The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard (highlights)

Dogma is what you have to believe, whether you believe it or not. And law is what you must do, whether it is good for you or not. (Location 106)

“I’ve been taking all these philosophy courses, and we talk about what’s true, what’s important, what’s good. Well, how do you teach people to be good?” And, she added, “What’s the point of knowing good if you don’t keep trying to become a good person?” (Location 266)

The truly powerful ideas are precisely the ones that never have to justify themselves. (Location 301)

If you are willing to be a weenie to be loved, what else would you be willing to do? Is it any wonder that depression and other mental and emotional dysfunctions are epidemic? Who is it, exactly, that is flying upside down now? (Location 365)

“Stand up for your rights” sounds so good. How about “All I ever needed to know I learned in kindergarten”? And “Practice random kindnesses and senseless acts of beauty”? And so forth. (Location 369)

But you will never find them on a greeting card, plaque, or bumper. They aren’t thought to be smart. What is truly profound is thought to be stupid and trivial, or worse, boring, while what is actually stupid and trivial is thought to be profound. That is what it means to fly upside down. (Location 375)

We sense the incoherence lying slightly beneath the surface, and we find the incoherence and lack of fit vaguely pleasing and true to life: What is the point of standing up for rights in a world where few stand up for their responsibilities? Your rights will do you little good unless others are responsible. And does one learn in kindergarten how to (Location 378)

attract people and make a lot of money by writing books assuring people they already know all they need to know to live well? And how do you practice something that is random? Of course you can’t. What is random may hit you, but whatever is purposely done is certainly not random. And no act of beauty is senseless, for the beautiful is never absurd. Nothing is more meaningful than beauty. (Location 380)

In fact, the popular sayings attract only because people are haunted by the idea from the intellectual heights that life is, in reality, absurd. Thus the only acceptable relief is to be cute or clever. In homes and on public buildings of the past, words of serious and unselfconscious exhortation, invocation, and blessing were hung or carved in stone and wood. But that world has passed. Now the law is “Be cute or die.” The only sincerity bearable is clever insincerity. That is what the clothing and greeting card graffiti really scream out. The particular “message” doesn’t matter. And yet we have to act. The rocket of our life is off the pad. Action is forever. We are becoming who we will be—forever. Absurdity and cuteness are fine to chuckle over and perhaps to muse upon. But they are no place to live. They provide no shelter or direction for being human. (Location 384)

what social or political arrangements—however important in their own right—can guide and empower me to be the person I know I ought to be? Can anyone now seriously believe that if people are only permitted or enabled to do what they want, they will then be happy or more disposed to do what is right? (Location 419)

...considered apart from its Creator—which was never intended—the “ordinary” truly is so ordinary and commonplace that it is of little interest or value. No atom by itself radiates solar power. In its own right everything is always just “another one of those.” To be ordinary is to be only “more of the same.” The human being screams against this from its every pore. To be just “another one of those” is deadening agony for us. Indeed, it actually drives some people to their death. It was never God’s intention for anyone. (Location 458)

Egotistical individuals see everything through themselves. They are always the dominant figures in their own field of vision. (Location 467)

Egotism is pathological self-obsession, a reaction to anxiety about whether one really does count. It is a form of acute selfconsciousness and can be prevented and healed only by the experience of being adequately loved. (Location 468)

But they were only responding to the striking availability of God to meet present human need through the actions of Jesus. (Location 502)

We must not overlook the connection between faith and love. The woman saw Jesus and recognized who he was and who dwelt in him. That vision was her faith. She knew he was forgiving and accepting her before he ever said, “Your sins are forgiven.” She knew because she had seen a goodness in him that could only be God, and it broke her heart with gratitude and love. (Location 536)

To gain deeper understanding of our eternal kind of life in God’s present kingdom, we must be sure to understand what a kingdom is. (Location 580)

Our “kingdom” is simply the range of our effective will. Whatever we genuinely have the say over is in our kingdom. And our having the say over something is precisely what places it within our kingdom. In creating human beings God made them to rule, to reign, to have dominion in a limited sphere. Only so can they be persons. (Location 589)

If we attend to what he actually said, it becomes clear that his gospel concerned only the new accessibility of the kingdom to humanity through himself. (Location 673)

So when Jesus directs us to pray, “Thy kingdom come,” he does not mean we should pray for it to come into existence. Rather, we pray for it to take over at all points in the personal, social, and political order where it is now excluded: “On earth as it is in heaven.” With this prayer we are invoking it, as in faith we are acting it, into the real world of our daily existence. (Location 678)

When we examine the broad spectrum of Christian proclamation and practice, we see that the only thing made essential on the right wing of theology is forgiveness of the individual’s sins. On the left it is removal of social or structural evils. The current gospel then becomes a “gospel of sin management.” Transformation of life and character is no part of the redemptive message. Moment-to-moment human reality in its depths is not the arena of faith and eternal living. (Location 924)

The influential Anglican Bishop Stephen Neill, for example, says simply: “To be a Christian means to be like Jesus Christ.” And, “Being a Christian depends on a certain inner relatedness to the living Christ. Through this relatedness all other relationships of a man—to God, to himself, to other people—are transformed.”7 But the inevitable question will then be: Who is a Christian by such a standard of authentic Christlikeness? (Location 937)

But for some time now the belief required to be saved has increasingly been regarded as a totally private act, “just between you and the Lord.” Only the “scanner” would know. (Location 956)

The sensed irrelevance of what God is doing to what makes up our lives is the foundational flaw in the existence of multitudes of professing Christians today. They have been led to believe that God, for some unfathomable reason, just thinks it appropriate to transfer credit from Christ’s merit account to ours, and to wipe out our sin debt, upon inspecting our mind and finding that we believe a particular theory of the atonement to be true—even if we trust everything but God in all other matters that concern us. (Location 1075)

However, for many in the liberal church, clergy and layperson alike, that language was not just a substitute for religious belief. It became their faith. Or perhaps we should say that their religious belief became commitment to civil rights in some broadened sense—including, more recently, a right not even to have offensive symbolism or language used in your presence. (Location 1117)

The older liberal theology, which indeed was still primarily a theology or a view of God, died and was resurrected in the form of a social ethic that one could share with people who had no reliance on a present God or a living Christ at all. Total inclusivism of all beliefs and practices except oppressive ones, such as the exclusivism of traditional Christianity itself, was the natural next step. (Location 1123)

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 are ready to believe that the “latest studies” have more to teach us about love and sex than he does, and that Louis Rukeyser knows more about finances. “Dear Abby” can teach us more about how to get along with our family members and co-workers, and Carl Sagan is a better authority on the cosmos. We lose any sense of the difference between information and wisdom, and act accordingly. (Location 1197)

