Here are my favorite ideas from chapter 6 of Dallas Willard’s Divine Conspiracy. He discussed fasting in this chapter and I really liked his perspective on it. It will be helpful for our church wide fast next Wednesday!

“There is nothing inherently wrong with being known. Just as in the case of ‘adultery of the heart,’ the issue here is one of intents and purposes. Not did we look at someone and sexually desire them, as we have seen, but did we look at someone in order to sexually desire them. And now: not are we seen doing a good deed, but are we doing a good deed in order to be seen. In any case where we use, on ourselves or others, promised recognition as a motive for doing what should be done for its own sake, we are preempting God’s role in our life.”

“But Jesus himself knew that when we have learned how to fast ‘in secret,’ our bodies and our souls will be directly sustained by the invisible kingdom. We will not be miserable. But we certainly will be different. And our abundant strength and our joy will come in ways a purely physical human existence in ‘the flesh’ does not know. It will come from those sources that ‘are in secret.'”

“The decisive motivation for acting as well as not acting must be our regard of the kingdom of God in which we live as Jesus’ people.”

“The practice of fasting goes together with this teaching about nourishing ourselves on the person of Jesus. It emphasizes the direct availability of God to nourish, sustain, and renew the soul. It is a testimony to the reality of another world from which Jesus and his Father perpetually intermingle their lives with ours (John 14:23). And the effects of our turning strongly to this true ‘food’ will be obvious.”

Here are some of my favorite quotes from chapter 3 of Dallas Willard’s Divine Conspiracy:

“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.”

“The abundance of his love and generosity is inseparable from his infinite joy. All of the good and beautiful things from which we occasionally drink tiny droplets of soul-exhilarating joy, God continuously experiences in all their breadth and depth and richness.”

“We are enraptured by a well-done movie sequence or by a few bars from an opera or lines from a poem. We treasure our great experiences for a lifetime, and we may have very few of them. But he is simply one great inexhaustible and eternal experience of all that is good and true and beautiful and right.”

“As we increasingly integrate our life into the spiritual world of God, our life increasingly takes on the substance of the eternal.”

Here are some of my favorite ideas from chapter 2 of Dallas Willard’s Divine Conspiracy.

“But, to be quite frank, grace is cheap from the point of view of those who need it.”

“Helmut Thielicke points out that we often wonder if the celebrities who advertise foods and beverages actually consume what they are selling. He goes on to say that this is the very question most pressing for those of us who speak for Christ. Surely something has gone wrong when moral failures are so massive and widespread among us. Perhaps we are not eating what we are selling. More likely, I think, what we are ‘selling’ is irrelevant to our real existence and without power over daily life.”

“But we get a totally different picture of salvation, faith, and forgiveness if we regard having life from the kingdom of the heavens now–the eternal kind of life–as the target. The words and acts of Jesus naturally suggest that this is indeed salvation, with discipleship, forgiveness, and heaven to come as natural parts.”

“Right at the heart of this alienation lies the absence of Jesus the teacher from our lives. Strangely, we seem prepared to learn how to live from almost anyone but him.”

“We who profess Christianity will believe what is constantly presented to us as gospel. If gospels of sin management are preached, they are what Christians will believe. And those in the wider world who reject those gospels will believe that what they have rejected is the gospel of Jesus Christ himself–when, in fact, they haven’t yet heard it.”

“We must develop a straightforward presentation, in word and life, of the reality of life now under God’s rule, through reliance upon the word and person of Jesus. In this way we can naturally become his students or apprentices. We can learn from him how to live our lives as he would live them if he were we. We can enter his eternal kind of life now.”