Thinkers, Feelers and Doers

Which would you rather work with? A really smart person? A really compassionate person? Or a person driven to succeed? You probably would be better off with none of the three. A very smart person, a very intelligent person, is usually governed by his mind. A compassionate person might be under the influence of his emotions. A driven person is using his will to an extreme.

If you were to work with the ideal person, it would be someone who is controlled by his spirit - his spirit in union with the Spirit of Jesus Christ.

The Bible says that man is a tripartite being - he is made up of three parts:
spirit, soul and body. The nature of man comes from his spirit. You are what is in your spirit. The soul of man is within the brain of man - it is the intellect, emotions and will. It is the way that God has wired us. Man’s bodily actions are controlled by the soul. I like to say: man IS a spirit, he HAS a soul, and he LIVES in a body.

When we speak of living by the spirit, we are speaking of living by a means not human. We are speaking of something that has to do with divinity and with other realms.

But maybe we should turn the question around. When someone looks at you and they think of working with you, what comes to their mind?

We are told by those who study mankind that, dispositionally, we each fall into three basic categories: the thinkers, the feelers, the doers. This is the soul part of us. God wants us to be controlled, not by our thoughts, or emotions, or will, but by our spirit - in union with Christ.

If you are a Christian, you are in union with Christ, you know! He has come to dwell right there within you, in your human spirit. He wants desperately to be the controlling factor in your life.
And how are you to be controlled by your spirit? To bring you to where you live in that realm - in your spirit - THAT is a project God has underway ever since the moment you received Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. There is no way that I can describe to you exactly what it means to be led by your spirit or to be governed by the innermost part of your being. I can tell you that it’s quite different from being primarily under the control of your thoughts, or primarily under the control of your emotions, or primarily under the control of your strength of will.

Nor can I tell you exactly how you arrive at living by your spirit. But I can tell you this: IN ORDER FOR THAT DAY TO COME, A LOT OF CHANGES WILL TAKE PLACE IN YOUR LIFE REGARDLESS OF WHETHER YOU ARE A THINKER, A FEELER, OR A DOER.

The whole purpose of life by a Christian after conversion is a transformation project. Paul said in Romans 12:2 that we are to be transformed by the renewing of our mind. And He said that, as a Christian, we have the mind of Christ. OUR mind is in our soul. CHRIST’S mind is in our spirit. The point is that we are to trust Christ’s mind to direct and guide our mind! As we turn our soul direction over to Christ in more and more areas of living, we GROW spiritually. We are being transformed.

When three newly converted Christians start on the adventure of the Christian life, one being rather emotional, another rather strong in his determination, and the third seeming to carry everything about life in his head, not one of these has an advantage over the other two. The truth of the matter is, each one will have to be taken out of that which is his primary characteristic. Or, to state it clearly, whatever you are, THAT has to be broken.
God isn’t primarily intellect, or emotions, or will - so He favors none of these. Generally speaking, the seminary professors favor one, the charismatic leader favors yet another, and the evangelist who wishes to convert the world yet another.

And how shall God break the will of the evangelist, subdue the emotions of the charismatic, and do goodness knows what to the intellectual? By making available to each of them an abundance of SOUL ENCOUNTERS between the world and their spirit. And also by a great deal of the cross, plunged like a knife at the very center of the soul.

What is God seeking to deal with in you? If you are a thinker, that is what He will be going after. If you are a feeler, He will be seeking to balance that. If you are a doer strong in volition, He will be out to break the strength of your will. What will He do? Make the emotional person intellectual, and the intellectual person an emotional person? No. God will be seeking to weave something else into you that is characterized not primarily by either a keen mind, deep feelings or a strong will. He will be seeking to introduce into you the characteristics of a LIFE that comes from another realm. That LIFE, in the Person of Christ, is not more (or less) mindy, more (or less) emotional, more (or less) willful than fallen man. Christ is just a little bit different from the thinker, the feeler or the doer.

In the transformation of that part of us which is so very human by that which is so divine, I do not mean to leave the impression that you will one day become some sort of human vegetable. Not at all. The emotions are still there, the intellect is still there and the will is still there. Thinkers, feelers and doers are changed, not eliminated. These elements in their lives will become servants of another life, the divine Life of Jesus Christ, in the innermost man.
So, I recommend that (1) you have a lot of encounters with Christ and (2) you prepare for an onslaught of encounters with the world.

There is a strong human element in the soul of each of us. Yes, all of us. We have been wired by God with particular tendencies and then, in our day to day living, have had those tendencies reinforced in ungodly ways by the world. Some portion of the earthen part of each Christian needs its energies and abilities and understandings transformed to something higher. Before that higher point arrives, the soul may go through some rough days.

