Conversatio Divina

Part 4 of 19

Acts of Incarnation

Dallas Willard
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Table of Contents

  1. 01.  Editor’s Note
  2. 02.  Introduction
  3. 03.  Seek First the Kingdom of God
  4. 04.  Christ in Us
  5. 05.  The Meaning of Trust
  6. 06.  Resurrection Life
  7. 07.  God Moves In
  8. 08.  Ways of Being For, With, and InFrom the table in “A Brief Overview of the With-God Life,” The Renovaré Spiritual Formation Bible, Richard J. Foster, ed. (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), xivi–xivii.

01.  Editor’s Note

In June of 2012, Dallas Willard presented two hours of teaching on the Book of Acts to the Renovaré Board and Ministry team at a retreat center in Colorado. Given the theme of this issue of Conversations, “Streams of Living Water: Celebrating the Great Traditions of Christian Faith,” and the “incarnational” focus of Dallas Willard’s presentation, we thought you might want to listen in on part of that talk. What follows, after a brief introduction from Gary W. Moon, is an edited version of portions of that talk.  

I encountered a teaching on the uniting themes of Scripture that I’ve never been able to forget. It was posited that if you step inside the Bible, anywhere between Genesis 1:1 and Revelation 22:21, you would not have to turn many pages before bumping into four retreated themes:  

 

  1. God loves people and has prepared a suitable dwelling place both as an inheritance and a place of being together. 
  2. God desires to be with His people in loving relationship. 
  3. Humanity continues to reject both the inheritance and the offer of presence and relationship. 
  4. God does not give up on His offer to be with the ones He loves.  

 

Henri Nouwen, in Bread for the Journey: A Daybook of Wisdom and Faith, offers a daily reflection on how the prepositions change as you turn the pages of the Bible. The very language of covenant or “coming together,” that you see so prominently in Scripture, reveals God’s desire to be together with us. And as you turn the pages, you see that some very important prepositions change from for, to with, and finally in. In early versions of the covenant relationship, we see that God is “for” His people, to protect from dangers and guide to freedom. With Jesus comes a new dimension of the covenant; God is now “with” His people in the muck and mire of life, growing, living, and dying. But with the resurrection and the gift of the Holy Spirit comes the full depth of the covenant and final preposition, God can now be “in” us, as close to us as the air we breathe. God can animate us.  

God’s desire to be for, with, and in us is not news to Dallas Willard, who was very inspirational to the creation of The Renovaré Spiritual Formation Bible that is sometimes called the “with-God Bible.” Indeed, it was Dallas Willard who inspired the project team with his vision of a panoramic view of biblical history that shows the progressive nature of how God has offered His presence. Three sample columns from the much larger organizational table found in the preface of The Renovaré Spiritual Formation Bible can be found at the end of this article.  

And against that backdrop, let us listen in on Dallas Willard’s teaching on the Book of Acts within the context of the entire Biblical narrative. —Gary W. Moon

02.  Introduction

Being invited to deal with Acts in two hours is a little like eating a horse for lunch, so we will see what we can do. 

I do not think Acts is normally appreciated for what it really is. So, I want to begin our discussion by just asking you, “Can we understand Acts in terms of contemporary church life?” 

Sadly, I think that for the most part we have to look past present-day church life to understand the book of Acts. We have to place it in the context of God’s march through human history to fully grasp what was happening there. And if we don’t do that, it may block understanding of what the Kingdom of God is doing for us today. 

I believe if we want to get this—what was happening in Acts—right, we have to start in the first chapter of Genesis, specifically in Genesis 1:26, and observe what was happening on the last day of the creation account. It is extremely important to understand the statement in verse 26 because these words are about you and me. Here is what the record says: “Then God said, ‘Let us make human beings, man, in our likeness . . . in our likeness.’”Note: All Scripture quotations are the author’s paraphrase.

Now of course, God was not talking about how we look, because actually we look pretty rough sometimes. In our “likeness,” refers to letting them rule, or as some versions say, letting them have “dominion.” Or, you could capture it well by saying, “let them be responsible.” That is, I believe, the image of God. The image of God in the human being is the ability to rule, to have dominion, to be responsible. 

Now, human beings outside a proper understanding of this are likely to start thinking that they are at the top of the “rule chain.” But the verse does not say this. The rule of the human being is meant to be under the rule of God, and it only works that way, and that is why when Jesus came, after a long historical development, his message was simply, “Repent, for the Kingdom of the Heavens (which is the Jewish understanding of the Kingdom of God) is here.” 

03.  Seek First the Kingdom of God

We have to seek the Kingdom of God, and if we don’t seek it, surrendering our will to the will of God, we’ll wind up living on our own. The result of that will be the disaster of human history as we have come to know it. 

