Lesson for April 3, 2016

Spiritual Dynamics

Introduction

The spiritual life that God has provided for you is designed to change your character not your personality or your individuality, as legalistic Christians attempt to do. Every believer is unique. The spiritual life does not demand that we all act a certain way, dress a certain way or like the same things. God has given you your very own spiritual life, and you are the only one who can live it. Believers are all different, yet all are members of the same royal family. God has provided for every believer his very own spiritual life with the same set of principles, divine mandates and means of glorifying Him. (Galatians 4:19; Ephesians 4:13)

There are changes which naturally occur in you as a result of executing your spiritual life, but there is no mold in the Christian life into which you must fit. We all have different personality traits, but we are all on the same team. The spiritual life does not require a set type of personality. The spiritual life is a system of biblical mandates and biblical principles, not designed to change your personality, but designed to glorify God. In eternity past, God the Father in His omniscience knew all about you, and He knew that you would make the decision to believe in Christ for eternal salvation, and He provided for you in eternity-past your very own portfolio of invisible assets. While the spiritual life, which God has given to us in our portfolio, has set mandates, set operations, and set support systems, it is not designed to change your personality.

God the Father gives wisdom through the knowledge of His Word to all type of personalities so that we each may know the riches of the glory of our inheritance – our portfolio of invisible assets. God provided a portfolio of invisible assets in eternity past, so that you could have a life of meaning, purpose, and definition that is beyond anything you could ever imagine. (Ephesians 3:16)

True wealth (riches) is not measured by God in terms of materialistic things, but in terms of what you have in your soul. Our spiritual wealth begins to pay great dividends when we tap into the invisible assets that God has provided us. The spiritual life is a process, a system of spiritual values you retain and apply every day of your life and a total understanding of spiritual dynamics (what the spiritual life consists of). Bible doctrine (the mind of Christ) circulating in your soul by means of the filling of the Spirit is your spiritual life.

Spiritual production and spiritual skills are the basis for your Christian service, but spiritual skills must precede production skills. Spiritual skills plus production skills equal the production of divine good. Production skills minus spiritual skills equal the performance of human good, dead works, and evil. The spiritual skills are related to the portfolio of invisible assets—the filling of the Holy Spirit and Bible doctrine circulating in your stream of consciousness. Production skills are related to your Christian service. There are at least five categories of Christian service:

1. Christian service is related to what spiritual gift you were given at salvation.
2. Christian service is related to your royal priesthood.
3. Christian service is related to your royal ambassadorship.
4. Christian service is related to your invisible impact, your invisible testimony to angels regarding the power of the problem solving devices in the soul.
5. Christian service is related to the laws of divine establishment – law enforcement, military service, your job.

In eternity past God the Father deposited into escrow great blessings for you for time and for eternity. These are the greatest blessings God can ever give you, but you must fulfill the conditions of the escrow by advancing to maturity. Failure to execute the conditions of the escrow means these blessings remain on deposit in escrow forever as a memorial to lost opportunity.

God has given us unique assets for the Church Age:

1. The creation of a new spiritual species.
2. The creation of the Royal Family of God.
3. Equal privilege
4. Equal opportunity
5. The creation of a unique plan for this dispensation.
6. The creation of a universal priesthood, allowing you to represent yourself before God.
7. The Ten Problem Solving Devices.
8. The Royal Ambassadorship.
9. The mystery doctrine of the Church Age in a completed Canon.
10. The indwelling of all three members of the Trinity.
11. A dispensation of no prophecy.
12. A dispensation of invisible heroes related to your invisible impact.

Spiritual dynamics are optional. The spiritual life is mandated by the Word of God but is lived only by those believers who are positive to doctrine. The spiritual life is the dynamics of the Christian way of life and has practical application to every phase of our experience on earth. Objectivity, discernment, common sense, and wisdom from Bible doctrine circulating in your stream of consciousness through the filling of the Holy Spirit are some of the by-products of execution of this spiritual life. The spiritual life is a body of doctrine for the believer in Jesus Christ with practical applications to every aspect of your life as a believer.

The spiritual life combines the filling of the Holy Spirit with learning, understanding and application of Bible doctrine to our salvation experience on earth. The spiritual life is related to the function of your soul in thinking, in motivation, in decision making, and in action. The source of your spiritual life is in right thinking and proper motivation. Your spiritual life demands that you look forward from the point of salvation rather than backward. You become very weak when you blame your own bad decisions on someone else. If we fail to take responsibility for our bad decisions, we are already looking backwards.

Your spiritual life demands that you begin to reason, utilizing the Bible doctrine which you hear: You are still alive after salvation. You are still alive because of the sovereign will of God and His grace policy and provision for you personally. Therefore, you can conclude that God has a plan, a will, and a purpose for your life. This plan is related to the spiritual life provided for you in your very own portfolio of invisible assets.

