There’s nothing worse than when someone treads on your toes. You know, they get in your space, they tread on your toes and what you feel is something between discomfort, anger and fear. That’s why boundaries are so important.

The concept of setting and maintaining boundaries in our lives is actually very important yet it’s not something that we tend to think too much about until someone crosses a boundary, until someone, as I said, tread on your toes. Then all of a sudden we react and more often than not our reactions aren’t all that good.

That’s why it’s important for us to think about and to understand our boundaries and that’s why it’s important to set our boundaries in the right place with the right controls. Boundaries that are too tight end up isolating us, boundaries that are too loose allow our lives, our emotions, our possessions, to be plundered.

Different people have different concepts of boundaries. I remember back in the 1980’s I was doing a consulting job for the City of Melbourne in Australia. They set up a small office for us in a small laneway not far from the Town Hall in a building that we shared with, amongst other things, an English language school with lots of Asian students.

There was only one elevator in the building and as I recall it was a pretty small one. Now we all have a concept about when a lift or an elevator as some call it, is full. You get in, you take a look, it looks too packed to you, so you decide to wait until it comes back again empty.

But it turned out that the Asian students coming from countries much, much more crowded than Australia had a totally different notion of what ‘full’ looked like and so they just keep on packing in and packing in and when I thought we simply couldn’t squeeze anyone else in four more people would get in the lift. That truly tested my notions on the boundaries of personal space with bodies pressed up against me and people literally treading on my toes.

But it didn’t seem to bother them because they were used to that sort of overcrowding, it was entirely normal for them. Fortunately though the lift never broke down, I don’t know how I would have ever coped with being stuck in there for half an hour pinned to the wall.

So we all have different ideas of what boundaries are acceptable, and what boundaries are unacceptable. You see it between nations, in most of the world you have to have a passport to enter a country as a foreign national but not all foreign nationals are the same.

Many countries treat different nationalities differently in terms of visa requirements and security requirements and so on. I have to fulfil certain requirements to get a visa to enter India but if you’re a Pakistani national the requirements are much more stringent. And yet travel to Europe now, most people can pretty much move across national borders without any sort of control whatsoever.

The more you think about boundaries whether on a personal level or a national or an international scale, the more complicated it gets. But there’s one thing for certain, if someone, a person, a group of people, an army or a nation steps over a boundary that they’re not supposed to, well there’s going to be a clash of some sort, anything from friction to all out war.

That’s why boundaries are important. And yet we spend little, if any time, thinking about, talking about the boundaries that we’ve set. Mostly the setting of boundaries is an unconscious thing and because boundaries are never talked about people step over them, often without knowing it, until it’s too late and right there you have the beginnings of a potential conflict.

Given that this subject is such an important one in our lives it won’t come as any surprise to you that God has rather a lot to say about the boundaries in our lives. It seems to me that if I set the right sort of boundaries in the right sort of places with the right sort of controls, balancing stringency and defence on the one hand with kindness and openness on the other, I’m going to have a much better life.

The Bible tells us that we should pursue peace. And since war happens over this whole issue of boundaries, it seems to me at least, it’s worth talking about and thinking through the boundaries that we set in our lives and perhaps adjusting a few of them to bring about more peace.

That’s why we’re talking about boundaries, learning to set the right boundaries on the program this week and next. And today I want to get us thinking by kicking off some wisdom on this whole issue of boundaries from the Old Testament Book of Proverbs. Have a listen, Proverbs chapter 22 verse 28:

Do not remove the ancient landmark that your ancestors set up.

Landmarks were the basis of boundaries. When Israel came into the Promised Land every one of the twelve tribes of Israel bar one, the Levites, were allocated their own land in this Promised Land. The ancient landmarks were set up to draw the boundaries between the lands between the tribes.

But here this idea is being used metaphorically, it’s this idea that God has ordained certain boundaries, certain things that are good and yet in this day and age we want to toss all those things out because they’re not all that convenient because we think we know better. Meanwhile, wars continue to be fought over boundaries, marriages continue to fall apart over boundaries, and lives continue to be robbed of God’s peace over boundaries.

Just a few verses on God takes this to a whole other level, Proverbs chapter 23 verses 10 and 11:

Do not remove an ancient landmark or encroach on the fields of orphans for their redeemer is strong and he will plead their cause against you.

