How to control your appetites, desires and cravings
Anything you cannot control controls you
In ancient times, city walls protected against external threats. The most authentic form of protection was strong city walls. Not having one or having yours broken down spelled doom, literally. The city dwellers would constantly live in fear of the unknown. They were not sure when an offended enemy would invade the city and take them as slaves. Everyone would sleep with their hearts in their mouths, looking out for the sound of the flight horn.
If I had all the time in the world, I might be able to cite all the terrible consequences of a city without walls. But I don’t. So, I’d rather go ahead with what I want to talk to you about, leaving you to fill all the other blank spaces.
I had to pinch myself again this morning when I was reminded that a human being without self-control is like a city without walls.
Do you recall all I mentioned about a city without walls?
Let’s compare them to a human being without self-control, using this scripture, Proverbs 25:28.
“A person without self-control is like a city with broken-down walls.”
What is self-control?
Apostle Paul mentions self-control as one of the fruits of the Spirit. Yes, it’s that important.
Galatians 5:22-23,
“But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control ...”
In this text, the word “self-control,” or “temperance” as used in the KJV, means
“the virtue of one who masters his desires and passions, especially his sensual appetites.”
So to have self-control is to master or rule over your passions and desires, especially sensual appetites.
Just a side note: Sensual appetites here would mean a craving for sensual pleasures and can be applied to various aspects of human experience, including but not limited to food, physical touch, sexual expressions, and other sensory stimuli that elicit pleasurable sensations.
In other words, the fruit of the Spirit called self-control will solve your uncontrollable craving for food, sex, money (as it affects the senses), etc.
You can carry out a self-diagnosis right now.
If you’re struggling with any of the above-listed things and such, your problem is that you do not have self-control.
Pause.
What’s wrong with food, pleasures, and all kinds of cravings?
Nothing is wrong with them.
They only become wrong when you cannot control yourself around them. But it’s not that simple.
Anything you cannot control controls you.
Anything you are not a master of and is present in your life automatically leads and controls you, whether you know this or not. The Spirit of God that we have is a leading spirit. God is described as a king, a ruler, and one who is in charge of all. It means being created in the image of God means you also are a ruler. Not just over creation that the eyes can see, but also over thoughts, emotions, feelings, and things that the physical eyes can’t see.
But in the fall, man forgot his oneness with his creator and so lost control. Thus, his walls were broken down. But being in Christ and having the Spirit of God in you means you can now again exercise control over creation and uncreated things, emotions, feelings, appetites, etc.
You are now the one who calls the shots and not the other way around.
When you’re the boss, do you know what that affords you?
It means you are in control of your time, and you can decide to allocate more time to what matters to you without stress.
One thing our uncontrollable appetites steal from us is time, and time is focus, and focus is who you become.
What you give focus to is what you eventually become.
You became an engineer because you focused on getting an engineering degree for 6 or 7 years. As a man thinks in his heart, so is he, and what a man gives himself to is what his heart is focused on, and that’s who he eventually turns out to be.
So, if your sensual appetites, which are in themselves not bad, dictate how you act, react, and make your decisions, then you lack self-control, and you’re like a city without walls.
This brings us back to the focus of this discussion.
What happens when you don’t have self-control?
I’ve hinted at them already in some places above. But let’s summarize them again more closely.
Lack of self-control hands over the control of your life to something or someone else. So, if you cannot control your appetite for money (for instance), then money is controlling you. If money is controlling you, that means you’re losing time because you would give all or the bulk of your focus to pursuing money.
If you’re losing time, that means you’re losing focus on things that matter, God, for example. If you’re losing focus on things that matter, God, for example, that means you’re not going to grow as a believer. If you don’t grow, you’d miss out on why you’re here on earth, which is to know God and, by extension, creation.
After this point is where different schools of thought collide.
But for sure, there are consequences to lack of growth. Don’t kid yourself. I’m not talking of the hellfire, the literal burning thing, here. Nahh.
I don’t know the shape or type of consequences, but the Bible does not leave us in the dark.
Matthew 8:12: “weeping and gnashing of teeth...”
