Top 100 Timothy Keller Quotes
#1. Jesus' claims are particularly unnerving, because if they are true there is no alternative but to bow the knee to him.
Timothy Keller
#2. It takes both spouses to say, "My self-centeredness is the main problem in my marriage" to have a great marriage.
Timothy Keller
#3. If you are a child of God, you don't lose your status if you have a bad week.
Timothy Keller
#4. Humility is so shy. If you begin talking about it, it leaves.
Timothy Keller
#5. Christians should not be optimists; we know too much about sin. We should also not be pessimists, for we know the living God.
Timothy Keller
#6. 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?
Timothy Keller
#7. If Christianity is really true it will be offending and correcting you somewhere.
Timothy Keller
#8. Covenant community is like air. We don't miss it until we need it.
Timothy Keller
#9. The proper biblical understanding of sin is much more radical and far-reaching. It can never be used as a weapon, because it will recoil on anyone who tries to deploy it that way.
Timothy Keller
#10. The product of a true, growing, gospel-centered nature is often gentleness.
Timothy Keller
#11. The more you understand how your salvation isn't about your behavior, the more radically your behavior will change.
Timothy Keller
#12. Both low self-esteem and pride are horrible nuisances to our own future and to everyone around us.
Timothy Keller
#13. When a newspaper posed the question, "What's Wrong with the World?" the Catholic thinker G. K. Chesterton reputedly wrote a brief letter in response: "Dear Sirs: I am. Sincerely Yours, G. K. Chesterton." That is the attitude of someone who has grasped the message of Jesus.
Timothy Keller
#14. Every other religion points to answers. Jesus, though, says 'I am the answer'.
Timothy Keller
#15. In cities you have more image of God per square inch than anywhere else on Earth.
Timothy Keller
#16. The determining factor in our relationship with God is not our past but Christ's past.
Timothy Keller
#17. Even though the gospel is a set of truths to understand and believe, it cannot remain a set of beliefs if it is truly believed and understood. As Lesslie Newbigin states, "The Christian story provides us with such a set of lenses, not something for us to look at, but for us to look through."2
Timothy Keller
#18. The Gospel is good news not good advice. Advice = what we should do. News = report of what was done for us.
Timothy Keller
#19. 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.
Timothy Keller
#20. Think like a prophet, serve like a priest, and plan like a king.
Timothy Keller
#21. Forgiveness always comes at a cost to the one granting the forgiveness. To not retaliate is to absorb the cost.
Timothy Keller
#22. The Scriptures show numerous instances when gospel truths are brought out in different orders, argued for using different premises, and applied to hearts in distinctive ways. It is clear that Paul does not feel an obligation to give the whole gospel picture to his audience in one sitting.
Timothy Keller
#23. In the end, we love people into belief. We do not argue them into belief.
Timothy Keller
#24. 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.
Timothy Keller
#25. God gives out good gifts of wisdom, talent, beauty, and skill 'graciously'
that is, in a completely unmerited way. He casts them across all humanity, regardless of religious conviction, race, gender, or any other attribute to enrich, brighten, and preserve the world.
Timothy Keller
#26. Our prayers should arise out of immersion in the Scripture. [We] speak only to the degree we are spoken to.
Timothy Keller
#27. There are many ways to cover up our sin. We may justify or minimize it by blaming circumstances and other people. However, real repentance first admits sin as sin and takes full responsibility. True confession and repentance begins when blame shifting ends.
Timothy Keller
#28. The world values power, comfort, success, and recognition. Jesus frees us to value grief, sacrifice, weakness, and exclusion.
Timothy Keller
#29. We get angry when we feel like God owes us a better life than we have.
Timothy Keller
#30. Pastors must practice a two-fold program of cultural engagement: deconstruction and demystification of cultural idols, and reconstruction and re-enchantment of a gospel-shaped worldview.
Timothy Keller
#31. Do you realize that it is only in the gospel of Jesus Christ that you get the verdict before the performance?
Timothy Keller
#32. Religious people find God useful. Gospel people find him beautiful.
