Christlikeness from the Heart
The calling of the Christian to be holy is not abstract. Rather, becoming holy means becoming like Jesus. And this is a becoming from the heart.
We talked about this several weeks in ago as we opened up Leviticus 11–15. In that sermon, I explained that understanding sanctification as becoming more like Jesus takes us deeper than just “trying not to sin.”
Simply “not sinning” would be the most reduced, shallow way to imagine what it means to “learn Christ” (see Ephesians 4:20) — as if his abundant life that we possess, and his freedom-creating truth that we experience, only means that we say “no” to certain things. That’s certainly part of what it means, but it goes much deeper than that.
The Christian life, remember — our becoming more like Jesus — means we orient our lives toward Eden. This orientation transcends outward behavior to radically shape the heart from which the orientation springs in the first place. Then it’s from the heart that behavior and everything else flows.
In Dallas Willard’s Renovation of the Heart, a magisterial work on spiritual formation, he clarifies the matter from the very start:
Christian spiritual formation is focused entirely on Jesus. Its goal is an obedience or conformity to Christ that arises out of an inner transformation accomplished through purposive interaction with the grace of God in Christ. (15, italics added)
Read that key line again: “conformity to Christ that arises out of an inner transformation.”
That’s the goal. It’s not how we present or what we do. That matters, of course, but that is not the focus.
Willard later quotes the Great Commission, when Jesus charges us to “teach [disciples] to obey all that I have commanded you” (Mattew 28:20), noting that our obedience to Jesus here
… is not about how to act, just as the primary wrongness or problem in the human life is not what we do. Often what human beings do is so horrible that we can be excused, perhaps, for thinking that all that matters is stopping it. But this is an evasion of the real horror: the heart from which the terrible actions come. In both cases, it is who we are in our thoughts, feelings, dispositions, and choices — in the inner life — that counts. (17)
To summarize the point, our main goal in Christlikeness is not that we look like Christ, but it’s that our hearts become like Christ’s heart.
All of this is especially important for how we think of progress in Christlikeness. There are many parts of Christlikeness that we can imitate on the exterior. We can pick up how to act like Jesus would have acted, or how to not act in certain ways that Jesus would not have acted. That’s progress to be sure, and if it comes from faith there’s no doubt it pleases God (see Hebrews 11:6) — even if such behavior requires a habit of mechanically asking “WWJD?”
But we also know there are countless things we think and feel and desire — things that we refuse to act on or even say — that are extremely unChristlike. Is God pleased in our Spirit-produced self-control to confine such things and prohibit their expression? Absolutely. But might God also, by his Spirit, change us to not even think and feel and desire those unChristlike things? Yes, he will, and more. And we should desire that, however long and painstaking it seems to be.
Father, make us more like Jesus from the heart!
