3. Your Good Health
3
Your Good Health
I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that by testing you may discern what is the will of God.
Romans 12:1–2
The title of this chapter is a form of words that you might expect to hear at a party as people around the table drink toasts to each other. We borrow the phrase because it pinpoints what this chapter deals with. In the first place, you who read these words are people whose overall spiritual health we hope and pray God will use our book to promote. And secondly, what we must now explore is the certain truth that our power to discern and follow God’s guidance in our making of both short-term and long-term decisions will be reduced if spiritually we are out of sorts. Ordinarily, as we know from experience, our best brainwork is done when our bodies are fit and we feel good, but bodily disorders diminish the balance and power of our minds—and there is a spiritual counterpart to that. As business people who want always to be at their best make a point of taking regular exercise to keep their bodies healthy, so Christians who desire always to be sensitive to nudges from God, in whatever form they are going to come, need to take appropriate action for keeping in good spiritual shape. To show how this may be done, and to point out as we move along some of the pitfalls that threaten if this is not done, is thus our next task.
Facing the realities of our present condition is the first step for all of us. All athletes must endure a regular “sports physical.” This is a checkup designed to show if the athlete’s body is set for the rigors ahead and to spot any potential weaknesses that might jeopardize his or her well-being or (perhaps more importantly) the well-being of the team. The sports physical is intended to uncover these weaknesses and lead to treatment for strengthening what is not up to the mark before major damage is done. So it is with spiritual checkups. They are a part of our training for “wellness” in our life with God. The New Testament pictures the Christian life as running a race (see 1 Cor. 9:24, Gal. 5:7; Phil. 3:13–14; and Heb. 12:1) and makes clear that checkups are part of the discipline required. “Examine yourselves. . . . Test yourselves,” writes Paul (2 Cor. 13:5).
Why Checkups?
Why do we need regular checkups of our spiritual health? During off-season, an athlete doesn’t always notice when he or she has drifted into a state of being below par—a little weight gain, a little flab on the haunch, a little more windedness at a dead run—it all goes unnoticed. Everything still feels right—and that is precisely the problem. Similarly, perfectly ordinary people, when weakened by flu or some other scourge, begin to forget what it felt like to be really well. “Didn’t I always have to lean on the chair on my way to the couch? Wasn’t I always out of breath walking to the kitchen? Yes, I guess so. Was that really I who ran laughing down the hallway just last week, then rolled around on the floor with the children? Surely not!” Being sick, or less than well, begins to feel “normal.” The same thing happens with regard to spiritual health. Just as we can begin to lose our athletic conditioning (if we ever had it), so we can begin to lose our spiritual edge, the edge that brings joy and confidence, peace, love, and productivity, and we hardly realize what has happened. Our spiritual languor begins to feel normal. What we need is the jolt of a checkup.
There are all sorts of reasons for a below par spiritual state in which energy for God and for God’s glory is simply lacking, but its outcome is always the same. The peace, the active goodwill, and the joy that we once knew are no longer a part of our regular condition of life. William Cowper, who lived much of his life in acute depression, wrote “Where is the blessedness I knew when first I saw the Lord?” This question is often echoed by people who drift into a spiritual lassitude. Such folk may feel physically and mentally exhausted. Sometimes they lapse into an ongoing attitude of irritation at other people, irritation at the church, irritation at husband or wife or children or employer. Of course these symptoms may represent some medical condition or chronic exhaustion due to overwork. But whatever else is happening, these folk have come to be spiritually out of sorts, and they now need spiritual guidance for their recovery, over and above the other forms of help that they may also need.
It is our strong conviction that the guidance of God will only be reliably received by those whose hearts are right with God, and whose motivation is the glory of God—which are both signs of good spiritual health. If people who are not in good spiritual health seek the guidance of God, as many do, they are going to find frustration, disappointment, delusion perhaps, and certainly distress; for things simply won’t come right. Many books take up the subject of God’s guidance, some of them offering a wide range of excellent insights, but few speak to the prerequisite of spiritual health: that guidance from God is only to be expected when spiritually you are in good shape. This however seems to us a matter of crucial importance, and so we stress it here.
One of the first things that happens during a spiritual drift is that we slip under the power of pride, which is the basic expression of original sin that regularly takes over in such cases. Pride says in some form, “Me first, I want my choices, just as I want everything else, to put me on top.” Then our pride expresses itself in all sorts of attitudes and maneuvers contrived to put other people down so that we will indeed be on top. To trace all the ins and outs of the attitudes people adopt in the service of pride is like mapping the Mississippi Delta—the complex of bayous and backwaters, and the quantity of mud one meets, are both very great. Meanwhile the delinquent Christian hardly knows that he or she is spiritually substandard. This absence of spiritual awareness is the beginning of the problem, one that cannot be solved until people frankly face the fact that pride has got hold of them and that pride is now what is making the mess, which they feel in some broad unfocused way, that their life has become.
Bible biography provides many object lessons about this, and two of the fullest and clearest are in the life of the man who wrote Psalm 23, David himself. Look at David for a moment. He was a godly shepherd boy who became a godly king. The prophet Samuel celebrated him at the outset as a man after God’s own heart, and the apostle Paul confirms that this was God’s final estimate of him. (See 1 Sam. 13:14 and Acts 13:22.) Magnetic leader and man of action, gifted musician, and deeply devotional poet, tenderhearted friend and generous foe, ardent, adoring, single-minded servant of God, constantly concerned to honor God and bring benefit to God’s people, David deserves his place in the heroes’ gallery of Hebrews 11 among those who “through faith conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, obtained promises . . . became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight” (Heb. 11:32–34). And Psalm 23 shows that through all his days he saw himself as a sheep whom God was leading “in paths of righteousness”—ways, that is, as we have seen, of holiness, integrity, wisdom, and virtue (v. 3). Yet David’s life of service to God was marred by two great lapses, like near-fatal illnesses punctuating a life of normally robust health. In both of these episodes, as it seems, pride egged David on into really ruinous folly. The first concerned Bathsheba and Uriah; the second was the national census-taking.
