a drop of water

These three points in Dallas Willard’s, Renovation of the Heart helped me process my thought life.

1.  Pride and overconfidence in ideas, images, or bits of information  simply because they are “ours” or “mine and I am (we are) in the habit of relying on them.

2. Simple ignorance of fact which can be combatted by “constant openness and learning”.

3. Allowing our desires to guide our thinking, especially the desire to prove we are right or have the approval of others in “our crowd”. 

I believe that the most competent leaders rely humbly on their advisor’s knowledge and understanding of their fields in order to make judgements.  Likewise, God is the expert in any field that we might engage, from programming to cooking, from friendships to romance.  We must not let our pride and overconfidence, our habit of relying on our own understanding to skip the cornerstone of relying on God for our ideas, images and information.  (We also can not trick ourselves into thinking that God needn’t be bothered or relied on for the simple daily tasks of our lives.)

Always being in a posture of learning (and growth) allows us to make ignorance a motivational fuel instead of a humliating stumbling block.  When we apply ourselves to something, whether it be the study of theology or photography or apologetics, we often puff ourselves up as self proclaimed experts.  Then we look back down from where we have come, from the top of our hill, and fail to see the mountains all around us that we are called to climb.

It seems really difficult to keep our desires from influencing our thinking.  I guess this is partly a result of crowd mentality, where it is easy to conform to the crowd’s movement and direction.  We don’t want to be alone in our thoughts, we want community to validate our ideas and thoughts.  We become accustomed to the approval of man instead of the approval of God.  Sometimes we end up associating the approval of Godly men and women as the approval of God, but that shouldn’t be our goal.

All three of these aspects allow us to leave space for God to speak directly into our lives through our thoughts.  With less pride in our own self-reliance, we can rely on God as the expert in everything we attempt to do.  With constant openness and learning we can let God break down the wrong ways we’ve been doing things.  With seeking approval and rightness in God’s eyes, we allow God to break the pressures and expectations that culture has put on us.

“To accept, with confidence in God, that I do not immediately have to have my way, releases me from the great pressure that anger, unforgiveness and the “need” to retaliate imposes upon my life.”

p. 74, Renovation of the Heart by Dallas Willard

The above quote (out of context from the main point) made me realize, that I often inaccurately use the idea of free will to justify my will.  I fall into thinking, because I have free will, then my actions to implement, ensure, and get my will are justified.  But what this line of prideful thought really says is that I am glorifying my own will as the righteous purest and most valuable expression of life and existence and that any infringment upon my will can only be wrong (evil).  When my will is not met, it is not just that “I have been wronged” but that I have the opportunity to acknowledge and embrace God’s will as a response inplace of the “anger, unforgiveness and the ‘need’ to retaliate.’”  Free will is not a justification for my own will; it is a freedom to consciously and intentionally choose, discover, and align my heart with God’s will.

I was reading Chapter 2 of Dallas Willard’s, Renovation of the Heart, and came across this break down of the human life on page 30.

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)

I’m finding it helpful to evaluate my spiritual health in regards to each of these areas.  I’d like to make it a regular habit, because often life’s experiences magnify one area out of proportion.  It’s easy for us to dissociate one aspect of our lives in order to focus on just that.  Alone, each of these areas are thought to be manageable, but when considered together, the result is overwhelming.  But I believe that our spiritual health depends on the integration of all the parts.

They are all equally important and interdependent; some may be more important than others for a time, but their relation to each other has the potential to enhance and empower.  The true health of our soul in light of a redemptive plan, seems to depend on our lives integration of each complimenting God designed area.  Some brief questions that I’ve considered:

1. (Thought) – Where do my thoughts go in my free time?
2. (Feeling) – Where do I feel content in my life?
3. (Choice) – What choices in my life reflect my thoughts and feelings?
4. (Body) – Where am I being available with energy for people?
5. (Social Context) – Who am I lovingly investing in?
6. (Soul) – How compartmentalized is my life?

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 therefore 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 wil 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 ourselve 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.

p.24, Renovation of the Heart, Dallas Willard