Dallas Willard Spiritual Disciplines Quotes

The world can no longer be left to mere diplomats, politicians, and business leaders. They have done the best they could, no doubt. But this is an age for spiritual heroes- a time for men and women to be heroic in their faith and in spiritual character and power. The greatest danger to the Christian church today is that of pitching its message too low.

In relation to spiritual disciplines, the most helpful distinction is the difference between trying to do something and training to do something.

Spiritual disciplines are training exercises to give us power to live in the kingdom.

Celebration heartily done makes our deprivations and sorrows seem small, and we find in it great strength to do the will of our God because his goodness becomes so real to us.” —Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines8

Spirituality has thus come to be regarded by the world as those futile, self-torturing excesses of strange men and women who lived in far-off, benighted places and times. Accordingly, the One who came to give abundance of life is commonly thought of as a cosmic stuffed shirt, whose excessive "spirituality" probably did not allow him normal bodily functions and certainly would not permit him to throw a frisbee or tackle someone in a football game.

The Disciplines of Christ-likeness The third side of our triangle is made up of spiritual disciplines. These are special activities, many engaged in by Jesus himself, such as solitude and study, service and secrecy, fasting and worship.

Multitudes are now turning to Christ in all parts of the world. How unbearably tragic it would be, though, if the millions of Asia, South America and Africa were led to believe that the best we can hope for from the Way of Christ is the level of Christianity visible in Europe and America today, a level that has left us tottering on the edge of world destruction. The world can no longer be left to mere diplomats, politicians, and business leaders. They have done the best they could, no doubt. But this is an age for spiritual heroes-a time for men and women to be heroic in faith and in spiritual character and power. The greatest danger to the Christian church today is that of pitching its message TOO LOW.

Dallas Willard writes, “If you want to experience the flow of love as never before, the next time you are in a competitive situation, pray that the others around you will be more outstanding, more praised, and more used of God than yourself. If Christians were universally to do this for each other, the earth would soon be filled with the knowledge of God’s glory.”4

We can practice this through spiritual disciplines such as fasting, which can help us stay sweet and strong when we do not get what we want. If we can cheerily give up Twinkies, and peanuts, and steak, and things of that sort for a while, this will bring us to the place where we can say, “Lord, you’re quite sufficient for me. If you want to take it away forever, that would be fine.

what are “the disciplines for the spiritual life”? The disciplines are activities of mind and body purposefully undertaken, to bring our personality and total being into effective cooperation with the divine order. They enable us more and more to live in a power that is, strictly speaking, beyond us, deriving from the spiritual realm itself, as we “yield ourselves to God, as those that are alive from the dead, and our members as instruments of righteousness unto God,” as Romans 6:13 puts it.

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).

But this is an age for spiritual heroes—a time for men and women to be heroic in faith and in spiritual character and power.

Dallas Willard writes, “Today I continue to believe that people are meant to live in an ongoing conversation with God, speaking and being spoken to. . . . Given who we are by basic nature, we live—really live—only through God’s regular speaking in our souls and thus ‘by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’”1

The prejudice is even stronger today, two hundred years after Hume wrote. This is due to the further development of the idea that Protestantism, or just the progress of enlightenment, has refuted any view of Christian salvation requiring disciplines for the spiritual life. The Western world at large, not merely philosophers and scholars, is now firmly prejudiced against disciplinary activities as a part of the religious life. What, we wonder, could possibly be the point of such discipline, if not the earning of merit or maybe forgiveness through self-denial and suffering? We are confidently informed that the fundamental principle of the Protestant movement -- that salvation is secured by justification through faith and not through dead works -- "struck at the root of monkery an mortification in general." That's how the article on "asceticism" in the long-standard M'Clintock and Strong encyclopedia on religion expresses this accepted attitude of Protestant culture. Somehow, the fact that "mortification" -- self-denial, the disciplining of one's natural impulses -- happens to be a central teaching of the New Testament is conveniently ignored.

Of course the condition of life in God that we seek is not to be thought of as a merely mechanical result. It is a widespread fallacy that careful and thorough preparation precludes freedom, spontaneity, and personal interaction. In fact the very person best prepared for any situation is the one who experiences the greatest freedom and spontaneity in it. The spiritual life is a life of interaction with a personal God, and it is pure delusion to suppose that it can be carried on sloppily. The will to do his will can only be carried into reality as we take measures to be ready and able to meet and draw upon him in our actions.

It is almost impossible in the thought climate of today's Western world to appreciate just how utterly unnecessary it was for Paul to say explicitly, in the world in which he lived, that Christians should fast, be alone, study, give, and so forth as regular disciplines for the spiritual life.

In the simplest possible terms, the spiritual disciplines are a matter of taking appropriate measures. To reject them wholesale is to insist that growth in the spirit is something that just happens all by itself. It is hard to see how any serious disciple of Christ could possibly believe that. To reject the standard, classical disciplines we've discussed, to hold that practices such as solitude, fasting, service, and others aren't essential to spiritual growth, is at least conceivable. But when a believer does reject them, he or she must then assume the responsibility of putting other effective activities in their place. Perhaps this can be done, and we at least are willing to leave the question open for now. But to be spiritual disciplines, any such activities substituted would have to be activities of mind and body, done to bring our whole selves into cooperation with the divine order, so we can experience more and more a vision and power beyond ourselves.

Full participation in the life of God’s Kingdom and in the vivid companionship of Christ comes to us only through appropriate exercise in the disciplines for life in the spirit. Those disciplines alone can become for average Christians "the conditions upon which the spiritual life is made indubitably real.

