The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

by Dallas Willard

More than any other single thing, in any case, the practical irrelevance of actual obedience to Christ accounts for the weakened effect of Christianity in the world today, with its increasing tendency to emphasize political and social action as the primary way to serve God. It also accounts for the practical irrelevance of Christian faith to individual character development and overall personal sanity and well-being.

To the right, being a Christian is a matter of having your sins forgiven. (Remember that bumper sticker?) To the left, you are Christian if you have a significant commitment to the elimination of social evils. A Christian is either one who is ready to die and face the judgment of God or one who has an identifiable commitment to love and justice in society. That’s it. The history that has brought this about—being filtered through the Modernist/Fundamentalist controversy that consumed American religion for many decades and still works powerfully in its depths—also has led each wing to insist that what the other takes for essential should not be regarded as essential. What right and left have in common is that neither group lays down a coherent framework of knowledge and practical direction adequate to personal transformation toward the abundance and obedience emphasized in the New Testament, with a corresponding redemption of ordinary life. What is taught as the essential message about Jesus has no natural connection to entering a life of discipleship to him.

The issue, so far as the gospel in the Gospels is concerned, is whether we are alive to God or dead to him. Do we walk in an interactive relationship with him that constitutes a new kind of life, life “from above”? As the apostle John says in his first letter, “God has given undying life to us, and that life is in his Son. Those who have the Son have life” (1 John 5:11–12).

The sensed irrelevance of what God is doing to what makes up our lives is the foundational flaw in the existence of multitudes of professing Christians today. They have been led to believe that God, for some unfathomable reason, just thinks it appropriate to transfer credit from Christ’s merit account to ours, and to wipe out our sin debt, upon inspecting our mind and finding that we believe a particular theory of the atonement to be true—even if we trust everything but God in all other matters that concern us. It is left unexplained how it is possible that one can rely on Christ for the next life without doing so for this one, trust him for one’s eternal destiny without trusting him for “the things that relate to Christian life.” Is this really possible? Surely it is not! Not within one life. When all is said and done, “the gospel” for Ryrie, MacArthur, and others on the theological right is that Christ made “the arrangement” that can get us into heaven. In the Gospels, by contrast, “the gospel” is the good news of the presence and availability of life in the kingdom, now and forever, through reliance on Jesus the Anointed. This was Abraham’s faith, too. As Jesus said, “Abraham saw my time and was delighted” (John 8:56). Accordingly, the only description of eternal life found in the words we have from Jesus is “This is eternal life, that they [his disciples] may know you, the only real God, and Jesus the anointed, whom you have sent” (John 17:3). This may sound to us like...

Robbed of its reference to a transcendent spiritual being or substance that nonetheless personally engages with humanity while holding them responsible to its specific directives on how to live, this “love” (“God”) has no recourse but to become whatever the current ideology says it is. Currently that means not treating people as different, while liberating them and enabling them to do what they want. But this “gospel” turns out in practice to be little more than another version of the world-famous American dream. Other words associated with it are “egalitarianism,” “happiness,” and “freedom.” As a professor of education at Bradley University recently stated, the American dream is that “people can do or be what they want if they just go ahead and do it.”22 Desire becomes sacred, and whatever thwarts desire is evil or sin.

But where do we find churches, right or left, that put them on their walls? The Ten Commandments really aren’t very popular anywhere. This is so in spite of the fact that even a fairly general practice of them would lead to a solution of almost every problem of meaning and order now facing Western societies. They are God’s best information on how to lead a basically decent human existence.

The situation we have just described—the disconnection of life from faith, the absence from our churches of Jesus the teacher—is not caused by the wicked world, by social oppression, or by the stubborn meanness of the people who come to our church services and carry on the work of our congregations. It is largely caused and sustained by the basic message that we constantly hear from Christian pulpits. We are flooded with what I have called “gospels of sin management,” in one form or another, while Jesus’ invitation to eternal life now—right in the midst of work, business, and profession—remains for the most part ignored and unspoken. Must not all who speak for Christ constantly ask themselves these crucial questions: Does the gospel I preach and teach have a natural tendency to cause people who hear it to become full-time students of Jesus? Would those who believe it become his apprentices as a natural “next step”? What can we reasonably expect would result from people actually believing the substance of my message?

