Dallas Willard

Spiritual formation for the Christian basically refers to the Spirit-driven process of forming the inner world of the human self in such a way that it becomes like the inner being of Christ himself.

Discipleship is the process of becoming who Jesus would be if he were you.

Everyone gets a spiritual formation. It's like education. Everyone gets an education; it's just a matter of which one you get.

If our gospel does not free the individual up for a unique life of spiritual adventure in living with God daily, we simply have not entered fully into the good news that Jesus brought.

My central claim is that we can become like Christ by doing one thing -- by following him in the overall style of life he chose for himself.

Today it is the skeptics who are the social conformists, though because of powerful intellectual propaganda they continue to enjoy thinking of themselves as wildly individualistic and unbearably bright.

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.

Many people have found prayer impossible because they thought they should only pray for wonderful but remote needs they actually had little or no interest in or even knowledge of. Prayer simply dies from efforts to pray about ‘good things’ that honestly do not matter to us. The way to get to meaningful prayer for those good things is to start by praying for what we are truly interested in. The circle of our interests will inevitably grow in the largeness of God’s love.

The sinner is not the one who uses a lot of grace... The saint burns grace like a 747 burns fuel on take off.

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.

The will is transformed by experience, not information.

The idea that everything would happen exactly as it does regardless of whether we pray or not is a specter that haunts the minds of many who sincerely profess belief in God. It makes prayer psychologically impossible, replacing it with dead ritual at best.

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.

What a child does when not told what to do is the final indicator of what and who that child is.