Good and Evil

Do you see the face of awareness in the top right and the blindness in the lower left? To visualize choices, each individual determines their own trajectory on the graph of life. How are naive perceptions in the upper left and deception in the lower right similar?

Up and to the right is “just right” with eyes wide open and aware, based on justice that is good as a recipe for a healthy society where mercy and justice exist. Down and to the left is “just wrong” with blind closed eyes of violence, where motives are evil — no mercy, no justice exists. In the negative/positive mix and positive/negative quadrants, there is ambiguity and deceptive lies of fake news with half-truths spread by people.

There is so much to learn and see on this journey through the quadrants. Revealed through mathematical equations of personal choices, the world, the flesh, and the devil are at work in 3 of the 4 sections. The characteristics of each quadrant will become clearer through multiple examples. Can you think of some scenarios in the current news?

Framework Design by Matrix Quadrants

A matrix is designed to reveal opposites, see paradoxes, and identify best research techniques. Then the results make the obvious more obvious to apply for healthy outcomes. Study this shell of a matrix design to begin understanding the structure.

With this basic framework, four different characteristics can be combined to identify a combination of results and clarify direction. The four quadrants reveal positive and negative features, labeled with Roman numerals, numbered in counter-clockwise order with a graphs of positive and negative outcomes. Then trendlines can be drawn by connecting the dots to project conclusions that predict trajectories of direction.

That means you can 1) examine theory, 2) plot data, and 3) put action into practice. You can see what the data reveals based on facts. Better decision-making is possible for continuous improvement and increased capacity.

Evidence demands a verdict

Evaluate your direction and accurately plot your own trendline. In real time as a follower of Jesus Christ, you are preparing in this way for the Judgment Seat of Christ. This is your Temple Identity Monitor (TIM). In other words, you can check how close you are to the upward path of the center line, aligned with God’s plan. As one who rejects Jesus, the consequences are evident.

Because you are willing to surrender your will, you can find the secret to the mystery of being transformed into the image of Jesus Christ. (That is the definition of becoming a disciple and a disciplemaker.) Living for the glory of God is your ultimate reason for being alive since your love of God rises above your love for whatever else. Love of God becomes your primary motive.

When the Holy Spirit is your Divine Driver working in and through you, you will experience the joy-filled Christian way of life. No longer will you ride aimlessly on the roller coaster of circumstantial happiness based on external happenings. Instead, you will enjoy the supernatural outflow of the fruit of the Spirit to manifest these multiple internal blessings and rise above.

“But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things!” (Galatians 5:22–23)

Spiritual Alignment of the Whole Person

“Spiritual transformation only happens as each essential dimension of the human being is transformed to Christlikeness under the direction of a regenerate will interacting with constant overtures of grace from God. Such transformation is not the result of mere human effort and cannot be accomplished by putting pressure on the will (heart, spirit) alone” (Dallas Willard).

Concentric circles — from the outside to the inside — illustrate the integration of the invisible soul. Then visualizing this soul journey on a map, divided into quadrants, is a way to track the trajectory of your life so that you can clarify where you will end up.

Quadrants Measure Progress and Clarify Directions

In order to explain the way to measure progress as well as visually represent the direction of your behavior, plane geometry is helpful. The progress in one direction or another reflects where you are, like a car on a map, driving towards a specific destination. The quadrants are labeled in Roman numerals going counterclockwise.

• Starting in the top right, the coordinates of this Cartesian grid are numbers that are positive (+,+). This is called Quadrant I (Roman numeral 1).
• The next is Quadrant II (Roman numeral 2) which is characterized as (-,+), where x to the left is negative, and y above the line is positive.
• Below the horizontal x-axis and to the left of the y-axis is Quadrant III (Roman numeral 3) where (-,-) indicates that both x and y coordinates are negative, just the opposite of Quadrant I. This is binary reality of being off-target compared to on-target.
• Finally, Quadrant IV (Roman numeral 4) is (+,-), where the x-value is to the right as positive, and the y-value is negative, below the horizontal x-axis.

Quadrant Coordinate Values

The origin (0,0) is in the center of the cross indicating where you begin your journey in life on earth to travel in any direction. As noted, Quadrant III completely misses the purpose for living, focusing on death, believing lies.

