17. An Invitation to a "With-God Life" in Jesus

[MUSIC] Emmanuel, God with us. We sing these words over and over during the Christmas season. But have you really thought about what it means for God to be with us? I'm Rebecca Willard-Hetley, and this is the Dallas Willard podcast, where today we're learning from Dallas about living the with God life. In June 2005, Renavari hosted a conference celebrating the publication of their Life with God study Bible. The conference was called The With God Life, the dynamics of Scripture for Christian spiritual transformation. The general session speakers and topics were lined up to give us sequential overview of how God has been with us throughout all of history, preparing the human race for the coming of the Messiah, and then teaching us how to have an interactive relationship with Him as our constant companion and friend. What we're listening to today is the fourth session. Dallas's assignment was to pick up after the Old Testament and Inter-Testimental periods, beginning at the point in history when the world was ready for the arrival of Jesus. The Apostle Paul called this the fullness of time. We'll learn some of the main ways God is with us, some of the barriers to a with God life, and what we can do if we want to live the with God life ourselves. If you'd like to have a copy of the notes that were distributed for this talk, you can find them in our show notes, along with other resources related to the Renavari Conference and Study Bible. We've called today's episode an invitation to The With God Life in Jesus. But for the record, the original title was, no longer along with God as Jesus in the eternal kingdom now, the with God life under the new covenant. Here's Dallas. Well, thank you for coming back. I hope the day is being a great blessing to you. We are talking in these sessions about the with God life. As we see it developing through the scripture, we had a wonderful presentation by a brother, De Silva, a few hours ago on the intertestamental period. And we really do need to think seriously about the importance of that period and what it meant for the coming of Jesus. And we should understand that the fullness of time for becoming Jesus was not until after that period. And that period was one of those times when God was developing among the people of Israel. Some of the sweetest things that we have in the Bible was in those times that the congregational thing that we call the synagogue emerged. And the synagogue was very close to what we would have as a local Christian congregation, except it was more so. It was really local. And all of the family traditions and rituals and the ways in which God was living with the people of Israel without a government to support them. And without a central force that would make everything work out right as it were. And they were of course an oppressed people when Jesus came. But on the other hand, they were immoralously rich people. And it was to the simple people of the outlying part of the land of Israel in those days that Jesus came. That's where He was raised. That's where He was spiritually formed, if you wish. It's important to understand how God works in history and how He uses the time of history to draw near in a way that people and especially individuals can find Him and find Him in their lives and find Him in their lives wherever they are. And that's the real lesson that comes to us in that great hymn book we call the Psalms. Is the immediate availability. And we learned this in the language because it was when the Jews were pushed into exile and they had their temple and their government taken away from them. That they discovered there was someone that they could call the God of Heaven. And that language, the God of Heaven, emerges in the late exile and comes out through Ezra, Nehemiah, and the Restoration, so that when John the Baptist came preaching and saying, the kingdom of the heavens is at hand. And by the way, he did not mean it was about to happen. He meant it had drawn eye where people, individuals, wherever they were could turn into it. See, the use of heaven there, and likewise when we say our Father who art in heaven, we're saying our Father always near us because the heaven from which God was available was the surrounding atmosphere. That is where the Jewish people experienced him. And we see talk about the heavens being opened in various parts of the Bible. And that's just a way of talking about how what is always there, what is there all along comes to be present in a manifest way. See, the presence of God with us in one sense is metaphysical presence. Omniscience and omnipresence and omnipotence as we would talk theologically. God is present. Yes, of course, he's present everywhere. But he's not always manifest everywhere. And it was the manifest presence of the kingdom that the Jews learned and he came down so that when Jesus was baptized in all four gospels, it indicates that the heavens opened. It never says they closed again on him. It was the presence of the heavens to him. And then he brings that and announces it so that in the gospels what you see is