Dallas Willard Quotes

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.

It would be strange if we came to shun the genuine simply because it resembled the counterfeit.

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?

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.

Spiritual transformation into Christ-likeness in not going to happen unless we act... What transforms us is the will to obey Jesus Christ.

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

Grace is not opposed to effort; it's opposed to earning.

Spiritual formation in Christ moves us toward a total interchange of our ideas and images for his.

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

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

Find a person who has embraced anger, and you will find a person with a wounded ego.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

If you don't have a teacher you can't have a disciple.

One does not miss heaven by a hair, but by constant effort to avoid and escape God.

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.

As we reach out to God, we get another source of strength.

Knowing the 'right answers' does not mean we believe them. To believe them means to act as though they're true.

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.

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.

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

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.

Relations between parents and children and siblings and mates. This is not external. We can't separate them.

Crooked thinking, unintentional or not, always favors evil.

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.

If we are to use our minds rightly, we must live in an attitude of constant openness and learning.

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

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.

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!

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

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

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.

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

The effect of standing before God by welcoming him before us will be the transformation of our entire life.

God does not 'love' us without liking us.

We cannot handle injustice by finding more ways to impose what is in fact "right" on people. It has to come from the inside. And that's where the church should be working.

It's just stunning to watch churches struggle to get mission statements when there it is, the Great Commission, and they should simply do what it says.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Keep eternity before the children.

Blessing is the projection of good into the life of another.

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.