The doctrine of negative volition

There are six areas of negative volition whereby you can fail to take in doctrine or fail to utilise doctrine or fail to reach supergrace.

1. Refusal to hear. This is the person who fails to assemble. This does not include the Exodus generation, we have already in this passage “the word of hearing did not profit.” This is the person who has rejected today his right pastor and doctrine, or both. That is primary negative volition.

2. Refusal to rebound after assembling to hear the Word. This is the person who assembles but because he is not filled with the Spirit he cannot take in the Word and the Word does not become objective reality in his left lobe. No gnwsij because he is quenching or grieving the Spirit, or both, while he sits in the assembly.

3. Refusal to use faith in the transfer. This is secondary negative volition. This is the believer who hears the doctrine under the filling of the Spirit and he understands the doctrine in his left lobe. This is the person that James calls a hearer of the Word but not a doer.

James 1:19 — the perfect passage on secondary negative volition, refusal to transfer doctrine from the left lobe to the human spirit. “Wherefore” is really “Know this” — perfect active imperative of o)ida used as a present tense. “Every man” means “every one”, every believer, every member of the body of Christ , every believer priest — “be” is a present active imperative. The present tense of the imperative is linear aktionsart, “keep on being”. And the first factor is “swift to hear.” That is positive volition for assembling. The adjective “swift”, taxuj, means prompt, speedy. It means to have the mental attitude that goes with the function. Then we have a prepositional phrase e)ij plus an infinitive — “swift for hearing.” “Slow to speak” means, in context, you can’t talk and learn at the same time. “Slow to wrath” reflects the mental attitude when you assemble. If you’ve blown your cork you can’t learn anything either. All of this is the first phase of GAP. “Swift to hear”: positive volition at the point of assembly; “slow to speak”: you can’t talk and learn at the same time; “slow to wrath”: your mental attitude is vitally important and involved.

“Know this, my beloved brethren, everyone keep on being swift for the purpose of hearing, slow for the purpose of chatting, slow with reference to mental attitude sins like anger.”

Verse 20 — “For the anger of the noble believer [the believer who assembles] does not produce righteousness from the source of God.” Righteousness is in view here for several reasons. As far as GAPing it is concerned it is to understand who and what God is.

Verse 21 — in order to rectify this problem in GAPing it we have the rebound technique. “Having removed all pollution [mental attitude sins] and the overflow of wickedness [sins of the tongue and overt sins] ...”

And then we get back to GAPing it again. “Receive is an aorist middle imperative of dexomai and it means to embrace. It is a constative aorist and it gathers into one ball of wax or one entirety every time that you GAP it. The middle voice connected with dexomai means to welcome and retain. The imperative mood: it is an order. “Meekness” is the mental attitude toward doctrine, toward the one teaching doctrine in the assembly. This is included by God the Holy Spirit through the writer James to remind you that there is no such thing in GAP as a personality conflict. You either have the right pastor or you don’t. He may rub you the wrong way, that is not the point. What he teaches is the issue. You take it from the Lord.

“the engrafted word” — the “ingerminated” or “impregnated” word, actually. Doctrine is no good unless it makes you pregnant. Pregnancy is the passing of doctrine from the left lobe to the human spirit, from the human spirit to the right lobe. That’s where it begins to really count.

“which is able to deliver your souls” — you are delivered from scar tissue, from the devil’s world.

Verse 22 — “Be ye” — present middle imperative of ginomai, “keep on becoming”, present tense, linear aktionsart. Active voice: you as a believer produce the action of the verb. Imperative mood: it is an order that you do this, that you transfer. This is the command right here which offsets secondary negative volition.

