The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

by Dallas Willard

But not all of reality is physical. There is, as a matter of fact, no science that even attempts to demonstrate that all that exists is physical. Anyone is invited to point out which one does so, and where.

Prayer in what we might accurately call the spirit of Jesus Christ was found to have noteworthy effects for good in those who learned to use it. The book recording all of this, Prayer Can Change Your Life, is still very much worth reading and is especially useful in learning some aspects of the practice of healing prayer.

Prayer as kingdom praying is an arrangement explicitly instituted by God in order that we as individuals may count, and count for much, as we learn step by step how to govern, to reign with him in his kingdom. To enter and to learn this reign is what gives the individual life its intended significance.

Prayer is, above all, a means of forming character. It combines freedom and power with service and love. What God gets out of our lives—and, indeed, what we get out of our lives—is simply the person we become. It is God’s intention that we should grow into the kind of person he could empower to do what we want to do.

Reign is no doubt wording that is a little too grand for the contemporary mind, though what it refers to is what everyone actually pursues in life. We have been trained to think of “reigning” as exclusionary of others. But in the heart of the divine conspiracy, it just means to be free and powerful in the creation and governance of what is good. In the life of prayer we are training for, we reign in harmonious union with the infinite power of God.

When we pray we enter the real world, the substance of the kingdom, and our bodies and souls begin to function for the first time as they were created to function.

When we speak to someone, we use a name to call to that person in distinction from everyone else. We thereby indicate that we wish to speak to that particular person.

When we speak to God, Jesus tells us, we are to address him as “Our Father, the one in the heavens.” This is the configuration of reality from within which we pray. The overwhelming difficulties many people have with prayer, both understanding it and doing it, derive from nothing more than their failure or their inability to place themselves within this configuration and receive it by grace.

Unfortunately, the old standard formulation, “Our Father who art in heaven,” has come to mean “Our Father who is far away and much later.” As explained in an earlier chapter, the meaning of the plural heavens, which is erroneously omitted in most translations, sees God present as far “out” as imaginable but also right down to the atmosphere around our heads, which is the first of “the heavens.” The omission of the plural robs the wording in the model prayer of the sense Jesus intended. That sense is, “Our Father always near us.”

Today very few people any longer understand what it means to “hallow” something and are apt to associate hallow only with ghosts and Halloween. So we would do better to translate the language here as “let your name be sanctified.” Let it be uniquely respected.

The word translated “hallow” or “sanctify” is hagiastheto. It is basically the same word used, for example, in John 17:17, where Jesus asks the Father to sanctify his students, especially the apostles, through his truth. And it appears again in 1 Thess. 5:23, where Paul expresses his hope that God will sanctify the Thessalonians entirely, keeping them blameless in spirit, soul, and body until Jesus returns. In such passages, too, the term means to locate the persons referred to in a separate and very special kind of reality.

Recall, now, that the kingdom of God is the range of his effective will: that is, it is the domain where what he prefers is actually what happens. And this very often does not happen on this sad earth—on Gaia, as it is often called nowadays.

The clause “Thy will be done, as in heaven so also on earth,” added in the Matthew 6 version of the model prayer, therefore only clarifies what it means to say, “Thy kingdom come.”

Culture is seen in what people do unthinkingly, what is “natural” to them and therefore requires no explanation or justification. Everyone has a culture—or, really, multidimensional cultures of various levels. These cultures structure their lives. And of course by far the most of everyone’s culture is right and good and essential. But not all.

The third request in the model prayer deals with the immediate sustenance of our body. Food, of course, is symbolically central, but whatever else we really need to live in a functional manner is included in this request.

The emphasis is on provision today of what we need for today.

Now, to make it clear about the teaching and the prayer, it is quite all right, as earlier noted, to have things now that we intend to use tomorrow and to work or even pray in a sensible way for them. What hinders or shuts down kingdom living is not the having of such provisions, but rather the trusting in them for future security. We have no real security for the future in them, but only in the God who is present with us each day.

The fourth request is for forgiveness of sins. It asks the Father to deal with us on the basis of mercy or pity. We forgive someone of a wrong they have done us when we decide that we will not make them suffer for it in any way. This does not mean we must prevent suffering that may come to them as a result of the wrong they have done.

But as a father pities his children, so the Lord pities us. He knows what we are made of and remembers that we are dust. He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor does he reward us in proportion to our wrongdoings (Ps. 103:10–14). That is the wonderful, healing nature of The Kingdom Among Us.

