The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

by Dallas Willard

From the very beginning of his work, those who relied on him had, at his touch, entered the rule, or governance, of God and were receiving its gracious sufficiency. Jesus was not just acting for God but also with God—a little like the way, in a crude metaphor, I act with my power steering, or it with me, when I turn the wheel of my car. And this “governance” is projected onward through those who receive him. When we receive God’s gift of life by relying on Christ, we find that God comes to act with us as we rely on him in our actions. That explains why Jesus said that the least in the kingdom of the heavens are greater than John the Baptist—not, of course, greater in themselves, but as a greater power works along with them. The “greater” is not inherent, a matter of our own substance, but relational. So, C. S. Lewis writes, our faith is not a matter of our hearing what Christ said long ago and “trying to carry it out.” Rather, “The real Son of God is at your side. He is beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as Himself. He is beginning, so to speak, to ‘inject’ His kind of life and thought, His Zoe [life], into you; beginning to turn the tin soldier into a live man. The part of you that does not like it is the part that is still tin.”13