i am posting an excerpt from Willard’s book that contrasts the life of death versus the living kingdom of god to which we are called:
“. . . the souls of human beings are left to shrivel and die on the plains of life because they are not introduced into the environment for which they were made, the living kingdom of eternal life. to counteract this we must develop a straightforward presentation, in word and life, of the reality of life now under god’s rule, through reliance upon the word and person of jesus. in this way we can naturally become his students or apprentices. we can learn from him how to live our lives as he would live them if he were we. we can enter his eternal kind of life now [Italics added]. . . . it is universally agreed by new testament scholars that the central theme of the teaching of jesus was the kingdom of god. . . . to be born ‘from above,’ in new testament language, means to be interactively [italics added] joined with a dynamic, unseen system of divine reality in the midst of which all of humanity moves about . . . that, of course, is ‘the kingdom among us..”