This document summarizes key points from Chapter 8 of Renovation of the Heart: Putting on the Character of Christ by Dallas Willard. It discusses: 1. Willard equates the will/heart/spirit with the executive center that directs the whole person. Character develops from thoughts, feelings, and choices of the will over time. 2. The will can be transformed by interacting with thoughts and feelings from God's word and spirit. A transformed will looks like single-minded devotion to God and his will. 3. The will gives humans their dignity and worth, though it can become "splintered" and turn against itself when separated from God. Spiritual disciplines can help reveal

1. Wednesday Night Class
Renovation of the Heart:
Putting on the Character of Christ
October 14, 2020
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2. Chapter 8:
Transforming the Will (Heart or
Spirit) and Character
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3. How the Mind Depends on the Will
• Willard equates the will with heart or spirit.
• The progression he makes from discussing the mind to
will is purposeful.
• Thoughts and feelings that depend on the will cannot
be changed in the moment of choice, but the will/heart
can change the thoughts and feelings for future
choices. This is then what leads to the development of
character.
• He defines character as the “internal, overall structure
of the self that is revealed by our long-run patterns of
behavior and from which our actions more or less
automatically arise.”
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4. How the Mind Depends on the Will
• Character can be changed and that is what our
spiritual formation into Christlikeness is about.
• It’s not enough to just resolve “not to do something
again.” Our character must change so that we are not
the type of person who does said thing.
• The will alone is not enough. Making the choice is not
enough if we have not changed the thoughts and
feelings that would lead to the wrong choice again.
– The human mind and will must be transformed through
interaction with thoughts and feelings deriving from the
Word and the Spirit.
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5. Identification of Our Will with God’s Will
• What does a transformed heart look like? Jesus
is the pattern.
– John 8:29
– Galatians 2:20
– Calvin
• From this, Willard draws a conclusion:
– Single-minded and joyous devotion to God and his
will, to what God wants for us—and to service to
him and to others because of him—is what the will
transformed into Christlikeness looks like.
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6. The Basic Nature of the Will
• The will/heart/spirit is the dimension that
makes us unique.
• It’s the “executive center of the human self.”
From the will, the whole person is directed
and organized.
• Will is not the same thing as character, but
character comes out of will.
– Character is more habitual and automatic.
– Thought, feeling and will give rise to character.
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7. Will and Human Dignity
• It is our will that gives us worth, or
dignity.
• God gives us will or choice because if
he took it away and imposed his will on
us, then we would lose that which we
are.
• We value will in others such as when
kids are growing and begin doing things
on their own and we guard our own
ability to choose throughout our lives. 7

8. The Splintered Will
• God has implanted a drive toward good
but it becomes splintered and turns
against itself.
• Our self-deification turns our desire to
do good into a desire to have our own
way. Bad choices of manipulation,
seduction, deception, and malice
replace good choices of transparency,
sincerity and goodwill. 8

9. The Opportunity to Be Lost
• God will not force a will to do what he
wants.
• The will has a choice, though it does
not have a choice of the
consequences that result in choosing
what it wants.
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10. Duplicity, Deceitfulness, and Darkness
• The will apart from God is duplicitous or
fragmented. And our thoughts and feelings
fall into chaos. While decisions seem simple,
there is a conflicted complexity.
• In alienation from God, the human will
moves towards duplicity and deception.
• We live in a world where we are all engaged
in duplicity. We are even struggling to deal
with duplicity in ourselves.
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11. God Hears the Heart
• God is not looking for who we are on
the outside, but rather he is looking at
our hearts.
• God responds to even “the slightest
move of the heart toward him.”
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12. Shouting to God
• It is not a sophisticated process to be
reached by God.
• God is constantly monitoring hearts; hearts
that completely are given to him and rely on
him.
• What hearts hoping in him look like and what
happens as a result:
– 2 Chronicles 16:9
– Psalm 34:15
– Matthew 18:10
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13. From Surrender to Drama
• Surrender is us consenting to God’s
supremacy in all things.
• If grace prevails, then reluctant surrender
turns into abandonment.
• There is yet a third phase of surrender
beyond abandonment—“contentment with
the will of God: not only with his being who
he is and ordaining what he has ordained in
general, but with the lot that has fallen to us.”
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14. From Abandonment to Contentment—and
Participation
• Beyond this contentment level of
surrender is participation. We go from
being spectators to being active
participants in accomplishing God’s will
in our world.
• Not just trying to resist sin but rather
taking action to carry out God’s will. This
is complete surrender to God’s will and
one that acts with it. 14

15. “To Will One Thing”
• We must deal with our fallen character. The automatic
and habitual ways of thinking and feeling have shaped
who we are and have integrated themselves into our
subconsciousness.
• So we must then become unentangled and have a
single-minded focus upon doing the will of God.
• The “CEO of the self” is replaced by the other
dimensions of the self.
– 2 Timothy 2:4
– Luke 10:41
– Philippians 3:13
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16. The Power of Untamed Desire
• Entanglement stems from our desires and
our enslavement to them.
• James 1:14
• As we follow our desires, it increases the
hold our desires have on us.
• We may even link our will with our desire
and that could cause us to do whatever it
takes to achieve the satisfaction of those
desires.
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17. Getting Free from Entanglement
• We must then rid ourselves of these
entanglements by overcoming duplicity.
• John 14:12
• The person who intends to will what God wills—
to identify his or her will with God’s—begins with
what God has said he wills.
• Romans 13:8
• It’s not simple to achieve the implementation of
our decisions. But we have to maintain that
intention and sincerely make the effort.
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18. The Role of Spiritual Disciplines Here
• He lists some spiritual disciplines (solitude with God,
fasting, worship, and service) and says the purpose of
these disciplines is to cause the duplicity and malice
that is buried in our will and character to surface and
be dealt with. Those disciplines make room for the
Word and the Spirit to work in us, and they permit
destructive feelings—feelings that are usually veiled by
standard practices and circumstances and by long
accepted rationalizations—to be perceived and dealt
with for what they are: our will and not God’s will.
• Becoming someone with a will completely surrendered
and participating is a progression. It does not happen
overnight.
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19. Sweet Will of God
• Do we then lose ourselves?
• It’s not that we lose our will if our will becomes God’s.
Rather, by making this change we finally have a fully
functioning will.
• When through spiritual transformation we have in
some measure come to know the well-kept heart in
real life, we experience it as a gift of grace, no matter
how hard we may have had to struggle in the process
of growing into it.
• Not only do we have a fully functioning will but we have
a clear identity in the eternal kingdom of God.
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20. Next Week:
Chapter 9:
Transforming the Body
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21. Matters for Thought and Discussion
• 3. What in our makeup constitutes our will?
• 4. How does “getting my way” result in a
“splintered” will that is ambiguous and incapable
of sincerity?
• 7. What kind of person is God actively seeking?
• 11. Have you seen first-hand the effects of the
“entanglements” of desire on life?
• 13. Does it make sense to you that spiritual
disciplines could retrain the will and reform
character?
• 14. What would it be like for you to be “wholly
lost in the will of God”?
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