He uses the example here of the orphans, the poor and the needy and the vulnerable in society. God has a heart for the poor and what He’s saying here is, “Don’t step over that boundary, don’t move the ancient landmark because God, the redeemer of the orphans, is strong and He will defend them”.

See there are some good boundaries that we can set in life, we’re going to talk about a few of those in the rest of this series and there are some very bad boundaries that we can set like exploiting the vulnerable as in this case or being selfish. When you think about it, selfishness is about setting the wrong boundary in the wrong place, having more than enough and not sharing it with those who are in need, placing your comfort above others needs.

And when we move from being selfish to generous with our resources, with our time, with our encouragement, what we’re doing is saying, “Hey, this boundary around what I have and what I own, I’ve had it set in the wrong place. I actually need to move it outwards a lot more, I need to make it’s defences less stringent so that some of what I have can flow out to those who don’t have what I have and who need what I have.”

Do you see the point? Do you see how important it is to have our boundaries set in the right place? The question is where is the right place? What is the right level of control? Well the answer to that is that the right place is the place that God sets up according to His ancient landmarks.

We tend to think of things ancient as being irrelevant, hey! Come on, the world’s moved on. In this era of instant connectivity, in this era of having the world in the palm of your hand on your smart phone, what possible relevance can ancient landmarks really have?

Well for God the answer is rather a lot of relevance as things turn out. Let me bring you back to it, Proverbs 22 verse 28:

Do not remove the ancient landmark that your ancestors set up.

What landmarks have you set up in your life that defines your boundaries? Are they where God would have them or have you set them up to suit yourself with little or no thought as to God’s will for your life? Now that’s something worth thinking about, have you removed God’s ancient landmarks in your life?

Now setting boundaries in our lives is incredibly important but not all boundaries are good boundaries. As things turn out we need to set the right boundaries in the right places and nowhere is that more important than the boundaries we set in our hearts.

We talk a lot about the heart, not just our physical heart, that amazing pump that beats on average around seventy-five beats a minute, a hundred and eight thousand times a day or almost forty million times a year. But our emotional heart, our spiritual heart, that part of us that’s so deep inside, it’s who we are, where we live, where we experience joy and sorrow and laughter and pain.

Proverbs chapter 4 verse 23 says this:

Above all else guard your heart for everything you do flows out of it.

And that’s pretty much it, what happens deep in our hearts ends up influencing, no, no, influence isn’t quite the right word, it ends up determining how we behave. That’s what Jesus said too, Matthew chapter 12 verses 33 to 35:

Either make the tree good and its fruit good or make the tree bad and its fruit bad for the tree is known by its fruit. You brood of vipers, how can you speak good things when you are evil? for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks, the good person brings good things out of a good treasure and the evil person brings evil things out of an evil treasure

Your heart is incredibly important when it comes to how you live. That’s why it’s so important to guard your heart. But, how do you guard your heart? Where do you set the boundaries?

It’s funny how often the Bible talks about boundaries without ever explicitly calling them that. But that Scripture from Proverbs chapter 4 verse 23 about guarding your heart is all about boundaries. Back in those days to protect a city you did two things. First you build a dirty great big wall around it. The wall that Nehemiah built around Jerusalem after the Israelites returned from their exile in Babylon was forty feet high and many feet thick.

So the first thing you do is you build a wall, the second thing you do is you put guards on top of that wall to keep watch so that you can see if someone is coming to attack the city. So yes, this whole thing about guarding your heart is about setting up boundaries and setting up defences.

But as I’ve just said not all boundaries are good boundaries. Think about your heart, what boundaries, what defences have you set up? Some people are defensive and touchy, what that tells me is that they’ve built their wall too high, they’ve drawn their boundaries too tight and what they’re guarding tucked away in their heart isn’t worthy of the defence.

When it comes to your heart it’s not only the walls that we’re talking about but it’s what’s in your heart that matters. God’s Word draws some sharply different pictures of the human heart. On the one hand it says, Jeremiah chapter 17 verses 9 and 10:

The heart is devious above all else. It’s perverse, who can understand it? I the Lord test the mind and search the heart to give to all according to their ways, according to the fruit of their doings.

But on the other hand, Matthew chapter 5 verse 8:

Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God.

