Timothy Keller Quotes

Secularism and Religion are both all about your personal performance. The Gospel is the performance of another applied to you.

The gospel is not only the way to enter the kingdom; it is the way to live in the kingdom.

If God does not have our highest allegiance, we will use prayer to try to get things that have that designation.

When love of one's people becomes an absolute, it turns into racism. When love of equality turns into a supreme thing, it can result in hatred and violence toward anyone who has led a privileged life. It is the settled tendency of human societies to turn good political causes into counterfeit gods.

There is a joy available that the deepest grief cannot put out. No circumstance or person can take away the joy God gives.

Grace is the free, unmerited favor of God, working powerfully on the mind and heart to change lives.

If you add anything to Jesus as a requirement for being happy, that's your real king.

Nothing we formulate or do can qualify us for access to God. Only grace can do that- based not on our performance but on the saving work of Christ.

The rich brother needs to let the gospel humble him while the poor brother needs to let the gospel affirm him.

The infallible test of spiritual integrity, Jesus says, is your private prayer life.

The reason the stone was rolled away on Jesus's tomb was not so that Jesus could get out, but so that we could get in.

The deeper the experience of the free grace of God, the more generous we must become.

There are many ways to cover up our sin. We may justify or minimize it by blaming circumstances and others people. However, real repentance first admits sin as sin and takes full responsibility. True confession and repentance begins when blame shifting ends...Just as real repentance begins only where blame shifting ends, so it also begins where self-pity ends, and we start to turn from our sin out of love for God rather than mere self-interest.

It is one thing to say that science is only equipped to test for natural causes and cannot speak to any others. It is quite another to insist that science proves that no other causes could possibly exist. . . . There would be no experimental model for testing the statement: 'No supernatural cause for any natural phenomenon is possible.' It is therefore a philosophical presupposition and not a scientific finding.

Faith is not opposed to reason, but it is sometimes opposed to feelings and appearances.

It’s a mistake to think that you must feel love to give it.

Pride is that which claims to be the author of what is really a gift.

Worry is not believing God will get it right, and bitterness is believing God got it wrong.

The story of Jesus changes our lives because it is true.

Happiness is a by-product of wanting something more than happiness-to be rightly related to God and our neighbor.

The church is often like a football stadium where 22 people need a rest and thousands of people need exercise.

If you aren't constantly astonished at God's grace in your solitude, there's no way it can happen in public.

Our culture says that feelings of love are the basis for actions of love. And of course that can be true. But it is truer to say that actions of love can lead consistently to feelings of love.

In short, the enlightenment privatized marriage, taking it out of the public sphere, and redefined its purpose as individual gratification, not any 'broader good' such as reflecting God's nature, producing character, or raising children. Slowly but surely, this newer understanding of the meaning of marriage has displaced the older ones in Western culture.

Jesus is the only Lord who, if you receive him, will fulfill you completely, and, if you fail him, will forgive you eternally.

God's grace and forgiveness, while free to the recipient, are always costly for the giver. From the earliest parts of the Bible, it was understood that God could not forgive without sacrifice. No one who is seriously wronged can “just forgive” the perpetrator.

We must neither confuse evangelism with doing justice, nor separate them from one another.

Religion poses a danger of creating division or intolerance between groups of people. However, the gospel of Jesus lead us to three things: humble service, reconciling behavior that is neither patronizing nor self-righteous, and a love toward people who hold different beliefs than we do.

If we say, 'I believe in Jesus,' but it doesn't affect the way we live, the answer is not that now we need to add hard work to our faith so much as that we haven't truly understood or believed in Jesus at all.

A triune God would call us to converse with him . . . because he wants to share the joy he has. Prayer is our way of entering into the happiness of God himself.

Every religion has a prophet who is pointing people to God. Jesus is the only one who says, 'I am God, and I am coming to find you.'

If you have a small view of your sin, God's grace will be small to you.

If a person has grasped the meaning of God's grace in his heart, he will do justice. If he doesn't live justly, then he may say with his lips that he is grateful for God's grace, but in his heart he is far from him. If he doesn't care about the poor, it reveals that at best he doesn't understand the grace he has experienced, and at worst he has not really encountered the saving mercy of God. Grace should make you just.

The doctrine of grace and redemption keeps us from seeing any person or situation as hopeless.

The most liberating act of free, unconditional grace demands that the recipient give up control of his or her life.

[T]he main problem in life is sin, and the only solution is God and his grace. The alternative to this view is to identify something besides sin as the main problem with the world and something besides God as the main remedy. That demonizes something that is not completely bad, and makes an idol out of something that cannot be the ultimate good.

People only get in the afterlife what they have most wanted-either to have God as Savior and Master or to be their own Saviors and Masters.

I am God and I am coming to find you.

Jesus was the temple to end all temples, the priest to end all priests, & the sacrifice to end all sacrifices.

I hate the moment when suddenly my anger turns into tears

Doing justice includes not only the righting of wrongs but generosity and social concern, especially toward the poor and vulnerable.

What you do today is shaped by what you believe about tomorrow.

To love our success more than God and our neighbor hardens the heart, making us less able to feel and to sense.

Jesus Christ as only an example will crush you. You'll never be able to live up to it. But Jesus Christ as the Lamb will save you.

Christianity does not set faith against thinking. It sets faith against assuming.

The purpose of Jesus's coming is to put the whole world right, to renew and restore the creation, not to escape it.

The Gospel is the deepest consolation you can offer to the human heart.

Humility is so shy. If you begin talking about it, it leaves.