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PROGRAM D-7600
Why do you think you have the personality you have? Let me assure you, your personality is not an accident. God has given you your personality to be used as a resource for his purposes. However, the truth is that your strongest personality trait can be your greatest weakness, if you don’t learn to polish that personality.
It might be helpful for you to analyze your personality. Simply make a chart listing your strongest personality traits and showing the strengths and the weaknesses of those traits. Be sure you look for the good and the bad side of each trait. Sometimes we concentrate on one or the other too much.
When you have done that, take your prayer journal—and if you don’t have one, I encourage you to start one in some sort of a notebook—and list the good things about your personality which you need to thank God for. You should regularly thank God for the way you’ve been created and the good things he is doing with your personality. That’s not pride; that’s thankfulness.
Then, list the things that you know need to be changed and improved about you—the rough edges that need to be polished. For example, I tend to talk without thinking, and I’m very impatient. Those are personality weaknesses. It’s good to find Scripture verses to correspond with those weak areas. In my prayer journal I have written: “Lord, make me slow to speak and quick to listen,” which is right from James 1:19. And I pray on the fruits of the Spirit as found in Colossians 3, dressing the inner person with patience along with all the others.
There are many others listed in my journal as a result of God’s conviction in my heart and seeing the weaknesses of my personality traits. Very often I pray through that list, my personality improvement list. I know these are desires that are in line with the Word of God, and therefore I know he will give me these desires. And in this way, day by day, little by little, God the Holy Spirit is able to polish the rough edges of my personality and transform me more and more into the image of Jesus.
I regularly pray Romans 12:1-2, offering my body and my personality to God as a living sacrifice, giving him permission to transform my mind. That’s a good passage to pray into your life.
Instead of wishing you were like someone else or allowing your strengths to become your weaknesses, focus on thanking God for his master design in you, and work at enhancing the good side of your personality, while polishing the rough edges. And remember 2 Corinthians 3:18 which says, “. . . we . . . are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory. . . “