a lot more to it than that. That's just defining it by negation. And you have to not only define a term by what it is not, or what is excluded, but also what is positively included in that. And we saw that Jesus explains this in the Sermon on the Mount. Somebody had a question on this the other day, and I had explained this principle. It's an important principle of understanding distensationalism, so I'm going to go over it again. And that is that dispensationalism, you have the principle of hermeneutics, the basic principle of interpretation, that any time you have a mandate in one particular age, that mandate does not continue into the next era or dispensation unless it is repeated. And what we find is that in Leviticus 19.18, as well as in the Sermon on the Mount, Luke chapter 10, as well as in James chapter 2 verse 8 through 10 Romans 16 I believe in these passages you have a repetition of this principle that we are to love others as ourselves again and again eight times in the New Testament this verse is quoted from the Old Testament which would indicate something about how important it is But since it's repeated, initially stated in Leviticus 19, in the age of Israel, in the era of the Mosaic Law, then again the Lord during the Incarnation emphasizes it and also applies it specifically to the Millennial Kingdom. And then it's reiterated in James 2 and Romans 16 for the Church Age. We know that this is a timeless principle. And dispensations, there are two issues that concern theologians. One is called continuity. The other is called discontinuity. Continuity means that there are some things that continue through every era. For example, salvation has always been by faith alone in Christ alone. The Old Testament, they anticipated the fulfillment of the promise of salvation and the coming of Messiah. And so you had not only the promises that look forward to that, you also had the teaching through types in the tabernacle and sacrifices and the furniture. This is continuity. In the New Testament, salvation is still by faith alone and Christ alone. But now we look back to the fulfillment of those promises. They were fulfilled by the death of Jesus Christ on the cross, but then you have some things that are discontinued They do not go continue through every dissensation for example you had certain sacrifices during the era of the Gentiles in the Old Testament There were many more sacrifices given during the age of the Mosaic law in the age of Israel All animal sacrifice ended with the crop. However, when Jesus comes to establish the Millennial Kingdom at the Second Coming, this is not the Rapture. The Rapture takes place seven years prior when Jesus comes in the clouds and the Church is taken in Mass. The dead in Christ will rise first and those who are alive and remain will be caught up together with Him in the clouds. That's the rapture. Then, seven years later, he returns to Mount Olive to end the tribulation. You have the Battle of Armageddon and then the establishment of the Millennial Kingdom, which lasts for 1,000 years. There is going to be a rebuilt temple. This is described in Ezekiel chapter 44 and following. Ezekiel also indicates that there will be a return or restoration of animal sacrifice during the millennial kingdom. Just as we have the memorial supper today with the Lord's table looking back to the cross, there will be a restoration of just a few, not as many as you had during the year of the Mosaic Law, but there will be a few animal sacrifices during the millennial kingdom as a memorial again for Israel looking back to the cross. So you have discontinuity It changes every dispensation. There's a change in relationship to animal sacrifice. So we have that principle. But when we come to the royal law, the law of impersonal or unconditional law, it continues through every single dispensation. That means in terms of interpretation, that we can go to the Sermon on the Mount look at the characteristics there even though it may be in a in a message of the Lord that applies directly or more directly to the Millennial Kingdom he gives examples of what it looks like an impersonal love or unconditional love to look the same in every dispensation so it's very legitimate to go to Luke 10 Matthew 5 these other passages and analyze how the Lord applies the passage, because the principle never changes. The application doesn't change. So that's what we've been doing, trying to look at the Scriptures that talk about unconditional love in order to gather together the characteristics of that. So we find ourselves in James 2.8. Let's look at verse 7. Do they not blaspheme the fair name by which you have been called? And we saw last time that they're going through testing. And the particular example that James is using is an example of people testing. There are all kinds of evaluation testings. People testing can be one of the worst. How we handle testing related to people. And here we have a particular type of people testing which focuses on the broad category of rejection. Rejection can be manifested in many different ways. It can be real or it can be imagined. and we have to look at this and so as I build for you a construct, this is what I'm doing, I'm doing this very carefully because frankly we haven't talked about this since last Wednesday night and it wasn't the first thing on your mind this afternoon and so you need to be brought right back to where we were when we ended last time because we're going to put all of these pieces of the puzzle, so to speak, together so that when we reach the conclusion, I'm going to see a lot of light bulbs go off out there as you begin to see how this really works in terms of a problem-solving device or stress buster. Last time, we reviewed the principle of adversity and stress. Adversity is the outside pressure of external circumstances. Stress is the inside pressure of the soul. Adversity is what circumstances of life do to you and stress is what you do to yourself. Adversity is inevitable. Stress is optional. Stress is always the result of sin nature control of the soul and failure to handle adversity through the gracious provision of the ten stress busters. The stress busters allow any and every believer to face any situation in life. There's no situation you face in life. I don't care how overwhelming it appears at the time. I don't care how difficult it may be. I don't care how painful it is. I'm not saying that in an uncompassionate way. It's so often somebody comes and they say, but this is so terrible. But is it too terrible for the grace of God? It's never too