And Ezekiel chapter 11 verses 19 to 21:

I will give them one heart and put a new spirit within them. I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh so that they may follow my statutes and keep my ordinances and obey them. Then they shall be my people and I will be their God. But as for those whose heart goes after their detestable things and their abominations I will bring their deeds down upon their own heads, says the Lord.

Seems to me that God is vitally interested in what’s going on in your heart and mine and what He’s looking for is a pure heart, a heart of good intentions, a heart that wants to honour Him, a heart that’s fit to burst with love for Him. And unless we guard that purity of heart, unless we defend it and contend for it, then the enemy is going to plunder it. For he knows that if he can plunder your heart, if he can fill it with impurity, with evil thoughts, with bitterness and vengeance and the like, he’s going to ruin your life.

Because your thoughts, your words and your actions flow from what’s going on in your heart. That’s why the Bible says, Proverbs chapter 4 verse 23:

Above all else guard your heart for everything you do flows out of it.

Did you pick up the first bit there? Above all else. Before everything else, of principle primary importance is guarding your heart. Well how do you do that?

Tell you what I do, when I see evil coming my way in whatever form it takes, as an idea, as a temptation, as someone else’s poor behaviour or low standards, I close my heart to that. Not perfectly every time I have to say, but my intent is always to guard the goodness that God puts into my heart by His Spirit as I read His Word, as I pray, as I worship Him.

All those things fill my heart with the goodness and the purity that God’s looking for, it doesn’t come from me it comes from God. After all that’s precisely what He promises to do back in the Scripture from Ezekiel chapter 11:

To give us a new heart.

So it’s to evil that God wants us to close our hearts, but to good things they should be wide open, to generosity, to compassion, to kindness, to gentleness, to sacrifice, to Jesus. To those things our hearts should be wide open, but to the things that will breed evil in our hearts they should be closed shut.

So when someone comes alongside and starts grumbling and complaining, say about the leadership of our Church, that’s something I’m closed to and when someone comes along and talks to me about serving and helping that’s something I try very hard to be open to.

It’s a boundary of discernment that God is calling us to build around our hearts. A boundary that will maintain the purity of our hearts so our thoughts and words and deeds which flow from the heart will be God honouring, will glorify God, will speak to the people around us of this Jesus who came and died for them. Above all things guard your hearts for out of them flows the wellspring of your life.

Now the truth is that our hearts aren’t perfectly pure right at this moment, mine isn’t and yours isn’t and the call of God to you and me today is to do something about that, James chapter 4 verse 8:

Draw near to God and He will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands you sinners and purify your hearts you double minded.

But how do you cleanse your heart? The answer is, you don’t, God does. And so today, right now, right this minute I want to lead you in the shortest of prayers that was prayed by King David after he committed adultery and murder, Psalm 51 verse 10:

Create in me a clean heart O God and put a right spirit within me.

May that be the cry of your heart today. May that be your simple but heartfelt prayer to God today. Create in me a clean heart O God and put a new and a right spirit within me, fill me with your Holy Spirit and clean me from within.

As you read God’s Word, as you hear it proclaimed, as you pray, as you worship, as you serve, let me tell you this, God is going to clean your heart. He’ll take out the trash, the rubbish that’s piling up and creating a stench in His nostrils and God will replace it with purity, His purity, His holiness, His Holy Spirit.

But as He does that for you, as you co-operate with Him in this most important of ventures let me exalt you above all else to guard your heart because if you don’t all that work of His will be undone and you will find yourself right back where you started from. Guard your heart for out of it flows the wellspring of your life.

Your mind is an incredibly powerful thing, what we think often ends up becoming reality. If we think good things then we end up doing good things, if we think bad things we end up doing bad things. That’s why it’s so incredibly important to set boundaries around your mind.

Yeah, as I said the mind is an incredibly powerful thing. If we use it positively and creatively we’ll end up living a positive and creative life. If we use it in a negative way we’ll end up living a negative life. As Joyce Meyer once said, “You can’t have a negative mind and expect to live a positive life”.

But our mind, these days, is being bombarded with so many things, so many negative and unhelpful ways of thinking that if we’re not careful we end up taking that negativity on and making it part of our minds. Just one example is the sitcoms that play themselves out on television these days.

On the surface, yeah they’re funny and we laugh and we feel entertained, but more and more these sitcoms are being used as platforms for delivering wrong thinking about sexual promiscuity and perversions much in the same way as cigarettes were merely a delivery platform for the addictive substance nicotine.

