Quotes from Dallas Willard

Our "kingdom" is simply the range of our effective will. Whatever we genuinely have the say over is in our kingdom.

The discipline of secrecy will help us break the grip of human opinion over our souls and our actions. A discipline is an activity in our power that we do to enable us to do what we cannot do by direct effort. Jesus

Such love is holistic, not something one turns on or off for this or that person or thing. Its orientation is toward life as a whole. It dwells on good wherever it may be found, and supports it in action. Love is nourished upon the good and the right and the beautiful.

Crucifixion is an interesting thing. It is hard to do by yourself. In fact, it is impossible.

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.

When the prophet Jeremiah, for example, says, "The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick: Who can understand it?" we have to recognize from our heart that we are the ones spoken of, that, indeed, I am the one described. Only then is a foundation laid for spiritual formation into Christlikeness.

Treasures are directly connected to our spirit, or will, and thus to our dignity as persons. It is, for example, very important for parents to respect the "treasure space" of children. It lies right at the center of the child's soul, and great harm can be done if it is not respected and even fostered.

Beyond my immediate context of relationships, the central question my friends and I began asking was quite simple: How could the soul health and transformation available to us become normative in our experience as a church community? While such experience of soul transformation has certainly been normative in seasons throughout history and even today, it is largely absent, or at least rare and idiosyncratic, in many environments where I have served.

Things good and bad will happen to us, of course. But what our life amounts to, at least for those who reach full age, is largely, if not entirely, a matter of what we become within.

Remember that our heart is our will, or our spirit: the center of our being from which our life flows. It is what gives orientation to everything we do. A heart rightly directed therefore brings health and wholeness to the entire personality.

What my life really is even now is "hid with Christ in God" (Col. 3:3). What I "treasure" in heaven is not just the little that I have caused to be there. It is what I love there and what I place my security and happiness in there. It is God who

So the idea conveyed is an absolutely fatal one - that to follow him simply means to try to behave as he did when he was on the spot, under pressure or persecution or in the spotlight. There is no realization that what he did in such cases was, in large and essential measure, the natural outflow of the life he lived when not on the spot.

Most families would be healthier and happier if their members treated one another with the respect they would give to a perfect stranger. C. S. Lewis's discussion of storge, familial love, is endlessly instructive on this point and is required reading for all who intend to have a decent family life.1 He notes that he has "been far more impressed by the bad manners of parents to children than by those of children to parent.

Genius, it is said, is the ability to scrutinize the obvious.

And where people do not want to know God, he usually allows them to be without him—at least for a while. When desire conflicts with reality, sooner or later reality wins.

The key, then, to loving God is to see Jesus, to hold him before the mind with as much fullness and clarity as possible. It is to adore him. For

Great power requires great character if it is to be a blessing and not a curse, and that character is something we only grow toward.

Many, many of the people who are identified as Christians have never been invited to become a disciple of Jesus. We don't have discipleship evangelism, but we need to have it because of the multitudes of people who are ready to go, who just need to understand and see and have the invitation to become disciples of Jesus. That's the way we have to go forward.

But for all of the soul's vastness and independence, the tiny executive center of the person—that is, the spirit or will—can redirect and re-form the soul, with God's cooperation. It mainly does this by redirecting the body in spiritual disciplines and toward various other types of experiences under God.

So my fifth point is this: spiritual formation is the process whereby the inmost being of the individual takes on the quality or character of Jesus himself.

spiritual formation is a matter of reworking all aspects of the self.

It is desirable to base our beliefs on knowledge wherever possible. Knowledge stabilizes true belief and makes it more effectual for good as well as more accessible and shareable.

There are two Gods," Tolstoy once said. "There is the God that people generally believe in—A God who has to serve them (sometimes in very refined ways, say by merely giving them peace of mind). This God does not exist. But the God whom people forget—the God whom we all have to serve—exists, and is the prime cause of our existence and of all that we perceive."3

Nondiscipleship costs abiding peace, a life penetrated throughout by love, faith that sees everything in the light of God's overriding governance for good, hopefulness that stands firm in the most discouraging of circumstances, power to do what is right and withstand the forces of evil. In short, nondiscipleship costs you exactly that abundance of life Jesus said he came to bring (John 10:10).