What’s In an Idea?

In the book Renovation of the Heart, Dallas Willard talks about the power of ideas and images. By an idea he means a model of, or assumption about, reality.

Ideas are everywhere; they underpin a society’s beliefs and are historically developed and shared. They are the habitual ways we think about and interpret things; they form and shape our worldview, but in so subtle and pervasive a way that we aren’t usually aware of it. Often found in advertising, ideas are easily manipulated to make us buy things we don’t really need, and they govern our lives because we take them as being reality.

Images are closely associated with ideas and often associate a perception with an emotion. They use ideas and allow us to visualise an idea in a simple or dramatic way.  An image may be a physical picture, statue or replica, or it may be a word picture or memory.

Now here’s Willard:

Ideas and images are part of the way we think and can be used for spiritual enrichment. But they can also be a stronghold of evil.  They determine the meanings we assign to what we deal with, and can blind us to the spiritual significance of what lies before us. This is evident over and over again in biblical and Christian history, and in human life generally. The power for evil of ideas and images cannot be overestimated.

Wow – this is scary. An idea, which perhaps we learned from our parents when we were children, were taught by our peer group as we passed through our teenage years or picked up at college, can alter the reality – what is really true – that we think we see for the rest of our lives.

Willard goes on:

Ideas and images are the primary focus of Satan’s efforts to defeat God’s purposes with and for mankind. When he undertook to draw Eve away from God, he did not hit here with a stick, but with ideas and images. It was with the idea that she was a free agent, able to make up her own mind about what was good for her. And it was with an image that the fruit was good to eat, and desirable for achieving wisdom.

How often are we assailed by ideas and images, cleverly dressed up and chosen to persuade us into a purchase or a certain type of behaviour or activity? Election literature is a prime example of the way in which images and ideas are combined to encourage us to vote for a particular candidate, either by making this candidate look good or – more likely these days – making the opposing candidate look bad.  Next time you hear or watch an election commercial, try to step back and pay attention to the way in which the candidates draw on traditional values (such as motherhood and apple pie) and manipulate you into thinking they are right.

Willard again:

This is how temptation works. God appears to be depriving us of what we want. We associate what we want with what is good, and so we make up our own minds and disobey him. We put ourselves on the throne of the universe, and we decide what is ‘good’.

We can see this happening all around us in modern society. Long held beliefs and values are being overturned as society decides that it wants to make its own more convenient and comfortable decisions about what is good and what is bad, even if that directly contradicts both history and the laws that God has given us. Society knows best, even if the decisions that society takes are already being shown to be wrong and harmful in empirical evidence. Society simply insists dogmatically that there is nothing wrong with the decisions; it is the implementation of the decisions that is faulty – they were under applied and more of the same is what is required to make it all come right.

How are we to overcome the distortions of ideas and images planted in our minds and lives long ago and carried by the societies in which we have to live, so that we can see clearly and make right judgements about people, situations and our own desires?

Willard concludes:

The gospel of Jesus is the only complete answer to the false and destructive ideas and images that control life without God. The process of spiritual formation in Christ is one of progressively replacing destructive ideas and images with the images and ideas of Jesus himself.

If we are to see real growth in the kingdom we have to allow our values and ideas about God, the kingdom and the world in which we live transformed by the Spirit working within us to show us the truth behind all the spin, ideas and images that the enemy constantly throws at us in order to blunt and diffuse our efforts. Such transformation can only come about by the Spirit and by constant immersion in the Bible as we compare what we see to what we read and hear the Spirit’s voice saying, “This is the way, walk in it” (Isaiah 30:21).

This may mean rejecting the “better, quicker, faster” ideas of modern management in favour of old fashioned simplicity and quality.  It may mean honouring covenant commitment over economy and political correctness.  It may mean defying modern and progressive ideas and insisting on biblical truth and standards.  All perhaps costly in one way or another, but all demonstrating that we put the value of the kingdom, recognising and honouring personal worth and integrity, first in our lives and in our ministries. Are you ready for the challenge?