Prosperity Testing and Self-Deception - Review. 1 Kings 11:1

 

The soul fortress: four basic principles

 

  1. Construction of the soul fortress takes a lifetime. We don’t see it, this is just the imperceptible reality of edification in our souls. In Ephesians Paul talks about the fact that Scripture is designed to edify the believer. This has the idea of building up or strengthening our soul. What strengthens our souls is principles from the Word of God, and this takes a lifetime. It has to be a priority.
  2. The construction is piecemeal and dynamic—a little here and a little there. Every time we study the Word doctrines are either confirmed or presented new—we gain insight, the Holy Spirit uses it is a new way—and it is a continuing ongoing process. It is dynamic because we are learning in the context of the laboratory of real life. It doesn’t follow a set course; we don’t have to master the faith-rest drill before we can go on to doctrinal orientation, etc. 
  3. The utilisation of the spiritual skills enables us to stay inside the fortress. As we practice these skills when we face adversity and prosperity we stay inside the fortress, which is the same thing as staying in fellowship. When we stop applying these principles and utilising these skills then we start living on the basis of the sin nature, start living on the basis of human viewpoint strategies and techniques to make life work; therefore we are vulnerable to damage from sin, the world and the devil.  
  4. When we fail to utilise the spiritual skills we default. It is a fall-back position to the arrogance skills, and these are the total opposite. We are either operating under and developing the arrogance skills or the spiritual skills.

 

Arrogance always starts with self-absorption. That leads to self-deception. The unbeliever and the carnal believer want to reshape the external world so that it is not the world God says it is bit it is the world that we want it to be. We want it to march to our tune and not follow the patterns that God has established. This, of course, leads to self-deification; we want to be the ultimate authority. And we practice these skills over and over and over again, and by the time a child is four years old it has mastered it, and has a Ph D in arrogance! So the pattern for the spiritual life is to be able to identify these things on the one hand, and that is part of the exercise we go through with confession of sin. In the practice of confession of sin we are training ourselves to identify the arrogance pattern that we see in our soul. So the spiritual skills have to be learned and developed in contrast to the arrogance skills.

 

The foundation has to do with the filling of the Spirit, which is really the second spiritual skill. The first one is how we become filled with the Spirit. When we are first saved we are automatically filled with the Spirit. Then when we sin we are out of fellowship, outside of the soul fortress, and no longer operating on the direction of God the Holy Spirit. The filling of the Spirit is a passive concept. The command in Ephesians 5:18 is to be filled—passive imperative. That means that someone else performs the action. The subject of the command, you and I, receives the action. So we are to be filled, but the flip side of that which is really addressed to our ongoing, moment by moment volition, is to walk by the Spirit—a present active imperative which engages our volition more directly as we have to actively walk in dependence upon God the Holy Spirit.

 

