The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

by Dallas Willard

The exclusiveness of the Christian revelation of God lies here. No one can have an adequate view of the heart and purposes of the God of the universe who does not understand that he permitted his son to die on the cross to reach out to all people, even people who hated him. That is who God is. But that is not just a “right answer” to a theological question. It is God looking at me from the cross with compassion and providing for me, with never-failing readiness to take my hand to walk on through life from wherever I may find myself at the time.

Third, we teach the reality of Jesus risen, his actual existence now as a person who is present among his people. We present him in his ecclesia, his motley but glorious crew of called-out ones. We trace him from those uncomprehending encounters on the first Easter morning and on through the amazingly different historical periods of the church. But we also show him now active among his disciples. Who he is, is revealed in an essential way in his people. So the continuing incarnation of the divine Son in his gathered people must fill our minds if we are to love him and his Father adequately and thus live on the rock of hearing and doing. And to see how he has been and is lived with and loved and served and presented and celebrated by all kinds of people across time and space adds to the force of our love for him.

But fourth, we teach the Jesus who is the master of the created universe and of human history. He is the one in control of all the atoms, particles, quarks, “strings,” and so forth upon which the physical cosmos depends.

An older Franciscan brother said to Brennan Manning on the day he joined the order, “Once you come to know the love of Jesus Christ, nothing else in the world will seem as beautiful or desirable.”

The third area of teaching required to bring disciples to the place where they love the Lord with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength concerns the goodness of their own existence and of the life made theirs through their natural birth and the following course of life. God, as our “faithful Creator” and as presented “in the face of Jesus Christ,” is lovely and magnificent. But he will remain something to be admired and even worshiped at a distance if that is all we know of him. In order for disciples to be brought into a full and joyous love of God, they must see their very own life within the framework of unqualified goodness. Perhaps “see” is too strong a word, though it is certainly what we should hope for. But they must at least be sure in their heart of hearts that their life must be a good thing. And those who teach disciples to “do all things” must aim to help them to this assurance.

We will never have the easy, unhesitating love of God that makes obedience to Jesus our natural response unless we are absolutely sure that it is good for us to be, and to be who we are. This means we must have no doubt that the path appointed for us by when and where and to whom we were born is good, and that nothing irredeemable has happened to us or can happen to us on our way to our destiny in God’s full world.

Any doubt on this point gives force to the soul-numbing idea that God’s commandments are, after all, only for his benefit and enjoyment, and that in the final analysis we must look out for ourselves. When the “moral failures” of well-known Christians (and unknown Christians, for that matter) are examined, they always turn out to be based on the idea that God has required them to serve in such a way that they themselves must “take care of their own needs” rather than being richly provided for by God. Resentment toward God, not love, is the outcome, and from such a condition it is impossible to consistently do the deeds of love.

It is confidence in the invariably overriding intention of God for our good, with respect to all the evil and suffering that may befall us on life’s journey, that secures us in peace and joy. We must be sure of that intention if we are to be free and able, like Joseph, to simply do what we know to be right.

Most of our doubts about the goodness of our life concern very specific matters: our parents and family, our body, our marriage and children (or lack thereof), our opportunities in life, our work and calling (which are not the same thing), and our job. At the heart of our own identity lies our family, and our parents in particular. We cannot be thankful for who we are unless we can be thankful for them. Not, certainly, for all the things they have done, for they may have been quite horrible. And in many cases we must come to have pity on them before we can be thankful for them. Nevertheless, the fifth of the Ten Commandments says, “Honor your father and your mother,” and then adds, “that you may enjoy a long life in the land the Lord your God gives to you” (Exod. 20:12). And Paul notes that this is “the first commandment with a promise attached to it” (Eph. 6:2). The promise is rooted in the realities of the human soul. A long and healthy existence requires that we be grateful to God for who we are, and we cannot be thankful for who we are without being thankful for our parents, through whom our life came. They are a part of our identity, and to reject and be angry with them is to reject and be angry with ourselves. To reject ourselves leads to sickness, dissolution, and death, spiritual and physical. We cannot reject ourselves and love God.

The training in question has clearly discernible stages. First, the individual disciples must be honest about who and what their parents really are and how they truly feel about them. Then they must confess the wrongs of attitude and act they have done their parents and ask for forgiveness. Then they must accept their parents for who and what they are, have mercy on them, and forgive them.

All of this will require careful advice and much prayer and perhaps intense personal presence by the teacher on occasion. The assistance of specially trained counselors may be required. It will take a lengthy period of time in some cases, and the child must take care not to get caught in old damaging patterns of interaction with the parent: for example, trying to make the parent understand, or trying to have the “last word,” or proving he or she was right. Such matters must be simply surrendered to God for him to work out as he will.

