Living in Christ's Presence E-Book

Dallas Willard

• Herausgeber: IVP Formatio
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 276

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

- Logos Bookstores' 2014 Best Book in Spirituality - 2014 Readers' Choice Award Winner - 2014 Leadership Journal Best Books for Church Leaders (The Leader's Inner Life) - A Special Award of Merit, from Byron Borger, Hearts and Minds BookstoreIn these pages Dallas Willard explores what it means to live well now in light of God's kingdom. He reflects on the power of the Trinity in our lives, the meaning of knowledge, the importance of spiritual disciplines and much more. Dallas Willard offers poignant thoughts about what it will be like to transition into the very presence of Christ in heaven.This book is adapted from the talks given at the February 2013 Dallas Willard Center "Knowing Christ Today" conference in Santa Barbara, California. Each chapter is followed with an illuminating dialogue between Dallas Willard and John Ortberg.The book closes with the theme of offering a blessing to one another. These reflections form an apt conclusion to Dallas Willard's public ministry. It is a gift of grace.A conversation guide written by Gary W. Moon is included. Also available is the companion Living in Christ's Presence DVD.

Leseprobe

Also by Dallas Willard:

The Divine Conspiracy

Knowing Christ Today

Hearing God

Renovation of the Heart

The Great Omission

The Spirit of the Disciplines

Also by John Ortberg:

Who Is This Man?

The Me I Want to Be

God Is Closer Than You Think

The Life You’ve Always Wanted

If You Want to Walk on Water, You’ve Got to Get Out of the Boat

DALLAS WILLARD

LIVING IN CHRIST'SPRESENCE

FINAL WORDS ON HEAVEN AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD

WITH A DISCUSSION GUIDE BY GARY W. MOON

www.IVPress.com/books

InterVarsity Press P.O. Box 1400,  Downers Grove, IL 60515-1426 World Wide Web: www.ivpress.com Email: [email protected]

©2014 by Jane Willard, John Ortberg and Dallas Willard Center

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from InterVarsity Press.

InterVarsity Press® is the book-publishing division of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA®, a movement of students and faculty active on campus at hundreds of universities, colleges and schools of nursing in the United States of America, and a member movement of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. For information about local and regional activities, write Public Relations Dept., InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, 6400 Schroeder Rd., P.O. Box 7895, Madison, WI 53707-7895, or visit the IVCF website at www.intervarsity.org.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright© 1973, 1978, 1984 by the International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.

While all stories in this book are true, some names and identifying information in this book have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.

Cover design: Cindy Kiple

Images: businessman silhouette: Andrew Penner/Getty Imagessunset: © Barcin/iStockphotoflower: © Steve Bond/Trevillion Images

ISBN 978-0-8308-9625-7 (digital) ISBN 978-0-8308-3584-3 (print) ISBN 978-8-8308-3585-0 (DVD)

Contents

Preface

Gary W. Moon

1 How to Live Well

Eternal Life Begins Now

Dallas Willard

Conversation

Dallas Willard and John Ortberg

2 Who Are the Experts on Life Transformation?

John Ortberg

Question and Answer

with John Ortberg

3 How to Step into the Kingdom and Live There

Dallas Willard

Conversation

Dallas Willard and John Ortberg

4 Experiential Knowledge of the Trinity

John Ortberg

Conversation

Dallas Willard and John Ortberg

5 Understanding the Person

Including the Invisible Parts

Dallas Willard

Conversation

Dallas Willard and John Ortberg

6 The Importance of Christian Disciplines

John Ortberg

Conversation

Dallas Willard and John Ortberg

7 Blessing

Dallas Willard

Conversation

Dallas Willard and John Ortberg

Acknowledgments

Appendix: Discussion Guide

Gary W. Moon

About the Author

Formatio

More Titles from InterVarsity Press

Preface

Gary W. Moon

I believe that church history will be very kind to Dallas Willard. He lived his life as a rare composite of rigorous academic, passionate Bible expositor and friend of God. Those who knew him well marveled at his mind but loved him because of his firsthand knowledge of God and his desire for others to share his experiences of life in the kingdom.