terrible. God anticipated it billions of years ago and made absolute provision at the cross. So it doesn't matter how difficult, how painful, how awful it may be at the time, and it may seem absolutely crushing at the time. But God's gracious provision is more powerful and can handle any situation so that you can remain poised, stable, and in control of the situation, and not give in to the sin nature. And sin nature control means arrogance and the operation of the three arrogant skills. Now the three arrogant skills begin with self-absorption. This is an obsession with oneself, always looking at life through one's own subjective experiences, always interpreting everything in terms of me. Self-absorption leads to The second arrogant skill of self-justification so that when something happens unfortunate and if there's responsibility on your part then you deny responsibility and you justify your actions and your failures. Self-justification then leads to a distortion of reality and that's the third arrogant skill of self-deception and then this in turn promotes more self-absorption. So you get caught up in this endless cycle. from self-absorption to self-justification to self-deception. Now last time when we stopped, we were looking at the issue of how we learn doctrine. how this is, how transformation takes place in the soul of the believer under the doctrine of the grace learning spiral. This is something, I keep going over these things again and again because I want you to have this inculcated into your soul so you dream about it at night. And when you get to the point where you're dreaming about this at night, then you just might get to the point of applying it when the pressure hits. That's not ten minutes later, but when the pressure hits, that's the goal. Let's analyze this a little bit. Pastor-teacher communicates doctrine. Now, it doesn't matter what the pastor's personality is. That's one of the biggest faults in most churches, most denominations, is they identify the gift of pastor-teacher with a certain kind of personality. And yet, believe me, I've known pastors with all kinds of personalities. And I knew all kinds of different guys when I went through seminary. A lot of them had no sense of humor, they were legalistic, and you really didn't want to be around them. But nevertheless, they had the gift of pastor-teacher. Now a pastor-teacher communicates doctrine, communicates truth. Now anytime you go into a church, whether it's this church or any other church, you really have something that's comparable to a one-room schoolhouse, don't you? You have a wide category of spiritual growth. You have spiritual babies and you have spiritual adults. And the goal of the pastor is to give everybody the information they need so that they can learn doctrine and grow and advance spiritually. And that's the goal of pastor. Now what happens is When human viewpoint begins to affect communication theory in seminaries, and this is what has happened in most of the major evangelical seminaries in our country, whether you're talking about Dallas Seminary or Trinity or any of the others, when you look at homiletical theory and communication theory, they've adopted the world model. Just as television, television communicates to people in 8 to 10 minute increments. Therefore, you're taught in class, people have these short attention spans. So you should never teach for more than 20 or 30 minutes, because people just can't do that. Well, if you never teach more than 20 or 30 minutes, people are never going to learn to concentrate for a longer period of time. And my favorite professors always seem to be the professors that say that, okay, folks, you're here. You've got to go here. The only way you're going to go from this level to that level is if I teach you at this level. Because if I teach you at a third grade level, what we're going to have in a year is a bunch of third graders. So I'm going to teach you at the level you need to arrive at. And that's the philosophy that I have in teaching is that in combination with a lot of repetition, I'm going to teach at a level that will produce spiritual maturity. Now that means that when you come, sometimes, especially if you're a visitor, and I've heard it said sometimes here and at other churches that, well, I don't know if I want to bring a visitor, because I don't know if they can understand all this. They don't have the vocabulary. They don't have the background. So I don't know that they can understand it. Well, folks, the issue isn't their background or their vocabulary. It's not their education, it's not their IQ, it's the power of God the Holy Spirit. That's what this is all about. This is about the fact that human IQ, human education, human background and human experience is not the issue. The issue is the power of God the Holy Spirit and the power of the Word of God. So the pastor-teacher communicates doctrine under the filling of the Holy Spirit And God the Holy Spirit indwells and indwells every believer. And when you are filled with God the Holy Spirit, then He is teaching you that doctrine. He is helping you to understand it. He is not understanding it for you. That takes time. I can't tell you how many times I have sat through the same doctrine, or listened to the same tape, and on the eighth time I went, oh, yeah, that's what's going on here. See it takes time for all of us to learn anything and to concentrate and it takes exposure and thought and finally it's understandable and then we exercise positive volition and God the Holy Spirit transfers it into the cardia, the innermost part of the thinking of our soul and there becomes epinosis doctrine. Now the point of the whole grace learning spiral is that learning in the spiritual life is a product of the grace of God. It is not up to your background, your education, your IQ. That would be worse. That would mean that there would be a vast difference in the spiritual life between those who have a low IQ and those who have a high IQ. That would mean that if you have an academic education, if you've gone to college and have a bachelor's degree, a master's degree, and a PhD, that you can do a whole lot better in the spiritual life than somebody who just barely completed the 8th grade. But that's not true. You see, I know all kinds of people with all kinds of backgrounds. I've known people who don't have an IQ much above room temperature. And I know people who have an IQ that's quite high, and they would be placed in the top one or two percent in the country in terms of their IQ. The funny thing is that the guys