Timothy Keller
#33. Lord, my culture and my heart tell me that it is wholly due to my hard work that I am not poor. If I believe that lie, I will be ungenerous. I praise you that you are a God with a heart for the poor. Give me the same kind of heart. Amen.
Timothy Keller
#34. 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.
Timothy Keller
#35. To know how to meditate on and delight in the Bible is the secret to a relationship with God and to life itself.
Timothy Keller
#36. Lord make me happy enough in the grace of Jesus to avoid being proud, cold, scared, and hooked.
Timothy Keller
#37. The goal of prayer is not just the sharing of our ideas, but also of ourselves.
Timothy Keller
#38. 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?
Timothy Keller
#39. Living is giving ... If you spend your money on yourself, you are just surviving. But if you want your life to count, if you want to really live - give.
Timothy Keller
#40. You can't live the Christian life without a band of Christian friends, without a family of believers in which you find a place.
Timothy Keller
#41. It is hard to get a good perspective on marriage. We all see it through the inevitably distorted lenses of our own experience.
Timothy Keller
#42. The key question in order to change you is not 'What would Jesus do?' but "What has Jesus done for you?"
Timothy Keller
#44. If we give God things in hope that they'll earn us blessings, we're really not doing anything for him. It's for ourselves.
Timothy Keller
#45. We are continuing God's work of forming, filling, and subduing. Whenever we bring order out of chaos, whenever we draw out creative potential, whenever we elaborate and "unfold" creation beyond where it was when we found it, we are following God's pattern of creative cultural development.
Timothy Keller
#46. It's important to remember the Gospel is a story; not a set of bullet points.
Timothy Keller
#47. No one is too bad for Jesus. A lot of people think they are too good for Jesus.
Timothy Keller
#48. Just because we don't see a reason for evil and suffering doesn't mean there's not a reason for it.
Timothy Keller
#49. Christians necessarily believe we depend on God for everything-a prayerless Christian, then, is a contradiction in terms.
Timothy Keller
#50. The church growth movement has made many lasting contributions to our practice of ministry. But its overemphasis on technique and results can put too much pressure on ministers because it underemphasizes the importance of godly character and the sovereignty of God.
Timothy Keller
#51. We should not decide how to pray based on the experiences and feelings we want. Instead, we should do everything possible to behold our God as he is, and prayer will follow.
Timothy Keller
#52. Let us preach grace till humility just starts to grow in us.
Timothy Keller
#53. In the church we have to deliberately let ourselves be transparent and accountable to others. We're a family.
Timothy Keller
#54. All that we know theologically must be "accessed" by our heart with all the joy, peace, self-control, love, durability, patience, and graciousness that it should produce in a human being.
Timothy Keller
#55. Grace is to be let into a place that you don't have a right to be.
Timothy Keller
#56. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God.
Timothy Keller
#57. The more you see your own flaws and sins, the more precious, electrifying, and amazing God's grace appears to you.
Timothy Keller
#58. Everyone says they want community and friendship. But mention accountability or commitment to people, and they run the other way.
Timothy Keller
#59. Suffering dispels the illusion that we have the strength and competence to rule our own lives and save ourselves.
Timothy Keller
#60. If God does not have our highest allegiance, we will use prayer to try to get things that have that designation.
Timothy Keller
#61. Whether you consider yourself a believer or a skeptic, I invite you to seek the same kind of honesty and to grow in an understanding of the nature of your own doubts. The result will exceed anything you can imagine.
Timothy Keller
#62. The only way to free ourselves from the destructive influence of counterfeit gods is to turn back to the true one. The living God, who revealed himself both at Mount Sinai and on the Cross, is the only Lord who, if you find him, can truly fulfill you, and, if you fail him, can truly forgive you.
Timothy Keller
#63. It takes more than a great church to reach a city, it takes a great movement of churches.
Timothy Keller
#64. The happy ending of the Resurrection is so enormous that it swallows up even the sorrow of the Cross.
Timothy Keller
#65. 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.
