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God is Waiting for You—Dallas Willard

God is waiting for you. God is not pushy—for now, in any case. He is not going to overwhelm you if you don’t want Him. He gives you the power to put Him out of your mind. And even if you want Him, you have to seek Him. Now, I realize that there is a sense in which He is already seeking you, and I am not trying to dispose of that, but we misunderstand what is our part and what is God’s part. God is ready to act. He is acting. We are not waiting on Him; and if it doesn’t hurt your theology too badly, He is waiting on us to respond.From The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’s Essential Teachings on Discipleship. Copyright © 2006 by Dallas Willard. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers
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4 Ways God Makes Himself Known Even When He Is Silent

This article serves as a good reminder that even if we feel like God is silent, He is not missing! From Crosswalk.com…………………

https://www.crosswalk.com/faith/spiritual-life/ways-god-makes-himself-known-even-when-he-is-silent.html?utm_source=Crosswalk%20Daily%20Update&utm_campaign=Crosswalk%20Daily%20Update&utm_medium=email&utm_content=6641258&recip=526962803&aps=71cdc536505d354473eac4da36005f917e504e0d5510da754370f3dab0a1012b
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Jesus is the Key to Enter the Kingdom — Dallas Willard

Jesus is the key to God’s kingdom

To be sure, that [God’s] kingdom has been here as long as we humans have been here, and longer. But it has been available to us through simple confidence in Jesus, the Anointed, only from the time he became a public figure. It is a kingdom that, in the person of Jesus, welcomes us just as we are, just where we are, and makes it possible for us to translate our “ordinary” life into an eternal one. It is so available that everyone who from the center of his or her being calls upon Jesus as Master of the Universe and Prince of Life will be heard and will be delivered into the eternal kind of life.

From The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God. Copyright © 1997 by Dallas Willard. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers

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Knowledge and Faith Go Together — Dallas Willard

Knowledge and faith go together

We don’t have to look very far into our own thinking and living to see the effects of either being sure of God or not being sure of God. I believe that scripture always presents real faith as something that is based on knowledge as well as something that goes beyond anything you could know, and involves a commitment to God and his kingdom. Those two things, knowledge and commitment, are not exclusive of one another; rather, they are related. If we do not have a knowledge of God at the foundation of our commitment, that commitment simply will not hold up. It will waver; it will not govern our lives. It will be like pulling a chair away from someone in the act of sitting down. We will not be able to hold on to our belief as God intends, by the action of his Spirit on our hearts and our minds.Knowledge and faith are intended to go together.

For example, when you read Hebrews 11, the great chapter on faith, you will see faith equated with a vision of reality. We are told that Moses endured as one who sees the invisible. Faith is not a mere thought that something is true or the hope or resolve to believe it is. As Martin Luther said in the preface to his commentary on Romans: Faith is a living, well-founded confidence in the grace of God, so perfectly certain that it would die a thousand times rather than surrender its conviction. Such confidence and personal knowledge of divine grace makes its possessor joyful, bold, and full of warm affection toward God and all created things—all of which the Holy Spirit works in faith. Hence, such a man becomes without constraint willing and eager to do good to everyone, to serve everyone, to suffer all manner of ills, in order to please and to glorify God, who has shown toward him such grace. It is thus impossible to separate works from faith—yea, just as impossible as to separate burning and shining from fire.From The

Allure of Gentleness: Defending the Faith in the Manner of Jesus. Copyright © 2015 by Dallas Willard. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.