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?

He knew the theology — at least as much as a boy in rural Missouri absorbs from church. He knew that God had laid upon Jesus “the iniquities and the wounds and the sicknesses of us all.” He knew Easter was coming. But still. How could you call good the day when the best person he had ever learned about was degraded, beaten, and nailed to a cross?

It’s a child’s question. And like most of the best theological questions, it’s one that adults have never really answered to their own satisfaction either.

In a sermon from February 2010, Willard returned to that childhood question. You can listen to the full sermon here.

He did not offer another rehearsal of the standard answers — substitution, satisfaction, the debt paid on our behalf. He started by naming how those answers had failed him. The boy who couldn’t understand why they called it good had grown into a philosopher who realized the church’s explanations often created as many problems as they solved.

The Problem with Our Theories

Willard was careful to distinguish between the fact of the atonement and the theories we generate to make it intelligible. The fact — that Christ suffered once for all, the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God — is not in question. But our explanations often obscure it.

Willard named the trouble:

“It is often presented as if the heart of the atonement was that God just had a beating in Him and He took it out on Jesus.”

That version of the story never sat right with him — even as a child. It made God look like someone who never forgave, who “just found a way of paying himself off.” And it created a second problem Willard thought was just as serious: it made the cross feel finished. A transaction completed two thousand years ago with no bearing on how we live now.

“It troubled me that it looked like the whole thing was over and done with 2,000 years ago so that his death and the cross didn’t help me live my life now.”

This is the question that drives the rest of the sermon — and one I think many of us in pastoral ministry have not answered well for our people. Is the atonement something that lives today? Does the cross have a bearing on how I go about my Tuesday?

Willard’s answer is yes. But he gets there by walking us through what happened on that Friday before telling us why it’s good.

Human Goodness Does Not Succeed

Willard asked his listeners to consider who put Jesus on the cross — as a matter of history, not theology. His answer is striking:

“The Jewish people brought the highest moral teaching into human history that has ever been brought into it. The best. Very likely, at least by that time, Roman law was the best. And Roman administration was the best that had ever been seen. And it was exactly that that put Jesus on the cross.”

The best moral system and the best legal system humanity had produced — together they conspired to murder the Son of God. The entire human order came down on Jesus. From the highest political authority to the lowest household servant — Willard notes that even the servants, “the slappies,” became the slappers. Christ was so lowered that everyone in the hierarchy found someone beneath them, until they found him.

And then the line the whole sermon hangs on:

“Human goodness does not succeed. And when pushed, it always turns to doing what is wrong. Always. If that’s all you have is human goodness, you need a cross.”

Willard was no cynic about human beings. But he understood something many of us in pastoral ministry resist admitting: moral effort, even at its best, breaks down. It breaks down in our churches, in our own hearts, in the most careful systems of accountability and virtue we can build. The cross is God’s response to the fundamental inadequacy of human goodness — an inadequacy demonstrated with finality on Calvary.

For those of us who preach transformation — and we should — this is the ground we stand on. We preach the cross.

God Descended Deliberately

But Willard would not let us stop at the failure of human goodness. The cross is more than a tragedy. Jesus was more than a victim.

“You don’t want to think of Jesus as a victim. You want to go back and read the stories and see that he was playing Pilate and he was playing the high priest and the rest of the authorities like a great artist plays the piano.”

Like a great artist plays the piano. Pilate thought he was running the trial. The chief priests thought they were engineering an execution. Jesus — in concert with the Father and the Spirit — was orchestrating the entire event toward a purpose none of them could see. “No man takes my life from me,” Jesus said. “I lay down my life. I take it up again.”

This was a deliberate descent:

“God through his most precious possession, his son, descended to the lowest depths of human sin and suffering to bring the love and power of God there.”

God did whatever needed to be done to open the floodgates of his compassion upon the world. And he did it on purpose — as the definitive act of a God who refuses to let human brokenness have the last word.

The Door to Paradise Is the Cross

If the cross reveals the failure of human goodness, and if God descended into that failure on purpose — then what does the cross open?

Willard loved the thief on the cross. He saw in that story a revelation of what the cross accomplishes in the present tense. The thief recognized something in Jesus — from watching how he took the cross and how he hung upon it. And when he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom,” Jesus answered:

“This day. This day. The door to paradise is the cross. Paradise is accessible from the cross.”

A man being executed — in the act of dying — is in a position to take someone to paradise. He is operating from a reality the Roman guards could not see and Pilate could not adjudicate.

And then Willard: “Once you understand the brokenness of human goodness, then you begin to understand how the cross works as the doorway to paradise.”

You don’t get to the doorway by skipping the brokenness. You get there through it. The cross shows us the bankruptcy of our own adequacy — and then, in that place, opens the way to God.

The Adequacy of God in the Worst Place

From the doorway, Willard moved to what the cross looks like when it lives in a person. He turned to Paul in 2 Corinthians 4:10–11. Paul describes bearing about in his body “the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life of Jesus also can be seen in our mortal bodies.”

This is where Willard’s childhood question got its answer — and where he borrowed, with a grin, from Pat Benatar:

“What the cross tells me is — in the language of a popular song — God is saying to humanity, ‘Hit me with your best shot.’ And strangely enough, the cross is the best shot of the worst that human beings can do.”

God does not flinch at the cross. He absorbs. He takes the full force of human sin — religious and political and personal — and none of it is sufficient to defeat his purposes. And then:

“The cross, in revealing human inadequacy, reveals the adequacy of God in the worst situation that human beings could possibly endure.”

Good Friday is not a historical commemoration. The cross did not happen two thousand years ago and finish. It is a living principle — alive in every person who has come to the end of their own adequacy and found God’s adequacy there. Paul looked like someone who could not do what needed to be done. He couldn’t. That was the point. The dying of Jesus, carried about in his body, was the thing that made the life of Jesus visible.

Crucified to the World

Willard closed with Galatians 6:14 — the place where Good Friday’s goodness becomes personal.

Paul’s declaration: through the cross, “the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” Willard pressed on this. The cross crucified the world. And “there is to be no resurrection for it.”