that sometimes don't have the real high IQ are able to grasp tremendous amounts of doctrine because intelligence and education sometimes can get in your way because you start overthinking doctrine. But this is a grace learning spiral because God has provided it for everybody. So every single believer, as part of their priesthood, has equal privilege and equal opportunity to learn the Word of God and to make it a part of their life. And the issue is not your IQ. The issue is not your education. The issue is your volition. The issue is positive volition and the desire to hear the Word of God. That's why you can bring somebody to church And they sit down and they hear doctrine taught, and they go, wow, I've never heard anything like this. This is the greatest thing I've ever heard. And they're there night after night after night, and every time there's a Bible class, every Sunday morning they're there. And a couple of years down the road, they've mastered a tremendous amount of doctrine. And there are other people that come. And they just say, well, the vocabulary is too much, and he uses all those overheads, and he talks for too long. It's a whole hour. Sometimes he even goes over about five or ten minutes. And I just want to go someplace where I feel closer to God. And that person is not positive. See, the issue is not their education. The issue is not their background. The issue is their volition. And what we do when we bring somebody to church, is we're exposing them to the Word of God. It's just like Jesus, the more He taught. We're going to see some powerful things in John 6 on Sunday morning. And one of them is that when Jesus starts off at the beginning of John 6, He has the multitudes with Him and He feeds the 5,000. And there's only 5,000. There's 5,000 men there. That's what the text says. He didn't feed 5,000. He fed between 12,000 and 15,000. There was a multitude there. And all the crowds were coming out to see Jesus and He's at the height of His popularity. And by the end of the chapter, the only ones who are left with him are the twelve. Everybody else goes. Everybody else leaves him. And what happened in between feeding them and creating all the special effects and miracles and everything, and everybody leaving? What happened? What did Jesus do to turn everybody off? He taught doctrine! Oh, we can't do that because the crowds won't come. He just broke every rule they teach you in seminary. You teach in too much depth, people think it's over their head and they won't come. Well, doctrine tends to drive people off because most people aren't there to learn. The Lord figured that out and He taught and everybody left. So I figure He's the model we should follow and not some of these guys who went to Dale Carnegie. So this is the grace learning spiral. This is the issue. Now, what we're talking about in James What James is talking about and helping us to understand is the issue of application of doctrine. First it has to be epinosis, which is usable doctrine. It's doctrine that's been converted through the power of the Holy Spirit, because after you understood it as academic knowledge, you exercise your positive volition, you said, I believe that, and the Holy Spirit then takes over and transfers it into the innermost part of your thinking, the cardia, where it becomes appliable. That doesn't mean it's automatically going to be applied. Any more than after you eat your dinner and that you sit back on the couch and turn on the television and that gets metabolized, that you're actually going to use the sugar that's produced and spread around as energy through the bloodstream and the oxygen and everything that goes to your brain cells, that you're actually going to use that and cogitate. and exercise and do anything with it other than just vegetate and watch TV. And that's what happens with a lot of Christians. They get the idea that under the filling of the Holy Spirit it's just going to happen automatically. No, you have to use your volition. That's application of doctrine. So you've got this doctrine now. You've been learning doctrine and the Holy Spirit's been storing it and it's categorized in your soul. So you have all kinds of different things. You've learned rebound. You've learned about confession of sin. You've learned about the filling of the Holy Spirit, the faith rest drill. You've memorized half a dozen promises. And all of a sudden, you get a situation in life where you're threatened by something or someone. And you say, OK, there's a promise here. God says, fear thou not, for I am with thee. Be not dismayed, for I am thy God. I will strengthen thee. Yea, I will help thee. Yea, I will uphold thee with the right hand of my righteousness. So I'm not going to respond in fear. I'm going to let God handle the situation, so I'm going to mix that promise with faith and exercise the faith thrust drill. That's what James says. Hear it and do it. You hear it, and that's this process of getting it into epinosis. The doing is the application. You apply it in terms of the faith thrust drill. You apply it in terms of confession. You apply it in terms of exercising impersonal love for all mankind. You apply it in terms of inner happiness. You apply it in terms of personal sense of your eternal destiny. That's application. Now what we're talking about in this study is applying it in the realm of love. stress busters involved in this category, we're looking at three, the love triplex, which includes personal love for God. Now this is the motivation, because for love to have any value at all in life, and those of you who are single need to pay attention to this, for love to have any value in life, it has to be based on integrity. And when you have love for God, God is the one, personal love for God, it is God's integrity that has the value. And so God is the only worthy object of personal love in life because he is the only one who has absolute and perfect integrity because he is perfect righteousness. Now that becomes the basis for impersonal love for all mankind. Why? We love others because of who God is. He's the model. His essence provides the stability for us, Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and forever. We don't exercise impersonal love because of who we are. Because our character as immature believers or as spiritual adults is still affected by sin. We have to base it on something that endures forever and is always stable. So we base our impersonal love on the essence of God. This is why we have to spend a lot of time talking about who God is and his character so we understand that