The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

by Dallas Willard

far. I hope that our understanding of what it is really to trust Jesus Christ, the whole person, with our whole life, would make the call to become his whole-life apprentice the natural next step. That would be discipleship evangelism. And it would be very different from what is now done.

But we emphatically reiterate that the intention to make disciples is essential. It will not happen otherwise. We are, of course, not talking about eliminating nondisciple, consumer Christianity. It has its place. But we are talking about making it secondary, as far as our intentions are concerned. We would intend to make disciples and let converts “happen,” rather than intending to make converts and letting disciples “happen.” And we certainly recognize what an overwhelmingly difficult task this shift would be. This is why, once again, it is absolutely necessary that those who exercise leadership must be close and faithful students of Jesus himself. He must be the one who shows the way.

This view of reality is precisely the situation the Christian disciple maker must address. For it is quite obvious that nothing remains of discipleship to Jesus or of Christian faith if there is no God such as he obviously lived from and had faith in, if there are only “particles and progress.” You have to be extremely well educated and very adept at deconstructive and reconstitutive thinking to believe any such discipleship remains, and perhaps not one in a million can qualify. To make disciples to Jesus today, one has to make him and his God real to them, right in the face of all that stands at the center of our world as “official” knowledge and reality. Of course what is represented by the automatic assumptions of “A Glorious Accident” is only one belief or group of beliefs obstructive to discipleship today. In every age it is one belief system or another, but a total and exclusive confidence in the natural sciences as the key to reality is the major opposing belief now.

Not, we emphasize, the sciences themselves, but the widespread faith in them as sole source of truth. And in any case the point here is not so much about which beliefs must be challenged and changed as it is that to enable people to become disciples we must change whatever it is in their actual belief system that bars confidence in Jesus as Master of the Universe. That is fundamental and must be taken as an unshakable conscious objective by any maker of disciples.

One of the greatest weaknesses in our teaching and leadership today is that we spend so much time trying to get people to do things good people are supposed to do, without changing what they really believe.

We frankly need to do much less of this managing of action, and especially with young people. We need to concentrate on changing the minds of those we would reach and serve. What they do will certainly follow, as Jesus well understood and taught.

We often speak of people not living up to their faith. But the cases in which we say this are not really cases of people behaving otherwise than they believe. They are cases in which genuine beliefs are made obvious by what people do. We always live up to our beliefs—or down to them, as the case may be. Nothing else is possible. It is the nature of belief. And the reason why clergy and others have to invest so much effort into getting people to do things is that they are working against the actual beliefs of the people they are trying to lead.

But the truth about obedience in the kingdom of Jesus, as should be clear by now, is that it really is abundance. Kingdom obedience is kingdom abundance. They are not two separate things. The inner condition of the soul from which strength and love and peace flow is the very same condition that generously blesses the oppressor and lovingly offers the other cheek. These Christlike behaviors are expressions of a pervasive personal strength and its joy, not of weakness, morbidity, sorrow—or raw exertion of will—as is so often assumed. And all those old “options” that we might think should be kept in reserve, just in case they turn out to be “necessary,” will not even be missed. However, this truth about obedience seems a secret very well kept today. And the correlation between faith in Christ and the obedience/abundance of life in Christ has now become, apparently, something of a mystery. Yes, it is a relationship that has functioned well in many periods of Christian history. The cultural and literary record is there for all to see. And there still are those today for whom faith in Christ progressively modulates into both obedience and abundance. I meet such people. But, not very many. The usual Christian experience does not progress in that way. And it is mainly because individuals are rarely offered any effective guidance into the inner substance of the path laid down by Jesus in his teachings and example.

What feeds that elephant and keeps it strong is the absence of effectual programs of training that enable his people to do what Jesus said in a regular and efficient manner.

In practical matters, to teach people to do something is to bring them to the point where they actually do it on the appropriate occasions.

When you teach children or adults to ride a bicycle or swim, they actually do ride bikes or swim on appropriate occasions. You don’t just teach them that they ought to ride bicycles, or that it is good to ride bicycles, or that they should be ashamed if they don’t. Similarly, when you teach people to bless those who curse them, they actually do bless those who curse them—even family members! They recognize the occasion as it arises for what it is and respond from the heart of Jesus, which has become their own. They do it and they do it well.

