Top 581 Quotes & Sayings by Timothy Keller - Page 4

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

The cross is the place where we find the freedom to accept ourselves without being proud and to challenge ourselves without being crushed.

All life-changing love is inconvenient.

Rejoicing and repentance must go together. Repentance without rejoicing will lead to despair. Rejoicing without repentance is shallow and will only provide passing inspiration instead of deep change.

The ministry of mercy, then, is the best advertising a church can have. It convinces a community that this church provides people with actions for their problems, not only talk. It shows the community that this church is compassionate.

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

Because of Jesus-there is always hope, even in the darkest moments of your life.

We only fully grasp the gospel when we understand, as Paul did, that we are the worst sinner we know

Only if God can say things that make you struggle will you know that you have met a real God and not a figment of your imagination.

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 peace of God is not the absence of fear. It, in fact, is His presence.

You are under-qualified for the job of God.

The world says you are loved because of what you do. Jesus says you can now do all things because you are loved.

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?

If I have the smile of God, all other frowns are inconsequential.

A sense of Jesus’ absence might be a sign of his presence- a sign that he’s working already in your life.

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

Only if you are part of a community of believers seeking to resemble, serve, and love Jesus will you ever get to know him and grow into his likeness.

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.

We deserve to be forgotten because we forget Him. But because Jesus died on the cross, we will never, ever be forgotten by God.

Look at Jesus Christ. Every time he was in trouble he used the Word of God. When he was tempted he used the Word. When he was suffering on the cross he used the Word.

The lack of joy in your life is due to your lack of mission.

To fear the Lord is to be overwhelmed with wonder before the greatness of God and his love.

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

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

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.

For indeed, grace is the key to it all. It is not our lavish good deeds that procure salvation, but God's lavish love and mercy. That is why the poor are as acceptable before God as the rich. It is the generosity of God, the freeness of his salvation, that lays the foundation for the society of justice for all. Even in the seemingly boring rules and regulations of tabernacle rituals, we see that God cares about the poor, that his laws make provision for the disadvantaged. God's concern for justice permeated every part of Israel's life. It should also permeate our lives.

The secret to freedom from enslaving patterns of sin is worship. You need worship. You need great worship. You need weeping worship. You need glorious worship. You need to sense God’s greatness and to be moved it — moved to tears and moved to laughter — moved by who God is and what he has done for you.

The essence of Christian obedience is not do’s and don’ts but personal allegiance to Jesus.

Most people in the world believe that if there is a God, you relate to God by being good. Most religions are based on that principle, though there are a million different variations on it...But they all have the same logic: If I perform, if I obey, I’m accepted. The gospel of Jesus is not only different from that but diametrically opposed to it: I’m fully accepted in Jesus Christ, and therefore I obey.

Hell is having to execute a pointless act from which nothing ever comes except the need to do it again.

Like a baby learning language, we learn how to communicate with God by listening to His words first.

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"

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

Accepted in Christ, we now run the race 'for the joy that is set before us' rather than 'for fear that comes behind us'.

The gospel shows us that our spiritual problem lies not only in failing to obey God, but also in relying on our obedience to make us fully acceptable to God, ourselves and others. Every kind of character flaw comes from this natural impulse to be our own saviour through our own performance and achievement. On the one hand, proud and disdainful personalities come from basing your identity on your performance and thinking you are succeeding. But on the other hand, discouraged and self loathing personalities also come from basing your identity on your performance and thinking you are failing.

Jesus asks for far more than you ever thought, but offers more than you ever dreamed.

You can only afford to be generous if you actually have some money in the bank to give. In the same way, if your only source of love and meaning is your spouse, then anytime he or she fails you, it will not just cause grief but a psychological cataclysm. If, however, you know something of the work of the Spirit in your life, you have enough love "in the bank" to be generous to your spouse even when you are not getting much affection or kindness at the moment.

If you have money, power, and status today, it is due to the century and place in which you were born, to your talents and capacities and health, none of which you earned. In short, all your resources are in the end the gift of God.

Those who believe they have pleased God by the quality of their devotion and moral goodness naturally feel that they and their group deserve deference and power over others. The God of Jesus and the prophets, however, saves completely by grace. He cannot be manipulated by religious and moral performance--he can only be reached through repentance, through the giving up of power. If we are saved by sheer grace we can only become grateful, willing servants of God and of everyone around us.

In the church we have to deliberately let ourselves be transparent and accountable to others. We're a family.

If you want God's grace, all you need is need, all you need is nothing.

Love without truth is sentimentality; it supports and affirms us but keeps us in denial about our flaws. Truth without love is harshness; it gives us information but in such a way that we cannot really hear it. God's saving love in Christ, however, is marked by both radical truthfulness about who we are and yet also radical, unconditional commitment to us. The merciful commitment strengthens us to see the truth about ourselves and repent. The conviction and repentance moves us to cling to and rest in God's mercy and grace.

If your fundamental is a man dying on the cross for his enemies, if the very heart of your self-image and your religion is a man praying for his enemies as he died for them, sacrificing for them, loving them - if that sinks into your heart of hearts, it's going to produce the kind of life that the early Christians produced. The most inclusive possible life out of the most exclusive possible claim - and that is this is the truth. But what is the truth? The truth is a God become weak, loving and dying for the people who opposed him, dying forgiving them.

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

Christ's resurrection not only gives you hope for the future; it gives you hope to handle your scars right now.

It is remarkable that in all of his writings Paul's prayers for his friends contain no appeals for changes in their circumstances.

Job never saw why he suffered, but he saw God, and that was enough.

The more you rejoice in your own forgiveness, the quicker you will be to forgive others.

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.

A lack of generosity refuses to acknowledge that your assets are not really yours, but God's.

To say doctrine doesn't matter, only how you live matters, is itself a doctrine. It's the doctrine of salvation by works.

The gospel destroys pride because it tells us we are so lost that Jesus had to die for us.

Putting our faith in Christ is not about trying harder; it means transferring our trust away from ourselves and resting in him.

Grace is humbling and restorative. It pulls you down because Christ had to die for you, but also lifts you up because he wanted to die for you.

Life in this fallen world is to a great degree meaningless, our aspirations are constantly being frustrated, and sometimes the respectable people are oppressive and bigoted. And yet there is a Good that will triumph over Evil in the end. From a Christian perspective the problem with both kinds of stories is that they tend to blame problems on things besides sin and identify salvation in things besides God — and therefore are ultimately too simplistic.

If you wait until your motives are pure and unselfish before you do something, you will wait forever.

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

All change comes from deepening your understanding of the salvation of Christ and living out the changes that understanding creates in your heart.

We get angry when we feel like God owes us a better life than we have.