The book in your hands has been created from the transcript of a conference held February 21–23, 2013, in Santa Barbara, California. The conference was born out of conversations between Dallas and John Ortberg, senior pastor at Menlo Park Presbyterian Church in Menlo Park, California, and a gifted author and speaker.

The primary passion for the conference was to provide an overview of Dallas’s writings and ministry—his most impassioned ideas. The conference was built around the theme “Knowing Christ Today” and as a way to present the golden thread that runs through all of his primary writing: that it is possible to know the Trinity intimately and to step into their glorious kingdom.

The talks at the conference by Dallas and John have been edited just a bit to make the transition to create this book, but they retain the conversational feel of a conference. At the start of each chapter of the book is one of the prayers that was prayed during the conference. Each chapter ends with a conversation about the content with further content being drawn out with questions from John to Dallas and from the audience. Also available is a companion DVD of the talks which is taken up along with the book in the discussion guide found in the appendix.

The conference was sponsored by the Martin Institute for Christianity and Culture and the Dallas Willard Center for Christian Spiritual Formation (MIDWC), where I serve as executive director. The MIDWC exists because of the vision and generosity of Eff and Patty Martin. We hope that you find that the book, DVD and discussion guide capture and preserve the nature of the conference—and more importantly, Dallas’s thoughts—in a way that will be helpful to you.

1

How to Live Well

Eternal Life Begins Now

Dallas Willard

May you experience grace—God acting in your life, in your thoughts, in your feelings, in your rest. May his face shine upon you. May his shining face lift up over you as you lie down, as you sleep, and give you the thoughts you need to have. The blessing of the Trinity rest upon you and everything you are and do. Let it be so. Amen.

Dallas Willard

We are on the verge of a time when the church is going to be able to make some decisions. For long periods in the history of the church, as in the history of Israel, there were no significant decisions that could have been made. I think we have been through a pretty tough patch with the church, and I try never to criticize the church, because I know who is in charge of it. But sometimes we need to be conscious of where we are coming from and where we are going.

We are coming into a time when many churches and Christians who are in leadership positions will be able to say it’s all about discipleship and transformation into Christlikeness. Now, if you read the New Testament or even the Old Testament, you might have come to that conclusion already. It is hard to avoid, but circumstances in history have a way of claiming us and not letting us see what’s actually happening.

We have been through a period when the dominant theology simply had nothing to do with discipleship. It had to do with proper belief, with God seeing to it that individuals didn’t go to the bad place, but to the good place. But that developed in such a way that the predominant thought is that a person can have the worst character possible and still get into the good place if he believed the right thing. This disconnection became increasingly burdensome to the church itself until we came to the point that, as is widely discussed, there is not a clear difference between Christians and those who aren’t Christians.

Now, that is due partly to the fact that Christian teaching has thoroughly penetrated ordinary society. Many people who are not part of the church and who are not followers of Christ by their own conscious intentions wind up living in a kind of halfway, limp way of living out what Jesus taught and who he was. And it is a familiar fact that the world likes to beat the church with the church’s own stick and to criticize it in terms of what Jesus himself taught.

We have perhaps had enough of that, and there are indications that we are ready for a change. That change will make a startling difference in our world, because Jesus’ intention for his people from the beginning, and indeed from long before that in God’s covenant relationship with the people of Israel, was world revolution. If you read the Great Commission, you may not realize it is about world revolution. If you think it is about planting churches, as important as that may be, if you think it is about evangelization, as that is often understood—no, no, it is about a world revolution promised through Abraham, come to life in Jesus and living on in his people up to today. That is what our hearts hunger for, even when we don’t know how to approach it or how to go about it.