To understand the wretched story of David and Bathsheba, we must realize that royal polygamy was at that time a status symbol. It was taken for granted that kings would have a plurality of wives and concubines, and God did not make an issue of this with either David or Solomon. What was so bad here, however, over and above David’s indulgence of lust, which in itself was bad enough, was that he impregnated a woman whom he knew to be another man’s wife, thus breaking the seventh and tenth commandments. Having failed to fool the husband into thinking the coming baby was his, David sent the man off to certain death so that he might marry the lady himself, thus in effect breaking the sixth, eighth, and ninth commandments as well. We might well ask, “What was happening inside David?” The evident answer is that his bodily laziness (he had not led his men out to the war, but was taking it easy at home) had induced spiritual unconcern and vacancy; he was thinking, not about what he could and should do for God, but like any other king at that time what he might do to please himself. Proud egoism had taken over and put his conscience to sleep. As we know, God judged David for this: Bathsheba’s child died, and David’s home life as well as his public life was ravaged by Absalom’s rebellion. (See 2 Sam. 11–12, and with 12:11 compare 16:20–22. For David’s eventual repentance, see Psalm 51.)
The taking of the census, from which Joab tried unsuccessfully to dissuade David, also expressed a lapse into pride while conscience slept. There was no reason to do this other than the arrogance of a monarch who wanted to be able to tell the world how many people he governed and how large an army he could raise when he had to. In the temptation to act thus, which Satan administered (1 Chron. 21:1–8), God’s displeasure with Israel for unspecified sins was being expressed (2 Sam. 24:1), and God’s judgment on David for his own sin in taking the census was to make him choose which of three forms of public diminution his people, along with their king, should now suffer. (See 2 Samuel 24 and 1 Chronicles 21 for the whole sad story.)
In both these instances the saving grace for David was that when alerted to his sin and rebuked for it, he acknowledged his wrong, humbled himself, made no secret of his guilt, repented, threw himself on God’s mercy, sought forgiveness, and thus came back to spiritual sanity. When servants of God fall into sin, either with eyes wide open to the wrongness of what they are doing or, seemingly like David, not letting themselves realize that it is sin until after it is done, this is the only way they can be restored. All of us believers need to learn this lesson, for we shall all of us make mistakes and slip into sins of one kind or another, and we shall all from time to time need to tread the pathway back that David trod before us, where the rule is that the greater the folly the more radical the repentance needs to be. Wisdom, however, tells us to try to avoid such lapses by knowing and not losing sight of our own vulnerabilities. But for that we need both faithful friends and periodic health checks, which bring us back to the topic now before us.
Looking Backward
Before we go any further into our explorations, we need a further glance at the places where we have walked in the first two chapters. We started by looking at Psalm 23 and identifying ourselves as sheep under the guardianship and guidance of our divine Shepherd. We saw that God’s guardianship and guidance covers the whole of our life. From one standpoint his guiding guardianship is his work of leading us “in paths of righteousness for his name’s sake.” From another standpoint it is guardianship and guidance in the path of spiritual wellness. God’s sheep are wonderfully blessed! The psalmist changed the imagery in order to make that point. “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.” Here is abundance, an overflow of good things, all gifts from the Shepherd. “Goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the LORD forever.” All this is a picture of spiritual wellness, the ideal. That is what may be ours if we humbly hold our position as the Lord’s sheep.
At the heart of living, as we also saw, is decision making. We are to make our decisions in our character as the sheep of the Lord Jesus Christ, moving through life under the guidance of our Good Shepherd. First a warning: bad decision making can take the form of following impressions—hunches masquerading as messages from God. “I feel” is a red-flag phrase in this matter of guidance; self-proclaimed holy hunches can be a source of real danger. True, our Lord does indeed sometimes gently nudge his sheep in one direction or the other—particularly those who know him well and are used to recognizing his voice within. But this is less the norm than many people assume, and it is not the place to start when seeking guidance from God.
Healthy decision making isn’t a matter of thinking what we want to think, and then acting as if it were true. It isn’t a matter of following our feelings, although if, by the grace of God, we make wise decisions for the living of our life, good feelings and even joy regularly follow. But the wise Christian seeking God’s guidance doesn’t start with impressions and subjective fantasies. Wise Christians start with the written Word of God, which they receive as their guidebook, as from the hand of Jesus Christ himself. We make our decisions in the light of what Scripture actually says and then, following on from that, in the light of wisdom that comes to us as we soak ourselves in God’s Word. The Word and the wisdom: these are the first two basic resources for good decision making, the activity that promotes and sustains true spiritual health.
From the Scriptures we learn parameters. We learn where it is wrong to go; we see the outline of the path that we must stay on. Following the principles taught in the Word, we seek to obey the revealed directions of God for living our lives to his praise. This is not always as straightforward as it sounds. There is quite an art involved in unshelling biblical principles from their context in Scripture and applying them (reapplying them) to the specifics of our lives. The classic Christian name for this art is casuistry, the resolving of cases of moral decision by the Word of God. Christians need basic skills in casuistry, and that will be treated later in this book.
Healthy Wisdom
We have also looked briefly at the kind of wisdom that comes from soaking yourself in Scripture. Wisdom produces the good life, the life of responsible relationships, the life which is lived in the joy and peace that come from God. Joy and peace will mark our life, flowing to us in the first instance from our reconciled relationship to God and remaining ours as long as at the heart of our living is the sense that, “Yes, God has prompted me to follow this path. I am judging, I am deciding, I am moving, I am acting according to his wisdom. God is with me, then, in what I am doing.” This is healthy Christian experience. But in order to live in wisdom, we have to learn from God to understand people and situations, and to work out the consequences of different courses of action, and to see the creative possibilities that are there for us as well as for those who depend on us—the people we live with and are nurturing and advising. Wisdom discerns what constitutes faithfulness to God, respect for others, and prudent behavior in difficult situations. Wisdom covers all of that—and much, much more.
The way of spiritual health, then, is to learn to live and make decisions under the Word, in the light of God’s wisdom as the Bible itself presents it. Certain books of Scripture are classified as wisdom writings, and these are not always as well appreciated as they should be; so we pause for a moment to say something about what they give us. Wisdom literature in the Old Testament includes the Proverbs collected or composed by Solomon and others (a compendium of shrewd sayings about life, perhaps echoing the words of Jewish grandmothers to their grandchildren for generations, but presented as from father to son); the book of Job (which shows us how to suffer); the book of Ecclesiastes (which, in the person of Solomon, teaches the way to enjoy life in this fallen world); the Psalms (modeling praise and prayer); and the Song of Solomon (which sings the exuberance of love). With these belongs the New Testament letter of James, as we shall see.
Some people may be startled to find Song of Solomon listed as “wisdom literature,” but the Bible is quite robust about the fact that love between a him and a her is of enormous importance in human existence. It is meant to be, and of course it still is; and a great deal of wisdom is needed to know how best to express it. Furthermore, this uninhibited love song images the love between the Lord and his people: the love that he shows to them and the love that they must show to him. True, the book is essentially a torrid love song, but so it had to be in order to become the vivid parable of self-giving, two-way love between the Lord and his own that it most certainly is.
