Timothy Keller Quotes

[Spiritual friendship] is eagerly helping one another know, serve, love, and resemble God in deeper and deeper ways.

If you need something in addition to God to make you happy, that is your true King.

Every other religion points to answers. Jesus, though, says 'I am the answer'.

You are under-qualified for the job of God.

Any person who only sticks with Christianity as long as things are going his or her way, is a stranger to the cross

If you seek to serve people more than to gain power, you will not only serve people, you will gain influence.

Jesus experienced homelessness at Christmas so that we could experience a love we could never lose.

The great basis of Christian assurance is not how much our hearts are set on God, but how unshakably his heart is set on us.

Many people think of the Bible as a book of moral teachings with stories sprinkled through to illustrate the teachings. But it's a lot BETTER THAN THAT...the Bible is a single true story with teachings sprinkled through to illustrate the story.

In Ephesians 5, Paul shows us that even on earth Jesus did not use his power to oppress us but sacrificed everything to bring us into union with him. And this takes us beyond the philosophical to the personal and the practical. If God had the gospel of Jesus's salvation in mind when he established marriage, then marriage only 'works' to the degree that approximates the pattern of God's self-giving love in Christ.

When people say, "God is love," I think they mean that love is extremely important, or that God really wants us to love. But in Christian conception, God really has love as his essence.

God relentlessly offers his grace to people who do not deserve it, or seek it, or even appreciate it after they have been saved by it.

If you say: I believed in God, I trusted God and He didn't come through - You only trusted God to meet your agenda.

Reason can get you to probability, but only commitment can get you to certainty.

The cross is the place where the Judge takes the Judgment.

How Religion Works: If I obey, then God will love and accept me. The Gospel: I'm loved and accepted, therefore I wish to obey.

While marriage is many things, it is anything but sentimental. Marriage is glorious but hard. It's a burning joy and strength, and yet it is also blood, sweat, and tears; humbling defeats and exhausting victories.

This is the humbling truth that lies at the heart of Christianity. We love to be our own saviors. Our hearts love to manufacture glory for themselves. So we find messages of self-salvation extremely attractive, whether they are religious (Keep these rules and you earn eternal blessing) or secular (Grab hold of these things and you’ll experience blessing now).

God's salvation does not come in response to a changed life. A changed life comes in response to the salvation, offered as a free gift.

Without immersion in God's words, our prayers may not be merely limited and shallow but also untethered from reality.

A life of gratitude to God for being saved is far more pleasing than a life based on self-righteousness over being good.

The image of God carries with it the right not to be mistreated or harmed.... Regardless of their record or character, all human beings have an irreducible glory and significance to them, because God loves them.... So we must treasure each and every human being as a way of showing due respect for the majesty of their owner and Creator.

Our moral efforts are too feeble and falsely motivated to ever merit salvation.

Religion operates on the principle 'I obey-therefore I am accepted by God.' But the operating principle of the gospel is 'I am accepted by God through what Christ has done-therefore I obey.'

God loves and defends those with the least economic and social power, and so should we.

As long as we think we are not that bad, the idea of grace will never change us.

Gifts are abilities God gives us to meet the needs of others in Christ’s name.

But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God.

All Christians have opportunities to serve those who might never come to church or listen to a sermon.

Christianity teaches that, contra fatalism, suffering is overwhelming; contra Buddhism, suffering is real; contra karma, suffering is often unfair; but contra secularism, suffering is meaningful. There is a purpose to it, and if faced rightly, it can drive us like a nail deep into the love of God and into more stability and spiritual power than you can imagine.

Jesus cannot be just liked. His claims make us either kill him or crown him.

Suffering is the stripping of our hope in finite things, therefore we do not put our ultimate hope in anything finite.

If you can't show the difference between religion and the Gospel, people will confuse morality with a changed heart

We tend to see God as a means through which we get things to make us happy. For most of us, He has not become our happiness.

How could you possibly know that no religion can see the whole truth unless you yourself have the superior, comprehensive knowledge of spiritual reality you just claimed non of the religions have?

Christians need the gospel as much as non-Christians do.

God’s grace does not come to people who morally outperform others, but to those who admit their failure to perform and who acknowledge their need for a Savior.

All life-changing love is inconvenient.

God takes our misery and suffering so seriously that he was willing to take it on himself.

At the root of all our disobedience are particular ways in which we continue to seek control of our lives through systems of works-righteousness. The way to progress as a Christian is to continually repent and uproot these systems the same way we become Christians, namely by the vivid depiction (and re-depiction) of Christ’s saving work for us, and the abandoning of self-trusting efforts to complete ourselves. We must go back again and again to the gospel of Christ-crucified, so that our hearts are more deeply gripped by the reality of what he did and who we are in him.

Our character is mainly shaped by our primary social community - the people with whom we eat, play, converse, and study.

It is no more narrow to claim that one religion is right than to claim that one way to think about all religions is right.

The human race doesn't need more books telling them what to do. They need the power to do what they already know.

The gospel has supernatural versatility to address the particular hopes, fears, and idols of every culture and every person.

Suffering can refine us rather than destroy us because God himself walks with us in the fire.

God looks at the anxious and says, I tore my Son to shreds for you, and you're afraid I will not give you what you need?

No one is so good that they don’t need the grace of the gospel, nor so bad that they can’t receive the grace of the gospel.

The key question in order to change you is not 'What would Jesus do?' but "What has Jesus done for you?"