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What to Do with the Beatitudes
Dallas Willard’s handling of the Beatitudes in The Divine Conspiracy simply flipped my world upside down. I had not considered his approach before. He is probably not original to the thought, but the first time I saw this approach it was from him. How do we see the Beatitudes in Matthew 5? I remember the title to an old Robert…
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The Great Beauty of Jesus
Moving my way through The Divine Conspiracy as a refresher, I gain wonderful reminders of how to communicate exactly why I follow Christ. It is not to punch my ticket and get out of hell. It is not to save the world or solve the issues of poverty. Jesus, quite frankly, is the smartest person who ever lived. He is,…
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Sin-Management and Getting Back to the Gospel
When we get more obsessed with what people do or don’t do, we’ve moved into the gospel of sin management. We are “white-knuckling” our way through life. If you’ve ever been a bit afraid on that first huge hill the first time on a roller coaster, you understand “white-knuckling.” You grab onto the hand bar in front of you and…
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The Goal Should Be LIFE Transformation
More and more in American Christianity we struggle with what “success” is all about. As Willard has pointed out, on one side it would seem to be “the decision.” We pray and at that point in time we punch our ticket to stay out of hell. The goal then becomes for the Church help as many people “punch that ticket”…
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The Gospel of Sin-Management
The process of following Christ is often thought of in terms of outward change. There should be something that look different in the believer. On the “conservative” side of Christianity, sin management is found in having our sins forgiven. (Maybe you’ve seen a bumper sticker that says, “Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven.”) On the “liberal” side of Christianity, sin management…
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Save Us From Bumper Sticker Theology
We have so much information thrown at us every day we don’t know how to sift out what is meaningful and what is meaningless. As a result, we are reduced to trying to get our “message” out in short, pithy ways that capture some sort of attention, but ultimately fails to communicate what we really want to say. We’ve become…
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Back to the Man Who Started It All
The whole concept of “Apprentice2Jesus” arose out of reading Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy. Actually, it took two readings of the book, plus preaching on it, before I began to get what he was saying. (I’m an incredibly slow learner.) But as I began to get my head around what he was saying, I knew this was what my heart…
Tag: Divine Conspiracy
