Top 263 Quotes & Sayings by Dallas Willard - Page 3

"Spirituality" wrongly understood or pursued is a major source of human misery and rebellion against God.

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.

The transformation of the social world is at its heart the transformation of personal relations. That's the key to transforming society in the larger arena.

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.

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.

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.

Business is a primary arrangement on God's part for people to love one another and serve one another.

There is absolutely nothing in what Jesus himself or his early followers taught that suggests you can decide just to enjoy forgiveness at Jesus' expense and have nothing more to do with him.

See, once you have begun to experience solitude and silence, you discover that you actually have a soul and that there is a God.Then you can begin to practice Sabbath and that will enable you to re-enter community.You can't have community without Sabbath.

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.

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

It is the responsibility of every Christ-centred follower to carve out a satisfying life under the loving rule of God or else sin will start to look good.

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

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

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

God is the treasure, and where the treasure is, there is the heart. By this we may test our love to God. What are our thoughts most upon? Can we say we are ravished with delight when we think on God? Have our thoughts got wings? Are they fled aloft? Do we contemplate Christ and glory? A sinner crowds God out of his thoughts. He never thinks of God, unless with horror, as the prisoner thinks of the judge.

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.

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.

You really can't justify anything else but giving your whole attention to spiritual formation in Christ.

Jesus offers himself as God's doorway into the life that is truly life. Confidence in him leads us today, as in other times, to become his apprentices in eternal living. "Those who come though me will be safe," he said. "They will go in and out and find all they need. I have come into their world that they may have life, and life to the fullest.

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.

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

Jesus came among us to show and teach the life for which we were made. He came very gently, opened access to the governance of God with him, and set afoot a conspiracy of freedom in truth among human beings. Having overcome death he remains among us. By relying on his word and presence we are enabled to reintegrate the little realm that makes up our life in the infinite rule of God. And that is the eternal kind of life. Caught up in his active rule, our deeds become an element in God’s eternal history. They are what God and we do together, making us part of his life and him a part of ours.

We should, to begin with, think that God leads a very interesting life, and that he is full of joy. Undoubtedly he is the most joyous being in the universe. The abundance of his love and generosity is inseparable from his infinite joy. All of the good and beautiful things from which we occasionally drink tiny droplets of soul-exhilarating joy, God continuously experiences in all their breadth and depth and richness.

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

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.

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.

We don't have to be brilliant.

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.

In 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.

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.

Contemporary American churches in particular do not require following Christ in his example, spirit, and teachings as a condition of membership-either of entering into or continuing in fellowship of a denomination or a local church.... Most problems in contemporary churches can be explained by the fact that members have not yet decided to follow Christ.

Grace is opposed to earning, but not to effort.

Keep eternity before the children.

Everyone gets a spiritual formation. It's like education. Everyone gets an education; it's just a matter of which one you get.

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

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

The Great Commission is still the mission statement of the Church.

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

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.

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

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.

Play is the creation of value that is not necessary.

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.

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.

To depart from righteousness is to choose a life of crushing burdens, failures, and disappointments, a life caught in the toils of endless problems that are never resolved.

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.

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.

Our relations with others are not external. They enter into our very identity. And that's why people struggle with them so.

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.

If our gospel does not free the individual up for a unique life of spiritual adventure in living with God daily, we simply have not entered fully into the good news that Jesus brought.

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.

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.

The different parts of the automobile like the ignition switch, the various buttons, the steering wheel - the interfaces between the driver and the machine - is our spirit or heart.

In solitude we find psychic distance, the perspective from which we can see, in the light of eternity, the created things that trap, worry, and oppress us.

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

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.

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

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