The Gospel for Every Enneagram (GHFC Elective: Lesson 3)

Review:

Today we’re continuing the description of the Enneagram numbers. Last week we went over the 5, 6, and 7’s: the Mind center, the people who are confused about how to secure themselves in the world. Today we’re going to go through the 2, 3, and 4’s known as the Heart Center: These numbers are the most disordered in how they use feelings to gage love. And next week we’ll get to the 8, 9, and 1’s who improperly wield power. We’re also going to answer the question: what is our responsibility to others in regards to their sin? 

Reminders

Remember these confusions about how to get love, power, and security develop because we are born out of a relationship with God. Those who are without Christ CAN’T support themselves with real love, power, or security because they are disconnected from the source of these things. So they rely on their strengths to get a fake version of what they need.

These strengths become their identity. And, if unattended to, these strengths can become a prison preventing them from acting contrary to their “personality.”

It’s not just unbelievers who get stuck like this. Some Christians, and I have to put myself in this category, believe that faith in Christ is something you do once. It’s like they put Jesus in their backpack and continue on using their old coping mechanism while that backpack faith grows heavier and heavier. If our faith doesn’t grow, it becomes dead weight.

Sadhu Sundar Singh, an Indian Missionary, describes these sort of Christians as: "invalids who, though they have recovered from their disease and are taking nourishing food, yet remain weak because they do no work and take no proper exercise.”

The Lord really revealed to me how I was using my coping mechanism: first through the Enneagram and then quarantining. Suddenly, I couldn’t withdraw and be by myself and analyze life. I had no other choice but to put my strengths on the altar.

The 2’s: The Helper

So the Heart Center: the 2, 3, and 4’s. These numbers are the most disordered in how they use feelings to gage love. By the way when I say love, I mean other’s good regard, lovingkindness, and understanding. There are other parts to love—real love gives others power, it’s fair and gives security—, but that’s how the Enneagram uses love in this context.

So the 2’s, the Helpers value and feel a need for God’s compassion, care, and loving-kindness. The 2’s are the behind-the-scenes nurses, caretakers, mothers, waitresses, saints and martyrs. They are more commonly women than men.The 2’s are kinda complicated because they try to obtain love by giving love.

If they’re hungry, they make someone else a sandwich because they intuitively know that the meeting of their own needs is somehow connected to meeting others’ needs. And they’re sort of right. Our receiving from the Lord naturally leads to our giving to others. However the 2’s have this backwards. They think that they MUST give to get. So they do to others what they wish others others would do for them.

In church the 2’s coping mechanisms are especially encouraged: “die to yourself, take up your cross, defer to another, be a servant to all.” And the 2’s are like: “okay; I wanted to do that anyway.” See the 2’s have come to believe that their own needs are shameful and that it is selfish to allow others to serve them.

The 2’s are highly sensitive to other’s emotions because through other’s emotions towards them they feel good about themselves. They often change who they are depending on who they’re with. 2’s can have a tendency towards co-dependency, and have a difficult time saying no and putting up boundaries.

Their primary sin is pride due to always being the helper and not accepting help themselves. They feel that they are more loving, more compassionate, more caring than everyone else. Rohr and Ebert point out that those who give too much are just as much of a burden on a community as those who take too much. Because eventually those who give too much ask to be paid back, and who can give as much as 2?

Examples of 2’s: Eleanor Roosevelt, Elizabeth Taylor, Monica Lewinsky, John Denver, Josh Groban, Dolly Parton, Bellatrix Lestrange, Cinderella, Peeta Melark, Marmee in Little Women. They are frequently supporting characters in movies, Martha in the Bible had 2 tendencies.

If you are a two let me remind you: You are not any more or less needy than anyone else, and God likes the you with needs. He made you with those needs and he loves meeting them with tenderness and understanding and empathy. He wants you to ask him for what you need. In fact, he modeled this for you in the person of Christ. The Shepherd, that is Jesus, became a sheep. Jesus became fully human, acknowledged his needs and looked to God to fulfill them. See it is only through becoming a needy sheep that we can ever serve others from God’s abundance. “For the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd.” (Rev 7:17)

Jesus freed us from having to have transactional relationships. He died to free us from being a slave to ignoring our desires. We don’t have to give to get, but we do have to open our hands and acknowledge their emptiness.

