Living in Christ's Presence Quotes

“He said, “The main thing that you bring the church is the person that you become, and that’s what everybody will see; that’s what will get reproduced; that’s what people will believe. Arrange your life so that you are experiencing deep contentment, joy and confidence in your everyday life with God.”
― Dallas Willard, Living in Christ's Presence: Final Words on Heaven and the Kingdom of God

“Living in the kingdom of God is a matter of living with God's action in our lives.”
― Dallas Willard, Living in Christ's Presence: Final Words on Heaven and the Kingdom of God

“Many people think of Jesus as our Savior, as the one who will get us into heaven. So the question often is “Have I accepted Jesus as my Savior?” But we never ask the question “Have I accepted Jesus as my teacher?”
― Dallas Willard, Living in Christ's Presence: Final Words on Heaven and the Kingdom of God

“Disciples are those who have been so ravished with Christ that others want to be like them.”
― Dallas Willard, Living in Christ's Presence: Final Words on Heaven and the Kingdom of God

“The advantage of believing in the Trinity is not that we get an A from God for knowing the right answer. The advantage of believing in the Trinity is that we then live as if the Trinity is real, as if the cosmos around us is actually beyond all else a community of unspeakably magnificent personal beings of boundless love, knowledge and power.”
― Dallas Willard, Living in Christ's Presence: Final Words on Heaven and the Kingdom of God

“Lord, you will have to be our teacher, because the dignity has been drained out of us in so many ways. We have been treated like dirt, and that has stuck on us. We’ve put ourselves against standards of our own making, because we thought it would give us worth. Please touch each person with how unique they are in your eyes and how their dignity in your eyes is so great that you will not even override them; you will woo them and pursue them and help them to accept that you are seeking them and you will allow yourself to be found by them if they simply cry out for help. I pray that great freedom will come across them because of their awareness of where they stand in your kingdom. That will make Jesus very happy, and the angels in heaven will jump up and down. And so we say, Let it be so, and that’s what we mean by amen. Amen. Dallas Willard”
― Dallas Willard, Living in Christ's Presence: Final Words on Heaven and the Kingdom of God

“In relation to spiritual disciplines, the most helpful distinction is the difference between trying to do something and training to do something.”
― Dallas Willard, Living in Christ's Presence: Final Words on Heaven and the Kingdom of God

“Sin always splits the self to some degree, yes. You know that you have harmed yourself and others, but you probably are not going to come to terms with that because you’re carrying on a charade of righteousness, even if you don’t believe it. So confession is very deep in the process of discovering the soul.”
― Dallas Willard, Living in Christ's Presence: Final Words on Heaven and the Kingdom of God

“Father, we remember now that we are right here with you and that you are in our midst and that you love us and that you long for us to be healed and whole and that we do not do any of this on our own and that this universe is a perfectly safe place for us to be and that you are closer than the air we breathe. And so we ask that you would be at work now and help us and give us energy and openness and strength, and we pray this together in Jesus’ name. Amen. John Ortberg”
― Dallas Willard, Living in Christ's Presence: Final Words on Heaven and the Kingdom of God

“Often I have asked at USC and other places in public, “Has anyone shown that reality is secular? Could you show me the person and where this was done? If it has not been done, isn’t it a little on the questionable side to announce we are a secular university?”
― Dallas Willard, Living in Christ's Presence: Final Words on Heaven and the Kingdom of God

“Immerse them together in the presence of the Trinity, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Yes, baptize them in the name, but, dear friends, that doesn’t just mean getting them wet while you say those names. It means to immerse them in the Reality.”
― Dallas Willard, Living in Christ's Presence: Final Words on Heaven and the Kingdom of God

“Witnessing is not thought of as bringing knowledge, but as attempts to convince people to do things. When you divorce faith from knowledge, you wind up in the position of trying to get people to do things, not of providing them with a basis on which they can then decide how to live and how to lead their lives together. Witnessing has turned into a kind of process of bothering people, and very few people witness because of that.”
― Dallas Willard, Living in Christ's Presence: Final Words on Heaven and the Kingdom of God

“Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in the first chapter of his wonderful book Life Together, has a discussion of how Christians never meet one-on-one; they always meet under the presence of Christ. That’s the way we escape the dreadful habit that human beings have of sizing one another up. Does that identify anything that you are familiar with? It’s one of the most dreadful things in human life, and only the love of Christ and the presence of the kingdom can bring us beyond it.”
― Dallas Willard, Living in Christ's Presence: Final Words on Heaven and the Kingdom of God

“To train means arranging our life around those practices that enable us to do what we cannot now do by direct effort. The point of training is to receive power, so we arrange our life around practices through which we get power.”
― Dallas Willard, Living in Christ's Presence: Final Words on Heaven and the Kingdom of God

“A disciple is someone who is learning by going through the process of change. All the things that we moan about and talk on and on about, such as pornography, divorce and drugs, are things that can be dealt with effectively only by bringing change into the mind and the spirit, into the will, into the body and into the fellowship of the person. Then people come out saying, “Who needs that stuff? I’ve got something much better than that.”
― Dallas Willard, Living in Christ's Presence: Final Words on Heaven and the Kingdom of God