people who have no qualifications and no credentials whatsoever simply coming into the kingdom of heaven through their confidence in Jesus. And Jesus is the great boundary breaker always, but he could not do that until the time was right. And God, in His great love and His joy over His people, leads them along and brings them to the place to where Jesus now can come. That's what we want to look at in the time we have this afternoon. Some conversation afterwards, I always like it when what I say gets people to thinking and having questions. And one of the questions that came up was, "How can God be happy and also be sorrowful?" Well, that's one of the wonderful things we learn. Joy is a pervasive sense of well-being and that never escapes from God. It is a pervasive sense of well-being. Jesus was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, but He was also a man of joy. And in His last time with His disciples and teaching them, He imparted to them His joy. He gave them His joy. And they knew that it was real. They didn't say, "Oh, they passed the aspirin." Because they knew He was joyful. Paul learned that secret and you see it in 2 Corinthians 610 where he says, "In that wonderful list where He's talking about all the things that He had suffered," he says, "one of them is sorrowful, yet always rejoicing." Rejoicing in the midst of sorrow. You see, God is so great that we learn the secret of constant joy. And Jesus brings that to us with His message of the kingdom and His life and His death and His triumph in resurrection. The resurrection of Jesus proves that everything that He said about the kingdom of God was true. That you could do absolutely the worst in the kingdom of God with triumph. And we live in that when we say things like nothing can separate us from the love of God, that is in Christ Jesus. See, that's the source of our joy and God is so great that we can rest in that. And we can say things like, "Everything works to good, together, together for good, not individually, but everything works together for good to those who love God and are called into His great purposes." Now the theme we're developing is that God has this issue of how to relate to human beings in such a way as to bring out of history the community of people who will reign. with Him forever and ever. I hope you will go off and sit in a corner for a while and just think about raining with Him forever and ever. Because that's where God is leading us. And I mean you individually. You individually. And that's what we learn here is how to do that. And as we move on in our lives, there will come a time when Jesus will look at you and say, "Well, none good and faithful servant. You've been faithful over little. I will put you in charge of much. Take charge of ten cities is one illustration that Jesus uses." And you see, you have to be in a position where you can then rule those ten cities because you have gained the wisdom and the character that leaves you perfectly free in goodness. So that you never have to stop and think about whether you're going to do something that is not right. Because you've got it right down where your kingdom is coincident with His kingdom and you are ready to do what is right and let Him supply the power. And that is where we should be as we grow in Christ's likeness. There's a little story that is unsure. It must be a pothocryphal. It's too good not to be. It's about a little girl in Sunday school who's asked, "What is a lie?" And she replies, "It's an abomination to God and a very present help in time of trouble." Now you see, she had that down. She knew, "If you're going to run your kingdom, you're going to need some help." "If you don't get it from God, you're going to have to get it from somewhere else." Now, this morning tried to lay out some of the advances that came as Christ approached His covenant people, Abraham and the people after they became a nation in under Moses. And as they go on through David and all the wonderful things that came out of that. And on 53 of your notebook, or of your, whatever you call this handout, you, we can pick up the discussion. Let's just go with the thought. Now, that God is so great, so vast, that if we want to hide from Him, we can only do that if He hides from us. And He cooperates in that project. He gives us the distance to hide. I don't know what you think about what was going on in the garden where God called out to Adam, where art thou. But I would suggest that God was extending to Adam the privilege of hiding. He allowed him to do that. And he extends that privilege to anyone for a while. And the aim is to allow people to come to the place to where they can seek God and find Him. Actually, He finds us. If we seek Him with all our heart, He finds us. And if we understand that that is a part of what is required then we understand many things that are apt to puzzle us, otherwise. For example, why is there such an arrangement as prayer? Now, a lot of people get hung up on that theologically and wind up incapable of praying because they say things like what God knows everything anyway, why am I telling Him? Or they