The Divine Conspiracy

He and his early associates overwhelmed the ancient world because they brought into it a stream of life at its deepest, along with the best information possible on the most important matters. (Location 118)

it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.” (Location 294)

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. (Location 384)

We are becoming who we will be—forever. (Location 389)

The major problem with the invitation now is precisely overfamiliarity. Familiarity breeds unfamiliarity—unsuspected unfamiliarity, and then contempt. People think they have heard the invitation. They think they have accepted it—or rejected it. But they have not. (Location 395)

It is good to know that when I die all will be well, but is there any good news for life? If I had to choose, I would rather have a car that runs than good insurance on one that doesn’t. Can I not have both? (Location 417)

Jesus’ enduring relevance is based on his historically proven ability to speak to, to heal and empower the individual human condition. (Location 431)

Our human life, it turns out, is not destroyed by God’s life but is fulfilled in it and in it alone. (Location 452)

everyone, from the smallest child to the oldest adult, naturally wants in some way to be extraordinary, outstanding, making a unique contribution or, if all else fails, wants to be thought so—if only for a brief time. (Location 462)

We were built to count, as water is made to run downhill. We are placed in a specific context to count in ways no one else does. That is our destiny. (Location 472)

he always takes individual human beings as seriously as their shredded dignity demands, and he has the resources to carry through with his high estimate of them. (Location 475)

we are made to “have dominion” within an appropriate domain of reality. (Location 587)

We are, all of us, never-ceasing spiritual beings with a unique eternal calling to count for good in God’s great universe. (Location 588)

“kingdom” is simply the range of our effective will. (Location 589)

We are responsible before God for life on the earth (Location 607)

We are meant to exercise our “rule” only in union with God, as he acts with us. (Location 609)

The deepest longings of our heart confirm our original calling. Our very being still assigns us to “rule” in our life circumstances, whatever they may be. (Location 618)

we can only love adequately by taking as our primary aim the integration of our rule with God’s. That is why love of neighbor is the second, not the first, commandment and why we are told to seek first the kingdom, or rule, of God. (Location 684)

Jesus came among us to show and teach the life for which we were made. (Location 692)

that kingdom has been here as long as we humans have been here, and longer. But it has been available to us through simple confidence in Jesus, the Anointed, only from the time he became a public figure. (Location 774)

You cannot call upon Jesus Christ or upon God and not be heard. You live in their house, their ecos (Location 797)

Can we seriously believe that God would establish a plan for us that essentially bypasses the awesome needs of present human life and leaves human character untouched? (Location 863)

Suppose our failures occur, not in spite of what we are doing, but precisely because of it. (Location 907)

To insist that something more than mere faith must be present would be to add “works” on to pure grace. (Location 965)

Associated with this agreement that the issue in salvation is only “heaven or hell” is a further agreement that being saved is a forensic or legal condition rather than a vital reality or character. (Location 1033)

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. (Location 1039)

What must be emphasized in all of this is the difference between trusting Christ, the real person Jesus, with all that that naturally involves, versus trusting some arrangement for sin-remission set up through him—trusting only his role as guilt remover. (Location 1067)

the American dream is that “people can do or be what they want if they just go ahead and do it.”22 Desire becomes sacred, and whatever thwarts desire is evil or sin. (Location 1166)

They concern sin guilt or structural evils (social sins) and what to do about them. That is all. That real life goes on without them is a natural consequence of this. (Location 1176)

A saying among management experts today is, “Your system is perfectly designed to yield the result you are getting.” (Location 1245)

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. (Location 1253)

learn from him how to live our lives as he would live them if he were we. (Location 1254)

To trust in God, we need a rich and accurate way of thinking and speaking about him to guide and support our life vision and our will. (Location 1347)

the most important things in our human lives are nearly always things that are invisible. That is even true without special reference to God. People who cannot believe without seeing are desperately limited in all their relationships. (Location 1492)

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. (Location 1554)

Those who have attained considerable spiritual stature are frequently noted for their “childlikeness.” What this really means is that they do not use their face and body to hide their spiritual reality. In their body they are genuinely present to those around them. That is a great spiritual attainment or gift. (Location 1557)

God is, without special theophanies, seen everywhere by those who long have lived for him. (Location 1568)

It is the “will” aspect of personal/spiritual reality that is its innermost core. (Location 1639)

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

Because we have will we are not things. We have in us the capacity to be self-determined to some significant degree. (Location 1659)

spirit is unbodily personal power. It is primarily a substance, and it is above all God, who is both spirit and substance. (Location 1665)

spirit is something that exists in its own right—to some degree in the human case, and absolutely so with God. (Location 1668)

We ought to be spiritual in every aspect of our lives because our world is the spiritual one. It is what we are suited to. (Location 1674)

The mind or the minding of the spirit is life and peace precisely because it locates us in a world adequate to our nature as ceaselessly creative beings under God. (Location 1700)

He lived, and invites us to live, in an undying world where it is safe to do and be good. (Location 1706)

At this present time the eternally creative Christ is preparing places for his human sisters and brothers to join him. Some are already there—no doubt busy with him in his great works. (Location 1719)

But, immersed in Christ in action, we may be sure that our life—yes, that familiar one we are each so well acquainted with—will never stop. (Location 1743)

We should be anticipating what we will be doing three hundred or a thousand or ten thousand years from now in this marvelous universe. (Location 1744)

How should we “take care of ourselves” when we are never to cease? Jesus shows his apprentices how to live in the light of the fact that they will never stop living. This is what his students are learning from him. (Location 1753)

The idea of an all-encompassing, all-penetrating world of God, interactive at every point with our lives, where we can always be totally at home and safe regardless of what happens in the visible dimension of the universe, is routinely treated as ridiculous. (Location 1829)

Our souls are, accordingly, soaked with secularity. In any context in which people are supposed to be smart and informed, even the most thoughtful and devout Christian will find it hard to make a convincing presentation of the relevance of God and his spiritual world to “real life.” (Location 1836)

nothing fundamental has changed in our knowledge of ultimate reality and the human self since the time of Jesus.30 (Location 1879)

Descending to particulars always helps to clear the mind. (Location 1884)

In any case, we can say with even greater certainty that, if we go with the currents of modernity, we shall never make sense of Jesus’ gospel for life and discipleship. (Location 1888)

First there is the question of which life is the good life. (Location 1941)

The second question Jesus deals with in the sermon concerns who is truly a good person. (Location 1945)

in the Sermon on the Mount…the promises attaching, for example, to the so-called “Beatitudes” must not be regarded as the reward of the spiritual states with which they are respectively connected, nor yet as their result. It is not because a man is poor in spirit that his is the Kingdom of Heaven, in the sense that the one state will grow into the other, or be its result; still less is the one the reward of the other. The connecting link is in each case Christ Himself: because He…“has opened the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers.” (Location 2030)

Here we have full-blown, if not salvation by works, then possibly salvation by attitude. (Location 2053)

What could be more plain? If the usual interpretation of Jesus’ Beatitudes as directions on how to attain blessedness is correct, you would have to be poor, have to mourn, be persecuted, and so forth, to be among the blessed. (Location 2071)

The Beatitudes, in particular, are not teachings on how to be blessed. They are not instructions to do anything. They do not indicate conditions that are especially pleasing to God or good for human beings. (Location 2100)

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

uses the particular occasion to correct the prevailing practice of neglecting those in real need while we feast with the full who will reciprocate by doing something for us. (Location 2154)

The story does not teach that we can have eternal life just by loving our neighbor. We cannot get away with that nice legalism either. The issue of our posture toward God still has to be taken into account. (Location 2191)