he's not just some grandfatherly figure up there in heaven looking down and nodding at us, aren't they wonderful? They're just trying so hard. They're so sincere. I'll just have to bless them a little bit. We understand that's just a fraudulent concept of God, that God doesn't look at man that way. We have to understand His essence, His righteousness, His justice, and what His love is like, and that's what we model our love like. Because God had to exercise impersonal love for all mankind when He sent His Son to die on the cross for our sins. When God sent Jesus Christ to die on the cross for our sins, he exemplified for us the characteristics of impersonal love. And we've studied those last week and the week before, and I don't have time to review those again. God's impersonal love for all mankind then becomes a model of the active side of impersonal love. It's not just that God didn't have any mental attitude sins toward us. but that God actively did things. There was initiation, there was dedication, there was commitment, there was consecration. All of these are part of impersonal love. Not only God's impersonal love towards mankind, but our impersonal love toward mankind is to reflect His impersonal love toward us. So we have learned that there is active as well as a passive aspect to impersonal love. The active is initiating that which is best for the object, and the passive is the absence of any mental attitude sins, which in the end become self-destructive in human relationships. Now the situation that presents itself here in James chapter 2 for application is one that is very common, and I find something that affects and is destructive in the life of many believers. So we're going to take some time to analyze this. We're going to break it apart and we're going to see how in one particular arena we can use impersonal love for all mankind to avoid converting the outside pressure of adversity into the inside pressure of stress in the soul. And that is in the arena of rejection. That's the category that we're looking at here because The rich man that comes into the assembly, it's not that he is his richness, his wealth, the fact that he has an abundance of material possessions and the details of life that makes him bad. It's his attitude towards the believer. This is described in verse 6. is not the rich man, the one who oppresses you and personally drags you into court. So the rich man oppresses them, there's persecution here, there's hostility, there's ridicule, and this is all part of rejection. So we're going to try to come to grips with what rejection is, how it works itself out in everyday life, and then we're going to see how impersonal love for all mankind handles that so that we can avoid converting it into stress. I just love a good practical joker. He filled his cup of water with salt water. You are nasty. That's a first. That's a first. When I was a kid, when I was at Baraka, Pastor Thiem had a pitcher of water and somebody went up there and filled it with vodka. I'm going to start getting my own water from now on. Just wants to see if I can apply it. What do you do? Dump a whole bottle of salt in there? Hmm. Well, yeah, you handle rejections. Okay. Let's start with defining the concept. Rejection is defined as being forsaken, attacked, ignored, persecuted, made the object of ridicule, bullied emotionally or in some other way physically or emotionally, being repudiated, eliminated, denied, or being set aside. It can take the form of being laid off at work, being fired. It can take a passive form or an active form. Rejection can also be defined as negative volition and refusing to acknowledge, believe, or accept doctrine. But for the purpose of this study, we're looking at rejection in terms of personal rejection. Point number two, the person who is being rejected, we're going to remember our terms here, is the rejectee. The person who is doing the rejecting is the rejector. Now whether you are the rejectee or the rejector, both have serious problems in relationship to handling adversity and stress. The rejector can be reacting to a situation and rejecting out of motivation from the sin nature and converting that outside pressure of adversity and the inside pressure of stress and rejecting and it can generate the rejector reacts to real or perceived threat and rejects someone. Well, if it was imagined and now the rejectee has the problem of how they're going to handle the rejector and they can react. And now there was maybe it was an imagined threat or imagined insult or an imagined slight and the rejector thinks it's real and says something or does something out of malice or anger or motivated by fear of rejection and it hurts the rejectee. And now the rejectee is the one who reacts again and it creates a vicious cycle. So you have We will define our terms and we'll take that apart in a little bit and that will help explain how and why some things happen. Now there is passive rejection. We're going to try to be very logical in this study and set up all of our options. In passive rejection, a person is rejected by someone else. The person being rejected may be rejected because they have actually done something wrong or they may be rejected and have done nothing wrong. Jesus Christ was rejected and he did nothing wrong. And our ultimate model for handling rejection is the Lord because he was rejected and he was perfectly innocent and did nothing wrong and he models for us, exemplifies for us on the cross how to handle rejection. In active rejection, You are the one who is doing the rejecting. And sometimes the rejector is blamed for being wrong when in reality that person may not be at fault at all. I've done, especially in early years when I was first pastoring, one of the things I think that a lot of pastors want to do is counsel because it makes them feel like they're actually doing something and meddling in people's lives and solving problems. And so I would get various couples come for counseling and I've seen situations in the complexity of relationships where you see one spouse so manipulate the other spouse into a position where the second spouse rejects the first spouse but they wouldn't do it if the first spouse hadn't put them in that position to do it. And it makes the first spouse come off as the innocent party and the second spouse look like the guilty party because they're the one doing the active So when you get into the issue of rejection, especially when it has to apply to a marriage situation or some close relationship like that, trying to unravel it can be very, very