To identify the process and be aware of your progress, start at the intersection of the one central horizontal and vertical axis. Roadmaps clarify how to reach a destination or goal. Each person starts at the point of origin, not choosing where or when to be born.

To get to where you want to go, know what direction you are going. What gets your attention? That is determined by your motivation.

Next, definitions make the difference. Your identity is key. You are a unique creation of God, designed to become the person God created you to be — progressively more like Jesus, reflecting God in time. In other words, your heart reveals your INTENTION, your head reveals the VISION, and your hands and feet reveal the MEANS to progress from where you are to where you want to be. Actions are the result of intention and vision.

Therefore, imagine your life on a map, a graph. Within the quadrants, you choose where to spend your time, talents, and treasures in positive or negative ways.

Quadrant Paths Reveal Heart Motives

These quadrants combine the invisible concepts with your visible choices. To align your identity in Christ Jesus is to “humble yourself before God. Resist the devil and he will flee from you” (James 4:7). Map this graph to chart your choices.

Does the Holy Spirit lead you? The Holy Spirit is a Person, not a neuter “it” as some translations render “Holy Ghost.” Nor is He just an engine, a feeling, an inspiration to be emotional. His filling of you is real — a real Person recreating you, a new creation. You are not your own. You are bought with a price to be led by Him.

God will clearly show you in key ways what His will is by listening to these:

1. God’s Word;
2. Peace of His Holy Spirit; and,
3. Timing of circumstances.

All three must align. If all three do not align, God is often telling you to wait, or He is saying no. To win the game of life, intentional surrender is required to proceed by yielding to His timing. Instead of being a slave to your flesh, you let go of your plans and submit to God’s will, not your own. As Jesus prayed for God the Father’s will to be done, not His, you can follow His lead to become like Him. Are you ready? Being a Christian means that you will become more like Christ. You will be tested to see who is #1.

Start with the Spark of Your Heart

Start with your heart. Begin with that end in mind. Your heart is the spark that starts the engine of your life. Because God resides in you, the Holy Spirit chauffeurs you as His “clay pot” vehicle. The power of the Universe is living in you and working through you!

You are a vessel. God repeats and reinforces that your body is a vehicle or container for the Holy Spirit. You are His chosen passenger! He is the Driver, leading you ahead, not driving in a negative way of pushing you from behind.

His Word in you is real. Words define, describe, and create concepts that start in the heart, travel to the mind as thoughts, and continue to actions that move your hands and feet.

Your heart is the starter. That leads to the head. Then to the hands. Your HEART is the WHY, the motive, will, desires, intention, volition, “want to” to start the engine. These words are synonyms. Your HEAD refers to thoughts and words, the clarity of windshield vision to follow the pathways on the map. HANDS & FEET are the actions that result in emotions, speech, behavior to press the accelerator.

Out of the heart the mouth speaks

Remember that words are weapons. Become aware of the way that you talk to yourself and to others before you press the accelerator.

In Luke 6:45, Jesus says that people can be judged by what they say and do because these things reveal what is really inside the person: “A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart. For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of.” If you want to know what is on the inside of a person, you simply watch his actions; listen to what comes out of his mouth on a regular basis. This is not being judgmental; this is being realistic.

If a person is angry, rude, lewd, or immoral on a regular basis, you can be assured that this is what he is like “on the inside.” If a person is consistently kind, encouraging, and polite, then you can be sure that is what he is like “on the inside.” Of course, it is possible that someone might put up a façade to deceive others regarding his character, but eventually what is inside will come out. The mouth speaks out of the abundance — the overflow — of the heart.

The primary point of application in Jesus’ words seems to be this: when we see evil consistently coming out of a person in word and deed, we should not deceive ourselves by saying, “I think he really is a good person inside; he just has some bad habits” or “That’s just the way he talks, but he’s not really like that.” How many people fall in love and get married, thinking that the bad behavior they have observed is only an aberration? How many parents deceive themselves regarding the spiritual state of their children, thinking that they are true believers because of a childhood profession of faith, even though their lives demonstrate a heart of evil? (Got Questions)

Word and sword share w-o-r-d. Words and swords can be used as offensive or defensive tools. “Take the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God” (Ephesians 6:17). When temptation came to Jesus in Matthew 4, Jesus used the sword of the word from Scripture. God’s Word protects.

