Show Notes
In this episode of Peaceable and Kind, Derek Vreeland explores the Holy Spirit’s role in transforming our character. The ancient virtue tradition gives us a valuable framework for understanding how good habits are formed, but Christian faith recognizes a deeper problem: human corruption reaches into the heart. We need more than moral education and greater effort. We need the transforming work of the Holy Spirit.
Derek explores Paul’s understanding of virtue through the “fruit of the Spirit” in Galatians 5 and Paul’s powerful description of transformation in 2 Corinthians 3. The Spirit does not simply improve us by adding something we lack. The Spirit changes us from the inside out, making us more like Jesus. Derek uses the image of a caterpillar becoming a monarch butterfly to illustrate Paul’s language of metamorphosis.
The episode also explores how we participate in this transformation. We can remain idle, work against the Spirit, or work with the Spirit by practicing the habits that Christians have used for centuries to place themselves where the Spirit can shape them. Derek then turns to one of the Spirit’s central works in spiritual formation: reordering our loves. Drawing from Augustine, he explains how the Spirit reshapes our desires so that we learn to love God, ourselves, others, and creation in their proper order.
Key Takeaways
Human effort alone cannot overcome the corruption of the human heart.
Christian virtue requires the transforming work of the Holy Spirit.
Paul describes what Aristotle calls virtue as the “fruit of the Spirit.”
Spiritual transformation is a fundamental change in who we are, not merely an improvement in behavior.
The Holy Spirit transforms us from the inside out while inviting our participation.
Practicing virtue is one way we cooperate with the Spirit’s transforming work.
The Spirit reorders our loves and desires according to God’s design.
Courage and humility are both expressions of a heart being shaped by the love of God.
Spiritual formation is ultimately about becoming more like Jesus.
Books Mentioned
Nicomachean Ethics — Aristotle
On Christian Doctrine — Augustine
Scriptures Mentioned
Jeremiah 17:3, 5, 9
Matthew 15:17–20
John 3:6
Philippians 4:8
Galatians 5:19–23
2 Corinthians 3:6, 17–18
Jeremiah 31:33
Romans 5:5
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Transcript
Welcome back to
Another episode of Peaceable and Kind.
I’m your host, Derek Vreeland.
Hope you’re having a good day today.
On this episode, I want to talk about the Holy Spirit.
But before we jump in, let me invite you to leave our
rating or a review and if you want to support the work that we are doing here at Peaceable and Kind you can go over to the peaceable way
And you can donate if you’d like to help us out.
We’d appreciate that.
We’ll put a link to the peaceable way in the show notes
But let’s go ahead and jump into this episode.
I’ve made the announcement now at the time of this recording that I have signed a new book contract.
that I’m writing a book that’s coming out fall 2027, the working title Recovering Hypocrites Discarding Image Management for Wholehearted Integrity
It is a book about the virtue tradition.
So here at Peaceable and Kind, I have been talking a lot recently.
about why character matters and some of the important virtues.
Courage, for example, that’s one of the cardinal or classic virtues, the virtue of humility
Which I need a lot of.
I am still growing in humility, but my personality type is one to accentuate my strengths and ignore my weaknesses.
In other words, for my personality type, I I think I’m doing pretty good.
And so uh virtues like humility don’t come naturally to me.
Uh, but it is the work of the spirit producing humility in me.
I’m practicing humility and I desire to grow in that.
So on the next couple episodes after this one, we’re gonna stay in this theme of virtue and the virtue tradition.
because that’s what’s on my heart these days as I’m working on this book.
So if we start with Aristotle, and for me, the virtue tradition does go back to Plato.
But I I’ve gone all in with Aristotle.
Uh there’s value in Plato, uh, but I think that you’re either a Platonist or an Aristotelian, and I’ve just learned that I am an Aristotelian.
When I read Aristotle, it makes sense to me.
I find myself clapping and applauding and saying, yes, Aristotle, you got it figured out.
But what I’ve learned from Aquinas and Augustine and others is that the Christian vision
Of virtue.
And remember, we’re defining virtue as a settled quality of heart and mind that allows us to instinctively
live the good life Jesus has called us to.
