"Just Say No" blanketed America's schools for twenty years, won awards, and landed in fifty countries — and then the Surgeon General officially declared it an ineffective prevention program, because saying no out loud never touched anyone's character underneath. Stephen Davey opens with that failure to introduce Peter's third spiritual supplement in 2 Peter 1:6: self-control, or as an old Greek phrase puts it, getting a grip on yourself. Davey even pulls out his own second-grade report card, where he racked up an N for self-control year after year, to make the point that this quality never arrives automatically at salvation. He closes with Chuck Swindoll's account of an eighty-one-year-old flight delayed ninety minutes, a stranger's nosebleed, a sneezing seatmate, and a broken video system, and how, instead of losing it, he surrendered to the Spirit and stayed calm. That, Davey says, is where real Christianity gets tested: not in the quiet of a study, but in the delay, the traffic, the line.
Getting a Grip on Life
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