Christians often neglect the wisdom literature of Scripture, but it is an important part of God’s guidance to us. According to these books, we must learn, at all costs, to avoid folly, which the book of Proverbs in particular pictures over and over as the opposite of wisdom and which is the chronic condition of so many benighted members of the human race. The preamble sermon which fills the first nine chapters of Proverbs guides us away from folly and toward wisdom. Throughout Proverbs the “wise man” (Solomon) admonishes his “son.” In the first chapter he warns his son against ever lapsing into violence for fun:
My son, if sinners entice you,
do not consent.
If they say, “Come with us, let us lie in wait for blood;
let us ambush the innocent without reason. . . .”
My son, do not walk in the way with them.
Proverbs 1:10–11, 15
Then in chapter 5 he admonishes his son against lapsing into unmarried sex merely for short-term entertainment while he praises sensuous joy in married love:
My son, be attentive to my wisdom; . . .
For the lips of a forbidden woman drip honey,
and her speech is smoother than oil,
but in the end she is bitter as wormwood, . . .
Let your fountain be blessed,
and rejoice in the wife of your youth,
a lovely deer, a graceful doe.
Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight;
be intoxicated always in her love. . . .
For a man’s ways are before the eyes of the LORD,
and he ponders all his paths.
Proverbs 5:1, 3–4, 18–19, 21
In Proverbs 7, the wise man continues his warnings about appropriate and inappropriate sex, this time warning his son against succumbing to the temptation of prostitutes and thus becoming so much the prisoner of his own passions as to follow her “as an ox goes to the slaughter” (7:22). Why all of this restraint? Why not enjoy the thrill of violence against a weaker person, or of sex with any willing partner? It is not that God is a dour killjoy willing misery and deprivation for us; it is rather that the results of these forbidden actions are harmful to those who perform them. At the same time, the writer affirms the goodness and joy of sexuality within marriage, under the benevolent oversight of God the Creator who is not whimsical or random in judgment but who “ponders all [each person’s] paths” and matches outcomes to choices (Prov. 5:21).
Violence and promiscuous sexuality are extraordinarily prevalent in today’s world, but God says that they are ruinous folly. This is a kind of folly which, whatever it does for other people, brings personal and spiritual decline to anyone who falls into it. It is the way of spiritual bad health leading to death. The personified Wisdom of Proverbs says, “Don’t follow it.” Alas, people did pursue folly, and people do still. The opening chapters of the book of Proverbs are thus very much words for our time: they remain guidance (to us) from God.
These are just a few examples of how the wisdom writings give guidance to us who believe. We will return to them throughout this book. For the moment, our point is simply that lapsing from God’s revealed ideal is like contracting a degenerative disease, with disfigurement and dysfunction soon appearing, and that to maintain spiritual health and fortify us against such infection we need regular checkups.
The checkup process for spiritual health is something we can usually manage with God’s help on a do-it-yourself basis. Some Christians, however, look for human help through a process called spiritual direction. As Catholics have always known, and evangelicals are beginning to learn, the task of a spiritual director is to enable a person to discern what the Holy Spirit is doing in his or her life and then to cooperate with that; their task is also to observe anything that is deficient or going wrong in a person’s spiritual life and to put their finger on it with the purpose, by God’s grace, of bringing correction. In a way the spiritual director’s job is like the midwife’s: presiding over the birth, checking that the process is going along as it should, and blowing whistles straightaway if something begins to go wrong in the delivery process. The question “Should I seek out a spiritual director?” is like the question “Should I tell my sins to another person?” In both cases the answer is “All may, none must, some should.”
The rest of this chapter is devoted to setting out four key principles that belong together as a kind of chain. To help the memory, we state the four principles using four words that begin with the letter H: Health, Habit, Heart, and Holiness.
Health
Principle One: Health for the soul is the fruit of holiness in the heart. Psalm 86:11 shows us the meaning of this principle. “Teach me your way, O LORD,” says the psalmist “that I may walk in your truth.” Here is the basic purpose of seeking God’s instruction. We labor to learn his way so that we may walk in his truth. Motive, as always, ranks high in God’s value system. Seeking God’s guidance in order to decide later whether or not we will follow what he reveals is out of the question. We must ask that God teach us his way in order that we may walk in it, even if his way is not the route we had first intended.
And now verse 11 goes on to say, “Unite my heart to fear your name.” That is a breathtaking, revelatory prayer. The heart is the very center, the energy center, of the person. Our desires, purposes, plans, attitudes, according to Scripture, all come out of the heart. Jesus set the Pharisees straight on that one. They said, “Well, holiness is a matter of (for instance) washing your hands before meals.” Jesus said, no. The disciples asked him what he meant, and he said that the bodily functions have nothing to do with real purity or impurity; what comes out of the heart is what defiles a person. (See Mark 7:1–13.) On another occasion he berated the Pharisees for the hidden greed, self-indulgence, hypocrisy, lawlessness, and injustice that was the inside story of their lives (Matt 23:23–28). All that constitutes a person (life, energy, attitudes), all of this and more come out of the heart, as if the heart is a factory in which all personal qualities are constructed. What then does it mean for God to unite my heart? The psalmist shows an awareness that the fallen human heart needs integration, a kind of uniting which naturally it has not got, and which, even in the person like himself who is born again and has a new heart, still does not fully appear. How are we to understand this?
When a person becomes a Christian by putting faith in the Lord Jesus through the work of the Holy Spirit within, a new creation takes place. We have a new heart. The very core of our person, the basic inner self, the factory production line as we might say, is changed. The Holy Spirit has renovated us and now indwells us to sustain our new life at all points. And all the attitudes and desires and purposes and expressions of energy that are part of our new personal life, what the new heart pumps out when we are born again, center first and foremost upon the desire to be Jesus-like, the desire to love and honor and obey and please and exalt our heavenly Father, and most of all to glorify our Savior by sharing our knowledge of him. This desire, or group of desires, is what we mean by holiness in the heart. But the difficulty is that those good desires are opposed by the old egocentric, self-seeking, self-serving desires that controlled us before we became Christians. They are still there in our system, even though they are no longer controlling our life. “Dethroned but not destroyed” is the phrase that describes them. Thus tormented inwardly, we find that there is conflict between the two sets of desires, so that it takes a certain amount of resolution, plus help from above, to go with what our heart is really wanting, and so be natural as a Christian, doing all that we know of the will of God.