Sincere teaching on such matters simply does not appear on the Christian’s intellectual horizon as something that might be done. We do not seriously consider Jesus as our teacher on how to live, hence we cannot think of ourselves, in our moment-to-moment existence, as his students or disciples. So we turn to popular speakers and writers, some Christians and some not—whoever happens to be writing books and running talk shows and seminars on matters that concern us. (Location 1229)

The situation we have just described—the disconnection of life from faith, the absence from our churches of Jesus the teacher—is not caused by the wicked world, by social oppression, or by the stubborn meanness of the people who come to our church services and carry on the work of our congregations. It is largely caused and sustained by the basic message that we constantly hear from Christian pulpits. We are flooded with what I have called “gospels of sin management,” (Location 1234)

Does the gospel I preach and teach have a natural tendency to cause people who hear it to become full-time students of Jesus? Would those who believe it become his apprentices as a natural “next step”? What can we reasonably expect would result from people actually believing the substance of my message? (Location 1240)

And so we have the result noted: the resources of God’s kingdom remain detached from human life. There is no gospel for human life and Christian discipleship, just one for death or one for social action. The souls of human beings are left to shrivel and die on the plains of life because they are not introduced into the environment for which they were made, the living kingdom of eternal life. To counteract this 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. (Location 1250)

Still today the Old Testament book of Psalms gives great power for faith and life. This is simply because it preserves a conceptually rich language about God and our relationships to him. If you bury yourself in Psalms, you emerge knowing God and understanding life. (Location 1349)

the eternal, independent, and self-existent Being; the Being whose purposes and actions spring from himself, without foreign motive or influence; he who is absolute in dominion; the most pure, the most simple, the most spiritual of all essences; infinitely perfect; and eternally self-sufficient, needing nothing that he has made; illimitable in his immensity, inconceivable in his mode of existence, and indescribable in his essence; known fully only (Location 1362)

by himself, because an infinite mind can only be fully comprehended by itself. In a word, a Being who, from his infinite wisdom, cannot err or be deceived, and from his infinite goodness, can do nothing but what is eternally just, and right, and kind.4 (Location 1365)

To be born “from above,” in New Testament language, means to be interactively joined with a dynamic, unseen system of divine reality in the midst of which all of humanity moves about—whether it knows it or not And that, of course, is “The Kingdom Among Us.”6 (Location 1403)

Moreover, we have heard of psychological “projection,” and our heads are full of pseudoscientific views that reject a spiritual world and insist that space is empty and matter the only reality. So we are prepared to treat all of this long historical record as a matter of “visions” that are “only imagination,” or as outright delusions, not as perceptions of reality. And we slump back into those materialistic mythologies of our culture that are automatically imparted to us by “normal” life as what “everyone knows.” (Location 1447)

That very unity of experiences that constitutes a human self cannot be located at any point in or around this body through which we live, not even in the brain. Yet I am present as agent or causal influence with and about my body and its features and movements. In turn, what my body undergoes and provides influences my life as a personal being. And through my body, principally through my face and gestures, or “body language,” but also verbally, I can make myself present to others.13 (Location 1546)

Interestingly, “growing up” is largely a matter of learning to hide our spirit behind our face, eyes, and language so that we can evade and manage others to achieve what we want and avoid what we fear. By contrast, the child’s face is a constant epiphany because it doesn’t yet know how to do this. It cannot manage its face. This is also true of adults in moments of great feeling—which is one reason why feeling is both greatly treasured and greatly feared. (Location 1554)

Love always wants to be known. (Location 1569)

The will, or heart, is the executive center of the self. (Location 1641)

Little Children quickly learn to make things and to give them to those they love. If their souls are not crushed by life, as so many unfortunately are, they will continue to do this throughout their lives and at death will wish to leave to others things they have produced or secured by their own efforts. (Location 1642)

Because we have will we are not things. (Location 1659)

In his book The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley remarks, “Most men and women lead lives at the worst so painful, at the best so monotonous, poor and limited that the urge to escape, the longing to transcend themselves if only for a few moments, is and has always been one of the principal appetites of the soul.”21 They are relentlessly driven to seek, in H. G. Wells’s phrase, “Doors in the Wall” that entombs them in life. (Location 1684)

To one group of his day, who believed that “physical death” was the cessation of the individual’s existence, Jesus said, “God is not (Location 1716)

the God of the dead but of the living” (Luke 20:38). His meaning was that those who love and are loved by God are not allowed to cease to exist, because they are God’s treasures. He delights in them and intends to hold onto them. He has even prepared for them an individualized eternal work in his vast universe. (Location 1717)

Obviously, in some sense, the widow did not cast in more. But viewed in the context of what God does with her action and what he does, or rather does not do, with the actions of the others, it is a strictly literal truth that she cast in more. It was of greater value. More of value was done with the widow’s pennies than with the “large” gifts of the others. The context of The Kingdom Among Us transforms the respective actions. “Little is much,” we say, “when God is in it.” And so it is. Really. (Location 1791)

There are none in the humanly “down” position so low that they cannot be lifted up by entering God’s order, and none in the humanly “up” position so high that they can disregard God’s point of view on their lives. (Location 1800)

Jesus renewed this image in his parable of the kingdom of the heavens as a tiny seed that grows into a large plant where birds can make their home (Matt. 13:31–32). In that parable he refers precisely to the growth of his people in the earth without reference to human government. His government from the heavens is quite sufficient for them. (Location 1815)

We can savor them, affirm them, meditate upon them, and engrave them on plaques to hang on our walls. But a major question remains: How are we to live in response to them? (Location 1958)

his teaching in the Beatitudes is a clarification or development of his primary theme in this talk and in his life: the availability of the kingdom of the heavens.2 How, then, do they develop that theme? (Location 1974)

The poor in spirit are blessed as a result of the kingdom of God being available to them in their spiritual poverty. But today the words “poor in spirit” no longer convey the sense of spiritual destitution that they were originally meant to bear. Amazingly, they have come to refer to a praiseworthy condition. So, as a corrective, I have paraphrased the verse as above. No doubt Jesus had many exhibits from this category in the crowd around him. Most, if not all, of the Twelve Apostles were of this type, as are many now reading these words. (Location 1993)

minister tells of trying to lead home Bible studies among the poor of northern Mexico. In such studies participation is, of course, always encouraged. He related that, at the beginning, he would read a passage from scripture and ask, “What do you think?” No response. Just silence. Over and over this happened. Finally he realized that no one ever asks the poor what they think. That also is a part of what it means to be poor “in spirit.” No one imagines you could have any thoughts worth sharing. Real poverty in the human order is almost automatically taken as a sign of failure in every respect. (Location 2006)

This struggle with the translation reflects our intense need to find in the condition referred to something good, something God supposedly desires or even requires, that then can serve as a “reasonable” basis for the blessedness he bestows. But that precisely misses the point that the very formulation of the Beatitudes should bring to our attention. (Location 2019)