And so we have the result noted: the resources of God’s kingdom remain detached from human life. There is no gospel for human life and Christian discipleship, just one for death or one for social action. The souls of human beings are left to shrivel and die on the plains of life because they are not introduced into the environment for which they were made, the living kingdom of eternal life. To counteract this we must develop a straightforward presentation, in word and life, of the reality of life now under God’s rule, through reliance upon the word and person of Jesus. In this way we can naturally become his students or apprentices. We can learn from him how to live our lives as he would live them if he were we. We can enter his eternal kind of life now.

Jesus’ good news about the kingdom can be an effective guide for our lives only if we share his view of the world in which we live. To his eyes this is a God-bathed and God-permeated world. It is a world filled with a glorious reality, where every component is within the range of God’s direct knowledge and control—though he obviously permits some of it, for good reasons, to be for a while otherwise than as he wishes. It is a world that is inconceivably beautiful and good because of God and because God is always in it. It is a world in which God is continually at play and over which he constantly rejoices. Until our thoughts of God have found every visible thing and event glorious with his presence, the word of Jesus has not yet fully seized us. The novelist Vladimir Nabokov writes of a moment of awakening in one of his characters who, watching an old woman of the streets drink a cup of coffee given to her, became aware of the world’s tenderness, the profound beneficence of all that surrounded me, the blissful bond between me and all of creation; and I realized that joy…breathed around me everywhere, in the speeding street sounds, in the hem of a comically lifted skirt, in the metallic yet tender drone of the wind, in the autumn clouds bloated with rain. I realized that the world does not represent a struggle at all, or a predaceous sequence of chance events, but shimmering bliss, beneficent trepidation, a gift bestowed on us and unappreciated.

Sometimes I feel I don’t really want the kingdom to be open to such people. But it is. That is the heart of God. And, as Jonah learned from his experience preaching to those wretched Ninevites, we can’t shrink him down to our size.

Wrong action, he well knew, is not the problem in human existence, though it is constantly taken to be so. It is only a symptom, which from time to time produces vast evils in its own right.

One must aim to become the kind of person from whom the deeds of the law naturally flow. The apple tree naturally and easily produces apples because of its inner nature. This is the most crucial thing to remember if we would understand Jesus’ picture of the kingdom heart given in the Sermon on the Mount. And here also lies the fundamental mistake of the scribe and the Pharisee. They focus on the actions that the law requires and make elaborate specifications of exactly what those actions are and of the manner in which they are to be done. They also generate immense social pressure to force conformity of action to the law as they interpret it. They are intensely self-conscious about doing the right thing and about being thought to have done the right thing. But the inner dimensions of their personality, their heart and character, are left to remain contrary to what God has required. That heart will, of course, ultimately triumph over their conscious intentions and arrangements, and they will in fact do what they know to be wrong. Their words, especially, will reveal the contents of their heart (Matt. 12:34). And their need to appear righteous “before men” (Luke 15:15) then forces them into hypocrisy. Hypocrisy becomes the spirit, or “yeast,” that pervades and colors their entire existence (Luke 12:1). One can hardly exaggerate the extent to which this deadly “yeast” infects human relationships all around us. One could wish only religious people were subject to it.

Some degree of malice is contained in every degree of anger.9 That is why it always hurts us when someone is angry at us. Consequently, we would not choose to have others angry at us unless some ulterior end were to be gained by it. We know that people who are angry at us will our harm, and by just their look (or refusal to look) or the raising of their voice (or not speaking at all) they intend to make a painful impression on us. They certainly succeed.

The explosion of anger never simply comes from the incident. Most people carry a supply of anger around with them.

The importance of the self and the real or imaginary wound done to it is blown out of all proportion by those who indulge anger. Then anger can become anything from a low-burning resentment to a holy crusade to inflict harm on the one who has thwarted me or my wishes or bruised my sense of propriety. It may explode on anything and anyone within reach. I may become addicted to the adrenaline rush and never feel really alive except when my anger is pumping.

