Watch over the heart will all diligence - reflections on spiritual formation
Spiritual Formation is not optional - we are being formed, whether we acknowledge it or don’t. The question is will it be into the character of Jesus or something else?
Early on in the Renovation of the Heart, Dallas Willard writes: 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?’
Later at near the end of the chapter entitled ‘The Heart in the System of Human Life’ Willard writes: ‘We therefore live in “hot pursuit” of Jesus Christ. “My soul followeth hard after thee”, the psalmist called out (Ps. 63:8). And Paul’s panting cry was ‘That I may know Him, and the power of His resurrection and the fellowship of His sufferings, being conformed to His death‘ in order to participate in the life of His resurrection. (Phil. 3:10-11). What are we to say of anyone who thinks they have something more important to do than that?
That is a very challenging statement. Recently, there was a study done on the level of spiritual growth one finds among regular church attending Christians. It is now necessary to differentiate those individuals who call themselves Christians, but do not attend church from those who do attend. In this study the people involved in designing it wanted to try and take a measure of whether people claiming to be Christians, and attending church were actually experiencing ’spiritual growth’. They used criteria like, regular bible reading, regular prayer, service to others etc (there were something like seven categories).
One series of responses is quite telling. Over 50 percent claimed that they had grown spiritually in the previous year, but when measured against conduct, or modest evidence of this only a little more than 3% actually could demonstrate that in any measurable manner. Now that indicates two things - apparently most Christians think they are growing, but have nothing tangible to point to which might indicate that growth.
I don’t know how you feel about this but I feel very frustrated when I think of that tiny a number of Christians being able to point to anything substantive in their lives to indicate growth in Christian maturity. It seems easy then to conjecture from that the seemingly profound impotence of Christianity must be directly related. If its really true that only 3 out of 100 Christians can point to measurable change in the past year, we are really in trouble. This is a significant part of the reason why I am so passionate about the book ‘The Renovation of the Heart.’ I really believe must raise the level of expectation we have of ourselves relative to growing as disciples of Jesus. It begins as Dallas Willard suggests with a vision of the kind of life that God desires for us. Jesus said that those who give themselves to him will receive ‘living water’, and that they will not be driven and ruled by unsatisfied desires. Paul writes that we can know the love of Christ in such a way that we will be filled with the fullness of God. Peter writes that those who love and trust Jesus ‘rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy. Can it really be that only 3 out of 100 Christians have anything approaching that kind of experience of following Jesus?
We simply cannot let this be the case for Lamb of God Fellowship (we don’t want it to be true about any believing congregation), but we begin with ourselves and our own backyard. I say all of this in the hopes that somehow God, by the workings of His Holy Spirit would stir up a tremendous urgency in every single one of us to undertake a serious effort to understand how we grow as followers of Christ. My experience is that most people are unreflective concerning their lives. Only tragedy, loss, or serious illness slows most people down long enough to ask - where am I going with God, am I making progress in getting there, is there any real change going on in me?
What we are trying to do about all this?
Saturday, October 18th a group of men and women gathered together for in an effort to try and make some progress in gaining an understanding of how one ‘watches over their heart.’ I want to use the rest of this post to try and summarize as best as I can the essential things that came out of that effort. My heartfelt prayer is that we would see a stronger core of brothers and sisters who are clear headed about how one ‘puts on the character of Christ’ as well as growing in the ability to help others who want to learn how to do it for themselves.
The Basic Principal - The Heart Directs the Life.
This is the core of what the Bible teaches about growing as a disciple of Jesus is this - we live out of our hearts. “The human heart, will or spirit is the executive center of a human life. The heart is where the decisions and choices are made for the whole person.” (pg. 30) Jesus taught this very clearly - ‘Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.’ (Matt. 12:34) In another place Jesus broadens this - Out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness, slander.’