Understanding of these matters can help us with one of the most painful failures to be found in our families. We each of us have a deep, biological need to honor our parents. This need is reflected in the commandment: “Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that your God Jehovah has given you” (Exod. 20:12). To honor our parents means to be thankful for their existence and to respect their actual role as givers of life in the sequence of human existence. Of course in order to honor them in this way we need to be thankful for our own existence too. But we also will usually need to have pity on them. For, even if they are good people, it is almost always true that they have been quite wrong in many respects, and possibly still are.

And if you’ve been squirming as you read this, there’s a good reason. I have used the word pity through much of this discussion of “forgive us our sins,” rather than the word mercy or the even more dignified compassion. This is because only pity reaches to the heart of our condition. The word pity makes us wince, as mercy does not. Our current language has robbed mercy of its deep, traditional meaning, which is practically the same as pity. To pity someone now is to feel sorry for them, and that is regarded as demeaning, whereas to have mercy now is thought to be slightly noble—just “give’em a break.”

Today even many Christians read and say “forgive us our trespasses” as “give me a break.” In the typically late-twentieth-century manner, this saves the ego and its egotism. “I am not a sinner, I just need a break!” But no, I need more than a break. I need pity because of who I am. If my pride is untouched when I pray for forgiveness, I have not prayed for forgiveness. I don’t even understand it.

And so the version in Matthew 6 elaborates this last request by saying, “Spare us from bad things that might happen to us.”

As we attentively make this prayer a part of our constant bearing in life, we will see how God indeed does keep us from trials and deliver us from evil. Constantly. We will see how often good things happen even to “bad” people—as well as to the good. And of course we will find that we do have trials, and that some bad things come to everyone. No one is totally exempt. We can count on that too.

Here lies the secret of Paul’s astonishing testimony: “So, living for Christ, I am delighted when I experience weaknesses, insults, desperate needs, persecutions and difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am powerful” (2 Cor. 12:9–10). It is precisely this experience-based assurance that is expressed in the great psalms, such as 23, 34, 37, and 91. These and similar passages in the scriptures trouble many people because they seem to promise too much—to be, frankly, unrealistic. But they do not promise that we will have no trials, as human beings understand trials. They promise, instead, totally unbroken care, along with God-given adequacy to whatever happens.

This truth is twisted by our imagination to give a false view of God. That “twist” is largely responsible for a morbid streak that runs through much of historical and even current Christianity. We project upon God the sadistic tendencies that really are present in human beings. Given the anger, hatred, and contempt that pervades human society, it is not uncommon that individual human beings actually enjoy the suffering of others. One of our worst thoughts about God is that he too enjoys human suffering.

Is it any wonder that Jesus told us to forget everything we think we know about the nature of God and lose ourselves in his picture of our Father, the one in the heavens? (Matt. 11:25–27; John 3:13; 17:6–8).

People who do not ask God to spare them from trials and evils usually do not even recognize his hand when they are spared. They then live under the illusion that their lives are governed by chance, luck, accident, the whims of others, and their own cleverness. And because they do not ask, do not constantly invite God in, that may well be, to some significant extent, no illusion.

One thing is sure: You are somebody’s disciple. You learned how to live from somebody else.

It is one of the major transitions of life to recognize who has taught us, mastered us, and then to evaluate the results in us of their teaching. This is a harrowing task, and sometimes we just can’t face it. But it can also open the door to choose other masters, possibly better masters, and one Master above all.

In other words, his basic message, “Rethink your life in the light of the fact that the kingdom of the heavens is now open to all” (Matt. 4:17), presents the resources needed to live human life as we all automatically sense it should be and naturally leads one to become his student, or apprentice in kingdom living.

The narrow gate is not, as so often assumed, doctrinal correctness. The narrow gate is obedience—and the confidence in Jesus necessary to it.

The great Pauline, Petrine, and Johannine passages, such as 1 Corinthians 13; Colossians 3; 1 Peter 2; 2 Pet. 1:1–15; 1 John 3:1–5:5, all convey exactly the same message in so many words, one of an inward transformation by discipleship to Jesus. In them the central point of reference is always a divine kind of love, agape, that comes to characterize the core of our personality.