However, the emphasis all too often is on some point of behavior modification. This is helpful, but it is not adequate to human life. It does not reach the root of the human problem. That root is the character of the inner life, where Jesus and his call to apprenticeship in the kingdom place the emphasis.

As we approach this task, it is very important to understand that the “teaching” to be done at this point—whether directed toward ourselves or toward others—is not a matter of collecting or conveying information. The task is not to inform the disciple, or student, about things that Jesus believed, taught, and practiced. Usually that will already have been done, and more of that alone will be of very little use. The student will already possess almost all of the correct information. If tested for accuracy on it, he or she would probably pass. And that information is essential. It is even a large part of the reason why the students have confidence in Jesus at all. Very likely they deeply want it all to be true. They want heartily to believe it. But they do not really understand it, and their confidence in its reality is shaky. They are like Peter in his truly earth-shaking confession that Jesus was the One anointed to save humanity. He had it right, of course, but had no real idea of what it meant (Matt. 16:16–19, 23). Often those who are disciples initially only believe that Jesus believed the message of the kingdom. They are perhaps somewhat strengthened by that. But what the information they have actually represents does not form a part of their real life. In their bodily and social being they continue to be ready to act as though it were not true, even though in their conscious affirmations they accept it. Here is the point where the training “to hear and do” must begin.

And here also is one of those points where the educational practices that have developed in our society deeply injure our souls and impede the coming of the kingdom into our lives. In our culture one is considered educated if one “knows the right answers.” That is, if one knows which answers are the correct ones.

So, as Jesus’ current assistants in his ongoing program, one important way of characterizing our work of “training disciples to do everything I told you” is “bringing them to actually believe all the things they have already heard.” Our task in ourselves and in others is to transform right answers into automatic responses to real-life situations.

So, to drive home the crucial point, a great deal of what goes into “training them [us] to do everything I said” consists simply in bringing people to believe with their whole being the information they already have as a result of their initial confidence in Jesus—even if that initial confidence was only the confidence of desperation.2

Jesus’ disciples are those who have chosen to be with him to learn to be like him. All they have necessarily realized at the outset of their apprenticeship to him is, Jesus is right. He is the greatest and best. Of this, they are sure. That initial faith is God’s gift of grace to them. So they have him. They do not yet have it. Living as his apprentices, they are increasingly getting “it.” And as they move along they do indeed attain, by increasing grace, to an “advanced spiritual condition.” They increase in the amount and quality of grace (interaction with God) they have in their real life. That is the same as increasing in their experiential knowledge of the real person, Jesus Christ, which in our current condition just is the eternal kind of life (2 Pet. 3:18; compare John 17:3).

The apostle Peter puts the belief structure involved here in a correct and helpful manner by saying, “For Jesus was in the plan before the world started, but for your sake he has come at the end of the times, for you who through him believe in God who raised him from the dead and gave him glory, so that your faith and hope are in God” (1 Pet. 1:21). We are captivated by Jesus and trust ourselves to him as his apprentices. He then leads us to genuine understanding and reliance upon God in every aspect of our life. But that progression takes some time, and it is supposed to come in part through the efforts of others among his people, who are prepared to train us so that we are able to do, and routinely do, all of the things he said we should.

In order to become a disciple of Jesus, then, one must believe in him. In order to develop as his disciple one must progressively come to believe what he knew to be so. To enter his kingdom, we believe in him. To be at home in his kingdom, learning to reign with him there, we must share his beliefs.

Two objectives in particular that are often taken as primary goals must not be left in that position. They can be reintroduced later in proper subordination to the true ones. These are external conformity to the wording of Jesus’ teachings about actions in specific contexts and profession of perfectly correct doctrine. Historically these are the very things that have obsessed the church visible—currently, the latter far more than the former. We need wait no longer. The results are in. They do not provide a course of personal growth and development that routinely produces people who “hear and do.” They either crush the human mind and soul and separate people from Jesus, or they produce hide-bound legalists and theological experts with “lips close to God and hearts far away from him” (Isa. 29:13). The world hardly needs more of these.

