110+ Dallas Willard Quotes On Kingdom Of God, Discipleship And Soul

Dallas Willard (1935-2013) was an American philosopher and Christian teacher who wrote extensively on the nature of spiritual transformation and the development of Christian spiritual formation. He was a professor of philosophy at the University of Southern California and a senior fellow at the Center for Christian Thought at Biola University. His works, such as The Divine Conspiracy, The Spirit of the Disciplines, and Renovation of the Heart, have been influential in the development of contemporary Christian spirituality. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Dallas Willard on kingdom of god, discipleship, soul.

Top 10 Dallas Willard Quotes

1. 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.
2. Few people arise in the morning as hungry for God as they are for cornflakes or toast and eggs.
3. Discipleship is the process of becoming who Jesus would be if he were you.
4. The key, then, to loving God is to see Jesus, to hold him before the mind with as much fullness and clarity as possible. It is to adore him.
5. The aim of spiritual formation is not behavior modification but the transformation of all those aspects of you and me where behavior comes from...Circumcision of the heart.
6. Spiritual people are not those who engage in certain spiritual practices; they are those who draw their life from a conversational relationship with God.
7. Our failure to hear His voice when we want to is due to the fact that we do not in general want to hear it, that we want it only when we think we need it.
8. The ultimate freedom we have as human beings is the power to select what we will allow or require our minds to dwell upon.
9. The more we pray, the more we think to pray, and as we see the results of prayer-the responses of our Father to our requests-our confidence in God's power spills over into other areas of our life.
10. Spiritual formation for the Christian basically refers to the Spirit-driven process of forming the inner world of the human self in such a way that it becomes like the inner being of Christ himself.

Dallas Willard Short Quotes

• You cannot trust Jesus in areas in which you don't think him competent.
• The hardest thing about leadership is the intimacy it requires.
• We are unceasing spiritual beings with an eternal destiny in God's great universe.
• We are invited to make a pilgrimage – into the heart and life of God.
• It would be strange if we came to shun the genuine simply because it resembled the counterfeit.
• It's very difficult to be right about something without hurting someone with it.
• As we reach out to God, we get another source of strength.
• If we are to use our minds rightly, we must live in an attitude of constant openness and learning.
• There is no problem in human life that apprenticeship to Jesus cannot solve.
• Of course, we do the righteous deed because of our redemption, not for our redemption.

Dallas Willard Quotes About Kingdom Of God

We are built to live in the kingdom of God. It is our natural habitat. — Dallas Willard

The kingdom of God is the true ecology of the human soul. — Dallas Willard

Kingdom praying and its efficacy is entirely a matter of the innermost heart's being totally open and honest before God. It is a matter of what we are saying with our whole being, moving with resolute intent and clarity of mind into the flow of God's action. — Dallas Willard

Two ways of thinking: Human kingdom and human cleverness or God's kingdom and God's cleverness — Dallas Willard

Jesus is the human face on the kingdom of God. He makes it concretely accessible. — Dallas Willard

Churches are not the kingdom of God, but are primary and inevitable expressions, outposts, and instrumentalities of presence of the kingdom among us. They are 'societies' of Jesus. — Dallas Willard

It would be of course a low voltage spiritual life in which prayer was chiefly undertaken as a discipline, rather than as a way of co-labouring with God to accomplish good things and advancing his Kingdom purposes. — Dallas Willard

He [Peter after the resurrection] now understood that he and the church were to exercise a transcendent power that did not depend upon having a kingdom or government in any human sense, for it was literally a "God government" in which they were participants (Acts 1:6-8). — Dallas Willard

The disciple of Jesus is not the deluxe or heavy-duty model of the Christian-especially padded, textured, streamlined, and empowered for the fast lane on the straight and narrow way. He stands on the pages of the New Testament as the first level of basic transportation in the kingdom of God. — Dallas Willard

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. — Dallas Willard

Dallas Willard Quotes About Soul

Generally speaking we don't want to hear from the soul. We want it to just do its job. Unfortunately, in a broken world, it also is broken, and we're going to hear from it because many of the ordinary miseries and extraordinary glories of human life are expressions of the state of the soul. — Dallas Willard

