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You have to learn how to use your will, but your will has very little power.
You maximize the effect of your will by using it to direct yourself into experiences that will change your mind, and your body, and your social relations, and your soul.
Now, again, I emphasize that the Holy Spirit is constantly active in this process, as are all the instrumentalities of the Kingdom of God. So you’re not alone in it; this isn’t a solitary trip. And indeed, a major part of our process of growth is our relationship to other people. God has intended it that way—set it up that way—because all of this growth is captured in a single word that is essentially relational: love. We’ll deal with that shortly. But for now, we must emphasize that the process of growth into emotional and spiritual maturity requires that we learn to use our will—and yet,
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Peter was thinking about his will, his intentions. But there was much more to Peter than he himself realized, and Jesus knew it. In particular, Jesus knew that Peter’s body was loaded with readiness to act in certain ways—ways that would trap him.
So now let us look at the essential dimensions of the self and how we can change those dimensions. Sometimes in the Scriptures it will come down on one thing—for example, Romans 12: Devote yourself; your body a living sacrifice.[4] What does that mean?
What does it mean to consecrate your body as a living sacrifice? Or consider another famous passage from Paul (which, by the way, I have never heard a sermon on): “I buffet my body.”[5] What does that mean? You are training your body in such a way that it will not get the jump on you in living.
The circle around our will/spirit/heart is “thought and feeling.” I put these together; if you wish, you may call them “the mind.” This circle represents our capacity to think about things. The will and the mind don’t work independently from one another—in fact, none of these things work independently from the rest.
The basic function of the soul is to put all these parts together and make one life out of it. And if it’s not a broken soul, it will do that. But souls often are broken, so the parts of the life don’t function together as they should. The way we express that in common language is a loss of integrity. Integrity is a matter of things being integrated. They fit together in a certain way. The simplest way of losing integrity is to not live in the truth. When you depart from the truth, then you are running different lines of life.[6]
The overall tendency of the self is what we refer to as our character, and our character is fleshed out in our actions, which are born out of some interaction of these various parts.
A human being is a very complicated system; the dynamics are of endless fascination. What makes good fiction and even good nonfiction so interesting is the interplay of the factors that go into the personality. By the way, if you ask, “Where did you get that analysis?” consider when Jesus was asked on one occasion, “What is the great law?” He just rattled off those parts: “You love God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength, and you love your neighbor as yourself.”[7]
Each part is a particular dimension of abilities. The will (which I equate with spirit and heart in biblical terms)[8] is the central capacity to create and originate things and events.
The will is a creative capacity for good. I would say that for most of us, our best days are our most creative days.
When the will is alienated from God, however, it has to go on its own, which is a tough road to follow. You become responsible for your own life—and, of course, that’s a good deal more than almost anyone can take care of. But we can return to the kind of dominion that God intended for us. At this point grace is introduced as the way in which we are able to function and accomplish
The will is meant to make us count for good.
Now I personally don’t believe that God sends anyone to hell, but I think He permits people to go there if they want. Hell is basically a matter of being away from God. You can say, “How could anyone want to do that?” Please understand that if you don’t like God, it would be hell for you to be in heaven. Just imagine, you go to heaven and you can’t avoid Him. The turn to liking and loving God is what makes it a good thing to be with Him—here, as well as afterward.
Nevertheless, the main thing we want to look for as a mark of emotional and spiritual maturity is the surrendered will. A will that is surrendered to God is the center of the redeemed person.
Thankfulness to God is central to the organization of the person who is fully devoted to God. It is a mark of a will surrendered to God, a
will that acknowledges God’s provision and care for us. First Thessalonians tells us to be thankful in everything because this is the will of God concerning you.[10]
The will is the capacity to initiate creatively. The mind is centered on the will. Consider this: If you think wrongly about God, are you more or less likely to surrender your will to Him? Our
comprehension of the image of God is so extremely important. I often say that all human evil comes from thinking wrongly about God.
We pick it up just by living—we unconsciously adopt a misunderstanding of who God is. But it is also possible to reall...
