Quotes from "The Divine Conspiracy"

I've been thoroughly enjoying Dallas Willard's book "The Divine Conspiracy" during my study time over the last couple weeks.  I'm about halfway through it now, and there's just so much I could share from it, but I'll try to stick to some of the ideas in the first few chapters so you get an idea of what he's trying to address where our spiritual life is concerned.  

Willard makes an analogy that compares human existence to a pilot doing high speed maneuvers who ends up flying upside down.  Eventually they do a high speed ascent only to go crashing into the ground, because they thought everything was fine and had no idea that they were flying upside down.  I feel like I observe that every day in our society and watch as we continue to crash in different ways, and sometimes even get stuck flying upside down myself.  The things we value, the paths we follow, the life we strive for are usually so upside down, so opposite from what God designed and desires for us.  

"Jesus offers Himself as the God's doorway into the life that is truly life," not just to give us a fire escape from hell.  He can teach us and enable us to fly right side up.  The problem is, much of Christianity today really doesn't look like people who are apprentices of Jesus in eternal living.  One reason is because the heart of the "christian" message has too often been about sin management.  This is my own take on the sin management message and what it results in, not Willard's words.  We have to accept that we're all sinners, then we realize that we deserve to go to hell, and then we find out that we can escape hell if we "invite Jesus into our heart" (instead of accepting Jesus invitation into the true life which will naturally result in eternal life after death).  From that point there's often a cycle of committing more sin, confess, feel sorry about it (not necessarily repent), re-commit our lives to Christ from time to time, and usually start to learn how to hide our sins from people too, or just feel good that ours isn't as bad as that other person's.  The overarching message is that Jesus took care of the payment for sin, and as long as we keep saying we believe then we'll be in the clear after we die.  A partial message like that is what leads people, including many Christians, to come to believe that "Jesus has no substantial impact on our "real lives.""  I think Willard put it even better in this statement.

"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 think 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 atonement to be true - even if we trust everything but God in all other matters that concern us."

We can see Willard's point when he says, "Life, our actual existence, is not included in what is now presented as the heart of the Christian message, or it is included only marginally."  This thought really helped me to get an even deeper understanding of why the Western Church still lives in and looks like the "the world" (instead of the Kingdom of God).

Another interesting issue which Willard brings up is that so many professing Christians buy into the perspective of the "intellectual community" if you will, and does not perceive Jesus as the smartest man that ever lived.  We don't view Him as our life teacher, nor do we care to learn from him.  Willard is even bold enough to say that some professing believers don't truly "respect" Jesus, and don't think His teachings are relevant for today.  "Strangely, we seem prepared to learn how to live from almost anyone but him."  Oprah, Dr. Phil, Joel Osteen, Barack Obama, hollywood celebrities, famous musicians, and the list goes on as I think about who I see our culture (including many in the church) modeling their lives after or who they look to for guidance and help.  "Where we spontaneously look for "information" on how to live shows how we truly feel and who we really have confidence in."  Sadly, it could be said that much of the church is not "spontaneously" looking to Jesus for how to live, which apparently means we have a lack of confidence in Him.  But He's worthy of all our confidence, so we need to help people see that.

Dallas Willard constantly refers to the Word, which I think is imperative to a book that is trying to help us learn from Jesus.  As the book continues he does a lot of work trying to undo wrong interpretations of some of Jesus' fundamental teachings which has certainly given me a new perspective.  The beatitudes teaching in particular is one that I didn't quite connect the dots in until I started reading this book.  I will probably post some more as I continue reading, but you might consider reading "The Divine Conspiracy" if you agree that we need to intentionally rework the "the heart of the message" where Jesus is concerned and help people to see Him as more than just a get out of hell free card, but as the only author, giver and teacher of life in this world and the world to come.