Dallas Willard Quotes

Solitude well practiced will break the power of busyness, haste, isolation, & loneliness.

Of course, we do the righteous deed because of our redemption, not for our redemption.

We are unceasing spiritual beings with an eternal destiny in God's great universe.

Consumer Christianity is now normative. The consumer Christian is one who utilizes the grace of God for forgiveness and the services of the church for special occasions, but does not give his or her life and innermost thoughts, feelings, and intentions over to the kingdom of the heavens. Such Christians are not inwardly transformed and not committed to it.

Every church needs to be able to answer two questions. First, what is our plan for making disciples? And second, does our plan work?

When we receive God's gift of life by relying on Christ, we find that God comes to act with us as we rely on him in our actions.

You have established the earth and it continues. All things stand this day according to your directions. For all things are your servants (Ps. 119:91). God himself loves the earth dearly and never takes his hands off it. And because he loves it and it is good, our care of it is also eternal work and a part of our eternal life.

A great part of the disaster of contemporary life lies in the fact that it is organized around feelings. People nearly always act on their feelings, and think it only right. The will is then left at the mercy of circumstances that evoke feelings. Christian spiritual formation today must squarely confront this fact and overcome it.

Education (the institution) has now adopted values, attitudes, and practices that make any rigorous understanding of the human self and life impossible.

If we are to use our minds rightly, we must live in an attitude of constant openness and learning.

When I left home after graduating high school, I left as a migrant agricultural worker with a Modern Library edition of Plato in my duffel bag. It sounds kind of crazy, but I loved it. I loved the stuff. Before I knew there was a subject called philosophy, I loved it.

Feelings too must be renovated: old ones removed in many cases, or at least thoroughly modified, and new ones installed or at least heightened into a new prominence.

We are invited to make a pilgrimage – into the heart and life of God.

Generally speaking we don't want to hear from the soul. We want it to just do its job. Unfortunately, in a broken world, it also is broken, and we're going to hear from it because many of the ordinary miseries and extraordinary glories of human life are expressions of the state of the soul.

If you have a group of people come together around a vision for real discipleship, people who are committed to grow, committed to change, committed to learn, then a spiritual assessment tool can work.

You cannot trust Jesus in areas in which you don't think him competent.

The open secret of many Bible believing Churches is that a vanishingly small percentage of those talking about prayer and Bible reading are actually doing what they are talking about.

What is reality? The answer Jesus gives to this question is: God and his kingdom. That is what you can count on and what you have to come to terms with.

If we do not make formation in Christ the priority, then we're just going to keep on producing Christians that are indistinguishable in their character from many non-Christians.

At the center of care for the heart is the love of God. This must be the joyful aim of our life.

Make disciples. Surround them in the reality of the Trinity in a fellowship of disciples. Teach them to do everything Jesus says.

Thoughts are the place where we can and must begin to change. There the light of God first begins to move upon us through the word of Christ, and there the divine Spirit begins to direct our will to God and his way.

I was in a fascinating meeting where one man had been in China recently. A Chinese professor has found evidence that Christians reached Western China before 90 AD. Before 90 AD! The idea isn't all that astonishing when we think about it. That's what the disciples thought they were supposed to do! And, I'm sure, the disciples just said, "That's it. Let's go!" And they all wound up dead. But everyone else did too!

In many cases, our need to wonder about or be told what God wants in a certain situation is nothing short of a clear indication of how little we are engaged in His work.

Clinical depression is an extreme form of a 'bad mood.'

The truly powerful ideas are precisely the ones that never have to justify themselves.

In accord with his original intent, the heavenly Father has in fact prepared an individualized kingdom for every person, from the outset of creation.

No matter how lost a person is, they still draw on their body. So the body would be more like the motor.

God 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.

Great faith, like great strength in general, is revealed by the ease of its workings. Most of what we think we see as the struggle OF faith is really the struggle to act as IF we had faith when in fact we do not.

Spiritual formation for the Christian basically refers to the Spirit-driven process of forming the inner world of the human self in such a way that it becomes like the inner being of Christ himself.

A disciple is a person who has decided that the most important thing in their life is to learn how to do what Jesus said to do.

The disciple of Jesus is not the deluxe or heavy-duty model of the Christian-especially padded, textured, streamlined, and empowered for the fast lane on the straight and narrow way. He stands on the pages of the New Testament as the first level of basic transportation in the kingdom of God.

What a child does when not told what to do is the final indicator of what and who that child is.

Happiness in reality consists only in rest, and not in being stirred up. This instinct conflicts with the drive to diversion, and we develop the confused idea that leads people to aim at rest through excitement.

Many 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 ‘good things’ 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 God’s love.

The soul's order is re-established in God through the law.

We cannot handle injustice by finding more ways to impose what is in fact "right" on people. It has to come from the inside. And that's where the church should be working.

Fasting confirms our utter dependence upon God by finding in Him a source of sustenance beyond food.

Spiritual people are not those who engage in certain spiritual practices; they are those who draw their life from a conversational relationship with God.

Ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.

Imagine 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.

Almost everything worth doing in human life is very difficult in its early stages and the good we are aiming at is never available at first, to strengthen us when we seem to need it most.

The greatest danger to the Christian church today is that of pitching its message too low.

In the area of social righteousness we cannot be right on the inside and not do it. We cannot! Of course we have people who pretend that they can, but it simply isn't true.

Our failure to hear His voice when we want to is due to the fact that we do not in general want to hear it, that we want it only when we think we need it.

We don't have to be brilliant.

The greatest need you and I have-the greatest need of collective humanity-is renovation of our heart. That spiritual place with in us from which outlook, choices, and actions come has been formed by a world away from God. Now it must be transformed. Indeed, the only hope of humanity lies in the fact that, as our spiritual dimension has been formed, so it also can be transformed.