Those of you that know me, know that I am a huge fan of Dallas Willard. Recently I picked up his book, Renovation of the Heart: Putting On the Character of Christ. In it he discusses what I consider to be one of the most profound challenges facing the believer and church today -- how we can genuinely and powerfully experience and express the reality of Christ's life in us.
The following are a some excerpts from the first chapter of Dallas' book. The intention of posting them is to hopefully cause us to reflect and meditate on the powerful reality, privilege and opportunity we have as Jesus followers.
Note: My first thought was to emphasize the phrases that stuck out to me, but I have decided not to do that with the exception of his definition of 'spiritual formation'. All other italics in the text is his.)
...the greatest need you and I have— the greatest need of collective humanity— is renovation of our heart. That spiritual place within us from which outlook, choices, and actions come has been formed by a world away from God. Now it must be transformed...
Genuine transformation of the whole person into the goodness and power seen in Jesus and his “Abba” Father — the only transformation adequate to the human self — remains the necessary goal of human life...
The reality of all this is currently veiled from view by the very low level of spiritual life seen in Christianity as now placed before the general public. That low level explains why there are at present so many psychologies and spiritualities contesting the field — often led or dominated by ex-Christians who have abandoned recognized forms of Christianity as hopeless or even harmful.
Recently, however, a widespread and intense interest in spiritual formation, under that very name, has arisen among many groups of Christians and their leaders. Why is that? It is mainly due to a realization — confirmed now by many thorough and careful studies, as well as overwhelming anecdotal evidence — that, in its current and recent public forms, Christianity has not been imparting effectual answers to the vital questions of human existence. At least not to wide ranges of self-identifying Christians, and obviously not to nonChristians. And spiritual formation has now presented itself as a hopeful possibility for responding to the crying, unmet need of the human soul. The hope springs once again for a response to the need that is both deeply rooted in Christian traditions and powerfully relevant to circumstances of contemporary life...
Often we miss the opportunity to act with God in the now. We fail to find, quickly enough, new wineskins for the new wine...
WE CAN SAY, IN a preliminary manner, that spiritual formation for the Christian basically refers to the Spirit-driven process of forming the inner world of the human self in such a way that it becomes like the inner being of Christ himself. In what follows we must carefully examine what this means for today. But we can say at the outset that, 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.
Christian spiritual formation is focused entirely on Jesus. Its goal is an obedience or conformity to Christ that arises out of an inner transformation accomplished through purposive interaction with the grace of God in Christ. Obedience is an essential outcome of Christian spiritual formation (John 13: 34-35; 14: 21).
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. That is what has happened so often in the past, and this fact is a major barrier to wholeheartedly embracing Christian spiritual formation in the present. We know now that peculiar modes of dress, behavior, and organization just are not the point...
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. Often what human beings do is so horrible that we can be excused, perhaps, for thinking that all that matters is stopping it. But this is an evasion of the real horror: the heart from which the terrible actions come. In both cases, 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.
It is very hard to keep this straight. Failure to do so is a primary cause of failure to grow spiritually. 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.
It is love itself — not loving behavior, or even the wish or intent to love — that has the power to “always protect, always trust, always hope, put up with anything, and never quit” (1 Corinthians 13: 7-8, PAR). Merely trying to act lovingly will lead to despair and to the defeat of love. It will make us angry and hopeless.
But taking love itself — God’s kind of love — into the depths of our being through spiritual formation will, by contrast, enable us to act lovingly to an extent that will be surprising even to ourselves, at first. And this love will then become a constant source of joy and refreshment to ourselves and others. Indeed it will be, according to the promise, “a well of water springing up to eternal life” (John 4: 14) — not an additional burden to carry through life, as “acting lovingly” surely would be...
IN RENEWING THE LANGUAGE and reality of “spiritual formation” in our time and in opening afresh the way to the reality of it, the Spirit of God now calls his people to live from an adequate basis for character transformation, resulting in obedience to and abundance in Christ. This really is something different. 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. If we as Christ’s people genuinely enter Christ’s Way of the Heart, individuals will find a sure path toward becoming the persons they were meant to be: thoroughly good and godly persons, yet purged of arrogance, insensitivity, and self-sufficiency. Christian assemblies will become what they have been in many periods of the past and what the world desperately calls for today: incomparable schools of life — life that is eternal in quality now, as well as unending in quantity.
Blessings...
Willard, Dallas (2014-02-01). Renovation of the Heart: Putting On the Character of Christ. NavPress.
Teacher, speaker, entrepreneur and follower of Christ; with a passion to be a catalyst for authentic community.