Top 100 Dallas Willard Quotes
#1. 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.
Dallas Willard
#2. When the will is enslaved to a desire, it will in turn enslave the mind.
Dallas Willard
#3. The humility that cringes in order that reproof may be escaped or favor obtained is as unchristian as it is profoundly immoral.
Dallas Willard
#4. Method is always tied to subject matter, and in dealing with life in general there is no such thing as a single scientific method.
Dallas Willard
#5. Third, the "correcting" to be done is not a matter of "straightening them out." It is not a matter of hammering on their wrongness and on what is going to happen to them if they don't change their ways. It is a matter of restoration. The
Dallas Willard
#6. 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.
Dallas Willard
#7. Play is the creation of value that is not necessary.
Dallas Willard
#8. Fasting confirms our utter dependence upon God by finding in Him a source of sustenance beyond food.
Dallas Willard
#9. 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.
Dallas Willard
#10. 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.
Dallas Willard
#11. What God gets out of our lives - and, indeed, what we get out of our lives - is simply the person we become. It
Dallas Willard
#12. 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
Dallas Willard
#13. Practice routinely purposeful kindnesses and intelligent acts of beauty.
Dallas Willard
#14. Human beings are at their core defined by what they worship rather than primarily by what they think, know, or believe. That is bound up with the central Augustinian claim that we are what we love.
Dallas Willard
#15. We need to understand that Jesus is a thinker, that this is not a dirty word but an essential work, and that his other attributes do not preclude thought, but only ensure that he is certainly the greatest thinker of the human race: "the most intelligent person who ever lived on earth"
Dallas Willard
#16. 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.
Dallas Willard
#17. The effect of standing before God by welcoming him before us will be the transformation of our entire life.
Dallas Willard
#18. Other kingdoms are still present on earth along with the kingdom of the heavens. That is the human condition.
Dallas Willard
#19. 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.
Dallas Willard
#20. Education (the institution) has now adopted values, attitudes, and practices that make any rigorous understanding of the human self and life impossible.
Dallas Willard
#21. Love is not God, but God is love. It is who he is, his very identity.
Dallas Willard
#22. Mystery" means, in the language of the New Testament, something that had long remained hidden but then came to be known for the first time. The
Dallas Willard
#23. Hearing God cannot be a reliable and intelligible fact of life except when we see his speaking as one aspect of his presence with us, of his life in us. Only our communion with God provides the appropriate context for communications between us and him.
Dallas Willard
#24. 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.
Dallas Willard
#25. Disciples are those who have been so ravished with Christ that others want to be like them.
Dallas Willard
#26. 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
#27. The revelation of God in Jesus Christ (which is the object of Christian faith) is something very different from religion."5 Religion has many critics, but Jesus very few. He is a self-authenticating reality beyond the myriad social cocoons. He belongs to humanity. He called himself "Son of Man.
Dallas Willard
#28. The prospering of God's cause on earth depends upon his people thinking well.
Dallas Willard
#29. You can live opposite of what you profess, but you cannot live opposite of what you believe.
Dallas Willard
#30. The assumption of Jesus' program for his people on earth was that they would live their lives as his students and co-laborers.
Dallas Willard
#31. Spiritual transformation into Christ-likeness in not going to happen unless we act ... What transforms us is the will to obey Jesus Christ.
Dallas Willard
#32. The Spiritual disciplines are wisdom and not righteousness.
Dallas Willard
#33. 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.
Dallas Willard
#34. 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.
Dallas Willard
#35. To withhold our bodies from religion is to exclude religion from our lives.
Dallas Willard
#36. The mind or the minding of the spirit is life and peace precisely because it locates us in a world adequate to our nature as ceaselessly creative beings under God. The
Dallas Willard
#37. 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.
Dallas Willard
#38. The idea of having faith in Jesus has come to be totally isolated from being his apprentice and learning how to do what he said.
Dallas Willard
#39. Last words of his mother to his father: Keep eternity before the children.
Dallas Willard
#40. 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?
Dallas Willard
#41. If a law had been given capable of bringing people to life," Paul said, "then righteousness would have come from that law" (Gal. 3:21). But law, for all its magnificence, cannot do that. Graceful relationship sustained with the masterful Christ certainly can.
Dallas Willard
#42. But taking love itself - God's kind of love - into the depths of our being through spiritual formation will, by contrast, enable us to act lovingly to an extent that will be surprising even to ourselves, at first.
Dallas Willard
#43. 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.
Dallas Willard
#44. It would be strange if we came to shun the genuine
simply because it resembled the counterfeit.
Dallas Willard
#45. 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.
Dallas Willard
#46. 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.
Dallas Willard
#47. Great power requires great character if it is to be a blessing and not a curse, and that character is something we only grow toward.
Dallas Willard
#48. 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.
Dallas Willard
#50. Grace is not just about forgiveness but about life.
Dallas Willard
#51. The hardest thing about leadership is the intimacy it requires.
Dallas Willard
#52. The Kingdom Among Us is simply God himself and the spiritual realm of beings over which his will perfectly presides - as it is in the heavens.
