The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

by Dallas Willard

We should find a reliable and readable version of the four Gospels, such as the Revised New English Bible or the New Revised Standard Version.

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. These are only effects of the underlying problem. The fundamental negative reality among Christian believers now is their failure to be constantly learning how to live their lives in The Kingdom Among Us. And it is an accepted reality. The division of professing Christians into those for whom it is a matter of whole-life devotion to God and those who maintain a consumer, or client, relationship to the church has now been an accepted reality for over fifteen hundred years.10 And at present—in the distant outworkings of the Protestant Reformation, with its truly great and good message of salvation by faith alone—that long-accepted division has worked its way into the very heart of the gospel message. It is now understood to be a part of the “good news” that one does not have to be a life student of Jesus in order to be a Christian and receive forgiveness of sins. This gives a precise meaning to the phrase “cheap grace,” though it would be better described as “costly faithlessness.”

the last thing the disciple or disciple maker will do is assume superiority over anyone, Christian or not, disciple or not. Remember, we are called to form a community of prayerful love.

Now we need to understand that what simply occupies our mind very largely governs what we do. It sets the emotional tone out of which our actions flow, and it projects the possible courses of action available to us.

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).

the fifth of the Ten Commandments says, “Honor your father and your mother,” and then adds, “that you may enjoy a long life in the land the Lord your God gives to you” (Exod. 20:12). And Paul notes that this is “the first commandment with a promise attached to it” (Eph. 6:2). The promise is rooted in the realities of the human soul. A long and healthy existence requires that we be grateful to God for who we are, and we cannot be thankful for who we are without being thankful for our parents, through whom our life came. They are a part of our identity, and to reject and be angry with them is to reject and be angry with ourselves. To reject ourselves leads to sickness, dissolution, and death, spiritual and physical. We cannot reject ourselves and love God.

Let us now be perfectly clear. Your life is not something from which you can stand aside and consider what it would have been like had you had a different one. There is no “you” apart from your actual life. You are not separate from your life, and in that life you must find the goodness of God. Otherwise, you will not believe that he has done well by you, and you will not truly be at peace with him. You must find the goodness of God and the fellowship of Jesus in who you are, or your love for the Father and his unique Son cannot become the foundation for a life of abundance/obedience. They desire to dwell with you in your life and make glorious every aspect of it in the light of the whole that God has planned (John 14).

The consumer Christian is one who utilizes the grace of God for forgiveness and the services of the church for special occasions, but does not give his or her life and innermost thoughts, feelings, and intentions over to the kingdom of the heavens. Such Christians are not inwardly transformed and not committed to it. Because this is so, they remain not just “imperfect,” for all of us remain imperfect, but routinely and seriously unable and unwilling to do the good they know to do, as Paul so accurately describes. They remain governed by, or “slaves” of (John 8:34; Rom. 6:16), sin. For example, their lives are dominated by fear, greed, impatience, egotism, bodily desires, and the like, and they continue to make provision for them.

This is the true situation: nothing has power to tempt me or move me to wrong action that I have not given power by what I permit to be in me. And the most spiritually dangerous things in me are the little habits of thought, feeling, and action that I regard as “normal” because “everyone is like that” and it is “only human.” Our training and experience must bring us to peace with the fact that if we do not follow our habitual desires, do not do what “normal” people would do, it is no major thing. We won’t die, even though at the beginning our outraged habits will “tell us” we are sure to. The sun will come up and life will go on: better than we ever dreamed. Rightly understood, the “death to self” of which scripture and tradition speak is simply the acceptance of this fact. It is the “cross” applied to daily existence. And it is a major part of what disciples must learn in order to break the grip of the “motions of sin in their members” that drive them.

And we can’t all just get along. Rather, we have to become the kinds of persons who can get along. As a major part of this, our epidermal responses have to be changed in such a way that the fire and the fight doesn’t start almost immediately when we are “rubbed the wrong way.” Solitude and silence give us a place to begin the necessary changes, though they are not a place to stop.

This idea of doing nothing proves to be absolutely terrifying to most people I speak with. But at least the person who is capable of doing nothing might be capable of refraining from doing the wrong thing. And then perhaps he or she would be better able to do the right thing. 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.

the love is genuine to our deepest core. These are called the “fruit of the spirit” because they are not direct effects of our efforts but are brought about in us as we admire and emulate Jesus and do whatever is necessary to learn how to obey him.

Circumstances and other people are not in control of an individual’s character or of the life that lies endlessly before us in the kingdom of God.