Following in the steps of Christ

I just finished reading The Spirit of the Disciplines by Dallas Willard. I recommend it as a great resource to understand why spiritual disciplines exist and the power that comes through them. At the end of the book, Willard put in an article that he wrote for Christianity Today back in 1980. I thought the last paragraph of the article was a good summary of what the book conveys:

“Nothing less than life in the steps of Christ is adequate to the human soul or the needs of our world. Any other offer fails to do justice to the drama of human redemption, deprives the hearer of life’s greatest opportunity, and abandons this present life to the evil powers of the age. The correct perspective is to see following Christ not only as the necessity it is, but as the fulfillment of the highest human possibilities and as life on the highest plane. It is to see, in Helmut Thielicke’s words, that ‘The Christian stands, not under the dictatorship of a legalistic ‘You ought,’ but in the magnetic field of Christian freedom, under the empowering of the ‘You may.’”