Now, we’re going to have to talk a lot about the Kingdom of God, so I want you to please think of it in this way. You don’t have to like or believe anything I say; you won’t be penalized. 

What is Kingdom of God? It is God in action. We talk about it as a “reign.” You go to our seminaries and you hear about God’s reign, but you may come out not knowing much about what that means. It is God in action. God is acting in many, many ways. His Kingdom is present wherever what he wants done is done. But don’t think about that abstractly; the Kingdom is about right here, right now. 

The new birth is an experience of the Kingdom of God. That is what John 3 is about. Nicodemus came to Jesus, claiming to be able to see God’s action with Jesus. He said, “We know you are a man come from God because no one can do the things you do unless God is”—what?—“unless God is with him” (John 3:2). See, that’s the Kingdom of God. And Nicodemus is right, in a sense, but he didn’t know what he was saying because he didn’t understand the reality of the Kingdom of God and how it comes in an invisible power that is personal. The Kingdom of God is spiritual, and that means unbodily, spiritual, personal power, and you can’t see it. 

Think back to Genesis 1:26 again: It was never intended that we would live in our own power; we were to exercise dominion but always in union with God. And the primary way that we were to know the presence of God with us was by his action with us. 

But a problem throughout Scripture is that people weren’t thinking of it in terms of God’s Kingdom but, instead, as a particular form of human kingdom, mainly one created by the religious authorities. What had come to be understood as the Law and the Prophets in the hands of religious authorities was not the law at all, but arrangements which people in religious power had developed for crushing the life out of the citizens—generally the people of God—and allowing them—the leaders—to exalt themselves. 

Jesus is constantly fighting that battle. This comes to a head in Matthew 21, where there is a big conflict between the religious authorities and Jesus. He is teaching about what has happened, what has gone wrong, and winds up with the statement that the ones in power rejected the cornerstone. 

And you know that the cornerstone is more than the stone that is in the corner; it is the stone that holds the whole structure together. Now Jesus is announcing a tremendous shift in Matthew 21:43, where he says to them, “The Kingdom of God will be taken from you and given to a people bearing the fruits thereof.” The book of Acts is an account of how that happened. It begins with post-resurrection teachings by Jesus and winds up with Paul in Rome teaching with a power beyond all human power. 

04.  Christ in Us

Think now of the two fellows on the road to Emmaus that Jesus was talking to, but they didn’t know who He was. After he was revealed, they said, “Did not our hearts burn within us?” That is “Jesus heartburn,” and they could identify that from how he had been with them when he was visible. He was with them. He could soon be in them. 

Again, this is a big point for us to get and for understanding what was happening in the book of Acts and happens today. There is a constant tendency to try to give power to people in a human organization and think that this will somehow work for the glory of God. 

So, before the ascension, Jesus presented himself alive in many convincing ways as he taught concerning the Kingdom of God. And he told them not to leave Jerusalem but to wait for what the Father had promised. They would soon realize that while John the Baptist baptized with water, Jesus’ followers would be baptized with the Holy Spirit. 

Unfortunately, many people, when they come to the book of Acts and other parts of the New Testament, tend to think in terms of what was manifested as the baptism of the Holy Spirit. So, let me perhaps shock you just by saying, the book of Acts is not about the baptism of the Holy Spirit. I’ve heard many people say, “Well, what we need is just to get in that upper room and pray, and God will baptize us with the Holy Spirit and that will solve our problems.” But it won’t. 

Now, I’m not speaking against any of the manifestations; I’m just saying if you want to understand what the baptism of the Holy Spirit means, you have to go beyond the manifestations and look at the reorganization of God’s people under the guidance of the Holy Spirit. 

Jesus said to them, “It is not for you to know times or epochs which the Father has put in his own authority, but you shall receive power.” Wait a minute. You are going to have power without position? They wanted position. Their understanding of power was that it flowed from position, and they could not understand how they could return to the dominion of Genesis 1:26 without having human position and power. That is something that comes up over and over in our ecclesiastical organizations, where power is associated with position. Yet if you look back, the prophetic tradition has always been power without position. Who sent you, guy? And they were still asking Jesus that question. Where did you get this authority? What were they asking? 

But Jesus says, “You shall receive power” (Acts 1:8). It’s a power that comes from God. It is not mediated through human beings. That shift is the primary shift in the book of Acts, because what you see now is God taking a people that has been prepared and reaching out to the whole world for transformation of character and society. 

So, now you see we’re talking world revolution. “I’ve been given say over everything in heaven and earth,” Jesus says, “Go, make Baptists, make Quakers, make Catholics, make Protestants, make Christians.” No, he did not say that. He said make disciples. 