Knowledge of Christ

What I want to talk about is knowledge of Christ today. It is not about faith except insofar as faith is a reflection of knowledge. It is about knowing Christ. One of the things that has happened in the last hundred and a few more years is that society, through its institutions, has very carefully taken Christ’s teachings and set them out of the domain of knowledge and put them in an area called faith. That one shift has deprived faith of its power, because faith is never meant to exist apart from knowledge, where knowledge is possible. What is possible through the Scriptures and the actions of God in history is knowledge—knowledge of God, knowledge of human life—and that dignity has to be restored. So our focus is on knowledge for living and the disastrous effects of forcing the teachings of Jesus Christ and his people from the domain of human knowledge.

Now we have an odd thing called secular knowledge. What is that? Is reality secular? If reality is not secular, secular knowledge falls miserably short of what human beings need. Knowledge is what we bring to the world, what pastors and other spokespersons for Christ bring to the world.

Spokespersons for Christ are all men and women, wherever they are, who speak up for Christ and bring knowledge of God. They bring knowledge of the human soul, and without that, the world has no structure. It’s all up for grabs, and there are a lot of people grabbing. It is about what you can make out of what you have, rather than how you can come to terms with the realities of God and of his nature and of his purpose in creation and of his sending of Christ and of the coming of the Holy Spirit into the world. They present this as knowledge, and that is the first thing we must understand when we approach the issue of knowing Christ.

The second thing is closely related to it: spokespersons for Christ are those who have knowledge that no one else has. That’s why they are the most important people in society. That is because they bring knowledge of what time and eternity are about. They bring knowledge on which people can base their lives. They bring knowledge that can be communicated to others on the basis of experience and reason and Scripture and grace and work and everything else you want to put in the bag.

Spokespersons for Christ have the dignity of bringing that knowledge to everyone around them. One of the sad things is what has happened to witnessing in our culture. Witnessing is not thought of as bringing knowledge, but as attempts to convince people to do things. When you divorce faith from knowledge, you wind up in the position of trying to get people to do things, not of providing them with a basis on which they can then decide how to live and how to lead their lives together. Witnessing has turned into a kind of process of bothering people, and very few people witness because of that.

As a young man, I was a Southern Baptist pastor, and I could very easily inspire guilt in my people by talking about why they didn’t witness. This differs a little from denomination to denomination, but that was the sad truth, and I must confess my sin; I often did this because I thought the way to move people was to make them feel, not to provide them with knowledge.

We are here to try to restore the dignity of the spokesperson based on the dignity of the knowledge that they bring. We want to bring forth the people of Christ and let them stand in the world shoulder to shoulder with everyone else who claims to know what they are talking about and to enable individuals to tie into the tradition of Christ and his people, which has always been a tradition of knowledge.

Now, while saying as much as I am, I am probably going to say one or two things that are wrong. You may be getting uneasy, and that is okay. What I say is meant to open things up for discussion. But my main point is that we have to understand the dignity of the knowledge that we possess as followers of Christ.

The famous passage in Hosea 4:6 doesn’t say, “My people perish for lack of faith.” It says, “My people perish for lack of knowledge.” Knowledge and faith are different kinds of things. In my book Knowing Christ Today, I describe in depth the difference between faith and knowledge; and while they are both vital, they are different.

Spiritual Formation

We dare not take faith out of the area of knowledge. We need to explore not knowledge as such, but the particular knowledge that comes to us in spiritual formation. Spiritual formation is an old term. It is new in many circles, but it is as old as the New Testament. The early years of the church were years in which spiritual formation was assiduously studied and developed and written about. If it is at all possible, read the Philokalia, one of the earliest collections of Christian writings, or John Cassian’s Institutes, which are in that same genre. Come to know them to see what spiritual formation is about.

So, what is spiritual formation? It is the process of transforming the person into Christlikeness through transforming the essential parts of the person. Though transforming the mind is absolutely fundamental, the other parts of the self also have to be transformed. Spiritual transformation is not about behavior modification. It is about changing the sources of behavior, so the behavior will take care of itself. When the mind is right and the heart is right and the body and the soul and the relationships that we have in our social world are right, the whole person simply steps into the way of Christ and lives there with joy and strength. It is not a struggle.

One of the lies about the spiritual life is that it is hard. No, no. It is not hard. It is the easy way. What’s hard is the other way, and that is what you see when you look at the world. This is a bit of knowledge that we need to bring to people; we need to help them understand that the transformation of the self leads into the life of blessing.

