The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

by Dallas Willard

The kingdom disciple teaches from his or her storehouse of personal experiences of God’s rule in the commonplace events of real life.

In summary, then, the disciple or apprentice of Jesus, as recognized by the New Testament, is one who has firmly decided to learn from him how to lead his or her life, whatever that may be, as Jesus himself would do

Jesus gave us two parables to illustrate the condition of soul that leads to becoming a disciple.

What this passage in Luke is about is clarity. It is not about misery, or about some incredibly dreadful price that one must pay to be Jesus’ apprentice.

After their breakfast on the beach, Jesus says to him, “Peter, do you love me more than these?”

The first thing we should do is emphatically and repeatedly express to Jesus our desire to see him more fully as he really is.

Second, we should use every means at our disposal to come to see him more fully.

But dwelling in his word is not just intensive and continuous study of the Gospels, though it is that. It is also putting them into practice. To dwell in his word we must know it: know what it is and what it means. But we really dwell in it by putting it into practice.

And it is the simple want of that intention to please God, Law points out, that explains why you see such a mixture of sin and folly in the lives even of the better sort of people….

must, of course, be disciples, we must intend to make disciples, and we must know how to bring people to believe that Jesus really is the One.

So we are, then, disciples in disciple making. We learn from Jesus how to make disciples as he did. We have seen that this involves proclaiming, manifesting, and teaching the kingdom of God. The teaching aspect becomes very important in making disciples. In it we help others to think accurately about “the effective range of God’s will” and to understand why it is as it is and how it works. When we have come to the point where we can do this, then in conjunction with our own experience of becoming a disciple, making a disciple is no longer something mysterious. It is only a matter of appropriately informing people about Jesus and his kingdom and helping them, through prayer and guidance, to make a decision.

Nondiscipleship is the elephant in the church. It is not the much discussed moral failures, financial abuses, or the amazing general similarity between Christians and non-Christians.

This gives a precise meaning to the phrase “cheap grace,” though it would be better described as “costly faithlessness.”

I am thoroughly convinced that God will let everyone into heaven who, in his considered opinion, can stand it. But “standing it” may prove to be a more difficult matter than those who take their view of heaven from popular movies or popular preaching may think. The fires in heaven may be hotter than those in the other place.

For example, much time is spent among Christians trying to smooth over hurt feelings and even deep wounds, given and received, and to get people to stop being angry, retaliatory, and unforgiving. But suppose, instead, we devoted our time to inspiring and enabling Christians and others to be people who are not offendable and not angry and who are forgiving as a matter of course. “Great peace,” the psalmist says, “have they who love Thy law. Nothing trips them up” (Ps. 119:165). To intentionally make disciples is to open the doorway for people to become like that. That is why it is such a great gift to humankind.

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.

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.

But in our culture there is a severe illusion about faith, or belief. It is one that has been produced by many centuries of people professing, as a cultural identification, to believe things they do not really believe at all. That goes hand in hand with the predominance of what was called client, or consumer, Christianity earlier. Thus there arises the misunderstanding that human life is not really governed by belief.

“Your system is perfectly designed to produce the result you are getting.”

What could we teach apprentices to Jesus, and how could we train them in such a way that they would routinely do the things he said were right?

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.

And the correlation between faith in Christ and the obedience/abundance of life in Christ has now become, apparently, something of a mystery.

We Teach All Who Seriously Commit Themselves to Jesus How to Do Everything He Said to Do.

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.

“training disciples to do everything I told you” is “bringing them to actually believe all the things they have already heard.”

Remember, to believe something is to act as if it is so.

The first objective is to bring apprentices to the point where they dearly love and constantly delight in that “heavenly Father”

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.

Saint Thomas Aquinas remarks that “love is born of an earnest consideration of the object loved.” And: “Love follows knowledge.”

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.

God has placed the only key to the innermost parts of the human soul in its own hands and will never take it back to himself or give it to another. You may even be able to destroy the soul of another, but you will never unlock it against his or her will.

So the question for the first part of our curriculum is simply how to bring God adequately before the mind and spirit of the disciple.

This is to be done in such a way that love for and delight in God will be elicited and established as the pervasive orientation of the whole self.

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.

But this “freedom” will never be realized unless the individual involved takes constant care over the direct placement of his or her mind.

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.

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).

1. “God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth” In

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.

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.

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.

2. The God of Jesus and His People

The magnificent prayer in Neh. 9:5–38 expresses how creation and covenant come together in the historical tradition of a redeemed and redemptive people. The occasion is one of corporate confession of a disastrous failure to keep the covenant, and of renewal before the gracious God who does not give up on us. The first part of the prayer is the “address,” which we studied in chapter 7. The two crucial elements stated in the address are, precisely, creation and covenant:

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 criminals on our behalf. We don’t have to understand exactly how it works.

Third, we teach the reality of Jesus risen, his actual existence now as a person who is present among his people.

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.

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.

When the breach in the human soul that is self-rejection remains unhealed, the individual, and thereby society, is open to all kinds of terrible evils. This is where the Hitlers come from. And for every Hitler who rises to power, there are millions who consume themselves and die in quiet corners of the earth.

First, the individual disciples must be honest about who and what their parents really are and how they truly feel about them.

The object in each case is to enable the disciple to be thankful for who they are and what they have.