Also by Dallas Willard:
The Divine Conspiracy
Knowing Christ Today
Hearing God
Renovation of the Heart
The Great Omission
The Spirit of the Disciplines
Also by John Ortberg:
Who Is This Man?
The Me I Want to Be
God Is Closer Than You Think
The Life Youve Always Wanted
If You Want to Walk on Water, Youve Got to Get Out of the Boat
D ALLAS W ILLARD
LIVING IN
CHRIST'S
PRESENCE
FINAL WORDS ON HEAVEN
AND THE KINGDOM OF GOD
WITH A DISCUSSION GUIDE
BY GARY W. MOON
www.IVPress.com/books
InterVarsity Press
P.O. Box 1400,
Downers Grove, IL 60515-1426
World Wide Web: www.ivpress.com
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2014 by Jane Willard, John Ortberg and Dallas Willard Center
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from InterVarsity Press.
InterVarsity Press is the book-publishing division of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, a movement of students and faculty active on campus at hundreds of universities, colleges and schools of nursing in the United States of America, and a member movement of the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students. For information about local and regional activities, write Public Relations Dept., InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA, 6400 Schroeder Rd., P.O. Box 7895, Madison, WI 53707-7895, or visit the IVCF website at www.intervarsity.org .
All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from the Holy Bible, New International Version. NIV . Copyright 1973, 1978, 1984 by the International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.
While all stories in this book are true, some names and identifying information in this book have been changed to protect the privacy of the individuals involved.
Cover design: Cindy Kiple
Images: businessman silhouette: Andrew Penner/Getty Images
sunset: Barcin/iStockphoto
flower: Steve Bond/Trevillion Images
ISBN 978-0-8308-9625-7 (digital)
ISBN 978-0-8308-3584-3 (print)
ISBN 978-8-8308-3585-0 (DVD)
Preface
Gary W. Moon
I believe that church history will be very kind to Dallas Willard. He lived his life as a rare composite of rigorous academic, passionate Bible expositor and friend of God. Those who knew him well marveled at his mind but loved him because of his firsthand knowledge of God and his desire for others to share his experiences of life in the kingdom.
The book in your hands has been created from the transcript of a conference held February 2123, 2013, in Santa Barbara, California. The conference was born out of conversations between Dallas and John Ortberg, senior pastor at Menlo Park Presbyterian Church in Menlo Park, California, and a gifted author and speaker.
The primary passion for the conference was to provide an overview of Dallass writings and ministryhis most impassioned ideas. The conference was built around the theme Knowing Christ Today and as a way to present the golden thread that runs through all of his primary writing: that it is possible to know the Trinity intimately and to step into their glorious kingdom.
The talks at the conference by Dallas and John have been edited just a bit to make the transition to create this book, but they retain the conversational feel of a conference. At the start of each chapter of the book is one of the prayers that was prayed during the conference. Each chapter ends with a conversation about the content with further content being drawn out with questions from John to Dallas and from the audience. Also available is a companion DVD of the talks which is taken up along with the book in the discussion guide found in the appendix.
The conference was sponsored by the Martin Institute for Christianity and Culture and the Dallas Willard Center for Christian Spiritual Formation (MIDWC), where I serve as executive director. The MIDWC exists because of the vision and generosity of Eff and Patty Martin. We hope that you find that the book, DVD and discussion guide capture and preserve the nature of the conferenceand more importantly, Dallass thoughtsin a way that will be helpful to you.
How to Live Well
Eternal Life Begins Now
Dallas Willard
May you experience graceGod acting in your life, in your thoughts, in your feelings, in your rest. May his face shine upon you. May his shining face lift up over you as you lie down, as you sleep, and give you the thoughts you need to have. The blessing of the Trinity rest upon you and everything you are and do. Let it be so. Amen.
Dallas Willard
W e are on the verge of a time when the church is going to be able to make some decisions. For long periods in the history of the church, as in the history of Israel, there were no significant decisions that could have been made. I think we have been through a pretty tough patch with the church, and I try never to criticize the church, because I know who is in charge of it. But sometimes we need to be conscious of where we are coming from and where we are going.
We are coming into a time when many churches and Christians who are in leadership positions will be able to say its all about discipleship and transformation into Christlikeness. Now, if you read the New Testament or even the Old Testament, you might have come to that conclusion already. It is hard to avoid, but circumstances in history have a way of claiming us and not letting us see whats actually happening.
We have been through a period when the dominant theology simply had nothing to do with discipleship. It had to do with proper belief, with God seeing to it that individuals didnt go to the bad place, but to the good place. But that developed in such a way that the predominant thought is that a person can have the worst character possible and still get into the good place if he believed the right thing. This disconnection became increasingly burdensome to the church itself until we came to the point that, as is widely discussed, there is not a clear difference between Christians and those who arent Christians.
Now, that is due partly to the fact that Christian teaching has thoroughly penetrated ordinary society. Many people who are not part of the church and who are not followers of Christ by their own conscious intentions wind up living in a kind of halfway, limp way of living out what Jesus taught and who he was. And it is a familiar fact that the world likes to beat the church with the churchs own stick and to criticize it in terms of what Jesus himself taught.
We have perhaps had enough of that, and there are indications that we are ready for a change. That change will make a startling difference in our world, because Jesus intention for his people from the beginning, and indeed from long before that in Gods covenant relationship with the people of Israel, was world revolution. If you read the Great Commission, you may not realize it is about world revolution. If you think it is about planting churches, as important as that may be, if you think it is about evangelization, as that is often understoodno, no, it is about a world revolution promised through Abraham, come to life in Jesus and living on in his people up to today. That is what our hearts hunger for, even when we dont know how to approach it or how to go about it.
