Pastor Mark Driscoll shared a powerful sermon about self-control. He explained how saying no to pleasure and yes to pain can help individuals carry on with their purpose in life.
Self-Control
Pastor Mark began the sermon by talking about where pleasure and pain are in the brain.
“The way that God hardwired your brain, you have a region in your brain called the ventral pallidum. It’s a center for pleasure and pain. Literally in a very small part of your brain. All of the pleasure and pain that comes usually from your nerve endings. It goes to this center,” he said.
He added that if it’s pain, it causes you to avoid it, and if it’s pleasure, it causes you to pursue it. This is why human beings, as a general rule, run toward pleasure and away from pain.
Say No To Pleasure And Yes To Pain
In addition, Pastor Mark said that a man isn’t a fully matured adult until he can turn away from pleasure and toward pain.
“If you’re going to be a man, you’ve got to learn sometimes to run away from the pleasure and run toward the pain so that you can mature and be a man,” he said.
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Because those moments of choosing between pleasure and pain are the intersections of temptations. The brain releases a chemical called ‘dopamine,’ which is very pleasurable and addictive.
He also talked about the dopamine one can get from their phones or any addiction.
“The beginning of pleasure becomes the end of self-control. And this is what the devil will do: he will tempt you with a little bit of pleasure to get you into a place where you become addicted to the pleasure,” he said.
Self-Control: Jesus Was Tempted Too
Pastor Mark added, “And then that temptation is not something that you control but it’s something that overcomes and controls you.”
He then uses Jesus’s story as an example. He reminded everyone that the enemy will always misquote the Bible to lead you to temptation.
But what Jesus did, because He knew the scripture by heart, he was able to defeat the temptations of the enemy.
“Satan knows the Bible and he knows it well enough to misquote it. And if you don’t know well enough to quote it, then what he’s literally doing is he’s taking that weapon from you and he’s using it to destroy you,” he said.
Reference: ThunkUniversity
Header image: Pastor Mark Driscoll [ThunkUniversity]. YouTube, 31 January 2024, https://youtu.be/_m0VqvOIGzw
