Renovation of the Heart: Putting On the Character of Christ

by Dallas Willard

Understanding is the basis of care. What you would take care of you must first understand, whether it be a petunia or a nation.

And how rare to find a group that consistently functions well for the good it envisions. In fact, the group usually exhibits the divided hearts and lives of its members even more strikingly than does the individual alone. That is because of its larger scope and greater complexity. When successful, spiritual formation (or, really, reformation) unites the divided heart and life of the individual. That person can then bring remarkable harmony into the groups where he or she participates.

1. Thought (images, concepts, judgments, inferences) 2. Feeling (sensation, emotion) 3. Choice (will, decision, character) 4. Body (action, interaction with the physical world) 5. Social context (personal and structural relations to others) 6. Soul (the factor that integrates all of the above to form one life)

“There are two Gods,” Tolstoy once said. “There is the God that people generally believe in—A God who has to serve them (sometimes in very refined ways, say by merely giving them peace of mind). This God does not exist. But the God whom people

forget—the God whom we all have to serve—exists, and is the prime cause of our existence and of all that we perceive.”3

Sin does not make it worthless, but only lost. And in its lostness it is still capable of great strength, dignity, and heartbreaking beauty and goodness—enough so to hide from the unenlightened, or those who do not wish to understand, the horror it has become and is becoming.

Fear is the anticipation of harm. The intelligent person recognizes that his or her well-being lies in being in harmony with God and

“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.

God being God offends human pride.

HUMAN BODY BECOMES the primary area of pleasure for the person who does not live honestly and interactively with God, and also the primary source of terror,