Dallas Willard
God may not guide us in an obvious way because he wants us to make decisions based on faith and character.Collection: Faith
Spiritual formation is character formation. Everyone gets a spiritual formation. It's like education. Everyone gets an education; it's just a matter of which one you get.Collection: Education
Many churches are measuring the wrong things. We measure things like attendance and giving, but we should be looking at more fundamental things like anger, contempt, honesty, and the degree to which people are under the thumb of their lusts. Those things can be counted, but not as easily as offerings.Collection: Anger
If you don't have a teacher you can't have a disciple.Collection: Teacher
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.
Spiritual formation in a Christian tradition answers a specific human question: 'What kind of person am I going to be?' It is the process of establishing the character of Christ in the person. That's all it is.
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.
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.
So many people would like to have guidance from God because obviously, if you have a word from God, it's the best possible thing. But they don't relate that to life as a whole. Often they want guidance as a way of opting out of the responsibility of making decisions.
The aim of God in history is the creation of an all-inclusive community of loving persons with God himself at the very heart of this community as its prime Sustainer and most glorious Inhabitant.
What you present as the gospel will determine what you present as discipleship. If you present as the gospel what is essentially a theory of the atonement, and you say, 'If you accept this theory of the atonement, your sins are forgiven, and when you die you will be received into heaven,' there is no basis for discipleship.
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.
What sometimes goes on in all sorts of Christian institutions is not formation of people in the character of Christ; it's teaching of outward conformity. You don't get in trouble for not having the character of Christ, but you do if you don't obey the laws.
Reality is what you can count on.
'Discipleship' as a term has lost its content, and this is one reason why it has been moved aside. I've tried to redeem the idea of discipleship, and I think it can be done; you have to get it out of the contemporary mode.
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.
I think that when I die, it might be some time until I know it.
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.'
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.
When pastors don't have rich spiritual lives with Christ, they become victimized by other models of success - models conveyed to them by their training, by their experience in the church, or just by our culture.
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.Collection: Important
Discipleship is the process of becoming who Jesus would be if he were you.Collection: Jesus
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.Collection: Believe
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.Collection: Christian
The first act of love is always the giving of attention.Collection: Love
Spiritual people are not those who engage in certain spiritual practices; they are those who draw their life from a conversational relationship with God.Collection: Spiritual
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.Collection: Jesus
One of the hardest things in the world is to be right and not hurt other people with it.Collection: Hurt
The main thing God gets out of your life is not the achievements you accomplish. It's the person you become.Collection: Achievement
Ruthlessly eliminate hurry from your life.Collection: Hurrying
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.Collection: Christian
The ultimate freedom we have as human beings is the power to select what we will allow or require our minds to dwell upon.Collection: Mind
Every church needs to be able to answer two questions. First, what is our plan for making disciples? And second, does our plan work?Collection: Two
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.Collection: Ideas
You can live opposite of what you profess, but you cannot live opposite of what you believe.Collection: Inspirational
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.Collection: Jesus
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.Collection: People
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.Collection: Christian
Feelings are good servants, but they are disastrous masters.Collection: Feelings
Most problems in contemporary churches can be explained by the fact that members have never decided to follow Christ.Collection: Church
Grace is not opposed to effort; it's opposed to earning.Collection: Effort
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.Collection: Jesus
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.Collection: Christian
The will is transformed by experience, not information.Collection: Coaching
Discipline, strictly speaking, is activity carried on to prepare us indirectly for some activity other than itself. We do not practice the piano to practice the piano well, but to play it well.Collection: Practice
Discipleship' as a term has lost its content, and this is one reason why it has been moved aside. I've tried to redeem the idea of discipleship, and I think it can be done; you have to get it out of the contemporary mode.Collection: Thinking
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.Collection: Thinking
Jesus offers himself as God's doorway into the life that is truly life. Confidence in him leads us today, as in other times, to become his apprentices in eternal living. "Those who come though me will be safe," he said. "They will go in and out and find all they need. I have come into their world that they may have life, and life to the fullest.Collection: Jesus
To depart from righteousness is to choose a life of crushing burdens, failures, and disappointments, a life caught in the toils of endless problems that are never resolved.Collection: Crush
When we pass through what we call death, we do not loose the world. Indeed, we see it for the first time as it really is.Collection: World