Living in Christ's Presence

Witnessing is not thought of as bringing knowledge, but as attempts to convince people to do things. When you divorce faith from knowledge, you wind up in the position of trying to get people to do things, not of providing them with a basis on which they can then decide how to live and how to lead their lives together. Witnessing has turned into a kind of process of bothering people, and very few people witness because of that.

Spiritual transformation is not about behavior modification. It is about changing the sources of behavior, so the behavior will take care of itself. When the mind is right and the heart is right and the body and the soul and the relationships that we have in our social world are right, the whole person simply steps into the way of Christ and lives there with joy and strength. It is not a struggle.

heard a person once say, very profoundly, that if you follow Jesus long enough, he will disappoint you. And that is what’s going on.

There is nothing wrong with the church that discipleship will not cure.

Yes, baptize them in the name, but, dear friends, that doesn’t just mean getting them wet while you say those names. It means to immerse them in the Reality. After you have done that, teach them in a way that they actually do what Jesus said. That is the process of spiritual formation.

Making disciples is a matter of pulling people, of drawing them in through who we are and what we say.

Eternal life is the life we have now, because our life is caught up in God’s life. It is not later. What Jesus is doing is a part of what we are doing, and what we are doing is a part of what he is doing.

In our recent past the single greatest illustration of this is C. S. Lewis. He never pulls authority on you. He just talks about things, and he helps you see things. Multitudes of people have simply put in practice what he says, and they have found it to be true. That is the ultimate appeal of the spokesperson for Christ.

I am just saying that we need to tell our young people, “Follow Jesus, and if you can find a better way than him, he would be the first to tell you to take it.”

One of the things that made people maddest about Jesus was his talk about how easy it is to forgive sins. Well, if I may say so, and I hope I don’t mislead anyone, to forgive your sins is a load off God’s mind. He is happy to do it.

God isn’t keeping score. That’s shocking to many people, but he’s not. He doesn’t care about that. He cares about who we become, and he knows that as we become more like Christ, there is not going to be anything to keep score on, because he’s not keeping the good things either.

I believe that the only people who will not be in heaven are people who don’t want to be there. When you think about it, if you don’t really like God, you don’t want to be in heaven.

When you start trusting your best you think the solution is to work harder, and that is never the solution, especially for folks who wind up in leadership for Christ. I’ve rarely ever . . . I can’t even remember finding someone I thought should work harder. They’re working too hard. So they need to put their best into something and then leave it with God.

“Authentic transformation is possible if we are willing to do one thing and that is to arrange our lives around the kind of practices and life Jesus led to be constantly receiving power and love from the Father.”

The counsel of the ungodly is “Live as if it matters what people think of you.” The counsel of the ungodly is “Live as if the outcomes of your life are on your shoulders and you control them.” The counsel of the ungodly is “Live as if aging is something to worry about.” The counsel of the ungodly is “Live as if satisfying your desires and appetites is central to your well-being and a wise strategy for living.” That’s the counsel of the ungodly. It goes on all the time, and we rarely even see it.

Dallas talks about four questions that everybody has to wrestle with. One is “What’s reality?” Another one is “What’s the good life?” We can’t stop wondering about that. Another one is “Who is a good person?” The fourth is “How do you become a good person?” We cannot stop wrestling with these questions.

That’s his gospel: the kingdom of God is now available, and if you want to, you can come right on in and live in it. It is tragic that the gospel of Jesus has been substituted for another cheaper, powerless gospel—what might be called the gospel of minimal entrance requirements for getting into heaven when you die.

Here is the problem: Where in the New Testament does Jesus ever say, “Now I will tell you the minimal entrance requirements for getting into heaven when you die”? Nowhere.

Jesus says that life is the presence and power of God come to earth in him, in his body. Heaven is on earth, literally. Jesus says, “Look at it, and if you want it, just come and be with me and watch me and learn from me and try to do what I do.”

Jesus did three things in his own ministry: proclaim the availability of the kingdom of God to everyone, regardless of their standing in life; teach what it was like; and manifest its presence in events that could not be explained in a natural way.

God is faithful to take care of his part. It is much like gravity. You couldn’t walk without gravity, but if you wait on gravity to make you walk, you will never walk. It’s there. It’s in process, and God is seeking those who would worship him in spirit and in truth.

The solution is to acknowledge the presence of the kingdom in the most awful of events. Where was God in Auschwitz? He was in Auschwitz. Why didn’t he do what we think he should have done? Well, that’s a question to which I don’t have an answer, but there is meaning to human history, including Auschwitz. God is over all. He will see to it that what is good and right is done, but you will always have to add the larger picture.

“You must arrange your life so that you are experiencing deep contentment, joy and confidence in your everyday life with God.”

We occasionally need to remind ourselves that there isn’t a single thing that Jesus said that we cannot do. There isn’t a single thing that he said that we can do on our own, but we are not on our own. Everything that he said is accessible to us.

The soul is the deepest part of the self. It is the integrative part of the human being. By the way, you aren’t your soul, and your soul isn’t going to go to heaven by itself. You are going to go to heaven. You don’t save souls; you save people.

In our teaching and leadership, for example, we want to encourage people not to want what they now want, not to think what they now think, not to feel what they now feel. Just go through the range of things. For every person who is concerned about changing a particular kind of thing, there is a reason they are troubled with it. This is absolutely vital in the habits that get so much attention, like pornography. Where does that desire come from?

If you’re not willing to not want, you’re stuck. That’s where the will comes in. If you are willing to not want what you now want, then you begin to find out why you want what you want.

Jesus taught if we go to the roots of behavior. Eventually, that means finding those areas of spirit, mind, soul, where the sources of the behavior come from.

The mark of disciplined people is that they do what needs to be done when it needs to be done.

The disciplined person, the disciple, is someone who is able to do what needs to be done when it needs to be done. The whole purpose of disciplines is to enable you to do the right thing at the right time in the right spirit, so if something doesn’t help you to do that, then don’t do it.

how I know which disciplines to practice. A really good way is to start by asking, “What would my life look like if I was living fully in the kingdom?” Then ask, “What barriers keep me from living that way?” Finally, ask, “What are practices through which I can receive power to be freed of those barriers and obstacles?” This involves working backward.

Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual life in our day. There’s a difference between being busy and being hurried. Busy is a condition of the body having many things to do. Hurry is a condition of the soul in which I am so preoccupied that I cannot be fully present to God or a person. Jesus was often busy, but he was never hurried.

If a discipline is not producing freedom in me, it’s probably the wrong thing for me to be doing.

How do we help people ask and answer the question “How is my spiritual life doing?” Dallas: Well, very slowly, one at a time, we listen to them. “How is your spiritual life doing?” The next thing is a question and not a statement: “What’s bothering you?” You start there. “What are you bothered about?”