Timothy Keller Quotes

The secret to freedom from enslaving patterns of sin is worship. You need worship. You need great worship. You need weeping worship. You need glorious worship. You need to sense God’s greatness and to be moved it — moved to tears and moved to laughter — moved by who God is and what he has done for you.

The peace of God is not the absence of fear. It, in fact, is His presence.

Just because you cannot realize your highest aspirations in work does not mean you have chosen wrongly, or are not called to your profession, or that you should spend your life looking for the perfect career that is devoid of frustration. ... You should expect to be regularly frustrated in your work even though you may be in exactly the right vocation.

Are you living to justify yourself, or are you living because you are justified?

There is a direct relationship between a person's grasp and experience of God's grace, and his or her heart for justice and the poor.

The world can’t save itself. That’s the message of Christmas.

Just because you can't see or imagine a good reason why God might allow something to happen doesn't mean there can't be one.

Jesus Christ doesn’t just give us truths; he is the truth. Jesus Christ is the prophet to end all prophets. He gives us hard-copy words from God, truths on which we can build our lives, truths we have to submit to, truths we have to obey, and truths we have to build our lives on, but he himself is the truth.

If God is not at the center of your life, something else is.

Faith is not primarily a function of how you feel. Faith is living out and believing what truth is despite what you feel.

We are so quick to tweet, Facebook, and Instagram but we treat prayer with a sense of delay?

While Christianity was able to agree with pagan writers that inordinate attachment to earthly goods can lead to unnecessary pain and grief, it also taught that the answer to this was not to love things less but to love God more than anything else. Only when our greatest love is God, a love that we cannot lose even in death, can we face all things with peace. Grief was not to be eliminated but seasoned and buoyed up with love and hope.

Prayer is the way to experience a powerful confidence that God is handling our lives well, that our bad things will turn out for good, our good things cannot be taken from us, and the best things are yet to come.

Jesus took the tree of death so you could have the tree of life.

Those who condemn the self-righteous for the sake of self-discovery do so with ironic self-righteousness.

How do you change your behavior? Change what you worship

If we can't "love the sinner; hate the sin" then how can we relate to ourselves? Love who we are in Christ but still hate the sin remaining.

Generosity is not only about money. There is more than one currency. Let your generosity be pervasive in life.

The only person who dares wake up a king at 3:00 AM for a glass of water is a child. We have that kind of access

Idols are often good things that we have made into ultimate things.

Life in this fallen world is to a great degree meaningless, our aspirations are constantly being frustrated, and sometimes the respectable people are oppressive and bigoted. And yet there is a Good that will triumph over Evil in the end. From a Christian perspective the problem with both kinds of stories is that they tend to blame problems on things besides sin and identify salvation in things besides God — and therefore are ultimately too simplistic.

When Jesus looked down from the cross, he didn't think “I am giving myself to you because you are so attractive to me.” No, he was in agony, and he looked down at us - denying him, abandoning him, and betraying him - and in the greatest act of love in history, he STAYED. He said, “Father, forgive them, they don't know what they are doing.” He loved us, not because we were lovely to him, but to make us lovely.

We deserve to be forgotten because we forget Him. But because Jesus died on the cross, we will never, ever be forgotten by God.

Success and suffering will either darken your heart or make you wise, but they won't leave you where you were.

The more you rejoice in your own forgiveness, the quicker you will be to forgive others.

True citizens of the heavenly city are the best residents of the earthly city.

A genuinely persuasive argument does not merely tell you that you are wrong about everything. It doesn't just beat on you from the outside. It comes inside your belief system, as it were, and affirms something you believe strongly. And then it says - well if you believe this (A) then why in the world can't you see that B is true?

Unless we believe the gospel, we will be driven in all we do-whether obeying or disobeying-by pride ('self-love') or fear ('of damnation'). Apart from 'grateful remembering' of the gospel, all good works are done then for sinful motives. Mere moral effort may restrain the heart, but does not truly change the heart. Moral effort merely 'jury rigs' the evil of the heart to produce moral behavior out of self-interest. It is only a matter of time before such a thin tissue collapses.

Marriage does not so much bring you into confrontation with your spouse as confront you with yourself.

Prayer is awe, intimacy, struggle-yet, the way to reality.

We need to remember that we are saved by grace when we fail. But we need to remember it much more when we succeed.

If Christianity is really true it will be offending and correcting you somewhere.

If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did.

As things are brought back under Christ's rule and authority, they are restored to health, beauty, and freedom.

Friendship is a deep oneness that develops when two people, speaking the truth in love to one another, journey together to the same horizon.

The happy ending of the Resurrection is so enormous that it swallows up even the sorrow of the Cross.

Truth without love is imperious self-righteousn ess. Love without truth is cowardly self-indulgence .

The Gospel does not promise you better life circumstances; it promises you a better life.

To be a Christian is a standing, a legal position. It means to be a child of God. You are or you are not, there is no try.

The gospel has two parts. It has the part that says you're a sinner, and it has the part that says you're loved and accepted.

For indeed, grace is the key to it all. It is not our lavish good deeds that procure salvation, but God's lavish love and mercy. That is why the poor are as acceptable before God as the rich. It is the generosity of God, the freeness of his salvation, that lays the foundation for the society of justice for all. Even in the seemingly boring rules and regulations of tabernacle rituals, we see that God cares about the poor, that his laws make provision for the disadvantaged. God's concern for justice permeated every part of Israel's life. It should also permeate our lives.

If you are trying to live a life in accordance with the Bible, the concept and call to justice are inescapable. We do justice when we give all human beings their due as creations of God. Doing justice includes not only the righting of wrongs but generosity and social concern, especially toward the poor and vulnerable.

Anything can serve as a counterfeit god, especially the very best things in life.

Change won’t happen through ‘trying harder’ but only through encountering the radical grace of God.

At the cross, we see the worst that sin can do, as humanity - of which each one of us is a part - crucified the Lord. But at the cross, we also see that the most that sin can do cannot thwart God's salvation.

The Christian faith gives us a new conception of work as the means by which God loves and cares for his world through us.

Like a surgeon, friends cut you in order to heal you.

I am so bad that He had to die. I am so loved that He was glad to die.