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.
Dallas WillardIn thus sending out his trainees, [Jesus] set afoot a perpetual world revolution: one that is still in process and will continue until God's will is done on earth as it is in heaven.... He has chosen to accomplish this with and, in part, through his students.
Dallas WillardMany people have found prayer impossible because they thought they should only pray for wonderful but remote needs they actually had little or no interest in or even knowledge of. Prayer simply dies from efforts to pray about โgood thingsโ that honestly do not matter to us. The way to get to meaningful prayer for those good things is to start by praying for what we are truly interested in. The circle of our interests will inevitably grow in the largeness of Godโs love.
Dallas WillardGod inducts us into the eternal kind of life that flows through himself. He does this first by bringing that life to bear upon our needs, and then by diffusing it throughout our deeds - deeds done with expectation that he and his Father will act with and in our actions.
Dallas WillardHe [Peter after the resurrection] now understood that he and the church were to exercise a transcendent power that did not depend upon having a kingdom or government in any human sense, for it was literally a "God government" in which they were participants (Acts 1:6-8).
Dallas WillardSo when Jesus directs us to pray, โThy kingdom come,โ 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: โOn earth as it is in heaven.โ With this prayer we are invoking it, as in faith we are acting it, into the real world of our daily existence
Dallas WillardImagine that you had discovered gold or oil on a certain property, and no one else knew about it. Can you see yourself being sad and feeling deprived for having to gather all your resources and sacrifice them in order to buy that property? Hardly. Now you know what it is like to deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Jesus.
Dallas Willard