The Allure of Gentleness: Defending the Faith in the Manner of Jesus
Dallas Willard
Top 10 Best Quotes
“It is only in the heat of pain and suffering, both mental and physical, that real human character is forged. One does not develop courage without facing danger, patience without trials, wisdom without heart- and brain-racking puzzles, endurance without suffering, or temperance and honesty without temptations. These are the very things we treasure most about people. Ask yourself if you would be willing to be devoid of all these virtues. If your answer is no, then don’t scorn the means of obtaining them. The gold of human character is dug from torturous mines, but its dung and dirt are quite easily come by. And it should come as no surprise to us that in our time—the time of the great flight from pain—such virtues as these are conspicuous only by their absence. I’m”
“Faith according to our Lord’s teaching in this paragraph is primarily thinking; and the whole trouble with a man of little faith is that he does not think. He allows circumstances to bludgeon him. . . . We must spend more time in studying our Lord’s lessons in observation and deduction. The Bible is full of logic, and we must never think of faith as something purely mystical. We do not just sit down in an armchair and expect marvelous things to happen to us. That is not Christian faith. Christian faith is essentially thinking. Look at the birds, think about them, and draw your deductions. Look at the grass, look at the lilies of the field, consider them. . . . Faith, if you like, can be defined like this: It is a man insisting upon thinking when everything seems determined to bludgeon and knock him down in an intellectual sense. The trouble with the person of little faith is that, instead of controlling his own thought, his thought is being controlled by something else [circumstances, for example], and, as we put it, he goes round and round in circles. That is the essence of worry. . . . That is not thought; that is the absence of thought, a failure to think.2 We’re”
“What is to be made known is what God is going to bring out of human history, what Malachi 3:17 describes as his “jewels” (KJV). What God is going to bring out of human history in his people is going to be the greatest reflection of God’s own glory, wisdom, and love. That is what human history is about. It is to make a society of the redeemed that will be the crown jewel of creation. And when we look at all of the terrible things that happen in human history, when we look at the extent of human evil in it, we want to remember what would be lost if human history had not happened. What would be lost is precisely this crown jewel of creation, which consists of Christlike people living together with the kind of love that the members of the Trinity have for one another and enjoying that full, shared, self-subsistent being that characterizes God himself as God dwells in those people.”
“Truth reveals reality, and reality can be described as what we humans run into when we are wrong, a collision in which we always lose. Being”
“The world that contains the possibility of evil is the one that also contains the greatest possibility of good. And the question of why God allows evil to happen has to be put against the question of what a world where evil could not happen would be like. It’s by working on those questions that people can come to some resolution in their minds about the reality of evil and what it means.”
“So the call to “give an account” is, first, not a call to beat unwilling people into intellectual submission, but to be the servant of those in need, often indeed the servant of those who are in the grip of their own intellectual self-righteousness and pride, usually reinforced by their social surroundings.”
“Remember, in Colossians we are told that in him are hidden “all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (2:3). And, of course, it’s perfectly logical that the reason all the treasures are hidden in him is because he made everything. So if you’re engaged in research in some field, you should take him in as your partner, because he really does know what makes things work. Regardless of what you’re working on, Jesus has the knowledge required to solve your problems.”
“I get a lot of resistance to the idea that God can choose not to know things, because people are concerned about God’s omniscience. But let me tell you that God’s omniscience does not overwhelm his omnipotence. God does not have to know anything he does not wish to know. His omniscience refers to his ability to know everything, just as his omnipotence refers to his ability to do anything he wishes. God’s omnipotence does not mean that he is always doing—or that he ever does—everything he can do. In the same way, he does not have to know everything he can know. He is capable of not knowing whatever he does not wish to know—should there be any such thing.”
“We have a terrible time understanding love, because we confuse it with desire. Desire and love are two utterly different kinds of things. Not only is desire not love; it is often opposed to love. Right action is the act of love, regardless of the desires of anyone involved.”
“To be simple, humble, and thoughtful as we listen to others and help them come to faith in the One who has given us life.”
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