What is the cure for this conflict? Psalm 86:11, as we saw, asks God to “unite my heart to fear your name.” The psalmist is asking God to advance the process of integration so that all of our energies will come together, to fear the Lord. Fearing the Lord has nothing to do with panic and alarm; it has everything to do with reverence, and response, and obedience to God’s revealed will. When God unites our heart to fear his name, that fear includes a humble, honest response of love to the God whose love to us is measured by Calvary, as the psalmist’s measure of the love of God would have been the exodus. Appreciating God’s love as one seeks to resist the urgings of indwelling sin is the way to maintain and increase our spiritual health.
This links up with Paul’s admonition in his letter to the church at Galatia. “Walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh” (Gal. 5:16). That is a statement of certain fact, but this walk will not be easy. Paul warns us in the next verse that there will be a fight. “For the desires of the flesh are against the Spirit, and the desires of the Spirit are against the flesh, for these are opposed to each other, to keep you from doing the things you want to do” (Gal. 5:17).
This is why conformity to the will of God is never perfect in this life. Even if the performance outwardly regarded seems perfect, the motivation, the state, and desire of one’s heart is never as strong in its God-centeredness, never as passionate in its purpose of bringing God honor and glory, as it should be and will be in heaven when God’s work of grace is finished in us. So inwardly there is always an element of battle against lethargy and distraction. We accuse ourselves of not being zealous enough for the Lord, and we are right to do so because none of us is as zealous for the Lord as we should be. So we need to keep asking the Lord to unite my heart more fully, to fear your name more thoroughly. That is how Christians progress in sanctification all through this life.
In the same passage, Paul goes on, in verses 19–25, to provide a full-scale self-test for spiritual health, almost in check sheet form. First, in verses 19–21, he lists the desires of the flesh: sexual immorality, impurity, sensuality, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, divisions, envy, drunkenness, and orgies. Many readers pass over this list quickly glancing first at “sexual immorality” and last at “orgies,” and then rating themselves as not much involved with these “works of the flesh.” But in the midsection, Paul lists common sins, some of them sins specifically of the mind and heart: enmity, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, envy. Who has not on occasion been enmeshed in these? These “soft sins” also reveal the state of the heart from which they pour, and wise Christians will take an honest look inside and ferret out their presence.
But the fruit of the Spirit is also present in the heart of the true believer. This is the same Spirit who is presiding over the work of grace within us and by whose power we are to walk daily in God’s presence. Paul lists his ninefold fruit, and thus gives us a further self-test for health. The Spirit’s fruit too includes “soft” realities, attitudes that are quantitatively unmeasurable, yet their presence or absence in our hearts are true health indicators. A wise Christians holds his or her life to this ninefold fruit and regularly asks, to what extent do my heart and life overflow with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control? How would the person who knows me best answer that question?
J. I. has been directed to take regular walks for his health, ideally every day, and Paul’s “walk in the Spirit” can be construed as God calling us to a constant spiritual “health walk.” The picture of walking is itself instructive. Walking is a purposeful steady activity; it is one foot in front of another. You go on, and you go on. You may not feel that you’re moving very fast, but you get to your destination. Walking spiritually often feels exactly like that—but you get to your destination. Charles Wesley’s prayer, expressed in one of his hymns, was that he might “closely walk with thee to heaven.” This is God’s picture of every Christian’s life; in and through the Spirit, it is a walk, indeed a walk home with the good Lord himself.
Habits
Principle Two: Holiness of life is the fruit of habits in the heart. A common proverb says:
Sow an action; reap a habit.
Sow a habit; reap a character.
Sow a character; reap a destiny.
There is great wisdom in this pronouncement. Your habits, increasingly, are you; all our habits, increasingly, are us. In the regenerate heart, as we have seen, certain habits are inbred and instinctive. If you are a Christian, you will habitually desire to please the Lord, to glorify the Lord, to show proper gratitude for the Lord’s love, to show proper reverence for the Lord’s greatness. You will in addition want to please God by obedience, in wisdom. You will also want to praise and pray because that is one of the habitual urgings which is implanted in you in the new birth. The Spirit comes into your heart and pulses, as we might say, so that you instinctively desire all of this and more.
Earlier in Galatians Paul wrote, “God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, . . . so that we might receive adoption as sons. And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’ So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God” (Gal. 4:4–7). “You are sons,” says Paul. Becoming God’s child is what happens when you put faith in Jesus. With justification (pardon and acceptance) has come adoption and inheritor status. And God has sent his Spirit into your heart, to prompt you to address God henceforth as “Abba,” which means father in an intimate sense. The analogy is the young child who doesn’t need to be told that Daddy and Mommy are there to speak to. The child just comes to them and starts talking. It is the most natural thing in the world; in a normal healthy family it happens, we could say, by instinct. In a spiritual sense, theologians label this intimate approach to God “filial instinct,” the instinct of the child who raises her arms to her daddy knowing that he will pick her up and love her and take care of her and give her all that is good for her. It is a Christian paradox that while we approach God with reverence and awe, we also come to him with all the instinctive confidence with which the small child runs to her daddy. Holiness is the fruit of this filial instinct, expressed now in God-pleasing habits of heart and life that reproduce in us the moral profile of our elder brother in the Father’s family, our holy kinsman-redeemer, Jesus Christ our Lord.
These nine habits that Paul called the “fruit of the Spirit” (singular, “fruit,” not “fruits”), this love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, are nine facets of Christlikeness. They are so important as essentials of spiritual health, that we shall spend a few moments now explaining their nature.
Note first that each of them is a fixed habit of behaving as distinct from a passing mood or a fitful gust of feeling. They are aspects of character, life-habits that persist in place of external incentives, or shall we say temptations, to behave differently. Thus, love persists in the face of active hostility; joy, in face of grounds for bitterness; peace, in face of traumatic troubles; patience in face of impatience and panicky pressures; and so on. Each of these behavior patterns involves a willingness to swim against the stream of unthinking impulse, as did the Lord Jesus before us.
Note second, that they are expressions of conviction, shaped by knowledge of God’s love to us and will for us. As they are not natural virtues, so they are not supernatural endowments wrought in us over our heads, so to speak, that is, while our heads are still empty of this knowledge. The fruit of the Spirit is the outcome of learning and obeying the gospel, consciously trusting Christ as Savior and Master, and resolutely repenting of our sins. Now look at these qualities separately.
