Tim LaHaye - Spirit-Controlled Temperament

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Spirit-Controlled Temperament

Copyright by 1966 Post, Inc., La Mesa, California; 1994 renewed by Tim LaHaye. Revised edition copyright 1992 by Tim LaHaye. All rights reserved.

Cover background artwork copyright by Gavin Anderson/Shutterstock. All rights reserved.

Cover image of tree copyright by Telnova Olya/Shutterstock. All rights reserved.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the New King James Version. Copyright 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked KJV are taken from The Holy Bible, King James Version.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

LaHaye, Tim F.

Spirit-controlled temperament / Tim LaHaye. Rev. ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN-13: 978-0-8423-6220-7

ISBN-10: 0-8423-6220-7

1. Temperament Religious aspects Christianity. 2. Holy Spirit. I. Title.

BV4509.5.L328 1993

248.4 dc20 93-17269

Build: 2021-04-21 22:35:50 EPUB 3.0

Introduction

There is nothing more fascinating about people than their inherited temperament! It is temperament that provides each human being with the distinguishing qualities that make each as individually unique as the differing designs God has given to snowflakes. Temperament is the unseen force underlying human action, a force that can destroy a normal and productive human being unless it is disciplined and directed.

Temperament provides both our strengths and weaknesses. Although we like to think only of our strengths, everyone has weaknesses!

God has given Christians the Holy Spirit, who is able to improve our natural strengths and overcome our weaknesses as we cooperate with him. Thats the basic message of this book.

No one was more surprised than I when Spirit-Controlled Temperament, my first book, became a best-seller. It has now sold more than one million copies just in English. It has also been translated into more than twenty languages, for which I am particularly grateful. It is a special privilege to be a writer, as the written word allows you to minister to people you have never met all over the world.

Actually, I originally had no intention of this material being published as a book. It started out as printed notes of a series of Sunday night sermons delivered in 1966 to my congregation in San Diego. The series was designed to help them see how the Holy Spirit could strengthen their natural weaknesses.

Well, it was one of the most practical and best received sermon series that I delivered in my twenty-five years at that church. Many parishioners testified that God used it to transform their lives. I had noticed that the attendance was better when I printed my messages, and for this series one of my first we broke all previous attendance records.

In the providence of God, John Lindscott, the manager of the Campus Crusade bookstore in Arrowhead Springs and a former member of our church, happened to be in San Diego and hear the last of these sermons. Looking over the eleven messages, he said, Why dont you put these together and put a cover on it so I can try selling them in our bookstore?

Wondering if anyone outside our church would read them, I asked, How many should I send?

Three hundred, he said.

Well, my high-school children collated the printed notes and glued covers on them. Then I took them to a printer to cut them properly.

Three days later John called and said he wanted twelve hundred more! It seems he had given one to Hal Lindsey, teaching for Campus Crusade at the time, and asked him to recommend it. Hal crawled into bed that night and read it before he went to sleep. The next morning he held it up in class and said, I just read the neatest little book. You ought to read it. The first three hundred were gone in one afternoon. Thus the call for twelve hundred more. My second private printing was for three thousand, which I assumed would last the rest of my life.

About that time I preached this series in Phoenix. It had the same effect on those people as it had had on my congregation. The hundred copies of the book I took with me quickly sold out. About the time we needed a third printing, our children were getting tired of collating Dads books.

One day as my wife, Beverly, dropped me off at the airport to fly to Chicago, where I was to speak at a Sunday-school convention, we stopped and prayed that God would raise up a publisher for this little book. Little did we know that he had already prepared the ground.

John Lindscott had given Bob Hawkins, the marketing genius of Ken Taylors The Living Bible, a copy and said, Bob, you ought to publish this book. It seems that Bob had put it in his briefcase and hadnt read it until his wife, Shirley, had got hold of it and said, Bob, Tyndale House ought to publish this book.

With those recommendations from John Lindscott and Shirley Bob came to hear me speak in Chicago. Afterward he introduced himself and invited me out for dinner to the famed Jim Diamonds Steak House. What he said that night changed my life: Tyndale House is going to branch out into book as opposed to Bible publishing, and we would like to make Spirit-Controlled Temperament our first book.

And that is how my first book became the first book published by Tyndale House.

In a vital sense Spirit-Controlled Temperament, with its down-to-earth practical message on how we can strengthen our weaknesses through the Holy Spirit, reflects Gods gracious, strengthening work in these three principal parties. Now, twenty-five years later, Tyndale House is a major Christian publisher with one of the most complete lines of helpful biblically based materials in the country; Bob Hawkins has founded Harvest House, publisher of hundreds of good books; while I have written thirty books to date with more than 9 million copies in print worldwide.

When I first wrote Spirit-Controlled Temperament, I was excited about its potential for helping people who yearned for a more consistent Christian life. Its concepts had already changed my life, and through my extensive counseling ministry I was witnessing similar transformations in the lives of many others.

From the thousands of letters and personal testimonials I have received in response to my teaching this material in more than eight hundred Family Life Seminars around the world, I have become even more convinced of its relevance. So when Tyndale House asked me to revise the book, I gladly accepted the challenge.

The theory of the four temperaments is not perfect; no theory of human behavior is. However, it is the oldest on record, going back more than three thousand years: In Proverbs 30:11-14 the wise man saw four kinds of people. About five hundred years later, the four were given names by Hippocrates, said to be the father of modern medicine. Galen, a Greek doctor, came up with a detailed list of the strengths and weaknesses of the four around A.D. 200. This has remained pretty much intact throughout history and is still the prevailing position in Europe.