Words matter. These are the best Dallas Willard Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
God may not guide us in an obvious way because he wants us to make decisions based on faith and character.
Spiritual formation in a Christian tradition answers a specific human question: ‘What kind of person am I going to be?’ It is the process of establishing the character of Christ in the person. That’s all it is.
Spiritual formation is character formation. Everyone gets a spiritual formation. It’s like education. Everyone gets an education; it’s just a matter of which one you get.
When I left home after graduating high school, I left as a migrant agricultural worker with a Modern Library edition of Plato in my duffel bag. It sounds kind of crazy, but I loved it. I loved the stuff. Before I knew there was a subject called philosophy, I loved it.
I think that when I die, it might be some time until I know it.
‘Discipleship’ as a term has lost its content, and this is one reason why it has been moved aside. I’ve tried to redeem the idea of discipleship, and I think it can be done; you have to get it out of the contemporary mode.
Human beings are at their core defined by what they worship rather than primarily by what they think, know, or believe. That is bound up with the central Augustinian claim that we are what we love.
When pastors don’t have rich spiritual lives with Christ, they become victimized by other models of success – models conveyed to them by their training, by their experience in the church, or just by our culture.
Reality is what you can count on.
We Christians should be aware that there’s something at stake in cultural participation that we wouldn’t have been concerned about if all we did was worry about the messages in culture.
So many people would like to have guidance from God because obviously, if you have a word from God, it’s the best possible thing. But they don’t relate that to life as a whole. Often they want guidance as a way of opting out of the responsibility of making decisions.
If you have a group of people come together around a vision for real discipleship, people who are committed to grow, committed to change, committed to learn, then a spiritual assessment tool can work.
If you don’t have a teacher you can’t have a disciple.
