The View from the West Mesa

Dallas Willard defines life something like this: the ability to interact with, respond to, and affect its surroundings. His somewhat surprising example is that of a cabbage. He observes that the cabbage interacts and responds to the soil, water, sunlight, etc., and grows. A dead cabbage he observes doesn’t do any of that. Similarly, human life is defined by those characteristics as well. When humans interact with, respond to, and affect their environment, we can say they are alive. When we lose those abilities, we are dead. Higher forms of life, especially humans have other abilities in addition to the basic ones of a cabbage. We can think, discern, trade off options, and have the ability to set our will in a direction over our entire lives – including our spiritual lives. What are those things that nurture our spiritual lives like soil, water, and sunlight do for the cabbage? Through history there have been a number of ideas, extending from personal isolation in desolate places t...

What does God want? This is a question that has caused consternation among the faithful for a very long time, even it seems among Jesus’s disciples. We have heard the story of the two disciples who wanted to be Number 2 and Number 3, next in line behind Jesus in the kingdom of God. Jesus on that occasion disabused them of their mistaken ideas about first, who gets to come first before the rest of the disciples and second, that the kingdom is somehow about power, position, and privilege. No, we’ve read the divine comments about the first shall be last and the last first, about how in the group of disciples, the leaders won’t “lord it over” other disciples like the Gentile leaders do, and even that the Son of Man has come to serve, not be served. It takes a while it seems for us humans to get the idea that the kingdom of God isn’t about me. We’ve changed the question a bit over time, or maybe added variations on the theme, “what is this all about?” Over the millennia disciples have...

This week, we’re going to start with two quotes from Dallas Willard, both from his The Spirit of the Disciplines. Here they are: One specific errant concept has done inestimable harm to the church and God’s purposes with us—and that is the concept that has restricted the Christian idea of salvation to mere forgiveness of sins. …It becomes understandable why the simple and wholly adequate word for salvation in the New Testament is “life.” “I am come that they might have life and that they might have it more abundantly…” Forgiveness has been the center point of much of Christianity since Jesus was here. More than once we read of the need for sacrifices for forgiveness, and we are told that Jesus preached a gospel of repentance for forgiveness of sins. Forgiveness of sin has been a constant of Man’s relationship with God. Getting rid of our sins, “as far as the east is from the west,” has held the attention of many believers over the years. We have used multiple rites and rit...