Restful Journey

ROMANS 12 – Think back over past holiday gatherings. Were they full of joy? Or bickering? Mocking? Put-downs? Belittling? Our hope today: that godly brothers/sisters/authors and God’s Word can shed some light on how we can bring light and grace to future gatherings at home and wherever we find ourselves. Along the line of family tensions, My lifelong buddy and I, both followers of Jesus, have talked and fretted over wayward children, now grown. Now we’ve discovered a book, shedding light on God’s Word and God’s Word shedding light on this book. The book is called Renovation of the Heart, Putting On the Character of Christ by Dallas Willard. The author talks about our messed up hearts or souls that need godly formation or transformation. What contributes to messing up our soul or heart or spirit: Rejection – in my own life: favoritism shown to my siblings, translating into rebellion and reinforced by lack of self-esteem and rejection by dates and unfaithful wives. Assault – we ...

Second, announce that you teach people to do the things that Jesus said to do. Put it out in front of your meeting place on a sign, declare it in local print media and on your Web page. Publicize and run training programs designed to develop specific points of the character of Christ as given in the New Testament. Put the whole weight of the staff and the congregation back of this. Let that be our only aim, and the triumph of God in our individual lives and our times is ensured. The renovation of the heart, putting on the character of Christ, is the unfailing key. It will provide for human life all the blessing that money, talent, education, and good fortune in this world cannot begin to supply, and will strongly anticipate, within this present life, a glorious entry in the full presence of God. pp. 250-251 SOURCE  

We seek to know truth and we teach others: There is a God. This is his world, and we with it. This God is totally good and totally competent. He comes to us in Jesus Christ, whom we can totally trust. He gives us a book and a history, through which his Spirit will lead us to all we need to know about him and about us. Respecting the priority of the mind in spiritual formation means that we seek to understand these things and to help others understand them. We work in depth. We can choose to turn our minds toward these truths. Belief will come as God’s gift within the hidden depths of our life and will grow under the nurturing of the Word and the Spirit. This is what is going on in a local congregation that is following God's plan for spiritual formation. SOMETIMES THE WAY to this is blocked—even among people who have genuinely become apprentices of Jesus and have the best of intentions. They are not capable of receiving truth. Their body, soul, feelings, thoughts, and their social ...

OUR BELIEFS AND FEELINGS cannot be changed by choice. We cannot just choose to have different beliefs and feelings. But we do have some liberty to take in different ideas and information and to think about things in different ways. We can choose to take in the Word of God, and when we do that, beliefs and feelings will be steadily pulled in a godly direction. One of the worst mistakes that can be made in practical ministry is to think that people can choose to believe and feel differently. Following that, we will mistakenly try to generate faith by going through the will—possibly trying to move the will by playing on emotion. Rather, the will must be moved by insight into truth and reality. Such insight will evoke emotion appropriate to a new set of the will. That is the order of real inward change. My father was a two-pack-a-day smoker until he was in his seventies. Then one day, in the Veterans’ Hospital where he went for health care, he saw a man smoking with the aid of a special ma...

It is, I gently suggest, a serious error to make “outreach” a primary goal of the local congregation, and especially so when those who are already “with us” have not become clear-headed and devoted apprentices of Jesus, and are not, for the most part, solidly progressing along the path. Outreach is one essential task of Christ’s people, and among them there will always be those especially gifted for evangelism. But the most successful work of outreach would be the work of inreach that turns people, wherever they are, into lights in the darkened world. The presence of God in the midst is the only sure mark of the true ecclesia. Of course there are conditions under which God will not be present in a group, and biblical and church history painfully illustrate this over and over. But every condition that omits his presence as the essential redeeming factor is just another effort at substituting a vessel for the treasure. Spiritual transformation will not occur, in that case, for it is a ...

Most professing Christians today have “prayed to receive Christ” because they felt a need and would like him to help them deal with it. Now, one cannot lay a satisfactory foundation for spiritual formation or growth in grace by approaching people in terms of “the trouble they are in.” I do not say that “felt needs” are to be disregarded, but in human affairs the “presenting problem”—the thing that needs to be fixed now—is rarely the real problem. One should of course be sympathetic with people who are lonely, guilt-ridden, and incapable of dealing with life, and so on, but these are not their problem. Their problem is that they have rejected God, for whatever reason, and have chosen to live life on their own. They have not surrendered their will to him. They do not want to do what God says to do, but what they think is best. And they are lost because of that, in the sense explained in an earlier chapter. They do not know what their real needs are and do not think of themselves as rebel...

