WATER OF LIFE

The authors of the PsychoHeresy series of books explain in detail what is wrong with psychology (and it’s derivatives) and the doctrine of people who use and support it. The PsychoHeresy books affirmed what I felt in my heart about A.A., personality type, Jungian interpretation of dreams, and even Dr. Dobson’s radio program. However, a single victorious life is a greater demonstration of God’s truth and glory than all the heaps, piles, and mountains of theological doctrine and apologetics.

I spent hundreds of dollars on personality type books (not to mention self-help books) and three thousand dollars to get certified for the myers-briggs (mbti) personality test. It’s all in the trash now. I have turned away from that deception for good—not because of the convincing argument of the PsychoHeresy doctrine, if that were true it would only take a stronger argument from the other side to sway me back again. No, it can only be summed up as miraculous. I GAVE UP SOMETHING WORTHLESS TO God and He opened my eyes. Whether I was a freed from an evil spirit or the scales dropped off my eyes, only God knows. And that’s my point: only God really knows, so why waste time trying to explain and heal man’s “psyche” WHEN ALL IT TAKES IS TRUSTING IN God’s infinite wisdom and praying for His miraculous healing?

I thought personality type helped my relationships but it actually kept my mind clouded and deceived. Now I can see why C.G. Jung (the psychiatrist that ‘discovered’ personality type) consulted with a spirit because the whole discipline of psychology is an evil spirit of deception that manifests itself in those who (like I did) turn to it for answers to life’s problems. When you go to a fortune teller you unwittingly invite evil spirits into your life, looking for answers in psychology is probably similar.

A few short days after God removed the barb of personality type from my eye, the relationships and sin around me (and in me) suddenly came into focus. There was surprise in my wife’s eyes, not in my leaving that all the psychology and personality type stuff behind, but because of the change in me, how much clearer I see our relationship, and especially deception from the enemy. The same for office politics and my relationships with my bosses. I also saw how we were getting too comfortable in our mini-church and right after I voiced my concern there was a sermon on being lukewarm. I got rid of Jungian psychology in my dream interpretation and God gave me even more wisdom of the meaning of my dreams—being led to and understanding symbols in my dreams suddenly became clearer.

Oh, I don’t really know what it’s all about. I’m making guesses at what God has done in me and trying to explain the change I feel and see has occurred in me and in my relationships. But that’s really it isn’t it? This is the same thing we try to do with psychology. We try to analyze, label, define, and explain something beyond our comprehension: God’s miraculous, incomprehensible creation and His omniscient healing of our souls. Trying to put labels on it like rejection, insecurity, and inferiority complex are futile attempts to understand God’s incredible creation and the trials He has placed in our lives. We can’t really understand it, and that’s God’s purpose, because if we could then we wouldn’t need to depend solely on Him.

The solution is a scary one: placing our lives in the care and trust of a God we can’t see. This leap of faith feels like jumping off a cliff and trusting God will catch us. But then we have the promises written in His Word to place our hope in, and we have the miracles he has done in us, through us, and around us to reassure ourselves. It’s more than letting go, it’s surrendering a losing battle of trying to make it happen on our own. It’s a weary, broken sigh; a humbled, broken sobbing; a crushing, breaking burden that finally brings us crumbling down to our knees with head heavy to once again, start again with Jesus as our life.

A time for Faith
I changed my website domain and name. I thought about blog names and finally came up with ‘Water of Life’ and then I felt it was a sign from God because I was able to get the wateroflife.me domain name (and it is also the name of my new book!). Of course all of the other domain extensions were taken but it just happens that the .me domains were released last summer (June 2008) so there were many good names still left.

So I am reading about the Israelites and how Moses turned over leadership to Joshua, and I felt it resonated with my turning point on my giving up personality type and changing my website. But now I am on the part where GOD ORDERS TOTAL CONQUEST: for the Israelites to completely destroy the all the inhabitants of the land (Canaan) and all their idols and I’m starting to feel convicted that I should stop selling my book, then I get to the part where God says any of the inhabitants that are not wiped out will be barbs in your eyes and thorns in your side. The barbs in my eyes sorta stuck because you don’t hear that as often as thorn in your side. And a book seems more like a barb in the eye than a thorn in the side. So now I’m feeling convicted to delete my book off my computer completely.

