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By Jeff Gang, November 24, 2011 12:50 pm

Late one night this week I found myself high upon a rock in the middle of Joshua Tree National Park. I was camping with my family. They were tucked in their sleeping bags trying to keep warm. The last one up, I’d left the glowing embers of our campfire and wandered up to this promontory to observe the night sky.

As I gazed up, I was greeted by the constellation Cassiopeia, along with her husband Cepheus and their daughter Andromeda draped in the Milky Way. As my eyes adjusted to the light, my mind adjusted to the reality above me. A Psalm came to me:

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them? (Ps. 8:4 NRSV)

I recalled something I’d read earlier this year in theologian Miroslav Volf’s book about forgiveness, Free of Charge. The first chapter is titled “God the Giver”, exploring how God is first a pure giver (Free of Charge, 43). Some believe our response is to gravel before God—as if somehow our worship will “pay” him back. Volf says, no, our response is two fold—faith and gratitude. He writes: Continue reading 'The Giving God'»

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By Jeff Gang, November 2, 2010 11:37 pm

Note: I am re-reading Dallas Willard’s book, The Divine Conspiracy. Over the next several weeks I’ll be posting my reflections as I make my way through a book  that changed my life nearly a decade ago.

Last week I said, What Jesus Knew: Our God-Bathed World, is one of the most important chapters in Willard’s book. Namely because he gives us a vision for putting our confidence in Jesus Christ—crucial for anyone who really wants to follow him. Here are further reasons why we can trust Jesus with our lives.

1. God Wants to be Seen
God isn’t hiding from us. He wants to be seen, but in the spiritual realm we don’t see things the same way we do with the naked eye. Part of seeing God is desiring to see him.

Persons rarely become present where they are not heartily wanted. Certainly that is true for you and me. We prefer to be wanted, warmly wanted, before we reveal our souls—or even come to a party. The ability to see and the practice of seeing God and God’s world comes through a process of seeking in intimacy with him. (p. 77)

2. God is Not in “Space”
If you go looking for God in “outer space” you won’t find him (e.g. the Orion Nebula). However that doesn’t mean God isn’t there. God operates in a realm that we can’t see with our finite vision.

… the air our body requires envelops us in every hand. To receive it we need only breathe. Likewise, “The air’ which our souls need also envelops all of us at all times and on all sides. God is round about us in Christ on every hand, with his many-sided and all-sufficient grace. All we need to do is to open our hearts. (p. 78)

Continue reading 'Tuesdays with Willard – Chapter Three [Pt. 2]'»

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By Jeff Gang, October 26, 2010 10:17 pm

Note: I am re-reading Dallas Willard’s book, The Divine Conspiracy. Over the next several weeks I’ll be posting my reflections as I make my way through a book  that changed my life nearly a decade ago.

In the third chapter, What Jesus Knew: Our God-Bathed World, we come to one of Willard’s most important chapters in the Divine Conspiracy. The table is set for what’s to come. The main idea: If we’re really going to trust Jesus, we need to see things the way he does, about God, ourselves, and the world. As Willard says,

Jesus’ good news about the kingdom can be an effective guide for our lives only if we share his view of the world in which we live. To his eyes this is a God-bathed and God-permeated world…. It is a world that is inconceivably beautiful and good because of God and because God is always in it. It is a world in which God is continually at play and over which he constantly rejoices.  Until our thoughts of God have found every visible thing and event glorious with his presence, the word of Jesus has not yet fully seized us. (p. 62)

This may seem obvious to some who know the Scriptures well, but until I encountered this chapter a decade ago, I’d never thought of God this way before. Even though growing up my parents tried to show me a good image of God, I never imagined God as a joyous being. Instead God was a stern, cold, exacting being. Continue reading 'Tuesdays with Willard – Chapter Three [Pt. 1]'»

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By Jeff Gang, October 19, 2010 8:00 am

Note: I am re-reading Dallas Willard’s book, The Divine Conspiracy. Over the next several weeks I’ll be posting my reflections as I make my way through a book  that changed my life nearly a decade ago.

In the second chapter, Gospels of Sin Management, Dallas sees as a crisis in Christianity. Christians aren’t that different than non-Christians. This has resulted in our anemic witness for the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The main reason? We are not disciples of Jesus. Rather we have turned Christianity into a “bar-code” religion where anyone can go to heaven if they have the right beliefs, bypassing the need to follow Jesus. As Willard writes:

Some ritual, some belief, or some association with a group affects God the way the bar code affects the scanner. Perhaps there has occurred a moment of mental assent to a creed, or an association entered into with a church. God “scans” it, and forgiveness floods forth. An appropriate amount of righteousness is shifted from Christ’s account to our account in the bank of heaven, and all our debts are paid. We are accordingly, “saved.” Our guilt is erased. (p. 37)