“Spiritual disciplines are training exercises to give us power to live in the kingdom.”
― Dallas Willard, Living in Christ's Presence: Final Words on Heaven and the Kingdom of God

“washing and little food rituals. The battle in the Gospels focuses on those. When Jesus tries to turn it to things that really matter, the scribes and Pharisees go away and ask among themselves, “How can we kill this guy?” It is fascinating to see how bloodthirsty the people around Jesus were, but that’s where the righteousness of the scribe and the Pharisee leaves you. It leaves you trying to manage affairs and make them work out as you think they should in your own strength, and so you need to have a little committee meeting here or get-together there and figure out how to get rid of this guy. Beyond the righteousness of the scribe and the Pharisee is where we experience the kingdom. It’s where we begin to enter interactively into the kind of change that allows us to live constantly in the action of God in our lives. As long as we stick at the level of action and of righteousness identified in terms of action, we will never move on to where the real action of the kingdom of God is. Of course, many people say, “Well, you’re not very sophisticated.” But that’s why Jesus talked about children and said that unless you repent and become like a little child, you won’t enter the kingdom of heaven. You know, we have heard many sermons about how to do that, about how to repent and become like a little child. But that primarily means that we forsake the wisdom of men, of human beings, about how to deal with God. That’s the primary part of becoming a child. A little child runs to the door, hears the garbage truck and says, “I want to be”
― Dallas Willard, Living in Christ's Presence: Final Words on Heaven and the Kingdom of God

“You know something when you are able to deal with it as it is on an appropriate basis of thought and experience.”
― Dallas Willard, Living in Christ's Presence: Final Words on Heaven and the Kingdom of God

“Put his words into practice and find them to be true.”
― Dallas Willard, Living in Christ's Presence: Final Words on Heaven and the Kingdom of God

“have always replied that I will be glad to enter a joint inquiry with so and so, but I will not debate. We will seek the truth together.”
― Dallas Willard, Living in Christ's Presence: Final Words on Heaven and the Kingdom of God

“Dallas: Jesus was a man of truth. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth, not of correct doctrine. I am just saying that we need to tell our young people, “Follow Jesus, and if you can find a better way than him, he would be the first to tell you to”
― Dallas Willard, Living in Christ's Presence: Final Words on Heaven and the Kingdom of God

“your tongue follows correctness; your heart follows truth.”
― Dallas Willard, Living in Christ's Presence: Final Words on Heaven and the Kingdom of God

“They bring the life of the kingdom to other people. They bring that life in themselves. That’s what Jesus himself said, and that’s what he did. When he came, he said, “Repent for the kingdom of the heavens is at hand.” What was at hand? The kingdom that was in him. As people looked at him and listened to him, they realized that the kingdom of God was there and that it was available to them, and they became disciples of Jesus because of that.”
― Dallas Willard, Living in Christ's Presence: Final Words on Heaven and the Kingdom of God

“Many people think of Jesus as our Savior, as the one who will get us into heaven. So the question often is “Have I accepted Jesus as my Savior?” But we never ask the question “Have I accepted Jesus as my teacher?” And that’s the real question. With the disciples, it began there. They began by accepting him as their teacher, and then accepting him as their Savior—which included, of course, their eternal destiny—was a natural outflow of that. But they started with Jesus as their teacher, because we all have to learn how to live.”
― Dallas Willard, Living in Christ's Presence: Final Words on Heaven and the Kingdom of God

“When you look at something like pornography and you realize the state of mind of the person who is hooked on it, you say, “This is a terrible condition to be in.” You know that person can have a better way of thinking that will make the compulsion just drop off. It is the same way with hatred, with contempt and with all the things that cause the deepest problems in our families and in our communities and in our world. They all come out of an inside that is messed up, and Jesus comes and says, “Here is the way out.”
― Dallas Willard, Living in Christ's Presence: Final Words on Heaven and the Kingdom of God

“If I’m a pastor, the trinitarian fellowship is my first team. My ultimate loyalty is to that fellowship. My primary identity is as a part of that fellowship. My understanding of how I am doing in life comes out of that trinitarian fellowship. No other team is allowed to determine my identity or evaluate my performance beyond that one.”
― Dallas Willard, Living in Christ's Presence: Final Words on Heaven and the Kingdom of God

“What is my message?” Is my message one that pulls people into discipleship?”
― Dallas Willard, Living in Christ's Presence: Final Words on Heaven and the Kingdom of God

“Mark 12 lists every dimension under the governance of Jesus’ love.”
― Dallas Willard, Living in Christ's Presence: Final Words on Heaven and the Kingdom of God

“We want to ask questions and not just make assertions.”
― Dallas Willard, Living in Christ's Presence: Final Words on Heaven and the Kingdom of God

“Today there is no foundation. Ultimately what rules in a discipline today is the social pressure of the best professional opinion, and that changes.”
― Dallas Willard, Living in Christ's Presence: Final Words on Heaven and the Kingdom of God