Stewardship: Relationships & Temperaments

Let's go first of all to Psalm 111, Psalm 111, verse 1, Praise ye the Lord, I will praise the Lord with my whole heart, In the assembly of the upright, and in the congregation. The works of the Lord are great, sought out of all them that have pleasure therein. Now that word sought out can also be translated studied, sought out or studied.

Now let's turn to the Proverbs, Proverbs 30, and reading at verse 11, There is a generation that curseth their father, and does not bless their mother. There is a generation that are pure in their own eyes, and yet is not washed from their filthiness. There is a generation, oh how lofty are their eyes, and their eyelids are lifted up.

There is a generation whose teeth are as swords, and their jaw teeth as knives, to devour the poor from off the earth, and the needy from among men. Now some years ago, when looking at this passage, I noticed in another translation, that instead of the word generation, the translation is, There is a kind of man. There is a kind of person.

And as you repeat that for each one of these four categories, there is a generation, there is a kind of man, that curses their father and does not bless their mother. There is a kind of man, a kind of person, that are pure in their own eyes, and so on. Now, tonight what I'm going to be taking up, if you look at your outline, basically the second page and what follows, is something rather different from what I ordinarily speak on, and what you ordinarily would be hearing from the platform.

And so I want to give some qualification for why I'm taking up what I am. In Psalm 111, there is this expression, that the works of the Lord are great. They are sought out or studied by all them that have pleasure therein.

And so, while we as believers focus primarily upon the Scriptures as our source of knowledge, our understanding, and our occupation, because that is the primary source of understanding of ourselves and of God, it is also true that God expects us to be students of his creation. He expects us to have an interest in what he has made. And basically, tonight what we're going to be doing is doing a little bit of a study of people.

And using the term temperament, the study of temperament, sometimes the word personality is a little more familiar, although personality is not always entirely identical with temperament. Personality is more the face that we present to people, how we like to present ourselves. And sometimes we're not entirely real, whereas temperament is dealing with what we actually are.

And so, again, in a previous night I made some reference to psychology and the fact that we do not derive our understanding of truth from psychology but from Scripture. And while this would be more likely associated with psychology and psychologists, I suppose you could find dozens, if not hundreds, of personality studies. One thing that is interesting, and you'll get every kind of classification and term used in these personality studies, but they nearly always come up with four basic categories of character or temperament.

And basically what I'm getting at is that what this information is derived from is observation. Observation of people and their behavior and patterns of character that are found in people. And it is probably associated with genetics.

I am not an expert in genetics. But basically it is acknowledged today that the behavior of people is probably at least about 70% according to genetics, according to who our parents were and their character. And if you know anything about genetic formulas and how characteristics are derived from parents, you can often just look at a person at a distance and you know they come from a certain nationality or a certain group because of the physical characteristics that they share in a certain segment of the population.

Now that's so well known we don't even think about the fact that we automatically identify and label people according to those physical characteristics which they have derived from their genealogy, their parentage. And interestingly the same thing is true of what we call character or temperament or personality. Now in Proverbs 30 it's interesting that you have this fourfold description of four kinds of people.

And it's obvious as you look at it that it's not very flattering. And so this is looking at you might call the worst of these expressions of our humanity. There is a kind of person that curses their father and does not bless their mother.

Now I'm just going to give you the four categories that these are associated with on the temperament charts. And that first one is the melancholy. For the reason that the melancholy character tends to be very critical.

And every, well virtually every melancholy has a story of having been done wrong by. The teacher at school or the parents at home never treated them fairly. And the sad thing about the tendency of the melancholy, and I happen to be one of those so I can speak of that.

We can remember something that happened depending on our age, 25 years ago, 40 years ago. And we can relive that in our memory just as vividly as when it happened. And there are other people who are more what we might call sanguine, who live in the present.

The past, well that was yesterday. Whatever problems are coming tomorrow, well that's tomorrow, it hasn't happened yet so don't start worrying about it. The sanguine has this amazing ability to enjoy the moment.

And yet both melancholy and sanguine temperaments are basically emotionally driven. Very much emotionally driven. The melancholy tends to be pessimistic.

The sanguine tends to be optimistic. And this is part of what explains why people respond so differently to the same kind of circumstances of life. One person may be devastated by something, the other person just seems to shrug it off and keep going.