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 2195)

we cannot identify who “has it,” who is “in” with God, who is “blessed,” by looking at exteriors of any sort. That is a matter of the heart. There alone the kingdom of the heavens and human kingdoms great and small are knit together. Draw any cultural or social line you wish, and God will find his way beyond it. (Location 2208)

the aim of the popular teacher in Jesus’ time was not to impart information, but to make a significant change in the lives of the hearers. (Location 2216)

it is a peculiarly modern notion that the aim of teaching is to bring people to know things that may have no effect at all on their lives. (Location 2217)

The teacher in Jesus’ time—and especially the religious teacher—taught in such a way that he would impact the life flow of the hearer, leaving a lasting impression without benefit of notes, recorders, or even memorization. (Location 2235)

We automatically remember what makes a real difference in our life. (Location 2241)

And as he does so, we don’t have to try to “get it” and remember it. It has stuck in our life, whether we want it or agree with it or not. We will eventually have to come to terms with it somehow. (Location 2245)

“So every bible scholar who is trained in the kingdom of the heavens is like someone over a household that shows from his treasures things new and things old” (Location 2250)

Thus by proclaiming blessed those who in the human order are thought hopeless, and by pronouncing woes over those human beings regarded as well off, Jesus opens the kingdom of the heavens to everyone. (Location 2346)

You are really walking in the good news of the kingdom if you can go with confidence to any of the hopeless people around you and effortlessly convey assurance that they can now enter a blessed life with God. (Location 2392)

The sad truth is that many people around us, and especially people in their teens and young adulthood, drift into a life in which being thin and correctly shaped, having “glorious” hair, appearing youthful, and so forth, are the only terms of blessedness or woe for their existence. It is all they know. They have heard nothing else. Many people today really are in this position. (Location 2401)

you don’t have to wait until you’re dead. Jesus offers to all such people as these the present blessedness of the present kingdom—regardless of circumstances. (Location 2426)

the centuries-long attempt to devise a morality from within merely human resources has now proven itself a failure. (Location 2531)

The most important text is an enigma? That this could be so is deeply revelatory of the condition of the church in the modern world. (Location 2549)

the comment on cutting off your hands or punching out your eyes (Matt. 5:29–30) is most often presented as a serious recommendation from Jesus, though not one to be taken literally. (As we shall see later, he was in fact teaching precisely the futility of any such actions. They would make no difference, because true rightness remains a matter of one’s heart.) (Location 2554)

unless we understand it as one discourse, purposively organized by its highly competent speaker, its parts—the particular statements made—will be left at the mercy of whatever whims may strike readers as they contemplate each pearl of wisdom. (Location 2557)

The keeping of law turns out to be an inherently self-refuting aim; rather, the inner self must be changed. Trying merely to keep the law is not wholly unlike trying to make an apple tree bear peaches by tying peaches to its branches. (Location 2562)

The aim of the sermon—forcefully indicated by its concluding verses—is to help people come to hopeful and realistic terms with their lives here on earth by clarifying, in concrete terms, the nature of the kingdom into which they are now invited (Location 2566)

Would you be able to trust your life to such a person? (Location 2588)

the modern secular outlook rigorously opposes sanctity to intelligence. 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)

“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). (Location 2621)

almost one sixth of the entire Discourse (fifteen of ninety-two verses) is devoted to emphasizing the importance of actually doing what it says. Doing and not just hearing and talking about it is how we know the reality of the kingdom and integrate our life into it. (Location 2643)

If we do not keep the sequential order of kingdom life in mind, as Jesus certainly did, it will seem that each new topic in his Discourse is being taken up on its own, with no connection to what has already been dealt with. (Location 2664)

The various scenes and situations that Jesus discusses in his Discourse on the Hill are actually stages in a progression toward a life of agape love. (Location 2669)

If people in our Christian fellowships today were to announce that they had decided to keep God’s law, we would probably be skeptical and alarmed. (Location 2696)

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

Jesus, the faithful Son, does not deviate at all from this understanding of the law that is truly God’s law. (Location 2712)

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

From the viewpoint of the kingdom of the heavens or from God’s perspective, Jesus points out, those who do the commandments and teach them are the greatest among human beings, whereas those who break the least of the genuine commandments of God and teach others to do so are the worst of human beings (Location 2729)

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. (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. (Location 2759)

The heart is not a mystery at the level of ordinary human interactions. We discern one another quite well. (Location 2761)

A special term is used in the New Testament to mark the character of the inner life when it is as it should be. This is the term dikaiosune. (Location 2765)

In its simplest form, anger is a spontaneous response that has a vital function in life. (Location 2832)

immediately impels us toward interfering with, and possibly even harming, those who have thwarted our will and interfered with our life. (Location 2833)

The primary function of anger in life is to alert me to an obstruction to my will, and immediately raise alarm and resistance, before I even have time to think about it. (Location 2838)

And if that were all there was to anger, all would be well. Anger in this sense is no sin, even though it is still better avoided where possible. (Location 2839)

Anger first arises spontaneously. But we can actively receive it and decide to indulge it, and we usually do. We may even become an angry person, and any incident can evoke from us a torrent of rage that is kept in constant readiness. (Location 2851)

The explosion of anger never simply comes from the incident. Most people carry a supply of anger around with them. (Location 2853)

Anger indulged, instead of simply waved off, always has in it an element of self-righteousness and vanity. Find a person who has embraced anger, and you find a person with a wounded ego. (Location 2862)

Anger embraced is, accordingly, inherently disintegrative of human personality and life. (Location 2869)

Anger and contempt are the twin scourges of the earth. Mingled with greed and sexual lust (to be discussed later), these bitter emotions form the poisonous brew in which human existence stands suspended. Few people ever get free of them in this life, and for most of us even old age does not bring relief. (Location 2879)

there is nothing that can be done with anger that cannot be done better without it. (Location 2892)

the answer is to right the wrong in persistent love, not to harbor anger, and thus to right it without adding further real or imaginary wrongs. (Location 2895)

The intent and the effect of contempt is always to exclude someone, push them away, leave them out and isolated. (Location 2909)

Conversely, respect automatically builds a wall against mistreatment. In family battles the progression is nearly always from anger to contempt (always expressed in vile language) to physical brutality. (Location 2915)

Filthy language and name calling are always an expression of contempt. The current swarm of filthy language floats upon the sea of contempt in which our society is now adrift. (Location 2919)

Contemptuous actions and attitudes are a knife in the heart that permanently harms and mutilates people’s souls. That they are so common does not ease their destructiveness. (Location 2926)

In most professional circles and “high” society, where one might hope for the highest moral sensitivity, contempt is a fine art. Practicing it is even a part of being “in good standing.” Not to know whom and how to despise is one of the surest of signs that you are not quite with it and are yourself mildly contemptible. (Location 2927)

To belong is a vital need based in the spiritual nature of the human being. Contempt spits on this pathetically deep need. (Location 2933)

contempt does not have to be acted out in special ways to be evil. It is inherently poisonous. (Location 2934)

The fool, in biblical language, is a combination of stupid perversity and rebellion against God and all that sensible people stand for. He is willfully perverted, rebellious, knowingly wicked to his own harm. (Location 2950)

Jesus is giving us a revelation of the preciousness of human beings. He means to reveal the value of persons. (Location 2960)

Likewise, when I treasure those around me and see them as God’s creatures designed for his eternal purposes, I do not make an additional point of not hating them or calling them twerps or fools. Not doing those things is simply a part of the package. (Location 2973)

not going to London or Atlanta is a poor plan for going to New York. And not being wrongly angry and so on is a poor plan for treating people with love. It will not work. (Location 2976)

Now just think of what the quality of life and character must be in a person who would routinely interrupt sacred rituals to pursue reconciliation with a fellow human being. What kind of thought life, what feeling tones and moods, what habits of body and mind, what kinds of deliberations and choices would you find in such a person? (Location 2999)

We do not control outcomes and are not responsible for them, but only for our contribution to them. (Location 3008)

