The Self-Control We Were Never Meant To Carry

There is a kind of self control most of us were taught.

It looks like discipline. It sounds like willpower. It feels like a clenched jaw, a held breath, and a quiet war fought every day in the privacy of our own minds.

We were told this was holiness. We were told this was maturity. We were told this was the path to the life we longed for. At least I was.

So we tightened. We restrained. We held ourselves back from the things we were told we should not look at, listen to, read, taste, want, or feel.

Yet, many of us, if we are honest, are tired.

Tired in a way sleep does not touch.

Tired in the soul.

I want to write to you today about another kind of self control. One I believe is closer to the heart of what we were created for. One Yeshua and Joseph carried, though we rarely name it this way.

The self control most of us practice is a form of overpowering ourselves. We treat our hearts like enemies that must be subdued. We treat our desires like criminals that must be locked away. We become wardens of our own inner lives.

For a while, it works. We feel strong. We feel disciplined. We feel like we are winning.

Yet over time something quiet begins to happen.

The heart grows sick. Not because we did the wrong thing. Often we did the right thing. We restrained. We resisted. We held the line.

But we held it with the wrong hands.

We held it with the hands of control rather than the hands of identity, and there is a vast difference between the two.

Control says, I will not let myself have this - Identity says, this is no longer who I am.

Control fights - Identity rests.

Control depletes - Identity replenishes.

Control eventually burns out and either collapses into the very thing it was resisting, or hardens into a brittle, joyless version of righteousness that has long forgotten why it began.

Identity does not need to fight in the same way because identity is not standing guard at the door of the heart. Identity is living from inside the heart.

We were not created to obey rules.

We were created to respond to love!

I believe this is the very self control Jesus was inviting us into.

It is probably why he did not say seek first the rules and the law and everything else will be added to you. He said seek first the Kingdom. He pointed us toward an inner reality. 

A belonging. An identity rooted in the love of the One that created us and  gave us our lives.

He knew that if we tried to live the kingdom from the outside in, by gripping the rules tighter and tighter, we would end up where so many of the religious of his day had already arrived.

Exhausted. Brittle. Performing a righteousness that had long since lost its heart and ability to recognize the God it claimed to serve.

So he invited us deeper. Into a kingdom we could carry within us. Into an identity that would do quietly what no amount of rule keeping ever could.

He was not asking us to try harder.

He was asking us to come home.

This is what I see in Joseph in that room.

He did not run because he had spent years building up enough willpower to overpower his body. He did not run because he had memorised the right verses or rehearsed the right refusals. He ran because something deeper in him knew who he was.

His running came from identity, not from suppression.

I believe this is the difference between a self control that heals us and a self control that slowly makes us unwell.

When self control is identity based, we are no longer fighting ourselves. We are living from our true self. From the heart that has been awakened and healed. 

From the place in us that already knows what it loves and what it does not.

From here shame loses its ability to impact and influence our choices as we begin to operate from a space of truth which is responsible for setting us and keeping us free.

This is also where the HEART framework I have been sharing with you over these past months continues to come alive in a very practical way.

When we live from the Heart rather than from the mind that has been trained to police us, our centre of gravity changes. We are no longer making decisions from fear of failing the rules. We are responding from a deeper knowing.

When we live with Embodiment, we feel the moment a room shifts, the moment a thought begins to pull us somewhere we do not want to go. The body becomes an early teacher rather than a battleground.

When we live with Awareness, we notice the whispers before they become roars. We see the wound dressed in the clothing of desire and we recognise it for what it is.

When we live Relationally, we remember we were never created to walk these things alone. We bring our inner world into trusted company rather than locking ourselves in the cell of our own willpower.

Finally, when we let Transformative Thinking serve rather than rule, the mind becomes the beautiful instrument it was always created to be, no longer the warden of the heart but its companion that works in tangent with the heart to keep it healthy and free.

The five together form the soil in which identity based self control is quietly revealed. Not as a technique but as a way of being.

Now here is the part I want you to hold gently today.

Everything you have been told you would receive by restraining yourself, by holding yourself clean, by performing the discipline well enough for long enough, is already available to you in your true self.

The peace. The fullness. The sense of being whole. The quiet knowing that you are loved and held and seen.

You do not earn these by overpowering your humanity.

You inherit them by coming home to who you actually are.

This is the surrender we were made for. Not the surrender of suppressing our hearts. The surrender of trusting them again. Of letting the deeper part of us, the part that has always known, lead the way.

When we live from there, the things that used to consume us begin to lose their pull. Not because we white knuckled them into submission, but because something in us simply no longer reaches for them. We have found what they were imitating all along.

This is what I am understanding slowly, and I am still understanding, 

The self control that comes from identity does not feel like control at all.

It feels like coming home. It feels like rest. It feels like finally being able to breathe in a body that has spent too long holding its own breath.

It is from this place, when the rooms of our lives present themselves, and they will, that we do not need to fight them with clenched fists.

We simply walk different because we are different.

Not because we have become stronger.

But because we have finally started to come home to our God given true selves.

With you in the unfolding,