Renovation of the Heart

Metadata

Author: Dallas Willard
Full Title: Renovation of the Heart
Category: #books

Highlights

one reason why so many people do in fact fail to immerse themselves in the words of the New Testament, and neglect or even avoid them, is that the life they see there is so unlike what they know from their own experience.
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- Note: Need to keep this in mind when I am frustrated that others don’t see what I see, don’t show an interest in what interests me. My own current lifestyle and past experience is very different from the norm --- I’m the oddball.
Therefore the clear New Testament presentation of the life we are unmistakably offered in Christ only discourages them or makes them hopeless.
It really isn’t true that where there is a will there is automatically a way, though of course will is crucial. There is also needed an understanding of exactly what needs to be done and how it can be accomplished: of the instruments for the realization of that life and the order of their use.
The perceived distance and difficulty of entering fully into the divine world and its life is due entirely to our failure to understand that “the way in” is the way of pervasive inner transformation and to our failure to take the small steps that quietly and certainly lead to it.
all of the hindrances to our putting off the old person and putting on the new one can be removed or mastered.
the situations in which we find ourselves are never as important as our responses to them, which come from our “spiritual” side. A carefully cultivated heart will, assisted by the grace of God, foresee, forestall, or transform most of the painful situations before which others stand like helpless children saying “Why?”
The revolution of Jesus is in the first place and continuously a revolution of the human heart or spirit. It did not and does not proceed by means of the formation of social institutions and laws, the outer forms of our existence, intending that these would then impose a good order of life upon people who come under their power. Rather, his is a revolution of character, which proceeds by changing people from the inside through ongoing personal relationship to God in Christ and to one another. It is one that changes their ideas, beliefs, feelings, and habits of choice, as well as their bodily tendencies and social relations. It penetrates to the deepest layers of their soul. External, social arrangements may be useful to this end, but they are not the end, nor are they a fundamental part of the means.
T. S. Eliot once described the current human endeavor as that of finding a system of order so perfect that we will not have to be good. The Way of Jesus tells us, by contrast, that any number of systems—not all, to be sure—will work well if we are genuinely good. And we are then free to seek the better and the best.
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- Note: Systems do not create goodness, though they can create circumstances in which goodness can be nurtured, can flourish. Goodness can express itself through systems --- the “better” the system, the less friction in expression, the more power transmitted.
This impotence of “systems” is a main reason why Jesus did not send his students out to start governments or even churches as we know them today, which always strongly convey some elements of a human system.
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- Note: And of course the eventual response was to systematize, and then get lost in admiring the system and delving into it, rather than applying it (and finding that it doesn’t work as a system).
Spiritual formation, without regard to any specifically religious context or tradition, is the process by which the human spirit or will is given a definite “form” or character. It is a process that happens to everyone. The most despicable as well as the most admirable of persons have had a spiritual formation. Terrorists as well as saints are the outcome of spiritual formation. Their spirits or hearts have been formed. Period.
in the degree to which spiritual formation in Christ is successful, the outer life of the individual becomes a natural expression or outflow of the character and teachings of Jesus.
External manifestation of “Christlikeness” is not, however, the focus of the process; and when it is made the main emphasis, the process will certainly be defeated, falling into deadening legalisms and pointless parochialism.
But—I reemphasize, because it is so important—the primary “learning” here is not about how to act, just as the primary wrongness or problem in human life is not what we do.
it is who we are in our thoughts, feelings, dispositions, and choices—in the inner life—that counts. Profound transformation there is the only thing that can definitively conquer outward evil.
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Love, we hear, is patient and kind (1 Corinthians 13:4). Then we mistakenly try to be loving by acting patiently and kindly—and quickly fail. We should always do the best we can in action, of course; but little progress is to be made in that arena until we advance in love itself—the genuine inner readiness and longing to secure the good of others. Until we make significant progress there, our patience and kindness will be shallow and short-lived at best.
The present moment is not an occasion to keep on doing the same things Christians have been doing in the recent past—except now “really meaning it.” It is time to change our focus, individually and in our Christian groupings.
Spiritual formation in Christ is therefore not a mysterious, irrational—possibly hysterical—process: something that strikes like lightening, whenever and wherever it will, if at all. Or something that is magically conferred upon us as we dwell in the midst of curious rituals and antique practices. Spiritual experiences (Paul on the Damascus road, and so on) do not constitute spiritual formation, though they could be a meaningful part thereof and sometimes are. This, I freely admit, is contrary to a view of grace as passivity that is widely held now. But the God-ordained order of the soul under grace must be discovered, respected, and cooperated with, if its God-intended results for spiritual growth are to be attained.
