The Spirit of the Disciplines Quotes

“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.”
― Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

“Our most serious failure today is the inability to provide effective practical guidance as to how to live the life of Jesus. And I believe that is due to this very real loss of biblical realism for our lives”
― Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

“The general human failing is to want what is right and important, but at the same time not to commit to the kind of life that will produce the action we know to be right and the condition we want to enjoy. This is the feature of human character that explains why the road to hell is paved with good intentions. We intend what is right, but we avoid the life that would make it reality.”
― Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

“The Abba Evagrius (who died in 399) taught:   There are eight principal thoughts, from which all other thoughts stem. The first thought is of gluttony; the second, of fornication; the third, of love of money; the fourth, of discontent; the fifth, of anger; the sixth, of despondency; the seventh, of vainglory; the eighth, of pride. Whether these thoughts disturb the soul or not does not depend on us; but whether they linger in us or not and set passions in motion or not—does depend on us.”
― Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

“we can become like Christ by doing one thing—by following him in the overall style of life he chose for himself.”
― Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

“Multitudes are now turning to Christ in all parts of the world. How unbearably tragic it would be, though, if the millions of Asia, South America and Africa were led to believe that the best we can hope for from the Way of Christ is the level of Christianity visible in Europe and America today, a level that has left us tottering on the edge of world destruction. 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 faith and in spiritual character and power. The greatest danger to the Christian church today is that of pitching its message TOO LOW.”
― Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

“And in this truth lies the secret of the easy yoke: the secret involves living as he lived in the entirety of his life—adopting his overall life-style. Following “in his steps” cannot be equated with behaving as he did when he was “on the spot.” To live as Christ lived is to live as he did all his life.”
― Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

“Our mistake is to think that following Jesus consists in loving our enemies, going the “second mile,” turning the other cheek, suffering patiently and hopefully—while living the rest of our lives just as everyone around us does.”
― Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

“Spirituality has thus come to be regarded by the world as those futile, self-torturing excesses of strange men and women who lived in far-off, benighted places and times. Accordingly, the One who came to give abundance of life is commonly thought of as a cosmic stuffed shirt, whose excessive "spirituality" probably did not allow him normal bodily functions and certainly would not permit him to throw a frisbee or tackle someone in a football game.”
― Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

“Why is it that we look upon our salvation as a moment that began our religious life instead of the daily life we receive from God?”
― Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

“People who love one another can be silent together.”12”
― Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

“what are “the disciplines for the spiritual life”? The disciplines are activities of mind and body purposefully undertaken, to bring our personality and total being into effective cooperation with the divine order. They enable us more and more to live in a power that is, strictly speaking, beyond us, deriving from the spiritual realm itself, as we “yield ourselves to God, as those that are alive from the dead, and our members as instruments of righteousness unto God,” as Romans 6:13 puts it.”
― Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

“Paul followed Jesus by living as he lived. And how did he do that? Through activities and ways of living that would train his whole personality to depend upon the risen Christ as Christ trained himself to depend upon the Father.
In other words, Paul and his Lord were people of immense power, who saw clearly the wayward ways the world considered natural. With calm premeditation and clear vision of a deeper order, they took their stand always among those "last who shall be first" mentioned repeatedly in the Gospels. With their feet planted in the deeper order of God, they lived lives of utter self-sacrifice and abandonment, seeing in such a life the highest possible personal attainment.”
― Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines

“True Christlikeness, true companionship with Christ, comes at the point where it is hard not to respond as he would.”
― Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

“How unbearably tragic it would be, though, if the millions of Asia, South America and Africa were led to believe that the best we can hope for from The Way of Christ is the level of Christianity visible in Europe and America today,”
― Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

“Our most serious failure today is the inability to provide effective practical guidance as to how to live the lifwe of Jesus. And I believe that is due to this very real loss of biblical realism for our lives.”
― Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

“Christianity has not so much been tried and found wanting, as it has been found difficult and left untried.” So said that insightful and clever Christian, G. K. Chesterton.”
― Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

“It is a curious fact that many today who read that in the period of the judges all did “what was right in their own eyes” think that something terrible was covered by that phrase. Indeed, the people of this time went wrong in many ways. But to do as one pleases is the ideal condition of humanity, what is often called “freedom,” and does not imply wrongdoing at all. In the book of Judges, doing what was right in one’s own eyes was not opposed to doing what is right in God’s eyes, but opposed to doing what some governmental official saw as right. God has all along intended that we walk with him on a personal basis, be pleased by the right things, and then do what is right in our own eyes. This is why we were made and what constitutes our individuality.”
― Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

