The Word
Vol.
9 No. 8
Upper Room Discourse
John 15:2
Suffering For Blessing
In
The Doctrine of
Suffering for Blessing
Under the Pre-designed Protocol
Plan of God, God has designed His Plan so that your happiness will always
reside in you, and therefore you do not depend on other people or things for
your happiness. Not until you reach Spiritual Adulthood, do you become aware
that you are a person with a relationship with God. In adulthood you finally
realize that God intends for you to be blessed and strong in every situation in
life. As a function of your Royal Priesthood it all comes from within when you
have His Word and Spirit consistently operating within your soul. You are
supposed to have personal control of your life, a Personal Sense of Destiny,
self‑ confidence from metabolized Bible doctrine, and therefore, poise
and command of self. Therefore, you bring your happiness to others, but do not
lean on others or circumstances for your happiness.
3. People Testing; (continued)
d. People are a
distraction from the Plan of God.
1)
Believers can be easily led away from the Plan of God and Bible doctrine by
their friendships, loved one, and even those who are antagonistic towards them,
unless they attain spiritual adulthood. Every time you fall in love, acquire a
new friend or develop a new enemy, there is a potential for the object of your
affection or hatred to control your life and your happiness. Therefore, without
impersonal and unconditional love from SA, you will become a slave to people.
2)
When you fall in love, look how you act, how you change your mode of operation,
and how you begin to think in different terms relating everything you do to
that person. Likewise, look how you act every time you are around an antagonist
and how the mentality of your soul is occupied with them either in defensive or
attack mode.
3)
Without impersonal love when you make a new friend, fall in love or develop a
new enemy, you will inevitably become jealous, possessive, or even hate those
who have it over you. In those cases you have immediately become a slave to
them and have manufactured for yourself many problems that are not the fault of
the object of your love.
4)
When you become jealous, angry, bitter, vindictive, or implacable; when you are
dissatisfied, antagonistic toward someone else, friend or stranger, lover or
enemy, you surrender the control of your life and happiness to that person.
5)
At that point you have become a slave to the object of your love or antagonism.
At the same time, you have no control over your life, canceling all the
characteristics of SSE and SA.
a) There are very few people who actually have
control of their own lives. Yet, having control over your own life is the norm
in the Christian way of life. Those who do not are controlled by the objects of
their affection. Therefore, there are very few believers who are spiritually
self‑sustaining because few have achieved SA.
6)
When someone else has control of your life through love or hatred, you enter
into the law of volitional responsibility with its self‑induced misery.
That is, you make your own decisions in your choice of friends, loved ones and
sometimes your enemies. But thereafter, they begin to make all the decisions
for you unless you have the function of impersonal love.
7)
Since happiness is the monopoly of God and His plan, you cannot depend upon
people or circumstances for your happiness. So if you surrender your happiness
to someone else, you will blame that person for everything that goes wrong in
your life. In personal love or hatred the object controls your life.
When you become upset with
someone, you surrender the custody of your happiness to that person. When you
blame them for your unhappiness, which is produced by your own volition, you
have intensified punitive suffering in your life under the law of volitional
responsibility. At that point grace disappears and you try to mold the life of
those around you or you mold your life around them. When that happens, you can
no longer deal with your problems from the strength of your own priesthood.
8)
Likewise, the reaction factor in personality conflict becomes a source of great
irritation and misery. The reaction in personality conflict is generally
expressed through the arrogance complex as hatred, bitterness, maligning,
judging, revenge motivation and function. All are a source of terrible
unhappiness.
When you react to people in some
form of antagonism, they immediately have control over your life, so that you
resort to either mental or verbal hostility or even violence. To recover
control you must have impersonal love. Most believers never get this far. If
you do not recover control of your soul you then begin to destroy the person who
has control over your life, and at the same time you destroy your own happiness
when you are frustrated and react from any phase of the arrogance complex.
To avoid reaction in personality
conflict you must reside in your very own palace, God’s Power System, under the
enabling power of the Holy Spirit, with momentum from metabolized Bible
doctrine. This will bring you to spiritual adulthood where you have great
happiness even while Suffering for Blessing. This means you derive your
happiness from God and from His plan. When that happens, then all the pieces of
the puzzle fall in place and your relationships in life become wonderful.
As the believer grows
spiritually inside
e.
The solution to People Testing is found in “Virtue-love”, which is the
combination of Personal Love for God and Impersonal and Unconditional (I/U)
Love for all mankind.
1)
I/U love is the sum total of the believer's honor, integrity, and objectivity
derived from the Word resident within your soul first acquired in attainment of
SSE, but becomes strong in SA. The function of SA is the use of virtue-love.
2)
Virtue-love as a Problem Solving Device (
3) Virtue-love as a
a)
Believers in spiritual childhood do not have Personal Love for God or I/U Love
for all mankind. With the attainment of Spiritual Autonomy through Spiritual
Self-Esteem plus Providential Preventative Suffering, you begin to peak out in
the use of virtue-love as a
4)
There is no built‑in virtue in personal love, which only requires that
another person meet your standards of beauty, attractiveness, and rapport.
