"We do not aim just to control behavior, but to change the inner castle of the soul, ..."
~ Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy
"This idea of doing nothing proves to be absolutely terrifying to most people I speak with. But at least the person who is capable of doing nothing might be capable of refraining from doing the wrong thing. And then perhaps he or she would be better able to do the right thing. And doing nothing has many other advantages. It may be a great blessing to others around us, who often hardly have a chance while we are in action."
~ Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy
"We hear the cries from our strife-torn streets: "Give Peace a chance!" and "Can't we all just get along?" But you cannot give peace a chance if that is all you give a chance. You have to do the things that make peace possible and actual. When you listen to people talk about peace, you soon realize in most cases that they are unwilling to deal with the conditions of society and soul that make strife inevitable.
And we can't all just get along. Rather, we have to become the kinds of persons who can get along. As a major part of this, our epidermal responses have to be changed in such a way that the fire and the fight doesn't start almost immediately when we are rubbed the wrong way."
~ Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy
"It was an important day in my life when at last I understood that if he needed forty days in the wilderness at one point, I very likely could use three or four."
~ Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy
"But his use of solitude, silence, study of scripture, prayer, and service to others all had a disciplinary aspect in his life."
"Your life is not something from which you can stand aside and consider what it would have been like had you had a different one. There is no 'you apart from your actual life."
~ Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy.
"Consumer Christianity is now normative. The consumer question 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.
Because this is so, they remain not just "imperfect," for all of us remaining perfect, but routinely and seriously unable and unwilling to do the good they know to do."
~ Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy
"The acid test for any theology is this: Is the God presented one that can be loved, heart, soul, mind, and strength? If the thoughtful, answer is; "Not really," then we need to look elsewhere or deeper. It does not really matter how sophisticated intellectually or doctrinally our approach is. If it fails to set a lovable God - a radiant, happy, friendly, accessible, and totally competent being- before ordinary people, we have gone wrong. We should not keep going in the same direction, but turn around and take another road."
~ Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy
"Of all the things we do, we have more freedom with respect to what we will think of, where we will place our mind, than anything else. And the freedom of thinking is a direct freedom wherever it is present.....
The deepest revelation of our character is what we choose to dwell on in thought, but constantly occupies our mind as well as what we can or cannot even think of."
Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy.
"Now we need to understand that what simply occupies our mind very largely governs what we do. It sets the emotional tone out of which our actions flow..."
Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy
"Love is an emotional response aroused in the willl by visions of the good."
~Dallas Willard
" .....to explicitly intend to make apprentices to Jesus could be quite upsetting to congregational life. Won't those who are mere members or converts find themselves in an embarrassing position? Second-class citizenship?
It is certainly true that the implicit understanding that nondisciple Christians have with their leaders and congregations will have to be brought to light and dealt with in some appropriate way."
~ Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy
"Much time is spent among Christians trying to smooth over hurt feelings and even deep wounds, given and received, and to get people to stop being angry, retaliatory, and unforgiving. But suppose, instead, we devoted our time to inspiring and enabling Christians and others to be people who are not offendable and not angry and who are forgiving as a matter of course. "Great peac," the psalmist says, "have they who love thy law. Nothing trips them up" (Psalm 119:165).
To intentionally make disciples is to open the door for people to become like that. That is why it is such a gift to humankind.
But really to intend this is no trivial matter, of course. It means a huge change of direction. The weight of the tradition of client, or consumer, Christianity, which now without thought dominates the local congregations and denominations of Christian people - indeed, the entire Christian culture - stands against any such intention- not consciously, perhaps, but just by the inertia of "how things are," of the daily rounds and what "has to get done."
~ Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy
"A gentle but firm non-cooperation with things that everyone knows to be wrong, together with a sensitive, nonofficious, nonintrusive, nonobsequious service to others, should be our usual overt matter."
~ Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy
"So as his disciple I am not necessarily learning how to do special religious things...... My discipleship to Jesus is, within clearly defined limits, not a matter of what I do, but of how I do it. And it covers everything, "religious" or not.
~ Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy
"Not that the genuine presence of the Kingdom in a person can be hidden.... But it also cannot be canned, controlled, produced on demand, standardized, or brought to a point at which it can be dispensed by one human being to another."
~ Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy
" Who teachers you? Whose disciple are you? Honestly
One thing is sure; you are somebody's disciple. You learn how to live from somebody else. There is no exceptions to this rule, for human beings are just the kind of creatures that have to learn and keep learning from others how to live. Aristotle remark that we owe more to our teachers than to our parents, for those our parents gave us life, our teachers taught us the good life."
~ Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy.
"Most of what is wrong in human affairs simply can't be dealt with by law."
~Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy
"All one has to do to identify those who would mislead us he's watch what they do and pay little attention to what they say. What they do will be the unerring sign of who they are on the inside. Trees and plants manifest their nature in their fruit..... And what people do reveals, when thoroughly and honestly considered, the kind of person they really are."
~ Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy
"As long as I am condemning my friends or relatives, or pushing my "pearls" on them, "I" and their problem."
(Dallas Willard. The Divine Conspiracy)
