Your Future Self Will Thank You

by Drew Dyck

  I’ll never arrive at perfection, not in this life. I don’t expect to. But shouldn’t Christians expect to make some progress? Shouldn’t they gradually overcome bad habits and besetting sins? Shouldn’t they become more humble and selfless? Shouldn’t they look a little more like Jesus with every passing year? Shouldn’t I?

  The reality hit me with extra force the other day when my brother (yes, the heart attack one) posed a difficult question.

  “Are you more spiritual today than you were twenty years ago?”

  I tried to get off on technicalities.

  “Well, I was a teenager then. Plus I’ve gone to seminary and …”

  “I’m not talking about how much you know,” he interrupted.

  My brother isn’t in the habit of posing deep, difficult questions. Yet he’d posed one nonetheless. It wasn’t a sideways confrontation either; he was asking because he was worried about his own lack of growth. His query kept rattling around my skull for the next couple of weeks, and I couldn’t shake it out.

  In that twenty years, I’d attended church hundreds of times, sang thousands of Christian songs. I’d graduated from seminary. I’d written books. About God! But was I more spiritually mature? Less enslaved to sin? Was I more passionate about following Jesus?

  As I look back at my patterns of behaviors and the state of my soul, I don’t know if I can say that I am. In many ways, I’m stuck—or even moving in reverse.

  FINDING THE FOUNDATION

  Around the time I was grappling with my spiritual stuckness, I stumbled upon an intriguing description of a group of ancient Jewish monks. They were called the Therapeutae “because, like doctors, they cure and heal the souls of those who come to them or because of their pure and sincere service and worship of the Divine.”1

  And pure it was. The monks led lives of extraordinary discipline and devotion. Their lifestyle was austere in the extreme. Think the TV show Survivor, minus the cameras and coups. Renouncing all possessions, they traded city life for caves in the wilderness. They spent their days praying, singing spiritual songs, and meditating on the Hebrew Scriptures. They ate nothing till nightfall and gathered only once a week for prayer and a shared meal. “They abandon their property without being influenced by any predominant attraction, they flee without even turning their heads back again,”2 Philo marveled. The third-century church historian Eusebius was so impressed by their devotion, he was convinced they were actually early Christians.

  What was the secret to their extreme piety? Philo offered an explanation. “Having first laid down self-control as a foundation for the soul,” he wrote, “they build the other virtues on it.”3

  The line jumped off the page for me. A foundation for the soul. I found the paradox striking. A foundation is solid, immovable. A soul, by definition, is the opposite—airy and immaterial. Yet there they were, mashed together in one lovely phrase written millennia ago.

  I was even more moved by the insight they conveyed. I didn’t aspire to an ascetic life of punishing purity, but I recognized that these ancient monks were onto something. Self-control isn’t just one good character trait, a nice addition to the pantheon of virtues. It’s foundational. Not because it’s more important than other virtues, but because the others rely upon it.

  Think about it. Can you be faithful to your spouse without self-control? Can you be generous without self-control? Peaceable? Selfless? Honest? Kind? No, even the most basic altruism requires suspending your own interests to think of others. And that can’t happen without self-control. The theologian Thomas Aquinas called temperance (another word for self-control) a cardinal virtue. He taught that none of the other virtues—including humility, meekness, mercy, and studiousness—could be developed without it.4 As a statement from Fuller Seminary’s Thrive Center puts it: “Self-control is an instrumental virtue. It facilitates the acquisition/development of other virtues: joy, gratitude, generosity.”5

  Self-control is key.

