“Dear Self-Entitled Yuppie,” the hand-scribbled note began, “on what planet do you think it’s okay to completely block people’s driveways?”
The note was tucked under my windshield wiper. The letters were large enough to read from a distance. The author questioned my ability to read English, deemed my car “stupid,” and finished with great concern that I might “PAY ATTENTION” in the future. I read the note in an impound lot. It cost me several hundred dollars to be reunited with my car. This day home from work was not going well.
It’s true that, foggy from my head cold that day, I had partially blocked their driveway. It’s also true that I carefully checked, front and back, in an effort to not do what I had been accused of.
Despite good intentions, I overlooked something important. Then I paid for it.
Driving my freed car back home, I thought about what had happened. Being human, part of me demanded something in return for all my trouble and money—especially on a day when I was home with the flu. I remembered a time when feeling wronged demanded a response. My reactions would have included anything from getting angry all the way to trying to even the score. It seemed automatic, fair and right. There was little choice at all.
When I decided following Jesus should probably affect the way I lived my life, it became clear I was not supposed to display these reactions. But what did good Christians do? Pretend not to have them? For a long time, indulging or denying seemed like the only two options.
But I had been introduced to someone who wrote about becoming a substantially different kind of person—as if it were really possible. He said someone could respond to life’s challenges in ways that were not forced, suppressed or artificial, but instead, in a way that is naturally gracious. This, he asserted, was the intention of Jesus; the way of the easy yoke and light burden.
Up to that point I experienced limited impact from his words on my life. I had my ultimate hope in Jesus but had little idea how following him might actually change things here and now. In my career, family, friendships, and even church community I felt captive to difficulties and to the expectations of others. But worst of all were the expectations I had set for myself and constantly failed to meet. Finding little traction to change these areas for the better, I constantly bumped into limits I seemed unable to alter or even understand. Outwardly, my life was punctuated by thrills from wilderness adventures and international travel, but on the inside I felt very small.
Such was my life when I first came to study books by Dallas Willard.
Reading his words, I began to realize I had carried some unhelpful ideas for a long time. The funny thing is I hadn’t even been aware these ideas were in me. I realized I had serious doubts as to whether “following” Jesus’ words would actually make a difference in one’s life, or if they were even intended to. But if I don’t really believe something is possible, then how much progress will I make?
As I read Dallas Willard’s books, it was obvious that the Bible was clearly alive for him and that he took it all seriously—from the miraculous to the mundane. His care and concern were deeply apparent as he explained that we must view ourselves as the type of people who could have shown up in the “with God” history we read in the scriptures. If vivid communication with God and occasions of inexplicable wonderment are solely reserved for very special people of faith, then we are all that special. The gift enabling these sorts of experiences has already been sent and just needs to be opened and treasured.
I became aware of the lens through which I had been reading scripture, and I was eager to step out from behind it. It had been so limiting. If I believed God acted in wonderful and mysterious ways once, then why did I no longer believe he would now? How easy it is to doubt my “specialness” and protect myself from risking that sort of radical faith.
Today I continue to believe that people are meant to live in an ongoing conversation with God, speaking and being spoken to. rightly understood I believe that this can be abundantly verified in experience. God’s visits to Adam and Eve in the garden, Enoch’s walks with God and the face-to-face conversations between Moses and Jehovah are all commonly regarded as highly exceptional moments in the religious history of humankind. Aside from their obviously unique historical role, however, they are not meant to be exceptional at all. Rather they are examples of the normal life God intended for us: God’s indwelling his people through personal presence and fellowship. Given who we are by basic nature, we live—really live—only through regular speaking in our souls and thus “by every word that comes from the mouth of God.”Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999), 18.
I opened myself to the written word of God like opening oneself to a beautiful piece of music. Once given access, I found it can hold the power to provoke fresh perspective, memories, imagery and ideas. Reading the word no longer felt like a dutiful chore for the end of the day, but more like gazing into a world of relevant possibilities. Here was a chance to claim hope, to gain wisdom and power far beyond myself.
