Top 581 Quotes & Sayings by Timothy Keller - Page 3

It takes both spouses to say, "My self-centeredness is the main problem in my marriage" to have a great marriage.

The church should be a place where people can be free to say that they are sinners.

The only love that won’t disappoint you is one that can’t change, that can’t be lost, that is not based on the ups and downs of life or of how well you live. It is something that not even death can take away from you. God’s love is the only thing like that.

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

Real love, the Bible says, instinctively desires permanence.

Describe the God you've rejected. Describe the God you don't believe in. Maybe I don't believe in that God either.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

The world is a dark place, and yet the coming of Jesus Christ shows us no one and nothing is hopeless.

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

The Christian gospel is that I am so flawed that Jesus had to die for me, yet I am so loved and valued that Jesus was glad to die for me.

Everyone worships something. The only choice you get is what to worship.

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

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

No matter what precautions we take, no matter how well we have put together a good life, no matter how hard we have worked to be healthy, wealthy, comfortable with friends and family, and successful with our career — something will inevitably ruin it.

Friends become wiser together through a healthy clash of viewpoints.

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

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.

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.

Marriage is two broken people having little broken people.

We do not have to make ourselves suffer in order to merit forgiveness. We simply receive the forgiveness earned by Christ. 1 John 1:9 says that God forgives us because He is ‘just.’ That is a remarkable statement. It would be unjust of God to ever deny us forgiveness, because Jesus earned our acceptance! In religion we earn our forgiveness with our repentance, but in the gospel we just receive it.

Jesus Christ, who had all the power in the world, saw us enslaved by the very things we thought would free us ... He laid aside the infinities and immensities of His being and, at the cost of His life, paid the debt for our sins, purchasing us the only place our hearts can rest, in His Father's house. Knowing He did this will transform us from the inside out.

The early church was strikingly different from the culture around it in this way - the pagan society was stingy with its money and promiscuous with its body. A pagan gave nobody their money and practically gave everybody their body. And the Christians came along and gave practically nobody their body and they gave practically everybody their money.

When people say, "I know God forgives me, but I can't forgive myself," they mean that they have failed an idol, whose approval is more important than God's.

Not everyone is your brother or sister in the faith, but everyone is your neighbor, and you must love your neighbor.

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

Without the gospel we hate ourselves instead of our sin. Without the gospel we’re motivated through all sorts of awful fear and pride to change and it doesn’t really change our hearts; it just restrains our hearts.

At the cross, we see the worst that sin can do, as humanity - of which each one of us is a part - crucified the Lord. But at the cross, we also see that the most that sin can do cannot thwart God's salvation.

Falling in love in a Christian way is to say,'I am excited about your future and I want to be part of getting you there. I'm signing up for the journey with you. Would you sign up for the journey to my true self with me? It's going to be hard but I want to get there.

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.

We can only grasp the gospel's sweetness if we first grapple with its offense- you can't save yourself.

Christians necessarily believe we depend on God for everything-a prayerless Christian, then, is a contradiction in terms.

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.

God is so committed to your ultimate joy that he was willing to plunge into the greatest depths of suffering himself for you.

Most churches make the mistake of selecting as leaders the confident, the competent, and the successful. But what you most need in a leader is someone who has been broken by the knowledge of his or her sin, and even greater knowledge of Jesus' costly grace

We would say homosexuality is not the original design for sexuality. Therefore, it’s not good for human flourishing. We want people to do things that are good for human flourishing. But that’s not what sends you to heaven or Hell.

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.

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.

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.

We modern people think of miracles as the suspension of the natural order, but Jesus meant them to be the restoration of the natural order. The Bible tells us that God did not originally make the world to have disease, hunger, and death in it. Jesus has come to redeem where it is wrong and heal the world where it is broken. His miracles are not just proofs that he has power but also wonderful foretastes of what he is going to do with that power. Jesus' miracles are not just a challenge to our minds, but a promise to our hearts, that the world we all want is coming.

Truth is more important, freedom is more complex, and Jesus is more liberating than you think.

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

Sin has caused our affections to stray, propelling us to worship relationships, achievement, and work-everything but God.

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.

A church must be more deeply and practically committed to deeds of compassion and social justice than traditional liberal churches and more deeply and practically committed to evangelism and conversion than traditional fundamentalist churches. This kind of church is profoundly counter-intuitive to American observers. It breaks their ability to categorize (and dismiss) it as liberal or conservative. Only this kind of church has any chance in the non-Christian west.

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

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

A job is a vocation only if someone else calls you to do it for them rather than for yourself. And so our work can be a calling only if it is reimagined as a mission of service to something beyond merely our own interests. Thinking of work mainly as a means of self-fulfillment and self-realization slowly crushes a person.

When pain and suffering come upon us, we finally see not only that we are not in control of our lives but that we never were.

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

A faith without some doubts is like a human body with no antobodies in it. People who blithely go through life too busy or indifferent to ask the hard questions about why they believe as they do will find themselves defenseless against either the experience of tragedy or the probing questions of a smart skeptic. A person's faith can collapse almost overnight if she failed over the years to listen patiently to her own doubts, which should only be discarded after long reflection.

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

Paul sees all kinds of sins in himself and all kinds of accomplishments too, but he refuses to connect them with his identity.

To take a person out of slavery takes an instant. To take slavery out of a person takes a process.

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.