Timothy Keller Quotes

If God exists then every good endeavor, even the simplest ones, pursued in response to God's calling can matter forever.

Do you realize that it is only in the gospel of Jesus Christ that you get the verdict before the performance?

Believers should acknowledge and wrestle with doubts... It is no longer sufficient to hold beliefs just because you inherited them.

The targets of this story are not wayward sinners but religious people who do everything the Bible requires. Jesus is pleading not so much with immoral outsiders as with moral insiders. H wants to show them their blindness, narrowness, and self righteousness, and how these things are destroying both their own souls and the lives of the people around them.

The Cross is not simply a lovely example of sacrificial love. Throwing your life away needlessly is not admirable — it is wrong. Jesus’ death was only a good example if it was more than an example, if it was something absolutely necessary to rescue us. And it was. Why did Jesus have to die in order to forgive us? There was a debt to be paid — God himself paid it. There was a penalty to be born — God himself bore it. Forgiveness is always a form of costly suffering.

The determining factor in our relationship with God is not our past but Christ's past.

It is possible to avoid Jesus as Savior as much by keeping all the Biblical rules as by breaking them.

The gospel is not just the A-B-C's but the A-Z of Christianity. The gospel is not just the minimum required doctrine necessary to enter the kingdom, but the way we make all progress in the kingdom.

Pride is the carbon-monoxide of Sin. It silently and slowly kills you without you even knowing.

The life of faith is not the perfect life; it is the life which clings on to what God has said he will do.

In the end, we love people into belief. We do not argue them into belief.

Covenant community is like air. We don't miss it until we need it.

Some suffering is given in order to chastise and correct a person for wrongful patterns of life (as in the case of Jonah imperiled by the storm), some suffering is given not to correct past wrongs but to prevent future ones (as in the case of Joseph sold into slavery), and some suffering has no purpose other than to lead a person to love God more ardently for himself alone and so discover the ultimate peace and freedom.

To the degree you experience God's love towards you - seeing you as beautiful and radiant - to that degree sex won't ruin your life.

Whatever you base your life on--you have to live up to that. Jesus is the one Lord you can live for who already died for you.

God will only give you what you would have asked for if you knew everything he knows

Jesus's teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing , religious people of his day.

You won't be able to change the world, yourself, anything, if you don't change yourself inwardly, deeply, enduringly.

What you do in secret tells you who your God is.

Christmas is telling you that you could never get to heaven on your own. God had to come to you.

The resurrection makes Christianity the most irritating religion on the face of the earth.

Both men and women today see marriage not as a way of creating character and community but as a way to reach personal life goals. They are looking for a marriage partner who will 'fulfill their emotional, sexual, and spiritual desires.' And that creates an extreme idealism that in turn leads to a deep pessimism that you will ever find the right person to marry.

Adam wasn't lonely because he was imperfect but because he was perfect. The ache for friends is not the result of sin.

Where you find your significance is where you find your salvation.

Prayer gives us relief from the melancholy burden of self-absorption .

We think that idols are bad things, but that is almost never the case. The greater the good, the more likely we are to expect that it can satisfy our deepest needs and hopes. Anything can serve as a counterfeit god, especially the very best things in life.

The goal of prayer is not just the sharing of our ideas, but also of ourselves.

God loves you just because He loves you.

The purpose of Sabbath is not simply to rejuvenate yourself in order to do more production, nor is it the pursuit of pleasure. The purpose of Sabbath is to enjoy your God, life in general, what you have accomplished in the world through his help, and the freedom you have in the gospel-the freedom from slavery to any material object or human expectation. The Sabbath is a sign of the hope that we have in the world to come.

Mercy and forgiveness must be free and unmerited to the wrongdoer. If the wrongdoer has to do something to merit it, then it isn’t mercy, but forgiveness always comes at a cost to the one granting the forgiveness.

Prayer is continuing a conversation that God has started through his Word and his grace, which eventually becomes a full encounter with him.

Every one of our sinful actions has a suicidal power on the faculties that put that action forth. When you sin with the mind, that sin shrivels the rationality. When you sin with the heart or the emotions, that sin shrivels the emotions. When you sin with the will, that sin destroys and dissolves your willpower and your self-control. Sin is the suicidal action of the self against itself. Sin destroys freedom because sin is an enslaving power.

Prayer is our way of entering into the happiness of God himself

Jesus says, "I want you to follow me so fully, so intensely, so enduringly that all other attachments in your life look weak by comparison"

Think like a prophet, serve like a priest, and plan like a king.

If his suffering did not make Jesus give up on us, nothing will.

The two things we all want so desperately — glory and relationship — can coexist only with God.

We must not settle for an informed mind without an engaged heart.

I am going to judge my circumstances by Jesus’ love, not Jesus’ love by my circumstances.

The most rapturous delights you have ever had - in the beauty of a landscape, or in the pleasure of food, or in the fulfillment of a loving embrace - are like dewdrops compared to the bottomless ocean of joy that it will be to see God face-to-face (1 John 3:1-3). That is what we are in for, nothing less. And according to the Bible, that glorious beauty, and our enjoyment of it, has been immeasurably enhanced by Christ's redemption of us from evil and death.

When we grasp that we are unworthy sinners saved by an infinitely costly grace, it destroys both our self-righteousn ess and our need to ridicule others.

Suffering is actually at the heart of the Christian story.

Your feelings come from where you find your hope. Where is your happiness and your significance?

Prayer can be simple, but it's not easy. Nothing great is.

We are saved by a man who died loving his enemies.

Just because we don't see a reason for evil and suffering doesn't mean there's not a reason for it.

When Job was prospering, he prayed. When he was suffering, he still prayed.

Even if our own troubles are great, we should still serve. Jesus washed His disciples feet on the way to the cross.