it is finished

Finally finished The Divine Conspiracy.  Hopefully I can live out what I read.

The final few chapters are devoted to developing a discipleship plan.  For those with the responsibility of making disciples, he lays out a “curriculum for Christlikeness.”

The end is Willard’s vision of eternal life.  Importantly, he discusses death and our common misperceptions of it.  Once cleared, he uses scripture to illuminate the eternal world and our role in it.  This is critical to the committment to be a disciple, because you must know what you’re working toward.

In case you were wondering, the divine conspiracy (if I can sum up this weighty work in one paragraph) is that the Being greater than the universe slipped into our midst, becoming one of us.  This decision changed all of humanity for all time.  It can change me – right now.

the divine conspiracy, part 2

In case you didn’t see it, I posted earlier about trying to read The Divine Conspiracy for the third time.  I’m over half way through now, and loving it (third time’s a charm I guess).

His scholarly style does take some getting used to.  The more I read the better I understand his approach to mapping out his subject matter.  I’m also getting better at reading his unique sentence constructions.  Though it’s getting easier, I can’t read too much at a time because it requires digestion.  Here’s a snippet:

The eternal life that begins with confidence in Jesus is a life in his present kingdom, now on earth and available to all. So the message of and about him is specifically a gospel for our life now, not just for dying. It is about living now as his apprentice in kingdom living, not just as a consumer of his merits. Our future, however far we look, is a natural extension of the faith by which we live now and the life in which we now participate.

But besides the mechanics of reading comprehension, how’s the book itself?  Very insightful,  thoughtful and intellectually inspiring.  I love his approach of starting with the assertion that Jesus was (is) the most intelligent person ever, so we should take seriously his teaching.  So often when we read Jesus’ words we skim over them out of familiarity, without really studying his teaching for application to our everyday life.  Willard methodically breaks down the central teachings of Jesus into readily applicable chunks of kingdom truth.