Sermon on the Mount: Vision, Intention, Means
Dallas Willard on what stands between admiring the Sermon on the Mount and living it
We can admire the Sermon on the Mount for a lifetime and never live it. We quote the Beatitudes, frame them, preach a series on them every few years. Admiring the Sermon has never been the hard part. Living it is.
Dallas Willard thought he knew why, and the reason was not a lack of effort. We reach for the means and skip everything underneath them. We want the behavior without the vision that would make it make sense, and without ever forming the intention to do it. Willard’s words in Renewing the Christian Mind: “we tend to accentuate the means and get all the means, but we do not have in place the vision or the intention.” The Sermon becomes livable only when vision and intention are back in place beneath the means.
This is the third and last post in a short series on Willard’s reading of the Sermon. The first walked through how Jesus came to fulfill the law. The second made the case that the Sermon describes a kind of person rather than a list of rules. That leaves the obvious question hanging. If the Sermon is the portrait of a kind of person, how does anyone become that person? This lecture is Willard’s answer, and he gives it three names: vision, intention, means.
You can watch the full lecture or read the transcript here: Sermon on the Mount: Vision, Intention, Means
Willard did not invent VIM for the Sermon. He saw it as the pattern behind every real human change, from learning a language to getting sober. “If we are to be spiritually formed in Christ,” he writes, “we must have and must implement the appropriate vision, intention, and means.” Leave one out, or hold them in the wrong order, and Christ “simply will not be formed in us.” Then he turns the pattern on the Sermon on the Mount.
Motivation Comes from Vision
Willard starts with vision because nothing moves without it. “Motivation comes from vision,” he writes, “and vision should come from the preaching of the gospel of the Kingdom of God as an all-encompassing invitation to live life under the rule of God.” Vision is seeing that the kingdom of God is real, open, and available now. Willard called the life that flows from it “eternal living,” and he defined it in five words: “living interactively with God.” He treated this vision as something to be cultivated, not assumed. He opened the lecture with devotional exercises, an old missionary story and the Shield of St. Patrick, ways to make the kingdom present to the mind until a person can see it.
This is why the Sermon reads as impossible to so many sincere people. They are trying to perform its commands without the one thing that makes the commands sensible, the kingdom standing open in front of them. Turn the other cheek is a crushing demand if this world is all there is and your safety depends on hitting back first. It becomes a different thing for someone who has seen, as Willard told his students, that wherever you are is “a perfectly safe place to be,” because you are alive in the kingdom of God. The vision changes what the command costs.
Pastors carry a particular weight here, because Willard locates the source of vision in preaching. We can press the commands of Jesus on our people for years, louder each season, and never give them the vision underneath. When that happens, the problem is not that our people lack willpower. They lack a vision of the kingdom large enough to make obedience reasonable. We have been handing out the demands of the Sermon while withholding the only thing that could make a person want them.
The Intention Hangs on the Vision
Willard’s second term is the one he says we skip most. Between admiring Jesus and obeying him sits a step almost no one takes: forming the intention to do what he said. “The ‘I’ hangs on the ‘V,’” Willard says. “If you don’t have a vision, you won’t form the intention.” Vision makes intention possible. It does not force it. At some point a person has to decide, and deciding is more than wanting the result or bracing for another try.
William Law, the eighteenth-century writer whose Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life shaped Wesley and Whitefield, made the point with a small test case. Law had noticed that Christians live more or less like everyone else, and not because Christianity failed them. They never intended to live otherwise. “Let a man but have so much piety as to intend to please God in all his actions,” he wrote, “and then he will never swear again.” Law is not asking for a resolution to quit swearing. He is asking for an intention to please God in everything, after which the swearing falls off on its own, because it cannot survive the intention.
The Sermon on the Mount does not feel unlivable because we tried to live it and failed. It feels unlivable because we never formed the intention to live it at all. We admire it, we feel guilty about it, we file it under the things Jesus said that no one does. Jesus named the gap himself. “Why do you call me Lord, Lord, and do not do what I say?” That is not a question about ability. It is a question about intention.
Train, Do Not Just Try Harder
Here Willard closes off the two roads we tend to travel. One says transformation is not possible, so we settle for being broken and forgiven and leave it there. The other says transformation is a matter of effort, so we grit our teeth, try harder, and fail on the same schedule as last year. Willard rejects both and offers a third way he calls indirection. “Indirection says don’t just try hard: train yourself, and training involves finding out why what happens in your life happens the way it does and changing those conditions.”
Trying harder aims straight at the behavior. Training aims at the conditions underneath it. Take a habit you mean to break. Willard says it never jumps you from nowhere. “It’s always coming,” and the work is learning to “recognize its approach” and “get off the conveyor belt while you can.” You change what feeds the habit before it arrives, instead of wrestling it in the moment when it is already stronger than you.
The means are not optional. “If you don’t take the means,” Willard says, “you really didn’t decide to stop.” The student who will not study has not decided to pass. An intention that refuses the means was never an intention. It was a wish.
This is also where someone reaches for the word grace, as though training and grace pulled against each other. They do not. “The problem,” Willard says, “is that people talk about the Holy Spirit and they talk about grace but they don’t talk about this.” Grace is God at work in us as we do the training he makes possible, not God working instead of us. The training never earns the kingdom; it is how we take hold of a kingdom already given. The vision is his, the kingdom is his, the power in the means is his. What is left to us is the deciding and the showing up.
This is also the only road to the righteousness Jesus said must “exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees.” Willard is clear that Jesus did not mean a stricter, more anxious version of their rule-keeping. An outward approach to formation, he writes, “will merely increase ‘the righteousness’ of the scribe and Pharisee.” Vision, intention, and means aim somewhere else, at a person remade from the inside, whose obedience comes off a changed heart the way fruit comes off a healthy tree. Willard summed up the goal as the great commandment, loving God with everything and your neighbor as yourself, and said living toward it takes “the whole shebang,” the vision, the intention, and the means together.
A note for pastors:
Willard told his students he wanted to “get Jesus out of the category of the ‘scolder.’” Jesus teaches, Willard said. He does not merely scold. Willard kept a comic of a woman leaving worship, shaking the preacher’s hand at the door, telling him, “Nice deploring, Pastor.” For a long time we assumed a sermon was not working unless it was scolding.
Vision, intention, means is the way out of deploring. Preach the kingdom first, and keep preaching it until your people can see it, because their motivation will come from that vision and from nowhere else. Then name the intention out loud, the decision many of them have never made, and call for it. Then put the means in their hands, the training that turns the intention into a life, and tell them the Spirit meets them in the work rather than excusing them from it. That sequence is the difference between a congregation that goes home convicted and one that goes home equipped. Proclaim the vision, clarify the intention, teach the means. That is the pastor as a teacher of the nations, and it is the opposite of scolding.
For Reflection
When you preach the commands of Jesus, are you giving your people a vision of the kingdom large enough to make obedience reasonable, or are you handing them harder rules and calling it faithfulness?
Is there a command of Jesus you have admired for years and never once intended to obey? What would change this week if you decided, today, to please God in that one area?
Where are you trying harder and failing on the same schedule, when what you need is training? Name one condition in your life you could change so the thing you keep losing to never gets its momentum.