And that is true of saved people and unsaved people. So there is a lot of natural temperament that determines how we actually respond and react to life. Now in verse 12 where it says there is a generation that are pure in their own eyes and yet not washed from their filthiness.

Now that is the last one on your sheets, the phlegmatic. And the phlegmatic is the typical nice guy that is so easy to get along with. Who is calm and easy going, diplomatic, inoffensive.

And sometimes when we are around people like that who aren't believers we would say, boy that fellow would make a good Christian. In fact he behaves better than some of the Christians do. But in that phlegmatic with all his nice qualities there is a self-righteousness and there is a silent stubbornness.

And again I know quite a bit about that because that's the other part of my temperament, melancholy and phlegmatic. Now the third one that is given to us here in verse 13 there is a generation or there is a kind of person, oh how lofty are their eyes and their eyelids are lifted up. Now this corresponds to the worst of the sanguine.

The sanguine is an actor or an actress. To a sanguine all the world is a stage and they are the central actor on it. Someone has said that a sanguine will always come into a room mouth first.

The bigger the crowd the more they want to hold the floor. They are very outgoing, cheerful, talkative, friendly people. The kind of people that when you've been around them for five minutes you think you've known them all your life.

They have instant friendship. They can strike up conversations with anyone. It's actually a marvelous quality.

And of course there's weaknesses as I've already mentioned. And even though we all have struggles with sin, those manifestations of sin very interestingly show up differently again according to our temperament. And so you have to watch how you judge other people.

Because you will judge other people according to your temperament. And sometimes we judge very harshly people who are of an opposite kind of temperament to ourselves. Because to us that characteristic is so glaring, so obvious.

And we wouldn't be caught dead being like that. Whereas we have our own manifestation of the very same thing but it comes out differently. And so it's not that we are entirely different creatures like aliens from different planets.

We're all very much connected. But there is within us an amazing variety of personality or temperament. And what I am suggesting is that that's designed by God.

But it's been distorted by sin. And those are the two fundamental things we need to fit into our perception of one another. And so I'll just give you the last one here, verse 14.

There is a generation or a kind of person whose teeth are as swords, their jaw teeth as knives to devour the poor from off the earth and the needy from among men. And this is one of the ways of a cleric. Now the word cleric really comes from the word anger.

And anger is one of the features of a cleric. One of the things that a cleric has a lot of struggles with. And I'll go over that more as we go down through it in more detail.

But if you have ever been chewed out by someone, and you have felt like you have just been slashed into a thousand pieces, you have just met a cleric. Who will walk away feeling quite satisfied with himself or herself that he or she has told you exactly what you needed to hear. And the problem has been addressed.

And it's finished. And if you happen to be a melancholy, you will remember that for a long time to come. When you see two clerics clash, they will be very forceful.

They will express their views very strongly. They might insult each other. At the end, they could very well shake hands and make the deal.

And they go away satisfied. Whereas if that is especially a melancholy and sometimes a phlegmatic, that could be the end of that relationship. Because they'll never let that person get close to them again.

And so we all have our ways of handling other people. Of reacting to other people. And it is so much according to the temperament that we were born with.

And so basically to just get this into our minds again, the temperament is the basic nature inherited, the basic pattern of character, traits. And this is one of the things for myself, and if you are a little bit disinclined to this, welcome to the club. When I first was exposed to this, I really didn't want to have anything to do with it.

I didn't mind people talking about each other and saying, well, you're like this and you're like that and you're like that. But I certainly didn't want anybody pointing at me and telling me what I was. I felt like I was being exposed.

That's why it's a little bit easier to get it from reading it in a book or reading it on some charts. And then you can see, yes, I have these qualities. These qualities tend to come in a package.

And if I have these qualities, it's very possible I have these as well. Now, my wife has been excellent for me. She's the best wife I've ever had.

And early on in our marriage, she did not let me remain a hidden personality. Especially from the phlegmatic tendencies that I have, we can protect ourselves and keep at a safe distance. But Becky's the kind of person that asks questions and waits for the answer and makes sure you express yourself and draws out people.

She's very, very good at that. And she's been very good for me to bring me out of my self-protectiveness to enable me to become a much more open and transparent kind of person. And that's a very important aspect of relationships.