By “the world” he meant what he always meant — the system of human arrangement that operates apart from God, the promises and powers that compete for our allegiance, the buttons and strings that move people who have nothing else.

“We don’t pull the strings and push the buttons that people who have only the world do, and it doesn’t pull our strings and push our buttons, because we are crucified unto it.”

The cross does not pull us out of life. It frees us within it. We can love without manipulation, serve without keeping score, minister without needing the outcomes to validate our efforts.

Good Friday is good because the cross shows us where we stand in reality — at the end of our own adequacy — and leads us to resurrection life with Christ, here and forever.

For Reflection

• Willard asked: “Is atonement something that lives today and I can receive and it be a part of my life as I go about my business?” As you prepare to preach this Holy Week, how would you answer that for your people? Is the cross shaping your Monday, or does it stay on Sunday?

• “What happened at the cross?” Willard asked it twice. His answer was that the best of human goodness broke down and turned to violence. Where are you trusting your own moral effort — your competence, your seriousness, your discipline — to do what only the cross can do?

• “What got crucified at the cross?” The world did, Willard said. And there is to be no resurrection for it. What strings is the world still pulling in your ministry? What buttons does it still push?

I preach on Sunday. I study. I visit. I pray with people. I pour myself into the text, into the preparation, into the service. And then Monday comes. Is this doing anything? Is anyone changing? Am I having any impact at all?

If you are a pastor, you know this feeling. It is often the background track to everything else you do. You carry it into your sermon prep and your hospital visits and your budget meetings. You carry it around in the back of your mind until your driving or laying in bed and all of a sudden it is turned up to 11.

Dallas Willard had a word for us when we have this feeling.

He said ministry is impossible.

You can watch the full lecture or read the transcript here: What Is Ministry? https://conversatio.org/what-is-ministry-2/

The Impossibility of Ministry

Early in his lecture on the nature of ministry, Willard states, “We wait on the Lord for things that are impossible and that lands us squarely in ministry because guess what is impossible? Ministry.”

The impossibility of ministry is not meant to discourage ministers but to remind them that ministry depends not on their abilities but on what God can do through his presence and action. For Willard, ministry is not a job. It is “that part of God’s work that He has committed to you.” God is the minister’s employer and master. This frees pastors to discern between institutional expectations and their true role within the kingdom of God.

Ministry is joining Jesus in his work.

That Monday morning feeling comes from assuming the impact is yours to produce. Willard would say you have the wrong employer. The outcomes belong to God.

Drinking What You Sell

Willard articulates a threefold pattern of Jesus’s ministry, proclaiming, manifesting, and teaching the kingdom of God, as the paradigm for pastors who are teachers of the nations. Pastors are those who proclaim the availability of life in the kingdom of God now, manifest the power and presence of the kingdom in their words and actions, and teach others to live in the kingdom through confidence in Christ.

Willard reminds his students that when Jesus first sent out his disciples, he told them not to take provisions with them. No extra shoes. No extra clothing. No food. No money.

“He wanted these people as they went out to be living from what they were talking about. In other words, the provision was to come from the Kingdom of God through people, or not. When they are preaching the availability of the Kingdom of God, He wants people to be able to look at them and say, ‘Oh, I see how that works.’”

Willard continues: “He wanted them to be living from what they were advertising, to be drinking the soft drinks they were selling and that is a huge issue for ministers. Are you living from what you are talking?”

The issue for the minister is not technique or strategy or output. The issue is whether you are living in the Kingdom you proclaim. Ministry must be experiential and personal, shaped by the life the minister leads in the kingdom. Willard states, “You have to teach from your experiences; otherwise, it just becomes empty words.”

Relinquishing Outcomes

At the center of ministry is the call to proclaim and manifest the truth that, even amid frustration and disappointment, life in the kingdom is available now. This is the same message that Jesus preached and remains the content of the message for teachers of the nations today: to teach what Jesus taught in the manner he taught it.

Dallas told his students, “Just think of conveying to people in all of their troubles and disappointments and so on, announcing that they can live in the Kingdom of God now. That’s a part of His ministry. Do we do that? Life in the Kingdom of God now through confidence in Jesus. Preach what Jesus preached in the manner He preached it, and then watch.”

And then watch.

By doing this, pastors are able to relinquish the outcomes of their ministries to God, embracing the blessing of Jesus’ easy yoke while trusting in his ability to work. Willard warns that taking control of outcomes is deadly to ministry, reminding ministers that God alone is in charge of outcomes. “He is in charge of the outcome of our ministry... don’t take charge of outcomes.”

As Willard emphasizes, “We minister the reign of God. God in action.”

In the Willardian model, ministry is proclaiming, manifesting, and teaching the availability of the kingdom now, relying on God’s action, not managing outcomes, and embodying the life of the kingdom for the sake of others.

The outcomes are not yours. The ministry is not yours. It is God’s work committed to you. Your part is to live in the Kingdom you announce and trust God with the rest.

For Reflection

Dallas asks several pointed questions throughout this lecture. I will leave you with three of them.

“Are you living from what you are talking?” Is your life a demonstration of the Kingdom you preach, or have your words outpaced your experience?

Do we convey to people in all of their troubles and disappointments that they can live in the Kingdom of God now? Or are we exhausting ourselves trying to produce outcomes that belong to God?

Can you “preach what Jesus preached in the manner He preached it, and then watch”?

For Willard, faith is active expectation of God’s movement. It transfers us from spectators into participants. Believers must discern what foundation drives their life and ministry as they seek to accomplish the power of God in the world. Pastors, and indeed all disciples, are called to examine their lives and align them with God’s present reign and life in his kingdom.

This lecture draws a line between the church and the Kingdom that I believe every pastor needs to sit with.

You can watch the full lecture or read the transcript here: The Kingdom and Its Instrumentalities

The Kingdom Is Present

Willard insists that the kingdom is not only an eschatological event but is present from everlasting to everlasting (Ps 41:13; 90:2). The kingdom is a present reality. Kingdom living requires a birth from above (John 3:6), where those born of the kingdom align their lives with God’s will in the world.

