The renewal of the Holy Spirit creates a clean heart and restores a right spirit within God's people. This work restores the joy of salvation to believers and produces such a willing heart and mind in them, that it makes doing God's will a delight rather than a drudgery.
One of the clearest indictors of the renewing of the Spirit is the "renewing of the mind." When the Holy Spirit begins to create this new mind in us, we began to be able to accurately prove what the good, acceptable, and perfect will of God is. Suddenly, old ideas and desires pass away, all things become new. Things we once thought gain before the renewing work began, now are counted as loss; ideas and activities we once judged as good are seen in such a new light that some of them become garbage.
Another evidence that a deep renewal is at work is a dynamic reorientation from being consumed with what pleases ourselves to a burning desire to do what pleases our Father. Permissible activities begin to be discarded out of a renewed concern about doing what is most profitable. We become more concerned about something being edifying than merely enjoyable. This powerful work of renewal changes complacent, self-seeking, believers into devoted bondservants of God and their fellow saints.
Ezekiel described one of the last results of the deep work of dynamic spiritual renewal as the ability to look back on the way we were living and actually loathe what we once loved. May we look for and long for the renewing of the Holy Spirit!