To be of a kindly or favorable mind toward an adversary or anyone else does not mean to do what they demand. It means to be genuinely committed to what is good for them, to seek their well-being. (Location 3024)

do whatever you do without hostility, bitterness, and the merciless drive to win. Be prepared to sacrifice your interest for that of another if that seems wise. And keep a joyous confidence in God regardless of what happens. (Location 3032)

Just as the thief is the person who would steal if circumstances were right, so the adulterer is the one who would have wrongful sex if the circumstances were right. (Location 3083)

simply cannot be kept a private reality. “The look” is a public act with public effects that restructure the entire framework of personal relations where it occurs.15 (Location 3089)

More commonly, now, it is thought that sex is right with anyone you love in the sense of a “romantic” involvement. And on the other hand sex without romantic feelings is thought to be wrong even if the sexual partners are married. Often the “romantic love” in question turns out upon examination to be nothing more than precisely that fantasized lusting (Location 3111)

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 3115)

intimacy is a spiritual hunger of the human soul, and we cannot escape it. (Location 3126)

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 3128)

Anger and contempt between mates makes sexual delight between them impossible, and when such an important need is unmet, people are, almost invariably, drawn into the realm of fantasy. (Location 3136)

sexual desire is not wrong as a natural, uncultivated response, any more than anger is, or pain. It has a vital function in life, and as long as it performs that function it is a good and proper thing. (Location 3151)

The wording refers to looking at a woman with the purpose of desiring her. That is, we desire to desire. We indulge and cultivate desiring because we enjoy fantasizing about sex with the one seen. Desiring sex is the purpose for which we are looking. (Location 3163)

Though there no doubt are times when, man or woman, we can only run from temptation, or simply avoid the possibility, that must be regarded as a temporary expedient. It cannot serve as a permanent solution. (Location 3190)

The mutilated stump could still have a wicked heart. The deeper question always concerns who you are, not what you did do or can do. (Location 3204)

one of the hardest things for the contemporary mind to accept is that life runs in natural cycles that cannot be disrupted without indelible damage to the individuals involved. (Location 3250)

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. Such divorce, though rare, remains nonetheless possible and may be necessary. If it were truly done on this basis, it would be rightly done, in spite of the heartbreak and loss it is sure to involve. (Location 3298)

when we are personally injured our world does not suddenly become our injury. We have a larger view of our life and our place in God’s world. We see God; we see ourselves in his hands. And we see our injurer as more than that one who has imposed on us or hurt us. We recognize his humanity, his pitiful limitations (shared with us), and we also see him under God (Location 3370)

they can only imagine that Jesus is laying down laws about what they have to do regardless of what else may be at issue. (Location 3392)

Within the human order, the presumption is that you return harm for harm (“resist evil”), that you do only what legal force requires you to, and that you give only to those who have some prior claim on you (those who are “family” or have done you a favor, etc.). (Location 3406)

it means I can’t just invoke a presumed “law of required vulnerability.” I must decide before God what to do, and there may be grounds for some measure of resistance. (Location 3428)

In every concrete situation we have to ask ourselves, not “Did I do the specific things in Jesus’ illustrations?” but “Am I being the kind of person Jesus’ illustrations are illustrations of?” (Location 3435)

We will decide, as best we know how, on the basis of love for all involved and with a readiness to sacrifice what we simply want. And in every situation we have the larger view. We are not passive, but we act always with clear-eyed and resolute love. (Location 3453)

We know what is really happening, seeing it from the point of view of eternity. And we know that we will be taken care of, no matter what. We can be vulnerable because we are, in the end, simply invulnerable. (Location 3455)

It is very hard indeed if you have not been substantially transformed in the depths of your being, in the intricacies of your thoughts, feelings, assurances, and dispositions, in such a way that you are permeated with love. Once that happens, then it is not hard. What would be hard is to act the way you acted before. (Location 3493)

He does not call us to do what he did, but to be as he was, permeated with love. Then the doing of what he did and said becomes the natural expression of who we are in him. (Location 3498)

The Pharisee takes as his aim keeping the law rather than becoming the kind of person whose deeds naturally conform to the law. (Location 3507)

But, as we pointed out, knowing good is not seriously proposed in college or university courses today. Any “knowing” in such matters is thought to be totally impossible. (Location 3524)

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. Such people are in the present kingdom of the heavens. (Location 3542)

genuinely good people are those who, from the deepest levels of their understanding and motivation, are committed to promoting the good of everyone they deal with—including, of course, God and themselves. (Location 3544)

two main things that will block or hinder a life constantly interactive with God and healthy growth in the kingdom. These are the desire to have the approval of others, especially for being devout, and the desire to secure ourselves by means of material wealth. (Location 3553)

“Be sure not to do your rightness (dikaiosune) before human beings with the intent of being seen by them. (Location 3580)

the teaching is not that we should hide our good deeds. That might be appropriate in some cases, but it is not Jesus’ point. (Location 3582)

our intent is determined by what we want and expect from our action. (Location 3588)

if we live unto God alone, he responds to our expectations—which are of him alone. (Location 3594)

they lived as if they stood before an audience of One. They carried on their lives as if the only one whose opinion mattered were God. (Location 3596)

we must never forget that Jesus points beyond action to the source of action in character. This is a general principle that governs all he says. (Location 3633)

So when the children of the kingdom pray, they may even disappear from sight, for they have learned to be indifferent to whether others know of their prayer or not. (Location 3654)

The secret place is where God is. (Location 3657)

Prayer, it is rightly said, is the method of genuine theological research, the method of understanding what and who God is. (Location 3658)

The visible side of your life will involve highly significant events that cannot be explained in terms of the visible world. The “spiritual” person is understood by no one, as Paul says (1 Cor. 2:15). That is because they are operating from the reality that is “in secret.” (Location 3662)

prayer to the God of Israel and of Jesus, the living and personal God of the universe, is intelligent conversation about matters of mutual concern. (Location 3668)

Kingdom praying and its efficacy is entirely a matter of the innermost heart’s being totally open and honest before God. (Location 3677)

however, we cannot say too often that in the Sermon on the Mount we are not looking at laws, but at a life: a life in which the genuine laws of God eventually become naturally fulfilled. (Location 3685)

Jesus ate normal food, as all of us do and must. That is the God-appointed normal course, to be received with humility and thankfulness. But he also knew the direct sustenance of God to his body. He would have us know it too. (Location 3729)

Of course what really comes into play in all such passages are the beliefs we actually hold concerning “reality,” especially about God and his world. Lack of confidence in the kingdom will force us to take the “pretty words” reading of the words of scripture. Many people simply put all of the scriptures and even religion as a whole in that category. (Location 3749)

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. (Location 3761)

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. (Location 3776)

The discipline of secrecy will help us break the grip of human opinion over our souls and our actions. (Location 3780)

it seems to be a general law of social/historical development that institutions tend to distort and destroy the central function that brought them into existence. (Location 3797)

Whatever our position in life, if our lives and works are to be of the kingdom of God, we must not have human approval as a primary or even major aim. We must lovingly allow people to think whatever they will. We may, if it seems right, occasionally try to help them understand us and appreciate what we are doing. That could be an act of love. But in any case we can only serve them by serving the Lord only. (Location 3820)

The most important commandment of the Judeo-Christian tradition is to treasure God and his realm more than anything else. (Location 3830)

Indeed, merely to pry into what one’s treasures are is a severe intrusion. Apart from very special considerations, no one has a right even to know what our treasures are. A main part of intimacy between two persons is precisely mutual knowledge of their treasures. (Location 3835)

to discuss our treasures is really to discuss our treasuring;. We are not to pass it off as dealing merely with “external goods,” which are “nonspiritual” or just physical stuff. It is to deal with the fundamental structure of our soul. (Location 3848)

That is to say, direct your actions toward making a difference in the realm of spiritual substance sustained and governed by God. Invest your life in what God is doing, which cannot be lost. (Location 3862)

