Knowing Christ Today Quotes

“Love is not God, but God is love. It is who he is, his very identity.”
― Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge

“Love means will-to-good, willing the benefit of what or who is loved. We may say we love chocolate cake, but we don't. Rather, we want to eat it. That is desire, not love. In our culture we have a great problem distinguishing between love and desire, but it is essential that we do so.”
― Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge

“The American Quaker theologian Elton Trueblood, some years ago, quoted Kirsopp Lake’s definition: “Faith is not belief in spite of evidence, but life in scorn of consequences.” Then he adds: “Faith, as the plain man knows, is not belief without proof, but trust without reservations”
― Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge

“the revelation of God in Jesus Christ (which is the object of Christian faith) is something very different from religion.”5 Religion has many critics, but Jesus very few. He is a self-authenticating reality beyond the myriad social cocoons. He belongs to humanity. He called himself “Son of Man.”
― Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge

“Jesus is the human face on the kingdom of God. He makes it concretely accessible.”
― Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge

“Justice without love will always fall short of what needs to be done. It will never be as good as it should be. Justice without love will never do justice to justice, nor will “love” without justice ever do justice to love. Indeed, it will not be love at all; for love wills the good of what is loved, and that must include justice where justice is lacking. Justice is a fundamental human good and a prerequisite of many others. The correct understanding of love, and the intelligent overall orientation of our lives in terms of it, is the source from which all standards of virtue and right behavior and all the aspects of goodness of character coherently flow. That is certainly the view of Jesus and the New Testament, and in that view love is everything.”
― Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge

“Incarnation” does not concern just the events of his conception and birth. It was the taking on of “flesh” in all its human meaning. He could live in your circumstances now. He could be you and still live in the kingdom of God. You can be his apprentice no matter who and where you are. It is as his personal friends, living interactively with him, that we know the truth and have the freedom—the power over evil—that comes with such knowledge”
― Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge

“And when people sense that something is coming around the logical corner that they will not to be so, they often just refuse to carefully follow the argument. It’s as common as sin, and a large part of it too.”
― Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge

“Pastors now are mistakenly seen, and perhaps even see themselves, as teaching what Christians are supposed to believe (perhaps what we had better believe), not what is known and what can be known through fair inquiry.”
― Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge

“Whatever your situation, there is nothing more important on earth than to dwell in the knowledge of Christ and to bring that knowledge to others.”
― Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge

“The best physical, chemical, and other scientific knowledge will not tell us what to do and who to be.”
― Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge

“The sad truth is that people can be just as arrogant from belief, commitment, various associations, or simple egotism as from claimed knowledge.”
― Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge

“Only the humble person will let God be God. Such people are realistic about who they actually are”
― Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge

“To know Christ in the modern world is to know him in your world now. To know him in your world now is to live interactively with him right where you are in your daily activities. This is the spiritual life in Christ.”
― Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge

“THOSE WHO REALLY do know Christ in the modern world do so by seeking and entering the kingdom of God.”
― Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge

“As Frank Laubach says: “The simple program of Christ for winning the whole world is to make each person he touches magnetic enough with love to draw others.”13 If we grow our fellowship in this direction, it will naturally affect those around us, whether in the fellowship or not. This kind of love and the “Presence” go with us wherever we go. They cannot be hidden.”
― Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge

“Tolerance is not indifference, but a generous regard and even provision for those who differ from us on points we deeply care about.”
― Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge

“We can fail to know because we do not want to know - because what would be known would require us to believe and act in ways contrary to what we want.”
― Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge

“An understanding of ordinary logic is no longer a required part of university degree programs, as was almost universally the case sixty years ago. Now, as a result, our world is full of uneducated people with higher degrees. They”
― Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge

“Discipleship is for the sake of the world, not for the sake of the church. It is carried out in those situations where people spend their life.”
― Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge

“If you are thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you you are embarking on something which is going to take the whole of you, brains and all…. One reason why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself.”
― Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge

“Secularism—itself always posing as knowledge, usually by striving to associate itself with “science” and “research”—justifies itself in determining political and legal processes and outcomes by stepping outside what is regarded as religion.”
― Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge

“But what is true of Christianity in its inception and history is true of other religions as well. They all present themselves as providing knowledge of what is real and what is right. To think otherwise is to falsify the very nature of religious consciousness and religious life”
― Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge

“In fact, however, no known religions are the same; they teach and practice radically different things. You only have to look at them to see that. To say they are all the “same” is to disrespect them. It is a way of claiming that none really matter, that their distinctives are of no human significance.”
― Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge

“The biblical stories know absolutely nothing of blind “leaps of faith,” as that phrase is now understood. Such “leaps” are a pure fantasy imposed upon those stories and upon the religious life by the prejudices and tortured turns of modern thought.”
― Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge

“But myth making, as it turns out, is not the sole prerogative of religion. It is also a very active secular and academic pastime—and a human one as well; perhaps it is some kind of human necessity.”
― Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge

“It is one of the curiosities of Western intellectual history that, during the last century or so, those with no serious involvement with practical Christianity—maybe totally ignorant of it or even hostile to it—have been allowed, under the guise of “scholarship” or innovative thought, to define what religion is and to reinterpret Christian teachings in the light of their own biased definitions and purposes.”
― Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge

“Religion as actually lived, not as some figment of the academic imagination, always claims to involve knowledge of how things are.”
― Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge

“Belief cannot reliably govern life and action except in its proper connection with knowledge and with the truth and evidence knowledge involves.”
― Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge

“The easiest explanation by far is that these things happened because Jesus really was raised from the dead, and the disciples really did meet him, even though his body was renewed and transformed so that now it seemed to be able to live in two dimensions at once. (That, indeed, is perhaps the best way to understand the phenomena: Jesus was now living in God’s dimension and ours, or, if you like, heaven and earth, simultaneously.)…The resurrection of Jesus does in fact provide a sufficient explanation for the empty tomb and the meetings with Jesus.”
― Dallas Willard, Knowing Christ Today: Why We Can Trust Spiritual Knowledge