So virtue is about character.
It’s about a quality of our heart, a quality of our character.
but it’s one that is given to us by God.
See, for Aristotle, the virtues came to him according to right reason.
But for Christians, we believe that virtue is a gift from God.
Now, we have the opportunity to participate in what God is doing.
So we can learn from Aristotle in terms of the value of habits, but we first recognize that virtue is given to us by God, and that virtue is the work of God.
Because as important as Aristotle is, his framework for virtue doesn’t account for the depth of human corruption.
So I think about the prophet Jeremiah, Jeremiah 17, 9.
The human heart is the most deceitful of all things and desperately wicked.
Who really knows how bad it is?
Now, this is often a verse that’s pulled out of context, but here the prophet Jeremiah is speaking to the ancient people of God.
And saying, your idolatry has revealed how wicked your heart is
So we recognize as Christians that we were created by God to reflect God’s image.
God is truth and beauty and goodness.
So for us to be good people is for us to be more like God, the God made famous by Jesus.
Now, what happens, and it happened to the ancient people of God, it happens to us too.
Whenever we turn from God and we give our love, our devotion to something that’s not God.
We do more than just damage our relationship with God, we also damage our hearts.
So sin is not only doing wrong things, but sin is a kind of corruption of our hearts, a distortion of the image of God within us
Everything that God makes is good, including you, my friend, including me.
All human beings have worth and value and dignity because we’re all created by God in the image of God
But it’s also true to say we are born into a sinful world.
And so sin, particularly idolatry, worshipping in the place of God something that is not God.
It just doesn’t interfere with our relationship with God.
It does something.
It mars the goodness of God.
It’s like vandalism in our souls.
Now, among many of the troubling conditions of our heart is our propensity to fall into self-deception.
I think part of that broken image of God within us is that we are susceptible to the trap of self-deception.
I mean.
We are so clever, we can end up talking ourselves into anything.
I mean, we and this is how hypocrisy works, right?
Hypocrisy is we pretend to be something that we’re not
We we portray an image of something that doesn’t reflect our true character.
And over time we begin to believe the lie.
Because we fall into this trap of self-deception.
We can so easily
make our sins, our our moral insufficiencies, uh true virtues, right?
We can turn pride
Which is at the very heart of sin, right?
If you think about the word sin, S-I-N, and the middle of sin is I.
We can take that selfish
impulse and we can turn it into a virtue because we cannot save ourselves from self-deception
And when we s when we live in that world of self-deception, we we don’t grow because we stay ignorant of our ignorance.
And we believe all these half-truths that we tell ourselves.
Well, to go back to Jeremiah and his word, his prophetic word about the wickedness of our hearts.
What Jeremiah saw was among the ancient Judeans, the people of Judah, he saw that idolatry
and the inevitable injustice that follows idolatry, that it had marred the image of God within them.
I mean, in his prophecy, Jeremiah seventeen, verse three,
Even their children go to worship at their pagan altars of Asteroids.
And I don’t want to point
fingers.
I don’t want you to hear the prophet Jeremiah is pointing fingers to these ancient Judeans saying, look how awful they are, because
The experience of ancient Israel and Judah has become a paradigm for all human experience because we all have
The temptation to worship something that’s not God.
Idolatry is not just creating a golden statue and bowing down to it.
Idolatry is giving our hearts over to things that are not God.
John Calvin in the Institutes says that human nature is a perpetual factory of idols.
This is what we do.
We’re looking for the good life.
We’re looking for something to rescue us from our problems.
And so we prop up these functional saviors
Right?
So we think the problem is I’m not making enough money.
And so we begin to worship at the altar of mammon.
We say, if I had more money.
Then I could do things my way.
If I had more money, I would be happy.
If I had more money, I’d be rescued from all of our problems, and we turn money into an idol.
So none of us escape the temptation to worship something that’s not God.
So we can’t just point the finger as if Jeremiah is doing that and not say, we all struggle with this.
None of us escape the devastating effects of human corruption.
And what we end up doing, and we see it throughout the scriptures, is when we fall into this role of hypocrisy and idolatry, is
We end up just relying on our own strength and talents instead of relying on the God who created us.