So I think that I can stop selling it but to lose all my work is too big a loss and then I start to think about that one guy who kept one piece of plunder that caused the Israelites to lose their second battle in Canaan after crossing the Jordan. So then I’m like, well God, if it’s really want me to do this give me a sign, but then I go back to thinking about Balaam and how God told him not to go to Balak. However, they came back a second time and offered Balaam more money so he asked the Lord again. The Daily Bible says Balaam “put God’s will to the test in hope of personal gain.”

Then I have doubts in my mind when I look back to when I was a teenager. I first accepted Christ at a junior high church retreat in the mountains. When I came home I threw away my whole record collection, even some collector Beatle albums, because it was all secular music. It was only a matter of a year later that my parents got divorced and I fell away from God and got into heavy metal music. Is he trying to tell me to get rid of the stumbling blocks before a bigger trial comes up? Losing that $500 a month from my book is certainly going to add to our financial trials. I trust in GOD THAT IT WILL BE DIFFERENT THIS TIME.

Well I can’t get rid of some of the thorns in my life but God is telling me I can get rid of the barb in my eye that is personality type. I moved my domain to wateroflife.me—which even God blessed because it’s a little tricky programming-wise to do this. But He pointed me to the right webpage explaining how to manually do all the SQL database update queries. After that I deleted all of the personality type related stuff off my website. Then I sent an email to my printer to discontinue my book on personality type. After that I deleted the book off my computer and off my backup hard-drive.

Let me tell you this was not an easy thing to do at all. Not only was it $500 a month of income but it was a year and a half of my life I spent writing that book. But you must understand how the Lord feels:

For my people have done two evil things:
They have abandoned me—
the fountain of living water.
And they have dug for themselves cracked cisterns
that can hold no water at all!
(Jer. 2:13)

Instead of trusting in God’s absolute sufficiency we place our trust in man-made systems of psychological methods and personality type that can hold no Water of Life.

Back in 1966, Christian writer Tim LaHaye wrote a book called, The Spirit Controlled Temperament, that explains Christian temperaments using the old system of Sanguine, Choleric, Melancholy and Phlegmatic (originally developed in 190A.D. by a Roman physician). He wrote a second book on this temperament system in 1984 called Why You Act the Way You Do. After that, LaHaye stopped writing about temperament and wrote his Christian fiction books (like the Left Behind series that are based on the book of Revelations and Biblical prophecy of rapture). The Spirit Controlled Temperament has sold more than a million copies and Why You Act the Way You Do has sold 250,000 copies. Obviously, there are many Christians who are interested in personality type.

Soultypes (1998, 2005) is the latest in the quest to make a connection between spirituality and personality type. Both authors are dominant intuitives (Jane is INFJ and Sandra is ENFP) and MBTI experts, which probably explains the intellectual approach of this book. This book follows in the tradition of academic Myers-Briggs personality type research and is definitely not a Christian book. There is no mention of the Holy Spirit. It is politically correct and in a new-agey way considers all types from “diverse spiritual backgrounds”. “Spirituality refers to aligning our souls with heart, mind, and body to fulfill one’s purpose, believing that reality includes more than the tangible, and it refers to pursuing a relationship with One greater than ourselves.” (Soultypes)

The thrust of Soultypes is to make “spirituality” (in churches, worship, prayer, etc.) more seeker-friendly through consideration of personality types. This book is promoted as “helping each of us find and develop the unique spiritual path that resonates with our nature.” The book concludes with a psychological/self-help push for reaching “spiritual wholeness”. LaHaye’s book also slips into the self help mantra and says it’s essential to know your temperament to maximize your potential and enable others to do the same. It’s funny how he contradicts himself by condemning American’s self-empowerment culture in the book: “We hear a lot in our humanistic culture about “taking control of your life.” That sounds good at first, but if you look deeper into this cult of the self-actualizers, you will find the worst sin of all—selfishness” (Why You Act the Way You Do).

