Dallas Willard > Quotes

“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, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus's Essential Teachings on Discipleship

“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, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“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, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

“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, Renovation of the Heart: Putting On the Character of Christ

“I'm practicing the discipline of not having to have the last word.”
― 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, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God

“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 Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus's Essential Teachings on Discipleship

“Suppose our failures occur, not in spite of what we are doing, but precisely because of it.”
― Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God

“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, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“What a child does when not told what to do is the final indicator of what and who that child is.”
― 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, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“Few people arise in the morning as hungry for God as they are for cornflakes or toast and eggs.”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“The test of character posed by the gentleness of God's approach to us is especially dangerous for those formed by the ideas that dominate our modern world. 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 be almost as stupid as a cabbage, as long as you doubt. The fashion of the age has identified mental sharpness with a pose, not with genuine intellectual method and character. Only a very hardy individualist or social rebel -- or one desperate for another life -- therefore stands any chance of discovering the substantiality of the spiritual life today. 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

“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 Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God

“The aim of God in history is the creation of an all-inclusive community of loving persons, with Himself included in that community as its prime sustainer and most glorious inhabitant.”
― 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, Renovation of the Heart: Putting On the Character of Christ

“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 Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God

“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, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God

“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

“[Jesus] matters because of what he brought and what he still brings to ordinary human beings, living their ordinary lives and coping daily with their surroundings. He promises wholeness for their lives. In sharing our weaknesses he gives us strength and and imparts through his companionship a life that has the quality of eternity." (Dallas Willard in Ruthless Trust - Brennan Manning)”
― Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God

“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

“Happiness in reality consists only in rest, and not in being stirred up. This instinct conflicts with the drive to diversion, and we develop the confused idea that leads people to aim at rest through excitement.”
― 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, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“Solitude well practiced will break the power of busyness, haste, isolation, and loneliness. You will see that the world is not on your shoulders after all. Your will find yourself, and God will find you in new ways. Silence also brings Sabbath to you. It completes solitude, for without it you cannot be alone. Far from being a mere absence, silence allows the reality of God to stand in the midst of your life. God does not ordinarily compete for our attention. In silence we come to attend. Lastly, fasting is done that we many consciously experience the direct sustenance of God to our body and our whole person.”
― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus's Essential Teachings on Discipleship

“The first fruit of love is the musing of the mind on God. He who is in love, his thoughts are ever upon the object. He who loves God is ravished and transported with the contemplation of God. "When I awake, I am still with thee" (Psalm 139:18). The thoughts are as travelers in the mind. David's thoughts kept heaven-road. "I am still with Thee." 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, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus's Essential Teachings on Discipleship

“Sabbath is a way of life (Heb 4:3; 9-11). It is simply "casting all your anxiety on Him," to find that in actual fact " He cares for you" (1 Peter 5:7). It is USING the keys to the Kingdom to receive the resources for abundant living and ministering.”
― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus's Essential Teachings on Discipleship

“The truly powerful ideas are precisely the ones that never have to justify themselves.”
― Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God

“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, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

“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, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than the one who believes. You can be almost as stupid as a cabbage, as long as you doubt. The fashion of the age has identified mental sharpness with a pose, not with genuine intellectual method and character.”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God