Disciples of whom? Disciples of him. 

Now, when you get disciples, bring them together in trinitarian fellowship. It says to baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, but you have to understand that these names are the reality. Jesus is talking about immersion in a trinitarian fellowship, and you can see what that means, most clearly, if you read John 17, where Jesus is likening the fellowship he has with the Father with the fellowship that the disciples are intended to have with one another and with the Father. 

Now then, if we get this, then we can take on the last clause, which says, “teach them to do everything that I said.” And I don’t think he is talking about teaching them that they “ought” to do it, but teach them in such a way that they do the things that Jesus said, easily, routinely. How? Because at that point, he could be with them and in them. That is the point at which it is all done, and we have wrapped it up, and God has accomplished his purposes in human history and now he has the community that he intended from the beginning in the creation of human beings. 

World revolution is what the Great Commission is about. World revelation is what Acts 1 is about. “You will be my witnesses.” And what are witnesses? Witnesses are people who cause others to know something. They have knowledge, and they bring it and make it available to others. This is a radical shift. This is bringing knowledge of the Kingdom of God and of Jesus Christ and what he is doing on earth today—as well as then—to people as a basis for them deciding how to live their lives. 

The natural response to what Jesus is offering is transformation of character. Now then, when that comes, everything changes in human life generally. So in the book of Acts, what you are looking at is the transformation of lives as they step out of dependence on human organizations, and sometimes, that is manifestly against prevailing practices. 

As the Kingdom of God in Christ comes upon a group of people, it is safe for them to be able to communicate. And so, Pentecost reverses Babel. And that is one of the big things that happens, we see a transformation of life under Christ in the Kingdom of God that makes it safe for people to be able to cooperate. Isn’t that an interesting perception? People are going to move on to a different basis of life that is going to be the direct presence of God in their lives. They will exemplify a model of what it is like for people to live together who genuinely love one another, because that is going to be the mark of his disciples. 

Eternal life is not something that begins after you die. It helps if we translate this as “eternal living” because the phrase “eternal life” has pretty well been ruined. Eternal living is living now, as part of having our life in God. When Jesus says, “This is eternal life, that they would know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (John 17:3). Jesus is referring to an interactive, participative relationship with the Trinity. What we do, in this context, is a part of what God is doing, and it becomes eternal in that way. 

So, it is the quality of God’s life that is eternal life, and we were meant for that. That is what we were created for. The book of Acts comes at the point in the biblical story where all the preparation has been completed and Jesus has come into the world to make real the power of the Kingdom of God. And he was put to death. 

And, what do you know? He just gets up on the other side. He is present and begins to create a community of people who live in his eternal Kingdom now. And the book of Acts is about that, eternal living now, Genesis 1:26, now. It is a beautiful, beautiful story. 

05.  The Meaning of Trust

But, there is also a very BIG issue here. 

The big issue is the message, and associated with the message is the idea of salvation. What is salvation?  

So, let’s think a moment about the message. The message that enlivened and gave power to the people of Christ in the book of Acts was primarily the resurrection of Christ. The resurrection of Christ is the summary, really, of the Kingdom of God. Now he can rule in you. And the resurrection of Christ vindicates everything that he said about the Kingdom of God. 

And the message is, trust Jesus! And by that, he doesn’t mean to have the correct beliefs about him, but put your weight on him. Trust is something that people experience very differently from faith in our culture, and they [seem to] actually believe you can have faith in something you don’t trust. But, as presented in Acts, trust means that you have turned everything over to God. 

Now, it is important to understand that this message has a different take on the salvation that is underlying it. The church is facing a mistaken understanding of the message and what salvation is. If you get the message wrong, it will leave ordinary life out of the work of salvation. And that is basically what has happened in the prevailing understanding of Christians in the United States and in the Western culture. 

The focus of salvation has been placed on removing guilt. That has not always been true, and if you sing and read your old hymns, you’ll see that they include much more than that. In the hymn “Rock of Ages, Cleft for Me” is this line: “Be of sin the double cure.” What is the double cure? The lyrics answer, “Save from wrath and make me pure.” Salvation from sin is not just salvation from guilt; it is salvation from the power of wrongdoing over my life. It’s the double cure, and if you have a message that does not encompass that, then you are going to have a different version of salvation. And if your message leaves out whole life, then your salvation will leave out whole life. That, I think, is the place that we must really bear down and be sure we understand it. 

06.  Resurrection Life

Resurrection life in the Kingdom of God comes to enable us to easily and routinely escape the power of sin as a practice in our lives. This actually goes back and digs into the root of the whole idea in the Old Testament which, if you read it, will return over and over and over again to the issue of obedience. If you are able to look at what is there, you will get the impression that there is simply no excuse for not obeying. 