So if we can keep this in mind, that the temperament is the basic nature inherited, first of all, as designed by God. Now, that would lead us to believe that even in eternity, we will still have our basic personality. Now, you might say, well, okay, let's try to put this in perspective with the Lord Jesus.

Could you analyze the Lord Jesus according to these? Really, you couldn't. Because He is the perfection of everything that is good. And so He would fulfill all of these strengths that are given on these charts without any deficiency.

And of course, He would never have any weakness whatsoever. And so, how is it possible then that we would not be exactly like Him in that way? I'm only going to suggest this. I don't know the answer to that.

But that we are finite. He is infinite in His greatness and we are finite. But as I have been suggesting from earlier meetings, God has entrusted to us something of His greatness, something of His goodness, something of His glory.

We are, as human beings, entrusted with the image of God. And while none of us individually have the capacity to express perfectly everything that God is, when you put us all together, we can, in the harmony of our collective beings, we can express the beauties of God. And so, if we appreciate then that our basic temperament or personality that we have been given has been given to us by God, that will teach us not to be ashamed of who we are, it will also teach us not to envy any other person.

But to recognize that God has formed us, He has made us as He intended us to be, so that we might glorify Him, that we might manifest His beauties, that we might be useful according to what He has distributed to us. And really, I'm thinking now of 2 Peter 1, but if you meditate in that passage, this is possibly our greatest stewardship, is the stewardship of godly character. We're going to leave behind a lot of things when we leave this world.

What we are going to take with us into eternity is what we have become. And the greatest aspect of that is the stewardship of our character. Now, again, sin has distorted us.

We are all a glorious ruin. How many people have you met who have such wonderful potential and yet they seem to sabotage their own life? And through one foolish kind of attitude or behavior, sometimes one foolish choice, they sometimes cripple the rest of their life or cause serious hindrance to their capability of being what God would want them to be. We are all distorted by sin.

And so if we look at these charts and how they're laid out and basically understand this, that the strengths that you will see according to the different temperaments are the potentials of what God has intended for us to be able to fulfill. And the weaknesses, which we can see so clearly in one another, are the twisting of those qualities into something that is actually a detriment and which we struggle with even in our relationships. Now, I will say this, that when I use the word character, although I've been using it a little bit loosely as almost parallel, our character is in a sense even deeper than personality or temperament.

Our character is what we are spiritually. And under the ministry of the Spirit of God, there is a spiritual character that is being developed that is meant to flow through our personalities. They're going to be manifested in all the variety of personality that we have, but the spiritual character that is foundational to it all of honesty, of love, of justice, of mercy, and these qualities, those are the essential things.

Now, as I said, personality is really the face that we portray to one another, and it may or may not be genuine character. And so, again, just to give you a little bit of overview as we have it here, I've already mentioned about myself that I fit into the melancholy, phlegmatic realm, and you really have to just, as you go through these charts, and I'll just do a little bit of a run through these charts, and I don't have page numbers on this, but this would be page three, the third page, your personality profile. Now, on this page, all of these characteristics are all jumbled up.

They're not in their categories, and so you're actually to go across each row and think of whichever terms would be true of you. If there's one, I'll check off one. If there's two, check off two.

If they're all there, well, you're really a wonderful person. And go through it and do the strengths first because that's the most encouraging, and then after you have encouraged yourself by looking at all the strengths that are there, then start looking at the weaknesses. Now, often when I have done this with Becky, or sometimes we'll have one or two couples in our house and they want to look at this and so on, it is very helpful to have someone who knows you and who loves you and is able to be honest with you that can go over it with you and help you decide.

It's sometimes very interesting how the person does himself or herself and then how a best friend or husband or wife will analyze you. But don't lose your friendship over it, please. So this page is really just to try to sort that out, and then I know it's a bit awkward going on the back of the page, but there they are under the corresponding columns, and if you add them all up and total them just by having the totals put down, then you will be able to see which is your primary dominant character or temperament, I should say, and what is likely your secondary one.

Most people are a blend of two. Some people have one fairly strong and then two others almost equally distributed. There's every range possible.

God is a God of infinite variety, and we've mixed up our genetics generation after generation so that we're pretty well mixed too. But it is amazing how typical it is for there to be one leading one, one secondary one basically fits the bill of who we are. And what I have done in the following pages is just to look at each one in the primary characteristics and to jot it down as the melancholy, for instance.