  The insight about my lack of self-control was enlightening—and unsettling. I realized that lurking behind my inability to make progress was a deficiency in this cardinal virtue. My lack of spiritual progress wasn’t a matter of adequate knowledge. I wasn’t short on resources or strategies. I didn’t lack time or opportunities or talent. The chief reason I couldn’t follow through on my plans, why I felt chronically stuck in my spiritual life, why my best-laid plans and highest ambitions went unfulfilled day after day, year after year, really boiled down to one maddening, embarrassing, surprising, and undeniable truth: I lacked self-control. And making ancillary changes wasn’t going to fix the problem. Sure, I could busy myself rearranging the furniture of my life. Add some cute shutters and a fresh coat of paint. But if things were really going to change, I had to work on the foundation.

  The book you’re holding is my attempt to do just that. Books are written by people who have either mastered a topic or by those who desperately need to. I fall into the latter camp. I’m going to explore the science and spirituality of self-control, research strategies for fostering this essential trait—then run experiments in the laboratory I call my life. While this is a personal journey, I don’t plan to go it alone. I’ll be talking with theologians and pastors, sociologists and psychologists. Self-control is a spiritual topic—and a psychological one. All truth is God’s truth, and I’m scouting for wisdom wherever I can find it.

  I’m not looking to become a multimillionaire, or release the giant within, or follow my bliss, or any other silly self-help fantasy. My hopes are more modest. I want to make progress in important areas of life by cultivating self-control. I want a firmer foundation for my soul.

  If you have the same goal, keep reading.

  Chapter 1

  Why Self-Control?

  Because It Leads to Freedom and Flourishing

  “He who reigns within himself and rules passions, desires, and fears is more than a king.”

  —JOHN MILTON

  Whenever you lose control, someone else always finds it.”

  These were the words of my high school English teacher Mr. Sologar on our first day of class. They didn’t have anything to do with literature or grammar, but I guess he wanted to kick off the class with a life lesson.

  It was a good one.

  If we acted up at home, he explained, control of our lives would swiftly transfer to our parents in the form of lost privileges or being grounded. The same was true at school. If we abused our freedom in the classroom or in the hallways—and we did!—we’d find ourselves in the principal’s office or confined to detention. If we got really crazy and decided to break the law, the legal system would step in to curtail our freedom.

  “No, control is never truly lost,” he repeated in his thick Indian accent. “If you fail to control yourself, others will control you.”

  I didn’t care for Mr. Sologar. He covered our papers in red ink, hectored us about poor diction (he would have liked the word hectored), and insisted we read The Lord of the Flies even though there was a perfectly good movie based on the novel. Yet somehow his self-control lesson lodged itself in my lazy, teenage brain. There it sat, dormant and almost forgotten until I started researching for this book. Only now am I starting to truly to appreciate the wisdom of his words. As he looked out across a class of adolescents, he knew the biggest threat to our freedom isn’t any external enemy. It’s our inability to control ourselves.

  Mr. Sologar, you were onto something.

  CONQUERING CITIES

  The Bible has a lot to say about self-control. In that great repository of wisdom called Proverbs, we’re told that it’s “better to have self-control than to conquer a city” (Prov. 16:32 NLT). I’ll admit that the city-conquering language feels a little weird to me (I’m more of a Cappuccino-conqueror), but I get the point. In the ancient world, people built massive walls around cities and patrolled them with armed guards. Conquering a city was the hardest military feat imaginable. But here’s Solomon, the wisest guy in antiquity, saying that contr
olling yourself is more impressive than pulling off this nearly impossible exploit. The image also provides a telling contrast between two kinds of enemies. Defeating the enemy beyond your walls is hard; subduing the enemy within is harder.

  Proverbs revisits the city-smashing motif elsewhere to hammer home the point. “Like a city whose walls are broken through is a person who lacks self-control” (Prov. 25:28). In other words, an absence of self-control is dangerous. Soldiers-breaking-through-your-walls dangerous.

  It’s not all wall breaking and city smashing. In one of the most beautiful passages in all of Scripture, the apostle Paul lists self-control alongside core virtues like love, joy, and peace as among the “fruit of the Spirit” (Gal. 5:22). We tend to think of self-control as a strictly human enterprise, but Scripture describes self-control as a product of being connected to God. It’s something that grows when your life is rooted in divine reality. In fact, if it’s missing, your faith may be a ruse. No fruit, no root.

