It is a distinct honor and privilege for me to introduce our commencement speaker. Dr. Dallas Willard has served since 1965 as the Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southern California. Receiving his M.A and Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Dr. Willard quickly established himself as a first-rate philosopher, especially in the area of Phenomenology. His translation of Edmund Husserl’s Investigations, a cornerstone of the phenomenology movement in the twentieth century has been especially pivotal.
His publications in Philosophy are concerned primarily with Epistemology, the philosophy of mind and of logic. He’s in the midst right now of writing a book on the death of moral knowledge in the west. But over the past twenty-five years, much of Dallas’ writings have focused on issues pertinent to Christianity and Christian living. He’s the author of numerous books including The Spirit of the Disciplines, Hearing God, Renovation of the Heart, The Divine Conspiracy, The Great Omission, and most recently, Knowing Christ Today. Please join me in giving Dr. Willard a warm, Westmont welcome. Dallas.
Thank you, Gayle. Thank you very much and congratulations, President Beebe, your faculty and administration, your Board of Trustees on this wonderful result for so many people here today. Blessings on honored guests, and friends and family but above all, special blessing and congratulations to the graduates.
Now, at this point, one is always wondering what additionally could be said to you. You have heard a lot in the last hours and the days and years you have been here, and yet I think that there may be something left to say. If you are looking at your program, you will see that I am going to talk to you for a few minutes on “Living Eternally in the Moment.”
My strategy, first of all, is to tell you what in the world I mean by that and then I will try to unfold it piece by piece. You know, we often mistakenly think eternal life is something that begins later but, eternal life is now. It is eternal living. Now sometimes, I think it would help if when we go through our Scriptures, we would just replace eternal life with eternal living.
Now what exactly does that mean? It simply means that living moment by moment, our lives are caught up in God’s life. And by that, I mean what God is doing, and in particular what God is doing where you are and where you are going to be. God’s life invites us to be part of it and we can make our lives and our moments eternal by making sure that we are acting in the presence and the character and the power of God. Practically what that means is that we acknowledge His presence where we are and that we expect Him to be involved in what we are doing so that our life becomes a part of His life and what He is doing in our times.
The Apostle Paul tells us in 1 Corinthians 3—”No man can lay a foundation other than the one which is laid which is Jesus Christ.” You have had in your lives because of your families and because of your time here, you have been laying that foundation ever more strongly. Your wonderful faculty and friends here have been engaged in that.
It is a process, but this is certainly an important point of transition in that process. There is still some reason to calling this commencement though you might think it’s a little late to commence at this point. But still, you are making a big transition and now you are going to go out into your places and as I look at you and think about that, I am thinking about those places, often ordinary places—quite ordinary in the eyes of the world—and probably not places you expect to be. Very few of us when we have gone a few miles down the road can look back and say, “I expected to be right where I am.”
And Paul tells us that we have the opportunity to build on that foundation of Jesus Christ. But he goes ahead to say, “But if any man builds upon the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw” (some translations say stubble) and you may be thinking about the three little piggies at this point. You’re going to build a house. They didn’t get up to gold; they just got up to brick—not bad. But in the realm of personality, we go far beyond brick, and so we have the opportunity to build on the foundation of Jesus Christ a precious, eternal life. Each man’s work will become evident for the day will show it because it will be revealed with fire. And the fire itself will test the quality of each man’s work. “If any man’s work which he has built upon that foundation remains, he shall receive a reward.” I believe the fire is simply God Himself and as we come into His manifest, overpowering presence, then everything will disappear that was not built solidly on Jesus Christ utilizing the presence of Christ to do that.
Now, if we are going to succeed with that—and I am talking to myself as much as to you, we always have to remember that we live at the cross-section of two landscapes. One of those landscapes is visible; the other is invisible and as we build upon Christ where we wind up in our lives, we do want to keep in mind that even though it might seem like a quite ordinary place, God is there. It’s a good exercise to practice when you awaken in the morning and perhaps through the day to just affirm God is here. That’s the heart of the invisible landscape.
The visible landscape can be overpowering, and the danger is that we will become lost in that—that we will lose what Paul calls the mind of the spirit which is fixed on the invisible landscape of God and His power. And by the way, you are part of the invisible landscape—your thoughts and your choices and your experiences are not visible. They are a part of the invisible landscape, and the great danger is that you will not know that and that you will think to build your life in what is visible—the natural presence of God. And when you do that, you are likely to be overwhelmed by your sufferings and your disappointments, what others may do to you, and you may give up and start building with hay and stubble and wood instead of with the gold and silver and precious stones of the life of Jesus Himself.
You know the story of Jacob and you will recall how in Genesis 28, he wound up in a ditch—Jacob in a ditch—a good story for us to keep in mind. He had turned to the visible and his mother had helped him. They devised a scheme to get the blessing of Isaac on Jacob instead of Esau and they carried it out and if you ever want to see a good illustration of wood, hay and stubble, just read Jacob’s stories. There is a lot of wood, hay and stubble there. Gradually, the good stuff breaks through, but it is a challenge.