Only this element of self-righteousness can support me as I retain my anger long after the occasion of it or allow its intensity to heat to the point of totally senseless rage. To rage on I must regard myself as mistreated or as engaged in the rectification of an unbearable wrong, which I all too easily do. Anger embraced is, accordingly, inherently disintegrative of human personality and life. It does not have to be specifically “acted out” to poison the world. Because of what it is, and the way it seizes upon the body and its environment just by being there, it cannot be hidden. All our mental and emotional resources are marshaled to nurture and tend the anger, and our body throbs with it. Energy is dedicated to keeping the anger alive: we constantly remind ourselves of how wrongly we have been treated. And when it is allowed to govern our actions, of course, its evil is quickly multiplied in heartrending consequences and in the replication of anger and rage in the hearts and bodies of everyone it touches.

To cut the root of anger is to wither the tree of human evil. That is why Paul says simply, “Lay aside anger” (Col. 3:8).

But the answer is to right the wrong in persistent love, not to harbor anger, and thus to right it without adding further real or imaginary wrongs. To retain anger and to cultivate it is, by contrast, “to give the devil a chance” (Eph. 4:26–27). He will take the chance, and there will be hell to pay. The delicious morsel of self-righteousness that anger cultivated always contains comes at a high price in the self-righteous reaction of those we cherish anger toward. And the cycle is endless as long as anger has sway.

It is crucial to realize that Jesus does not here say that we should simply give in to the demands of an adversary. To be of a kindly or favorable mind toward an adversary or anyone else does not mean to do what they demand. It means to be genuinely committed to what is good for them, to seek their well-being. This may even require that we not give in to them. But there are many ways of holding the line, some of God, some not. Likewise, he does not forbid us to go to court. Yet how many people, looking for a law, have falsely supposed he does. But that is simply not there in his words. Nevertheless, a man of my acquaintance was in business with someone who took ruinous advantage of him. This man gave in to his partner’s illegitimate demands and actions and did not go to law over the matter. He presumed that Jesus had laid down a law to that effect. As it turned out, he was expecting God to see to it that he suffered no loss. But he suffered a great loss. And now he is very angry at God, and not at God alone. Jesus here gives us a second illustration, then, of how the kingdom heart will respond. He does not tell us what to do, but how to do it. Indeed, go to court or not—as makes sense in the circumstances. But do whatever you do without hostility, bitterness, and the merciless drive to win. Be prepared to sacrifice your interest for that of another if that seems wise. And keep a joyous confidence in God regardless of what happens.

In charting one’s course in life, it is important never to forget that many things that cannot be called wrong or evil are nevertheless not good for us.

The intent in marriage is a union of two people that is even deeper than the union of parents and children or any other human relationship. They are to become “one flesh,” one natural unit, building one life, which therefore could never lose or substitute for one member and remain a whole life (Matt. 19:5; Gen. 2:24).

Having shown us true well-being and the goodness of the kingdom heart, Jesus now, in Matthew 6, alerts us to the two main things that will block or hinder a life constantly interactive with God and healthy growth in the kingdom. These are the desire to have the approval of others, especially for being devout, and the desire to secure ourselves by means of material wealth. If we allow them to, these two desires will pull us out of the sway of the kingdom—“the range of God’s effective will,” as we have described it—and back into the barren “righteousness” of the scribe and the Pharisee. But as we keep these two things in their proper place, through a constant, disciplined, and clear-eyed reliance on God, we will grow rapidly in kingdom substance.

our intent is determined by what we want and expect from our action. When we do good deeds to be seen by human beings, that is because what we are looking for is something that comes from human beings. God responds to our expectations accordingly. When we want human approval and esteem, and do what we do for the sake of it, God courteously stands aside because, by our wish, it does not concern him.

He told us that he was to be “eaten”: “He who eats me shall live by me,…and shall live forever” (John 6:51). He, not the manna, is “the bread which comes down out of heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die” (vv. 48–50). The practice of fasting goes together with this teaching about nourishing ourselves on the person of Jesus. It emphasizes the direct availability of God to nourish, sustain, and renew the soul. It is a testimony to the reality of another world from which Jesus and his Father perpetually intermingle their lives with ours (John 14:23).

The effect of both action and nonaction for human approval is to push the presence of God aside as irrelevant and to subject ourselves to the human kingdom. In both avoiding evil and doing good, our respect should be for God alone.

