Top 250 Dallas Willard Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “The disciple of Jesus is not the deluxe or heavy-duty model of the Christian-especially padded, textured, streamlined, and empowered for the fast lane on the straight and narrow way. He stands on the pages of the New Testament as the first level of basic transportation in the kingdom of God.”

— Dallas Willard

202. “Until our thoughts of God have found every visible thing and event glorious with his presence, the word of Jesus has not yet fully seized us.”

— Dallas Willard

203. “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.”

— Dallas Willard

204. “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. But it lies beyond the reach of programs of inner transformation that draw merely on the human spirit – even when the human spirit is itself treated as ultimately divine.”

— Dallas Willard

205. “Today it is the skeptics who are the social conformists, though because of powerful intellectual propaganda they continue to enjoy thinking of themselves as wildly individualistic and unbearably bright.”

— Dallas Willard

206. “Old ways of doing things cease to be effective, though they may have been very powerful in the past. There arises a very real danger that we will set ourselves in opposition to what God truly is doing now and aims to do in the future.”

— Dallas Willard

207. “If the Bible says something once, notice it but don’t count it as a fundamental principle. If it says it twice, think about it twice. If it is repeated many times, then dwell on it and seek to understand it. What you want to believe from the Bible is its message on the whole and use it as a standard for interpreting the peripheral passages.”

— Dallas Willard

208. “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.”

— Dallas Willard

209. “The world that contains the possibility of evil is the one that also contains the greatest possibility of good. And the question of why God allows evil to happen has to be put against the question of what a world where evil could not happen would be like. It’s by working on those questions that people can come to some resolution in their minds about the reality of evil and what it means.”

— Dallas Willard

210. “Sometimes we get caught up in trying to glorify God by praising what He can do and we lose sight of the practical point of what He actually does do.”

— Dallas Willard

211. “Bodily pleasure is not in itself a bad thing. But when it is exalted to a necessity and we become dependent upon it, then we are slaves of our body and its feelings. Only misery lies ahead.”

— Dallas Willard

212. “The sad truth is that people can be just as arrogant from belief, commitment, various associations, or simple egotism as from claimed knowledge.”

— Dallas Willard

213. “To live strongly and creatively in the kingdom of the heavens, we need to have firmly fixed in our minds what our future is to be like. We want to live fully in the kingdom now, and for that purpose our future must make sense to us. It must be something we can now plan or make decisions in terms of, with clarity and joyful anticipation. In this way our future can be incorporated into our life now and our life now can be incorporated into our future.”

— Dallas Willard

214. “Actions are not impostions on who we are, but are expressions of who we are. They come out of our heart and the inner realities it supervises and interacts with.”

— Dallas Willard

215. “The adult members of churches today rarely raise serious religious questions for fear of revealing their doubts or being thought of as strange. There is an implicit conspiracy of silence on religious matters in the churches. This conspiracy covers up the fact that the churches do not change lives or influence conduct to any appreciable degree.”

— Dallas Willard

216. “Single-minded and joyous devotion to God and his will, to what God wants for us-and to service to him and to others because of him-is what the will transformed into Christliheness looks like.”

— Dallas Willard

217. “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.”

— Dallas Willard

218. “Of course, we do the righteous deed because of our redemption, not for our redemption.”

— Dallas Willard

219. “Commitment is not sustained by confusion but by insight. The person who is uninformed or confused will inevitably be unstable and vulnerable in action, thought and feeling.”

— Dallas Willard

220. “Who, among Christians today, is a disciple of Jesus, in any substantive sense of the word “disciple”? A disciple is a learner, a student, an apprentice – a practitioner, even if only a beginner. The New Testament literature, which must be allowed to define our terms if we are ever to get our bearings in the Way with Christ, makes this clear.”

— Dallas Willard

221. “Christian spiritual formation rests on this indispensable foundation of death to self and cannot proceed except insofar as that foundation is being firmly laid and sustained.”

— Dallas Willard

222. “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?”

— Dallas Willard

223. “Feelings too must be renovated: old ones removed in many cases, or at least thoroughly modified, and new ones installed or at least heightened into a new prominence.”

— Dallas Willard

224. “The hidden dimension of each human life is not visible to others, nor is it fully graspable even by ourselves. We usually know very little about the things that move in our own soul, the deepest level of our life, or what is driving it. Our “within” is astonishingly complex and subtle – even devious. It takes on a life of its own. Only God knows our depths, who we are, and what we would do.”

— Dallas Willard

225. “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.”

