Timothy Keller Quotes

The human heart is an idol factory that takes good things like a successful career, love, material possessions, even family, and turns them into ultimate things. Our hearts deify them as the center of our lives, because, we think, they can give us significance and security, safety and fulfillment, if we attain them.

What is an idol? It is anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give.

How does Satan accuse us? By causing us to look at our sin rather than our Savior.

God invites us to come as we are, not stay as we are.

Christ literally walked in our shoes and entered into our affliction. Those who will not help others until they are destitute reveal that Christ's love has not yet turned them into the sympathetic persons the gospel should make them.

Without the gospel we hate ourselves instead of our sin.

Honor the image of God. Human beings are not accidents, but creations.

I think these younger Christians are the vanguard of some major new religious, social, and political arrangements that could make the older form of culture wars obsolete. After they wrestle with doubts and objections to Christianity many come out on the other side with an orthodox faith that doesn't fit the current categories of liberal Democrat or conservative Republican.

One of the signs that you may not grasp the unique, radical nature of the gospel is that you are certain that you do.

The sin that is most destructive in your life right now is the one you are most defensive about.

People are messy; therefore, relationships will be messy. Don't be surprised by messiness.

The Gospel worldview equips the artist with a unique combination of optimism and realism about life.

No one is exempt from trials and tribulations. In fact, this is often what happens to people God loves very much, for it is part of God’s often mysterious and good plan for turning us into something great.

You should not begin to pray for all you want until you realize that in God you have all you need.

Within this Christian vision for marriage, here's what it means to fall in love. It is to look at another person and get a glimpse of the person God is creating, and to say, "I see who God is making you, and it excites me! I want to be part of that. I want to partner with you and God in the journey you are taking to his throne."

A common vision can unite people of very different temperaments.

...the essence of gospel-humility is not thinking more of myself or thinking less of myself, it is thinking of myself less.

Only if you first seek inner forgiveness will your confrontation be temperate, wise, and gracious. Only when you have lost the need to see the other person hurt will you have any chance of actually bringing about change, reconciliation, and healing. You have to submit to the costly suffering and death of forgiveness if there is going to be any resurrection.

Faith journeys are never simply intellectual exercises.

If we pick out which parts of the Bible we dislike, we actually have a god we've created. How can that god ever call you out on anything?

God made you to love him supremely, but he lost you. He returned to get you back, but it took the cross to do it. He absorbed your darkness so that one day you can finally and dazzlingly become your true self and take your seat at his eternal feast.

If Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all that he said; if he didn't rise from the dead, then why worry about any of what he said? The issue on which everything hangs is not whether or not you like his teaching but whether or not he rose from the dead.

Unless you point to the good news of God's grace people will not be able to bear the bad news of God's judgement.

How you experience your present is completely shaped by what you believe your ultimate future to be.

Sin is the despairing refusal to find your deepest identity in your relationship and service to God.

We only fully grasp the gospel when we understand, as Paul did, that we are the worst sinner we know

Only on the cross do you have a totally holy God and a totally loving God.

The more you understand how your salvation isn't about your behavior, the more radically your behavior will change.

It fits to glorify God - it not only fits reality, because God is infinitely and supremely praiseworthy, but it fits us as nothing else does. All the beauty we have looked for in art or faces or places - and all the love we have looked for in the arms of other people - is only fully present in God himself. And so in every action by which we treat him as glorious as he is, whether through prayer, singing, trusting, obeying, or hoping, we are at once giving God his due and fulfilling our own design.

Because creation was made in the image of a God who is equally one and many, the human race will finally be reunited and our racial and cultural diversity will remain intact in the renewed world. The human race finally lives together in peace and interdependence. Glory to God in the highest goes with peace on earth.

While we want doubts to give way to faith, we should be merciful and patient with those who are still in a doubt-troubled place.

When you forgive, that means you absorb the loss and the debt. You bear it yourself. All forgiveness, then, is costly.

If you're a Christian how do you deal with stress without Jesus? You don't.

Prayer is awe before an infinite force, and yet it's intimacy with a personal friend.

Love is primarily giving. It’s an action that leads to a feeling, not a feeling first.

It takes pride to be anxious – I am not wise enough to know how my life should go.

Public faith means going public with what’s in your heart, with humility and respect for others, as we speak of the truth of the gospel.

Remember that according to the Bible, the heart is not primarily the emotions but rather the seat of our fundamental commitments and trusts, and therefore it is the control center of the whole life. So to preach to the heart means to go right for the commanding commitments of people's lives that drive their desires, thinking, feeling, and action.

Jesus smashed two of the rich young ruler's assumptions: Christianity is something you can ADD and something you can DO.

Suffering is unbearable if you aren’t certain that God is for you and with you.

Rejoicing and repentance must go together. Repentance without rejoicing will lead to despair. Rejoicing without repentance is shallow and will only provide passing inspiration instead of deep change.

In religion, you obey because God is useful. In Christianity, you obey because God is beautiful.

Because we put ourselves in God’s place, He put Himself in our place.

Prayer turns theology into experience.

We are so evil and sinful and flawed that Jesus had to die for us... But we are so lobed and valued that he was willing to due for us.

If God wiped out all sources of evil in the world we would no longer be here, the evil is inside us.

Important reminder: It's not fair of you to demand more proof of Christians for their beliefs than you demand for your own.

The observer of beauty always receives a passion to share the beauty with others.