The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

by Dallas Willard

Jesus and his words have never belonged to the categories of dogma or law, and to read them as if they did is simply to miss them. They are essentially subversive of established arrangements and ways of thinking.

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.

What is truly profound is thought to be stupid and trivial, or worse, boring, while what is actually stupid and trivial is thought to be profound. That is what it means to fly upside down.

Our human life, it turns out, is not destroyed by God’s life but is fulfilled in it and in it alone.

Unlike egotism, the drive to significance is a simple extension of the creative impulse of God that gave us being. It is not filtered through self-consciousness any more than is our lunge to catch a package falling from someone’s hand. It is outwardly directed to the good to be done. We were built to count, as water is made to run downhill. We are placed in a specific context to count in ways no one else does. That is our destiny.

When we see Jesus as he is, we must turn away or else shamelessly adore him.

C. S. Lewis writes, our faith is not a matter of our hearing what Christ said long ago and “trying to carry it out.” Rather, “The real Son of God is at your side. He is beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as Himself. He is beginning, so to speak, to ‘inject’ His kind of life and thought, His Zoe [life], into you; beginning to turn the tin soldier into a live man. The part of you that does not like it is the part that is still tin.”

We are meant to exercise our “rule” only in union with God, as he acts with us. He intended to be our constant companion or coworker in the creative enterprise of life on earth. That is what his love for us means in practical terms.

So when Jesus directs us to pray, “Thy kingdom come,” he does not mean we should pray for it to come into existence. Rather, we pray for it to take over at all points in the personal, social, and political order where it is now excluded: “On earth as it is in heaven.” With this prayer we are invoking it, as in faith we are acting it, into the real world of our daily existence.

The eternal life of which Jesus speaks is not knowledge about God but an intimately interactive relationship with him.

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 Beatitudes indications of who will be on top “after the revolution.” They are explanations and illustrations, drawn from the immediate setting, of the present availability of the kingdom through personal relationship to Jesus.

In every concrete situation we have to ask ourselves, not “Did I do the specific things in Jesus’ illustrations?” but “Am I being the kind of person Jesus’ illustrations are illustrations of?”

If we honestly compared the amount of time in church spent thinking about what others think or might think with the amount of time spent thinking about what God is thinking, we would probably be shocked. Those of us in congregational leadership need to think deeply about this. Often the “eyeservice” that occurs in present-day church services comes in the form of trying to “move” people. “Wasn’t that a great service,” we often say. But what do we mean? Are we really thinking of how God felt about the service? What is the correlation between God’s view of a great service and the human view? We need to be very careful about this, or the rule, “Truly, they have their reward,” may apply to us.

But what is it, exactly, that we do when we condemn someone? When we condemn another we really communicate that he or she is, in some deep and just possibly irredeemable way, bad—bad as a whole, and to be rejected. In our eyes the condemned is among the discards of human life. He or she is not acceptable. We sentence that person to exclusion. Surely we can learn to live well and happily without doing that.

C. S. Lewis’s discussion of storge, familial love, is endlessly instructive on this point and is required reading for all who intend to have a decent family life.1 He notes that he has “been far more impressed by the bad manners of parents to children than by those of children to parent.” Parents are seen to treat their children with “an incivility which, offered to any other young people, would simply have terminated the acquaintance.” They are dogmatic on matters the children understand and the elders don’t, they impose ruthless interruptions, flat contradictions, ridicule of things the young take seriously, and make insulting references to their friends. This provides an easy explanation to the questions, “Why are they always out? Why do they like every house better than their home?” “Who,” Lewis inquires, “does not prefer civility to barbarism?”

For millennia it was the leper who was the most potent symbol of condemnation and exclusion. The “immoral” person has had an equally long run in history, the divorced woman also. One of the major lessons of the Gospels is how Jesus was with such people, accepting them, touching them, and eating with them. He did this in a very natural way. It was for them, not for show or to make a point.

In the very act of asking, in the very nature of the request, we acknowledge that the other person can say no, and, “innocent as doves,” we accept that response. We are not set to punish him or her for saying no. Yet we ask, and we are supposed to ask, and in by far the most cases he or she does not say no. “Ask,” Jesus said, “and you shall receive. Seek, and you shall find. Knock, and it shall be opened to you.” That is how we are to relate to others. And that is the primary intention of this much-quoted passage. As Emily Dickinson has written, The soul selects her own society, Then shuts the door; On her divine majority, Obtrude no more.

