Dallas Willard Quotes

The most important thing in your life is not what you do; it's who you become. That's what you will take into eternity.

Discipleship is the process of becoming who Jesus would be if he were you.

We don't believe something by merely saying we believe it, or even when we believe that we believe it. We believe something when we act as if it were true.

The greatest issue facing the world today, with all its heartbreaking needs, is whether those who, by profession or culture, are identified as ‘Christians’ will become disciples – students, apprentices, practitioners – of Jesus Christ, steadily learning from him how to live the life of the Kingdom of the Heavens into every corner of human existence.

The first act of love is always the giving of attention.

A disciple is a person who has decided that the most important thing in their life is to learn how to do what Jesus said to do.

Spiritual people are not those who engage in certain spiritual practices; they are those who draw their life from a conversational relationship with God.

The main thing God gets out of your life is not the achievements you accomplish. It's the person you become.

One of the hardest things in the world is to be right and not hurt other people with it.

Ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.

Consumer Christianity is now normative. The consumer Christian is one who utilizes the grace of God for forgiveness and the services of the church for special occasions, but does not give his or her life and innermost thoughts, feelings, and intentions over to the kingdom of the heavens. Such Christians are not inwardly transformed and not committed to it.

The ultimate freedom we have as human beings is the power to select what we will allow or require our minds to dwell upon.

Every church needs to be able to answer two questions. First, what is our plan for making disciples? And second, does our plan work?

When [Satan] undertook to draw Eve away from God, he did not hit her with a stick, but with an idea. It was with an idea that God could not be trusted and that she must act on her own to secure her own well-being.

Grace is not opposed to effort; it's opposed to earning.

You can live opposite of what you profess, but you cannot live opposite of what you believe.

A disciple is a learner, a student, an apprentice – a practitioner… Disciples of Jesus are people who do not just profess certain views as their own but apply their growing understanding of life in the Kingdom of the Heavens to every aspect of their life on earth.

Feelings are good servants, but they are disastrous masters.

The people to whom we minister and speak will not recall 99 percent of what we say to them, but they will never forget the kind of persons we are.

If we do not make formation in Christ the priority, then we're just going to keep on producing Christians that are indistinguishable in their character from many non-Christians.

Jesus, Willard says, “does not call us to do what he did, but to be as he was, permeated with love. Then the doing of what he did and said becomes the natural expression of who we are in him.

The will is transformed by experience, not information.

My central claim is that we become like Christ by doing one thing-by following Him in the overall style of life He chose for Himself. If we have faith in Christ, we must believe that He knew how to live. We can, through faith and grace, become like Christ by practicing the types of activities He engaged in, by arranging our whole lives around the activities He Himself practiced in order to remain constantly at home in the fellowship of the Father.

Spiritual formation cannot, in the nature of the case, be a 'private' thing, because it is a matter of whole-life transformation. You need to seek out others in your community who are pursuing the renovation of the heart.

I'm practicing the discipline of not having to have the last word.