Dallas Willard
#53. I fear that many people seek to hear God solely as a device for obtaining their own safety, comfort and sense of being righteous. For those who busy themselves to know the will of God, however, it is still true that "those who want to save their life will lose it" (Mt 16:25).
Dallas Willard
#54. We are built to live in the kingdom of God. It is our natural habitat.
Dallas Willard
#55. Spiritual formation cannot, in the nature of the case, be a 'private' thing, because it is a matter of whole-life transformation. You need to seek out others in your community who are pursuing the renovation of the heart.
Dallas Willard
#56. An obsession merely with doing all God commands may be the very thing that rules out being the kind of person that he calls us to be.
Dallas Willard
#57. Belief is when your whole being is set to act as if something is so.
Dallas Willard
#58. 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.
Dallas Willard
#59. Spiritual formation in Christ moves toward a total interchange of our ideas and images for his.
Dallas Willard
#60. Our task in ourselves and in others is to transform right answers into automatic responses to real-life situations.
Dallas Willard
#61. Many people think of Jesus as our Savior, as the one who will get us into heaven. So the question often is "Have I accepted Jesus as my Savior?" But we never ask the question "Have I accepted Jesus as my teacher?
Dallas Willard
#62. 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.
Dallas Willard
#63. Jesus is actually looking for people he can trust with his power.
Dallas Willard
#64. "Spirituality" wrongly understood or pursued is a major source of human misery and rebellion against God.
Dallas Willard
#65. 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.
Dallas Willard
#66. And where people do not want to know God, he usually allows them to be without him - at least for a while. When desire conflicts with reality, sooner or later reality wins.
Dallas Willard
#67. Our aim here is not to prove that Jesus is superior to other spiritual masters and traditions. But he really is different, and we should acknowledge it.
Dallas Willard
#68. No one need worry about our getting the best of God in some bargain with him, or that we might somehow succeed in using him for our purposes. Anyone who thinks this is a problem has seriously underestimated the intelligence and agility of our Father in the heavens. He will not be tricked or cheated.
Dallas Willard
#69. Why is it that we look upon our salvation as a moment that began our religious life instead of the daily life we receive from God?
Dallas Willard
#70. That is one reason it is hard to get people to pray at church and why prayer meetings are often dead. People don't see that prayer - real, two-way conversation with God - makes any difference. If
Dallas Willard
#71. The "interior castle" of the human soul, as Teresa of Avila called it, has many rooms, and they are slowly occupied by God, allowing us time and room to grow.
Dallas Willard
#72. Every church needs to be able to answer two questions. First, what is our plan for making disciples? And second, does our plan work?
Dallas Willard
#73. What a child does when not told what to do is the final indicator of what and who that child is.
Dallas Willard
#74. What my life really is even now is "hid with Christ in God" (Col. 3:3). What I "treasure" in heaven is not just the little that I have caused to be there. It is what I love there and what I place my security and happiness in there. It is God who
Dallas Willard
#75. He said, The main thing that you bring the church is the person that you become, and that's what everybody will see; that's what will get reproduced; that's what people will believe. Arrange your life so that you are experiencing deep contentment, joy and confidence in your everyday life with God.
Dallas Willard
#76. It's very difficult to be right about something without hurting someone with it.
Dallas Willard
#77. I think that, when I die, it might be some time until I know it.
Dallas Willard
#78. 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.
Dallas Willard
#79. He saves us by realistic restoration of our heart to God and then by dwelling there with his Father through the distinctively divine Spirit. The heart thus renovated and inhabited is the only real hope of humanity on earth.
Dallas Willard
#80. Anything done in anger can be done better without it!
Dallas Willard
#81. Crooked thinking, unintentional or not, always favors evil.
Dallas Willard
#82. Jesus is the human face on the kingdom of God. He makes it concretely accessible.
Dallas Willard
#83. 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.
Dallas Willard
#84. The main thing God gets out of your life is not the achievements you accomplish. It's the person you become.
Dallas Willard
#85. Faith is not opposed to evidence that we might gain from perception as well as from reason.
Dallas Willard
#86. 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.
Dallas Willard
#87. 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.
Dallas Willard
#88. In Spiritual formation we are aiming at a character and life that is so shaped that the deeds of Christ routinely and easily come from what is inside.
Dallas Willard
#89. If we allow everything access to our mind, we are simply asking to be kept in a state of mental turmoil or bondage. For nothing enters the mind without having an effect for good or evil.
Dallas Willard
#90. 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.
Dallas Willard
#91. We Christians should be aware that there's something at stake in cultural participation that we wouldn't have been concerned about if all we did was worry about the messages in culture.
Dallas Willard
#92. They were to bring the presence of the kingdom and its King into every corner of human life simply by fully living in the kingdom with him.
Dallas Willard
#93. 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.
Dallas Willard
#94. You cannot trust Jesus in areas in which you don't think him competent.
Dallas Willard
#96. Blessing is the projection of good into the life of another.
Dallas Willard
#97. 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.
Dallas Willard
#98. In accord with his original intent, the heavenly Father has in fact prepared an individualized kingdom for every person, from the outset of creation.
Dallas Willard
#99. 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.
Dallas Willard
#100. Sit in the companionship of God - the one who shows up and can be seen.
Dallas Willard
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top