Much the same can be said of the strategies—rarely taken as primary objectives, to be sure, but much used—of encouraging faithfulness to the activities of a church or other outwardly religious routines and various “spiritualities,” or the seeking out of special states of mind or ecstatic experiences. These are good things. But let it be said once and for all that, like outward conformity and doctrinally perfect profession, they are not to be taken as major objectives in an adequate curriculum for Christlikeness. Special experiences, faithfulness to the church, correct doctrine, and external conformity to the teachings of Jesus all come along as appropriate, more or less automatically, when the inner self is transformed. But they do not produce such a transformation. The human heart must be plowed much more deeply. Thus these four emphases are good in their place, and even necessary when rightly understood. But when taken as primary objectives, they only burden souls and make significant Christlikeness extremely difficult, if not impossible. With respect to these four emphases, we need to say loudly and repeatedly, to everyone concerned, “You cannot build your house on the rock in this way.”

The first objective is to bring apprentices to the point where they dearly love and constantly delight in that “heavenly Father” made real to earth in Jesus and are quite certain that there is no “catch,” no limit, to the goodness of his intentions or to his power to carry them out.

When the mind is filled with this great and beautiful God, the “natural” response, once all “inward” hindrances are removed, will be to do “everything I have told you to do.”

The second primary objective of a curriculum for Christlikeness is to remove our automatic responses against the kingdom of God, to free the apprentices of domination, of “enslavement” (John 8:34; Rom. 6:6), to their old habitual patterns of thought, feeling, and action. These are the “automatic” patterns of response that were ground into the embodied social self during its long life outside The Kingdom Among Us.

It is not enough, if we would enable Jesus’ students to do what he said, just to announce and teach the truth about God, about Jesus, and about God’s purposes with humankind. To think so is the fallacy underlying most of the training that goes on in our churches and theological schools. Even relentlessly pursued, it is not enough. Very little of our being lies under the direction of our conscious minds, and very little of our actions runs from our thoughts and consciously chosen intentions. Our mind on its own is an extremely feeble instrument, whose power over life we constantly tend to exaggerate. We are incarnate beings in our very nature, and we live from our bodies. If we are to be transformed, the body must be transformed, and that is not accomplished by talking at it.

The training that leads to doing what we hear from Jesus must therefore involve, first, the purposeful disruption of our “automatic” thoughts, feelings, and actions by doing different things with our body. And then, through various intentional practices, we place the body before God and his instrumentalities in such a way that our whole self is retrained away from the old kingdoms around and within us and into “the kingdom of the Son of His love” (Col. 1:13 NAS).

Pursuit of the two primary objectives goes hand in hand. They are to be simultaneously sought. This would be expected in the case of persons such as we are, who live at the mercy of their thoughts, to be sure, but also are bodily beings with a social context that all too easily takes over our life.

With regard to our first primary objective, the most important question we face is, How do we help people love what is lovely? Very simply, we cause them, ask them, help them to place their minds on the lovely thing concerned. We assist them to do this in every way possible. Saint Thomas Aquinas remarks that “love is born of an earnest consideration of the object loved.” And: “Love follows knowledge.”3 Love is an emotional response aroused in the will by visions of the good. Contrary to what is often said, love is never blind, though it may not see rightly. It cannot exist without some vision of the beloved.

This simple illustration contains profound truths. If anyone is to love God and have his or her life filled with that love, God in his glorious reality must be brought before the mind and kept there in such a way that the mind takes root and stays fixed there. Of course the individual must be willing for this to happen, but any genuine apprentice to Jesus will be willing. This is the very lesson apprentices have enrolled in his school to learn.

Now we need to understand that what simply occupies our mind very largely governs what we do. It sets the emotional tone out of which our actions flow, and it projects the possible courses of action available to us. Also the mind, though of little power on its own, is the place of our widest and most basic freedom. This is true in both a direct and an indirect sense. Of all the things we do, we have more freedom with respect to what we will think of, where we will place our mind, than anything else. And the freedom of thinking is a direct freedom wherever it is present. We need not do something else in order to exercise it. We simply turn our mind to whatever it is we choose to think of. The deepest revelation of our character is what we choose to dwell on in thought, what constantly occupies our mind—as well as what we can or cannot even think of.