And this is a part of Jeremiah’s critique of the ancient Judeans
In Jeremiah 17, 5, he speaks of them as those who put their trust in mere humans who rely on human strength.
Now, don’t misunderstand, Jeremiah.
This prophetic critique of human strength is not to say that we shouldn’t be strong people of character.
That we shouldn’t develop that.
He’s not critiquing human strength in and of itself.
He’s critiquing human strength that is isolated from faith in God.
I mean, the problem runs deeper than just our tendency to trust in ourselves alone.
Our hearts can become so distorted
That we deceive ourselves about what it looks like to be good people.
And so we need to displace the trust in our own efforts
And, as Jeremiah leads us, recognize the wickedness of our own hearts and turn in faith to trust God, to trust God first and foremost.
Now, in the New Testament, we can see in the Gospels how Jesus recognized that the real problem are problems of the heart
Jesus was certainly in the same spirit of Jeremiah, who recognized the wickedness, the corruption, the brokenness within us, on the inside of us.
And, you know, throughout the Gospels, Jesus is always wrangling with the Pharisees and the teachers of the law.
They were always criticizing.
Both Jesus and the disciples.
And on one occasion, the Pharisees and teachers of the law were questioning Jesus about why his disciples didn’t wash their hands before they ate.
Now, side note, the the root of their criticism was more about the ceremonial nature of hand washing uh and and not at all about the hygienic effects of washing one’s hands.
So the Pharisees weren’t like your mom who reminded you when you were a kid, have you washed your hands?
So their critique is not about hygiene.
But it is about the ceremony of hand washing which they had developed as a part of their system.
Well, Jesus understood and taught that worship, that any ceremonial act for God, comes from the heart.
It starts in the heart, then it’s expressed through the body.
It starts in the heart, and it’s expressed over our lips.
But a misaligned and obsessive focus on the externals like washing your hands, Jesus knew that comes from a place of hypocrisy.
So he gives the Pharisees and teachers of the law a bit of a rebuke, and in explaining that rebuke to his disciples, Jesus said.
Anything you eat passes through your stomach and then goes into the sewer, but the words you speak come from the heart.
That’s what defiles you.
Pause here.
Jesus is going to talk about different things that come from the heart.
But when he says the words you speak come from your heart, that’s what defiles you.
It’s not just the words.
But it’s the heart.
Jesus goes on.
For from the heart come evil thoughts
Murder, adultery, all sexual immorality, theft, lying, and slander, these are what defile you.
Eating with unwashed hands will never defile you
So Jesus puts a dagger in the heart of hypocrisy and says, it’s not the outside stuff, it’s the inside stuff.
And on the inside, we have been defiled, corrupted, we’ve been broken.
You know, he mentions murder, adultery.
These are things he talked about in the Sermon on the Mount.
That murder as an external act of sin is not the true problem.
The true or the deeper root problem is the anger in our hearts.
Adultery, right?
Having sex outside of the bonds of marriage is itself a sin, but the root problem is committing adultery in your heart.
Is that lust in your heart?
Jesus understands that if we’re going to become good people who reflect the image and nature of God, then we need to be transformed from the inside out.
And so the virtue tradition helps us to see the connection between who we are and what we do, our being and doing.
But any thorough Christian appreciation of the ancient virtue tradition must make room for the Holy Spirit
for the Holy Spirit’s work in making us good and putting us on the path to good life
So if we go back to the definition of virtue that I’ve been using, and that is that virtue is a subtle quality of heart and mind that leads us towards the good life.
If we agree on that definition, then as Christians, as followers of Jesus, we have to ask
Well, what about the hearts of people, including me and you, that have been damaged by human corruption?
And the Christian response is that the answer is simply not found in human effort alone.
Right?
We can’t heal ourselves
In fact, left to our own devices, we tend to just make things worse.
Isn’t that true?
We need God’s help
And Jesus knows this.
This is why when Jesus was talking to Nicodemus, this is in John chapter 3, Jesus said, humans can reproduce only human life, but the Holy Spirit
gives birth to spiritual life.