  These are just a few mentions of the virtue. Scripture is also crammed with examples of self-control in action, people who demonstrated this vital virtue as they served God and their fellow man.

  Unfortunately, self-control has a bad reputation these days. When I told people I was writing a book on the topic, I heard a lot of sighs and groans. “Oh yeah, I should be better about that,” they would say, their voices tinged with defeat. Most of us view self-control like that overdue dentist appointment—necessary but dreaded. Others don’t even see the necessity. The self doesn’t need to be controlled; it needs to be liberated. For them, self-expression is the real virtue. Self-control is boring, confining, the cop that shows up and shuts down the party.

  Others worry emphasizing self-control will lead to legalism, an approach to spiritual life that reduces faith to a list of dos and don’ts. Yet it’s a mistake to relegate self-control to this category. Biblical self-control isn’t about proud self-reliance or earning your way to heaven. It’s not somehow nullified by grace. You will find no asterisks beside the biblical exhortations to exercise self-control. What you will find is a truckload of commands to resist evil, flee lust, avoid temptation, abstain from sin, control your tongue, guard your heart, and, most graphically, kill the flesh.

  Yet these drastic measures aren’t meant to confine us; they are edicts from a loving God designed to bring liberty. The Bible portrays self-control not as restrictive but rather as the path to freedom. It enables us to do what’s right—and ultimately what’s best for us.

  From the biblical view, there are only two modes of life available to us: enslavement to sin and life in the Spirit. The former speaks of confinement in the extreme. Today “sin” is a playful word, associated with decadent desserts and lingerie ads. We see the word sin and imagine someone sampling a menu of forbidden delights. Don’t be thrown by that connotation. Instead, think of being pistol-whipped by increasingly destructive patterns of behavior, ones that ultimately lead to your demise. That’s what the Bible means by sin: enslavement. The early theologian Augustine (who knew a thing or two about sin) described it this way: “vanquished by the sin into which it fell by the bent of its will, nature has lost its liberty.”1

  Life in the Spirit, on the other hand, is a life of liberty. In this scenario a loving God guides and empowers you to live a life of righteousness that leads to flourishing and joy. But without self-control, you’re doomed to the enslavement side of the equation.

  RESISTING MARSHMALLOWS

  For the past year, I’ve been reading everything about self-control I can get my hands on. Primarily that meant surveying the relevant Bible passages and diving into the vast corpus of Christian thought on the topic. I’ve also scoured academic journals and pored over dozens of studies. I’ve read bestselling books about grit and willpower and resilience and habits. I’ve interviewed experts in a variety of disciplines. Along the way, I’ve acquired a new vocabulary to talk about the subject. Self-regulation. Ego depletion. Delayed gratification. Active volition. Inhibitory control. All fancy ways of referring to our ability—or inability—to control our behavior.

  It’s been a fascinating journey, even if the material at times has been a little dry. Let’s just say that studies with titles like “Cognitive, affective, and behavioral correlates of internalization of regulations for religious activities” aren’t exactly beach reading. No matter. There have been enough revelations along the way to keep me going. More than once I’ve had my assumptions about self-control challenged—or flipped upside-down. Which is to be expected. Even those who study the subject for a living have been stunned by the discoveries of recent years.

  One of the biggest surprises is just how powerful self-control is. Researchers first caught wind of the importance of self-control thanks to a 1960s experiment. In the now famous “marshmallow experiment,” Stanford researcher Walter Mischel put a group of preschoolers through a wrenching test.2 Each child was offered a marshmallow, cookie, or pretzel to eat. Or they could make a deal. The tikes were told that if they could hold off eating the sweet or salty treat for just fifteen minutes they would receive two treats.

  Almost none of them could.

