Dallas Albert Willard was an American philosopher also known for his writings on Christian spiritual formation. Much of his work in philosophy was related to phenomenology, particularly the work of Edmund Husserl, many of whose writings he translated into English for the first time. This Dallas Willard quotes on prayer, heaven, grace, death, anger will motivate you.
Best Dallas Willard Quotes
- “Discipleship is the process of becoming who Jesus would be if he were you.” ~ Dallas Willard
- “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.” ~ 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
- “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.” ~ Dallas Willard
- “The first act of love is always the giving of attention.” ~ 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
- “The main thing God gets out of your life is not the achievements you accomplish. It’s the person you become.” ~ Dallas Willard
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“One of the hardest things in the world is to be right and not hurt other people with it.” ~ Dallas Willard
- “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.” ~ Dallas Willard
- “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
- “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
- “Spiritual people are not those who engage in certain spiritual practices; they are those who draw their life from a conversational relationship with God.” ~ Dallas Willard
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“Ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.” ~ Dallas Willard
- “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.” ~ Dallas Willard Quotes
- “The ultimate freedom we have as human beings is the power to select what we will allow or require our minds to dwell upon.” ~ Dallas Willard
- “Feelings are good servants, but they are disastrous masters.” ~ Dallas Willard
- “You can live opposite of what you profess, but you cannot live opposite of what you believe.” ~ Dallas Willard
- “Solitude well practiced will break the power of busyness, haste, isolation, & loneliness.” ~ Dallas Willard
- “What Paul is clearly saying is that if anyone is worthy of being saved, they will be saved. At that point many Christians get very anxious, saying that absolutely no one is worthy of being saved. The implication of that is that a person can be almost totally good, but miss the message about Jesus, and be sent to hell. What kind of a God would do that? I am not going to stand in the way of anyone whom God wants to save. I am not going to say ‘he can’t save them.’ I am happy for God to save anyone he wants in any way he can. It is possible for someone who does not know Jesus to be saved.” ~ Dallas Willard
- “The will is transformed by experience, not information.” ~ Dallas Willard
- “I submit my tongue as an instrument of righteousness when I make it bless them that curse me and pray for them who persecute me, even though it “automatically” tends to strike and wound those who have wounded me. I submit my legs to God as instruments of righteousness when I engage them in physical labor as service, perhaps carrying a burden the “second mile” for someone whom I would rather let my legs kick. I submit my body to righteousness when I do my good deeds without letting them be known, though my whole frame cries out to strut and crow.” ~ Dallas Willard
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“You cannot trust Jesus in areas in which you don’t think him competent.” ~ Dallas Willard
- “We’re not here to prove we’re right; we’re here to help people.” ~ Dallas Willard
- “Few people arise in the morning as hungry for God as they are for cornflakes or toast and eggs.” ~ Dallas Willard
- “Prayer is talking with God about what we are doing together.” ~ Dallas Willard
- “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.” ~ Dallas Willard
- “The command is “Do no work.” Just make space. Attend to what is around you. Learn that you don’t have to DO to BE. accept the grace of doing nothing. Stay with it until you stop jerking and squirming.” ~ 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
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“God’s address is at the end of your rope.” ~ Dallas Willard
- “So when Jesus directs us to pray, “Thy kingdom come,” he does not mean we should pray for it to come into existence. Rather, we pray for it to take over at all points in the personal, social, and political order where it is now excluded: “On earth as it is in heaven.” With this prayer we are invoking it, as in faith we are acting it, into the real world of our daily existence” ~ Dallas Willard Quotes
- “So when Jesus directs us to pray, “Thy kingdom come,” he does not mean we should pray for it to come into existence. Rather, we pray for it to take over at all points in the personal, social, and political order where it is now excluded: “On earth as it is in heaven.” With this prayer we are invoking it, as in faith we are acting it, into the real world of our daily existence” ~ Dallas Willard
- “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
- “To glorify God means to think and act in such a way that the goodness, greatness, and beauty of God are constantly obvious to ourselves and all those around us.
It means to live in such a way that when people see us they think, Thank God for God, if God would create such a life.” ~ Dallas Willard -
“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.” ~ Dallas Willard
- “We must understand that God does not “love” us without liking us – through gritted teeth – as “Christian” love is sometimes thought to do. Rather, out of the eternal freshness of his perpetually self-renewed being, the heavenly Father cherishes the earth and each human being upon it. 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”.” ~ 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 Quotes
- “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.” ~ Dallas Willard
- “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.” ~ Dallas Willard
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“As we mature in Christ, it is actually possible to outgrow fear.” ~ 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
- “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
- “God may not guide us in an obvious way because he wants us to make decisions based on faith and character.” ~ Dallas Willard
- “Jesus is actually looking for people he can trust with his power.” ~ Dallas Willard
- “We are built to live in the kingdom of God. It is our natural habitat.” ~ 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
Where are these quotes from? WHich books? It would be helpful to know as he has written many, where they come from
We have collected from various sources and compiled them here. Stay motivated!