Jesus did not say, “Blessed are the poor in spirit because they are poor in spirit.” He did not think, “What a fine thing it is to be destitute of every spiritual attainment or quality. It makes people worthy of the kingdom.” And we steal away the much more profound meaning of his teaching about the availability of the kingdom by replacing the state of spiritual impoverishment—in no way good in itself—with some supposedly praiseworthy state of mind or attitude that “qualifies” us for the kingdom.4 (Location 2022)

If all we need to be blessed in the kingdom of the heavens is to be humble-minded through recognizing our spiritual poverty, then let’s just do that and we’ve got bliss cornered. We escape the humiliation of spiritual incompetence because, strange to say, we have managed to turn it into spiritual attainment just by acknowledging it. And we escape the embarrassment of receiving pure mercy, for our humble recognition makes blessedness somehow appropriate. (Location 2040)

Ours is the age of grace, they say. Haven’t we suffered long to establish this? Because being in the kingdom of God is, on the usual interpretation of the Beatitudes, obviously not a matter of grace but of attaining to special conditions, the present age cannot be the age of the kingdom. That is the thinking of many.6 (Location 2077)

They are explanations and illustrations, drawn from the immediate setting, of the present availability of the kingdom through personal relationship to Jesus. (Location 2103)

He is, on the other hand, most certainly telling us to provide for more than our little circle of mutual appreciation, and thus to place ourselves in the larger context of heaven’s rule where we have a different kind of mind and heart regardless of who we do or do not have over for dinner. (Location 2155)

Such is often the life and thoughts of those who are not destitute of spiritual things—not “poor in spirit”—but instead are loaded with them. (Location 2177)

How to Make a Neighbor (Location 2190)

So we don’t first define a class of people who will be our neighbors and then select only them as the objects of our love—leaving the rest to lie where they fall. Jesus deftly rejects the question “Who is my neighbor?” and substitutes the only question really relevant here: “To whom will I be a neighbor?” (Location 2194)

If Jesus were here today, the story would be told differently. The words good Samaritan now identify a person of an especially good sort in our society. We even have “good Samaritan” laws to protect them when they do “their good deeds.” (Location 2199)

“good Samaritan” in the place of the priest or Levite as he originally told the story. Or if he were in Israel now, he would probably tell a story about the “good Palestinian.” The Palestinians, on the other hand, would hear about the “good Israeli.” In the United States, of course, he would tell us about the “good Iraqi,” “good Communist,” “good Muslim,” and so on. In some quarters it would have to be the good feminist or good homosexual. In yet others the good Christian or good church member would have the appropriate shock value. Indeed, given some current secular attitudes, to speak of the good priest or good deacon might be very effective. All of these break up pet generalizations concerning who most surely is or is not leading the eternal kind of life. (Location 2201)

These are things that we all know to be true. “Though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor,” Paul points out, “and though I give my body to be burned, and fail to love as God does, it is of no gain to me.” So whatever the point of the Beatitudes, it cannot be that they state conditions that guarantee God’s approval, salvation, or blessing. (Location 2273)

We have already indicated the key to understanding the Beatitudes. They serve to clarify Jesus’ fundamental message: the free availability of God’s rule and righteousness to all of humanity through reliance upon Jesus himself, the person now loose in the world among us. (Location 2282)

Thus, when they kill you they think they are doing God a favor (John 16:2). (Location 2338)

The Law and the Prophets had been twisted around to authorize an oppressive, though religious, social order that put glittering humans—the rich, the educated, the “well-born,” the popular, the powerful, and so on—in possession of God. Jesus’ proclamation clearly dumped them out of their privileged position and raised ordinary people with no human qualifications into the divine fellowship by faith in Jesus. (Location 2475)

The historian of morals W. E. H. Lecky describes the teachings of Jesus as “an agency which all men must now admit to have been, for good or for evil, the most powerful moral lever that has ever been applied to the affairs of man.”1 (Location 2514)

And today any attempt to combine spirituality or moral purity with great intelligence causes widespread pangs of “cognitive dissonance.” (Location 2596)

What lies at the heart of the astonishing disregard of Jesus found in the moment-to-moment existence of multitudes of professing Christians is a simple lack of respect for him. He is not seriously considered or presented as a person of great ability. What, then, can devotion or worship mean, if simple respect is not included in it? Not much. (Location 2600)

However, “the law” they had in mind and that they rubbed up against every day was not the law of God. It was a contemporary version of religious respectability, very harsh and oppressive in application, that Jesus referred to as “the goodness of scribes and Pharisees” (5:20). Law as God intended it remains forever essential to the kingdom, and Jesus made it clear to his hearers that his aim is to bring those who follow him into fulfillment of the true law. The fulfillment he had in mind was not for the purpose of making them humanly acceptable. That is quite another matter. But fulfillment of God’s law is important because the law is good. It is right for human life. And the presence of the kingdom brings us all that is right for human life. (Location 2621)

Now confidence in the Christ is, correctly understood, inseparable from the fulfilling of the law. People came to him on one occasion and asked, “What shall we do to work the works of God?” (John 6:28). His reply was, “You do the work of God when you place your confidence in the one he sent.” We would now say, and say correctly, “Trust Jesus Christ.” But we have already seen in previous chapters how the idea of having faith in Jesus has come to be totally isolated from being his apprentice and learning how to do what he said. (Location 2687)

How to combine faith with obedience is surely the essential task of the church as it enters the twenty-first century. (Location 2701)

To be sure, law is not the source of rightness, but it is forever the course of rightness. (Location 2721)

He knew that we cannot keep the law by trying to keep the law. To succeed in keeping the law one must aim at something other and something more. One must aim to become the kind of person from whom the deeds of the law naturally flow. The apple tree naturally and easily produces apples because of its inner nature. This is the most crucial thing to remember if we would understand Jesus’ picture of the kingdom heart given in the Sermon on the Mount. (Location 2737)

Actions do not emerge from nothing. They faithfully reveal what is in the heart, and we can know what is in the heart that they depend upon. Indeed, everyone does know. That is a part of what it is to be a mentally competent human being. The heart is not a mystery at the level of ordinary human interactions. We discern one another quite well. (Location 2759)

The term dikaiosune was used to translate the Hebrew terms tsedawkaw and tsehdek, usually rendered in English as “righteousness.” Thus, a great central text of the Old Testament, Gen. 15:6, tells us, “And Abram believed God, and it was counted to him for dikaiosune.” And we see in Isaiah: “All our dikaiosune is like filthy rags” (64:6). And again in Amos: “But let judgment roll down as water, and dikaiosune as an impassable flood” (5:24). (Location 2795)

That is why it always hurts us when someone is angry at us. (Location 2846)

