Blogging Dallas Willard

This will be the first of a series of posts looking at Dallas Willard's The Spirit of the Disciplines. The subtitle of the book is Understanding How God Changes Lives and it is this that tells us what the book is actually about. Written in 1988, the book emerges from among the seeming coming of age of spiritual formation movements that wanted to tell disciples that if they would just do this or that spiritual behavior, they could progress closer to God. The result was a lot of people doing a lot of stuff and spending a lot of money on "spiritual formation" and not really getting much out of it.

Willard understood that there was a "deep longing among Christians and non-Christians alike for the personal purity and power to live as our hearts tell us we should." Even so, much as Willow Creek will eventually learn, a lot of churchiness and discipline use make for short term excitement but finally fizzles out, Willard observed that "faith today is treated as something that only should make us different, not that actually does or can make us different." Christianity he says "can only succeed as a guide for current humanity if it does two things." Christianity must take the need for transformation as seriously "as do modern revolutionary movements," and "it needs to clarify and exemplify realistic methods of human transformation." In short, Christianity - the church - needs to set the expectation that people will actually become much like Jesus, and lead and demonstrate the world into that transformation. The greatest threat to the Christian church today is "pitching its message too low."

Willard wants us to "remove the disciplines from the category of historical curiosities and place them at the center of the new life in Christ." "The spirit of the disciplines is nothing but the love of Jesus, with its resolute will to be like him whom we love."

Pick up your copy and come along - it'll be fun.

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