I can look back now and see that God stirred up the very issues blocking me on my journey and introduced me to the teachings of Dallas Willard at just the right time to provide healing in those very areas of my life.
I use the word “healing” intentionally. We often say someone helped us with something, like carry groceries. Dallas’s influence, on paper and later in person, would be more appropriate to refer to as healing, in the sense that a doctor thinks deeply about symptoms and their underlying causes in order to recommend a course of action that makes a real difference, that causes something to function once again as it should.
So much I heard about following God was focused on getting ourselves out of the way—losing our lives so we might be found in the Lord, dying to self, setting aside a vile body with its accompanying rampant urges. I wanted my life to change, to find some freedom from the pettiness, selfishness and fearfulness that motivated so many of my actions and kept me enslaved to a lesser existence. It only made sense that sacrifice is the price for such freedom, but if I started to get closer to God and began to change, would “I” be erased? Does following God necessitate the loss of personality? Are our bodies actually vile? Had I been turning selections from the Bible into mantras, repeating them while missing a more meaning of Scripture? I wanted to know.
Willard spoke of the body being conditioned by a fallen world and needing retraining, but “the body is not, in the biblical view, essentially evil. While it is infected with evil, it can be delivered.”Dallas Willard, Renovation of the Heart: Putting on the Character of Christ (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 2002), 36. In a strikingly original and hopeful perspective, he suggested there is a way of retraining our bodies and lives so they do not continually struggle to act in a way consistent with Jesus and his kingdom. To even begin to consider a whole-hearted attempt at this journey of retraining, several unhelpful layers of me needed to be removed.
Many believers I knew seemed to expect God to make all the choices in life for them, moment by moment, if they could only hear him clearly enough. But I found that trying really hard in the moment helps little more than trying really hard to run a marathon we didn’t train for. Was Paul’s charge to pray without ceasing really about getting a continual “turn left” and “now turn right” or some other kind of interaction?
A wonderful theme in Willard’s writing is of God patiently developing his character and will in us, prizing a fruitful relationship over robotic compliance. Would a healthy parent instruct their youngster continuously on how to play in the backyard or would they simply be pleased with the child delighting themselves in play, within the boundaries—or the will—established by the parent? Does a parent aspire to grow a child solely in compliance or is it to instill in them values so the child, more or less, begins to naturally live them out? Isn’t the mechanical sort of compliance really the low road of human estimation? When we look at the conversational relationship between God and Moses or with David, or especially the way Jesus engaged people, does it really seem that God desires anything resembling this kind of one-dimensional relationship with us?
It seemed to me that many Christians bought into an idea that following God is akin to entering a vast and flavorless “sameness.” But in entering the journey through Willard’s perspective, I began to find that following God is not at odds with his creation of us, but affirming it. Later, in person, Willard encouraged me to consider how God used the vivid and diverse personalities of the saints to further his kingdom. Their individual flavor was not removed by God but used instead to further his purposes.
I was beginning to see God free of the lesser, miserly human characteristics that have been projected on him by so many. Instead I saw God as true, noble, pure, lovely, kind and winsome and gracious beyond any human reasoning. He is simply too good to be true, yet he is.
Understanding that God did not have a mousy or vanilla mold to fit me in was not only affirming but also motivating. I considered what it would be like casting off old habits that kept me opting for the low road in life’s challenging situations. How unoriginal that path is! How could I start becoming more of the type of person that overwhelmingly willed the good of others like Jesus, more of the type of person where the fruit of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control—was evident and more of an automatic response to both easy and difficult situations alike?
Where could I set my compass for this journey? Guidance from most Christian circles overwhelmingly focused on not sinning. In fact, nearly every Christian community I had spent time in had an underlying focus—either spoken or simply understood—on being “saved” as primarily evidenced by not sinning.
