The Use of Scripture in Spiritual Formation

Transforming lives by the application of the living Word of God
By Dallas Willard

Editor’s note: This article is adapted from a lecture given by Dallas Willard for The Henry Center for Theological Understanding. A video of the lecture is available from its website.

Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—his good, pleasing and perfect will. Romans 12:2

I call your attention to the wording there, “Be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” I think that over our churches today there hangs a cloud of failure. This is often driven home by statistical studies that show what the public sees of the church in terms of the failures of its leaders and also a lack of transforming power of Christians in our society.

I’m constantly trying to help individuals and groups who are or seem to be stalled out. They are not seeing the kind of transformation in their lives that you might expect from reading the New Testament. I believe that we can do much better. I believe firmly that there’s nothing wrong with the church that a clear-minded, resolute application of discipleship to Jesus Christ would not cure. But we have fallen into a period where discipleship is not the norm and not much understood.

So we have the accepted situation of multitudes of Christians who are by their own admission not disciples of Jesus. If that’s the situation you have, then the remedy is to turn to discipleship. And if you turn to discipleship, then you’re going to Scripture as a means to personal transformation.

This world against the kingdom of God

Paul admonishes us in this passage not to be conformed to the world. That’s the option. Not to be conformed to the world, but be transformed. How? By the renewing of the mind. We are talking about an alternative reality. The world on the one hand and the kingdom of God on the other. They have different views of the things that matter most. And of course, the Scripture comes to help us master life in the kingdom of god not just intellectually but also practically.

What is the kingdom of God? The kingdom of God is the range of God’s effective will. It’s where what God wants done is done. We pray, “Thy kingdom come.” And we spell that out, “Thy will be done on earth,” which is the only place that the kingdom of God is not.

All of the problems of humanity come from thinking wrongly about God. This world is organized around human desire. That is why John says, “Love not the world, nor the things that are in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in them.” What is in the world? Lusts of the flesh, lusts of the eyes, and the pride of life. Those three things are all expressions of human desire.

The will of God is directed toward what is good, not toward what is desired. Love is not the same thing as desire. Love is meant to govern the will. Desire contemplates an object and says I want that. Desire is obsessive. It is blind. It is, as Paul says in Eph 4, deceitful.

Love looks for what is good, which unfortunately for human beings is not what is desired. It is the human catastrophe that we often desire what is not good. In the mind transformed by God, love comes to replace desire.

John continues to say the world is passing away and the desires thereof. People find it easy to say, I don’t lust. But the real problem is desire. In the world, the mind is set on the flesh. And so we go back to Romans chapter eight. They that are living in terms of the flesh mind the things of the flesh.

The flesh is simply the natural powers of human beings. The world is the flesh organized historically and socially. So it all comes back to the natural powers of human beings apart from God.

What is spiritual transformation?

The mind of the spirit is what characterizes those who live in terms of the spirit. And the spirit is primarily God. Spiritual transformation is the process of moving from conformity to the world to conformity to the kingdom of God. It is a process.

To speak of spiritual formation actually is old language, very ancient in the Catholic tradition. For various reasons it dropped away. We had a period coming from post-Reformation time, up untill the present, where there were various ways of talking about formation.  But the one constant idea is spiritual growth.

For the Christian, spiritual formation is nothing but the procession of the individual taking on the character of Christ. What does that look like in practice? We have all kinds of illustrations of it, but here is a version of spiritual formation. Romans 5, says in part “Since we have been justified through faith … we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.” You will find parallel passages in Rom 8:1-11, Col 3:8-14 and 2 Peter 1:4-10. These are descriptions of a procedure, a process that human beings go through as they live as disciples of Jesus Christ.

Christian spiritual formation is the process through which the inner and outer dimensions of human personality take on the character of Jesus Christ himself.

What would that look like? That would look like someone who loves God with all their heart, with all their soul, with all their mind, with all their strength, and their neighbor as themselves. That would be the outcome of spiritual formation in Christ.

We have a theological background at present, however, which leans many people to say this is impossible, you cannot do this. A substantial part of our intellectual theological climate holds the view that brokenness is the top rung of the ladder of spiritual growth. Brokenness, that’s as far as you get. I think it takes time to realize what that means. Brokenness is an important stage to pass through, and once you’ve passed through it, you carry no confidence in the flesh. That’s what Paul lays out in Philippians 3, no confidence in the flesh. But beyond that you place confidence in the Spirit, in God, in his Word.

As a result, transformation occurs. It does so by working with each of these dimensions of personality that are set forth by Jesus in Mark chapter 12.

Works and grace

There’s a bumper sticker that I often mention because what it says is so profound. It says, “Christians are not perfect, only forgiven.” That’s certainly true, that they’re not perfect. But there’s a large difference between only forgiven and being perfect. And that’s the area of the process that one goes through in coming to the fullness of Christ.

One reaction to all of this is the complaint that this process is works, not grace. When the topic of spiritual formation comes up and you get into the need to actually do something, people are apt to say that’s works and not grace. Grace is not opposed to effort. In fact, you won’t see anyone put out effort like someone who has been touched by grace. Grace is opposed to earning, not to effort. If we are going to be formed in Christ, transformed into Christ’s likeness and out of conformity with the world it will be because we have done certain things. Spiritual transformation is not a passive process.

We come into discipleship to Christ with no credentials except our need and our understanding that he has welcomed us to life in him in the kingdom of God. That’s where the life of the disciple takes place. I am learning from him how to lead my life in the kingdom of God as he would lead my life if we were I.