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The human heart, will, or spirit is the executive center of a human life. The heart is where decisions and choices are made for the whole person. That is its function.
- Note: True as far as it goes … but wrong in that it characterizes the heart/will/spirit as a thing, which will presumably dissolve under inquiry.
A person who is prepared and capable of responding to the situations of life in ways that are “good and right” is a person whose soul is in order, under the direction of a well-kept heart, in turn under the direction of God.
Although a free action has many conditions, those conditions do not an action make. If it is our act, there must be added to those conditions the inner and always unforced “yes” or “no” by which the person responds to the situation. This response is our unique contribution to reality. It is ours, it is us, as nothing else is.
Without the inner “yes” there is no sin, for only that “yes” (or “no”) is just us. The thought of sin is not sin and is not even a temptation. Temptation is the thought plus the inclination to sin—possibly manifested by lingering over the thought or seeking it out. But sin itself is when we inwardly say “yes” to the temptation, when we would do the deed, even though we do not actually do it.
Human beings have only some small element of spirit—unbodily, personal power—right at the center of who they are and who they become. It is, above all, this spirit (or will) that must be reached, cared for, and transformed in spiritual formation. The human will is primarily what must be given a godly nature and must then proceed to expand its godly governance over the entire personality.
To choose, one must have some object or concept before the mind and some feeling for or against it.
what we feel and think is (or can and should be) to a very large degree a matter of choice in competent adult persons, who will be very careful about what they allow their mind to dwell upon or what they allow themselves to feel. This is crucial to the practical methods of spiritual formation.
Action never comes from the movement of the will alone. Often—perhaps usually—what we do is not an outcome of deliberate choice and a mere act of will, but is more of a relenting to pressure on the will from one or more of the dimensions of the self.
weak.” If the six dimensions are properly aligned with God and what is good—and therefore with each other—that “mere relenting” will be good, and our actions will simply be the good fruit of the good tree. If they are not so aligned, they will be the inevitable bad fruit of the bad tree.
Actions are not impositions on who we are, but are expressions of who we are. They come out of our heart and the inner realities it supervises and interacts with.
he brought them (and later us) to a new life of interactive (covenant) relationship to him. This interactive, covenant relationship is eternal life (John 17:3).
But this eternal kind of life is not a passive life. Passivity was for the Israelites, and it is for us one of the greatest dangers and difficulties of our spiritual existence.
In the beginning of the conquest of the Promised Land, the walls of Jericho fell down, to make clear God’s presence and power. Welcome to the kingdom! But that never happened again. The Israelites had to take the remaining cities through hand-to-hand warfare, though always still with divine assistance.
What was then true of the Promised Land of the Israelites was then and is now true of individual human beings who come to God. The Israelites were saved or delivered by grace just as surely as we are. But in both cases “grace” means we are to be, and are enabled to be, active to a degree we have never been before.
if we will only move to that land now, the passage in physical death will be but one more day in the endless life we have long since begun. That is exactly what Jesus meant when he said, “If anyone keeps my words he shall never see or taste death” (John 8:51, PAR).
much of what we do in Christian circles with very good intentions—hoping, we say, to see steady, significant growth in Christlikeness—simply makes no sense and leads nowhere so far as substantive spiritual formation is
One of the greatest obstacles to effective spiritual formation in Christ today is simple failure to understand and acknowledge the reality of the human situation as it affects Christians and nonChristians alike. We must start from where we really are.
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BECAUSE IN OUR PRESENT thought world the horror is “hidden,” “sin” as a condition of the human self is not available as a principle of explanation for those who are supposed to know why life goes as it does and to guide others.
the real sources of our failures lie in choice and the factors at work in it. Choice is where sin dwells.
the warpedness and wrungness of the human will is something we cannot admit into “serious” conversation. We are like farmers who diligently plant crops but cannot admit the existence of weeds and insects and can only think to pour on more fertilizer. Similarly, the only solution we know to human problems today is “education.”
education (the institution) has now adopted values, attitudes, and practices that make any rigorous understanding of the human self and life impossible.
sin, in a form everyone plainly recognizes as such, undermines even the efforts of Christ’s own people to be his people.