The aim and substance of spiritual life is not fasting, prayer, hymn singing, frugal living, and so forth. Rather, it is the effective and full enjoyment of active love of God and humankind in all the daily rounds of normal existence where we are placed.

The idealization of poverty is one of the most dangerous illusions of Christians in the contemporary world. Stewardship—which requires possessions and includes giving—is the true spiritual discipline in relation to wealth.

Yet God doesn’t intend for us to do nothing about our growth. Sloth is not spiritual. As Dallas Willard wrote, “Grace is not opposed to effort, but [it] is opposed to earning.”[5] The difference between legalism and spiritual discipline is not the work or energy involved; it’s the motivation. Are we doing things to impress God and earn his favor? Or are we doing them because we are dearly loved children of God who are being conformed to the image of his Son by the power of the Spirit (Romans 8:1-17, 29)?

Ideals of Asceticism, quite correctly summarizes the essence of religious asceticism as the voluntary practice of activities “for the deliverance and protection of the soul from defilement, for the increase of its powers by the discharge of its proper functions in accordance with its own conception of the moral and spiritual order, and for the consequent achievement and enjoyment of its full status.”16 Teachers who condemn asceticism correctly practiced in the contemporary context will almost certainly do more harm than good, unless they have some other method for their students that effectively lays hold on life in the Kingdom of God.

People who think that they are spiritually superior because they make a practice of a discipline such as fasting or silence or frugality are entirely missing the point. The need for extensive practice of a given discipline is an indication of our weakness, not our strength. We can even lay it down as a rule of thumb that if it is easy for us to engage in a certain discipline, we probably don’t need to practice it. The disciplines we need to practice are precisely the ones we are not “good at” and hence do not enjoy.

relationship with God, as with any person, soon requires a contribution from us, which will largely consist of study. Calvin Miller well remarks: “Mystics without study are only spiritual romantics who want relationship without effort.”23

The world can no longer be left to mere diplomats, politicians, and business leaders. They have done the best they could, no doubt. But this is an age for spiritual heroes—a time for men and women to be heroic in faith and in spiritual character and power. The greatest danger to the Christian church today is that of pitching its message too low.

Praying with frequency gives us the readiness to pray again as needed from moment to moment. The more we pray, the more we think to pray, and as we see the results of prayer—the responses of our Father to our requests—our confidence in God’s power spills over into other areas of our life.” —Dallas Willard, The Spirit of the Disciplines4

Dallas Willard said, “Bible memorization is absolutely fundamental to spiritual formation. If I had to choose between all the disciplines of the spiritual life and take only one, I would choose Bible memorization.”5

In our spiritual disintegration we may not be able to rule the earth, but we now have the power several times over to ruin it utterly.

The possibility of knowledge is relevant to Dallas’s account of the spiritual life. The point of his books The Spirit of the Disciplines, The Divine Conspiracy and Renovation of the Heart is that we must adopt specific practices in order to deepen our apprehension of God’s activity in the world. If we fail to sharpen our perception of the great spiritual truths as revealed in the life of Christ, God’s kingdom, in all its life-transforming richness and power, will simply pass us by. Again, you see it happen every day.

We need to understand that Jesus is a thinker, that this is not a dirty word but an essential work, and that his other attributes do not preclude thought, but only ensure that he is certainly the greatest thinker of the human race: “the most intelligent person who ever lived on earth.” Dallas Willard

Almost anything in the way of sexual relations is now regarded as correct as long as both parties consent to it... it is thought that sex is right with anyone you love in the sense of a "romantic" involvement. And on the other hand sex without romantic feelings is thought to be wrong even if the sexual partners are married. Often the "romantic love" in question turns out, upon examination, to be nothing more than precisely that fantasized lusting that Jesus called "adultery in the heart." One is not in love but in lust, which glorifies itself as something deeper in order to have its way.It is almost inconceivable today that the rightness or wrongness of sexual intercourse would have nothing whatsoever to do with what now passes for romantic love. Yet that is the biblical view generally: the rightness of sex is tied instead to a solemn and public covenant for life between two individuals, and sexual arousal and delight is a response to the gift of a uniquely personal intimacy with the whole person that each partners has conferred in enduring faithfulness upon the other.Intimacy is the mutual mingling of souls who are taking each other into themselves to ever increasing depths. The truly erotic is the mingling of souls. Because we are free beings, intimacy cannot be passive or forced. And because we are extremely finite, it must be exclusive... The profound misunderstandings of the erotic that prevail today actually represent the inability of humanity in its current Western edition to give itself to others and receive them in abiding faithfulness. Personal relationship has been emptied out to the point where intimacy is impossible. Quite naturally, then, we say, "Why not?" when contemplating adultery. If there is nothing there to be broken, why worry about breaking it?One of the most telling things about contemporary human beings is that they cannot find a reason for not committing adultery... We now keep hammering the sex button in the hope that a little intimacy might finally dribble out. In vain. For intimacy comes only within the framework of an individualized faithfulness within the kingdom of God.- Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy

But for all of the soul’s vastness and independence, the tiny executive center of the person—that is, the spirit or will—can redirect and re-form the soul, with God’s cooperation. It mainly does this by redirecting the body in spiritual disciplines and toward various other types of experiences under God.

Dallas Willard said, “Bible memorization is absolutely fundamental to spiritual formation. If I had to choose between all the disciplines of the spiritual life and take only one, I would choose Bible

To withhold our bodies from religion is to exclude religion from our lives.