Love: Love (agapē) is the habit of seeking some form of greatness for the other party, laboring to do what is truly good for that person. It is the way of love always to do its best for the beloved one. When we worship God it is love seeking to show him to be already great in our estimation, and to encourage others to acknowledge his greatness. When we love our neighbor, which is a further instinct of the regenerate heart, we seek to discern and to meet our neighbor’s real need. Thus, love aims and works to make the neighbor, the loved one, great, whether or not this love is recognized and returned. Paul profiles the fundamentals of neighbor-love in 1 Corinthians 13.
Joy: Joy is a habit that, like the rest of the fruit, matures into an active attitude. Joy is a discipline—a delightful discipline—of rejoicing, which begins with simply thinking over the things that God has done for us, the commitment that God has made to us, and the service that God renders to us. To this kind of meditative thinking on God’s kindness, joy is the natural reaction. But joy begins with a disciplined habit of thinking of these things until one is freshly thrilled by them. Then one’s rejoicing finds natural expression in smiling, singing, and sharing and as has truly (and picturesquely) been said, joy then proves to be like jam: the more you try to spread it, the more it sticks to you. Joy in the Lord can coexist in the Christian’s heart even with grief at unhappy things; “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing” (2 Cor. 6:10) is a Spirit-induced state of mind, incomprehensible to the world but well-known among God’s saints.
Peace: One of the great gifts that our Lord has given us is objective, relational peace between us and our God through the achievement at Calvary. Subjective, personal peace flows from the habit of never forgetting the cross, but constantly remembering what our Lord went through in order to bring us pardon for sin and justification through faith. As we hold the cross before our minds, brooding on it (as is the good habit of many devout Christians, a habit regularly reinforced at the Lord’s Table) the outcome is not morbidity, but peace—knowing peace with God, enjoying the peace of God, and becoming a center of peace, a peacemaker and peace-bringer, as we move around among the strife-torn. “Blessed are the peacemakers,” says the Lord Jesus, “for they shall be called sons of God” (Matt. 5:9). The peace of God produces pleasure, praise, and patience under God’s hand of providence; those privileged to know and share it are key people in every community of which they are part.
Patience: Patience, as we have just said, is a habit of mind and heart that grows out of inner peace. Patience trusts God to be at work even in the frustrating events of life, whether it is engorged traffic or crying babies or implacable vendettas or a seemingly unending series of personal disasters. Patience thinks before speaking, aiming to avoid offending. Patience wills the self to see the world from someone else’s perspective—and to walk with that person through their world. Patience is rooted in hope because “if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience” (Rom. 8:25). Patience takes the long view; unfazed by short-term setbacks, it will carry on unruffled instead of giving up in despair. Patience accepts God’s timing and responds to others in a way that reflects the patience God has toward us. “With the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord . . . is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (2 Peter 3:8–9). Patience sees today in the perspective of eternity—and so can laugh.
Kindness: Kindness is a habit that softens the atmosphere. It is an outgoing of neighbor-love that becomes instinctive, and is often unnoticed even by the person who practices it; yet voices and actions and even thoughts surrounding acts of kindness impart this softening toward others as if it were a benevolent virus, a happy infection that eases everything for everyone. The bewildered “sheep” of Matthew 25:31–40 could hardly remember when they visited the prison, fed the hungry, welcomed a stranger, and they had no idea that Christ valued these acts of kindness so much that he considered them as done to himself. Kindness is like that. It is a selfless form of thinking that sees a need and meets it, almost by reflex, with no thought of reward. Like the other fruit of the Spirit, kindness comes by receiving and then imitating the kindness of God, as the apostle Paul wrote to the church at Ephesus, “Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you” (Eph. 4:32).
Goodness: Goodness and kindness run into each other and so are often confused. Yet goodness has a quality of moral discernment about it that naked kindness might lack. Goodness thinks beyond the present and evaluates what is best in the long term. Kindness spends its strength handing out boatloads of fish to the hungry. Goodness both feeds the hungry and then helps them set up a microenterprise of fishing. Goodness discerns what is good and what is evil disguised as good. Goodness, we might say, is kindness well-soaked in wisdom. Like the other qualities that make up the ninefold fruit of the Spirit, goodness is a habit or disposition modeled after God’s own character. When Moses asked God to show him his glory, God responded, “I will make all my goodness pass before you” (Exod. 33:19). Later when David composed Psalm 23, reflecting on a life guided and guarded by his shepherd, he said, “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life” (v. 6). Because of the goodness of God’s character, the goodness with which he deals with us and in which he wraps our lives, healthy people of God can truly be described as, in the best sense of the word, “good.”
Faithfulness: Faithfulness doesn’t quit. The book of Hosea pictures God’s faithfulness with unforgettable poignancy. God tells Hosea to marry a prostitute named Gomer who (predictably) continued to practice her craft bearing a number of children not fathered by Hosea. Years later when Gomer, having long left Hosea, has as it seems become another man’s sick and destitute slave, God commands Hosea to buy her and take her home once again as his wife, saying to her, “I will betroth you to me in faithfulness. And you shall know the LORD” (Hos. 2:20). Throughout the book, Gomer is a living symbol of Israel’s unfaithfulness to God, and Hosea is a symbol of God’s faithfulness to his people—so much so that at some points it is difficult to separate Hosea’s words to Gomer from God’s words to Israel. Hosea, in ways far past human expectation, has absorbed into his own character the sacrificial faithfulness of God. Most of us are not called to make Hosea’s kind of sacrifice. But to the extent that we develop the habit of faithfulness, whether it is in keeping appointments, keeping bills paid when due, or keeping marriage vows, we begin to mirror, even partially, the character of our God who is faithful always.
Gentleness: We rarely see gentleness in a corporate boardroom, but small children, especially babies, seem to draw gentleness from within us. A favorite desk photo of Carolyn’s shows a burly car mechanic, shoulders hunched protectively forward, calloused hands willed to a soft cradle, head sloping downward as his eyes meet those of the newborn son in his arms. A healthy Christ-follower is gentle to the core. Gentleness in the Bible is not the opposite of strength; it is not wimpishness, as modern usage might suggest; it is, rather, strength under control, harnessed to love and serve. Gentleness is all the more real because every time it is practiced, gentleness is a freely made choice that is backed by strength. Isaiah, in foretelling the coming of Jesus describes him in shepherd terms: “He will tend his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms; he will carry them in his bosom, and gently lead those that are with young” (Isa. 40:11). This is a strong shepherd! He climbs rocky mountains looking for pastures, he carries recalcitrant lambs, he leads. But he notices those who need help, and those who are hungry, and those who require protection. It is his gentleness that notices, and cares. So it is with healthy Christians. People who follow their strong shepherd grow constantly in gentleness.