Now I must say something you can be mad at me about. A fundamental mistake of the conservative side of the American church today, and much of the Western church, is that it takes as its basic goal to get as many people as possible ready to die and go to heaven. It aims to get people into heaven rather than to get heaven into people. This of course requires that these people, who are going to be “in,” must be right on what is basic. You can’t really quarrel with that. But it turns out that to be right on “what is basic” is to be right in terms of the particular church vessel or tradition in question, not in terms of Christlikeness. Now, the project thus understood and practiced is self-defeating. It implodes upon itself because it creates groups of people who may be ready to die, but clearly are not ready to live. They rarely can get along with one another, much less those “outside.” Often their most intimate relations are tangles of reciprocal harm, coldness, and resentment. They have ...

A SPIRITUAL “HOSPITAL” OF COURSE THIS STILL leaves room for some pretty weak and needy people and some distressing events in the process, but no room for doubt concerning where it all is to come out. The local groups of disciples, in the usual case, will certainly have people at all stages of the journey. They can be compared to hospitals, with people at various stages of recovery and progress toward health. Some will be undergoing radical surgery or other strong treatment. Some will be in ICU. Others will be taking their first wobbly steps after a lengthy time bed-ridden. And others will be showing the flush of health and steady strength as they get ready to resume their ordinary life. Parallels to these stages should be found in every church, and explicitly recognized and treated as such. And in addition, there would be those who are stepping out strongly in a strength of life that far exceeds just not being “sick” (sin-ridden), and there would be old warriors with many battle scar...

  DARKNESS NOW PRESENTED AS LIGHT PEOPLE IN “HOLLYWOOD” WHO are sometimes criticized as pushing immorality do not, in general, see themselves in that way. Rather, they regard themselves as pushing a “higher” and “better” morality. (Hugh Hefner is a most obvious illustration, but just listen to what others there say.) Traditional Christian practice is held up as morally inferior to the values sponsored by “Hollywood” presentations and as having been intellectually discredited. Of course the same is true of the Islamic critique of “the West.” Can we learn anything from these voices? At the present time, popular culture and political parties have largely taken over the attack, though government is still involved in various ways—especially in education. Lyrics of popular music before the Beatles and Bob Dylan did not undertake to critique traditional (Christian) teachings. Just look back at the lyrics of Perry Como and Doris Day. Even Elvis—while he was perceived as threatening to Chri...

DAVE'S CAUTION: Anything you might observe about so-called Christians that is anything but admirable (even a rebuke, which should be with love and grace) is a grotesque distortion of the genuine follower of Christ--whether it be inquisitions, crusades, or described below--ask yourself: Is this what Jesus would say or do? No talk here of “the crushing burden of piety,” as it has been called, or of religion as a “life sentence” instead of a life. Our walk with Christ, well learned, is a burden only as wings are to a bird or the engines are to an airplane. The mature children of light are like their Master. They know God and his Word, they think straight, and they live in the truth, because every essential dimension of their being has been transformed to serve God: heart, soul, mind, and strength. We can understand the subsequent course of history only if we see it as a combination of the successes and the failures of those who became identified with Christ to be the light of their wo...

SEVERAL CHARACTERISTICS CAN SERVE as marks of those who have become established in their whole being as children of light. One is that whenever they are found to be in the wrong, they will never defend it—neither to themselves nor to others, much less to God. They are thankful to be found out, and they fulfill the proverb, “Reprove a wise man, and he will love you” (9:8). Indeed, when accused of being in the wrong when they are not, they will not defend themselves, but will say only as much as is required to prevent misunderstanding of the good and to assist those who truly desire to know the facts of the case. Another of their characteristics is that they do not feel they are missing out on something good by not sinning. They are not disappointed and do not feel deprived. They do not fret because evildoers prosper, and they are not envious toward them (Psalm 37:1). They know that “better is the little of the righteous than the abundance of many wicked” (verse 16). This of course is re...

