The Great Omission Quotes

“Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action. Grace, you know, does not just have to do with forgiveness of sins alone.”
― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus's Essential Teachings on Discipleship

“The greatest issue facing the world today, with all its heartbreaking needs, is whether those who, by profession or culture, are identified as ‘Christians’ will become disciples – students, apprentices, practitioners – of Jesus Christ, steadily learning from him how to live the life of the Kingdom of the Heavens into every corner of human existence.”
― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus's Essential Teachings on Discipleship

“Solitude well practiced will break the power of busyness, haste, isolation, and loneliness. You will see that the world is not on your shoulders after all. Your will find yourself, and God will find you in new ways. Silence also brings Sabbath to you. It completes solitude, for without it you cannot be alone. Far from being a mere absence, silence allows the reality of God to stand in the midst of your life. God does not ordinarily compete for our attention. In silence we come to attend. Lastly, fasting is done that we many consciously experience the direct sustenance of God to our body and our whole person.”
― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus's Essential Teachings on Discipleship

“The first fruit of love is the musing of the mind on God. He who is in love, his thoughts are ever upon the object. He who loves God is ravished and transported with the contemplation of God. "When I awake, I am still with thee" (Psalm 139:18). The thoughts are as travelers in the mind. David's thoughts kept heaven-road. "I am still with Thee." God is the treasure, and where the treasure is, there is the heart. By this we may test our love to God. What are our thoughts most upon? Can we say we are ravished with delight when we think on God? Have our thoughts got wings? Are they fled aloft? Do we contemplate Christ and glory?... A sinner crowds God out of his thoughts. He never thinks of God, unless with horror, as the prisoner thinks of the judge.”
― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus's Essential Teachings on Discipleship

“Sabbath is a way of life (Heb 4:3; 9-11). It is simply "casting all your anxiety on Him," to find that in actual fact " He cares for you" (1 Peter 5:7). It is USING the keys to the Kingdom to receive the resources for abundant living and ministering.”
― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus's Essential Teachings on Discipleship

“Much of our problem is not, as is often said, that we have failed to get what is in our head down in our heart. Much of what hinders us is that we have had a lot of mistaken theology in our head and it has gotten down into our heart. And it is controlling our inner dynamics so that the head and heart cannot, even with the aid of the Word and the Spirit, pull one another straight.”
― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship

“May I just give you this word? Grace is not opposed to effort, it is opposed to earning. Earning is an attitude. Effort is an action.”
― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship

“The command is "Do no work." Just make space. Attend to what is around you. Learn that you don't have to DO to BE. accept the grace of doing nothing. Stay with it until you stop jerking and squirming.”
― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus's Essential Teachings on Discipleship

“The fruit of the Spirit, in contrast, gives a sure sign of transformed character. When our deepest attitudes and dispositions are those of Jesus, it is because we have learned to let the Spirit foster his life in us.”
― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship

“The single most obvious trait of those who profess Christ but do not grow into Christ-likeness is their refusal to take the reasonable and time-tested measures for spiritual growth.”
― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship

“You may be very sure that if your sincere intent is to glorify God and bless others in your efforts, and you are not motivated by unloving attitudes, you will see the hand of God move with you as you expectantly do your work. Your part is simply to expect it, watch for it, give thanks as you see it, and, on the basis of your experience, encourage others to do the same.”
― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship

“But spirituality in many Christian circles has simply become another dimension of Christian consumerism. We have generated a body of people who consume Christian services and think that that is Christian faith. Consumption of Christian services replaces obedience to Christ. And spirituality is one more thing to consume. I go to many, many conferences and talk about these things, and so often I see these people who are just consuming more Christian services.”
― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship

“The church of Jesus Christ is not necessarily present when there is a correct administration of the sacrament and faithful preaching of the Word of God. The church of God is present where people gather together in the power of the resurrected life of Jesus Christ. It is possible to have the administration of the sacraments and the preaching of the Word of God and to have it be simply a human exercise. And the misunderstanding of the church in this respect is one of the things that create a primary problem for the integration of theology and spirituality. Because, as was emphasized yesterday, a bad theology will kill any prospects of a spirituality that comes from life in Christ.”
― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship

“Grace is opposed to earning, but not to effort.”
― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship

“There is no question of doing is purely on our own. But we must act. Grace is opposed to earning, not to effort. And it is well-directed, decisive, and sustained effort that is the key to the keys of the kingdom and to the life of restful power in ministry and life that those keys open to us.”
― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus's Essential Teachings on Discipleship

“How, then, shall we set the Lord always before us? Bible memorization is absolutely fundamental to spiritual formation. If I had to—and of course I don’t have to—choose between all the disciplines of the spiritual life and take only one, I would choose Bible memorization. I would not be a pastor of a church that did not have a program of Bible memorization in it, because Bible memorization is a fundamental way of filling our minds with what they need. “This book of the law shall not depart out of your mouth” (Joshua 1:8). That’s where we need it! In our mouth.

Now, how did it get in your mouth? Memorization. I often point out to people how much trouble they would have stayed out of if they had been muttering scripture. Our friend Bill Clinton would have done much better with that. Muttering scripture. You meditate in it day and night. What does that mean? Keep it, and therefore God, before your mind all the time. Can anyone really imagine that they have anything better to keep before their mind? No! “That you may observe to do all that is written therein, and then you will make your way prosperous, and you will have your success” (Deuteronomy 28:1–2).”
― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus's Essential Teachings on Discipleship

“We must stop using the fact that we cannot earn grace ( whether for justification or for sanctification) as an excuse for not energetically seeking to receive grace.”
― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship

“The Spirit makes Christ present to us and draws us toward his likeness. It is as we thus behold the “glory of the Lord” that we are constantly “transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:18).”
― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship

“Every single thing that Jesus taught us to do was something he had put into daily practice in circumstances just like ours.”
― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship

“Heaven is a deeply significant word. From Abraham (Genesis 24:7) onward, it signified to the people of Israel the direct availability of God to his children, as well as his supremacy over all that affects us.”
― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship

“Nothing less than life in the steps of Christ is adequate to the human soul or the needs of our world. Any other offer fails to do justice to the drama of human redemption, deprives the hearer of life’s greatest opportunity, and abandons this present life to the evil powers of the age.”
― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship

“Most problems in contemporary churches can be explained by the fact that members have never decided to follow Christ.”
― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship

“For at least several decades the churches of the Western world have not made discipleship a condition of being a Christian. One is not required to be, or to intend to be, a disciple in order to become a Christian, and one may remain a Christian without any signs of progress toward or in discipleship.”
― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship

“Who, among Christians today, is a disciple of Jesus, in any substantive sense of the word “disciple”? A disciple is a learner, a student, an apprentice—a practitioner, even if only a beginner. The New Testament literature, which must be allowed to define our terms if we are ever to get our bearings in the Way with Christ, makes this clear.”
― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship

“There is an obvious Great Disparity between, on the one hand, the hope for life expressed in Jesus—found real in the Bible and in many shining examples from among his followers—and, on the other hand, the actual day-to-day behavior, inner life, and social presence of most of those who now profess adherence to him.”
― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship

“We have generated a body of people who consume Christian services and think that that is Christian faith. Consumption of Christian services replaces obedience to Christ. And spirituality is one more thing to consume.”
― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship

“A. W. Tozer expressed his “feeling that a notable heresy has come into being throughout evangelical Christian circles—the widely accepted concept that we humans can choose to accept Christ only because we need him as Savior and that we have the right to postpone our obedience to him as Lord as long as we want to!”
― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship

“the aim of spiritual formation is the transformation of the self, and that it works through transformation of thought, transformation of feeling, transformation of social relations, transformation of the body, and transformation of the soul. When we work with all these, transformation of the spirit (heart, will) very largely, though not entirely, takes care of itself.”
― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship

“Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant” (Mark 10:44). By the way, it is dreadful to see this recommended as only another technique for succeeding in leadership. Jesus wasn’t giving techniques for successful leadership. He was telling us who the great person is. He or she is the one who is servant of all. Being a servant shifts one’s relationship to everyone. What do you think it would do to sexual temptation if you thought of yourself as a servant? What do you think it would do to covetousness? What do you think it would do to the feeling of resentment because you didn’t get what you thought you deserved? I’ll tell you. It will lift the burden.”
― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship

“Union in action with the triune God is Christian spirituality. That is where the life is drawing its substance from God.”
― Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship