Quotes from Dallas Willard

This is where so many distressing stories come from about people in the ministry. Anyone who is attempting to help others in the way of Christ needs to have the life they are describing. They must have peace, purity, patience, and the other fruit produced by following Jesus. They must have a willingness to see others praised, while they are overlooked. They must die to the idea that what they want has any importance at all.

Spiritual formation in Christ is the process leading to that ideal end, and its result is love of God with all of the heart, soul, mind, and strength, and of the neighbor as oneself.

When we give up the smaller, everyday things we are training for times when greater sacrifice is required.

So my first point is simply: life in Christ has to do with obedience to his teaching.

In feelings we really know that something is "there," and solidly so. But what it is and why it is remains obscure—though hauntingly present.

We can receive the things we do not want—or give up the things we do want—if we have decided, by the grace of God, that we can trust God to take care of us.

Our aim here is not to prove that Jesus is superior to other spiritual masters and traditions. But he really is different, and we should acknowledge it.

In people without rock-solid character, feeling is a deadly enemy of self-control and will always subvert it. The mongoose of a disciplined will under God and good is the only match for the cobra of feeling.

He calls us to him to impart himself to us. He 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.

Saint Thomas Aquinas remarks that "love is born of an earnest consideration of the object loved." And: "Love follows knowledge." Love is an emotional response aroused in the will by visions of the good. Contrary to what is often said, love is never blind, though it may not see rightly. It cannot exist without some vision of the beloved.

Anthropologists observe that the world occupied by a human being comprises not only the surrounding land, water, sky, plant and animal life, human beings and works of human hands, but also a "symbolic reality," which is superimposed upon material reality.

We should, to begin with, think that God leads a very interesting life, and that he is full of joy. Undoubtedly he is the most joyous being in the universe. The abundance of his love and generosity is inseparable from his infinite joy. All of the good and beautiful things from which we occasionally drink tiny droplets of soul-exhilarating joy, God continuously experiences in all their breadth and depth and richness.