Dallas Willard Spiritual Quotations

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.

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.

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.

Everyone receives spiritual formation, just as everyone gets an education. The only question is whether it is a good one or a bad one. We need to take a conscious, intentional hand in the developmental process. We need to understand what the formation of the human spirit is, and how it can best be done as Christ would have it done. This is an indispensable aspect of developing a psychology that is adequate to human life.

Even professing Christians, by and large, devote to their spiritual growth and well-being a tiny fraction of the time they devote to their body, and it is even tinier fraction if we include what they worry about.

It would be of course a low voltage spiritual life in which prayer was chiefly undertaken as a discipline, rather than as a way of co-labouring with God to accomplish good things and advancing his Kingdom purposes.

The real issue relating to exclusiveness is whether or not the Christian actually has a relationship with God, a presence of God, which non-Christians do not have. Apart from Christian spiritual formation as described here, I believe there is little value in claiming exclusiveness for the Christian way.

Many Christians were suddenly prepared to look at traditional methods of spiritual formation. They could not help but see that spiritual growth and vitality stem from what we actually do with our lives, from the habits we form, and from the character that results.

The Spiritual disciplines are wisdom and not righteousness.

In Spiritual formation we are aiming at a character and life that is so shaped that the deeds of Christ routinely and easily come from what is inside.

The greatest need you and I have-the greatest need of collective humanity-is renovation of our heart. That spiritual place with in us from which outlook, choices, and actions come has been formed by a world away from God. Now it must be transformed. Indeed, the only hope of humanity lies in the fact that, as our spiritual dimension has been formed, so it also can be transformed.

There is knowledge of God and the spiritual nature of man, as well as other types of reality..., that are not reducible to the world dealt with by the so-called "natural" sciences. The idea that knowledge - and, of course, reality - is limited to that world is the single most destructive idea on the stage of life today.

If our gospel does not free the individual up for a unique life of spiritual adventure in living with God daily, we simply have not entered fully into the good news that Jesus brought.

Spiritual transformation into Christ-likeness in not going to happen unless we act... What transforms us is the will to obey Jesus Christ.

Spiritual formation in Christ moves us toward a total interchange of our ideas and images for his.

Everyone gets a spiritual formation. It's like education. Everyone gets an education; it's just a matter of which one you get.

Spiritual formation cannot, in the nature of the case, be a 'private' thing, because it is a matter of whole-life transformation. You need to seek out others in your community who are pursuing the renovation of the heart.

The world can no longer be left to mere diplomats, politicians, and business leaders. They have done the best they could, no doubt. But this is an age for spiritual heroes- a time for men and women to be heroic in their faith and in spiritual character and power. The greatest danger to the Christian church today is that of pitching its message too low.

The organized churches must become schools of spiritual discipline where Christians are taught how to own without treasuring (Matt. 6:21); how to possess without, like the "rich young ruler," being possessed (Mark 10:22); how to live simply, even frugally, though controlling great wealth and power.

We are unceasing spiritual beings with an eternal destiny in God's great universe.

Spiritual people are not those who engage in certain spiritual practices; they are those who draw their life from a conversational relationship with God.

You really can't justify anything else but giving your whole attention to spiritual formation in Christ.

Spiritual formation for the Christian basically refers to the Spirit-driven process of forming the inner world of the human self in such a way that it becomes like the inner being of Christ himself.

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.

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.