“doers” is a noun, the nominative plural of poihthj. This does not mean that you have to be running around “doing things for God”. Doing is function in the soul. The function is not necessarily overt, the function in this case is inside of the soul. “Keep on becoming doers of doctrine, both hearers only.” You have to be a hearer first, that is the first stage of GAP. The hearer is a believer who is positive and takes in ICE teaching from his right pastor. He is filled with the Holy Spirit because he rebounds whenever necessary so that he has an objective understanding of doctrine inside of his left lobe. This is a hearer. But you can’t stop there. Doctrine in the left lobe is not useable and volition must handle it. If you are positive faith will transfer it down to the human spirit where it becomes e)pignwsij. But the big problem with the believers in Jerusalem in 67 AD, and the big problem with the Exodus generation was that they were negative right here. Objective understanding of doctrine is being a hearer, and that doctrine has to go to work. So there is a great barrier that the doctrine has to cross. The barrier is between the left lobe, called the nouj or the mind, and the human spirit. The final objective: there is a line from the frame of reference right into the human spirit, and it is a vacuum line which pumps this doctrine right into the heart or the right lobe. So, “keep on becoming doers of the word.” That means you must persist in transferring doctrine from the left lobe to the human spirit.

“not hearers only” — if you have doctrine in your left lobe you can give it back on a piece of paper, you can pass an examination with it, but unless you transfer it you are is a state of self-deceit — “deceiving your own selves”, present middle participle of paralogizomai, which means to defraud or deceive yourself.

Verse 23 — “is like a noble believer contemplating his natural face in a mirror.”

Verse 24 — “he observes himself, and departs, and immediately disregards what sort of a person he is”. The whole point is that by looking into a mirror every day you are oriented to what you are. If you only look into a mirror once in a while you are never oriented. A mirror is a basic principle for orientation in life. “He immediately disregards what he looked like.” In other words, he is oriented for the day. Now, much more important is looking into another mirror, and that is the Word of God.

Verse 25 — “But he that looketh into the perfect law of liberty”. That refers to the Bible, and it refers to GAPing it daily. We have an adversative conjunction here. The word “looketh” is an aorist active participle of parakuptw, a verb for concentration. It means to stoop down and stare vigorously. So it means to concentrate. “He that concentrates on the perfect [completed] law [the canon of scripture] of liberty [Bible doctrine gives freedom to serve God, freedom to function under the priesthood]”

“and continueth” — here is the important thing. We have the aorist active participle of paramenw which means “and having continued” [Doing this all the time]. This is persisting in taking in Bible doctrine.

“he being” is literally, “he having become” — “the one having become not a hearer of oblivion but a doer of work, this man shall be happy in the action of doing.”

Translation: “The one having looked intently [concentrated] on the perfect law of freedom [Bible teaching], and having persisted, the one having become not a hearer of oblivion, but a doer of work [Bible doctrine going into the various areas of the soul where growth in involved], this one shall be happy in the action of doing [happiness in the function of GAP].”

James says “transfer”; Hebrews says, “this is what happens if you don’t transfer. Hebrews looks at it from the standpoint of faith or no faith, from the standpoint of volition in the soul. James looks at the happiness of being a doer of the Word, someone whose doctrine is working for him.

Hebrews 4:2 — “did not benefit them.”

4. Refusal to be consistent. Here is the person who functions correctly under GAP, but when under adversity he won’t function correctly. When he has any kind of difficulty in his life or when he wants something from the Lord he is always in Bible class. But this person is highly unstable and with a little prosperity he begins to neglect Bible doctrine.

5. Negative vulnerability. This is the believer who reaches supergrace but reacts. here is a believer who GAPs it consistently all the way to supergrace. Once he reaches supergrace he begins to react. He had supergrace capacity, started to receive supergrace blessings, and one day he reacted toward the reaction column — disillusion, boredom, discouragement, self-pity, loneliness, frustration, being jilted, being under some kind of mental attitude sin such as jealousy or bitterness or implacability. These are some of the things that cause reaction. Any time you are bored or disillusioned, or any of these others, you are vulnerable to the whole realm of negation toward doctrine. This is negative vulnerability in which in a frantic search for happiness reaction you lose the ECS, you have blackout of the soul, you lose everything.

6. Negative emotionalism, which is the believer becoming negative to doctrine through emotional revolt of the soul. This is what happens to holy-rollers, etc.