God himself loves the earth dearly and never takes his hands off it. And because he loves it and it is good, our care of it is also eternal work and a part of our eternal life. (Location 3869)

There is a natural order of things that is good to respect. Human beings naturally understand this if they have not been robbed of good sense by their experiences and their education. (Location 3871)

to “lay up treasures in heaven” is to treasure all of these intimate and touching aspects of heaven’s life, all of what God is doing on earth. (Location 3878)

We simply cannot have two ultimate goals or points of reference for our actions. That is how life is, and no one escapes. (Location 3903)

the treasure we have in heaven is also something very much available to us now. We can and should draw upon it as needed, for it is nothing less than God himself and the wonderful society of his kingdom even now interwoven in my life. (Location 3916)

What is most valuable for any human being, without regard to an afterlife, is to be a part of this marvelous reality, God’s kingdom now. Eternity is now ongoing. (Location 3920)

I recognize how strange, even strained, it sounds. But that is only because the entire posture of our embodied self and its surroundings is habitually inclined toward physical or “earthly” reality as the only reality there is. (Location 3932)

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)

love “believes all things, hopes all things.” If there is any lack of clarity about whether the sin occurred, assume it did not. At least, don’t start correcting. (Location 4113)

Only a certain kind of life puts us in position to “correct.” (Location 4116)

the ones who are restoring others must go about their work with the sure knowledge that they could very well do the same thing that the person “caught” has done, or even worse. This totally removes any sense of self-righteousness or superiority, (Location 4120)

Anger and condemnation like vengeance, are safely left to God. We must beware of believing that it is okay for us to condemn as long as we are condemning the right things. It is not so simple as all that. I can trust Jesus to go into the temple and drive out those who were profiting from religion, beating them with a rope. I cannot trust myself to do so. (Location 4151)

The decision to step aside from it, neither giving it nor receiving it, is a major turning point in one’s life. (Location 4157)

Condemnation always involves some degree of self-righteousness and of distancing ourselves from the one we are condemning. (Location 4160)

condemnation brings anger in return, and anger will attack. (Location 4191)

It is extremely rare that anyone who is condemned will respond by changing in the desired way. (Location 4194)

in most cases where we condemn we are not dealing with wise people. We are dealing with people, even very young people, who will simply be deeply injured, become angry, and repay us in kind. (Location 4196)

Condemnation is the board in our eye. He knows that the mere fact that we are condemning someone shows our heart does not have the kingdom rightness he has been talking about. (Location 4215)

We cannot “see clearly” how to assist our brother, because we cannot see our brother. And we will never know how to truly help him until we have grown into the kind of person who does not condemn. Period. (Location 4217)

We do not have to—we cannot—surrender the valid practice of distinguishing and discerning how things are in order to avoid condemning others. (Location 4230)

A practiced spirit of intelligent agape will make this possible. (Location 4233)

Having no adequate sense of themselves as spiritual beings, or of their place in a good world of God, they regard any negative appraisal of what they do as condemnation of themselves as persons. (Location 4237)

The steadying influence of a very clear and very real example can do much to help us understand the gentleness of the way of Jesus. Unfortunately I did not immediately learn to live in the spirit of my sister-in-law and her family and continued for many years to use condemnation on those close to me. I still could think of Jesus’ teachings as “impossible laws.” (Location 4265)

we stand in a new reality where condemnation is simply irrelevant. (Location 4268)

as for the condemnation we may receive from others, I endeavor not to receive it, to just ignore or drop it. (Location 4269)

“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” (Location 4272)

the practice of pushing the things of God upon them whether they want or are ready for them or not. (Location 4278)

Our children or others do not know what else to do with us pearl pushers. And even though they love us—as parent or friend, for example—they simply cannot take any more of our “pushy irrelevance,” as they see it, or possibly our stubborn blindness. (Location 4303)

Frankly, our “pearls” often are offered with a certain superiority of bearing that keeps us from paying attention to those we are trying to help. We have solutions. That should be enough, shouldn’t it? (Location 4308)

very quickly some contempt, impatience, anger, and even condemnation slips into our offer. (Location 4309)

respect and never forget that the latch of the heart is within. (Location 4352)

The power of asking is so great that it makes many people uncomfortable. Don’t you know of people who will go considerably out of their way to avoid someone who is apt to ask them for something? (Location 4396)

In our intimate relationships and associations, the request is by itself usually enough to bring the desired result, unless those relationships and associations have been damaged by previous experience or the persons involved are too deeply scarred. (Location 4401)

But genuine shared laughter is one of the surest ways for human beings to come together and break the stalemates of life. It is essential to genuine community. (Location 4467)

How earnestly Jesus longed for Peter to come out right in his time of testing! But he left him free to succeed or fail before God and man—and, as it turned out, before all of subsequent human history. He used no condemnation, no shame, no “pearls of wisdom” on him. And he didn’t use supernatural power to rewire his soul or his brain. (Location 4506)

Heroism, generally, is totally out of place in the spiritual life, until we grow to the point at which it would never be thought of as heroism anyway. (Location 4519)

many people are uncomfortable with this picture, especially with the idea that we would be requesting things we want from God. (Location 4531)

On the other hand, I am to pray for what concerns me, and many people have found prayer impossible because they thought they should only pray for wonderful but remote needs they actually had little or no interest in or even knowledge of. (Location 4538)

Prayer simply dies from efforts to pray about “good things” that honestly do not matter to us. The way to get to meaningful prayer for those good things is to start by praying for what we are truly interested in. The circle of our interests will inevitably grow in the largeness of God’s love. (Location 4540)

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

I too was raised in a theology that presents God as a great unblinking cosmic stare, who must know everything whether he wants to or not, and who never in the smallest respect changes his mind about what he is going to do. (Location 4581)

we see here is a God who can be prevailed upon by those who faithfully stand before him. (Location 4602)

His nature, identity, and overarching purposes are no doubt unchanging. But his intentions with regard to many particular matters that concern individual human beings are not. This does not diminish him. Far from it. He would be a lesser God if he could not change his intentions when he thinks it is appropriate. (Location 4606)

If you know the biblical tradition, you cannot imagine that this would only be a matter of strange sensations or warm feelings. God is above all a God who speaks and listens.15 (Location 4678)

Prayer is, above all, a means of forming character. (Location 4684)

What God gets out of our lives—and, indeed, what we get out of our lives—is simply the person we become. (Location 4684)

It is God’s intention that we should grow into the kind of person he could empower to do what we want to do. (Location 4685)

We have been trained to think of “reigning” as exclusionary of others. But in the heart of the divine conspiracy, it just means to be free and powerful in the creation and governance of what is good. (Location 4687)

a major element in this training is experience in waiting for God to move, not leaping ahead and taking things into our own hands. (Location 4690)

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. Sometimes, apparently, the changes in question involve conflicts going on in a spiritual realm lying entirely outside human affairs (Dan. 10:13). We always live in a larger context of activities we do not see. But whatever the exact cause, Jesus emphatically taught that we are to stay with our request. That is, quite simply, an aspect of all serious human relationships. We stay with an issue until it is resolved one way or another. (Location 4693)

we should expect prayer to proceed in the manner of a relationship between persons. (Location 4714)

To suppose that God and the individual communicate within the framework of God’s purposes for us, as explained earlier, and that because of the interchange God does what he had not previously intended, or refrains from something he previously had intended to do, is nothing against God’s dignity if it is an arrangement he himself has chosen. (Location 4734)

But in a domain of persons, such as The Kingdom Among Us, it is far greater to be flexible and yet able to achieve the good goals one has set. And that is an essential part of the Divine Personality shown in the Bible and incarnated in the person of Jesus and presented in his message. (Location 4740)

Matter, ordinary physical “stuff,” is the place for the development and manifestation of finite personalities who, in their bodies, have significant resources either to oppose God or to serve him. (Location 4753)