Find a person who has embraced anger, and you find a person with a wounded ego. (Location 2863)

A leading social commentator now teaches that despair and rage are an essential element in the struggle for justice.12 He and others who teach this are sowing the wind, and they will reap the whirlwind, the tornado. Indeed, we are reaping it now in a nation increasingly sick with rage and resentment of citizen toward citizen. And often the rage and resentment is upheld as justified in the name of God. (Location 2888)

The sense of self-righteousness that comes with our anger simply provokes more anger and self-righteousness on the other side. (Location 2893)

laws that deal only with actions, such as the Ten Commandments, simply cannot reach the human heart, the source of actions. (Location 2978)

But Jesus was aware, as we may easily notice today, that the very same people who thought of themselves as sexually pure and right would follow a woman with their eyes, lavishing their lookings upon her, tracing out by sight the lineaments of her body with a look of absorbed lusting upon their face and posture. They obviously take great pleasure in this activity, fantasizing what touching, caressing, and entering this body would be like. (Location 3057)

In other words, all the elements of a genuine act of adultery other than the overt movements of the body are present in such a case. The heart elements are there. Usually the only thing lacking for overt action is the occasion. When the heart is ready, the action will occur as occasion offers. (Location 3081)

“The look” is a public act with public effects that restructure the entire framework of personal relations where it occurs.15 (Location 3089)

It would be hard to find any current writer in ethics who would regard adultery as simply wrong. Actually, almost anything in the way of sexual relations is now regarded as correct as long as both parties consent to it. You will now hear it explained that adultery is not even committed as long as no child is conceived. (Location 3107)

It is almost inconceivable today that the rightness or wrongness of sexual intercourse would have nothing whatsoever to do with what now passes for romantic love. Yet that is the biblical view generally: the rightness of sex is tied instead to a solemn and public covenant for life between two individuals, and sexual arousal and delight is a response to the gift of a uniquely personal intimacy with the whole person that each partner has conferred in enduring faithfulness upon the other. (Location 3114)

One of the most telling things about contemporary human beings is that they cannot find a reason for not committing adultery. Yet intimacy is a spiritual hunger of the human soul, and we cannot escape it. This has always been true and remains true today. We now keep hammering the sex button in the hope that a little intimacy might finally dribble out. In vain. For intimacy comes only within the framework of an individualized faithfulness within the kingdom of God. Such faithfulness is violated by “adultery in the heart” as well as by adultery in the body. (Location 3125)

In charting one’s course in life, it is important never to forget that many things that cannot be called wrong or evil are nevertheless not good for us. (Location 3143)

Now, truly, if you blind yourself, you cannot look at a woman to lust after her, because you cannot look on her at all. And if you sufficiently dismember yourself, you will not be able to do any wrong action. This is the logic by which Jesus reduces the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees to the absurd. (Location 3197)

When Jesus himself comes to deal with the rightness of persons in divorce, he does not forbid divorce absolutely, but he makes it very clear that divorce was never God’s intent for men and women in a marriage. The intent in marriage is a union of two people that is even deeper than the union of parents and Children or any other human relationship. They are to become “one flesh,” one natural unit, building one life, which therefore could never lose or substitute for one member and remain a whole life (Matt. 19:5; Gen. 2:24). (Location 3232)

Rather, it is the hardness of the human heart that Jesus cites as grounds for permitting divorce in case of adultery. In other words, the ultimate grounds for divorce is human meanness. (Location 3241)

But of course a brutal marriage is not a good thing either, and we must resist any attempt to classify divorce as a special, irredeemable form of wickedness. It is not. It is sometimes the right thing to do, everything considered. (Location 3259)

Divorce, if it were rightly done, would be done as an act of love. It would be dictated by love and done for the honest good of the people involved. (Location 3298)

As God’s free creatures, people are to be left to make their decisions without coercion or manipulation. Hence, “let your affirmation be just an affirmation,” a yes, and your denial be just a denial, a no. Anything more than this “comes from evil”—the evil intent to get one’s way by verbal manipulation of the thoughts and choices of others. Kingdom rightness respects the soul need of human beings to make their judgments and decisions solely from what they have concluded is best. It is a vital, a biological need. We do not thrive, nor does our character develop well, when this need is not respected,23 and this thwarts the purpose of God in our creation. (Location 3350)

Additionally, if you read them as laws you will immediately see that we could “obey” them in the wrong spirit. For example, as is often actually said, “I’ll turn the other cheek, but then I’ll knock your head off.” (Location 3396)

But Paul is plainly saying—look at his words—that it is love that does these things, not us, and that what we are to do is to “pursue love” (Location 3487)

Bertrand Russell, a well-known British philosopher of this century, was raised a Christian, though he later adopted atheism. He was familiar with the teachings of Jesus, if not their actual meaning. In one place he comments, “The Christian principle, ‘Love your enemies’ is good…. There is nothing to be said against it except that it is too difficult for most of us to practise sincerely.” (Location 3499)

Then the deeds of love, including loving our enemies, are what that agape love does in us and what we do as the new persons we have become. (Location 3511)

One is blessed, we now know, if one’s life is based upon acceptance and intimate interactions with what God is doing in human history. (Location 3542)

But as we keep these two things in their proper place, through a constant, disciplined, and clear-eyed reliance on God, we will grow rapidly in kingdom substance. We will progressively incorporate all aspects of our life into the kingdom, including, of course, the social and the financial. (Location 3556)

Now manna is an interesting term. It basically means “whatever it is,” or “what is it?” (Location 3711)

The discipline of secrecy will help us break the grip of human opinion over our souls and our actions. A discipline is an activity in our power that we do to enable us to do what we cannot do by direct effort. Jesus is here leading us into the discipline of secrecy. (Location 3780)

I may be tempted to think I have to attract people to hear me but could get by without God. (Location 3815)

Everyone is talking about you all the time. They say, “Come and let’s hear what the word is from the Lord.” And they sit before you as my people, and they hear your words, but they do not do them. For their mouths talk devotion but their hearts seek wicked gains. Why, you are just like one who sings about love with a beautiful voice and a well-played instrument. They hear what you are saying, but do not do it. (Ezek. 33:31–32) (Location 3816)

Everyone has treasures. This is an essential part of what it is to be human. To have nothing that one treasures is to be in a nonhuman condition, and nothing degrades people more than to scorn or destroy or deprive them of their treasures. (Location 3833)

But of course if we do value “mammon” as normal people seem to think we should, our fate is fixed. Our fate is anxiety. It is worry. It is frustration. The words anxious and worry both have reference to strangling or being choked. Certainly that is how we feel when we are anxious. Things and events have us by the throat and seem to be cutting off our life. We are being harmed, or we fear what will come upon us, and all our efforts are insufficient to do anything about it. Perhaps more energy has gone into dealing with this human situation than into anything else—from songs about “Don’t Worry! Be Happy!” to $250-an-hour sessions with a therapist. (Location 3935)

