Quotes from Dallas Willard

We sing from this passage, "When we've been there ten thousand years, bright, shining as the sun…." But we should understand that brightness always represents power, energy, and that in the kingdom of our Father we will be active, unimaginably creative.

The spiritual side of the human being, Christian and non-Christian alike, develops into the reality that it becomes, for good or ill.

voice. It cannot be stressed too much that the permanent address at which the word of God may be found is the Bible.     More

knowledge is a friend of faith, essential to faith and to our relationship with God in the spiritual life.

They spend their whole earthly existence trying to save, enhance, and enrich their lives. And what happens? They lose the most important things in their life: an intimate relationship with God and with others.

Every Christian must strive to arrive at beliefs about God that faithfully reflect the realities of his or her life and experience, so that each may know how to live effectively before him in his world. That's theology!

His Heart, Our Heart As disciples (literally students) of Jesus, our goal is to learn to be like him. We begin by trusting him to receive us as we are. But our confidence in him leads us toward the same kind of faith he had, a faith that made it possible for him to act as he did.

The Beatitudes simply cannot be "good news" if they are understood as a set of "how-tos" for achieving blessedness. They would then only amount to a new legalism. They would not serve to throw open the kingdom—anything but. They would impose a new brand of Phariseeism, a new way of closing the door—as well as some very gratifying new possibilities for the human engineering of righteousness.

The truth of the matter is that people are obsessed with themselves. This is often caused by the wounds they have received. When you hit your thumb with a hammer, what happens in the following days? You are very mindful of your thumb. The same is true when we are hurt; we become conscious of ourselves to such an extent that we are imprisoned in that consciousness.

Christian spiritual formation is inescapably a matter of recognizing in ourselves the idea systems of evil that govern the present age and respective culture, as well as those that constitute life away from God.

Anger indulged, instead of simply waved off, always has in it an element of self-righteousness and vanity. Find a person who has embraced anger, and you find a person with a wounded ego.

First, we must learn from him the reason why we live and why we do the things we do.

Jesus is the expression of the love of God for us, and in him we see the many ways God deals with people in mercy and grace.

Must one not wonder about people willing to wear a commercial trademark on the outside of their shirts or caps or shoes to let others know who they are? And just think of a world in which little children sing, "I wish I were a [certain kind of] wiener. That is what I really want to be. For if I were [that certain kind of] wiener. Everyone would be in love with me.

Put his words into practice and find them to be true.

We humans, though, on our own—manipulating the natural powers around us, whether of the atom or of social processes—are truly a terrifying phenomenon. We easily appear to be completely out of control today, careening madly toward the edge of the cosmic cliff. Candid observers quickly come to the conclusion that there is some pervasive and basic lack in human life.

We automatically remember what makes a real difference in our life. The secret of the great teacher is to speak words, to foster experiences, that impact the active flow of the hearer's life. That is what Jesus did by the way he taught. He tied his teachings to concrete events that make up the hearers' lives. He aimed his sayings at their hearts and habits as these were revealed in their daily lives.

Humility leads to perfect death. Humility means the giving up of self and the taking of the place of perfect nothingness before

You know something when you are able to deal with it as it is on an appropriate basis of thought and experience.

My people perish from lack of knowledge" (Hos 4:6).

the full manifestation of the power of this death in your disposition and conduct depends upon the measure in which the Holy Spirit imparts the power of the death of Christ.

Religion as actually lived, not as some figment of the academic imagination, always claims to involve knowledge of how things are.

What is his load? It is to bring the reign of God into ordinary human life. That is why he came the way he did, lived the way he did and died the way he did. In the midst of a world of ordinary human life he was pulling the load of bringing the kingdom of God into ordinary human life. That was his message. And his message was to everyone.

humble yourself. This is your one duty.