say God's going to do whatever He's going to do. That you see, prayer is one of the first steps in growth in the kingdom of God. When I pray, I am talking with God about what He and I are doing together. And God wants to know what I want to happen. And He wants to know what I really want to happen. And that's why He doesn't pay much attention to dive bombing prayer where you just sort of swoop in and drop your request and get out before you can see what happens. And so He teaches us about a widow who keeps coming to ask for justice from a judge who is one mean booger. He's not respected God. He didn't care anything about you. This woman keeps coming. I was teaching about this just last week in a group and finding a person burst out and said, "Do you mean we're just as supposed to keep bugging God?" And the answer is, yes, that's what we're supposed to do. One of the things God wants to know when we come to pray is do we have some alternatives in mind? [laughter] That's one of the things He's interested in. And you know, we sometimes do that. And that's one reason why He will let us stay with the request sometime in order to work that out of our system if you know what I mean. And that takes a little while. And sometimes He wants to know how badly we will own something. If you remember that in Daniel, the story is told about how the angel came quickly and found Daniel on his knees. And an old saint once said he would have to come very quickly indeed to find most of us on our knees. Man? See, God is interested where our heart is. That's what God looks at. He looks at our hearts. The eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth to show Himself strong. On the behalf of those whose hearts are perfectly set on Him. I have to confess to you that many times when I have prayed my heart has not been perfectly set on Him. See, praying is learning how to live in the Kingdom of God is kingdom praying. That's how the kingdom works. And when we come to the point where we live there, you can just see it buzzing over people. Bill Voswig is here. And if you watch that man when he is in, when he's doing prayer with people, this like something is coming out of him, radiating. And of course, he just is easy and casual. You would think he was cleaning his windshield or something, you know? But that's because Bill has lived there for years. He just breathes that atmosphere. God doesn't have to think about what is in Bill's mind. See, that's where God wants to bring us. Now, we've talked about the blessedness that had been in Israel and how it comes out in the Scriptures. And if you look at my point number one, the blessing and the barrier, the blessing of the old covenant was the identifiable people of God up on the earth, where he could be found by those within and without who would seek him. The barrier was that the Jewish culture had hardened into a form that prevented many people from living the with God live. Many people in Israel, these chilling words of Jesus in Matthew 23, "Woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut off the kingdom of the heavens from men. For you do not enter in yourself, nude nor do you allow those who are entering to go in." Now, I'll tell you that passage, that whole passage and these words in particular really impressed me as a young would-be minister. And I had to ask myself, "Now, am I doing that?" And there was another part of this that says, "You compass land and sea to make one proselyt, and when you've got him, you make yourself twofold more, make him the twofold more the child of hell than you yourselves are." Ooh! You see, the people who thought they were in charge of God at that time had come to the place where they were teaching a system of conformity that was built upon, the truthfully, was built upon the experience of the Jewish people with God. Built upon many good things, but they had turned them into a system of domination. And they left out most people, and the poor, and those who were in real trouble, and those who were imprisoned, and there was just a whole list of people But the…. The authorities basically said, "God really doesn't have anything to do with you." And Jesus comes now, and he's the great barrier-breaker to the "with God" life. And so he comes announcing the availability of the Kingdom of God without any conditions other than putting your confidence in Him. Just put your confidence in Him. And here's the gospel today. Trust Jesus. Trust Jesus. When Don sang that wonderful O Him last night, tell me the old old story. I almost wanted to throw a book at Him because I wanted to sing it so bad myself. That He did it so beautifully that I didn't. You see, that old story is what's that old story about? Remember, of Jesus and His love. Let's say that again, of Jesus and His love. Now that's the great "with God" story in the New Testament, and it's the great story for the rest of human history. Jesus and His love. Jesus comes in the fullness of time. When it's just that meant when there were people who could receive Him for what He was. And He went out among the simple people and gathered them in. You know all of His apostles were simple people who were generally thought to be beyond the blessing of the Jewish tradition. I mean, just think of who they were. With almost no exception, they were plain people. I guess four of them were fishermen. They had a tax collector, a terrorist or two among them. And Jesus, they're the very people that He said blessed to. They're the ones. He didn't say, "Blessed are those with exquisite theological training." He didn't say that. Now you understand the way He's teaching. He's not saying if you've got exquisite theological training, you're out of luck. Just like when He said, "We'll be to you that are rich." He didn't mean that everyone was rich. Because in trouble, what He was saying is, "If you're trusting your riches, you've got real problems." And if we're trusting our exquisite theological education, we're in real trouble. Our doctrinal perfection. Or whatever we make. See, Jesus comes in the fullness of time to simple people and announces the availability of the kingdom. And He does this by opening the kingdom of the heavens to everyone without regard to human characteristics. To the Jew first? Yes. Why? Well, because they were the people who were prepared. He did not do it on the basis of racism. He did it on the basis of who is capable now of receiving what I am bringing and taking it to the world. And He didn't shut others out. This is some wonderful teachings. That beautiful, cyber-finition woman who comes and says, "My daughter is in desperate need." And Jesus pushes her away initially. If you want to know why He pushed her away as He didn't want to start an outbreak up there and have to deal with the effects of that. He had His hands full. He had a ministry plan. And actually He came up there to get away for a while, and His main purpose was to train some people so that when He was gone, they could carry that message on because they had to go to the whole world, you know. So it wasn't like Jews are better than Gentiles. It's God has been working on this bunch of people for centuries. And now there's some who are ready to receive Me and let this spread across the whole earth and bring the with God life to everyone without exception. So Jesus announces repent for the kingdom of the heavens as it hath. Say that's like someone I didn't know the building I'm walking through here and someone would say, "Turn for the elevators are at hand." That's what it's like. He said, "That wouldn't be like saying, 'Well, the elevators are about to happen and maybe they won't and they'll go away if you don't receive them.'" No, no. The King Jesus didn't bring the kingdom of God into existence. He made it available to everyone. Whosoever will may come. Now when you think about it, you go back and you look at the pages, the gospel you'll see that that's really what's going on there. Lappers, Romans. People with health problems that made them unclean. Tax collectors. See the kingdom of God was with Jesus. It was working with Him. And that is why we call Him a manual. God with us. He is the God with life. The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, He said, because He anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. By the way, the gospel to the poor was and you're going to get rich. That wasn't it. It was a lot better than that. The big thing was that He had good news with the poor and no one else did. See His news was, they too can live in the kingdom of God, and then they may get rich or they may not. You see, in human affairs, we have to understand that the only people who are really well off are people who are alive in the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is the range of God's effective will. It's where what God wants done is done. And we're invited to live there now. And when He says, "Repent," that word "methanoeti" means, "think about your thinking," who is that guy that talks about your stink and thinking? Well, that's pretty true for most human thinking, because most human thinking is organized around how can I get my way and run my kingdom? There's a better way. That's methanoeti. It doesn't mean you get down and cry. You probably will if you start thinking about how wrong you've been. But the main thing is that you say, "This is wonderful news I can now live in the kingdom of God." And all of Jesus' teachings are predicated on that. That's why all that talk about birds and flowers and all that. That's just not holy nonsense. That's sober reality. And in every respect when we talk about the with God's life, we have to make sure that we're carrying this beyond flowery language and that we're referring to something that really happens, that we know what it is. And that is the interactive presence of God in our life. So grace is God acting in my life. That's what grace is. Of course it's unmerited favor, but just to say it's unmerited favor doesn't tell you what it is. God acting in my life is grace. That's living life in the kingdom of God. That's what it is to have eternal life is to be living interactively with God. Real knowledge always refers to interactive relation, never what we call head knowledge. And