Top 581 Quotes & Sayings by Timothy Keller - Page 6

Believers should acknowledge and wrestle with doubts... It is no longer sufficient to hold beliefs just because you inherited them.

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

While other worldviews lead us to sit in the midst of life’s joys, foreseeing the coming sorrows, Christianity empowers its people to sit in the midst of this world’s sorrows, tasting the coming joy.

Marriage has the power to set the course of your life as a whole. If your marriage is strong, even if all the circumstances in your life around you are filled with trouble and weakness, it won't matter. You will be able to move out into the world in strength.

Prayer turns theology into experience.

There is no evil that the father’s love cannot pardon and cover, there is no sin that is a match for his grace.

As many have learned and later taught, you don't realize Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you have.

The best people often have terrible lives. Job is one example, and Jesus—the ultimate ‘Job,’ the only truly, fully innocent sufferer — is another.

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

To stand in the presence of God, that is what the Gospel is. The Gospel is not primarily about forgiveness. It’s not primarily about good feelings. It’s not primarily about power. All those things are byproducts, sparks. It’s primarily about the presence of God.

If there is a God, you owe him far more than a morally decent life.

Jesus is the author of faith, the provider of faith, and the object of faith.

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.

Repentance out of mere fear is really sorrow for the consequences of sin, sorrow over the danger of sin — it bends the will away from sin, but the heart still clings. But repentance out of conviction over mercy is really sorrow over sin, sorrow over the grievousness of sin — it melts the heart away from sin. It makes the sin itself disgusting to us, so it loses its attractive power over us. We say, ‘this disgusting thing is an affront to the one who died for me. I’m continuing to stab him with it!’

I've heard plenty of Christians try to answer the why question by going back to the what. "You have to believe because Jesus is the Son of God." But that's answering the why with more what. Increasingly we live in a time in which you can't avoid the why question. Just giving the what (for example, a vivid gospel presentation) worked in the days when the cultural institutions created an environment in which Christianity just felt true or at least honorable. But in a post-Christendom society, in the marketplace of ideas, you have to explain why this is true, or people will just dismiss it.

Just because we don't see a reason for evil and suffering doesn't mean there's not a reason for it.

Jesus's miracles are not just a challenge to our minds, but a promise to our hearts, that the world we all want is coming.

Just because you can't see or imagine a good reason why God might allow something to happen doesn't mean there can't be one.

If Christianity is really true it will be offending and correcting you somewhere.

Only on the cross do you have a totally holy God and a totally loving God.

All forms of love are necessary, and none are to be ignored, but all of us find some forms of love to be more emotionally valuable to us. They are a currency that we find particularly precious, a language that delivers the message of love to our hearts with the most power. Some types of love are more thrilling and fulfilling to us when we receive them.

If you didn't earn your salvation how are you going to un-earn it?

Anything can serve as a counterfeit god, especially the very best things in life.

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

Prayer can be simple, but it's not easy. Nothing great is.

God's Kingdom is "present in its beginnings, but still future in its fullness. This guards us from an under-realized eschatology (expecting no change now) and an over-realized eschatology (expecting all change now). In this stage, we embrace the reality that while we're not yet what we will be, we're also no longer what we used to be.

To stay away from Christianity because part of the Bible’s teaching is offensive to you assumes that if there is a God he wouldn’t have any views that upset you. Does that belief make sense? If you don’t trust the Bible enough to let it challenge and correct your thinking, how could you ever have a personal relationship with God? In any truly personal relationship, the other person has to be able to contradict you.

If Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all he said.

Because sin is not just breaking the rules, it is putting yourself in the place of God as Savior, Lord, and Judge just as each son sought to displace the authority of the father in his own life.

There's nothing that makes you more miserable (or less interesting) than self-absorption .

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

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.

Every treasure on this earth says, 'Give your life to purchase me.' Jesus says 'I'm the one treasure who died to purchase you.'

We're far worse than we ever imagined, and far more loved than we could ever dream.

Unless we believe the gospel, we will be driven in all we do-whether obeying or disobeying-by pride ('self-love') or fear ('of damnation'). Apart from 'grateful remembering' of the gospel, all good works are done then for sinful motives. Mere moral effort may restrain the heart, but does not truly change the heart. Moral effort merely 'jury rigs' the evil of the heart to produce moral behavior out of self-interest. It is only a matter of time before such a thin tissue collapses.

Prayer is awe before an infinite force, and yet it's intimacy with a personal friend.

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

But resurrection is not just consolation — it is restoration. We get it all back — the love, the loved ones, the goods, the beauties of this life — but in new, unimaginable degrees of glory and joy and strength.

Prayer is a recognition of the greatness of our God.

If you're avoiding sin and living morally so that God will have to bless you and save you, then you may be looking to Jesus as a teacher, model, and helper, but ironically you are avoiding him as Savior. You are trusting in your own goodness rather than in Jesus for your standing with God.

Prayer is continuing a conversation that God has started through his Word and his grace, which eventually becomes a full encounter with him.

Even if our own troubles are great, we should still serve. Jesus washed His disciples feet on the way to the cross.

God so loved us and hates suffering that he was willing to come down and get involved in it.

The determining factor in our relationship with God is not our past but Christ's past.

Just because you cannot realize your highest aspirations in work does not mean you have chosen wrongly, or are not called to your profession, or that you should spend your life looking for the perfect career that is devoid of frustration. ... You should expect to be regularly frustrated in your work even though you may be in exactly the right vocation.

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.

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

Repentance is like antiseptic. You pour antiseptic onto a wound and, at first, it stings. Then it heals.

Legalism is looking to something besides Jesus Christ in order to be acceptable and clean before God.

What greater value could you possibly have than to be delighted in and sacrificed for by the Maker of the universe.

Only when our greatest love is God, a love that we cannot lose even in death, can we face all things with peace. Grief was not to be eliminated but seasoned and buoyed up with love and hope.

Let us preach grace till humility just starts to grow in us.

Love is primarily giving. It’s an action that leads to a feeling, not a feeling first.

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.

Suffering dispels the illusion that we have the strength and competence to rule our own lives and save ourselves.

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.

Contextualization is not giving people what they want. It is giving God's answers (which they probably do not want) to the questions they are asking and in forms they can comprehend.

Jesus took the tree of death so you could have the tree of life.

Our need for worth is so powerful that whatever we base our identity and value on we essentially 'deify.' We will look to it with all the passion and intensity of worship and devotion, even if we think ourselves as highly irreligious.

What the heart most wants, the mind finds reasonable, the will finds doable, and the emotions find desirable.