That’s John 3.
Human effort and activity alone
Is simply insufficient because we are all entangled in the chains of slavery to our stubborn, sin-sick hearts
Something inside of us has died.
You know, this is what Jeremiah was saying about the the deceitfulness of our hearts
The Christian account for what’s wrong in the world is that we’re wrong and that we are corrupted at a very, very deep level.
And so there is something that the virtue tradition from the ancient Greeks provide for us, and the early Christians knew that.
The practice of virtue, the practice of good habits, that’s important.
But we need more than just a new set of human habits.
We need a spiritual rebirth.
What Jesus said there was, what is born of the Spirit is spirit.
So we need not only to be regenerated by the Spirit, but we need, if I can use a theological term, we need to be sanctified by the Spirit, set apart.
by the Spirit.
And I often don’t use the word sanctify or sanctification because I think it has a lot of baggage.
I prefer to use the term transformation.
We need the Holy Spirit to come and transform our lives.
I mean, with our deceitful hearts and manufactured hypocrisy,
We have to look beyond ourselves to something or someone unlike us to transform us.
And that is God, the Holy Spirit.
Hey friends, I want to pause this episode for just a moment to let you know that Resurrection, 8 Lessons on How God Restores Us, the third and final book in the God in the Neighborhood Bible study.
series is out now.
Go to the show notes for ordering information.
And Jesus knows this, that we we need to go beyond ourselves, and the apostles knew it.
The Apostle Paul hardly ever uses the word virtue.
The Greek word for virtue, the Greek word that Aristotle used for virtue is arate.
And you don’t see that word too often.
Um but Paul doesn’t use it once in Philippians 4.
8, when Paul writes, and now, dear brothers and sisters, one final thing.
Fix your thoughts on what is true and honorable and right and pure, lovely and admirable.
Think about the things that are Areate, translated in the New Living Translation, excellent.
And then he concludes the verse and worthy of praise.
So Paul was aware of the virtue tradition and wants us to think of those things that are excellent.
Remember.
Virtue in the ancient Greek sense is that quality that makes us excellent.
The virtue of anything is the quality that makes it
good at what it’s supposed to do.
So the virtue of a kitchen knife is its sharpness.
And for Christians
The virtue of our humanity is when we love God and love neighbor
So Paul is admonishing us followers of Jesus to have minds that are focused on those things that
Have moral excellence.
Now don’t misunderstand, Paul’s use of this word, Greek word, that’s translated virtue, here translated excellence.
Does not mean that Paul is in in importing the entirety of the Greek virtue tradition into the Christian faith.
At least not here.
Where I think he does that much more clearly is in Galatians 5, when he contrasts the works of the flesh with the fruit of the spirit
And it was very common in the ancient world for philosophers to offer these lists, a list of vices.
And a list of virtues, a list of vices that you should avoid, and a list of virtues that you should practice.
So what Paul was doing in Galatians 5 was very common for the first century Roman Greco world.
And so in Galatians 5, 19 through 21, he he lists out vices, what he calls works of the flesh.
Things to avoid like sexual immorality, outbursts of anger, division, drunkenness, and so on.
But then in verse 22, Paul writes.
The Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives.
Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness.
Goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.
There is no law against these things
So, what Aristotle called virtue, the Apostle Paul calls the fruit of the Spirit.
So when I’m talking about virtue, this subtle quality in our hearts and minds that instinctively leads us to the good life Jesus calls us to, when I’m talking about virtue, I’m talking about the fruit of the Spirit.
The fruit of the Holy Spirit, these nine items are all Christian virtues.
And Paul says it is the Spirit.
that is producing these things in us, so that we become people of love and joy and peace and patience and so on.
So I think Galatians 5 is a real clear place where where Paul is showing his awareness of virtue tradition
But this concept of the spirit producing virtue, the spirit producing these qualities of our character, where I think you see it clearly
And maybe most importantly, is in 2 Corinthians.
And these two verses, 2 Corinthians 3, verse 17 and 18, to me are foundational for understanding.
what Paul understood as our own formation, Christian formation, character formation, virtue formation.