That is the gospel for the Enneagram 2.

The 4’s: The Individualist

We’re going to go on to the 4 and go back to 3 after. The 4’s are called the Individualists. They most value and feel the need of God’s beauty, depth, and harmony. On the handout, I’ve put creativity & zeal. It’s hard to boil down what the 4’s value. It’s too ethereal—which the 4’s love.

4’s are fairly easy to spot in a crowd because they’re usually the ones that stand out. They tend to act, dress, and speak differently than others because they are longing for someone to acknowledge and know them as a beautiful unique person. In conversations the 4’s go deep fast and can say shocking things, which often make people feel uncomfortable or alarmed. The 4’s would tell you that they’re being authentic or real. And to the 4’s the most real thing is how they feel.

Remember 2’s tend to hang their identity on other’s emotions. The 4’s tend to hang their identity on their own emotions, and in trying to find meaning in them, in expressing them artistically and having others validate and understand them.

The 4’s are often these artistic, melancholy types. They are very aware of aesthetics, what tastes, sounds, feels and looks harmonious. And this coincides with their search for meaning and beauty and harmony.The 4’s can be stuck in mental fantasies of people pursuing them and recognizing them as unique because that is what they long for from God: to be seen and pursued.

However, the very thing they want—to be recognized as unique—is what results in their underlining sin: envy. They look around and feel like everyone is more normal than them, more happy, more successful, more attractive. It’s this self-inflicted tragedy, really.

Examples: Jackie Kennedy, Edgar Allen Poe, Virginia Woolf, Anne Frank, Billie Holiday, Judy Garland, Cher, Prince, Sarah McLachlan, Alanis Morrisette, Angelina Jolie, Nicolas Cage, Johnny Depp. King David may have been a 4/3 or 3/4.

I want to speak to the 4’s or anyone who resonates with 4 tendencies: God sees you. God sees you. God sees you.

The gospel for the 4’s is to believe in the individualized love God has for you especially. He created you to reflect himself like no one else can WHEN you are firmly resting in that understanding love he has for you.That feeling of awed reverence that you get when walking into an old church with stained glass windows, God meant that for you.

The poetry in the prophets and the metaphors in the parables that trigger images across your imagination, God meant those for you. The vivid red lacerations across Jesus' back, the midnight-black in the noon-day sky, His’ cries on the cross of his father’s abandonment: God meant that for you.

 
Everywhere, not just in “spiritual” places God is voicing his love for you personally. Even in the mundane and ordinary. Because God’s beauty and meaning encompasses what even a 4 might discard.

 
A redeemed 4 can create something extraordinary, but they’re okay with producing assembly-line work because they know they are not their art and that God, not themselves, assigns all beauty and meaning. They don’t have to understand how they feel in order to move forward.They are free to create and then let their art go! God gets it.

That is the gospel for the 4.

The 3’s: The Achiever

Lastly 3’s, the Achievers or Performers long for God’s glory and excellence. They delight in accomplishing things well and in the glory this produces. By the way, acquiring glory is not necessarily a bad thing. God made us to be glory-bearers in what we do: in climbing the tallest mountain, performing a lovely ballet, playing an excellent game of baseball, etc. This feeling of exaltation when we do something well comes from God, which is why I think Satan attempts to make us feel guilty whenever we do something we truly glory in.

So where do the 3’s go wrong? In the heart, their motive for seeking glory. Apart from God, the 3’s feel they MUST acquire their own glory in order to be accepted and loved. They feel that they have to prove their worth. It’s heart-breaking because the 3’s become slaves to putting on a good performance and never failing. When 3’s fail, they either: disassociate from it, dress it up like it wasn’t failure, or blame someone else for it.