Luke 12:47: “beaten with many stripes...”
And the rest...
So, you see the long chain of the consequences of lack of self-control?
Sometimes if we don’t stretch these realities to the far end, we may not see how important some things are.
How do you have self-control?
I daresay that self-control can be cultivated from the rigorous exercise of our souls through asceticism or any other so-called “soulical” self-discipline.
But I believe those methods are either a foreshadowing of the real thing or a suppressed form of it or a substitutional case, where you trade something else for the other, aided or unaided by another spirit.
I personally believe monks, mystics, priests, etc., who have mastered self-control or any other soulical energies to a fault, are on this table.
... well, that’s that.
For believers, the Bible tells us that self-control is among the fruit of the Spirit.
Galatians 5:22-23:
“But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control ...”
So, does the believer have all these already since it is the fruit of the Spirit?
Short answer: Yes, the believer has all the fruit of the Spirit, including self-control.
Long answer: Although the believer has all the fruit of the Spirit including self-control, if he doesn’t know this, he will still live like he never had them.
You must understand that in Christ, we have all the fullness of God. We are back at Eden before the fall. But remember that even before the fall, Adam was to learn of God. He was a work in progress. The journey was disturbed when he disbelieved and lived perpetually in that state.
The fall didn’t take place in one day or all of a sudden.
For man to disobey God and live in rebellion, he must have had a track record of willful disbelief. The fall of man was not a one-time thing. He indulged himself despite warnings. That’s the only way God can be just.
How do I know that?
Check through the scriptures and see the nature in which God brought judgment on people.
They were warned.
God would often put up with them for a long time.
The Bible talks about the long-suffering of God in the time of Noah.
120 years.
That’s how long God waited for people to repent.
Adam’s decline was a slow descent.
In fact, the world is still declining in that same disbelief today. You can see this in how people died physically in those days versus now. In the times of Adam, people lived very long, 700, 800, 900 years. But when that disbelief set in, they started departing from God.
So, scriptures like “And Cain went away from the presence of God” will now make sense.
It doesn’t mean he walked away with his legs.
That doesn’t make sense.
God is omnipresent; you can’t use your physical leg to walk away from him. He is everywhere. David said, “Where can I hide that God won’t find me?”
So, Cain’s departing from the presence of God would be him disbelieving God the more and going in variance to God’s instructions.
And it was from this departure that the earth was filled with all kinds of things. It is that same descent that we are in today.
Yes, we are still falling away from God today.
So, when we learn about God, we are walking back to God in knowledge, not in a relationship. Now that we are in Christ, we have access to all of God again, but we have to now walk back to him.
The walking back to him is what the scriptures call in some places “the renewal of the mind” (Romans 12).
It is a progressive walk with God, and it is primarily “slowly” expressed in the fruit of the Spirit.
So, although we have all the fruit of the Spirit, we need to cultivate or develop them in a “slow, progressive” walk with the Lord.
I didn’t coin that word myself.
Look at this:
Galatians 5:25,
“If we live in the Spirit, let us also walk in the Spirit.”
“Walk” here is “stoicheō.”
It means, “to proceed in a row as the march of a soldier, go in order.”
Also, in Galatians 5:16, “This I say then, Walk in the Spirit, and ye shall not fulfil the lust of the flesh.”
“Walk” here means “peripateō,” that is, “to make one’s way, progress.”
To progress is always a slow and steady journey.
To keep pushing and moving forward no matter the storms.
This walk or mind renewal is how we undo the divine forgetfulness we have plunged ourselves into due to rebellion against our Creator.
So as you keep walking with God, that is, learning and knowing more about him through obedience to his word, prayers, and meditation, you will develop your God consciousness more and more, and when your God consciousness is developed, you begin to express this God nature as the fruit of the Spirit.
That’s how you begin to express true self-control in its purest form.
This, my dear friends, is how you get self-control. It’s more like a round-and-round thing.
That is, you need to have self-control “to know God,” and you need to know God to have self-control.
If you understood up to this point, well done.
If you don’t, kindly read this piece again or let me know your areas of confusion in the comments or on the Ask a Question page.