Self-control: An uncontrolled self is a deadly force. It wills to defy or ignore God and tries to take the place of God—as Eve, our foremother and Adam after her, discovered through encounter with the serpent. Idolizing, exalting, celebrating, and indulging oneself as one’s god is the root cause of all the shame, folly, decadence, and moral blindness that mark modern Western culture so ruinously. When Jesus declared that the two greatest commands are that we must love God with all of our heart, soul, strength, and mind, and love our neighbor as much as we love ourselves, both of these commands attacked this human idolatry of self in a way that shows us how we are to transcend and overcome it. If we direct our whole being toward love of God, and if we give as much value to our neighbor as to ourselves, if not indeed more, the project of gaining control of self is well under way, and the fruit of the Spirit includes the habit of behaving in this fashion. As with gentleness, self-control operates from a position of strength. A strong understanding of oneself, a strong sense of selfhood, even of self-worth (under God’s governing), is entirely proper and even necessary for fruitful life in Christ. And a self that knows itself and has embraced self-denial and given itself to God’s control can become a powerful force for good. Indeed, this is the kind of gift that God asks of us through the apostle Paul: “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies [your whole selves] as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship” (Rom. 12:1). This path leads deeper and deeper into the grace of self-control.
All nine aspects of the fruit of the Spirit, as we noted above, are in essence habits of reaction: habits of benevolent reaction to awkward people and difficult situations, habits of glad reaction toward God in light of his love. These reactions to other people and oneself are not determined by the way people are behaving toward us, but by what we know of the God who made us, loves us, and has saved us. All nine are from one point of view responsive love to God in various expressions. “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).
Here, then, is the diagram, the blueprint, the outline, the profile, the checklist of the habits that make up the kind of holiness that constitutes true spiritual health.
Heart
Principle Three: Habits of living are the fruit of desires in the heart. Here we dig more deeply into the realities of Christian motivation. At surface level we have covered this point already, but there is more to be said. Repetition forms habits. We sometimes hear euphemistically that this or that person “has a habit.” These poor souls are the druggies, the gamblers, and the drunks. They have formed their habits of life by repetition, and now they are in the grip of them. They have repeatedly indulged certain cravings of the heart, and these cravings now control them. The habits they have acquired are self-destructive; they dissociate aspects of their personhood with increasing depth and sharpness—and so increase, rather than heal, the inner disintegration that is sin’s legacy to us all. Those in the grip of these habits become increasingly untrustworthy and unreliable, and the waste of their human potential becomes increasingly obvious and tragic. This is the negation of spiritual health from every point of view.
These unhappy folk are in the grip of a desire that grows, as long-term, other things being equal, all desires do grow, by being gratified; subsiding temporarily, perhaps, they are desires to which we yield and which come back all the stronger next time. The addictions we mentioned, and others like them—smoking, gluttony, sex, thieving, and so on—often begin with casual desire, perhaps only the desire not to be left out of what one’s friends are doing, but through being indulged the desire becomes compulsive, and strong enough to take over large areas, frequently indeed the central areas, of people’s lives. As the desire for a repeat fix feeds the habit, so the habit feeds the desire, and the person slips further and further under the power of both.
Now the point we would make here is that a comparable, though very different, process goes on in every healthy Christian life. As the heart’s desire to know and love and please and serve and exalt and glorify the Father and the Son more and more finds expression in our behavior, and comes to command more and more of our creativity, our imagination, and our inventiveness, so the desire itself grows stronger, with the result that the habits of life that it generates becomes more and more deeply ingrained in us. This aspect of the God-ordained pattern of life in Christ and in the Holy Spirit is not always appreciated as it should be. But when the New Testament writers call for growth and increase in the distinguishing life-qualities of born-again Christian people, it seems clear that this is the essence of what they mean.
To understand this, we must first note that desire does not always take the same psychological form. The spectrum that includes the young man’s constant desire for sexual relief, the child’s recurring desire for ice cream, the scholar’s intense desire to solve an academic problem and publish the solution in a convincing form, and the overworked teacher’s frantic desire for a vacation, is broad indeed. Desire is sometimes passionate, sometimes calm, sometimes physical, sometimes intellectual, sometimes panicky and hysterical, sometimes free from emotional overtones altogether. What constitutes it as desire is not its feeling-tone and emotional temperature, nor its moral quality, whether virtuous and noble or vicious and degrading, nor its comparative strength or weakness, but just the fact that it invades our thinking and tries, with or without success, to exercise some control over our planning so as to ensure its own gratification. Though we may resist its pull in our actual behaving we cannot get it out of our minds, at least not by simply saying “go away.” The deep desires of non-Christians are like that—they nag, as we say—and the deep desires of Christians are like that too.
Twenty years ago John Piper startled the evangelical world with his book Desiring God, in which he advocated what he called Christian Hedonism. Some who knew that in moral philosophy hedonism is the secular view that gaining pleasure is the natural, necessary, right, and proper goal of life and motive for action, and who knew too that in New Testament morality self-denial and cross-bearing, self-control, and self-surrender are central found Piper’s phrase paradoxical. But what Piper means is impeccable. He is pointing to the principle that God is most glorified when he is most enjoyed by his rational creatures; that, as Jonathan Edwards put it, “when those who see [God’s glory] delight in it, God is more glorified than if they only see it;” that, therefore, the famous first answer in the Westminster Shorter Catechism might have been even better than it is, had it read: “Man’s chief end is to glorify God by enjoying him for ever,” in place of “and enjoy him for ever.” Equating pleasure with joy, gladness, delight, and the happiness of being gratified and satisfied, Piper aims to stir up in us desire for God in order to induce the condition that pleases and honors God supremely as well as being supremely pleasant, captivating, gladdening, and fulfilling to the Christian heart. Piper is entirely right to insist that we do not desire God enough.
Desiring God is a state of heart that leads us to contemplate God always at work in providence and in grace, and always for our benefit. The phrase signifies a quest for three things. First, desiring God is the mindset that longs for the turning of God’s face toward us (this imagery points to the closest and most vividly realized intimacy with him). That desire breaks surface at the close of worship services when the pastor prays over the gathered people the same prayer Moses offered for his brother Aaron and his sons:
The LORD bless you and keep you;
the LORD make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you;
the LORD lift up his countenance up on you and give you peace.
