Willard Wednesdays

The Divine Conspiracy: Chapter 3 What Jesus Knew: Our God-bathed World (pp. 79-84)

The Spiritual...

Dallas Willard's words in this section help me to remember that I do not need to grow hopeless or afraid in the world.

" 'Spiritual' is not just something we ought to be.  It is something we are and cannot escape, regardless of how we may think or feel about it.  It is our nature and our destiny."

"We always place a tremendous premium on what comes from the center of our being, the heart.  It, more than anything else, is what we are."

"The heart, or will, simply is spirit in human beings.  It is the human spirit, and the only thing in us that God will accept as the basis of our relationship to him.  It is the spiritual plane of our natural existence, the place of truth before God, from where alone our whole lives can become eternal."

"We ought to be spiritual in every aspect of our lives because our world is the spiritual one.  It is what we are suited to.  Thus Paul, from his profound grasp of human existence, counsels us, 'To fill your mind with the visible, the 'flesh', is death, but to fill your mind with the spirit is life and peace.'" Romans 8:6

"As we increasingly integrate our life into the spiritual world of God, our life increasingly takes on the substance of the eternal.  We are destined for a time when our life will be entirely sustained from spiritual realities and no longer dependent in any way upon the physical.  Our dying, or 'mortal' condition, will have been exchanged for an undying one and death absorbed in victory.' "

"Of course that destiny flatly contradicts the usual human outlook, or what 'everyone knows' to be the case.  I take this to be a considerable point in its favor.  Our 'lives of quiet desperation', in the familiar words of Thoreau, are imposed by hopelessness.  We find our world to be one where we hardly count at all, where what we do makes little difference, and where what we really love is unattainable, or certainly not secure.  We become frantic or despairing."

"In A Confession, Leo Tolstoy relates how the drive toward goodness that moved him as a boy was erased by his experiences in society.  Later in life, after overwhelming success as a writer, he nevertheless sank into psychological paralysis brought on by his vision of the futility of everything.  The awareness that the passage of time alone would bring everything he loved and valued to nothing left him completely hopeless.  For years he lived in this condition, until he finally came to faith in a world of God where all that is good is preserved. "

"That is precisely the world of the spiritual that Jesus opened to humanity long ago and still opens to those who seek it.  Observing the faith of simple peasants and the deeply meaningful (though painful) lives that flowed from it, Tolstoy was led onward to Jesus and his message of the kingdom of God.  That message then showed him the way to the spiritual world and the 'mind of the spirit,' which, as Paul also said, is 'life and peace.'

The mind or the minding of the spirit is life and peace precisely because it locates us in a world adequate to our nature as ceaselessly creative beings under God.  The 'mind of the flesh,' on the other hand, is a living death.  To it the heavens are closed.  It sees only 'that inverted Bowl they call the Sky, Whereunder crawling cooped we live and die.'  It restricts us to the visible, physical world where what our hearts demand can never be.  There, as Tolstoy saw with disgust, we find we constantly must violate our conscience in order to 'survive'.   Jesus, by contrast, brings us into a world without fear.  In his world, astonishingly, there is nothing evil we must do in order to thrive.  He lived, and invites us to live, in an undying world where it is safe to do and be good..."