There’s a Greek word that appears only a handful of times in the New Testament: egkrates<\/i>. Its scarcity, though, is inversely proportionate to its importance.<\/p>\n\n\n
Egkrates <\/i>is often translated as “self-control”, “self-discipline”, or “self-mastery”.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
To show self-control’s importance, I need only point to its appearance in Galatians 5:23 where it is listed as one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit. There it keeps company with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, and gentleness.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
That’s the Big Leagues.<\/p>\n\n\n
But we don’t give self-control a lot of attention. In fact, most of the time if we do<\/i><\/b> mention it, we are making a joke about how little we have.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
Like Oscar Wilde’s famous crack: “I can resist anything but temptation.”\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
But here’s the odd thing about self-control: While publicly we joke <\/i><\/b>about our lack of self-control, inwardly we fret <\/b><\/i>over it.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n
A lack of self-control fosters feelings of guilt, shame, and failure.<\/p>\n\n\n
We can’t avoid this question: If self-control is, in fact, a fruit of the Spirit, what does it say about us when we don’t have it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There’s a Greek word that appears only a handful of times in the New Testament: egkrates. Its scarcity, though, is inversely proportionate to its importance. Egkrates is often translated as “self-control”, “self-discipline”, or “self-mastery”.\u00a0 To show self-control’s importance, I need only point to its appearance in Galatians 5:23 where it is listed as one of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2791","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2791"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2791\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2792,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2791\/revisions\/2792"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2791"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2791"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevegrossblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2791"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}