We are unrestrained as a culture, overindulgent, hedonistic people. And self-control as a fruit of the spirit says, I'm going to obey Christ, I'm going to mortify my flesh, I'm dead to my sin. I understand the bounds of piety, the bounds of righteousness, and I want to walk that out. So I'm going to restrain myself. I'm going to restrain my impulses. I'm going to restrain my desires. When I would argue that one of the biggest markers of a Christian or a believer

is someone who exercises self-control.

What are we to do if we lack fruit of the spirit in our marriage? What are we to do if we lack fruit of the spirit in our marriage?

What are we to do?

Well, if you're here, we're going to tell you.

There's a good chance you saw last week or heard last week's episode.

But today we're looking at what we've characterized as the tailpipe, right?

So if you think about a car

every car if it's a decent car has an engine and one of the ways you can diagnose what's happening

in the engine is the the dashboard lights that's another thing we can look at as an analogy but also

the tailpipe what is the outworking of a spiritually healthy marriage?

And so go back two episodes and three episodes ago, if you haven't listened to those, but we talked about 10 diagnostic questions to be asking yourselves to diagnose the spiritual health of your marriage.

And one of the things we said is all of your

marriage is inherently spiritual. All of it is Godward. All of it has something to do, everything

to do with what God has said, the impact of the gospel in our lives. And the reality of me

being a sinner who has been remade, made new, but still prone to not acting out my salvation

perfectly. Same for you, by the way. In case you thought you were better.

Sinner. So we're talking about the fruits of the spirit because we don't bear them perfectly.

And so one of the things that we prefaced more intensely in the previous episode was moralizing, had the temptation to moralize to say, oh, I want to be a patient person because that's the fruit of the spirit.

Well, if we're not indeweled by the spirit, we can't bear his fruit.

And any sort of attempt to do so is akin to stapling fruit onto a dead tree.

And it's only a matter of time until that fruit rots and falls off. It's fake fruit because it's not coming from a healthy root. And so you need to be united with Christ and dwelled by the spirit. If we any hope of burying this fruit in an ongoing lasting way, that's why such a powerful tool is if we're constantly failing to have love and joy and peace and the rest, that's an important thing to know and to address.

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