Also we see it in the place of Children in the Gospels. They are called “greatest in the kingdom.” The little child has no capacity to command a store of goods on its own that would allow it to live independently of others. It simply must assume that provisions are made for it by others. (Location 3948)

We noted earlier that if we do not treasure earthly goods we must be prepared to be treated as more or less crazy. (Location 4013)

the one who takes on the character of the Prince of Life will not be exempted from the usual problems of life, and in addition will have the problems that come from “not fitting in” and being incapable of conforming to the world order, new or old. This will not infrequently mean death or imprisonment or exclusion from the economy or education, and so on. All of these things have happened repeatedly in our history. (Location 4027)

We are dominated by the essentially Enlightenment values that rule American culture: pursuit of happiness, unrestricted freedom of choice, disdain of authority. The prosperity gospels, the gospels of liberation, and the comfortable sense of “what life is all about” that fills the minds of most devout Christians in our circles are the result. (Location 4033)

In shame we are self-condemned for being the person we are. (Location 4175)

We do not have to—we cannot—surrender the valid practice of distinguishing and discerning how things are in order to avoid condemning others. We can, however, train ourselves to hold people responsible and discuss their failures with them—and even assign them penalties, if we are, for example, in some position over them—without attacking their worth as human beings or marking them as rejects. A practiced spirit of intelligent agape will make this possible. Recall the words of Paul and the example of Saint Dominic referred to earlier. (Location 4230)

It is interesting and important to observe that today the old phrase “hate the sin and love the sinner” no longer is accepted. If you disapprove of what I do or how I do it, it is now generally thought, you can only be condemning me and rejecting me. This is another evidence of the devastating effect of the loss to our culture of any idea of the self as a spiritual being that not only has but is an inner substance. “I am my actions,” it is thought, “and how then can you say you disapprove of my actions but love me?” (Location 4238)

When we enter the life of friendship with the Jesus who is now at work in our universe, we stand in a new reality where condemnation is simply irrelevant. (Location 4268)

“Who is this one condemning me,” I ask, “when set beside that One who does not condemn me?” I think I shall not be depressed about this condemnation of me, then, especially since I know that “nothing can separate me from the eternal love of Christ” (Rom. 8:33–35). And in this context it seems only intelligent just to have done with the whole condemning game. (Location 4272)

The problem with pearls for pigs is not that the pigs are not worthy. It is not worthiness that is in question here at all, but helpfulness. Pigs cannot digest pearls, cannot nourish themselves upon them. Likewise for a dog with a Bible or a crucifix. The dog cannot eat it. The reason these animals will finally “turn and rend you,” when you one day step up to them with another load of Bibles or pearls, is that you at least are edible. Anyone who has ever had serious responsibilities of caring for animals will understand immediately what Jesus is saying. (Location 4294)

is taking others out of their own responsibility and out of God’s hands and trying to bring them under our control. (Location 4314)

God has paid an awful price to arrange for human self-determination. He obviously places great value on it. It is, after all, the only way he can get the kind of personal beings he desires for his eternal purposes. And just as we are not to try to manipulate others with impressive language of any kind (Matt. 5:37), so we are not to harass them into rightness and goodness with our condemnings and our “pearls” or holy things. (Location 4318)

Thus Saint Augustine understood love of our neighbor as requiring that “we must endeavor to get our neighbor to love God.” He understood this to apply to our family, our household, and “all within our reach.”3 And he is right. To a great extent, what matters in our approach to people is not just what we do, but how we do it, and when. And we can count on it that a superior attitude or condemnation will never help us help them. (Location 4322)

As long as I am condemning my friends or relatives, or pushing my “pearls” on them, I am their problem. They have to respond to me, and that usually leads to their “judging” me right back, or “biting” me, as Jesus said. (Location 4340)

When we stand thus in the kingdom, our approach to influencing others, for their good as well as ours, will be simply to ask: to ask them to change, and to help them in any way they ask of us. (Location 4347)

We teach our Children to say “please” and “thank you.” This is understood to be a matter of respect, and rightly so. But it is also a way of getting what we want or need. It is a way of getting that requires us to go through the freedom of the person asked, however. In the very act of asking, in the very nature of the request, we acknowledge that the other person can say no, and, “innocent as doves,” we accept that response. (Location 4377)

How beautiful it is to see relationships in which asking and receiving are a joyful and loving way of life. Often we see those who cherish one another each seriously or playfully trying to outgive the other. That is how relationships should be. Of course we must never eliminate the asking side of the relationship. A balance must be kept, for giving is not the same as imposition. That is why God does not just give us what we need without being asked. Prayer is nothing but a proper way for persons to interact. (Location 4388)

Our confidence in God is the only thing that makes it possible to treat others as they should be treated. (Location 4408)

The quality of love in the prayerful community is radically different from the highest form of human loves, according to Bonhoeffer. (Location 4441)

Human love is directed to the other person for his own sake, spiritual love loves him for Christ’s sake. Therefore, human love seeks direct contact with the other person; it loves him not as a free person but as one whom it binds to itself…. It desires to be irresistible, to rule. Human love has little regard for truth. It makes the truth relative, since nothing, not even the truth, must come between it and the beloved person.” (Location 4442)

It is deeply instructive of the nature of human life and its redemption that, when Jesus knew Peter would deny him, he did not just “fix him” so that he wouldn’t do the terrible thing. Surely he could have done that. But it would not have advanced Peter toward being the person he needed to become. So Jesus said to Peter, with sadness perhaps, but with great confidence in the Father, “I have requested, concerning you, that your faith might not die. And when you have straightened up, uphold your brothers” (Luke 22:32). (Location 4501)

Accordingly, I believe the most adequate description of prayer is simply, “Talking to God about what we are doing together.” That (Location 4546)

immediately focuses the activity where we are but at the same time drives the egotism out of it. Requests will naturally be made in the course of this conversational walk. Prayer is a matter of explicitly sharing with God my concerns about what he too is concerned about in my life. And of course he is concerned about my concerns and, in particular, that my concerns should coincide with his. This is our walk together. Out of it I pray. (Location 4547)

we must carefully consider, for example, that just talking to God is not prayer, though prayer is talking to God. (Location 4555)

Our requests really do make a difference in what God does or does not do. (Location 4572)

There is nothing automatic about requests. There is no “silver bullet” in prayer. Requests may be granted. Or they may not. Either way, it will be for a good reason. That is how relationships between persons are, or should be. (Location 4604)

For the strictly scientific analysis of strictly physical reality, we should assume nothing beyond quarks, it is often said. (Location 4614)

