The cautious faith that never saws off a limb on which it is sitting, never learns that unattached limbs may find strange unaccountable ways of not falling.
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.
Great power requires great character if it is to be a blessing and not a curse, and that character is something we only grow toward.
We don’t believe something by merely saying we believe it, or even when we believe that we believe it. We believe something when we act as if it were true.
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.
Play is the creation of value that is not necessary.
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.
Our search for safety and contentment is endless and inexhaustible precisely because of the intrinsic futility of relying on human abilities to provide resolution to our problems.
Last words of his mother to his father: “Keep eternity before the children.
The idea of having faith in Jesus has come to be totally isolated from being his apprentice and learning how to do what he said.
Jesus, Willard says, “does not call us to do what he did, but to be as he was, permeated with love. Then the doing of what he did and said becomes the natural expression of who we are in him.
To withhold our bodies from religion is to exclude religion from our lives.
Sometimes we get caught up in trying to glorify God by praising what He can do and we lose sight of the practical point of what He actually does do.
I think that, when I die, it might be some time until I know it.
I’m practicing the discipline of not having to have the last word.
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.
The aim of God in history is the creation of an all-inclusive community of loving persons with God himself at the very heart of this community as its prime Sustainer and most glorious Inhabitant.
God may not guide us in an obvious way because he wants us to make decisions based on faith and character.