Learning to Live Like Jesus
A Review of Dallas Willard's Classic Book on Spiritual Discipline
Editor's Note: We will resume our series on the evidences for the Christian faith next week.
Dallas Willard’s Spirit of the Disciplines attacks directly what he sees as a fundamental problem with modern Christianity. According to Willard, modern Christians have abandoned the transforming power of their faith, because they have neglected to live in submission and harmony with the One who Christianity is all about.
The “central claim” of Willard's classic book is that Christians can become like Christ by “following [Christ] in the overall style of life he chose for himself” and by “practicing the types of activities he himself practiced in order to remain constantly at home in the fellowship of his Father.”[1] According to Willard, Jesus manifested the following traits and habits in His daily life: solitude, silence, prayer, simple and sacrificial living, intense study and meditation, and service to others.[2] Only in living out these traits and habits, argues Willard, can a believer today experience a vibrant and fulfilled Christian life.
Here are a few concepts from Willard's book:
Live as Jesus Lived
The first premise of Willard’s book echoes the foundational theme of the entire book. We must live as Jesus lived. Willard warns, “To depart from righteousness is to choose a life of crushing burdens, failures, and disappointments, a life caught in the toils of endless problems that are never resolved.”[3]
Of course, most Christians recoil when forced to confront the holy example of Jesus. Willard acknowledges that Jesus’ ways seem “overwhelmingly burdensome” to us, but only because “we do not have the strength we should have.”[4]
The key to acquiring that strength is not an emotional decision to renew our hearts and minds, something many Christians do (and then fall away from). Christian author Richard Foster, a friend of Willard's, explains:
Our ordinary method of dealing with ingrained sin is to launch a frontal attack. We rely on our willpower and determination. Whatever may be the issue for us – anger, fear, bitterness, gluttony, pride, lust, substance abuse – we determine never to do it again; we pray against it, fight against it, set our will against it. But the struggle is all in vain, and we find ourselves once again morally bankrupt or, worse yet, so proud of our external righteousness that 'whitened sepulchers' is a mild description of our condition.[5]
Willard uses an athletic analogy to show the folly of such reasoning. People off the street are not capable of turning in an Olympic performance in some sporting event, whenever the urge seizes them to try. Athletes must work endless hours to hone their bodies and skill sets to demonstrate such prowess on the court or field. Likewise, Christians should not expect to experience victory in Christ without first putting in the time and discipline. It takes a complete, comprehensive commitment that encompasses our whole life. Says Willard, “[I]f we wish to follow Christ…we will have to accept his overall way of life as our way of life totally.”[6]
It Comes Down to the Body
“The human body is the focal point of human existence,” declares Willard.[7] It is how each person interacts with his environment. The body allows us to touch, feel, see, hear, and smell the world around us. It should therefore come as no surprise that the body is essentially how we interact with God, at least at this point in our existence.
Willard dramatically calls attention to the fact that Jesus Christ had a human body. He casts an interesting, contemporary light on the ancient heresy of Docetism. That doctrine held Jesus was fully spiritual, and His physical body was not an actuality. Willard points out that, while this doctrine has been largely debunked, many today still cannot fathom or accept that Jesus had a bona fide human anatomy. According to Willard, this is because “we tend to think of the body and its functions as only a hindrance to our spiritual calling, with no positive role in our redemption or in our participation in the government of God.”[8]
Indeed, for many Christians today, the body is a hindrance. According to Willard, it is true that “our bodies can overwhelm us with their impulses and terrify us with their invulnerabilities.”[9] However, faith in Christ -- the kind seen in the New Testament -- is a “distinctive life force that originates in the impact of God’s word upon the soul…and then exercises a determining influence upon all aspects of our existence.”[10]
Jesus had the same type of human body that we do today, and He bent that body to the Father’s will and used it to fulfill the Father’s purpose. He was not subject to His body, but rather made the body subject to Himself.