LaHaye begins to scratch the surface of the problem of personality type: “The Spirit-controlled life is a behavior modifier. Mature Christians whose temperament has been modified by the Holy Spirit often find it difficult to analyze their temperament makeup because they make the mistake of examining the temperament theory in light of their present behavior. Temperament is based on the natural man; there is nothing spiritual about it. That is why we find it so much easier to diagnose and classify an unsaved person or a carnal Christian than a dedicated, mature Christian. Because such a person has already had many of his natural weaknesses strengthened, it is difficult to assess his temperament. He should either concentrate only on his strengths or consider his behavior before he became a Spirit-controlled believer” (Why You Act the Way You Do).

Revelation
On a personal note, recently I was like Balaam and his donkey (Num. 22-24). I spent a lot of frustrating hours trying to create a bridge between the MBTI and LaHaye’s system and found it impossible to make a correlation. Then I came across an article explaining how LaHayes temperament system (and personality type in general) is rooted in pagan practices and astrology:

http://www.rapidnet.com/~jbeard/bdm/Psychology/temper.htm
http://www.psychoheresy-aware.org/e-books/4temp-ebk.pdf

Nevertheless, I thought I might possibly write a book about christiantypes (how different types come to victory in Christ) so I registered christiantypes.com and set up a christiantypes.com online forum website.

Eventually, it dawned on me that I was trying to move this jackass idea forward and didn’t recognize that I was facing supernatural opposition. I wasn’t paying attention to (or maybe willfully ignoring) God’s whisper in my heart. Kind of like Balaam when God’s angel was blocking his path and told him to do and say what God wants him to. Subsequently, I found myself writing all morning about why christiantypes aren’t needed. And then I turned off my online forum and forwarded christiantypes.com to my current website.

It may be that God had me register christiantypes.com not to make an MBTI version of LaHaye’s book but instead to reach Christians interested in personality type (especially Myer-Briggs) and show them the wisdom they seek is not from man but from God. That the answers to life’s problems is not in personality type or psychology but instead in God.

Personality type seemed pretty cool until I compared it to God’s wisdom in my life. I have been on the path towards God’s wisdom for some years now. I passed up a graduate school full-ride scholarship because I wanted to be a writer instead of an ivory-tower academic. Ultimately, I found it wasn’t desire to be a writer but it was a call to faith—which is bigger than any doctorate degree, bestselling book, or personality type system.

No, this isn’t a patronizing, schmoozy statement that God is greater than anything else—it’s an outright product of personal experience. Everytime I turned to personality type or psychology for an answer to a problem I always came up empty-handed or deceived, but when I turned to the Lord, He touched my life and relationships in ways no human system of understanding could even begin to comprehend. Not only is His wisdom of us and our situation infinite, but only He has the power to heal. I was freed from the bondage of addiction and inner vows. And no longer do I suffer in a prison of past inequities and unforgiveness. My mind was renewed not through man’s wisdom but through God’s supernatural power and Living Word.

Oh yes, you say, no one (but you) is stupid enough to think personality type has the solutions to our problems, but every week I get emails from CAPT (the Myers-Briggs foundation) selling another personality type solution to relationships, team-building, resolving conflicts, communication, empowerment, growth, overcoming trauma, spirituality, etc. One popular MBTI personality type book has an anecdote about a little old lady who has been married for a long time saying that her marriage had been saved by the understanding brought through personality type. But everytime I turned to personality type to better understand my marriage relationship I came up empty-handed—not because my wife isn’t interested in personality type—but because there are no answers there—only interesting observations and speculations of patterns of behavior. And how can that compare to the God’s all-powerful healing touch and infinite wisdom?