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The mind works from evidence and reason. It does so naturally. But the will is already in the mix, and it has to be a will for the truth—a will that says, “I will accept the truth. I will abandon my beliefs or my hopes, if necessary, to accept the truth.” The will and the mind work together. The mind has to provide some sort of representation in order for the will to work. If the will is bent away from the truth, however, it will not represent things as they are. So there is an interaction there.
Our choices about where we put our mind, then, become substantial in determining how we are going to mature emotionally and spiritually.
But our choice as to where we put our mind is what most determines where we go. That is why Paul says, “Be renewed, be transformed by the renewing of your mind.”[11]
Right thinking about God—as our source and provision—is the starting point. If you didn’t think of God like that, you might not go on presenting your bodies a living sacrifice. And it might well be that if you don’t do that, your mind won’t be renewed; you won’t be transformed.
the interconnection between these dimensions of the self.
What is in the mind and what is in the feelings and what is in the will is going to be determinative of my whole life. And thinking wrongly about...
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It really is important that we bear witness to the gospel.
your mind is not the same thing as your brain.
The brain is part of the body, the next dimension of the person in
Your body is the primary place you can redirect your life. Every spiritual discipline, even things like memorizing Scripture, involves physical energy or power: You engage your body in it. Your body is designed to enable you to act without thinking;
if you couldn’t act without thinking, you couldn’t do anything worth doing.
we want our bodies to come to the place where they do instinctually what is good and right. Unfortunately, they have been pretty thoroughly harmed by learning how to do the things that are wrong without having to think about it. Our bodies have to learn new instincts.
Aristotle says that anyone who lives alone is not a human being. They may be a god or they may be a monster but they are not a human being.[19] But once we grant that to be human is to live with others, we have to contend with how we engage with one another, which often includes attack and withdrawal.
Marriage can be a beautiful picture of what social relations are meant to be like, and I think God intended it to be that way. But many marriages are
harmful places—wounds are delivered and suffered from, wounds so serious that you cannot escape them. It’s heartbreaking to think about how often care and identification—compassion—is missing from our families. We were made to love together, to care for one another.
Shame, for example, is one of the most brutal things for the human being—a kind of internalized rejection where I have somehow projected onto myself the rejection that has been cast on me. Shame goes back to emotions (in the mind circle); it has a lot of pain in it because it’s rooted in how we think about ourselves.
The soul is that part of the person that integrates all the other dimensions to make one life.
Restoration is a need of the soul.
The restoration of the soul, its direction and its energy, is essential to its work: to pull together all the
aspects of your life and make it one life.
Paul’s testimony in Romans 7—“The things I would, that I do not,” and “the things that I would not that I do”—is a typical ...
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one life; it’s a bunch of stuff running in various directions. What we’re working on here is an approach to Christlikeness that leads to spiritual competence and spiritual maturity, with a restored...
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Soteriology is the explanation of how salvation works. What about us is saved and what is the mechanism? In biblical language, the central part of humans is the heart. At the very least, salvation must save the heart. A heart cannot save itself, so it must respond to God in some way.
By what mechanism does a heart respond to God’s salvation? The most common answer we hear in churches today is the will, which Dallas places at the center of the human being. A soteriology of attachment, which I am proposing, replaces the will with attachment. In this chapter we will discuss the changes a soteriology of attachment produces
in...
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But we are not saved by belonging to the right group or family.
Attachment that saves is in the heart. We must move attachment to the center, then, where our heart is found, where attachment becomes the mechanism through which the heart responds to God and develops Christlike character.
Greek philosophy shaped this medieval model of human psychology. According to the Greeks, people had many “faculties,” or abilities. Christian thinkers took that list of faculties and assigned some to the heart, soul, spirit, mind, or body. This classical view of human persons has gone through thousands of adjustments and upgrades but has formed the core of theology and Christian practice since the Middle Ages—even before.
Until the Enlightenment, no one gave much importance to human activity. God’s will dominated all options. During the Romantic period, thought leaders began focusing on human choices. Simultaneously, the American colonies were enjoying independence. The Second Great Awakening was sweeping through the United States. Salvation was understood, particularly among Baptists and Methodists, as a decision to follow Jesus. Making Jesus Lord,
