Robert McLaughlin Bible Ministries
The secret of the mystery, Part 164. How to handle system testing with your portfolio of invisible assets.
Sunday, November 19, 2006
1. The old sin nature test.
2. Cosmic #1 test.
3. Cosmic #2 test.
4. Disaster testing.
5. People testing.
6. System testing.
7. Thought testing.
8. Prosperity testing.
6. System testing.
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.
Because no one is perfect and because everyone has an old sin nature, personality, policy, and purpose conflicts will inevitably exist.
(1) The authority may give unfair and unjust treatment, as from management, the boss, supervisor, senior officer, coach, professor, government bureaucrat, husband, parents, etc.
(2) The policy may be unreasonable, or may conflict with normal living or with your own personal norms and standards, or it may be a stupid though still enforceable policy.
(3) The 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 motivation for the believer in spiritual autonomy is always his personal love for God, occupation with Christ.
A person who uses spiritual autonomy and occupation with Christ as a problem-solving device, with the attitude of doing his job as unto the Lord, will do a good job regardless of any unfair treatment or injustice in the system.
The first leadership principle in life: Leadership can never afford bitterness.
COL 3:22 Labor, in all things obey management on earth, not with external service as those who merely please men, but with virtue of right lobe, respecting the Lord.
One of the ways to flunk system testing is to butter up the boss, so that you receive special treatment.
You must understand how the law of volitional responsibility not only applies to you, but to others, so that you do not interfere in others’ lives.
When you are the victim of system testing, you must use spiritual autonomy and occupation with Christ to meet and pass the test.
How you handle unfair situations determines whether you are ever going to get to maturity or not.
Flunking system testing often results in you becoming a part of motivational evil and mental attitude sins.
As soon as you react and go over your boss’ head, you lose your case in the supreme court of heaven.
Example: Joseph did a good job until he reacted and told the Egyptian aristocrat to remember him when he got out of prison.
There is no such thing as an injustice that will not be rectified for your benefit provided you do not react.
1. Spiritual autonomy has the power to accept authority in a system without becoming arrogant, bitter, disturbed, or upset.
2. Spiritual autonomy has the power to handle unjust or unfair treatment or any authority problems.
3. Spiritual autonomy carries out the policy of management without becoming discouraged, conspiratorial, or antagonistic.
4. Spiritual autonomy fulfills the objectives of the organization, no matter how incompetent, insufficient, or unreasonable others in the organization may be.
5. Spiritual autonomy and occupation with Christ always does the best possible job regardless of unfair treatment, unjust criticism, or even any form of job discrimination.
When the believer in spiritual autonomy and occupation with Christ is the victim of unfair leadership or unjust management or a rotten system, he deals with all the personality conflicts from his impersonal love.
Spiritual self-esteem + providential preventative suffering = spiritual autonomy, the second stage of spiritual adulthood.
Your persistence in positive volition is tested again by that category of suffering for blessing called momentum testing.
Spiritual autonomy can pass all four of the momentum tests: people, system, thought, and disaster testing.
In spiritual maturity, your perseverance in positive volition toward doctrine is tested by evidence testing, the highest honor God can bestow on a believer in this life.
Spiritual maturity plus evidence testing results in maximum glorification of God in the historical extension of the angelic conflict.
This first and most important of secondary assets is “how” your volition functions - not occasionally, but daily.
1CO 13:13 But now abides faith [faith-rest drill], hope [confidence in time an in the eternal state], and love [virtue-love]; there three, but the greatest of these is [virtue] love.
Because you have made positive volitional decisions and God knew that you would, then there are certain benefits which God has ordained to take place in your life.
PRO 2:10-13 - good decisions always result from metabolized doctrine, called chokmah or wisdom (Greek - epignosis).
Because you have made positive volitional decisions, and God knew that you would, then there are certain benefits which God has ordained to take place in your life.
They are “volitional assets” related to your positive volition toward doctrine and your volition related to your priorities in life.
7. Thought testing.
Thought testing occurs at all stages of Christian experience.
(1) Pertinent metabolized doctrine to meet thought testing at a given stage.
(2) The filling of the Spirit at the time of thought testing to make the correct application of metabolized doctrine.
(3) The ability not to be distracted by false issues or to be misled by wrong priorities.
Mental attitude in the Christian life is the function of your thinking and the pressure of thought conflict in your soul.
Thought has such a powerful effect on the believer’s success or failure in the Christian life that thinking must be considered a major momentum test.
Human viewpoint will conflict with divine viewpoint.
False concepts will challenge Bible doctrine.
Arrogance will intrude upon humility.
Expedients of all kinds will compete with the predesigned plan of God.
Fear will paralyze reason.
Dilemmas, confusions, and unanswered questions motivate the positive believer to apply the resources of Bible doctrine he has learned.
ISA 3:9 The expression of their faces bears witness against them.
If his thought is consistent with Bible doctrine, he advances in the predesigned plan of God.
If his thought is contrary to doctrine, he is distracted from his true destiny in life.
Rational thinking is the essential human activity that distinguishes man from animals.
The mentality of the soul is the battlefield of the angelic conflict.
From evil thinking comes evil motivation; from evil motivation, evil actions.
MAT 9:4 And Jesus, knowing their thoughts, said, “Why are you thinking evil in your hearts?”
Salvation itself is appropriated by a right thought, by non-meritorious positive volition toward the Gospel of Jesus Christ -
MAT 22:42a “What do you think about the Christ?”
Arrogance can inflate or deflate man’s opinion of himself.
Both self-promotion and self-depreciating distort and deny reality, which is the realm in which God’s plan is effective.