Willard defines the relationship between the kingdom and the church this way:

“Assemblies of ‘called out ones’ result from the movement of the Kingdom. The church is a manifestation of the Kingdom of God but it’s not the same as the Kingdom of God...A church is an expression of the effect of the Kingdom of God in the lives of individuals.”

For the church to embrace this position, it must see itself not as the end goal of God’s work but as a context in which individuals and communities are formed to live out God’s kingdom vision and embody the teachings of Jesus within the world.

The Church as Beachhead

Willard is careful to correct the misconception that expanding the kingdom is synonymous with church planting. Church planting is beneficial, but it is not identical with disciple-making, nor is it the fulfillment of the kingdom. The church, by its nature, will always include disciples and non-disciples. Churches are to be nurturing communities, training grounds where individuals learn to live under God’s rule, participating in the kingdom vision, and carrying the mission of the Kingdom wherever they go.

The church is not the kingdom of God, but a beachhead of the Kingdom, establishing the rule and reign of God in the midst of a crooked generation.

With this beachhead mindset, Willard critiques church cultures that separate discipleship and mission. For Willard, any community oriented toward discipleship will become missional. He states:

“I would rather define a missional church as a church you can’t stop growing rather than one that has woken up and said, ‘Hey, we need to be missional’...Being missional is an inevitable result of being disciples. You can’t stop it.”

Church vitality does not come from institutionally informed activity but through the transmission of kingdom life by disciples who exhibit the gospel in what they do and say wherever they go.

The Pastor and Kingdom Knowledge

Willard offers a comparative analysis of the instrumentalities of the kingdom of God and the instrumentalities of the kingdom of Satan. Satan’s primary instrumentalities are ideas and thoughts. This is why pastors, as teachers of the nations, must advocate for kingdom knowledge, for Satan works at the level of ideas to distort the will and actions of God.

Willard states: “Satan did not hit Eve with a stick, he hit her with an idea and she bought it.”

The pastor’s insistence on advocating for knowledge stands as a direct opposition to the primary instrumentalities of the kingdom of Satan. Gospel work is intellectual and critical of cultural norms. The church must confront ideas that run counter to kingdom knowledge, guiding disciples into kingdom reality and forming communities that bear witness to the wisdom of the kingdom, where lives are transformed under the reign of God.

The True Gospel Minister

Drawing on John Wesley, Willard establishes a clear picture of a true gospel minister, citing Wesley’s statement that a true minister “does not put asunder what God has joined but publishes alike Christ dying for us and Christ living in us.”

True gospel ministers in the Wesleyan and Willardian tradition proclaim a gospel of both deliverance from sin and transformation into the image of Christ. Ministry, for Willard, is about proclaiming and embodying the gospel of the Kingdom, which leads to transformation in the present.

For Reflection

• Does your congregation understand the church as a beachhead of the Kingdom, or have they come to see the church itself as the destination?

• Are you advocating for kingdom knowledge in your preaching and teaching, or have you left your people vulnerable to the ideas and narratives that run counter to the reign of God?

• Is your ministry proclaiming both Christ dying for us and Christ living in us, or have you put asunder what God has joined?

Last week, we looked at how Dallas Willard diagnosed these three gospels heard today as deficient. This leaves us with the question. What gospel leads someone to live a new life in Christ today?

Dallas Willard offered a clear answer. In Lecture 10 of his Spirituality and Ministry course, he shows the results of preaching the message Jesus preached: the Gospel of The Kingdom.

You find the full lecture or read the transcript at this link: https://conversatio.org/the-gentle-art-of-disciple-making/

Changing the Question

When our message revolves around sin management and reaching heaven, our evangelism often relies on a single fear-based question. We ask, “If you die tonight, what is going to happen to you?”

With this question salvation is reduced to a moment. The conversation focuses on securing a destination after death. We offer a guarantee for the future. We ignore life on earth. We offer forgiveness without offering transformation. We fail to invite people into an interactive life with God today

The issue with this approach lies in asking people to trust the death of Christ for their sins without asking them to trust Christ himself. Dallas made a distinction on this point. He taught trusting Christ means believing “He is right about everything” and He is “completely reliable and in charge”.

Dallas suggested a different starting point. He would often ask a person, “Do you know anything about Jesus?” He would follow up with a further question. He asked, “If you don’t die tonight, what’s going to happen to you?”

If you do not die tonight, Dallas warned, and you do not trust Jesus you miss out on the most important thing happening in your world. Jesus invites us to trust Him and “go into business totally with God” on a whole-life basis. This gospel, centered on the centrality of the person and work of Christ, naturally leads someone to live as an apprentice of Jesus.

Status and Process

What exactly is a disciple? We often confuse becoming a Christian with becoming a disciple.

Dallas brought clarity to this confusion. He taught deciding to become a disciple means deciding to learn from Jesus. In his words, you are learning “how to live in the Kingdom of God as He would live your life in the Kingdom of God if He were you”.

This is a status. You assume a position as a learner or as Dallas often said, an apprentice of Jesus.

The process beginning after assuming this status as an apprentice is spiritual formation. Over time, grace takes more of your life. The Spirit occupies a greater portion of your daily existence. The result is growth into the image of Christ as you apprentice yourself to him.

The Mission Field

Because we have spent decades preaching truncated gospels, we face a problem. We have churches full of people who have never received an invitation into the status of a disciple. Dallas remarked many people in the church have “listened for a long time and not heard anything” to tie onto.

This reality led Dallas to a conclusion. He said he thinks his “primary field for discipleship evangelism is in our churches”.

Our job as pastors is not manipulating people into doing more church work. Dallas taught since “we count on God moving in their lives” we are “out of a position of having to manipulate them.” We pay attention to them. We pray with them. We associate with them. We give them the knowledge of Jesus and invite them into the gentle art of learning to live like Him.

Discipleship is for the World

The primary place of discipleship is not the church building.

