Hearing God Quotes

“We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than one who believes. You can almost be as stupid as a cabbage as long as you doubt.”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“In many cases, our need to wonder about or be told what God wants in a certain situation is nothing short of a clear indication of how little we are engaged in His work.”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“Our failure to hear His voice when we want to is due to the fact that we do not in general want to hear it, that we want it only when we think we need it.”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“Few people arise in the morning as hungry for God as they are for cornflakes or toast and eggs.”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“Great faith, like great strength in general, is revealed by the ease of its workings. Most of what we think we see as the struggle OF faith is really the struggle to act as IF we had faith when in fact we do not.”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“Individually the disciple and friend of Jesus who has learned to work shoulder to shoulder with his or her Lord stands in this world as a point of contact between heaven and earth, a kind of Jacob’s ladder by which the angels of God may ascend from and descend into human life. Thus the disciple stands as an envoy or a receiver by which the kingdom of God is conveyed into every quarter of human affairs.”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“We live in a culture that has, for centuries now, cultivated the idea that the skeptical person is always smarter than the one who believes. You can be almost as stupid as a cabbage, as long as you doubt. The fashion of the age has identified mental sharpness with a pose, not with genuine intellectual method and character.”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“The union Christ had with the Father was the greatest that we can conceive of in this life—if indeed we can conceive of it. Yet we have no indication that even Jesus was constantly awash with revelations as to what he should do. His union with the Father was so great that he was at all times obedient. This obedience was something that rested in his mature will and understanding of his life before God, not on always being told “Now do this” and “Now do that” with regard to every details of his life or work.”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“There is no avoiding the fact that we live at the mercy of our ideas This is never more true than with our ideas about God.”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“To manipulate, drive or manage people is not the same thing as to lead them.”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“The humility that cringes in order that reproof may be escaped or favor obtained is as unchristian as it is profoundly immoral.”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“And grace is not opposed to effort; it is opposed to earning.”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“If the Bible says something once, notice it but don’t count it as a fundamental principle. If it says it twice, think about it twice. If it is repeated many times, then dwell on it and seek to understand it. What you want to believe from the Bible is its message on the whole and use it as a standard for interpreting the peripheral passages.”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“An obsession merely with doing all God commands may be the very thing that rules out being the kind of person that he calls us to be.”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“We truly live at the mercy of our ideas; this is never more true than with our ideas about God.”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“Why is it,” comedian Lily Tomlin asks, “that when we speak to God we are said to be praying but when God speaks to us we are said to be schizophrenic?” Such a response from ourselves or others to someone’s claim to have heard from God is especially likely today because of the lack of specific teaching and pastoral guidance on such matters.”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“It is much more important to cultivate the    quiet, inward space of a constant listening than to always be approaching God for specific direction.”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“I fear that many people seek to hear God solely as a device for obtaining their own safety, comfort and sense of being righteous. For those who busy themselves to know the will of God, however, it is still true that “those who want to save their life will lose it” (Mt 16:25).”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“God’s presence is everywhere around us. God is able to penetrate intertwine himself within the fibers of the human self in such a way that those who are enveloped in His loving companionship will never be alone. page 59”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God

“Faith is not opposed to knowledge; faith is opposed to sight. And grace is not opposed to effort; it is opposed to earning.”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“In John 9, Jesus healed a blind man on the sabbath. The leaders of the people, proud of being Moses’ disciples (v. 28), “knew” that Jesus could not possibly be of God because he did not observe their restrictions on working during the sabbath (v. 16). They just “knew” that this man Jesus was a sinner because they “knew” the Bible. And they “knew” that the Bible said you were not supposed to do the kinds of things Jesus was doing on the sabbath. Therefore, since this man Jesus did these kinds of things on the sabbath, he was a sinner. These leaders had good, reliable general knowledge of how things were supposed to be. For his part, the man healed could only report, “I do not know whether he [Jesus] is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see” (Jn 9:25). But that was not in the Bible, in the law. The leaders had their own guidance, and they thought it was sufficient. But it was not sufficient, though it was very respectable and generally accepted. For it allowed them to condemn the power and works of love in Jesus himself: “We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from” (v. 29). “We don’t know!” That is perhaps the most self-damning statement they could possibly have made. They looked at what Jesus did and said, “We don’t know what this person is doing. We don’t know where he is coming from. We don’t know that he is of God.” Why didn’t they know? What they were really confessing was that they did not know who God is or what his works are. In their own way they shared Nicodemus’s problem of not being able to see the kingdom of God—though they were sure that in fact they did. Many stand in that same place today. They could look at the greatest works of love and righteousness and if those works did not conform either to their legalistic ideas of what the Bible or their church teaches, or to what their own subjective experiences confirm, they could condemn those works without batting an eyelid, saying, “We know that this is wrong!” We all need to be delivered from such knowledge! When facing the mad religionist or blind legalist, we have no recourse, no place to stand, if we do not have firsthand experience of hearing God’s voice, held safely within a community of brothers and sisters in Christ who also have such knowledge of God’s personal dealings with their own souls.[18]”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“in the progress of God’s redemptive work, communication advances into communion, and communion into union. When the progression is complete we can truly say, “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Gal 2:20) and “For to me, living is Christ” (Phil 1:21).”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“Generally speaking we are in God's will whenever we are leading the kind of life he wants for us. And that leaves a lot of room for initiative on our part, which is essential: our individual initiatives are central to his will for us.”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“Hearing God cannot be a reliable and intelligible fact of life except when we see his speaking as one aspect of his presence with us, of his life in us. Only our communion with God provides the appropriate context for communications between us and him.”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“Specifically, in our attempts to understand how God speaks to us and guides us we must, above all, hold on to the fact that learning how to hear God is to be sought only as a part of a certain kind of life, a life of loving fellowship with the King and his other subjects within the kingdom of the heavens.”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“Any voice that promises total exemption from suffering and failure is most certainly not God’s voice. In recent years innumerable spokespeople for God have offered ways we can use God and his Bible as guarantees of health, success and wealth.”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“People are meant to live in an ongoing conversation with God, speaking and being spoken to.”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“Commitment is not sustained by confusion but by insight. The person who is uninformed or confused will inevitably be unstable and vulnerable in action, thought and feeling.”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“Spiritual formation into Christlikeness—true change of character—comes from living in relationship to God.”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God

“We are required to “bet our life” that the visible world, while real, is not reality itself.”
― Dallas Willard, Hearing God: Developing a Conversational Relationship with God