But above all, he excelled in prayer. The inwardness and weight of his spirit, the reverence and solemnity of his dress and behavior, and the fewness and fullness of his words, have often struck even strangers, with admiration, and they used to reach others with consolation. The most awful, living, reverent frame I ever felt or beheld, I must say, was his in prayer.18 (Location 4758)

the necessary address to God in prayer is, in fact, an entirely inward reality, between us and God. Reading, posture, singing, special setting, and the like are all to be used only insofar as they serve to establish a gripping presence and address. (Location 4811)

though it may occasionally be useful to bow the head and close the eyes, that is not to be regarded as the “canonical position,” the only one in which we are really praying. (Location 4815)

“Our Father always near us.” (Location 4826)

the remainder of the model prayer as given in Luke 11 consists of requests or categories of requests. There are five of them: That the name “God” would be regarded with the utmost possible respect and endearment. That his kingdom would fully come on earth. That our needs for today be met today. That our sins be forgiven, not held against us. That we not be permitted to come under trial or to have bad things happen to us. (Location 4827)

better to translate the language here as “let your name be sanctified.” Let it be uniquely respected. Really, the idea is that his name should be treasured and loved more than any other, held in an absolutely unique position among humanity. (Location 4838)

Human life is not about human life. (Location 4845)

We want to dwell on this meditatively and perhaps weep for sadness that God is not so understood. We want to enter into the alarm of the little child who stumbles across those who do not think its father or mother is the greatest and best. (Location 4854)

the kingdom of God is the range of his effective will: that is, it is the domain where what he prefers is actually what happens. (Location 4859)

We are thinking here of the places we spend our lives: of homes, playgrounds, city streets, workplaces, schools, and so forth. These are the places we have in mind, and they are where we are asking for the kingdom, God’s rule, to come, to be in effect. (Location 4865)

among other things, we ask him to help us see the patterns we are involved in. We ask him to help us not cooperate with them, to cast light on them and act effectively to remove them. (Location 4878)

The emphasis is on provision today of what we need for today. This is because God is always present today, no matter which day it is. His reign is the Eternal Now. So we do not ask him to provide today what we will need for tomorrow. To have it in hand today does not guarantee that we will have it tomorrow when we need it. Today I have God, and he has the provisions. Tomorrow it will be the same. So I simply ask today for what I need for today or ask now for what I need now. (Location 4884)

What hinders or shuts down kingdom living is not the having of such provisions, but rather the trusting in them for future security. We have no real security for the future in them, but only in the God who is present with us each day. (Location 4893)

The natural consequences of actions have been pretty well designed by God to lead us to be the persons we ought to be. To blunt their lessons may be to harm those we would help. (Location 4904)

Once we step into this kingdom and trust it, pity becomes the atmosphere in which we live. (Location 4909)

It is not psychologically possible for us really to know God’s pity for us and at the same time be hardhearted toward others. (Location 4912)

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. (Location 4914)

To honor our parents means to be thankful for their existence and to respect their actual role as givers of life in the sequence of human existence. Of course in order to honor them in this way we need to be thankful for our own existence too. But we also will usually need to have pity on them. For, even if they are good people, it is almost always true that they have been quite wrong in many respects, and possibly still are. (Location 4925)

Living on the basis of pity makes it easier to ask and makes it easier to give, including forgiveness. (Location 4934)

I have used the word pity through much of this discussion of “forgive us our sins,” rather than the word mercy or the even more dignified compassion. This is because only pity reaches to the heart of our condition. The word pity makes us wince, as mercy does not. (Location 4948)

If my pride is untouched when I pray for forgiveness, I have not prayed for forgiveness. I don’t even understand it. (Location 4955)

It expresses the understanding that we can’t stand up under very much pressure, and that it is not a good thing for us to suffer. It is a vote of “no confidence” in our own abilities. (Location 4964)

Once again, we are asking for pity, this time in the form of protection from circumstances. (Location 4974)

they do not promise that we will have no trials, as human beings understand trials. They promise, instead, totally unbroken care, along with God-given adequacy to whatever happens. (Location 4986)

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)

The last request in the Lord’s Prayer is the revelation of a God who loves to spare his children and who will always do it upon request unless he has something better in mind, which he rarely does. (Location 5012)

People who do not ask God to spare them from trials and evils usually do not even recognize his hand when they are spared. (Location 5013)

In my family that prayer was, for three generations I know of, always said in unison at the breakfast table. (Location 5019)

It is a prayer that teaches us to pray. It is a foundation of the praying life: its introduction and its continuing basis. It is an enduring framework for all praying. You only move beyond it provided you stay within it. (Location 5031)

One thing is sure: You are somebody’s disciple. You learned how to live from somebody else. There are no exceptions to this rule, for human beings are just the kind of creatures that have to learn and keep learning from others how to live. (Location 5057)

But we certainly did not come by that individualistic posture through our own individual and independent insight into ultimate truth. (Location 5063)

Originally we are the disciples of our parents or other family members most intimately related to us. (Location 5067)

Then we are the disciples of our teachers, then of our playmates and peers—one of the most potent of “discipling” relationships—then perhaps again of our teachers. (Location 5072)

Nearly always they convey to us a strong impression of what life as a whole is all about. This provides the absolutely necessary orientations of conscious behavior toward ourselves, others—and God. We must have such orientations, even if they be wrong. (Location 5077)

It is one of the major transitions of life to recognize who has taught us, mastered us, and then to evaluate the results in us of their teaching. (Location 5078)

“Rethink your life in the light of the fact that the kingdom of the heavens is now open to all” (Location 5100)

All one has to do to identify those who would mislead us is watch what they do and pay little attention to what they say. What they do will be the unerring sign of who they are on the inside. (Location 5112)

what people do reveals, when thoroughly and honestly considered, the kind of person they really are (Location 5114)

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

But if I am to be someone’s apprentice, there is one absolutely essential condition. I must be with that person. (Location 5143)

If I am Jesus’ disciple that means I am with him to learn from him how to be like him. (Location 5145)

God as personality is not a physical reality that everyone must see whether they want to or not. He can, of course, make himself present to the human mind in any way he chooses. But—for good reasons rooted deeply in the nature of the person and of personal relationships—his preferred way is to speak, to communicate: thus the absolute centrality of scripture to our discipleship. (Location 5164)

an extensive use of solitude and silence is so basic for growth of the human spirit, for they form an appropriate context for listening and speaking to God.1 (Location 5168)

It is absolutely essential that his friends understand in the strongest way possible how he is going to be with them and how they will continue to be his apprentices and co-workers in the kingdom when they no longer see him in the usual sense. (Location 5179)

though they did not fully understand. And they were engulfed. And they understood enough to be able to say what was happening at that moment. (Location 5193)

Unfortunately, the relentlessly legalistic bent of the human soul has, over time, led many to identify engulfment in the spirit with its outward manifestations, whether they be signs and wonders; other tongues; poverty, chastity, and obedience; power to convert unbelievers; or certain practices and symbols that have become denominationally distinctive. (Location 5205)

The reality of the kingdom life is an inner one, a hidden one, with “the Father who is in secret.” (Location 5208)

Thus Paul very simply says, “All who are interactive with the spirit of God are God’s children” (Rom. 8:14). The interactive movement he refers to is the inner reality, not the outward manifestations. (Location 5216)

The most exalted outcome of submersion in the risen Christ is the transformation of the inner self to be like him. (Location 5225)

So the kingdom of the heavens, from the practical point of view in which we all must live, is simply our experience of Jesus’ continual interaction with us in history and throughout the days, hours, and moments of our earthly existence. (Location 5225)

