1 Corinthians 10:13-23
Luke 4:1-13
St. Thomas Aquinas (13th-century) once
observed, “We can certainly never
believe, trust, or love God more than, or even as much as, we should.
Extravagance [in goodness, mercy, and charity] is impossible. Here there is no
virtuous moderation, no measurable mean; the more extreme our activity [in
virtue], the better we are.”
In other words, loving The Lord by obeying His
commandments (John 14:15), and
thereby testifying by our lives of His goodness, does not have a measure of moderation. Living in the world and navigating life’s
temptations, however, are other matters.
Temperance
(another word for moderation) is the control
of one’s desire for pleasure. This does
not mean Christians are to deny themselves any sort of pleasure; rather it
means our deliberate quest for personal pleasure does, more often than not,
cross a fine line to gluttony, lust, and covetousness, to idolatry – even
spiritual complacency and apathy. Temperance is our prudent response to the Commandments that prohibit covetousness;
that overwhelming desire for things or persons we do not need in our lives and
must not desire for ourselves lest they tempt us away from The Lord and lead us toward neglect of and harm to one
another.
In a life of discipleship in the Wesleyan Methodist
tradition, it is the discipline of sanctification, the spiritually necessary and
deliberate measure of our growing (but
never settled) relationship with The Lord and His Church. We do not become better human beings, better
husbands and wives, better parents or siblings, better friends, better
disciples; nor do we grow in faith and in love except by embrace of the means
of grace, our deliberate choices and intentional acts, these values taught to
us from an early age by our parents AND our Holy Mother the Church; the very Bride
of Christ.
The measure of genuine virtue and the ethics of
discipleship is in the knowledge and
practice of the Living Word and the embrace of the many means of grace at our
disposal not only for personal spiritual growth and fulfillment – but also as the
means to the end of “making disciples who are equipped to make disciples”.
Perhaps the greatest challenge of temperance, a
challenge we face almost daily, is the measure of “good enough” and whether our
standard of measure takes others into account, including our God and Father. It is not enough to merely deny oneself; it
is about what we will give of ourselves to The Lord and His Church. In the more common language, complacency, or
apathy in the Church today, are we saved just “enough” to avoid hell without
really breaking a spiritual sweat or going out of our way for the Church’s
mission, let alone for a complete stranger?
Even then we are missing the boat – and probably the
point. St. Thomas also pointed out that
it is “better to illuminate than to
merely shine, better to deliver to others contemplated truths than merely to
contemplate”. Is this not a good illustration of Jesus’
encouragement to His followers to “let your light shine before all, that they
may see your good works and glorify your Father in Heaven”
(Matthew 5:16)?
Yet we must also understand that temperance is not about gaining “enough” for ourselves first with
the intent of giving more later – because later never seems to come. As is commonly stated, the road to hell is
paved with such intentions. Rather we
are compelled by virtue and the Spirit – as our Lord in the wilderness – to
discern between our legitimate needs and personal desires. The need for temperance as a cardinal virtue
in discipleship means we discern between that which is of the world and may meet bodily needs but will never meet spiritual needs.
We see in our Lord’s confrontation in the wilderness
with the evil one the way in which we will inevitably be faced with difficult
choices, temptations that have the potential to lure us away from the Light of the
Word and into the darkness that is the world, its false promises, and its
emptiness in striving only for that which is temporal, that which can be taken,
that which will rot or rust. We are often
experiencing not a demonic compulsion or possession – but the curse of free
will in the face of personal desire. And
our relationship with The Lord, if it even exists, will be severely tested.
What we are seeing in this exchange between Jesus and
the evil one in the wilderness is not merely some cosmic confrontation by which
the tempter is trying to decide exactly who he is dealing with; we are also
seeing the course of our own lives and the choices we are confronted with if or
when we decide to follow Christ in
His life rather than to merely believe
in His existence and death on the Cross (and, yes, there is a profound
difference) – because what we are seeing in the wilderness, in our more
contemporary context, is a choice between “going on to perfection” (Hebrews 6:1) in discipleship – OR – pursuing the so-called
American Dream.
The contemporary and socially respectable Church has
managed to convince us over the years we can have all the American Dream
promises AND have blessings from Above, but the teachers of the early Church,
including St. Augustine, would have challenged such an impossible balance in
that “Complete abstinence is easier than
perfect moderation” – as it pertains to worldly goods and personal desires.
In other words, we kid ourselves when we somehow become convinced we can
indeed “serve two masters” when Jesus clearly states this is impossible (Matthew 6:24); “for either you will hate the one
and love the other, or else be loyal to one and despise the other”.
Dare we suggest we can somehow prove the Savior of the
World, The Living Word wrong??
Life is filled with choices, and not all of them are
good. Often we feel compelled to choose
between the lesser of two evils when in reality, there are other
alternatives. But when we choose to
become disciples, we must understand that perfection in spiritual liberty can
be tarnished, damaged perhaps beyond repair.
The difference in denominational understanding
suggests once we are in grace, we cannot be removed from grace; but I think we
are asking the wrong questions when we manage to bring up such a biblically
incomplete answer. For then we are only
trying to decide whether we can have our cake and eat it, too. We are solely focused on “me”; The Lord and
His Church are merely incidental to our personal desires – and that, my dear
friends, is the “way of death” (Proverbs
16:25).
Temperance demands we discern between spiritual need
and personal desire, for the carnal desire is destructive to the spirit. In absolute terms, it is about asking whether
an evil act with good intentions can somehow become an act of virtue. St. Paul answers this question to the Romans (6:1-2): “Shall we continue in sin that
grace may abound? Certainly not! How shall we who died to sin live any longer
in sin?” Being justified before
The Lord does not somehow magically alter the destructive nature of sin!
Temperance is the acknowledgment that we do have
bodily needs that can be met by worldly goods and services, but temperance also
demands that the other virtues play a role in our decision-making process in
learning to discern between need and desire.
Being justified before The Lord does not automatically make our choices
and actions righteous – we still must be actively engaged in that Relationship through
the means of grace which build us up and inform our choices and actions by
drawing us closer to the Mind of Christ.
It is not always going to be easy; in fact it may
never be, for the “flesh is weak”. In
discipleship, however, as we are actively engaged in a relationship with The
Lord and His Church, we will find ourselves making more deliberate choices
toward the good of others – choices by which we deliberately glorify our Father
and testify to His Truth and our faith.
This is the ONLY way
to build up His Church. This is our
calling, this is our commission from Christ Jesus Himself – for this is our
life in this world, and in the world to come.
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