The melancholy is an introvert. Now, the word introvert means turned inward, tend to be introspective, looking within oneself rather than being outgoing. The thinker, the melancholy does a lot of thinking.

And the pessimist tends to think negatively. That is a tendency. And so you have the melancholy as emotions, the melancholy as a parent, melancholy at work, and the melancholy as a friend, and that's repeated for each one of these.

And so I'm just going to sort of look now back at the overview that we have. And I guess I've got them on the headings of each one of these pages, but the sanguine is an extrovert, which means turned outward. If you want a good salesman, hire a sanguine, because a sanguine relates to people very readily.

A sanguine, being extroverted, makes contact with people readily. And some of the most successful salespeople are strong sanguine personalities. Interestingly, and again, this is just sort of a general observation that I have, that most of the very successful evangelists are strongly sanguine.

And again, you can see how God uses what we are naturally in ourselves to the blessing of his spiritual purposes. If you have any typical assembly, you will have certain ones who bring out more people than the rest of the assembly put together. Now, that doesn't mean necessarily they're sanguine.

It could be that that individual has overcome a lot of personal inhibitions to get out there and invite people. For some of us to go out and reach out to people that we don't know and have no idea what their interest is and so on, we have to overcome a lot of natural hurdles. Whereas someone who is a sanguine personality is optimistic to start with, expects a good outcome, and actually much more often gets a good outcome.

And so we can see how these characteristics are actually very vital in different kinds of work. Now, if you want to kill a sanguine, tie him up to a desk, put him in Dilbert's cubicle. You've seen the Dilbert comics.

Well, sanguines will wither in that environment. They need people. They need to be interacting with people.

They need to be working with people. And that's where they excel. Now, the melancholy, as the introvert, the thinker, and the pessimist, a melancholy will excel in analyzing things, in sorting out, seeing problems, and figuring out how to fix them.

You know, back in Timmins, when we built the Gospel Hall, I actually took this up with the assembly before we ventured into the hall project. Because I said, as soon as we get out there to that job site, these four basic temperaments are going to be seen. And it's either going to drive us crazy, or we're going to learn how to cope with it and work together.

Now, let me just give you some of the ways in which this would be seen. A melancholy is a perfectionist. If it isn't done right, it's not done.

And it needs to be done again. Now, the choleric is characteristically the doer, the hard-working, productive person. The choleric will get twice as much work done, but the melancholy will probably pick holes in it, because it's not done perfectly.

But if you can get a person who is a melancholy and choleric combination, you're going to get what I call the ultimate workhorse. Where someone is going to be productive, they're going to get a lot of work done, and it's going to be done accurately, perfectly. The only downside of that is that that combination of personality is not people-oriented.

And we'll find people a nuisance on a job site. Unless there's a job to give them and let them get at it. Now, here's a funny thing, it's a really funny thing.

I grew up in a family on a dairy farm, which is basically a work-oriented establishment. And my father, I would say, I wouldn't know for sure what he is, but I would say he's probably melancholy and choleric. Probably choleric first.

And so he was always a hard worker. We learned to work. And I would characterize our family relationship as a working relationship.

And I remember our cousins, the Prats, who are also Christians, we were farmers, they were farmers, and in the summertime, however they managed to do it, they would have half of their cousins from the towns around over helping them do the haying. They somehow made it seem fun. And in the evening, they would be going off to go swimming, and we would be going out for another load of hay.

That was just the difference that there was in our two families. And the funny thing is, when I am put in a similar kind of setting as my farming background, Becky laughs at me because she says, you've just switched into choleric mode. Because I will get into that framework, which I was basically trained in, in my youth.

And I was in charge of the building project in Timmins, and I found myself frustrated with some of the fellows who were just there chatting away, chatting away, having the greatest time. You know, we had a lot of good help. There were at least 30 men working there for well over a month.

It was one of the best whole building projects I've ever been involved in. And I had to just step back and say, okay, there's room for fun here too. You know, it doesn't have to be all just the next thing, the next thing, the next thing.

But if we find ourselves in these settings, we will see us reacting to one another so typically according to personality. Now, as I said, when you get on a work site, you'll see the melancholies. They're sitting there thinking.