difficult and the real issues can be a lot more difficult to uncover. That's why I hate doing counseling. is you come in and you get one person's perspective and then you get the other person's perspective and those are both distorted and you've got 8% of the facts and you're trying to help them resolve the rest. That's why the issue is doctrine and consistently coming to Bible class. If you've got two people in a marriage situation who are both committed to the Lord, truly positive doctrine and they're coming day in and day out to class And sooner or later they're going to get the doctrine they need to handle whatever problems are in that marriage. And they're going to grow. Now every now and then a pastor may not be teaching on something that's somehow related and they need to come in for a little personal attention here or there to just get pointed in the right direction and there's nothing wrong with that. But for the most part, if people will just come and learn the word, they will eventually get all the information they need to apply it if there's real objectivity. The trouble is, once you get into the rejection situation and feelings start being hurt, then you end up people reacting because their feelings are hurt. They become very subjective. They begin to operate on emotion. The sin natures kick in because now they're converting outside pressure of adversity into the inside pressure of stress in the soul. And so now the sin nature, remember, and we're going to look at this in detail as we go through this study, the sin nature has two areas. The area of weakness, which produces personal sin, and the area of strength, which produces human good and self-righteousness. So now what happens, they're under the control of the sin nature. They're not responding through the area of weakness, they're responding through the area of strength. And so they're responding out of self-righteousness and a lot of human good. And so now the person who has been rejected is operating on subjectivity, emotion, self-righteousness, and human good, so that to the outside observer, they look like the person who is in the right. But they're in the wrong. And the person who's in the wrong They may also be in the wrong. You may have two wrongs. You may have a mix. It gets very complicated. So we're going to try to unravel some of this in our study. Passive rejection, where you're rejected by others. You have active rejecting, where you are the one doing the rejecting. And then very few believers are properly prepared doctrinally to handle this problem. Because we all hate, I think rejection hits the core of our being more than anything else and makes us feel a little more uncomfortable. And so we have to deal with those emotions that are generated. And as I said earlier, it's not having those emotions generated that's a problem. Somebody walks up and kicks you in the leg, it's going to hurt. There's nothing wrong with hurting. What's wrong is how you handle it. And you have to handle it either through the sin nature or through the stress busters. And that's what we're looking at here. Point number one was a definition. Point number two, defined terms, the rejectee, the rejector. Point number three, rejection is often a matter of the individual perception of reality. If you have somebody who is not very mature, either in terms of emotional maturity or in terms of spiritual maturity, they're operating on the arrogant skills such as self-absorption, then their perception of reality is going to be very warped. They're going to have a distorted view of reality and they may interpret X event as being an insult For example, let's say you have a husband, X, and a wife, Y, and they spend a lot of time together, and they both normally work about 40 hours a week with each other, and all of a sudden, Y, has her job jacked up for whatever reason, she's got to spend 70 hours a week down at the office. Well, that's not her fault. But all of a sudden husband Y doesn't get to spend as much time with, I mean, husband X doesn't get to spend as much time with wife Y. And it feels like rejection because he's self-absorbed. And so now he reacts to that rejection by trying to get rid of those feelings. And so now he's operating on the sin nature and he may use alcohol or drugs or another woman or whatever it may be in order to solve the problem. And it's the perception. is as much the reality as the reality. Rejection may be real or it may be imagined. And so we have to deal with issues of objectivity, hypersensitivity. Too often that's what the problem is. It's not that any kind of rejection has taken place. It's just that we're hypersensitive because we're self-absorbed and immature. So we have to deal with hypersensitivity, subjectivity, self-absorption, and all kinds of reaction. Too much emphasis is placed on defending our own integrity, defending ourselves in the situation that we're not really at fault and nobody should treat us that way. And we begin to whine and mew about somebody treating us unjustly. And then we come into the whole issue that we face today of victimization. And everybody wants to be a victim of something. And all victimization is is a psychobabble way of shifting the blame for our for the problems in our lives from the way we handle them. Everybody is a victim in one way or another. I hate using that term, but just to throw it back on them, Adam made a decision. Before that, Satan made a decision. And because of the decisions they made, we're living in an imperfect world. We're married to people who are sinners. We have children who are sinners. We have parents who are sinners. And we work for people who are sinners. I'm glad nobody said amen at any point during that. And the fact is we all live in a fallen world and so bad things are going to happen to us. There is going to be undeserved suffering and there are going to be things that people say and do, whether intentional or unintentional, that hurt our feelings. So we have to develop some maturity, some objectivity, and we have to get rid of that self-absorption. apply some doctrine so that we can grow and not wear our feelings on our shirt sleeves and so that we can get past the rejection problem. Now in some cases the perception of reality becomes so distorted that the believer who assumes that he or she is being rejected is in actuality the rejector. That's when things get confusing. They've brought about the circumstances that cause the reject the rejector to take the position they have so that they feel rejected. But if they hadn't done what they did initially, the other