April | 2016 | Led By Grace

Our lesson two weeks ago was focused on Personality type and Spiritual Growth.

There are so many things that we can learn from our personality types that can apply to our spiritual lives and our connections with God.

Most of what we discussed came from my reading in these two books:

There are so many insights to gain from reading each of these books!

Knowing Me Knowing God is focused on more general spirituality vs the Personality Type and Religious Leadership is focused more on spiritual leadership.

We discussed three different categories of spiritual growth.

Spirituality and Temperament style

We discussed how different temperament tend to connect with God in different ways.

NF: Transposition

NF’s transpose the scriptures to apply them to situations today. They look for the deeper meaning and find new ways to apply those scriptures to today. NF’s gain lots of new insights from the scriptures and often need to subject those insights to discernment before applying them to their lives. For extroverted NF’s benefit from discussing their insights with others while introverted NF’s benefit from time to journal and process and then reflect on the validity of their insights.

SJ: Remembrance

SJ’s enjoy remembering past events where God rescued or took care of his people in a special way. SJ’s tend to project themselves back into these moments of the past and connect with how those moments become applicable to today. They value discipline, order and a historical perspective in their study of the scriptures. These types tend toward pessimistic aspect of Christianity and should therefore spend at least half their time focusing on resurrection and salvation themes to keep a positive outlook.

NT: Analysis

NT’s take a scholastic approach to prayer and Bible study. They like to study topics out from every angle, determine conclusions from that study and then apply those practical conclusions to their life. They tend to thrive when they can carry practical insights from their Bible study with them throughout the day. They are constantly focused on searching for the truth and looking for new insights for God. They strive for perfection in every area of their lives and have to make sure to not get discouraged when perfection is not achievable.

SP: Openness

These types like to leave an openness in their relationship for God and the Spirit to move in their lives. They tend to desire less routine and more free flowing prayer and dialogue with God. SP’s are able to fruitfully meditate on one aspect of creation and draw closeness and connection with God from focusing on that one aspect. SP’s enjoy showing their love for God through things that involved movement and often focus better in prayer when the have something to do with their hands.

2. Spirituality and Function Use and

3. Spirituality and Function Growth

The four functions: Sensing, iNtuition, Thinking and Feeling can all be used in different ways in our walk with God.

Luke 10:27 says:

27 He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

When we look at how the functions fit into this scripture we can see that we can learnt o love God with all four functions:

Heart: Feeling

Soul: Intuition

Strength: Sensing

Mind: Thinking

We each have preferable functions in our walk with God that are more developed and more readily used than the other functions.

We talked through the different functions and how we each use our preferred functions in our walk with God and how we can grow to use the other functions in our walk with God as well.

One point we also hit on was the need to dig deeper into our inferior function. This is our fourth function in our function stack and the one that is least mature and least developed in our life and in our walk with God. Our inferior function is the function we tend to use when we’re stressed and overwhelmed and it is the least like our normal personality but it is a part of our personality type all the same.

We have so much room to grow and our need for God is so evident when we look at our inferior function. We can see our weaknesses and see that we need God’s strength to grow and change in this areas.

2 Cor 12:9-10

But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong.

God’s grace is sufficient for our weaknesses and for our use of our inferior function!

Here is a link to one of my favorite pins on inferior functions. It lets us see what happens when we begin to get overwhelmed, how we end up using our inferior function and how to get out of our rut when we’re stuck in our stress.

This is a great way to begin exploring our inferior function so we can begin to see our greater need for God and that we can focus on using our personality type for spiritual growth!

We each have many strengths and some weaknesses that are connected to our personality type. Studying out each of those things and how we can grow in our walk with God can be a great help to connecting with God more and being used by him in greater ways!

This is a great tool for helping study our personal strengths and weaknesses in our spiritual life.

I hope these things help you connect more with God and help you to use your personality type for spiritual growth!

I am so excited to being our spring women’s series for 2016 The Key to Me!

We will be spending these 5 weeks studying out our Myers Briggs Personality types and learning to grow in different areas of our lives based on these types! We each have so much to learn about ourselves and about our personality type and we can use the things we learn to learn more about God and more about how to become like Christ!