Numbers 6:24–26
We find echoes of this prayer either as a blessing or a petition throughout the psalms. See for example Psalm 4:6; 25:16; 31:16; 86:16; 119:132, 135. But how seriously do we take the thought? As young children constantly long for magic moments when their parents pick them up, cuddle them, and kiss them, so heart-healthy Christians constantly desire moments when God’s face shines on them—that is, so they will say, when God comes very close.
Second, desiring God is a mindset that looks constantly for the tokens of God’s friendship with us ( friendship is the noun that best fits the fellowship with the Father and the Son into which we are called). We see this in John’s first letter as he defines the connections between himself, his God, and his readers: “so that you too may have fellowship with us; and indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ” (1 John 1:3). Friendship was the way God defined his fellowship with Abraham (see 2 Chron. 20:7; Isa. 41:8–10; James 2:23), and Jesus defined his fellowship with his disciples in the same unfathomably generous terms when he said, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lays down his life for his friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you” (John 15:13–15). The tokens of this kind of friendship with God are needs relieved and requests met, and heart-healthy Christians treasure them all.
Third, desiring God is a mindset that navigates through life with God’s future for us, as a compass point focusing on our never-ending expectations and discoveries of how God in grace continually imparts to us a Christlikeness that furthers our glorification and so increases our joy. Paul wrote to the church at Corinth, “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor. 3:18).
Desiring God hereby comes to appear as a process, indeed a discipline, of delighting, deleting, denying, and dying. The inward delight that knowledge of this process brings is reflected in John’s word of wonder: “See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. . . . And what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we will be like him, because we shall see him as he is. And everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure” (1 John 3:1–2). The delighting is a matter of focusing thoughts on God, reminding ourselves specifically of his good gifts to us already and, with that, of who and what he is and what he has done, is doing, and will do—how he saved us, saves us, and will save us—for the glory with Christ that he has in store for us. Such thoughts will always bring delight and leave us delighted. The deleting is a matter of turning our back on all aspects of the ungodly self-service that ensnared us once and seeks now to do so again. The denying is a matter of saying no to what the Puritan Richard Baxter called “carnal self” (as distinct from “personal self”) in its attempts to evade the call to follow the Lord Jesus totally and without compromise. We must say no every day of our lives to the evasions and wrigglings of this carnal self. The dying is a matter of recognizing, intellectually and imaginatively, that in God’s sight we believers have been crucified, have already died and been buried with Christ (that is, the life we were living previously has ended), and we have been raised up in union with him into a new life replacing the old (see Rom. 6:3–11; Gal. 2:20; 2 Cor. 5:14–17; Col. 2:11–13; 3:1–3). Reminding ourselves that this is the truth about us and keeping ourselves as vividly aware of this as we can, must also be a daily discipline. This is the fourfold path for desirers of God to tread, and how far we desire God in our hearts will appear from how diligent we are in the treading of it. For our habits of life, as we said earlier, are the index of the strength of the desires of the heart that produce them.
Paul prayed that the Philippians’ love to God and man might “abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment” (Phil. 1:9), and he presents himself to them as an example of one who “count[s] everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord,” and whose goal is “that I may know him and the power of his resurrection. . . . I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Phil. 3:8, 10, 14). Also, he prayed that the Colossians might be “filled with the knowledge of [God’s] will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding, . . . bearing fruit in every good work, and increasing in the knowledge of God” (Col. 1:9–10), and he directed them thus: “As you received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving” (2:6–7). “Built up” and “established,” like “abounding,” are present participles in the Greek, signifying a continuous, ongoing process. Peter, having warned his readers against various doctrinal deviations and errors, writes similarly rounding off his second letter by saying to them: “But grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” (2 Peter 3:18).
What do these verses tell us about the Spirit-given knowledge of the Father and the Son that Peter and Paul have in view? Three things, it seems. First, this is evidently both cognitive and relational knowledge. It is knowledge about the Father and the Son, and within that cognition, which we may call orthodoxy, it is personal knowledge of both, that is, communion with them. Second, this knowledge evidently brings ability to discern God’s will, in a way that otherwise we would not be able to do. (We shall pick up this point in a moment.) Third, this is knowledge in which we are evidently meant to make progress. How is that to happen? If what we have said so far is right, it is to happen through our desiring more and more of God, both cognitively and relationally, and through using appropriate means (primarily prayer, biblical meditation, Christian fellowship, and the Lord’s Supper) to gain what we long for. In this we shall be following where holy folk in Scripture itself have led; take these texts for examples:
Whom have I in heaven but you?
And there is nothing on earth that I desire besides you. . . .
God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.
Psalm 73:25–26
I say to the LORD, “You are my Lord;
I have no good apart from you.” . . .
The LORD is my chosen portion.
Psalm 16:2, 5
As a deer pants for flowing streams,
so pants my soul for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God.
Psalm 42:1
O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you;
my soul thirsts for you. . . .
Your steadfast love is better than life.
Psalm 63:1, 3
My soul yearns for you in the night;
my spirit within me earnestly seeks you.
Isaiah 26:9
“The LORD is my portion,” says my soul,
“therefore I will hope in him.”
Lamentations 3:24
To desire and seek God habitually in this way is natural to the regenerate heart and is the root of all real progress in knowing God. Christ’s followers can truly be said to “have a habit,” but it is a different sort of habit from that of habit-bound druggies and drunks. This habit comes from a different sort of heart, namely, one that has been renewed by God, and is hungry for God, and enjoys adoring and pleasing God more than it enjoys anything else, and wants to know more of God’s work and ways and will, in order to worship and serve him better. Which leads us straight to the fourth and final point in our analysis of spiritual health.
Holiness
Principle Four: Holiness of life leads to discernment in the heart. To clarify this, we return to Romans 12:1–2, the verses that stand at this chapter’s head. The first thing these verses show us is how holiness becomes a reality in human lives.
The pastoral problem at Rome, as Paul saw it, was that due to fuzziness about some aspects of the gospel, relations between Jewish and non-Jewish believers were tense, with mistrust on both sides. So Paul realized that the letter he was writing to prepare the way for his own planned visit must spell out the whole gospel as he understood it and draw from it true principles of fellowship and cooperation so that the church at Rome would know where he stood, and why, on all that confused and divided them. Hence the layout of Romans, with 12:1 “I appeal to you . . . ,” as the transition point from declaring what God did, does, and will do and moving on to directing what Christians should do here and now.
