The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

by Dallas Willard

They also give us some space to reform our inmost attitudes toward people and events. They take the world off our shoulders for a time and interrupt our habit of constantly managing things, of being in control, or thinking we are. One of the greatest of spiritual attainments is the capacity to do nothing. Thus the Christian philosopher Pascal insightfully remarks, “I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they are unable to stay quietly in their own room.”

And doing nothing has many other advantages. It may be a great blessing to others around us, who often hardly have a chance while we are in action. And possibly the gentle Father in the heavens would draw nigh if we would just be quiet and rest a bit. Generally speaking, he will not compete for our attention, and as long as we are “in charge” he is liable to keep a certain distance.

Every person should have regular periods in life when he or she has nothing to do. Periods of solitude and silence are excellent practices for helping us learn how to do that. The law that God has given for our benefit as well as his tells us that one seventh of our time should be devoted to doing nothing—no work, not by ourselves or any of our family, employees, or animals. That includes, of course, religious work. It is to be Sabbath.

Even lay down your ideas as to what solitude and silence are supposed to accomplish in your spiritual growth. You will discover incredibly good things. One is that you have a soul. Another, that God is near and the universe is brimming with goodness. Another, that others aren’t as bad as you often think. But don’t try to discover these, or you won’t. You’ll just be busy and find more of your own business.

The cure for too-much-to-do is solitude and silence, for there you find you are safely more than what you do. And the cure of loneliness is solitude and silence, for there you discover in how many ways you are never alone.

When you go into solitude and silence, you need to be relatively comfortable. Don’t be a hero in this or in any spiritual discipline. You will need rest. Sleep until you wake up truly refreshed. And you will need to stay there long enough for the inner being to become diff...

You will know this finding of soul and God is happening by an increased sense of who you are and a lessening of the feeling that you have to do this, that, and the other thing that befalls your lot in life. That harassing, hovering feeling of “have to” largely comes from the vacuum in your soul, where you ought to be at home with your Father in his kingdom. As the vacuum is rightly fill...

Liberation from your own desires is one of the greatest gifts of solitude and silence. When this all begins to happen, you will know you are arriving where you ought to be. Old bondages to wrongdoing will begin to drop off as you see them for what they ...

Obviously the effects of these disciplines will greatly benefit our first primary objective, to love God with a full heart. For the usual distractions of life greatly hinder our attention to God, and the habit of thinking about everything else is almost impossible to break in the bustle of life. Time away can help. People often complain that they cannot pray because their thoughts wander. Those thoughts are simply doing what they usually do. The grip of the usual is what must be broken. Appropriate solitude and silence are sure to do it.

Now we must not worship without study, for ignorant worship is of limited value and can be very dangerous. We may develop “a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge” (Rom. 10:2) and do great harm to ourselves and others. But worship must be added to study to complete the renewal of our mind through a willing absorption in the radiant person who is worthy of all praise. Study without worship is also dangerous, and the people of Jesus constantly suffer from its effects, especially in academic settings. To handle the things of God without worship is always to falsify them.

In worship we are ascribing greatness, goodness, and glory to God. It is typical of worship that we put every possible aspect of our being into it, all of our sensuous, conceptual, active, and creative capacities. We embellish, elaborate, and magnify. Poetry and song, color and texture, food and incense, dance and procession are all used to exalt God. And sometimes it is in the quiet absorption of thought, the electric passion of encounter, or total surrender of the will. In worship we strive for adequate expression of God’s greatness. But only for a moment, if ever, do we achieve what seems like adequacy. We cannot do justice to God or his Son or his kingdom or his goodness to us. Worship nevertheless imprints on our whole being the reality that we study. The effect is a radical disruption of the powers of evil in us and around us. Often an enduring and substantial change is brought about. And the renewal of worship keeps the glow and power of our true homeland an active agent in all parts of our being. To “hear and do” in the atmosphere of worship is the clearest, most obvious and natural thing imaginable.

We want to “make the tree good.” We do not aim just to control behavior, but to change the inner castle of the soul, that God may be worshiped “in spirit and in truth” and right behavior cease to be a performance.

The pattern has two main elements: Clearly positioning the context before the heavenly Father’s present rule through Jesus Walking the individual through actual cases in their own lives to give them experience-based understanding and assurance

The disciplines are practices that change the inner self and its relationship to the “helper” (paraclete), so that we can actually do what we would and avoid what we would not. They of course have no point apart from the serious intent to obey Christ’s teaching and follow his example.

