Study and Worship
Dallas Willard on the disciplines that turn knowing God into loving him
Dallas Willard described the spiritual life as breathing. “Abstinence and engagement,” he told his students, “are the out-breathing and the in-breathing of our spiritual lives, and we require disciplines for both movements.” We have spent most of this series on the out-breath. Solitude and silence, fasting, frugality, secrecy: the disciplines of abstinence are all ways of letting go, of emptying the lungs. But no one lives on the out-breath alone.
This lecture is where Willard turns to the in-breath. The three lectures on the Sermon on the Mount ended on his insistence that the kind of person Jesus describes is formed by training, that vision and intention come to nothing unless we take up the actual means of change.
“Abstinence then makes way for engagement,” Willard said, and with that he crosses from the practices of stepping back to the practices of stepping in. He begins with study and worship.
You can watch the full lecture or read the transcript here: Study and Worship
Abstinence Makes Way for Engagement
Willard divided the spiritual disciplines into two types. The disciplines of abstinence, the ones we have been walking through, are where we refrain. The disciplines of engagement are where we act: study, worship, celebration, prayer. In the lecture he named the difference this way. “The disciplines of engagement say, ‘Grab something.’ Disciplines of abstinence say, ‘Turn it loose.’”
The two belong together. Abstinence deals with the attachments that have us, the noise we hide in, the appetites we obey. “A proper abstinence,” Willard said, “actually breaks the hold of improper engagement so that the soul can be properly engaged in and by God.” Clear away the wrong engagements, and the right ones have room. But emptying was never the goal. “If all you have is withdrawal,” he warned, “you will not develop. Your life will be stunted at best and perhaps disappear.”
Here Willard drew a hard line, because the disciplines of engagement are the easiest to counterfeit. Most of them are also acts of service, and that is where the danger hides. “People like us are apt to burn themselves out on what looked like the disciplines of engagement,” he said, “but they are not disciplines; they are services, and that’s how they will burn you out.” Activity in and around the church is not the same as engagement with God.
We can fill a calendar with religious activity and call it engagement. Real engagement is study and worship, the practices that put us in living contact with God and the world he made.
Study Puts the Mind in Sync with Reality
Willard ventured that study comes first. “I actually think,” he said, “the most primary discipline for engagement is study.” That surprises anyone who files study under academics, something for the classroom and the seminary. “In study,” he said, “our minds engage with an objective order,” an order that “stands over against our experience” and, once taken in, brings the mind “in sync with reality.” Study is how a person comes to see what is real.
He would not let study shrink into information for its own sake. “The ideal of study,” he said, “is to enable us to interact with reality; not just to pass tests.” A student can pass every test and never touch the thing the test was about. Willard said it of his own classroom: everything “we ask you to read is worthless if it doesn’t help you deal with reality.” Study done well moves us the other way, out of our heads and into the real life with God.
Willard drove study toward four questions he said sit at the center of human existence: “What is reality? Who is well off? Who is a good person? How do you get to be a good person?” The secular universities, Willard said, “have never been able to find an anchor for morality in anything other than divinity.” “We’ve been working on that project roughly since the late 1700’s of getting a basis for ethics without God, and I don’t need to tell you, I am sure we have not succeeded.”
The one place those questions get answered is Scripture. Willard called the Bible “essential truth provided by God on a need-to-know basis, which you can’t get anywhere else,” and he told pastors to say it “over and over again,” that “the Bible alone gives us essential truth we have to have to live.”1
At the center of study is the oldest practice of all, taking the Word so deep into us that it lives there. Willard was blunt about how little most of us take in. Many people, he said, “read the Bible like trying to take a shower one drop at a time.” His remedy was memorization and meditation. Do that, and the Word begins to work on its own. “What you memorize actually ends up guiding your life, often without even thinking about it,” he said. “You don’t have to think about it because it’s in your body.” This is the counsel of Joshua 1 and Psalm 1, the law turned over day and night until it becomes the mind’s resting shape.
For pastors this is an apt reminder. A pastor who has stopped studying has nothing left to give a congregation but opinion, and opinion is what the culture already has in surplus. Our people arrive holding belief, some of it inherited, some of it borrowed, much of it untested. They need knowledge. Study is the discipline that turns the one into the other, and no one can hand it to them who is not practicing it himself.
Worship Is a Clear Vision of God
Study does not stop at the mind. It reaches into our bodies, hearts, and minds, and opens onto worship. As we come to know God as he is, something happens that no amount of information produces on its own: the heart turns. Willard’s definition is plain. “Worship is intentional admiration of God. It ascribes worth to God. That’s what you do in worship; you ascribe worth to God.” Worship is what knowledge of God becomes when it lands.
Study feeds worship. “We need study to help us worship,” Willard said, “and if we are studying God, we’d better worship, because we can’t get close without ascribing worth to Him.” Worship is admiration with its eyes open, the created mind dwelling on the uncreated God until it responds the only way it can, with wonder.
