Renovation of the Heart: Putting on the Character of Christ with Bonus Content (Designed for Influence)

by Dallas Willard

as abundant experience teaches, to strive merely to act in conformity with his expressions of what living in the kingdom of God from the heart is like is to attempt the impossible. And it will also lead to doing things that are obviously wrong and even ridiculous—such

Aldous Huxley, in one of his retrospective writings, commented on how, among the associates of his youth, the endless talk of “meaninglessness”—the meaninglessness of life and therefore of everything in it—was merely an excuse to permit them to do whatever they wanted.

Considerable confusion on this topic has resulted from trying to think of being lost in terms of its outcome. Theologically, that outcome is hell—a most uncomfortable notion. Certainly, if you are lost in any sense there is little likelihood of your arriving where you want to be. But 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. To be lost means to be out of place, to be omitted. “Gehenna,” the term often used in the New Testament for the place of the lost, may usefully be thought of as the cosmic dump for the irretrievably useless. Think of what it would mean to find you have become irretrievably useless. Something that is lost is something that is not where it is supposed to be, and therefore it is not integrated into the life of the one to whom it belongs and to whom it is lost.

the fundamental pride of putting oneself at the center of the universe is the hinge upon which the entire world of the ruined self turns.

John Calvin said that “the surest source of destruction to men is to obey themselves.”

One should seriously inquire if to live in a world permeated with God and the knowledge of God is something they themselves truly desire. If not, they can be assured that God will excuse them from his presence. They will find their place in the “outer darkness” of which Jesus spoke. But the fundamental fact about them will not be that they are there, but that they have become people so locked into their own self-worship and denial of God that they cannot want God.

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 common today to hear Christians talk of their “brokenness.” But when you listen closely, you may discover that they are talking about their wounds, the things they have suffered, not about the evil that is in them.

We must always remember, in hearing these words of Jesus about the worth of the soul, that the art of the great teacher is to put things in ways you will remember even if you don’t yet understand them. In that way you can keep working on them (and they on you) until you do understand them.

Covetousness is self-idolatry, for it makes my desires paramount. It means I would take what I want if I could. To defeat covetousness we learn to rejoice that others enjoy the benefits they do.

So—and this is of utmost importance to those who would enter Christian spiritual formation—life as normally understood, where the object is securing myself, promoting myself, indulging myself, is to be set aside. “Can I still think about such things?” you may ask. Yes, you can. But you increasingly won’t. And when you do, as formation in Christlikeness progresses, they simply won’t matter. In fact, they will seem ridiculous and uninteresting.

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.

The possibility of denial and self-deception is something God has made accessible to us, in part to protect us until we begin to seek him. Like the face of the mythical Medusa, our true condition away from God would turn us to stone if we ever fully confronted it. It would drive us mad. He has to help us come to terms with it in ways that will not destroy us outright.

In the spiritual life one never rests on one’s laurels. It is a sure recipe for falling. Attainments are like the manna given to the Israelites in the desert, good only for the day (Exodus 16:4,20). Past attainments do not place us in a position of merit that permits us to let up in the hot pursuit of God for today, for now. Paul knew that, and he knew that others missed it or forgot it to their great harm.

Our power over our thoughts is of great and indispensable assistance in directing and controlling our feelings, which themselves are not directly under the guidance of our will.

Ironically, it is often people who think of themselves as “practical” or as “men of action”—both, of course, major ideas—who are most in the grip of ideas: so far in that grip that they can’t be bothered to think. They simply don’t know what moves them. But ideas govern them and have their consequences anyway.

One’s culture is seen most clearly in what one thinks of as “natural” and as requiring no explanation or even thought.

This is the basic idea back of all temptation: God is presented as depriving us by his commands of what is good, so we think we must take matters into our own hands and act contrary to what he has said.

Bluntly, to serve God well we must think straight; and crooked thinking, unintentional or not, always favors evil.

A repeated story in Christian history is of those who have set out to prove the falsity of the way of Christ and wound up being his followers. This is, in nearly every case, simply because, in their quest, they were forced to examine facts and to think carefully about them.

Often a good starting point when trying to help those who do not believe in God or accept Christ as Lord is to get them to deal honestly with the question: Would I like for there to be a God? Or, would I like it if Jesus turned out to be Lord? This may help them realize the extent to which what they want to be the case is controlling their ability to see what is the case.

