428 Quotes by Dallas Willard

The aim of God in history is the creation of an all-inclusive community of loving persons with God himself at the very heart of this community as its prime Sustainer and most glorious Inhabitant.

We are becoming who we will be-forever.

Churches are not the kingdom of God, but are primary and inevitable expressions, outposts, and instrumentalities of presence of the kingdom among us. They are 'societies' of Jesus.

Many churches are measuring the wrong things. We measure things like attendance and giving, but we should be looking at more fundamental things like anger, contempt, honesty, and the degree to which people are under the thumb of their lusts. Those things can be counted, but not as easily as offerings.

I was in a fascinating meeting where one man had been in China recently. A Chinese professor has found evidence that Christians reached Western China before 90 AD. Before 90 AD! The idea isn't all that astonishing when we think about it. That's what the disciples thought they were supposed to do! And, I'm sure, the disciples just said, "That's it. Let's go!" And they all wound up dead. But everyone else did too!

The core of the person is what he or she loves, and that is bound up with what they worship - that insight recalibrates the radar for cultural analysis. The rituals and practices that form our loves spill out well beyond the sanctuary. Many secular liturgies are trying to get us to love some other kingdom and some other gods.

The greatest challenge the church faces today is to be authentic disciples of Jesus.

God may not guide us in an obvious way because he wants us to make decisions based on faith and character.

The needed transformation is very largely a matter of replacing in ourselves those idea systems of evil (and their corresponding cultures) with the idea system that Jesus Christ embodied and taught and with a culture of the kingdom of God.