— Dallas Willard

226. “But Jesus’ own gospel of the kingdom was not that the kingdom was about to come, or had recently come, into existence. If we attend to what he actually said, it becomes clear that his gospel concerned only the new accessibility of the kingdom to humanity through himself.”

— Dallas Willard

227. “In accord with his original intent, the heavenly Father has in fact prepared an individualized kingdom for every person, from the outset of creation.”

— Dallas Willard

228. “Your thoughts cannot be empty. As the old saying goes, nature abhors a vacuum. If you are not entertaining God’s truth, you will be entertaining Satan’s lies.”

— Dallas Willard

229. “Incarnation” does not concern just the events of his conception and birth. It was the taking on of “flesh” in all its human meaning. He could live in your circumstances now. He could be you and still live in the kingdom of God. You can be his apprentice no matter who and where you are. It is as his personal friends, living interactively with him, that we know the truth and have the freedom – the power over evil – that comes with such knowledge.”

— Dallas Willard

230. “The truly powerful ideas are precisely the ones that never have to justify themselves.”

— Dallas Willard

231. “There are no formulas – no definitive how-tos – for growth in the inner character of Jesus. Such growth is a way of relentless seeking. But there are many things we can do to place ourselves at the disposal of God, and “if with all our hearts we truly seek him, we shall surely find him.”

— Dallas Willard

232. “Your mind will really talk to you when you begin to deny fulfillment to your desires, and you will find how subtle and shameless it is.”

— Dallas Willard

233. “Often I have asked at USC and other places in public, “Has anyone shown that reality is secular? Could you show me the person and where this was done? If it has not been done, isn’t it a little on the questionable side to announce we are a secular university?”

— Dallas Willard

234. “Jesus’ enduring relevance is based on his historically proven ability to speak to, to heal and empower the individual human condition. He matters because of what he brought and what he still brings to ordinary human beings, living their ordinary lives and coping daily with their surroundings. He promises wholeness for their lives. In sharing our weakness he gives us strength and imparts through his companionship a life that has the quality of eternity.”

— Dallas Willard

235. “What we can accomplish as good as it may be does not compare to what God can accomplish.”

— Dallas Willard

236. “Worship is at once the overall character of the renovated thought life and the only safe place for a human being to stand.”

— Dallas Willard

237. “We Christians should be aware that there’s something at stake in cultural participation that we wouldn’t have been concerned about if all we did was worry about the messages in culture.”

— Dallas Willard

238. “The so-called “right to privacy” of which so much is made in contemporary life is in very large measure merely a way of avoiding scrutiny in our wrongdoing.”

— Dallas Willard

239. “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.”

— Dallas Willard

240. “Disciples are those who have been so ravished with Christ that others want to be like them.”

— Dallas Willard

241. “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.”

— Dallas Willard

242. “The older liberal theology, which indeed was still primarily a theology or a view of God, died and was resurrected in the form of a social ethic that one could share with people who had no reliance on a present God or a living Christ at all. Total inclusivism of all beliefs and practices except oppressive ones, such as the exclusivism of traditional Christianity itself, was the natural next step.”

— Dallas Willard

243. “G. K. Chesterton famously quipped, “There is only one unanswerable argument against Christianity: Christians.”

— Dallas Willard

244. “The idea that you can trust Christ and not intend to obey him is an illusion generated by the prevalence of an unbelieving “Christian culture.”

— Dallas Willard

245. “We do not just hear what Jesus said to do and try to do that. Rather, we also notice what he did, and we do that too. We.”

— Dallas Willard

246. “When our students accept the call of a servant leader to further the cause of Christ, it is time to begin considering how they can escape the strictly Christian subculture in order to shine their lights of truth into the dark places in our world. This will take great care and wisdom.”

— Dallas Willard

247. “Spirituality has thus come to be regarded by the world as those futile, self-torturing excesses of strange men and women who lived in far-off, benighted places and times. Accordingly, the One who came to give abundance of life is commonly thought of as a cosmic stuffed shirt, whose excessive “spirituality” probably did not allow him normal bodily functions and certainly would not permit him to throw a frisbee or tackle someone in a football game.”

— Dallas Willard

248. “Hearing God cannot be a reliable and intelligible fact of life except when we see his speaking as one aspect of his presence with us, of his life in us. Only our communion with God provides the appropriate context for communications between us and him.”

— Dallas Willard

249. “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.”

— Dallas Willard

250. “No, you don’t have to certain about anything you’re not certain about. In fact, certainty is not something you can choose, anyway. Certainty and uncertainty are not things that are under the will.”

— Dallas Willard