Willard guarded this from collapsing into a mental exercise. The turning is the Spirit’s work before it is ours. “The Holy Spirit is involved in worship,” he said, “but we can count on Him to do His part. Our part is to make sure that our mind is turned to God in an attitude of admiration and ascribing worth.” And he refused to make study a prerequisite for real devotion. There are, he said, “illiterate people who are evangelical Christians, and there have been tons of them through the ages.” Study serves worship, and worship draws the mind back to study. Each one needs the other.
“The greatest hindrance to sin,” Willard said, following Tozer, “is a clear vision of God.” Sin gets its power from a small view of God and a large view of everything else, and worship reverses the proportions. Willard described the moment Scripture “sets before you the beauty and greatness of God.” Stand there, he said, and “everything that might present itself as a sin to tempt you appears very tawdry, very thin and uninteresting.” To stand before God, “with the dignity that He has,” he said, “pulls everything straight at a moral level.”
Study and worship are intertwined. We cannot admire a God we have not come to know. Worship that skips study drifts toward mood, a warm feeling worked up on cue and gone by Monday. Study that never arrives at worship hardens into information, a person who can define God and has never once been transformed by him. Two disciplines with one intention. The mind comes to see God as he is, and the heart, seeing, adores. Our vision of God is what lets us stand. David wrote, “I have set the Lord always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be shaken” (Psalm 16:8). The eye set on God steadies the whole life. Willard reduced it to a habit: “Develop the habit of keeping God before your mind.” With him in view, the ground beneath us holds.
A note for pastors:
The people in front of us on Sunday are fighting battles we mostly cannot see, and the thing we are tempted to hand them is more rules. Try harder. Do better. Willard points us somewhere else. Give them a clear vision of God, and give it through study they can do.
In Hearing God he walks a reader through one, and it is worth teaching a congregation whole. Prepare first: set the book down, close your eyes, “breathe out slowly,” and “ask God to give you an openness to hear whatever the Spirit wishes to bring to you today.” Then read the passage slowly, treating the words as “encountering God himself or hearing his voice.” Read it once. Read it again and “listen with the ear of your heart” for “a word or phrase, a detail or a special moment of the story that shimmers or stands out,” and for where you find yourself in the passage. “Do not choose this yourself,” Willard says. “Let the Spirit bring it to you. Even if you don’t like it, try to welcome it with meekness.”
Take the passage he uses, Elijah at Horeb. A man has run for his life, begged God to let him die, and been fed by an angel for a journey too great for him. Now he stands at the mouth of a cave. A great wind tears at the mountain, and God is not in the wind. Then an earthquake, and God is not in the earthquake. Then fire, and God is not in the fire. Then a still small voice, and a question: “What are you doing here, Elijah?” Read it slowly enough to be there, remembering, as Willard says, that those who lived these experiences “felt very much as we would have if we had been in their place.”
Then reflect. Read it once more and stay with the word that stood out: “Why do you think these words resonated with you?” Or stay with the person you found yourself to be, and ask “What draws you? What are you thinking or feeling about God?” Then, Willard says, “ask God, How does this connect with my life today? What do I need to know or be or do?” Respond by talking to God “about what you think the Spirit might have said to you,” thanking him or asking him. And last, rest. “Wait on God,” “simply be with God,” and ponder “What about God makes you want to worship him, or at least be with him?” Sit, in Willard’s words, in “the companionship of God, the one who invites you to come away and be with him.” This is study slowing into contemplation, and contemplation opening into worship.
This is the pastor as teacher of the nations, a teacher who hands people the knowledge of God and then shows them how to sit in his presence until they love him. A clear vision of God is the most practical gift we can give. Teach a congregation to read until they see him, and they will worship without being told to.
For Reflection
Look hard at your week in ministry. How much of it is real engagement with God in study and worship, and how much is religious activity wearing the costume of engagement, the services that, as Willard warned, can burn us out while looking like devotion?
Willard set four questions at the center of every life: what is reality, who is well off, who is a good person, and how do you get to be one. Your people are answering them one way or another. Are these questions shaping your proclamation of the Word and teaching of the church?
Where are you fighting a temptation by force of will? Willard said the greatest hindrance to sin is a clear vision of God. Name the sin, and ask what a clearer sight of God would do to this sin pattern.
Willard was careful about what that authority means. In The Allure of Gentleness he wrote, “My belief is that as God gave the scriptures, in their original form, they were absolutely perfect. But I don’t know of any scholar, no matter how conservative, who would point to a particular version of the Bible in any language and say, ‘That one is inerrant.’ I believe the originals were inerrant, because I think that is the way God would have done it, but neither I nor any other living person has seen the originals, and frankly I’m rather glad we don’t have them. Imagine what it would be like for some particular people to be in possession of them and what shenanigans would then follow!” (The Allure of Gentleness, 104-105)