Now that’s a somewhat unpopular thing for me to say because so many people have consumed so much of this stuff, so many people have swallowed the promiscuity and the perversions hook, line and sinker that it’s become part of them, it’s now how they think, it’s now what they believe.

There would be many people hearing me say this today who’ll write me off as some conservative crackpot. I know I’ll get many, many emails from people contending with what I’ve said, that’s okay, I don’t mind that because the lies of this world are not what determine how I think, God’s Word is and God’s Word says this, 1 Corinthians chapter 6 verses 18 to 20:

Shun fornication and flee from it. Every sin that a person commits is outside the body but the fornicator sins against the body itself. Or don’t you know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you which you have from God and that you are not your own for you were bought with a price. Therefore glorify God in your body.

We’re talking in this series, ‘Learning to Set Boundaries’, about the boundaries that we set in our lives and one of the important boundaries that we need to set is the boundary around our mind, what we let in and what we don’t. It’s about guarding your mind from that which is wrong and feeding it with that which is right.

And one of the reasons that this is so important is that the mind is the gateway to the heart. It’s a bit like the relationship between the mouth and the stomach. We take food into our mouths, if it tastes bad we spit it out, if it tastes good we chew it, we swallow it and it goes down into our stomach where it’s broken down and digested and then subsequently absorbed into our bodies where it becomes part of us.

And the reason that so many people are sick and obese these days is because they are putting the wrong sort of foods into their mouths, swallowing it and slowly killing themselves. Well it’s kind of the same with our minds, we’re presented, let’s say, by a seductive idea of promiscuity or perversion wrapped in the sweet wrapper of the comedy of a sitcom.

That is our minds, we chew it over and then we can either swallow it or spit it out. Swallow bad stuff and it will give you heart disease, swallow good stuff and it will make you strong and pure. The problem is we consume most of these things uncritically. In other words what we see is the humour of the sitcom that makes us laugh rather than thinking over what they’re feeding us.

Isn’t that what we do? We swallow before we chew, taste and decide whether this is any good for us or not. These days so many people in God’s Church, people who proclaim that they believe in Jesus will become all defensive when God’s Word on promiscuity and perversion is preached. Why? Because they’ve swallowed the rubbish, and as I said that’s just one example, there are many, many others.

But God’s Word says that He’s given you a powerful mind, a mind that can begin to affect powerful change in your life. Have a listen to this, Romans chapter 12 verse 2:

Do not be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your minds so that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

Now I know that that particular Scripture is going to be a familiar one for many but how often have you ever read it with the understanding that it’s talking about the power of your mind to set new boundaries. What it says is that as we renew our minds by starting to believe God rather than the father of lies, by starting to consume God’s Word rather than the poison of this world, our lives will be transformed. Listen to it again, Romans chapter 12 verse 2:

Don’t be conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind so that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.

Isn’t that powerful? It’s talking about real transformation by starting to believe God over the world because that’s where you’ll discover the good and perfect and acceptable will of God for your life.

So to come back to the example that I’ve been using today, the apparently innocuous but actually poisonous sitcoms that we get dished up on television every night. Those that are poisonous, not all are but quite a few of them are, I simply don’t watch, ever, full stop and when I’m watching a movie that promotes promiscuity I see it for what it is and reject it and if a sex scene pops up unexpectedly I actually fast forward through it.

Now call me square, call me old fashioned, call me whatever you like but I am determined to guard my mind, to set boundaries, but at the same time I allow my mind to wander free over the hills and valleys of my dreams and imagination because God has spoken to me so often out there on those hills and in those valleys. I’ve chosen not to be conformed to this world but to let God transform my life by changing my mind, by renewing my mind by setting the right boundaries around my mind.

So let me ask you, what is some of the rubbish that you’ve been allowing your mind to consume? Maybe people have been feeding you lies all your life that you’re not all that smart or you’re not all that good looking or you’re not all that useful and so your whole pattern of thought is premised on those lies.

Well if that’s the case it’s time to say, “Hey! Enough is enough here, I am not living like that anymore, I’m going to start believing what the Bible says about me not what the world says about me, I’m not going to conform to the pattern of this world anymore”, or as the J B Phillips translation of Romans chapter 12 verse 2 says:

I am not going to let the world squeeze me into its mould anymore because I simply don’t fit.