We can look to Jesus for inspiration on how we can submit our bodies to the Lord. Perhaps more fundamentally, we can look to our Creator for inspiration concerning our very soul. Willard writes that God, in contrast with the rest of his Creation, imparted “something of himself to an earthen form specially shaped to receive it.”[11] Thus, our living essence stems directly from the “influx of God’s spirit.”[12]
The eminent theologian A.W. Tozer expounded this concept by showing how our humanity is a reflection of God’s nature. Tozer wrote, “God is a person, and in the deep of His mighty nature He thinks, wills, enjoys, feels, loves, desires and suffers as any other person may.”[13] Answering those who argue God’s communication with us is abstract or unknowable, Tozer argues that God “stays by the familiar pattern of [human] personality” in “making Himself known to us.”[14] This is logical, since God is the one who implanted our personality, and that our personality is a reflection of our Creator’s.
Willard brings his case home by linking these two aspects of human nature – body and soul. He argues that the human body “is part of the imago Dei, for it is the vehicle through which we can effectively acquire the limited self-subsistent power we must have to be truly in the image and likeness of God.”[15]
According to Willard, the body “stands at the disposal of our conscious thought, intention, and choice.”[16] Our choices and intentions can follow the impulses of the body, and thus throw God’s purpose for us into disarray, or the body can follow our decisions. Willard is essentially arguing that we have the same choice before us that Adam and Eve did in the Garden. We must reject our human desires and impulses – those that take us away from God – and submit our bodies by conscious decision to God. This is what Paul means in Romans 12:1 when he calls on Christians to “present [their] bodies as living sacrifices.”
Spiritual Submission & Exercise
Willard strongly criticizes the mode of thinking that associates “success” in a religious setting with human feelings. “The preeminence of the ‘feel good’ mentality,” writes Willard, is “what makes it impossible for many people now even to imagine what Paul and his contemporaries” understood about the Christian life.[17]
Willard points out that the church is disturbingly close to the hedonistic mindset of the pagans, in that we often interpret the world around us (as well as our faith) according to our feelings. In contrast, explains Willard, the “thoughtful and religiously devout people of the classical and Hellenistic world, from the Ganges to the Tiber, knew that the mind and body of the human being had to be rigorously disciplined to achieve a decent individual and social existence.”[18]
In the ear of the early church (centuries before television and the Internet), discipline was a common practice of those who wished to reinforce their faith and bring their bodies in subjection to God’s will. In fact, says Willard, “wherever early Christians looked they saw examples of the practice of solitude, fasting, prayer, private study, communal study, worship, and sacrificial service and giving – to mention only some of the more obvious disciplines for spiritual life.”[19]
One of the biggest challenges facing the church today is the rampant materialistic world in which we live, one that fuels our lusts. It is a culture that elevates concepts of “freedom,” “choice,” and “expression” above virtually all others. Says Willard, it is “[a]gainst the crushing social presence of this vision” that we are called to “forsake all and to ‘hate one’s own life also,’” leaving us with a seemingly “incomprehensible” choice.[20] Not surprisingly, Willard spends a great deal of time discussing the concepts of poverty and wealth.
These are just a few of the concepts and principles found within the pages of Willard's book. For those wishing to be inspired and challenged, Dallas Willard's The Spirit of the Disciplines is worth a trip to the bookstore or local library.
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Editor's Note: Since this article is adapted from one of my seminary papers, the footnotes have been preserved from the original.
[1] Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1988), p. ix
[2] Ibid
[3] Ibid, p. 2
[4] Ibid
[5] Richard J. Foster, The Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth, 25th Anniversary ed. (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1998), pp. 4-5
[6] Willard, Spirit of the Disciplines, p. 8
[7] Ibid, p. 29
[8] Ibid, p. 30
[9] Ibid, p. 41
[10] Ibid
[11] Ibid, p. 52
[12] Ibid
[13] A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God: The Human Thirst for the Divine (Camp Hill: Christian Publications, 1993), p. 13
[14] Ibid
[15] Willard, Spirit of the Disciplines, p. 53
[16] Ibid
[17] Ibid, p. 99
[18] Ibid
[19] Ibid
[20] Ibid, p. 131
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