Feelings live on the front row of our lives like unruly children clamoring for attention. They presume on their justification in being whatever they are—unlike a thought, which by nature is open to challenge and invites the question “Why?”

If a strong and compelling vision of myself as one who is simply free from intense vanity or desire for wealth or for sexual indulgence can possess me, then I am in a position to desire to not have the desires I now have. And then means can be effectively sought to that end.

To “lose interest in life” means we have to carry on by mere exertions of will or by waiting for things to happen. That is a condition to be dreaded, and it cannot be sustained for long. That is why so many people become dependent upon “substances” and activities that give them feeling, even if the dependence badly harms them and those near them. Such a condition is also the frequent background of suicide.

And you can be sure that harmful feeling, feeling associated with evil—arising from it or producing it—will eventually be taken by a human being as better than no feeling at all.

When we confuse the condition with the accompanying feeling—peace, for example, with the feeling of peacefulness—we very likely will try to manage the feelings and disregard or deny the reality of the conditions. That way lie such things as “falling in love with love” and most of the well-known addictions. The person who primarily wants the feeling of being loved or being “in love” will be incapable of sustaining loving relationships, whether with God or with other humans. And the person who wants the feeling of peacefulness will be unable to do the things that make for peace—especially, doing what is right and confronting evil. So, as far as our planning for spiritual formation is concerned, we must choose and act with regard to the condition, good or bad, and allow the feelings to take care of themselves, as they certainly will.

A feeling of sufficient strength may blot out all else and will invariably do so in one who has not trained himself or herself, or been trained, to identify, to be critical of, and to have some distance from his or her own feelings.

Addiction is a feeling phenomenon. The addict is one who, in one way or another, has given in to feeling of one kind or another and has placed it in the position of ultimate value in his or her life.

In the “modern” condition, feeling will come to exercise almost total mastery over the individual. This is because people in that condition will have to constantly decide what they want to do, and feeling will be all they have to go on. Here lies the secret to understanding contemporary Western life and its peculiar proneness to gross immoralities and addictions. People are overwhelmed with decisions and can only make those decisions on the basis of feelings.

More than a century ago, Leo Tolstoy experienced the effects of “modernity” in the circle of wealthy, upper-class Russians who made up his world. In that world, he relates, “My life came to a standstill. I could breathe, eat, drink, and sleep, and I could not help doing these things; but there was no life, for there were no wishes the fulfillment of which I could consider reasonable.” “Had a fairy come and offered to fulfill my desires,” he continues, “I should not have known what to ask.”4 This is exactly the world of pointless activity portrayed in such staples of the contemporary American consciousness as television’s Cheers, Seinfeld, Friends, and Will and Grace.5

what exactly is love? It is will to good or “bene-volence.” We love something or someone when we promote its good for its own sake. Love’s contrary is malice, and its simple absence is indifference. Its normal accompaniment is delight, but a twisted soul may delight in evil and take no pleasure in good. Love is not the same thing as desire, for I may desire something without even wishing it well, much less willing its good. I might desire a chocolate ice cream cone, for example. But I do not wish it well; I wish to eat it. This is the difference between lust (mere desire) and love, as between a man and a woman. Desire and love are, of course, compatible when desire is ruled by love; but most people today would, unfortunately, not even know the difference between them. Hence, in our world, love constantly falls prey to lust. That is a major part of the deep sickness of contemporary life.

AND SO, PRACTICALLY SPEAKING, the renovation of the heart in the dimension of feeling is a matter of opening ourselves to and carefully cultivating love, joy, and peace: first by receiving them from God and from those already living in him, and then as we grow, extending love, joy, and peace to others and everything around us in attitude, prayer, and action.

What we think is, in the adult person, very much a matter of what we allow ourselves to think, and what we feel is very much a matter of what we allow ourselves to feel. Moreover, what we think is very much a matter of what we wish and seek to think, and what we feel is very much a matter of what we wish and seek to feel.

Our character is that internal, overall structure of the self that is revealed by our long-run patterns of behavior and from which our actions more or less automatically arise. It is character that explains why we use credit reports and resumes and letters of reference to make decisions about people. They do not just tell what someone did, but they reveal what kind of thoughts, feelings, and tendencies of will that person habitually acts from, and therefore how he or she will act in the future.

