June – For the Gospel’s Sake
Day 174 – 23 June
Who holds the reins?
Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. (1 Corinthians 9:25, NIV)
Of all the virtues, self-control is surely the one nobody pins to a poster. It sounds grey and joyless, conjuring up locked biscuit tins and cold early mornings, a long inventory of pleasures forgone and appetites sternly refused. We tend to file it among the duller obligations, admirable in theory yet faintly miserable in practice, the spiritual equivalent of being told to eat your greens. And so it comes as a real surprise to find that the word Paul reached for, describing the discipline of an athlete in training, paints a picture much closer to power than to deprivation. Rather than naming a cramped and shrunken existence, it points to a person who has grown formidably strong in the one arena that matters most of all, the inner contest over who actually runs the show.
Power exercised within
The word was ἐγκρατεύομαι (enkrateuomai, meaning to exercise self-control or self-mastery), and its inner machinery rewards a closer look. Buried at its heart is the old Greek word κράτος (kratos, meaning power, strength, or dominion), the very term standing behind our language for who holds power in a nation. Self-control, then, is literally a form of power turned inward, strength exercised over oneself. That single insight reframes the whole idea. The real question self-mastery poses is one of command, of who exactly is in charge inside you. Within every person a noisy crowd of appetites and impulses competes to take the lead, the craving for comfort, the tug of the easier path, the urge that demands satisfaction the very second it speaks. To exercise self-control is to refuse those clamouring voices the right to govern you, and to keep the steadier hand of your own considered will firmly in charge instead. It puts a pointed question to each of us. In the running of your own life, are you the one giving the orders, or have you, by default, surrendered command to whichever desire happens to shout the loudest?
The reined-in thoroughbred
Few things capture this better than a good rider on a powerful horse. A thoroughbred at full gallop is a breathtaking sight, all muscle and speed and barely contained force, and the temptation is to assume the reins exist to suppress that magnificence, to hold the creature back. The opposite is the truth. Those reins are precisely what turn raw animal power into something useful and glorious, channelling the horse’s enormous energy toward the finish rather than letting it bolt blindly into a hedge, or throw its rider and gallop off to no purpose at all. A horse with no guiding hand is a danger to itself and to everyone near it, its great strength squandered or worse. Your own desires and energies behave in much the same way. Self-control was never about crushing the powerful life within you, or pretending you have no appetites at all. It is about taking the reins, directing all that vigour toward a goal worth reaching, so that your strength carries you home instead of scattering you across a hundred ditches. The athlete Paul admired practised this mastery across every corner of life, in his eating and his sleeping and his training, bending the whole of himself toward the prize. And the same disciplined hand, laid gently but firmly on our own reins, is what keeps the race we are running this week from dissolving into aimless, wasted effort.
Declaration
I am learning to hold the reins of my own life rather than be dragged off wherever my appetites happen to bolt. The strong desires and restless impulses within me are real, and I have stopped pretending they will simply vanish, choosing instead to take them firmly in hand and aim them at what genuinely matters. Self-mastery, I am discovering, is far from a prison; it is a kind of power, the steady strength of a person who governs themselves rather than being governed by every passing craving. So I direct my energy on purpose, spending it on the goal ahead instead of letting it scatter wherever it pleases. Today I take command of myself with a firm and generous hand, certain that the one who learns to rule their own heart stands freer, and stronger, than they ever were while simply following it.
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