Spiritual Warfare – The Transforming Power of the Gospel: Personality, Character and Discipleship – part 2

Key points from last week:

• The goal of discipleship “it is enough for a disciple to be like his teacher” Luke 6:40
• It is the experience of many Christians that we are not making progress in the Christian life – we either think that everything depends on us and so beat ourselves up that we are not changing, or we have a mind-set that we will never change. (Many don’t even think about it!)
• There is confusion regarding the goal and process of discipleship – we tend to focus on activities rather than character
• There can therefore be a pre-occupation on the Gifts of the Spirit, and the Power of the Spirit, when the Holy Spirit wants to produce the Fruit of the Spirit in us
• Gifts are given and Power is bestowed, but we have to create the environment in our lives for Fruit to flourish
• The New Testament is filled with encouragements toward, and teaching regarding the transformation of our character
• Discipleship develops fruit
• The Fruit of the Spirit is the expression of Discipleship – you reap what you sow (in your own life and in the lives of others)
• God has ‘sown’ His DNA for character in us in the new birth – becoming like Jesus! Are we reproducing the family likeness? 1 Pet. 1:23; 2:2

2 Pet. 1:3-11 gives some of the details of the Bible’s approach to character. We will discuss this in some detail later.

What is ‘character’ and how does Discipleship affect it?

Each of us was born and reared in the kingdom of this world. Because of this, we have absorbed, largely without realising it, the beliefs and values of this earthly kingdom. However, we are now citizens of another kingdom, one with a very different set of beliefs and values.

The impact of the Gospel on our lives (salvation) is not just to share Jesus’ beliefs and values, but to make them our very own, and to think like He thinks, thus shaping our character and healing our personality where needed, a.k.a. Discipleship.

Paul speaks about this in Phil. 2:5 quoting the example of the Lord Jesus Himself – His values were upside-down compared to the way humans normally think. And Paul’s own values were likewise transformed as he says in the next chapter: “Those things that were gain to me, I counter loss for the sake of Christ.” (Phil. 3:7-8)

Discipleship is about building in us a Christ-like character. This may mean, by implication, that we need to change our existing character in some way. The idea of changing our character is difficult for us to accept, largely because we equate our character with our personality (we use the terms interchangeably) and we tend to think of our personalities as fixed by the time we reach adulthood.

Because we equate our character with our personality, we also often miss the fact that our character consists of more than just our personality – it also includes, amongst other things, our beliefs and our values (or attitudes).

Don’t want to go into detail about this – a real can of worms (Myers Briggs, etc.!) as it’s not necessary to try and map ourselves for the purpose of Discipleship. I just want to explore how the process of Discipleship shapes our characters. I’m not pushing any particular model of character or personality, but think that the distinctions the modern psychology has drawn (and they are just catching up with the Bible – 1900 years late!) can be helpful.

I hope that it will be helpful to take some of the mystery surrounding Discipleship and how it changes specific aspects of our character. God has a comprehensive plan for making us more like Jesus and I hope that He will expand our thinking around this topic. We will look later at some of the disciples to see this in action and how Jesus used their characters and personalities in their own development and in spreading the Gospel.

How does this affect our character?

• Character – how we present ourselves to others.
• Personality – who we are on the ‘inside’

Our personalities probably are largely fixed by adulthood, or even earlier, but happily for us Jesus does not ask us to change this aspect of our inner selves. If Jesus required us to have personalities conformed to some particular template (i.e. his), why would he have selected a core group of disciples (the twelve) with such a wide range of personality types?

We’ll probe a bit deeper into this in a moment, but top level, useful to see that your character consists of your personality, beliefs, attitudes and values. We cannot re-shape our personalities, but we can re-shape our beliefs, attitudes and values so that they are consistent with Jesus, so that we become more like Him. And that is the goal Rom.8:29, 2 Cor.3:18, Col.1:27-28, 1 John 3:2

Personality

Psychologists suggest that there are 5 basic dimensions to our personality – each of which is a continuum and our position on each of these continua determines our personality ‘type’

• Extraversion: This trait includes characteristics such as excitability, sociability, talkativeness, assertiveness and high amounts of emotional expressiveness.
• Agreeableness: This personality dimension includes attributes such as trust, altruism, kindness, affection, and other pro-social behaviours.
• Conscientiousness: Common features of this dimension include high levels of thoughtfulness, with good impulse control and goal-directed behaviours. Those high in conscientiousness tend to be organized and mindful of details.
• Neuroticism: Individuals high in this trait tend to experience emotional instability, anxiety, moodiness, irritability, and sadness.
• Openness: This trait features characteristics such as imagination and insight, and those high in this trait also tend to have a broad range of interests.