Similar teaching, training, and guidance must be given with reference to the other aspects of the disciples’ lives: body, love and sexuality, marriage and children, success with work and jobs. The object in each case is to enable the disciple to be thankful for who they are and what they have. And much the same progression will be required: from honesty to acceptance to compassion and forgiv...

It is being included in the eternal life of God that heals all wounds and allows us to stop demanding satisfaction. What really matters, of a personal nature, once it is clear that you are included? You have been chosen. God chooses you. This is the message of the kingdom.

It is noteworthy that when Job finally stood before God he was completely satisfied and at rest, though not a single one of his questions about his sufferings had been answered. His questions were good questions. He did not sin in asking them. But in the light of God himself they were simply pointless. They just drop away and lose their interest. Let us now be perfectly clear. Your life is not something from which you can stand aside and consider what it would have been like had you had a different one. There is no “you” apart from your actual life. You are not separate from your life, and in that life you must find the goodness of God. Otherwise, you will not believe that he has done well by you, and you will not truly be at peace with him. You must find the goodness of God and the fellowship of Jesus in who you are, or your love for the Father and his unique Son cannot become the foundation for a life of abundance/obedience. They desire to dwell with you in your life and make glorious every aspect of it in the light of the whole that God has planned (John 14). Today many will say that this simply does not do justice to the bitter facts of life. What of victims of sexual abuse or of dreadful diseases, birth defects, war, and other terrible things? But if we have suffered terribly, we must choose not to let that be our life focus. We must, if we can, focus on God, God’s world, and ourselves as included in it with a glorious destiny of our own. And when we cannot, we should...

We have spoken of bringing the disciple to behold the loveliness of God in himself, in the face of his incarnate Son, and in his personal appointment and care of our individual existence. This is a process that must go hand in hand with the second main objective in a curriculum for Christlikeness. That, as we have said, is the breaking of the power of patterns of wrongdoing and evil that govern our lives because of our long habituation to a world alienated from God. We must learn to recognize these habitual patterns for what they are and escape from their grasp.14

The problem currently is that we have little idea—and less still of contemporary models—of what this looks like. Consumer Christianity is now normative. The consumer Christian is one who utilizes the grace of God for forgiveness and the services of the church for special occasions, but does not give his or her life and innermost thoughts, feelings, and intentions over to the kingdom of the heavens. Such Christians are not inwardly transformed and not committed to it.

Because this is so, they remain not just “imperfect,” for all of us remain imperfect, but routinely and seriously unable and unwilling to do the good they know to do, as Paul so accurately describes. They remain governed by, or “slaves” of (John 8:34; Rom. 6:16), sin. For example, their lives are dominated by fear, greed, impatience, egotism, bodily desires, and the like, and they continue to make provision for them. It is this condition that the curriculum for Christlikeness must aim to abolish, in a very intelligent and businesslike manner.

To make a good beginning we must have it very clearly fixed in our minds that what dominates the individual in the course of “normal human existence” is not some invincible, overpowering cosmic force. It is not, as older theologians used to say, a metaphysical necessity we are under, but a personal or “moral” form of constraint.15 And if we think we are facing an irresistible cosmic force of evil, it will invariably lead to giving in and giving up—usually with very little resistance. If you can convince yourself that you are helpless, you can then stop struggling and just “let it happen.” That will seem a great relief—for a while. You can once more be a normal human being. But then you will have to deal with the consequences. And for normal human beings those are very severe.

Now, in fact, the patterns of wrongdoing that govern human life outside the kingdom are usually quite weak, even ridiculous. They are simply our habits, our largely automatic responses of thought, feeling, and action. Typically, we have acted wrongly before reflecting. And it is this that gives bad habits their power. For the most part they are, as Paul knew, actual characteristics of our bodies and our social context, essential parts of any human self. They do not, by and large, bother to run through our conscious mind or deliberative will, and often run exactly contrary to them. It is rare that what we do wrong is the result of careful deliberation.

Instead, our routine behavior manages to keep the deliberative will and the conscious mind off balance and on the defensive. That leaves us constantly in the position of having to deal with what we have already done. And the general “pattern of wrongdoing” that takes over in that case is to defend what we have already done by doing further wr...

Therefore it is primarily in the body and its social context that the work must be done to replace wrong habits with automatic responses that flow with the kingdom of Jesus and sustain themselves from its power. Certainly there must first come the profound inward turnings of repentance and faith. But the replacement of habits remains absolutely essential to anyone who is to “hear and do” and thus build his or her h...

This point that bodily habits are the primary form in which human evil exists in practical life is absolutely essential for an understanding of the curriculum required, so we must emphasize it.16 We will never be able to deal with that evil as long as we take it, in the popular manner, to be external to the self (Satan, the “world”) or something other than precisely the humdrum routines we accept as our habits.