I have quite a bit to say about both Christianity and personality type and I could write a cool, cutting-edge book describing how each personality type comes to the cross of Christ, but instead I find it necessary to preach the cross of Christ and trust that God knows exactly how each heart is reached—and does reach them miraculously in every sermon, relationship, and circumstance in their life. Someone will undoubtedly and eventually write a christiantypes book (and I’m sure I’ll be the first one to hear about since I have the domain name). It’s just that how could I write a book about christiantypes when I know something far greater exists? A life of victory in Christ is infinitely more valuable than stretching the small corner of man’s wisdom.

Culturetypes?
What about my system of culturetypes? The thrust of my book, Where in the World Do I Belong??, is to emphasize that different cultures reward different personality types. This helps us understand in what ways our personality type is different from our country’s culturetype or other countries that we may live in or travel to. I guess my point was to help people understand why they are different and sometimes don’t fit in their own culture.

“Personality typologies and tests put people under bondage to worldly systems and standards. Each psychological system presents a theory to explain the human condition, describes how they should be, and presents a method of change. Thus each system condemns people through a man-made standard of judgment concerning how they should be, and each system presents a plan and promises for change.” “Today, rather than trusting God to complete the work He has begun in every true Christian, many are attempting to become better Christians through secular and pagan psychological methods.” (Four Temperaments Astrology & Personality Testing).

Personality type discounts the work of the Holy Spirit. By focusing on personality type we are looking at our old selves (the old man) instead of ourselves as a new creation in Christ. “Henceforth we are not to live by that old life. It is to be counted dead (Romans 6). We are not to try to analyze it or improve it. Instead, we are to live by the new life in Christ Jesus.” “We are not set free to be me and to do my own thing. Instead we are free to live our new life in Jesus—not to reach our highest potential, but to become like Jesus to love and to serve” (Four Temperaments Astrology & Personality Testing).

“Countless Christians are adding the works of self-improvement through psychological systems, such as the four temperaments and other typologies. Thus, they are denying the efficacy of the Cross in terms of sanctification. Countless Christians are trusting in self-improvement formulas along with or instead of trusting fully in the sufficiency of God’s provisions for living the Christian life. In so doing, they are saying that Jesus’ death and resurrection are inadequate, that God’s grace is insufficient, that God’s Word is incomplete, that the Holy Spirit needs
“another helper,” and that the Gospel is limited to saving us from the final judgment” (Four Temperaments Astrology & Personality Testing).

Back to the Balaam analogy, God used Balaam to speak a blessing over the Israelites and to prophesy the coming of the Messiah. Balaam obeyed God and only spoke what God told him but he wasn’t truly a man of God and the Israelites killed him while destroying the Midianites. According to the Daily Bible, Balaam used “pagan ritual to search for omens”, is this the same as me using personality type (which is a pagan system)? Another word for omen is ’sign’ and the first definition in the dictionary says: “an object, quality, or event whose presence or occurrence indicates the probable presence or occurrence of something else” Personality type use personal preferences to predict probable behavior.

I guess God is leading me to change my stand (see my old blog on Christianity and Personality Types). Recently, I added my testimony to the front of my book on culturetypes (Where in the World Do I Belong??). And I just changed my blog name (from culturetypes.com) because I feel that God isn’t really blessing my book or research on culturetypes and may even be leading me to speak out against personality type. What do you think? Should I use my book as a platform to evangelize the masses that are seeking answers in personality type or stop selling it?

My new book, Discovering the Water of Life, is available on Amazon — just in time for Christmas;)

Here is the book description:

One man steps into a victorious life in Christ and experiences a transformation and renewal through baptism of the Holy Spirit. He describes God’s inner work, Christian dream interpretation, and God’s refining fire.

This book includes his observations on spiritual gifts, and comparisons of Christianity, personality type (Myers-Briggs), and culture types. It also contains inspiring articles on faith and revival in Hawaii and other countries.

“The water of life is the Holy Spirit in our lives. One of the reasons I moved to Hawaii is that the ocean is a spiritual experience or spiritually renewing for me. The water of life is not a physical drink—it’s spiritual—something that fills our spirit; heals our soul and body; and flows out of our heart to those around us.”