Dallas Willard Discipleship Quotes & Sayings

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

Dallas Willard warns us too of the "cost of non-discipleship." We may be able to live with some pain, but when our whole self becomes more and more rotten, the cost is far greater than dealing with the problem as soon as possible. This is why I think following Jesus, though challenging, is much easier than following anything else. The world has nothing better to offer me. Jesus has come to right my wrongs and to make me refreshingly new. — Dallas Willard

Demolition is a part of construction. — Daniel H. Wilson

Let's not hate the existence of hatred. — Toba Beta

There's something exciting and incredibly liberating for an artist to finish something Friday night and the world hears it Friday night instead of eight months later after marketing people and all those assholes get involved. — Trent Reznor

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

Do we now even have any idea of what discipleship evangelism, as we might call it, would look like? What message would we preach that would naturally lead to a decision to become an apprentice to Jesus in The Kingdom Among Us? I hope we can now understand what it might be, having worked our way this far. I hope that our understanding of what it is really to trust Jesus Christ, the whole person, with our whole life, would make the call to become his whole-life apprentice the natural next step. That would be discipleship evangelism. And it would be very different from what is now done. — 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

He said that permitting private judgments to turn my duty in the smallest matter would be just like getting a little bit pregnant
that the consequences would very soon get beyond me. — Lois McMaster Bujold

'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

The gods had vanished, her mother had once claimed. But had they? Had it been some god who had visited tonight, clothed in the skin of a battered young woman? — Sarah J. Maas

I try to work all over the canvas at once, because I feel that the forces of nature are unpredictable. — Nell Blaine

There was a lot to think about. The strange liquid sensation that kept drifting over me, for one. The way the breeze seemed to follow me like a little lost puppy. The English test I was going to be way, way to tired for in the morning. What I was going to say to Lend to make everything better. How I was going to find a ride home with no communicator. How hard I was going to hit Jack for abandoning me.
The last one warmed me up a bit. — Kiersten White

And so we have the result noted: the resources of God's kingdom remain detached from human life. There is no gospel for human life and Christian discipleship, just one for death or one for social action. The souls of human beings are left to shrivel and die on the plains of life because they are not introduced into the environment for which they were made, the living kingdom of eternal life. To counteract this we must develop a straightforward presentation, in word and life, of the reality of life now under God's rule, through reliance upon the word and person of Jesus. In this way we can naturally become his students or apprentices. We can learn from him how to live our lives as he would live them if he were we. We can enter his eternal kind of life now. — 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

Last words of his mother to his father: Keep eternity before the children. — 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

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

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

Entrepreneurs don't ask for permission. They act per a mission. — Ryan Lilly