Now, of course, you have guidance devices and all sorts of things. The soul would be more like the way this is all hooked together, a system of coordination. — Dallas Willard

The law of the Lord is perfect, restoring the soul. — Dallas Willard

Think of the soul as the computer system that runs the whole thing. And then the spirit is the executive center. It's the faculty of choice. And then you want that faculty governed by the truth of God and the Spirit of God. — Dallas Willard

I would say the soul would be more than the engine. The soul would be like the computer system that coordinates everything, from the smog device to the fuel injection system to the brakes. — Dallas Willard

See, once you have begun to experience solitude and silence, you discover that you actually have a soul and that there is a God.Then you can begin to practice Sabbath and that will enable you to re-enter community.You can't have community without Sabbath. — Dallas Willard

The acid test for any theology is this: Is the God presented one that can be loved, heart, soul, mind, and strength? ... If it fails to set a lovable God--a radiant, happy, friendly, accessible, and totally competent being--before ordinary people, we have gone wrong — Dallas Willard

I do emphasize that we cannot just get out of the Bible a definition of the soul. — Dallas Willard

The soul's order is re-established in God through the law. — Dallas Willard

The spirit is the part that is supposed to consciously direct everything in the person, including the soul. — Dallas Willard

Dallas Willard Quotes About Prayer

The open secret of many Bible believing Churches is that a vanishingly small percentage of those talking about prayer and Bible reading are actually doing what they are talking about. — Dallas Willard

And God has set up prayer in such a way that, if you want to explain it away, you can. That's the human mind. God set it up like that for a reason, which is this: God ordained that people should be governed in the end by what they want. — Dallas Willard

Prayer is talking with God about what we are doing together. — Dallas Willard

The idea that everything would happen exactly as it does regardless of whether we pray or not is a specter that haunts the minds of many who sincerely profess belief in God. It makes prayer psychologically impossible, replacing it with dead ritual at best. — Dallas Willard

Dallas Willard Quotes About Heaven

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. — Dallas Willard

One does not miss heaven by a hair, but by constant effort to avoid and escape God. — Dallas Willard

In thus sending out his trainees, [Jesus] set afoot a perpetual world revolution: one that is still in process and will continue until God's will is done on earth as it is in heaven.... He has chosen to accomplish this with and, in part, through his students. — Dallas Willard

In accord with his original intent, the heavenly Father has in fact prepared an individualized kingdom for every person, from the outset of creation. — Dallas Willard

I believe that every human being is sufficiently depraved that when we get to heaven, no one will be able to say, I merited this. — Dallas Willard

Other kingdoms are still present on earth along with the kingdom of the heavens. That is the human condition. — Dallas Willard

Dallas Willard Quotes About Forgiveness

Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action. Grace, you know, does not just have to do with forgiveness of sins alone. — Dallas Willard

There is absolutely nothing in what Jesus himself or his early followers taught that suggests you can decide just to enjoy forgiveness at Jesus' expense and have nothing more to do with him. — Dallas Willard

Those who have been touched by forgiveness and new life and have thus entered into God's rule become, like Jesus, bearers of that rule. — Dallas Willard

Grace is not just about forgiveness but about life. — Dallas Willard

Dallas Willard Quotes About Love

God's aim in human history is the creation of an inclusive community of loving persons, with himself included as its primary sustainer and most glorious inhabitant. — Dallas Willard

The first act of love is always the giving of attention. — Dallas Willard

Business is a primary arrangement on God's part for people to love one another and serve one another. — Dallas Willard

God does not 'love' us without liking us. — Dallas Willard

A leader enables people to love and honor the role they play in the organization or group they are part of — Dallas Willard

At the center of care for the heart is the love of God. This must be the joyful aim of our life. — Dallas Willard

It is the responsibility of every Christ-centred follower to carve out a satisfying life under the loving rule of God or else sin will start to look good. — Dallas Willard

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. — Dallas Willard

When I left home after graduating high school, I left as a migrant agricultural worker with a Modern Library edition of Plato in my duffel bag. It sounds kind of crazy, but I loved it. I loved the stuff. Before I knew there was a subject called philosophy, I loved it. — Dallas Willard

Human beings are at their core defined by what they worship rather than primarily by what they think, know, or believe. That is bound up with the central Augustinian claim that we are what we love. — Dallas Willard

Dallas Willard Quotes About Spiritual Formation.

