428 Quotes by Dallas Willard

At some point in the late afternoon, preferably before dinner, while you are still experiencing the strength and rest of God, take fifteen minutes in quiet solitude to review and examine the day.

May I just give you this word? Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action.

Spiritual disciplines are training exercises to give us power to live in the kingdom.

Generally speaking we are in God’s will whenever we are leading the kind of life he wants for us. And that leaves a lot of room for initiative on our part, which is essential: our individual initiatives are central to his will for us.

Genuine transformation of the whole person into the goodness and power seen in Jesus and his “Abba” Father – the only transformation adequate to the human self – remains the necessary goal of human life.

There is a widespread notion that just passing through death transforms human character. Discipleship is not needed. Just believe enough to “make it.” But I have never been able to find any basis in scriptural tradition or psychological reality to think this might be so. What if death only forever fixes us as the kind of person we are at death? What would one do in heaven with a debauched character or a hate-filled heart?

Witnessing is not thought of as bringing knowledge, but as attempts to convince people to do things. When you divorce faith from knowledge, you wind up in the position of trying to get people to do things, not of providing them with a basis on which they can then decide how to live and how to lead their lives together. Witnessing has turned into a kind of process of bothering people, and very few people witness because of that.

Our task in ourselves and in others is to transform right answers into automatic responses to real-life situations.

Accordingly, the greatest need you and I have – the greatest need of collective humanity – is renovation of our heart. That spiritual place within us from which outlook, choices, and actions come has been formed by a world away from God. Now it must be transformed.