“For the word of God is living and active and full of power [making it operative, energizing, and effective]. It is sharper than any two-edged sword, penetrating as far as the division of the soul and spirit [the completeness of a person], and of both joints and marrow [the deepest parts of our nature], exposing and judging the very thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12, AMP).

In order to comprehend the foundational principles of the Christian way of life, visualize a car (representing your body as the mobile temple, the vehicle, of the Holy Spirit). As a tool for charting your journey, you will act on indicators of your identity and begin to chart your position on a scoreboard by “traveling” in quadrants on a graph. Your mouth reveals your heart motives. What does that mean?

Connecting the Dots

Dr. Greg Ogden in The Essential Commandment explains more about the soul that lives forever.

Every person is a soul made up of three highly interactive, inseparable component parts: heart, mind and body. As Dallas Willard says, the soul “correlates, integrates, and enlivens the various dimensions of the self” (Dallas Willard).

The Scripture tells us that all human beings are souls, and as soulful beings, each of us is being formed spiritually. The state of the soul, however, depends on whether we are in rebellion against God or have been penetrated by the life of God, whether we are moving away from God or toward God. Paul gives us a picture of the natural person — someone who does not understand the things of God (1 Corinthians 2:14).

These people believe the gospel is foolishness, and their souls have settled for far less than the satisfaction that only the one true God offers; though God places eternity in our hearts, many live only for what time offers. Idols made by humans have become the object of their devotion. The souls in rebellion against God are not on God’s wavelength; they are tuned to a frequency that makes them deaf to God’s invitation. The soul without God is dead to the things of God.

Some souls, however, have been imbued with the life of Spirit. The difference between the natural and the spiritual person is a life that comes from outside and penetrates the individual. Jesus told Nicodemus that he had to be born from above or born again (John 3:3). What he meant by this is that there is a life force which does not exist in the natural person. The word used almost exclusively in the Gospels for this life force is zoe.

This life force is what Jesus is talking about in John 10:10, for example, where he says, “I have come that they may have life [zoe], and have it to the full.” The most well-known verse in Scripture also uses zoe: “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life [zoe]” (John 3:16). There is just one of two trajectories for us as soulful beings then. We’re either a soulful (natural) person who is moving away from God or a soulful (spiritual) person who is moving toward God or who has been penetrated by zoe.

We are each a soulful being, made up of heart, mind and body. And, because we’re soulful beings, each of us is being formed spiritually. When Jesus says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength” and “love your neighbor as yourself,” he is assuming that we have caught the infection of zoe. Only if this good infection has penetrated our life can we be transformed into the person God intends for us to be (C.S. Lewis). As soulful beings, the heart, mind and body are each to be transformed intentionally and interactively so that we can love God and one another in an agape fashion” (Greg Ogden).

What direction are you going? To get where you want to go, determine the trajectory of where you will end. Here is a list of questions to ask yourself.

1. Examine your heart first. Ask WHY are you doing this?
2. Write down your thoughts how to get where you want to go. List daily actions. WHAT are you doing?
3. Include a regular check-in with a scoreboard to identify WHEN you progress or regress in quadrants.
4. Ask WHERE are you going to end up?
5. Review and evaluate progress by self-reflection and accountability within a community of Christ-like believers because you do not grow in isolation.
6. HOW is this working for WHO you are now and WHO you want to become?

Beware of being a religious person who thinks that by obeying God, you will become one of God’s children.

“The truth is the absolute reverse: Christians understand that, having been made God’s children by grace [undeserved, unearned], they seek to obey him, and that it is only because they have God working in them that they are able to do what God calls for in their lives. As Paul says in Philippians 2:12–13, you are to ‘work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God [who works within] you both to will and to work for His good pleasure.’ It is only as God works in you that you are able to do what God calls for from you. You can make an attempt at it on your own, but you cannot achieve it because what Jesus calls for here is not the natural response of natural men and women but the supernatural response of kingdom subjects’ (Begg, The Christian Manifesto, 2023).

The choice is yours. Map it out. Determine your direction.