Renovation of the heart - Chapter 2

Chapter 2: The Heart in the System of Human Life

The aim of this chapter is to explain the nature of the heart (spirit, or will) and its function in the person as a whole. Heart, spirit, and will are words that refer to one and the same thing. But they do so under different aspects. Will refers to that component’s power to initiate, to create, to bring about what did not exist before. Spirit refers to its fundamental nature as distinct and independent from physical reality. And heart refers to its position in the human being, as the center or core to which every other component of the self owes its proper functioning. But it is the same dimension of the human being that has all these features.
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. 1) Thought 2) Feelings 3) Choice 4) Body 5) Social Context 6) Soul. 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.
Thought is that which enables our will (or spirit) to range far beyond the immediate boundaries of our environment and the perceptions of our senses. Feeling inclines us toward or away from things that come before our minds in thought. Notice that feeling and thought always go together, they are interdependent and are never found apart. Choice is the exercise of will, the capacity of a person to originate things and events that would not otherwise be or occur. Without the inner “yes” there is no sin, for only that “yes” is just us. The thought of sin is not sin and is not even a temptation. Temptation is the thought plus the inclination to sin – possibly manifested by lingering over the thought or seeking it out.[1] But sin is when we inwardly say “yes” to the temptation, when we would do the deed, even though we do not actually do it.[2] There is no choice that does not involve both thought and feeling. On the other hand, what we feel and think is to a very large degree a matter of choice to those who will be very careful about what they allow their mind to dwell upon or what they allow themselves to feel. This is crucial and unfortunately not widely understood. We are in fact very active in inviting, allowing, and handling our passions; we are not at the mercy of our passions. A great part of the disaster of contemporary life lies in the fact that it is organized around feelings. People nearly always act on their feelings, and think it only right. The will is then left at the mercy of circumstances that evoke feelings. Christian spiritual formation today must squarely confront this fact and overcome it. Body is the focal point of our presence in the physical and social world. Our choices, as they settle into character are “farmed out” to our body in its social context without our having to think about what we are doing. Social Context refers to the fact that all are rooted in God, whether they want it or not and our ties to one another cannot be isolated from our shared relationship to him, nor our relationship to him from our ties to one another. Our rootedness in others is primarily an ontological matter, it is who we truly are. We only live as we should when we are in a right relation to God and to other human beings – thus the two greatest commandments. Being with others, our social dimension, is inseparable from our inner thoughts, feelings, choices, and actions. Rightly understood, it is true that “there is no salvation outside the church” – just not this “church” or that “church”. Soul is that dimension which interrelates all of the other dimensions so that they form one life. Soul is a term that refers to the whole person through its most profound dimension. It is the deepest part of the self in terms of overall operations; and like the body, it has the capacity to operate without conscious supervision. The soul can however be redirected or reformed by the spirit or will with God’s cooperation.

Our actions, how we live, always arise out of the interplay of the six factors mentioned above. What we do is not an outcome of deliberate choice and a mere act of the will, but it is more of a relenting to pressure on the will from one or more of the dimensions of the self. This is why spiritual formation is bound to fail if it focuses upon the will alone. “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.” Actions are not impositions on who we are, but are expressions of who we are. They come out of our heart and the inner realities it supervises and interacts with. It is the central point of this book that spiritual transformation only happens as each essential dimension of the human being is transformed into Christlikeness under the direction of a regenerate will interacting with constant overtures of grace from God. Such transformation is not the result of mere human effort and cannot be accomplished by putting pressure on the will alone.

Passivity was for the Israelites, and it is for us, one of the greatest dangers and difficulties of our spiritual experience. The Israelites were saved or delivered by grace just as surely as we are. But in both cases “grace” means we are to be, and are enabled to be, active to a degree we have never been before. “And God is able to make all grace abound to you, so that in all things at all times, having all that you need, you will abound in every good work.” (2 Cor. 9:8)




[1] Consider what this tells us about the fact that Jesus was tempted in every way, but there was no sin found in Him.
[2] Again, consider Jesus’ teachings in the Sermon on the Mount.