Dallas Willard - Renovation of the Heart: Putting on the Character of Christ

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1

Watch over your heart with all diligence, for from it flow the springs of life.
P ROVERBS 4:23

We live from our heart.

The part of us that drives and organizes our life is not the physical. This remains true even if we deny it. You have a spirit within you and it has been formed. It has taken on a specific character. I have a spirit and it has been formed. This is true of everyone.

The human spirit is an inescapable, fundamental aspect of every human being; and it takes on whichever character it has from the experiences and the choices that we have lived through or made in our past. That is what it means for it to be formed.

Our life and how we find the world now and in the future is, almost totally, a simple result of what we have become in the depths of our beingin our spirit, will, or heart. From there we see our world and interpret reality. From there we make our choices, break forth into action, try to change our world. We live from our depthsmost of which we do not understand.

Do you mean, some will say, that the individual and collective disasters that fill the human scene are not imposed upon us from without? That they do not just happento us?

Yes. That is what I mean. In todays world, famine, war, and epidemic are almost totally the outcome of human choices, which are expressions of the human spirit. Though various qualifications and explanations are appropriate, that is in general true.

Individual disasters, too, very largely follow upon human choices, our own or those of others. And whether or not they do in a particular case, the situations in which we find ourselves are never as important as our responses to them, which come from our spiritual side. 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?

The Bible is full of wisdom on these matters. That is why we call major books of the Old Testament wisdom literature. Jesus sums it all up in his teachings. He is the power and the wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1:24). For example, he tells us, Seek first the kingdom and Gods righteousness, and all else shall be provided to you (Matthew 6:33, PAR ). And Everyone who hears these words of mine and does them is like a wise man who built his house upon rock. The rain fell and the streams rose and the winds blew and beat upon the house. But it did not collapse, for it was built on rock (Matthew 7:24-25, PAR ).

Accordingly, the greatest need you and I havethe greatest need of collective humanityis