Dallas insisted the main place to exercise discipleship is in our work that takes place out in the world, in the real of the ordinary. He noted the “church is for discipleship” and “discipleship is for the world”. We form apprentices of Jesus so they take His life into their ordinary lives.

A Word For Pastors

Understanding the Gospel of the Kingdom is imperative for the Pastor who seeks to be a teacher of the nations in what he proclaims, teaches, and manifests to the world.

When you preach the gospel of the kingdom, you find freedom from the burden of manipulation. You do not have to engineer a response. You do not have to guilt people into volunteering or giving.

As disciple-makers, our primary location for training is within the congregation. We work to help people know and trust Jesus. We do this by encouraging discouraged believers to enter into life in the kingdom with Jesus. They learn from his teaching and encounter him in a fresh way.

Our goal is partnering with God to help people become disciples. We must shift our evangelistic conversations away from focusing on only eternal security. We must offer an invitation to participate in life in the kingdom at present. When we do this, discipleship becomes the method by which ordinary life is overtaken by the kingdom. This transforms individuals and communities into the image of Christ.

For Reflection

• Are you calling people to trust the death of Christ for their sins? Or do you call them to trust Christ with their daily lives?

• How would your evangelism change if you asked people what will happen to them if they do not die tonight?

• Are you practicing discipleship evangelism with the people already sitting in your pews?

When lives stay the same year after year, we usually assume the problem is our methods. We think we need a better discipleship strategy. We think we need to tweak our programs.

But Dallas Willard suggested a much heavier diagnosis.

The problem is not our methods. The problem is our message.

If our people aren’t becoming like Jesus, it is likely because we aren’t preaching the gospel Jesus actually preached. In Lecture 9 of his Spirituality and Ministry course, Dallas reminded pastors that the transformative power of the church does not have to be manufactured by programs or vast expenditures. He told his students:

“Jesus is here. His Kingdom is here. Whatever He said is true. It’s real. It’s accessible to everyone and there is nothing in this world that competes with it. That’s a challenge to us to hold on to. It’s true; it’s real; it’s accessible to everyone. You don’t even have to get up a budget to do it.”

You can watch the full lecture1 or read the transcript here: https://conversatio.org/gospels-heard-today/?collection=2409

The Problem with Our Preaching

Willard identifies three versions of the gospel message that dominate modern churches. While each contains elements of truth, they all fail to present the whole gospel. Because they lack a real vision for life with God right now, they ultimately fail to produce actual disciples of Jesus.

Let’s look at the three of these deficient messages.

1. The Gospel of Forgiveness and Heaven

This is the one Dallas argued is most prevalent. It focuses entirely on Jesus’s substitutionary death as the guarantee of a place in heaven after we die. Get your doctrine right, and you will be accepted by God later. Willard does not dismiss this as false, but he shows how reductionistic it can be. Salvation is reduced to a single moment of transaction and there is no understanding of genuine entrance into a new kind of life today.

2. The Gospel of Liberation

Willard sometimes refers to this as the “gospel of the left.” It centers entirely on fighting structural evil and oppression. Jesus cared deeply about injustice. But when this message is isolated, it lacks any framework for personal character transformation. Without an understanding of the present reality of God’s kingdom, this gospel tends to devolve into political activism and ignores personal sin, accountability, and obedience to God.

3. The Gospel of Institutional Faithfulness

Willard also calls this the Gospel of Ecclesial Fidelity. This view ties salvation to sacramental participation and structural submission to the church. The bottom line essentially becomes, “Take care of your church and it will take care of you.” This externalizes salvation completely. It eliminates the need for ongoing personal transformation.

The Gospel Jesus Actually Preached

What do all three of these have in common?

They lack discipleship to Christ as their inner dynamic. None of them naturally lead to spiritual formation.

In contrast, Willard proposes the message Jesus actually preached: the gospel of the kingdom. He summarizes it this way:

“What is the Gospel of Jesus? Well, put your confidence in Jesus for everything and live with Him as His disciple now in the present Kingdom of God. That’s the good news. You can off load the life you spend so much time griping about anyway and take up His life.”

What About Sin?

For those of us serving in Baptist and the broader evangelical tradition, this definition might immediately raise a red flag for us. What does this gospel do with sin? Where is the language of justification?

The answer is found in Willard’s simple phrasing: confidence in Jesus for everything.

This means looking to Him to be the absolute solution and sacrifice for our sin. It means trusting that there is more grace in Him than there is sin in us. This definition may lack the robust language we prefer in our systematic theologies. But as a pastor to real, everyday people, “confidence in Jesus for everything” includes the heavy weight of your sin and need for forgiveness. That is a message I can communicate with clarity.

Salvation is not just a ticket to heaven. Salvation is participating now in the life which Jesus is living on earth.

The Pastoral Task

Pastors, as Teachers of the Nations, must learn to distinguish between these truncated gospels and the full message of Jesus.

We have to ask ourselves: Does the gospel I preach naturally produce disciples? Does it invite people into active participation in the present kingdom of God?

If the answer is no, then our message must be re-evaluated.

For Reflection

• Does the gospel you preach naturally produce disciples of Jesus, or just consumers of religion?

• Which of the three deficient gospels is your church most tempted to lean on?

• How can you better invite your people to offload their heavy lives and take up the life Jesus is living today?

We assume Jesus is giving us a spiritual to-do list. We tell our people that if they want to be blessed, they need to figure out how to be "poor in spirit." They need to try harder to be meek. They need to be purer in heart.

But reading the Beatitudes as a set of moral requirements creates a bizarre dilemma. Are we supposed to try to mourn? Should we actively seek out persecution? Turning these statements into commands takes a beautiful invitation and twists it into a confusing, heavy burden.

In Lecture 8 of his Spirituality and Ministry course, Dallas Willard takes this exact problem head-on. He shows us that we have completely misread what Jesus was doing. It is worth noting that the concepts in this lecture closely follow Willard's landmark book, The Divine Conspiracy. Because it upends so much of our traditional preaching, this specific reading of the Beatitudes remains one of his most highly debated concepts.

