Timothy Keller Quotes

Job never saw why he suffered, but he saw God, and that was enough.

To say doctrine doesn't matter, only how you live matters, is itself a doctrine. It's the doctrine of salvation by works.

Work is taking the raw material of creation and developing it for the sake of others.

Jesus Christ was treated as we deserved so that when we believe in Jesus, God treats us as Jesus deserves.

To fear the Lord is to be overwhelmed with wonder before the greatness of God and his love.

The resurrection was God's way of stamping PAID IN FULL right across history so that nobody could miss it.

I've heard plenty of Christians try to answer the why question by going back to the what. "You have to believe because Jesus is the Son of God." But that's answering the why with more what. Increasingly we live in a time in which you can't avoid the why question. Just giving the what (for example, a vivid gospel presentation) worked in the days when the cultural institutions created an environment in which Christianity just felt true or at least honorable. But in a post-Christendom society, in the marketplace of ideas, you have to explain why this is true, or people will just dismiss it.

Christians tend to motivate others with guilt. We tend to say: You would do this if you were really committed Christians, indicating that we are committed and all that is needed is for others to become as good as we are! This is why so many churches quench the motivation of people for ministry. In our shoes, Paul would say: Remember the grace God has showered on you—what does living out and enjoying that grace look like in this situation?

Unless you believe the gospel, everything you do will be driven by either pride or fear.

If you don't love the poor, you don't know what God's done for you.

The very fact that we have access to God's attention and presence should concentrate the thoughts and elevate the heart.

If you want God's grace, all you need is need, all you need is nothing. But that kind of spiritual humility is hard to muster. We come to God saying, "Look at all I've done," or maybe "Look at all I've suffered." God, however, wants us to look to him - to just wash.

If you have money, power, and status today, it is due to the century and place in which you were born, to your talents and capacities and health, none of which you earned. In short, all your resources are in the end the gift of God.

Many times people think if God has called you to something, he's promising you success. He might be calling you to fail to prepare you for something else through the failure.

If we give God things in hope that they'll earn us blessings, we're really not doing anything for him. It's for ourselves.

Change happens not just by giving the mind new arguments but also by feeding the imagination new beauties

Prayer is the way to experience a powerful confidence that God is handling our lives well.

Prayer should be done regularly, persistently, resolutely, and tenaciously at least daily, whether we feel like it or not.

If you don't feel like praying, pray to God to give you the desire.

Disordered love always leads to misery and breakdown. The only way to 'reorder' our loves is to love God supremely.

Our prayers should arise out of immersion in the Scripture. [We] speak only to the degree we are spoken to.

God's Kingdom is "present in its beginnings, but still future in its fullness. This guards us from an under-realized eschatology (expecting no change now) and an over-realized eschatology (expecting all change now). In this stage, we embrace the reality that while we're not yet what we will be, we're also no longer what we used to be.

In a smaller church your pastoring sets up your preaching. In a larger church your preaching sets up your pastoring.

The Bible judges the church; the church does not judge the Bible. The Bible is the foundation for and the creator of the church; the church is not the foundation for or creator of the Bible. The church and its hierarchy must be evaluated by the believer with the biblical gospel as the touchstone or plumb line for judging all truth claims.

The gospel humbles us into the dust and at the very same time exalts us to the heavens.

How could a good, all-powerful God allow suffering?

When the world sees us doing evangelism, they just see us recruiting. When they see us doing justice, they see God's glory.

A faith without some doubts is like a human body with no antobodies in it. People who blithely go through life too busy or indifferent to ask the hard questions about why they believe as they do will find themselves defenseless against either the experience of tragedy or the probing questions of a smart skeptic. A person's faith can collapse almost overnight if she failed over the years to listen patiently to her own doubts, which should only be discarded after long reflection.

Most churches make the mistake of selecting as leaders the confident, the competent, and the successful. But what you most need in a leader is someone who has been broken by the knowledge of his or her sin, and even greater knowledge of Jesus' costly grace

Trust is accepting what God sends into your life whether you understand it or not.

Our need for worth is so powerful that whatever we base our identity and value on we essentially 'deify.' We will look to it with all the passion and intensity of worship and devotion, even if we think ourselves as highly irreligious.

A god of less wrath than the God of the Bible is necessarily a god of less love. His anger is a product of his love.

When we worry we are saying, 'I know the way my life is supposed to go, and God's not getting it right'.

Let us preach grace till humility just starts to grow in us.

Revival occurs as a group of people who, on the whole, think they already know the gospel discover they do not really or fully know it, and by embracing the gospel they cross over into living faith.

To truly become Christians we must also repent of the reasons we ever did anything right.

If we are deeply moved by the sight of his love for us, it detaches our hearts from other would-be saviors. We stop trying to redeem ourselves through our pursuits and relationships, because we are already redeemed. We stop trying to make others into saviors, because we have a Savior.

While your character flaws may have created mild problems for other people, they will create major problems for your spouse and your marriage.

We modern people think of miracles as the suspension of the natural order, but Jesus meant them to be the restoration of the natural order.

If you love anything in this world more than God, you will crush that object under the weight of your expectations.

You can't live the Christian life without a band of Christian friends, without a family of believers in which you find a place.

No matter what precautions we take, no matter how well we have put together a good life, no matter how hard we have worked to be healthy, wealthy, comfortable with friends and family, and successful with our career — something will inevitably ruin it.

Easter means that Christmas worked.