“It is only the real presence of Christ in his mature people interspersed throughout the “secular” life of humanity that will cause the necessary “withering away of the state.”
― Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

“Six hundred thousand people starve to death in the Nazi siege of Leningrad during World War II. Untold millions die as Estonia, China, or Cambodia undergo forced collectivization. A bomb falls on Hiroshima and multitudes of people are melted outright or turned into slowly dying monstrosities. In the United States of America fifty thousand little children disappear every year, most never to be heard from again, perhaps to be sexually abused and killed or enslaved. We now have six hundred thousand young men and women under the age of sixteen who earn their living as prostitutes. In the United States a black market for children is reported to exist where a white male child has a going price of $30,000, with other types going for less. Battering and abuse within families passes itself on from generation to generation, seeming to grow more widespread as the social structure grows more and more fragmented and inhumane and as the victims of victims of abuse find less and less in their surroundings to sustain and redirect them.”
― Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

“There truly is no division between sacred and secular except what we have created. And that is why the division of the legitimate roles and functions of human life into the sacred and the secular does incalculable damage to our individual lives and to the cause of Christ. Holy people must stop going into “church work” as their natural course of action and take up holy orders in farming, industry, law, education, banking, and journalism with the same zeal previously given to evangelism or to pastoral and missionary work.”
― Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

“Greek philosophy had failed at the point of producing people of practical power and wisdom who could govern and be governed. It simply had no workable answer to the question of how this could be done. The same inability of classical civilization to produce sufficient people capable of serving as the foundation of good government destroyed the Roman Empire. Early in human development, races of people are sufficiently under the duress of real needs to exhalt the virtues that can make them strong. But after they become strong they have no sustaining principle that will allow the further development of virtue to maintain their society. They lack the tension adequate to maintain character in their citizens. No stable society can, therefore, be long maintained if it is prosperous. A transcendental principle and tension is lacking, and that is what is abundantly supplied in the gospel of Jesus Christ and his Kingdom.”
― Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

“Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering.”3”
― Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

“relationship with God, as with any person, soon requires a contribution from us, which will largely consist of study. Calvin Miller well remarks: “Mystics without study are only spiritual romantics who want relationship without effort.”23”
― Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

“Ideals of Asceticism, quite correctly summarizes the essence of religious asceticism as the voluntary practice of activities “for the deliverance and protection of the soul from defilement, for the increase of its powers by the discharge of its proper functions in accordance with its own conception of the moral and spiritual order, and for the consequent achievement and enjoyment of its full status.”16 Teachers who condemn asceticism correctly practiced in the contemporary context will almost certainly do more harm than good, unless they have some other method for their students that effectively lays hold on life in the Kingdom of God.”
― Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

“People who think that they are spiritually superior because they make a practice of a discipline such as fasting or silence or frugality are entirely missing the point. The need for extensive practice of a given discipline is an indication of our weakness, not our strength. We can even lay it down as a rule of thumb that if it is easy for us to engage in a certain discipline, we probably don’t need to practice it. The disciplines we need to practice are precisely the ones we are not “good at” and hence do not enjoy.”
― Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

“pilgrim’s progress” or “paradise regained.” Worse still, the impression is conveyed that this progress will somehow automatically take place through the normal course of life, if only the pilgrim holds on to certain beliefs. Certainly I do not attack this literature in its own right as literature. But it has entered into a fatal combination with the general Protestant overreaction against ascetic or disciplinary practices. A “head trip” of mental assent to doctrine and the enjoyment of pleasant imagery and imagination is quietly substituted for a rigorous practice of discipleship that would bring a true transformation of character.”
― Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

“We cannot behave “on the spot” as he did and taught if in the rest of our time we live as everybody else does. The “on the spot” episodes are not the place where we can, even by the grace of God, redirect unchristlike but ingrained tendencies of action toward sudden Christlikeness. Our efforts to take control at that moment will fail so uniformly and so ingloriously that the whole project of following Christ will appear ridiculous to the watching world.”
― Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

“The aim and substance of spiritual life is not fasting, prayer, hymn singing, frugal living, and so forth. Rather, it is the effective and full enjoyment of active love of God and humankind in all the daily rounds of normal existence where we are placed.”
― Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives

“The lessons I taught you, the tradition I have passed on, all that you heard me say or saw me do, put into practice; and the God of peace will be with you (Phil. 4:9, NEB).”
― Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines: Understanding How God Changes Lives