Now, you know if you read the Psalms, you are not left under any false impressions about this. The Psalms really are spiritual mud-wrestling. You just get down there in the real stuff and you roll around in it. And you cry for victory and experience some of it, and you come out with these wonderful statements over and over about how the people who stay engaged with God and obey him live a different kind of life, a Twenty-Third Psalm kind of life. They actually live that. But, that is a different understanding of salvation. Salvation as it comes down through the ages gradually moves further and further away from obedience. 

And yet, a human arrangement for forgiveness is something that the church very early on offers to human beings and makes them dependent on the human organization. The human organization has control over forgiveness. 

So, what then is the message that we speak of here and what is the message in the book of Acts? The message of the book of Acts is the resurrection of Christ and the availability of that life to everyone who trusts him, and the guidance of the Kingdom of God over activities of those who are in the fellowship of disciples. Salvation, then, is to live in that life by the power of God so that now you get a different quality of existence— resurrection life. 

So Paul in the opening of Colossians 3 says, “If you then, since you have been raised with Christ, seek those things that are above, where Christ sits on the right hand of God. Set your affections on things above and not on the things on the earth, because you are dead” (Colossians 3:1–3). 

Already dead! See, your old life; you have now transferred out of that. It is like you’ve been running on electricity and now you switch over to propane or something like that. It’s a very crude metaphor, but the idea is you enter a different reality. The idea of resurrection life in the Kingdom of God is now what is running your life. 

Now, is that a different gospel, preaching the Kingdom? Would Jesus be preaching two gospels? Not likely. They are the same gospel. Preaching the Kingdom of God is preaching repentance and returning to God, and putting your faith in the reality of the Kingdom. 

That is the same as repentance toward God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ. Now, what you see here is that Jesus and the Kingdom of God are coming together. They are coming together; they are not two things. They are one thing. If you have a Kingdom without Jesus, you don’t have much of a Kingdom; and if you have Jesus without a Kingdom, you don’t have much of a Jesus. They come together. Salvation is being caught up in the life that Jesus is now living on earth. 

Now then, where is he living that life? Not just in church. I hope he is living his life there, but that is not the primary location. The primary location is the world, which we were created to be responsible for. Can you begin to see how these things come together now? What were we created for? Responsibility for the earth. Where am I responsible for the earth? Wherever I am. Where am I a disciple? Wherever I am. Whatever I am doing. That’s where I come to know and live in the reality of the Kingdom of God. That is what discipleship is designed to equip me for. That involves reframing my mind, the way I think about my life. 

And you all, I’m sure, have read that marvelous passage in the sermon “The Weight of Glory,” where C. S. Lewis talks about the most common human being you ever saw may one day be something that you might be inclined to worship or you might be inclined to run from like the worst thing you ever met in a nightmare.C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory” in The Weight of Glory: And Other Addresses, rev. (New York: Harper Collins, 1980), 45.That’s crucial for understanding how the first big issue in the New Testament is the equality of all people before God. In Colossians 3, Paul says, “You have put off the old man with his deeds and put on the new person that is renewed in knowledge like God who made him . . . There is no Greek, no Jew” (Colossians 3:9–11). 

07.  God Moves In

And so, Paul, here he is sitting—in the last verse in the book of Acts—preaching the Kingdom of God and teaching concerning the Lord Jesus Christ with all openness, without regrets. He wasn’t supported by a human organization. He was there because God had picked him up and put him there. He was supported by the Kingdom of God, and the Kingdom of God brought all kinds of resources to get him there. That is what I’m trying to think with you about in talking about the book of Acts. 

Where Jesus is saying, “Keep my commandments and the Father will send another Comforter”—Parakletos, other than Jesus, God’s visible presence—he goes on to explain his Father will move in with you if you simply keep his words. He’ll move in with you and live with you; it will be like having another person in your house, or three other persons shall we say (John 14:15–16, 23). 

They [the Trinity] will be living in your house acting and instructing, guiding and making things happen that are totally beyond you. And as we live there, then we already are living eternal life; we are already placed with others who are part of the eternal fellowship; and we are looking forward to being in a better place, serving God, ruling under him forever and ever. And that brings us to completion. 

08.  Ways of Being For, With, and InFrom the table in “A Brief Overview of the With-God Life,” The Renovaré Spiritual Formation Bible, Richard J. Foster, ed. (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), xivi–xivii.

Footnotes

Professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, Dallas Willard is an ordained Southern Baptist minister and has written several books, including Hearing God, The Spirit of the Disciplines, The Divine Conspiracy, Renovation of the Heart, The Great Omission, and Knowing Christ Today.

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