My advice would be not to worry about what is going to happen to you: about what you will have to eat or drink, or about what clothes you will wear.  your life doesn’t consist of eating, and there is much more to your body than clothing.  Take a lesson from the birds of heaven.  They don’t sow or reap or hoard away to granaries, and your Father – the One in the heavens around you – sees to it that they have food.  Aren’t you more important than birds?

Who can change their physical features by worrying about them?  And as for worrying about clothes, well, look at the little flowers out in the fields.  They just pop right up.  They don’t slave away getting or making clothes.  But King Solomon in his best outfit was not as glorious as one of these.  Now if God so adorns the wild grasses – which are here for a day, and the next day are burned for fuel – won’t he do even better by you?  You mini-faiths!

So don’t worry about things, saying, “What are we going to eat?” or “Will we have anything to drink?”  or “What will we wear?” (People who don’t know God at all do that!)  For your Father – the One in the heavens around you – knows you need these things.  Instead, make it your top priority to be part of what God is doing and to have the kind of goodness he has. Everything else you need will be provided.

Tomorrow?  Don’t worry about it.  You can do your worrying about tomorrow tomorrow.  And anyway, enough will happen today to keep you in things to worry over until bedtime.

- Dallas Willard, quoting Matthew 6 in The Divine Conspiracy

I dusted off my copy of Dallas Willard‘s The Divine Conspiracy, and have started reading the book once more.  He writes about the hidden life in God, a life of meaning open to everyone – a way that seems closed to many:

“The major problem with the invitation now is precisely over-familiarity.  Familiarity breeds unfamiliarity, and then contempt.  People think they have heard the invitation.  They think they have accepted it – or rejected it.  But they have not.  The difficulty today is to hear it at all” (11).

The world, Willard explains, is filled with people who are “flying upside down” but don’t know it since there is a near complete disconnect between intellect and moral and spiritual realities (5).  Willard demonstrates how abstractions and philosophical ideas still do have consequences in an anecdote about a  young student named Pol Pot studying at a French university: “The killing fields of Cambodia come from the philosophical discussions in Paris” (7).

I spoke with my brother Daniel only yesterday.  In Thailand at the tail-end of sweeping trip through South East Asia, he recently visited Cambodia and gave me a haunting report of the evil regime which meant to restart civilization.  Pol Pot and his lackeys successfully created a peasant state, nearly wiping out most all the educated class.  His efforts to restructure all of Cambodian society left nearly 2.5 million people dead and wiped out over 20% of the whole population.  This was in the mid 70s, and forty years later the country still reels.  The total dehumanization of the populace still seen in the  vacant expressions on the faces of countless children who grow up in poverty, perpetually begging, so many trafficked and misused.

Elitist art and mass media stripped of old values and ruled by slogans like “be cute or die”(10)  comment on a reality that can only be summarized as absurdity, with some faint belief in progress. And yet – amazingly or not – Christ still stands as a towering figure in the scrap heap of ideas and bizarre record of humanity.  He has proven ability to “speak to, to heal and empower the individual human condition” (13).  Christ comes a-knocking, but does not force himself in.

“Our human life, it turns out, is not destroyed by God’s life but is fulfilled in it and in it alone” (14).

If you’ve been following my recent postings at all, then you know I’ve been reading Andrew Murray’s book on Prayer. A question I’ve started to ask of myself and the Church is, “What kind of prayers do we pray?” Is it always for us, for self?  Murray highlights that the point and power of prayer is in the selfless request for someone else.  Rooted in the request is the selfless hunt and longing for God’s glory – for his worthiness to be made known and reflected through answered prayer.  And so I was struck, as if across the mouth today, when I read the following words from his meditation on Obedience: The Path to Power in Prayer: “Service and obedience must become the chief objects of our desires and aims, even more so than rest, light, joy, or strength.  In them we will find the path to all the higher blessedness that awaits us” (171).

Imagine that.  Upping the ante again.

Christ and his way is always counter-cultural, opposite to the kingdom of the world.  To fly right-side up so we can have our eyes on the horizon, we must move against the norm of self-seeking egotism that trades cleverness and absurdity for meaning and significance.  Being selfless is not tantamount to being self-punishing or unsatisfied.  In fact Willard announces that as humans we are “built to count…. in ways no one else does.  That is our destiny” (15).

What a mystery that God has arranged things so that we can only be truly fulfilled when we are self-giving; blessed, as Murray states, when we obey and look to the needs of others.

And what needs there are, staring us in the face!  Cambodia is one example with myriad needs.  Spin the globe on your bookshelf and drop your finger on the map at random.  You don’t have to look very far, although we’re getting pretty good at closing our eyes.  Part of me starts to get defensive to these kind of statements, because I expect some form of accusation will be hurled at me from some time and space.  That I’m not doing enough.  My sight is too limited.  My interests too broad.  My interests are too narrow or specific.  And yet before I run to the panic room and lock myself into an internal state of self protection, I’m liberated and freed up by reflecting on the life of Christ.