It’s uncomfortable in there, I don’t belong, God has given me a mind, a good one and I’m going to set up boundaries to keep the lies of this world out and I’m going to open the door wide to feed my mind with the Word of God.

As a lecturer of mine back at Bible College used to say, Dr Barry Chant, “When we open our minds to God’s Word we replace our flawed self image with a faith image based on what Gods Word says about us.”

So instead of letting rubbish into your mind which ends up in your heart causing untold damage deep inside, damage which on a daily basis works its way back to the surface to ruin our lives, instead of that, you and I can take a choice, a simple choice. It’s a choice to set up boundaries and discern what our minds are being fed or alternatively just swallow all the rubbish, live a flawed, painful, unhealthy life that will ultimately lead to your destruction.

I don’t know if you’ve ever thought of it that way but that’s the choice that confronts us. Let me tell you something, I know, I absolutely know which one of those I’m going to choose, how about you?

Truth is a concept which is very much up for grabs these days. I mean you’d think that truth is absolute like in a court of law, you examine the evidence and you come to the truth. But these days we have a much more pliable relationship with the truth because frankly we’re much more interested in convenience than we are in the truth.

There’s a basic truth that applies in every circumstance in this world. It’s this: lies are always seductive. I mean if you’re going to slip someone a lie that will give you some advantage which is always the reason that you slip them a lie, you’re going to want it to appear incredibly attractive and seductive to get them to swallow it. I mean if it looks ugly and it tastes bitter they’re not going to swallow it are they?

So whenever the devil dishes you up a lie remember he’s going to make it look attractive because he wants you to swallow it. And when something looks attractive we justify taking it and swallowing it on the basis that it is after all attractive. Think about it.

You’re struggling with your weight, you always have done, your blood sugar is up and you’re out for dinner and the dessert trolley comes around and the selection of desserts is out of this world. You choose the chocolate mud cake with cream and grated chocolate to decorate the plate. There’s no way you should be eating that chocolate cake but you’ve been seduced because, well it’s seductive right?

That’s the pattern of temptation and sin. It’s an incredibly well worn path the devil uses over and over again in our lives. First he distorts the truth as he did with Adam and Eve, Genesis chapter 3 verse 1:

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say to you ‘you shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?”

Well actually no, that’s not what God said at all, and Eve feeds the truth back to the devil, verse 2 of Genesis chapter 3:

The woman said to the serpent, “we may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden but God said ‘you shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden nor shall you touch it or you will die’.

So she knows the truth, dang. So now it’s time for the devil to trot out his tool of making the lie appear seductive and attractive, something to be desired, Genesis chapter 3 verses 4 to 6:

But the serpent said to the woman, “you will not die for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you’ll be like God knowing good and evil” and so when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate and she gave some to her husband who was there with her and he ate.

Now do you get the picture, that’s the devil’s pattern? If the bald faced distortion or lie doesn’t work he goes with seduction which almost always works because attractive things are easily justified. The Bible says that you and I need to be aware of the wiles of the devil, well now you are.

In this series we’re talking about setting boundaries in our lives, good boundaries, right boundaries, boundaries that keep us pure and holy, boundaries that protect us from evil and yet leave us open to acts of generosity and sacrifice. So far we’ve talked about the boundaries of the heart and the boundaries of the mind and right now we’re going to chat about the boundaries that you and I need to set around the truth.

Truth of the idea of there being an absolute form of truth is extremely unpopular in this day and age. Why? Well because the devil, the prince of this world as he’s called since time immemorial, has been sowing seductive lies so successfully that people have accepted the lies and now they think of them as truth, their truth. I can have my truth, you can have your truth and all that’s fine, truth is a relative concept.

In fact, if it works for you buddy that’s fine, but don’t at any point try to tell me that your truth is the only truth. That’s wrong because we live in a pluralistic world where all sorts of competing truths are accepted as being, well true. The problem with that is that it’s just not true because there’s only one truth that will ever give you the freedom that you’re looking for. Jesus put it like this, John chapter 8 verses 31 and 32:

Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, “if you continue in my word you are truly my disciples and you will know the truth and the truth will set you free”.

Where do you go to find the one truth that leads to freedom? John chapter 14 verse 6:

Jesus said to him, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me”.