In contrast to this “gospel”, Jesus comes to each of us as the master teacher, seeking people who will become his “apprentices” and learn his ways and do what he did. In the process they will become like him, transformed from the inside out.  This means we must move from a faith marked by the right beliefs to a faith that takes Jesus seriously, i.e. one that is marked by faith and confidence in him. Willard explains it like this:

What must be emphasized in all of this is the difference between trusting Christ, the real person of Jesus, with all that that naturally involves, versus trusting some arrangement for sin-remission set up through him—trusting only his role as guilt remover. To trust the real person Jesus is to have confidence in him in every dimension of our real life, to believe that his right about and adequate to everything. (p. 48-49)

This is the challenge of following Jesus Christ in this world. Do we trust him and have confidence in him? Do we rely on him for everything? Or is it just an idea? An ideal we hope for someday? How we answer those questions influences how we live out our faith in the world. When we seek to follow Jesus, to become his students, or as Willard says, his apprentices, we learn to trust him completely, even in the face of death. And when that happens, we’ve entered into Jesus’ eternal kind of life now.

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By Jeff Gang, October 13, 2010 12:21 am

Note: I am re-reading Dallas Willard’s book, The Divine Conspiracy. Over the next several weeks’ I’ll be posting my reflections as I make my way through a book  that changed my life nearly a decade ago.

Here are a couple key themes in the last half of chapter one,  Entering the Eternal Kind of Life Now:

1. The Kingdom of God

The Kingdom of God is a key term in the Divine Conspiracy. For Dallas Willard, words such as rule, governance, and kingdom describe the range of a person’s effective will, i.e. each of us has a kingdom or a queendom, the range of our effective will.  When Jesus came he made it possible for our will to become part of his will. Willard writes, “When he [Jesus] announced that the ‘governance’ or rule of God had become available to human beings, he primarily referring to what he could do for people, God acting with him.”

The most revolutionary idea for me was that God’s rule doesn’t wait for the future, but happened with the coming of Jesus, and is now on going. “God’s rule is here now,” as Willard says. God’s rule is present and available to everyone through the life of Jesus Christ. However, this doesn’t mean that everyone sees it, or that everyone has agreed to be a part of it. This present Kingdom is more than just inside of us, it permeates the entire world. It always has been and always will be. Right now other kingdoms are allowed to coexist, but one day, God’s Kingdom will prevail.

2. The Gospel of the Kingdom

The good news about this Kingdom, or the Gospel of the Kingdom, is that anyone can be part of it. In the past people entered through the law and the prophets, but with Jesus any person can walk into the Kingdom, propriety’s aside. That’s what happened in Matthew 4.23-25:

Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people. So his fame spread throughout all Syria, and they brought to him all the sick, those who were afflicted with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, and paralytics, and he cured them. And great crowds followed him from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and from beyond the Jordan.

As Willard writes, “The reality of God’s rule, and all of the instrumentalities it involves, is present in action and available with and through the person of Jesus. That is Jesus’ gospel.”

Usually the Gospel is presented as accepting Jesus as the Son of God, seeking his forgiveness for your sins, assuring you of eternal life. The problem with this “limited version” is there’s nothing more to do than sit around and wait for Jesus to return. There’s a disconnect between going to heaven and living now.  This bypasses the real meaning of repentance—surrendering to the rule of God, where we experience true freedom.

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By Jeff Gang, October 6, 2010 11:29 am

Note: I am re-reading Dallas Willard’s book, The Divine Conspiracy. Over the next several weeks’ I’ll be posting my reflections as I make my way through a book  that changed my life nearly a decade ago.

I know, it’s Wednesday, but I was traveling yesterday and didn’t have an opportunity to post this until now. Anyways, last week I reflected on key themes in the first half of Entering the Eternal Kind of Life Now. Here are a few more from the second half:

1. The “Ordinariness” of Jesus Christ

For Dallas Willard, part of the Divine Conspiracy is the way Jesus enters our world through the ordinary. It’s the “receptacle of the divine.” That’s how God worked then, it’s how God works now. God does this so we may become part of his life—an “eternal kind of life” (a key phrase in the book). As Willard writes:

… if he [Jesus] were to come today he could very well do what you do. He could very well live in your apartment or your house, hold down your job, have your education and life prospects, and live within your family, surroundings, and time. None of this would be the least hindrance, to the eternal kind of life that was his by nature and becomes available to us through him. Our human life, it seems, is not destroyed by God’s life but is fulfilled in it and in it alone.

No human being wants to be ordinary. We go through life seeking significance, to know we matter. While this may be driven by egotism (many problems in this world are the result of our drive for significance), but for Willard, it’s also the spark of the divine creator. We were made to be extraordinary. He writes:

Our hunger for significance is a signal of who we are and why we are here, and it is also the basis of humanity’s enduring response to Jesus. For he always takes individual human beings as seriously as their shredded dignity demands, and he has the resources to carry through with his high estimate of them. Continue reading 'Tuesdays with Willard – Chapter One [Pt. 2]'»

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By Jeff Gang, September 29, 2010 1:20 am

Note: I am re-reading Dallas Willard’s book, The Divine Conspiracy. Over the next several weeks’ I’ll be posting my reflections as I make my way through a book  that changed my life nearly a decade ago.

