This document summarizes a chapter from the book "Renovation of the Heart" about transforming one's mind through spiritual formation. It discusses how thoughts involve ideas, images, information, and thinking abilities. Ideas and images are particularly influenced by ruling idea systems that can be godly or ungodly. Spiritual formation requires replacing ungodly ideas and images with those of Jesus Christ. Good thinking is also important, involving understanding scriptural information clearly. Maintaining a vision of God's greatness through worship and icons can help transform one's thought life and lead to deliverance from evil influences.

1. Wednesday Night Class
Renovation of the Heart:
Putting on the Character of Christ
September 30, 2020
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2. Chapter 6:
Transforming the Mind, Part
1
Spiritual Formation and the Thought Life
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3. Interlude
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4. The First Move Back from Ruin
• Thoughts are the place where we can
and must begin to change. There the
light of God first begins to move upon us
through the word of Christ, and there the
divine Spirit begins to direct our will to
more and more thoughts that can
provide the basis for choosing to realign
ourselves with God and his way. 4

5. What Thoughts Are
• By “thoughts” we mean all of the
ways in which we are conscious of
things.
• Interestingly, you can’t evoke
thoughts by feeling a certain way, but
you can evoke and to some degree
control feelings by directing your
thoughts. 5

6. What Thoughts Are
• The realm of thought involves four
main factors. These are:
– Ideas
– Images
– Information
– Our ability to think
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7. Ideas
• IDEAS ARE VERY GENERAL models of or
assumptions about reality. They are patterns
of interpretation, historically developed and
socially shared. They sometimes are
involved with beliefs, but are much more
than belief and do not depend upon it. They
are ways of thinking about and interpreting
things. They are so pervasive and essential
to how we think about and how we approach
life that we often do not even know they are
there or understand when and how they are
at work. 7

8. Spiritual Formation Must Transform Ideas
• NOW, CHRISTIAN SPIRITUAL
FORMATION is inescapably a matter
of recognizing in ourselves the idea
system (or systems) of evil that
governs the present age and the
respective culture (or various
cultures) that constitute life away from
God. 8

9. The Changing of Ideas Is Extremely Difficult
• From one essential perspective, of
course, Jesus himself confronted and
undermined an idea system and its
culture, which in turn killed him. He
proved himself greater than any idea
system or culture, however, and lives
on. He is continuing the process of a
worldwide idea shift that is crucial to his
perpetual revolution, in which we each
are assigned a part. 9

10. Images
• They frequently present themselves with
the force of perception and have a
powerful emotional and sensuous
linkage to governing idea systems. They
mediate the power of those idea
systems into the real situations of
ordinary life. Every idea system is
present among us as a life force through
a small number of powerful images. 10

11. Strongholds of Evil
• Ideas and images are, accordingly, the
primary focus of Satan’s efforts to defeat
God’s purposes with and for humankind.
When we are subject to his chosen ideas
and images, he can take a nap or a holiday.
Thus when he undertook to draw Eve away
from God, he did not hit her with a stick, but
with an idea. It was with the idea that God
could not be trusted and that she must act
on her own to secure her own well-being. 11

12. Images Empower Wrong Ideas
• IMAGES INCREASE THE DANGER
of inadequate ideas. They have the
power to obsess and to hypnotize, as
well as to escape critical scrutiny. The
image one has of oneself, for
example, can override everything else
and cause one to act in ways contrary
to all reality and good sense.
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13. Deliverance from Destructive Ideas and Images
• The process of spiritual formation in
Christ is one of progressively
replacing those destructive images
and ideas with the images and ideas
that filled the mind of Jesus himself.
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14. Information
• Failure to know what God is really like
and what his law requires destroys the
soul, ruins society, and leaves people to
eternal ruin…
• This is the tragic condition of Western
culture today, which has put away the
information about God that God himself
has made available. 14