The discipline of secrecy will help us break the grip of human opinion over our souls and our actions.

His teaching leads to a discipline, not a law, and a discipline that prepares us, precisely, to act in a way that fulfills the law of whole-person love of God.

Whatever our position in life, if our lives and works are to be of the kingdom of God, we must not have human approval as a primary or even major aim. We must lovingly allow people to think whatever they will. We may, if it seems right, occasionally try to help them understand us and appreciate what we are doing. That could be an act of love. But in any case we can only serve them by serving the Lord only.

Of course we may also treasure things other than material goods: for example, our reputation, or our relationship to another person, another person, or the security or reputation of our school or our business or our country.

God himself loves the earth dearly and never takes his hands off it. And because he loves it and it is good, our care of it is also eternal work and a part of our eternal life.

Anger and condemnation like vengeance, are safely left to God. We must beware of believing that it is okay for us to condemn as long as we are condemning the right things. It is not so simple as all that.

contempt. Condemnation always involves some degree of self-righteousness and of distancing ourselves from the one we are condemning. And self-righteousness always involves an element of comparison and of condemnation.

Anger is not as closely intertwined with condemnation as is contempt, but in fact there is a close association. Watching anger in action, we see that it almost always leads to condemnation—partly, no doubt, because condemnation is such a handy way of hurting people deeply. And anger desires to hurt. On the other hand, condemnation makes the road to anger a quick and easy trip. The one condemned is seen as deserving of suffering and, in any case, as not worthy of protection and respect. The condemned, in turn, responds with anger to the pain of being condemned. And around and around.

the effects of condemnation remain the same. It remains a stinging attack, a shocking assault upon the one condemned. Whatever good it may do in human affairs comes at a very high price. And often it grows into shame. Shame seems most widespread and deepest among the very people who take rightness and goodness most seriously. It is a dimension of condemnation that reaches into the deepest levels of our souls. In shame we are self-condemned for being the person we are. It touches our identity and causes self-rejection. We feel ourselves to be a failure just for being the person we are. We wish to be someone else. But of course we cannot. We are trapped, and our life is made hopeless. This explains why discrimination against people because of the kind of person they are, their identity, is so hateful and destructive. It also explains why the gospel of the kingdom has such transforming power in human life. For that gospel opens the kingdom to everyone, no matter their classification, and it enables us really to become a different kind of person, beyond all condemnation, blame, and shame, and to know it.

If our counterattack is unacceptable to ourselves, as it is very likely to be in a family setting, it may be shoved beneath the surface and will then come out in the many forms of behavior that look like something else, for example, perfectionism, procrastination, rejection of authority, or passive/aggressive tendencies such as chronic tardiness or the constant aborting of success—or even in physical symptoms. For condemnation brings anger in return, and anger will attack. And that will very likely move on to contempt, to “You fool!” to shame, or even to physical injury and abuse. And this attack can be and often is turned against oneself by the amazing chemistry of the mind. This reciprocity explains why condemnation as a strategy for correcting or “helping” those near and dear to us will almost always fail. It is extremely rare that anyone who is condemned will respond by changing in the desired way. And those who can so respond are most likely to be spiritual giants already. “Rebuke a wise man,” the proverb says, “and he will love you for it” (Prov. 9:8). Yes, but in most cases where we condemn we are not dealing with wise people. We are dealing with people, even very young people, who will simply be deeply injured, become angry, and repay us in kind.

We do not have to—we cannot—surrender the valid practice of distinguishing and discerning how things are in order to avoid condemning others. We can, however, train ourselves to hold people responsible and discuss their failures with them—and even assign them penalties, if we are, for example, in some position over them—without attacking their worth as human beings or marking them as rejects. A practiced spirit of intelligent agape will make this possible. Recall the words of Paul and the example of Saint Dominic referred to earlier. But that is a complicated task at best: not only because we may not know how to do it, which is often the case, but also because those we appraise may not know how to take our appraisal in any other way than as an attack on their person. This is especially true today, when people are so desperately seeking approval. Having no adequate sense of themselves as spiritual beings, or of their place in a good world of God, they regard any negative appraisal of what they do as condemnation of themselves as persons. They have nowhere to stand to do otherwise. It is interesting and important to observe that today the old phrase “hate the sin and love the sinner” no longer is accepted. If you disapprove of what I do or how I do it, it is now generally thought, you can only be condemning me and rejecting me. This is another evidence of the devastating effect of the loss to our culture of any idea of the self as a spiritual being that not only has but is a...

