Quotes from Dallas Willard

Hebrews 13:5–6: Let your conduct be without covetousness; be content with such things as you have. For He Himself has said, "I will never leave you nor forsake you." So we may boldly say: "The LORD is my helper; I will not fear. What can man do to me?" Don't covet; be content with what you have. The freedom from the frantic desire to have is grounded in God's promise to never leave us.

Preliminary 1: Determining Your Desire

Do I really want this?" This question needs answering for the simple reason that if God is going to be with us, we should expect that our lives will be extremely different from ordinary human life.

confident (con-fide, literally acting "with faith") about who we are and what we are doing. To be with Jesus is to have both.

everyone has been certain and wrong. Certainty is a psychological state that you can work up. You see a lot of this in religious groups. They are trying to work up certainty, but that is a terrible mistake. When you convey knowledge, you are giving people things they can test and find to be true in reality.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer forcefully states, "The only proper response to this word which Jesus brings with him from eternity is simply to do it."6

The Opening Door Enter, Lord Christ— I have joy in Your coming. You have given me life; and I welcome Your coming. I turn now to face You, I lift up my eyes. Be blessing my face, Lord; be blessing my eyes. May all my eye looks on be blessed and be bright, my neighbors, my loved ones be blessed in Your sight. You have given me life and I welcome Your coming. Be with me, Lord, I have joy, I have joy.*

It is setting aside our own ideas as supreme and our own will as ultimate, freeing us from the burden of having our own way and of being all-wise in our own eyes.

The fondness, the endearment, the unstintingly affectionate regard of God toward all his creatures is the natural outflow of what he is to the core—which we vainly try to capture with our tired but indispensable old word love.

Preliminary 2: In a Mirror, Dimly

Petition: Casting Your Cares on Him

The only way the devil can hurt God is through humans, and so he focuses upon us. His strategy is to try to frustrate God's purpose for humanity

Laotse, a wise man of ancient China, observed: "When the work of the best rulers is done, their task accomplished, the people all remark, 'We have done it ourselves.

But reliance upon what the Spirit does to us or in us, as indispensable as it truly is, will not by itself transform character in its depths. The action of the Spirit must be accompanied by our response, which, as we have seen, cannot be carried out by anyone other than ourselves.

Satan can do nothing about God's unshakable kingdom directly, but only indirectly through human infirmity and rebellion. His way of doing that is to persuade, and to tempt, and to deceive humanity.

Bluntly, to serve God well we must think straight; and crooked thinking, unintentional or not, always favors evil. And when the crooked thinking gets elevated into group orthodoxy, whether religious or secular, there is always, quite literally, "hell to pay." That is, hell will take its portion, as it has repeatedly done in the horrors of world history.

Fact 1: It is okay to be who you are wherever you are.

we see a clear pattern: Satan's constant deception of human beings.

The life and words that Jesus brought into the world came in the form of information and reality.

Satan, then, is God's primary target, for he is the one who bears the primary responsibility for all that is wrong with the world.

It is almost impossible in the thought climate of today's Western world to appreciate just how utterly unnecessary it was for Paul to say explicitly, in the world in which he lived, that Christians should fast, be alone, study, give, and so forth as regular disciplines for the spiritual life.

This can also be a time of confession, in which you ask for the strength to deal with the failures you experience day by day.

The secret to this blessed life is God being with them in the here-and-now of their real lives. Spending a day with Jesus is an opportunity to live in acknowledgement that this is so.

Satan, and his intent is to thwart God's purposes by manipulating the minds of human beings.