But not all of reality is physical. There is, as a matter of fact, no science that even attempts to demonstrate that all that exists is physical. Anyone is invited to point out which one does so, and where. If there were such a “science,” it would certainly fail. (Location 4615)

Finally, in Dossey’s interpretation of the research material, it does not matter, within broad limits, how you pray or to whom you pray. There is no how-to in the sense of methodical procedure (pp. 9–10). We are on “the pathless path”. And this is no doubt mainly because, in his view, there is no “external God” we have to go through to achieve the effects of prayer. God is in any case unknowable. What we pray “to” is within ourselves. (Location 4646)

Prayer is, under any interpretation, a particular exertion and expression of thought, will, and desire. (Location 4654)

God is above all a God who speaks and listens.15 (Location 4679)

we learn step by step how to govern, to reign with him in his kingdom. To enter and to learn this reign is what gives the individual life its intended significance. (Location 4681)

prayer frequently requires much effort, continuous effort, and on some matters possibly years and years of effort. Prayer is, above all, a means of forming character. (Location 4683)

Sometimes we must wait for God to do as we ask because the answer involves changes in other people, or even ourselves, and that kind of change always takes time. (Location 4693)

Maybe he looks out an hour later and sees you just standing there wringing your hands. What else can he do? And as Jesus points out, “It is not because he is your friend that he will do it, but because you just keep standing there waiting for the loaves” (v. 8). Of course, if you go away he won’t do it, and if he does do it you won’t be there to receive it. That is common sense, and Jesus integrates it right into the life of prayer. (Location 4702)

Prayer is never a mechanism. It is always a personal negotiation, as the earlier quotation from C. S. Lewis so wisely suggests. Jesus’ constant effort in his teaching about prayer is to drive this point home. (Location 4721)

So far from fitting the classical pattern of God as “the Unmoved Mover,” the God shown in the historical record is “the Most Moved Mover.” This is the One who lives with us and whom we approach from within the community of prayerful love. (Location 4742)

The idea is, I think, that we don’t want to be hypocritical and express fondness where it is not felt. How very noble the sentiment! No one seems to understand that it was not fondness but respect that was expressed by the “Dear Joe” form. The change of form marked the loss of respectful approach, not the loss of hypocrisy—which, from all appearances, remains in a very healthy condition. (Location 4787)

Certain bodily postures may also be useful in this regard. Luther, once again, recommends that we “kneel down or stand up with folded hands and eyes toward the sky.” (Location 4805)

Human life is not about human life. Nothing will go right in it until the greatness and goodness of its source and governor is adequately grasped. (Location 4845)

that the kingdom of God is the range of his effective will: (Location 4859)

To blunt their lessons may be to harm those we would help. (Location 4904)

We are praying for help to forgive others, for, though it is up to us to forgive—we do it—we know we cannot do it without help. But we can expect help, for the “unity of spiritual orientation” discussed earlier in this chapter covers all these matters. (Location 4914)

One of the greatest gifts of The Kingdom Among Us is the healing of the parent-child relation, “turning the hearts of fathers to their Children and the hearts of Children to their fathers” (Mal. 4:6). (Location 4930)

Living on the basis of pity makes it easier to ask and makes it easier to give, including forgiveness. People who are merciless, unable to pity others and receive pity, simply have a hard life full of unsolvable problems. (Location 4934)

This request is not just for evasion of pain and of things we don’t like, though it frankly is that. (Location 4963)

God expects us to pray that we will escape trials, and we should do it. The bad things that happen to us are always challenges to our faith, and we may not be able to stand up under them. They are dangerous. (Location 4966)

The excessive confidence people have in the strength of their own faith—usually it is when they are not suffering, of course—simply makes the danger worse. (Location 4970)

We should understand that God will usually spare us from trials, especially if we are living in the Lord’s Prayer. And we should also understand that, when trials are permitted, it only means that he has something better in mind for us than freedom from trials. (Location 4993)

Discipline is essential to our actual place in God’s earthly family, and discipline is “not joyful, but sorrowful; though…, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness” (Heb. 12:11). (Location 4998)

One of our worst thoughts about God is that he too enjoys human suffering. (Location 5003)

People who do not ask God to spare them from trials and evils usually do not even recognize his hand when they are spared. They then live under the illusion that their lives are governed by chance, luck, accident, the whims of others, and their own cleverness. (Location 5013)

One thing is sure: You are somebody’s disciple. (Location 5057)

“Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?” (Luke 6:46). Just try picturing yourself standing before him and explaining why you did not do what he said was best. (Location 5095)

The narrow gate is obedience—and the confidence in Jesus necessary to it. (Location 5128)

My main role in life, for example, is that of a professor in what is called a “research” university. As Jesus’ apprentice, then, I constantly have before me the question of how he would deal with students and colleagues in the specific connections involved in such a role. How would he design a course, and why? How would he compose a test, administer it, and grade it? What would his research projects be, and why? How would he teach this course or that? (Location 5277)

To repeat, I am learning from Jesus how to lead my life, my whole life, my real life. Note, please, I am not learning from him how to lead his life. His life on earth was a transcendently wonderful one. But it has now been led. Neither I nor anyone else, even himself, will ever lead it again. And he is, in any case, interested in my life, that very existence that is me. There lies my need. I need to be able to lead my life as he would lead it if he were I. (Location 5284)

Consider just your job, the work you do to make a living. This is one of the clearest ways possible of focusing upon apprenticeship to Jesus. To be a disciple of Jesus is, crucially, to be learning from Jesus how to do your job as Jesus himself would do it. New Testament language for this is to do it “in the name” of Jesus. (Location 5311)

refusal to press for financial advantage, (Location 5324)

He wants it well done. It is work that should be done, and it should be done as Jesus himself would do it. (Location 5335)

Although we must never allow our job to become our life, we should, within reasonable limits, routinely sacrifice our comfort and pleasure for the quality of our work, whether it be ax handles, tacos, or the proficiency of a student we are teaching. (Location 5340)

There is, apparently, no real connection between being a Christian and being a disciple of Jesus. (Location 5427)

Then a third time Jesus asks, “Do you love me?” But this time he himself switched to philo. In other words he accepted the level where Peter was. But Peter was grieved that he kept asking, and perhaps also grieved at his own lack of agape. He replied, “Lord, you know everything, and you know that I love philo

The first thing we should do is emphatically and repeatedly express to Jesus our desire to see him more fully as he really is. (Location 5498)

This gives a precise meaning to the phrase “cheap grace,” though it would be better described as “costly faithlessness.” (Location 5610)

We simply go along with the many “musts” and “oughts” that have been handed on to us, and we live with them as if they were authentic translations of the Gospel of our Lord. People must be motivated to come to church, youth must be entertained, money must be raised, and above all everyone must be happy. Moreover, we ought to be on good terms with the church and civil authorities; we ought to be liked or at least respected by a fair majority of our parishioners; we ought to move up in the ranks according to schedule; and we ought to have enough vacation and salary to live a comfortable life.11 (Location 5641)

