Timothy Keller Quotes

If you and your church were to disappear off the face of the earth tomorrow, would anyone in the community around you notice you were gone? And if the community did even notice would they say 'we are really glad they are gone', or 'we are really going to miss them'?

The lack of joy in your life is due to your lack of mission.

The gospel is an exclusive truth but it's the most inclusive exclusive truth in the world.

The best things that have been written, almost, are by Catholics during the counter Reformation: Ignatius of Loyola, St. Francis de Sales, John of the Cross, St. Theresa of Бvila.....great stuff.

Forgiveness always comes at a cost to the one granting the forgiveness. To not retaliate is to absorb the cost.

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. The Bible tells us that God did not originally make the world to have disease, hunger, and death in it. Jesus has come to redeem where it is wrong and heal the world where it is broken. His miracles are not just proofs that he has power but also wonderful foretastes of what he is going to do with that power. Jesus' miracles are not just a challenge to our minds, but a promise to our hearts, that the world we all want is coming.

Putting our faith in Christ is not about trying harder; it means transferring our trust away from ourselves and resting in him.

There are some needs only you can see. There are some hands only you can hold. There are some people only you can reach.

To stay away from Christianity because part of the Bible’s teaching is offensive to you assumes that if there is a God he wouldn’t have any views that upset you. Does that belief make sense? If you don’t trust the Bible enough to let it challenge and correct your thinking, how could you ever have a personal relationship with God? In any truly personal relationship, the other person has to be able to contradict you.

Religion: 'My identity is built on being a good person.' Gospel: 'My identity is not built on my record or my performance but on Christ's.'

Christ did not suffer so you wouldn’t suffer. He suffered so when you suffer you will become like Him.

God's grace and forgiveness, while free to the recipient, are always costly for the giver.

I am a Christian resident of New York City. I simply read things the other Manhattanites read (NY Times, New Yorker magazine, Wall Street Journal, and many of the books they read) plus all my Christian reading. I don't do anything special to understand skeptics. I also talk to a lot of skeptics and read things they point to.

As many have learned and later taught, you don't realize Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you have.

A rich, vibrant, consoling, hard-won prayer life is the one good that makes it possible to receive all other kinds of goods rightly and beneficially. [Paul] does not see prayer as merely a way to get things from God but as a way to get more of God himself.

If anything becomes more fundamental than God to your happiness, meaning of life, and identity then it is an idol.

The essence of forgiveness is absorbing pain instead of giving it.

If our identity is in our work, rather than Christ, success will go to our heads, and failure will go to our hearts.

To take a person out of slavery takes an instant. To take slavery out of a person takes a process.

The gospel shows a God far more holy than the legalist can bear, yet far more merciful than a humanist can conceive

A Christian is somebody whose eyes have been opened, who admits that Jesus is not what you expected, but he’s what you need.

It is impossible to forgive someone if you feel superior to him or her.

The future is already won, and the more hostile the culture, the easier it is to communicate the difference of Christianity.

Fear, logic, and tradition are not going to make you live a good life when no one is looking.

The basic purpose of prayer is not to bend God's will to mine, but to mold my will into His.

The essence of Christian obedience is not do’s and don’ts but personal allegiance to Jesus.

God is so committed to your ultimate joy that he was willing to plunge into the greatest depths of suffering himself for you.

The church is not a museum for pristine saints, but a hospital ward for broken sinners.

The primary means-of-reviva l that everyone agrees upon is extraordinary prayer.

If God is treated as God during suffering, then suffering can reveal and present him in all his greatness.

So live in the light of the resurrection and renewal of this world, and of yourself, in a glorious, never-ending, joyful dance of grace.

The best people often have terrible lives. Job is one example, and Jesus—the ultimate ‘Job,’ the only truly, fully innocent sufferer — is another.

Only in Jesus Christ do we see how the untamable, infinite God can become a baby and a loving Savior. On the cross we see how both the love and the holiness of God can be fulfilled at once.

Jesus's miracles are not just a challenge to our minds, but a promise to our hearts, that the world we all want is coming.

At the end of history the whole earth has become the Garden of God again. Death and decay and suffering are gone. . . . Jesus will make the world our perfect home again. We will no longer be living 'east of Eden,' always wandering and never arriving. We will come, and the father will meet us and embrace us, and we will be brought into the feast.

Grace is to be let into a place that you don't have a right to be.

Occasionally God rips aside the veil, and you begin to see this very fact: All things happen for you. All things. Everything is knit together.

The church should be a place where people can be free to say that they are sinners.

All human problems are ultimately symptoms, and our separation from God is the cause.

One of the biggest obstacles in the way of people coming to Christianity is that they think they know about it already.

Not everyone is your brother or sister in the faith, but everyone is your neighbor, and you must love your neighbor.

Describe the God you've rejected. Describe the God you don't believe in. Maybe I don't believe in that God either.

It takes both spouses to say, "My self-centeredness is the main problem in my marriage" to have a great marriage.

Through the person and work of Jesus Christ, God fully accomplishes salvation for us, rescuing us from judgment for sin into fellowship with him, and then restores the creation in which we can enjoy our new life together with him forever.

God has become human. The absolute has become particular. The ideal has become real. The divine has taken up a human nature.

Repentance out of mere fear is really sorrow for the consequences of sin, sorrow over the danger of sin — it bends the will away from sin, but the heart still clings. But repentance out of conviction over mercy is really sorrow over sin, sorrow over the grievousness of sin — it melts the heart away from sin. It makes the sin itself disgusting to us, so it loses its attractive power over us. We say, ‘this disgusting thing is an affront to the one who died for me. I’m continuing to stab him with it!’

When you say, "Come in Jesus as my caregiver, stay out as my Lord," he can't. He's both.

If you come to recognize the beliefs on which your doubts about Christianity are based, and if you seek as much proof for those beliefs as you seek from Christians for theirs - you will discover that your doubts are not as solid as they first appeared.