Dallas Willard Quotes

Suppose our failures occur, not in spite of what we are doing, but precisely because of it.

Projects of personal transformation rarely succeed by accident, drift, or imposition.

In one way or another, it is a common mistake to think transformation is all in the will. And it isn't! It's in the mind - how we think, what occupies our minds, and so forth. It's in our feelings. It's in our body.

God has yet to bless anyone except where they actually are, and if we faithlessly discard situation after situation, moment after moment, as not being "right," we will simply have no place to receive his kingdom into our life.

Think of the soul as the computer system that runs the whole thing. And then the spirit is the executive center. It's the faculty of choice. And then you want that faculty governed by the truth of God and the Spirit of God.

Grace is opposed to earning, but not to effort.

It's very difficult to be right about something without hurting someone with it.

Discipleship' as a term has lost its content, and this is one reason why it has been moved aside. I've tried to redeem the idea of discipleship, and I think it can be done; you have to get it out of the contemporary mode.

To withhold our bodies from religion is to exclude religion from our lives.

You can no more trust Jesus and not intend to obey him than you could trust your doctor and your auto mechanic and not intend to follow their advice. If you don't intend to follow their advice, you simply don't trust them. Period.

You have been given a ministry and your ministry is not your job and your job and your ministry are two things and beyond that is your work in life which isn't the same as your ministry and then beyond that is your life. And this is what God is more interested in than your work or your ministry-what He gets out of your life is the person you become. And He has plans for you, and these are long-range plans.

There is knowledge of God and the spiritual nature of man, as well as other types of reality..., that are not reducible to the world dealt with by the so-called "natural" sciences. The idea that knowledge - and, of course, reality - is limited to that world is the single most destructive idea on the stage of life today.

Feelings are good servants, but they are disastrous masters.

The acid test for any theology is this: Is the God presented one that can be loved, heart, soul, mind, and strength? ... If it fails to set a lovable God--a radiant, happy, friendly, accessible, and totally competent being--before ordinary people, we have gone wrong

The real issue relating to exclusiveness is whether or not the Christian actually has a relationship with God, a presence of God, which non-Christians do not have. Apart from Christian spiritual formation as described here, I believe there is little value in claiming exclusiveness for the Christian way.

And God has set up prayer in such a way that, if you want to explain it away, you can. That's the human mind. God set it up like that for a reason, which is this: God ordained that people should be governed in the end by what they want.

Dallas Willard warns us too of the "cost of non-discipleship." We may be able to live with some pain, but when our whole self becomes more and more rotten, the cost is far greater than dealing with the problem as soon as possible. This is why I think following Jesus, though challenging, is much easier than following anything else. The world has nothing better to offer me. Jesus has come to right my wrongs and to make me refreshingly new.

What is truly profound is thought to be stupid and trivial, or worse, boring, while what is actually stupid and trivial is thought to be profound. That is what it means to fly upside down.

We're not here to prove we're right; we're here to help people.

When the light comes into a room, we do not have to say, "Now what are we going to do about the darkness?" It's gone!

God's address is at the end of your rope.

Churches are not the kingdom of God, but are primary and inevitable expressions, outposts, and instrumentalities of presence of the kingdom among us. They are 'societies' of Jesus.

Grace is not just about forgiveness but about life.

We know we can't be spiritually transformed by just focusing on the will.

To allow lust (or strong desires) to govern our life is to exalt our will over God's.

Jesus is actually looking for people he can trust with his power.

We are built to live in the kingdom of God. It is our natural habitat.

The more we pray, the more we think to pray, and as we see the results of prayer-the responses of our Father to our requests-our confidence in God's power spills over into other areas of our life.

The basic question 'will I obey Christ 's teaching?' is rarely taken as a serious issue. For example, to take one of Jesus' commands, that is relevant to contemporary life, I don't know of any church that actually teaches a church how to bless people who curse them, yet this is a clear command.

That's the illusion - the idea that you can be all right on the inside and not act it out - and it has affected us in many ways. That's a part of the idea that professing is enough.

Belief is when your whole being is set to act as if something is so.

Paul followed Jesus by living as He lived. And how did he do that? Through activities and ways of living that would train his whole personality to depend upon the risen Christ as Christ trained Himself to depend upon the Father.

Even professing Christians, by and large, devote to their spiritual growth and well-being a tiny fraction of the time they devote to their body, and it is even tinier fraction if we include what they worry about.

We have to have the Vision. And we have to form the Intention. And we have to adopt the Means. Vision. Intention. Means. And if we do that, then it works! Every individual, every church, every organization... that's all we need to do.

We are becoming who we will be-forever.

There is no problem in human life that apprenticeship to Jesus cannot solve.

The main thing God gets out of your life is not the achievements you accomplish. It's the person you become.

A carefully cultivated heart will, assisted by the grace of God, foresee, forestall, or transform most of the painful situations before which others stand like helpless children saying “Why?

Other kingdoms are still present on earth along with the kingdom of the heavens. That is the human condition.

This life is not something that is imposed upon us; we receive it and work with it.

A disciple is a learner, a student, an apprentice – a practitioner… Disciples of Jesus are people who do not just profess certain views as their own but apply their growing understanding of life in the Kingdom of the Heavens to every aspect of their life on earth.

A leader enables people to love and honor the role they play in the organization or group they are part of

What we can accomplish as good as it may be does not compare to what God can accomplish

Kingdom praying and its efficacy is entirely a matter of the innermost heart's being totally open and honest before God. It is a matter of what we are saying with our whole being, moving with resolute intent and clarity of mind into the flow of God's action.

I would say the soul would be more than the engine. The soul would be like the computer system that coordinates everything, from the smog device to the fuel injection system to the brakes.

Few people arise in the morning as hungry for God as they are for cornflakes or toast and eggs.

The Bible, of course, is not a theology book. It is certainly not a philosophy book. So we have to derive the meaning of terms from the context in use.

He [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).