Timothy Keller Quotes

Legalistic remorse says, "I broke God's rules," while real repentance says, "I broke God's heart."

God sees us as we are, loves us as we are, and accepts us as we are. But by His grace, He does not leave us as we are.

The basic purpose of prayer is not to bend God's will to mine, but to mold my will into His.

Jesus didn't come to tell us the answers to the questions of life, he came to be the answer.

The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.

The only person who dares wake up a king at 3:00 AM for a glass of water is a child. We have that kind of access

Everyone says they want community and friendship. But mention accountability or commitment to people, and they run the other way.

The Bible’s purpose is not so much to show you how to live a good life. The Bible’s purpose is to show you how God’s grace breaks into your life against your will and saves you from the sin and brokenness otherwise you would never be able to overcome… religion is ‘if you obey, then you will be accepted’. But the Gospel is, ‘if you are absolutely accepted, and sure you’re accepted, only then will you ever begin to obey’. Those are two utterly different things. Every page of the Bible shows the difference.

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?

When Jesus looked down from the cross, he didn't think “I am giving myself to you because you are so attractive to me.” No, he was in agony, and he looked down at us - denying him, abandoning him, and betraying him - and in the greatest act of love in history, he STAYED. He said, “Father, forgive them, they don't know what they are doing.” He loved us, not because we were lovely to him, but to make us lovely.

There are some needs only you can see. There are some hands only you can hold. There are some people only you can reach.

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. This leads to deep humility and deep confidence at the same time. It undermines both swaggering and sniveling. I cannot feel superior to anyone, and yet I have nothing to prove to anyone. I do not think more of myself nor less of myself. Instead, I think of myself less.

If our identity is in our work, rather than Christ, success will go to our heads, and failure will go to our hearts.

In religion, you obey because God is useful. In Christianity, you obey because God is beautiful.

Christianity does not provide the reason for each experience of pain, but it does provide deep resources for actually facing suffering with hope and courage rather than bitterness and despair

If Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all that he said; if he didn't rise from the dead, then why worry about any of what he said? The issue on which everything hangs is not whether or not you like his teaching but whether or not he rose from the dead.

We need to remember that we are saved by grace when we fail. But we need to remember it much more when we succeed.

Jesus Christ was treated as we deserved so that when we believe in Jesus, God treats us as Jesus deserves.

The basic premise of religion– that if you live a good life, things will go well for you– is wrong. Jesus was the most morally upright person who ever lived, yet He had a life filled with the experience of poverty, rejection, injustice, and even torture.

After creation God said, 'It is finished'-and he rested. After redemption Jesus said, 'It is finished'-and we can rest.

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 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.

To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretense, humbles us out of our self-righteousness, and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us.

The more you understand how your salvation isn't about your behavior, the more radically your behavior will change.

Religion: 'My identity is built on being a good person.' Gospel: 'My identity is not built on my record or my performance but on Christ's.'

Worry is not believing God will get it right, and bitterness is believing God got it wrong.

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

Love is the effort and desire to make someone else everything they were created to be.

Many times people think if God has called you to something, he's promising you success. He might be calling you to fail to prepare you for something else through the failure.

Christianity teaches that, contra fatalism, suffering is overwhelming; contra Buddhism, suffering is real; contra karma, suffering is often unfair; but contra secularism, suffering is meaningful. There is a purpose to it, and if faced rightly, it can drive us like a nail deep into the love of God and into more stability and spiritual power than you can imagine.

It is not the strength of your faith but the object of your faith that actually saves you.

Friends become wiser together through a healthy clash of viewpoints.

Those who understand the gospel cannot possibly look down on anyone, since they were saved by sheer grace, not by their perfect doctrine or strong moral character.

Jesus came into this world not as a philosopher or a general but as a carpenter. All work matters to God.

Religion says earn your life. Secular society says create your life. Jesus says, 'My life for your life.

We instinctively tend to limit for whom we exert ourselves. We do it for people like us, and for people whom we like. Jesus will have none of that. By depicting a Samaritan helping a Jew, Jesus could not have found a more forceful way to say that anyone at all in need - regardless of race, politics, class, and religion - is your neighbour. Not everyone is your brother or sister in faith, but everyone is your neighbour, and you must love your neighbour.

If you love anything in this world more than God, you will crush that object under the weight of your expectations.

I am going to judge my circumstances by Jesus’ love, not Jesus’ love by my circumstances.

...the essence of gospel-humility is not thinking more of myself or thinking less of myself, it is thinking of myself less.

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.

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

We are called not simply to communicate the gospel to nonbelievers; we must also intentionally celebrate the gospel before them.

Tolerance isn't about not having beliefs. It's about how your beliefs lead you to treat people who disagree with you.

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.

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

If the church does not identify with the marginalized, it will itself be marginalized. This is God's poetic justice.

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

When I forget the gospel I become dependent on the smiles and evaluation of others.

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

You don't fall in love. You commit to it.