person would not have rejected them and put them in that position. So it becomes very difficult. Sometimes the person who appears to be at fault is not at fault at all. Now you have to start figuring out how to handle it. And all too often what we discover today is the victim of rejection and the one who is rejecting is fragmented in their soul. This is either the unbeliever who has no doctrine, or the believer who has doctrine but is not using it, and is operating under the sin nature and so has converted all this adversity, distress in the soul, and they're the Daisukas believer, the double-minded believer, James 1 8 and so they're they're distorted and eventually as we studied when we went through that passage they can end up in extreme neurosis or psychosis because they're trying to handle reality on the basis of a distorted and false view of reality and a false perception usually determined by their own their own arrogance so we look at the various kinds of problems that believers can face we have adversity which is the outside pressure of life, and stress is the inside pressure from the adversity. Adversity can be handled, but stress is always destructive to the spiritual life. So we have to make a decision whether we are going to handle the adversity through the stress busters that God has provided, or are we going to handle adversity the way that makes us feel most comfortable. You see, most of the time when people hit any kind of difficult situation, the ultimate criteria for handling the situation is how it makes us feel. And we live in an era of feeling. How many times when you hear somebody ask a question, they say, well, how do you feel about this? And the issue really isn't how you feel, it's what do you think? And yet we've substituted feel for the word think. And we're always, well, how do you feel about that? How do you feel about that? And I don't care how people feel about it, I want to know what you think about it. Because that's where the ultimate issues in life are, is between your ears, how you think. So we generate many different problems in our lives, and they culminate. You start off when you're a child. When you're a child, you are born with a sin nature. And unfortunately, As a child, as a baby, you are also self-absorbed. The first consciousness you develop is self-consciousness. It's a while before you develop other consciousness. And then third, you develop God consciousness. But you start off, and any of you who are parents know that those little kids, it doesn't take them long before they develop self-consciousness and they're self-absorbed and they start interpreting every situation in life in terms of how it affects me. And that's self-absorption. Now, let's stop here for just a minute and look at the sin nature. Because every person is born a sinner. That means they do not have any doctrine at all in their soul and they can only make decisions based on their sin nature. So they're either going to operate from the area of weakness and commit personal sins, or they're going to operate from the area of human good, the area of strength, and produce human good. Now human good is going to be wonderful. Human good is going to look good, and they're going to receive praise from their peers, from their parents, and from their teachers, if they're handling the outside pressure of adversity, converting it into stress in the soul, the sin nature, because they have no other option, But they're operating on human good, so it looks good. They grow up to be very successful. They grow up to be overachievers, workaholics, in control of their life, in every detail of their life, but they're so fragmented on the inside that they're miserable. In the Christian life, they'll come across as legalists and ascetics. It's those that handle it through adversity, I mean through the area of weakness and personal sins, that it's easy to focus on. They handle that rejection through anger, through hatred, through mental attitude sins, through overt sins of vindictiveness, murder. It's easy to spot that and they carry that over if they become a believer into licentiousness and lasciviousness. So I want to break this down and look in detail how we handle problems in life on the sin nature because it can be very deceptive. It can look good. It can feel even better. And yet what we're doing is not trusting God. We're trusting the flesh and we're destroying ourselves from the inside out. We develop habit patterns. As I said, we start off in childhood and we learn how to handle problems, how it makes us feel so that we feel better. Now it's either going to come from the area of weakness and we're going to create habit patterns of handling adversity through either mental attitude sins or just going to enjoy dwelling upon how we're going to get revenge. We have that revenge motivation and hatred and anger and we can just sit back and see and think about how we're going to roast their feet over coals because of how they've treated us. or through sins of the tongue, and we begin to gossip and malign, and that's how we relieve that pressure, that outside pressure of those circumstances. We call up somebody and we get on the telephone and we talk about how so-and-so has mistreated us so badly. And so now we don't feel as bad about being rejected because we've gotten back at them by running them down to somebody else. So we handle the problem through sins of the tongue or through overt sins. Maybe you get mad at them as a little kid, you try to hit them. Whatever it is, you use violence to solve the problem. That's operating from the area of weakness. From the area of strength, you operate on the basis of human good and self-righteousness. So you're going to try to cover it up with the cloak of morality and religion. And you're going to learn to go to prayer meeting and say, you need to pray for my husband because he mistreats me so, but I do so well applying the word and I'm just going to be submissive like Sarah to Abraham. And under the guise of communicating a prayer request, you've been maligning your husband and running him down in front of all the other ladies in the prayer group. But it is acceptable, so nobody calls it gossip. That's how we deceive ourselves. You see how subtle and complicated we make our lives when we operate on the sin nature. And it's so nice when we can cloak it in the guise of religious activity and doing and suffering for the Lord. Now some believers, when they're experiencing the problem of rejection, react. to those who are rejecting them, and then they intensify all of their problems