Author: Dallas Willard
Publication details: HarperCollins, New York, 2006
“Apprenticed to Jesus” (Dallas Willard)
“Like stars in a dark world” (Paul of Tarsus, Philippians 2: 15)
Dallas Willard talks of the Great Disparity in the Christian life. He refers to the promises of new life through salvation and faith in Jesus Christ, and the disappointing reality that mars so much of the Christian walk. What did we miss between the hopeful “accepting Christ” into our hearts and the actual day-to-day life that follows? A simple look at the life of Jesus himself would dispel our doubts as to the workability of the Christian faith. If that is so, our failure in living as he lived is all the more wretched and puzzling. Willard explains the reasons for this in The Great Omission, a book meant to bring back the emphasis of the Christian life to the forgotten matter of discipleship. If the walk does not work at all, or “only in fits and starts”, he says, then the logical thing to do is to trace the problem back to its beginnings, which is “that … we do not give ourselves to it in a way that allows our lives to be taken over by it”.
Willard thus puts the blame squarely on discipleship, or the lack thereof. Part 1, Apprenticed to Jesus deals with this. The existence of the true follower of Jesus is the life of conscious, deliberate discipleship. To be a disciple of Jesus is to be one who “continuously ‘grows in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ’ (2 Peter 3: 18)”. But what makes a disciple? And what is it in our contemporary Christian discipleship that makes it not quite the kind of discipleship that causes the life of Christ to spring up in us? Much of our contemporary understanding of Jesus’ Great Commission involves telling the gospel with the one view of “saving” folks and getting them into heaven. Lifeboat Christianity is not new, but certainly today, it is pervasive. The gospel’s salvific effect is aimed only at getting folks “in”, and involves making converts: “the governing assumption today, among professing Christians, is that we can be ‘Christians’ forever and never become disciples …. And this … is the Great Omission from the ‘Great Commission’ in which the Great Disparity is firmly rooted”.
Yet Jesus’ instructions in his Great Commission are clear: make disciples. Jesus’ idea of discipling is essentially to take a person, and yoke him with his yoke. Thus the disciple must be “a learner, a student, and apprentice—a practitioner”; but more so, he must be a constant apprentice, one given to a purposeful reorientation of his life, behavior and perspective that sets him along on a completely new path and pattern determined by Christ’s yoke. Primarily, discipleship in Jesus’ day meant walking with him in an “attitude of observation, study, obedience, and imitation”. Jesus’ own disciples, having been thus yoked to him, were to then go out and do the same, multiplying not converts for the kingdom, but truly converted men and women with renovated hearts that mirrored Jesus, experiencing the reality of the “kingdom of God” that he spoke of on earth. Such is the spiritual transformation that true discipleship looks for and aims at.
As the teacher, Jesus has been totally subsumed by Jesus the Messiah in today’s cultural Christianity. Yet to forget the excellencies of Christ as rabbi is also to regard his essential soteriological role lightly. If discipleship really means leaving all behind to follow (be apprenticed to) him, then Jesus the Teacher cannot be apart from Jesus the Savior, for it is only the Savior who offers the liberation, boldness and assurance to take the step of accepting the “cross-shaped yoke” of a completely different life (repentance). Cheap grace and easy Christianity which do not exact demands of utter loyalty and a complete turnaround of allegiances are actually more costly, not less: they cost us our abiding peace, a life that is totally imbued with the light and energy of God, a life of spiritual fruitfulness, and power for righteous living. In short, it is the abundant life that Christ promises (John 10: 10) that we shall forfeit if we are not truly his disciples. No wonder then that there is the Great Disparity between our beliefs and our lives. Being apprenticed to Jesus the Teacher and Disciple-maker means therefore that the “cross-shaped yoke … is after all an instrument of liberation and power to those who live in it with him and learn the meekness and lowliness of heart that brings rest to the soul”.
Living and walking with our Teacher, Jesus, opens our eyes to see the wonders of his person, and to understand that when he was on earth, he was simply the best of all human beings. His good heart, his generous compassion, his rapier wit and brilliance, tell us that to choose any other substitute than God in Christ is not only idolatrous, but utterly dreary. Nothing quite compares with Jesus in worth and excellence.
Such a discipled life is founded on grace but requires effort. Grace, contends Willard, is “not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action”. Many Christians mistakenly think that to expend effort and conscious discipline to the work of spiritual transformation is legalistic, and a harking back to salvation by works that formed Paul’s Galatian contention. But they fail to understand that faith without works, as James insists, is dead. The need for action and effort lies in the deliberate and focused working out of our salvation with fear and trembling (sanctification). We are not, however, saved by our efforts. No Christian earns his salvation–that is, rather, the case with sin, the futile ”wages of sin” being “death” (Rom. 6: 23). Christians are reformed and renewed persons who have been saved, through the free gift of grace and forgiveness, in order to perform good works; hence, the need for effort, or “actions of grace”, as Willard cleverly puts it, in the renovation of our lives. This action of grace gives us the keys to enjoy access to God and the abundant life. But what are the resources available to Christians today to make a start where effort is concerned? Willard returns to the spiritual disciplines of classical Christianity, such as silence, solitude, prayer and fasting, worship and study, fellowship and confession. The spiritual disciplines are the divine resources—grace-sustained disciplines—given to everyone who wishes to live a disciplined life.
The rest of the book builds on the premises laid in Part 1. Part 2, Spiritual Formation and the Development of Character expands on the disciplined life. Being consciously and deliberately engaged in our own spiritual formation means, first of all, deciding to do it, setting our hearts and wills to the execution of whatever discipline will effect our spiritual transformation. The practice of the spiritual life is thus founded on practical Christian living. Such determination upholds our obedience to Christ, and as we are formed by the Spirit who enables our effort, we become the persons we want to be in Christ, and our deeds flow naturally from our lives. Part 3, Discipleship of the Soul and the Mind, offers an explanation of sin as a psychological reality, and how the practice of the grace-sustained disciplines facilitates the breaking through of the health of the gospel message into the depths of our beings, thus leading to our transformed (and truest) selves. Part 4, Books on Spiritual Living: Visions and Practices, completes the book by turning to the experiences of Christian mystics. These witnesses who have gone before us stand as those disciples of Jesus, who having taken his yoke upon themselves, have discovered that abundant life of which Jesus spoke. Our response to them (our disciplers in Christ) will determine our own satisfaction with the life of the Kingdom promised us. In the end, their exhortation to us simply underlines Willard’s point: Christ’s call is for sustained apprenticeship; we are to be constant disciples—apprentices of Jesus—as we learn to live out Kingdom life, proving to a disbelieving world that what the gospel promises is “all true …works … is accessible to anyone. And there is nothing in the world to compare”.