Spiritual formation has everything to do with the process which leads us to the place where we do the will of God out of our hearts. It has a lofty, but a concretely Biblical goal - ‘to love God will all the heart, soul, mind and strength and our neighbor as ourselves.’ This is what God desires, this is the end to which He is directing everything and it is what will make eternity an endless delight. But the real, and necessary process of spiritual formation says this ideal is not just for the sweet-by-and-by. God intends for his sons and daughters to ‘be prepared for and capable of responding to the situations of life in ways that are good and right’ (pg. 29).
Basic Elements of Human Life:
Willard suggests that we can think about human nature as six basic aspects. (1) Thought (2) Feeling (3) Choice (4) Body (5) Social context (6) Soul. He summarizes in the following way: ‘every human being thinks (has a thought life), feels, chooses, interacts with his or her body and its social context, and more or less integrates all of the foregoing as parts of a life.’ Later in this section Willard suggests that this isn’t mysterious (in other words, we can all understand it). Human nature has parts, these parts have properties, which in turn make possible relationships between the parts to form larger wholes and so on. We can learn how our thoughts, our feelings, our will, and so on work and how they can be formed in cooperation with the Holy Spirit working though the Word, and the various means of grace which God makes available to all Christians. In my judgment we are required by the Word of God to gain this understanding. This is certainly what is implied by a scripture like II Peter 1:15 - For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith…
One of the most helpful understandings which Dr. Willard advances is a concept he calls ‘relenting.’ “Our actions always arise out of the interplay of the universal factors of human life: spirit, mind, body, social context, and soul. Actions never come from the movement of will alone” (pg. 39). Relenting describes how these various elements(thoughts, emotions, body, social context) place pressure on our will so that our choices are principally a relenting to these pressures.
This means that good intentions are not enough, and that there is a ‘rigorous consistency in the human self and its actions.” This single sentence may be worth the price of the book: “Actions are not impositions on who we are, but are expressions of who we are. The come out of our heart and the inner realities it supervises and interacts with” (pg. 39).
Trying to make this personal
Let me make that very personal, and I will use myself as the example. From about the 8th grade in school until I graduated college I was a fairly well disciplined athlete. Not a gym rat by any means, but pretty faithful to staying in shape. After college I began to slowly allow myself to ‘coast’ on past effort. It takes a fair amount of time to undo years of weight training and conditioning, but I am living proof that it can be undone. Over time I became a lazy person in so far as it relates to taking good care of myself, health wise. About 7 years ago I was diagnosed as a diabetic and this caused me to make some changes in my life including a fairly radical change to diet and to begin exercising once again. After about a year of conditioning and weight loss I began to see improvement. As most everyone who knows me knows five years ago I fell and suffered a serious break in my leg, one which resulted in surgery and the insertion of a 14 inch steel rod into my leg. Unfortunately, I used this excuse to drift back into inactivity and began to slump back into poor physical condition. In January of 2007 I promised myself and the Lord that this would change, and praise God I have been able to sustain nearly 11 straight months of consistent conditioning.
But I would like to make several observations about myself. I wasn’t someone who had ’slipped’ into a lifestyle of physical inactivity, I was in fact a lazy person who occasionally sustained physical activity. My use of the physical injury as a rational for inactivity wasn’t a slip, it was a pattern. Until I faced up to the condition of my heart - one which treated physical conditioning as unimportant, or as an optional matter of good stewardship I could never change. I wasn’t an occasional ’slug’, I was in fact a committed slob. Only the words of my family physician working in concert with my pastor Ray and the prompting of the Holy Spirit could get through my rationalizations for further inactivity. I had to face a truth which Dr. Willard makes plain - ‘whatever my action is comes out of my whole person’ (pg. 40). I now consider myself in recovery. Sustaining change, with all its concomitant elements (thoughts, emotions, body, etc) takes time and it would be a prideful mistake to think I have licked the problem.