Jesus was one man, limited in his reach and even in his appeal.  He didn’t head to the big city right from the get-go to connect with the masses and instantly change the world; he went to the far outposts of the Palestine of his day.  “His speaking in synagogues in turn provided for the broadest possible penetration into the social fabric of his people, for the synagogues were central to his community” (Willard, 16). And from here his message spread, his fame grew, change too.

Some people found meaning in what he had to say and were drawn to how he lived; they either turned away or shamelessly adored him (19). If anything, the life and ministry model of Christ, is attractive at least in the simplicity of how it was expressed and the response that it demanded.  Take it or leave it.  You don’t say!

The hidden life with God is no secret.  It’s power is not easily measurable.  And it certainly is the road less traveled.  It forthrightly declares a connection between character and internal thought, and does not separate the intellect from moral or spiritual reality.  Part of its appeal in an upside-down world is that all these things engage and are at play.

The hidden life with God is the great secret we should no longer conceal, the mystery we should buff and shine with the fabric of our daily lives.  It’s how we will fly right-side-up when the world is upside down.

Works Cited

• Andrew Murray, With Christ in the School of Prayer. Whitaker House, 1981

• Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy.  HarperSanFransisco, 1998.

i’m attentive to new understanding forming inside of me; interested in how words find root and grow in the fleshy darkness of the heart. in the quiet, in the cold and turmoil of this wind swept planet.  as eyebrows scrunch in the effort of useless striving and as the soul soars with faith, i wonder where and how the words will take flesh, hopefully first in me.

the following words from dallas willard have helped to unhinge some of the obstacles toward a more generous and vital faith, and i’m interested in the path:

Having shown us true well-being and the goodness of the kingdom heart, Jesus … alerts us to the two main things that will block or hinder life constantly interactive with God and healthy growth in the kingdom.  These are the desire to have the approval of others, especially for being devout, and the desire to secure ourselves by means of material wealth.

If we allow them to, these two desires will pull us out of the sway of the kingdom – “the range of God’s effective will,” as we have described it – and back into the barren “righteousness” of the scribe and the Pharisee.  But as we keep these two things in their proper place, through a constant, disciplined, and clear-eyed reliance on God, we will grow rapidly in kingdom substance.  We will progressively incorporate all aspects of our life into the kingdom, including, of course, the social and the financial.  By now, multitudes have proven this to be so” (187-88).

(from The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God.  Dallas Willard.  San Fransico: Harper Collins, 1998.)

i want to conspire with willard and others – with God himself – to advance the kingdom.  often i find or sense there is so much in the way.  like lewis i wonder if we are close to the goal either in distance or in approach.  willard emphasises that the answer is in becoming apprenticies and disciples of Christ, which is the original model and strikingly different than the pew-filling, behaviour-control approach we often see in church.

i highly recommend willard’s book.  and his others.  i suspect that i have a lot to learn from his writing and his account of the things he has learned.

I’ve been reading through Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy. It’s a must read for people interested in the vital message of Christ and the Kingdom. The following quote leaped out at me:

“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. Also the mind, though of little power on its own, is the place of our widest and most basic freedom. This is true in both a direct and indirect sense. Of all the things we do, we have more freedom with what we think of, where we will place our mind, than anything else. And the freedom of thinking is a direct freedom wherever it is present. We need not do something else in order to exercise it. We simply turn our mind to whatever it is we choose to think of. The deepest revelation of our character is what we choose to dwell on in thought. What constantly occupies our mind – as well as what we can or cannot even think of.

But the mind is also at the root of our indirect freedoms – of things we can do if we do something else…. [A] part of the call of God to us has always been to think. Indeed the call of Jesus to ‘repent’ is nothing but a call to think about how we have been thinking. And when we come to the task of developing disciples into the fullness of Christ, we must be very clear that one main part, and by far the most fundamental, is to form the insights and habits of the student’s mind so that it stays directed toward God. When this is adequately done, a full heart of love will go toward God, and joy and obedience will flood the life.”

The Divine Conspiracy. Dallas Willard. HarperCollins: New York, 1998. 324-25.

Dallas Willard’s Website

Four fantastics books. I’m learning about and from great men and women, both living and dead. I usually like to read one book at a time, and sort of plow through it. But it’s becoming a pretty regular thing for me to read multiple books simultaneously with a few fictional books in the mix.

The Wilberforce Connection by Clifford Hill is an examination of the strategies and values of William Wilberforce and the Clapham Group and purposes to learn how lessons from the people who made “goodness fashionable” in England and abolished the slave trade can help us offer society fresh hope today.

The Autobiography of George Mueller, George Mueller. George Mueller was an evangelist and founder of orphanages in the late 1800s who emerged from a culture of nominal religious belief into dynamic, world-changing faith. I first learned about him while reading Catherine Marshall’s Adventure’s in Prayer. Mueller raised millions of dollars in his lifetime, and did it through the discipline of praying in secret, never asking people for money, and yet operating huge budgets without going into debt.

The Preacher and the Presidents, Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy. Gibbs who I greatly admire as a writer co-writes a very interesting book about Billy Graham and his relationship to American Presidents.

The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard. A very important book that’s been on my shelf and recommended to me a few times. Willard walks through the Sermon on the Mount and does away with common preconceptions about life in the Kingdom, announcing at the book’s beginning that so many Christians are flying upside down. Read this!