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. — Dallas Willard

Spiritual formation in Christ moves us toward a total interchange of our ideas and images for his. — Dallas Willard

In Spiritual formation we are aiming at a character and life that is so shaped that the deeds of Christ routinely and easily come from what is inside. — Dallas Willard

Everyone gets a spiritual formation. It's like education. Everyone gets an education; it's just a matter of which one you get. — Dallas Willard

Many Christians were suddenly prepared to look at traditional methods of spiritual formation. They could not help but see that spiritual growth and vitality stem from what we actually do with our lives, from the habits we form, and from the character that results. — Dallas Willard

You really can't justify anything else but giving your whole attention to spiritual formation in Christ. — Dallas Willard

Dallas Willard Quotes About Person

We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. You can almost be as stupid as a cabbage as long as you doubt. — Dallas Willard

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. — Dallas Willard

The transformation of the social world is at its heart the transformation of personal relations. That's the key to transforming society in the larger arena. — Dallas Willard

We need to understand that Jesus is a thinker, that this is not a dirty word but an essential work, and that his other attributes do not preclude thought, but only ensure that he is certainly the greatest thinker of the human race: "the most intelligent person who ever lived on earth" — Dallas Willard

If we reject the Christian answer, we still have the problem. We're going to adopt some alternative, because the questions will not go away, the questions of, "What kind of person am I becoming?" and "What is my role in that?" and so on. — Dallas Willard

Paul followed Jesus by living as He lived. And how did he do that? Through activities and ways of living that would train his whole personality to depend upon the risen Christ as Christ trained Himself to depend upon the Father. — Dallas Willard

We renovate the heart by, of course, changing it, but we can't do that, really, without changing the other essential parts of the human personality. — Dallas Willard

Find a person who has embraced anger, and you will find a person with a wounded ego. — Dallas Willard

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. — Dallas Willard

Projects of personal transformation rarely succeed by accident, drift, or imposition. — Dallas Willard

Dallas Willard Quotes About Believes

Knowing the 'right answers' does not mean we believe them. To believe them means to act as though they're true. — Dallas Willard

My hope is to gain a fresh hearing for Jesus, especially among those who believe they already understand him. In his case, quite frankly, presumed familiarity has led to unfamiliarity, unfamiliarity has led to contempt, and contempt has led to profound ignorance. — Dallas Willard

We have churches full of people who profess all kinds of stuff that they don't believe. They think that by professing it they're doing something good. Really, they're just deluding themselves. — Dallas Willard

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. — Dallas Willard

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

Dallas Willard Quotes About Disciple

Make disciples. Surround them in the reality of the Trinity in a fellowship of disciples. Teach them to do everything Jesus says. — Dallas Willard

Disciples are those who have been so ravished with Christ that others want to be like them. — Dallas Willard

If you don't have a teacher you can't have a disciple. — Dallas Willard

The greatest challenge the church faces today is to be authentic disciples of Jesus. — Dallas Willard

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

Dallas Willard Famous Quotes And Sayings

As Augustine say clearly, God being God offends human pride. If God is running the universe and has first claim on our lives, guess who isn't running the universe and does not get to have things as they please. — Dallas Willard

A great part of the disaster of contemporary life lies in the fact that it is organized around feelings. People nearly always act on their feelings, and think it only right. The will is then left at the mercy of circumstances that evoke feelings. Christian spiritual formation today must squarely confront this fact and overcome it. — Dallas Willard

The organized churches must become schools of spiritual discipline where Christians are taught how to own without treasuring (Matt. 6:21); how to possess without, like the "rich young ruler," being possessed (Mark 10:22); how to live simply, even frugally, though controlling great wealth and power. — Dallas Willard

Fasting confirms our utter dependence upon God by finding in Him a source of sustenance beyond food. — Dallas Willard