I remember a men’s retreat where the guest speaker, who I thoroughly enjoyed off-stage, kept repeating the phrase “don’t screw up” to the point it became a slogan
for the weekend. I certainly agree not sinning is a good thing, but to avoid “screwing up” was not the primary emphasis of Jesus’ teaching.
It is certainly easy to oversimplify something with the very best of intentions, but if you use “not screwing up” as a roadmap for this life, where will you end up? Can I really expect to end up in San Francisco if my directions are: “Don’t go to Seattle?” What about a desirable, realistic goal to move towards? What is more likely to work, simply trying not to focus on something, or focusing on something else that is more compelling?
Dallas Willard discusses at length this elevation of avoiding wrongdoing above all else, calling it Gospels of Sin Management. Taking what Jesus had to say about living our lives differently here and now and putting it on the back burner has disastrous effects.
The souls of human beings are left to shrivel and die on the plains of life because they are not introduced into the environment for which they were made, the living kingdom of eternal life.Dallas Willard, Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), 58.
If gospels of sin management are preached, they are what Christians will believe. And those in the wider world who reject those gospels will believe that what they have rejected is the gospel of Jesus Christ himself—when, in fact, they haven’t heard it.Willard, Divine Conspiracy, 58.
The human propensity to focus on external actions neglects the real issue: the heart from which the actions spring. In contrast, Jesus spent a great deal of time talking about a new kind of life centered on a vivid, winsome, irresistible love. Truly, his life demonstrated this love, and his call for us to follow his example requires something radically beyond not simply doing bad things. The source of our actions must be changed. According to Willard:
It is precisely Jesus’ grasp of the structure of the human soul that also leads him to deal primarily with the sources of wrongdoing and not to focus on the actions themselves. He thus avoids the futility . . . of making the law ultimate. Wrong action, he well knew, is not the problem in human existence, though it is constantly taken to be so. It is only a symptom, which from time to time produces vast evils in its own right.
Going to the source of action is a major part of what he has in mind by saying that one must “go beyond the goodness of scribes and Pharisees.”Willard, Divine Conspiracy, 139–140.
Suddenly trying to follow Jesus became about increasing in his life, not an exercise of avoiding death.
Riding the bus to work one day, my thoughts went somewhere relatively new. I had spent plenty of time thinking about what God had done for me and what I hoped he might do, but today I just thought about him. Could I say I actually knew the Being that created me and everything else? Honestly, I didn’t feel like I could and that bothered me.
It seems human ideas ever so subtly find their way into what is thought and taught about God. Studying God’s written word certainly helps avoid falling for religious sound bites taken out of context, and the Holy Spirit is promised to guide us into all truth. But it seemed like a really good idea, for many reasons, to get to know God.
I had read many books to that end, but Willard’s words contained a rare and attractive spirit. Whatever the topic or passage of scripture being discussed, the inescapable idea in all his work is that God is a being simply permeated with love and joy. I saw how this illuminated in hopeful radiance not only Scripture passages where the heart of God is displayed clearly, but also the ones were we might be challenged to see it.
Willard says that we all have a theology—a concept of if God exists and what he is like—and we all live out our lives accordingly. If we are unaware of what ideas we have about God, then those ideas hold sway over us all the more. So many things over the years had tinted and warped my outlook of God and by extension the scriptures. Obviously, here was someone with a much clearer, less distorted lens and I paid attention. It was refreshing and also startling at times to glimpse what he saw: “We should, to begin with, think that God leads a very interesting life, and that he is full of joy. Undoubtedly he is the most joyous being in the universe.”Willard, Divine Conspiracy, 62.
We are enraptured by a well-done movie sequence or by a few bars from an opera or lines from a poem. We treasure our great experiences for a lifetime, and we may have very few of them. But he is simply one great inexhaustible and eternal experience of all that is good and true and beautiful and right. This is what we must think of when we hear theologians and philosophers speak of him as a perfect being. This is his life.Willard, Divine Conspiracy, 63.