Therefore, to make a personal love relationship work, the believer must use a
virtue‑base totally outside himself. Otherwise, people will make him
miserable all his life as a result of iconoclastic arrogance,
5)
Personal love is only a virtue when directed toward God. I/U love is only a virtue when directed toward all mankind. This
means that through impersonal love, the believer has control of his own life
and he maintains control of his own happiness. Therefore, the principle of
misery derived from getting your eyes on people, (iconoclastic arrogance), that
results in disappointment, disillusion, frustration, and dissatisfaction with
others, cannot mar your happiness.
Furthermore,
once you attain Spiritual Adulthood, and you begin to function under the three
categories of Suffering for Blessing, where God is the source of your
happiness. But if human relation-ships become more important to you than God
and Bible doctrine, people will become a distraction to the fulfillment of His
Plan for your life.
f.
Summary / Conclusion.
1)
False priorities exist when people in family life, social life, business life,
or sexual life take precedence over your residence, function, and momentum
inside
2)
When personal ambition is stronger than Bible doctrine, then the believer has
lost his scale of values, his priorities.
3)
So whether it's love or hatred, attraction or animosity, romance or
disenchantment, friendship or disillusion, these can distract you from the
fulfillment of the Plan of God and the glorification of our Lord Jesus Christ;
unless you apply virtue-love to all relationship situations and pass Momentum
Testing.
4)
Therefore, People Testing as a category of MT is a fantastic blessing from God,
as Suffering for Blessing. It is the only way to bring tranquility (+H) into
your life and make your relationships wonderful and worthwhile while remaining
in your personal relationship with God without distraction and continuing to
grow spiritually.
4. System Testing.
a. A
system is an organization composed of people under the command of other people
functioning under a policy which is designed to fulfill a specific objective.
Therefore there are three characteristics of a system: 1) Authority, 2) Policy,
and 3) Objective.
b.
As such the personnel under the authority, policy and objective of an
organization can face System Testing.
c.
There are seven general categories of different systems.
1)
Business organization, large or small.
2)
Military services.
3)
Professional organizations, such as medical organizations, law firms,
engineering companies, law enforcement.
4)
Ecclesiastical organizations, such as local churches, denominations, cults,
theological seminaries, Christian service organizations.
5)
Athletic organizations, such as professional, college, high school, and youth
teams.
6)
Divine institutions, volition, marriage, family and …
7) Government,
including federal, state and local,
d.
There are good and bad organizations, systems, leadership, policies, and
objectives. Your System Testing may be from either category, good or bad. Therefore,
there are many areas of System Testing related to the people, policy, and
purpose of any organization.
e.
Because no one is perfect and because everyone has an Old Sin Nature,
personality, policy, and purpose conflicts are inevitable.
f.
Generally, the three characteristics of a system provide three areas of System
Testing.
1)
In the field of authority where unfair and unjust treatment from management,
the boss, supervisor, senior officer, coach, professor, government bureaucrat,
husband, parents, etc., exists. Also favoritism on the part of management can
inevitably lead to personality conflict
in an office.
2)
Likewise, the policy may be unreasonable, or it may conflict with normal living
or with your own personal norms and standards, or it may be a stupid though
still enforceable policy.
3)
Finally, the objectives may also be unreasonable or even impossible because of
lack of ability in the personnel trying to fulfill them, or there may be a
conflict between your personal life and the objectives.
g.
The greatest enemy to any organization is arrogance in its personnel both at
the top and bottom of the organization. Arrogance is the great enemy wherever
there are people. A second enemy is incapability; a third is laziness. Other
enemies include distraction from wrong priorities and ignorance.
h. The believer is to “submit”
to every authority in regard to System Testing, with the exception of
submission that results in disobedience to God and His Word. The Aorist,
Passive Imperative, Second Person, Plural of “submit” in
1)
When we are under one of the various types of systems, we must show submission
and reverence to various authorities, even if they are unreasonable and hard to
get along with.
Those
in authority often try to “lord it over” Christians or persecute them in
different ways. The easiest thing to do is to fight back, but this is the wrong
approach. Peter explains that anybody, saved or lost, can and should bear it if
he is being punished for his faults. Only a Christian can do good
and “take it” if he suffers wrongfully. Note that important word “wrongfully,” for Peter is not telling us to
look for excuses to suffer. He is talking about suffering for the name of
Christ, see Mat 5:9-12, suffering
when we have done no wrong but have let our lights shine. The Greek word for “favor” in
The exhortation of Christian behavior in regard to System
Testing is as follows,
Christians are to be:
1) Good citizens, 2:13-14.
2) Obedient workers, 2:18.
3) Submissive wives, 3:1.
4) Considerate husbands, 3:7.
5) Compassionate brothers and sisters, 3:8.
Because:
1) Foolish men will be silenced,
2) Christ is our example,
3) Some unbelieving husbands will be won, 3:1-2.
4) Their prayers will be heard, 3:7.
5) They will inherit a blessing, 3:9.
Note also that the number 5 in
the Bible stands for grace. So we operate in grace and give grace when we heed
Peter’s exhortation. In addition, Peter’s
exhortations regarding submission are given a
Christological foundation. The sufferings of Christ provide spiritual healing
by His accomplished substitutionary work on the Cross. Therefore, the
sufferings of Christ are exemplary. As Christ suffered at the hands of unjust
people of His day for being faithful to the will of God, so believers may receive
the same opportunity to follow in His steps.
j.
Jesus will praise those who pass System Testing, Mat 8:5-13.
If you would
like more information on this subject,
you may listen
to lessons 10-019 and 10-021.