The work of Jesus in the world is twofold. It is a work accomplished for us, destined to effect reconciliation between God and man; it is a work accomplished in us, with the object of effecting our sanctification. By the one a right relation is established between God and us; by the other, the fruit of the reestablished order is secured. By the former, the condemned sinner is received into the state of grace; by the latter the pardoned sinner is associated with the life of God. . . . How many express themselves as if, when forgiveness with the peace which it procures has been once obtained, all is finished and the work of salvation is complete! They seem to have no suspicion that salvation consists in the health of the soul, and that the health of the soul consists in holiness. Forgiveness is not the reestablishment of health; it is the crisis of convalescence. If God thinks fit to declare the sinner righteous, it is in order that he may by that means restore him to holiness. “The stea...

THIS FACT IS SET out more clearly in some passages than others. Second Peter 1:3-11 is one of the clearest. Here, starting from the bedrock of “God’s divine power, that has granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness”—stop now and think about how much “everything” leaves out—the writer proceeds to point to the “precious and magnificent promises” of God that make it possible for us to “become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped the corruption that is in the world through excessive desire or lust” (verses 3-4, PAR). And how is this escape to come about? By putting forth your very best efforts—“applying all diligence,” a good translation says—to add to your faith, your confidence in Christ, moral excellence or virtue. That is, train yourself to simply do what is good and right. Obviously, this is something we are to do, which will not be done for us. And then, in your virtue, add on knowledge or understanding. That is, come to know why the good and right you do is...

“The one who loves his brother abides in the light and there is no cause of offence in him." Soul: Finally, as you come to know these [godly revelations to children of the light]—though those who know only the human powers of the flesh will never be able to understand them (1 Corinthians 2:14)—you see that all [manifestation of godly serenity] is not just at the surface. It is deep, and in a certain obvious sense, it is effortless. It flows. That is, the things we have been describing are not things the children of light are constantly trying hard to do, gritting their teeth and carrying on. Instead, these are features of life that well up out of a soul that is at home in God. The passages we have in mind are very well known. Of course Matthew 5–7 heads the list, but properly understood it really goes no further than familiar passages in Paul’s letters, or in those by Peter, James, and John. And there are similar, though on the whole somewhat less penetrating, passages in the ...

The significance of human life upon the earth must either be very small or very great. Very small from the strictly natural point of view. If we represent earth’s history on a twenty-four-hour clock, from midnight to midnight, then according to the evolutionary story, our remotest human ancestors appeared at 11:59 P.M., and what we call the “civilization” of the last several thousand years is represented as the pop of a flashbulb at midnight. By any account, from the merely scientific point of view, the earth will not support human society for any long period of time (in cosmic terms), and if the future of the earth’s surface resembles its astonishing past, for a few thousand more years at most. God’s purposes for human history, as set forth in the Bible, are of course quite another matter. According to the biblical picture, the function of human history is to bring forth an immense community of people, from “every nation and tribe and tongue and people” (Revelation 14:6), who will be ...

Those are surely right who have recognized in pride the root of all disobedience. We think we are “big enough” to take our life into our own hands and disobey, instead of “humbling ourselves under the mighty hand of God.” And this will certainly be driven by the thought that if we do not take things into our own hands, we will not get what we want—another blow to our pride. Our attitude should be, to the contrary, that there is no particular reason why I should get what I want, because I am not in charge of the universe. The presence of the Spirit and of grace is not meant to set the law aside, but to enable conformity to it from an inwardly transformed personality. We walk in the spirit of the law and the letter naturally follows as is appropriate. You cannot separate spirit from law, though you must separate spirit and law from legalism—righteousness in terms of actions. Grace does not set law aside except on the one point of justification, of acceptance before God. To the contrary, ...

WHAT WE MOST LEARN in his yoke, beyond acting with him, is to abandon outcomes to God, accepting that we do not have in ourselves—in our own “heart, soul, mind, and strength”—the wherewithal to make this come out right, whatever “this” is. Even if we “suffer according to the will of God,” we simply “entrust our souls to a faithful Creator in doing what is right” (1 Peter 4:19). Now, this is a major part of that meekness and lowliness of heart that we also learn in his yoke. And what rest comes with it! Humility is a great secret of rest of soul because it does not presume to secure outcomes. We simply have to rest in his life as he gives it to us. Knowledge, from Christ, that he is good and great enables us to cast outcomes on him. We find this knowledge in the yoke of Christ. Resting in God, we can be free from all anxiety, which means deep soul rest. Whatever our circumstance, taught by Christ we are enabled to “rest [be still] in the LORD and wait patiently [or longingly] for Hi...