I have spent time around teachers who had plenty of knowledge about God, but knowledge apparently hadn’t found its way to their heart. I know it had not found its way into mine. But I have now come to believe that gathering a great deal of information and facts in a context separate from humbly seeking the heart of God can actually become an inoculation from that knowledge (actually interacting experientially with God) ever permeating and affecting your heart. After meeting Willard in person, it became readily apparent such an inoculation is not the case with him. The caliber of penetrating thoughts from this philosopher/minister seem only matched by the sincere and humble care in which they are shared.
Comparing my life before to what is now happening is somewhat like the difference between living in an old house where the water and electricity had been shut off, and then suddenly turned on. Life in God was flooding in and it felt wonderful, but how much would I really change from all this?
How am I to read passages of the Bible like the Sermon on the Mount? Can anyone’s life really match up to the portraits of a progressively freed and loving heart Jesus gives, up to blessing those who curse me? It might be tempting to think Jesus is simply establishing how short we fall. But knowing him is a knowing better than that.
Willard explains it is tempting to hear the Sermon on the Mount in the context of our lives right now, with all our current habits and behavior that would make following them impossible. “If you want to keep the Ten Commandments or the teachings of Jesus, don’t try to keep them. Try to become the type of person who will keep them,” said Willard. The former is the dead end way of forces efforts; the latter is about inner change that will naturally express itself.
But the Sermon on the Mount requires this different sort of effort.
The various scenes and situations that Jesus discusses . . . progressively presuppose that we know where our well-being really lies, that we have laid aside anger and obsessive desire, that we do not try to mislead people to get our way, and so on. Then loving and helping those who hurt us and hate us, for example, will come as a natural progression. Doing so will seem quite right, and we will be able to do so.Willard, Divine Conspiracy, 139.
How do we approach this different sort of effort? In answering the question, “What is the most important commandment?” Jesus identifies the unique aspects of being a person. Willard gives great attention to these areas and how we might orient them in love on God.
To change substantially to become more like Jesus must be possible. If he said it was enough for students to become like their master, wouldn’t there be way to actually make progress?
The mechanics of that process are called spiritual formation, one where
all of the essential parts of the human self are effectively organized around God, as they are restored and sustained by him. . . . leading to the ideal end and its result is love of God with all the heart, soul, mind, and strength and the neighbor as oneself.Willard, Renovation of the Heart, 31
What will happen to us? With our energies more focused on submitting and loving God than simply avoiding “messing up,” could our freedom in Jesus lead to trouble?
It means that they will then for the first time be able to do what they want to do. Of course they will be able to steal, lie, and murder all they want—which will be none at all. But they will also be able to be truthful and transparent and helpful and sacrificially loving, with joy—and they will want to be.Willard, Renovation of the Heart, 65.
What I’ve been describing above is who I want to be and who I feel that I am becoming. The day I read the note on my car was a chance that I had to step forward into a new way of living.
So what happened? I didn’t feel the need to get revenge on my note-writing and car-towing friend, or the need to do something overtly Christian. I didn’t go and hug them. I didn’t bake them a cake with Bible verses in frosting. More importantly, I didn’t allow the sort of poisonous feeling to set up that I would have experienced before, and wished them well, entertained them for a while.
Later that day I parked my car across the street. I saw someone opening the gate in the fence that had concealed the driveway. They looked up at me and then at my car. I looked them in the eye and smiled—cheerfully, sincerely. After all, this person had helped me to know something. With God’s help, and some good guidance, I am becoming different.
Jeff Burkebile lives and practices architecture in the San Francisco Bay Area and recently completed the Renovaré Institute for Christian Spiritual Formation. He volunteers as an educator at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University, helping create innovations caring for the essential needs of the world’s poorest communities. Jeff married Regina, the love of his life, this August.