428 Quotes by Dallas Willard

Specifically, in our attempts to understand how God speaks to us and guides us we must, above all, hold on to the fact that learning how to hear God is to be sought only as a part of a certain kind of life, a life of loving fellowship with the King and his other subjects within the kingdom of the heavens.

Practice routinely purposeful kindnesses and intelligent acts of beauty.

He has made a way for us into easy and happy obedience – really, into personal fulfillment. And that way is apprenticeship to him. It is Christian “discipleship.” His gospel is a gospel for life and Christian discipleship.

The gospel of the kingdom is that no one is beyond beatitude, because the rule of God from the heavens is available to all. Everyone can reach it, and it can reach everyone. We respond appropriately to the Beatitudes of Jesus by living as if this were so, as it concerns others and as it concerns ourselves.

He said, “The main thing that you bring the church is the person that you become, and that’s what everybody will see; that’s what will get reproduced; that’s what people will believe. Arrange your life so that you are experiencing deep contentment, joy and confidence in your everyday life with God.

The revolution of Jesus is in the first place and continuously a revolution of the human heart and spirit.

And they shall live with His face in view, and that they belong to Him will show on their faces. Darkness will no longer be. They will have no need of lamps or sunlight because God the Lord will be radiant in their midst. And they will reign through the ages of ages. REV. 22:4–5.

But taking love itself – God’s kind of love – into the depths of our being through spiritual formation will, by contrast, enable us to act lovingly to an extent that will be surprising even to ourselves, at first.

Sin always splits the self to some degree, yes. You know that you have harmed yourself and others, but you probably are not going to come to terms with that because you’re carrying on a charade of righteousness, even if you don’t believe it. So confession is very deep in the process of discovering the soul.