Intention

In my reading of Renovation of the Heart today, Dallas Willard talked about the steps to begin renovation. Mainly, that affecting a true change in the depths of our heart involves more than just simply wanting transformation. There needs to be a clear vision of what the outcome of a change would look like, a firm intention to make the change, and a lot of work to provide the means for the change. He put this together in the acronym VIM:

• Vision
• Intention
• Means

But about intention specifically, he says:

Concretely, we intend to live in the kingdom of God by intending to obey the precise example and teachings of Jesus. This is the form that trust in him takes. It does not take the form of merely believing things about him, however true they may be. Indeed no one can actually believe the truth about him without trusting him by indending to obey him.
~Dallas Willard, pg. 87

I think this is where a lot of misunderstandings about faith come into the Christian church and into our lives. Many Christians come to describe faith as merely the belief that what God says is true. And thus salvation and the Christian life are just the belief that Christ died for my sins. But if all that comes from this is just a mental note or an inward agreement that it sounds right, then that is not true belief (James 2:18-19).

True belief as Willard points out is trust in what God is saying is true, and then from that actual trust comes the outflow of true intent founded upon the gripping vision of God's kingdom (the vision of a world where what God willed would be done without compromise). These two, when honestly put together, will not be able to help, but to pour out physical obedience to God in the form of Christ-likeness.

The difference between the "belief" and "faith" promenant in Christian culture and this type of belief is radical. It nullifies the debates between faith and works, because there was never meant to be a difference. True faith will spawn the works that signify a Kingdom minded person.

Grace

For my devotion this morning I was reading through Renovation of the Heart and I found this quote:

The transformation of the inner being is as much or more a gift of grace as is our justification before God. Of course neither one is wholly passive. (To be forever lost you need only do nothing. Just stay your course.) But with reference to both justification and transformation, "boasting is excluded" by the law of grace through faith (Romans 3:27-31; Ephesians 2:1-10). In fact, we consume the most grace by leading a holy life, in which we must be comnstantly upheld by grace, not by continuing to sin and being repeatedly forgiven. The interpretation of grace as having only to do with guilt is utterly false to biblical teaching and renders spiritual life in Christ unintelligible.
~Dallas Willard, pg. 82

What an amazing concept and one that I, at least, had never before thought about. The fact that we need grace from God constantly is taken as a matter of course by most Christians, but in why we need it is almost always seen only in the light of forgiveness for sin. Is it easier to resist temptation and push off sin or to ask for forgiveness after having given in? Could someone ever say that they resisted temptation without the grace of God?

The idea that grace from God is only given when one is asking for forgiveness from sin is a lie, and can do a lot more damage than we realize at first. Christians can get into the practice of remembering their need for God's grace only through committing sin and the process of forgiveness that it starts. The fact that it is only through God's initiative and continuing grace that we are anything but depraved is something that we should remind ourselves constantly so that we do not take anything for granted, but are continually thankful and humble in the remainder of our race.

Troubleshooting That Nasty Blue Screen

I ran across this web page yesterday and figured that I would share it around because buried in the middle there is the first good post for debugging blue screens that I've ever seen.

The basic directions extracted from that post are as follows:
Download Debugging Tools from Microsoft and use kd to analyse your minidumps
1) Create folder c:\symbols
2) Download and install the http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/devtools/debugging/installx86.mspx
3) Locate your latest memory.dmp file- C:\WINDOWS\ Minidump\Mini011005-01.dmp or whatever
4) open a CMD prompt and cd\program files\debugging tools for windows\
5) type the following stuff:

Code:
c:\program files\debugging tools>kd -z C:\WINDOWS\Minidump\Mini011005-01.dmp
kd> .logopen c:\debuglog.txt
kd> .sympath srv*c:\symbols*http://msdl.microsoft.com/download/symbols
kd> .reload;!analyze -v;r;kv;lmnt;.logclose;q

And it actually works.