Dallas Willard Quotes & Sayings

Churches are not the kingdom of God, but are primary and inevitable expressions, outposts, and instrumentalities of presence of the kingdom among us. They are 'societies' of Jesus. — Dallas Willard

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

Most problems in contemporary churches can be explained by the fact that members have never decided to follow Christ. — Dallas Willard

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

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

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

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

I realize that I will either allow my view of evil to determine my view of God and will cut him down accordingly, or I will allow my view of God to determine my view of the evil and will elevate him accordingly, accepting that nothing is beyond his power for good. — Dallas Willard

People who love one another can be silent together.12 — Dallas Willard

The world that contains the possibility of evil is the one that also contains the greatest possibility of good. And the question of why God allows evil to happen has to be put against the question of what a world where evil could not happen would be like. It's by working on those questions that people can come to some resolution in their minds about the reality of evil and what it means. — Dallas Willard

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

Does the Gospel I preach and teach have a natural tendency to cause people who hear it to become full-time students of Jesus? Would those who believe it become his apprentices as a natural 'next step'? What can we reasonably expect would result from people actually believing the substance of my message? — Dallas Willard

Discipleship is the process of becoming who Jesus would be if he were you. — Dallas Willard

Our task in ourselves and in others is to transform right answers into automatic responses to real-life situations. — Dallas Willard

Our most serious failure today is the inability to provide effective practical guidance as to how to live the life of Jesus. And I believe that is due to this very real loss of biblical realism for our lives — Dallas Willard

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

I'm practicing the discipline of not having to have the last word. — Dallas Willard

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. — Dallas Willard

Condemnation is the board in our eye. He knows that the mere fact that we are condemning someone shows our heart does not have the kingdom rightness he has been talking about. Condemnation, especially with its usual accompaniments of anger and contempt and self-righteousness, blinds us to the reality of the other person. We cannot "see clearly" how to assist our brother, because we cannot see our brother. And we will never know how to truly help him until we have grown into the kind of person who does not condemn. Period. "Getting the board out" is not a matter of correcting something that is wrong in our life so that we will be able to condemn our dear ones better - more effectively, so to speak. — Dallas Willard

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

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

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

Prayer is, above all, a means of forming character. It combines freedom and power with service and love. What — Dallas Willard

The powerful though vague and unsubstantiated presumption is that something has been found out that renders a spiritual understanding of reality in the manner of Jesus simply foolish to those who are "in the know." But when it comes time to say exactly what it is that has been found out, nothing of substance is forthcoming. — Dallas Willard

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

Much of our problem is not, as is often said, that we have failed to get what is in our head down in our heart. Much of what hinders us is that we have had a lot of mistaken theology in our head and it has gotten down into our heart. And it is controlling our inner dynamics so that the head and heart cannot, even with the aid of the Word and the Spirit, pull one another straight. — Dallas Willard

Other kingdoms are still present on earth along with the kingdom of the heavens. That is the human condition. — Dallas Willard

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. — Dallas Willard

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

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

History has brought us to the point where the Christian message is thought to be essential concerned only with how to deal with sin: with wrongdoing or wrong-being and its effects. Life, our actual existence, is not included in what is now presented as the heart of the Christian message, or it is included only marginally. — Dallas Willard

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. — Dallas Willard

For our Christian groups and their leaders, it means that there is a simple, straightforward way in which congregations of Jesus' people can, without exception, fulfill his call to be an ecclesia, his "called out" ones: a touch point between heaven and earth, where the healing of the Cross and the Resurrection can save the lost and grow the saved into the fullness of human beings in Christ. No special facilities, programs, talents, or techniques are required. It doesn't even require a budget. Just faithfulness to the process of spiritual formation in Christlikeness exposed in the Scriptures and in the lives of his "peculiar people" through the ages (Titus 2:14, KJV). — Dallas Willard

Disciples are those who have been so ravished with Christ that others want to be like them. — Dallas Willard

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

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

The humility that cringes in order that reproof may be escaped or favor obtained is as unchristian as it is profoundly immoral. — Dallas Willard

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

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

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

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

Anything done in anger can be done better without it! — Dallas Willard

Spiritual formation in a Christian tradition answers a specific human question: 'What kind of person am I going to be?' It is the process of establishing the character of Christ in the person. That's all it is. — Dallas Willard

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

Your mind will really talk to you when you begin to deny fulfillment to your desires, and you will find how subtle and shameless it is. — Dallas Willard

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. — Dallas Willard

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

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

Recently a pilot was practicing high-speed maneuvers in a jet fighter. She turned the controls for what she thought was a steep ascent - and flew straight into the ground. She was unaware that she had been flying upside down. This is a parable of human existence in our times - not exactly that everyone is crashing, though there is enough of that - but most of us as individuals, and world society as a whole, live at high-speed, and often with no clue to whether we are flying upside down or right-side up. Indeed, we are haunted by a strong suspicion that there may be no difference - or at least that it is unknown or irrelevant. — Dallas Willard

But spirituality in many Christian circles has simply become another dimension of Christian consumerism. We have generated a body of people who consume Christian services and think that that is Christian faith. Consumption of Christian services replaces obedience to Christ. And spirituality is one more thing to consume. I go to many, many conferences and talk about these things, and so often I see these people who are just consuming more Christian services. — Dallas Willard

