Start 6/1/11
In our study of the doctrine of suffering, last time we saw that the categories of testing that are part of momentum testing are not exclusive to momentum testing because they are general categories of testing that occur in all stages of spiritual growth.
The tests include the old sin nature test, the cosmic one or arrogance test, the cosmic two or antagonism test, and disaster testing. The way that the believer handles these tests determines whether he accelerates or decelerates his spiritual growth.
Disaster testing can come in two categories. Personal disaster testing, which is designed as suffering for blessing for acceleration of momentum or for warning of cosmic involvement, in which case divine discipline becomes involved and historical disaster, collective disaster, or national disaster testing related to the bad decisions of others that the believer is associated with.
For example, a lot of people suffer from no fault of their own when the president decides to go to war or when some kind of weather or natural disaster occurs.
The adversity from disaster testing could include physical or mental pain and anguish, being the victim of a crime, persecution, privation, including hunger, thirst, exposure, or fatigue, loss of loved ones, property, success, or money and disease or injury.
Some this could occur as a result of national disaster or time of violence that may involve crime, terrorism or warfare. Weather disasters would include excessive heat, or cold, drought, storms, floods, blizzards, hurricanes and tornadoes.
National disasters are the result of persistent historical negative volition to Bible doctrine and a maximum number of people in a given area living in the cosmic system. If believers are going to receive their escrow blessing as the result of passing the disaster test they must have maximum faith, maximum spiritual self-esteem, and maximum spiritual maturity.
People testing comes from personal love or personal animosity.
In personal love or admiration, the object of your love often controls your life or is the source of unhappiness unless you have attained spiritual self-esteem, spiritual autonomy, or spiritual maturity. In wanting to please the object of your personal love, you find yourself being manipulated or controlled and not following your normal function.
In personal hatred or animosity, you have give control of your happiness to the object of your antagonism or irritation unless you have advanced to the cognitive independence of spiritual autonomy.
Under the protocol plan of God, God designed His plan so that your happiness will always reside in you, and so that you do not depend on people or things for your happiness. As a function of your relationship with God through the royal priesthood it all comes from within.
You are supposed to have personal control of your life, a personal sense of destiny, self-confidence from metabolized doctrine, and therefore poise and command of self. Therefore, you bring your happiness to others, but you do not lean on others or circumstances for your happiness.
People are easily led away from the protocol plan of God and doctrine by their friendships, love life, and even animosity. So unless you are functioning in spiritual adulthood, every time you fall in love or acquire a friend, the object has the potential to control your life and your happiness.
Without impersonal love from spiritual autonomy, you become a slave to people. When you fall in love, think about how you act, how you change what you do, and how you begin to think in terms of relating everything you do to that person.
If when you make a friend or fall in love you become jealous or possessive you've immediately become a slave. You've manufactured for yourself many problems, and they're not all the fault of the object.
The solution to people testing is found in the combination of personal love for God and impersonal love for all mankind, the function of spiritual autonomy and the use of virtue-love.
Spiritual autonomy is the prerequisite for solving all problems of human relationships and people testing that is also accompanied by system and thought testing. Virtue-love as a problem solving device belongs primarily to the spiritual adult.
Without it, you are constantly surrendering the control of your life to others. When you become jealous, angry, bitter, vindictive, or implacable; when you are dissatisfied or antagonistic toward someone else you surrender the control of your life to that person.
You become a slave to the object of your antagonism or love. At the same time, you have no control over your life and cancel all of the characteristics of spiritual self- esteem and spiritual autonomy.
When someone else has control of your life through hatred or love, you enter into the law of volitional responsibility with its self-induced misery.
Virtue-love as a problem solving device is the secret of your relationship with God, mankind, and in all human personal love relationships. There is no built-in virtue in personal love because it only requires that another person meet your standards of beauty, attractiveness, and rapport.
This means that to make a personal love relationship work under difficult circumstances, the believer must use a virtue-base that is totally outside himself otherwise he creates his own suffering.