We would intend to make disciples and let converts “happen,” rather than intending to make converts and letting disciples “happen.” (Location 5669)

to enable people to become disciples we must change whatever it is in their actual belief system that bars confidence in Jesus as Master of the Universe. (Location 5708)

One of the greatest weaknesses in our teaching and leadership today is that we spend so much time trying to get people to do things good people are supposed to do, without changing what they really believe. (Location 5712)

We often speak of people not living up to their faith. But the cases in which we say this are not really cases of people behaving otherwise than they believe. They are cases in which genuine beliefs are made obvious by what people do. (Location 5719)

In a setting where a social premium has been placed upon believing certain things for the sake of group solidarity, we must face the fact that human beings can honestly profess to believe what they do not believe. (Location 5731)

But the truth about obedience in the kingdom of Jesus, as should be clear by now, is that it really is abundance. Kingdom obedience is kingdom abundance. (Location 5797)

In practical matters, to teach people to do something is to bring them to the point where they actually do it on the appropriate occasions. (Location 5824)

However, the emphasis all too often is on some point of behavior modification. This is helpful, but it is not adequate to human life. (Location 5850)

“teaching” to be done at this point—whether directed toward ourselves or toward others—is not a matter of collecting or conveying information. (Location 5867)

sometimes joke with my students at the university where I teach by asking them if they believe what they wrote on their tests. They always laugh. They know belief is not required. (Location 5880)

So, as Jesus’ current assistants in his ongoing program, one important way of characterizing our work of “training disciples to do everything I told you” is “bringing them to actually believe all the things they have already heard.” Our task in ourselves and in others is to transform right answers into automatic responses to real-life situations. (Location 5885)

For example, nearly every professing Christian has some information about the Trinity, the incarnation, the atonement, and other standard doctrines. But to have the “right” answers about the Trinity, for example, and to actually believe in the reality of the Trinity, is all the difference in the world. (Location 5892)

So, to drive home the crucial point, a great deal of what goes into “training them us

How do we help people love what is lovely? Very simply, we cause them, ask them, help (Location 5991)

them to place their minds on the lovely thing concerned. We assist them to do this in every way possible. Saint Thomas Aquinas remarks that “love is born of an earnest consideration of the object loved.” And: “Love follows knowledge.”3 (Location 5991)

The theologian who does not love God is in great danger, and in danger of doing great harm, for he or she needs to know him and believe with assurance concerning him. (Location 6118)

They need someone to make sense of God in relation to what they are sure, rightly or wrongly, they know about themselves and their world. (Location 6122)

You cannot change character or behavior and leave beliefs intact. It is one of the major illusions of Western culture, deriving from a form of Christianity that is merely cultural, that you can do this. We cannot work around that illusion, but must dispel it. (Location 6155)

That is the good reason to wear or display a cross. For all the false and misleading associations that may surround it, it still says—even without the knowledge of the one displaying it—“I am bought by the sufferings and death of Jesus and I belong to God. The divine conspiracy of which I am a part stands over human history in the form of a cross.” (Location 6208)

Let us now be perfectly clear. Your life is not something from which you can stand aside and consider what it would have been like had you had a different one. There is no “you” apart from your actual life. You are not separate from your life, and in that life you must find the goodness of God. Otherwise, you will not believe that he has done well by you, and you will not truly be at peace with him. (Location 6318)

This is the true situation: nothing has power to tempt me or move me to wrong action that I have not given power by what I permit to be in me. And the most spiritually dangerous things in me are the little habits of thought, feeling, and action that I regard as “normal” because “everyone is like that” and it is “only human.” (Location 6390)

Patterns of anger, scorn, and “looking to lust” vividly illustrate the basic triviality of the drive to wrongdoing. “The look” is only a habit. There is nothing deep or vital about it. One looks to lust or to covet upon certain cues. Anyone who bothers to reflect on his or her experience will be able to identify what those cues are. (Location 6398)

This is exactly the general arrangement that is used in the Twelve Step program already discussed, and, of course, Alcoholics Anonymous did not discover or invent it. It is a “law,” if you wish, of human personality. But even the A.A. program will be powerless to help anyone who has not decided to avoid drinking and stay alive. As always, the intention points the way, and then habituated thought and desire must be redirected to support the intention in the moments of action. (Location 6408)

Obviously, the effects of training in any area cannot be transferred into us from another person, and rarely, if ever, will it be injected by divine grace. Another person cannot learn Spanish for me, nor can someone else lift weights to improve my muscles. And our deepest moral character also is not something that can be developed by anything that is done for us or to us. Others can help us in certain ways, but we must act. We must act wisely and consistently over a long period of time. (Location 6416)

Therefore we are to “work out” the salvation we have (2:12). The word here, katergazesthe, has the sense of developing or elaborating something, bringing it to the fullness of what in its nature it is meant to be. But we do not do this as if the new life were simply our project. It isn’t. God also is at work in us, “choosing and acting on behalf of his intentions” (v. 13). Hence we do what we do—and what will not be done for us—“with fear and trembling” because we know who else is involved. (Location 6427)

Note that all this is emphatically expressed as what we are to do. (Location 6505)

We do not just hear what Jesus said to do and try to do that. Rather, we also notice what he did, and we do that too. We notice, for example, that he spent extended times in solitude and silence, and we enter solitude and silence with him. (Location 6514)

We have Bibles with red letters to indicate what he said. Might we not make a good use of a Bible that has green letters for what he did? Green for “go,” or “do it”? (Location 6517)

It would be a plan that incorporates whatever is necessary to enable us to have the character and then do the deeds indicated in the teachings of Jesus and his immediate followers. For simplicity’s sake we could just say “the character and deeds indicated in Colossians 3.” Our plan for a life of growth in the life of the kingdom of God must be structured around disciplines for the spiritual life. (Location 6529)

Practice is discipline, but not all discipline is practice, for in many disciplines we do not engage in the very activity that we hope to be good at. (Location 6538)

“the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,” we increasingly pass to the stages where the flesh—think of that as what we more or less automatically feel, think, and do—is with the spirit and supportive of its deepest intentions. This is absolutely essential in training that will bring us to do from the heart the things that Jesus knew to be best. (Location 6559)

There has been abuse and misunderstanding, no doubt, but the power of solitude, silence, meditative study, prayer, sacrificial giving, service, and so forth as disciplines are simply beyond question. This is a field of knowledge, and we remain ignorant of it to our great disadvantage. (Location 6574)