Gen 1:27 says: God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

How awesome is it to know that we are each created in God’s image! As we learn more about ourselves and who God created us to be, we learn more about God and who He really is! Myers Briggs has 16 different personality types and it’s so cool to think that as we learn about each type and the similarities and differences between them, we learn more about 16 different sides of God’s character and the image that we are created in!

This past week we discussed personality types and personal growth. We walked through an introduction of what Myers Briggs Type Indicator is and we talked about how to use what we learn about our type to grow personally.

We discussed 3 keys to Personality type and Personal Growth:

Embrace Your Type

We broke down what Myers Briggs is based on and learned how to embrace our 4-letter type.

We learned that in order to embrace our type we have to determine what our type is. If you haven’t taken a free personality test you can take one here.

Many people who take the personality test feel like they may be in between a couple different types or that they aren’t really sure if the results are accurate.

Reading through descriptions of each option can help you to determine what your type really is.

The 4 letter types are categorized into temperaments, and the temperament can be further broken down into roles and individual types. Much of our study on personality type will be based less on each specific type and more on research about each temperament that many can relate to at one time.

Our second key…

2. Enhance Your Knowledge.

After you have determined what your type is and embraced your type, the next step is to enhance your knowledge about your type.

This can come from checking out websites and descriptions of your type

http://www.humanmetrics.com and http://www.truity.com are just two of the great websites on personality.

You can also venture into reading books on personality type, googling information and descriptions of your type and my personal favorite, creating a pinterest board dedicated to pins about your personality type!

Enhancing your knowledge about your type will greatly add to your ability to use that knowledge for personal growth.

One thing to dig into and learn about is the function stack for your type. Each personality type has four functions, the dominant, auxiliary, tertiary and inferior function. We each use Sensing, iNtuition, Thinking, and Feeling somewhere in our function stack.

Here is a simple description of each function’s role in the function stack.

There is a lot to understand about how to determine which function fits where in our own function stack but the simplest way is to use a chart like this to figure out what your functions are.

The e or i indicates whether your that function is extroverted or introverted.

For example, my personality type is INFJ.

My functions are:

Dominant: Introverted iNtuition, Auxiliary: Extroverted Feeling, Tertiary: Introverted Thinking, Inferior: Extroverted Sensing.

Learning what your function stack is and enhancing your knowledge about your type then leads you to our third key:

3. Empower Your Life.

The things we learn about our types, including our strengths and weaknesses should be used to empower our lives. We should not use these things as excuses or things to enable us to just live the way we want to.

The best part of being created in God’s image is that we can empower our lives by what we learn in order to grow toward being more like Christ.

Learning that your introverted doesn’t mean that you can then choose not to initiate with people. Jesus was an incredible initiator. So in order to become more like Christ and empower your life as an introvert, you choose to get filled up in your alone time so you can pour yourself out for others like Jesus did.

There are many other examples I could give, but that’s where you get to focus on learning and growing in your personal life.

Enhancing your knowledge about your type gives you the ability to become more self-aware and to put words to the things you think and feel.

Empowering your life equips you to take what you’ve learned and allow yourself to grow closer to God and to become more like Christ.

These are descriptions of each of the introverted/extroverted functions that could be in your stack.

Your dominant and auxiliary functions are your strengths and the most developed of your functions. Learning more about these allows you to empower your life to use the strengths and gifts that God has given you.

Your tertiary and inferior functions are less developed and less mature in your function stack. In fact, your inferior function is the one that comes out when you are stressed or overwhelmed. It makes sense then that we often feel unlike our true selves when we are stressed out or overwhelmed.

These descriptions are what each function looks like when it is developed and you are using it correctly. We often don’t use our inferior functions correctly so these descriptions can be used to describe what your inferior function could look like if you choose to develop it more.

In times of stress, we have the choice to either develop our inferior function more or turn instead to our dominant function which is more mature and developed already and use that to get us out of our rut. Both are great options for personal growth!

These things should be used as an introduction to personality type and to start us on the path of personal growth through Embracing your Type, Enhancing your Knowledge and Empowering your Life.

Stay tuned for this week’s lesson on Personality Type and Spiritual Growth!

Led By Grace

Month: April 2016

The Key to Me: Personality and Spiritual Growth

The Key to Me: Personality Type and Personal Growth