We should be aware of, roughly, five dimensions of our eternal kind of life in The Kingdom Among Us, and these dimensions more or less arrange themselves in the following progression: Confidence in and reliance upon Jesus as “the Son of man,” the one appointed to save us. Relevant scriptural passages here are John 3:15; Rom. 10:9–10; and 1 Cor. 12:3. This confidence is a reality, and it is itself a true manifestation of the “life from above,” not of normal human capacities. It is, as Heb. 11:1 says, “the proof of things not seen.” Anyone who truly has this confidence can be completely assured that they are “included.” But this confidence in the person of Jesus naturally leads to a desire to be his apprentice in living in and from the kingdom of God. Only a sustained historical process involving many confusions and false motivations could lead to our current situation, in which faith in Jesus is thought to have no natural connection with discipleship to him. Our apprenticeship to him means that we live within his word, that is, put his teachings into practice (John 8:31). And this progressively integrates our entire existence into the glorious world of eternal living. We become “free indeed” (John 8:36). The abundance of life realized through apprenticeship to Jesus, “continuing in his word,” naturally leads to obedience. The teaching we have received and our experience of living with it brings us to love Jesus and the Father with our whole being: heart, soul, mind, and (bo...

Looking back over this progression, one of the most important things for us to see and accept is that, once confidence in Jesus lives in us, we must be intelligently active in stages or dimensions 2 through 5. We do this by unrelenting study under Jesus, and in particular by following him into his practices and adapting them to form an effective framework of spiritual disciplines around which our whole life can be structured. This is precisely how we “through the spirit do mortify the life of the flesh” (Rom. 8:13) and “put off the old person and put on the new” (Col. 3:9–10, etc.). Though we cannot do it by ourselves, it is nevertheless something that we do. Each of us must ask ourselves how are we doing it. What, precisely, is our plan? And as teachers of disciples, we must lead everyone we teach into developing his or her own plan.

We will not sit around looking at one another or at God for eternity but will join the eternal Logos, “reign with him,” in the endlessly ongoing creative work of God. It is for this that we were each individually intended, as both kings and priests (Exod. 19:6; Rev. 5:10). Thus, our faithfulness over a “few things” in the present phase of our life develops the kind of character that can be entrusted with “many things.” We are, accordingly, permitted to “enter into the joy of our Lord” (Matt. 25:21). That “joy” is, of course, the creation and care of what is good, in all its dimensions. A place in God’s creative order has been reserved for each one of us from before the beginnings of cosmic existence. His plan is for us to develop, as apprentices to Jesus, to the point where we can take our place in the ongoing creativity of the universe.

God’s way of moving toward the future is, with gentle persistence in unfailing purpose, to bring about the transformation of the human heart by speaking with human beings and living with and in them. He finds an Abraham, a Moses, a Paul—a you. It is this millennia-long process that Jesus the Son of man brings and will bring to completion. And it is the way of the prophets, who foresaw that the day would come when God’s heart is the human heart: “the law of God would be written in the heart.” That is, when what is right to God’s mind would be done as a simple matter of course, and when we would not be able to understand why anyone would even think of engaging in evil. That is the nature of God’s full reign.

This Heavenly city, while it sojourns on earth, calls citizens out of all nations, and gathers together a society of pilgrims of all languages, not scrupling about diversities in the manners, laws, and institutions whereby earthly peace is secured and maintained, but recognizing that, however various these are, they all tend to one and the same end of earthly peace. It therefore is so far from rescinding and abolishing these diversities, that it even preserves and adapts them, so long only as no hindrance to the worship of the one supreme and true God is thus introduced.4

What tho’ the spicy breezes Blow soft o’er Ceylon’s isle; Though every prospect pleases, And only man is vile? In vain with lavish kindness The gifts of God are strown; The heathen in his blindness Bows down to wood and stone.7 To wood and stone we must currently add political programs and social groups, economic status, education, technologies and human knowledge, drugs, and perhaps other things as well. To all of these, human beings bow down. They take them as ultimate points of reference for their lives and actions. And if that is all we see, certainly there are no grounds for hope. The ancient prophetic vision must then seem only a fanciful projection, nothing real.

The purpose of God with human history is nothing less than to bring out of it—small and insignificant as it seems from the biological and naturalistic point of view—an eternal community of those who were once thought to be just “ordinary human beings.”8 Because of God’s purposes for it, this community will, in its way, pervade the entire created realm and share in the government of it. God’s precreation intention to have that community as a special dwelling place or home will be realized. He will be its prime sustainer and most glorious inhabitant. But why? What is the point of it? The purpose is to meet what can only be described as a need of God’s nature as totally competent love. It is the same purpose that manifests itself in his creation of the world. Only in the light of such a creation and such a redeemed community is it possible for God to be known in his deepest nature. They make it possible for God to be known. And love unknown is love unfulfilled. Moreover, the welfare of every conscious being in existence depends upon their possession of this knowledge of God.

We exist and will continue to exist, then, because it pleases God. He sees that it is good.