when Jesus says, "This is eternal life," that they would know you, the only true God in Jesus Christ who now has sent in John 173, he's referring to interactive relationship. I bring my life into God's life. He calls me and I do that by trusting Jesus. I know the kingdom of God by stepping into the teachings of Jesus by doing what he said. That's how I know it. In knowledge is interactive relationship. So Jesus says, "Bless those who curse you." Now I want to know the kingdom of God. I do that. And God is with me and helps me learn how to do that so that that is automatically what I do as I am transformed spiritually transformed into the likeness of Christ. Grace is interactive relationship. To when Peter says in 2 Peter 3, 18, "Grow in the grace and in the knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ," he means, "Grow in your kingdom in her actions with Jesus." And we can't take a lot of that. And so normally we don't get to see it happen until we look back. And then we can see it. Now we step forward by faith, trusting it. And just like Jesus, we can say the Spirit of the Lord is upon me because I have been an anointed to preach gospel to the poor. He sent me to proclaim release to the captive, recovery of sight to the blind, and set free those who were downtrodden to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord. Now Jesus was with people in a simple ways, and many of them couldn't see him. So some said, "This is the carpenter," or "This is the carpenter's son," which all comes out to the same thing in that particular part of the world in time. He's a carpenter. Jesus is a carpenter. And he moves into his ministry, and some people are still saying he's just a carpenter. And he's beginning to manifest the kingdom of God and deliver people through the presence of the kingdom. And then they say, "Well, he asks one day, you remember who do men say that I am?" They ran through the teaching of the, or talking about what people were saying. One of the prophets, John the Baptist, risen from the dead. And this is where Peter had his inspiration. It's you, you, the Messiah, you're the one that was promised. You've come to take charge of human life and human history. Unfortunately he didn't understand what he was saying, but at least that was a start, you know? And that's very instructive about how God deals with us, how many of us knew what we were saying when we said things about Jesus or how many of us knew what we were saying when we got married. Thank goodness we didn't. We had no idea of the wonder that was going to come to pass in our lives. And the Lord blessed it, you see. The Lord blessed it. And that's one of the greatest gifts that we ever receive. But the Lord makes it happen. You see, that's where we step out into the kingdom. Jesus was with the people and he opened the door and let them find him. One of my favorite passages in all the Scripture is this little passage in Luke 15 that I quote here. Now all the tax gathers and the sinners were coming near to him to listen to him. And both the Pharisees and the scribes began to grumble, saying this man receives sinners and eats with them. That's Jesus with us. That's how he comes out. I love that picture. I think about their faces. I think about what Jesus must have looked like as he spoke to these people. I think about what made them come. Isn't that interesting that they came to hear and they gathered around him? And I think, "Oh God, help me to speak like that." And then are these folks over here grumbling? They had it right. And they thought maybe he didn't have it right? Well, actually he couldn't have had it right because you see the barriers. Jesus is the great barrier breaker. And the reason that people love to hear him was because all of the things, that the burdens that had been laid on them, all the things that they had been told about God. And how he would shut them out and be mean to them. Jesus was saying, "No, it's not like that." And all this story is running that way. You know that passage in Luke 15 is about the lost sheep and the lost coin and the lost son. So a new kind of community emerges around Jesus. Jesus creates a new place of God upon the earth. They are a people defined by the fact that they are in the kingdom. And Paul literally talks in some passage as if they were a new kind of humanity and the truth of the matter it is. And there's no external arrangement here that is necessary. External arrangements are important. They're fine. But they're not essential. And so he tells them very simply, "Where two or three are gathered together in my name, I am in the midst." See, that's the presence of the kingdom. Where two or three are gathered together. Now in my name means for my sake and with my resources. And where that's present, I am in the midst. A new commandment I give you that you love one another even as I have loved you. He did not leave love to float free. See in the present world people like to talk about love, but you have to measure it by Jesus' kind of love. That was not just measured by the cross. Jesus lived a cross life. And the cross was a natural