You can watch the full lecture or read the transcript here: https://conversatio.org/the-beatitudes-and-the-kingdom-in-the-book-of-acts/

The Inversion Principle[1]

Willard argues that the Beatitudes are not moral imperatives. Jesus is not giving us a list of things to do so we can earn a blessing. Instead, he is making an announcement.

Jesus is looking at the people who are dead last on the human scale of success. The spiritual zeroes. The grieving. The outcasts. He points to them and says they are blessed. Why? Because the kingdom of heaven is available even to them.

Willard calls this the inversion principle. Jesus is taking the general assumptions of the day about who gets to be close to God and letting all the air out of them.

Avoiding a New Legalism

If we read the Beatitudes as a list of things we have to achieve, we miss the gospel entirely. Willard warns that doing this just creates a new brand of Phariseeism. It gives us a new way to keep people out of the kingdom if they do not measure up.

The poor in spirit are not blessed because being poor in spirit is a wonderful moral achievement. They are blessed because God’s rule has moved redemptively toward them in spite of their broken condition. The kingdom is reachable.

One Unified Message

Willard traces this message from the Gospels straight into the Book of Acts. He wants us to see that the gospel of the kingdom and the gospel of Jesus are the exact same thing.

We cannot chop them up. Willard says plainly that if you have a Jesus who is not a King with a Kingdom, you do not have the whole Jesus. And if you have a Kingdom without Jesus as King, you do not have the Kingdom.

The early church did not preach a disconnected message. They preached Jesus and the kingdom together.

The Pastoral Task

This changes how we teach. Our job is to help our churches understand this inversion. God's grace is not reserved for the elite.

Willard boils the ministry of Jesus down to three activities: proclamation, manifestation, and teaching. This is the template for our work today. We proclaim the kingdom is available. We manifest it in our own lives. We teach others how to live in it.

As we continue through these lectures, we will see how these three activities form the definitive framework for the Willardian view of pastoral work. They provide the exact blueprint we need to shift from managing religious consumers to actually forming apprentices of Jesus.

For Reflection

• How often do you catch yourself preaching the Beatitudes as a list of moral requirements rather than an announcement of grace?

• Who are the "poor in spirit" in your immediate community, and how does your church make the kingdom accessible to them?

• Does your preaching unify the person of Jesus with the present reality of His kingdom?

[1]: As a pastor, I will admit that I have taught both Willard’s view and the more commonly held interpretations of the Beatitudes seeing them both as a proclamation of those who are blessed and as attributes to aspire to. It is a text that invites deep wrestling, but I increasingly find myself returning to Dallas's understanding of it as an announcement of grace rather than a list of moral prerequisites.

“You are not out there on your own. You are out there as a part of what God is doing in your generation... What we have to hold before us is the greatness of the work that God is doing in human history. We are a part of that, and the city of man cannot survive without the presence of the city of God.”

Dallas Willard spoke these words to a room of pastors and ministry leaders, reminding them that their daily, often unseen work is part of a massive, historical reality.

He understood that pastoral ministry can feel isolating. But he insisted that our work is intimately connected to what God is doing across generations. As pastors, teachers, and leaders, we are helping to build what Jesus called his ekklesia, his called-out ones, his Church.

To serve our generation faithfully, we need absolute clarity on the message we preach. In Lecture 7 of his Spirituality and Ministry course, Willard unpacks exactly what that message is.

You can watch the full lecture or read the transcript here: https://conversatio.org/the-kingdom-of-god-is-here-and-now/

A Unified Gospel

It is a common discussion in biblical studies and theology circles that Jesus and the Apostle Paul preached two different gospels. Some argue that Jesus preached the kingdom of God, while Paul simply preached the forgiveness of sins for the afterlife, and try and assert that these are diametrically opposed views.

Willard challenges this disconnect, affirming their essential continuity. He points directly to 1 Corinthians 15 to show that the resurrection is the center of the kingdom vision. The resurrection was not just an isolated miracle to secure our entrance into heaven. It was the ultimate proof of everything Jesus taught.

“What His resurrection did was to validate everything He had said about the Kingdom of God,” Willard explains. The gospel Paul preached is the exact same promise of new life under God’s reign.

The Range of God’s Effective Will

We frequently use the phrase “kingdom of God” in our churches, but what does it actually mean? Willard offers a practical, working definition.

The kingdom is “the range of God’s effective will. It is where what He wants done is done.”

The kingdom is not merely a future destination. It is a present reality where God’s will is actively being enacted today. For those of us called to pastor, this understanding demands that our preaching emphasizes the active, ongoing reign of God. We are not just holding the fort until Jesus returns. We are bringing the presence of the city of God into the city of man.

Eternal Living

To help us communicate this reality, Willard calls for a subtle but significant shift in our vocabulary: from eternal life to eternal living.

This changes how we view salvation. It shifts it from a static, future destination to an active, participatory experience. “It’s a quality of life that we come to have by taking our life into His life,” Willard notes. We are not just waiting to live. We are invited to start living eternally today.

When we grasp this, our pastoral task shifts. We are no longer just trying to inform people about theological concepts or manage their moral behavior. We are forming them in the reality of the kingdom. We subvert worldly systems of merit and comparison, and we guide people to trust Jesus with their actual, daily lives.

We help them serve God in their generation, right alongside us.

For Reflection

• When the weekly grind of ministry feels isolating, how does it change your perspective to remember that you are part of the great work God is doing in human history?

• Do you tend to preach the gospel as primarily a future promise (eternal life), or as a present, participatory reality (eternal living)?

• How would the culture of your church shift if you defined the kingdom simply as “the range of God’s effective will,” and actively looked for where that is happening in your congregation today?

He would preach his heart out. He would call for repentance. And people would respond. But he noticed a troubling pattern: the people who came forward to rededicate their lives were often the best people in the congregation.

“When I came down hard,” he explained, “the people who came forward… were the best people… revival… didn’t really change people.”

He saw cycles of rededication and emotional response, but very little genuine transformation of character. This crisis prompted him to return to Scripture, not to confirm his theological system, but to ask a simple question: What was it that Jesus actually taught?

