Quotes from “Divine Conspiracy” by Dallas Willard

My wife gave me this book in 2006. I finally started reading it last year. It has had such an incredible difference in how I understand God, my neighbour and my place in this world. I have attached a number of quotes – its much easier to simply acknowlege the great writing of others than to claim wisdom for myself…!

“We are invited to make a pilgrimage – into the heart and life of God. The invitation has long been on public record. p 11

God’s desire for us is that we should live in Him. He sends among us the Way to himself. That shows what, in his heart of hearts, God is really like – indeed, what reality is really like. In its deepest nature and meaning our universe is a community of boundless and totally competent love… The Way we speak of is Jesus…Jesus offers himself as God’s doorway into the life that is truly life. p 11

Jesus’ enduring relevance is based on his historically proven ability to speak to, to heal and empower the individual human condition. He matters because of what he brought and what he still brings to ordinary human beings, living their ordinary lives and coping daily with their surroundings. He promises wholeness for their lives. In sharing our weakness, he gives us strength and imparts through his companionship a life that has the quality of eternity. p 13

The obviously well kept secret of the “ordinary” is that it is made to be a receptacle of the divine, a place where the life of God flows…  everyone from the smallest child to the oldest adult, naturally wants in some way to be extraordinary, outstanding, making a unique contribution…. p 14

The drive to significance is a simple extension of the creative impulse of God that gave us being. Our hunger for significance is a signal of who we are and why we are here, and it also is the basis of humanity’s enduring response to Jesus. p 15

This is a call for us to reconsider how we have been approaching our life, in light of the fact that we now, in the presence of Jesus, have the option of living within the surrounding movements of God’s eternal purposes, of taking our life into his life. p 16

When we see Jesus as he is, we must turn away or else shamelessly adore him. p 19

Such a response, along with many others familiar from the Gospels, illustrates how Jesus’ hearers understood the invitation to base their own lives on the rule of God “at hand”. Of course, they had no general understanding of what was involved, but they knew Jesus meant that he was acting with God and God with him, that God’s rule was effectively present through him.  p 19

When he (Jesus) announced that the “governance” or rule of God had become available to human beings, he was primarily referring to what he could do for people, God acting with him. But he was also offering to communicate this same “rule of God” to others who would receive and learn it from him. p 19

When we receive God’s gift of life by relying on Christ, we find that God comes to act with us as we rely on him in our actions. p 20

Every last one of us has a “kingdom” – or a “queendom”, or a “government” – a realm that is uniquely our own, where our choice determines what happens….we are made to “have dominion” within an appropriate realm of reality. This is the core of the likeness or image of God in us and is the basis of the destiny for which we were formed. We are, all of us, never-ceasing spiritual beings with a unique eternal calling to count for good in God’s great universe. p 21

The sense of having some degree of control over things is now recognized as a vital factor in both mental and physical health and can make the difference between life and death in those who are seriously ill….having a place to rule goes to the very heart of who we are, of our integrity, strength, and competence….by contrast, attacks on our personhood always take the form of diminishing what we can do or have say over, sometimes up to the point of forcing us to submit to what we abhor.  p 22

God equipped us for this task by framing our nature to function in a conscious, personal relationship of interactive responsibility with him. We are meant to exercise our “rule” only in union with God, as he acts with us. He intended to be our constant companion or co-worker in the creative enterprise of life on earth. That is what his love for us means in practical terms. p 22

What we can do with these means (our own unassisted strength) is still very small compared to what we could do in acting in union with God himself, who created and ultimately controls all other forces. p 23

The deepest longings of our heart confirm our original calling. Our very being still assigns us to “rule” in our life circumstances…  and we still experience ourselves as creative will, as someone who accomplishes things, constantly desiring to generate value, or what is good, from ourselves and from our environment. We are perhaps all too ready, given our distorted vision and will, to take charge of the earth. p 23

God nevertheless pursues us redemptively and invites us individually, every last one of us, to be faithful to him in the little we truly “have say over.” There, at every moment, we live in the interface between our lives and God’s kingdom among us. If we are faithful to him here, we learn his cooperative faithfulness to us in turn. We discover the effectiveness of his rule with us precisely in the details of day-to-day existence. p 23

God is unlimited creative will and constantly invites us, even now, into an ever larger share in what he is doing. Like Jesus, we can enter into the work we see our Father doing. p 24

In accord with his original intent, the heavenly Father has in fact prepared an individualized kingdom for every person, from the outset of creation.  p 24

As we learn through increasing trust to govern our tiny affairs with him, the kingdom he all along planned for us will be turned over to us, at the appropriate time. p 25