Jacob was running because he was afraid his brother would kill him, and he came to a ditch or ravine and the sun was down and he took a stone and laid It down for a pillow and went to sleep. You will remember that when he went to sleep, he had a dream and the dream was of a ladder that reached into heaven, but it came all the way down to earth, right down to the ditch, right down where he was. And God spoke to him in the dream and gave him his promise, “I am with you. I will keep you wherever you go. I will bring you back to this land for I will not leave you until I have done what I promised you. And then, Jacob awoke from his sleep and said, ‘Surely the Lord is in this place, and I did not know it.’ “ Jacob was living in the visible landscape. He was trying to deal with his life simply in terms that he could bring up on his own. But now he said, “How awesome is this place. This is none other than the house of God and this is the Gate of Heaven.”
He was like Paul. Paul had a hard time with his life. I cringe sometimes when he is recounting all of the things he suffered because I realize how little I have actually suffered. But in your suffering, you turn to the world of God. You turn to the invisible landscape. Jacob did that.
Sometimes, philosophers come up with pretty good ideas and the philosopher Heidegger has come up with the idea of Geworfenheit or “thrown-ness” and his idea is that we are thrown into the world by our birth and then events keep throwing us into the world and that’s a good thing for us to remember that events will put us in positions that we never expected and sometimes those will not be pleasant positions to be in. And that’s where we want to remember, Geworfenheit or not, God is with us and we can count on Him and expect Him to act with us.
Now, as you go from this place, one of the things that is going to happen to you Is people around you are going to say what you learned here is to speak in theological terms—BOLOGNA. They are going to say, well, you got a lot of nice things there and got a lot of nice friends and perhaps some illusions to support you on your way, but it isn’t knowledge of reality. And you are going to be challenged to stand up and say, “I know whom I have believed. I know God, I have knowledge of reality in the basic teachings of the Christian church and a spiritual life that has been given to me.” That will be a challenge to you. It’s a major challenge in our time to present what we have, not as just faith but faith environed in knowledge, and you can do that because God will be with you and He will manifest Himself so that you will have a way of dealing with the realities of your life in terms of the realities of the invisible landscape that cannot be denied by those who are willing to know. Knowledge does not jump down people’s throats. You have to seek it. That’s true in Algebra. That’s true in Chemistry and any other field. You have to want it. You have to welcome it, and you have to seek it and you will know the reality of what you have learned here. You will know that what you have is knowledge of that reality by its responses to your expectations of presence and action with you. That is the challenge to make your life eternal.
In order to enter into it, you have to keep your heart. You have to guard your heart. You have to learn how to lead the spiritual life. Proverbs 4:23 says, “Keep your heart with all diligence because what your life amounts to comes out of your heart.” Interesting—not your circumstances—out of your heart. Your heart is the direct connection with God and His Kingdom, and you must learn how to keep your heart present to God. He is the way we heard last evening in the sermon at Baccalaureate; He is the way, not something He did, not something He said. He is the way.
When you ask for guidance in your life, God does not give you a road map; He gives you a person, and that person is Jesus Christ but, we have to seek Him. We have to call upon Him. We have to lean upon Him, cling to Him—the person—and that’s the secret of the spiritual life.
Now, when we do that, the result we hope for may be sometime coming but watch and wait in the knowledge of a future that is also there in which it is true to say that the sufferings of the present time are not worthy to be compared with the Glory that is to be revealed. In the meantime, patiently put into practice, right where you are the things that Jesus teaches us to do. The key is to do it and if you don’t know what is going to happen, that’s no reason not to put it into practice. Take the things that Jesus said, put them into practice and you will certainly fail and then you will learn and as you go, gradually your life will be one with the life of Christ. You know the truth and the reality that sets us free by putting into practice the words of Jesus in the companionship with Jesus.
One of the greatest blessings of living this way is that you become assured of who you are as God’s creature, child and co-laborer and this is very important because nearly everything you will meet will try to turn you away from that knowledge. Being with Him and Him with us becomes a tangible fact in our life as our life progresses.
I like the words that simply say, “You are an unceasing spiritual being with an eternal destiny in God’s great universe.” Let me say that again. “You are an unceasing spiritual being with an eternal destiny in God’s great universe.”
I wonder if you would be willing to say that, changing the pronoun. “I am an unceasing spiritual being with an eternal destiny in God’s great universe.” Would you be willing to say that with me? “I am an unceasing spiritual being with an eternal destiny in God’s great universe.” That was a little weak. Could we try it one more time? “I am an unceasing spiritual being with an eternal destiny in God’s great universe.” Wherever you are; whatever you are doing; that is who you are and as you seize that truth and put it into practice, you are living eternally in the moment. Thank you!