In the first chapter, Entering the Eternal Kind of Life Now, Dallas Willard develops several key themes that he uses in the rest of the book. Here are some key themes I see:

1. The Invitation of Jesus Christ

Our world is flying morally upside down. We’re like the pilot who crashed her plane into the ground. She was flying upside down, but didn’t know what direction she was travelling. We don’t know our direction either. We don’t know what’s right, nor do we know how to do what’s right. We don’t have the proper instrumentation to guide us through life. The good news? Jesus can show us the way home. As Willard writes, “We have received an invitation. We are invited to make a pilgrimage—into the heart and life of God.”. This compass is Jesus himself. He’s our way into the Kingdom of God. He goes on to say:

The invitation has long been on public record. You can hardly look anywhere across the human scene and not encounter it. It is “literally blowing in the wind.” A door of welcome seems open to everyone without exception. No person or circumstance other than our own decision can keep us away. “Whosoever will may come.” (p. 11) Continue reading 'Tuesdays with Willard – Chapter One [Pt. 1]'»

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By Jeff Gang, September 21, 2010 11:39 pm

Note: I am re-reading Dallas Willard’s book, The Divine Conspiracy. Over the next several weeks’ I’ll be posting my reflections as I make my way through a book  that changed my life nearly a decade ago.

Dallas Willard, says he wrote The Divine Conspiracy, “to gain a fresh hearing of Jesus.” Willard believes over familiarity with Jesus’ teachings have led many Christians to “profound ignorance” about following him, meaning “he [Jesus] is not taken to be a person of much ability.”  For example, when Jesus says love your enemies, he can’t be serious, it’s an ideal that doesn’t work in the “real” world. In contrast Willard argues, Jesus’ original followers took him at his word, they saw his teachings as the best way to live in this world. He writes:

The early message was, accordingly, not experienced as something its hearers had to believe or do because otherwise something bad—something with no essential connection with real life—would happen to them. The people generally impacted by that message generally concluded that they would be fools to disregard it. That was the basis of their conversion.

The Divine Conspiracy, p. xiv

Continue reading 'Tuesdays with Willard – Introduction'»

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By Jeff Gang, September 21, 2010 8:50 am

WWGD?

Stumbled on a fantastic review of Jeff Jarvis’ book, What Would Google Do?, at Bill Dahl’s blog. His review is so good you may be tempted not to buy Jarvis’ book. Key take away point for me? The significance of relationships in Google’s model of business. Jarvis writes, “It’s about people and making new connections among them. It all comes back to relationships.” p .22. Reflecting on that idea, Dahl goes on to identify a crucial practice for church leaders—listening.

You must realize that your crowd – your users, customers, voters, Students, audience, neighbors – is wise. The next questions should be: How do you capture and act on that wisdom? How do you listen? How do you enable them to share their wisdom with each other and with you? How do you help them make you smarter (and why should they bother)? Do you have the systems in place to hear? Do you have the culture in place to act on what you hear?” p. 88

What if churches took more time listening than doing? Rather than coming with all the answers, coming with all the questions? Asking themselves, what is the Spirit of God doing in people’s lives right now—inside and outside their congregations? How can we respond? This reminds me Mark Lau Branson’s excellent book, Memories, Hopes, and Conversations: Appreciative Inquiry and Congregational Change,  where he develops a practice of congregational listening. Branson makes the case that seeds of innovation are often in the lives of the people, rather than the minds of the leaders. That’s a difficult concept for many church leaders to get their minds around. The irony is that we tend to love business models when it comes to leading. Maybe Google’s counter-intuitive approach may be a way to encourage more church leaders to practice listening when it comes to leading. If you’d like to think about this further, check out Bill Dahl’s entire review of What Would Google Do? on his blog.

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By Jeff Gang, September 15, 2010 8:06 am

I’ve decided to read The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard … again. Here’s why:

1. Dallas Willard changed my life:

Well Jesus actually did, but I discovered the Gospel again for the first time through Willard’s book. That was nearly a decade ago. I refer to The Divine Conspiracy often, but haven’t read through the entire book in several years.

2. I’m studying it with a friend:

The impetus has been the recently published, The Divine Conspiracy DVD & Study,with Dallas Willard and John Ortberg. A friend and I have decided to go through this together over coffee during the next several weeks (espressos for me).

3. It’s an opportunity to journal:

During this time I’ll post brief reflections on Tuesdays, based on chapters from Willard’s book ( It’s Wednesday, I know, there wasn’t time to post this yesterday). If you haven’t read The Divine Conspiracy before, I encourage you to get a copy and start yesterday.  Richard Foster says he’ll never recommend a book higher, I agree.