If we allow everything access to our mind, we are simply asking to be kept in a state of mental turmoil or bondage. For nothing enters the mind without having an effect for good or evil.
DALLAS WILLARDWhy doesn’t God just force us to do the things he knows to be right? It is because that would lose precisely that which he has intended in our creation: freely chosen character.
More Dallas Willard Quotes
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Of course, we do the righteous deed because of our redemption, not for our redemption.
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The kingdom of God is the true ecology of the human soul.
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That’s the illusion – the idea that you can be all right on the inside and not act it out – and it has affected us in many ways. That’s a part of the idea that professing is enough.
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What a child does when not told what to do is the final indicator of what and who that child is.
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We are unceasing spiritual beings with an eternal destiny in God’s great universe.
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My central claim is that we can become like Christ by doing one thing — by following him in the overall style of life he chose for himself.
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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.
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Understanding is the basis of care. What you would take care of you must first understand, whether it be a petunia or a nation.
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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.
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Belief is when your whole being is set to act as if something is so.
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We know we can’t be spiritually transformed by just focusing on the will.
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It’s very difficult to be right about something without hurting someone with it.
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Prayer is talking with God about what we are doing together.
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The effect of standing before God by welcoming him before us will be the transformation of our entire life.
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Disciples are those who have been so ravished with Christ that others want to be like them.
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There is no avoiding the fact that we live at the mercy of our ideas This is never more true than with our ideas about God.
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Grace is opposed to earning, but not to effort.
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Relations between parents and children and siblings and mates. This is not external. We can’t separate them.
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As we mature in Christ, it is actually possible to outgrow fear.
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When the light comes into a room, we do not have to say, “Now what are we going to do about the darkness?” It’s gone!
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Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action. Grace, you know, does not just have to do with forgiveness of sins alone.
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Sometimes we get caught up in trying to glorify God by praising what He can do and we lose sight of the practical point of what He actually does do.
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One does not miss heaven by a hair, but by constant effort to avoid and escape God.
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Your mind will really talk to you when you begin to deny fulfillment to your desires, and you will find how subtle and shameless it is.
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There is no problem in human life that apprenticeship to Jesus cannot solve.
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Make disciples. Surround them in the reality of the Trinity in a fellowship of disciples. Teach them to do everything Jesus says.
DALLAS WILLARD