The Easy Yoke

Consider two passages that are both very familiar. One is in Matthew 11, where Jesus says these words, which are often picked up out of the context, with no question raised about to whom is he speaking: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:28-30).

The person who has the easiest, the happiest, the strongest life is the person who walks in the yoke with Christ. Only as we do that do we begin to draw the strength and direction that straightens out everything that is wrong in human existence. It does sometimes lead to a battle with a world gone wrong around us, but that world needs that battle, and they need us to stand steady in the easy yoke with Christ.

What is the yoke of Christ? Well, this language referred to oxen in Jesus’ day, and it can refer to horses or other animals. It speaks of two animals being yoked together to pull a load. To be in the yoke with Christ is to pull his load with him. What is his load? It is to bring the reign of God into ordinary human life. That is why he came the way he did, lived the way he did and died the way he did. In the midst of a world of ordinary human life he was pulling the load of bringing the kingdom of God into ordinary human life. That was his message. And his message was to everyone.

Rethink your thinking. Repent, as Jesus commanded in Matthew 4:17. Repent just means to turn back on how you are thinking about things and to reconsider. Repent, for the kingdom of the heavens is now available to you. That was his message, and if we are going to walk in the easy yoke with Jesus and have the light load that he gives—not light inherently, but light because of who we are yoked to—we need to understand that we are working with the kingdom of God. We are working with the kingdom of the heavens.

Who do you think Jesus is speaking to here? You might say, “Well, anyone who is weary and heavy laden.” But we need to put the passage in its context. Jesus had come into a period when he was facing great opposition, great rejection. When you go back and read the whole eleventh chapter of Matthew, you can see that emerging. Even John is questioning Jesus, because Jesus is not living up to his expectations. I heard a person once say, very profoundly, that if you follow Jesus long enough, he will disappoint you. And that is what’s going on.

Jesus had been run out of his hometown, Nazareth, and he had moved on to Capernaum and a lot of little cities around there—Chorazin, Bethsaida and some others. He was rejected even though he did wonderful things in their streets. He was rejected because of a prevailing view of religion and God in that society. And so leading up to his words “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens,” is Jesus’ statement, “I thank you, Father, . . . because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants” (Matthew 11:25, 28 NRSV).

He is actually talking to people who are carrying a terrible religious burden. That is what religion does to you. It wears you out. If there is anything that we need to do, it is to learn how to lay down the burdens of religion in a loving, intelligent way.

Let me tell you something that is striking; that is, when you come to spiritual formation, it makes very little difference what your religious position is. No matter what denomination or Christian group you look at, you see that they don’t share the same theology. Now, they have to believe certain things about Jesus, but spiritual formation doesn’t run with the orthodoxy of a position. Jesus is saying, “Take my yoke.” Take the yoke of official religion off your neck. Then you can go back and redeem that, but first you have to learn from him how to live in the yoke of the kingdom of God.

I am not one who thinks that we ought to criticize the church very much. There is nothing wrong with the church that discipleship will not cure. Nothing. When you find problems in the church—and this is constantly discussed over and over in the best periodicals, secular and sacred—it is always a lack of discipleship that led to it. It doesn’t much matter what the official structure is—whether it is big or little or whatever. What matters is, are you a disciple?

Leading Others into Discipleship

It is to a group of disciples that we now turn in the second passage, right at the end of the Gospel of Matthew (Matthew 28:18-20). It is called the Great Commission, but when you look at it closely, you might want to call it the Great Omission, because what Jesus said to do here is rarely done.

Here is what Jesus is saying: I have been given say over everything in heaven and on earth. As you go, make disciples. Immerse them together in the presence of the Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Yes, baptize them in the name, but, dear friends, that doesn’t just mean getting them wet while you say those names. It means to immerse them in the Reality. After you have done that, teach them in a way that they actually do what Jesus said. That is the process of spiritual formation. And what comes out at the end is the joy of living in the easy yoke, for you find that to do what Jesus said is the easy and strong way to live forever and in time.