15. Spiritual Formation Requires Thinking
• What is thinking? It is the activity of
searching out what must be true, or cannot
be true, in the light of given facts or
assumptions. It extends the information we
have and enables us to see the “larger
picture”—to see it clearly and to see it
wholly.
• We must seek the Lord by devoting our
powers of thinking to understanding the facts
and information of the gospel. This is the
primary way of focusing our mind on him,
setting him before us.
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16. The Crucial Role of Good Thinking Today
• The prospering of God’s cause on earth
depends upon his people thinking well.
• Bluntly, to serve God well we must think straight;
and crooked thinking, unintentional or not,
always favors evil.
• To take the “information” of the Scripture into a
mind thinking straight under the direction and
empowerment of the Holy Spirit, by contrast, is
to place our feet solidly on the high road of
spiritual formation under God.
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17. Thought, Love and Worship
• In this way we enter a life of worship. To think of
God as he is, one cannot but lapse into worship;
and worship is the single most powerful force in
completing and sustaining restoration in the
whole person. It puts into abeyance every evil
tendency in every dimension of the self. It
naturally arises from thinking rightly of God on
the basis of revealed truth confirmed in
experience. We say flatly, Worship is at once the
overall character of the renovated thought life
and the only safe place for a human being to
stand.
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18. The Supreme Worth
• Revelation 5:12
• Now, this angelic vision is precisely
the vision that possesses the thought
life of the renovated heart; and you
can see how it would grip the whole
person and his or her earthly
environment.
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19. Standing Before God
• WHEN GOD STANDS BEFORE us,
we stand before him. Refusing to
worship him is a way of trying to avoid
his face and his eyes.
• Our avoidance of God and worship of
him is from our wanting to avoid
“scrutiny in our wrongdoing.”
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20. Transforming the Details of Life
• Am I undertaking some task? Then I in
faith do it with God, assuming and
finding his power to be involved with me.
That is the nature of his kingdom. Is
there an emergency? I will meet it with
the knowledge that God is in the midst
of it with me and will be calm in a center
of intense prayer….And so forth. 20

21. Special Dangers in Our Thought Life with God
• There are dangers that Willard warns
against.
– The first is pride.
– A second danger is ignorance.
– A third danger is when our desires guide
our thinking.
– The final danger is in what images we allow
to come into our minds.
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22. The Way Forward
• The intention to be formed is to have the
great God and Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ a constant presence in our mind,
crowding out every false idea or destructive
image, all misinformation about God, and
every crooked inference or belief.
• With vision and intent in place, we will be
provided appropriate means to fulfill the
vision. These will be disciplines that aid in
our transformation.
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23. Images and Sayings
• As an opposite to the final danger
mentioned before, he states we need
to place ourselves in the presence of
good images. This could be icons,
sayings hanging on a wall, and so on.
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24. Finding Others Who Are Walking the Walk
• Last week we had a discussion about
this section.
• This will ideally be someone who we
can know in person within our family
or church family. Willard seems to
“allow” for the idea of looking at
bigger names
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25. Doing Justice to the Power of Thought
• The transformation of our thought life
by taking on the mind of Christ—his
ideas, images, information, and
patterns of thinking—opens the way
to deliverance of every dimension of
the human self from the oppressive
powers of darkness.
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26. Next Week:
Chapter 7:
Transforming the Mind, Part 2: Spiritual
Formation and Our Feelings
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27. Matters for Thought and Discussion
• 2. What are the main ideas that rule our society today? Do
you think they favor a godly life or hinder it?
• 3. What are the major ideas Jesus brought into human
history and how do you see them affecting the contemporary
world?
• 5. What images of God seem most common and influential
in our world? How about in your own thinking and devotional
life?
• 7. Reflect on the Gospel as basic information about reality. Is
that a good way to think of it? What are the alternatives to
thinking of it in that way?
• 8. Should followers of Jesus Christ be known as thinkers? Is
thinking actually a good thing for Christians to do? How
might it help us? Is it dangerous?
• 9. What is worship? How are thought, worship, and spiritual
formation related?
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