The Divine Conspiracy Quotes

“We must understand that God does not "love" us without liking us - through gritted teeth - as "Christian" love is sometimes thought to do. Rather, out of the eternal freshness of his perpetually self-renewed being, the heavenly Father cherishes the earth and each human being upon it. The fondness, the endearment, the unstintingly affectionate regard of God toward all his creatures is the natural outflow of what he is to the core - which we vainly try to capture with our tired but indispensable old word "love".”
― Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God

“Suppose our failures occur, not in spite of what we are doing, but precisely because of it.”
― Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God

“What is truly profound is thought to be stupid and trivial, or worse, boring, while what is actually stupid and trivial is thought to be profound. That is what it means to fly upside down.”
― Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God

“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.”
― Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God

“The idea of having faith in Jesus has come to be totally isolated from being his apprentice and learning how to do what he said.”
― Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God

“[Jesus] matters because of what he brought and what he still brings to ordinary human beings, living their ordinary lives and coping daily with their surroundings. He promises wholeness for their lives. In sharing our weaknesses he gives us strength and and imparts through his companionship a life that has the quality of eternity." (Dallas Willard in Ruthless Trust - Brennan Manning)”
― Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God

“So when Jesus directs us to pray, “Thy kingdom come,” he does not mean we should pray for it to come into existence. Rather, we pray for it to take over at all points in the personal, social, and political order where it is now excluded: “On earth as it is in heaven.” With this prayer we are invoking it, as in faith we are acting it, into the real world of our daily existence.”
― Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

“The truly powerful ideas are precisely the ones that never have to justify themselves.”
― Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God

“Many people have found prayer impossible because they thought they should only pray for wonderful but remote needs they actually had little or no interest in or even knowledge of. Prayer simply dies from efforts to pray about ‘good things’ that honestly do not matter to us. The way to get to meaningful prayer for those good things is to start by praying for what we are truly interested in. The circle of our interests will inevitably grow in the largeness of God’s love.” --Dallas Willard”
― Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God

“The adult members of churches today rarely raise serious religious questions for fear of revealing their doubts or being thought of as strange. There is an implicit conspiracy of silence on religious matters in the churches. This conspiracy covers up the fact that the churches do not change lives or influence conduct to any appreciable degree.”
― Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

“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: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

“We were built to count, as water is made to run downhill. We are placed in a specific context to count in ways no one else does. That is our destiny.”
― Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

“Kingdom praying and its efficacy is entirely a matter of the innermost heart's being totally open and honest before God. It is a matter of what we are saying with our whole being, moving with resolute intent and clarity of mind into the flow of God's action.”
― Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God

“Some current critics of the U.S. Supreme Court like to point out that it does not allow the Ten Commandments, though written upon the walls of its own chambers, to be displayed in public schools. But where do we find churches, right or left, that put them on their walls? The Ten Commandments really aren’t very popular anywhere. This is so in spite of the fact that even a fairly general practice of them would lead to a solution of almost every problem of meaning and order now facing Western societies. They are God’s best information on how to lead a basically decent human existence.”
― Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

“He is not just nice, he is brilliant. He is the smartest man who ever lived. He is now supervising the entire course of world history (Rev. 1:5) while simultaneously preparing the rest of the universe for our future role in it (John 14:2). He always has the best information on everything and certainly also on the things that matter most in human life. Let us now hear his teachings on who has the good life, on who is among the truly blessed.”
― Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God

“Still today the Old Testament book of Psalms gives great power for faith and life. This is simply because it preserves a conceptually rich language about God and our relationships to him. If you bury yourself in Psalms, you emerge knowing God and understanding life.”
― Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

“Dear Father always near us, may your name be treasured and loved, may your rule be completed in us— may your will be done here on earth in just the way it is done in heaven. Give us today the things we need today, and forgive us our sins and impositions on you as we are forgiving all who in any way offend us. Please don’t put us through trials, but deliver us from everything bad. Because you are the one in charge, and you have all the power, and the glory too is all yours—forever— which is just the way we want it!”
― Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

“In the Gospels, by contrast, “the gospel” is the good news of the presence and availability of life in the kingdom, now and forever, through reliance on Jesus the Anointed. This was Abraham’s faith, too. As Jesus said, “Abraham saw my time and was delighted” (John 8:56). Accordingly, the only description of eternal life found in the words we have from Jesus is “This is eternal life, that they [his disciples] may know you, the only real God, and Jesus the anointed, whom you have sent” (John 17:3). This may sound to us like “mere head knowledge.” But the biblical “know” always refers to an intimate, personal, interactive relationship.”
― Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

“This present universe is only one element in the kingdom of God. But it is a very wonderful and important one. And within it the Logos, the now risen Son of man, is currently preparing for us to join him (John 14:2–4). We will see him in the stunning surroundings that he had with the Father before the beginning of the created cosmos (17:24). And we will actively participate in the future governance of the universe. We will not sit around looking at one another or at God for eternity but will join the eternal Logos, “reign with him,” in the endlessly ongoing creative work of God. It is for this that we were each individually intended, as both kings and priests (Exod. 19:6; Rev. 5:10). Thus, our faithfulness over a “few things” in the present phase of our life develops the kind of character that can be entrusted with “many things.” We are, accordingly, permitted to “enter into the joy of our Lord” (Matt. 25:21). That “joy” is, of course, the creation and care of what is good, in all its dimensions. A place in God’s creative order has been reserved for each one of us from before the beginnings of cosmic existence. His plan is for us to develop, as apprentices to Jesus, to the point where we can take our place in the ongoing creativity of the universe.”
― Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

“Recently a pilot was practicing high-speed maneuvers in a jet fighter. She turned the controls for what she thought was a steep ascent—and flew straight into the ground. She was unaware that she had been flying upside down. This is a parable of human existence in our times—not exactly that everyone is crashing, though there is enough of that—but most of us as individuals, and world society as a whole, live at high-speed, and often with no clue to whether we are flying upside down or right-side up. Indeed, we are haunted by a strong suspicion that there may be no difference—or at least that it is unknown or irrelevant.”
― Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

“The key, then, to loving God is to see Jesus, to hold him before the mind with as much fullness and clarity as possible. It is to adore him.”
― Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

“Your system is perfectly designed to yield the result you are getting.” This”
― Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

“legalists and theological experts with “lips close to God and hearts far away from him” (Isa. 29:13). The world hardly needs more of these.”
― Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

“Blessed are the spiritual zeros—the spiritually bankrupt, deprived and deficient, the spiritual beggars, those without a wisp of ‘religion’—when the kingdom of the heavens comes upon them.”
― Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

“Christians certainly aren’t perfect. There will always be need for improvement. But there is a lot of room between being perfect and being “just forgiven” as that is nowadays understood. You could be much more than forgiven and still not be perfect.”
― Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

“Practice routinely purposeful kindnesses and intelligent acts of beauty.”
― Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

“We are becoming who we will be—forever.”
― Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

“The “interior castle” of the human soul, as Teresa of Avila called it, has many rooms, and they are slowly occupied by God, allowing us time and room to grow.”
― Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

“God’s care for humanity was so great that he sent his unique Son among us, so that those who count on him might not lead a futile and failing existence, but have the undying life of God Himself. JOHN 3:16”
― Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God

“More than any other single thing, in any case, the practical irrelevance of actual obedience to Christ accounts for the weakened effect of Christianity in the world today, with its increasing tendency to emphasize political and social action as the primary way to serve God. It also accounts for the practical irrelevance of Christian faith to individual character development and overall personal sanity and well-being.”
― Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life In God