through the functions related to the sin nature. You see, this is what happens. As you go through childhood, you begin to develop these patterns, and then they become habits. See, the difference between this trying to give a little bit of a divine viewpoint perspective on how sin and volition is the root of all of our problems. And human viewpoint psychology is that psychology says, number one, it's not really your fault. The blame is shifted to the environment. It's something your parents did. It's those things. It's the rejector who's at fault. It's not how you responded that's the issue. Secondly, and this is a subtle thing about psychology, And I'm not doing this. It may look this way, but I'm not doing this. Psychology says you have to understand how all of this happened in your life before you can handle the problem. That's not true. You don't have to go back and figure out when your uncle, instead of listening to you talk Babylon about some nonsensical thing when you were three years old and he decided to watch a football game and ignore you, how that stunted your emotional growth and now you hate all men and you're never going to have anything to do with anybody and you've been irresponsible and a drug user and an alcoholic all your life. Going back to that, see, that's psychology. You've got to figure out why it happened and where it originated or you can't solve a problem. The Bible says all the problems are volitional. We have these habit patterns all our lives. They're not ingrained. I mean, they are ingrained, but they're not unsolvable. They're all resolvable through the grace of God, and we have to unlearn all these bad habit patterns. That's the whole process of renovating our thinking. We have to learn how to think, and then on the basis of that thinking, the doctrine that's in our soul, we construct that mirror of doctrine in our soul. That gives us objectivity, clarity of thought. And when we have the courage to look at that mirror, look at ourselves in the light of God's Word, then we begin to see how we've developed all these various habits of dealing with problems in life on the basis of the sin nature, either the area of strength or the area of weakness, And once we see that, then under the ministry of God, the Holy Spirit, we see how to apply Bible doctrine to that situation so that we can quit converting it into stress and start having the inner happiness that God has for us and stability and joy in the midst of those trials and tests. So human viewpoint psychology says it's environment. You have to understand all the dynamics and all the issues and then Then third, you're basically a victim and there's a shift of responsibility. Well, the Bible is just the opposite. It's not the environment. It's your volition. You don't have to understand all the dynamics. You just have to understand the solution. In many ways, you're not going to understand why you do the things You do, other than just basically it's a sin nature. So you start from where you are today and don't worry about what somebody did to you when you were a child, even if it was devastating and terrible and horrible. You can't imagine the kind of horrible things that the Jews went through in the Exodus generation and the generations preceding them when they were in Egypt as slaves. You can just imagine there is no kind of abuse that any believer today or anybody today experiences that wasn't experienced by the Israelites during the period of bondage in Egypt. And yet God told them that His grace was able to deliver them from everything and they rejected the divine solution and they wanted to go right back to Egypt. See, the issue is volition. The issue is do you want to handle the problems in your life God's way or do you want to handle them your own way, what makes you feel the most comfortable, because sometimes applying doctrine doesn't make you comfortable. In fact, sometimes the right solution is the most difficult solution. Sometimes the right solution is going to feel like the worst solution, but it is the biblical solution. That's why we can't trust our feelings, because they are subjective and not trustworthy. I want to talk a little bit about the dangers of being rejected. Because when we hit that, especially if it's a harsh rejection, sometimes it may be losing a job, sometimes it may be some kind of rejection in friendship or in romance, in marriage, in your social life. It may be a rejection related to your business or even in church. And what happens is that somebody whom you admire, somebody you respect, somebody you love, suddenly doesn't want to have anything to do with you or they do something that hurts you. Now, it's either real or imagined. Sometimes people take offense. Somebody does something and it's innocuous and yet you're not in the right frame of mind that day and so you react to that as an offense and yet it was not intended that way. So rejection can be real or imagined. And the issue is, how are you going to respond? Here's rejection. The issue now is positive volition or negative volition. You can blame others and become bitter, vindictive, implacable, revengeful. You can turn it inward and just have self-pity and go home and cry and be depressed. Or you can choose to go into various stages where you just isolate yourself in some form of denial. It really didn't happen. and you deny all the issues related to it and that instead of facing reality, you're hiding from reality and it just begins to develop a whole series of complications which threaten the very integrity of your own soul. And life always becomes complicated when we start reacting to outside pressure. It fragments the soul. And that means that mental attitude sins, sins of the tongue, and overt sins are destroying us on the inside. Now, I want to look at this in terms of the sin nature. Let's just analyze this. You have an unbeliever. This person doesn't know any doctrine. Maybe it's just a child. Maybe it's a teenager or an adult. And they don't have any doctrine to apply to the situation. And all of a sudden what happens is that there's rejection. Now they have a choice in how they're going to respond. They start off reacting from the sin nature from the area of weakness. Somebody has opposed them so they can operate on mental attitude sins. They become angry. They start having hatred towards the person who's rejected them. Then they begin to harbor bitterness. Now, remember what Leviticus 19.18 says in its entire context, Leviticus 19.18 says, you shall not take vengeance nor bear any grudge against the sons of your people. You