Dallas Willard Quotes

Discipline, strictly speaking, is activity carried on to prepare us indirectly for some activity other than itself. We do not practice the piano to practice the piano well, but to play it well.

Discipleship is the process of becoming who Jesus would be if he were you.

The greatest challenge the church faces today is to be authentic disciples of Jesus.

The assumption of Jesus' program for his people on earth was that they would live their lives as his students and co-laborers.

And the God who hears is also the one who speaks. He has spoken and is still speaking. Humanity remains his project, not its own, and his initiatives are always at work among us.

Crooked thinking, unintentional or not, always favors evil.

The ultimate freedom we have as human beings is the power to select what we will allow or require our minds to dwell upon.

We must understand that God does not "love" us without liking us - through gritted teeth - as "Christian" love is sometimes thought to do. Rather, out of the eternal freshness of his perpetually self-renewed being, the heavenly Father cherishes the earth and each human being upon it. The fondness, the endearment, the unstintingly affectionate regard of God toward all his creatures is the natural outflow of what he is to the core - which we vainly try to capture with our tired but indispensable old word "love".

Those who have been touched by forgiveness and new life and have thus entered into God's rule become, like Jesus, bearers of that rule.

When we pass through what we call death, we do not loose the world. Indeed, we see it for the first time as it really is.

There is no avoiding the fact that we live at the mercy of our ideas This is never more true than with our ideas about God.

I do emphasize that we cannot just get out of the Bible a definition of the soul.

The kingdom of God is the true ecology of the human soul.

The organized churches must become schools of spiritual discipline where Christians are taught how to own without treasuring (Matt. 6:21); how to possess without, like the "rich young ruler," being possessed (Mark 10:22); how to live simply, even frugally, though controlling great wealth and power.

We have churches full of people who profess all kinds of stuff that they don't believe. They think that by professing it they're doing something good. Really, they're just deluding themselves.

The idea that everything would happen exactly as it does regardless of whether we pray or not is a specter that haunts the minds of many who sincerely profess belief in God. It makes prayer psychologically impossible, replacing it with dead ritual at best.

Today it is the skeptics who are the social conformists, though because of powerful intellectual propaganda they continue to enjoy thinking of themselves as wildly individualistic and unbearably bright.

Today we are apt to downplay or disregard the importance of good thinking to strong faith; and some, disastrously, even regard thinking as opposed to faith.

Blessing is the projection of good into the life of another.

The needed transformation is very largely a matter of replacing in ourselves those idea systems of evil (and their corresponding cultures) with the idea system that Jesus Christ embodied and taught and with a culture of the kingdom of God.

It would be of course a low voltage spiritual life in which prayer was chiefly undertaken as a discipline, rather than as a way of co-labouring with God to accomplish good things and advancing his Kingdom purposes.

The effect of standing before God by welcoming him before us will be the transformation of our entire life.

Unless you have already put God first, for example, what you will have to do to be financially secure, impress other people, or fulfill your desires will invariably lead you against God's wishes. That is why the first of the Ten Commandments, “You shall have no gods who take priority over me,” is the first of the Ten Commandments.

What you present as the gospel will determine what you present as discipleship. If you present as the gospel what is essentially a theory of the atonement, and you say, If you accept this theory of the atonement, your sins are forgiven, and when you die you will be received into heaven, there is no basis for discipleship.

The greatest issue facing the world today, with all its heartbreaking needs, is whether those who, by profession or culture, are identified as ‘Christians’ will become disciples – students, apprentices, practitioners – of Jesus Christ, steadily learning from him how to live the life of the Kingdom of the Heavens into every corner of human existence.

Play is the creation of value that is not necessary.

God's aim in human history is the creation of an inclusive community of loving persons, with himself included as its primary sustainer and most glorious inhabitant.

It's a wonderful thing to do an inductive study with our concordance.

Jesus, Willard says, “does not call us to do what he did, but to be as he was, permeated with love. Then the doing of what he did and said becomes the natural expression of who we are in him.

What is thinking? It is the activity of searching out what must be true, or cannot be true, in the light of the given facts or assumptions.

Two ways of thinking: Human kingdom and human cleverness or God's kingdom and God's cleverness

Many Christians were suddenly prepared to look at traditional methods of spiritual formation. They could not help but see that spiritual growth and vitality stem from what we actually do with our lives, from the habits we form, and from the character that results.

In the story of the good Samaritan, Jesus not only teaches us to help people in need; more deeply, he teaches us that we cannot identify who “has it”, who is “in” with God, who is “blessed”, by looking at exteriors of any sort. That is a matter of the heart. There alone the kingdom of the heavens and human kingdoms great and small are knit together. Draw any cultural or social line you wish, and God will find his way beyond it.

The cautious faith that never saws off a limb on which it is sitting, never learns that unattached limbs may find strange unaccountable ways of not falling.

Understanding is the basis of care. What you would take care of you must first understand, whether it be a petunia or a nation.

Kingdom obedience is kingdom abundance

There is no cure for the social battles that we fight in our culture - and there's so much grief around race, gender, and so forth - until you eliminate "withdrawal" and "attack" and replace them with "acceptance" and "help." Once you do that and not just talk about it, these other issues will fall into place quickly. They will not fall into place at all unless it is done this way.

The aim of spiritual formation is not behavior modification but the transformation of all those aspects of you and me where behavior comes from...Circumcision of the heart.

When the will is enslaved to a desire, it will in turn enslave the mind.

Sometimes we get caught up in trying to glorify God by praising what He can do and we lose sight of the practical point of what He actually does do.

Repent, for the kingdom of the heavens is at hand' (Matt 3:2, 4:17, 10:7). This is a call for us to reconsider how we have been approaching our life, in light of the fact that we now, in the presence of Jesus, have the option of living within the surrounding movements of God's eternal purposes, of taking our life into his life.

Your mind will really talk to you when you begin to deny fulfillment to your desires, and you will find how subtle and shameless it is.

That's the secret of Jesus. You watch Jesus and you see he never did "withdraw" and then "attack." All of the time people wanted him to do it and in many ways, but he would not. Then to the body of believers he said, "This will show everyone that you are my disciples, if you love one another," but he had already said, "Love one another as I have loved you." So that's the model.

If we are right on the inside, we will address these issues straight-forwardly and take a stand on them, and, if necessary, die for them. We will be that committed.

When we think of "taking Christ into the workplace" or "keeping Christ in the home," we are making our faith into a set of special acts. The "specialness" of such acts just underscores the point - that being a Christian, being Christ's isn't thought of as a normal part of life.

My central claim is that we can become like Christ by doing one thing -- by following him in the overall style of life he chose for himself.

The relation of redemption and sanctification would be the ongoing relationship between the driver and God who is directing her. Now, if God isn't directing him, he may go wild and do all sorts of things criminal and crazy.

Obedience to Christ is the easy way, take my yoke.