And of course it is discipleship, real-life apprenticeship to Jesus, that is the passageway within The Kingdom Among Us from initial faith in Jesus to a life of fulfillment and routine obedience. (Location 5233)

people who are asked whether they are apprentices of a leading politician, musician, lawyer, or screenwriter would not need to think a second to respond. Similarly for those asked if they are studying Spanish or bricklaying with someone unknown to the public. It is hardly something that would escape one’s attention. The same is all the more true if asked about discipleship to Jesus. (Location 5255)

a disciple, or apprentice, is simply someone who has decided to be with another person, under appropriate conditions, in order to become capable of doing what that person does or to become what that person is. (Location 5265)

he lives in the kingdom of God, and he applies that kingdom for the good of others and even makes it possible for them to enter it for themselves. (Location 5268)

I am learning from Jesus to live my life as he would live my life if he were I. (Location 5275)

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. (Location 5278)

That my actual life is the focus of my apprenticeship to Jesus is crucial. (Location 5281)

he is, in any case, interested in my life, that very existence that is me. (Location 5286)

“You, in the midst of your actual life there, are exactly the person God wanted.” (Location 5298)

The teachings of Jesus in the Gospels show us how to live the life we have been given through the time, place, family, neighbors, talents, and opportunities that are ours. (Location 5299)

The apprentices of Jesus are primarily occupied with the positive good that can be done during their days “under the sun” and the positive strengths and virtues that they develop in themselves as they grow toward “the kingdom prepared for them from the foundations of the world” (Location 5304)

The cultivation of oneself, one’s family, one’s workplace and community—especially the community of believers—thus becomes the center of focus for the apprentice’s joint life with his or her teacher. (Location 5308)

A gentle but firm noncooperation with things that everyone knows to be wrong, together with a sensitive, nonofficious, nonintrusive, nonobsequious service to others, should be our usual overt manner. This should be combined with inward attitudes of constant prayer for whatever kind of activity our workplace requires and genuine love for everyone involved. (Location 5321)

we should be watchful and prepared to meet any obvious spiritual need or interest in understanding Jesus with words that are truly loving, thoughtful, and helpful. (Location 5325)

as long as one is on the job, all peculiarly religious activities should take second place to doing “the job” in sweat, intelligence, and the power of God. That is our devotion to God. (Location 5337)

Our intention with our job should be the highest possible good in its every aspect, and we should pursue that with conscious expectation of a constant energizing and direction from God. (Location 5339)

As his apprentices, we are personally interacting with him as we do our job, and he is with us, as he promised, to teach us how to do it best. (Location 5345)

One who does not know this way of “job discipleship” by experience cannot begin to imagine what release and help and joy there is in it. (Location 5352)

Eternity is not something waiting to happen, something that will commence later. It is now here. Time runs its course within eternity. (Location 5368)

he nevertheless made it quite clear that he expected them to teach in the same general manner as he did; that is, by showing forth the nature of the rule of God in and from the things of ordinary life. (Location 5395)

“When, therefore, a ‘bible scholar’ becomes a disciple (matheteutheis) to the kingdom of the heavens, he is like a householder who can produce from his store things old and new” (Location 5400)

The kingdom disciple teaches from his or her storehouse of personal experiences of God’s rule in the commonplace events of real life. (Location 5402)

Joy is our portion in his fellowship. Joy goes with confidence and creativity. It is his joy, and that is not a small joy or a repressed “joy.” It is a robust joy, with no small element of outright hilarity in it. For nothing less than joy can sustain us in the kingdom rightness that possesses us, which truly is a weighty and powerful thing to bear. (Location 5414)

as we have seen, a disciple of Jesus is one who is with Jesus, learning to be like him, what, we must ask, is the state of soul that would bring us to choose that condition? What would be the thinking, the convictions about reality, that would lead someone to choose discipleship to him? (Location 5431)

The only thing these people were sweating about was whether they would “get the deal.” Now that is the soul of the disciple. (Location 5450)

No one goes sadly, reluctantly into discipleship with Jesus. As he said, “No one who looks back after putting his hand to the plough is suited to the kingdom of God” (Luke 9:62). No one goes in bemoaning the cost. They understand the opportunity. (Location 5451)

The entire point of this passage is that as long as one thinks anything may really be more valuable than fellowship with Jesus in his kingdom, one cannot learn from him. People who have not gotten the basic facts about their life straight will therefore not do the things that make learning from Jesus possible and will never be able to understand the basic points in the lessons to be learned. (Location 5457)

The point is simply that unless we clearly see the superiority of what we receive as his students over every other thing that might be valued, we cannot succeed in our discipleship to him. (Location 5470)

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)

Second, we should use every means at our disposal to come to see him more fully. (Location 5505)

We will devote our attention to these teachings, in private study and inquiry as well as public instruction. And, negatively, we will refuse to devote our mental space and energy to the fruitless, even stupefying and degrading, stuff that constantly clamors for our attention. We will attend to it only enough to avoid it. (Location 5512)

To look closely at a Saint Francis, a John Wesley, a David Brainerd, an Albert Schweitzer, or one of his many well-known Theresas, for example, is to see something that elevates our vision and our hope toward Jesus himself. (Location 5529)

But in the last analysis we fail to be disciples only because we do not decide to be. We do not intend to be disciples. (Location 5543)

hand, it could well prove to be a major turning point in our life if we would, with Law’s help, ask ourselves if we really do intend to be life students of Jesus. Do we really intend to do and be all of the high things we profess to believe in? Have we decided to do them? When did we decide it? And how did we implement that decision? (Location 5562)

Those who have found their way in will inevitably want to share the new reality they have found with those around them. When we discover something great, we naturally want all those we really care about to be in on it. (Location 5568)

we need to be standing in the position of Jesus’ students and co-workers, so that our efforts in making disciples will be appropriately guided and strengthened by him. (Location 5582)

We learn from Jesus how to make disciples as he did. We have seen that this involves proclaiming, manifesting, and teaching the kingdom of God. (Location 5584)

making a disciple is no longer something mysterious. It is only a matter of appropriately informing people about Jesus and his kingdom and helping them, through prayer and guidance, to make a decision. (Location 5588)

The fundamental negative reality among Christian believers now is their failure to be constantly learning how to live their lives in The Kingdom Among Us. And it is an accepted reality. (Location 5604)

I am thoroughly convinced that God will let everyone into heaven who, in his considered opinion, can stand it. (Location 5616)

There is a widespread notion that just passing through death transforms human character. Discipleship is not needed. Just believe enough to “make it.” (Location 5623)

What if death only forever fixes us as the kind of person we are at death? (Location 5625)

But really to intend this is no trivial matter, of course. It means a huge change of direction. The weight of the tradition of client, or consumer, Christianity, which now without thought dominates the local congregations and denominations of Christian people—indeed, the entire Christian culture—stands against any such intention—not consciously, perhaps, but just by the inertia of “how things are,” of the daily rounds and what “has to get done.” (Location 5635)

to explicitly intend to make apprentices to Jesus could be quite upsetting to congregational life. (Location 5650)

the last thing the disciple or disciple maker will do is assume superiority over anyone, Christian or not, disciple or not. Remember, we are called to form a community of prayerful love. (Location 5653)

a pervasive intention to make disciples would radically change the character the church, the “visible” people of God, as we know it. (Location 5663)

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

once again, it is absolutely necessary that those who exercise leadership must be close and faithful students of Jesus himself. He must be the one who shows the way. (Location 5671)

you lead people to become disciples of Jesus by ravishing them with a vision of life in the kingdom of the heavens in the fellowship of Jesus. (Location 5680)

This view of reality is precisely the situation the Christian disciple maker must address. For it is quite obvious that nothing remains of discipleship to Jesus or of Christian faith if there is no God such as he obviously lived from and had faith in, if there are only “particles and progress.” (Location 5699)

To make disciples to Jesus today, one has to make him and his God real to them, right in the face of all that stands at the center of our world as “official” knowledge and reality. (Location 5703)

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)

We frankly need to do much less of this managing of action, and especially with young people. We need to concentrate on changing the minds of those we would reach and serve. (Location 5714)

