Quotes from Dallas Willard

It is setting aside our own ideas as supreme and our own will as ultimate, freeing us from the burden of having our own way and of being all-wise in our own eyes.

The fondness, the endearment, the unstintingly affectionate regard of God toward all his creatures is the natural outflow of what he is to the core—which we vainly try to capture with our tired but indispensable old word love.

The only way the devil can hurt God is through humans, and so he focuses upon us. His strategy is to try to frustrate God's purpose for humanity

But reliance upon what the Spirit does to us or in us, as indispensable as it truly is, will not by itself transform character in its depths. The action of the Spirit must be accompanied by our response, which, as we have seen, cannot be carried out by anyone other than ourselves.

Satan can do nothing about God's unshakable kingdom directly, but only indirectly through human infirmity and rebellion. His way of doing that is to persuade, and to tempt, and to deceive humanity.

Bluntly, to serve God well we must think straight; and crooked thinking, unintentional or not, always favors evil. And when the crooked thinking gets elevated into group orthodoxy, whether religious or secular, there is always, quite literally, "hell to pay." That is, hell will take its portion, as it has repeatedly done in the horrors of world history.

Fact 1: It is okay to be who you are wherever you are.

We see a clear pattern: Satan's constant deception of human beings.

The life and words that Jesus brought into the world came in the form of information and reality.

Satan, then, is God's primary target, for he is the one who bears the primary responsibility for all that is wrong with the world.

It is almost impossible in the thought climate of today's Western world to appreciate just how utterly unnecessary it was for Paul to say explicitly, in the world in which he lived, that Christians should fast, be alone, study, give, and so forth as regular disciplines for the spiritual life.

This can also be a time of confession, in which you ask for the strength to deal with the failures you experience day by day.