The “confessions” of the various pastors were often half-truths or less and were clearly matters of a formality which would, supposedly, allow the pastors and staff members to “get on with God’s business.”
Most Christians have never been in an intimate fellowship where the corrupted condition of the human soul did not in fact prevail—that is, in a fellowship in which they could assume that everyone would do what everyone knew to be right.
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But sex is far from being the only problem. The presence of vanity, egotism, hostility, fear, indifference, and downright meanness can be counted on among professing Christians. Their opposites cannot be counted on or simply assumed in the “standard” Christian group; and the rare individual who exemplifies them—genuine purity and humility, death to selfishness, freedom from rage and depression, and so on—will stand out in the group with all the obtrusiveness of a sore thumb. He or she will be a constant hindrance in group processes and will be personally conflicted by those processes, for he or she will not be living on the same terms as the others.
- Note: Because the “standard” Christian group hasn’t been gathered according to those criteria. Which is OK, the criteria are aspirational, not membership requirements --- but there hast to be an acknowledgement that people will fall short, some more than others, and a radical commitment from each to walking the path of measuring up to those criteria. The ones who exemplify them stand out like a sore thumb because aspiration has been set aside for mutual admiration, you don’t point out my shortfall and I won’t point out yours, everyone pretending to be on the same (high) level.
As Vance Havner used to say, Jesus was not crucified for saying “Behold the lilies of the field, how they toil not, neither do they spin,” but for saying “Behold the Pharisees, how they steal.”
“Knowledge” in biblical language never refers to what we today call “head knowledge,” but always to experiential involvement with what is known—to actual engagement with it.
when Jesus defines the eternal life that he gives to his people as “that they might know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent” (John 17:3, KJV), he is speaking of the grace of constant, close interaction with the Trinitarian being of God that Jesus brings into the lives of those who seek and find him.
- Note: Even so, the definition of eternal life that Jesus gives doesn’t directly extend to gaining an afterlife, or a perpetual existence, or anything like that. It only says that your relationship with God will change in the area of knowledge (as the Bible defines knowledge).
the condition of lostness is not the same as the outcome to which it leads. We’re not lost because we are going to wind up in the wrong place. We are going to wind up in the wrong place because we are lost.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s words capture the scene: “Whereas the primal relationship of man to man is a giving one, in the state of sin it is purely demanding. Every man exists in a state of complete voluntary isolation; each man lives his own life, instead of all living the same God-life.”6 Well, of course. Each is a god unto himself.
The ultimately lost person is the person who cannot want God. Who cannot want God to be God. Multitudes of such people pass by every day, and pass into eternity. The reason they do not find God is that they do not want him or, at least, do not want him to be God. Wanting God to be God is very different from wanting God to help me.
One does not miss heaven by a hair, but by constant effort to avoid and escape God. “Outer darkness” is for one who, everything said, wants it, whose entire orientation has slowly and firmly set itself against God and therefore against how the universe actually is. It is for those who are disastrously in error about their own life and their place before God and
they will then for the first time be able to do what they want to do. Of course they will be able to steal, lie, and murder all they want—which will be none at all. But they will also be able to be truthful and transparent and helpful and sacrificially loving, with joy—and they will want to be.
Those who are not genuinely convinced that the only real bargain in life is surrendering ourselves to Jesus and his cause, abandoning all that we love to him and for him, cannot learn the other lessons Jesus has to teach us.
Being dead to self is the condition where the mere fact that I do not get what I want does not surprise or offend me and has no control over me.
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The one who is dead to self will certainly not even notice some things that others would—for example, things such as social slights, verbal put-downs and innuendos, or physical discomforts. But many other rebuffs to “the dear self,” as the philosopher Immanuel Kant called it, will be noticed still, often quite clearly. However, if we are dead to self to any significant degree, these rebuffs will not take control of us, not even to the point of disturbing our feelings or peace of mind. We will, as St. Francis of Assisi said, “wear the world like a loose garment, which touches us in a few places and there lightly.”
The sad thing when a leader (or any individual) “fails” is not just what he or she did, but the heart and life and whole person who is revealed by the act.
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Imagine a person wondering day after day if he or she is going to learn Arabic or if he or she is going to get married to a certain person—just waiting, to see whether it would “happen.” That would be laughable. But many people actually seem to live in this way with respect to major issues involving them, and with a deplorable outcome. That explains a lot of why lives go as they do. But to learn a language, and for the many even more important concerns of life, we must intend the vision if it is to be realized. That is, we must initiate, bring into being those factors that would bring the vision to reality.