We always live up to our beliefs—or down to them, as the case may be. Nothing else is possible. It is the nature of belief. (Location 5720)

What has to be done, instead of trying to drive people to do what we think they are supposed to, is to be honest about what we and others really believe. Then, by inquiry, teaching, example, prayer, and reliance upon the spirit of God, we can work to change the beliefs that are contrary to the way of Jesus. (Location 5726)

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. They may do this for so long that even they no longer know that they do not believe what they profess. (Location 5731)

“Your system is perfectly designed to produce the result you are getting.” (Location 5738)

to present the kingdom of the heavens will mean that we must teach about the nature of belief (which is the same as faith) and how it relates to the rest of our personality. (Location 5740)

We understand that our beliefs are the rails upon which our life runs, and so we have to address their actual beliefs and their doubts, not spend our time discussing many fine things that have little or no relevance to their genuine state of mind. (Location 5742)

One cannot build discipleship to Jesus by dodging serious issues or not doing justice to honest doubts about him and his teachings. (Location 5746)

If we cannot break through to a new vision of faith and discipleship, the real significance and power of the gospel of the kingdom of God can never come into its own. It will be constantly defeated by the idea that it is somehow not a real part of faith in Jesus Christ, and the church will remain in the dead embrace of consumer Christianity. (Location 5756)

These Christlike behaviors are expressions of a pervasive personal strength and its joy, not of weakness, morbidity, sorrow—or raw exertion of will—as is so often assumed. (Location 5800)

We have to come to terms with the fact that we cannot become those who “hear and do” without specific training for it. (Location 5809)

Training in Christlikeness is a responsibility they have for those who enter their number. But at the present time intentional, effective training in Christlikeness—within the framework of a clear-eyed apprenticeship commitment and a spiritual “engulfment” in the Trinitarian reality—is just not there for us (Location 5811)

Imagine, if you can, discovering in your church letter or bulletin an announcement of a six-week seminar on how genuinely to bless someone who is spitting on you. (Location 5816)

Imagine further, if your imagination is not already exhausted, driving by a church with a large sign in front that says, We Teach All Who Seriously Commit Themselves to Jesus How to Do Everything He Said to Do. (Location 5829)

When do you suppose was the last time any group of believers or church of any kind or level had a meeting of its officials in which the topic for discussion and action was how they were going to teach their people actually to do the specific things Jesus said? (Location 5834)

The fact is that there now is lacking a serious and expectant intention to bring Jesus’ people into obedience and abundance through training. (Location 5841)

the “teaching” to be done at this point—whether directed toward ourselves or toward others—is not a matter of collecting or conveying information. The task is not to inform the disciple, or student, about things that Jesus believed, taught, and practiced. (Location 5867)

The student will already possess almost all of the correct information. (Location 5869)

those who are disciples initially only believe that Jesus believed the message of the kingdom. (Location 5874)

In our culture one is considered educated if one “knows the right answers.” That is, if one knows which answers are the correct ones. (Location 5879)

Our task in ourselves and in others is to transform right answers into automatic responses to real-life situations. (Location 5887)

The advantage of believing in the reality of the Trinity is not that we get an A from God for giving “the right answer.” Remember, to believe something is to act as if it is so. (Location 5894)

the advantage of believing in the Trinity is that we then live as if the Trinity is real: as if the cosmos environing us actually is, beyond all else, a self-sufficing community of unspeakably magnificent personal beings of boundless love, knowledge, and power. And, thus believing, our lives naturally integrate themselves, through our actions, into the reality of such a universe, (Location 5898)

That is the same as increasing in their experiential knowledge of the real person, Jesus Christ, which in our current condition just is the eternal kind of life (2 Pet. 3:18; compare John 17:3). (Location 5914)

In order to become a disciple of Jesus, then, one must believe in him. In order to develop as his disciple one must progressively come to believe what he knew to be so. (Location 5927)

external conformity to the wording of Jesus’ teachings about actions in specific contexts and profession of perfectly correct doctrine. Historically these are the very things that have obsessed the church visible—currently, the latter far more than the former. (Location 5938)

Special experiences, faithfulness to the church, correct doctrine, and external conformity to the teachings of Jesus all come along as appropriate, more or less automatically, when the inner self is transformed. But they do not produce such a transformation. (Location 5947)

The first objective is to bring apprentices to the point where they dearly love and constantly delight in that “heavenly Father” made real to earth in Jesus and are quite certain that there is no “catch,” no limit, to the goodness of his intentions or to his power to carry them out. (Location 5954)

the aged apostle, on the basis of a lifetime of firsthand experience of Jesus, said that this was his message: “God is light, and darkness in him there is not, none” (v. 5). That is the message he brought, according to John. It is also, according to him, the message “we proclaim to you” (v. 5). It is the message we today are to proclaim. (Location 5961)

The second primary objective of a curriculum for Christlikeness is to remove our automatic responses against the kingdom of God, to free the apprentices of domination, of “enslavement” (John 8:34; Rom. 6:6), to their old habitual patterns of thought, feeling, and action. (Location 5968)

It is not enough, if we would enable Jesus’ students to do what he said, just to announce and teach the truth about God, about Jesus, and about God’s purposes with humankind. To think so is the fallacy underlying most of the training that goes on in our churches and theological schools. Even relentlessly pursued, it is not enough. (Location 5972)

We are incarnate beings in our very nature, and we live from our bodies. If we are to be transformed, the body must be transformed, and that is not accomplished by talking at it. (Location 5977)

The training that leads to doing what we hear from Jesus must therefore involve, first, the purposeful disruption of our “automatic” thoughts, feelings, and actions by doing different things with our body. (Location 5978)

This part of the curriculum for Christlikeness consists of “disciplines for the spiritual life.” (Location 5982)

these two “primary objectives” of the curriculum are not to be pursued separately but interactively. (Location 5983)

do not first bring apprentices to love God appropriately and then free them from pattern enslavement. Nor do we do it the other way around. (Location 5984)

How do we help people love what is lovely? (Location 5991)

Love is an emotional response aroused in the will by visions of the good. (Location 5994)

Though we act, and as intelligently and responsibly as possible, we are always in the position of asking: asking them, asking God, and responding to their responses. (Location 5998)

If anyone is to love God and have his or her life filled with that love, God in his glorious reality must be brought before the mind and kept there in such a way that the mind takes root and stays fixed there. (Location 6009)

what simply occupies our mind very largely governs what we do. (Location 6016)

Of all the things we do, we have more freedom with respect to what we will think of, where we will place our mind, than anything else. (Location 6018)

The deepest revelation of our character is what we choose to dwell on in thought, what constantly occupies our mind—as well as what we can or cannot even think of. (Location 6021)

Eventually, they want to be free of drink day by day. That is the goal. (Location 6028)

a part of the call of God to us has always been to think. Indeed the call of Jesus to “repent” is nothing but a call to think about how we have been thinking. (Location 6031)

one main part, and by far the most fundamental, is to form the insights and habits of the student’s mind so that it stays directed toward God (Location 6033)

The distortion, or “wrungness,” of the will, on the other hand—theologians of another day called it “corruption”—is primarily a matter of our refusal to dwell in our minds on right things in the right way. (Location 6040)

“God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth” must be made present to their minds in such a way that they can see his magnificent beauty and their love can be strongly and constantly drawn to him. (Location 6081)

We encourage every question, and we make it clear that dealing honestly with the questions that come up is the only path to a robust and healthy faith. (Location 6088)

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)

Hence, if we would train people to do “all things,” we must change their beliefs. (Location 6154)

hearty and clear-headed love of God must be the first objective in any curriculum for Christlikeness. (Location 6162)

The key, then, to loving God is to see Jesus, to hold him before the mind with as much fullness and clarity as possible. It is to adore him. (Location 6202)

First, we teach his beauty, truth, and power while he lived among us as one human being among others. (Location 6203)

