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By Jeff Gang, November 11, 2010 4:50 pm

Justin Martyr

I came across these words from Justin Martyr (103-165 AD) today. Being a Seventh-day Adventist, the phrase “Spirit of Prophecy” jumped out at me (It’s Jesus by the way), but so did Justin Martyr’s reference to Isaiah 2. Not the clearest translation, it seems he’s connecting Isaiah’s prophetic words about God’s coming peaceable kingdom with the transformation of Jesus’ followers, and their subsequent new allegiances to him. Justin Martyr had some radical things to say (I know, totally impractical for today, right?). So I share them for your reflection, and leave the interpretation to you:

And when the Spirit of prophecy speaks as predicting things that are to come to pass, He speaks in this way: “For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. And He shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people; and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” Isa. ii. 3. And that it did so come to pass, we can convince you. For from Jerusalem there went out into the world, men, twelve in number, and these illiterate, of no ability in speaking: but by the power of God they proclaimed to every race of men that they were sent by Christ to teach to all the word of God; and we who formerly used to murder one another do not only now refrain from making war upon our enemies, but also, that we may not lie nor deceive our examiners, willingly die confessing Christ. For that saying, “The tongue has sworn but the mind is unsworn,” Eurip., Hipp., 608. might be imitated by us in this matter. But if the soldiers enrolled by you, and who have taken the military oath, prefer their allegiance to their own life, and parents, and country, and all kindred, though you can offer them nothing incorruptible, it were verily ridiculous if we, who earnestly long for incorruption, should not endure all things, in order to obtain what we desire from Him who is able to grant it.

- http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf01.viii.ii.xxxix.html

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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 29, 2010 10:38 am

I just finished a three part sermon series on radical discipleship at CrossWalk. I have leftovers that didn’t make it in the sermons. Here’s one from Søren Kierkegaard on the imitation of Christ:

Is God’s meaning, in Christianity, simply to humble us through the model (putting before us the ideal) and to console us with “grace,” but between God and humanity there is no relationship, that we must express our thankfulness like a dog to a man, so that the adoration becomes more and more true, and more pleasing to God as it becomes less and less possible for us that we could be like the model? Is that the meaning of Christianity? Or is it the very reverse, that God’s will is to express that he desires to be in relations with us, and therefore desires the thanks and the adoration which is in Spirit and truth: imitation. The latter is certainly the meaning of Christianity. But the former is a cunning invention of us men in order to escape from the real relation to God.

- Søren Kierkegaard
1938/1951, p. 474 [Item 1272]

I found this in David Augsburger’s book, Dissident Discipleship: A Spirituality of Self-Surrender, Love of God, and Love of Neighbor. Prior to the quote, Augsburger talks about how to be radically attached to Jesus Christ—-imitate him. For Augsburger the soul of imitating Jesus Christ is participation. He writes:

Participation is something we do, just as imitation is something we become. Participating is the soul of all active imitation of Christ. Radical attachment … is observable. It is visible connectedness with Christ and with others lived out in identifiable, recordable, measurable relationships. Our actual daily relationships… We are connected to Christ, to others, to the world we inhabit. We participate in Christ’s life by reflecting him to our world, and through this we are participants in the lives of others who reflect him, so we join with them to participate in all of life as fellow participant disciples. We’re not observers, not spectators, not admirers, not onlookers, not conceptualizers, but participants.

- Daniel Augsburger
Dissident Discipleship, p. 26-27

The final sentence of Kierkegaard’s thoughts struck me most. One of the problems I see in contemporary Christianity (and my own life) is a tendency to spiritualize following Jesus. By that I mean we have faith about Jesus himself, but not in what he says about life. So we love to attend church and sing all about Jesus (How its all about him), but we leave church and don’t follow him. So church actually can be a way to distance ourselves from taking him seriously. If I understand Kierkegaard, the way I love God, worship God, follow God, is actually doing the things of God, i.e. participating in the ways of Jesus Christ. Like self-giving love to others, even my enemies. That’s true worship.

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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 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.