Quotes from Dallas Willard

that it was produced and preserved by competent human beings who were at least as intelligent and devout as we are today. I assume that they were quite capable of accurately interpreting their own experience and of objectively presenting what they heard and experienced in the language of their historical community, which we today can understand with due diligence.

Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.

Yet, without this realization of our utter ruin and without the genuine revisioning and redirecting of our lives, which that bitter realization naturally gives rise to, no clear path to inner transformation can be found. It is psychologically and spiritually impossible.

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.

But the final step in becoming a disciple is decision. We become a life student of Jesus by deciding. When

The spirit is able to consider alternatives, and God prompts us to have an interest in what is better and best.

The missing note in evangelical life today is not in the first instance spirituality but rather obedience. We have generated a variety of religion to which obedience is not regarded as essential.

That is the function of the will or heart: to organize our life as a whole, and, indeed, to organize it around God.

The problem comes when we mistake the vessel for the treasure, for the treasure is the life and power of Jesus Christ.

God relates to space as we do to our body. He occupies and overflows it but cannot be localized in it. Every point in it is accessible to his consciousness and will, and his manifest presence can be focused in any location as he sees fit. In the incarnation he focused his reality in a special way in the body of Jesus. This

For our Christian groups and their leaders, it means that 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.

Secularism—itself always posing as knowledge, usually by striving to associate itself with "science" and "research"—justifies itself in determining political and legal processes and outcomes by stepping outside what is regarded as religion.

have always replied that I will be glad to enter a joint inquiry with so and so, but I will not debate. We will seek the truth together.

Their desire for such honor was keeping them from believing, because you cannot hold the esteem of others to that degree of importance and at the same time believe that God is who he is. It is not possible. As long as people are hung up on honor from other people—reputation, appearing well—they cannot truly believe and trust God.

It is one of the defects of an age with no true sense of its past to suppose that what is now is what has always been, and that anything else is either novel or wrong or both.

When we see Jesus as he is, we must turn away or else shamelessly adore him.

So prayer is a total activity, incorporating many elements essential to a personal relationship between two persons—persons different from and related to one another as the Father is to his children on earth. But still the heart of prayer is the request.

What must be emphasized in all of this is the difference between trusting Christ, the real person Jesus, with all that that naturally involves, versus trusting some arrangement for sin-remission set up through him—trusting only his role as guilt remover. To trust the real person Jesus is to have confidence in him in every dimension of our real life, to believe that he is right about and adequate to everything.

under their influence, and that of a few less significant developments in psychology, the human being has been increasingly taken to be the kind of thing that could not be a subject of moral knowledge. That is because, in such views, the human self (if it even exists, which has been strongly denied) is governed by unconscious forces other than self-awareness and rational self-direction.

good unless others are responsible.

In creating human beings in his likeness so that we could govern in his manner, God gave us a measure of independent power. Without such power, we absolutely could not resemble God in the close manner he intended, nor could we be God's coworkers. The locus or depository of this necessary power is the human body. This explains, in theological terms, why we have a body at all. That body is our primary area of power, freedom, and—therefore—responsibility.

we demean God by considering him a cosmic boss who orders humans around

One of the greatest weaknesses in our teaching and leadership today is that we spend so much time trying to get people to do things good people are supposed to do, without changing what they really believe.

Most but not all uncertainties in the minds of disciples—and this is only somewhat less so for people in general—are the result of unclarities and failures to understand. These shut down confidence and love, and we must never rest until they are cleanly dispersed from the mind.