So he writes, for the Lord is the Spirit, and wherever the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom
So all of us who have had that veil removed can see and reflect the glory of the Lord.
And the Lord, who is the Spirit, makes us more and more like Him as we are changed
So I’ve pulled these out of context.
It’s helpful to read all of chapter three to kind of see what Paul is talking about.
He’s
Contrasting the old covenant, which led to death, to the new covenant, which by the Spirit brings life
And so he’s saying that as good as the law of Moses was in shaping the ancient people of God, the law could not change the content of their character.
And the law was about the externals.
And and the law is good in its historical context, because the law was forming ancient Israel into a just and worshipping society.
It was constraining evil.
I mean, in the law, you know, you have uh an eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth.
Well, that was an improvement, because before it was like you knock out my tooth, I’m gonna murder your entire family.
So
So the law given by Moses is good and holy, but remember what Paul said about the law.
In Galatians 4, Paul says that the law was given to us as our guardian, our tutor, our babysitter.
It was given to us temporarily to watch over us until Jesus came.
But let’s go back to what Paul was saying in 2 Corinthians chapter 3.
He mentions that there was this veil that was over the face of Moses when he came down the hill.
When he came down the mountain of the Lord.
And that veil did not allow the people to see the glory of God shining from Moses’ face.
Well, this is all old covenant stuff.
Paul’s saying in the new covenant, because of Jesus and the coming of the Spirit, the veil has been lifted.
There’s no veil between people, there’s no veil between us and God.
So Jeremiah, right, who told us about the wickedness of our hearts, actually prophesied
that this would come.
So what Paul is saying in 2 Corinthians 3 is built on top of what Jeremiah prophesied about.
You can read it in Jeremiah 31, 33.
This is where Jeremiah, prophesying, speaking on the Lord’s behalf, says, This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord.
I will put my law within them.
and I will write it on their hearts.
So way back during the time of the exile, God spoke to the ancient people of God, saying, There is coming a time where there’s a new covenant.
And there is a new way to experience the law.
It’s not going to be on tablets of stone.
The laws are going to be written in your hearts.
This is a prophetic metaphor for what Paul talks about in 2 Corinthians 3.
This idea that we are being changed, our hearts are being changed into the glorious image of Jesus.
Now, the word changed is in other translations.
I was reading 2 Corinthians 3, 17 and 18 from a new living translation.
In other translations, they use the word transformed.
The Greek word is where we get the English word metamorphosis.
So think about a caterpillar.
Think about a caterpillar that that that creates this chrysalis, this like.
hardened shells, kind of like a cocoon.
And after a few days or weeks, something happens and that chrysalis bursts open in what was once a caterpillar
Is now a beautiful butterfly.
We call that metamorphosis.
And so I think that image of a caterpillar becoming a butterfly is a great image of
Our own formation into the likeness of Jesus.
Because left to our own devices, even with moral knowledge, even with the trying of new habits.
Doing what we can do in our own power, we’re still just a bunch of caterpillars.
But as we enter into a process of spiritual formation,
When we open and allow the Holy Spirit to change us, we can become beautiful butterflies.
And for me, I’ve seen spiritual formation at the very heart of the Christian life.
I don’t know everyone sees it with the same centrality that I do, but for the longest time, this has been my emphasis as a pastor, as a teacher, as a writer.
to give voice to the need for formation.
I have often defined spiritual
Formation as the work of the Holy Spirit to transform us into the image of God for the joy of God the Father.
I agree with Dallas Willard, who calls spiritual formation a spirit-driven process.
But one of the things I’ve been working on now for just about two decades.
Is trying to understand what the Holy Spirit is doing in this spirit-driven process.
Because I think that spiritual formation
And the ancient virtue tradition overlap in so many different ways.
And I think our own spiritual formation
Is improved when we receive the treasures from the virtue tradition.
But Aristotle’s account of virtue doesn’t touch upon
This outside work of God coming into our hearts.
So again, for last two decades, I’ve been working on what is the Holy Spirit doing.
And so one of the things that I’ve seen
Maybe the most important thing that the Holy Spirit is doing to transform us is reordering our loves by the love of God.