  1. At salvation every believer is indwelt and filled by means of the Holy Spirit. There is a difference between the content and the means. The Holy Spirit is the instrument by which we are filled; it is the Word of God that is the content of the filling. It is the Word of God that is used in our spiritual life and spiritual growth. There are different terms that are used in the Bible that are roughly synonymous or they look at different facets of the same thing: walking by the Spirit, abiding in Christ, being filled by the Spirit, walking in the light, walking in the truth. These are all terms that are expressing the same idea from slightly different vantage points.
  2. Whatever is done in the power of the Holy Spirit is gold, silver and precious stones and have eternal value. The Holy Spirit is the primary means of power and enablement for the spiritual life. But the Holy Spirit doesn’t operate alone, he always operates in conjunction with the Word of God. Colossians 3:16 gives a parallel command to Ephesians 5:18: “Let the word of Christ dwell richly in you.” The same results come from letting the Word of Christ dwell in us as being filled with the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy Spirit who fills us with some, and the something He fills us with is the Word. He helps us to understand, retain, remember and apply Bible doctrine; He is the one who produces spiritual growth.
  3. The next step is learning to trust God on a day to day basis in terms of the situations we face, learning to put our faith in the Lord and resting in His provision. We get a definition of faith in Hebrews 11:1 NASB “Now faith is the assurance of {things} hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” Faith doesn’t operate after we are dead. When we die we are face to face with the Lord and we are seeing the heavenly reality, so faith in only operational during our time on earth. [3] “By faith we understand …” Faith is a means of knowledge, it is not in opposition to knowledge. Defining the faith-rest drill: it is the believer trusting God to fulfil His promises, relying upon Biblical principles, and thinking through doctrinal rationales. It results in a relaxed mental attitude because we know God takes care of the situation. 1 Peter 5:7 NASB “casting all your anxiety on Him, because He cares for you.” Because God cares for us we can put a situation in His hands and relax, because no matter what the outcome is he is in control. Hebrews 4:2 NASB “For indeed we have had good news preached to us, just as they also; but the word they heard did not profit them, because it was not united by faith in those who heard.” That is the key verse for the faith-rest drill; we mix our faith with the promises of God. Proverbs 3:5, 6 NASB “Trust in the LORD with all your heart And do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, And He will make your paths straight.” He will straighten things out and take you where He wants you to go.
  4. Grace orientation is one of the most difficult concepts for people to get their hand around because it runs completely counter to our whole self-absorbed, arrogant nature. We live in a world that operates on a tit-for-tat policy, that everything is based on works and performance; but grace is never based on works or performance, grace is based on the character of God. When we are being grace oriented to other people it is a misnomer to say we are going to treat people on the basis of who and what we are. We are to treat people on the basis of what God is. That is our pattern. We are, as Paul says in Ephesians 4, to forgive one another as God for Christ’s sake has forgiven us. The focal point is looking at who Jesus Christ is. Grace orientation is patterning our responses to people around us on the pattern of His grace. i) Grace orientation is conforming or aligning our thinking, the whole way in which we relate to people and circumstances, with God’s grace policy. ii) Grace means that God is free to give us everything we need on the basis of who he is and what Christ did on the cross—He did everything for us while we were yet sinners. iii) Grace means that God will freely give us everything we need in our spiritual life. He gives us prosperity tests, adversity tests, everything we need in order to mature us, to conform us to the image of Jesus Christ. iv) Grace means that our relationship to God is not based on merit, activity or action. So we are responding to this grace but we are not trying to manipulate His grace. Key passages: 2 Peter 1:3, 4 NASB “seeing that His divine power has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, through the true knowledge of Him who called us by His own glory and excellence. For by these He has granted to us His precious and magnificent promises, so that by them you may become partakers of {the} divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world by lust.” 2 Peter 3:18 NASB “but grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ…” 2 Corinthians 12:9 NASB “And He has said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness.’”
  5. Doctrinal orientation. This is when we align our thinking to the plan and purposes of God and His Word. It takes a lifetime to wrestle with what God tells us in His Word, to understand these things. And even when we think we do we need to hear them over and over and over again so that we don’t forget them. We constantly need that encouragement and that review. Doctrinal orientation by definition is to align our thinking to the reality of God’s Word, God’s creation and God’s plan. We must understand that doctrine must become a way of life. If we haven’t reached that point then we are still spiritual infants. Doctrine is life. That’s it, period. A walk with the Lord isn’t just something we do like having a job, family, a hobby. Doctrine glues it all together and without it everything is irrelevant. Doctrine includes the whole realm of Bible teaching, from what we would call the abstract to the intensely practical. Truth in its abstract form is intensely practical or it is not true. Anything that is practical has to be understood from its theoretical (more abstract) foundation, otherwise when we get into circumstances we don’t understand why we are doing what we are doing, we are just following a rote set of steps. Doctrine teaches us how to think, how to react, so that when something happens we react differently, our mind is engaged differently. Doctrine teaches us how to problem-solve, how to think it through, how to prioritise, how to relate to the world and the systems around us. We have to know the whole realm of doctrine. 2 Peter 3:18; Romans 12:2.      

 

Illustrations