Now, you try pedalling that idea of exclusive absolute truth out there in the market place and you are going to get shouted down, ridiculed, laughed at and marginalised, and as a result countless men and woman and children who believe in Jesus forsake the truth in order to be popular or to be accepted or to be apparently relevant.

We want to water down the Gospel of Jesus, we want to be accepted by this world, that’s what is happening in the lives of many individual Christians, that’s what’s happening in the lives of many Churches and even denominations. Truth is up for grabs in the popularity stakes isn’t it?

I’d like to remind you however that this is nothing new, Jesus told the truth and it was hard for many to come to grips with it, John chapter 6 verses 66 to 70:

Because of this (because of what He’d said) many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him. So Jesus asked the twelve, “do you also wish to go away?” And Simon Peter answered him, “Lord to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life, we have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God”.

And Jesus answered them, “did I not choose you the twelve yet one of you is a devil”. He was speaking of Judas, son of Simon Iscariot for he, though one of the twelve, was going to betray him.

So when it comes to the truth, the hard truth about the Gospel, about sin, about repentance, which one are you? Are you one of the many who turned their backs on Jesus and walked away, are you one of those? Or perhaps are you one of the faithful disciples, the eleven who even though they weren’t able to stand with Jesus during His trial and crucifixion, remained faithful to the truth.

Or are you Judas Iscariot who whilst he held to the outward form of Godliness, denied its power, rejected the truth and betrayed Jesus. I can’t answer that question for you, only you can but let me say this, Jesus had a clear boundary around the truth, He refused to deviate from it and as a result He was nailed to a cross.

That’s the boundary He set for Himself, it was an absolute boundary. Even though the world turned against Him and even His closest friends deserted Him, the truth was more important than anything else because He is the truth.

It seems to us so often that really it’s not so important that we stick to the truth, in any case there are so many shades of grey out there what does it matter? Surely the idea of truth as being black or white these days is an outdated concept, surely. But alone in the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus prayed something special for you and me, He said to His Father of us, John chapter 17 verse 17:

They don’t belong to the world just as I don’t belong to the world. Sanctify them in the truth, your word is truth. As you have sent me into the world so I have sent them into the world and for their sakes I sanctify myself so that they also maybe sanctified in the truth.

In other words, the truth was so important that Jesus died for it so that we could be sanctified, made holy and pure in that absolute truth. So in the light of the price that Jesus paid for the truth to be in you, what boundaries are you going to put around the truth in your life?

When we’re under pressure, one of the things that we love to do is to behave badly. In fact sometimes even when we’re not under pressure we still want to behave badly and don’t we find it just so easy to rationalise, to justify our bad behaviour. The problem is that behaving badly, well you know, it tends to end badly as well.

Whether we realise it or not, whether we like it or not there have been some boundaries set for us around our behaviour. It all started when we were children, when we did something wrong and our parents said ‘no’ and we continued doing it, we’d get a slap on the wrist or around the legs or on the bottom. Mum and dad were setting boundaries on our behaviours, and in fact the parents who don’t set those boundaries and enforce them are the ones who end up with delinquent teenagers more often than not.

And those delinquent teenagers, many of them, end up growing up into delinquent adults. So boundary setting begins or it should begin early in our lives. Sadly, some parents are savage in the boundaries they set, there’s a harshness that ends up damaging the child. Something that can, in some cases, stray into the area of abuse, mental, emotional and physical.

The point is that when it comes to setting boundaries around a behaviour both too little and too much are not a good thing, the answer lies somewhere in the middle. And the same flows through in our adult lives, none of us would like to live in a lawless society where there aren’t any boundaries on people’s behaviours because that sort of anarchy is simply dangerous. Whilst at the other end of the scale none of us would want to live under a brutal, despotic, dictatorship either and there are plenty of those left in this world today.

What we’re looking for is a society that’s governed by the rule of law whilst at the same time preserving individual freedoms, that’s the balance. And it’s that very same balance that you and I should be looking for when we’re thinking about setting boundaries on our own personal behaviour.

But that seems so easy in this day and age because we live in a time where people believe that if it feels good you should do it. And so people have latched onto that and they’re living that. Don’t worry that divorce rates and suicide rates are sky rocketing, don’t worry that the rich are getting richer and the poor and getting poorer, don’t worry that the excessive lifestyle’s that we’re seeking to live out are leaving us with a deep emptiness inside, no, if it feels good do it.

