Dallas Willard quotes
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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
-- Dallas Willard -
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 itâ€, who is “in†with God, who is “blessedâ€, 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.
-- Dallas Willard -
Few people arise in the morning as hungry for God as they are for cornflakes or toast and eggs.
-- Dallas Willard -
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 -
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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.
-- Dallas Willard -
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.
-- Dallas Willard -
We are built to live in the kingdom of God. It is our natural habitat.
-- Dallas Willard -
I'm practicing the discipline of not having to have the last word.
-- Dallas Willard -
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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 -
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 -
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 -
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".
-- Dallas Willard -
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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.
-- Dallas Willard -
As we mature in Christ, it is actually possible to outgrow fear.
-- Dallas Willard -
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.
-- Dallas Willard -
Most problems in contemporary churches can be explained by the fact that members have never decided to follow Christ.
-- Dallas Willard -
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The kingdom of God is the true ecology of the human soul.
-- Dallas Willard -
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 -
God may not guide us in an obvious way because he wants us to make decisions based on faith and character.
-- Dallas Willard -
Ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.
-- Dallas Willard -
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Suppose our failures occur, not in spite of what we are doing, but precisely because of it.
-- Dallas Willard -
We are invited to make a pilgrimage – into the heart and life of God.
-- Dallas Willard -
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 -
Play is the creation of value that is not necessary.
-- Dallas Willard -
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Disciples are those who have been so ravished with Christ that others want to be like them.
-- Dallas Willard -
The world can no longer be left to mere diplomats, politicians, and business leaders. They have done the best they could, no doubt. But this is an age for spiritual heroes- a time for men and women to be heroic in their faith and in spiritual character and power. The greatest danger to the Christian church today is that of pitching its message too low.
-- Dallas Willard -
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.
-- Dallas Willard -
Discipleship is the process of becoming who Jesus would be if he were you.
-- Dallas Willard -
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You cannot trust Jesus in areas in which you don't think him competent.
-- Dallas Willard -
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.
-- Dallas Willard -
Fasting confirms our utter dependence upon God by finding in Him a source of sustenance beyond food.
-- Dallas Willard -
Spiritual people are not those who engage in certain spiritual practices; they are those who draw their life from a conversational relationship with God.
-- Dallas Willard -
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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 -
Many people have found prayer impossible because they thought they should only pray for wonderful but remote needs they actually had little or no interest in or even knowledge of. Prayer simply dies from efforts to pray about ‘good things’ that honestly do not matter to us. The way to get to meaningful prayer for those good things is to start by praying for what we are truly interested in. The circle of our interests will inevitably grow in the largeness of God’s love.
-- Dallas Willard -
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 -
Actions are not impostions on who we are, but are expressions of who we are. They come out of our heart and the inner realities it supervises and interacts with
-- Dallas Willard -
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It would be strange if we came to shun the genuine simply because it resembled the counterfeit.
-- Dallas Willard -
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 -
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 -
The will is transformed by experience, not information.
-- Dallas Willard -
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God's address is at the end of your rope.
-- Dallas Willard -
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 -
The sinner is not the one who uses a lot of grace... The saint burns grace like a 747 burns fuel on take off.
-- Dallas Willard -
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.
-- Dallas Willard -
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Jesus is the human face on the kingdom of God. He makes it concretely accessible.
-- Dallas Willard -
The truly powerful ideas are precisely the ones that never have to justify themselves.
-- Dallas Willard -
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 -
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 -
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We are unceasing spiritual beings with an eternal destiny in God's great universe.
-- Dallas Willard -
Solitude well practiced will break the power of busyness, haste, isolation, & loneliness.
-- Dallas Willard -
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.
-- Dallas Willard -
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.
-- Dallas Willard -
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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 -
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 -
You can live opposite of what you profess, but you cannot live opposite of what you believe.
-- Dallas Willard -
To withhold our bodies from religion is to exclude religion from our lives.
-- Dallas Willard -
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Jesus is actually looking for people he can trust with his power.
-- Dallas Willard -
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 -
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 -
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 -
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What a child does when not told what to do is the final indicator of what and who that child is.
-- Dallas Willard -
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 -
The core of the person is what he or she loves, and that is bound up with what they worship - that insight recalibrates the radar for cultural analysis. The rituals and practices that form our loves spill out well beyond the sanctuary. Many secular liturgies are trying to get us to love some other kingdom and some other gods.
-- Dallas Willard -
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.
-- Dallas Willard -
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Theology is just what you really think about God, and if you're going to do that, you'd better use your mind and not just let it be a receptacle - a catch-all for whatever beliefs happen to be passing by.
-- Dallas Willard -
Feelings are good servants, but they are disastrous masters.
-- Dallas Willard -
Reality is what you can count on.
-- Dallas Willard -
What you present as the gospel will determine what you present as discipleship. If you present as the gospel what is essentially a theory of the atonement, and you say, If you accept this theory of the atonement, your sins are forgiven, and when you die you will be received into heaven, there is no basis for discipleship.
-- Dallas Willard -
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Unless you have already put God first, for example, what you will have to do to be financially secure, impress other people, or fulfill your desires will invariably lead you against God's wishes. That is why the first of the Ten Commandments, “You shall have no gods who take priority over me,†is the first of the Ten Commandments.
-- Dallas Willard -
Imagine that you had discovered gold or oil on a certain property, and no one else knew about it. Can you see yourself being sad and feeling deprived for having to gather all your resources and sacrifice them in order to buy that property? Hardly. Now you know what it is like to deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Jesus.
-- Dallas Willard -
Grace is opposed to earning, but not to effort.
-- Dallas Willard
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