In particular, I had learned that intensity is crucial for any progress in spiritual perception and understanding. To dribble a few verses or chapters of scripture on oneself through the week, in church or out, will not reorder one’s mind and spirit—just as one drop of water every five minutes will not get you a shower, no matter how long you keep it up. You need a lot of water at once and for a sufficiently long time. Similarly for the written Word. (Location 6594)

Moreover, one’s life as a whole had to be arranged in such a way that this would be possible. One must not be agitated, hurried, or exhausted when the time of prayer and study came. (Location 6602)

These are, on the side of abstinence, solitude and silence and, on the side of positive engagement, study and worship. (Location 6615)

We hear the cries from our strife-torn streets: “Give peace a chance!” and “Can’t we all just get along?” But you cannot give peace a chance if that is all you give a chance. You have to do the things that make peace possible and actual. When you listen to people talk about peace, you soon realize in most cases that they are unwilling to deal with the conditions of society and soul that make strife inevitable. They want to keep them and still have peace, but it is peace on their terms, which is impossible. (Location 6632)

And we can’t all just get along. Rather, we have to become the kinds of persons who can get along. (Location 6636)

One of the greatest of spiritual attainments is the capacity to do nothing. Thus the Christian philosopher Pascal insightfully remarks, “I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they are unable to stay quietly in their own room.” (Location 6641)

possibly the gentle Father in the heavens would draw nigh if we would just be quiet and rest a bit. Generally speaking, he will not compete for our attention, and as long as we are “in charge” he is liable to keep a certain distance. (Location 6647)

What do you do in solitude or silence? Well, as far as things to “get done,” nothing at all. As long as you are doing “things to get done,” you have not broken human contact. So don’t go into solitude and silence with a list. Can we enjoy things in solitude and silence? Yes, but don’t try to. Just be there. (Location 6652)

Liberation from your own desires is one of the greatest gifts of solitude and silence. (Location 6665)

Soon you may even come to know what it is like to live by grace rather than just talk about it. (Location 6667)

People often complain that they cannot pray because their thoughts wander. Those thoughts are simply doing what they usually do. The grip of the usual is what must be broken. Appropriate solitude and silence are sure to do it. (Location 6672)

Once solitude has done its work, the key to this progression is study. It is in study that we place our minds fully upon God and his kingdom. And study is brought to its natural completion in the worship of God. (Location 6681)

I know many people who profess serious allegiance to Jesus and claim him as their Savior but who, unfortunately, simply will not take these scriptures into their soul and body and utilize them as indicated. (Location 6705)

Now we must not worship without study, for ignorant worship is of limited value and can be very dangerous. We may develop “a zeal for God, but not according to knowledge” (Rom. 10:2) and do great harm to ourselves and others. But worship must be added to study to complete the renewal of our mind through a willing absorption in the radiant person who is worthy of all praise. Study without worship is also dangerous, and the people of Jesus constantly suffer from its effects, (Location 6712)

especially in academic settings. To handle the things of God without worship is always to falsify them. (Location 6715)

The key in such cases is to aim at the heart and its transformation. We want to “make the tree good.” We do not aim just to control behavior, but to change the inner castle of the soul, that God may be worshiped “in spirit and in truth” and right behavior cease to be a performance. (Location 6739)

Moreover, the shock of being dealt with in love and fairness and mercy will certainly change the behavior of others. “When your ways please the Lord, he causes your enemies to be at peace with you” (Prov. 16:7). (Location 6752)

The pattern has two main elements: Clearly positioning the context before the heavenly Father’s present rule through Jesus Walking the individual through actual cases in their own lives to give them experience-based understanding and assurance (Location 6774)

desire to be his apprentice (Location 6801)

The abundance of life realized through apprenticeship to Jesus, “continuing in his word,” naturally leads to obedience. (Location 6804)

Love of Jesus sustains us through the course of discipline and training that makes obedience possible. Without that love, we will not stay to learn. (Location 6809)

pervasive inner transformation of the heart and soul. (Location 6811)

Finally, there is power to work the works of the kingdom. (Location 6815)

“those who rely on me shall do the works I do, and even greater ones” (Location 6816)

Perhaps we feel baffled and incompetent before this statement. But let us keep in mind that the world we live in desperately needs such works to be done. They would not be just for show or to impress ourselves or others. But, frankly, even a moderate-size “work” is more than most people’s life could sustain. (Location 6817)

Each of us must ask ourselves how are we doing it. What, precisely, is our plan? (Location 6829)

for then the ultimate objective will be seen as presenting the “right answers” and combating the “wrong answers” so that people will be sure to be ready to pass the test and be doctrinally correct. Of course the “answers” are tremendously important, right and wrong. Let this be clearly understood. But they are only important in relation to life in the kingdom with Jesus now. And that is what Paul writes about, as do the other biblical writers. (Location 6837)

And they shall live with His face in view, and that they belong to Him will show on their faces. Darkness will no longer be. They will have no need of lamps or sunlight because God the Lord will be radiant in their midst. And they will reign through the ages of ages. REV. 22:4–5 (Location 6904)

We listen with a thrill and a shudder as our scientists and philosophers speculate on these subjects. Nearly always they speak of the future of the physical cosmos, and possibly of the human race as well. But they have no hope or thought of a future for the individual—not so much, even, as to discuss it. (Location 6928)

Even those who say it “popped” into existence out of nothing do not think it will “pop” into nothing out of existence. (Location 6931)

The biblical tradition, centered in the teachings of Jesus, stands in sharp contrast. For it, personality is primary in every respect. (Location 6939)

The greatest temptation to evil that humanity ever suffers is the temptation to make a “Jerusalem” happen by human means. (Location 6990)

They alone cannot change the heart and spirit of the human being. (Location 6993)

God’s way of moving toward the future is, with gentle persistence in unfailing purpose, to bring about the transformation of the human heart by speaking with human beings and living with and in them. He finds an Abraham, a Moses, a Paul—a you. (Location 6998)

the day would come when God’s heart is the human heart: “the law of God would be written in the heart.” (Location 7001)

Human history is then no longer a human affair. It is Someone Else’s project. (Location 7040)

we are of significance only as a—very important—part of an immense struggle between immense forces of good and evil. (Location 7043)

Science, then, may explain many interesting and important things, but it does not explain existence. Nor does it explain why the laws of science are the laws of nature.5 And it does not explain science itself.6 (Location 7058)

In the face of humanity at its worst, now eternally represented by the killing of Jesus himself, the gospel of the kingdom steadies us against believing anything bad about God. It calls us, rather, to believe that what is good God will bring to pass. (Location 7082)

love unknown is love unfulfilled. (Location 7103)

Events in a human life are like that, and so is a human life as a whole, as well as human life itself. They resemble the opening words in an unfinished sentence, paragraph, chapter, or book. (Location 7120)

For example, Plato’s account of the last hours of Socrates has him saying, (Location 7132)