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- Note: Don’t wait for the Holy Spirit to act. In fact, can you even distinguish between action of the Holy Spirit and your own action?
If we are to be spiritually formed in Christ, we must have and must implement the appropriate vision, intention, and means. Not just any path we take will do. If this VIM pattern is not put in place properly and held there, Christ simply will not be formed in us.
Instead of inward transformation, some outward form of religion—often today even called “a spirituality”—is taken or imposed as the goal of practical endeavor. What is then important is to be a “good _______ ” (you can fill in the blank). And the respective social group—the “good _______s”—will enforce that importance, on pain of disapproval or exclusion from the group. Or the individual even enforces it upon himself or herself as what is “obviously” right. But, whatever the details, authentic inward transformation into Christlikeness is omitted. It is not envisioned, intended, or achieved.
The kingdom of God is the range of God’s effective will, where what God wants done is
THE VISION OF LIFE in the kingdom through reliance upon Jesus makes it possible for us to intend to live in the kingdom as he did. We can actually decide to do it.
Concretely, we intend to live in the kingdom of God by intending to obey the precise example and teachings of Jesus. This is the form that trust in him takes. It does not take the form of merely believing things about him, however true they may be.
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Perhaps the hardest thing for sincere Christians to come to grips with is the level of real unbelief in their own life: the unformulated skepticism about Jesus that permeates all dimensions of their being and undermines what efforts they do make toward Christlikeness.
Such may have wished that what they supposedly intend would happen, and perhaps they even wanted to do it (or for it to be done); but they did not decide to do it, and their intention—which well may have begun to develop—aborted and never really formed.
Rather, if I intend to obey Jesus Christ, I must intend and decide to become the kind of person who would obey. That is, I must find the means of changing my inner being until it is substantially like his, pervasively characterized by his thoughts, feelings, habits, and relationship to the Father.
I can also consciously practice explicitly “self-sacrificial” actions in other, less “demanding,” situations. I can become a person for whom “looking out for number one” is not the framework of my life.
One’s culture is seen most clearly in what one thinks of as “natural” and as requiring no explanation or even thought.
The so-called “right to privacy” of which so much is made in contemporary life is in very large measure merely a way of avoiding scrutiny in our wrongdoing.
All else that enters our mind, and especially the thoughts that first come to mind as we encounter various kinds of events that make up our lives, will be healthy, godly, and good. The conclusions we “jump” to prompted by events around us will be those in harmony with the realities of a good-God-governed universe, not the illusions of a godless or a me-governed universe, or one where man is supreme—or no one is. My patterns of thinking will conform to the truths of scriptural revelation, and I will extend and apply those truths, under the guidance of God’s Holy Spirit, to all of the details of my daily life.
Spiritual (trans)formation of my thought life is achieved by the ministry of the Spirit in the midst of my necessary and well-directed efforts.
A second danger, associated with the first, is that of simple ignorance of fact.
A third great danger in the thought life of the disciple is allowing our desires to guide our thinking: especially the desire to prove we are right.
fourth and final great danger has to do with the images that we admit into our minds. These may be images of intellectual authority or images of financial well-being or images of the macabre and horrible or images of power (domination) and sexuality, and so on.
Disciplines are activities that are in our power and that enable us to do what we cannot do by direct effort.
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And with respect to feelings that are inherently injurious and wrong, their strategy is not one of resisting them in the moment of choice but of living in such a way that they do not have such feelings at all, or at least do not have them in a degree that makes it hard to decide against them when appropriate.
Most people cannot envision who they would be without the fears, angers, lusts, power ploys, and woundedness with which they have lived so long. They identify with their habit-worn feelings.
Joy is a pervasive sense—not just a thought—of well-being: of overall and ultimate well-being. Its primary feeling component is delight in an encompassing good well-secured.
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PEACE IS THE REST of will that results from assurance about “how things will turn out.” It is always a form of active engagement with good, plus assurance that things will turn out well.
To be at peace with God and others (family, neighbors, and coworkers) is a great attainment and depends on graces far beyond ourselves as well as on our own efforts. That is also true of being at peace with oneself.
It is, I gently suggest, a serious error to make “outreach” a primary goal of the local congregation, and especially so when those who are already “with us” have not become clear-headed and devoted apprentices of Jesus, and are not, for the most part, solidly progressing along the path.