Unless you have already put God first, for example, what you will have to do to be financially secure, impress other people, or fulfill your desires will invariably lead you against God's wishes. That is why the first of the Ten Commandments, “You shall have no gods who take priority over me,” is the first of the Ten Commandments. — Dallas Willard

A carefully cultivated heart will, assisted by the grace of God, foresee, forestall, or transform most of the painful situations before which others stand like helpless children saying “Why? — Dallas Willard

Spiritual transformation into Christ-likeness in not going to happen unless we act... What transforms us is the will to obey Jesus Christ. — Dallas Willard

You can no more trust Jesus and not intend to obey him than you could trust your doctor and your auto mechanic and not intend to follow their advice. If you don't intend to follow their advice, you simply don't trust them. Period. — Dallas Willard

Thoughts are the place where we can and must begin to change. There the light of God first begins to move upon us through the word of Christ, and there the divine Spirit begins to direct our will to God and his way. — Dallas Willard

No one need worry about our getting the best of God in some bargain with him, or that we might somehow succeed in using him for our purposes. Anyone who thinks this is a problem has seriously underestimated the intelligence and agility of our Father in the heavens. He will not be tricked or cheated. — Dallas Willard

Happiness in reality consists only in rest, and not in being stirred up. This instinct conflicts with the drive to diversion, and we develop the confused idea that leads people to aim at rest through excitement. — Dallas Willard

Today it is the skeptics who are the social conformists, though because of powerful intellectual propaganda they continue to enjoy thinking of themselves as wildly individualistic and unbearably bright. — Dallas Willard

If we allow everything access to our mind, we are simply asking to be kept in a state of mental turmoil or bondage. For nothing enters the mind without having an effect for good or evil. — Dallas Willard

"Spirituality" wrongly understood or pursued is a major source of human misery and rebellion against God. — Dallas Willard

The core of the person is what he or she loves, and that is bound up with what they worship - that insight recalibrates the radar for cultural analysis. The rituals and practices that form our loves spill out well beyond the sanctuary. Many secular liturgies are trying to get us to love some other kingdom and some other gods. — Dallas Willard

Great faith, like great strength in general, is revealed by the ease of its workings. Most of what we think we see as the struggle OF faith is really the struggle to act as IF we had faith when in fact we do not. — Dallas Willard

There is no avoiding the fact that we live at the mercy of our ideas This is never more true than with our ideas about God. — Dallas Willard

The basic question 'will I obey Christ 's teaching?' is rarely taken as a serious issue. For example, to take one of Jesus' commands, that is relevant to contemporary life, I don't know of any church that actually teaches a church how to bless people who curse them, yet this is a clear command. — Dallas Willard

Relations between parents and children and siblings and mates. This is not external. We can't separate them. — Dallas Willard

When the light comes into a room, we do not have to say, "Now what are we going to do about the darkness?" It's gone! — Dallas Willard

Does the Gospel I preach and teach have a natural tendency to cause people who hear it to become full-time students of Jesus? Would those who believe it become his apprentices as a natural 'next step'? What can we reasonably expect would result from people actually believing the substance of my message? — Dallas Willard

Repent, for the kingdom of the heavens is at hand' (Matt 3:2, 4:17, 10:7). This is a call for us to reconsider how we have been approaching our life, in light of the fact that we now, in the presence of Jesus, have the option of living within the surrounding movements of God's eternal purposes, of taking our life into his life. — Dallas Willard

The idea of having faith in Jesus has come to be totally isolated from being his apprentice and learning how to do what he said. — Dallas Willard

To allow lust (or strong desires) to govern our life is to exalt our will over God's. — Dallas Willard

When we think of "taking Christ into the workplace" or "keeping Christ in the home," we are making our faith into a set of special acts. The "specialness" of such acts just underscores the point - that being a Christian, being Christ's isn't thought of as a normal part of life. — Dallas Willard

The Bible defines almost nothing because it isn't a book for scholars and philosophers or free thinkers. It's a book for people who want help. It's primarily a book for pastors. They're the ones that can use it in a way so that it actually achieves its purpose. — Dallas Willard