It is because we believe our personalities to be fixed that we make efforts, using psychometric tests, to find out what type of personality we have, so that we can identify our personality strengths and weaknesses. We do not do this so that we can identify areas requiring change, but rather, so that we can avoid environments that don’t particularly suit us. For example, a potential employer may give us a personality test to find out whether we are suitable for leadership roles, or whether we are likely handle stress well.

I have no doubt that the Lord places us where He wants, and gives us the appropriate gifts to function there, fully aware of our personalities!

Change personality?

It is important to note that each of the five primary personality traits represents a range between two extremes.

NB It’s important to note that we are not dealing with what is now known as neuro-diversity – things like autism spectrum and ADD or ADHD, which may be accentuated aspects of the Big Five– and we are not dealing with what are known as Personality Disorders. A personality disorder is a mental health condition that involves long-lasting, all-encompassing, disruptive patterns of thinking, behaviour, mood and relating to others. These patterns cause a person significant distress and/or impair their ability to function, and should be referred to a health care professional – preferably a Christian one, who can incorporate aspects of Discipleship in the treatment.

Studies suggest that these big five personality traits tend to be relatively stable over the course of adulthood. One four-year study of working-age adults found that personality changed little as a result of adverse life events. Research suggests that both biological and environmental influences play a role in shaping our personalities. Twin studies suggest that both nature and nurture play a role in the development of each of the five personality traits.

Studies also show that maturation may have an impact on the five personality traits. As people age, they tend to become less extraverted, less neurotic, and less open to an experience. Agreeableness and conscientiousness, on the other hand, tend to increase as people grow older. (https://www.verywellmind.com/the-big-five-personality-dimensions-2795422)

This does not mean that there aren’t facets of our personalities that need some work. We can be prone to problems such as jealousy, or fits of rage, etc. But personality issues of this type tend to be the consequences of damage caused by our experiences. Of course we need to deal with such issues, but this process of change acts to restore our personalities, i.e. to make them healthy again, rather than give us a different personality type.

Masks

Do we wear masks to hide areas where we know that we are damaged or would like to be different? Or we wear masks because we don’t believe that people would accept us if they knew what we are really like? (Does that apply to everyone, I wonder?) If you’ve ever said “I’m not doing that again – trusting/loving/becoming vulnerable”, you may have put on a mask or erected a barrier.

At one level, we almost all do it. “The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life” was a book by Erving Goffman published in 1956, where he viewed everyone as an actor on a ‘social stage’ who actively create an impression of themselves for the benefit of an audience (i.e. others, and, ultimately themselves). Acting out social roles is quite demanding and so in addition to the front-stage aspect of our lives, we also have back-stage areas where we can drop our front and be more relaxed, closer to our ‘true-selves’, and where we can prepare for our acting in the world.

I would suggest that the only Person who ever lived who didn’t live like this was Jesus! He was the first and only truly human being ever to walk on this earth. He is presented in the Gospels as Someone who was truly approachable and Someone people wanted be with – except those who wore masks. We all wear masks of some sort for reasons we have just outlined. Wearing masks makes true fellowship virtually impossible and will hinder our growth in the likeness of Jesus –which is the definition of discipleship. But discipleship is also the means God uses to help us get out from behind our masks!

It can be hard work living behind a mask and sometimes things happen that causes the mask to drop and we respond badly – the true self comes out! The answer is not to wear a mask but to ask the Holy Spirit to help us deal with any damage, and to accept our personality are it is, rather than trying to be something that we are not.

Our personalities may be fairly fixed but God will use them to His glory. And He can repair any damage – the wounds of life and our own iniquity (inherited and deep-rooted sin principle) can damage our personalities. We looked at this when we looked at Strongholds last November. https://davidsbiblenotes.co.uk/spiritual-warfare-strongholds-and

Jesus did not require his disciples to change their personalities, and so we see these people retaining their widely varying personalities throughout their time with Jesus, and I have no doubt that their basic personalities remained the same right up to the day they died (although He may have repaired any damage!). Therefore, if Jesus is happy to accept, as his disciples, such a range of personality types as this, we can be sure that our personality types are acceptable also. After all, God gave us the diversity of personalities that we have, so why would he now want to change them?

So, if Jesus does not need us to change our personalities, what does he want us to change? And how does discipleship address those aspects of our character that can change? Does that also lead to wholeness in our personalities?