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Dr. Willard's diagnosis: A lot of us are doing Christianity at a putt-putt level. We want to be forgiven without following Jesus.

We're afraid to follow Jesus, because then we'd have to die and rise with him. We'd have to mortify our old self with its "fondest lusts," as Jonathan Edwards described them. Then we'd have to vivify Jesus' excellent virtues in their place. The truth is, we're mildly attracted to his virtues, but we're strongly attracted to our vices. We wouldn't like to lose them because they please us, and the prospect of a significant life with Jesus doesn't so much. Do we expect a new Christian life will just happen without our having to make inconvenient changes in how we live Monday to Sunday? If so, we are like people who want to be solvent and who also max out their credit cards. Or people who want to be sexually pure and who also bookmark porn sites. Or people who want to speak Japanese without all the tiresome study that's normally required. Here's Willard's devastating summary:

The general human failing is to want what is right and important, but at the same time not to commit to the kind of life that will produce the action we know to be right and the condition we want to enjoy. This is the feature of human character that explains why the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

So what to do?

The first thing to do is to trust our Christian friends who have died with Jesus Christ when they tell us it's going to be okay if we do it, too. This, in my judgment, is one of the greatest services offered to the church by our Christian friend Dallas Willard. He is a brilliant, modest, immensely experienced Christian older brother, calling to us from the Resurrection side of things. His books all call out, in one way or another: Come on over. It's going to be okay to die first. You have to do it, and you can do it. Not even Jesus got a resurrection without a death, and he'll be at your side when you surrender your old life. Trust me on this. If you die with Jesus Christ, God will walk you out of your tomb into a life of incomparable joy and purpose inside his boundless and competent love.

Willard shows us how to get this life—eloquently and enduringly. He tells us that learning to enjoy God forever and to participate in his big project is entirely like learning competitive baseball or the violin or Italian. God has put joy inside sports, music-making, and cross-cultural conversation, but the only way to get joy out of them is to work at them. You've got to listen to your teacher, imitate him or her, and then practice a lot. The disciple is not greater than his master. If Jesus needed to learn obedience, so will Jesus' disciples. We will need to train our brain, heart, hand, eye, and tongue to get us in shape for robust Christian living. Eyebrows, too, when they still have a haughty spirit. Fortunately, says Willard, the essential disciplines for Jesus' disciples have been taught and learned for centuries, including by our Lord himself.

What are they? Here's a sampling from Willard's The Spirit of the Disciplines.

Solitude and, within it, silence to expose ourselves to ourselves ("What if there turns out to be very little between 'just us and God'?") and to provide a natural context in which to listen to God.

Fasting and, within it, meditating upon God's Word. Fasting is "prime self-denial," a way to expose "how much of our peace depends upon the pleasures of eating." Superficial peace, too. Meditating secures in our lived experience the conviction that "we have meat to eat that the world does not know."

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September 2006, Vol. 50, No. 9