The Gospel for the Enneagram 4
The Individualist
The 4’s: The Individualist
The Enneagram 4’s are often called the Individualists. They most value and feel the need of God’s beauty, depth, and harmony. They also mirror God’s 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 beautiful unique people. In conversations, the 4’s go deep fast and can say shocking things that often make people feel uncomfortable or alarmed. The 4’s would tell you that they’re just being authentic or real. And to the 4’s the most real thing is how they feel.
Enneagram 2’s tend to hang their identity on other’s emotions. The 4’s tend to hang their identity on their own emotions, 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. This coincides with their search for meaning, 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 underlying sin: envy. They look around and feel like everyone is more normal than them, more happy, more successful, more attractive.
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 as dull and common.
A redeemed 4 can create something extraordinary, but they’re okay with producing assembly-line work too because they know they are not their art and that God, not themselves, assigns beauty and meaning to all things. 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 understands it.
That is the gospel for the 4.