Timothy Keller
#66. If you can't show the difference between religion and the Gospel, people will confuse morality with a changed heart
Timothy Keller
#67. We must have a strong inner life of fellowship and intimacy with Jesus if we are going to have a strong outer life of ministry
Timothy Keller
#68. Prayer-though it is often draining, even an agony-is in the long term the greatest source of power that is possible.
Timothy Keller
#69. We have to be careful not to elevate our preferences to moral standards and judge others by them. We only do so to feel superior.
Timothy Keller
#70. What you do today is shaped by what you believe about tomorrow.
Timothy Keller
#71. If you wait until your motives are pure and unselfish before you do something, you will wait forever.
Timothy Keller
#72. Everyone needs the gospel, both the "you" inside the church and the "you" who are yet outside it. The gospel is the way people are called to faith, and the way people grow in faith.
Timothy Keller
#73. The deeper the experience of the free grace of God, the more generous we must become.
Timothy Keller
#74. The church is not a museum for pristine saints, but a hospital ward for broken sinners.
Timothy Keller
#75. If you want God's grace, all you need is need, all you need is nothing. But that kind of spiritual humility is hard to muster. We come to God saying, "Look at all I've done," or maybe "Look at all I've suffered." God, however, wants us to look to him - to just wash.
Timothy Keller
#76. Religion makes us proud of what we have done. The Gospel makes us proud of what Jesus has done.
Timothy Keller
#77. Living a self-absorbed life will always be at the cost of everyone else.
Timothy Keller
#78. The main human problems often are that we misidentify what will make us happy; and we ask people and things to save us beyond their ability.
Timothy Keller
#79. Only with time do we really learn who the other person is and come to love the person for him- or herself and not just for the feelings and experiences they give us.
Timothy Keller
#80. 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.
Timothy Keller
#81. Revival occurs when those who think they already know the gospel discover they do not really or fully know it.
Timothy Keller
#82. Lloyd-Jones once said that he had never written on prayer because of a sense of personal inadequacy in this area.28
Timothy Keller
#83. Discipleship is not an option. Jesus says that if anyone would come after me, he must follow me.
Timothy Keller
#84. Work is a major instrument of God's providence; it is how he sustains the human world.
Timothy Keller
#85. Love is counting someone else's needs and interests as more important than your own needs or interests or comfort.
Timothy Keller
#86. The church does not simply have a missions department; it should wholly exist to be a mission.
Timothy Keller
#87. If we have not seen our sin and sought radical forgiveness from God, we will be unable to forgive and to seek the good of those who have wronged us.
Timothy Keller
#88. If you have a God infinite and powerful enough for you to be angry at for allowing evil, then you must at the same time have a God infinite enough to have sufficient reasons for allowing that evil.
Timothy Keller
#89. In a smaller church your pastoring sets up your preaching. In a larger church your preaching sets up your pastoring.
Timothy Keller
#90. Why do the Ten Commandments begin with a prohibition of idolatry? It is, Luther argued, because we never break the other commandments without breaking the first.
Timothy Keller
#91. The Psalter, then, affirms both the communion-seeking and kingdom-seeking kinds of prayer.
Timothy Keller
#92. To fear the Lord is to be overwhelmed with wonder before the greatness of God and his love.
Timothy Keller
#93. Christmas means Jesus came down and got involved in suffering. He hears your cries.
Timothy Keller
#94. To love our success more than God and our neighbor hardens the heart, making us less able to feel and to sense.
Timothy Keller
#95. The Gospel is news of what God has done to reach us. It is not advice about what we must do to reach God.
Timothy Keller
#96. Harvie Conn, who related this story in one of his books, added that gospel preaching that targets some sins but not the sins of oppression cannot possibly work among the overwhelming majority of people in the world, poor peasants and workers.
Timothy Keller
#97. All I know is, if I don't care about the poor, if my church doesn't care about the poor, that's evil.
Timothy Keller
#98. Sin is the despairing refusal to find your deepest identity in your relationship and service to God. Sin is seeking to become oneself, to get an identity, apart from him.
Timothy Keller
#99. 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.
Timothy Keller
#100. The Spirit's work of making the gospel real to the heart weakens the self-centeredness in the soul.
Timothy Keller
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