Session Four: Self-Discipline

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Taught October 4, 2026. Reading: Adams, chapter 4.

Summary

Last Sunday was the map. This Sunday is the first band on the left of it, and it is the step where Adams thinks most cases should quietly end. Steps two through five exist because step one failed, and every one of them, done well, ends by bringing a person back to step one.

The word is enkrateia, usually rendered “self-control” in Galatians 5:23, where it is part of the fruit of the Spirit. Control names the effect; discipline names the cause, which is why this is step one of a process and not a personality trait some people happen to have. The root idea is holding or gripping: the self-controlled person has a grip on himself, especially on his desires and his habitual responses. The second is the one people forget. Most of what needs disciplining is not a dramatic desire but a practiced reaction. Paul uses the same word for the athlete who exercises self-control in all things (1 Corinthians 9:25).

Under the whole chapter sits a theological floor: the Westminster Confession’s statement that God is “without body, parts, or passions.” God is not acted upon, not moved about by forces outside himself, never swept along. That does not mean he is cold or indifferent; it means that nothing outside him changes him. His love and his wrath are not reactions he suffers but perfections he is. That is the character we are being conformed to, so a man governed by his desires, or by the emotional weather around him, is unlike God at precisely that point.

Step one, then, is the Christian with enough grip on himself to handle problems and relationships in the church and the world without needing help from others. Two corrections follow at once. It is not solitude: there is, as Adams says, “no such thing as a submarine Christian.” The self-controlled Christian is the one who knows when to seek help himself rather than waiting to be found out; asking early is an exercise of self-discipline, not a failure of it. And it is not self-generated: his control comes not from himself but from the Spirit, and it is self-control only in the sense that he does not depend on other human beings for it. Without that sentence the whole chapter would be moralism.

Alongside Adams we set Joe Rigney’s Leadership and Emotional Sabotage (2024), a different kind of book, since Rigney is translating the family-systems thought of Edwin Friedman into biblical categories while Adams is a biblical counselor writing a procedure. Rigney recovers a virtue the New Testament requires of elders and we almost never name: sober-mindedness, nephalios, the capacity to keep good judgment under pressures that play on the passions, which we lose when we get drunk on other people’s passions. Titus 1:8 lists self-controlled and disciplined side by side, so Paul distinguishes them. One virtue, two directions: inward, a grip on your own desires and habitual responses; outward, judgment that is not steered by other people’s. A man can master his own appetites and still be run by the emotional weather of the people around him. The lone wolf and the man with no judgment of his own are both undisciplined.

Self-discipline is the beginning and the end of church discipline, the most basic form and the most mature at once. Child training, paideia and musar, brings a child to maturity, and maturity is his ability to discipline himself in the ways of God; the control of parents is gradually replaced by the control of the Spirit through the Word. Proverbs is written to a young man precisely to produce this: control of his spirit (16:32), his tongue (17:27), his anger (19:11). And the mature person obeys not for fear of punishment or hope of reward but out of gratitude to the God who sent the Savior to die for him. He wants to please God rather than his parents, others, or even himself.

Here is the implication that changes how a Session runs a case. Each of the other four steps, when it succeeds, should result not merely in setting a matter straight but in helping the restored person become more self-disciplined. Second Corinthians 2:7 requires that the restored offender be assisted, and a large part of that assistance is teaching him discipline in the very area of the offense; without it he will more than likely fall the same way again. Buried in a footnote is Adams’ answer to the objection that discipline is heavy-handed where patient counsel would do: often the counsel was already being offered and going nowhere, and discipline is what, for the first time, makes counseling fruitful. In most cases the offense grows out of a pattern of life rather than a one-time event, and repentance is essentially a desire to think, be, and do differently. Helping someone toward self-discipline is not itself part of remedial church discipline, but it could be the most valuable outcome of it.

Key texts: Galatians 5:23; 1 Corinthians 9:25; 1 Corinthians 7:9; Titus 1:8; 1 Timothy 3:2; Proverbs 16:32; 17:27; 19:11; Romans 8:2; 2 Corinthians 2:7.

For discussion

• What is the last offense you decided to cover rather than confront, and how did you decide?
• What is the difference between a self-disciplined Christian and a self-sufficient one?
• Where have you seen a person with real self-control still steered by other people’s passions?

Go deeper: Jay E. Adams, Handbook of Church Discipline, chapter 4. Buy the book