The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

by Dallas Willard

We are somehow blind to the information that should guide us. It’s invisible and just does not fall within our mental horizons. This peculiar blindness causes us to reject from our lives what Jesus and Paul actually did, what they chose to live through or experience. “Reject” is not too strong a term, but it is not quite accurate. To reject something, one must first consider or analyze it. But the details of Jesus’ and Paul’s daily lives, as opposed to their commands or instructions, we don’t even seem to consider, so we don’t feel called upon to accept or reject them. Such details somehow are irrelevent to any actual choices we have to make. So we say, “What does the long period of fasting and solitude that Jesus entered after his baptism have to do with us? We aren’t Jesus, are we? And Paul’s forceful subjugation of his body may have been necessary for his work, but I am doing quite well without it, you see.” What happens, then, is that all talk of following Jesus—or of Paul’s example of following him—is emptied of practical meaning. It does not express an actual strategy of living our day-to-day existence but at most concerns only certain special moments or articles of faith. This in turn makes it impossible for us to share their experiences and consistently carry through with behavior like theirs. That behavior rested, after all, upon their experiences. And the experiences in turn resulted from how they arranged their lives. Since we do not share their behaviors, we ar...