What he found was “as obvious as the nose on my face.” Jesus didn’t preach a gospel of sin management. He preached the gospel of the kingdom.

In Lecture 6 of his Spirituality and Ministry course, Willard unpacks this distinction. You can watch the full lecture or read the transcript here: https://conversatio.org/the-gospel-of-nearness/

The Gospel of Availability

In Matthew 4:17, Jesus proclaims that the kingdom of God is “at hand.”

We often read this as a threat of imminent judgment. But Willard argues that for Jesus, this was an announcement of availability. To say something is “at hand” means it is reachable. It is accessible.

Willard defines the gospel simply: “The gospel is the good news that you and I and in fact anyone can now live in the Kingdom of God.”

This stands in stark contrast to the dominant gospel of modern evangelicalism, which often amounts to a “gospel of sin management.” If the gospel is only about forgiveness of sins and assurance of heaven after death, it leaves us with no strategy for life now.

It leaves us trying to be good without the power to be good.

God in Action

Willard teaches that the kingdom is not a geographic location or a future destination.

“We say it’s the reign of God,” he explains. “Yeah, that’s true. But what is the reign of God? It’s God in action.”

The gospel Jesus preached was an invitation to immerse your life into God’s effective will right now. It is the offer of an interactive life with God that is available on a Tuesday morning just as much as a Sunday morning.

When we fail to preach this, we create consumers rather than disciples. Willard urges pastors to ask a hard question:

“Am I preaching a gospel that has a natural tendency to produce disciples of Jesus or only consumers of religious goods and services?”

If our gospel does not naturally lead to apprenticeship to Jesus, it is a deficient gospel.

The Nearness of God is My Good

In the lecture, Willard points to Psalm 73 as a theological hinge. The psalmist declares, “The nearness of God is my good.”

This is the reality of the kingdom. It is the nearness of God to the texture of our daily lives.

This reframes how we understand salvation. It is not just “going to the proper place when you die.” It is “participation in the divine Kingdom now.”

If we only prepare people to die, we fail to teach them how to live. And if we do not teach them how to live in the power of the kingdom, we should not be surprised when they rely on their own flesh to get through the day.

Rest in the Sowing

Perhaps the most liberating part of this lecture for pastors is Willard’s application of the parable of the seed in Mark 4.

If the kingdom is real, and if the Word has power, then the pressure is off the pastor to manufacture results.

“The seed sprouts up and grows—how, he himself does not know,” Willard quotes.

He offers this counsel to ministers: “Go to sleep. Rest. You’re not building the house; the Lord is building the house.”

When we recover the gospel of nearness, we can abandon performance-driven ministry. We stop trying to engineer emotional responses or rededications. Instead, we trust in the complete work of the Word to bring the kingdom into view.

We invite people into a life that is available, transformational, and eternal.

For Reflection

• Does the gospel you preach naturally lead people to want to become apprentices of Jesus, or does it mostly relieve their anxiety about the afterlife?

• Do your people know that the kingdom of God is available to them in their workplace, their home, and their crisis right now?

• Are you resting in the power of the Word, or are you exhausting yourself trying to make the seed grow?

At least, it is impossible for us to do in our own power.

Drawing from the Apostle Paul’s testimony in 1 Corinthians 2 and 2 Corinthians 3, Willard argues that effective ministry is not the result of intelligence, skill, or rhetorical ability. It is not about being clever or relevant.

Instead, ministry is the concrete manifestation of the presence of God.

You can watch the full lecture and read the transcript here: What Ministry Is and How It Is Spiritual.

The Trap of Performance

Willard contrasts Spirit-empowered ministry with what he calls “preaching in words only.”

We all know what this looks like. It is a performance-based approach to ministry. It focuses on the visible outcomes: increased attendance, better giving metrics, and emotional responses.

If we are talented enough, we can produce these outcomes without God. We can use guilt, pressure, or charisma to get people to do things.

But as Willard warns, if we try to convert people through human effort, we are left with a heavy burden: “You will get some of them converted and then you will have to spend the rest of your time trying to get them to do things that they don’t want to do.”

Witness as Knowledge

True ministry in the power of the Spirit is different. It is not about coercion; it is about reality.

Willard defines our role as a witness simply: “Witness is the bringing of knowledge.”

The pastor’s job is not to be a performer but an authoritative teacher of spiritual knowledge that is learned through the Word of God. We are there to communicate genuine knowledge of God and to invite hearers into transformation by His presence.

This reflects Willard’s commitment to epistemological realism. We are not peddling sentiments. We are dealing with the most real things in the universe, and making those things available to our hearers in a way they are able to understand.

Spirit is Power

One of the most striking moments in this lecture is when Willard defines what “Spirit” actually is.

In our modern context, we tend to think of “spirit” as something wispy or ghostly. Willard corrects this immediately.

“Spirit is not a little steam out of the kettle,” he insists. “It’s the root of everything that exists in the physical world.”

Spirit is, as Dallas often said, unbodily personal power. It is the power that created the universe. And according to Willard, “That’s what you have to work with when you speak the gospel.”

When we preach the gospel, we are not just sharing ideas. We are “unleashing upon people the power of God that produced everything visible and invisible.”

The Spiritual Person

This leads us to a definition of what it means to be a spiritual person. It is not about being mystical or detached from the world.

Willard defines it this way: “A person is a spiritual person to the degree that his or her life is correctly integrated into and dominated by God’s spiritual Kingdom or rule.”

The pastoral task is to live and speak from that kingdom. It is to trust that the Spirit will accomplish what our rhetoric never could.

This brings us back to the central paradigm of the lecture: “Ministry is a function of the Spirit of God with us. It really does depend upon our coming to grips with the fact that we can’t do it.”

This is not a statement of defeat. It is the doorway to power.

For Reflection

1. In your weekly preparation, how much do you rely on your own “words only” versus the expectation of the Spirit’s power?

2. Do you view your preaching as “unleashing the power of God” or merely explaining religious ideas?

3. What would it look like to stop trying to “get people to do things” and instead focus on bringing them knowledge of the reality of God?