Even professing Christians, by and large, devote to their spiritual growth and well-being a tiny fraction of the time they devote to their body, and it is even tinier fraction if we include what they worry about. — Dallas Willard

Does Christ commend the famous 'apathy' of the Stoic or the Buddhist elimination of desire? Far from it. The issue is not just feeling or desire, but right feeling or desire, or being controlled by feeling or desire. — Dallas Willard

Clinical depression is an extreme form of a 'bad mood.' — Dallas Willard

Suppose we have a motor and our transmission doesn't work or our clutch or whatever. Then our body, our motor, just takes us down the road. Or our brakes don't work! We must have a coordination system. — Dallas Willard

If you have a group of people come together around a vision for real discipleship, people who are committed to grow, committed to change, committed to learn, then a spiritual assessment tool can work. — Dallas Willard

What is thinking? It is the activity of searching out what must be true, or cannot be true, in the light of the given facts or assumptions. — Dallas Willard

Obedience to Christ is the easy way, take my yoke. — Dallas Willard

What a child does when not told what to do is the final indicator of what and who that child is. — Dallas Willard

We Christians should be aware that there's something at stake in cultural participation that we wouldn't have been concerned about if all we did was worry about the messages in culture. — Dallas Willard

Imagine that you had discovered gold or oil on a certain property, and no one else knew about it. Can you see yourself being sad and feeling deprived for having to gather all your resources and sacrifice them in order to buy that property? Hardly. Now you know what it is like to deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Jesus. — Dallas Willard

The world can no longer be left to mere diplomats, politicians, and business leaders. They have done the best they could, no doubt. But this is an age for spiritual heroes- a time for men and women to be heroic in their faith and in spiritual character and power. The greatest danger to the Christian church today is that of pitching its message too low. — Dallas Willard

Blessing is the projection of good into the life of another. — Dallas Willard

The greatest danger to the Christian church today is that of pitching its message too low. — Dallas Willard

It's just stunning to watch churches struggle to get mission statements when there it is, the Great Commission, and they should simply do what it says. — Dallas Willard

Your mind will really talk to you when you begin to deny fulfillment to your desires, and you will find how subtle and shameless it is. — Dallas Willard

If our gospel does not free the individual up for a unique life of spiritual adventure in living with God daily, we simply have not entered fully into the good news that Jesus brought. — Dallas Willard

There is knowledge of God and the spiritual nature of man, as well as other types of reality..., that are not reducible to the world dealt with by the so-called "natural" sciences. The idea that knowledge - and, of course, reality - is limited to that world is the single most destructive idea on the stage of life today. — Dallas Willard

Hearing God is about the very specific issue of what it means to live with guidance in our life. — Dallas Willard

When Jesus directs us to pray, "Thy kingdom come," he does not mean we should pray for it to come into existence. — Dallas Willard

Many people get what they need from church attendance because the Word is preached, and the rituals are carried on, and God works, but it's drift more than anything else. And that's why the churches keep reaching for some programmatic formula that will make people come and give money. It's just really very sad. — Dallas Willard

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. — Dallas Willard

In one way or another, it is a common mistake to think transformation is all in the will. And it isn't! It's in the mind - how we think, what occupies our minds, and so forth. It's in our feelings. It's in our body. — Dallas Willard

In a world apart from God, the power of denial is absolutely essential if life is to proceed. The will or spirit cannot-psychologically cannot-sustain itself for any length of time in the face of what it clearly acknowledges to be the case. Therefore it must deny and evade and delude itself. — Dallas Willard

God may not guide us in an obvious way because he wants us to make decisions based on faith and character. — Dallas Willard

As we mature in Christ, it is actually possible to outgrow fear. — Dallas Willard

Play is the creation of value that is not necessary. — Dallas Willard

Life Lessons by Dallas Willard

1. Dallas Willard taught that spiritual transformation is possible through the practice of spiritual disciplines such as prayer, meditation, and study of scripture.
2. He also encouraged people to live out their faith in everyday life, emphasizing the importance of living a life of love and service to God and others.
3. Finally, Willard believed that the ultimate goal of life is to become a person of character, wisdom, and virtue, and to live a life of joy and peace in the presence of God.