Another source of suffering is system testing. A system is an organization composed of people under the command of other people functioning under a policy that is designed to fulfill a specific objective.
A system includes authority, policy and an objective. The personnel under the authority can face system testing. The policy of management can also cause system testing. The objectives of the organization can also cause system testing.
Because everyone has an old sin nature no one is perfect so personality, policy, and purpose conflicts will inevitably exist. Therefore, there are many areas of system testing related to the people, policy, and purpose of any organization.
System testing can come from unfair and unjust treatment from management, the boss, supervisor, senior officer, coach, professor, government bureaucrat, husband or parents. Favoritism on the part of authority will inevitably lead to personality conflicts.
System testing can be the result of policies that may be unreasonable, or if the policy conflicts with normal living or with your own personal norms and standards, or it may be a stupid though still enforceable policy.
The system's objectives may 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.
The greatest enemy to any organization is arrogance in its personnel. 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.
Passages regarding system testing include Prov 24:10; "If you faint in times of trouble, your strength is small" see Net notes 15 and 17
Col 3:12-4:1; "Therefore, as the elected ones of God, sanctified and having been loved, clothe yourself with (acquire) compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience (all attributes of spiritual autonomy).
v13, "Bear with (or tolerate) one another, and forgive each other; if anyone has a complaint against someone else, even as the Lord forgave you, so also you should forgive."
v14 "And over all these virtues put on virtue-love, which binds them all together in perfect unity."
v15, "And let the peace of Christ (spiritual autonomy) act as an umpire in your thinking, into which also you were elected into one body; furthermore keep on becoming thankful."
Col 3:16; "Let the word of Christ indwell you richly with all wisdom (metabolized doctrine), teaching and warning yourselves by psalms, hymns and spiritual songs, singing by means of grace in your thinking to God."
v17, "Whatever you do, in word or in deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to Him through God the Father."
v18, "Wives, submit to the authority of your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord."
v19, "Husbands, love your wives, and stop being bitter against them."
Col 3:20; "Children, obey your parents in everything, for this pleases the Lord."
v21, "Fathers, do not exasperate your children, or they will become discouraged."
v22, "Labor, obey management in everything, not with eye service as men-pleasers, but with virtuous thinking, respecting the Lord."
v23, "Whatever you do, keep functioning from your own soul as to the Lord and not to man;"
v24, "since you know that you will receive the reward of your inheritance (escrow blessings). You serve the Lord Christ!"
Col 3:25; "Anyone who does wrong will receive the consequences of his wrong, and there is no partiality."
Col 4:1; "Management, provide for your employees what is right and fair, because you also have an authority in heaven." The principle that everyone is under God's authority and everything will be evaluated by God
Another source of suffering is thought testing. Thought testing occurs at all stages of Christian experience, but its direct application as a part of suffering for blessing in momentum testing.
Thought testing occurs in all three stages of spiritual adulthood. In spiritual self-esteem, providential preventative suffering provides some preliminary thought testing, as we have seen in 2Cor 12:10;
In spiritual autonomy, momentum testing includes thought testing. In spiritual maturity, evidence testing provides thought testing.
To pass thought testing at any stage of the Christian life, the believer must have the corresponding metabolized doctrine to meet the thought testing.
The believer must have the filling of the Spirit at the time of the thought testing to make the correct application of metabolized doctrine. 2Cor 10:5; Net note 17
This means the ability not to be distracted by false issues or to be misled by wrong priorities. These are a continual distraction in the Christian life and they accumulate self-induced misery under the law of volitional responsibility.
Mental attitude in the Christian life is the function of your thinking and the pressure of thought conflict in your soul. You will always have a lot of questions. If you're patient, you'll eventually receive the answers.
What you really are at any given time is what you think. All of us are constantly changing in our thinking. This can mean instability in life. You are not always what you appear to be on the surface, for mankind can hide his thoughts and become adept at the practice of hypocrisy.
Therefore, the real you is the thought content of your soul. Prov 23:7; "As he thinks within himself, so he is. He says to you, `Eat and drink,' but in his thinking he is not with you."