A couple of years ago my family and I were visiting the Homestead Craft Village just outside of Waco, Texas. The village belongs to Homestead Heritage, an agrarian Christian community that offers a beautiful picture of people working together to produce what they need. As my kids and I bounded through the shops, I stopped to watch a young carpenter at his work. After a couple of minutes I asked him what he was making. He looked at me and lowered his head. “A coffin.”

There I stood in a room full of platters and decorations and other wood crafts, with nothing to say. For those who know me, that is rare. I stumbled through a polite reply, and then he asked me a question. “Are you a carpenter?”

I had to tell him no. But I told him I have a great appreciation for craft and craftsmen, and that I loved watching him put to work skills he had learned from his community. He went on to tell me the coffin was for his uncle. His uncle was still living. This was a gift, so that he could see the work being done for him.

I have thought a lot about that interaction ever since. As I continue my work in the pastoral office, the work of the craftsman becomes more and more of a model for me. Didn’t Paul tell the Ephesians that the church is being built together into a dwelling place for God? If pastors are to join him in that work, then at some level we are craftsmen.

I have thought for years that one of the things I lacked in my life was a craft. I am an incapable carpenter. I am a liability with any tool in my hand. Ask me to build, make, or repair anything and I am of little use.

But if the work of ministry is craft, then my whole life has been training in the work.

I have spent many words on this site, in other places, and in my preaching on the undue influence of three mentors I never met: Dallas Willard, Eugene Peterson, Wendell Berry. Each of these men has shaped my life and thinking in major ways.

Yet I have remained mostly silent on the one man who most shaped my craft of ministry. Part of the reason is that the other three left books. My dad left no pages. He never sat me down to explain ministry to me. He took me with him.

Gary Griffith, born October 20, 1962, entered eternal rest October 1, 2008, eighteen years ago today. I was seventeen. My dad. The one my name comes from, as I am Gary’s son. A name I hope I earn.

Christian history will not remember my dad. He was a music, youth, and college minister. To my knowledge he preached very few, if any, sermons. But if eighteen years of interactions with those he influenced have taught me anything, it is that no pulpit is required for pastoring. All that is required is availability.

I remember how much my dad wanted to make people comfortable. I’ll never forget him teaching me that the way you dressed as a pastor was a way to make people feel comfortable. There were some people who could never connect with him in a coat and tie, so he changed into his jorts, his LifeShare blood center free t-shirt, and those ugly red flip flops so they could be comfortable.

He took me to visit the older ladies in their homes when they couldn’t come to church anymore, always treating it like an adventure we were on together. If we went to Mrs. Smart’s house maybe we’d get a bottled coke, or to Mrs. Irene’s and get a cookie, or best of all Mrs. Glass’s and I’d get to play in the treehouse. But I was never there just to play. I was there to listen, to watch, to participate.

I joke often at my church that all I want to do is preach and visit old ladies. Maybe that is because it is what I learned to do first.

I spent part of today going through pictures of the last couple of years of his life. In almost every one he is surrounded by church members doing something silly. Dancing in a sombrero. Making a whole dinner party laugh. Cheering at some obscure kids sporting event.

The craft he taught me was ministry, and these were the tools he showed me. Availability. Humor, to soften the edges of a broken or angry person. And most of all: pray with and for people.

He has been gone longer now than I had him. I am only now seeing how he was shaping me for what would come, before he or I even knew it. He did not know I would be a pastor, and neither did I. He was preparing me to be a kind of man, and that is what made me a certain kind of pastor.

I told that young carpenter no, and that was true. Is what my dad handed me a craft the way that young man would recognize it? Maybe not. There is no bench, no set of chisels, no community in Waco that certifies it. But I believe it is no less craft.

A couple of weeks ago I needed to make a late evening hospital visit with my son. We walked into the room of one of our beloved church members, and we hugged, we laughed, and we prayed.

We were walking the same halls I walked with my dad when he made hospital visits with me, back when I was young enough to think I was just along for the ride.

As we left, I told my son about the icees my dad would always get me in that cafeteria, and about what he told me every time: show up, smile, pray.

He asked if he could get an icee, sadly they were closed. Then he said, “You know dad, maybe one day I’d want to be a pastor.”

I smiled at him. “Ok. But remember, whatever you are, we always show up for our people.”

The tools of our craft require no box, son. They require our lives.

That is the charge Dallas Willard left with his final class. Not a strategy for ministry, not a word about production, just care for the life. You can watch or read the lecture here: Spirituality and Whole Life. For thirty-four weeks, this Substack has walked through Willard’s 2012 Spirituality and Ministry intensive at Fuller, lecture by lecture. If you are just joining, here is the arc: Willard taught that pastors are teachers of the nations, and this last lecture is the capstone, where he lands on the whole life: a pastoral spirituality that is actionable and accessible. His thesis was a single sentence: “your call is to live your life in God and to His Glory and what you get out of your life is the person you become and actually that’s what God gets out of your life, too.” God does not measure a pastor by what he produces, sermons, programs, attendance, but by the person he becomes under God’s reign: a life formed in the image of Christ, lived for his kingdom, serving for the good of the world.

Your Life Is Bigger Than Your Job, Your Ministry, and Your Work

Willard drew four concentric circles: your life, your work, your ministry, your job. “Aspects of me that I am in great danger of confusing.” Your job is “what you are paid to do; Its how you earn a living. Your job is something that men, human beings assign to you.” Your ministry is different: “something God has given to you; men do not give you a ministry. God gives you a ministry and your ministry is that part of God’s special work in my time that He has specifically allotted to me.” Your work is “the total of lasting goods, which I will produce in my lifetime.” And your life encloses them all: “Now, your life, that’s you! And that’s what you are all about. You are not about your job and you are not about your ministry and you are not about your work. Your life is bigger than all of those and I suggest to you that your life is what God is mainly interested in.”

The temptation is to reverse the circles and make the job the encompassing one. Willard warned: “if you live there, you are on a short course to ‘burn out’ and anger and disappointment and you are going to make a lot of other people unhappy.”

Midway through the lecture, Willard handed the floor to Keith Matthews, his teaching assistant for the course and an executive pastor in a large church. Keith told the class what the circles look like when they collapse. “When I crashed and burned,” Keith said, “my life circle was gone and my job circle invaded fully the ministry circle.” So he went to his congregation and his leadership and said, “I am going to reorder my life. I am not coming in until 10. I am getting the life circle in order.” He started ordering from the outside in. His congregation learned to live with a pastor who arrived at ten. The alternative was a pastor who arrived early and resented everyone by noon. Separating the job from the ministry is what freed him. The job answers to people; the ministry answers to God. Distinguish them, and the pastor is freed from people-pleasing performance and remains committed to the calling God allotted.

Your Formation Comes Before Your Ministry

If the life encloses the ministry, then formation comes first. “If you are working more than 50 hours a week, you are not doing it for God no matter how eloquent your rationalizations.” Willard read the class that line from William Martin’s The Art of Pastoring, a book he admitted he had never read, by a man he did not know. He read it because it was true. “Work a modest day; then step back and rest and this will keep you close to God.” The calendar tells the truth about the soul. “One’s daily planner tells plenty about one’s spiritual formation.”

Someone will object that the church needs the pastor at full capacity, and pulling back to take care of ourselves lets the work suffer. Fair enough for a crisis week. Willard’s answer is that the work is what suffers when the circles reverse. A pastor living inside the job circle burns out, grows angry, disappoints people, and makes everyone around him unhappy. That is not a theory. That is Keith.

John Cotton, the old Puritan, gave Willard the older vocabulary for the same point. A Christian “lives in his vocation by his faith,” Cotton wrote, and “all the life I live is lived by the faith of the Son of God.” That faith “casts all the failings and burdens of his calling upon the Lord.” Pastors are called to be faithful participants in God’s purposes and to engage in his kingdom work, not to increase their own kingdoms or platforms.

Joy Is a Duty, and Trying Harder Destroys It

Get the circles right, and joy comes back. His charge to the class came in all caps: “WE CAN STOP TRYING SO HARD AND DIRECT OUR MIND TO GOD AND TO OUR PLACE IN THE WORLD, NOW AND FOREVER.” The solutions to our problems, he said, “rarely lie in trying harder and trying too hard will destroy your joy.” When who we are gets consumed by what we do, striving turns addictive, draining the spirit and our relationships. The choice underneath is stark: cease striving and participate in the kingdom of God, or keep seeking to rule our own kingdoms.

Joy, for Willard, is “a sense of overall well-being.” “You have a duty to be joyful,” which can be chosen, cultivated, activated. The past is its great enemy. “One of the worst things about the past is it’s in the barn but you can’t change it.” The way forward, he said, “is to accept the fact that I am a failure. I am a failure,” and to trust that “God has an overarching purpose in my life.” Regret is not guilt: “when I am tempted to go back and feel regret, I am apt to slide into asking for forgiveness again but regret is different from guilt. We don’t want to spend a lot of time in the house of regret but it does prove to be very instructive and humbling about where we are now.”

For the fear of what is ahead and the pressure of what is at hand, Willard reached for the psalms. Psalm 16:8: “I have set the LORD always before me.” Psalm 55:22: “Cast your burden on the LORD, and he will sustain you.” Set the Lord before you; cast the burden on Him. “We can choose to be joyful and we have to.” That is where the disciplines come back in, by indirection.

“It’s almost in the nature of our calling that we promise too much.” So we learn the wisdom of no: “horse sense is the ability to say, ‘Nay.’” We say it “in kindness and in love.” No promises on the spot. We keep a calendar at least two years out, Willard said, and make sure it is not full. Then we “give the next hour to God and delight in what He gives.”

Willard loved the flower beds outside the lecture hall. Beauty, he said, is a discipline: “the beauty that is at hand and the enjoyment of beauty is one of the spiritual disciplines that has great power,” because “it’s very hard to be grumpy when you are looking at a beautiful flower.” Beauty is “the sensible presentation of good.” Time itself can be redeemed. Paul says to redeem the time, and redeem means buy back: “you have to buy it back; that it’s already gone wrong and if it’s gone and if you don’t do something about it, then it’s gone forever.” That is where the disciplines land: a joyful celebration of the good God intends.

To Love God Is to Love the World

An ordered life does not leave the world. It loves it. Willard read the church’s mission from the Epistle to Diognetus, an early Christian letter, “The Christian as the Soul of the World.” Christians are not set apart by country or language or customs, the writer says. They marry, they eat, they dress like their neighbors. But “what the soul is to the body, Christians are to the world.” The world hates them, the writer says, “because they say, ‘Nay.’ They say, ‘No’ to worldly passions.” The same Nay as horse sense, now said to the world.

“It would be wrong for them to flee from it,” the writer concludes, “for this is the position to which God has assigned them and it is glorious. It is glorious.” They stay because God assigned them there: participants in his mission of love within the structures of ordinary life.

Then Willard gave them the paradox of our time: “those who believe in God do not believe in the salvation of the world and those who believe in the future of the world do not believe in God.” Christians expect the final catastrophe. Atheists invent doctrines of salvation. “To love God is to love the world. To love God passionately is to love the world passionately. To hope in God is to hope for the salvation of the world.” God is looking, Willard said, for “sons and daughters who resemble Him enough to love the world enough that He could send them into the world to save it.” That is the whole calling: to join him in his love for the world.

He closed with the charge, “So, take care of yourselves now,” and then a poem, Antonio Machado’s, about a garden. The wind asks the soul for the odor of its roses, and the soul answers, “I have no roses. All the flowers of my garden are dead.” The wind takes the withered petals and leaves, and the soul weeps: “What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?” Willard gave the interpretation himself: “Now, that garden is your life. It’s you!” Teachers of the nations are not managers of religious institutions but people committed to the kingdom in every part of their lives, serving for the good of the world and inviting others into the same.

For Reflection

1. Willard asked his students: “Is your cup running over? Is your head anointed with oil?” When did you last sit still long enough to know the answer?

2. Willard asked: “What is your work?” Name the lasting goods your lifetime is producing, apart from your job and your ministry.

3. Willard closed with the poet’s question: “What have you done with the garden that was entrusted to you?” That garden is your life. What is one bed you will tend this week?

In the second-to-last lecture of his 2012 Spirituality and Ministry course at Fuller, the session on the use of spiritual disciplines in pastoral direction, Willard told a room full of pastors that their real work was something else entirely. You can watch or read the lecture here: Spiritual Disciplines in Pastoral Direction. A pastor is a teacher of the nations, and a teacher’s work is direction: telling people, in practical terms, exactly what to do to live with God.

Magnify Your Office

Paul was doing public relations for a ministry nobody respected. “I magnify my office,” he wrote in Romans 11:13, speaking of his apostleship to the Gentiles, which to many of his Jewish friends was like announcing a ministry to dogs. To magnify something is to make it look bigger. When Mary said, “My soul doth magnify the Lord,” she made the Lord look bigger. Willard’s hope for the pastors in that room was that the discussion would help them magnify their own calling: that “the greatness of what you are called to would stand out in your own mind,” and that out of that awareness they could represent it to a world in the dark.

“No one else can do this work. You are the only ones that have the knowledge, the position, and the power to do it.” That is the knowledge theme of the last lecture carried straight into this one. The pastor directs because the pastor knows. Knowledge confers the right to direct action and to teach, and no one else in the community holds that particular knowledge in that particular office.

Direction will stir up trouble, and Willard spent the first part of the lecture getting his students ready for it. He read them prayers from people who had been wounded for the faith: a Serbian bishop martyred for opposing Nazism, Thomas More writing from prison, an unknown prisoner at Ravensbruck. The point was not admiration. It was preparation. “We need to practice these prayers,” he said, because if you make the gospel of the Kingdom and discipleship the center of your work, “you are going to have some people who will be very unhappy with you.” The pastor must be ready to “receive wounds without retaliating, staying all the while faithful to what we have come to understand is right.” And when the wounds come, the instruction is Peter’s: “think it not strange.” Opposition is not a sign that something went wrong. It is the natural course of things, part of the training of a disciple. Teach your people that too, he said, or they will think a good work gone painful means God left the room.

Disciplines Are for Disciples

“Let your words be freighted with grace.” Willard lingered over Paul’s phrase in Ephesians 4 and asked the question underneath it: what is grace? “Grace is God acting.” In silence we learn to listen to God and to speak with Him, and we watch the effect of His presence on the words people hear. That is what a discipline is for. The pastor Willard describes is a “pasture-er,” “someone who arranges for the sheep to find their food and safety and lead them to it.” The disciplines are the pasture. Solitude and silence look like private exercises, but Willard insists they bear their true fruit in community, when people share life together and their times alone enrich the shared life. Memorization, he notes, is simply better done together, and the pastor shepherds that too, along with fasting, study, and worship.

“Disciplines are for disciples and they need to be approached with intelligence and understanding.” Every group has disciplines, whatever it calls them. What most groups lack is any understanding of what they are for, so the growth never comes. The pastor’s work is to relate the disciplines to the gospel itself, and that requires a gospel with a discipleship connection in it. “If you don’t have a Gospel that has any connection with discipleship, then disciplines will be haphazard at best and there will not be an orderly plan for growing in grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ.”

Willard named the obstacle plainly: “The elephant in the church house,” he said, is “un-discipleship as business as usual.” The quiet assumption underneath most congregational life is that we are Christians, not disciples, as if those were two different things. That assumption goes back to the message the church preaches and the invitation it makes. His remedy was what he called discipleship evangelism: evangelize for the purpose of making disciples. Give people the chance to decide to be disciples, and then deal with the consequences, because there will be consequences.

Give Practical Direction

“Don’t just heap guilt on them,” Willard said, “and make them feel they ought to do what Jesus said.” They ought to, but guilt alone never produced a disciple. “You need to give practical direction. We need to tell people in some measure exactly what to do to get them started. They don’t know what to do and they don’t understand the things that happen in the process.” Tell them what to do, and offer them hope that they can do it. At some point, he said, you have to stand up and say, “Everything Jesus said, you can do,” and let the room answer back, “No, we can’t,” and then get the actual objection out on the floor. A man dead convinced he cannot give what he should give will never be argued out of it. He has to be led through it, practice by practice.

Take giving. The basic idea, Willard said, “is quite simple, that you give to participate in the Kingdom. That’s what you are doing when you give and it’s not for God’s benefit.” God owns the cattle on a thousand hills and the Cadillacs too. “Giving is not a plea for help. It is an opportunity” to take part in the most important thing happening on earth. That reframes the annual budget push entirely. The question is not whether the church makes its budget. The question is whether your people know that giving is their invitation into the action of the Kingdom of God, and whether anyone has ever taught them that from 2 Corinthians 9, where Paul shows the poor Macedonians sowing bountifully and reaping bountifully, where God loves a hilarious giver, where grace, God acting in your life to accomplish what you cannot accomplish on your own, comes like water from a spring in the hillside.

None of this fits the contract your people think they signed. Willard’s phrase for the pastor’s slow work is rewriting the congregational contract: “what does the individual person think they have agreed to do and to allow you to do to them as a member of your congregation?” A hundred years ago a pastor was assumed to visit the home, ask after the spiritual life of the family, know the children, pray, and come back in a few weeks to see what had changed. Try that now and you will get told off. “The contract is there,” Willard said. “That’s what you are dealing with, the contract in the minds of your people, and for many of them, it does not include anything like spiritual disciplines.” They grant you the right to expect they show up once in a while. They reserve the right to leave for better services if they stop liking yours.

So how do you rewrite it? Two-pronged, he said. First, in your general teaching and preaching, address the issues head on: what giving is, what the disciplines are, what a disciple is. Then watch how people respond, and work with individuals from there. Carry the new contract in your shirt pocket. Let it out slowly, for people who are ready to hear it. “Go with the people who are ready. Pay attention to them. Endure the others with love and some humor.”

But won’t they leave? Some will. Jesus was prepared for it. Willard pointed to Luke 14, where Jesus rewrites the contract in the minds of the crowd following Him, sharply, on purpose, knowing the cost. If tinkering with the contract in people’s minds draws opposition in an established church, that is not strange either. That is the work.

That is what spiritual leadership actually is. “Spiritual leadership is essentially a matter of being able to induct others into the spiritual life and guide their development in it,” Willard said, “not merely a matter of being mighty in the spiritual one self.” Two models, then. Paul says, “Follow me as I follow Christ.” He takes people by the hand and leads them into the life. Samson is the mighty one. Willard gave him a slogan: “Watch me, baby! I will solve your problems.” The mighty man draws a crowd and makes spectators. The inviting man makes disciples.

Willard’s observation stings: if the two were candidates for a church position today, Samson would win. Strings of churches have been whipped to pieces by the Samson they brought in. The leader the Kingdom needs is the one who takes people by the hand, step by step, practice by practice.

A note for this week: pick one discipline and teach it to your people on Sunday. Take silence. Tell them what it is for, in Willard’s terms: in silence we learn to listen to God and to speak with words loaded with grace. Then give them the exact first step. Ten minutes, phone in another room, one verse of Scripture read slowly, no agenda beyond being with God. Tell them what to watch for during the week: the urge to fill the quiet, the words that come out of their mouths afterward. Ask them next Sunday what they noticed. You have just done the whole lecture in miniature. You related a discipline to the gospel, you gave practical direction, and you started rewriting the contract, one practice at a time.

This week, tell them one thing to do, and do it with them.

For Reflection

1. Willard asked his students: “what does the individual person think they have agreed to do and to allow you to do to them as a member of your congregation?” What would your people say?

2. Willard told his students to get the real objection out on the floor: “Now, what are you thinking you can’t do?” What is the one thing your people are convinced they cannot do, and when will you ask them?

3. Willard asked: “How can we help our people be together in such a way that they really do nourish one another, direct one another and help one another?” What is your part in arranging that?

He put that ordinary demand next to the Christian teacher. What are we doing when we stand up to speak? For most of the church's history, the answer was assumed. We were bringing knowledge. Then the content of Christian tradition was moved out of knowledge and into mere "faith," and the standing of the Christian teacher collapsed with it.

This is Lecture 32 of Willard's Fuller series, near the close of the course. You can watch the full lecture or read the transcript here: https://conversatio.org/christian-teachers-and-their-knowledge/?collection=2409

He put the thesis on the screen:

"The historical displacement of the content of Christian tradition out of the category of knowledge and into the category of mere 'faith' has destroyed the standing of the Christian teacher in contemporary society. Nothing is more important today than the recovery of the church as the unique purveyor of essential knowledge in response to the four great questions of life."

What is reality? Who is well off? Who is a really good person? How do you get to be? Those are Willard's four. Jesus Christ and the tradition in which He stands give knowledge of the answers.

Displacement Turned Teachers into Cheerleaders

Go back to Calvin or Luther or Wesley or Edwards and say, "Well, you don't have knowledge, you just have faith," and they would answer, "What is wrong with you?" Through much of American history the minister of the gospel was often the best-educated person in the town. Many university presidents were ministers. People might disagree with the pulpit. They still treated it as bringing the most important knowledge to bear on the most important questions.

Then the standing shifted. Max Picard's The Flight From God names the change as a social reality, not a research advance that proved the church wrong. Modern thought and "science," in a loose sense, took the public chair, and Christian teaching moved to the private opinion lane. Secular institutions still claim some of the answers to the four questions. Ask who in those institutions has them, and no one shows up. Writers of the New Atheist movement, for example, do not represent a body of certified knowledge within the universities and research institutes. On Willard's account, secular education has no ability to address the deepest questions of life.

When the church no longer claims knowledge, the pastor's job changes. We stop bringing what people need in order to live. We start trying to get people to do something.

Knowledge Is Not Belief, Commitment, or Profession

We pick up beliefs the way a suit picks up lint. Children pick up the beliefs of the people around them. Faith, in ordinary speech, often means that readiness to act. It is not yet knowledge.

Knowledge, as Willard defines it:

"You know something if you are able to represent it as it is on an appropriate basis of thought and experience."

Accuracy and foundation. Knowledge cannot come out of thin air. Belief can. Most of what we know, we know on authority, and good authority is authority that can be questioned. That is how most of us know the multiplication tables.

A person believes something when prepared to act as if it were so. It does not have to be so. Belief can be ungrounded, irrational, and false, and it is still belief.

Commitment is choosing and implementing a course of action. A person can commit to something without believing it. A speaker can push people into commitments with threats and pressure and leave belief and knowledge behind. Profession is saying that one believes something. The speaker may not believe it. Whole churches can run on profession and never reach knowledge.

"Am I here to provide knowledge to the people I am speaking to as a Christian teacher?" If we do not think we are bringing knowledge, we will not provide it. Then the work collapses into getting people to do things, often things they do not want to do. Giving. Witnessing. Showing up. A successful minister, on that model, is someone who can get lots of people to do lots of things they do not want to do. That is not a good job.

Knowledge confers something belief and commitment do not:

"the right to act, to direct action, to form and supervise policy and to teach."

If we do not have knowledge, we do not have the right to teach. Truth matters here because action follows belief.

"Truth is like the aiming device on a gun. If it is true and you use it well, you'll hit your target."

"If your beliefs are not true, pretty soon, your actions will be running crosswise of reality."

He told a story about a young woman in a church practicing sexual acts the pastor named from Scripture. Her reply was, "Well, that's your interpretation." Thou shalt not commit adultery. That's your interpretation. The line is a safety valve. It disarms any claim that what a person is doing is wrong. Some interpretations are correct and others are not. The slippery premise is that interpretations are never right. They are only interpretations. Without a claim to knowledge, the pastor has nothing left but cheerleading and pressure.

The Great Commission Makes Students of the Nations

Matthew 28 is how Willard recovers the pastor's job after that collapse. The Great Commission is not a charge to go get people to do things. It is a charge to make disciples, students of the nations, under the teaching of Jesus. Knowledge is what we bring. Not everyone responds. That concession covers the hearer who refuses, not the claim that knowledge is what we owe them, and not the claim that education without knowledge is only another form of misleading. Most people, Willard says, will respond to knowledge by acting in appropriate ways once they have it. Education is the perennial hope of the world for that reason.

Pastors, meaning spokespeople for Christ, are the ones who can be teachers of the nations. They alone have the knowledge content, the social position, the power from God, and the position in God to do it. Willard states the stake:

"the Great Commission is what pastors are called to do and empowered to do and if they don't do it, humanity is a perpetual lost cause"

That includes the afterlife. He asks the class whether they sense the dignity of the calling. The weight is the answers human beings cannot manufacture on their own.

Given the New Testament, local congregations might be expected to devote themselves to the spiritual formation of the people who come. They would raise people in 1 Corinthians 13 love, free them from the lust of the flesh and the angers that rise out of it, and make disciples who make disciples under the Presence of God, teaching them how to do everything Jesus said. If this were regarded as knowledge we are teaching, that is likely what would be happening. What we often find instead is constant distraction from that central task. The organization has so many other things to do. Ministers wind up doing work they do not feel the calling was about.

Bring Knowledge and Let Them Decide

One job is getting people to do things they do not want to do. The other is bringing knowledge and then letting them decide. Jonathan Edwards bent over his pulpit reading "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God." People fell. An elder crawled up and grabbed his leg. They thought they were hearing knowledge. They were being given knowledge of something awful. Edwards did not have to persuade them to fall on the floor. They were ready to go.

If we stand in our world as bringing knowledge, the whole configuration changes. First comes whether we can think of ourselves that way. Whether there is such a thing as the spiritual life, how it is lived, and whether the spiritual disciplines are knowledge we can teach and test, or only a private preference. What am I doing if I am not communicating knowledge?

He gives three moves for the church as an organization, the VIM pattern applied to the body, not only the individual. They do not settle the first question by themselves.

We focus preaching and teaching on entering and living in the Kingdom of the heavens now.

"Talk it! Preach it! Explain it! Live it!"

Begin with what is preached. No big fuss and no battle. Give them a parable of Jesus. Ask what kind of world that is, and who is upside down and who is right side up.

We make sense of discipleship in realistic terms, in work, family, and community. Discipleship practiced in our employments changes the workplace. Business, on Willard's account, is God's arrangement for people to love and serve one another in community. Profit will take care of itself. That is not what business is for. We help people revise their affairs so they can carry through on their decision to follow Jesus where they already spend their days.

We take a few things Jesus taught and help people learn to do them. His line to the class was blunt: stop living for lust and see if you are still breathing. Teach anger the same way. Then teach the positive life Paul names: whatsoever things are true, lovely, pure. A person does not run out of things to do when lust is given up.

This does not require extra budget or facilities.

"It is by far the most successful 'Church Growth' program the earth has ever seen."

It requires clarity, intention, and learning how to do it by experiment. He asked the room, "Can we do that?" He reminded them it has been done. When he gets discouraged he flips back to Count Zinzendorf, or to Calvin in Geneva, and he names the bad with the good. Grant that Geneva burned a man. That grant stops at the failure. It does not cancel that formation under knowledge has already been done, and that we can begin again. "I hope we won't burn anyone."

The three moves are plain enough. Whether we can think of ourselves as bringing knowledge, and stay with that when the organization pulls us into other work, is still the hard part. I do not have a clean fix for that pull. Beginning is still available.

For Reflection

1. Dallas asked his class, "What am I doing if I am not communicating knowledge?" When you stand to preach or teach this week, what are you doing if you are not communicating knowledge?

1. Willard distinguishes knowledge, belief, commitment, and profession. Where has your congregation been asked to profess or commit without being enabled to know?

1. Dallas asked the room, "Can we do that?" Focus preaching on the kingdom now, make sense of discipleship at work and home, and help people learn a few things Jesus taught. Which of those three will you begin without a new budget line?

“Are you praying for the business?”

They were shocked. They thought a person should not pray for anything wanted and needed. That would not please God.

Dallas told the Fuller class the story because pastors have to face that shock in themselves. The son’s business was the work in front of them, and they would not bring it to God. Prayer, Dallas has already taught, is talking with God about things we are doing together. If we will not ask God to act on the work before us, we have decided God will do whatever He was going to do anyway. Then we have lost fellowship with God, and we have lost the power of prayer. Dallas says, “you have really redefined the whole idea of fellowship with God.”

A congregation is supposed to live that fellowship with people, not only with God. If we will not bring the real work to God, the people we lead will not bring it to each other.

This is Lecture 31 of Willard’s Fuller series, the hour after the cycle of two gospels. You can watch the full lecture or read the transcript here: https://conversatio.org/prayer-fellowship-confession-submission/?collection=2409

These four practices train a church to participate in the kingdom now: ask God for a specific request, stay with one another long enough to be known, tell the truth to a few, and stop having to win.

Prayer Stays Until Something Happens

Dallas is finishing the disciplines of engagement. He wants prayer as a practice, partnership with God as He governs the world. “Prayer is a power-sharing device for a world of recovering sinners.” “God doesn’t stand back. He involves Himself.”

Ask, or the conversation is already over. “You need to come to a healthy understanding that your prayers make a difference in what happens in this world.” Refuse that understanding, and prayer turns into what Dallas calls spiritual happy hour. We think it helps us. It does not change what happens in the world. A church like that will have nothing honest to do with one another either.

Partners have to say exactly what they want, or they cannot tell when God has answered. “Specificity is crucial.” For ministers: “focus on exactly what you want to happen in your services, in your life, in your church or community.” Leave the request vague, and a good gift can pass before us and we will call it a coincidence. That, Dallas says, is one of Satan’s primary ways of shutting down prayer.

Then stay. “Don’t dive bomb with prayers.” “Many people buzz in and drop the bomb and get out and don’t even stay around long enough to see if anything happened.” The man at midnight who needed bread is still at the door. Luke 11:5-8. “You stay in the posture of prayer. Don’t quit.”

Jane Willard had a circle of friends who prayed for Dallas. He thought their praying made a huge amount of difference to “what actually comes out at the end of the pipe.” “Don’t go forward with your work unless you have some people praying for you.” When a person asks us to pray for them, we pray right then. “Praying with people proves to have more power than praying for them.”

We take the request to God, then to two or three who will pray it with us.

Fellowship Needs Sandpaper

Fellowship, Dallas says, is being with others, especially in the common enterprise of worship, learning, and service. That is not turning at a set time, shaking a hand, and saying, “God loves you and so do I.” The greeting is over before anyone has time to scrape anyone else, so it forms nothing.

Stay in the work together, and problems come. The twelve were in the work together, and they had problems. Dallas does not treat those problems as a failure of fellowship. They are the tool. “Problems are the sandpaper which smoothes out the fellowship.” We accept the problems and stay.

In a congregation those problems are often people we do not like. In the second of the Screwtape Letters, a young convert walks into church and the people look odd. Keep those people. Make the service too slick, keep the difficult people out, and the tool is gone. “Fellowship is deep. Intimacy is a matter of shared life.”

Dallas turns to John Wesley, the eighteenth-century English preacher who organized the Methodists. People who wanted to flee from the wrath to come joined a society, a regular gathering for that life together. Inside it, a class had a leader who saw each person once a week, to inquire how their souls prospered, to advise, reprove, comfort, and exhort. Still smaller circles, which Wesley called bands, asked searching questions. “Do you desire to be told of all your faults? And that plain and home?” Without mincing words.

“This is serious business and this results in intimacy, the intermingling of lives. There is no distance here.” A church can fill a calendar of gatherings and still refuse that inquiry. If no one is permitted to ask how our souls prosper, we do not have what Dallas is describing. We have the gatherings.

Confession Lays Down Pretense

Confession “breaks the dam in many peoples’ lives even in a community.” It lets us “lay down the burden of pretense and hypocrisy.” That burden always separates us from other people. “You can’t have fellowship unless there is a laying down of pretense and things that separate us from one another.”

Jesus had heavy things to say about hiding. “You know everything that is hidden is going to be revealed.” Dallas asks the class, “Can we afford that?” If we have built our lives around pretense, and never owned what we have done and what we are, that revealing will be hard. Confession is owning it now. The relief, Dallas says, is “incredible,” and it “reconfigures our relationships to others.” “Good-bye to pride and good riddance.”

We do not confess everything to everybody. That starts to prove something. We stay open with a few close friends. Pastors have a bigger difficulty here than usual, because we think we have to sustain an appearance. We go to two or three people who already know the work we are asking God for, and we tell those friends the fault we have been managing.

Submission Is the Cross in an Ordinary Disagreement

“This discipline is simply doing what others think best.” Dallas ties it to pride, stiffness of will, and stubbornness. Where a principle is at stake, we stand by what is right as we see it, in humility, and we hear others. More often the fight is not about what is right. It is about what is best to do, and we are hung up on our own judgment.

“The cross is crossing our will, not having to have our way.” Where the only issue is my will, we say, “Well, let’s do it your way.” Dallas says churches break over the refusal: someone will not say, “Ok, have it your way.”

Submission is never one way. Dallas reads Paul in Colossians, and also in Ephesians: submit one to another in the fear of the Lord. When our own will is out of the way, we can look at what is right and what is good, and we can let someone else determine what is best to do.

For Reflection

1. Dallas asked a couple on the way to the airport, “Are you praying for the business?” What specific work in your congregation have you not yet asked God to do?

2. Wesley’s bands asked, “Do you desire to be told of all your faults? And that plain and home?” Who in your church is allowed to tell you that, and when did you last let them?

3. Dallas asked the class, “Can we afford that?” Everything hidden is going to be revealed. Whom will you ask this week to pray with you for that request?

2020 proved one of the hardest years of my life. In a few short months I found myself in a town where I knew no one but my in-laws, working a remote sales job for a marketing firm, doing a poor job of keeping it all together. I was a mess. My sense of purpose had been tied to my work, and I could not find it in the new role. I was angry, bitter, depressed, and suicidal.

In that desperation I picked up Dallas Willard’s Life Without Lack, a reflection on Psalm 23 that began to restore my soul. I do not remember why, but the next book I picked up was Eugene Peterson’s Practice Resurrection. In those pages I found a poet who would teach me a great deal about the man I was to become. I did not know it yet, but I was about to be pastored by a man I would never meet.

Peterson takes his title from the last line of Wendell Berry’s Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front. Heeding Dallas’s encouragement to read deeply, I read and reread Berry’s poem. After I finished Practice Resurrection I started listening to Jayber Crow, not knowing a work of fiction would become a turning point in my life.

Jayber Crow follows an orphan, turned seminary dropout, turned barber. Jayber lives most of his life in the fictional town of Port William, Kentucky, Berry’s portrayal of his own Port Royal, and he is the storykeeper of the place. Not much happens there without Jayber catching wind of it from his chair. The story is as much about the place as it is about the man.

I remember one interstate drive to run some inconsequential errands, half listening to Jayber, when the narrative pulled me in and drove me to tears. In the chapter called The Beautiful Shore, Jayber adds church janitor and grave digger to his barbering. This seminary dropout, finding vocation in and around the church, returns to eternity, church, and community. Midway through the chapter Jayber turns to the preachers of Port William.

The preachers were always young students from the seminary who wore, you might say, the mantle of power but not the mantle of knowledge. They wouldn’t stay long enough to know where they were, for one thing. Some were wise and some were foolish, but none, so far as Port William knew, was ever old. They seemed to have come from some Never-Never Land where the professionally devout were forever young.

They were not in school to learn the pleasures and the pains of being there, or what ought to be said there. Those things are not learned in a school. “They went to school, apparently, to learn to say over and over again, regardless of where they were, what had already been said too often. They learned to have a very high opinion of God and a very low opinion of His works, although they could tell you that this world had been made by God Himself.”