Next week, we will look at The Gospel of Nearness and how Jesus preached a gospel that is available here and now.

You can watch the full lecture and read the transcript here: Human beings as spiritual beings.

Beyond behavior modification

Willard believed that our actions come from the deep structure of our selves, not just willpower. To prove his point, he used a famously messy example involving Mike Tyson. When Tyson bit Evander Holyfield’s ear, he tried to claim it was just a “moment” of bad judgment. Willard disagreed. He said, “That wasn’t just a moment. That was Mike Tyson”.

This was more than Dallas being witty, he was showing that what we do reveals who we have become. If we believe that, then pastoring isn’t about behavior modification. Behavior modification creates the kind of “external righteousness” Jesus critiqued in the righteousness of the Scribes and the Pharisees. Instead, true apprenticeship to Jesus it is about inviting people into a total inner transformation that starts with surrendering their will to God.

Training for reigning

Secular culture likes to reduce our behavior to environmental causes, which basically destroys the idea of any personal agency. It’s easy to start feeling like a victim of your impulses when everyone tells you that’s all you are. Willard pushed back hard on this “intellectual drift”. Drawing on Genesis 1, Psalm 8, and Romans 5, he reminded his students that humans were created by God to reign.

Therefore, He saw the pastor’s job as “training for reigning.” This training equips people to exercise dominion over their actual lives including their jobs, their families, and their social contexts. To "reign" in this sense is not about holding a political throne. It is about being free and powerful in the creation and governance of what is good within your own entrusted domain. As Revelation 22 suggests, as believers we are training to govern the universe with God. This training can only happen through an interactive relationship with God. As Willard put it, “Eternal life is eternal living.” This means living right now in a way that your life is caught up in His.

The guide to reality

This lecture gives us a very grounded vision for pastoring. A pastor isn’t just a manager of religious activity. They are a spiritual guide, a shepherd. I think we spend too much time trying to fix people’s habits without helping them understand their identity as eternal beings. When we help people live under God’s governance in the places they already are, we are doing the real work of ministry.

Pastoring people as spiritual beings requires us to deal with their spiritual failings. Spiritual formation begins with repentance, which Willard defines as the surrender of the will to God: “God help me. I may not be able to do it, but I want to do what you want me to do”. In practice, this kind of repentance is a shift in how we help people handle their failures. We aren’t looking for a momentary emotional response or a list of resolutions. We are helping the individual recognize that they cannot change their character through direct effort alone. True repentance is the person admitting their powerlessness and then choosing to place their “kingdom”—the range of their own effective will—under God’s reign. As a pastor, you guide them to stop “trying” to be better and start by surrendering their inmost thoughts and intentions to Christ’s present reality. We move them from the guilt of “I did something bad” to the spiritual honesty of “I am the kind of person who does this, and I need God to change who I am.”

For reflection:

• How would your approach to “difficult” people change if you saw their actions as a map of their spiritual formation rather than just a list of bad choices?

• Where has the “secular drift” made you feel like you have no control over who you are becoming?

• What would your week look like if you viewed ordinary tasks as “eternal living”?

Next week, we’ll dive into Lecture 5: What Ministry Is and How It Is Spiritual. We’ll look at why Willard thought ministry was actually impossible to do on our own

But how did those names get on that list? It wasn’t because of their intellectual prowess or personal CV”s. It was because Dallas let them into his life.

John Ortberg tells the story best. In Soul Keeping, he recounts his first drive out to Box Canyon to meet Dallas. John was a young pastor with a Ph.D., and by his own admission, he went there wanting to impress. He couldn’t turn off the switch in his brain that needed to be smart and successful.

When he entered the Willard’s home he probably expected a pristine academic office. Instead, he found a humble, hodgepodge house filled with books and old furniture.

Dallas invited him in and offered him a glass of iced tea. They sat down, and John began firing off the questions he felt were important. He asked how people change and why it is so hard. He asked why his church members believed the right things but didn’t look different. He admits he was trying hard to impress Dallas with his intellect. Dallas listened, but then he simply asked John about his family and his work.

Then, the phone rang.

Remember, this was before cell phones or voicemail. If you didn’t answer, you missed the call.

John writes:

“He didn’t even look as if he wanted to answer it. He just went on talking with me as if there were no phone ringing, as if he actually wanted to talk with me more than to answer the telephone, even though it might be someone important”.

In that moment, John realized he wasn’t there to get information. He was experiencing a different kind of life. A life worth following. He realized that Dallas’s body was totally unhurried. As John sat there, he felt his own heart rate slowing down to match Dallas’s. In that moment, he realized there was something about who Dallas was that was worth repeating, not just what Dallas thought.

An Invitation, Not a Syllabus

We usually treat pastoral mentorship as content delivery. Read this book. Learn this doctrine. Try this strategy.

But the Box Canyon story argues for something else. Mentorship is an invitation into a life.

The Apostle Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “Follow my example, as I follow the example of Christ” (1 Cor 11:1).

I used to be discouraged by that vers. I read it as a statement of arrival, as if Paul were saying, “I have figured this out; do exactly what I do, and you will be perfect too.” I wondered how I could ever say the same thing. I now see it differently.

It isn’t a command to copy perfection. It is an invitation to watch a real person bring the gospel to bear on real life.

Breakfast for Seven Years

I learned this firsthand at Southwestern Seminary with a professor named Dr. Tommy Kiker.

Unlike John, I didn’t go to Dr. Kiker trying to impress him with my intellect. I went terrified that I was wasting his time. I asked him to mentor me, but deep down I felt small, insignificant, and convinced I was asking for too much. I figured I was just more work for him, another student adding a need to his already long to-do list. When I finally asked, he invited me into his office, and then shortly after, he invited me into his life.

For seven years, Dr. Kiker met me for breakfast. He woke up early, came to the seminary, and shared his life with me.

We talked about theology, sure. But mostly, I had a front row seat to watch him live. He welcomed me into his home. He didn’t hide the messy parts of ministry or life. He shared the ups and downs of parenting. He walked me through the brutal realities of pastoral calling and church transitions. He prayed, really prayed, for the concerns in my life and followed up what me on them.