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

If you don't have a teacher you can't have a disciple. — Dallas Willard

Individually the disciple and friend of Jesus who has learned to work shoulder to shoulder with his or her Lord stands in this world as a point of contact between heaven and earth, a kind of Jacob's ladder by which the angels of God may ascend from and descend into human life. Thus the disciple stands as an envoy or a receiver by which the kingdom of God is conveyed into every quarter of human affairs. — Dallas Willard

I think that, when I die, it might be some time until I know it. — Dallas Willard

Great deal of what goes into "training them [us] to do everything I said" consists simply in bringing people to believe with their whole being the information they already have as a result of their initial confidence in Jesus - even if that initial confidence was only the confidence of desperation.2 — Dallas Willard

Most families would be healthier and happier if their members treated one another with the respect they would give to a perfect stranger. C. S. Lewis's discussion of storge, familial love, is endlessly instructive on this point and is required reading for all who intend to have a decent family life.1 He notes that he has been far more impressed by the bad manners of parents to children than by those of children to parent. — Dallas Willard

We live from our depths - most of which we do not understand. Do — Dallas Willard

Sit in the companionship of God - the one who shows up and can be seen. — Dallas Willard

May I just give you this word? Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action. — Dallas Willard

There is a widespread notion that just passing through death transforms human character. Discipleship is not needed. Just believe enough to "make it." But I have never been able to find any basis in scriptural tradition or psychological reality to think this might be so. What if death only forever fixes us as the kind of person we are at death? What would one do in heaven with a debauched character or a hate-filled heart? — Dallas Willard

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He is not just nice, he is brilliant. He is the smartest man who ever lived. He is now supervising the entire course of world history (Rev. 1:5) while simultaneously preparing the rest of the universe for our future role in it (John 14:2). He always has the best information on everything and certainly also on the things that matter most in human life. Let us now hear his teachings on who has the good life, on who is among the truly blessed. — Dallas Willard

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

Jesus did not send his students out to start governments or even churches as we know them today ... They were, instead, to establish beachheads of his person, word, and power in the midst of a failing and futile humanity. — Dallas Willard

Malice or desire and intention to harm is often rooted in how we think about the persons concerned: our images of them, the inferences we habitually draw about them, and so forth. Perhaps we see them only as an obstacle to our desires, or as less than "human," as worthless. Perhaps we need to take steps toward seeing them as objects of God's love, or as beings of intrinsic value, like our own children or grandchildren or others we delight in. That will, in turn, require changes in how we think about our world and our self. All of this may be helped along by getting to know them, seeing what their life is like, or serving them. — Dallas Willard

Circumstances and other people are not in control of an individual's character or of the life that lies endlessly before — Dallas Willard

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

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

When Jesus directs us to pray, "Thy kingdom come," he does not mean we should pray for it to come into existence. — 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

When the will is enslaved to a desire, it will in turn enslave the mind. — Dallas Willard

The greatest need you and I have-the greatest need of collective humanity-is renovation of our heart. That spiritual place with in us from which outlook, choices, and actions come has been formed by a world away from God. Now it must be transformed. Indeed, the only hope of humanity lies in the fact that, as our spiritual dimension has been formed, so it also can be transformed. — Dallas Willard

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

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

Anxiety is just groundless and pointless. It occurs only as a hangover of bad habits established when we were trusting things - like human approval and wealth - that were certain to let us down. Now our strategy should be one of resolute rejection of worry, while we concentrate on the future in hope and with prayer and on the past with thanksgiving. — Dallas Willard

Spirituality has thus come to be regarded by the world as those futile, self-torturing excesses of strange men and women who lived in far-off, benighted places and times. Accordingly, the One who came to give abundance of life is commonly thought of as a cosmic stuffed shirt, whose excessive "spirituality" probably did not allow him normal bodily functions and certainly would not permit him to throw a frisbee or tackle someone in a football game. — Dallas Willard

Reason functions as a basis of responsibility before God precisely because of its ability to serve in the instigation, nurture, and correction of faith. Because of this ability, we are responsible before God if we do not abide according to its results. To disparage the role of reason in the production and sustenance of faith is to contradict the plain intent of the scriptures, according to which reason provides adequate grounds to support a right worship of God. — 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

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

The hidden dimension of each human life is not visible to others, nor is it fully graspable even by ourselves. We usually know very little about the things that move in our own soul, the deepest level of our life, or what is driving it. Our "within" is astonishingly complex and subtle - even devious. It takes on a life of its own. Only God knows our depths, who we are, and what we would do. — Dallas Willard

He [Peter after the resurrection] now understood that he and the church were to exercise a transcendent power that did not depend upon having a kingdom or government in any human sense, for it was literally a "God government" in which they were participants (Acts 1:6-8). — Dallas Willard

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

Remember, to believe something is to act as if it is so. To believe that two plus two equals four is to behave accordingly when trying to find out how many dollars or apples are in the house. The advantage of believing it is not that we can pass tests in arithmetic; it is that we can deal much more successfully with reality. Just try dealing with it as if two plus two equaled six. — Dallas Willard

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

As we mature in Christ, it is actually possible to outgrow fear. — Dallas Willard

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

Grace is not just about forgiveness but about life. — Dallas Willard

Knowledge strengthens faith, sometimes by allowing us to grasp an item of faith in such a way that it also becomes an item of knowledge. Knowledge also can and often has laid a foundation for faith. We do often believe things because we have come to know them, and that is an ideal condition of belief. — Dallas Willard

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. — Dallas Willard

The first act of love is always the giving of attention. — Dallas Willard

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