What we see in this wondrously life-saving program is a general arrangement of the human personality that, really, is totally obvious to any thoughtful person. But we are rarely thoughtful. As the line from A. E. Houseman says, “We think by fits and starts.” Thus a part of the call of God to us has always been to think. Indeed the call of Jesus to “repent” is nothing but a call to think about how we have been thinking. And when we come to the task of developing disciples into the fullness of Christ, we must be very clear that one main part, and by far the most fundamental, is to form the insights and habits of the student’s mind so that it stays directed toward God. When this is adequately done, a full heart of love will go out toward God, and joy and obedience will flood the life.

The distortion, or “wrungness,” of the will, on the other hand—theologians of another day called it “corruption”—is primarily a matter of our refusal to dwell in our minds on right things in the right way.6 We “refuse to retain God in our knowledge,” as Paul says (Rom. 1:28).

He comes to us (1) through his creation, (2) through his public acts on the scene of human history, and (3) through individual experiences of him by ourselves and others.8

In training ourselves or others for fullness of life in The Kingdom Among Us, the first task is to present our Father, the one in the heavens, as maker and sustainer of everything else, of “heaven and earth.”

The basis for this assurance about God lies in the common understanding or impression that all of “natural” reality, including you and me, owes its existence and therefore its astonishing order and magnificence to something other than itself. We have no experience of any natural object or event that is self-productive or self-sustaining. Yet we are very familiar with the role of human thought and planning in the production of food, furniture, computers, airplanes, and so forth. So it is an easy inference for human beings, which they have always drawn, to find a great “God most high” through all that exists around us.

The famous Greek philosopher Epictetus, a contemporary to Peter and Paul, commented that “any one thing in the creation is sufficient to demonstrate a providence to a modest and grateful mind.”9 Paul himself explains that all human beings remain responsible, no matter how far they fall, because of the clear way in which God stands forth in natural reality. “Since the creation of the world,” he says, “God’s invisible nature is clearly presented to their understanding through what has been made” (Rom. 1:19–20).

However that may be, the point is that in the training that brings apprentices of Jesus to live on that rock of “hearing and doing,” “God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth” must be made present to their minds in such a way that they can see his magnificent beauty and their love can be strongly and constantly drawn to him. This will make a huge and indispensable contribution to their ability to love him with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength.

In the seeking and teaching to be done, we will of course open up every term—God, Father, Maker—and so on, as carefully and as fully as we can to the disciples. We will use the goldmine of conceptualization in the scriptures for this purpose and the best of human thinking and writing available to us. Of utmost importance, we will take care to do this work in constant interplay with the rest of the education that we have received or are receiving at the time. We then listen prayerfully to those we teach. We encourage every question, and we make it clear that dealing honestly with the questions that come up is the only path to a robust and healthy faith. We will never “pooh-pooh” difficulties, or take any problem with anything less than utter seriousness, or direct the slightest reproach or shame on anyone for having questions and doubts. When we don’t honestly know what to say at the time, we will just say so. We will go away and find an answer through study, conversation, and prayer. After times of study and teaching, we will pay most attention precisely to the puzzles and ambiguities in our own minds and in the minds of our hearers. What makes no sense? What is not understood? These unclarities are more important than questions about evidence or proof, though the latter are not to be slighted. Most but not all uncertainties in the minds of disciples—and this is only somewhat less so for people in general—are the result of unclarities and failures to understand. These shut...

Basically, modern attempts to think about God independently of historical revelation have been thoroughly victimized by currents of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy that simply make knowledge of God—and maybe everything else—an impossibility. Indeed, something laughable. This forces one to handle the texts and traditions of Jesus in such a way that he can never bring us to a personal God whom we can love with all our being.

