Daily Devotionals

Music For the Soul

Devotional: November 1st

CHRISTIAN SELF-POSSESSION

This is the will of God, even your sanctification . . . that each one of you know how to possess himself of his own vessel in sanctification and honour. - 1 Thessalonians 4:3-4

Self-control is self-possession, as the popular use of that word "self-possessed" hints at. A man that has the mastery of his inclinations, dispositions, emotions, and passions, and can keep them all down where they ought to be, is the man whom we call "self-possessed" - which is just to say, that only he who governs himself by temperate reason and firm will and pure conscience, only he is, in truth, his own owner and master. Why, to take one of the plainest and grossest instances: suppose a drunkard who resolves, with all the power left to his enfeebled will, that he will never touch drink again. He goes out into the street full of his resolution, and before he has gone a couple of hundred yards, and passed a public-house or two, it all oozes out at his fingers’ ends, and in he goes. Is he master of himself? Does he own himself, in any true sense of the expression? No! That tyrannous lust dominates; to it he belongs; he has no power of governing his own nature. His reason, his will, his conscience, are all drowned out of sight by the flood of ungoverned passion that comes rushing from his indulged animal appetite like winter torrents from the recesses of the hills, that cover fertile lands with hideous slime and sterile gravel. You cannot call such a man as that his own master. To use a common phrase, he, at any rate, cannot call his soul his own. It belongs to the tempter whom he cannot resist. That, of course, is an illustration of an extreme kind, drawn from a gross appetite, but the principle involved in it can be applied to other much more refined and subtle desires. Wherever there is a passion, an inclination that masters a man, and brushes aside the sovereign faculties of reason and will and conscience, and says to them, "You may all lay your heads together as you like, but I am going to take the reins into my hands," there is a man who does not belong to himself, but to the dominant inclination and to the object which excites it.

Self-sacrifice is self-possession. From a selfish point of view, it is a gross mistake to make myself my own aim and centre. " Who pleasure follows, pleasure slays," says the poet. The surest way to gratify and satisfy all that is good in myself is to put the satisfaction of self out of sight, and to yield myself up to something higher and nobler. They tell us that if a man gazes full-front at the Pleiades they do not appear so bright, and he cannot count so many of them as if he looks a little on one side of them. Whoever makes self the aim of his vision and of his effort thereby defeats his own end, and ceases to possess himself. There are far sweeter delights in the love of others, to which a man yields up himself, than are ever found in loving self. The poignant joys that spring in a heart that is inflamed by high enthusiasm for any great cause, be it what it may, are nobler, rarer, more thrilling by far, than any which are to be found on the low levels of self-indulgence. The secret of happiness is self-oblivion. "He that loveth his life shall lose it ’’ is true all round the circumference of a man’s nature.