Quotes from Dallas Willard

God is not mean, but he is dangerous.

I routinely watched Dallas, like no one I had encountered before or since, wipe clean people's vision of who God was, what his Son did and why, and what the Holy Spirit wishes to do in and through his church and then replace it with an all-consuming, hope-filled, grace-empowered, joy-seeking, love-giving gospel of God's boundless goodness and power. All the while he never manipulated emotions, overcame people's will, or used fear as a motivator.

To withhold our bodies from religion is to exclude religion from our lives.

What God gets out of our lives—and, indeed, what we get out of our lives—is simply the person we become. It

The other idea is, "I love you, and I will serve you by doing what is good for you, whether you want it or not.

Prayer is, above all, a means of forming character. It combines freedom and power with service and love. What

Content with beholding His face, My all to His pleasure resigned; No changes of season or place Would make any change in my mind; While blessed with a sense of his love, A palace a toy would appear; And prisons would palaces prove, If Jesus would dwell with me there.

The right thing would be simply releasing it all and saying, "All right. God knows. I'm living in his world. He can give me what he wants. I will not put these things in the place of God.

Reason functions as a basis of responsibility before God precisely because of its ability to serve in the instigation, nurture, and correction of faith. Because of this ability, we are responsible before God if we do not abide according to its results. To disparage the role of reason in the production and sustenance of faith is to contradict the plain intent of the scriptures, according to which reason provides adequate grounds to support a right worship of God.

Method is always tied to subject matter, and in dealing with life in general there is no such thing as a single scientific method.

Reign is no doubt wording that is a little too grand for the contemporary mind, though what it refers to is what everyone actually pursues in life. We have been trained to think of "reigning" as exclusionary of others. But in the heart of the divine conspiracy, it just means to be free and powerful in the creation and governance of what is good. In the life of prayer we are training for, we reign in harmonious union with the infinite power of God.

We live from our depths—most of which we do not understand. "Do

Grace is opposed to earning, not to effort.

Professing to believe has, sadly, played a large role in the practice of religion. It has profoundly stained our understanding of what religion is. Some people seem to profess belief in God "just in case" there is a God. But they neither are committed to nor believe in the idea that God exists.

Knowledge strengthens faith, sometimes by allowing us to grasp an item of faith in such a way that it also becomes an item of knowledge. Knowledge also can and often has laid a foundation for faith. We do often believe things because we have come to know them, and that is an ideal condition of belief.

It is always a personal negotiation, as

That is one reason it is hard to get people to pray at church and why prayer meetings are often dead. People don't see that prayer—real, two-way conversation with God—makes any difference. If

Remember, to believe something is to act as if it is so. To believe that two plus two equals four is to behave accordingly when trying to find out how many dollars or apples are in the house. The advantage of believing it is not that we can pass tests in arithmetic; it is that we can deal much more successfully with reality. Just try dealing with it as if two plus two equaled six.

Satan's constant assault is aimed at our belief in God's goodness and power, that God will supply all our needs, and that we can trust God to be sufficient in all ways. When our minds are on God, and our thoughts are formed by our knowledge of God, such sufficiency will flow to us. Thus Satan's main task is to keep our minds elsewhere, anywhere but on God.

believe our only hope for leaders to increasingly work in the way of Jesus, for the glory of Jesus, in the power of Jesus and under the direction of Jesus will be as they have passed through stages that help them learn the soul work of surrender, abandonment, contentment and participation. There simply are no shortcuts.

great deal of what goes into "training them [us] to do everything I said" consists simply in bringing people to believe with their whole being the information they already have as a result of their initial confidence in Jesus—even if that initial confidence was only the confidence of desperation.2

Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.

The Christian story is a story of human redemption from sin and from the power of evil. It is a story of the power of Jesus to overcome evil without engaging in it—of how he lives beyond all that evil can do against him or us. He has to be victorious in this battle.

For this purpose we will benefit most from the great passages of scripture that clearly show us our Father in relation to his creation and his earthly family. These are passages such as Genesis 1 or 15; Exodus 19; 1 Kings 8; 2 Chronicles 16 and 19; Nehemiah 9; many of the psalms (34, 37, 91, and 103, for example); Isaiah 30, 44, and 56–66; Luke 11; Romans 8; Philippians 4.