I Longed for Sheep

Like any good Baptist boy I should offer the caveat that I have never heard the voice of God with my ears. These words may be the closest I have come. As Berry, through Jayber, details the frequent departure of young preachers toward a bigger and better place, I was crushed for that fictional town, and convicted of my own foolish pride. Until then, in my life and ministry, I had one ambition: make it big. When I first felt called to ministry I was certain I was in line to be the next camp and conference speaker, a Christian celebrity. Then, once I arrived in seminary and recognized that my face was made for radio, and that my boring disposition as a Bible teacher might keep me from the platform, I became convinced that my work ethic might at least make a name for me in the academy. All the while I claimed a call to ministry. What I wanted was to be well known.

My wife likes to remind me how silly all of this was. My course of study was Pastoral Ministry, and I never conceived of myself as a pastor. I wanted recognition. Through various trials the Lord began to free me of that hunger. Then, when Jayber spoke about the pastor for the first time, my heart was broken, and I realized what God had made me to be. A pastor. A shepherd. And as Jayber spoke I began to long for something, maybe for the first time. I longed for sheep.

Something in me changed that day. It was a conversion. Ministry, and life, would no longer be about me or my name. God grew a passion in me for people and for place that had been absent. I had no idea where the new conviction would take me, but I found, in Jayber’s words, who I was made to be. I am a pastor, or maybe better said, a pasturer. God crafted me to take care of the people and the place around me. Where I made a living was immaterial. I went on as a marketing-consultant pastor, and I was content to do that as long as the Lord saw fit. A pastor was who I was, and would be, and wherever I was would be my flock.

A Membership

Alongside the new commitment to the pastoral vocation came an awareness of place. The more I read Berry and Peterson, the more I realized that the places I had been, and the places I would go, would shape my family as much as anything else. I wanted a place we could call home. Somewhere like where I grew up, where I had an army of people who shaped me, not blood-kin but somehow deeper. Wendell had a word for this. What I longed for was a membership.

Jayber’s vision of the gathered church, the one that came to him after he became the janitor, gave way to a vision of the gathered community.

What I saw now was the community imperfect and irresolute but held together by the frayed and always fraying, incomplete and yet ever-holding bonds of the various sorts of affection.

I knew that, in the midst of all the ignorance and error, this was a membership; it was the membership of Port William and of no other place on earth.

And yet I saw them all as somehow perfected, beyond time, by one another’s love, compassion, and forgiveness, as it is said we may be perfected by grace.

A place to belong, even when we were not getting along. A place and a people to call my own, for my children and maybe their children to call their own. In Wendell’s stories the pastor is always the alien and the outsider. Even then God was stirring in me the desire to be somewhere and belong to it.

The Work Their Fathers Did

Over the next couple of years the Lord kept confirming the calling. He used some of the deepest pain I have felt, and the words of a few men who had a way of living in the world that would reshape how I wanted to live. Dallas Willard, Eugene Peterson, and Wendell Berry left a life their children could enter. They reshaped me into the man, the pastor, and the person I am today. I never met any of these men. They have been my mentors. In God’s kindness I have met each of their children. Becky Willard Heatley has become a dear friend and partner in ministry. I spent a long weekend with a small group of pastors and Eric Peterson. I will always treasure a trip to Port Royal with my friend and Wendell devotee Jesse Young, where I met Mary Berry.

Those conversations confirmed that the work their fathers did was worth doing. The commitments their fathers made were worth living. They found in their father’s work a work of their own. As I think of these three men, and the influence they have had on my life and on their children, I can only pray my children find a similar calling. I am certain I will never reach as many readers as those men, and I do not desire that. I hope my own children can find a desire in themselves to do what their father has tried to do: find a place, commit to it, stay, share all they have, and belong. That belonging, being part of a place, is worth more than any ambition or pride.

I Was the Machine

Mr. Berry, I was the machine. Greater, bigger, better, that was the hunger. I was convinced I was headed for world conquest and notoriety, the poster child for gain and excess. Your words changed me, changed my family, changed my life. Every decision I have made since 2021, every direction I take my church and family, is filtered through the pastoral lens you helped me develop. How can I find pleasure in what I have instead of what I can get? Is this good for this place, at this time, for this people? How will this decision impact those who come after us?

Dallas Willard opens the last chapter of Knowing Christ Today, “Pastors as Teachers of the Nations,” with two questions.

Who is to bring the knowledge that will answer the great life questions that perplex humanity? Who is to teach the world, the “nations,” people of all kinds, the knowledge that belongs to Christ and his people? ... I shall use the word “pastors” for such people, but the word is here to be taken very broadly; it refers not just to those who hold a position with that title, though it is especially for them.

Thank you, Wendell, for being my pastor, for being our pastor. May you enjoy now participating in that which you helped us practice for, resurrection.

The question comes out of a generation of evangelism training. It sat at the front of Evangelism Explosion, and it asks a man to face his own death and settle where he stands with God.

Keith Matthews set another question beside it on the same chart.

“If you knew you could live forever, what kind of person would you like to be?”

Keith compared these questions because the two aim at different things. The first aims at a destination. The second aims at a person and their life today. Dallas Willard wanted this gospel in the pulpit because he wanted congregations equipped to grow as apprentices of Jesus.

This is Lecture 30 of Willard’s Fuller series, the session after Keith took the practical hour. Keith stays at the board long enough to map what a conversion-only gospel does to a body of believers. Then Willard takes the floor. You can watch the full session or read the transcript here: https://conversatio.org/the-cycle-of-two-gospels/?collection=2409

The gospel in its fullness gives us an answer to both questions. Christ forgives us and receives us, and He calls us into a new kind of life that starts now. Preach only the forgiveness and a cycle starts, one that fills a church with Christians who believe they have already finished. Preach the whole of it and a different way of life becomes available, one that fills a church with disciples who train for a life of righteousness.

The Conversion-Only Gospel Runs a Cycle

Keith is talking to evangelicals, and he says so. Scot McKnight had described three streams of initiation in the church: personal decision in the evangelical stream, socialization in the mainline, liturgical acts among Catholics and Orthodox. Keith is working with the first, because that is where the majority of the students present came from. “A conversion gospel is one that you need to come to Jesus, in order to be forgiven of your sins so you can go to Heaven.” Simplification, he admits. Then he asks what the model produces when the transaction is done: a Christian.

Becoming a Christian is a good thing to become. The word is meant to be a picture of a person. Luke reports the name starting in Antioch, and starting with outsiders, and commentators read it as a jab. “You little Christ.”

Evangelicals give the word at a moment of prayer, while the life is still ahead of the person. So it comes to mean a settled account rather than a new life. “Once you’ve prayed the prayer, essentially, you are done.” Bring discipleship later and the honest reply of the converted may become: “If I’ve prayed and received Christ and am going to Heaven, why do I need to do that?”

Passivity is what this cycle tends to produce first. We tell people to come to church and read their Bibles. The gospel we preached to them already settled the account, so they hear the asking as optional. We preach harder at their passivity but give them no purpose for practicing their faith. They are left to try this or that, and never given a picture of what life as a disciple of Jesus looks like.

Trying is bare intention. Keith draws the chain out at the board. “Trying is dying and trying equals failure and what happens after failure? Where does failure go? Guilt.” Willow Creek Church offers a warning. They ran the experiment and published what they found. Get a commitment to Christ, get people into a small group, get them busy and committed, and growth was supposed to follow. Keith puts their Reveal study up in the class, the 2007 self-audit of their own discipleship. “Guess what The Reveal Study said? All of those things... did not make somebody a mature disciple.” Their vision was mature disciples. Their programming and their measurement both tracked activity, so activity is what the system got good at producing. A church can run every program well and still turn out people who have been kept busy but are not disciples of Jesus.

Lecture 9 called this a deficient gospel.

A Disciple Has a Teacher

The other column on Keith’s chart is the whole-life gospel. It produces disciples. The question changes the aim. “If you knew you could live forever, what kind of person would you like to be?”

A disciple is attached to a person, and Keith is careful about whose person. “Again, when I talk about discipleship, I am not talking about discipleship to me.” The attachment runs to Jesus. The operative word on this side is Teacher. Renovaré names four ways we relate to Jesus: Lord, Savior, Teacher, Friend. The conversion column has kept two of the four. Savior comes first. Lord arrives as duty.

“If people relate to Jesus primarily as their Savior, the only time they need Jesus is when they sin or they are in need.” The rest of the week is their own. Teacher is the name that claims those days. “Jesus is their teacher. He is going to teach them how to live life in the Kingdom of God.” We wake up and ask Him how to live this job, this marriage, this day, because He has the wisdom for it.

Training replaces trying. Trying spends itself in the moment of testing, reaching for an action the person is attempting for the first time. Training spends itself in the ordinary week, on things the person can already do, so that the action is within reach when the moment comes. Keith wants this personal and corporate, a church training together rather than a room of people each trying alone. Honesty and brokenness belong in the main room, as the ordinary means of a life that is being taught. Keith’s name for the shift is Sunday to Sunday into Monday to Monday. Formation happens in the job and the family, where the Teacher is already at work.

And the training has a destination. “We’re training for reigning.” God made people to govern, to have a real say over a piece of His world and to run it well under Him. That capacity is what sin cost us, and it is what the training gives back. This gospel moves toward “fulfilling God’s agenda for the world.”

The conversion column aims a person at the next life and leaves this one unused. The whole-life column aims a person at a kingdom that has already arrived, and trains them to live in it until they can be trusted with more. What waits at the end of the training is responsibility, a share in the running of things. The apprenticeship for it is under way now.

Willard Keeps the Conversion

Willard takes the board back and leaves conversion on it.

He points at Keith’s whole-life column and answers the objection. “This does not exclude conversion.” The whole-life gospel keeps the turning. It asks what the turning is for.

He turns to Augustine. “Boy, did he ever have a conversion, right?” A man walks into a garden one person and walks out another, and he spends the rest of the Confessions tracing what changed in his appetites and his friendships. The moment was real, and the decades after it were the proof. Willard wants that, and he wants more of it. What he refuses is one particular account of it. “There is no problem with conversion on these two cases. The problem is that we equate conversion with that magical moment of mental ascent that translates the merits of Christ into our bank account. That’s not the only model of conversion, right? So, remember that.”

Put in older words, this is an argument about where sanctification sits. A forgiveness-only gospel leaves it outside, to be added later. The gospel Willard wanted has it inside from the start.

Belief, on that reduced account, becomes a score. “It isn’t like check that off and you check off a certain number and you get into Heaven. It’s the difference that what we believe makes in our life.” Many people, Willard says, think being right with God is like a driver’s test. Miss three and you are out.

“As a Baptist preacher, I was taught that one of my main businesses was to convince people that they were saved and I really don’t think that’s our business.” He will help the person who is troubled on the point, and he leaves the verdict where it belongs. “What really matters is what went on between God and the individual, right? And we are not really in a position to check that off.”

A person walking in the power of the Holy Spirit and the character of Christ, he says, “ain’t no problem.” The trouble is the culture we built on the other column. “We’ve created a culture where that’s not the standard,” and on that standard “you can be a Christian without doing that.”

A person like that is already living the salvation he would be asking about. The eternal kind of life has started in him, and people who are growing in it rarely lie awake wondering whether they are in or out. That worry grows where we offered a person a transaction, told him the matter was closed, and left him to wonder whether it took.

New Life From Above

Willard opens the floor. “I’d better give you a chance to say something.” The room laughs. “So, say something. Richard, say something.” The rest of the hour belongs to the class.

A student asks about the Spirit’s role.

The Spirit imparts life from above. Baptism, anointing, filling, fruit, gifts: the new life is meant to be surrounded and filled, and “that will not be automatic.” We can grieve Him. We can refuse to cooperate. “Just the fact that you’ve been born again doesn’t mean now, it will be taken care of. You still have to have intelligent engagement, well informed scripturally and you have to act on it and that’s where things like disciplines come in.”

God has determined that human beings “should be responsible for the kind of person they become.” “Without the Holy Spirit?” “No, no, no, not without the Holy Spirit, but if they won’t act, the Holy Spirit won’t do it.”New life is a gift. Who we become is in cooperation with the Holy Spirit.

Another student wants to know how to tell a transformed life from a “social” gospel. Willard rejects the split. “There is no Gospel that is not social.” Loving God and loving a neighbor is one commandment, so everything filed under the social gospel is “simply the outworking” of it. “There is also no social without Gospel. You gonna do social? You better go to the Gospel first.” A conversion-only gospel can leave love of neighbor out of the deal. A life with the Teacher has neighbors in it.

The vision that motivates both columns is John 3:16. Willard reads the verse whole. “God so loved the world that He gave His only Begotten Son that whoever believes in Him would not lead a futile and failing existence but would lead an eternal kind of life.” John 3, he says, “is not about forgiveness of sins; it is about new life from above.” Forgiveness is inside that life.

What he wants from the pastors in the room is larger than a well-managed congregation. He wants pastors who teach their people the knowledge of how to live with God, which is what I mean when I call us teachers of the nations. He tells them “what we are looking for is the creation of a wave. And you all can be part of that... a wave of Christ coming evermore fully into the world through people.” The early church became “a wave that nothing could stand against.”

A conversion-only gospel settles a person’s account, then spends the years after managing the guilt. The gospel Willard wanted preached gives that same person a Teacher and from him a way of life to learn. Preach that one, and say out loud from the pulpit what the forgiveness is for, and the people in front of you have somewhere to put their real life when they wake up Monday morning.

For Reflection

1. Keith asked the class, “If you knew you could live forever, what kind of person would you like to be?” What kind of person is the gospel you preach producing?

2. Willard said that as a Baptist preacher he was taught to convince people they were saved, and he does not think that is our business. If that is not the job, how does that change what you do week to week?

3. "What is it that can actually do something about the condition that the world is in?" Willard asked a room of pastors that. What is your church's answer to it?

That is where a graduate course on the spiritual life began. Sleep.

The class was a two-week intensive for Fuller’s Doctor of Ministry program, held in a Catholic retreat center outside Los Angeles. Keith sat beside Willard for eighteen of those years. He says the pastors arrived in rough shape. “Many of them came broken. Many of them came weary and tired.” Willard judged that the first thing standing between them and the material was exhaustion, and he treated their bodies as part of the curriculum, because he believed they were.

By the last week of the course, Willard turned the class over. “Ok, we’re moving toward the conclusion,” he tells them, and hands Keith the floor to talk about “how he works with this material, both in churches and in groups that form around conferences.” What follows is the session Conversatio titles Practical Matters.

You can watch the full session or read the transcript here: https://conversatio.org/practical-matters/

Last summer Keith gave me an hour over Zoom for my dissertation research, retired now, living on the central California coast, thirteen years out from Willard’s death. He has been making the same argument for thirty years, and he makes it about himself first.

A congregation stops growing where its pastor stopped. A growing pastor is no guarantee of a growing church, and plenty of holy men have led churches that went nowhere. But a pastor who has quit growing leaves his people nothing to model.

This is where a teacher of the nations does his quietest work. Willard gave pastors three tasks: proclaim the kingdom, teach it, and manifest it. Proclamation and teaching can be prepared on Saturday. Manifestation is the kingdom showing up in a life, and a pastor can only manifest what he has actually received.

The Answer Is You

Keith opens on a gap our congregations have quietly agreed to live with. People believe for forty years and change very little, and we have made that normal. Then he moves the charge closer to home: “Another big tragedy is that the pastorate; we are complicit in the game.”

We stand up each week and describe a life we are not living. We recommend a water source we have not drunk from. Keith says it three times.

“The answer is you. The answer is you. You need to drink deeply from the well.”

“Many pastors themselves haven’t drunk deeply at the well, and yet they point to it and say that’s what you have to do.”

Keith had a working example of that in front of him for eighteen years, and when we talked he kept returning to Willard’s manner rather than his material. The class was not working because the content beat other content. Willard was not, by any account including Keith’s, a compelling speaker. “He was not a dynamic speaker, as you know,” Keith told me. He toned himself down on purpose, because he wanted the Spirit doing the work rather than the speaker manufacturing an effect. Keith knows what the alternative produces: “Something of a feeling that would fade.”

What moved the room was that the man had been to the well. Willard wrote the same instruction in Renewing the Christian Mind: “I encourage pastors to have substantial times every week when they do nothing but enjoy God.”

Every week. Substantial. Doing nothing but enjoying God.

Willard was drinking in front of them. That was the point of the two weeks, and the reason the room filled with pastors who had come to check whether the writing matched the man. They went home to stand in front of their own congregations, where the same transfer would run again. What a pastor has received is what his people get to watch.

The Go-To Guy Was Dying

Keith taught this material for a living and drifted anyway. He was ten years into a church that had grown, and what shaped him over those years was the congregation’s demand rather than his own training. “I realized how the church demands had started to form me in ways that were now working inside of me in a very unhealthy way.”

He was the go-to guy, the fireman, the executive pastor. Every major crisis came across his table, and he was good at it. “I got a tremendous amount of affirmation for being the ‘go-to’ guy but that wasn’t where I was called to be, but I found myself doing something everyone thought I should do because I was good at it and I got affirmation for it.”

“My calling was teaching and spiritual formation and I found that all I was doing was all this other stuff and the church needed it and they would clap for me and say, ‘How great!’ but I was dying. I started to die.”

The older name for it is the fear of man. Keith was being formed by the approval of the people he had been called to form.

He had given the class the general version earlier in the hour: “as a vocational group, pastors are some of the most unaware people of themselves in general.” And the mechanism: “Everyone thinks they have the job description for you.” A congregation hands a pastor a job description per member, all sincere, most of them reasonable, none written by anyone responsible for who he becomes. “Often times you get into the pastorate and you literally lose yourself in the pastorate.”

What stopped it was the friendship. Keith was across the country by then and still had standing meetings with Willard, and in those conversations a verse surfaced that he still calls his wake-up verse, Hebrews 13:7.

Remember your leaders who spoke the word of God to you.

Keith stops the class there and makes them guess what comes next. Then he gives it to them.