outcome of the life that he had lived. And he said, "By all by this all men will know that you are my students, my apprentices, my disciples, if you have that kind of love." Why? Because you can't learn it anywhere else in order to move into that kind of love. You have to have Jesus' vision of God and who God is. And you have to keep company with Jesus. You have to let him teach you how to do that because you can't even imagine what it's like apart from that. And they, that is his students, that they may all be one in his kind of love. Even as thou father, Argonne, me and I and thee, that they may also be in us that the world may steadfastly believe that you did send me. Maybe this is the final move in God's coming to humanity is Jesus. And when people see Jesus and they see the people around him who have this character, what did they say? They say, "This is it. This is it." Now there's some who will still say no. But generally speaking, when people see that, they recognize the God who has come to life in Jesus and is willing to live in them. So we have to think about the great commission in the light of all of this. I think you're very familiar with it. Jesus says that he speaks for himself now post-resurrection. I've been given say over everything in heaven and earth go make disciples. So what do we do now in the will-God life? We induct people into the same life that lives in us. We really don't have to work hard at that. What we want to do is let that life dwell in us. It will speak for itself. You can be sure. Where it becomes hard to get people to become Christians is where you have Christians who aren't Christian. Then you've got a real problem. But it will speak for itself if we will simply allow it to grow and process us so that we are living easily in the life of Jesus Himself. And these groups of disciples then bring the light to the Gentiles and they fulfill the Abrahamic promise for all the families of the earth. And the central outcome of all of this is masses of people who routinely and easily do the things that characterize Christ. See the resource is, "I am with you always." I who have say over everything in heaven and earth, "See that's with God life, right?" I mean, that's what He said. He sends them out to do this and says, "I'm with you always. I'm with you." And being with us, then we see the effects of the kingdom of God with our action. So mission is in something that we have to add on. It is a natural effect. Of course we have to choose to do things. I'm not saying that, but we don't make it happen. We simply live the with God life where we are in everything that we do. We learn that and then mission naturally comes out of that. Well, now as we come to close, I want to just summarize some of the ways that God is with us. And that's so. on page 55 of your notebook, 0.8. What are some of the ways that God is with us? Now I want at this point to reduce it to something you can test and know about as you live your life, because all the talk about the with God life amounts to nothing if we don't do it. One way God is with us is in blind faith. To live and act in blind faith is not a terrible thing. And sometimes the faith we have is based on the faith of another person. I probably a lot of you here today are here today because of your grandmother's faith, or your grandfather's, or your mother's, or your father's, or someone you knew. I know that certainly was true in my case. I could never have not believed in God having known my grandmother. Psychologically impossible. To you. You live around people like that, and God is with you, even though you may not experience it as such. But thank God that's not all there is to it. He's also with us insensible presence. And I think most of you will know what that's like. You have a sense of God being with you. And that is one of the strongest things that can then carry you forward as you go on as the sense that God is with you. You sometimes feel as if the angels were breathing down your shirt collar. That's one way that God is with us. It's a good thing. Also He speaks to us. And we may have to learn what that is like. But that's another way that He's with us. And when you look at that whole tradition of the Bible, old and New Testament, you see that over and over again. And everyone can learn what that is like and recognize when it is God that is communicating with you. And that's a great thing to have. Richard illustrated it last night a couple of times. And we all want to be sure that we know when God speaks and that we listen. He doesn't, it isn't a message, a moment kind of thing. Many people mess this part of it up by trying to turn it into that. But God will speak. And that's one of the ways that He is with us. Lastly, He is with us by acting with us. Can you tell when someone is acting with you? If you're trying to lift a load and carry it and all of a sudden it's much lighter. So someone else has taken a hold of it. When Jesus talked about His burden being light and His yoke being easy, that's exactly what He's talking about. The yoke He's talking about isn't something that's in an egg. It's a way of