They're analyzing. We had a dear preaching brother who was there, and he's definitely strongly melancholy. So what did they do? They set him to do all the figuring out of the lengths of the boards and the cutting, and he did a perfect job.

When that was picked up and taken to the site, the doors were the right height, the windows were the right size. He's a perfectionist. There are others that would, as long as it was up there on the wall, it's there.

In fact, one of the other men who was really leading the job, his idea was get it up, and they did the windows like they did the doors, and then they were to fill it in afterwards. Well, that didn't go over too well with some of those melancholies, but it just shows how differently we respond to different settings and their challenges. The clerics will be busy getting most of the work done.

The sanguines will be having the time of their life socializing with one another, and the phlegmatics will be happily watching the whole project. The same thing happens in the assembly. There are certain people who will be the doers.

But you know, it is a different challenge in a lot of our assembly activity because we need to focus on people. And you know, even after the building project was over and the wallpaper and the color of the paint, we changed the color of the paint because it wasn't right in the main auditorium. Anyway, that was a mistake.

But the melancholies could not let it pass, whereas it seemed ridiculous to the others. But after it was all done, after the hall was all done, it was a beautiful job, you know what was important? What was really important is what we still thought of each other. And sadly, even though that project was one of the best hall building projects that I've ever been involved in, there were things that happened during that time of little strifes, rivalries, that were, in one sense, the lasting heritage of the building project.

And it is sad when whatever the issue is or whatever the project is, we forget the impact that there is upon the people because that's what lasts. Now, one thing about the phlegmatics in defense, I better say a few things in defense of myself. The phlegmatics, even though we tend to be unmotivated, again, this is something that I didn't know about myself when I was farming because we were in such a framework of deadlines, of pushing, and so on.

I didn't know that part of myself until I was removed from that setting and I was in a setting where I became totally responsible for my schedule, what I did for the day. And I found that I could become very, very disorganized, fail to get things done, and I had, actually, to get anywhere, I had to put myself into a schedule. I had to make a schedule for myself.

Now, my wife is the opposite. From as long as I have known her, she has a little notepad or something like that and she'll jot down maybe two or three or four things that she wants to do, and she'll likely get them done. She's very goal-oriented, and that is one of the qualities of the choleric personality, goal-oriented.

And so just to relate it to just a marriage relationship, because both myself and my wife are melancholy, we both like to see things done well. So she likes my carpenter work. We get along quite well on projects because we work very well together.

We see it the same way. But when it comes to motivation, we're the opposite. She's very self-motivated, and I work better under pressure.

So as you go through these, as you think about yourself and these qualities and these characteristics, it should lead us to be able to get a realistic look at ourselves to see areas where we need help. God doesn't want us to be disabled by our temperaments. He wants us to be useful, effective people in our lives.

And one of the things that distinguishes what we can experience as Christians from a lot of the self-help kind of field is that we have a power, the Spirit of God, who is at work within our lives to transform us, to deliver us from these characteristics that are listed here as weaknesses, so that we don't waste our lives and we don't harm other people in our relationships with them, but we learn to cultivate those things that are of God. And the idea of sanctification is really a lifelong process of change from what we are naturally in ourselves into what God would make us to be. And I should mention that a lot of the basic material where I learned this from initially was from Tim LaHaye.

There was a book called Spirit-Controlled Temperament. And then he wrote a larger book called Your Temperament, Discover Its Potential. And then it was republished as a paperback called Why You Act The Way You Do.

And in the book Your Temperament, Discover Its Potential, he goes into a lot of areas which I'm not really touching on, but I will just at least mention it to you. He believed that this kind of understanding is very, very helpful in sorting out what kind of career or work you are suited for. I've already given you some just little hints and indications by what I've already mentioned.

If you can recognize what kind of temperament you are, what kind of temperament blend you are, and then you can look at different kinds of occupations and the kinds of demands that there are in those occupations, it can be very helpful to see where you're suited for. Sometimes people think they want to do a certain kind of work, and they get into it and they find out I don't fit here. I don't belong here.

It's just not me. And I can't seem to ever get to really enjoy this or feel that this is beneficial or so on. And sometimes it's just a bad match of what our basic temperament is and the kind of work that we think we're going to do.

Now, I could give you a few more little details here. I should just go over to reiterate what's down at the bottom there. The basic use of this information is to be able to see yourself more honestly, more accurately, to understand yourself.

