A Tribute to Dallas Willard: "God doesn't mumble"

In the wake of Dallas Willard's passing into the fullness of the Kingdom of God he proclaimed as available now, I offer this tribute, highlighting one of the many lessons I learned from him. 

As twenty-somethings are wont to do, I was contemplating my future.  I had recently discerned that it was time for me to leave my role as a small groups pastor to head back to school and pursue a PhD.  In recent weeks I’d been extended offers from two of my top schools, and the time was fast-approaching when I would have to made a decision.  Thus, when the opportunity arose to be Dallas Willard’s ride back to San Jose Airport, I seized it.  (Sometimes service is pure selfishness.)  Heading down 101, I related to Dallas as best I could the pertinent details of the decision I faced.  To me, the choice seemed rather complex, what with all the moving pieces: different financial packages, career implications, geography and relational opportunities.  Dallas asked a few gentle questions, and then, without showing the least indication of having absorbed any of the anxiety which must have been exuding from me, he said, “Well, simply pray, and say: “Lord, I do not believe that you mumble, so if you’d like to direct me, you need to do so before Friday.  Otherwise, I will presume your blessing to make my own choice.”

I took his advice and am now three years into a PhD program at Boston University that I’m proud to have chosen with God’s blessing.  The beauty and wisdom of Dallas’ simple reminder that God doesn’t mumble goes a long way to taking the pressure off of us in the discernment process.  Trusting God in times of choice isn’t always a matter of obediently following the clear direction God gives; sometimes it looks like having the faith that God is a competent communicator, able to get across a message, even to the resistant.  How much more to those, eager and willing to obey?  And then there are the times when faith looks like accepting that the warm, pregnant silence of God is an expression of trust in us.

As Dallas reminded us in Hearing God, God isn’t primarily interested in recruiting a mindless crowd who needs specific direction at every turn.  God is not looking for people to endlessly command; God desires to form persons and a people who can bring to bear all their own redeemed creativity and will into the realization of the the Reign of God on earth in the particular choices and contexts they face. Prayer, Dallas loved to say, is “training for reigning” (may he RIP -- reign in peace).  In times of discernment, God’s relation to us may be less like that of a Drill Sargent at bootcamp and more like a soccer coach eager to see what good we will do as we improvise on the field with the skills for playing the game he has taught us.

This was originally posted on the Conversations Journal blog.  

Here are some other posts deeply endebted to Dallas Willard

How to Live in the Kingdom of God
A Philosophy of Spiritual Growth
A Theology of Spiritual Formation 
Why (and How) Spiritual Disciplines Work
Dallas Willard: Interview with John Ortberg at Catalyst Conference

Renovation of the Heart: Transforming the Will Video

Dallas Willard's Renovation of the Heart is one of the most profound books I am aware of touching the human longing for personal transformation, growth, change.  The clips below are a sample of the curriculum Willard, John Ortberg and others have provided, focusing on session and chapter eight of the book: transforming the will.

How (and Why) Spiritual Disciplines Work

The kingdom life which Jesus offered is accessible to all, but it is not entered fully without a serious and active intention.   It takes the kind of intention that would lead one to sell all they own to buy a field with a pearl in it.  The disciplines are means by which an individual opens themselves to the transforming grace of God, and they cultivate holy habits of mind and body.[i] 

As disciplines, they are indirect means toward a goal that cannot be directly apprehended.  The goal is a whole self subject to God.  Spiritual disciplines are simply those “special activities through which we present our bodies as a living sacrifice”[ii] so that we can live in “more effective cooperation with Christ and his Kingdom.”[iii]

A life full of spiritual disciplines is not necessarily a spiritual life, since disciplines

John Ortberg Interviews Dallas Willard @ Catalyst

Dallas Willard changed my understanding of the Christian life and gospel, for the better (and the more biblical).  Watch John Ortberg interview him at the Catalyst West conference where I witnessed the audience gasp and burst into applause at a few of his pearls of wisdom.  He speaks to young leaders about the need to clarify the central message of Jesus.  Is it the announcement of the minimal entrance requirements for entering heaven...or something else?  He also speaks about the role of grace and spiritual disciplines in the process of becoming like Jesus through spiritual formation.  





Some of Dallas Willard's most life changing books are:
The Spirit of the Disciplines
The Renovation of the Heart
Hearing God

How to Live in the Kingdom of God

The Kingdom (or Reign) of God is the realm in which God’s will is actualized. Thus heaven is a part of the Kingdom of God, angels are citizens in the Kingdom, animal life and all creation (generally speaking) are within the Kingdom of God. It is only people and evil spirits who, through their resistance to God’s will, find themselves outside of the Kingdom of God.

People come to inhabit the Kingdom of God when their wills become aligned with God’s. Thus, the Kingdom of God is available to any who are willing to surrender their will to God’s. When a person makes their will, their mind and their body available to God as tools in the hands of his will, then they are living in the Kingdom of God.

A Theology of Spiritual Formation: Fruits of the Renovare Institute

The theological grounding for spiritual formation in Christ is found in answering two fundamental questions with the same answer: What was God’s hope for the creation of humans and why did Jesus live, die and resurrect?

God’s loving desire from the beginning has been that he might extend the fellowship enjoys in the Trinitarian community and enter an interactive love relationship with humans.  It seems that divine love is constantly finding and creating new objects of love.  God intended that in this relationship these created beings would come willingly to God in full surrender and obedience such that God would be able to entrust to them free use of his power for good.  And this is still God’s good intention for humankind and in order for it to be realized, people—broken and spoiled by the fall—will need to be formed into the character of Christ...one who, by virtue of his humble submission to God’s will was given “all authority in heaven and on earth.”