Top 100 Dallas Willard Quotes
#1. 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.
Dallas Willard
#2. 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
#3. It was an important day in my life when at last I understood that if he needed forty days in the wilderness at one point, I very likely could use three or four.
Dallas Willard
#4. 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.
Dallas Willard
#5. My hope is to gain a fresh hearing for Jesus, especially among those who believe they already understand him. In his case, quite frankly, presumed familiarity has led to unfamiliarity, unfamiliarity has led to contempt, and contempt has led to profound ignorance.
Dallas Willard
#6. The Spiritual disciplines are wisdom and not righteousness.
Dallas Willard
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. It is possible to have the administration of the sacraments and the preaching of the Word of God and to have it be simply a human exercise.
Dallas Willard
#10. Old ways of doing things cease to be effective, though they may have been very powerful in the past. There arises a very real danger that we will set ourselves in opposition to what God truly is doing now and aims to do in the future.
Dallas Willard
#11. You can live opposite of what you profess, but you cannot live opposite of what you believe.
Dallas Willard
#12. What we can do with these means (our own unassisted strength) is still very small compared to what we could do in acting in union with God himself, who created and ultimately controls all other forces.
Dallas Willard
#13. Our search for safety and contentment is endless and inexhaustible precisely because of the intrinsic futility of relying on human abilities to provide resolution to our problems.
Dallas Willard
#14. 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
#15. The prospering of God's cause on earth depends upon his people thinking well.
Dallas Willard
#16. 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
#17. The kingdom of God is the true ecology of the human soul.
Dallas Willard
#18. If we are to use our minds rightly, we must live in an attitude of constant openness and learning.
Dallas Willard
#19. 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!
Dallas Willard
#20. 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
#21. Disciples are those who have been so ravished with Christ that others want to be like them.
Dallas Willard
#22. 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
#23. We live from our depths - most of which we do not understand. Do
Dallas Willard
#24. The people to whom we minister and speak will not recall 99 percent of what we say to them, but they will never forget the kind of persons we are.
Dallas Willard
#25. Spiritual formation is character formation. Everyone gets a spiritual formation. It's like education. Everyone gets an education; it's just a matter of which one you get.
Dallas Willard
#26. 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
#27. It would be strange if we came to shun the genuine
simply because it resembled the counterfeit.
Dallas Willard
#28. A disciple is a person who has decided that the most important thing in their life is to learn how to do what Jesus said to do.
Dallas Willard
#30. 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.
Dallas Willard
#31. A leader enables people to love and honor the role they play in the organization or group they are part of
Dallas Willard
#33. 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
#34. 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.
Dallas Willard
#35. 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.
Dallas Willard
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. We were built to count, as water is made to run downhill. We are placed in a specific context to count in ways no one else does. That is our destiny.
Dallas Willard
#39. Feelings are good servants, but they are disastrous masters.
Dallas Willard
#40. The aim of God in history is the creation of an all-inclusive community of loving persons, with Himself included in that community as its prime sustainer and most glorious inhabitant.
Dallas Willard
#41. We forgive someone of a wrong they have done us when we decide that we will not make them suffer for it in any way. This
Dallas Willard
#42. Last words of his mother to his father: Keep eternity before the children.
Dallas Willard
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. An understanding of ordinary logic is no longer a required part of university degree programs, as was almost universally the case sixty years ago. Now, as a result, our world is full of uneducated people with higher degrees. They
Dallas Willard
#47. As we mature in Christ, it is actually possible to outgrow fear.
Dallas Willard
#48. To withhold our bodies from religion is to exclude religion from our lives.
Dallas Willard
#49. Circumstances and other people are not in control of an individual's character or of the life that lies endlessly before
Dallas Willard
#50. The will is transformed by experience, not information.
Dallas Willard
#51. Grace is not opposed to effort; it's opposed to earning.
Dallas Willard
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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.
Dallas Willard
#56. 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.
Dallas Willard
#57. Does Christ commend the famous 'apathy' of the Stoic or the Buddhist elimination of desire? Far from it. The issue is not just feeling or desire, but right feeling or desire, or being controlled by feeling or desire.
Dallas Willard
#58. Fasting confirms our utter dependence upon God by finding in Him a source of sustenance beyond food.
Dallas Willard
#59. Play is the creation of value that is not necessary.
Dallas Willard
#60. The heart, or will, simply is spirit in human beings. It is the human spirit, and the only thing in us that God will accept as the basis of our relationship to him. It is the spiritual plane of our natural existence, the place of truth before God, from where alone our whole lives can become eternal.
Dallas Willard
#61. 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.
Dallas Willard
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#65. If you don't have a teacher you can't have a disciple.
Dallas Willard
#66. Suppose our failures occur, not in spite of what we are doing, but precisely because of it.
Dallas Willard
#67. When pastors don't have rich spiritual lives with Christ, they become victimized by other models of success - models conveyed to them by their training, by their experience in the church, or just by our culture.
Dallas Willard
#68. 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.
Dallas Willard
#69. Single-minded and joyous devotion to God and his will, to what God wants for us-and to service to him and to others because of him-is what the will transformed into Christliheness looks like.
Dallas Willard
#70. 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.
Dallas Willard
#71. 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
#72. Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action. Grace, you know, does not just have to do with forgiveness of sins alone.
Dallas Willard
#73. 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
#74. The humility that cringes in order that reproof may be escaped or favor obtained is as unchristian as it is profoundly immoral.
Dallas Willard
#75. When the will is enslaved to a desire, it will in turn enslave the mind.
Dallas Willard
#76. 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.
Dallas Willard
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. Clinical depression is an extreme form of a 'bad mood.'
Dallas Willard
#80. This present world is a perfectly safe place for us to be." That certainly is what Jesus, and the Bible as a whole, has to say to us. "Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever" (Ps 23).
Dallas Willard
#81. 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.
Dallas Willard
#82. Love is not God, but God is love. It is who he is, his very identity.
Dallas Willard
#83. Education (the institution) has now adopted values, attitudes, and practices that make any rigorous understanding of the human self and life impossible.
Dallas Willard
#84. 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
#85. Other kingdoms are still present on earth along with the kingdom of the heavens. That is the human condition.
Dallas Willard
#86. We fail to be disciples only because we do not decide to be. We do not intend to be disciples. It is the power of the decision and the intention over our life that is missing. We should apprentice ourselves to Jesus in a solemn moment, and we should let those around us know that we have done so.
Dallas Willard
#87. The effect of standing before God by welcoming him before us will be the transformation of our entire life.
Dallas Willard
#88. 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.
Dallas Willard
#89. 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
#90. Why doesn't God just force us to do the things he knows to be right? It is because that would lose precisely that which he has intended in our creation: freely chosen character.
Dallas Willard
#91. Few people arise in the morning as hungry for God as they are for cornflakes or toast and eggs.
Dallas Willard
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. Bodily pleasure is not in itself a bad thing. But when it is exalted to a necessity and we become dependent upon it, then we are slaves of our body and its feelings. Only misery lies ahead.
Dallas Willard
#95. 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.
Dallas Willard
#96. 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
#97. Practice routinely purposeful kindnesses and intelligent acts of beauty.
Dallas Willard
#98. Of course, we do the righteous deed because of our redemption, not for our redemption.
Dallas Willard
#100. Find a person who has embraced anger, and you will find a person with a wounded ego.
Dallas Willard
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