Followership - Willard

Too often words lose their meaning and become something they’re not. We might be there with discipleship.

We are called to become more and more like Jesus – to be formed, honed, chipped, molded, etc. so that as we walk through this life, the sculpture looks less and less like us and more and more like Jesus.

Here are a few challenging excerpts from Dallas Willard’s book, The Great Omission, which help us understand how we look more like Jesus.

We like to quote verses like, “Without me you can do nothing,” which is absolutely true. But we forget that if you do nothing, it will be without Me. And this, while not a scripture verse, is absolutely true and borne out by scripture teaching as a whole.

What we must understand is that spiritual formation is a process that involves the transformation of the whole person, and that the whole person must be active with Christ in the work of spiritual formation. Spiritual transformation into Christ-likeness is not going to happen unless we act.
(57)

If you are on the throne of your life, you won’t want to think about God because He is, after all, God, and there will not be room for both Him and anybody else on the throne of your life. And when human beings put God out of their knowledge, as Paul said, He then gives them up to themselves – a dreadful fate.

God is not pushy – for now, in any case. He is not going to overwhelm you if you don’t want Him. He gives you the power to put Him out of your mind. And even if you want Him, you have to seek Him. Now, I realize that there is a sense in which He is already seeking you, and I am not trying to dispose that, but we misunderstand what is our part and what is God’s part. God is ready to act. He is acting. We are not waiting on Him; and if it doesn’t hurt your theology too badly, He is waiting on us to respond. And you know we have a problem here. . . we are not only saved by grace, we are paralyzed by it. We will preach to you for an hour that you can do nothing to be saved, then sing to you for forty-five minutes trying to get you to do something to be saved. That is confusing, to say the least. We really have a problem with the activity and passivity in our theology.

You cannot be a pew potato and simultaneously engage in spiritual formation in Christ’s likeness. You have to take your whole life into discipleship to Jesus Christ . . .

Much of our problem is not, as is often said, that we have failed to get what is in our head down in our heart. Much of what hinders us is that we have had a lot of mistaken theology in our head and it has gotten down into our heart. And it is controlling our inner dynamics so that the head and heart cannot, even with the aid of the Word and the Spirit, pull one another straight.

May I just give you this word? Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action. Grace, you know, does not just have to do with forgiveness of sins alone. Many people don’t know this, and that is one major result of the cutting down of the gospel to a theory of justification, which has happened in our time.
(61-62)

If there is anything we should know by now, it is that a gospel of justification alone does not generate disciples. Discipleship is a life of learning from Jesus Christ how to live in the Kingdom of God now, as he himself did. If you want to be a person of grace, then, live a holy life of discipleship because the only way you can do that is on a steady diet of grace. Works of the Kingdom live from grace.
(62-63)