Dallas Willard - The Spirit of the Disciplines - Reissue: Understanding How God Changes Lives

The Secret of the Easy Yoke

Making Theology of the Disciplines Practical

Salvation Is a Life

Little Less Than a God

The Nature of Life

Spiritual Life: The Bodys Fulfillment

St. Pauls Psychology of RedemptionThe Example

History and the Meaning of the Disciplines

Some Main Disciplines for the Spiritual Life

Is Poverty Spiritual?

The Disciplines and the Power Structures of This World

Jeremy Taylors Counsel on the Application of Rules for Holy Living

Discipleship: For Super-Christians Only?

To a new generation of readers The Spirit of the Disciplines confidently says that there is a way of spiritual transformation that is accessible to all people and it really does work in the contemporary world. The spirit of the disciplines is the way of Jesus, our divine but human teacher, who has walked and now walks that path before us and invites us to simply follow him as that path leads us through our lives into eternity.

The path starts where we are and as we areno matter what precisely that means, or how despairing our situation may seem from the human perspective. We gain insight into how and why his path works and receive a power far beyond ourselves as we take the simple steps of his trusting apprentice living in his Kingdomthe Kingdom of the heavens.

The new person and the new world for which humanity constantly seeks is the overriding theme of the biblical writings, culminating in the person and Kingdom of Jesus. To experience the newness of life in Jesus Kingdom, we need only to put into practice what confidence we have in him, observe the outcome, and learn how to do better what we believe he would have us do. His way is self-validating to anyone who will openly and persistently put it into practice. The Spirit of the Disciplines tries to show how this may be done in our day.

To those who overcome, Jesus says, I will grant to eat of the tree of life, which is in the Paradise of God. This is for us. Now.

Dallas Willard
March 1999

The modern age is an age of revolutionrevolution motivated by insight into the appalling vastness of human suffering and need. Pleas for holiness and attacks on sin and Satan were used for centuries as the guide and the cure for the human situation. Today such pleas have been replaced with a new agenda. On the communal level, political and social critiques yield recipes for revolutions meant to liberate humankind from its many bondages. And on the individual level various self-fulfillment techniques promise personal revolutions bringing freedom in an unfree world and passage into the good life. Such are modern answers to humanitys woes.

Against this background a few voices have continued to emphasize that the cause of the distressed human condition, individual and socialand its only possible cureis a spiritual one. But what these voices are saying is not clear. They point out that social and political revolutions have shown no tendency to transform the heart of darkness that lies deep in the breast of every human being. That is evidently true. And amid a flood of techniques for self-fulfillment there is an epidemic of depression, suicide, personal emptiness, and escapism through drugs and alcohol, cultic obsession, consumerism, and sex and violenceall combined with an inability to sustain deep and enduring personal relationships.

So obviously the problem is a spiritual one. And so must be the cure.

But if the cure is spiritual, how does modern Christianity fit into the answer? Very poorly, it seems, for Christians are among those caught up in the sorrowful epidemic just referred to. And that fact is so prominent that modern thinking has come to view the Christian faith as powerless, even somehow archaic, at the very least irrelevant.

Yet even though the churchs track record for solving social and individual ills may not appear historically outstanding, we believe that it holds the only answerstill. What then is keeping Christianity from being that guide to life which it alone can be? Christianity can only succeed as a guide for current humanity if it does two things.

First, it must take the need for human transformation as seriously as do modern revolutionary movements. The modern negative critique of Christianity arose in the first place because the church was not faithful to its own messageit failed to take human transformation seriously as a real, practical issue to be dealt with in realistic terms. Fortunately, there are today many signs that the church in all its divisions is preparing to correct this failure.

Second, it needs to clarify and exemplify realistic methods of human transformation. It must show how the ordinary individuals who make up the human race today can become, through the grace of Christ, a love-filled, effective, and powerful community.

This book offers help with this second task. Here I want to deal with methods for the spiritual life, for the life present in the Christian gospel. We can become like Christ in character and in power and thus realize our highest ideals of well-being and well-doing. That is the heart of the New Testament message.

Do you believe this is possible?

My central claim is that we can become like Christ by doing one thingby following him in the overall style of life he chose for himself. If we have faith in Christ, we must believe that he knew how to live. We can, through faith and grace, become like Christ by practicing the types of activities he engaged in, by arranging our whole lives around the activities he himself practiced in order to remain constantly at home in the fellowship of his Father.

What activities did Jesus practice? Such things as solitude and silence, prayer, simple and sacrificial living, intense study and meditation upon Gods Word and Gods ways, and service to others. Some of these will certainly be even more necessary to us than they were to him, because of our greater or different need. But in a balanced life of such activities, we will be constantly enlivened by The Kingdom Not of This Worldthe Kingdom of Truth as seen in John 18:3637.

But history keeps a heavy hand upon our present thoughts and feelings. Such a faith as just described is strongly opposed today by powerful tendencies around us. Faith today is treated as something that only should make us different, not that actually does or can make us different. In reality we vainly struggle against the evils of this world, waiting to die and go to heaven. Somehow weve gotten the idea that the essence of faith is entirely a mental and inward thing.

I dont think anyone wanted or planned this state of affairs. We have simply let our thinking fall into the grip of a false opposition of grace to works that was caused by a mistaken association of works with merit. And history has only made things worse. It has built a wall between faith and grace, and what we actually do . Of course we know there must be some connection between grace and life, but we cant seem to make it intelligible to ourselves. So, worst of all, were unable to use that connection as the basis for specific guidance as to how to enter into Christs character and power.

Today, we think of Christs power entering our lives in various waysthrough the sense of forgiveness and love for God or through the awareness of truth, through special experiences or the infusion of the Spirit, through the presence of Christ in the inner life or through the power of ritual and liturgy or the preaching of the Word, through the communion of the saints or through a heightened consciousness of the depths and mystery of life. All of these are doubtlessly real and of some good effect. However, neither individually nor collectively do any of these ways reliably produce large numbers of people who really are like Christ and his closest followers throughout history. That is statistically verifiable fact .