428 Quotes by Dallas Willard

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

What sometimes goes on in all sorts of Christian institutions is not formation of people in the character of Christ; it's teaching of outward conformity. You don't get in trouble for not having the character of Christ, but you do if you don't obey the laws.

I would say the soul would be more than the engine. The soul would be like the computer system that coordinates everything, from the smog device to the fuel injection system to the brakes.

The people to whom we minister and speak will not recall 99 percent of what we say to them, but they will never forget the kind of persons we are.

The basic question 'will I obey Christ 's teaching?' is rarely taken as a serious issue. For example, to take one of Jesus' commands, that is relevant to contemporary life, I don't know of any church that actually teaches a church how to bless people who curse them, yet this is a clear command.

Suppose our failures occur, not in spite of what we are doing, but precisely because of it.

Many people have found prayer impossible because they thought they should only pray for wonderful but remote needs they actually had little or no interest in or even knowledge of. Prayer simply dies from efforts to pray about ‘good things’ that honestly do not matter to us. The way to get to meaningful prayer for those good things is to start by praying for what we are truly interested in. The circle of our interests will inevitably grow in the largeness of God’s love.

If you don't have a teacher you can't have a disciple.

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