Do not fall into the trap of trying to suppress your soul - or personally hauling it to the cross, there to scrounge around for a hammer and some nails. Christ Himself needs no help. You will only get in His way. Besides, I don’ t think I would be too wide of the mark to say to you that His higher purpose in you is not so much to make your soul weak as it is to make your soul understand the strength of your spirit!

Somewhere deep down within you, everything that Christ has ever gone through is already deposited in you. Some of that which is His experience He desires that you also experience. He has a yoke to place around your neck. It is an easy yoke - that is a guarantee - because He has already gained the strength to bear that yoke.

Some of His experience has to do with sufferings, but you will never know suffering to the extent that He did. Your encounters with the world, the flesh and the devil will make up only a very small part of the likes of His suffering. YET, YOU ARE THE RECIPIENT OF ALL THE STRENGTH HE WON IN HIS SUFFERINGS. Granted, that strength may never seem to arrive at the most needy moment. But that is what transformation is all about. Paul said that we would never be tested beyond our ability to overcome the test.

You have within your innermost being, right now, the divine life of God. You also have within your being - a little closer to the surface - the human life of your soul given to you by your mother and father. The life they gave you was fallen life. The soul life they gave you made you primarily a thinker, or primarily a feeler, or primarily a doer. Their genes wired you this way. GOD wired you this way. And that’s good! But the adventure of transformation is trusting Christ to USE those “primarilies”! God needs thinkers to manifest His thoughts to the world. God needs feelers to show His compassion to the world. God needs doers to reach out and get the job done.

With all the leftover garbage of the world implanted in our brain cells, the human soul life and that other divine life cannot always live inside you in total harmony. After all, the two are vastly different life forms.

There are times when your human soul life easily relates to that divine life. At still other times your soul is neutral to the divine life. Unfortunately, but true, at other times - wittingly or unwittingly -your human soul life moves in the opposite direction of that higher life.
The intellect, the emotions and the will are God-wired and each has an important function in human activity. But we are made to be dependent Christians - people who rely on and trust in Christ to direct the functions of the soul. And the way it turns out is that we tend to be most INDEPENDENT in whichever of the three functions we are most strongly wired. A thinker most often trusts his own thoughts. A feeler most often trusts his own emotions. A doer most often depends on himself to get the job done.

And therein lies the problem of the transformation of the soul. Whenever we slip into independent activity of the soul, God uses the opportunity for our correction. We are shown that independence does not work. We are driven to a greater understanding and acceptance of trust in and guidance by Christ from our spirit.

As we grow spiritually by trusting more arid more in our spirit and less and less in our own ability, then Jesus can really begin to USE our soul as it has been wired. The thinker who accepts Christ’s thoughts can then have his emotions and his will brought up to proper levels by Christ. The feeler who allows Christ to control and direct his emotions can then have his thought processes and his will brought up to speed. The doer who trusts Christ to give him the power to achieve can then have his understanding and emotions brought up to aid in his activity.

We will still be strongest in the area of the soul in which we were most strongly wired, but the other two functions will be more useful than before. Each Christian will be uniquely equipped to manifest Jesus Christ to his world in the best way.

Ah, take heart, whatever you are: thinker, feeler or doer. Know that we serve a Lord who loves us enough to go after every trait the soul can display.

When you see how needful all of us are of being changed, how blind and incapable we all are of doing the changing for ourselves, then you are only a short walk over to the place where you can see that every trouble and trial that comes into your life is used by the hand of God to accomplish the highest possible good in your life.

But you will need all the wisdom of your spirit in Christ, all the experience which life has given you to date, plus an awful lot of waiting before God to understand how to be a vessel of Christ to your world.

Somehow, in God’ s business of transformation, there has to come a place where virtually nothing done to you, regardless of how unjust it is, can (1) change your Christ-centered thoughts (2) hurt your Christ-controlled feelings or (3) sway your Christ-determined will.

Transformation involves our soul becoming the image of our spirit. It is the two looking so much alike that they are almost indistinguishable. Your spirit was reborn into the image of God in Christ at conversion. Your spirit is finished and complete. Transformation of the soul is the making of the human part of you into the image of the deity part of you. Not just Jesus Christ IN you, but Jesus Christ AS you to your world.

I would sum up transformation with two basic realities:
(1) The most outstanding characteristic of the fallen soul is independence. And independence has an almost limitless capacity to survive.
(2) The most outstanding characteristic of God is love. And God, through Christ, is the only power in the universe MORE determined to transform you than your independence is to survive.
THE CLASH OF THOSE TWO CHARACTERISTICS IS OFTEN QUITE A SPECTACULAR EVENT TO BEHOLD!

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