I saw him not just as a “professor,” but as a father, a husband, a pastor, and a friend.

He let me see his weaknesses. He let me see how he processed pain and how he made decisions when the answers weren’t in a textbook. He didn’t just teach me how to be a pastor; he showed me how to be a disciple of Jesus who happens to be a pastor.

Where Do You Start?

If you want to be a mentoring pastor, if you want to be the kind of person who has “boys out there”, where do you begin?

It starts with two invitations. One is easy. The other much harder because it requires vulnerability.

The First Invitation: A Conversation This is the easy part. You invite someone to the table. You buy the coffee or the lunch. You ask questions and you listen. You offer the gift of attention. This is where the relationship begins, but this alone isn’t where mentorship happens.

The Second Invitation: Your Life This is the harder one. This is the invitation to let them see behind the curtain. This is where the vulnerability kicks in.

It is inviting them to see your real life. Not just the polished Sunday morning version of you, but the Tuesday afternoon version when the budget is tight and you’re tired. It means letting them see how you speak to your wife, how you handle a church conflict, and how you sit in silence when you don’t know what to do next (or how you process what you said when you should have stayed quiet).

If we only show our mentees our successes, we teach them to be performers. But if we let them see how we process failure, how we apologize, and how we bring the gospel into our actual decision-making, we teach them how to be disciples.

The Gift of a Life

Dallas famously told John Ortberg, “The main thing you will give your congregation—just like the main thing you will give to God—is the person you become”.

That is also the main thing you give the people you mentor.

The “boys out there” didn’t just learn theology from Dallas. They learned what it looked like to live in a time zone where hurry had been ruthlessly eliminated. I didn’t just learn pastoral theology from Tommy Kiker; I learned what faithfulness looks like over pancakes and diet soda for seven years.

Pastoral mentoring is more than a curriculum. It is access.

For Reflection

• Who is watching your life? Is there a younger believer or pastor you are keeping at arm’s length because you feel the need to present a polished image?

• Are you accessible? Dallas let the phone ring because the person in front of him mattered most. Dr. Kiker gave me seven years of breakfasts. What signal does your schedule send to those who need your mentorship?

• What is your “Box Canyon”? What are the unpolished, real areas of your life that you need to invite a mentee into, so they can see how the gospel applies to actual struggles?

Not a trick question. But how we answer it changes everything about how we live and how we pastor.

You can watch the full lecture here.

Living at the Intersection

Willard builds on Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 4:16–18. The outer self is wasting away, but the inner self is being renewed day by day. We fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen.

From this, Willard draws a striking image: human beings live “at the intersection of two worlds,” one visible and temporary, the other invisible and eternal.

This isn’t mysticism. For Willard, it’s just reality. You are a spiritual being. You have consciousness, intention, memory, will. None of these can be located in your brain. No one has ever observed an act of consciousness under a microscope. Your thoughts, your choices, your desires belong to you, not to your neurons.

This matters for pastoral work because our culture has largely forgotten it. We’ve been trained to think of ourselves as sophisticated animals, bundles of chemistry and impulse. Willard wants pastors to recover a vision of the human person that matches what Scripture actually says.

The Parts of the Person

Willard offers a framework here that he develops more fully in Renovation of the Heart. The human being consists of spirit (or will), mind, body, social context, and soul.

The spirit is the executive center, the part of you that chooses and initiates. The mind is the seat of thought and feeling, where ideas and emotions live. The body is what Willard calls the “power-pack” for acting in the world. Your body is how your spirit and mind get things done. Social context refers to the relationships and communities that shape you. And the soul is the integrating center that holds all of these together into a single life.

Pastoral work involves helping people bring these dimensions into harmony under God. When one part is out of order, when the body runs on untrained habits, or the mind is filled with lies about God, the whole person suffers.

Eternal Life Starts Now

Here’s where Willard’s teaching becomes urgent for ministry.

Drawing on John 8 and John 17, he emphasizes that eternal life is not something that begins after death. Jesus said, “The one who keeps my word will never see death.” For the believer, death is not the end of conscious existence. It’s a seamless transition into fuller life with God.

But even more than that: eternal life is available now. It is the present reality of living interactively with God. This is the kind of life Jesus offers, not just forgiveness for the past or a ticket to heaven, but a new quality of existence that starts the moment you trust Him.

If your people don’t know this, they will spend their lives in survival mode. Managing sin. White-knuckling obedience. Waiting for heaven instead of participating in it.

Why the Body Matters

One of Willard’s most practical insights in this lecture concerns the body.

He argues that bodily habits are the mechanism by which spirit and mind extend into the world. Your body is not just a vehicle you drive around. It is trained, for good or for ill. Without intentional formation, the body becomes the seat of untransformed patterns. Old reflexes, old desires, old ways of responding to stress and temptation.

This is why spiritual disciplines matter. They reshape the body toward kingdom alignment. They train the flesh to respond differently. Fasting teaches the body that it is not in charge. Silence trains the tongue. Solitude breaks the addiction to approval.

Neglect this, and the body will be governed by sin rather than grace, no matter what the spirit believes.

The Pastoral Task

So what does this mean for those of us who pastor?

Willard concludes by anchoring pastoral ministry in this understanding of human nature. Pastors are to teach people to understand themselves as eternal spiritual beings, not merely material ones. We critique the culture’s obsession with the visible and help people shift their sense of reality toward the unseen, eternal kingdom.

This is not about giving people keys to a better life. It’s about shaping lives for eternity.

We are not motivational speakers or religious program directors. We are teachers of the nations, helping people understand who they really are and how to live accordingly.

For Reflection

How would your preaching change if you consistently addressed your congregation as eternal spiritual beings?

What untrained habits in your own body are working against your formation into Christlikeness?

Do your people understand eternal life as something available now, or only as something waiting for them after death?

Next week, we’ll continue through the Fuller lectures. If you’re finding these posts helpful, I’d love to hear how Willard’s teaching is shaping your own pastoral work.