The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

by Dallas Willard

Kingdom of God has come upon you” (Luke 10:9). Even those who refused their ministry were to be informed that “the K...

In the ministry of Jesus Himself the divine power is released in effective conflict with evil.

The Significance of the Synoptic Miracles

The present situation of kingdoms in conflict is one eloquently portrayed in the Twenty-third Psalm: “In the valley of the shadow of death I will fear no evil.” Yes, but the “evil” is very much here to be feared. And: “Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.” The “enemies” are certainly here, but we are safe in God’s hands even though other “kingdoms” loom over us and threaten us.

The “interior castle” of the human soul, as Teresa of Avila called it, has many rooms, and they are slowly occupied by God, allowing us time and room to grow.

That

is a crucial aspect of the conspiracy. But even this does not detract from the reality of the “kingdom among us.” Nor does it destroy the choice that all have to accept...

the kingdom of God is also right beside us. It is indeed The Kingdom Among Us. You can reach it from your heart with your mouth—through even a shaky and stumbling confidence and confession that Jesus is the death-conquering Master of all (Rom. 10:9).

it has been available to us through simple confidence in Jesus, the Anointed, only from the time he became a public figure.

It is a kingdom that, in the person of Jesus, welcomes us just as we are, just where we are, and makes it possible for us to translate our “ordinary” life into an eternal one.

everyone who from the center of his or her being calls upon Jesus as Master of the Universe and Prince of Life will be heard and will be d...

“The Lord is near to the brokenhearted, and saves those who are crushed in spirit” (Ps. 34:18).

“for the same one is Lord of all, abounding in riches to all who call upon him” (Rom. 10:12).

You cannot call upon Jesus Christ or upon God and not be heard. You live in their house, their ecos (Heb. 3:4). We usually call it simply “the universe.” But they fully occupy it. It is their place, their “kingdom,” where through their kindness and sacrificial love we can make our present life an eternal life.

He then helped them understand the scriptures, which foretold that the Anointed One would be killed, and would rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins would be offered in his name to every ethnic group on earth, beginning from Jerusalem. “You are the ones to do it,” he said…. “But stay in town until you have been clothed with power from the heights.” LUKE 24:45–49

CANON B. F. WESTCOTT, THE GOSPEL OF THE RESURRECTION

Any arrangement God has established will be right for him and right for us. We can count on it.

Helmut Thielicke

The Trouble with the Church

Perhaps we are not eating what we are selling. More likely, I think, what we are “selling” is irrelevant to our real existence and without power over daily life.

it is not so much outward as it is inward. This difference that God makes is often visible only to God…and no one else…. I haven’t abandoned my faith, I have abandoned a way of looking at my faith…. Life is different.

But what is different is different than I thought.”

Mike Yaconelli

At least many of our best-known leaders seem to think so.

Philip Yancy July 17, 1995 Christianity Today

Suppose our failures occur, not in spite of what we are doing, but precisely because of it.

Why are Christians indistinguishable from the world?”

The Gospel According to Jesus

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.

Sin management or social justice

be like Jesus Christ.”

“Being a Christian depends on a certain inner relatedness to the living Christ. Through this relatedness all other relationships of a man—to God, to himself, to other people—are transformed.”

The Difference in Being a Christian; How Are We Saved?

justification has taken the place of regeneration, or new life.

Absorption of Christology into Soteriology, Karl Barth

Being let off the divine hook replaces possession of a divine life “from above.” For all of the talk about the “new birth” among conservative Christians, there is an almost total lack of understanding of what that new birth is in practical terms and of how it relates to forgiveness and imputed or transmitted righteousness.

“the Gospel that saves is believing that Christ died for our sins and rose from the dead.”

Hodges, Absolutely Free; Ryrie, Balancing the Christian Life

“The crooked man is an abomination to the Lord,” as the proverb sums it up, “but He is intimate with the upright” (Prov. 3:32 NAS).

Abraham believed God and it was reckoned to

him as righteousness, we are told (Gen. 15:6).

Was it that God had arranged payment for his sins?

The story makes it very clear that Abraham believed God was going to give him a male baby, an heir, and through that baby a multitude of descendants who would possess the land promised to him. He trusted God, of course, but it was for things involved in his current existence. He believed that God would interact with him now

He even dared to ask God how he could know that the promise of a male heir would be fulfilled. In response, God directed him to prepare animals for sacrifice. Abraham did so and then waited for God to act (Gen. 15:8–11). He waited until God materialized fire “out of thin air.” God acted from surrounding space, the atmosphere—th...

“God visited Sarah” and Isaac was conceiv...

In the face of such faith, God declared Abraham to be righteous. Does that mean he declared he would go to heaven when he died? Not precisely that, but certainly that Abraham’s sins and failures would not cut him off from God in the pre...

would he go to heaven when he died? Of course! What else would God do with such a person? They were friends, a fact made much of in scripture (2 Chron. 20:7; Isa. 41:8; James 2:23), as we are to b...

(John 15:15). No friend of God wil...

Certainly forgiveness and reconciliation are essential to any relationship where there has been offense, and also between us and God. We cannot pass into a new life from above without forgiveness. Certainly it is Christ who made possible such a transition, including forgiveness, through his life and his death. We must be reconciled to God and he to us if we are going to have a life together. But such a reconciliation involves far more than the forgiveness of our sins or a clearing of the ledger.

And the faith and salvation of which Jesus speaks obviously is a much more positive reality than mere reconciliation.

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”?

“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).

What must be emphasized in all of this is the difference between trusting Christ, the real person Jesus, with all that that naturally involves, versus trusting some arrangement for sin-remission set u...

To trust the real person Jesus is to have confidence in him in every dimension of our real life, to believe that he is righ...

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 Jes...

the biblical “know” always refers to an intimate, personal, inter...