Temperance: Ordering Your Desires
The Bible often articulates the virtue of temperance as sobriety or self-control, as in 1 Peter 1:13: “preparing your minds for action, and being sober-minded.” Or, in 1 Peter 4:7 he says, “The end of all things is near; therefore, be alert and sober-minded for prayer.” Likewise, in 2 Peter 1:5–8 he commands believers to “make every effort to supplement your faith with goodness, goodness with knowledge, knowledge with self-control, self-control with endurance, endurance with godliness, godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love.” Here we see why Scripture frequently contrasts the outer man from the inner man, the old man from the new (1 Cor. 15:47–49; 2 Cor. 4:16; Col. 3:1–17). This is the substance of temperance, “to put off the old man and to be renewed in God—that is, to scorn all bodily delights, and the popular applause, and to turn the whole love to things divine and unseen.”[1] Temperance is that habit of grace, by the Spirit’s employment, whereby the Christian is able to keep his soul from corruption, degradation, and deformation.
The cultivation of virtue is not an end in itself, nor are virtues simply to bring about the common good. Rather, we are in service to holiness since we are in union with Christ to God. Because believers are united to Christ—having his righteousness imputed to them—the pursuit of virtue has a new foundation and end. It is directed toward eternal life and blessedness, culminating in the vision of God when we see Christ as He is.
Augustine says temperance is “restraining and quieting the passions which make us pant for those things which turn us away from the laws of God and from the enjoyment of His goodness, that is, in a word, from the happy life.”[2] Temperance is not merely avoiding or negating earthly passions, but cultivating love for the chief love. It is like a faithful parent who restrains and trains a child to grow up and flourish. Like good parents, temperance seeks to use the proper means of discipline and restraining and of conditioning and training.
Holiness: Keeping Watch Over Your Life
Robert Murray McCheyne’s well-known comment about the pastor’s holiness is well-known and worth being reminded of (even if it’s apocryphal): “The most important thing our people need is our holiness.”
Pastors are models of what the psalmist says, “My soul longs, yes faints, for the courts of the Lord; my heart and flesh sing for joy to the living God.” (Ps. 84:2)
One of Satan’s greatest devices against pastors is to adorn the world’s folly in such beauty that the soul is ensnared into false affection. He does this to keep us from the holy life of mortifying sin and vivifying Christlikeness. The actions of mortifying and vivifying not only capture the regenerate life of the Christian in Colossians 3:1–17, but also the way of pastoring. The one who is hidden with Christ in God mortifies that which remains fleshly (vv. 5–10) and vivifies, or enlivens, who we are in Christ (vv. 12–17) for the sake of the flock entrusted to him.
However, for the pastor, the life of holiness and temperance is not without peculiar obstacles.
Even within the holy action of temperance, there is opportunity for disorder and entanglement. Of this disorder, Webster insightfully notes that mortification and vivification are “often marred by self-absorption, whether in the form of excessive confidence in human powers of self-realization, or in the form of restless anxiety about performance. Both threaten the flourishing of the Christian life, because both manifest mistrust in the condition in which God’s grace has placed the believer, and are accompanied by the temptation to detach mortification and vivification from the original grace of regeneration.”[3] In other words, the pastor is not merely tempted to have excessive confidence or restless anxiety in his leadership or preaching, but in his very life of holiness.
As a gift of God’s grace, the virtue of temperance allows us to both restrain and quiet the passions by resting and enjoying Christ’s temperance for and on behalf of us. The virtue of temperance is designed by God in such a way for pastors to be who they were made to be by seeing that “the true sacrifice is offered in every act which is designed to unite us to God in a holy fellowship, every act, that is, which is directed to that final Good which makes possible our true felicity.”[4] Instead of morbid self-absorption that ruins our enjoyment of this earthly life, the practices of temperance are themselves the path to true joy in the chief good.
Enjoyment: Right Ordering of Loves
The virtue of temperance says the life of the pastor is ordered in such a way that he restrains the passions and trains his affections to produce righteousness, resting all the while in Christ’s righteousness imputed to them. As such, pastors cultivate temperance by ordering affections through enjoyment of God.
If David relishes the contentment found in the self-sufficient God in Psalm 34, then he revels in the abundant joy of the right hand of God in Psalm 16. Being content in God means participating in his ever-new happiness. With contentment in the all-satisfying and self-sufficient God, the pastor bears the fruit of joy because he is made happy in Christ. In both Psalm 16 and 34, David relates his enduring joy specifically in God’s goodness. Moreover, David says he has no good apart from God (16:2), but that in God he lacks no good thing (34:10).
Though this God-centered and God-backed joy is real now, it awaits full completion. Pastors daily encounter competitors to God’s goodness, rivals to God’s beauty, challengers to God’s truth. Thus, in other Psalms, David repeatedly makes known his laments and longings for the fully satisfying enjoyment of God (i.e., 42:2; 63:1; 84:2; 119:81; 143:6). This complete satisfaction and enjoyment of God is both our source of strength and our motivation to endure in the life of temperance (i.e., Rom. 5–8).
In other words, the relation of God-centered joy, which arises from God-centered contentment, to temperance is that the hope of heaven trains us for our arrival on heaven’s blissful shore (Ps. 16:9–11). Temperance believes that God will make sure we make it home. The hymn on Psalm 16 helps the pastor treasure God as his chief good as he is an eager and willing example to the flock entrusted to him:
You have made know to me
The path of life divine.
Bliss shall I know at Your right hand;
Joy from Your face will shine.[5]
[1] Augustine, Morals of the Catholic Church, 63-64.
[2] Ibid.
[3] John Webster, God Without Measure, vol. 2, 105.
[4] Augustine, City of God, X.6
[5] Words: Psalm 16; Music: Ananias Davisson (1780–1857), arr. David Iliff (1939–present)