There is a developmental order in the soul, such that if it does not receive what it needs to receive within appropriate periods of time as it grows, its further progression toward wholeness is permanently hindered. It will never be what it might have been. Sometimes horrible events of later life, such as being tortured or cruelly betrayed, have similar effects, from which the soul may never recover. Fundamental aspects of life such as art, sleep, sex, ritual, family (“roots”), parenting, community, health, and meaningful work all are in fact soul functions, and they fail and fall apart to the degree that soul diminishes. It is possible that the reason modern intellectuals have failed to find soul is that soul really is no longer present in their individual lives. Perhaps something like a soulless life really is possible and not just something to be portrayed in fashionable literary works. That would explain why meaning is such a problem for human beings today. “Meaning” in action is f...

  DEFENSIVENESS GONE -  THE SECOND ELEMENT IN the spiritually transformed social dimension is abandonment of all defensiveness. This of course could occur only in a social context where Christ dwells—that is, among his special people. But it is natural it would occur in the absence of attack and withdrawal, wherever that may be, or where we have an impregnable defense against it. This abandonment of defensiveness includes a willingness to be known in our most intimate relationships for who we really are. It would include abandonment of all practices of self-justification, evasiveness, and deceit, as well as manipulation. That is not to say we should impose all the facts about ourselves upon those close to us, much less on others at large. Of course we shouldn’t. But it does mean that we do not hide and we do not follow strategies for “looking good.” The abandonment of all defensiveness and its many strategies would clearly be achieved in such a group. There would no long...

“We are dead,” Paul tells us, and “our life is hid with Christ in God. When Christ, who is our life, shall appear, then we will appear with him, glorious” (Colossians 3:3-4, PAR). We have stepped into a new life where the primary relationship is with Christ and we are assured of a glorious existence forever. God has a plan for each of us in the work he is doing during our lifetime, and no one can prevent this from being fulfilled if we place our hope entirely in him. The part we play in his plans now will extend to the role he has set before us for eternity. Our life in him is whole and it is blessed, no matter what has or has not been done to us, no matter how shamefully our human circles of sufficiency have been violated. It is God’s sufficiency to us that secures everything else. Paul again said, “Our sufficiency is of God” (2 Corinthians 3:5; 9:8, PAR). It is the God-given vision of us as whole in him that draws all the poisons from our relationships to others and enables us to go ...

SPIRITUAL FORMATION IS NECESSARILY SOCIAL SPIRITUAL FORMATION, GOOD OR bad, is always profoundly social. You cannot keep it to yourself. Anyone who thinks of it as a merely private matter has misunderstood it. Anyone who says, “It’s just between me and God,” or “What I do is my own business,” has misunderstood God as well as “me.” Strictly speaking there is nothing “just between me and God.” For all that is between me and God affects who I am; and that, in turn, modifies my relationship to everyone around me. My relationship to others also modifies me and deeply affects my relationship to God. Hence those relationships must be transformed if I am to be transformed. Love is not a feeling, or a special way of feeling, but the divine way of relating to others and oneself that moves through every dimension of our being and restructures our world for good. This “relating” quality reaches into every dimension of human existence. It characterizes the basic nature of all thought and feeling, w...

1. We must actually release our body to God. That is what Paul means when he tells us “to present our body to God as a living sacrifice” (Romans 12:1, PAR). It needs to be a definite action, renewed as appropriate, perhaps on a yearly basis. You will not drift into this position before God, and you will not, without decisive action, stay there. Perhaps you could do it like this. Decide to give your body to God on the basis of understanding how important it is and that scriptural teaching requires it. Know, therefore, that it is a good and indispensable thing to do. Then take a day in silent and solitary retreat. Quiet your soul and your body, and let them get clear of the fog of your daily burdens and preoccupations. Meditatively pray some central Scriptures before the Lord, especially those dealing directly with the body, already cited and emphasized in this chapter. I recommend that you then lie on the floor, face down or face up, and explicitly and formally surrender your body to Go...