Quotes from Dallas Willard

This is the true situation: nothing has power to tempt me or move me to wrong action that I have not given power by what I permit to be in me. And the most spiritually dangerous things in me are the little habits of thought, feeling, and action that I regard as "normal" because "everyone is like that" and it is "only human.

Petition: Casting Your Cares on Him Having risen in praise and thankfulness, then you pray for yourself, for the people in your life, and for the things you are facing that day. Declare your dependence upon God, asking him to remove all fear and to fill you with his love for your life and all that enters it.

Our challenge is to fill our hours, minutes, and actions from day to day with the appropriate amount of love for God's creation and creating, and then work to produce more of the good he has put in this world. This is every person's calling.

In charting one's course in life, it is important never to forget that many things that cannot be called wrong or evil are nevertheless not good for us.

we see the reality of Jesus risen, his actual existence now as a person who is present among his people. We find him in his ecclesia, his sometimes motley but always glorious crew of called-out ones.

in a day spent with him, we can expect to be receiving his strength to do those things that will please him, and avoid those things that bring him pain.

if you sufficiently dismember yourself, you will not be able to do any wrong action. This is the logic by which Jesus reduces the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees to the absurd.

Grace is opposed to earning, not to effort. And it is well-directed, decisive, and sustained effort that is the key to the keys of the Kingdom and to the life of restful power in ministry and life that those keys open to us.

there is a simple, straightforward way in which congregations of Jesus' people can, without exception, fulfill his call to be an ecclesia, his "called out" ones: a touch point between heaven and earth, where the healing of the Cross and the Resurrection can save the lost and grow the saved into the fullness of human beings in Christ.

the intention points the way, and then habituated thought and desire must be redirected to support the intention in the moments of action.

The Day Dawns: Rising with Praise, Petition, and Planning

It is fitting that we arise with thankfulness and praise to God. This is fundamental and will be a natural (and supernatural!) beginning to your day after having retired in faith and prayer.

In every concrete situation we have to ask ourselves, not "Did I do the specific things in Jesus' illustrations?" but "Am I being the kind of person Jesus' illustrations are illustrations of?

An older Franciscan brother said to Brennan Manning on the day he joined the order, "Once you come to know the love of Jesus Christ, nothing else in the world will seem as beautiful or desirable.

The effect of the rupture that sin created in the relationship between the man and the woman is this: mistrust, anger, and disappointment became the standard quality of human life. Even

The revolution of Jesus is in the first place and continuously a revolution of the human heart or spirit. It did not and does not proceed by means of the formation of social institutions and laws, the outer forms of our existence, intending that these would then impose a good order of life upon people who come under their power. Rather, his is a revolution of character, which proceeds by changing people from the inside through ongoing personal relationship to God in Christ and to one another.

Joy and Confidence

Thank you, God, for this new day. Thank you for this new beginning.

External, social arrangements may be useful to this end, but they are not the end, nor are they a fundamental part of the means.

living water," the Spirit of God Himself, that will keep them from ever again being thirsty—being driven and ruled by unsatisfied desires

kneel for five or ten minutes and welcome the presence of Jesus. You may not think it will make any difference to kneel when you pray, but try it anyway. Then consider the difference it may have made. As you pray, give the day up to God, renewing your invitation to him to be with you each moment.

What takes over when knowledge disappears is tradition.

men of the modern world exist in a continual and flagrant antagonism between their consciences and their way of life."1 There

The most constant "whim," historically, has been the disastrous idea just mentioned: that Jesus is here giving laws. For if that is all he is doing, they will certainly be laws that are impossible to keep. The keeping of law turns out to be an inherently self-refuting aim; rather, the inner self must be changed. Trying merely to keep the law is not wholly unlike trying to make an apple tree bear peaches by tying peaches to its branches.