The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

by Dallas Willard

In other words, Paul and his Lord were people of immense power, who saw clearly the wayward ways the world considered natural. With calm premeditation and clear vision of a deeper order, they took their stand always among those “last who shall be first” mentioned repeatedly in the Gospels. With their feet planted in the deeper order of God, they lived lives of utter self-sacrifice and abandonment, seeing in such a life the highest possible personal attainment. And through that way of living God gave them “the power of an indestructible life” (Heb. 7:16) to accomplish the work of their appointed ministry and to raise them above the power of death. During their lives, they both were men of lowly and plain origin and manner, when compared with the glittering and glamorous ones who dominated the world’s attention. So most of their powerful contemporaries could not possibly have seen either of them for who they were. Nor can we, until we have begun in faith actually to live as they lived.