Quotes from Dallas Willard

To know Christ in the modern world is to know him in your world now. To know him in your world now is to live interactively with him right where you are in your daily activities. This is the spiritual life in Christ.

Immerse them together in the presence of the Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Yes, baptize them in the name, but, dear friends, that doesn't just mean getting them wet while you say those names. It means to immerse them in the Reality.

The Spirit makes Christ present to us and draws us toward his likeness. It is as we thus behold the "glory of the Lord" that we are constantly "transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit" (2 Corinthians 3:18).

Any voice that promises total exemption from suffering and failure is most certainly not God's voice. In recent years innumerable spokespeople for God have offered ways we can use God and his Bible as guarantees of health, success and wealth.

For at least several decades the churches of the Western world have not made discipleship a condition of being a Christian. One is not required to be, or to intend to be, a disciple in order to become a Christian, and one may remain a Christian without any signs of progress toward or in discipleship.

When our students accept the call of a servant leader to further the cause of Christ, it is time to begin considering how they can escape the strictly Christian subculture in order to shine their lights of truth into the dark places in our world. This will take great care and wisdom.

the situations in which we find ourselves are never as important as our responses to them, which come from our "spiritual" side.

Most problems in contemporary churches can be explained by the fact that members have never decided to follow Christ.

This impotence of "systems" is a main reason why Jesus did not send his students out to start governments or even churches as we know them today, which always strongly convey some elements of a human system. They were, instead, to establish beachheads of his person, word, and power in the midst of a failing and futile humanity. They were to bring the presence of the kingdom and its King into every corner of human life simply by fully living in the kingdom with him.

The obviously well kept secret of the "ordinary" is that it is made to be a receptacle of the divine, a place where the life of God flows.

The ultimate freedom we have as individuals is the power to select what we will allow or require our minds to dwell upon and think about.

People are meant to live in an ongoing conversation with God, speaking and being spoken to.

There are no formulas—no definitive how-tos—for growth in the inner character of Jesus. Such growth is a way of relentless seeking. But there are many things we can do to place ourselves at the disposal of God, and "if with all our hearts we truly seek him, we shall surely find him

Giving is the highest expression of potency. In the very act of giving I experience my strength, my wealth, my power.

Father, we remember now that we are right here with you and that you are in our midst and that you love us and that you long for us to be healed and whole and that we do not do any of this on our own and that this universe is a perfectly safe place for us to be and that you are closer than the air we breathe. And so we ask that you would be at work now and help us and give us energy and openness and strength, and we pray this together in Jesus' name. Amen. John Ortberg

we must accept the circumstances we constantly find ourselves in as the place of God's kingdom and blessing. God has yet to bless anyone except where they actually are, and if we faithlessly discard situation after situation, moment after moment, as not being "right," we will simply have no place to receive his kingdom into our life. For those situations and moments are our life.

Giving is more joyous than receiving, not because it is a deprivation, but because in the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness.

So the call to "give an account" is, first, not a call to beat unwilling people into intellectual submission, but to be the servant of those in need, often indeed the servant of those who are in the grip of their own intellectual self-righteousness and pride, usually reinforced by their social surroundings.

Only the humble person will let God be God. Such people are realistic about who they actually are

Nothing less than life in the steps of Christ is adequate to the human soul or the needs of our world. Any other offer fails to do justice to the drama of human redemption, deprives the hearer of life's greatest opportunity, and abandons this present life to the evil powers of the age.

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

We have generated a body of people who consume Christian services and think that that is Christian faith. Consumption of Christian services replaces obedience to Christ. And spirituality is one more thing to consume.

Our most serious failure today is the inability to provide effective practical guidance as to how to live the lifwe of Jesus. And I believe that is due to this very real loss of biblical realism for our lives.

The revolution of Jesus is in the first place and continuously a revolution of the human heart and spirit.