Dallas Willard Quotes

50 Sourced Quotes

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
The union Christ had with the Father was the greatest that we can conceive of in this life-if indeed we can conceive of it.

Dallas Willard
Jesus is actually looking for people he can trust with his power.

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

Dallas Willard
There is absolutely nothing in what Jesus himself or his early followers taught that suggests you can decide just to enjoy forgiveness at Jesus' expense and have nothing more to do with him.

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

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

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
The ultimate freedom we have as human beings is the power to select what we will allow or require our minds to dwell upon.

Dallas Willard
What is thinking? It is the activity of searching out what must be true, or cannot be true, in the light of the given facts or assumptions.

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
In a world apart from God, the power of denial is absolutely essential if life is to proceed. The will or spirit cannot-psychologically cannot-sustain itself for any length of time in the face of what it clearly acknowledges to be the case. Therefore it must deny and evade and delude itself.

Dallas Willard
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
Even professing Christians, by and large, devote to their spiritual growth and well-being a tiny fraction of the time they devote to their body, and it is even tinier fraction if we include what they worry about.

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

Dallas Willard
We are invited to make a pilgrimage – into the heart and life 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
Understanding is the basis of care. What you would take care of you must first understand, whether it be a petunia or a nation.

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

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
Jesus is the human face on the kingdom of God. He makes it concretely accessible.

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
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
A disciple is a learner, a student, an apprentice – a practitioner… Disciples of Jesus are people who do not just profess certain views as their own but apply their growing understanding of life in the Kingdom of the Heavens to every aspect of their life on earth.

Dallas Willard
What a child does when not told what to do is the final indicator of what and who that child is.

Dallas Willard
God's aim in human history is the creation of an inclusive community of loving persons, with himself included as its primary sustainer and most glorious inhabitant.

Dallas Willard