Are we going to be transformed through the renewal of our mind? Do we hold that doing what Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount is an objective of the Christian life? If the answer is yes, then the next question is, How?

How are you going to come to the place where the things that Jesus commanded would be routine, routine, easy obedience. What are the methods? It isn’t going to happen without the grace of God. Jesus says without me you can do nothing. That’s granted.

The human person

Jesus, in Mark 12, tells us that we should love the Lord our God with all our hearts, with all our souls, with all our minds, with all our strength, and our neighbor as ourselves.

Jesus knew what he was talking about. When he gives us this statement, he is telling us how to move toward the renewal of the person. He’s saying we need to come to love God with all of those dimensions.

What is your heart? I think the heart is your will. Your heart is the executive center of the self. It’s where decisions are made. The fundamental role of the will in human personality is to rely on God.

Mind is your capacity for thought and feeling. You’re ability to represent things and the response of your feelings to what is represented. The will must respond to something that it is thinking and feeling, and then it can act.  When the mind goes wrong, the will is enslaved. And if you will read Romans 1 with this in mind, you’ll see how that works. The will can only act from what is in the mind.

The body is your little power pack. God has given you an energy source for your life that enables you to act, even to act in rejection of him. Your body is extremely important in the spiritual life. You are meant to live out what your body already knows to do. If it’s speaking a language or driving a car, that comes directly from your body. That’s why your body has to be retrained. That’s why Paul says to submit your body a living sacrifice. All the spiritual disciplines are bodily.

The next element is to love your neighbor as yourself, that’s the social relationship. Two things primarily inhabit your social relations in a fallen world: attack and rejection. That has to be redeemed so that love takes the place of distancing and attack.

The soul is that part of you that takes all of the elements of your experience and makes one life out of it. Your soul is not directly accessible to you. Your will is the executive center of the self, the soul is more like the computer that runs the whole operation, and you don’t want to hear from it. So if it’s cast down, you’ve got a problem. There is the wonderful Psalm, hope thou in God, that is addressed to the soul.

Now that’s a little complicated perhaps, but we have to get that all out there in order to talk about the role of Scripture in spiritual formation.

Beginning the formation process

Once you have made the decision to be transformed—by the power of God and by your action as well—then you have to decide where you can take hold of the process. This is what the beginning of the process looks like: The Spirit of God and the power of the Word come into the heart through the mind. The heart has the choice of how to respond. If the heart responds by trusting God in Christ, then there is a reconnection with God. And now you have resources for spiritual transformation.

That is where reaching out to the Scripture, and Scripture reaching out to me, begins to transform my mind. Through this, the will has a way of working. The soul can come back together. As Psalm 19 says, “The law of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul.” God’s law restores the soul because when you walk in the law your world begins to come together into a coherent whole. You are now living from the kingdom of God. The law is God’s expression of what is good and right. Following it brings us closer to Christ, because it instructs regarding what is good. The Scripture puts before our mind what must be there if we are to surrender ourselves to God.

But there is an additional process occurring as we keep Scripture before our minds. Word itself is a power that enters us. it doesn’t just stand before the mind giving us something to aim at. Rather it becomes a powerful force in us.

Jeremiah said the Word is like fire and like a hammer that breaks the rock. That’s a testimony of experience. That’s not cheerleading. That’s not Jeremiah jumping up and down and waving pompoms and saying, “Oh the word of God is powerful!”

That’s a testimony of experience that Jeremiah had from working with the Word of God. It is, Paul said, the power of God to salvation. When we take in the Scripture, it isn’t just a matter of it being before our mind, but of it spreading throughout our whole personality.

It is a power that works. It is quick and powerful. To say it is quick is not to say it’s fast, but to say it’s living. That means it takes on a life of its own. When you take it in, it begins a natural process of transformation.

Scripture and transformation in the church

If we’re thinking about using the Scripture as a means of transformation, we may need to rethink our church services. Are our services ones that effectively convey the Scripture and its content into people’s hearts, minds, souls, bodies, and their social relations?

This is a question we have to deal with. Is it possible that the widespread conviction of a lack of transformation among modern Christians is due to a failure to apply the Scriptures effectively to the lives of people? Having a high view of the nature of Scripture is not enough to ensure that we are conveying the Scripture and its content into the lives of our people.

Do we have enough time in our services to do that? Do we use the time we have to honor the Word?

How much time is spent reading the Word in our congregations? In many churches now, people don’t bring their Bibles, because they know that they’re going to see some Scriptures put up on the screen, and that’s going to be it. We need to ask ourselves, is that adequate?

What do we do outside of our services? Are we identifying those who are ready to do more to take on the Scripture into their lives? Do we do enough with memorization? Memorization is fundamental to spiritual transformation. At a retreat, I will normally ask people to memorize Col. 3:1-17. I watch the effect, often to their own astonishment, of memorizing passages of scripture. Are we doing enough with that?

Do we teach people to pray the Word, the Scripture? Many people don’t know what to do when they pray. They think you’ve got to say something, and they can’t think up anything to say. It’s a great relief to them to teach them how to pray the Scripture, to turn the Scripture into a prayer. That is one of the ways that we bring the Scripture into the lives of our people.

These are just a few things we can do practically to use Scripture in spiritual transformation. The big thing is for us to understand that we can change the minds of people by bringing the Scripture into their lives. So it is the place of decision. Are we going to find the ways of using the Scriptures in the lives of those under our ministry that will lead to their transformation into Christ-likeness?

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