  A few jammed the yummy snack into their mouths immediately. Most at least tried to resist. The children who held out employed a range of behaviors to cope with the temptation. Some would put their hands over their eyes or turn away from the tray bearing the delicious temptation. Out of sight, out of mind, they hoped. Others started kicking the desk or tugging on their hair. Some even played with the marshmallow, stroking it “as if it were a tiny stuffed animal.”

  The researchers analyzed the results, charting the children on a four-point scale on their ability to delay gratification. But the big findings wouldn’t come until decades later and completely by chance. As fate would have it, Mischel’s own daughters attended school with several children who had participated in the experiment. Over the years, he heard secondhand reports from his daughters about how their classmates were doing. Mischel noticed a pattern in the gossip. The children who seemed to get in the most trouble were the same ones who had trouble waiting for a second marshmallow.

  His curiosity was piqued. Mischel and his colleagues tracked down hundreds of participants from the original study, now teenagers. Sure enough, the ones who had demonstrated the higher levels of willpower as preschoolers were outpacing their peers. Not only did they have better grades and test scores, they were more popular at school and less likely to abuse drugs. The benefits continued to mount as the test subjects grew older. The children who had held out for the full fifteen minutes scored 210 points higher on their SATS than their weakest willed counterparts. They went on to achieve higher levels of education and report higher levels of happiness in their relationships. They even had lower body mass indexes.

  Part of what made the follow-up findings so remarkable is that very few childhood traits are helpful in predicting outcomes later in life. Yet this simple test had shown a strong correlation between the ability to delay gratification in childhood with numerous benefits in adulthood.

  The findings rippled through multiple fields. Psychologists had long assumed intelligence was the key to a successful life. For educators, high self-esteem was the ticket. Self-control had never entered the discussion. But Mischel’s marshmallow test changed everything. It showed that self-control was paramount and affected virtually every area of life. Since Mischel’s famous experiment, study after study has linked self-control to a surplus of “favorable life outcomes,” including better relationships, higher incomes, and higher levels of happiness. People with greater self-control are more sociable, honest, and sacrificial. They have lower rates of depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and aggression. They even live longer. If you could bottle self-control, it would be one of the most valuable substances on earth.

  I’LL BE GOOD—LATER

  Some researchers define self-control as the ability to delay gratification. This is what the marshmallow experiment sought to test. Can yo
u resist the smaller immediate reward for a bigger one later? On paper, it looks like a no-brainer. The smart move is to hold out for the better reward. But desire has a way of changing the game, and not just for preschoolers. You know that passing on that donut now will make you feel healthier and more energetic tomorrow … but wait, is that a maple glaze?

  Our inability to delay gratification lands us in all kinds of trouble. Perhaps the most famous example in the Bible involves a birthright and a bowl of soup. You might recall the story. The patriarch Isaac has twin sons, Jacob and Esau. Esau is born mere minutes before his brother, which means he’s recognized as the firstborn. That might not seem like a big deal to us, but back then it was everything. The son with the birthright would eventually inherit all of the father’s wealth and possessions.

  The boys grow up, and they’re complete opposites. Esau is a man’s man. He excels at hunting and growing body hair (seriously … see Gen. 27:11). Jacob is a committed indoorsman who knows his way around the kitchen. One day Esau comes back from a hunt and he’s starving. “Quick, let me have some of that red stew! I’m famished,” he says to his brother. Jacob agrees to serve him the stew—on one condition. Esau has to give up his birthright. On the face of it, it’s the most ludicrous offer of all time: one meal in exchange for a fortune. But Esau is hungry. And that makes all the difference. “Look, I am about to die,” Esau says. “What good is the birthright to me?”

  Esau was crazy, right? He was, but we all have a little Esau in us. We have a hard time holding out for future rewards, even when it’s clearly in our best interest to do so. We tend to opt for the smaller, short-term payoff.

  We whip out the credit card to buy things we don’t need, knowing we’ll have to pay it back later, plus interest.