shall love your neighbor as yourself. So the person who is the rejector here is the neighbor. And you're not to harbor any feelings of vindictiveness or bear a grudge. That's operating on the area of weakness. Okay, so this person says, let's make this person a believer. This person says, okay, I'm going to not respond out of anger, hatred. I'm going to do good. But see what happened initially was this person responds out of personal sins and they're angry. Now they're out of fellowship. They feel guilty. because they responded in anger because that wasn't the right thing to do. But rather than confessing their sin and applying doctrine and getting back into a position of strength, they operate from their position of strength in terms of human good. So now they're going to start trying to be nice to this person, but it's generated from the flesh and not from the sin nature. So you can either operate from mental attitude sin, sins of the tongue, overt sins down here, or once you're out of fellowship, now you're operating from the area of strength, the realm of human good. And this area always has an affinity for the trends towards asceticism and legalism. So another thing we need to note about human good is it has a mix of establishment principles and human viewpoint thinking. Now, that mix can take any can go throughout the whole spectrum. It can be 5% establishment and 95% bad human viewpoint thinking. Or it can be 95% establishment and 5% bad human viewpoint thinking. So we look at it, if it's 95% establishment, you look at it from the outside and you think, well, they're really handling this problem well. But they're not, because the source is the same nature. The source isn't the, stress busters under the feeling of God, the Holy Spirit. And the result is that this person, for example, let's say they grow up in a lousy home and the parents just sort of ignore them. In fact, maybe it's more than that. Maybe the parents bully the kids and push them around or don't ever do anything. So the kids feel very rejected. Maybe the father's an alcoholic and the mother's a crackhead. So the kid grows up in this awful, awful environment and feels rejection. Now, the kid wants to compensate. Now, the kid's area of weakness doesn't come into play. But he decides to compensate through human good. He's going to find a model to look up to, to replace his parents. So he picks a teacher. The teacher has a great influence on the kid. The kid does well in school, really tries to perform to please the teacher, makes good grades. Everybody looks at this kid, he reaches college, he graduates from college. goes into a profession, rises to the top of his profession. Everybody says, look at the lousy environment. He made good decisions, and he rose to the top, and he's handled everything in his life. On the outside, it looks good. But the issue is, he's been doing it all under the power of the sin nature, operating from the area of strength, in terms of human good. And it's going to look good, it might even feel good, and it will impress everybody. But on the inside, There's fragmentation. There's self-destruction. And there's arrogance. So we need to understand that just because you're doing good things and handling it well and it seems to work and it feels good, that doesn't mean you're operating on the power of God the Holy Spirit. Because you can handle problems from either the area of weakness or the area of strength in the sin nature. And the end result is always going to be self-destruction. Because in the long run you can't handle life's problems by anything other than the certainty of God's Word and the sufficiency of God's Word and the power of God the Holy Spirit. So that's why we keep coming back to these stress busters to show how it makes a difference. How it changes the way we handle rejection. You can take another example. Let's say on that particular case, we had a person who was motivated in their sin nature by approbation lust, so he looked to some role model to be the source of approval, and then he did everything in life in order to gain that approval. But let's say this is a person who is motivated by sexual lust. And let's say their trend isn't towards asceticism, but their trend is towards licentiousness or lasciviousness. Then this individual grows up in the same home, It's the younger brother of the first guy. And the first guy grows up and seems to do real well. And the second one ends up going into all kinds of sexual deviance, becomes sexually promiscuous at a young age. By the time they're 14 or 15 years old, they're also operating on some approbation lust. And so they're They go out and they get involved in homosexuality and all kinds of sexual perversion, all because they're trying to gain approval of other people. And on the inside, there is much damage. There's not any more damage there than in the person who's trying to handle everything under the power of the strength. Just as socially, we're going to say, this guy's functional and this guy's dysfunctional. Don't you just love the psychobabble? But they're both. Because whenever we're operating on the sin nature, that's why I hate that terminology. Because we're living in a fallen world and so everything's dysfunctional. The only thing that becomes functional is when we're operating under the power of God the Holy Spirit. So I try to avoid all that terminology because it just brings with it that whole picture of life that is false, known as psychology. It's how we handle the rejection and we're going to handle it either in the power of the Holy Spirit through the application of doctrine or we're going to handle it through the stress busters because that's the only solution, that's the great solution that God has provided for us. Now one of the biggest problems that comes across in rejection is the issue of guilt and we're going to look at how the scripture says we should handle that next Wednesday night, so with our heads bowed and our eyes closed. Father, we thank you for your grace because it has provided everything we need to face any and all situations in our lives. There is nothing that is too great for your grace. Father, now as we have studied these things and understood how you work in our lives and how you have provided your word for us and how we can learn it, make it Epinosus Doctrine so that we can apply it. We pray that we would be, indeed, doers of the Word, applying these stress busters to the tests of our lives that we might grow and advance in our spiritual lives, that you might be glorified. We pray in Christ's name, Amen.