Phlegmatic vs. Perseverance
Well sorry guys, it’s been a while since I’ve written anything…but reagardless of anything, God is still good. It’s been a good year of personal/spiritual growth for me. But you know whenever you make progress in God, this old carnal nature and the devil come around to push you right back to where you were. I’ve lost a couple feet for sure, but I got to get back up again. My pastor preached about the quality of patience, it is an enduring hope, a loose definition in the context of bible. I was really touched by this message, of doing the will of God and just waiting for the promises to be furfilled. I prayed about this message. I searched myself, how did this apply to me? While praying, I felt led to look up the word perseverance in the dictionary and then the thesaurus. It was powerful. God totally spoke to me in a way that I immediately recognized. In the thesaurus, before finding the word “perseverance”, I fell upon “phelgmatic”, which refers to my personality type, according to this book I read called : “Spirit-led Temperment”. I started to read the entry and realized it was really negative. So I felt pretty down, as I really identified my character to being “phelgmatic”, BTW here’s an example of being careful about mesuring your stance in God with secular teaching, in the end of it all, it should all not upsurp the authority of the Word of God. Anyway, feeling down, I decided to turn the page back, and guess what I found…the word “perseverance” exactly under “phelgmatic” on the preceding page, they lined up one on top of the other… I think God was saying: “Listen, you may have been ” detached, impassive, incurious, indifferent, insensible, lethargic, listless, stolid, unconcerned, uninterested, unresponsive, phlegmatic” BUT now I want you to be/have “doggedness, steadfastness. Perseverance, persistence, tenacity, pertinacity imply resolute and unyielding holding on in following a course of action.” Wow… God wants us to be overcomers and not give up. We can’t get in the way of ourselves, we are going through. I am going through! I am not phelgmatic, I am perserverer.
