The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

by Dallas Willard

Bertrand Russell, a well-known British philosopher of this century, was raised a Christian, though he later adopted atheism. He was familiar with the teachings of Jesus, if not their actual meaning. In one place he comments, “The Christian principle, ‘Love your enemies’ is good…. There is nothing to be said against it except that it is too difficult for most of us to practise sincerely.”24

Os Guinness, the well-known Christian thinker and leader, has said of the Puritans in American history that they lived as if they stood before an audience of One. They carried on their lives as if the only one whose opinion mattered were God. Of course they understood that this is what Jesus Christ taught them to do.

The term hypocrite in classical Greek primarily refers to an actor, such as one sees on the stage, but it came to refer also to anyone who practices deceit. It is clear from the literary records that it was Jesus alone who brought this term and the corresponding character into the moral vocabulary of the Western world.

He teaches us how to be in prayer what we are in life and how to be in life what we are in prayer.

The story is told of a man who lost his composure and cursed in the presence of his pastor. After an embarrassed silence, he looked sheepishly at the pastor and said, “Oh, it’s all right, pastor. I cuss a little and you pray a little, but neither one of us means anything by it.” The challenge to our faith in the kingdom is to mean something by our talk of it.

The words anxious and worry both have reference to strangling or being choked.

Some of the most beautiful people I have ever seen are elderly people whose souls shine so brightly their bodies are hardly visible:

Here Jesus uses a term that may have been his own invention: oligopistoi, “little-faiths.” It occurs ten times in five verses in the Gospels. It seems to have been a nickname that he invented as a way of gently chiding his apprentices for their lack of confidence in God and in himself.

In sixteenth-century Holland, the Mennonites were outlawed and, when caught, often executed. One of them, Dirk Willens, was being chased across an icefield when his pursuer broke through and fell in. In response to his cries for help, Willens returned and saved him from the waters. The pursuer was grateful and astonished that he would do such a thing but nevertheless arrested him, as he thought it his duty to do. A few days later Willens was executed by being burned at the stake in the town of Asperen. It was precisely his Christlikeness that brought on his execution.7

Indeed, it is said that more Christians have died as martyrs in the twentieth century than in all the period from the beginning to 1900.8 The “Western” segment of the church today lives in a bubble of historical illusion about the meaning of discipleship and the gospel. We are dominated by the essentially Enlightenment values that rule American culture: pursuit of happiness, unrestricted freedom of choice, disdain of authority. The prosperity gospels, the gospels of liberation, and the comfortable sense of “what life is all about” that fills the minds of most devout Christians in our circles are the result. How different is the gritty realization of James: “Friends of the world (kosmou) are enemies of God” (James 4:4) And John: “If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him” (2 John 2:15).

Within the spiritual community there is never, nor in any way, any immediate relationship of one to another, whereas human community expresses a profound, elemental, human desire for community, for immediate contact with other human souls, just as in the flesh there is the urge for physical merger with other flesh. DIETRICH BONHOEFFER, LIFE TOGETHER Ask, and it shall be given.

Bonhoeffer’s insights and language are so powerful on this point that it would be a mistake not to dwell on his own words: Because Christian community is founded solely on Jesus Christ, it is a spiritual and not a psychic [merely human] reality. In this it differs absolutely from all other communities…. Christian brotherhood is not an ideal that we must realize; it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate. The more clearly we learn to recognize that the ground and strength and promise of all our fellowship is in Jesus Christ alone, the more serenely shall we think of our fellowship and pray and hope for it.6

Larry Dossey, M.D., in his Healing Words.14

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!

Aristotle remarked that we owe more to our teachers than to our parents, for though our parents gave us life, our teachers taught us the good life.

Kingdom obedience is kingdom abundance.

As his apprentices, we pass through a course of training, from having faith in Christ to having the faith of Christ (Gal. 2:16–20).

Emily Dickinson, “the soul selects her own society, then shuts the door.”

An older Franciscan brother said to Brennan Manning on the day he joined the order, “Once you come to know the love of Jesus Christ, nothing else in the world will seem as beautiful or desirable.”12

At the heart of our own identity lies our family, and our parents in particular. We cannot be thankful for who we are unless we can be thankful for them. Not, certainly, for all the things they have done, for they may have been quite horrible. And in many cases we must come to have pity on them before we can be thankful for them.

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.

God has yet to bless anyone except where they actually are,

We have Bibles with red letters to indicate what he said. Might we not make a good use of a Bible that has green letters for what he did? Green for “go,” or “do it”?

We hear the cries from our strife-torn streets: “Give peace a chance!” and “Can’t we all just get along?” But you cannot give peace a chance if that is all you give a chance. You have to do the things that make peace possible and actual. When you listen to people talk about peace, you soon realize in most cases that they are unwilling to deal with the conditions of society and soul that make strife inevitable. They want to keep them and still have peace, but it is peace on their terms, which is impossible.

One good public answer to our prayer might be enough to lock some of us into weeks of spiritual superiority. Great power requires great character if it is to be a blessing and not a curse, and that character is something we only grow toward. Yet it is God’s intent that in his kingdom we should have as much power as we can bear for good.

Book III of John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, for example, is a treatment of the Christian Life. In chapter VII of book III, he sums up the Christian Life in one phrase, “self-denial.” Not self-esteem, certainly, nor personal fulfillment.

We may not soon have bigger crowds around us—and in fact they may for a while even get smaller—but we will soon have bigger Christians for sure. This is what I call “church growth for those who hate it.” And bigger crowds are sure to follow, for the simple reason that human beings desperately need what we bring to them, the word and reality of The Kingdom Among Us.

“Then the prophecies of the old songs have turned out to be true, after a fashion!” said Bilbo. “Of course!” said Gandalf. “And why should not they prove true? Surely you don’t disbelieve the prophecies, because you had a hand in bringing them about yourself? “You don’t really suppose, do you, that all your adventures and escapes were managed by mere luck, just for your sole benefit? You are a very fine person, Mr. Baggins, and I am very fond of you; but you are only quite a little fellow in a wide world after all!” J. R. R. TOLKEIN, THE HOBBIT

This life structure is mirrored in language, where meaning and meaningfulness most clearly display themselves. Thus, if we hear only the word water or see it written down somewhere, we do not know whether it is a verb or a noun. Hence we cannot know what it refers to or what it is about. If the remainder of a sentence is given, however, it may be either one: as in “Water my plants while I’m away,” where it is a verb, or “Water is essential to life on this planet,” where it is a noun. Events in a human life are like that, and so is a human life as a whole, as well as human life itself. They resemble the opening words in an unfinished sentence, paragraph, chapter, or book. In a sense we can identify them and grasp them, but we cannot know what they mean and really are until we know what comes later. Thus we are always seeking the meaning of events we live through and of our lives themselves. We wonder about the meaning of historical events and personages, or even of human history itself. And it is always true that meaning is found, when it is found, in some larger context.

As John Hick, one of the most widely known Christian thinkers of our day, has nicely put it, If we trust what Jesus said out of his own direct consciousness of God, we shall share his belief in the future life. This belief is supported by the reasoning that a God of infinite love would not create finite persons and then drop them out of existence when the potentialities of their nature, including their awareness of himself, have only just begun to be realized.11

We now know that there are about ten thousand million galaxies in “our” physical system, with one hundred billion billion planets. That is, 100,000,000,000,000,000,000 planets.