Dallas Willard Quotes

Divine desperateness is the beginning of spiritual awakening because it gives rise to the aspiration for God-realisation.

My life is such a contradiction. My soul yearns for holiness and then runs from the mortification necessary to attain it.

What I don't think I knew when I was young was that 'losing your faith' is actually part of the plan for a lot of people - that it's actually maybe the most beautiful and graceful thing that can happen. The mystery of God can handle all of it. It can handle all of your thoughts, all of your doubts, all of your folly. It's all in the game.

Conversion is not, as some suppose, a violent opening of the heart by grace, in which will, reason and judgment are all ignored or crushed. The season is not blinded, but enlightened; and the whole man is made to act with a glorious liberty which it never knew till it fell under the restraints of grace.

God, I pray Thee, light these idle sticks of my life and may I burn for Thee. Consume my life, my God, for it is Thine. I seek not a long life, but a full one, like you, Lord Jesus.

The ultimate test of our spirituality is the measure of our amazement at the grace of God.

During my solitude, conflicting thoughts increased; but much exercise of soul had the effect of causing the scriptures to gain complete ascendancy over me. I had always owned them to be the Word of GOD . . . the careful reading of the Acts afforded me a practical picture of the early church; which made me feel deeply the contrast with its actual present state; though still, as ever beloved by GOD.

God does love you and that, hopefully, you get to the point that you realize that having a relationship with God should be first and foremost in your life.

When you see Jesus as your Treasure, the Spirit has blown through your heart.

The sinner is not the one who uses a lot of grace... The saint burns grace like a 747 burns fuel on take off.

Renunciation is the central sun, round which devotion, knowledge and the rest revolve like planets.

Grace pours all beauty into the soul ... The soul means the world.

Christianity seems at first to be all about morality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that, into something beyond. One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of those things, except perhaps as a joke. Every one there is filled full with what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light. But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of it. They are too busy looking at the source from which it comes.

The grace of God has no charms for men till the Holy Spirit gives them a taste for it.

But my doubt would not be overcome. Kierkegaard had declared that it was only to the consciousness of sin that Christianity was not horror or madness. For me it was sometimes both.

I have come to know a God of compassion and mercy and love.

None of us feels the true love of God till we realize how wicked we are. But you can't teach people that - they have to learn by experience.

God is so big. It's a gigantic concept in God. The idea that God might love us and be interested in us is kind of huge and gigantic, but we turn it, because we're small-minded, into this tiny, petty, often greedy version of God, that is religion.

Remember, we are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

If we're interested in spiritual things, we gradually realize that what we really need is to understand this nature that seems to be a bottomless basket, because there is no peace in it.

A steady diet of the higher truths might prove exhausting, but it's important that we acknowledge their validity and celebrate their survival.

The soul... may have many symbols with which it reaches toward God.

The 'kingdom of Heaven' is a condition of the heart - not something that comes 'upon the earth' or 'after death.'

The way you become divine is to become wholly human.

The main object of religion is not to get a man into heaven, but to get heaven into him.