The responses we make to our context without thinking are simply an expression of what our body “knows” to do. Of course, in most situations this is good. It is what our body is for. There is almost nothing we do as adult human beings that does not depend on our body’s “knowledge” taking over. Speaking, kitchen work, and driving about in our community are things we have to think very little about as we do them. Unfortunately this remains true when what our body “knows to do” is wrong.

The struggle in the Garden of Gethsemane was a matter of Jesus’ mind and feelings being hammered in every possible way to make him mistrust the Father. He almost died of it on the spot. But, Jesus added to his friends, “in me this ‘ruler’ has not the least thing on his side” (John 14:30). It was, finally, what was not in Jesus that made him invincible, that kept him safe.

This is the true situation: nothing has power to tempt me or move me to wrong action that I have not given power by what I permit to be in me. And the most spiritually dangerous things in me are the little habits of thought, feeling, and action that I regard as “normal” because “everyone is like that” and it is “only human.”

Our training and experience must bring us to peace with the fact that if we do not follow our habitual desires, do not do what “normal” people would do, it is no major thing. We won’t die, even though at the beginning our outraged habits will “tell us” we are sure to....

Rightly understood, the “death to self” of which scripture and tradition speak is simply the acceptance of this fact. It is the “cross” applied to daily existence. And it is a major part of what disciples must learn in order to break the...

Patterns of anger, scorn, and “looking to lust” vividly illustrate the basic triviality of the drive to wrongdoing. “The look” is only a habit. There is nothing deep or vital about it. One looks to lust or to covet upon certain cues. Anyone who bothers to reflect ...

This is also true of anger, scorn, and—you name it. It’s not like the law of gravity. Falling when you step off a platform is not a habit. Cultivated lusting, anger, and so on are. And, generally speaking, those who say they “cannot help it” are either not well informed ab...

But the really good news here is that the power of habit can be broken. Habits can be changed. And God will help us to change them—though he will not do it for us—because he has a vital interest in who we become. If, for example, you have decided not to let anger or lusting govern you, you can train yourself (and certainly you can do so given the help of experienced disciple trainers) to use the very “cues” that until now have served to activate habits of ang...

The training required to transform our most basic habits of thought, feeling, and action will not be done for us. And yet it is something that we cannot do by ourselves. Life in all its forms must reach out to what is beyond it to achieve fulfillment, and so also the spiritual life. The familiar words of Jesus are “Without me you can do nothing” (John 15:5). But these must be balanced by the insight that, in general, if we do nothing it will certainly be without him.

Still, we cannot “put off the old person and put on the new” on our own. The transition and transformation are the result of several factors at work along with our inward or outward efforts. This is made clear in the magnificent passage in Philippians 2, where Paul is explaining the “mind” or inmost character of Jesus and calling us to have the same “mind.” The mind or attitude in question is that of the loving servant to the good of others. This is the kingdom life. Jesus abandoned himself to the status of a voluntary slave, to the point of even dying for others. In so doing he achieved the highest possible unification of the life of God and the life of man. He is the Maestro, the Lord, and that will be acknowledged throughout the cosmos, by everyone, at the appropriate time (Phil. 2:11). Now, Paul continues, we have received the life of the kingdom through the word of the gospel and the person of Jesus. That life we have as a gift. But once we have it, there is something for us to do, for, as noted earlier, the person we become cannot be the effect of what someone else does. Therefore we are to “work out” the salvation we have (2:12). The word here, katergazesthe, has the sense of developing or elaborating something, bringing it to the fullness of what in its nature it is meant to be. But we do not do this as if the new life were simply our project. It isn’t. God also is at work in us, “choosing and acting on behalf of his intentions” (v. 13). Hence we do what we do—and ...

The importance of the work of the Holy Spirit cannot be overemphasized. But today our practice in Christian circles is, in general, to place almost total emphasis on the apex of this triangle, the work of the Spirit of God for or on the individual. This takes various forms, depending on the history and outlook of the individual or group. Very commonly church participation is recommended on the basis of how it will change our lives, because God will be there and we will be just overwhelmed. And certainly there is an important truth to this. Public manifestations of God, “revivals” if you wish, have made a great difference in many lives, mine included. Emphasis may also be laid upon the gifts of the Spirit, the fruit of the Spirit, the baptism or filling of the Spirit, or the anointing by the Spirit—all very important. But reliance upon what the Spirit does to us or in us, as indispensable as it truly is, will not by itself transform character in its depths. The action of the Spirit must be accompanied by our response, which, as we have seen, cannot be carried out by anyone other than ourselves. This active participation on our part has two aspects, represented by the bottom angles in the triangle.

God has yet to bless anyone except where they actually are, and if we faithlessly discard situation after situation, moment after moment, as not being “right,” we will simply have no place to receive his kingdom into our life. For those situations and moments are our life.

