Quotes from Dallas Willard

when it comes to experiencing the sufficiency of God, we are not talking about what God can do; we are talking about what we need to do. And what we need to do is to turn our minds to God.

Father, I abandon myself into your hands. Do with me what you will. Whatever you may do, I thank you, I am ready for all, I accept all. Let only your will be done in me and in all your creatures. I wish no more than this, O Lord. Into your hands I commend my soul. I offer it to you with all the love of my heart, for I love you, Lord, and so need to give myself, to surrender myself into your hands without reserve and with boundless confidence, for you are my Father.4 —CHARLES DE FOUCAULD

Abstinence, then, makes way for engagement. If the places in our blood cells designed to carry oxygen are occupied by carbon monoxide, we die for lack of oxygen. If the places in our souls that are to be indwelt by God and his service are occupied by food, sex, and society, we die or languish for lack of God and right relation to his creatures. A proper abstinence actually breaks the hold of improper engagements so that the soul can be properly engaged in and by God.

your tongue follows correctness; your heart follows truth.

We have generated a body of people who consume Christian services and think that that is Christian faith.

Now, as St. Augustine saw long ago, the opposite of love is pride. Love eliminates pride because its will for the good of the other nullifies our arrogant presumption that we should get our way. We are concerned for the good of others and assured that our good is taken care of without self-will. Thus pride and fear and their dreadful offspring no longer rule our life as love becomes completed in us.

Anyone who can find a better way than Jesus, he would be the first to tell you to take it.

heaven is here and God is here, because God and his spiritual agents act here and are constantly available here.

Change only comes through breakdown or revolution.

It may seem strange but doing the will of God is a different matter than just doing what God wants us to do. The two are so far removed, in fact, that we can be solidly in the will of God, and know that we are, without knowing God's preference with regard to various details of our lives.

IF WE ARE CHRISTIANS simply by believing that Jesus died for our sins, then that is all it takes to have sins forgiven and go to heaven when we die. Why, then, do some people keep insisting that something more than this is desirable? Lordship, discipleship, spiritual formation, and the like?

God has paid an awful price to arrange for human self-determination. He obviously places great value on it. It is, after all, the only way he can get the kind of personal beings he desires for his eternal purposes. And just as we are not to try to manipulate others with impressive language of any kind (Matt. 5:37), so we are not to harass them into rightness and goodness with our condemnings and our "pearls" or holy things.

The will to obey is the engine that pulls the train of spirituality in Christ. But spirituality in many Christian circles has simply become another dimension of Christian consumerism. We have generated a body of people who consume Christian services and think that that is Christian faith.

Those who continue to be mastered by their feelings—whether it is anger, fear, sexual attraction, desire for food or for "looking good," the residues of woundedness, or whatever—are typically persons who in their heart of hearts believe that their feelings must be satisfied. They have long chosen the strategy of selectively resisting their feelings instead of that of not having them—of simply changing or replacing them.

We bring the reality of God into our lives by making contact with him through our minds, and our actions are based on the understanding that results from the fullness of that contact. There is nothing mysterious here. This is why the mind, and what we turn our minds to, is the key to our lives.

This is seen in his well-known use of the parable—which, from its origin in the Greek word paraballein, literally means to throw one thing down alongside another. Parables are not just pretty stories that are easy to remember; rather, they help us understand something difficult by comparing it to, placing it beside, something with which we are very familiar, and always something concrete, specific.

Mark 12 lists every dimension under the governance of Jesus' love.

One has to feel strong revulsion toward the wrong feeling one now has or is likely to have and at the same time strong attraction to good feeling that one does not now feel.

The Bible is, after all, God's gift to the world through his Church, not to the scholars. It comes through the life of his people and nourishes that life. Its purpose is practical, not academic. An intelligent, careful, intensive but straightforward reading—that is, one not governed by obscure and faddish theories or by a mindless orthodoxy—is what it requires to direct us into life in God's kingdom.

giving is not the same as imposition. That is why God does not just give us what we need without being asked. Prayer is nothing but a proper way for persons to interact. Thus

The problem with the flesh lies in its weakness and lostness when uncoupled from God's Spirit, which is precisely the condition of humanity apart from Christ. To live in the flesh, to live with uncrucified affections and desires, is simply a matter of putting them in the ultimate position in our lives. Whatever we want becomes the most important thing.

had to believe or do because otherwise something bad—something with no essential connection with real life—would happen to them. The people initially impacted by that message generally concluded that they would be fools to disregard it. That was the basis of their conversion.

desires are terrible masters. The objects of desire may differ; I may want to eat or sleep, I may want to dominate others, I may want great wealth. Taken by themselves, desires are inherently chaotic and deceitful (James 4:1–3; Eph. 4:22).

The idealization of poverty is one of the most dangerous illusions of Christians in the contemporary world. Stewardship—which requires possessions and includes giving—is the true spiritual discipline in relation to wealth.