Willard Wednesdays

I'm back to Dallas Willard.  Pulled The Divine Conspiracy off my shelf after John Perkins' visit. More than ever, I'm considering the invitation to life in the Kingdom of God and training as a student of Jesus. I'm inviting my co-workers into the 10 chapters of The Divine Conspiracy over the next 10 months of 2016.  Other than the Bible, there's not been a book that has influenced my thinking and faith more than this book.  It's dense, but it's oh so worth it.

Introduction 

"Very few people today find Jesus interesting as a person or of vital relevance to the course of their actual lives.  He is not generally regarded as a real-life personality who deals with real-life issues but is thought to be concerned with some feathery realm other than the one we must deal with and must deal with now.  And frankly, he is not taken to be a person of much ability."

"It is the failure to understand Jesus and his words as reality and vital information about life that explains why, today, we do not routinely teach those who profess allegiance to him how to do what he said was best."

"How could the obligation be so clear and at the same time there be no attempt to meet it?  The problem, we may be sure, lies very deep within the ideas that automatically govern our thinking about who we are, as Christians and as human beings, and about the relevance of Jesus to our cosmos and our lives."

"In fact, it lies much deeper than anything we might appropriately feel guilty about.  For it is not, truly, a matter of anything we do or don't do.  It is a matter of how we cannnot but think and act, give the context of our mental and spiritual formation.  So any significant change can come only by breaking the stranglehold of the ideas ad concepts the automatically shunt aside Jesus, "The Prince of Life," when questions of concrete mastery of our life arise."

"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 ad 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."

Planning on blogging through the book on Willard Wednesdays...hold me to it!