complimented me on my internal grammar monitor. He noticed, though I was unaware of it, that I regularly stopped in mid-sentence to correct myself when I used the wrong form. Doing that did not always make for smooth conversation but it was a way, bit by bit, to get into the habit of comparing my speech with the grammar charts in my head.

Similarly with our own children as they learn to talk. Inevitably, despite a child's stunning ability to learn language, the kid typically messes up on the exceptions to the rules. So a young boy might tell you how neat it was at the zoo to see three "mooses," or how yesterday morning "I see'd a dump truck in the street." Parents who know the correct forms can help their children learn the right way to say such things, but child development experts advise to do this gently and indirectly. Parents should not say, "No, Johnny! It's just 'moose' not 'mooses.'" Instead, parents are encouraged to be more subtle, merely repeating what the child said but the right way so the kid can hear it and incorporate it naturally. "Oh, you saw a dump truck!" "Wow! Were there really three moose at the zoo!?"

The Holy Spirit is like that. The Spirit knows what is right, presents it to us as often as he can, but also watches over our lives. He gently corrects us when need be, repeats the pattern of what a life in Christ should look like, and patiently helps us to incorporate this into the fabric of our lives. Our goal should be to nurture the kind of spiritual attentiveness which allows us to listen. We need to check ourselves against the "chart" of Godliness.

"Would you like another cocktail?" "Um, no thanks. I've had enough."

"How about another slice of triple-fudge flourless cake?" "Oh! One slice is a treat, two is a bellyache and a loosened belt. No thank you."

"Wanna hear the latest about the boss and his secretary?" "Not really. All I've picked up so far has been baseless rumor and innuendo. I don't need to hear something no one is sure about. People can get hurt."

"Did you hear the one about the black guy and the cop?" "No, and I'd just as soon not since I'm working on evicting the racist who rents space in my heart. I don't need to give him more pictures to hang on the wall and so feel more at home than he already does."

Most of us probably already know at least the basics, if not a lot of the specifics, of what a healthy spiritual life looks like. We don't struggle with whether or not it's right to get drunk, to think adulterous thoughts, to eat too much, to tell or hear dirty or racist jokes, or to perpetuate what may well be false rumors. We know these things are wrong. We also know that we don't feel good physically or spiritually if we over-indulge and all of us have at one time or another seen the tears streak down a person's face because of some untrue tale we were guilty of spreading around with our own loose lips.

This is where the fruit of self-control stops being a private matter and becomes very much public indeed. The insanely out-of-control person hurts not just him- or herself but others, too. Would anyone in this room deny the social dislocation caused in families by alcoholism? Would anyone deny the dire health effects of over-eating (and the pain this, too, can cause people when someone drops dead of an avoidable disease)? Does anyone doubt the disaster which adultery causes, the grim spread of sexually transmitted diseases which results from promiscuous sex? Does anyone doubt, after the twentieth century's long laundry list of horrors, the ruinous effect that racism has on our world?

As it turns out, those who exercise the fruit of self-control are not just spiritually healthy but overall healthy. God's creation hygiene regimen is good for you! But why would this be a surprise? The Bible makes everywhere clear that God loves us. That's why he put us in a creation which contains the potential for so much enjoyment and pleasure. It was God who thought up sexuality (and then made it both desirable and pleasurable). It was God who created us with the need to eat and it was likewise God who, instead of consigning us to ingest just some bland, gray liquid every day, actually concocted an entire cornucopia of flavors. It was God who gave us humor and so the ability to savor good jokes in which we can laugh at the ironies of life.

We were created with a whole passel of passions. But they need managing. As Lewis Smedes once said, self-control is like the conductor of a symphony orchestra. Under the conductor's baton are a multitude of talented musicians, each of whom is needed to make a contribution. But they need to sound the right notes at the right time at the right volume for things to sound lovely. If the trumpeter blared constantly, we'd never have the chance to hear the hauntingly sweet loveliness of a violin arpeggio. The percussion section sometimes needs to be idle so that when the timpani does blaze forth, it's that much more dramatic.

Similarly all the passions, appetites, lusts, and desires God has given have their proper place. Self-control is the Holy Spirit's baton in our hearts under whose skilled spiritual direction everything stays in its proper place and comes in at the proper times. As with learning a language (or to stick with the orchestra simile, as with learning how to play a musical instrument), self-control takes practice. You've got to pay attention to and incorporate into yourself the basics of grammar charts and musical scales.

In a world as fallen, broken, and sinful as this one, if we were left on our own to develop this kind of self-control, we'd never make it. The Christians on Crete faced long odds. There were lots of people tugging them back into the old way of riotous living--the pre-Jesus life of abandon which knew neither limits nor joy. Our society may not be quite as bad as Crete, but neither are we immune to the siren voices of our culture. We need self-control. We need to heed the Spirit when he gently says, "No!"

Self-control can and does have an effect on those around us, but its first focus is the interior of our hearts. Self-control is rooted in a fierce desire to think right ways so that we can then live in those right ways. Anybody can put up a good front without necessarily enjoying it in their heart of hearts. The New Testament has a word for that: hypocrisy.

But God does not want merely to slap a fresh coat of paint overtop of the rotting wood of our old, pre-Christian selves. God does not merely want to re-arrange the furniture of our hearts--he wants to change us from the inside out and make us new. Sanctification, CS. Lewis once said, is not about teaching a tired old horse to run faster. It's more like giving a horse wings and teaching it how to fly! Self-control is a fruit deep within our hearts, the succulent growth of which leads to the genuine flourishing of all the rest of the fruit, to the delight of all we meet. Amen.