Multitudes of people have come to a full knowledge of God because in a moment of complete hopelessness they prayed “The Atheist’s Prayer” or something like it: “O God, if there is a God, save my soul if I have a soul.” When that is the true cry of the heart, of the inmost spirit of the individual, who has no longer any hope other than God, God hears and responds without fail.

Evil people who are genuinely focused can gain the great power they do over others because of the fact that good people and evil people alike are, for the most part, simply drifting through life.

A MAJOR SERVICE OF spiritual disciplines—such as solitude (being alone with God for long periods of time), fasting (learning freedom from food and how God directly nourishes us), worship (adoration of God, as discussed in chapter 6), and service (doing good for others with no thought of ourselves)—is to cause the duplicity and malice that is buried in our will and character to surface and be dealt with.

A person caught up in rage or lust or resentment—or religious self-righteousness, for that matter—is basically one whose body has taken over and, at least for the moment, is totally running his or her actions or even life.

For usual human beings in the usual circumstances, their body runs their life. Contrary to the words of Jesus in Matthew 6:25, life is, for them, not more than food, nor the body more than clothing. As a matter of simple fact, their time and energy is almost wholly, if not entirely, devoted to how their body looks, smells, and feels, and to how it can be secured and used to meet ego needs such as admiration, sexual gratification, and power over others.

An outlook focused entirely on the body finds the body’s failure and cessation to be, of course, the ultimate insult from which there is no recovery. You have to understand this if you want to understand Western life and culture.

Bodily pleasure is not in itself a bad thing. But when it is exalted to a necessity and we become dependent upon it, then we are slaves of our body and its feelings. Only misery lies ahead.

The old apostle minces no words: “He who does not love abides in death” (1 John 3:14). Notice that he did not say, “he who hates,” but simply, “he who does not love.” The mere absence of love is deadly. It is withdrawal.

Isn’t the desperate need for approval that drives people so relentlessly today—causing them to go to foolish and self-destructive lengths to be “attractive” or at least to get attention—nothing but the echo of a lost world of constant mutual welcome and blessing in family, neighborhood, school, and work?

But the problem is not divorce—though divorce generates a set of problems all its own. The problem is that people don’t know how to be married. They don’t actually get married in many cases, though they go through a legal and possibly a religious ceremony. They are, sad to say, incapable of marriage—the kind of constant, mutual blessing that can make two people in conjugal relation literally one whole person (Ephesians 5:22-33). It is not their fault. In their world, how could they know? Who would teach them? This is the soul-searing fact at the heart of our modern sadness.

We in the Western world live today in an antinomian culture. This culture in part derives from our religious and secular history, but it in turn reinforces antinomianism among professing Christians. “Antinomian” means “against the law.” It was a term coined by Martin Luther to designate some in his day (Johann Agricola and his followers) who held that God’s law was not a factor in conversion to Christ. However, the antinomian tendency is much older than Luther and possibly as old as some reactions to Paul’s gospel. It is based upon the mistaken conclusion—strongly rejected by Paul—that because we are not justified by keeping the law, but through our personal relationship of confidence in Jesus, in his death and his life, we have no essential use for the law and can simply disregard it.

To the person who is not inwardly transformed in each essential dimension, evil and sin still look good. They are strongly attractive.

As Jesus trains them and “cleanses them for himself,” however, all of that begins to reverse. The law begins to appear as a beautiful gift of God, as precious truth about what is really good and right. It becomes, in the language of the psalmist, “sweeter than honey freshly dripping from the honeycomb” (Psalm 19:10, PAR; honey never again tastes as good as when freshly taken). At that point it is sin that looks stupid, ridiculous, as well as repulsive—which it really is. Resistance to sin is then based upon that new and realist vision of what it is, not on fear of punishment. The illusion that sin is really a good thing arbitrarily prohibited by God is dispelled, and we see with gratitude that his prohibitions are among his greatest kindnesses.

Strong goes on to quote a striking illustration from another (now unknown) author: “The steamship whose machinery is broken may be brought into port and made fast to the dock. She is safe, but not sound. Repairs may last a long time. Christ designs to make us both safe and sound. Justification gives the first—safety; sanctification gives the second—soundness.”

SEVERAL CHARACTERISTICS CAN SERVE as marks of those who have become established in their whole being as children of light. One is that whenever they are found to be in the wrong, they will never defend it—neither to themselves nor to others, much less to God.