Top 250 Dallas Willard Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 2 of 6

51. “Everyone gets a spiritual formation. It’s like education. Everyone gets an education; it’s just a matter of which one you get.”

— Dallas Willard

52. “Kingdom obedience is kingdom abundance.”

— Dallas Willard

53. “When we think of “taking Christ into the workplace” or “keeping Christ in the home,” we are making our faith into a set of special acts. The “specialness” of such acts just underscores the point – that being a Christian, being Christ’s isn’t thought of as a normal part of life.”

— Dallas Willard

54. “As we mature in Christ, it is actually possible to outgrow fear.”

— Dallas Willard

55. “Most problems in contemporary churches can be explained by the fact that members have never decided to follow Christ.”

— Dallas Willard

56. “Knowing the ‘right answers’ does not mean we believe them. To believe them means to act as though they’re true.”

— Dallas Willard

57. “And God has set up prayer in such a way that, if you want to explain it away, you can. That’s the human mind. God set it up like that for a reason, which is this: God ordained that people should be governed in the end by what they want.”

— Dallas Willard

58. “When the will is enslaved to a desire, it will in turn enslave the mind.”

— Dallas Willard

59. “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

60. “When we pass through what we call death, we do not lose the world. Indeed, we see it for the first time as it really is.”

— Dallas Willard

61. “To train means arranging our life around those practices that enable us to do what we cannot now do by direct effort. The point of training is to receive power, so we arrange our life around practices through which we get power.”

— Dallas Willard

62. “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

63. “It is the responsibility of every Christ-centred follower to carve out a satisfying life under the loving rule of God or else sin will start to look good.”

— Dallas Willard

64. “Blessing is the projection of good into the life of another.”

— Dallas Willard

65. “When the light comes into a room, we do not have to say, “Now what are we going to do about the darkness?” It’s gone!”

— Dallas Willard

66. “It would be of course a low voltage spiritual life in which prayer was chiefly undertaken as a discipline, rather than as a way of co-labouring with God to accomplish good things and advancing his Kingdom purposes.”

— Dallas Willard

67. “God does not ‘love’ us without liking us...”

— Dallas Willard

68. “When we receive God’s gift of life by relying on Christ, we find that God comes to act with us as we rely on him in our actions.”

— Dallas Willard

69. “If you have a group of people come together around a vision for real discipleship, people who are committed to grow, committed to change, committed to learn, then a spiritual assessment tool can work.”

— Dallas Willard

70. “Why doesn’t God just force us to do the things he knows to be right? It is because that would lose precisely that which he has intended in our creation: freely chosen character.”

— Dallas Willard

71. “The greatest danger to the Christian church today is that of pitching its message too low.”

— Dallas Willard

72. “The command is “Do no work.” Just make space. Attend to what is around you. Learn that you don’t have to DO to BE. accept the grace of doing nothing. Stay with it until you stop jerking and squirming.”

— Dallas Willard

73. “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.”

— Dallas Willard

74. “And the God who hears is also the one who speaks. He has spoken and is still speaking. Humanity remains his project, not its own, and his initiatives are always at work among us.”

— Dallas Willard

75. “My central claim is that we can become like Christ by doing one thing – by following him in the overall style of life he chose for himself.”

— Dallas Willard

76. “If you don’t have a teacher you can’t have a disciple.”

— Dallas Willard

77. “Today we are apt to downplay or disregard the importance of good thinking to strong faith; and some, disastrously, even regard thinking as opposed to faith.”

— Dallas Willard

78. “Theology is a part of our lives. It’s unavoidable. A thoughtless theology guides our lives with just as much force as a thoughtful and informed one.”

— Dallas Willard

79. “Paul followed Jesus by living as He lived. And how did he do that? Through activities and ways of living that would train his whole personality to depend upon the risen Christ as Christ trained Himself to depend upon the Father.”

— Dallas Willard

80. “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.”

— Dallas Willard

81. “The open secret of many Bible believing Churches is that a vanishingly small percentage of those talking about prayer and Bible reading are actually doing what they are talking about.”

— Dallas Willard

82. “Those who have been touched by forgiveness and new life and have thus entered into God’s rule become, like Jesus, bearers of that rule.”

— Dallas Willard

83. “We are invited to make a pilgrimage – into the heart and life of God.”

— Dallas Willard

84. “As Augustine say clearly, God being God offends human pride. If God is running the universe and has first claim on our lives, guess who isn’t running the universe and does not get to have things as they please.”

— Dallas Willard

85. “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

86. “At the center of care for the heart is the love of God. This must be the joyful aim of our life.”

— Dallas Willard

87. “To withhold our bodies from religion is to exclude religion from our lives.”

— Dallas Willard

88. “There is no avoiding the fact that we live at the mercy of our ideas This is never more true than with our ideas about God.”

— Dallas Willard

89. “What is thinking? It is the activity of searching out what must be true, or cannot be true, in the light of the given facts or assumptions.”

— Dallas Willard

90. “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

91. “Many Christians were suddenly prepared to look at traditional methods of spiritual formation. They could not help but see that spiritual growth and vitality stem from what we actually do with our lives, from the habits we form, and from the character that results.”

— Dallas Willard

92. “It’s very difficult to be right about something without hurting someone with it.”

— Dallas Willard

93. “Almost everything worth doing in human life is very difficult in its early stages and the good we are aiming at is never available at first, to strengthen us when we seem to need it most.”

— Dallas Willard

94. “Find a person who has embraced anger, and you will find a person with a wounded ego.”

— Dallas Willard

95. “Circumstances and other people are not in control of an individual’s character or of the life that lies endlessly before.”

— Dallas Willard

96. “No one need worry about our getting the best of God in some bargain with him, or that we might somehow succeed in using him for our purposes. Anyone who thinks this is a problem has seriously underestimated the intelligence and agility of our Father in the heavens. He will not be tricked or cheated.”

— Dallas Willard

97. “Blessed are the spiritual zeros – the spiritually bankrupt, deprived and deficient, the spiritual beggars, those without a wisp of ‘religion’ – when the kingdom of the heavens comes upon them.”

— Dallas Willard

98. “It is confidence in the invariably overriding intention of God for our good, with respect to all the evil and suffering that may befall us on life’s journey, that secures us in peace and joy.”

— Dallas Willard

99. “Thoughts are the place where we can and must begin to change. There the light of God first begins to move upon us through the word of Christ, and there the divine Spirit begins to direct our will to God and his way.”

— Dallas Willard

100. “The effect of standing before God by welcoming him before us will be the transformation of our entire life.”

— Dallas Willard