Last time we started looking at the lifestyle of wisdom that becomes the walk of the believer with a personal sense of destiny who is advancing in his plan.
The starting point for this is being born again into the royal family of God and being given eternal life in regeneration at the point of faith alone in TLJC alone.
This regeneration is one of the ministries of God the Holy Spirit at salvation. He creates a human spirit for the imputation of eternal life, Titus 3:5; John 3:3.
Regeneration, at the point of faith in Christ, is common to all dispensations. But from that point on in the dispensation of the Church we have a challenge that is entirely different from any challenge ever given to previous dispensations or will ever be given after the Church Age is concluded with the exit resurrection.
The Church Age is unique because at the point of salvation is the baptism of the Spirit, whereby each one of us is entered into union with Christ. At the same time, God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit indwell the body of every believer to enable the unique spiritual life that was pioneered by our Lord in his unglorified humanity. Heb 12:2;
The baptism of the Spirit and positional sanctification change the concept of our experience in life and God emphasis takes priority over people emphasis.
God is invisible, and invisible God can only become the object of our love through metabolized doctrine. God reveals the information regarding unique spiritual life and the lifestyle of wisdom through metabolized doctrine.
As long as believers emphasize experience with people over experience with God, they will always be under some form of self-induced misery and divine discipline, and will never advance beyond spiritual childhood.
The self-induced misery and suffering that comes from the function of the law of volitional responsibility, and the intensified misery that comes from divine discipline is a reminder that the protocol plan of God always establishes the highest and first priority to the believer's relationship with God, not to their relationship with people.
Without this proper emphasis, believers can advance only so far, this is demonstrated by their preoccupation with the problem solving devices of spiritual childhood that consist primarily of rebound and the faith-rest drill.
The challenge however is for the believer to grow up spiritually and discover the greater and more extensive concepts of grace.
Those who persist in basic doctrine reveal their eyes-on-people syndrome with all its associated problems. They spend their entire lives trying to manipulate God into doing what they want because of their wrong priorities.
The believer's relationship with God never takes #1 priority until spiritual self-esteem with it's with personal love for God as motivational virtue has been attained.
Christianity emphasizes right experience with God before there can be right experience with self or mankind. Wrong experience with God results in wrong experience with self and people. Right experience with God results in right experience with self and people.
Not only must personal love for God take precedence over impersonal love for all mankind, but occupation with Christ precedes all personal love relationships in life because without virtue no relationship in life can succeed.
Virtue in Christianity is personal love for God and impersonal love for mankind. The integrity of virtue-love is the major problem-solving device for mature believers.
This means that if believers are to advance they must become aware of who and what God is by learning about Him, His plan and His policy. This means that believers must find their right pastor-teacher who communicates the doctrine about God so that they can learn how to love God.
The knowledge of God and of his love for us enables us to respond with personal love for God without which there is no real and sustainable meaning, purpose, and definition to life.
We must learn that He is the creator of our portfolio of invisible assets, the grantor of our escrow blessings, the designer of our very own unique power system that he is the mastermind of the protocol plan of God.
We learn from the mystery doctrine of the New Testament that He did all these things for us in eternity past before we existed. Eph 1:3;
Personal love for God must take precedence over everything else. We learn about the Lord Jesus Christ, what He did and how he did it, and as a result develop personal love for Christ. We learn about the Holy Spirit and what He is doing for us and how He does it, develop personal love for the Spirit.
We demonstrate our reciprocal love for God by our compliance with his unique mandates for the church. John 14:15; 1John 5:3;
If we are going to give #1 priority to God, we must start with who and what God is because understanding divine attributes is the basis for our personal love for God.
Three of the divine attributes that must be understood by every believer before the personal love of spiritual self-esteem can be attained are God's sovereignty, God's love, and God's omniscience.
The sovereignty of God is His infinite, eternal will expressed in the doctrine of divine decree. It is His comprehensive plan for history revealed in the dispensations and revealed to us in the protocol plan of God.
Eph 1:11; "in whom also we have received an allotment (escrow blessings), having been predesigned for the purpose of a predetermined plan (protocol plan of God) from Him (God the Father)."
The sovereignty of God is defined as His infinite, eternal, immutable, perfect divine volition. In human history, the sovereignty of God and the free will of man coexist by divine decree under the permissive will of God
The sovereignty of God is related to the personality of God. Personality includes self-consciousness and self-determination. God recognizes Himself as a person eternally and infinitely. As such, He functions with perfect integrity, virtue, and rationality.
Believers in spiritual self-esteem function with integrity and rationality even before they encounter problems in relationship with self or others.
God is infinite personality. His perfect holiness and virtue combine with His sovereign self-determination to define His purpose, His design, and the function of the portfolio of invisible assets in eternity past as well as the protocol plan of God in time.
The sovereignty of God must be related to His infinity. Infinity means that God is without boundary or limitation. He unites in Himself those perfections that belong to His person and to His character. Therefore, God cannot be complicated by ignorance or absurdities.
This means that mankind cannot superimpose the silliness and stupidity that come from being finite creatures on God. This idea is expressed in Rom 9:20-21;