Quotes from Dallas Willard

Denial—usually in some form of rationalization—is the primary device that humans use to deal with their own wrongness. It was the first thing out of the mouths of Adam and Eve after they sinned, and it continues up to the latest edition of the newspaper. The prophetic witness from God must throw itself against the massive weight of group and individual denial, often institutionalized and subtly built into our customary ways of speaking and interacting.

if you will here stop and ask yourself why you are not as pious as the primitive Christians were, your own heart will tell you that it is neither through ignorance nor inability, but purely because you never thoroughly intended it.

Accordingly, the greatest need you and I have—the greatest need of collective humanity—is renovation of our heart. That spiritual place within us from which outlook, choices, and actions come has been formed by a world away from God. Now it must be transformed.

There are three main ways in which God comes before the mind, where we can lose ourselves in love of him. These are, of course, also ways in which we may present God to others, as well as ways by which we individually may seek to fill our minds with him. Through them, the lovely God wins the love of the disciple. He comes to us (1) through his creation, (2) through his public acts on the scene of human history, and (3) through individual experiences of him by ourselves and others.

Human desire is infinite by its nature; it cannot be satisfied. You must take your stand against it because you cannot satisfy it.

The disciplines are practices that change the inner self and its relationship to the "helper" (paraclete), so that we can actually do what we would and avoid what we would not. They of course have no point apart from the serious intent to obey Christ's teaching and follow his example.

Our task in ourselves and in others is to transform right answers into automatic responses to real-life situations.

Our mistake is to think that following Jesus consists in loving our enemies, going the "second mile," turning the other cheek, suffering patiently and hopefully—while living the rest of our lives just as everyone around us does.

And in this truth lies the secret of the easy yoke: the secret involves living as he lived in the entirety of his life—adopting his overall life-style. Following "in his steps" cannot be equated with behaving as he did when he was "on the spot." To live as Christ lived is to live as he did all his life.

Pastors now are mistakenly seen, and perhaps even see themselves, as teaching what Christians are supposed to believe (perhaps what we had better believe), not what is known and what can be known through fair inquiry.

A disciple is someone who is learning by going through the process of change. All the things that we moan about and talk on and on about, such as pornography, divorce and drugs, are things that can be dealt with effectively only by bringing change into the mind and the spirit, into the will, into the body and into the fellowship of the person. Then people come out saying, "Who needs that stuff? I've got something much better than that.

At some point in the late afternoon, preferably before dinner, while you are still experiencing the strength and rest of God, take fifteen minutes in quiet solitude to review and examine the day.