Over the last few days, I’ve been delving into the topic of personality and want to discuss how personality fits in with all the ‘rest of us’ in terms of our make-up as people…

This is just a discussion of what I’m learning and also a download of what I’ve observed throughout my experience of life to date…

I strongly believe that every person has a unique personality given to them by God…

Recently my oldest son and I were studying human meiosis as part of his Biology exam preparation…

Homologous pairs and crossing over were two key topics and we watched some YouTube videos to endeavour to get some understanding of what might be going on there…

I believe that our personalities come from that process – what we receive from our parents – and that God is highly involved in that process and what we end up inheriting by way of personality from our parents…

Personality is amoral (i.e. neither moral nor immoral)…

There is nothing sinful about personality…

When we sinned in the Garden of Eden our personalities didn’t become sinful…

Personality is neither right nor wrong…

There are no wrong personalities…

Personality is how we view the world and behave on the inside without any outside influence or conditioning…

It is our style or our way of expressing ourselves or ordering our thoughts or responding to situations…

What we do with our personalities, i.e. whether we are true to them, or express them, or hide them, or mask them, or deny them or try to change them, suppress them, be someone else, those things can either be right or wrong, i.e. sinful if we repress or suppress our personalities and try to be something we’re not, as that is not being transparent…

In terms of personality, we are not all the same…

We are not ‘cookie-cutter’ clones…

Even as those of us who know the Lord and have received the Holy Spirit, Jesus and the Father who live in us, even we, are not ‘cookie-cutter’ clone Christians…

When we receive the Holy Spirit, Jesus and the Father we don’t lose our personality…

That would be like God giving each person a uniqueness (an amoral uniqueness) and then taking it away from them when they came to know Him…

This would be counterproductive for God…

Every snowflake is unique (this is a scientific fact)…

Every person is also unique (we are fearfully and wonderfully made)…

Psychologists have studied people’s behaviour and mental processes and come up with various ways of categorizing personality traits and personality types…

Just recently I came across one personality type from one of the categorizations on YouTube called the ‘INFJ’ and watched a video on it and was quite taken by how similar to myself the description seemed to be…

Since then I’ve watched quite a few more videos on this personality type to delve further into it…

This particular way of categorizing personalities seems to talk about ‘preferences’ of how different people view the world…

I don’t really have an opinion on that presently – it’s been an interesting study but that’s about all I can say about that – I seem to be very similar to the ‘INFJ’ characteristics which other people who view themselves as being ‘INFJ’ are identifying but I don’t feel that a label of ‘INFJ’ can describe me…

There are parts of my personality which don’t perfectly fit within what I’ve heard that description to be to date although that description does appear to fit me better than any of the other 15 descriptions in that particular model (or categorization system) for working out personality types…

So, I believe we’re each given our personalities by our parents (it’s very possible that some of the characteristics of our personalities were recessive genes in our parents which didn’t get expressed in their personalities but which are now being expressed in ours) but somewhere along the line Adam and Eve were given all the personality traits by the Lord in the Garden of Eden when He created them and these have been spread throughout the rest of us over time and thus each and every one of us has a unique personality given to us by the Lord…

Why does the Lord give us unique personalities?

The Lord has a unique call on each of our lives…

Along with personalities, the Lord gives us giftings…

Giftings are different from personalities…

You could have the same gifting as someone else but express that same gifting through your different personalities and although the result is technically the same, perhaps you will reach those who resonate with your personality or expression and someone else will reach those who resonate with theirs (or even vice versa as sometimes we can receive things from those who are the exact opposite to us as when we hear it from them it strikes us as being true)…

Giftings might be (i) physical (to do with the body), (ii) mental, emotional & volitional (to do with the soul) or (iii) spiritual (to do with the spirit)…

God gives us all these gifts but these gifts do not define our personalities…

(i) Maybe you’re insanely good looking (think Zoolander)…

(ii) Maybe you have an incredible IQ or EQ or are incredibility self-motivated or self-disciplined…

(iii) Maybe you have the ability to heal people or raise them from the dead…

If, for example, you’re insanely good looking then that’s a physical gifting – praise God for that… 🙂

If, for example, you have an amazing IQ then that’s a gift you have in your soul – praise God for that… 🙂

If, for example, you have “gifts of healing” (1 Corinthians 12:9) or “the effecting of miracles” (1 Corinthians 12:10) – praise God for that… 🙂

There may be times when we’re operating in a spiritual gifting where the Holy Spirit temporarily ‘suspends’ or ‘puts on hold’ the way in which we would normally operate through our personalities to ‘get done’ what He needs to get done…

I have experienced this – certain times where I know it’s Him and He basically expresses Himself through me in a way that I would never express myself and it leaves me kind of shocked and taken aback but I know that it’s Him and that it’s OK, then that kind of subsides and I’m back with myself…

Now, I believe that the Lord lives through me – more and more and more – in a natural way every day…

I believe this because I experience His peace and His wisdom and His calm in certain situations which left to myself would stress me out…

I also find that I don’t get angry (about not getting what I want) anywhere near as much as I used to which is another sign that the Lord is living through me but all this is natural – just through my personality…

So what I’m saying is, and I first heard this through a friend many years ago when we were walking around town, that the Lord will use us but its totally natural, we don’t have to change the way we naturally function, i.e. our way of doing things, to have the Lord living through us…

In saying this again, I stress that I’m not talking about sin, I’m talking about our own unique way of expressing ourselves, the little quirks which make up who we are compared with who someone else is…

In some ways, it’s easiest for us to know that we’re operating out of our own personality when others comment on how they like it that we’re “comfortable in our own skin” or words to that effect, or when we observe others delighting in our particular expression of a thought as being authentic or unique or even cute through us…

I believe people are cute (no matter how old or young they are) when they are operating naturally through their God-given personality…

They’re not putting on a show, they’re not faking it, they’re not ‘in their head’ about how to come across to try and manipulate someone’s emotions or impressions of them – they’re just authentic…

For me, I find beauty in all people, through their personalities, no matter how sinful they may be…

I believe God does too…

He made all of our personalities, He made us all unique (like the snowflakes I mentioned earlier) and I believe He gets pleasure in seeing us enjoying expressing ourselves through our personalities without being ‘boxed in’ or encumbered by ‘social norms’ or ‘social expectations’ of what is ‘right’ and ‘proper’ in terms of personality…

Personality isn’t right or wrong, it’s unique…

The joy of living is getting to know the myriad personalities which the Lord has created and in knowing that each one is just a slice of who the Lord is Himself, as He is all those personalities rolled in One… 🙂

Image by Public Co from Pixabay