God’s own “kingdom,” or “rule,” is the range of his effective will, where what he wants done is done. The person of God himself and the action of his will are the organizing principles of his kingdom, but everything that obeys those principles, whether by nature or by choice, is within his kingdom…. We have an invitation to be a part of it, but if we refuse, we only hurt ourselves. p 25

The kingdom of God always pervades and governs the whole of the physical universe – parts of planet earth occupied by humans and other personal beings. p 26

When Jesus directs us to pray, “Thy kingdom come,” he does not mean we should pray for it to come into existence. Rather, we pray for it to take over at all points in the personal, social, and political order where it is now excluded: “on earth as it is in heaven.” With this prayer, we are invoking it, as in faith we are acting it, into the real world of our daily existence.  p 26

Within his overarching dominion, God has created us and has given each of us, like him, a range of will – beginning from our minds and bodies and extending outward, ultimately to a point not wholly predetermined but open to the measure of our faith. His intent is for us to learn to mesh our kingdom with the kingdoms of others. Love of neighbor, rightly understood, will make this happen. But if we can only love adequately by taking as our primary aim the integration of our rules with God’s. That is why love of neighbor is the second, not the first, commandment and why we are told to seek first the kingdom, or rule, of God. p 26

Jesus came among us to show and teach the life for which we were made. He came very gently, opening access to the governance of God with him, and set afoot a conspiracy of freedom in truth among human beings. Having overcome death he remains among us. By relying on his word and presence we are enabled to reintegrate the little realm that makes up our life into the infinite rule of God. And that is the eternal kind of life. Caught up in his active rule, our deeds become an element in God’s eternal history. They are what God and we do together, making us part of his life and him a part of ours.  p 27

God inducts us into the eternal kind of life that flows through himself.  He does this first by bringing that life to bear upon our needs, and then by diffusing it throughout our deeds – deeds done with expectation that he and his Father will act with and in our actions. p 27

The reality of God’s rule, and all of the instrumentalities it involves, is present in action and available with and through the person of Jesus. That is Jesus’ gospel. p 28

Those who have been touched by forgiveness and new life and have thus entered into God’s rule become, like Jesus, bearers of that rule.  p 28

Other kingdoms are still present on earth along with the kingdom of the heavens. That is the human condition. Persons other than God, such as you or I, are still allowed on earth to have a “say” that is contrary to his will. A kingdom of darkness is here, certainly, and the kingdoms of many individuals who are still “trying to run their own show.”… so along with the “already here” there obviously remains a “not yet” aspect with regards to God’s present rule on earth. p 29

Sometimes the places where God’s effective or actual rule is not yet carried out, and his will is not yet done, lie within the lives and little kingdoms of those who truly have been invaded by the eternal kind of life itself – those who really do belong to Christ because his life is already present and growing within them. p 30

The “interior castle” of the human soul, as Tersa of Avila called it, has many rooms, and they are slowly occupied by God, allowing us time and room to grow. That is a crucial aspect of the conspiracy. But even this does not detract from the reality of the “kingdom among us” Nor does it destroy the choice that all have to accept it and bring their life increasingly into it. p 30

The kingdom of God is also right beside us. It is indeed the Kingdom Among Us. You can reach it from your heart with your mouth – through even a shaky and stumbling confidence and confession that Jesus is the death conquering Master of all…to be sure, that kingdom has been here as long as we humans have been here, and longer. But it has been available to us through simple confidence in Jesus, the Annointed, only from the time he became a public figure. It is a kingdom that, in the person of Jesus, welcomes us just as we are, just where we are, and makes it possible for us to translate our “ordinary” life into an eternal one. It is so available that every one who from the center of his or her being calls upon Jesus as Master of the Universe and Prince of Life will be heard and will be delivered into the eternal kind of life. p 31

And the God who hears is also the one who speaks. He has spoken and is still speaking. Humanity remains his project, not its own, and his initiatives are always at work among us.  p 33

much time is spent among Christians trying to smooth over hurt feelings and even deep wounds, given and received, and to get people to stop being angry, retaliator, and unforgiving. But suppose instead, we devoted our time to inspiring and enabling Christians and others to be people who are not offendable and not angry and who are forgiving as a matter of course. p 303

you lead people to become disciples of Jesus by ravishing them with a vision of life in the kingdom of the heavens in the fellowship of Jesus. And you do this by proclaiming, manifesting, and teaching the kingdom to them in the manner learned from Jesus himself. You thereby change the belief system that governs their lives p 305

when we bring people to believe differently, they really do become different. One of the greatest weaknesses in our teaching and leadership today is that we spend so much time trying to get people to do things good people are supposed to do, without changing what they really believe. p 307