However, the Lord taught me a good deal about change in the past 11 months. But I can do no better in describing that learning that to refer to Dr. Willard’s description of the nature of spiritual change in chapter five of the Renovation of the Heart. First, this past 11 months has reminded me that change is possible. I am 54, and like many folks my age I am set in my ways. But developing a lifestyle of physical conditioning has taught me again that you can teach an old dog a new trick. And although physical exercise is not the same as spiritual formation it is in many ways parallel. Listen to Dr. Willard: “Without the gentle though rigorous process of inner transformation by the graceful presence of God in our world and in our soul, the change of personality and life clearly announced and spelled out in the Bible, and explained and illustrated throughout Christian history, is impossible. We not only admit it, but also insist upon it” (pg. 79)
Lamb of God brothers and sisters get this! “Without the rigorous process of inner transformation… the change of personality and life… is impossible.” As Willard observes - “the result of the effort to change our behavior without inner transformation is precisely what we see in the current shallowness of Western Christianity.” Even revival alone will not change this. I am praying for, and believing God will bring revival, however, we cannot bypass this truth so eloquently stated by Dr. Willard.
V.I.M. - A Pattern of Change
The acronym which Dr. Willard develops for this pattern of change is simple: V.I.M., Vision, Intention, and Means. If we are to be spiritually formed in Christ, we must have and must implement the appropriate vision, intention and means (pg. 85) Dr. Willard wisely points out if we are concerned about our spiritual formation then we must have a vision of life under God, in His kingdom that is compelling. This requires me to know deeply what it is that God is making available to me in Christ and for me to embrace it with my whole heart. But as Willard says it is a vision that has to be given to us, one which we don’t naturally see on our own. But, thanks be to God, that vision is given to us in the Word of God. It is a vision of a new kind of life, life lived in the range of God’s effective will being done. It is a vision of life which can be discovered, meditated upon, and in cooperation with the Holy Spirit worked into our lives until it becomes an overwhelmingly compelling desire of our hearts.
In concert with the vision of life in the Kingdom of God is the necessity of our actual intention to do it. This is an extraordinary quality of being a human. We can decide. I can choose to make this vision of life in the kingdom a reality that I actually pursue. That means, even if my resolve is weak, I can decide that no excuse will any longer be accepted (even if I struggle and fail to always follow through). Intention moves us beyond our rationalizations, our denial, our blame-shifting to a place where we accept that the decision to do what ever is necessary to grow as a disciple of Jesus belongs to me. I must decide, and that intention is mine to follow through on. God will not magically make me do this. If I am to change, it is my decision to pursue the things that bring change. One of the observations which Dr. Willard makes which really stings is this: “Perhaps the hardest thing for sincere Christians to come to grips with is the level or 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” (Pg. 88) Intention means I can no longer accommodate this unbelief as acceptable.
Finally, vision and intention must be combined with means: how will we go about replacing the inner character of ‘lostness’ with the inner character of Jesus? Thankfully we are not left to make this up on our own. But let me use Willard’s own summary: “We must start by discovering, by identifying, the thoughts, feelings, habits of will, social relations and bodily inclinations that prevent us from growing in the character of Christ. God has given us many ‘means’ of grace to enable this process to actually get somewhere. Richard Foster’s classic ‘The Celebration of Discipline’ is an excellent resource. Dallas Willard’s own ‘The Spirit and the Disciplines’ is also incredibly helpful. The is no lack of carefully explained material to help each one of us to become fully engaged apprentices of Jesus. The problem is not lack of information.
As Dr. Willard says: “The problem of spiritual transformation among those who identify themselves as Christians today is not that it is impossible or that effectual means are not available. The problem is that it is not intended. People do not see it and its value and decide to carry through with it. They do not decide to do the things Jesus did and said” (pg. 91)
This truth of this must be faced: I must not allow my harried life, or my state in life, or any other vicissitude to stand in the way of the blessed life of being apprenticed to Jesus. He paid an extraordinary price to open a doorway to make it possible. He gives amazing resources to sustain any who seek it and it is not idealistic to hold forth the expectation that what Jesus calls us to is in fact possible.