If the 2’s identity rests on other’s emotions and the 4’s identity rests their own emotions, the 3’s identity is disconnected from what they really want or feel. See the 3’s are so often playing a role, performing for people, that they begin to believe their performance IS who they are. Their sin is deceit—being someone they’re not. Interesting fact: Evangelical American pastors are often 3’s. And Americans in general value 3-ish strengths.

Examples: Bill Clinton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Muhammed Ali, Tiger Woods, Lance Armstrong, Elvis Presley, Condoleeza Rice, Paul McCartney, Madonna, Sting, Whitney Houston, Tom Cruise, Barbra Streisand, Justin Bieber, Will Smith, Mr. Incredible, Buzz Lightyear in the First Toy Story. Some people think Jacob in the Bible was a 3, the deceiver.

What liberates the 3 from their need to perform? Christ’s performance. Jesus checked all the boxes and brought ultimate glory to God through his life and death. It’s like God made a contest to see who could be the best human and Jesus won the first place medal. And then Jesus gave us that medal to wear around our neck. We put on Jesus’ glory! And get to say, “I won through Christ!”

Thus the redeemed 3 who is trusting that God accepts them because of Christ’s performance, is okay with a less than perfect performance that others people might actually criticize. They can do things that people might think is a failure, because they know God’s measurement of success if different than man’s. God makes something of failures.

And that is the gospel for the Enneagram 3.

Sin Reminder

At this point, I want to reminder anyone who is NOT a 2, 3, or 4 about being judgmental.It’s easy for others to be disgusted with a 3 when they start working the crowd to gather admirers, or to roll our eyes when the 4’s start talking about how their art isn’t appreciated, or to get angry when the 2’s are patronizing or making martyrs of themselves.

It’s easy for us to want to shake them and say, “Snap out of it! Just trust God’s love!” But remember, these ways of coping were once these people’s only way of knowing that they were loved and accepted and valuable. How can they just stop? To stop people-pleasing or image-managing or performing would be suicide to them, heart suicide. It would be like asking them to step off a cliff. And unless they know that the Lord is going to catch them, they’re not going to do it.

Besides, only the Holy Spirit can lead someone off a cliff into God’s hands.

VII. Encouraging Others

And here we loop back to the question I asked at the end of last week: what’s our role to other brothers and sisters in Christ in regards to sin. And by the way, I mean the sin of using these coping mechanisms instead of trusting Christ. I don’t mean breaking our local government’s law. That’s a different issue.

If we’re not supposed to play doctor on each other or point out each other’s flaws, how can we encourage others to leap off that cliff into God’s hands? To have faith?I think by jumping first. By allowing another’s “sin” to draw me off that cliff into God’s hands first. Other people’s sin is one of the ways God uses to draw out the poison of sin in my own bloodstream. 

Do other’s imperfections surface the anger and frustration within me at the slowness of their progress towards godliness? Does it get in the way of you being perfect?

Do other’s imperfections make me feel like I have to be the wise one, the one with all the answers? 

Do other’s imperfections make me suffer? It threatens your happiness? 

Am I afraid of how it might look if I associate with someone who has these imperfections? 

Go to the Lord and ask him to reveal what’s going on in your heart. And when he does, let the old self die.
Step off that cliff and fall into God’s hands, yell back to those standing on the edge of the cliff that God caught you. And here the cliff analogy breaks down because faith isn’t something we do once. Faith is something we do in all things, all day long. Like one step after another into seemingly-thin-air.

See, it is impossible and, frankly, fool-hearty for anyone to live like this without believing God is going to catch them. We need to see the evidence. For the 5, 6, and 7’s, it’s evidence that God provides security. For the 2, 3, and 4’s it’s evidence of that particular kind of love. Next week we’ll get into the 8, 9, and 1 and evidence of God’s power at work.

When we tell and retell the stories of how God saved us, we present the evidence to others of things unseen. How will people know unless we tell them?

Video to this lesson: https://www.facebook.com/granadaheightsfriends

Link to Lesson 4