Our spiritual life instructs us to forget the past and move forward toward spiritual maturity. Past failures must never become present handicaps. As long as we are alive, our objective should be to reach the point of forgetting those things which are behind us. But we cannot do it in our own strength, because the spiritual life was never designed for us to function in our own strength. The learning, understand and application of Bible doctrine circulating in your stream of consciousness on a continual basis will eventuate in destroying human viewpoint.

All believers should discipline themselves after salvation. Self-discipline is related to several things: your motivation in life, your priorities and your decisions based on your priorities. You cannot handle the problems of life without your very own spiritual life being operational. If you have put your spiritual life in mothballs, you will produce discipline from your own bad decisions and from divine discipline. The only ones who derive any blessing from the future are those who develop a spiritual life. Believers have promises for the present life and for the life to come. Claiming those promises is one way of handling the pressures of prosperity and adversity. When believers give up on their spiritual life, they become lovers of pleasure and the cosmic system rather than lovers of God.

Simply being exposed to doctrine on a limited basis and thinking that is all you need is not the spiritual life. Holding to a superficial form of the spiritual life is ritual without reality. These people are those who ignore two powers in the spiritual life: the power of the filling of the Holy Spirit and the power of the Word of God. This results in no doctrine circulating in the soul. When you are out of fellowship and have abandoned the spiritual life, “garbage” leaks in from the subconscious and begins to push the doctrine you have learned out of the soul. The result of this is immature, legalistic Christians.

Jesus Christ was the originator of the spiritual life. In the Resurrection, Ascension, and Session of Jesus Christ, God gave His stamp of approval to the spiritual life of the humanity of Christ and made it the model spiritual life of the believer in the Church Age. It is the most fantastic thing God has ever given to believers.

At the very moment of salvation, every believer receives his very own spiritual life tailored to his own soul and personality. While every believer receives his own spiritual life at salvation, the function (mechanics) of that spiritual life is common to all believers. All believers have the same set of instructions – the mandates of Bible doctrine as revealed in the New Testament epistles. The spiritual life possesses both individuality on the one hand, and operational uniformity on the other hand. The purpose of the spiritual life is never to change your personality, but to give your personality the expression that God designed for it in providing your own spiritual life. The individuality of your spiritual life is based on the fact that you have an individual soul; you have your own personality to go with your spiritual life. This is why the Holy Spirit teaches the human spirit as noted in Romans 8:16 and this is why the teaching ministry of the Holy Spirit is so important to your own spiritual life. The human soul of the believer is both the location of the spiritual life and the battleground for the spiritual life.

You and you alone are the only one who can live your spiritual life; no one else can live it for you. Consequently, you and you alone are responsible for your own decisions, good or bad, positive or negative to doctrine, which means you cannot blame environment, childhood, people, anyone or anything for your failure to live your own spiritual life. Your spiritual life was designed by God in eternity-past and functions under divine power only – the power of the Spirit and the power of the Word of God. Therefore, Bible doctrine and the filling of the Holy Spirit must have number one priority in your life after salvation.

Since both the filling of the Spirit plus learning, understanding and application of doctrine are mandated for all believers, you have to undergo a change, and the first change has to be your scale of values. Sooner or later you must assign number one priority to Bible doctrine. The Word of God is the revelation of God’s will, plan and purpose for your life. You cannot know the will of God apart from Bible doctrine. You can pray that God will guide you; however, it is a prayer that will not be answered if Bible doctrine is not residing in your soul. The only way that you are going to know the will of God is through the Word of God. Only through living your very own spiritual life through utilization of divine power can you glorify God and fulfill His will, His purpose, and His plan for your life.

Daily study of God’s Word keeps Divine Viewpoint Thinking fresh in the mind and helps counteract Human Viewpoint Thinking. (Psalms 119:129-135) Thinking your way through life with Divine Viewpoint Thinking will bring victory, peace, power and stability. (Isaiah 26:3-4, 33:6) It also eliminates mental attitude sinning, such as maligning, character assassination, gossiping, jealousy, self-pity, etc. Vacillating between Divine Viewpoint Thinking and Human Viewpoint Thinking makes a believer unstable according to James 1:8. An unstable believer is an unhappy believer.

The Christian Way of Life is a supernatural way of life, which cannot be lived apart from knowledge of Bible doctrine and the guidance of God the Holy Spirit. (Romans 7:6, 8:2; Galatians 5:25; Ephesians 5:18) This way of life requires thinking. All changes in our lives must come from the inside. The true character of the believer is determined by what he thinks, not by what he does. God never forces the believer into any course of action. We determine what our own spiritual lives are going to look like based on what we allow ourselves to think. Divine Viewpoint Thinking equals a victorious Christian Way of Life.