combining the effort of two work animals, oxen or horses or mules or something of that sort or goats, so that matter, though they can't really pull very much. You see, we step into His yoke and we find that His yoke is easy and His burden is light. And that we know His presence through that. We lay down the burden of making things come out the way we think they're supposed to do and we let Him pull the load. We make effort, but we don't try to control things and make them happen. Now it is true that we can't do anything without Jesus, as He said, without me you can do nothing. But remember, it's also true that if you do nothing it will be without Him. See, the ball is in our court. And so we trust Jesus for the outcome and we go ahead and we know the with God's life in this way. Actually I think number one there with us in blind faith and with us by acting with us are the two main ways in which we know the presence of God in our life. And when we know that we're going to look back and see what God has done. And we will say, "I don't know how that happened." But really we know it is because we are living the with God's life. Now if you want to live the with God's life, there are some simple things you can do. First of all, decide to do what you know God wants you to do. And we can say here, just stop thinking about it. One of the few places that Jesus got manifestly angry was a synagogue in which He asked a bunch of people whether or not He should heal a man on the Sabbath and they had to think about it. You remember that? See, you just want to. if there's something good and something right, you just do it. And on this point you want to learn to stay out of temptation. You know, if you want to avoid wrongdoing to stay out of temptation and avoiding wrongdoing will be easy. And if you're still thinking, "That's so much fun." You need to look closer at the kingdom. Say, "Temptation is accepted in many people's lives, and that's the mistake." Get off the conveyor belt before it starts towards the buzzsaw. Just get off. And we can learn to do that as we walk with Jesus. Secondly, undertake everything you do on God's behalf. God says whatever you do in Word or deed do all in the name of the Lord. Jesus giving thanks through Him to God the Father. Now, that's the outcome of a marvelous passage on discipleship in together in Christ. But we can decide to do that. We're just going to do what we do on behalf of Jesus and we're going to count on Him to bring it to pass. Thirdly, you can set the Lord always before you. David says, "I have set the Lord always before me. He is at my right hand. I shall not be moved. We can choose to do that." We can learn to memorize Scripture. Our minds should simply be a wash in Scripture. And you know, all that stuff on television looks so silly when you put it up against Scripture. And I never get enough. I have tapes in my car. I listen to collotions and Ephesians. And every time I listen to a fresh water running over me. And my soul just blesses the Lord for the riches of this. And then you memorize a lot of Scripture. Remember it memorized passages. Work through the 23rd Psalm and the Lord's Prayer several times a day. Now I'm talking about what we can do practically to live the with God life. We can do that. Our first freedom is where we will place our mind. And if we place our mind on God and keep it off of all the other stuff that could distract us, we will find that God is with us and we're at living with God life. You know, there are so many hard events that can come to us in life. And we may be walking to the age with people. We may have a loved one who is descending into the valley of Alzheimer's or cancer or death. And we may be going there. So many people around us need us to walk the with God life with them. And we need to have the confidence in Jesus who comes and breaks all barriers and lives right where we are and gives us the love and the character and the power to glorify God and to bless human beings all around us simply because we are living a life with God. May the Lord bless this to us, make it real to us, put it in operational terms if you wish so that we can know the constant presence of the kingdom. Thank you very much. Thanks for joining us. You can learn more from Dallas about this topic and much more by visiting deweller.org. You'll find a wide variety of resources and learning opportunities there, including personal growth resources, small group studies, online courses, retreats and conferences. We also have an 18 month discipleship community called the School of Kingdom Living that you might be interested in. New cohorts begin every October. Visit us on your favorite social media channels for thought-provoking quotes throughout the week and visit our Facebook group, Dallas Willard is my homeboy, to discuss the things you're learning on your journey with Jesus. This podcast is brought to you by Dallas Willard Ministries and the family of Dallas Willard. Our producer is Tim Williams. Until next time, remember who you are. You are an unceasing spiritual being. with an eternal destiny in God's great universe. [BLANK_AUDIO]