Such easy misunderstandings as are now current make it all the more important that we be very clear in our own minds what condemnation is and how it relates to the more basic sense of judgment that only involves “separating” one thing from another to the best of our ability. We simply cannot forsake discernment, and Jesus himself devotes the last half of Matthew 7 to urging us precisely to discern and, in that sense, to “judge.” But we must forsake the practice of condemning people, and that will not be difficult at all once we see clearly what it is to condemn and have previously rid ourselves of anger and contempt.

“Who is this one condemning me,” I ask, “when set beside that One who does not condemn me?” I think I shall not be depressed about this condemnation of me, then, especially since I know that “nothing can separate me from the eternal love of Christ” (Rom. 8:33–35).

To understand Jesus’ teachings, we must realize that deep in our orientations of our spirit we cannot have one posture toward God and a different one toward other people. We are a whole being, and our true character pervades everything we do. We cannot, for example, love God and hate human beings. As the apostle John wrote, “Those who do not love their brother who is visible cannot love God who is invisible” (1 John 4:20). And: “The one who does not love does not know God, who is love” (4:8). Similarly James rules out the blessing of God and the cursing of human beings, “made in the likeness of God,” coming from the same mouth (3:9). He also indicates that humility before God and humility before others go together. Those humble before God do not “judge” their brothers and sisters (4:6–12). The same basic point of the necessary unity of spiritual orientation is seen in Jesus’ teachings about forgiveness and about forgiveness and prayer. “If you forgive men the wrongs they do you, your Father in the heavens will also forgive you. But if you don’t, neither will he” (Matt. 6:14–15). And again with confession of Jesus, or being ashamed: “Whoever is ashamed of me and my teachings in the midst of these adulterous and sinful people, the Quintessential Man will be ashamed of them too, when he comes in the midst of the glory of his Father and the holy angels” (Mark 8:38). And with explicit regard to prayer: “When you stand praying, forgive anything you may have against anyone, so th...

Our confidence in God is the only thing that makes it possible to treat others as they should be treated.

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.

Dear Father always near us, may your name be treasured and loved, may your rule be completed in us— may your will be done here on earth in just the way it is done in heaven. Give us today the things we need today, and forgive us our sins and impositions on you as we are forgiving all who in any way offend us. Please don’t put us through trials, but deliver us from everything bad. Because you are the one in charge, and you have all the power, and the glory too is all yours—forever— which is just the way we want 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. The deeds of “the law” naturally flow from it. The law is not the cause of personal goodness, as we have said before, but it invariably is the course of it.

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.

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.

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.

That my actual life is the focus of my apprenticeship to Jesus is crucial. Knowing this can help deliver us from the genuine craziness that the current distinction between “full-time Christian service” and “part-time Christian service” imposes on us. For a disciple of Jesus is not necessarily one devoted to doing specifically religious things as that is usually understood. 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. So as his disciple I am not necessarily learning how to do special religious things, either as a part of “full-time service” or as a part of “part-time service.” My discipleship to Jesus is, within clearly definable limits, not a matter of what I do, but of how I do it. And it covers everything, “religious” or not.

you can see that not to find your job to be a primary place of discipleship is to automatically exclude a major part, if not most, of your waking hours from life with him. It is to assume to run one of the largest areas of your interest and concern on your own or under the direction and instruction of people other than Jesus.

A gentle but firm noncooperation with things that everyone knows to be wrong, together with a sensitive, nonofficious, nonintrusive, nonobsequious service to others, should be our usual overt manner. This should be combined with inward attitudes of constant prayer for whatever kind of activity our workplace requires and genuine love for everyone involved.

one. Heaven, we have seen, is right now, right here, around our bodies, hovering beside our heads—“in Him we live and move and have our being.” Eternity is not something waiting to happen, something that will commence later. It is now here. Time runs its course within eternity.