“A man without self-control is like a city broken into and left without walls.”
– Proverbs 25:28
Self-control is really significant. To not have self-control is to expose your life to all kinds of temptations and danger. Think about my life. I’ve shared this in some different settings before, but there was a period of my life, a long period of my life as a pastor where I would describe my life as a total lack of self-control. Lack of self-control when it comes to time with the Lord. I was busy doing so many things in the church and so many things in ministry. I wasn’t lazy, I wasn’t just sitting around doing nothing. And I was doing a ton, but I was hardly ever pausing and just being with God. I was out of control.
This verse highlights the destruction of lacking self-control. We need the Lord’s grace to help in this battle.
This Verse Praises God For His Grace
I lacked control in the way I ate, the way I drank. I mean, not getting drunk by any means, but just drinking things that were not healthy. In fact I was totally out of control when it came to my health, when it came to sleeping. I was staying up all night and getting up early in the morning, running, doing this and that. No self-control. And I praise God for his grace in my life because I was a city broken into and left without walls and he protected me.
There is so many different ways that season in my life could have gone. It could have ruined my life. So I praise God for my wife. I asked her one day… I try to periodically ask her how I can love her better, and this day… She usually is like, “You know, you can work on this or that, but you’re doing great.” This day there wasn’t any, you’re doing great. She said, “You don’t eat well, you don’t sleep, don’t exercise. You have no physical discipline in your life. And your spiritual discipline, I don’t know when you ever spend time with God. And if you don’t make some major changes, you’re not going to be around to love me very long.” And it was a wake up call in my life that I was a city broken into, and I had no walls.
By God’s grace, I made some significant changes in my life. I realized my lack of physical discipline and lack of spiritual discipline kind of went together, and so working on both strengthen both. And so I share that. I share that just as a warning from my own life, not that you needed that, the warning is clear in Proverbs 25:28. A man or woman without self-control is in a very dangerous place.
Proverbs 25:28 Prays For Self-Control
So God, I pray, I pray for self-control in my own life. I pray for walls that guard me against all the adversary’s attempts to pull me away from you, to pull me away from my wife, my children, from the work that you have called me to, from the way that you have called me to live. And God, I pray for this for every single person who is listening to this right now, I pray for their self-control. We praise you. This is the fruit of your spirit, is self-control.
So I pray for this. For those who are listening, that you would give them self-discipline by your grace, that you would put into place in their lives safeguards, self-control that guards them against the adversaries, multifaceted, creative attempts to pull them away from you and from what is most important. From people who are most important and priorities that are most important according to your word. God, we pray that you would help us to live lives of self-control. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.
David Platt serves as a pastor in metro Washington, D.C. He is the founder of Radical.
David received his Ph.D. from New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and is the author of Don’t Hold Back, Radical, Follow Me, Counter Culture, Something Needs to Change, Before You Vote, as well as the multiple volumes of the Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary series.
Along with his wife and children, he lives in the Washington, D.C. metro area.