Look at those passages again. First of all, Jesus said, “I have been given all authority.” In other words, “I have been given say over everything.” We are not sent out without equipment. We are sent out with all the equipment we can possibly use, and as we go, we make disciples.

I think the best way of translating this is “As you go, make disciples.” This presents making disciples as a kind of side effect, and that is really important to understand in relation to making disciples. In life, some things that can be pulled cannot be pushed, and some things that can be pushed cannot be pulled. Making disciples is a matter of pulling people, of drawing them in through who we are and what we say.

Disciples are those who have been so ravished with Christ that others want to be like them. Others look at those disciples’ life in the kingdom of God, and they say, “This is the best thing I ever saw in my life. I must have that.” The best place to make disciples in the United States is in church, because there are always people there who are hungering for discipleship. They are really looking for it.

Many, many of the people who are identified as Christians have never been invited to become a disciple of Jesus. We don’t have discipleship evangelism, but we need to have it because of the multitudes of people who are ready to go, who just need to understand and see and have the invitation to become disciples of Jesus. That’s the way we have to go forward.

Until we go through discipleship, we can’t bring people together in trinitarian fellowship, because a commitment to God, to Christ and to the Holy Spirit is not adequate to allow people to come together in the intimate form of relationship that is life transforming.

The church as the gathering of disciples is God’s ideal way of bringing people to the fullness of Christ. Remember that Jesus said, “For where two or three come together in my name, there am I with them” (Matthew 18:20). Well, the Father is there in the midst. The Spirit is there in the midst. Where there are three or four thousand gathered in his name, he is in the midst. Sometimes that verse is quoted only when two to three people show up, but the important thing to realize is that Christ is in the midst, the Father is in the midst, the Spirit is in the midst; and they are building the church on that.

Now, if you have gone through discipleship and you are gathering disciples in the trinitarian presence, you are in a position to teach them to do everything Jesus said. Once again, it will not be by pushing, but by pulling. That is how you bring people to see the goodness and rightness of Christ’s teachings and lead them to step into it.

The other way leads to legalism, which has repeatedly defeated the best intentions of the best of Christ’s followers through the ages, because it simply does not deal with the life of the individual; it deals with the behavior. Over and over you have situations that can be cured by the changing of the person, but the person is not changed because he is pushed rather than pulled by the winsomeness of Christ. You might say, “Oh, you mustn’t have anger with your brother.” Then what are you going to do? Hit him on the head if he is angry with his brother? No, you have to show him why anger is not a good thing. You have to show him there is a better way of dealing with situations that provoke anger and hatred and create a spiral of injury and hurt.

A disciple is someone who is learning by going through the process of change. All the things that we moan about and talk on and on about, such as pornography, divorce and drugs, are things that can be dealt with effectively only by bringing change into the mind and the spirit, into the will, into the body and into the fellowship of the person. Then people come out saying, “Who needs that stuff? I’ve got something much better than that.”

When you look at something like pornography and you realize the state of mind of the person who is hooked on it, you say, “This is a terrible condition to be in.” You know that person can have a better way of thinking that will make the compulsion just drop off. It is the same way with hatred, with contempt and with all the things that cause the deepest problems in our families and in our communities and in our world. They all come out of an inside that is messed up, and Jesus comes and says, “Here is the way out.”

Bringing the Kingdom

What do the pastors and other spokespersons for Christ do? They bring the life of the kingdom to other people. They bring that life in themselves. That’s what Jesus himself said, and that’s what he did. When he came, he said, “Repent for the kingdom of the heavens is at hand.” What was at hand? The kingdom that was in him. As people looked at him and listened to him, they realized that the kingdom of God was there and that it was available to them, and they became disciples of Jesus because of that.

Pastors and spokespersons for Christ exemplify eternal living and bring it to bear on everything around them. Eternal life is the life we have now, because our life is caught up in God’s life. It is not later. What Jesus is doing is a part of what we are doing, and what we are doing is a part of what he is doing.

