A Woman's Wisdom: How the Book of Proverbs Speaks to Everything by Lydia Brownback Page A

things. Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen. For this reason God gave them up to dishonorable passions. (Rom. 1:22–26)

    Proverbs puts it this way:
The iniquities of the wicked ensnare him,
and he is held fast in the cords of his sin.
He dies for lack of discipline,
and because of his great folly he is led astray.
(Prov. 5:22–23)
    When people seek fulfillment apart from God himself, they initially think they are on the path to delight and freedom, but the reality is just the opposite. They are fools, because they are looking to gratify their cravings in what God has created rather than in the One who created them. Over time, God gives them up to their cravings. If you read that entire chapter of Romans, you will see that being given over to the sinful desires of our flesh is God’s ultimate judgment on unrepentant sin.
    Some time ago I ran into an old acquaintance whom I hadn’t seen in twenty years. As we caught up over coffee, he told me that since I’d seen him last, he’d spent many years away from the Lord and gotten caught up in unrestrained sexual sin. He was seeking the Lord afresh, he said, but he continued to struggle with desire for some of the perverted practices in which he’d engaged. As he told me a bit of this, he said with a wry smile, “I did some pretty awful things, and I’m surprised that God didn’t strike me down in the process.” He didn’t realize that his desire for perversion was itself a foretaste of what eventually would have happened in full measure had he not repented. Such is the nature of sin and God’s dealings with it, whether we are Christians or not. James Boice writes:
    When we are sliding downhill we delude ourselves into thinking that we are only going to dip into sin a little bit or at least that there are points beyond which we will never go, lines we will never cross. But this is sheer fantasy. When we start down that downhill path, there are no points beyond which we will not go and no lines we will not choose to cross—if we live long enough. . . . When we come to Christ, the question is not “How low can you go?” We are done with that. The question is “How high can you rise?” And to that question the answer also is: no limit. We are to become increasingly like the Lord Jesus Christ throughout eternity. 2

    And this is right where Paul’s second list fits in: “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law” (Gal. 5:22–23).
    Here we discover that the self-control of Proverbs 25:28 isn’t a natural trait, something that, if we just try hard enough, we can master. Our understanding of it is much fuller as a result of what we find in Galatians. In both Testaments, it is clear that self-control is possible only by and through the living Lord. In Proverbs we know it as the fear of the Lord, living under him in trust, submission, and dependence. In the New Testament we get a much fuller picture. Self-control comes about through our union with Christ. Only those who live in fellowship with God can apprehend and maintain true self-control. Any of us can modify our behavior, but behavior modification is not the same thing as self-control, because, from a biblical standpoint, only one of those—self-control—has to do with the whole person—body, mind, and heart.
    Who doesn’t want this? We all want to be characterized by self-control. But how? How can we live this way on a consistent basis? We all can relate to Paul, who said, “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate” (Rom. 7:15). We would all prefer to be in control rather than to be controlled by something or