Consider the outcome of their way of life.

The verse asks a pastor where his way of life is going to land him, and it came to Keith while he was succeeding and dying at the same time.

What he changed was the order. He borrowed a tool from Willard that he still uses, “the life circle,” which puts the permanent relationships first: time with God, then family. The church takes its place behind the two that outlast the job.

Reordering a life that way sounds like works-righteousness to a certain kind of pastor, and Keith took the objection head on in the same hour, turning to Willard as he answered it: “People think that if we are asking you to do something, now you are practicing works righteousness. Again, God is not opposed to effort; He’s opposed to earning.”

Training over trying is his phrase for it. What he means by it is a slow, methodical, grace-fueled process, which is a different animal from a program of self-improvement.

“The bottom line is: does your congregation want the empty cup that you bring or a full cup coming to them?”

Our churches accept the empty cup because it is what has been on offer. Set a full one in front of them and they will taste the difference before anyone explains it. A congregation that watches its pastor come back from the well week after week starts to believe the well is there, and that the walk to it is short enough for them to make.

Close Enough to Be Watched

Paul tells Timothy to train himself to be godly. A few verses later he tells him why the training has to be visible: so that everyone may see your progress. Keith builds the hour on those two verses. “You’ve got to be close enough to people for them to see your growth,” he tells the class.

The congregation is meant to watch someone change. A pastor who is already finished teaches his people that the life he preaches is a destination other people reached, and they will file it accordingly.

Keith hosted a conference at his church in the Bay Area, five or six hundred people. A young man whose father was in the church was studying philosophy at Stanford and asked whether he might grab a meal with Willard. Keith made the introduction and expected nothing. At lunch, instead of going to the green room, Willard found the student, took him to the side of the stage, and the two of them sat on the edge of it with box lunches.

Keith watched from the back. A few people drifted up and stood listening. Then a few more. “By the end of lunch, there were a hundred people around them on the stage leaning in to listen to what he was saying. And he was not even looking at the mass. He was with that student.”

People told Keith some version of the same thing everywhere he took Willard: “I felt like he made me feel like I was the only person in the room.”

“It really shifted from I want to get what he’s saying to I want to be like this guy.”

The pastors in the classroom at Fuller came to study a theology of ministry. They left with two examples in front of them, Dallas and Keith both living the thing they were teaching. Keith put it to me this way: “pastors as teachers of the nations, we better radiate Jesus absolutely, or it doesn’t matter what we say.”

Being close enough cuts both ways. The people near enough to watch a pastor grow are also near enough to tell him what they see, and Keith counts that as part of how the growing happens. He quotes a friend: “there is no transformation without feedback.” He could go to a monastery for twenty years and God would do a great deal, “but there are some things that He will not do without me getting feedback from some eyes in front of me.”

Monday to Monday

Keith kept waiting for the class to become unnecessary.

“I thought after five or six years or 10 years I wouldn’t have to teach this class anymore,” he told me, “because all of these people that are coming from evangelical churches will have already read Dallas.” It never happened. “Every year I taught the class it was new because the default system for a faulty gospel is so powerful and we are locked into a seven day a week work model, church model that keeps us locked into this default system.”

His name for the repair: “A paradigm shift from a Sunday to Sunday model to a Monday to Monday model.”

Sunday to Sunday is the arrangement most of our people already live inside. Church is where the spiritual feeding happens. Keith names the tell: “isn’t that what people say? Well, were you fed today?” The week is what you survive between meals. You do your best, you fail, you come back Sunday to be forgiven and fed, and the cycle runs again.

Monday to Monday relocates it. “The place of my growth is not primarily Sunday. It’s when I’m at work, my family, my play, all the other aspects of my regular life I live.”

“I am not, as a single man, the church. Even though I’m a Christian, I am not. I’m not the church. The church comes into being in its gatherings.” The gathering is real and necessary. It is also one location among the several where the life actually gets lived.

So Sunday changes jobs. Preaching creates the vision, “wet the appetite of the Church to see the unseen.” Vision alone leaves people wanting a life they have no means to enter. “None of us will change unless time and intensity is a piece of that,” Keith says, “and this is why generally a Sunday morning service is not enough.”

So we teach. We find a venue where we can do more than talk at the backs of each other’s heads, and we put the means in people’s hands.

And we go first. Monday to Monday is a life our people have to see somebody living before it becomes available to them.

My last question to Keith was what he most hopes gets carried forward, now that Dallas is gone and he is no longer teaching the course.

“That people see that this life with Jesus is primarily lived in your local community. And if you as a pastor or even a layperson see that the spheres of influence that God has you in is your place of ministry and you are radiating Jesus, you are the aroma of Christ, then that would be fulfilling everything Dallas would have loved.”

For Reflection

1. Keith says pastors are among the most self-unaware people in any vocation. If someone stood close enough to watch your week, what would they say you are being formed into?

2. Keith reordered his life so that time with God and his family sat ahead of the church. If someone charted your last month by the hours you actually spent, where would the church fall?

3. Keith asks whether your congregation gets the empty cup you bring or a full one. Which have they been getting this month?

The question has an answer, though: Dallas chose his churches for their shepherds, not for their fit. Dallas went to church his whole life, and his daughter Becky walked me through the congregations when I interviewed her for my dissertation. Gary Moon’s biography tells the same story. It starts in a Baptist pulpit in Missouri.

He Joined the Churches His Friends Pastored

Dallas grew up in Southern Baptist churches and went on to serve several himself, including a stretch as a young associate pastor carrying the Sunday evening preaching, before his turn to the academy. He left pastoral ministry for the philosophy program at the University of Wisconsin, convinced he understood too little of God and the human soul to serve a flock well, and during the Wisconsin years the Southern Baptist doctoral student pastored two small Congregational churches outside Madison. Even the doctorate was pastoral at its root.

When the family settled in Los Angeles, they joined Woodlake Avenue Friends Church, a small Quaker congregation in Canoga Park. In 1970 a young pastor named Richard Foster arrived, and the friendship that reshaped modern spiritual formation began in that little sanctuary. The Southern Baptist philosopher led the singing while Jane played the organ. He taught the classes where, Moon records, he first worked out the material that became The Spirit of the Disciplines and The Divine Conspiracy. He handled maintenance and landscaping; Becky remembers planting trees on the grounds with her father. One Sunday night he ended his own sermon early so his kids could get home in time for The Wonderful World of Disney.

After Woodlake closed, the Willards sang in the robed choir of a Presbyterian church under a pastor named Gary Smith, a congregation Becky remembers partly for its cat, Second Timothy, successor to First Timothy. They worshiped at Shepherd in the Valley Lutheran Church, pastored by their friend Bill Vaswig. When Van Nuys Baptist Church split in 1977, the departing group asked Dallas to serve as interim pastor, and he preached to the new Faith Evangelical Church in a high school auditorium. For most of the 1980s the family belonged to Valley Vista, pastored by Larry Burtoft, who had been Dallas’s own philosophy student; the Psalm 23 series Dallas taught there in 1991 became Life Without Lack. On Wednesday nights across more than three decades he taught at Rolling Hills Covenant Church, where a class member named Keith Matthews became one of his closest partners in ministry. And at the end, Dallas and Jane were active members of Valley Vineyard in Reseda, whose pastor, Bill Dwyer, credits Dallas and Jane with drawing him into the work of spiritual formation. Dallas’s funeral gathered in that church.

One prayer conference from those years brought, in Foster’s words, “a Baptist pastor inviting a Quaker pastor to go to a Lutheran pastor’s church to hear an Episcopalian who used to be a Presbyterian.” Quaker, Presbyterian, Lutheran, Baptist, Covenant, Vineyard, plus five trips, by Becky’s count, to encourage Trevor Hudson and the Methodists of South Africa. Dallas swam in every stream.

When I wrote my dissertation, I put it this way: the choice of congregation for the Willards seems to have been greatly related to Willard’s relationships with the pastors of those congregations. Foster. Smith. Vaswig. Burtoft. Dwyer. He was choosing shepherds.

Burtoft had been his student. Dwyer names Dallas as the man who drew him deeper into formation. The interim pulpit went to him because a room full of wounded Baptists needed a steady shepherd for a season. Every church he joined, he joined for the shepherd already standing there, and he stayed to help that man become more fully a teacher of the nations.

“The Church Closed. That’s Not a Failure.”

Two of the churches Dallas gave his Sundays to, Woodlake and Valley Vista, stayed small, and Woodlake closed when Becky was in fifth grade. Someone in the homeboy group once ran the math on those little congregations and called them failures.

Becky answered with memories instead of metrics. She was one of the kids sent along when twenty or thirty members showed up to paint a young family’s house, inside and out. Men from the church came two separate times to help her dad build retaining walls on the family property. And after one of the men noticed the state of the Willard VW Bug, the men of Woodlake brought Dallas a set of new tires; Foster told Becky years later that Dallas received them with a quiet “thank you. I needed those.” “These people were doing life together and they were caring for each other,” she said of Woodlake. Then: “The church closed. That’s not a failure.”

Moon’s work treats Woodlake as the laboratory, the room where Dallas and Richard tested the disciplines on an ordinary congregation. Measure that room the way we measure churches and it flunks: the attendance stayed small and the doors eventually shut. Measure it by formation and a tiny Quaker church in Canoga Park produced Celebration of Discipline, The Spirit of the Disciplines, and The Divine Conspiracy, and the whole church is still eating from its garden. If Woodlake had succeeded the way churches are told to succeed, Foster likely stays a busy pastor with a full calendar and an unwritten book.

Woodlake and Valley Vista would have flunked every church shopper’s checklist we carry today.

He Went Where He Could Give

Dallas knew why the question gets asked. “Contemporary American churches in particular do not require following Christ in his example, spirit, and teachings as a condition of membership,” he wrote in The Great Omission. The diagnosis is real, and he made it more bluntly than the Facebook group does.

His remedy was different. The searcher asks which congregation can feed me. Dallas asked which shepherd he could strengthen. “One of the most heartbreaking things today is that we are divided between different traditions, and there is no fellowship; pastors don’t care for one another because they think they are different,” he told a room of ministers near the end of his life. He spent five decades being the man who cared for them, one congregation at a time.

Where would Dallas go to church? His life is the answer. Dallas would go to church where he found a pastor becoming a teacher of the nations, or a pastor who could become one with some encouragement, and he would sit close enough, for long enough, to be part of the becoming. If you are asking yourself where Dallas would have you go to church, maybe the answer is the same place you have always gone, with a new mindset when you get there.

Dallas’s pattern assumes a shepherd who can be loved toward the kingdom. Leaving is for the church that harms its people or has sealed itself against Christ’s formation. Everywhere else, the pattern is worth trusting.

I need to say this as a pastor. I am thirty-five, three years into my first full-time pastorate, young by most reckonings. Beyond the members I inherited, the Lord has in his kindness sent our church several families who needed a new church home for reasons of their own. These are people who have served in ministry for decades and know more than I do about ministry and about walking with Jesus. They could likely list things about our church they would do differently, and other churches they might prefer if personal taste were the only factor. They chose this one anyway, to help this pastor. I am eternally grateful for that, and spiritually better because of it. I think I have seen in them the same thing Dallas embodied. They found a shepherd, and they chose to help him become a teacher of the nations.

The Smallest and Nearest Church

Eugene Peterson spent part of his later ministry writing pastoral letters to a friend he named Gunnar, a composite figure built from real letters and real encounters, a man re-entering the faith after decades away. He published them as The Wisdom of Each Other. Gunnar wanted to know where to go to church, the same question the homeboy group keeps asking. Peterson’s counsel reads as if he had the thread open in front of him. “You’re better off sticking with what you started out with at your Christian re-entry,” he answers, and names the place: “the ‘smallest and nearest church.’ It’s still my standard counsel in churchgoing.”

Gunnar complained about the music. Peterson answered like a spiritual director with a grin: “No, you don’t have to like the hymns. And yes, you do need to sing them,” calling the singing “an excellent exercise in humility.” And when Gunnar grew restless with his unimpressive congregation, Peterson sent him back: “Go back to the company of those seventy or eighty people on Sunday, listen believingly to the Scriptures read and preached, offer your prayers, receive Jesus in the sacrament, and bless your neighbors. And wait for the Kingdom. It’s the Holy Spirit’s style to fashion holy lives among the inept.”

Willard and Peterson land in the same place. Willard gave his Sundays to congregations because the shepherds there were worth loving and the people there were worth investing in. Peterson told his friend that the Holy Spirit does his finest work among exactly such people. Between them stands a mercy for everyone still scanning the horizon for a church that thinks like Dallas: the best place for our spiritual formation may be the church that costs us our comfort.

For Reflection

1. When you last weighed a church, was your checklist measuring what the congregation could give you or whom you could love there?

2. Which pastor within a short drive of your house could become a teacher of the nations if you committed to him the way Dallas committed to Foster, Burtoft, and Dwyer?

3. Are you willing to wait for the Kingdom among the seventy or eighty people the Holy Spirit is fashioning into holy lives right where you are, or are you waiting on a church that’s already finished?

You can watch the full lecture or read the transcript here: https://conversatio.org/prayer-4/

Prayer is power. God shares it on purpose. He backs it with a promise. And in prayer He lets us wield it with Him.

Prayer Is Too Powerful to Treat Lightly

Willard starts with C. S. Lewis. Prayer, Lewis saw, does something in the world. Reading Lewis, Willard calls prayer “fundamentally bringing something to happen,” and names it “a variety of causation.” Prayer belongs in the same sentence as cause and effect. It is one of the ways things come to pass.

Set against that, our usual worry runs backward. We ask whether prayer works, whether it changes anything, whether God was going to act anyway. Willard, following Lewis, moves the worry to the other end. Prayers “have to be handled very carefully,” he says, and the reason runs “not because they are weak but because they are too powerful.” You can be casual with something weak. You give a live wire your full attention.

Think of the person in your church who says, when the bad news comes, that all she can do now is pray. She means it as surrender, the last small thing left when the real options are gone. Willard would turn her gently around. She has reached for the most powerful thing in the room.

God Lends Us the Dignity of Causality

God needs nothing, and still He waits on us. Willard explains the strangeness of that with a line he takes from Pascal, by way of Lewis: “God instituted prayer in order to allow His creatures the dignity of causality.”

God could run the world alone. He arranged things so that some of them wait on our asking anyway, because He wanted us in the work with Him. To be a cause, to move something real by prayer, is a dignity He hands to His creatures on purpose. He went further than permission. He built a world where our asking changes things.

The God we approach in prayer stays close to the controls, and He invites us to His side of them. Willard describes Him as “a person who is a great King over the universe, has great power and He wants to share it with us.” The King opens His hand. That is the wonder at the heart of prayer.

When you teach a teenager or a new believer to pray, you are showing them where God keeps the controls and telling them He wants their hands there too. You are handing them a share of the King’s work. Few things you say from the pulpit will dignify a person more.

Ask in My Name

Willard turns the class to Jesus’ promise about prayer. John 14:13, “Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.” Whatever you ask. It is a hard line to hold at full size, because we have all asked and gotten silence.

Willard slows down on the words we treat as a formula. Most of us hear “in My name” as a phrase we staple to the end of a request to make it land. Willard reads it as the aim of the whole prayer: “to ask in Jesus’ name is to ask for something that is entirely for His benefit.” The promise is real, and it is aimed. It runs toward what God is doing.

That aim is what makes the promise safe to give. A God who said yes to every wish as we first framed it would ruin us. So He ties His yes to His own name and His own purposes, and He invites us to want those with Him.

This gets hardest exactly where we love most. When you pray for your own child, your wants and God’s aims are tangled so tight you can barely tell them apart. Willard leaves the wanting in place and asks God to reshape it, until what you ask for your child is what God is already doing in them.

The child is only the hardest case. Every prayer runs the same way. We bring God what we want, and He answers in line with what He is doing.

He Grows Us Until He Can Say Yes

“In this matter of prayer,” Willard says, “our ‘wanter’ is the primary obstruction.” The trouble is less often God’s reluctance than the shape of what we want.

God’s answer to a misshapen wanter is to grow it. His aim, Willard says, is “to bring people to Him and grow them to the point where they could do what they wanted.” God intends to make us so joined to Him that He can hand us the power to do as we please, because by then what we please and what He wills are one thing. The distance between our prayers and their answers is often the room where God is still forming the one doing the asking.

This keeps prayer from collapsing into technique. Push for guaranteed results and, in Willard’s words, “it will turn into magic, and God isn’t into the magic business.” The way in stays low and human. “I pray humbly, dependently,” Willard says, and he makes it concrete: “specificity is the key to prayer.” Name the actual thing. Pray for this person, this town, this need, so that when God moves, you will know it was Him.

Prayer looks less like a long shot and more like an apprenticeship. God hands us the dignity of causality, backs it with His own promise, and takes the years required to grow a wanter He can safely answer. The delay is the care. He is making hands that can hold real power, and that work is already underway in anyone who prays. We start now, specifically and humbly, as people God is bringing all the way in.

For Reflection

1. Willard says our “wanter” is the primary obstruction. What have you been asking God for that He may be reshaping in you before He answers?

2. If prayer is God sharing His power with you, where have you treated it as a wish rather than real work you take up with Him?

3. Willard says specificity is the key to prayer. Name one thing for your church or your town you will pray for this week, and say how you would know God had answered.

Willard told that story to make a point we are quick to nod at and slow to believe: worship is a discipline, and it makes God larger in the mind than the thing we fear.

This is the twenty-seventh lecture in Willard’s Fuller series, the second on the disciplines of engagement, and it moves through three of them: worship, celebration, and prayer. You can watch the full lecture or read the transcript here: https://conversatio.org/worship-celebration-prayer-2/

Worship makes God large. Celebration makes that largeness personal. Prayer turns it into a conversation. Together they are the steps a person takes into the kingdom of God.

Worship Cuts the Universe Down to Size

“Worship is an exercise in seeing the greatness of God,” Willard tells his students. “That’s the primary, it’s a choice.” We imagine a great big universe with a little bitty God somewhere inside it. Willard turns it around: “a itty bitty universe and a great big God.” Beside a God that size, he says, the universe is “little more than a flick of a finger.”

Worship places everything in its proper view: a large God, a small universe, and troubles smaller than both. It is a choice we make with the mind, to set God before us until we see Him closer to His real size. David kept the practice. “I have set the Lord always before me. He is at my right hand so I shall not be moved,” Willard quotes, and names the mechanism: “that’s an effect of worship.” The steadiness David describes grows in a person who has cultivated the habit of keeping God in view.

When our view of God and self is right, the rest of life looks different. Willard puts it in the grieving mother’s own words: “since there is God, everything else looks different to me.” Anger looks different. Fear looks different. He does the same with Daniel. We say “Daniel in the lions’ den,” but Willard turns to the lions and asks, “Whose den was that, by the way?” God was in that den with Daniel, so it was really, in Willard’s phrase, “the lions in Daniel’s den.” The lions were real. God was larger.

This is why worship carries weight. In The Great Omission, Willard writes that “vision of God secures humility. Seeing God for who He is enables us to see ourselves for who we are.” A clear sight of God gives us nerve. We “practice calm and joyful noncompliance with evil of any kind,” because we have seen who stands in the den beside us.

Celebration Is the Completion of Worship

Worship sets the mind on who God is. Celebration takes the next step and remembers what He has done. “Celebration is tied to ‘me’ in a way that worship is not,” Willard says. “In celebration, I rejoice over what He has done for me and for mine. This is largely a discipline of remembering.” He reaches for an old word. After God defeated the Philistines, Samuel set up a stone and named it Ebenezer, 1 Samuel 7:12, “Till now the LORD has helped us.” To celebrate is to raise that stone in our own lives, to name the specific mercies and count them out loud.

“Do you think God has done well by you?” He puts it to the class the way he would put it to a congregation, because he knows what he will find. Many have gone their whole lives without the question. Some, asked for the first time, will say no. That is why the question matters. “It is hard to worship God if you think He has not done well by you,” Willard says, and so “celebration is kind of the completion of worship.” The mind that has seen God’s greatness has to bring it home, or the greatness stays abstract.

Celebration is a thing we choose. Richard Foster guards the same point: celebration “is not something that falls on our heads,” it is “an act of the will.” Willard puts a body on it. Practice saying it out loud, he tells the class, “God has done well by me,” even if we have to “slip out into the brush here” to do it. The words come before the feeling and train it.

And the discipline does something to grief. “When you celebrate, you turn loose of your sorrows,” Willard says, “and you take hold of good things and you praise God for them.” He refuses to let holiness be measured by how much it costs us. “If it’s holy, it hurts,” the objection runs, and Willard answers, “No, that’s not true.” Celebration is holy, and it makes, in his words, “our deprivations and sorrows seem small.”

Talking About What We Are Doing Together

Worship makes God large and celebration makes Him personal, and in prayer both turn into a conversation. Willard’s definition is plain. “Prayer is talking to God about what we are now doing together.” The phrase carries a whole theology. God and I are at work on something, side by side, and I can talk to Him about it as we go.

Prayer, he says, “isn’t like putting money in the Coke machine,” where the right coins in the right slot produce the outcome. A machine has no interest in working with us. God does. Prayer “is a conversation. It is an interaction between people.” Jesus taught it as one. When the disciples asked Him to teach them, “He gave them words,” Willard says, and the words begin with address. “Our Father.” We say who He is before we say what we need.

The structure of the prayer offers us a lesson in prayer. The first request is “Hallowed be Thy Name,” that God’s name be held holy in us. The second is “Thy Kingdom come,” which Willard describes as “the action of God coming into the world where it is not present.” Only after God’s name and God’s kingdom do we reach our own bread. Scot McKnight, reading the same prayer, lands where Willard does: the Lord’s Prayer “is not intercession. It is enlistment.” We pray it and find ourselves signed up for what God is doing.

That enlistment has a blunt name: prayer is “a power-sharing arrangement for a world of recovering sinners.” God shares the running of His kingdom with people He is still repairing, and He sets the entrance low. “Prayer and giving are the first two moves,” Willard says. “Anyone can start there. You don’t have to be very sophisticated or advanced.” A person who prayed for the first time this morning has already begun to engage the kingdom of God.

A Note for Pastors

Worship, celebration, and prayer are one motion, and a pastor can lead it. I learned the shape of it at a prayer retreat, and we have prayed it together as a church ever since. It works for a congregation gathered and for one person alone, and it moves in three directions.

We begin by looking upward. We fix our minds on God and praise Him for who He is, then celebrate what He has done. I ask our people to speak up, each one naming a reason to thank God for God. A room learns to worship by hearing worship.

Then we turn inward. We pray with David, Psalm 139:23-24, “Search me, O God, and know my heart... see if there be any grievous way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” Having looked hard at God, we let God look hard at us, and we ask Him to lead us out of whatever He finds.

Last we look outward. We bring the needs of the congregation and the community to God together, and we pray for His kingdom to come in our lives and our neighborhoods. We look upward until God fills the view, inward until He has searched us, and outward until His kingdom is what we most want.

For Reflection

1. Dallas Willard asked his students, “Do you think God has done well by you?” Sit with it before you answer for anyone else. Can you name three specific mercies from the past year and say out loud that God has done well by you?

2. When you walked into this week, what was the largest thing in it? If the diagnosis or the deadline or the empty pew loomed larger than God, what would it take to set God before your mind until He is the largest thing you see?

3. Is your praying a conversation about what you and God are doing together, or is it closer to coins in a machine? Where would your prayers change if you hallowed His name and wanted His kingdom before you reached your own need?

This lecture is where Willard turns to the in-breath. The three lectures on the Sermon on the Mount ended on his insistence that the kind of person Jesus describes is formed by training, that vision and intention come to nothing unless we take up the actual means of change.

“Abstinence then makes way for engagement,” Willard said, and with that he crosses from the practices of stepping back to the practices of stepping in. He begins with study and worship.

You can watch the full lecture or read the transcript here: Study and Worship

Abstinence Makes Way for Engagement

Willard divided the spiritual disciplines into two types. The disciplines of abstinence, the ones we have been walking through, are where we refrain. The disciplines of engagement are where we act: study, worship, celebration, prayer. In the lecture he named the difference this way. “The disciplines of engagement say, ‘Grab something.’ Disciplines of abstinence say, ‘Turn it loose.’”

The two belong together. Abstinence deals with the attachments that have us, the noise we hide in, the appetites we obey. “A proper abstinence,” Willard said, “actually breaks the hold of improper engagement so that the soul can be properly engaged in and by God.” Clear away the wrong engagements, and the right ones have room. But emptying was never the goal. “If all you have is withdrawal,” he warned, “you will not develop. Your life will be stunted at best and perhaps disappear.”

Here Willard drew a hard line, because the disciplines of engagement are the easiest to counterfeit. Most of them are also acts of service, and that is where the danger hides. “People like us are apt to burn themselves out on what looked like the disciplines of engagement,” he said, “but they are not disciplines; they are services, and that’s how they will burn you out.” Activity in and around the church is not the same as engagement with God.

We can fill a calendar with religious activity and call it engagement. Real engagement is study and worship, the practices that put us in living contact with God and the world he made.

Study Puts the Mind in Sync with Reality

Willard ventured that study comes first. “I actually think,” he said, “the most primary discipline for engagement is study.” That surprises anyone who files study under academics, something for the classroom and the seminary. “In study,” he said, “our minds engage with an objective order,” an order that “stands over against our experience” and, once taken in, brings the mind “in sync with reality.” Study is how a person comes to see what is real.

He would not let study shrink into information for its own sake. “The ideal of study,” he said, “is to enable us to interact with reality; not just to pass tests.” A student can pass every test and never touch the thing the test was about. Willard said it of his own classroom: everything “we ask you to read is worthless if it doesn’t help you deal with reality.” Study done well moves us the other way, out of our heads and into the real life with God.

Willard drove study toward four questions he said sit at the center of human existence: “What is reality? Who is well off? Who is a good person? How do you get to be a good person?” The secular universities, Willard said, “have never been able to find an anchor for morality in anything other than divinity.” “We’ve been working on that project roughly since the late 1700’s of getting a basis for ethics without God, and I don’t need to tell you, I am sure we have not succeeded.”

The one place those questions get answered is Scripture. Willard called the Bible “essential truth provided by God on a need-to-know basis, which you can’t get anywhere else,” and he told pastors to say it “over and over again,” that “the Bible alone gives us essential truth we have to have to live.”1

At the center of study is the oldest practice of all, taking the Word so deep into us that it lives there. Willard was blunt about how little most of us take in. Many people, he said, “read the Bible like trying to take a shower one drop at a time.” His remedy was memorization and meditation. Do that, and the Word begins to work on its own. “What you memorize actually ends up guiding your life, often without even thinking about it,” he said. “You don’t have to think about it because it’s in your body.” This is the counsel of Joshua 1 and Psalm 1, the law turned over day and night until it becomes the mind’s resting shape.

For pastors this is an apt reminder. A pastor who has stopped studying has nothing left to give a congregation but opinion, and opinion is what the culture already has in surplus. Our people arrive holding belief, some of it inherited, some of it borrowed, much of it untested. They need knowledge. Study is the discipline that turns the one into the other, and no one can hand it to them who is not practicing it himself.

Worship Is a Clear Vision of God

Study does not stop at the mind. It reaches into our bodies, hearts, and minds, and opens onto worship. As we come to know God as he is, something happens that no amount of information produces on its own: the heart turns. Willard’s definition is plain. “Worship is intentional admiration of God. It ascribes worth to God. That’s what you do in worship; you ascribe worth to God.” Worship is what knowledge of God becomes when it lands.

Study feeds worship. “We need study to help us worship,” Willard said, “and if we are studying God, we’d better worship, because we can’t get close without ascribing worth to Him.” Worship is admiration with its eyes open, the created mind dwelling on the uncreated God until it responds the only way it can, with wonder.

Willard guarded this from collapsing into a mental exercise. The turning is the Spirit’s work before it is ours. “The Holy Spirit is involved in worship,” he said, “but we can count on Him to do His part. Our part is to make sure that our mind is turned to God in an attitude of admiration and ascribing worth.” And he refused to make study a prerequisite for real devotion. There are, he said, “illiterate people who are evangelical Christians, and there have been tons of them through the ages.” Study serves worship, and worship draws the mind back to study. Each one needs the other.

“The greatest hindrance to sin,” Willard said, following Tozer, “is a clear vision of God.” Sin gets its power from a small view of God and a large view of everything else, and worship reverses the proportions. Willard described the moment Scripture “sets before you the beauty and greatness of God.” Stand there, he said, and “everything that might present itself as a sin to tempt you appears very tawdry, very thin and uninteresting.” To stand before God, “with the dignity that He has,” he said, “pulls everything straight at a moral level.”

Study and worship are intertwined. We cannot admire a God we have not come to know. Worship that skips study drifts toward mood, a warm feeling worked up on cue and gone by Monday. Study that never arrives at worship hardens into information, a person who can define God and has never once been transformed by him. Two disciplines with one intention. The mind comes to see God as he is, and the heart, seeing, adores. Our vision of God is what lets us stand. David wrote, “I have set the Lord always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken” (Psalm 16:8). The eye set on God steadies the whole life. Willard reduced it to a habit: “Develop the habit of keeping God before your mind.” With him in view, the ground beneath us holds.

A note for pastors:

The people in front of us on Sunday are fighting battles we mostly cannot see, and the thing we are tempted to hand them is more rules. Try harder. Do better. Willard points us somewhere else. Give them a clear vision of God, and give it through study they can do.

In Hearing God he walks a reader through one, and it is worth teaching a congregation whole. Prepare first: set the book down, close your eyes, “breathe out slowly,” and “ask God to give you an openness to hear whatever the Spirit wishes to bring to you today.” Then read the passage slowly, treating the words as “encountering God himself or hearing his voice.” Read it once. Read it again and “listen with the ear of your heart” for “a word or phrase, a detail or a special moment of the story that shimmers or stands out,” and for where you find yourself in the passage. “Do not choose this yourself,” Willard says. “Let the Spirit bring it to you. Even if you don’t like it, try to welcome it with meekness.”

Take the passage he uses, Elijah at Horeb. A man has run for his life, begged God to let him die, and been fed by an angel for a journey too great for him. Now he stands at the mouth of a cave. A great wind tears at the mountain, and God is not in the wind. Then an earthquake, and God is not in the earthquake. Then fire, and God is not in the fire. Then a still small voice, and a question: “What are you doing here, Elijah?” Read it slowly enough to be there, remembering, as Willard says, that those who lived these experiences “felt very much as we would have if we had been in their place.”

Then reflect. Read it once more and stay with the word that stood out: “Why do you think these words resonated with you?” Or stay with the person you found yourself to be, and ask “What draws you? What are you thinking or feeling about God?” Then, Willard says, “ask God, How does this connect with my life today? What do I need to know or be or do?” Respond by talking to God “about what you think the Spirit might have said to you,” thanking him or asking him. And last, rest. “Wait on God,” “simply be with God,” and ponder “What about God makes you want to worship him, or at least be with him?” Sit, in Willard’s words, in “the companionship of God, the one who invites you to come away and be with him.” This is study slowing into contemplation, and contemplation opening into worship.

This is the pastor as teacher of the nations, a teacher who hands people the knowledge of God and then shows them how to sit in his presence until they love him. A clear vision of God is the most practical gift we can give. Teach a congregation to read until they see him, and they will worship without being told to.

For Reflection

1. Look hard at your week in ministry. How much of it is real engagement with God in study and worship, and how much is religious activity wearing the costume of engagement, the services that, as Willard warned, can burn us out while looking like devotion?

2. Willard set four questions at the center of every life: what is reality, who is well off, who is a good person, and how do you get to be one. Your people are answering them one way or another. Are these questions shaping your proclamation of the Word and teaching of the church?

3. Where are you fighting a temptation by force of will? Willard said the greatest hindrance to sin is a clear vision of God. Name the sin, and ask what a clearer sight of God would do to this sin pattern.

Dallas Willard thought he knew why, and the reason was not a lack of effort. We reach for the means and skip everything underneath them. We want the behavior without the vision that would make it make sense, and without ever forming the intention to do it. Willard’s words in Renewing the Christian Mind: “we tend to accentuate the means and get all the means, but we do not have in place the vision or the intention.” The Sermon becomes livable only when vision and intention are back in place beneath the means.

This is the third and last post in a short series on Willard’s reading of the Sermon. The first walked through how Jesus came to fulfill the law. The second made the case that the Sermon describes a kind of person rather than a list of rules. That leaves the obvious question hanging. If the Sermon is the portrait of a kind of person, how does anyone become that person? This lecture is Willard’s answer, and he gives it three names: vision, intention, means.

You can watch the full lecture or read the transcript here: Sermon on the Mount: Vision, Intention, Means

Willard did not invent VIM for the Sermon. He saw it as the pattern behind every real human change, from learning a language to getting sober. “If we are to be spiritually formed in Christ,” he writes, “we must have and must implement the appropriate vision, intention, and means.” Leave one out, or hold them in the wrong order, and Christ “simply will not be formed in us.” Then he turns the pattern on the Sermon on the Mount.

Motivation Comes from Vision

Willard starts with vision because nothing moves without it. “Motivation comes from vision,” he writes, “and vision should come from the preaching of the gospel of the Kingdom of God as an all-encompassing invitation to live life under the rule of God.” Vision is seeing that the kingdom of God is real, open, and available now. Willard called the life that flows from it “eternal living,” and he defined it as: “living interactively with God.” He treated this vision as something to be cultivated, not assumed. He opened the lecture with devotional exercises, an old missionary story and the Shield of St. Patrick, ways to make the kingdom present to the mind until a person can see it.

This is why the Sermon reads as impossible to so many sincere people. They are trying to perform its commands without the one thing that makes the commands sensible, the kingdom standing open in front of them. Turn the other cheek is a crushing demand if this world is all there is and your safety depends on hitting back first. It becomes a different thing for someone who has seen, as Willard told his students, that wherever you are is “a perfectly safe place to be,” because you are alive in the kingdom of God. The vision changes what the command costs.

Pastors carry a particular weight here, because Willard locates the source of vision in preaching. We can press the commands of Jesus on our people for years, louder each season, and never give them the vision underneath. When that happens, the problem is not that our people lack willpower. They lack a vision of the kingdom large enough to make obedience reasonable. We have been handing out the demands of the Sermon while withholding the only thing that could make a person want them.

The Intention Hangs on the Vision

Willard’s second term is the one he says we skip most. Between admiring Jesus and obeying him sits a step almost no one takes: forming the intention to do what he said. “The ‘I’ hangs on the ‘V,’” Willard says. “If you don’t have a vision, you won’t form the intention.” Vision makes intention possible. It does not force it. At some point a person has to decide, and deciding is more than wanting the result or bracing for another try.

William Law, the eighteenth-century writer whose Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life shaped Wesley and Whitefield, made the point with a small test case. Law had noticed that Christians live more or less like everyone else, and not because Christianity failed them. They never intended to live otherwise. “Let a man but have so much piety as to intend to please God in all his actions,” he wrote, “and then he will never swear again.” Law is not asking for a resolution to quit swearing. He is asking for an intention to please God in everything, after which the swearing falls off on its own, because it cannot survive the intention.

The Sermon on the Mount does not feel unlivable because we tried to live it and failed. It feels unlivable because we never formed the intention to live it at all. We admire it, we feel guilty about it, we file it under the things Jesus said that no one does. Jesus named the gap himself. “Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and do not do what I say?” That is not a question about ability. It is a question about intention.

Train, Do Not Just Try Harder

Here Willard closes off the two roads we tend to travel. One says transformation is not possible, so we settle for being broken and forgiven and leave it there. The other says transformation is a matter of effort, so we grit our teeth, try harder, and fail on the same schedule as last year. Willard rejects both and offers a third way he calls indirection. “Indirection says don’t just try hard: train yourself, and training involves finding out why what happens in your life happens the way it does and changing those conditions.”

Trying harder aims straight at the behavior. Training aims at the conditions underneath it. Take a habit you mean to break. Willard says it never jumps you from nowhere. “It’s always coming,” and the work is learning to “recognize its approach” and “get off the conveyor belt while you can.” You change what feeds the habit before it arrives, instead of wrestling it in the moment when it is already stronger than you.

The means are not optional. “If you don’t take the means,” Willard says, “you really didn’t decide to stop.” The student who will not study has not decided to pass. An intention that refuses the means was never an intention. It was a wish.

This is also where someone reaches for the word grace, as though training and grace pulled against each other. They do not. “The problem,” Willard says, “is that people talk about the Holy Spirit and they talk about grace but they don’t talk about this.” Grace is God at work in us as we do the training he makes possible, not God working instead of us. The training never earns the kingdom; it is how we take hold of a kingdom already given. The vision is his, the kingdom is his, the power in the means is his. What is left to us is the deciding and the showing up.

This is also the only road to the righteousness Jesus said must “exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees.” Willard is clear that Jesus did not mean a stricter, more anxious version of their rule-keeping. An outward approach to formation, he writes, “will merely increase ‘the righteousness’ of the scribe and Pharisee.” Vision, intention, and means aim somewhere else, at a person remade from the inside, whose obedience comes off a changed heart the way fruit comes off a healthy tree. Willard summed up the goal as the great commandment, loving God with everything and your neighbor as yourself, and said living toward it takes “the whole shebang,” the vision, the intention, and the means together.

A note for pastors:

Willard told his students he wanted to “get Jesus out of the category of the ‘scolder.’” Jesus teaches, Willard said. He does not merely scold. Willard kept a comic of a woman leaving worship, shaking the preacher’s hand at the door, telling him, “Nice deploring, Pastor.” For a long time we assumed a sermon was not working unless it was scolding.

Vision, intention, means is the way out of deploring. Preach the kingdom first, and keep preaching it until your people can see it, because their motivation will come from that vision and from nowhere else. Then name the intention out loud, the decision many of them have never made, and call for it. Then put the means in their hands, the training that turns the intention into a life, and tell them the Spirit meets them in the work rather than excusing them from it. That sequence is the difference between a congregation that goes home convicted and one that goes home equipped. Proclaim the vision, clarify the intention, teach the means. That is the pastor as a teacher of the nations, and it is the opposite of scolding.

For Reflection

1. When you preach the commands of Jesus, are you giving your people a vision of the kingdom large enough to make obedience reasonable, or are you handing them harder rules and calling it faithfulness?

2. Is there a command of Jesus you have admired for years and never once intended to obey? What would change this week if you decided, today, to please God in that one area?

3. Where are you trying harder and failing on the same schedule, when what you need is training? Name one condition in your life you could change so the thing you keep losing to never gets its momentum.

In The Divine Conspiracy Willard takes that verse, “They will turn the other cheek,” and refuses to treat it as a rule. These hard sayings, he writes, are “illustrations of what a certain kind of person, the kingdom person, will characteristically do.” They are not laws, and the reason is plain: “they do not cover the many cases.”

Read every command in the Sermon that way, as a picture of the person Jesus is forming, and it stops reading like a rulebook. This is the second post in a short series walking through it, after last week on how Jesus came to fulfill the law. Willard makes the same case in his Fuller lecture this week, where the title carries the claim: the Sermon describes a kind of life, not a list of laws.

You can watch the full lecture or read the transcript here: Sermon on the Mount: A Kind of Life

Wisdom for Kingdom Living, Not Laws for Kingdom Living

Willard draws a line between two ways of reading the Sermon. One reads it as legislation, commands to be kept to the letter. The other reads it as wisdom, the counsel that forms a person who then knows how to act. He puts Jesus’ teaching in the second category. In the lecture he says it again: the hard sayings are “illustrations of how the transformed heart might well behave in ways that are counter-cultural.”

Hold “turn the other cheek” up to that and it stops being a measuring stick. Jesus is not issuing a procedure for every insult. He is showing us what a person looks like who is no longer run by the need to hit back. The Sermon on the Mount offers wisdom for kingdom living, not only laws for kingdom living. That difference decides whether we come to the Sermon to find the line, or to find out who we are becoming.

Legalism Abolishes Your Responsibility for Judgment

Willard names a danger we rarely think to guard against. We assume the threat to the Sermon is that people will go soft on it, water it down, look for the loophole. He points the other way. The real danger is legalism, and it appeals to us for a precise reason. Legalism, Willard warns, is tempted to “abolish your responsibility for judgment.”

A rule tells you when you are finished. Keep it and you are clear. That is the comfort a rule gives. It is also an escape. When the Sermon becomes a code, we no longer have to ask what love requires of us here, with this person, in this moment. We check the rule and stop there. Willard calls what we have surrendered “judgment,” and he does not treat it as a small loss. A faith reduced to rule-keeping has handed away what maturity is made of.

A rule asks only for compliance. Wisdom asks for a formed heart, which is the harder and slower thing. Read as a kind of life, the Sermon asks more of us than any rulebook could, not less.

You Are Called to Make Judgments

Willard is blunt with his students. “What I am most concerned to say to you on this particular point is you are called to make judgments and a part of your growth as a disciple of Jesus is learning how to make judgments.”

Growing up in Christ means becoming someone who can read a situation and act well in it, not because a rule happened to cover that case, but because the heart behind the action has been trained toward the good. Jesus said this righteousness has to exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, and Willard is clear he did not mean a stricter version of their rule-keeping. He meant a different kind of goodness, one that grows from the inside. In The Divine Conspiracy, Willard describes a “genuinely good” person as someone who acts “from the deepest levels of their understanding and motivation,” “committed to promoting the good of everyone they deal with,” having gone “beyond the goodness of scribes and Pharisees.”

When the Sermon is reduced to law, Willard says, it leaves us passive, convinced we cannot live this way at all. The rulebook reading, the one that looks most serious about obedience, is the one that ends in resignation. We decide the standard is impossible and file it away. Read instead as wisdom for a life we are being formed into, the Sermon becomes something we can begin to live.

A Certain Kind of Person

Willard gathers the whole lecture into a single sentence about what the Sermon is for. The commands of Jesus, he says, are “invitations to be a certain type of person.” Through faith and apprenticeship to Jesus, a person has “become inwardly transformed so that his behaviors flow naturally from who they now are as His mature brothers and sisters under the present rule of God.”

The behaviors flow from the person. We get it backwards when we start with the behaviors and hope a person forms around them later. Jesus starts with the person. Form the heart, and the conduct the Sermon describes comes off it the way fruit comes off a healthy tree.

Willard keeps returning to the kingdom as something available now. The Beatitudes, he writes, announce “the free availability of God’s rule and righteousness to all of humanity through reliance upon Jesus himself, the person now loose in the world among us.” The life the Sermon describes is not stored up for heaven. It is on offer today, to anyone willing to apprentice to Jesus and be changed.

A Sermon read as a kind of life is not a softer way of pulling ourselves up by our own effort. The transformation Willard describes comes through reliance on Christ, the person now loose in the world. J. Gresham Machen wrote that the Sermon on the Mount “leads a man straight to the foot of the Cross.” The kind of person Jesus describes is the kind of person only Jesus can produce in us. Scot McKnight calls the Sermon “the moral portrait of Jesus’ own people,” and a portrait is a likeness we grow into.

A note for pastors:

Our task with the Sermon on the Mount is to teach it, not to police it. Those are different jobs, and policing is the easier of the two, which is why we drift toward it.

Policing the Sermon means handing our people the rules and checking their compliance. Teaching it means doing what Willard describes, showing a congregation the kind of person Jesus is forming and then walking with them into the practices that form it. When we preach “turn the other cheek,” the policing instinct reaches for the boundary, measuring how far the rule extends and how often it binds. The teaching instinct asks a better question out loud, in front of our people. What kind of person could take an insult without needing to return it, and how does someone become that?

That question opens onto the real work of formation, the disciplines and the training a church can run. So teach it that way. Open Matthew 5 and tell your people plainly that Jesus is raising the bar, but not where they expect. The righteousness he calls for runs deeper than conduct. He is describing a life they can grow into, not a longer list of rules to keep. Then give them one step toward it. Naming the life is the proclamation. Handing them the means to start living it is the teaching. That is the pastor as teacher of the nations, declaring the kingdom is open and then showing real people how to live in it.

For Reflection

1. When you open the Sermon on the Mount, are you reading to find the line, the point where you have done enough? Or are you reading to see the person Jesus is forming you into?

2. Willard warns that legalism is tempted to “abolish your responsibility for judgment.” Where have you reached for a rule because it was easier than becoming the kind of person who would not need one?

3. Jesus says the life of the kingdom flows from a transformed heart. Are you training your people to keep rules, or teaching them to make kingdom judgments, and giving them somewhere to learn how?

Most of us read it in fragments, a verse here for a sermon, the Beatitudes lifted out on their own. Willard says that is how you miss it.

“It’s actually a wonderful thing if you could get someone to preach it to you and start out hearing it and go from beginning to end all together. The continuity of a text is always absolutely vital to its meaning and if you just jump on this like you jump on The Beatitudes and now you are going to preach something about that, you are pretty certainly going to miss the whole point.”

The Sermon is not a grab bag of hard sayings to admire one at a time. Willard treats it as a single, carefully prepared discourse, Jesus answering the questions every human being is already asking. This post opens a short excursus on that discourse, the framework Willard hands pastors for kingdom living.

You can watch the full lecture or read the transcript here: Sermon on the Mount: Fulfilling the Law

The Sermon Answers the Questions Everyone Is Already Asking

Willard reads the Sermon as Jesus’ answer to the questions everyone seems to be asking. What is real. Who is really well off. Who is a really good person. And how do you become one.

The first question runs underneath everything. “Repent for the Kingdom of the Heavens is at hand.” Willard calls that a reality claim, an announcement about what is now available. And he gives the reality its plainest definition. “What is the Kingdom of the Heavens? It is God in action.”

That is the ground the whole Sermon stands on. Before Jesus tells anyone how to live, He tells them what is there. God, in action, within reach.

The second question gets answered in the Beatitudes, and the answer overturns the human scoreboard. Willard insists the Beatitudes are not instructions. “They are announcements of who is and who is not blessed. The Beatitudes are proclamation of the Kingdom of God. They don’t tell you to DO anything.” They tell you who is well off, and the list runs backward from the one the world keeps.

Then comes the sentence a pastor in a small church should sit with for a while:

“You can be blessed no matter what your circumstances are in life.” “No matter where you rank on the human scale, you can be blessed. Why? Well, because you can live in the Kingdom of God.”

Think about who is sitting in front of you on a Sunday. The man who got passed over again. The widow who feels invisible now that her husband is gone. The teenager who has already decided she is at the bottom of every ranking that matters. The Beatitudes do not tell those people to climb. They announce that the climb was never the point, because the kingdom is open to them where they stand.

Fulfilling the Law Means More Than Paying the Penalty

The crowd heard the Beatitudes as a revolution. If the rankings are inverted, the law must be coming down. So Jesus heads it off. “Don’t think that I am come to destroy the law; I am come to fulfill the Law and the Prophets.”

Willard pushes on what “fulfill” means, because most of us only hear half of it. One meaning is the one we preach often. The law required a payment we could not make, and Christ made it. Willard does not deny that. But he points to a second meaning we tend to skip, the one Jeremiah and Ezekiel promised, the law written on the heart. “That means that people will do what the law says as a natural thing to do.”

That is the fulfillment the Sermon is after. Not only a debt paid once for all, but actual people in their actual lives becoming the kind of people who do what the law was always reaching for.

Which brings Willard to the hinge of the passage, Matthew 5:20. The righteousness that enters the kingdom has to exceed the righteousness of the scribe and Pharisee. He is careful here. “Righteousness of the Scribe and the Pharisee is DOING what the Law says.” That is outward compliance, and Jesus says it is not enough, and Willard says you cannot pull it off anyway by trying harder.

The alternative is not lower. It is deeper. “If you go beyond that now and you establish a living connection with the action of God in grace living interactively with Him.” Kingdom righteousness is not a better behavior record. It is a transformed will, joined to the action of God, so a person keeps the law from the inside, out of who he has become, instead of forcing himself to obey it from the outside.

Jesus Starts at Street Level, with Anger and Contempt

Willard notices where Jesus begins, and it matters for how we preach. “He doesn’t start with, ‘Love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength’ or with ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’” He starts, Willard says, “where the action is,” on the street, with “murder, hatred, contempt, lusting.”

The first illustration is anger. Jesus traces murder back to its root. Anger, he says, “is an intent to harm of some degree,” and it comes “from having your will crossed.” That is why a person who has not surrendered their will to God lives in a low-grade readiness to be angry. Everything that crosses them is a threat.

Then contempt, which Willard says Jesus deliberately mingles with anger. “It is much easier to be angry with a person for whom you have contempt.”

People treat anger as a tool. They keep it in the drawer because they believe it gets things done. Willard says they are wrong:

“You can do everything without anger and you can do it better than you can do it with anger.”

He is honest that people resist this. They are “tied to the righteousness of anger.” He is also honest about the exceptions, the wife who has to call the police, the situation that has to be broken open now. He does not pretend the better way is always available in the moment. But he refuses to let the exception become the rule. The kingdom person is being trained out of anger and contempt, not because the feelings are forbidden, but because there is a way to live that does not need them.

And none of it happens by deciding. “People have to be trained.” Willard sketches what that training looks like in a church, a small group that spends weeks learning to watch anger, name its sources, and change them. That is the pastoral payoff. The Sermon is not a standard to feel guilty under. It is a curriculum to be taught. And the pattern is the same for every sin on the street: watch the behavior, find its sources, change the sources. Anger is only where Willard shows the work.

The Kingdom Heart Lives Free of Human Applause

Willard moves quickly through the rest of the Sermon, and a thread holds it together. The kingdom person is being freed from the systems that run everyone else.

Freed from manipulation. Willard reads the teaching on swearing as a teaching against working people over. The issue “is manipulation. You are manipulating other people to believe or do something they don’t particularly want to do.” Let your yes be yes. Stop spinning people.

Freed from the need to be seen. On Matthew 6, Willard is brief and exact. The kingdom heart “doesn’t perform for human credit. It doesn’t try to get approval or applause and that is a part of learning to stand before God in the blessedness of His Kingdom.” Part of blessedness, then, is the death of the audience. The man who is free of applause is free.

Freed, finally, from the habit of condemning. Willard handles “judge not” with a distinction every pastor needs. Jesus is not banning discernment. He is banning condemnation. “You don’t have to condemn people to discern.” Discernment names what is good and what is evil, which Willard says we cannot abandon and stay useful. Condemnation adds the extra move of “distancing,” he says, “of pushing away, of saying you are worthless.” We are called to the first and warned off the second.

All of it culminates in “being perfect as Your Father in Heaven is perfect,” and Willard cuts the verse loose from the despair it usually produces. He does not read it as flawless moral achievement. “I think the word there refers to being fully mature for where you are.” Not finished. Not faultless. Mature, grown up, responsible for the place you occupy.

A note for pastors:

Our first task with the Sermon on the Mount is to proclaim it. To preach it, plainly and confidently, as the clearest picture we have of what life in the kingdom looks like on an ordinary street.

Two failures wait on either side of that task. One is to preach the Sermon as a set of beautiful ideals, admired from a distance, never expected to touch a real week. The other is to preach it as an impossible demand, a bar so high its only function is to make people feel guilty before they go home. Willard rejects both. He treats the Sermon as concrete teaching for people who are learning to do what Jesus said, on purpose, with help.

So preach it that way. When you stand up Sunday and open Matthew 5, you are not handing your people a verdict they have already failed. You are announcing that the kingdom is open to them where they stand, that God in action is within reach, and that a person can learn to live without anger and without contempt and without the tyranny of who is watching. Proclaim the righteousness that exceeds the scribe and the Pharisee, not as a heavier rulebook, but as the deeper, freer life Jesus is describing.

And proclaim it as something teachable. Willard’s whole point is that this does not happen by a decision in a pew. It happens through training, the kind a church can run, eight Thursday evenings learning to be rid of anger. When you preach the Sermon, end by opening a door to that work, not by closing an argument. The proclamation is the invitation. The teaching instructs the congregation in the steps and disciplines needed to live free.

That is the pastor as teacher of the nations: one who declares the kingdom is here, and then shows his people, week after week, how to live in it.

For Reflection

1. Willard says Jesus answers the question “who is really well off?” by announcing that a person can be blessed no matter where they rank on the human scale. When your people listen to you preach, are they hearing that the kingdom is open to them exactly where they stand, or are they hearing one more ranking they are failing to climb?

2. Willard insists that “you can do everything without anger and you can do it better than you can do it with anger,” and that people resist this because they are tied to the righteousness of anger. Where in your own ministry have you kept anger in the drawer as a tool? What would it mean to lead, correct, and confront without reaching for it?

3. Willard answers “who is a really good person?” not with better compliance but with a transformed will trained over time, since “people have to be trained.” Are you preaching the Sermon on the Mount as ideals to admire and demands to feel guilty about, or are you proclaiming it as a life your people can actually be taught to live, and then giving them somewhere to learn it?

“It is the discipline of refraining from letting our good deeds be known.”

That is Willard’s definition of secrecy, the twenty-second lecture in his Spirituality and Ministry series. The lecture closes his unit on the disciplines of abstinence. It treats two of them, secrecy and sacrifice, and both go after the same thing in us: the appetites that have quietly taken the throne. Secrecy goes after the hunger to be seen. Sacrifice goes after the need to be secure.

You can watch the full lecture or read the transcript here: Secrecy

Secrecy Kills the Motive, Not the Visibility

Secrecy is not hiding. It is not a vow to never let anyone see you do anything good. The point of the discipline is the motive, not the deed.

Willard takes us to Matthew 6, where Jesus warns against practicing your righteous deeds before men to be noticed. Read carelessly, that passage produces people who think they should never pray in public. Willard says they have misread it. “Jesus is not speaking against being known, He is speaking about acting in order to be known.” The problem was never that the Pharisees gave money or prayed or fasted. The problem was why. They did it to be seen.

So Jesus says the strangest thing about them. They got exactly what they wanted. “They prayed to be seen and what do you know? They got seen. They got their reward.”

The recognition they were chasing was the whole reward. There was nothing else coming. The Father who sees in secret had nothing to add, because the reward they wanted was the only one they would get, and they already had it.

The Father who sees in secret rewards the deed done for Him. The discipline of secrecy trains us to do the good thing and then let it go unannounced, so that the only audience we are performing for is God.

Practicing secrecy “enables us to live and stand before the audience of One. The audience of One is the only One that matters. The others do not matter.”

Here is what that means for the person in your pew, and for you. Most of us feel as if we live in front of a crowd that is always grading us. We do the right thing and then we wait to see if anyone noticed. That waiting is what secrecy goes after. It trains us to do the good and walk away without checking whether anyone clapped.

It Is a Real Load Off Your Back

Willard does not sell secrecy as a heavier yoke. He sells it as relief.

“This practice teaches us to be content without human approval,” he says, “and that our business with God is not filtered through others of necessity. We don’t depend upon the approval of people and that is a real load off your back.”

That load is heavier than we admit. Consider how much of an ordinary day runs on it. The small adjustment you make so a comment lands well. The thing you mention so someone knows you did it. The sting when the work goes unthanked. Willard asks the question straight: how much of your peace and joy depends on people knowing and understanding what you have done?

He reaches back to something he read in Thomas a Kempis years ago. The wording Willard recalls is this: what people say about you “doesn’t make you any different. What you are, you are.” If they speak ill of you, it does not make you ill. If they speak well of you, it does not make you well. The verdict of the crowd has no power to make you into anything. Only God’s seeing does that.

“It is what I call a ‘hygienic’ discipline,” Willard says, “a clean up the mess discipline.” The mess is the residue of a life lived for an audience. It builds up without our noticing, like grime on a window. Secrecy is the cloth that wipes it off. And he says the cleanup would change a great deal: “you can imagine how much of our lives, especially in religion, would be changed if we were not angling for approval or to avoid disapproval.”

Angling for approval or to avoid disapproval. It cuts both ways. Some of us perform to be praised. Others bend everything we do to keep from being criticized. Both are the same bondage. Both hand the throne to the crowd.

The Will Has to Be Trained to Pause

Secrecy belongs to a larger family. Earlier in the same session, Willard and his teaching assistant, Keith Matthews, set up the whole unit on abstinence by talking about desire. Keith quotes a line he attributes to Willard from years back: “Desire is a good servant but a bad master.” The two of them are clear that the Christian aim is not to kill desire, the way a Buddhist might. The aim is to put desire back under the will, where it belongs.

“Desire is an impulse towards an object,” he says, and the trouble is that “it never questions itself.” Desire only ever says one thing: I want that. The will is what asks the second question. The will says, What about that? The will deliberates. And to deliberate, Willard notes, means to free up. The will frees you from being run by the next impulse.

“All of the disciplines are ‘Will training’ and they are trying to liberate you from Desire and the immediacy of Desire,” he says. The disciplines of abstinence, fasting, solitude, silence, secrecy, “always are designed to put Desire on hold and give you a chance to reflect.” They build margin. In that margin the will has room to ask why before the body acts.

Secrecy trains the will in one specific desire: the want to be seen. Every time you do a good thing and choose not to announce it, you have put that desire on hold long enough for the will to choose God instead of the crowd. Do that enough and the desire stops being your master.

Sacrifice Teaches You That God Is Enough

The last discipline of abstinence in Willard’s list is sacrifice, and he treats it differently from the others. “For the most part, this is a discipline which is received.” You do not usually choose it. It comes upon you. Loss arrives, and when it does, you receive it as a discipline rather than as proof that God has left.

Sacrifice is not frugality. “Frugality is not surrendering what is necessary; it is surrendering what is optional and you don’t have to have it but you might indulge.” Frugality lets go of the extra. Sacrifice lets go of the necessary. It releases the thing you depend on for security, the paycheck, the provision, sometimes the person, and trusts that God will hold you anyway.

What it teaches is the lesson underneath all the others. Sacrifice, Willard says, “helps us learn to rest upon the sufficiency of God when we don’t have what we need.” He anchors this in Psalm 138, verses 7 and 8: though I walk in the midst of trouble, You will revive me. He points to Luke 10, where Jesus sends out his disciples with no provision so that they would learn by experience the truth of what they were preaching, that the kingdom of God is at hand. He lands on Paul’s word, that he has learned “to be content with whatever I have, wherever I am.”

And then Willard states the whole point of the discipline in three words he says twice. “What sacrifice and loss helps us know is that God is enough. God is enough!”

That is the pastoral comfort hidden inside the hardest seasons. Profound loss is not the sign that God has abandoned your people. It is the soil where a faith that does not depend on circumstances finally grows. The widow learns it. The man who lost the job learns it. They come out the far side knowing something the comfortable never had to learn: that when the provision is gone, God is still there, and He is enough.

A note for pastors:

The thesis I keep returning to is that the pastor is a teacher of the nations, called to proclaim, teach, and manifest the kingdom. Secrecy is a discipline you cannot proclaim or teach unless you manifest it. You cannot lead anyone out of the hunger for recognition while you are still feeding your own.

Be honest about the trap, because ministry is built out of the exact material secrecy is meant to mortify. Our work is visible by design. We stand up front. We are measured by results we can count and applause we can hear. The whole vocation tilts toward what Willard named: angling for approval, or angling to avoid disapproval. The pastor who needs the sermon to land well so people will think well of him is being run by the crowd, not the kingdom. So is the pastor who avoids the hard text because he cannot bear the cold faces.

The culture of ministry rewards the hunger. Platform, brand, the count of who showed up, the comparison to the church down the road. A man can give his whole life to that audience and, like the Pharisees, get exactly what he chased and nothing more. He prayed to be seen, and he was seen, and that was the reward.

Secrecy is how you climb down off that stage. Do some good your congregation will never hear about. Make some of your requests known only to God. Stop narrating your faithfulness. Let a kindness go unmentioned even when mentioning it would help your reputation. The point is not to become invisible. The point is to be a man whose peace does not rise and fall with the verdict of the room, because he has learned to stand before the audience of One.

That is what manifesting the kingdom looks like here. When your people watch a pastor who is plainly not angling, plainly not wounded by every criticism, plainly not fishing for thanks, they are seeing the freedom the gospel offers made flesh in someone they know. You are not only telling them the load can come off. You are showing them a man who set it down.

For Reflection

1. Willard says practicing secrecy would change much of our lives, “especially in religion,” if we stopped angling for approval or to avoid disapproval. Where in your ministry this week were you angling for one or the other? What would that same act have looked like if the audience of One were the only audience you cared about?

2. Willard asks how much of our peace and joy depends on people knowing and understanding what we have done. Answer it honestly about yourself. When your good work goes unnoticed by your people, does your peace survive it, and what does the answer reveal about whose verdict is still on the throne?

3. Willard says sacrifice teaches us that God is enough, and that this lesson is usually received rather than chosen. Think of someone in your congregation walking through real loss right now. Are you helping them read that loss as evidence God has left, or are you teaching them it is the very place they will learn that God is enough?

This week thousands of Southern Baptists gather in Orlando for our annual meeting. There will be motions and resolutions, reports and elections, the slow machinery of a convention doing its business. I will be somewhere in that hall, grappling with how the decisions that are being made impact our denominational identity.

The theologian who has taught me the most about following Jesus, and, to my surprise, the most about being a Baptist, will not be on any stage. He has been gone since 2013.

His name was Dallas Willard. He was ordained a Southern Baptist minister in 1956.

Roots

Willard grew up in rural Missouri, in circumstances that were anything but stable. As a boy, in the First Baptist Church of Buffalo, he gave his life to Christ. He carried a love of learning from the schoolhouse to the church house, and in 1956, while pastoring First Baptist Church of Thomasville, Missouri, he was ordained to the ministry. From there his road bent toward the academy. He spent most of his working life as a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California.

By most accounts Willard had not been a member of a Baptist church since the 1960s. For the rest of his life he worshiped across traditions, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Quaker, Covenant, and he drank from every stream he could reach. Richard Foster, his Quaker friend, once described one such gathering as a Baptist pastor inviting a Quaker to a Lutheran’s church to hear an Episcopalian who used to be a Presbyterian. And yet, to the end, in his books and his recordings, Dallas Willard kept calling himself a Baptist minister. That is the part I could never explain.

I asked his daughter, Becky Willard Heatley, why. She told me her father had laid low on the Southern Baptist name for a long season. Part of it was reputation. “There was just kind of a stereotype,” she said, “you’ve got the Southern twang and you’re a farmer, and not well educated.” In Southern California, where Baptist churches were scarce, it was not a name that opened doors.

So why keep it at all? Becky said she asked him about it once. His answer has stayed with me. The men who ordained him, she said, the men who taught him and raised him up, meant so much to him that he would never want to disconnect from them. And then she said the line I keep coming back to. “That’s what Southern Baptist means to him. It’s what those people were.”

For Willard the label was not a position on a denominational map. It was a debt of love to the people who first handed him the gospel.

What the Word Made of Him

If you read Willard looking for Baptist distinctives, you will not find him arguing the mode of baptism or the shape of church government. What was Baptist in him ran underneath all of that, down in the way he understood the gospel itself.

I put the question to James Bryan Smith. Smith was mentored by Willard and now holds the Dallas Willard Chair of Christian Spiritual Formation at Friends University. Willard believed, Smith said, “that the gospel rightly proclaimed was a form of power in the universe.” He went on: “More times than I can remember, he would pause and talk about the power of the preached word. That really connected him to the evangelical tradition, the Baptist tradition, because of that strong emphasis on the authority of the Bible as both written and proclaimed. That’s a very Baptist sort of thing.”

A high view of Scripture. A confidence that the preached word carries real power in the world. Those convictions did not fall away when Willard traded the Baptist pulpit for the philosophy seminar. They went with him into every classroom he ever taught.

A Presbyterian or a Methodist could claim much of that, and Smith knew it. He named the evangelical tradition in the same breath as the Baptist one. What tips Willard toward the Baptist side of that family is where he put his confidence next, in the ordinary gathered church. “The church is and always will be God’s best arrangement for his people,” Willard liked to say. Smith remembered him calling congregations outposts of the kingdom, not to be confused with the kingdom itself, but indispensable to it all the same. A man with Willard’s gifts could have floated above the ordinary gathered church and lectured the world from a distance. He refused to. He kept showing up to teach midweek classes in local congregations into his final years. That stubborn belief in the small assembly is a deeply Baptist conviction.

Keith Matthews, who taught alongside Willard for years, put his finger on something subtler. Willard’s Southern Baptist training, Matthews said, including the dispensationalism he learned as a young man, never entirely left him. What changed is that Willard toned it down, and he did it on purpose, “because he wanted to see the Spirit work, and not generate something of a feeling that would fade.” He kept the soil he was planted in. He pulled the weeds out of it.

The Gospel He Outgrew, and the One He Kept

I will not pretend Willard’s Baptist story was all gratitude. Some of what he carried out of those years he carried as a burden.

He was honest about what his own preaching had become in the Baptist pulpit. He grew disillusioned that his sermons produced rededication but not transformation. “When I came down hard,” he said, “the people who came forward to rededicate their lives were the best people in the congregation. Revival didn’t really change people.” Looking back, he named the deeper problem: “As a Baptist preacher, I was taught that one of my main businesses was to convince people that they were saved. I really don’t think that’s our business.”

John Ortberg, one of Willard’s closest protégés, described the gospel he and Dallas had both inherited. Even after years under Willard’s teaching, Ortberg admitted, his invitations still came out the same way. “Here’s how to be forgiven so that you can know for sure you’re going to heaven when you die.” A whole gospel shrunk down to a transaction settled at the end of life.

I know that gospel. I grew up on it. Willard called it the gospel of sin management. I have called it the gospel of minimum insurance requirements, the faith of a struggling Southern Baptist who could not work out why being saved never seemed to make him new. The first time I read Willard, on a flight, in the cheapest copy of The Great Omission I could find, I read one sentence I have never gotten past. Grace, he wrote, is opposed to earning, not to effort. Faith made sense for the first time.

Willard did not leave the Baptists because he stopped believing what they believe. He left a thin version of the gospel that some of our preaching had settled for, and he kept the convictions underneath it, the authority of the Word, the power of proclamation, the necessity of the church.

The ache, for me, is that the people most shaped by his work were not the people who raised him.

One of Our Own

Richard Foster, a Quaker, built Renovaré with Willard alongside him. Methodists in South Africa flew him across the world, again and again, to teach their pastors. A rising generation of younger ministers across many traditions has made his books the backbone of their formation. My own tradition, the one that converted him and ordained him and gave him the Word he never stopped trusting, has done very little to embody or appreciate his work.

I do not write that to scold the room in Orlando. I write it as a man who is part of that room, and who grieves a missed inheritance. We had a teacher of the nations among us. We let other people claim him and missed a great legacy we could have learned from.

I used to wear the Baptist name uneasily. Willard has changed that for me. He helped me see that being Baptist, at its best, is exactly what Becky described to me. It is the men and women who first hand you the gospel, who teach you to trust the written and spoken Word, who lay hands on you and send you out and never let you forget that the preached word is power. That is worth keeping. That is worth a debt of love.

So this week I will sit in that hall as one of Willard’s people, and as one of theirs. Maybe, as I told Jim Smith when we talked, that is the Baptist that is in me, and the Baptist that was in Dallas all along. Neither of us could quite take the label off. Both of us came to understand it was never about the label. It was about the people who handed us the Word, and the Word they handed us.

For Reflection

1. Who first handed you the gospel, and what did they give you that you would never want to disconnect from? Have you thanked God for them lately, by name?

2. Is your preaching aimed mostly at convincing your people they are saved, or at forming them into apprentices of Jesus who can do what he said? How would your congregation know the difference this Sunday?

3. Whose work has shaped your walk with God the most, and what would it cost you to carry that gift back to your own people instead of leaving it for others to claim?

“Now, how much is there to you other than your homosexuality? Is that all? Are you going to make a life of being homosexual?”

That is the second of Willard’s two lectures on sexuality, and it moves the conversation off the ground the culture wants to fight on. The first lecture taught chastity as the training of desire. This one does something harder. It teaches pastors how to think clearly about sexual sin without crushing the person sitting across from them, and it does so by going underneath the behavior to two questions almost no one in the room has been taught to ask. What is sin, as distinct from temptation? And who is this person underneath their sexuality?

You can watch the full lecture or read the transcript here: Sexuality and Spiritual Life II

Temptation Is Not Sin. The Relenting of the Will Is.

Willard opens this part of the lecture with a pastoral problem he has watched destroy serious Christians, especially the young. They do not know the difference between a thought, a temptation, and a sin. So they treat all three as the same, and they live under a condemnation that is not even true.

He names the source of the confusion. Many of our people read Jesus’ words in Matthew 5 as if a thought is a sin. Willard traces this in part to a translation problem and to what he calls “one of the great ‘sillies’ of the recent, not too recent, past,” Jimmy Carter telling Playboy magazine that he had evil thoughts. Carter, Willard says, was “doing just exactly what is so destructive here,” collapsing the distance between having a thought and consenting to it.

Then Willard draws the line precisely. He distinguishes three things.

First, the thought itself. “The thought of something wrong with no inclination to do it is something you cannot control directly.” A thought can arrive unbidden. You did not invite it, you do not want it, and you cannot keep it from showing up at the door. Willard adds that as the mind is transformed over time, fewer of these thoughts will come. But the bare arrival of a thought is not sin, and it is not even temptation.

Second, temptation. “Temptation is where you have the thought and the inclination and that is where you are apt to tease that out and foster temptation.” Now there is a pull. The thought has company. You feel the lean toward it. Willard is clear that this is “a problem,” a place to be careful, but he is equally clear: “I don’t think He is saying that temptation is sin.”

Third, sin. “Sin is the relenting of the will.” Here the will says yes. Not necessarily the body, not necessarily the act carried out, because circumstances may prevent the deed. Willard’s test is blunt: “would you if you could?” When the answer is yes, the will has relented, and that is the adultery of the heart Jesus names.

Scripture draws the same line. Hebrews says Christ was tempted in every way we are, yet without sin, which means temptation reached him and never crossed into sin. James traces the sequence a step further: desire conceives, and then it gives birth to sin. The thought and the pull are the conception. The relenting of the will is the birth.

Most of our people have lived their whole Christian lives unable to tell the difference between an intrusive thought and a cultivated desire, between being tempted and having sinned. They confess things that are not sins and miss the place where the will relents. When you teach this distinction, you hand a struggling believer something they have been desperate for: an honest map of their own interior, and a place to fight that is not everywhere at once.

The Way Out of Temptation Is the Trained Mind

Willard does not leave the distinction sitting as theory. He turns it into a practice, and it is the same practice the first lecture pointed to.

If sin is the relenting of the will, and temptation is the place where the will is most likely to relent, then the work is to stay out of temptation as much as possible. And the way to do that, Willard says, is to train the thoughts. “A good thing is to come to the place to where there are certain thoughts that will not occur to us and especially in sexual relations.”

This is where Paul’s word to the Philippians does its work. Whatever is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, excellent, worthy of praise, think about these things. The trained mind is not a mind that white-knuckles every temptation as it arrives. It is a mind that has been so filled with what is good that whole categories of thought stop showing up. The defense against the relenting will is not vigilance at the moment of crisis. It is formation long before the crisis, so that the crisis comes less often and with less force.

Willard is honest that this is bodily and habitual, not magical. “Habit applies to thoughts, feelings, will, actions, social relations.” Your mind has habits the same way your hands do. The believer who has indulged and cultivated sexual thought for years has trained a habit, and habits are broken the way they are made, by practice over time. This is not condemnation. It is the ordinary path of formation, available to anyone willing to walk it.

You Are a Whole Person Before God, Regardless of Sexuality

Here is the heart of the lecture, and the place where Willard is most counter-cultural. He insists that sexuality is not the center of a person. It is not their identity. It is one dimension of a life that is far larger than any appetite.

Willard defines identity carefully. “Your identity is that in you out of which you act routinely without thinking.” And then: “Identity reaches to the depths of the person and it indicates ways of acting that are consistent with that identity.” Measured against that definition, sexual orientation makes a thin foundation for a self. Willard asks: “Suppose now that’s the whole deal. What does it tell you to do? Not much of anything except certain kinds of genital behaviors.” A self built on sexuality cannot tell you how to be honest, how to be compassionate, how to follow Christ. It is, in Willard’s words, “pretty thin gruel.”

This is why his question to the distressed young person is not a trap but a rescue. “How much is there to you other than your homosexuality?” He is not minimizing the person’s experience. He is refusing to let a culture that “blows sex up into such a big thing” hand a staggering young person a ready-made identity that cannot hold the weight of a life.

Willard grounds all of this in Scripture that goes deeper than the culture war. “Sex is a passing mode of human union,” he says, pointing to Jesus’ words to the Sadducees about marriage and the resurrection. And he reads Isaiah 56, the foreigner and the eunuch given a name in God’s house “better than that of sons and daughters.” Willard calls it “breathtakingly anti-cultural for that day.” The person the ancient world counted as cut off, dried up, outside the line of belonging, God gives an everlasting name. The conclusion Willard draws is direct: “You are a whole person before God regardless of sex and marriage.”

Hold this together with the clarity of the previous section and you have the whole of Willard’s pastoral ethic here. Sexual sin is real. The relenting will places a person in violation of God’s good order, and Willard does not soften that. Homosexual practice, cohabitation, the whole “hooking up” culture, these damage people and hinder the kingdom life, and a pastor who pretends otherwise has failed to teach. And at the very same time, no person is reduced to their sexual history or their orientation. The man who confesses pornography, the couple living together, the young person who has just named an orientation, each one is a whole person standing before God, to be loved and taught and never treated as less-than while they bring their sexuality into the way of Christ. Willard holds both with no contradiction, because he has rooted identity in Christ rather than in appetite.

That is the kingdom frame. Willard says it plainly: “We need to deal with the general problem in the light of the Kingdom of God and discipleship.” Not in the light of the latest battle over ordination or marriage law, important as those decisions are, but in the light of a King whose reign reorders every appetite and gives every person a name.

A note for pastors:

Our task here is to teach, and Willard means something specific by the word. Proclaiming a behavior wrong from the pulpit is the easier half, and plenty of pastors manage it. Teaching is the harder half: the specific instruction that shows a believer how to live the with-God life in the body he has. Willard says it to the room without flinching: “Now, folks, this is going to be very demanding on your preaching and teaching to do this.” The demand is the concrete part, handing your people a way to live before the crisis ever arrives.

So teach the three-part distinction as a tool your people can use, not a concept they can admire. Give them the sequence in plain words: a thought arrives unbidden and is not sin; an inclination joins it and now there is temptation; the will consents and now there is sin. Then teach what to do at each step. When the thought comes, name it and decline to entertain it. When the inclination pulls, move the body, change the room, tell someone, put a Philippians 4:8 object in front of the mind on purpose. People carrying years of false guilt need the line drawn and the next move named.

Teach identity as something trained, not announced. Willard defines it as “that in you out of which you act routinely without thinking,” which means it is built by practice. Give your people practices that build it: a morning that names whose they are before they reach for a phone, a standing question at the end of the day about where they acted out of Christ and where they acted out of appetite, a place of service that proves their life is larger than any one appetite. A congregation drilled in those habits has somewhere to stand when a young person finally says out loud what he has carried alone.

And when you sit with a believer working out of a sexual sin, teach, do not only counsel. Counseling listens. Teaching hands over a way to live. Give him a rule of life that names the other dimensions Willard says a self is made of: work, friendship, worship, service, and the body’s ordinary care in sleep and food and exercise. Sexual formation does not happen by staring at the sexual struggle. It happens as the whole person is put back under the reign of Christ, one practiced dimension at a time. Teach that to people who are not yet in trouble, and you will have done the work this lecture asks of you.

For Reflection

1. Willard says many serious Christians suffer because they cannot tell a thought from a temptation, and a temptation from a sin. When your people confess to you, are you helping them locate where the will relented, or are you letting them carry guilt for thoughts they could not control? When did you last teach the distinction as a practice your people could use, instead of only naming it from the pulpit?

2. Willard asks the distressed young person, “How much is there to you other than your homosexuality? Is that all?” The same question exposes anyone who has built a self on a single appetite. Where have you let your people, or yourself, locate identity in something too thin to carry a life? What would it take to teach your congregation to find their identity in Christ before they are ever in crisis?

3. Willard insists you are a whole person before God regardless of sex and marriage, and in the same breath he refuses to call sexual sin anything other than what it is. When you sit with someone in a sexual struggle, do you hold both, the dignity and the clarity, or do you drop one to protect the other? What changes in your church if every person is taught they are whole before God while they bring their sexuality into the way of Christ?

“You cannot deal with desire by trying to satisfy it. You cannot deal with it that way because it will always cry for more.”

That is the opening claim of Willard’s twentieth lecture in his Spirituality and Ministry series, the lecture where he begins teaching chastity as a spiritual discipline. It is not a lecture on sexual rules. It is a lecture on what desire does inside a person, and what the alternative to being ruled by it looks like.

Our people have spent their lives operating on the opposite premise. Hunger is the signal. The signal points to satisfaction. Satisfaction quiets the hunger. So they satisfy it. And the hunger comes back, only louder, and they satisfy it again, and the loop tightens. Willard says the loop is not a loop. It is a slope. Every satisfaction makes the next desire larger, not smaller. Desire, he insists, has no ceiling.

What follows is Willard’s account of how to step off the slope. Not by killing the desire, but by forming a joy large enough that the desire stops running the person.

You can watch the full lecture or read the transcript here: Sexuality and Spiritual Life I

Desire Cannot Be Satisfied. It Can Be Trained.

Willard’s definition of chastity is narrower than what most people assume. Chastity, in Willard’s teaching, is the practice of abstaining from sexual acts, thoughts, and desires for a significant period in order to develop the strength necessary to be free from the domination of sexual appetites. The aim is not the avoidance of sex. The aim is freedom from being ruled by sexual appetite.

Chastity is therefore a training discipline. It is the work of submitting the will to God in an area where the will has likely never submitted before. As that submission becomes practiced, desire stops dictating. The person becomes free to choose.

Willard is precise about what freedom means here. The trained believer lives in shalom, the peace of God. Shalom is the aliveness of a person whose desires have stopped running the show, who can love and serve and rest without the next appetite dictating the next move. The undisciplined life dominated by sexual gratification is the deadened life. The disciplined life, the life of shalom, is the alive one.

Pastors may at times have it backwards. We assume discipline costs the person their joy, and that the gospel offer is the willingness to pay that cost. Willard says the gospel offer is the reverse. Discipline is how a person becomes free for a joy that does not depend on gratification.

If we preach chastity as a renunciation, we have left our people thinking that the holy life is the half-alive life. If we preach chastity as a training that frees them, we have told them the truth Willard is teaching here.

Chastity Is Not Sex-Negative

Willard is careful with this one because the church has often gotten it wrong. Chastity, in his framing, is not a verdict on sexuality as such. It is not the position that sex is bad, that the body is a problem, that the appetites are dirty. Willard rejects all of that. The discipline of chastity does not exist because sex is unclean. It exists because sexual appetite, left unchecked, “will always cry for more,” and that is a kingdom problem.

When sexual desire is left unchecked, it does not stay sexual. It becomes idolatrous. It begins to function as the organizing center of the person’s life. It decides what they pursue, what they fear, what they buy, what they look at, who they imagine themselves to be. The desire stops being one appetite among many and becomes the appetite that runs the others.

An appetite that runs the person is a god the person serves. The First Commandment is not silent on this. If sexual desire occupies the throne of the heart, then whatever religious language the person uses, the throne has been given to something other than the God of Israel.

The pastoral move here is significant. When we treat sexual sin only as moral failure, we leave the deeper issue untouched. A person can repent of the act and still serve the desire. They can stop the behavior and continue to be ruled by it. Willard’s frame goes underneath the behavior to the throne and asks who rules. The path forward is not white-knuckled suppression. It is reordering. The desire that runs the person can be unseated, but only because something and someone better can take its place.

Joy Is the Protector

Willard turns next to what protects a person from being dominated by sexual desire. The protection is not vigilance. It is not policing the eyes. It is not, in the end, even accountability software. (Though all of these serve a purpose and have their place.) The protection is the active pursuit of joy and love for what is good.

Willard points us to Paul instead. Philippians 4:8 is the text. Whatever is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, excellent, worthy of praise, think about these things. Paul writes that command in the context of teaching the Philippians how to live with peace amid temptation and pressure. Willard reads it as the protector text on the formation of desire. The mind focused on what is good is not weighed down by foolish desires.

This reframes the work of chastity in a way that matters for pastoral instruction. Chastity is not the absence of something. It is the presence of something larger. When we teach our people only the no, we have handed them suppression. When we teach the yes, the active formation of joy in what is good, we have handed them the actual discipline.

That joy comes from the disciplines that aim the person at the kingdom: worship, Scripture, prayer, fellowship, solitude, service, generosity. These practices do not exist to make us religious. They exist to give the heart something to love that is larger than the appetite. When the heart loves what is true, honorable, and praiseworthy, sexual appetite does not stop being present. It stops being king.

That is the trained life. The desire is not dead. The desire has been put in its place under a larger joy that is being formed by the kingdom’s disciplines.

A note for pastors:

Our task as pastors is to proclaim, teach, and manifest the kingdom. Beyond the sermon series, beyond the counseling-office moment when a man confesses pornography or a young person confesses a hidden relationship, the formation work is to teach our whole congregation what chastity is and how to practice it. That includes the married in our churches whose covenant already places sexual intimacy within God’s gift.

Paul gives the married in the church a teaching text in 1 Corinthians 7. He writes that husband and wife should not deprive one another sexually, except by agreement for a limited time, in order to devote themselves to prayer. That is married chastity. It is the practice of mutually agreed seasons where sexual intimacy is set aside so the couple can be filled by a truer intimacy. Paul does not treat this as a heroic move for the spiritually advanced. He treats it as a practice the married in the church are meant to know.

When we teach this, we open our people to something the culture cannot give them. The temporal joy of sexual intimacy is real. Christians do not have to deny it or apologize for it. It is one of God’s good gifts. But it is not the deepest joy available to the human person. The deepest joy is the with-God life made available in Christ, the eternal joy that does not begin at death and does not depend on bodily appetite. Chastity is one of the practices that gives the disciple, married or single, access to that joy now.

For the disciple who wonders whether they will always be at war with their own appetites: train the joy. Make a habit of what is true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, excellent, and worthy of praise. Let the disciplines of the kingdom take up the room in your day that the compulsion has been taking. Chastity is the practice that lets that joy take hold.

For Reflection

1. Willard says the central thing a pastor must accept about desire is that it cannot be dealt with by trying to satisfy it. What desire in your own life have you treated as something to manage by feeding it, only to watch it grow larger? What would it look like to treat that desire as something to train, not satisfy?

2. Willard makes joy the protector against the domination of sexual desire. In your preaching and teaching, do you spend more time describing what your people should refuse, or more time describing what they should pursue? What joy are you actively forming in them that is large enough to crowd out the compulsion?

3. Sexual sin in your congregation is rarely an isolated behavior issue. It usually points to a throne. When you sit with someone in that struggle, are you helping them stop a behavior, or helping them unseat the appetite that has been running their life? What changes if you do the second?

He had watched them as they had grown in discipline and honest labor. They saved. They stopped spending on drink and vice. And they got wealthy. Wesley, watching it happen across decades of ministry, wrote a sermon called “The Inefficacy of Christianity.” His diagnosis: diligence and frugality produce wealth, and wealth produces pride, love of the world, and every temper destructive of Christianity. His solution: give everything away before it corrupts you.

Dallas Willard thinks Wesley was brilliant and wrong. Wesley could not imagine a Christian teaching that would produce people capable of holding possessions and power without being corrupted. He could not conceive that character could withstand prosperity. So his answer was evacuation. He taught his parishioners get rid of the money before it gets a hold of you.

Willard’s nineteenth lecture at Fuller Seminary argues that the answer is formation, not abject poverty. The question is what your money reveals about what you worship.

You can watch the full lecture or read the transcript here: Frugality and Poverty

Frugality Is Not Poverty

Willard defines frugality as “refraining from indulgence,” where indulgence is “something that goes beyond need and is done just for the sake of the activity in question.” In The Spirit of the Disciplines he puts it this way: “Practicing frugality means we stay within the bounds of what general good judgment would designate as necessary for the kind of life to which God has led us.”

Frugality is attentiveness to what God has called you to, and the freedom to live within those bounds without reaching past them.

Willard mentions what frugality trains out of us: “the things that just have to do with appearance or sensuality or security.” Legitimate human concerns that become compulsions. The person who cannot pass a sale without buying something has been mastered by love of possessions. The person who cannot give because they might need it someday has been mastered by love of security. Frugality is the slow work of learning which compulsion has hold of you, and refusing to let it master you.

The goal of frugality is desire rightly ordered, desire pointing toward what is good rather than what is pleasurable. The problem it addresses is wanting ordinary things too much: comfort, recognition, the next thing. Frugality is the long, sustained work of learning that the next thing will not complete us. It will not make us grateful. It will not make us free.

The Dangerous Illusion of Poverty

Many spiritual formation conversations treat poverty as the ideal, the vow of poverty, the monk with nothing. Willard calls that “one of the most dangerous illusions for human beings.” Poverty removes the occasion for the discipline; it does not guarantee the formation itself. Jesus did not tell everyone he encountered to sell everything they owned. He told the rich young ruler that, because the rich young ruler’s wealth had become his kingdom. The question is what rules your life? What dominates your desires?

For Willard, stewardship of possessions under the reign of God is “far more of a discipline of the spirit than poverty itself.” The question is what has control of you.

Money Is a Dimension of the Kingdom

Money is a form of power. It shapes neighborhoods. It determines who eats and who does not. It funds the institutions that form children. How disciples use their financial lives is a kingdom matter, not just personal preferences settled between themselves and their accountant.

Willard directs this toward a Christian understanding of vocation. “The main place of discipleship is in our employments.” The workplace, the business, the classroom, the clinic are all places where believers are meant to extend the kingdom as apprentices of Jesus.

When a believer negotiates a contract honestly, sets a wage that reflects the dignity of workers, and resists the industry standard when the industry standard is exploitative, they are not doing something adjacent to their faith. They are living it where Willard says it primarily lives, in their daily work and occupation.

What Charity Cannot Do

Charity “will never make up for” the absence of disciples working within the economic and social order, Willard argues. Charity addresses outcomes. Disciples working within economic systems address causes. The congregation that raises money for the food pantry while none of its members bring kingdom values to the businesses and policies that produce food insecurity have not understood what Willard is after.

That formation does not come just from a sermon series. It comes through the slow work of teaching what the kingdom is, what apprenticeship to Jesus means, and why frugality is a discipline of the soul. Your congregation’s spending power is an indicator of who they serve and what they love. Frugality is the slow, unglamorous discipline of making sure the answer is the kingdom and not the idol.

A note for pastors:

Most churches handle money once or a year during a stewardship sermon or series. People are taught they owe a tithe or that the church can’t make it without them. Yet, nobody teaches them what to do with the rest of what they have.

Addressing that gap is what Willard is after. The business owner in your congregation makes decisions about wages, contracts, and industry standards every week. The finance professional navigates systems that produce poverty or reduce it. Have you formed them for that, or only for securing your churches bottom line?

Formation for the marketplace doesn’t require a new program. It requires a pastor who asks different questions: not “are you giving?” but “how are you bringing the kingdom into your work and wealth?” Those questions, asked over years, produce disciples. Disciples produce different kingdom-centered economies.

For the disciple who wonders whether they have the wrong job or too comfortable a life: encourage them to spend and save as someone whose treasure is in heaven. Teach them in private and from the pulpit to let their financial life be evidence of what they actually believe about where wealth comes from and where it’s going. Frugality is the practice that proves that declaration. Invite them into your spending habits both where you have practiced frugality and where you have failed as an example of how life in the kingdom shapes your spending.

For Reflection

1. Willard says “the main place of discipleship is in our employments.” When you preach on following Jesus, does the Monday workplace show up as often as the Sunday sanctuary? What would it look like to form your people for the theater where most of their kingdom work happens?

2. Willard describes frugality as freedom from “things that just have to do with appearance or sensuality or security.” Which of those three categories has the strongest pull on you? How would your financial decisions look different if that category lost its hold?

3. Willard argues that charity alone “will never make up for” the absence of kingdom workers in the economic order. Who in your congregation is operating in business, policy, or finance? Are you equipping them to work as apprentices of Jesus in those spheres, or are you asking them to fund the ministry and treating that as enough?