Second, we teach the way he went to execution as a common criminal among other criminals on our behalf. (Location 6205)

Third, we teach the reality of Jesus risen, his actual existence now as a person who is present among his people. (Location 6226)

show him now active among his disciples. (Location 6229)

we teach the Jesus who is the master of the created universe and of human history. (Location 6232)

is Jesus himself who is king of the kings of the earth, and who for good purposes allows Satan and evil to have some influence on humanity for a little while. And it is he, as the Logos, who maintains and manipulates the ultimate laws of the physical universe. (Location 6238)

we must have no doubt that the path appointed for us by when and where and to whom we were born is good, and that nothing irredeemable has happened to us or can happen to us on our way to our destiny in God’s full world. (Location 6262)

in training disciples to “hear and do” the words of their master, a major point will often be to help them honor their parents. (Location 6292)

It is noteworthy that when Job finally stood before God he was completely satisfied and at rest, though not a single one of his questions about his sufferings had been answered. His questions were good questions. He did not sin in asking them. But in the light of God himself they were simply pointless. They just drop away and lose their interest. (Location 6316)

the second main objective in a curriculum for Christlikeness. That, as we have said, is the breaking of the power of patterns of wrongdoing and evil that govern our lives because of our long habituation to a world alienated from God. (Location 6332)

Paul’s life after meeting and growing in Christ was totally different from this, as his writings and the remainder of the New Testament record make clear. (Location 6341)

Consumer Christianity is now normative. The consumer Christian is one who utilizes the grace of God for forgiveness and the services of the church for special occasions, but does not give his or her life and innermost thoughts, feelings, and intentions over to the kingdom of the heavens. Such Christians are not inwardly transformed and not committed to it. (Location 6346)

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. (Location 6391)

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 6391)

We are not to try to get in a position to avoid trials. And we are not to “catastrophize” and declare the “end of the world” when things happen. We are to see every event as an occasion in which the competence and faithfulness of God will be confirmed to us. (Location 6478)

the process is to be a walk with a person. (Location 6486)

it is Jesus above all who shows us how to live in the kingdom. (Location 6510)

A discipline is any activity within our power that we engage in to enable us to do what we cannot do by direct effort. (Location 6535)

they are disciplines designed to help us be active and effective in the spiritual realm of our own heart, now spiritually alive by grace, in relation to God and his kingdom. (Location 6543)

the body is the first field of energy beyond our thoughts that we have direction over, and all else we influence is due to our power over it. (Location 6550)

In this second part of the curriculum for Christlikeness, then, the main task is, by engaging in ways of using the body differently, to disrupt and conquer habits of thought, feeling, and action that govern our lives as if we or someone other than God were God and as if his kingdom were irrelevant or inaccessible to us. (Location 6555)

The ultimate effect of this part of the curriculum is to make our body a reliable ally and resource for the spiritual life. (Location 6558)

From the stage of early discipleship, where “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. (Location 6559)

We find our way into a life where the power of inward hindrances to obedience/abundance are broken by observing what Jesus and others who have followed him do and learning to structure our lives around those same activities. (Location 6564)

So, basically, to put off the old person and put on the new we only follow Jesus into the activities that he engaged in to nurture his own life in relation to the Father. (Location 6567)

his use of solitude, silence, study of scripture, prayer, and service to others all had a disciplinary aspect in his life. And we can be very sure that what he found useful for conduct of his life in the Father will also be useful for us. (Location 6570)

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 6575)

One has to enter them with Jesus as teacher to find the incredible power they have to change one’s world and character. (Location 6578)

intensity is crucial for any progress in spiritual perception and understanding. (Location 6595)

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

it is solitude and silence that allow us to escape the patterns of epidermal responses, with their consequences. (Location 6628)

They break the pell-mell rush through life and create a kind of inner space that permits people to become aware of what they are doing and what they are about to do. (Location 6631)

One of the greatest of spiritual attainments is the capacity to do nothing. (Location 6641)

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. (Location 6652)

don’t go into solitude and silence with a list. (Location 6653)

When you go into solitude and silence, you need to be relatively comfortable. Don’t be a hero in this or in any spiritual discipline. You will need rest. Sleep until you wake up truly refreshed. And you will need to stay there long enough for the inner being to become different. Muddy water becomes clear if you only let it be still for a while. (Location 6659)

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

disciples of Jesus are people who want to take into their being the order of The Kingdom Among Us. (Location 6691)

They devote their attention, their thoughtful inquiry, and their practical experimentation to the order of the kingdom as seen in Jesus, in the written word of scripture, in others who walk in the way, and, indeed, in every good thing in nature, history, and culture. (Location 6693)

we must not worship without study, for ignorant worship is of limited value and can be very dangerous. (Location 6712)

Study without worship is also dangerous, and the people of Jesus constantly suffer from its effects, especially in academic settings. (Location 6714)

four specific spiritual disciplines—solitude and silence, worship and study—around which a curriculum for Christlikeness should be framed. (Location 6724)

Anger and contempt toward others is only removed by the vision and experience of God being over all, ensuring that all is well with me and that others are his treasures. (Location 6749)

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)

The disciplines are practices that change the inner self and its relationship to the “helper” (paraclete), so that we can actually do what we would and avoid what we would not. They of course have no point apart from the serious intent to obey Christ’s teaching and follow his example. (Location 6780)

Yet it is God’s intent that in his kingdom we should have as much power as we can bear for good. (Location 6821)

in order to appreciate this, you cannot read them with the “consumer Christian” mentality, 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. (Location 6837)

we do not need to talk a lot about what we are doing. In time it will be obvious. (Location 6882)

Much of the distress of these good people comes from a failure to realize that their life lies before them. That they are coming to the end of their present life, life “in the flesh,” is of little significance. What is of significance is the kind of person they have become. (Location 6921)

the universe as a created system that responds to and is pervaded by what is not a part of it but of which it is a part or product. (Location 6940)

We will not sit around looking at one another or at God for eternity but will join the eternal Logos, “reign with him,” in the endlessly ongoing creative work of God. It is for this that we were each individually intended, as both kings and priests (Location 6955)

We are, accordingly, permitted to “enter into the joy of our Lord” (Matt. 25:21). That “joy” is, of course, the creation and care of what is good, in all its dimensions. (Location 6958)

the intention of God is that we should each become the kind of person whom he can set free in his universe, empowered to do what we want to do. (Location 6968)

we should understand that brightness always represents power, energy, and that in the kingdom of our Father we will be active, unimaginably creative. (Location 6974)

there is a limit on what human arrangements can accomplish. They alone cannot change the heart and spirit of the human being. (Location 6993)

the instrumentalities invoked to make “Jerusalem” happen always wind up eliminating truth, or mercy, or both. (Location 6994)

The purpose is to meet what can only be described as a need of God’s nature as totally competent love. (Location 7100)

Moreover, the welfare of every conscious being in existence depends upon their possession of this knowledge of God. (Location 7103)

Meaning is not a luxury for us. It is a kind of spiritual oxygen, we might say, that enables our souls to live. (Location 7112)

If death were a release from everything, it would be a boon for the wicked. But since the soul is clearly immortal, it can have no escape or security from evil except by becoming as good and wise as it possibly can. (Location 7134)

We exist and will continue to exist, then, because it pleases God. He sees that it is good. (Location 7156)

the existence of the God of Jesus simply dissolves any problem about whether “survival” is to be expected. (Location 7163)

The truly brave person is surely the one who can cheerfully face the prospect of an unending existence. (Location 7178)

you are never going to stop existing and there is nothing you can do about it—except possibly make your future existence as desirable an existence as possible? That would call for real courage. (Location 7179)

we can be sure that heaven in the sense of our afterlife is just our future in this universe. (Location 7210)

Practical mastery enables one to speak clearly and simply of what is as profound as reality itself. (Location 7793)