A scripture verse for this is Romans 5, 5, for we know how dearly God loves us, because he has given us the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with his love.
This to me is foundational.
The Holy Spirit is filling up our hearts
with God’s love.
And a heart drenched in the love of God is malleable.
It can can be formed and shaped
And so think about any of the virtues.
We’ve been talking about the virtue of courage and humility recently.
Courage requires the love of God so that we can remain steadfast in the face of fear
I mean, the love of God causes us to love other people more than our own reputation or image.
And humility?
Humility is a very distinct Christian virtue.
It doesn’t appear in any of the virtue lists of the Greek philosophers
Because for Christians, humility is a lowly mind, and for the Greeks, the elevation of the mind and human reason was top on the list.
It was an idol for them.
But for Christians, humility is a key Christian virtue and it’s the outworking of love in the Christian life.
We need the love of God to fill our hearts that we might look at ourselves honestly.
and reckon with our own weaknesses and flaws.
We need the love of God to form our hearts in such a way that we become the kind of
Loving and self-giving people that we see in the very person of Jesus.
And so we receive the love of God
That the love of God might reorder our loves.
Now, this is a concept that comes from Augustine in his little book on Christian Doctrine
And in The City of God, a different book, Augustine says that virtue can be summed up in rightly ordered love
So for Augustine, love and for most of the Christian tradition, love is the highest of the Christian virtues
But for Augustine, virtue, right, human excellence, the settled quality in our heart and mind, is when our loves are in order.
So Augustine says that there are four things that we can love.
We love the things above us, we love the things that constitute us, we love things that are like us, and we love things that are below us.
So the things that are above us, that’s God, of course.
The things that constitute us, well, that’s our souls.
The things that are like us are other people, and the things below us are our bodies.
Now I really struggle with
Augustine putting bodies as something below us, um, I’m just a little nervous around language that displaces the human body
And so when Augustine says that our bodies are below us, he means in terms of how we prioritize our love.
He’s no dualist.
I mean, Augustine goes on to say in on Christian doctrine that it is our souls and bodies that do constitute us.
So when he says the second thing that can be loved, things that constitute us, I think body and soul, but he is thinking about it not in terms of ontology.
but in terms of ranking our loves.
So again, things above us, things that constitute us, things like us, things below us.
So he says, you know, we all love ourselves.
We have a natural instinct towards loving ourselves, both our souls and our bodies.
So two and four are not really important.
We don’t need to give much attention to those.
Uh of course it’s important to care for your own soul and body.
But in terms of how we think about our priority of love, we can almost set those two aside.
Augustine says instead we need to focus on one and three, the things above us and things like us.
Which consequently is why Jesus says the greatest commandments are to love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves.
So if we think about how we prioritize our love, I think what we need is the Holy Spirit.
Not only to guide us in making moral decisions, but to rank these desires in our hearts
And these things that cause us to be alive and good, namely loving God and loving neighbor, begin to float to the top.
Now, I believe we can participate in the work of the Spirit.
I mean, I think it’s the Holy Spirit producing these things, but we can participate in what the Spirit is producing.
And Aristotle shows us the way, like practicing virtues like love, joy, peace, patience, and kindness.
That’s one of the ways we participate in what the spirit’s producing.
But one of the ways the spirit is producing love within us is prioritizing and reprioritizing.
our sense of loves.
So that our love for our body, which is a love, you should care for your body.
I’ll I’ll talk in an upcoming episode about practices for your body.
Think God made us body and soul, and so we we don’t want to neglect our body.
But in thinking through how
Augustine subjugates love for body.
I think one of the things there is it’s a
A subjugation of our bodily desires.
That the desires of the body are not to be extinguished
But there be subordinate.
So I don’t do what I want to do to fulfill bodily desires because the Holy Spirit has reprioritized my loves.
And my love for God is so much higher than my love for fulfilling bodily needs or bodily desires that I instinctively begin to live the kind of life
that Jesus wants.
Well that’s probably enough for one episode.
Thank you so much for joining me for this episode.
Go in peace and be kind.
This transcript was generated with AI and may contain errors.