Whatever comes will only confirm the goodness and greatness of the God who has welcomed us into his world.

So it is absolutely essential to our growth into the “mind” of Jesus that we accept the “trials” of ordinary existence as the place where we are to experience and find the reign of God-with-us as actual reality. We are not to try to get in a position to avoid trials. And we are not to “catastrophize” and declare the “end of the world” when things happen. We are to see every event as an occasion in which the competence and faithfulness of God will be confirmed to us. Thus do we know the concrete reality of the kingdom of the heavens.

And of course it is Jesus above all who shows us how to live in the kingdom. Genuine apostolic succession is a matter of being with him, learning to be like him, along with all those faithful ones who have gone before us. Jesus is the ultimate object of imitation, as Paul’s words to the Corinthians just quoted indicate. But then come those directly after Jesus who imitate him. And so it goes on down through the ages. The history of the people of God is an exhaustible treasure that draws its substance from the person of Jesus alive then, alive now, alive always, in himself and in others. We do not just hear what Jesus said to do and try to do that. Rather, we also notice what he did, and we do that too. We notice, for example, that he spent extended times in solitude and silence, and we enter solitude and silence with him. We note what a thorough student of the scriptures he was, and we follow him, the Living Word, into the depths of the written word. We notice how he used worship and prayer, how he served those around him, and so forth. We have Bibles with red letters to indicate what he said. Might we not make a good use of a Bible that has green letters for what he did? Green for “go,” or “do it”?

Being a man of the scriptures, Jesus understood that it is the care of the soul or, better, the care of the whole person, that must be our objective if we are to function as God designed us to function. This is the wisdom of the entire scriptural tradition.

A discipline is any activity within our power that we engage in to enable us to do what we cannot do by direct effort.

But spiritual disciplines are also spiritual disciplines. That is, they are disciplines designed to help us be active and effective in the spiritual realm of our own heart, now spiritually alive by grace, in relation to God and his kingdom. They are designed to help us withdraw from total dependence on the merely human or natural (and in that precise sense to mortify the “flesh,” kill it off, let it die) and to depend also on the ultimate reality, which is God and his kingdom.

solitude, silence, meditative study, prayer, sacrificial giving, service, and so forth as disciplines are simply beyond question.

However, the disciplines do not confirm their value to those who only talk about them or study them “academically” or hear others talk about them. One has to enter them with Jesus as teacher to find the incredible power they have to change one’s world and character. They are self-confirming when entered in faith and humility. And you don’t really need much of faith and humility if you will just stay with them. They will do the rest because they open us to the kingdom.

This is an extension of Jesus’ emphasis on doing as a way of knowing the kingdom. We will be able to do what he says to do as we are inwardly transformed by following him into his life practices of solitude, service, study, and so forth.

Sometimes entering spiritual disciplines is not so much a matter of doing something we have not done before as of doing it in a different way.

In particular, I had learned that intensity is crucial for any progress in spiritual perception and understanding. To dribble a few verses or chapters of scripture on oneself through the week, in church or out, will not reorder one’s mind and spirit—just as one drop of water every five minutes will not get you a shower, no matter how long you keep it up. You need a lot of water at once and for a sufficiently long time. Similarly for the written Word.

These are, on the side of abstinence, solitude and silence and, on the side of positive engagement, study and worship.

TWO DISCIPLINES OF ABSTINENCE: SOLITUDE AND SILENCE. By solitude we mean being out of human contact, being alone, and being so for lengthy periods of time. To get out of human contact is not something that can be done in a short while, for that contact lingers long after it is, in one sense, over. Silence is a natural part of solitude and is its essential completion. Most noise is human contact. Silence means to escape from sounds, noises, other than the gentle ones of nature. But it also means not talking, and the effects of not talking on our soul are different from those of simple quietness. Both dimensions of silence are crucial for the breaking of old habits and the formation of Christ’s character in us.

Now why, precisely, are these disciplines of abstinence so central to the curriculum for Christlikeness? Remember that the second primary objective of the curriculum is to break the power of our ready responses to do the opposite of what Jesus teaches: for example, scorn, anger, verbal manipulation, payback, silent collusion in the wrongdoing of others around us, and so forth. These responses mainly exist at what we might call the “epidermal” level of the self, the first point of contact with the world around us. They are almost totally “automatic,” given the usual stimuli. The very language we use is laden with them, and of course they are the “buttons” by which the human surroundings more or less control us. They are not “deep”; ...

Now it is solitude and silence that allow us to escape the patterns of epidermal responses, with their consequences. They provide space to come to terms with these responses and to replace them, with God’s help, by different immediate responses that are suitable to the kingdom environment—and, indeed, to the kind of life everyone in saner moments recognizes to be good. They break the pell-mell rush through life and create ...