John 17:3 is one of the most important verses to understand: “And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (NRSV). Now, this knowing is not doctrinal knowledge; it’s a living interaction with God, with his Son and with his Spirit. It is trinitarian presence in fellowship with one another that is eternal life. That is what eventually is going to come to earth. That is what has come to earth already, and we can make it a part of our lives. In so doing, we make our lives a part of God’s life. So, what did Jesus preach? What was his gospel? His gospel was the availability of life in the kingdom of the heavens, or the kingdom of God, now.

Now let me ask myself something very sobering to me, and maybe to you. What is my gospel? What’s my central message? This is the heart of our problem and of our promise. Listen to yourself when you’re speaking, and ask, “What is my message?” Is my message one that pulls people into discipleship?

Now again, I don’t want to be critical, but frankly, most people don’t ask this question of themselves. Instead they talk about an arrangement made by God through Christ that involved his death on the cross. That is very important to understand, but ask yourself, “Is that the gospel?”

Isn’t this the gospel: that when others not only hear the content of it but also see how we live it and present it, they say, “I want that. I want to be a disciple of Jesus. I want to be one of his students, learning how to live in the kingdom of God now as he lives in the kingdom of God”?

When we present the gospel through our life and our teaching of what Jesus preached, as life now available in the kingdom of God, we see people respond. I have watched it for years and have heard the testimonies of people who suddenly realize this is the gospel. This is what Jesus is about. Jesus is about bringing the life of the kingdom of God into my life now and making me a citizen of that kingdom. And then it is not over, because we spend our lives seeking the kingdom of God. As Jesus said, seek above all the kingdom of God.

Now I have to ask myself, “Do I do that, and how do I do it? Am I actually seeking the kingdom of God above all and the kind of righteousness that characterizes that kingdom?” When we do that, we can count on disciples being made. If we preach another message and live another message, we can’t count on that.

That is why the work of leaders and pastors is often so hard and so full of disappointments. Their own lives are empty, and eventually they blow up. That is because they haven’t heard the message that Jesus gave. They have heard another message, and perhaps with the best of intentions they were drawn into a life where they thought their job was to make things happen. But that is the worst position they can be in.

Of course, leaders need to act, but our job is not to make things happen. We live in the kingdom of God, where God is active. His Spirit is present. His Son is alive. That’s where we live. If we make it happen, the result will be our converts, and we’ll have to keep making them do things, because they will depend on us to jump-start them and keep them going. Instead we need to put them onto the living kingdom of God and the living Christ and allow them to live interactively, one on one, with God and to transform the world in which they live.

Discipleship is not for the church. Actually, the church is for discipleship. Discipleship is for the world, the world that God so loved, that he has great hopes for and that he is going to bring great things out of. That’s where discipleship belongs. If we shrink discipleship down to church work, we will never see its power to transform ourselves or to transform the world around us. But as we step into discipleship to Christ in the great kingdom of God, out in the world as well as in the church, we begin to see a basis on which disciples can come together.

Unity in Discipleship

One of the most heartbreaking things today is that we are divided between different traditions, and there is no fellowship; pastors don’t care for one another because they think they are different. When we step into discipleship, we find the only basis for Christian union, the only way we can get past all the traditions and all the doctrines and all the habits and things like property that we own and who gets to control it and so on. We can come together in our communities as shepherds of Christ and deal with that world by bringing the kingdom of God through our people into the fine texture of daily living.

Discipleship isn’t complicated. It is all laid out. We simply have to start with the beginning, which is Christ’s authority over everything in heaven and earth, and we make disciples. We don’t make Lutherans. We don’t make Baptists. We don’t make Catholics. We don’t make Protestants. Make disciples of the Baptists, of the Lutherans, of the Catholics—of all the groups make disciples; and they will come together to form the body of Christ where they are.

Ministers can minster to one another and hold one another up and know one another without being threatened or without competing, because they are in the business of going through their community and making disciples and bringing them together and teaching them to do everything that Jesus said.

Conversation

Dallas Willard and John Ortberg

John: