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?

Fasting, Willard says, is “to refrain in some significant degree from food and perhaps all pleasant drink.”

“Fasting is the affirmation and experience of another world.”

As the body refrains from eating the kingdom of God becomes more real than the lunch you skipped.

Fasting Is Feasting

“Fasting is feasting” on the kingdom of God. The believer who fasts is not punishing the body. Another source nourishes the believer. The hunger is real, but a deeper hunger gets fed.

In Deuteronomy 8, God led Israel into the wilderness and let them go hungry, “that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord.”

Israel learned in the wilderness what most of us never learn at the table. The body wants bread. The soul wants the word. The body will tell you it needs bread to survive. The body is partly right and entirely wrong. Bread keeps the body alive. The word of God keeps the person alive.

Fasting teaches the body to tell the truth about what it needs.

Two Kinds of Fasting

The first is disciplinary fasting. Practiced on a regular rhythm. The point is to keep the desires of the flesh from running the show. Disciplinary fasting forms believers who are “strong and cheerful under circumstances of deprivation.”

Strong and cheerful when things are taken away. That is not the natural state of the Christian. That is a state the body has to be trained into, and the training happens through small, regular refusals of food.

The second is functional fasting. Practiced when something urgent demands undivided attention. The biblical examples are Esther fasting before going to the king, and Joel calling the nation to fast in the face of judgment. Functional fasting answers a moment.

Disciplinary fasting prepares believers for functional fasting. A body that has never refused a meal on an ordinary week is not a body that can fast its way through a crisis. The functional fast depends on disciplinary practice the believer has already done.

Ritualistic Fasting as Counterfeit

Disciplinary fasting and functional fasting are faithful expressions of the same discipline. The believer refrains because the kingdom is real and the kingdom is enough. The body learns to live on something other than appetite.

Ritualistic fasting looks identical from the outside, but fails to provide actual transformation.

Isaiah 58 records God’s complaint against a people fasting devoutly while crushing their workers the same afternoon. They wonder why God does not respond. He answers them: “Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free?” The faithful fast and the rest of the faithful life cannot be pried apart. When they are, fasting becomes a ritual the body performs while the soul stays exactly where it was.

The danger is that ritualistic fasting produces the very thing fasting was meant to dissolve. Pride. Self-righteousness. A sense that the practitioner has accomplished something that God owes them for. The Pharisee in Luke 18 fasts twice a week and goes home unjustified.

A pastor teaching fasting should warn of the danger of making fasting an end in itself. Otherwise our people may start fasting and quietly grow proud of it, and we will have given them a new way to be far from God.

The Body Is Not the Enemy

Last week’s lecture argued that the body is the primary tool for spiritual formation. Direct command cannot reach the soul. Bodily practice can and does.

Fasting is not punishment of the body. It is training of the body. The body is not the enemy of the soul. The body is the soul’s instrument, and instruments need calibration.

Paul calls believers to “present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service.” The body is the offering. The body is not in the way of the offering, the body is our offering. Fasting is one of the most concrete way we can give our bodies as a living sacrifice.

A body that learns to be hungry without panic teaches the soul that it does not live by bread alone. A body that learns to refuse a craving teaches the soul that it can be ruled by something other than appetite. The body teaches the soul. That is the whole logic of indirection that Willard has been laying out for the last several lectures.

Fasting Confronts Gluttony

Willard defines gluttony as “eating for the sensual pleasure of ingestion.” Gluttony is when ingestion becomes a compulsion rather than a sanctified pleasure.

Most American Christians and Pastors (this one included) are formed by a food culture that is gluttonous.

Fasting confronts that compulsion by removing food long enough for the compulsion to become recognizable. You cannot deal with a hunger you cannot see. The first thing a fast does is show you how much of your hunger was never about food, but about pleasure.

The question underneath fasting is which kingdom rules the body. As long as the cravings of the flesh sit on the throne, the kingdom of God cannot rule there. Fasting unseats the cravings, not by willpower, but by giving the body the experience of being satisfied by something else.

What Pastors Owe Their People

Fasting is a discipline pastors are called to teach, model, and lead a congregation into. A congregation that never fasts is being formed all the same. The grocery aisle is forming them. The drive-through window is forming them. The constant low-grade availability of every pleasure under the sun is forming them. The question is whether their pastor will offer them this practice that interrupts that negative formation.

Willard, paraphrasing Paul to Timothy, calls this leading people into “the life that is truly life.”

A note for pastors:

(The practice of fasting can be hard to introduce into a congregation where it has not been emphasized before. One of the great tools I have used is encouraging the church to embrace a corporate fast on Good Friday. People who have never considered fasting before take it up alongside the whole congregation and begin to see the way their appetites drive them. It has been a meaningful way to introduce the practice, and it adds to the celebration of the crucifixion and resurrection when we break the fast together at our Good Friday Fish Fry. Living in the Catfish Capital of Louisiana and having the largest catfish producers in the area in your church has its perks. Shoutout Haring’s Pride.)

For Reflection

1. Willard asks his students, “What are you addicted to?” He notes that pastors are often addicted to human approval, that praise can function as a kind of food we keep returning to for sustenance. What in your life, beyond the literal table, has become the thing you cannot go a day without? What would refusing it teach you about who is on the throne?

2. Willard tells his students that fasting opens you “to an influence that is not natural.” Do you actually believe that? Or has your prayer time and fasting quietly settled into asking God for things you suspect he is not actually going to do anything about?

3. Willard says his approach to teaching fasting is, “Let’s try it on food for two weeks and see how it goes.” When was the last time you took that kind of experimental posture toward a discipline?

“What does that do?”

Willard names “the open secret of Bible-believing churches”: how little of the Bible “is ingested and taken in and made a part of life.” The same diagnosis applies to much of our singing, praying, and gathering. We perform the practices. Few of us stop to ask how those practices form the soul.

Willard answers by returning to the bodily nature of formation, territory he has covered before. This time he reaches across two and a half centuries and brings in a partner: the eighteenth-century Anglican priest William Law. Law sharpens what every pastor and believer comes to know. You cannot order the heart to change.

You can watch the full lecture or read the transcript here: https://conversatio.org/the-role-of-the-body-in-developing-the-spiritual-life/?collection=2409

Discipleship Names a Status; Formation Names a Process

Discipleship, Willard says, names a status. The disciple enrolls in the “class with Jesus” as a beginner “probably still pretty green, ignorant, and unformed.” Spiritual formation, in turn, names “the process you go through as a disciple,” the slow work where “all of the elements of personalities… increasingly become like Christ.”

Discipleship describes a status. Spiritual formation describes a process.

Churches collapse the two when discipleship signifies mere membership. An unformed disciple has not failed the gospel. Every disciple starts unformed. After enrollment, the disciple’s action begins formation.

Direct Command Cannot Reach the Soul

Willard delivers the diagnosis: “You cannot directly command the inward state of your souls to any significant degree.”

Willard concedes that thoughts allow some direction: “You can, in some measure, direct your thoughts. That is perhaps the first freedom that a normal human being has.” But emotions and desires escape the will. We cannot command love. We cannot manufacture desire. Orders alone do not bend the heart.

So how does the heart change? “You have to go indirectly at them, through how you use your body.”

Willard’s phrase “the way of indirection” names this whole approach. Paul says the same thing in Romans 12, by Willard’s reading: “If you want to renew your body, your mind, you do that by surrendering your body a living sacrifice.” The body provides the access point. Bodily surrender to God transforms the soul.

In Willard’s framing, every person rules a small kingdom: the area where individual will operates. Spiritual formation hands over that personal rule. The handover takes years. The body carries out that transfer. Bodily action accomplishes what direct command cannot.

Outward Actions Reach the Heart

Law had written that “certain motions and actions of the body have the same power of raising such and such thoughts and sentiments in the soul.” Singing, Law says, produces joy. It operates “as truly a natural cause of raising joy in the mind.”

For Law, outward actions produce inward states.

Willard agrees, and lets Law’s summary stand: “though therefore the seed of religion is in the heart, yet since our bodies have power over our heart, since our outward actions both proceed from and enter into the heart, it is plain that outward actions have a great power over that religion which is seated in the heart.”

Willard reverses the logic. As James says, “the tongue is a fire, set on fire of hell.” Anger produces angry words, and angry words increase anger. The body acts. The soul follows.

The practices a pastor sets before believers help cause formation. Singing, kneeling, praying aloud, eating at the Lord’s table, reading the Word with the body present: these practices accomplish more than ceremony. They open the door for grace to enter.

Thanksgiving Marks the Greatest Saintliness

Law treats thanksgiving as the chief case of bodily formation.

“There is no state of mind so holy, so excellent, and so perfect as that of thanksgiving,” Law writes. And then, in a sentence Willard lets sit:

“Would you know who is the greatest saint in the world? It is not he who prays most or fast most. It is not he who gives most alms or is most imminent for temperance, chastity, or justice. It is he who is always thankful to God, who wills everything God wills, who receives everything as an instance of God’s goodness, and has a heart always ready to praise God for it.”

Law puts thanksgiving first. Prayer, fasting, and giving matter, but thanksgiving names the goal each practice serves. Such a heart takes shape through the body. Singing, saying thanks at the table, and the daily reception of everything as God’s gift complete that shaping.

Law presses further: “If anyone would tell you the shortest, surest way to all happiness and all perfection, he must tell you must make it a rule to yourself to thank and praise God for everything that happens to you, for it is certain that whatever seeming calamity that happens to you, if you thank and praise God for it, you turn it into a blessing.”

Will alone does not form thanksgiving. Bodily practice opens the soul, and grace shapes a thankful heart.

Pastoral Work Reaches the Body

For Willard pastors teach the nations. These pastors proclaim, manifest, and teach God’s kingdom. Our work as pastors, this lecture insists, must reach the body. We do more than tell our people what Jesus taught. We guide them into the bodily practices that let grace accomplish what willpower cannot.

“Grace,” Willard reminds, “is God acting in our lives to accomplish what we can’t accomplish on our own.”

And: “God has set up human life so that it is capable of discipline so that we can have a part in determining what kind of persons we’ve become.”

The soul has not lost its capacity. Bodily action helps shape future identity. The teaching that hands our people the practices of song, prayer, Scripture, fasting, and thanksgiving accomplishes more than ritual maintenance. Such teaching delivers the bodily means that shape Christ-like character.

Willard adds a careful pastoral note. Not every believer stands ready to take up a discipline. Some, he says, “need ministry in different ways… before people can come to the place where they can actually direct their body in spiritual disciplines.” Teaching, fellowship, pastoral care, and deliverance carry that ministry. The shepherd discerns where each sheep stands, and offers the practice that helps rather than harms. You cannot order the heart to change. You can train the body. The body, practiced over years, forms the soul.

For Reflection

1. Willard asks pastors and believers to look at every practice and ask, “What does that do?” Take the practices shaping your week. Your reading, your singing, your serving, your gathering. Identify the kind of soul they form. Do they reach the inward state, or do you perform them at a level that leaves the heart untouched?

2. Willard reads Law’s question and lets it stand: “Would you know who is the greatest saint in the world?… It is he who is always thankful to God.” Does the shape of your bodily life, your speech, your singing, your daily reception of what God sends, form a thankful person? Or have you tried to feel grateful by sheer will when the rule Law recommends would have done the work?

3. After Law calls believers to thank God for everything that happens, Willard pauses on the practical question: “How can you do that?” Have you adopted the bodily practice the will alone cannot supply? Grace, by the way of indirection, can finish what willpower never starts.

We fill our days with meetings and hospital visits and sermon prep and phone calls and committee agendas and text threads and counseling sessions and the hundred small demands that make up the texture of vocational ministry. And most of us, if we are honest, have arranged our lives so that there is almost no moment in the day when we are alone, quiet, doing nothing.

Dallas Willard saw this as a problem. Not of schedule management, but of spiritual formation. In his sixteenth lecture from the Fuller Seminary course on Spirituality and Ministry, he turns from the philosophy of disciplines to a specific practice he considers foundational: solitude and silence.

You can watch the full lecture or read the transcript here: Solitudet and Silence — Conversatio Divine

Up to this point in the course, he has laid the theological groundwork: the gospel of the kingdom, the nature of ministry, the VIM model, the body’s role in formation. Now he asks a different question: What does it look like to practice a spiritual discipline? And he starts with the one most pastors avoid.

The Radical Cure of Entanglement

He classifies the spiritual disciplines into two categories: disciplines of abstinence and disciplines of engagement. Solitude and silence fall in the first category. They are practices of not doing, of stepping away from what normally fills our days.

Disciplines of abstinence, he explains, help us deal with “things that come to hold a place in our lives that eliminates other things that need to be there.” For pastors, the thing that often holds too much place is other people. Not because relationships are bad, but because our dependence on them, on being needed, being helpful, being available, has become disordered.

Solitude, he teaches, is “electing to step free from human relationships for a lengthy period of time in isolation or anonymity.” It is choosing to be alone and to do nothing. “Solitude is designed to totally take us off of what we do.” And the point of it is, in his memorable phrase, that “solitude is the radical cure of entanglement.”

Entanglement. Most pastors are not just busy. They are entangled. Caught in a web of expectations and obligations and relational dynamics they cannot see because they never step far enough away to get a clear view.

When you practice solitude, he says, you learn something every pastor needs to know but few believe: “If we don’t show up the world will go on and God will take care of it, and other people will be able to serve as well as we.” A hard sentence for a pastor to hear, and a necessary one.

Turning Loose

Willard connects solitude to the practice of Sabbath. Sabbath, he teaches, is “a tremendous discipline — primarily a discipline of turning loose.”

He draws on the Old Testament Sabbath laws (Exodus 23:12, Deuteronomy 5:14) and offers this paraphrase: “You turn your donkey loose; you turn your undocumented labor loose. Just turn it loose, that’s the law of the Sabbath.”

The donkey represents all the labor and productivity we depend on. The Sabbath command is not to stop working. It is to release your grip on the things that work for you. To trust that God’s provision will hold even when your effort stops.

He presses the point: “Most people aren’t able to practice that unless they have learned to practice solitude.” Sabbath requires you to trust that God holds the world without your effort. Solitude is where you learn that trust in small doses. You cannot turn loose for an entire day if you have never practiced turning loose for an hour. Sabbath is the fruit of a life that has learned, through the regular practice of solitude, that God does not need your productivity to run the world.

Solitude is also a place of restoration. He points to Elijah, exhausted, afraid, running from Jezebel, and notes that God’s first prescription was not a sermon or a strategy session. It was sleep. It was food. It was solitude. “Solitude is a place of restoration.”

For the pastor who has been running on fumes and adrenaline, that is an invitation.

Finding The False Self in the Quiet

Solitude is hard. It is hard because it forces you to meet someone you have been avoiding: yourself.

“The false self,” he explains, “is basically a way of presenting yourself to others, partly because of demands that you feel are being made upon you, but they don’t really represent who you are.” Pastors know this. There is the person you are in the pulpit, the person you are in the committee meeting, the person you are when a church member needs you to be strong. Adapting to these contexts is not the problem. The problem is when we can no longer tell which version of ourselves is real, when the performance has replaced the person underneath it.

He names the mechanism: “Constant interaction with others becomes a way of being pre-occupied and not really dealing honestly with ourselves, and who we are, and what we are to do.” We stay busy, in part, because busyness protects us from the quiet where the false self cannot survive. In solitude, he says, “you don’t need to fool anybody.”

That is uncomfortable. But as the false self dissolves in the quiet presence of God, what remains is who you are. A person beloved by God, called by God, sustained by God, regardless of what you produce.

Silence Is Not an Absence. It Is a Presence.

Willard distinguishes between solitude and silence, though they are close companions. Silence, he insists, is more than the absence of noise. “Silence is not an absence, it’s a presence.”

That is a theological claim, and he means it. The God who spoke creation into being is present in silence, not absent from it. “Be still, and know that I am God” is not a command to relax. It is a promise that the God who is already there can be known when we stop filling the space with ourselves. Silence, practiced with intention, opens us to this reality that the noise of daily life conceals. In silence, he says, “we are able to experience eternity.” Not emptiness. Fullness. The kind we cannot hear over the constant chatter of our own voices and the voices of others.

“God will not, as a rule, compete for your attention.” He will not shout over our noise. If we want to hear, we will have to get quiet.

The specific discipline he has in view is not being in a quiet room. It is the practice of not speaking. And the reason it matters is precise: “When you refrain from speaking, you lay down the burden of adjusting how you appear to other people.”

Every pastor knows this burden. You adjust your words for the deacon who is upset, for the visitor who might come back, for the family in crisis, for the colleague who needs encouragement. The tongue, as James says, is close to the will, and it runs on without our knowledge of what is good. In silence, you lay that burden down.

Solitude and silence together break the power of hurry. And hurry, he notes, “is a kind of attitude that combines, usually, guilt and fear, and an excessive sense of you.” When these practices become part of the pastor’s life, they form a person who acts from rest rather than compulsion. From trust rather than anxiety. From allegiance to God rather than fear of failure.

This is not willpower. He is clear: “Willpower itself is exhausting and if you have to live by willpower, it will get the best of you eventually.” Solitude and silence are not tests of endurance. They are practices of surrender, the slow, grace-enabled work of becoming the kind of person who does not need to be in control.

There is a gift hidden in the practice. He offers this promise: “Solitude is something that, when you practice, you can have it wherever you are. That’s a benefit of solitude.” The person who has learned solitude carries it into the committee meeting, the hospital room, the pulpit. They are present in a way the hurried pastor never can be. They have learned, as the psalmist writes, to “set the Lord always before me,” and to find that he is enough.

For the pastor who, as a teacher of the nations, embraces the Willardian paradigm, these practices are not to be proclaimed and taught from a distance. They must be manifested. Solitude and silence must be integral to a pastor’s personal practice. These disciplines shape pastors into the kind of people who embody the realities of the kingdom while serving within it. You cannot teach what you have not practiced. You cannot lead people into the quiet if you have never been there yourself.

For Reflection:

1. Willard asks his students: “How do we seek the face of God? How do we come to the place to where He is before us?” What is your honest answer? Do you have a practice that brings you there, or are you running on theological knowledge without personal experience of the quiet?

2. Willard challenges: “If you have too much to do, it’s not God’s responsibility, it’s somebody else’s, and you might work on that, as to whose it is.” Whose responsibility is the pace of your life? Have you turned your donkey loose, or are you still gripping the reins?

3. Are you teaching your people the practice of solitude and Sabbath from the overflow of your own experience, or are you proclaiming a rest you have never entered?

May the mind of Christ my Savior live in me from day to day, by His love and power controlling all I do and say.

May the word of God dwell richly in my heart from hour to hour, so that all may see I triumph only through His power.

May the love of Jesus fill me as the waters fill the sea, Him exalting, self abasing — this is victory.

Dallas Willard opened his fifteenth lecture at Fuller Seminary by asking a room full of doctoral students to sing those words together. Pastors, ministry leaders, people with years of preaching behind them, singing a prayer about transformation before anyone said a word about theology.

Then he led them through a slow, reflective exercise on the Lord’s Prayer. The version where you stop and stay. “Our Father...who art...in...Heaven,” he modeled, putting thought into each word, giving it time. “I don’t rush on,” Willard told them. “Sometimes you may not go on; you just find such a rich place there that you just want to stay there.”

He admitted that he grew up saying this prayer every morning at breakfast. “I am very thankful for that, to tell you the truth, but we didn’t think much about it. We just sort of ‘got through it.’” The better use, he said, is to take it meditatively. “When I first began years ago to learn how to use this, I often couldn’t finish it because I would get into one of these phrases and I would just luxuriate there and that’s okay.”

Willard was doing spiritual formation in this course, not talking about it. Through singing, prayer, and meditation, he gave his students tools they could take back to their own congregations, tools for leading people into the realities of the kingdom through embodied practice. Pastors are training people in practices that help them participate in the kingdom in the present. He was showing them how.

You can watch the full lecture or read the transcript here: The Body and Habits in Spiritual Disciplines, Conversatio Divina

The Body Is Not the Enemy

If you grew up in church, you absorbed, whether anyone said it this directly or not, a suspicion of the body. The body is where temptation lives. The body is what gets you into trouble. The body is the thing the spirit must overcome.

Willard names this assumption and dismantles it. The body, he tells the class, “is meant to be the main support of practical holiness, of life in the Kingdom of God with Jesus. It’s the body.”

Willard starts with a basic description: “Body is potential energy.” Kinetic energy is something in action. Potential energy is something that can be called into action. “We are given a body by God in order that we might act.” It is made available to us so that we might live and love and create, and so that we might defy God if we choose. “That is important to our becoming a person,” Willard says. Our capacity for rebellion is part of the architecture of personhood. “I become a person with a Kingdom by means of my Body. That’s the only way I can do it.”

And then: “It’s my little personalized Power Pack.”

The body is also, in its current condition, tangled up in patterns that run against the grain of the kingdom. “In our fallen world, our body takes on a system of tendencies away from or against God,” Willard says. And he is clear about what conversion does and does not do: “Conversion does not wipe out the tendencies that are wrongly directed and built into our body.” These tendencies persist in our reflexes, our cravings, our automatic responses, our grooved patterns of anxiety and self-protection. “If you are going to break that, you have to break those habits.”

Conversion alone does not produce Christlikeness. The body must be retrained.

Why Peter Denied Jesus

Willard offers Peter’s denial as the case study.

Peter loved Jesus. Peter meant every word when he said he would never deny him. But Willard points out that Peter “was thinking in terms of his intentions as he understood them and he had no way of understanding how his emotions and his physical isolation and weariness and being scared to death of death and so on, how that was going to affect him.”

When the pressure came, Peter did not make a decision. His body made it for him. “That was what was in his body. He didn’t have to think about it.” His intentions said one thing. His habits, forged in a lifetime of self-preservation, said another. The habits won. They always do, until they are reformed.

The good news in Peter’s story is that the breakdown came fast. “Partly because of what Jesus had told him and now he is thinking about it and he remembers that Jesus said, ‘You are going to deny me three times.’” Peter gained, Willard says, “a deeper self-knowledge.” You see that self-knowledge surfacing again and again in Peter’s life, most strikingly when Jesus tells him to go fishing, he hauls in the massive catch, and falls to his knees: “Lord, depart from me, for I am a sinful man.”

Peter’s denials were a failure of formation, not devotion. His heart was willing. His body had not been retrained.

Love and Want Are Not the Same Thing

Willard pauses to make a distinction that cuts to the heart of pastoral work.

“Our culture has pretty well come to the point that it cannot distinguish between what is good and what it wants,” he tells the class. “Then we wind up living for what we want and not for what is good.”

He illustrates with characteristic humor: “People say that they love chocolate cake but they don’t love chocolate cake, they want to eat it and that’s different from loving it. Now, you can imagine someone who loved chocolate cake; they just took good care of it and saw to it that it was in the best condition and so on. That’s not what people have in mind, right?”

The room laughs, and then it gets quiet. “The difference between loving and wanting is absolutely profound,” Willard continues, “and when you come to things like ‘love your enemies’ or ‘your neighbor,’ you have to know what love is or you can’t go there.”

The body’s desires are not wrong in themselves. “Human beings couldn’t live without desire. No child would survive except for their desires.” But desire must be subordinated to what is good rather than exalted as ultimate. That subordination does not happen by wishing. It happens through training. The body is where the training takes place.

The Flywheel of the Spiritual Life

To explain how retraining works, Willard turns to philosopher and psychologist William James.

James spent years thinking about how habits live in us. His answer is through what he calls plasticity: “the possession of a structure weak enough to yield to an influence but strong enough not to yield to it all at once.” The body is built to change. But it does not change all at once. It changes through repetition, through the slow accumulation of small actions that become automatic.

James’s most important sentence, the one Willard highlights for his students, is this: “Habits depend on sensations not attended to.”

“You won’t ever learn anything more important about all this stuff than what that sentence says,” Willard tells them. Habits are governed not by our conscious decisions but by sensations operating beneath our awareness, the cues and feelings we do not notice but that direct our actions moment by moment. Peter did not attend to the sensations that were going to govern his action when the servant girl asked if he knew Jesus. “The process of spiritual growth largely comes in having enough space to be able to recognize what is going on,” Willard says, “and often those are mere feelings.”

James offers a metaphor Willard loves: “Habit is the enormous flywheel of society, its most precious conservative agent.” A flywheel is a large, heavy wheel that stabilizes the motion of a machine. It looks like it is sitting there spinning. But it is regularizing the entire operation. Habit does the same thing in our lives. It stabilizes us, for good or for ill.

The practical claim follows: “The great thing then in all education is to make our nervous system our ally instead of our enemy.” The nervous system, the body, the habits that run beneath our awareness, these are either carrying us toward the kingdom or away from it. The disciplines are the means by which we make them our ally.

James is blunt about what this requires. No tapering off. No half-measures. “Seize the very first possible opportunity to act on every resolution you make,” he writes. “It is not in the moment of their forming but in the moment of their producing motor effects that resolves and aspirations communicate the new set of the brain.” If it does not get to your body, it will not govern your life. Intentions that never reach the muscles remain intentions.

John Stuart Mill captured the endpoint: “A character is a completely fashioned will.” A will is “an aggregate of tendencies to act in a firm and prompt and definite way upon all of the principal emergencies of life.” A will so trained that right action flows from it in the emergencies and in the ordinary moments alike.

Paul knew this. “Put off the old person,” he writes to the Ephesians, “and put on the new” (Eph 4:22–24). To the Colossians: “Put off the old self with its practices and put on the new self” (Col 3:9–10). The language is bodily. It is the language of clothing, of physical action, of doing something with your limbs and hours and habits. And it is the same language Willard uses when he quotes Romans 13: “Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lust thereof.” The spiritual disciplines are how the putting-off and putting-on happens. You cannot direct your emotions. You cannot direct your desires. But you can direct your body. And through how you use your body, transformation occurs.

Conditions, Not Actions

Willard turns to 2 Peter 1 to show what this fashioned will looks like in Scripture. Peter lists the qualities of a kingdom-formed life: faith, virtue, knowledge, self-control, perseverance, godliness, brotherly kindness, and love (2 Pet 1:4–8).

Willard walks through each one. Faith needs virtue: “virtue that is not based on knowledge is very weak and wobbly and it won’t stand up well.” Knowledge needs self-control. Self-control needs perseverance: “You don’t want self-control on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. It’s seven days a week.” And agape always comes out at the top.

Then Willard says: “There is not a single action mentioned. The things that are listed are not actions.”

“Actions will, by and large, take care of themselves. You focus on the condition, and this is a list of conditions, not actions. And this is the righteousness that lies beyond the righteousness of the Scribe and the Pharisee.”

We build our ministries around telling people what to do, the right behaviors, the right moral performances. Willard says focus on the conditions. Cultivate the character. The actions will follow. These conditions do not stack on top of each other like blocks. “They interweave, they mesh with one another,” Willard says, “and it is as you bring them together that you begin to see.”

For the pastor, the question is direct: “What’s your plan? How do you do this?” These writers, Willard acknowledges, “tend to tell us what needs to be done but they don’t go into the details of how you do it.” That is the pastor’s task. Teach people not just what a kingdom-formed life looks like, but how to move from faith toward virtue, from virtue toward knowledge, from knowledge toward the love that holds it all together.

Why Would God Set Things Up This Way?

Near the end of the lecture, Willard asks: “Why would God set things up that way?”

He does not answer the question head-on. He says we need a theology of it, that “a lot of people’s faith is very weak because they don’t understand why God has arranged things this way.” The implication is clear: God made us embodied creatures because embodiment is how persons are formed. The body is the means by which we become who we are.

Willard’s grandmother was living proof. She was a woman for whom the worst words she could think or say were “shucks” and “tobaccer.” Her habits, mental and verbal and bodily, had been shaped so that certain things were not available to her. “There were just a lot of things that she couldn’t think.”

That is formation. It is what happens when the flywheel has been spinning in the right direction for a long time.

Keith Matthews offered the class the phrase that ties all of this together: “Spiritual disciplines are more related to wisdom than righteousness.” The disciplines are the practical wisdom by which we cooperate with God in the retraining of our personalized power pack, so that the body becomes what it was always meant to be: the main support of practical holiness, of life in the Kingdom of God with Jesus.

For Reflection

1. Willard says “conversion does not wipe out the tendencies that are wrongly directed and built into our body.” Where are those unreformed tendencies still running in your life, the automatic responses of anxiety, self-protection, or compulsion that your conscious intentions have not caught up to? What would it look like to “seize the very first possible opportunity” to act against them?

2. Do you treat the body as an obstacle to spiritual growth, or as the God-given “personalized power pack” through which growth happens? If you are a pastor, how does that assumption shape the way you teach your people? If you are not, how does it shape the way you pursue your own formation?

3. When your church teaches spiritual disciplines, are they presented as wisdom for kingdom living, or as duties you ought to perform? Has the foundation of Vision been laid before the Means were handed out?

“What would it be like to have someone prepared to teach people to do the things that Jesus said?”

Are you prepared for such a thing? Am I?

Most of us were trained in ministry to preach about the things Jesus said. Few of us were trained to teach people how to actually do them. That may account for much of the quiet frustration in the modern pastorate. We produce congregations who can tell us what is right, but have little ability or interest in doing what is right. We tell them what Jesus taught, urge them to obey, and then watch them fail at it on repeat — and wonder why our people are exhausted and why we are, too.

Willard’s helps us understand that the problem is not that our people are insincere. The problem is that nobody ever trained them. And the reason nobody trained them is that most of us were never trained ourselves. We need a reeducation in the ways and means of spiritual formation.

This lecture is where Willard hands the pastor the framework to change that. He pivots his whole course from ministry philosophy to ministerial practice, and he does it by unfolding three gifts that the rest of this essay will trace: a refusal to let us treat formation as optional (everyone is already being formed), a refusal to let us pursue obedience by willpower (obedience comes by indirection), and an ordered pattern — Vision, Intention, Means — that the pastor can actually build a ministry around.

If we cannot yet do what Willard is asking of us, this is the lecture that teaches us how to begin.

You can watch the full lecture or read the transcript here: Spiritual Formation and the Disciplines.

Everyone Is Being Formed

The first thing Willard wants his students to understand is that spiritual formation is not an optional program the church adds on for interested parties. It is not a track for the spiritually serious. It is happening to every person in your congregation, and to every person outside it, every hour of every day.

“The spiritual formation you had is responsible for the life you are now living.”

Everyone arrives at the present moment as a product of the formation that preceded it. Your deacon was formed. Your teenager is being formed. The couple who wandered in on Sunday morning has been under formation their whole lives — by their parents, their marriages, their work, their entertainments, the algorithms they feed every night before sleep. The question is never whether your people are being spiritually formed. The question is by what.

This reframes the pastoral task. The pastor is not trying to start formation in people. The pastor is trying to name the formation already at work in them — and to offer them a different course of action.

Obedience by Indirection

Willard, in a way that only he can, takes the whole project of Christian obedience and sets it at an angle to how most of us pursue it.

“The real issue in spiritual formation is obedience, but you don’t go there directly. You go there indirectly.”

Try this out on a Monday morning in your own life. Preach Sunday on patience. Wake up Monday with every intention to be patient. By 9:15 you have snapped at your wife, muttered at a driver, and been short with a deacon who stopped by the church office. You tried to be patient by direct effort and you failed. You will try again next week and fail again. This is the cycle our people live in continually.

Willard’s diagnosis is not that you lacked sincerity. It is that you lacked training. You cannot produce on the spot what has not been formed in the body over time. As he puts it:

“Indirection is where you get somewhere by going somewhere else.”

You do not reach patience by gritting your teeth on Monday morning. You reach patience by practicing solitude and silence, study and service, fasting and prayer — activities that address the underlying person who is reacting impatiently. A spiritual discipline, Willard says, is

“an activity within our power that enables us to accomplish what we cannot do by direct effort.”

The Golden Triangle is the picture of how this works. At the top is the action of the Holy Spirit. At the bottom-left are the ordinary events of life — most often experienced as temptations. At the bottom-right are the spiritual disciplines. All three converge on the center: the transformation of the whole person into Christlikeness.

Notice that none of the three vertices functions alone. The Spirit works through events and through disciplines. Events test the formation the disciplines have done. The disciplines train the person who will meet the next event. A pastor who preaches the top vertex and ignores the bottom-right produces Christians who are exhausted from trying to do by willpower what only a trained life can do.

Grace Is Not Opposed to Effort, But to Earning

This next line of Willard’s is the first one that ever stuck with me. I had been handed the standard evangelical gospel - don’t go to hell, and don’t let anyone else. Then Willard I read where Willard wrote this:

"Grace is not opposed to effort but to earning. Earning is an attitude. Grace is opposed to that."

The whole center of faith shifted for me. Effort was not the enemy of grace. Effort was the shape of a life that had already received it. My life meant something today not just for eternity.

Paul says the same thing in Romans 6. The one who has received grace from above is no longer a slave to sin but a slave to righteousness. The person who has been raised with Christ does not work to earn God’s favor. They work because they have already received it and now belong to a new Master whose way is life.

Willard is not sentimental about this. He is blunt:

"The single most obvious trait of those who profess Christ but do not grow into Christlikeness is their refusal to take the reasonable and time-tested measures for spiritual growth."

The thing most obviously missing in the life of a stagnant Christian is not more teaching, more passion, more experience. It is their unwillingness to take up the practices that Christians have been taking up for two thousand years. It is the unwillingness to put any effort into their spiritual walk. The disciplines are the reasonable and time-tested measures. A pastor who will not practice them is not well positioned to lead anyone into them.

Vision, Intention, Means

Willard ends the lecture with the pattern that organizes his whole vision of formation. He calls it VIM.

• Vision — a clear picture of life in the kingdom of God and your place in it.

• Intention — the deliberate decision to realize that vision by becoming Jesus’ apprentice.

• Means — the specific practices and disciplines that train you to live what you have intended.

The three must be held in order. Vision first. Intention second. Means third. Willard warns that most churches default to Means. We hand our people the practices — read your Bible, pray, get to church, join a small group — without ever establishing the Vision of kingdom life that would make those practices desirable, or the Intention to be Jesus’ apprentice that would make them durable.

The result is the cycle of failure every pastor recognizes. Your people try a habit or new way of living for three weeks and drop it. You chalk it up to their lack of discipline. Willard would tell you the problem started much earlier. You handed them Means before they had Vision. You told them what to do before they had seen why anyone would want to.

The gift Willard gives the pastor is an order of operations. Preach the kingdom first until your people can see it — until they want to live there. Then invite them to intend that life — to say yes to being an apprentice of Jesus. Then, and only then, hand them the practices. You will find the practices stick because they are now carrying a Vision and an Intention, not floating alone.

Spiritual growth, Willard reminds us, "does not happen passively" but requires "well-directed effort." The pastor’s task is to direct the effort through proclaiming, teaching, and manifesting the kingdom.

For Reflection

I’ll let Dallas’s questions from the lecture guide our reflection:

1. “What would it be like to have someone prepared to teach people to do the things that Jesus said?” Are you that person in your church? If not, who is?

2. “Could we do that?” Could your church, as it is currently structured, actually form apprentices of Jesus — or is it structured to produce attenders?

3. “Can you not do it?” Where in your own life are you still trying to obey Jesus by direct effort, and what discipline of indirection would Willard send you toward this wee

“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.”

The work of teaching the nations belongs to all of Christ’s people, wherever they are, in whatever vocation they occupy. The early disciples, Willard reminds us, were first-class nobodies with no institutional power and no organizational backing. Their method was, in his phrase, “speaking and being.” They spoke the truth about Christ and their lives confirmed what they said. That was enough to turn the world over.

Peggy Brooks was that kind of person. She taught me English at Ouachita Junior High and Ouachita High School in Monroe, Louisiana in 7th, 8th, 10th, 11th, and 12th grade. She was my mentor, a lifelong friend, and other than my parents has had the most direct impact on the direction of my life. On Friday I officiated her funeral, and since her passing a week ago I have been thinking continually about the impact of her life.

Work as the Location of Discipleship

Willard argues that life is devoted to work, and that all legitimate work is devoted to creating what is good. He traces that conviction back to creation: God not only creates, he creates creators. Your vocation is a location where you participate in that creating. Disciples of Jesus carry the kingdom of God into their work.

“Divine service is not a church service, though it might include that. Divine service is life. It is in the world, in daily business of whatever level and importance, that there unfolds... ‘the great adventure that was once Christianity.’”

Mrs. Brooks taught grammar and vocabulary and Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams. She graded papers and planned parties and handed unruly junior high boys a John Grisham novel when they needed to burn off energy a desk couldn’t contain. She organized end-of-year ceremonial burnings of vocabulary books and stood outside grinning while the smoke rose.

All of it was a woman spending her days as an apprentice to Christ inside a public school in north Louisiana, creating what is good in the name of the One she loved.

Speaking and Being

Mrs. Brooks was a teacher, but the word undersells what she offered. She offered a life. Willard says the disciples extended Christ’s presence throughout the earth through abilities not entirely their own — the Holy Spirit upon them, working through their speaking and their being. That is a description of what it felt like to be in her classroom.

She practiced grace on students who couldn’t get it together, kept the door open, and kept expecting something out of you even when you had given her no reason to. She sang about Christ in her classroom and in church choirs with the unselfconscious joy of a person actually changed by what she believed. She honored her marriage, bragged on her children and grandchildren in rooms they would never walk into, and bore the character of Christ so consistently that you absorbed it before you knew what was happening to you.

One afternoon during my senior year, she told me that if I did anything other than ministry I would be wasting my life. I had no intention of being a pastor. She said it anyway, because she had seen something in me I hadn’t seen yet, and she had the courage to name it. A spokesperson for Christ speaks the truth into a life still being formed and trusts God to do something with it.

For the Rest of Us

Willard’s point stands for all of us. You are a spokesperson for Christ in your occupation. The teacher, the farmer, the nurse, the business owner, the coach — every legitimate vocation is a location for the kingdom of God to become visible through a person who has surrendered their will to Jesus and gone to work.

The writer of Hebrews says: “Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith.”

The outcome of Peggy Brooks’ way of life was a pastor she told the truth to before he knew he was going to be one, hundreds of students who learned something true about what it means to be human, and a depth of influence that runs beyond anything she could have seen from the front of a classroom in Monroe.

The great adventure Willard describes is available to you, in your classroom, your clinic, your field, your kitchen, your shop. You don’t need a platform. You need to be present, doing good work, in the presence of the One who is the same yesterday and today and forever.

Mrs. Brooks, thank you. Thank you for teaching us more than English and Language arts, thank you for showing us the Kingdom of Heaven.

For Reflection

• Willard says divine service is life, not a church service. What would it look like to bring that conviction into your work this week?

• Who around you needs someone to speak the truth into their life before they can see it themselves?

• Whose way of life do you need to consider and imitate? Take a few minutes to name them and thank God for them.

That is a strange sentence to read as a pastor. Most of us would protest. We have classes. We have small groups. We have membership processes and curriculum and a calendar full of programs. But Willard’s question cuts deeper. He is not asking whether we are busy. He is asking whether anyone in our care is being trained to obey what Jesus taught, to live their everyday life in the manner Jesus would live it if He were them.

You can watch the full lecture or read the transcript here: The Great Omission on Conversatio Divina

This is the lecture where the entire Fuller series begins to land on the pastor’s desk. Up to this point, Willard has been describing the gospel of the kingdom and the impossibility of doing ministry in our own power. Here he names what we have left out of our obedience to Jesus, and what it has cost us.

The Commission Has a Verb We Skipped

Willard is precise about Matthew 28. The risen Jesus has been given all authority, and from inside that authority He issues one command. Here is Willard’s paraphrase:

“Make apprentices to me. Submerge them in Trinitarian reality and train them so that they do all things I have commanded you.”

Read that slowly. The command is to make apprentices. The submerging, what we call baptism, is the entry. The training is the substance. The Great Commission is, at its core, a training command.

Most of our churches have treated the first two pieces as the substance of the Commission and the training as optional polish. We make converts. We process them through baptism. We hand them a Bible and hope something happens. The training never gets built. The teaching is the omission.

Willard’s vision of a Great Commission church is concrete. He describes it as a community of people who, when “confronted with something Jesus said, well, they would just do it.” That is the test. Not whether we agreed with the sermon. Not whether we cried at the altar. Whether the next time we run into something Jesus said, we just do it.

Most of our congregations cannot pass that test. The reason is that we never planned to.

A Plan Is the Thing That Is Missing

The most uncomfortable sentence in the lecture is this one:

“I do not know of a single group that has a plan to teach the people in the group to do everything that Jesus said and actually, not everything, just a few things.”

Willard is not accusing pastors of laziness. He is naming a structural absence. The plan is missing because we never believed the teaching in the Great Commission was the point. We believed that getting people in was the point, and the rest would somehow follow.

It does not follow. It has not followed. We have rooms full of baptized people who have never been told, in any practical way, how to live their financial life or their marriage or their resentments or their hours under the kingship of Jesus.

Here Willard turns the rebuke into a gift. The reason the plan is missing is not that we lack the resources. We have looked for the resources in the wrong place.

“[It] requires no special facilities, programs, talents or techniques… Anyone can do it; it doesn’t even require a budget, just the decision to do it and the willingness to learn as you go from the One who has all say and who is with us.”

Notice what Willard has done in a single sentence. Every excuse we offer for not doing this, that we are too small, that we have no building, no staff, no budget, has been stripped away. None of it is required. The only things required are a decision and a willingness to learn from Jesus as you go.

The Curse of Performance Is Why We Stopped Trying

Willard is also honest about the reason the church has quietly omitted the teaching ministry of Jesus. He calls it the curse of performance. He is not against doing your best. He is against performing for impression, against letting the work of ministry get hijacked by the management of how it looks.

“The sufficiency of Christ to all is the basis of our efforts in gathering and in service. The ministers, pastors, teachers and others should, with time and experience, expect to receive from ‘Christ with them’ profundity of insight, sweetness and strength of character and abundance of power to carry out their role in the local group. The minister does not need tricks and techniques but need only speak Christ’s Word from Christ’s character standing within the manifest presence of God.”

The whole burden lifts in that paragraph. The pastor’s sufficiency rests not in his preparation, his cleverness, his program, or his platform. It rests in Christ with him. He does not need tricks. He needs to speak Christ’s Word from Christ’s character standing within the manifest presence of God. That is the job description.

Apprenticing people to Jesus does not produce visible numbers quickly. It produces transformed lives slowly. A pastor under the curse of performance cannot afford slow. So the teaching command gets traded away for something more measurable, and we tell ourselves the trade was necessary. It was not necessary. It was the omission.

The Benchmark for the Whole Thing

Willard ends the lecture by giving us the standard. If we want to know whether our ministries are doing the thing Jesus told us to do, here is the measure:

“An apprentice of Jesus is one who is learning from Him how to lead my life in the Kingdom of God as He would lead it if He were I.”

That is the benchmark. Not how full the building is. Not how the budget closed. The measure is whether the people in your care are learning from Jesus how to lead their ordinary week as He would lead it if He were them. Their marriage. Their money. Their work. Their grief. Their anger at the deacon who hurt their feelings.

If they are learning that, you are doing the Great Commission. If they are not, you are doing something else, and it does not matter how well you are doing it.

For Reflection

These are Willard’s questions, not mine. He asked them of pastors in his classroom, and they are the questions that ought to follow us out of this lecture.

1. Do you have a plan, not a calendar, not a curriculum, an actual plan, to teach the people in your group to do the things Jesus said? Even just a few of them?

2. If the people in your church were confronted this week with something Jesus said, would they just do it? If not, you are responsible to close the gap between hearing and doing. Where will you start?

3. Are the people in your care learning from Jesus how to lead their life in the Kingdom of God as He would lead it if He were them, or are they only learning to attend, give, and behave?