In John 14, he goes carefully over the fact that he would soon be taken away from them in the visible human form they had known. Then, he explains, another “strengthener”—“comforter” is just not the right word to use in translating paracleton today—would be active and interactive in their lives. The marginal reading of John 14:16 in the New American Standard Version is excellent for the meaning intended: a paraclete is “one called alongside to help.” This other strengthener (other, that is, than the visible Jesus as they had known him) would be with them to the end.

God as personality is not a physical reality that everyone must see whether they want to or not. He can, of course, make himself present to the human mind in any way he chooses. But—for good reasons rooted deeply in the nature of the person and of personal relationships—his preferred way is to speak, to communicate: thus the absolute centrality of scripture to our discipleship. And this, among other things, is the reason why an extensive use of solitude and silence is so basic for growth of the human spirit, for they form an appropriate context for listening and speaking to God.1

In Acts I we have a fascinating account of the forty days Jesus spent with his eleven apostles between his resurrection and his ascension. That account is absolutely central for our understanding of how he is with his people now. It clearly indicates that during the period in question he alternated between communicating with them without being visibly present and communicating with them while being visibly present.

The personal presence of Jesus with individuals and groups that trust him was soon understood by Jesus’ first students to be the practical reality of the kingdom of God now on earth. That is, it is what the kingdom is as a factor in their lives. This reality is the additional “life” of which the apostle John makes so much in his writings. It is the “in Christ” that forms the backbone of Paul’s understanding of redemption.2

The reality of the kingdom life is an inner one, a hidden one, with “the Father who is in secret.” And we often find it to be absent in those who convert many others or who manifest tongues, signs, wonders, and the like.

The kingdom is within you!

Thus Paul very simply says, “All who are interactive with the spirit of God are God’s children” (Rom. 8:14). The interactive movement he refers to is the inner reality, not the outward manifestations. And: “The kingdom of God is not eating and drinking [whether you do it in one way or in another] but is inner rightness (dikaiosune) and peace and joy sustained by the Holy Spirit. For those serving Christ in this way are well-pleasing to God and approved by men” (Rom. 14:17–18).

So the kingdom of the heavens, from the practical point of view in which we all must live, is simply our experience of Jesus’ continual interaction with us in history and throughout the days, hours, and moments of our earthly existence.

Thus was fulfilled Jesus’ statement to the Jewish nation—not, we emphasize, to individual Jews—that “the kingdom of God shall be taken from you and will be given to a people producing its fruits” (Matt. 21:43). And those people were the people of the name “Jesus.”

First of all, we should note that being a disciple, or apprentice, of Jesus is a quite definite and obvious kind of thing.

The very term Christian was explicitly introduced in the New Testament—where, by the way, it is used only three times—to apply to disciples when they could no longer be called Jews, because many kinds of gentiles were now part of them.

Following up on what has already been said, then, a disciple, or apprentice, is simply someone who has decided to be with another person, under appropriate conditions, in order to become capable of doing what that person does or to become what that person is.

How does this apply to discipleship to Jesus?

The answer is found in the Gospels: he lives in the kingdom of God, and he applies that kingdom for the good of others and even makes it possible for them to enter it for themselves.

And as a disciple of Jesus I am with him, by choice and by grace, learning from him how to live in the kingdom of God. This is the crucial idea. That means, we recall, how to live within the range of God’s effective will, his life flowing through mine. Another important way of putting this is to say that I am learning from Jesus to live my life as he would live my life if he were I. I am not necessarily learning to do everything he did, but I am learning how to do everything I do in the manner that he did all that he did.

To repeat, I am learning from Jesus how to lead my life, my whole life, my real life. Note, please, I am not learning from him how to lead his life. His life on earth was a transcendently wonderful one. But it has now been led. Neither I nor anyone else, even himself, will ever lead it again. And he is, in any case, interested in my life, that very existence that is me. There lies my need. I need to be able to lead my life as he would lead it if he were I.

It is crucial for our walk in the kingdom to understand that the teachings of Jesus, which we have been examining at such length in this book, do not by themselves make a life. They were never intended to. Rather, they presuppose a life. But that causes no problem, for of course each one of us is provided a life automatically. And we know exactly what it is. It is who we are and what we do. It is precisely this life that God wants us to give to him. We must only be careful to understand its true dignity. To every person we can say with confidence, “You, in the midst of your actual life there, are exactly the person God wanted.”

The teachings of Jesus in the Gospels show us how to live the life we have been given through the time, place, family, neighbors, talents, and opportunities that are ours.