Top 581 Quotes & Sayings by Timothy Keller - Page 8

[T]he main problem in life is sin, and the only solution is God and his grace. The alternative to this view is to identify something besides sin as the main problem with the world and something besides God as the main remedy. That demonizes something that is not completely bad, and makes an idol out of something that cannot be the ultimate good.

The issue on which everything hangs is not whether you like His teaching but if He ?rose from the dead.

Even if 80 percent of the population of a country are Christian believers, they will have almost no cultural influence if the Christians do not live in cultural centers and work in culture-forging fields such as academia, publishing, media, entertainment, and the arts. The assumption that society will improve simply be more Christian believers being present is no longer valid.

The Cross is not simply a lovely example of sacrificial love. Throwing your life away needlessly is not admirable — it is wrong. Jesus’ death was only a good example if it was more than an example, if it was something absolutely necessary to rescue us. And it was. Why did Jesus have to die in order to forgive us? There was a debt to be paid — God himself paid it. There was a penalty to be born — God himself bore it. Forgiveness is always a form of costly suffering.

Religious people find God useful. Gospel people find him beautiful.

Paul reminds us that in the Gospel we are both brought lower and raised higher than we can imagine.

So live in the light of the resurrection and renewal of this world, and of yourself, in a glorious, never-ending, joyful dance of grace.

When we try and use fear or pride to stop from sinning, we are forgetting that we sin because of either fear or pride.

Every religion has a prophet who is pointing people to God. Jesus is the only one who says, 'I am God, and I am coming to find you.'

If God wiped out all sources of evil in the world we would no longer be here, the evil is inside us.

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

The rich brother needs to let the gospel humble him while the poor brother needs to let the gospel affirm him.

I am God and I am coming to find you.

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.

Prayer is awe, intimacy, struggle-yet, the way to reality.

Those who condemn the self-righteous for the sake of self-discovery do so with ironic self-righteousness.

Through the person and work of Jesus Christ, God fully accomplishes salvation for us, rescuing us from judgment for sin into fellowship with him, and then restores the creation in which we can enjoy our new life together with him forever.

The gospel is an exclusive truth but it's the most inclusive exclusive truth in the world.

The gospel is not just the A-B-C's but the A-Z of Christianity. The gospel is not just the minimum required doctrine necessary to enter the kingdom, but the way we make all progress in the kingdom.

Elder brothers obey God to get things. They don't obey God to get God himself — in order to resemble him, love him, know him, and delight him.

If you aren't constantly astonished at God's grace in your solitude, there's no way it can happen in public.

Both men and women today see marriage not as a way of creating character and community but as a way to reach personal life goals. They are looking for a marriage partner who will 'fulfill their emotional, sexual, and spiritual desires.' And that creates an extreme idealism that in turn leads to a deep pessimism that you will ever find the right person to marry.

Suffering is actually at the heart of the Christian story.

No writer or thinker has taught me as much as James Hunter has about this all-important and complex subject of how culture is changed.

Like a surgeon, friends cut you in order to heal you.

When you forgive, that means you absorb the loss and the debt. You bear it yourself. All forgiveness, then, is costly.

Christmas means Jesus came down and got involved in suffering. He hears your cries.

Idols are often good things that we have made into ultimate things.

The gospel frees us from the relentless pressure of having to prove ourselves, for we are already proven and secure.

Our prayers should arise out of immersion in the Scripture. [We] speak only to the degree we are spoken to.

Christians should not be optimists; we know too much about sin. We should also not be pessimists, for we know the living God.

We are saved by a man who died loving his enemies.

It is because Jesus Christ experienced cosmic thirst on the cross that you and I can have our spiritual thirst satisfied. It is because he died that we can be born again. And he did it gladly. Seeing what he did and why he did it will turn our hearts away from the things that enslave us and toward him in worship. That is the gospel, and it is the same for skeptics, believers, insiders, outcasts, and everyone in between.

Jesus does not divide the world into the moral "good guys" and the immoral "bad guys". He shows us that everyone is dedicated to a project of self-salvation, to using God and others in order to get power and control for themselves. We are just going about it in different ways. Even though both sons are wrong, however, the father cares for them and invites them both back into his love and feast.

The church does not simply have a missions department; it should wholly exist to be a mission.

If the evolutionary mechanism of natural selection depends on death, destruction, and violence of the strong against the weak, then these things are perfectly natural. On what basis, then, does the atheist judge the natural world to be horribly wrong, unfair, and unjust?

Friendship is a deep oneness that develops when two people, speaking the truth in love to one another, journey together to the same horizon.

It fits to glorify God - it not only fits reality, because God is infinitely and supremely praiseworthy, but it fits us as nothing else does. All the beauty we have looked for in art or faces or places - and all the love we have looked for in the arms of other people - is only fully present in God himself. And so in every action by which we treat him as glorious as he is, whether through prayer, singing, trusting, obeying, or hoping, we are at once giving God his due and fulfilling our own design.

Christ literally walked in our shoes and entered into our affliction. Those who will not help others until they are destitute reveal that Christ's love has not yet turned them into the sympathetic persons the gospel should make them.

Our Christian hope is that we are going to live with Christ in a new earth, where there is not only no more death, but where life is what it was always meant to be.

A Christian is somebody whose eyes have been opened, who admits that Jesus is not what you expected, but he’s what you need.

While your character flaws may have created mild problems for other people, they will create major problems for your spouse and your marriage.

The main problem in the Christian life is that we have not thought out the deep implications of the gospel, we have not 'used' the gospel in and on all parts of our life.

We are so quick to tweet, Facebook, and Instagram but we treat prayer with a sense of delay?

A genuinely persuasive argument does not merely tell you that you are wrong about everything. It doesn't just beat on you from the outside. It comes inside your belief system, as it were, and affirms something you believe strongly. And then it says - well if you believe this (A) then why in the world can't you see that B is true?

When you experience God it is deeply personal, but it's not at all private.

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

You cannot have Jesus' rescue without accepting His rule.

One of the biggest obstacles in the way of people coming to Christianity is that they think they know about it already.

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.

In a smaller church your pastoring sets up your preaching. In a larger church your preaching sets up your pastoring.

To fail to pray, then, is not to merely break some religious rule- it is a failure to treat God as God.

Faith is not opposed to reason, but it is sometimes opposed to feelings and appearances.

The gospel has two parts. It has the part that says you're a sinner, and it has the part that says you're loved and accepted.

Neither son loved the father for himself. They both were using the father for their own self-centered ends rather than loving, enjoying, and serving him for his own sake. This means that you can rebel against God and be alienated from him either by breaking his rules or by keeping all of them diligently. It 's a shocking message: Careful obedience to God's law may serve as a strategy for rebelling against God .

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

Christians don't believe that goodness gets you to heaven. Christians believe it's exhausting to rely on your own goodness to please God.

Jesus is not asking us to do anything for him that he hasn’t already done for us, under conditions of difficulty beyond our comprehension.

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.

Tolerance is not the absence of belief. Tolerance is how your beliefs teach you to treat other people