I live not far from an inner city hospital, a very good hospital in fact but each Friday and Saturday night the emergency department is jam packed full of people affected by alcohol fuelled violence. Sure if it feels good do it. Well maybe you don’t get out and get drunk every weekend, maybe you’re not at the point of divorce or suicide but still the excesses of our behaviour can have a detrimental effect on our lives.

As I said yesterday on the program lies are always presented to us as being something attractive, something seductive, and the lie ‘if it feels good we should do it’ is just that, it’s an attractive, seductive lie. But when you spend a bit of time listening to God through His Word the Bible, His love letter to you and me, you discover one of the things He urges us to do is to show some self control.

The Book of Titus in the New Testament chapter 2 verses 2 to 8, have a listen:

Tell the older men to be temperate, serious, prudent and sound in faith, in love and in endurance. Likewise tell the older women to be reverent in their behaviour, not to be slanderers or slaves to drink, they are to teach what is good so that they may encourage the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be self controlled, chaste, good managers of the household, kind, being submissive to their husbands so that the word of God may not be discredited.

Likewise urge the younger men to be self controlled. Show yourselves in all respects as a model of good works and in your teaching show integrity, gravity and sound speech that cannot be censured. Then any opponent will be put to shame having nothing evil to say of you.

Now at first that may all appear just a little bit old fashioned, a quaint notion from a slower world that existed two thousand years ago but just listen to the wisdom of that. Imagine a society where the older men are great leaders, where the older women teach the younger folk to love each other, where the older men teach the younger men to be self controlled, to show respect, to have integrity and character of substance. Just imagine a society like that, what would it look like?

Now let’s bring all that back to you and me, let’s bring that back to our behaviours. We’ve been talking this week about learning to set boundaries, boundaries around our heart, around our mind, a boundary around the truth that we all believe. All those are important as is the need to set some boundaries around our behaviours.

Of course what we say and what we do is a consequence of what’s going on in our hearts, that’s what Jesus said, Matthew chapter 15 verses 17 to 19:

Do you not see that whatever goes into your mouth enters your stomach and goes out into the sewer but what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander.

And the way that we guard against those things, the Bible says, is self control. Now the thing with self control is that it’s not a particularly fun thing to have to exercise because you’re talking here about putting boundaries around your behaviour and we each have some Achilles heel here, we each have that one thing that just sets us off. Maybe it’s grumbling and complaining, maybe it’s passive/aggressive behaviour, maybe it’s lying or undermining or gossiping or anger.

For me it was always anger. That might surprise you, but I think quickly, I move quickly, I act quickly, that’s how I get lots of things done in my day. But the underbelly of that is impatience and anger. You get annoyed with people who don’t match up to your speed and stamina and standards and so in my walk with the Lord I’ve had to learn to zip my lip, to shut up when something or someone doesn’t suit me, to be patient and that, I have to tell you has not been easy and it still isn’t.

But unless I learn to exercise my self control, what good am I as a minister of the Gospel? Unless I show the same patience and gentleness and grace and mercy that God showed me through Jesus on that cross, how can I say I believe in Jesus? And the same is true of you, have a listen, 2 Peter chapter 1 verses 4 to 8:

Thus he has given us through these things his precious and very great promises so that through them you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of lust and may become participants of the divine nature. For this very reason you must make every effort to support your faith with goodness and goodness with knowledge and knowledge with self control and self control with endurance and endurance with Godliness and Godliness with mutual affection and mutual affection with love.

For if these things are yours and are increasing among you they keep you from being ineffective and unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.

You read that and you realise just how right God is in all of this, how important this boundary of self control is around our behaviour. So allow me to bring you back to your Achilles heel, whatever it is, you know what it is. Today is the day where you decide to begin to work at this self control thing.

No it won’t be easy and no it won’t be pleasant to start with, it’s like over-eating, ultimately you have to give up the chocolate cake in order to lose the weight but when you lose the weight it’s worth it right? It’s the same with our sin, it’s the same with that one thing that’s been ruining your life and the lives of the people around you up to this point. Because God has a mighty plan for your life, He really does and to see that plan fulfilled He needs you to be self controlled, Godly and loving.

When those things increase in you, so will the fruit that you bear for His glory.