Dallas Willard Quotes

Human beings are at their core defined by what they worship rather than primarily by what they think, know, or believe. That is bound up with the central Augustinian claim that we are what we love.

God is the treasure, and where the treasure is, there is the heart. By this we may test our love to God. What are our thoughts most upon? Can we say we are ravished with delight when we think on God? Have our thoughts got wings? Are they fled aloft? Do we contemplate Christ and glory? A sinner crowds God out of his thoughts. He never thinks of God, unless with horror, as the prisoner thinks of the judge.

Jesus offers himself as God's doorway into the life that is truly life. Confidence in him leads us today, as in other times, to become his apprentices in eternal living. "Those who come though me will be safe," he said. "They will go in and out and find all they need. I have come into their world that they may have life, and life to the fullest.

The humility that cringes in order that reproof may be escaped or favor obtained is as unchristian as it is profoundly immoral.

As we reach out to God, we get another source of strength.

The most important thing in your life is not what you do; it's who you become. That's what you will take into eternity.

Everyone receives spiritual formation, just as everyone gets an education. The only question is whether it is a good one or a bad one. We need to take a conscious, intentional hand in the developmental process. We need to understand what the formation of the human spirit is, and how it can best be done as Christ would have it done. This is an indispensable aspect of developing a psychology that is adequate to human life.

The Bible defines almost nothing because it isn't a book for scholars and philosophers or free thinkers. It's a book for people who want help. It's primarily a book for pastors. They're the ones that can use it in a way so that it actually achieves its purpose.

The first act of love is always the giving of attention.

Now, of course, you have guidance devices and all sorts of things. The soul would be more like the way this is all hooked together, a system of coordination.

As we mature in Christ, it is actually possible to outgrow fear.

The revolution of Jesus is in the first place and continuously a revolution of the human heart or spirit...it is a revolution of character which proceeds by changing people from the inside through ongoing personal relationship to God in Christ and to one another. It is one that changes their ideas, beliefs, feelings, and habits of choice, as well as their bodily tendencies and social relations. It penetrates to the deepest layer of their soul. External, social arrangements may be used to this end, but they are not the end, nor are they a fundamental part of the means

In Spiritual formation we are aiming at a character and life that is so shaped that the deeds of Christ routinely and easily come from what is inside.

The law of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul.

My central claim is that we become like Christ by doing one thing-by following Him in the overall style of life He chose for Himself. If we have faith in Christ, we must believe that He knew how to live. We can, through faith and grace, become like Christ by practicing the types of activities He engaged in, by arranging our whole lives around the activities He Himself practiced in order to remain constantly at home in the fellowship of the Father.

We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. You can almost be as stupid as a cabbage as long as you doubt.

The people to whom we minister and speak will not recall 99 percent of what we say to them, but they will never forget the kind of persons we are.

We Christians should be aware that there's something at stake in cultural participation that we wouldn't have been concerned about if all we did was worry about the messages in culture.

What we think is, in the adult person, very much a matter of what we allow ourselves to think, and what we feel is very much a matter of what we allow ourselves to feel. Moreover, what we think is very much a matter of what we wish and seek to think, and what we feel is very much a matter of what we wish and seek to feel. In short, the condition of our mind is very much a matter of the direction in which our will is set.

Our relations with others are not external. They enter into our very identity. And that's why people struggle with them so.

In solitude we find psychic distance, the perspective from which we can see, in the light of eternity, the created things that trap, worry, and oppress us.

The idea of having faith in Jesus has come to be totally isolated from being his apprentice and learning how to do what he said.

Many people get what they need from church attendance because the Word is preached, and the rituals are carried on, and God works, but it's drift more than anything else. And that's why the churches keep reaching for some programmatic formula that will make people come and give money. It's just really very sad.

It's just stunning to watch churches struggle to get mission statements when there it is, the Great Commission, and they should simply do what it says.

There is absolutely nothing in what Jesus himself or his early followers taught that suggests you can decide just to enjoy forgiveness at Jesus' expense and have nothing more to do with him.

"Spirituality" wrongly understood or pursued is a major source of human misery and rebellion against God.

The Great Commission is still the mission statement of the Church.

One of the hardest things in the world is to be right and not hurt other people with it.

If we allow everything access to our mind, we are simply asking to be kept in a state of mental turmoil or bondage. For nothing enters the mind without having an effect for good or evil.

To depart from righteousness is to choose a life of crushing burdens, failures, and disappointments, a life caught in the toils of endless problems that are never resolved.

The command is "Do no work." Just make space. Attend to what is around you. Learn that you don't have to DO to BE. accept the grace of doing nothing. Stay with it until you stop jerking and squirming.

I'm practicing the discipline of not having to have the last word.

If we reject the Christian answer, we still have the problem. We're going to adopt some alternative, because the questions will not go away, the questions of, "What kind of person am I becoming?" and "What is my role in that?" and so on.

Individually the disciple and friend of Jesus who has learned to work shoulder to shoulder with his or her Lord stands in this world as a point of contact between heaven and earth, a kind of Jacob’s ladder by which the angels of God may ascend from and descend into human life. Thus the disciple stands as an envoy or a receiver by which the kingdom of God is conveyed into every quarter of human affairs.

We don't save our soul and leave our emotions and our feelings and our body and all the rest of it out. That's just a way of talking that emphasizes the soul is so fundamental that we can, in some cases, treat it as the whole person because it actually is the thing that integrates all of these aspects of the self and makes them work together. Now, I don't think we can find a passage in the Bible that says that. We have to read and study how it addresses the soul, and we then see that it is the deepest, most vital part of the human self.

The union Christ had with the Father was the greatest that we can conceive of in this life-if indeed we can conceive of it.

Spiritual formation cannot, in the nature of the case, be a 'private' thing, because it is a matter of whole-life transformation. You need to seek out others in your community who are pursuing the renovation of the heart.

So when Jesus directs us to pray, “Thy kingdom come,” he does not mean we should pray for it to come into existence. Rather, we pray for it to take over at all points in the personal, social, and political order where it is now excluded: “On earth as it is in heaven.” With this prayer we are invoking it, as in faith we are acting it, into the real world of our daily existence

God will meet us and help us.

You really can't justify anything else but giving your whole attention to spiritual formation in Christ.

The transformation of the social world is at its heart the transformation of personal relations. That's the key to transforming society in the larger arena.

When [Satan] undertook to draw Eve away from God, he did not hit her with a stick, but with an idea. It was with an idea that God could not be trusted and that she must act on her own to secure her own well-being.

History has brought us to the point where the Christian message is thought to be essential concerned only with how to deal with sin: with wrongdoing or wrong-being and its effects. Life, our actual existence, is not included in what is now presented as the heart of the Christian message, or it is included only marginally.

If you don't have a teacher you can't have a disciple.

Spiritual transformation into Christ-likeness in not going to happen unless we act... What transforms us is the will to obey Jesus Christ.

Grace is not opposed to effort; it's opposed to earning.

The true saint burns grace like a 747 burns fuel on takeoff.

When Jesus directs us to pray, "Thy kingdom come," he does not mean we should pray for it to come into existence.