Dallas Willard Quotes

50 Sourced Quotes

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
Today it is the skeptics who are the social conformists, though because of powerful intellectual propaganda they continue to enjoy thinking of themselves as wildly individualistic and unbearably bright.

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
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
Few people arise in the morning as hungry for God as they are for cornflakes or toast and eggs.

Dallas Willard
My hope is to gain a fresh hearing for Jesus, especially among those who believe they already understand him. In his case, quite frankly, presumed familiarity has led to unfamiliarity, unfamiliarity has led to contempt, and contempt has led to profound ignorance.

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

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
Grace is not opposed to effort. It is opposed to earning. Effort is action. Earning is attitude. You have never seen people more active than those who have been set on fire by the grace of God.

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
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
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
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
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
Repent, for the kingdom of the heavens is at hand' (Matt 3:2, 4:17, 10:7). This is a call for us to reconsider how we have been approaching our life, in light of the fact that we now, in the presence of Jesus, have the option of living within the surrounding movements of God's eternal purposes, of taking our life into his life.

Dallas Willard
Feelings too must be renovated: old ones removed in many cases, or at least thoroughly modified, and new ones installed or at least heightened into a new prominence.

Dallas Willard
The prospering of God's cause on earth depends upon his people thinking well.

Dallas Willard
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
Does Christ commend the famous 'apathy' of the Stoic or the Buddhist elimination of desire? Far from it. The issue is not just feeling or desire, but right feeling or desire, or being controlled by feeling or desire.

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