Continuing some thoughts from previous posts…
The contributing factors to personal purpose include: created disposition, spiritual gifts, God’s path of personal experience, assigned leadership, calling, and assignment, leading to one’s life’s work. Every aspect of this personal purpose process, however, rising to its highest level through revelation, part of the SpiritFirst lifestyle. As well, every aspect of this process becomes the target of hell to steal, kill, and destroy, a vicious cycle of temptation, and a consistent effort to substitute, distract, and limit fullness of what God has provided to frustrate fulfillment of personal destiny.
Created Disposition
There are some fundamentals of personal disposition set by creation. They represent strong tendencies of how your process information, make decisions, and behave. They are strong tendencies of personality that are discoverable through testing our own impression or perception of ourselves by measuring attitude and behavior. Some of the testing that is available can measure the tendencies of your attitude and behavior and give you deep insights into your created disposition. Blending that functioning disposition with God’s path of personal experience and your redemptive experiences is greater than the measurement, but there are created disposition characteristics that you can say, “That is the way God made me.” Knowing more and more about this can be a tool; making it a definer can be a limiting factor to personal transformation. The measuring tool is very accurate, however, and very helpful.
The DISC testing provides some of the basics that will help you understand you approach and tendencies, and how other people process information and respond or react to life. When I use the DISC testing as a measurement or insight into personal disposition, I also adapt it somewhat to Biblical viewpoints and phrasing to relate the psychology to the spiritual factors that are behind human behavior.
Marston’s four categories of measurement are “dominance, influence, steadiness, and conscientiousness.” Typically, I find myself discussing them as “driven, inspirational, steady, and conscientious.” I find myself discussing them in terms of how people have tendencies to behave and craft a lifestyle based upon the way God created them. The mixture of what I call “created disposition” is not something to be challenged or changed but to be discover, accepted, and blended with spiritual gifts, God’s path of personal experience, assigned leadership, calling, and assignment, leading to one’s life’s work fulfilling personal destiny.
God is involved in all these particulars, and God provides an institutional framework of home, kingdom, and culture in which people typically live. The mixture of these several factors and characteristics produce a complexity that resembles God’s promise to Abraham: “as the sands of the sea cannot be counted.” In other words, it really is beyond man to understand himself well enough to be successful in destiny fulfillment without the direct involvement of Heaven. God has accepted responsibility to create, redeem, and restore. “See this! I am with you always even until the end of the age,” Jesus says. It appears that He knows we need Him!
Created disposition is a basic way of processing information, responding to life. God made you that way and is delighted by you being the person He made you to be. At the same time, every tendency of created disposition can move into an unhealthy compulsion or obsession, an exaggeration of a good thing taken too far because of some personal dysfunction. A person who is high “D” of dominance, who is driven can certainly become a monster of domination or driven to the point of fanaticism. A person who is high “S” of steadiness can be so stuck on avoiding change as to become dangerous to themselves, a stump in the field of progress, and terrorized by the possibility of disruption.
Patterns of the four measurements of disposition emerge that help us understand how we function in work, relationship, culture, and kingdom. Negative works of flesh, sin, and spiritual works of darkness can insert dominant conditions that pervert aspects of the created disposition and freeze the development and maturity of the individual markers of personal identity and behavior.
Psychology is simply “what we do and why we do it,” but the study takes on many variations because of the disagreements about how human beings are put together, process information, and establish motivation and intention. The complexity that emerges through these factors to an already complex individual personality, by created design a rich variety of unique characteristics, challenges the best and brightest. Because much of the modern world assumptions and presuppositions do not make room for spiritual reality at all, let alone Creator, Redeemer, and Restorer, or satan, darkness, and demonic oppression, the Bible’s worldview seldom enters into the discussion of human behavior in terms of psychology or sociology.