Please don't use it as a weapon on anybody else. And one thing I will say is it's never enough just to be able to label yourself or label another person. Now, I will say that in the Lord's work, both the couple that Becky and I worked with for the first 15 years of the Lord's work, Murray Pratt, Murray and Doris Pratt, we found this understanding very, very helpful in working with people.

Now, we didn't spend all our time analyzing people, but you get to recognize these characteristics fairly quickly. And once you recognize that this person is predominantly this character, you will be better equipped as to how you can relate to that person, how you can encourage them and strengthen them, and what kind of handling you need with them. Now, I'm sure anybody that's raised children knows that you can't just use the same way for every child.

One child just needs a look, just a word maybe. The other child needs force. Another child needs a lot more firmness.

And all of that is related to this aspect. And just to think back to the first assembly that we were involved with in Kapuskasing, there's one brother who is there. He's moved to Timmins where we lived for 22 years, so we've had a lot of years of experience of being with this brother.

He became an elder in the new work in Kapuskasing, and after he moved to Timmins, after two or three years, he became involved in oversight in Timmins as well. He's an excellent brother. He's a phlegmatic and a sanguine.

The sanguine part makes him very, very sociable. He relates easily with people. The phlegmatic part makes him very, very kind, caring, diplomatic in his handling of people.

And yet he can be persistent and he can deal with people as well. But the one thing that we learned very early about him was this. If you wanted him to take some responsibility, you couldn't just push it on him or he'd say no.

His first response was nearly always no. That is just the signature of a phlegmatic, that we tend not to jump to responsibility. If somebody else will do it, we're quite happy.

We don't like being pushed. And even though we're very quiet and diplomatic about it, we will just put our stubborn, little phlegmatic feet down and we won't budge. And so what we had to do is we had to suggest it to him and say that we felt that he could help out in that way, that we saw qualities in him that we felt would be suitable for it, and then just let him think about it.

And he still would usually say no. And we'd have to leave him and come back a little later. Eventually, he would accept the responsibility and once he did, he would do a good job.

He would be faithful. He's one of the best overseers, the one that most people would find the easiest to speak to. They know he's not going to jump all over them, he's not going to be too forceful, and so on.

And so what I am saying is that each kind of person can be very valuable, can be very useful for God, but each one of us has things to overcome that could derail our usefulness. Now the cleric, in contrast, is a born leader. In fact, you can almost guarantee that most entrepreneurs have some cleric in them or they wouldn't succeed.

You have to be independent. You have to be visionary. You have to have what it takes to keep going through a lot of adversity.

The cleric is a strong, natural leader. The things that can create problems in the cleric is that a cleric can be very insensitive to other people. A cleric can tend to be unemotional and despise emotion and despise what he or she looks at as weak people.

And so as we go through, and I'll just have to leave you to look through these characteristics and see what is applicable, it helps us to gain an honest look at ourselves, a realistic look at one another. And for me personally, it has been a great help in learning to appreciate, particularly, other brothers and sisters who are the opposite of what I am. Because I tend to naturally react against them.

Whereas if I recognize where they're coming from, that it stems from their character, their temperament, then I'll recognize what I'm dealing with and also know how I should respond to them. And so, while it isn't the end-all of understanding of one another, it can be a very helpful tool to enabling us, to enable us to work effectively with each other, to learn to appreciate those strengths and to know how to protect relationships from the damage that are inherent in the weaknesses which can so easily derail Christian relationships. Shall we pray? Our Father, we draw near to Thee.

We acknowledge that we are fearfully and wonderfully made. And not only our physical being and all the physical aspects of our being, but that which is our soul and spirit, that which is invisible and yet dominates so much of what we are. We pray that we may gain in our appreciation of the beauty and intended variety, and yet we confess that we are often pointlessly in conflict and we can fight over the same things over and over again when we could learn to appreciate how each one tends to think and the things that will be important to each person.

Our Father, we pray that Thou would make us more discerning and in that discernment, for it to be governed by that love that will, while recognizing faults and deficiencies, will not seek to make them worse, but will seek to cover them with Thy grace. We draw near to Thee to seek Thy blessing, how much we need Thy presence, the ministry of Thy Spirit to transform us so that we are truly what Thou has called us to be. We ask before this as we commit ourselves again to Thee in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Amen.