Top 250 Dallas Willard Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “We truly live at the mercy of our ideas; this is never more true than with our ideas about God.”

— Dallas Willard

102. “Keep eternity before the children.”

— Dallas Willard

103. “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

104. “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

105. “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

106. “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

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

— Dallas Willard

108. “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.”

— Dallas Willard

109. “The cautious faith that never saws off a limb on which it is sitting, never learns that unattached limbs may find strange unaccountable ways of not falling.”

— Dallas Willard

110. “God inducts us into the eternal kind of life that flows through himself. He does this first by bringing that life to bear upon our needs, and then by diffusing it throughout our deeds – deeds done with expectation that he and his Father will act with and in our actions.”

— Dallas Willard

111. “Belief is when your whole being is set to act as if something is so.”

— Dallas Willard

112. “In relation to spiritual disciplines, the most helpful distinction is the difference between trying to do something and training to do something.”

— Dallas Willard

113. “Jesus, Willard says, “does not call us to do what he did, but to be as he was, permeated with love. Then the doing of what he did and said becomes the natural expression of who we are in him.”

— Dallas Willard

114. “We are built to live in the kingdom of God. It is our natural habitat.”

— Dallas Willard

115. “A leader enables people to love and honor the role they play in the organization or group they are part of.”

— Dallas Willard

116. “You cannot trust Jesus in areas in which you don’t think him competent.”

— Dallas Willard

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

— Dallas Willard

118. “Much of our effort to do things for the Lord is really the resurgence of our desire to dominate and make things happen in our own strength.”

— Dallas Willard

119. “The union Christ had with the Father was the greatest that we can conceive of in this life-if indeed we can conceive of it.”

— Dallas Willard

120. “The best physical, chemical, and other scientific knowledge will not tell us what to do and who to be.”

— Dallas Willard

121. “Even professing Christians, by and large, devote to their spiritual growth and well-being a tiny fraction of the time they devote to their body, and it is even tinier fraction if we include what they worry about.”

— Dallas Willard

122. “A. W. Tozer expressed his “feeling that a notable heresy has come into being throughout evangelical Christian circles – the widely accepted concept that we humans can choose to accept Christ only because we need him as Savior and that we have the right to postpone our obedience to him as Lord as long as we want to!”

— Dallas Willard

123. “Does Christ commend the famous ‘apathy’ of the Stoic or the Buddhist elimination of desire? Far from it. The issue is not just feeling or desire, but right feeling or desire, or being controlled by feeling or desire.”

— Dallas Willard

124. “Only the humble person will let God be God. Such people are realistic about who they actually are.”

— Dallas Willard

125. “The advantage of believing in the Trinity is not that we get an A from God for knowing the right answer. The advantage of believing in the Trinity is that we then live as if the Trinity is real, as if the cosmos around us is actually beyond all else a community of unspeakably magnificent personal beings of boundless love, knowledge and power.”

— Dallas Willard

126. “Living in the kingdom of God is a matter of living with God’s action in our lives.”

— Dallas Willard

127. “You may be very sure that if your sincere intent is to glorify God and bless others in your efforts, and you are not motivated by unloving attitudes, you will see the hand of God move with you as you expectantly do your work. Your part is simply to expect it, watch for it, give thanks as you see it, and, on the basis of your experience, encourage others to do the same.”

— Dallas Willard

128. “Faith is not opposed to knowledge; faith is opposed to sight. And grace is not opposed to effort; it is opposed to earning.”

— Dallas Willard

129. “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.”

— Dallas Willard

130. “Love is not God, but God is love. It is who he is, his very identity.”

— Dallas Willard

131. “Two ways of thinking: Human kingdom and human cleverness or God’s kingdom and God’s cleverness.”

— Dallas Willard

132. “What is the point of standing up for rights in a world where few stand up for their responsibilities? Your rights will do you little good unless others are responsible.”

— Dallas Willard

133. “For at least several decades the churches of the Western world have not made discipleship a condition of being a Christian. One is not required to be, or to intend to be, a disciple in order to become a Christian, and one may remain a Christian without any signs of progress toward or in discipleship.”

— Dallas Willard

134. “We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. You can almost be as stupid as a cabbage as long as you doubt.”

— Dallas Willard

135. “Still today the Old Testament book of Psalms gives great power for faith and life. This is simply because it preserves a conceptually rich language about God and our relationships to him. If you bury yourself in Psalms, you emerge knowing God and understanding life.”

— Dallas Willard

136. “We need to understand that Jesus is a thinker, that this is not a dirty word but an essential work, and that his other attributes do not preclude thought, but only ensure that he is certainly the greatest thinker of the human race: “the most intelligent person who ever lived on earth””

— Dallas Willard

137. “Theology is just what you really think about God, and if you’re going to do that, you’d better use your mind and not just let it be a receptacle – a catch-all for whatever beliefs happen to be passing by.”

— Dallas Willard

138. “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.”

— Dallas Willard

139. “The American Quaker theologian Elton Trueblood, some years ago, quoted Kirsopp Lake’s definition: “Faith is not belief in spite of evidence, but life in scorn of consequences.” Then he adds: “Faith, as the plain man knows, is not belief without proof, but trust without reservations.”

— Dallas Willard

140. “Many people think of Jesus as our Savior, as the one who will get us into heaven. So the question often is “Have I accepted Jesus as my Savior?” But we never ask the question “Have I accepted Jesus as my teacher?”

— Dallas Willard

141. “In a world apart from God, the power of denial is absolutely essential if life is to proceed. The will or spirit cannot-psychologically cannot-sustain itself for any length of time in the face of what it clearly acknowledges to be the case. Therefore it must deny and evade and delude itself.”

— Dallas Willard

142. “He saves us by realistic restoration of our heart to God and then by dwelling there with his Father through the distinctively divine Spirit. The heart thus renovated and inhabited is the only real hope of humanity on earth.”

— Dallas Willard

143. “Grace is not just about forgiveness but about life.”

— Dallas Willard

144. “Christ was not crucified so that we wouldn’t have to be. He was crucified so we could be crucified with him.”

— Dallas Willard

145. “What is truly profound is thought to be stupid and trivial, or worse, boring, while what is actually stupid and trivial is thought to be profound. That is what it means to fly upside down.”

— Dallas Willard

146. “When I left home after graduating high school, I left as a migrant agricultural worker with a Modern Library edition of Plato in my duffel bag. It sounds kind of crazy, but I loved it. I loved the stuff. Before I knew there was a subject called philosophy, I loved it.”

— Dallas Willard

147. “To know Christ in the modern world is to know him in your world now. To know him in your world now is to live interactively with him right where you are in your daily activities. This is the spiritual life in Christ.”

— Dallas Willard

148. “Union in action with the triune God is Christian spirituality. That is where the life is drawing its substance from God.”

— Dallas Willard

149. “Similarly, a primary objective for Christian educators and a major task of professional pastors, if not the foremost task, should be the wholesale elimination of condemnation and anti-intellectualism from the local church.”

— Dallas Willard

150. “We have generated a body of people who consume Christian services and think that that is Christian faith. Consumption of Christian services replaces obedience to Christ. And spirituality is one more thing to consume.”

— Dallas Willard