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

Today very few people any longer understand what it means to “hallow” something and are apt to associate hallow only with ghosts and Halloween. So we would do better to translate the language here as “let your name be sanctified.” Let it be uniquely respected. Really, the idea is that his name should be treasured and loved more than any other, held in an absolutely unique position among humanity. The word translated “hallow” or “sanctify” is hagiastheto. It is basically the same word used, for example, in John 17:17, where Jesus asks the Father to sanctify his students, especially the apostles, through his truth. And it appears again in 1 Thess. 5:23, where Paul expresses his hope that God will sanctify the Thessalonians entirely, keeping them blameless in spirit, soul, and body until Jesus returns. In such passages, too, the term means to locate the persons referred to in a separate and very special kind of reality.

Brother Lawrence, who was a kitchen worker and cook, remarks. Our sanctification does not depend upon changing our works, but in doing that for God’s sake which we commonly do for our own…. It is a great delusion to think that the times of prayer ought to differ from other times. We are as strictly obliged to adhere to God by action in the time of action as by prayer in the season of prayer.5

In John 8 he said to those around them, “If you dwell in my word, you really are my apprentices. And you will know the truth, and the truth will liberate you” (8:31–32). As the context makes clear, he is saying that we will be liberated from all of the bondage that is in human life through sin, and especially from that of self-righteous religion. Positively, we will be liberated into life in the kingdom of God. And what does “dwelling,” or “continuing,” in his word mean? It means to center your life upon the very things we have been studying in this book: his good news about The Kingdom Among Us, about who is really well off and who is not, and about true goodness of heart and how it expresses itself in action. We will fill our souls with the written Gospels. We will devote our attention to these teachings, in private study and inquiry as well as public instruction. And, negatively, we will refuse to devote our mental space and energy to the fruitless, even stupefying and degrading, stuff that constantly clamors for our attention. We will attend to it only enough to avoid it.

Being a man of the scriptures, Jesus understood that it is the care of the soul or, better, the care of the whole person, that must be our objective if we are to function as God designed us to function. This is the wisdom of the entire scriptural tradition. “Put everything you have into the care of your heart,” the book of Proverbs says, “for it determines what your life amounts to” (4:23). “You will keep those in the peace of peace,” Isaiah says, “whose minds are fixed on you, because they trust in you” (26:3). The blessed person is one who “meditates in the law day and night” (Ps. 1:2; Josh. 1:8).

Our plan for a life of growth in the life of the kingdom of God must be structured around disciplines for the spiritual life.

spiritual disciplines are also spiritual disciplines. That is, they are disciplines designed to help us be active and effective in the spiritual realm of our own heart, now spiritually alive by grace, in relation to God and his kingdom. They are designed to help us withdraw from total dependence on the merely human or natural (and in that precise sense to mortify the “flesh,” kill it off, let it die) and to depend also on the ultimate reality, which is God and his kingdom.

With these clarifications of the general nature of spiritual disciplines in mind, what are some of the specific practices that are of most use in the development of disciples? Here we need not be concerned about a complete list of such practices, and indeed there really is no such thing anyway.18 That makes it all the more important that we understand the general concept just explained. What is clear and, for our purposes, essential is that a small number of them are absolutely central to spiritual growth. They must form a part of the foundation of our whole-life plan for growth as apprentices of Jesus. These are, on the side of abstinence, solitude and silence and, on the side of positive engagement, study and worship.

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.

Every person should have regular periods in life when he or she has nothing to do. Periods of solitude and silence are excellent practices for helping us learn how to do that. The law that God has given for our benefit as well as his tells us that one seventh of our time should be devoted to doing nothing—no work, not by ourselves or any of our family, employees, or animals. That includes, of course, religious work. It is to be Sabbath.

The cure for too-much-to-do is solitude and silence, for there you find you are safely more than what you do. And the cure of loneliness is solitude and silence, for there you discover in how many ways you are never alone.

This present universe is only one element in the kingdom of God. But it is a very wonderful and important one. And within it the Logos, the now risen Son of man, is currently preparing for us to join him (John 14:2–4). We will see him in the stunning surroundings that he had with the Father before the beginning of the created cosmos (17:24). And we will actively participate in the future governance of the universe. We will not sit around looking at one another or at God for eternity but will join the eternal Logos, “reign with him,” in the endlessly ongoing creative work of God. It is for this that we were each individually intended, as both kings and priests (Exod. 19:6; Rev. 5:10).

George MacDonald has given us some lines that help us think about such a future: And in the perfect time, O perfect God, When we are in our home, our natal home, When joy shall carry every sacred load, And from its life and peace no heart shall roam, What if thou make us able to make like thee— To light with moons, to clothe with greenery, To hang gold sunsets o’er a rose and purple sea.2

Our old age is the scorching of the bush By life’s indwelling, incorruptible blaze. O life, burn at this feeble shell of me, Till I the sore singed garment off shall push, Flap out my Psyche wings, and to thee rush.

in due time we will be moved into our eternal destiny of creative activity with Jesus and his friends and associates in the “many mansions” of “his Father’s house.”