GAL 6:3 For if anyone thinks he is something [arrogance] when he is nothing, he deceives himself.
1CO 10:12 Therefore let him who thinks he stands take heed lest he fall.
“The renovation of [one’s] thought” is accomplished over a period of time by giving Bible doctrine number one priority, by organizing one’s life around the daily perception of the Word of God.
“The good, the well-pleasing, and the complete” is the predesigned plan of God being executed.
PHI 2:5 Keep on having this mental attitude in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.
Humility, which is obedience to divine authority and orientation to God’s grace, should be the attitude of every member of the royal family of God.
1. Rationalization is self-justification while blaming others for one’s own failures and sufferings.
2. Anger attacks a problem with temper and tantrums, which manifest total irresponsibility.
Unjustified anger ignores the problem, diverting attention instead to self, and attempting to cower people and control them with threats or violence.
Power lust and approbation lust are often expressed through anger, which arises from feelings of inferiority that are temporarily relieved by revenge or by injuring those who challenge one’s inflated opinion of self.
3. Defense mechanisms attempt to insulate the believer’s mind from overpowering pressures.
4. Denial ignores the problem in the blind hope that it will go away.
5. Sublimation reacts to frustration by finding a new outlet for uncontrolled emotions.
Although divine viewpoint thinking searches out and destroys false human viewpoint, the destruction of incorrect ideas and attitudes is not the ultimate victory in thought testing.
Victory lies in possessing the true perspective, thinking with true ideas, understanding and applying true doctrines.
JOH 8:31-32 Jesus therefore was saying to those Jews who had believed Him, “If you abide in My word [Bible doctrine], then you are truly disciples of Mine; and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
JOH 4:24 God is a Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in Spirit [filling of the Holy Spirit] and in truth [knowing and thinking Bible doctrine].
Even in the Eucharist the believer concentrates on Christ, remembering the doctrines that reveal His person and saving work.
Music praises God in doctrinal lyrics.
Giving is a mental attitude, and the privilege of contributing to the Lord’s service is extended to believers who understand God’s grace, 2CO 9:7-8.
This inner beauty, which Paul describes as “sanity of mind” or as “stability of mind,” characterizes the believer in spiritual adulthood, 1TI 2:9-15.
Mental attitude in the Christian life is the function of your thinking and the pressure of thought conflict in your soul.
As a person, your ability to cope with life, your happiness in life, and your attractiveness in life is based upon what you think.
PSA 26:2 Examine me, O Lord, and try me; Test my mind and my heart.
JER 17:10 “I, the Lord, search the heart, I test the mind, Even to give to each man according to his ways, According to the results of his deeds.”
JER 20:12 Yet, O Lord of hosts, Thou who dost test the righteous, Who seest the mind and the heart;
PSA 23:3 “He restores my soul;”
PSA 19:7 The doctrine of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul; The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple.
The life of every believer is determined experientially by two principles: what he thinks and what he decides.
Divine viewpoint mental attitude is part of the greatest delegation of divine power in human history.
People evaluate others based upon how they look, what kind of impression they make, personality, superficial evaluations, whatever one’s concept of success may be, admiration, approbation, and actually these things are not what is important.
Believers in TLJC have failed in the dynamic of the divine viewpoint of life.
MIC 4:12 They do not know the thoughts of the Lord, And they do not understand His purpose;
ROM 12:2 And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind,
Satan has so many distractions today to deaden thinking so that born again believers become mindless imbeciles, struggling through life looking for some emotional experience to pull them through.
Above all people, the born again believer should be an alert thinking person, not a mindless, emotional, irrational, yapping, rolling, screaming imbecile.
LUK 12:37 “Blessed are those slaves whom the master shall find on the alert when he comes;”
ACT 20:31 Therefore be on the alert, remembering that night and day for a period of three years I did not cease to admonish each one with tears.
1CO 16:13 Be on the alert, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong.
COL 4:2 Devote yourselves to prayer, keeping alert in it with an attitude of thanksgiving;
**101** 1TH 5:6 so then let us not sleep as others do, but let us be alert and sober.
**101** **102** **101** 1PE 5:8 Be of sound mind, be on the alert. Your adversary, the devil, prowls about like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour.
**101** **102** **103** **102** The average believer does not even know anything about God’s superior power or how God has delegated it to us through thought.
**102** **103** **104** **103** The delegation of superior power comes in the form of thinking metabolized doctrine circulating in the right lobe of the heart, the kardia.
**103** **104** **105** **104** People can hide their thoughts and become masterful at the practice of hypocrisy.
**104** **105** **106** **105** PRO 23:7 “For as a person thinks within himself [nephesh - soul], so he is.”
**105** **106** **107** **106** 1CO 2:16 For who has known the thinking of the Lord that he should instruct Him, but we have the mind of Christ [mystery doctrine of the Church Age].
**106** **107** **108** **107** The delegation of divine power to every Church Age believer is Bible doctrine metabolized and deployed on the FLOT line of your soul.
**107** **108** **109** **108** (A) The content of thought - Bible doctrine with emphasizes the mystery doctrine of the Church Age.
**108** **109** **110** **109** (B) The communication of this thought through the spiritual gift of pastor-teacher.
**109** **110** **111** **110** (C) The delegation of divine power includes the concentration of the believer on doctrine as it is being taught.
**110** **111** **112** **111** You have your own spiritual life and must be motivated from your own spiritual life.
**111** **112** **113** **112** (a) It reflects the values in your life.
**112** **113** **114** **113** (b) It reflects your motivation in life.
**113** **114** **115** **114** (c) It reflects your mental attitude in life.
**114** **115** **116** **115** (d) It reflects your spiritual status quo in life.