But things often turn out little better for theology on the right. It tends to be satisfied with having the right doctrines or traditions and to stop there without ever moving on to consuming admiration of, delight in, and devotion to the God of the universe. On the one hand, these are treated as not necessary, because we have the right answers; and on the other hand, we are given little, if any, example and teaching concerning how to move on to honest and full-hearted love of God.

The acid test for any theology is this: Is the God presented one that can be loved, heart, soul, mind, and strength? If the thoughtful, honest answer is; “Not really,” then we need to look elsewhere or deeper. It does not really matter how sophisticated intellectually or doctrinally our approach is. If it fails to set a lovable God—a radiant, happy, friendly, accessible, and totally competent being—before ordinary peop...

Whether or not they stand within the professing community, they are human beings, and, like human beings generally, they think about God more than about any other thing. But if they do not understand him rightly, they can have no confidence in him. More often than not, it is not evidence or proof they need. They need someone to make sense of God in relation to what they are sure, rightly or wrongly, they know about themselves and their world.

One is the idea that questions about God as creator have recently been conclusively settled in the negative by the progress of “scientific knowledge,” and that nothing of significance can be known of God from examining the order of nature—or anything else there may be.

To understand why the negative prejudice is so strong now, just reflect on how the entire system of human expertise, as represented by our many-tiered structure of certification and accreditation, has a tremendous vested interest in ruling God out of consideration. For, if it cannot do that, it is simply wrong about what it presents as knowledge and reality—of which God is no part. As we noted earlier, God currently forms no part of recognized human competence in any field of knowledge or practice. But if this actually is God’s universe, the current lords of knowledge have made what is surely the greatest mistake in human history. Believing the world is flat or the moon is cheese would be nothing in comparison to their mistake. To believe that the current lords of “knowledge” are right, on the other hand, is to omit the spiritual God and the spiritual life from the literally real. It is to take them to be illusions; and two or more centuries of “advanced thinking” have now been devoted to showing that they are illusions. So the battle to identify our universe as God’s and our existence as part of his creation simply has to go on. We cannot stand aside. And in training people to “hear and do,” we must take an open, loving, and intelligent stand on these fundamental matters.

But what we must never forget, in moving toward the faith “on the rock,” is that our “doing” comes—or fails to come—from what our beliefs actually are. Hence, if we would train people to do “all things,” we must change their beliefs. Only so can we change their loves. You cannot change character or behavior and leave beliefs intact. It is one of the major illusions of Western culture, deriving from a form of Christianity that is merely cultural, that you can do this. We cannot work around that illusion, but must dispel it.

This is such a striking arrangement that it poses a puzzle to the biblical writers about their own nature. “Compared to the cosmos, what are human beings,” the psalmist cries, “that you pay attention to them? Or human offspring that you care about them? You created them a little less than supernatural beings. But you let glory and majesty rest on them! You cause them to rule over the works of your hands and put everything on earth under their feet!” (Ps. 8:4–8). Even when they turn their back on the Father and put themselves on the cosmic throne, he continues to visit human beings and makes every possible provision for their salvation. Apparently even the angels don’t understand this (1 Pet. 1:12). It seems that through the ages they will be constantly admonished and instructed concerning the nature of God by the eternal presence of the redeemed community of human beings among them (Eph. 2:7; 3:10). And God not only interacts with every individual human being (John 1:9; Acts 10:30–31; 14:17; Rom. 1:14–15), but also establishes a public presence in human history through a covenant people in which he is tangibly manifest to everyone on earth who wants to find him.

The key, then, to loving God is to see Jesus, to hold him before the mind with as much fullness and clarity as possible. It is to adore him. For purposes of training disciples, we should divide this into four main aspects.

First, we teach his beauty, truth, and power while he lived among us as one human being among others. The content of the Gospels should be explained and brought to life in such a way that the Gospels become a permanent presence and possession of the mind of the disciple.

Second, we teach the way he went to execution as a common criminal among other ...

But the fact is something we must always have before our minds. That is the good reason to wear or display a cross. For all the false and misleading associations that may surround it, it still says—even without the knowledge of the one displaying it—“I am bought by the sufferings and death of Jesus and I belong to God. The divine conspiracy of which I am a part stands over human history in the form of a cross.”