THE SIX BASIC ASPECTS OF A HUMAN LIFE NOW, when we take a closer look at the whole person, we find that there are six basic aspects in our lives as individual human beings—six things inseparable from every human life. These together and in interplay make up “human nature.” 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) Simply put, 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 one life.

These are the essential factors in a human being, and nothing essential to human life falls outside of them. The ideal of the spiritual life in the Christian understanding is one where all of the essential parts of the human self are effectively organized around God, as they are restored and sustained by him. Spiritual formation in Christ is the process leading to that ideal end, and its result is love of God with all of the heart, soul, mind, and strength, and of the neighbor as oneself. The human self is then fully integrated under God.

 Willard, Dallas. Renovation of the Heart: Putting On the Character of Christ (pp. 30-31). The Navigators. Kindle Edition.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reading goal checked off or meet and know God now?

Image
To read certain verses to fulfill a Bible reading system is not to take the Scripture in, to dwell upon it, to ponder its meaning and to explore its implications. Often, it’s an effort to perform, to check off one more thing I need to do today to be a decent Christian.  This explains why many folks know a lot of Bible trivia but do not meet God when they open the Scripture. To dwell, to ponder, to explore means reading slowly and wondering what life, reality, or even I personally would look like if this passage were really true. It means asking, What is God saying to me today?  TODAY’S EXPERIMENT - Read the following slowly: “Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory” (Colossians ...
Read more

From stinking thinking to thinking straight & well

Image
CRUCIAL ROLE OF GOOD THINKING The prospering of God’s cause on earth depends upon his people thinking well. Today we are apt to downplay the importance of good thinking in favor of strong faith, and some, disastrously, even regard thinking as opposed to faith.  They do not realize that in so doing they are not honoring God but simply yielding to the deeply anti-intellectualist currents of Western egalitarianism, rooted, in turn, in the romantic idealization of impulse and blind feeling found in Hume, Rousseau, and their nineteenth- and twentieth-century followers.  They do not realize that they are operating on the same satanic principle that produced the killing fields of Cambodia, where those with any sign of education, even the wearing of glasses, were killed on the spot or condemned to starvation and murderous labor.  Bluntly, to serve God well we must think straight. Crooked thinking, unintentional or not, always favors evil. To take the information of t...
Read more

Challenging our thinking toward more Spirit-oriented study & worship

Image
Some people’s understanding of God keeps growing; their vision of the kingdom of God becomes increasingly richer. They don’t mind being stretched and having to think things through. We can become Spirit-oriented thinkers if we ask the Spirit to help us as we approach Scripture or even the newspaper opinion page or a magazine that stretches us.  We can seek guidance, asking, How does this square with what I already know or think? Is my thinking straight here? Is there something here I need to learn? You can always tell such truth-seekers because they connect the dots between two things that seem to be opposites. They see what others miss, such as when Dallas links a thoughtful, studious approach to life with worship of God. Many people concentrate only on worship or only on study to the exclusion of the other. In contrast, study and worship should flow together. Students of God remain humble when they worship, and worshippers who also study worship with substance and tr...
Read more