I have to say that The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God (HarperOne, 1997) by the late Dallas Willard is four hundred pages of pure Christian life wisdom worth reading over and over again. The only regret is I did not read it a decade ago. Chapter by chapter, Willard brilliantly draws some of the most profound insights from the Sermon on the Mount. I have to say, if you have not read this book, get a copy, and read it.
Divine Conspiracy is about Christian discipleship. To follow Jesus Christ means to become His disciple, learner, or apprentice. The very heat of the gospel is being Jesus’ disciple (xvii). Willard explains,
The really good news for humanity is that Jesus is now taking students in the master class of life. The eternal life that begins with confidence in Jesus is a life in his present kingdom, now on earth and available to all. So the message of and about him is specifically a gospel of our life now, not just for dying. It is about living now as his apprentice in kingdom living, not just as a consumer of his merits. Our future, however far we look, is a natural extension of the faith by which we live now and the life in which we now participate (xvii).
Many ponder questions about whether or not they are God’s elect. Others wonder whether they are worthy enough for God or whether they sinned too much. What we can be more certain about is that being a disciple of Christ is better understood as being an apprentice of Christ. Willard recognizes that “to be a disciple in any area or relationship is not to be perfect. One can be a very raw and incompetent beginner and still be a disciple.” There are numerous times Jesus corrected the twelve disciples. “A disciple, or apprentice,” writes Willard, “is simply someone who has decided to be with another person, under appropriate conditions, in order to become capable of doing what that person does or become what that person is” (282).
Christian disciples, according to Willard, are with Jesus both by choice and grace learning the way to live in God’s kingdom. They learn from Jesus to live as if He would live their lives, if He were them. They do not expect to do everything Jesus did; rather, they learn to do all their routines in a way that He would do them (283).
This apprenticeship with Christ is far from just getting the right answers on a test. The goal is never just to get an “A” on the quiz. It is to actually believe all the things we learn from Christ. This is the sort of belief that makes all the difference in the world. Willard illustrates the point with essential Christian doctrine of the Trinity:
Hence, the advantage of believing in the Trinity is that we then live as if the Trinity is real: as if the cosmos environing us actually is, beyond all else, a self-sufficing community of unspeakably magnificent personal beings of boundless love, knowledge, and power. And, thus believing, our lives naturally integrate themselves, though our actions, into the reality of such a universe, just as with two plus two equals four. In faith we rest ourselves upon the reality of the Trinity in action — and it graciously meets us. For it is there. And our lives are then enmeshed in the true world of God (318).
The curriculum for Christ-likeness is never about “special experiences, faithfulness to church, correct doctrine, and external conformity to the teachings of Jesus” (320). These things come in the process of being like Christ but they are never the primary objectives. Willard proposes two primary objectives for training as Christ’s apprentice. The first is “to bring apprentices to the point where they dearly love and constantly delight in that ‘heavenly Father’ made real to earth in Jesus and are quite certain that there is no ‘catch,’ no limit, to the goodness of his intentions or his power to carry them out” (321).The other primary objective is “to remove our automatic responses against the kingdom of God, to free the apprentices of domination, of ‘enslavement’ (John 8:34; Rom. 6:6), to the old habitual patterns of thought, feeling, and action” (322).
Christ’s apprentice looks forward to the future restoration of all things. Willard indicates the Logos, i.e. Son of Man, is right now getting us ready to see Him again. We will experience the glory of God the Father in the way God the Son eternally experiences even the experience of divine glory prior to the creation of the universe. We will participate in God’s rule over all things (378). Our present apprenticeship prepares us for life in the new heaven and new earth.
Life gets complicated and unless we have a reliable point of reference, we can never really successfully navigate through whatever mess comes our way. Without a reliable point of reference, we are like pilots trying to fly our jets into a steep ascent only realizing too late that our jets were upside down and about to crash into the ground. The point of reference is Jesus Christ. The Christian life journey is led by Christ at the beginning to the end and all junctures between. Divine Conspiracy is a great resource to assist in putting all things about Christian discipleship into the right perspective.
— WGN
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