Dear friends,

My copy of Dallas Willard’s The Divine Conspiracy, pages yellowing with years, is beginning to look like the classic it is. 

The book turns twenty-five today. I got mine shortly after its publication, after I heard a pastor passing along its life-altering messages: 

• The eternal kind of life starts now, 
• the Kingdom of God is a present reality, 
• the Gospel is more than sin management, and 
• Jesus is not only our Divine Savior but our Brilliant Teacher.

These ideas — not new but forgotten — were brought forward in the book with fresh insight. They changed the course of many lives, including mine.

Here I need to pause and tell a story, because Willard and this book have taken on mythic proportions in certain circles, and the last thing Dallas would want is for people to become ​“Willardites” who enshrine him and his ideas.

Years ago, I met with a young charismatic pastor who loved people well and taught with surprising alignment to The Divine Conspiracy. I asked him if he’d ever read Willard. ​“No,” he replied, ​“but I’ve met those people.” It wasn’t a compliment. Probing further, I discovered he knew people who reveled in Willard’s ideas but lacked intimacy with God and love for others.

That possibility — that we will geek out about Willard’s ideas instead of living intothem with Jesus — gives me pause about mentioning him yet again in this newsletter.

Yet I do so because Dallas, like no one else I’ve read, articulates the Way of Jesus with spiritual depth, intellectual rigor, down-to-earth warmth, and real-world practicality. And he backed up what he wrote by a life that, while not perfect, radiated with humility and love.

Minds greater than mine believe Willard’s work will still be read 500 years from now. That puts it in rare company. Whether or not that happens, I can say for certain that there are few books more worth our time today than The Divine Conspiracy—especially if we read with the mind and the heart, in conversation with the Holy Spirit, ready not just to admire Willard’s words but to respond to the invitation of Jesus found within them.