Any thoughtful reader today, having reached the end of Romans 11, might be ruminating somewhat as follows: “What amazing stuff ! God is so much more than I had thought, and the sweep of his judgment and his mercy, and his plan of salvation with Jesus at its center, fairly takes my breath away. I had never thought of God’s grace working in history, from Adam and Abraham on, the way it is presented here, nor as a believer had I understood my Christian life in terms of being dead and risen in Christ with Christ, and indwelt by the Holy Spirit to make me live so very differently—it’s mind-boggling! And seeing how non-Jewish Christians are grafted into Jewish stock and now share the same spiritual root system is amazing too. This Christian faith is big, much bigger and more complex, and much more deeply rooted in world history, than ever I realized, and Jesus Christ, I now see, is center stage and horizon-filling for persons with faith as no other person ever is or could be. I never dreamed that religious truth would be like this. So now what? I know that I don’t have to work for my salvation, which has come to me, for good, as a free gift; is there anything, then, that I should now be doing?”
Chapters 12–16 are Paul’s answer to that unspoken but deeply felt question. Believers without exception, they tell us, are called to be holy, serving God by neighbor-love in and beyond the church, and the hinge of holiness is 12:1, at which we shall now look in detail. “I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God . . .” “Wherefore the ‘therefore’?” we ask. Answer: this is an inference from “the mercies of God” as Paul has been expounding them from chapter 3 onward; and just as these mercies in themselves logically require the response Paul is about to specify, so the knowledge and appreciation of these mercies by those who have received them generate a motive of gratitude, leading them to make the response that is required.
“Brothers” in Paul’s opening sentence (v. 1) actually means brothers and sisters; the word is an inclusive masculine. All God’s adopted children, as those justified by faith truly are (8:14–17), are each other’s spiritual siblings within the divine family, “heirs of God and fellow heirs with Christ” our elder brother (8:17). Adoption is one of the greatest gifts of God’s great grace.
“I appeal to you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, that you present your bodies. . . .” Not bodies as opposed to souls, or spirits, or hearts for that matter, but whole persons—quite simply, all that you are. The Bible from time to time uses both “body” and “soul” to denote the whole person. Paul’s phrase here harks back to the way he spoke of presenting (same verb) ourselves and our body parts to God in 6:13. “A living sacrifice, holy acceptable to God. . . .” From the Old Testament we learn that the basic idea of a sacrifice (leaving aside the special role of some offerings in atoning for sin; that is not in view here) is of a gift that expresses responsive gratitude: a gift offered in homage to the God of creation, providence, and grace, at his own command, according to his own specification, and proceeding from a truly God-fearing heart. A study of Leviticus will confirm this. “Holy” (set apart for God) and “acceptable to God” are terms that the Old Testament applies to sacrifices that are offered in the way they should be.
“Which is your spiritual worship” (“reasonable service,” as in KJV, is a great thought but a doubtful translation). Real holiness is thankful, responsive, obedient consecration, with adoration of God alongside gratitude at its heart. The Word rendered “spiritual” is not the usual word that points to the Holy Spirit, but one that conveys the thought of something being appropriately rational and intelligent, and done with real understanding.
The second thing these verses show us is how discernment of God’s will becomes a reality in holy lives. “Do not be conformed to this world . . .” Christian believers, who through their supernatural change of heart and indwelling of the Holy Spirit are radically different from non-Christians around them, must be ready to make this evident by behaving differently.
“But be transformed by the renewal of your mind . . .” The Greek verb rendered as “transformed” yields the English word metamorphosis, signifying a real and substantial change in one’s personal existence in some way. Being in the present tense, the verb indicates that the transformation will be an ongoing, continuous, progressive process. “Mind” as we have already seen, is a word with a large and inclusive meaning; it covers all mental processes, all attitudes, all motives, purposes, and plannings. It embraces on the one hand all our power of creative imagination (such as sympathy, identifying with others, skill to practice fine and useful arts, so generating beauty, and ability to express, to perform, act parts and play roles, rise to occasions, and so enrich relationships); and on the other hand it covers all types and lines of analytical thought (such as inferences, calculation, reflections, evaluation, speculations, and guesses). Decision making, which is central to this book, is one of the mind’s many joint activities in which our imaginative and analytical powers are united.
“That by testing you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and acceptable and perfect.” Here is Paul’s punch line! The will of God is the course of action in each situation that God sees as good, pleasing, and complete; the most truly and fully God-glorifying response to each set of needs and possibilities; the most biblical, faithful, and reverent option open to us each time as servants of God and of his Son Jesus Christ. It is this that God wants and helps us to discern and then carry out. We shall make the discernment, says Paul, by testing—that is envisaging and weighing alternatives, and not letting the merely good become the enemy of the best. This means brainwork, which we should do in God’s presence, looking to him for light and help; but our reliance on him will not make it any the less brainwork. Discernment of this sort is often hard and demanding, often involves research and consultation to get our facts and principles straight, which takes time and severely tries our patience. Paul is not speaking of a global supernatural disclosure of God’s plan for one’s whole life, but of a situational perception of what is best to do here and now for God, for others, and for oneself in terms of God’s own law and value system, by which his judgments are formed. The Greek word rendered “perfect” means not so much flawless as complete and adequate, covering all angles in the way most satisfactory to God. Our power thus to perceive God’s will—our insight in testing alternatives, that is—will reflect the degree of thoroughness, love, and depth with which we have inventoried our powers of imagination and thought and lovingly consecrated them to God. Should we be lax in this, our discerning of God’s will becomes deficient too.
So whenever we seek God’s guidance in particular matters, we need to begin by making sure that we are walking with him in Christ, in love and loyalty and full commitment to both him and our neighbor, in the way that we should. Holiness of heart and life, a mind seeking deeper and fuller renewal from God, willingness to think hard in exploring and comparing possible courses of action, and successful discernment of the will of God are four things that go together. Subtract any or all of the first three, and the fourth will suffer.
Perfection, in the sense of flawless Christian maturity in intellectual, moral and spiritual virtues, and in practical wisdom is always an unrealized goal in our present life: we aim at it, but never attain it. Our reach exceeds our grasp. “Lord, I long to be perfect; help my imperfection” must surely be the constant cry of us all. However, the goal of good spiritual health in this life is attainable, and the foregoing pages have, we believe, shown what essentially it involves, with repeated stress on the fact that our grasp of God’s will and our consequent decision making are unlikely to be any better than is our overall spiritual condition. So we venture to urge that the way of wisdom for us all is to pause now and institute our own personal health checkup before we go any further.