Dallas Willard Quotes

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.

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.

We don't believe something by merely saying we believe it, or even when we believe that we believe it. We believe something when we act as if it were true.

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

Ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.

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

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.

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

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

What Paul is clearly saying is that if anyone is worthy of being saved, they will be saved. At that point many Christians get very anxious, saying that absolutely no one is worthy of being saved. The implication of that is that a person can be almost totally good, but miss the message about Jesus, and be sent to hell. What kind of a God would do that? I am not going to stand in the way of anyone whom God wants to save. I am not going to say 'he can't save them.' I am happy for God to save anyone he wants in any way he can. It is possible for someone who does not know Jesus to be saved.

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

The key, then, to loving God is to see Jesus, to hold him before the mind with as much fullness and clarity as possible. It is to adore him.

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.

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.

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

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".

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.

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

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.

As Augustine say clearly, God being God offends human pride. If God is running the universe and has first claim on our lives, guess who isn't running the universe and does not get to have things as they please.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

You can live opposite of what you profess, but you cannot live opposite of what you believe.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Feelings are good servants, but they are disastrous masters.

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

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

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

God may not guide us in an obvious way because he wants us to make decisions based on faith and character.

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

The will is transformed by experience, not information.

The hardest thing about leadership is the intimacy it requires.

To glorify God means to think and act in such a way that the goodness, greatness, and beauty of God are constantly obvious to ourselves and all those around us. It means to live in such a way that when people see us they think, Thank God for God, if God would create such a life.

Theology is a part of our lives. It's unavoidable. A thoughtless theology guides our lives with just as much force as a thoughtful and informed one.

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.

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.

Disciples are those who have been so ravished with Christ that others want to be like them.

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

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.

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

Prayer is talking with God about what we are doing together.

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.

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