Timothy Keller quotes:

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  • 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.

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

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

  • Older forms of indentured servanthood and the bond-service of biblical times had often been harsh, but Christian abolitionists concluded that race-based, life-long chattel slavery, established through kidnapping, could not be squared with biblical teaching either in the Old Testament or the New.

  • 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.

  • Men, you'll never be a good groom to your wife unless you're first a good bride to Jesus.

  • 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.

  • Singles, too, must see the penultimate status of marriage. If single Christians don't develop a deeply fulfilling love relationship with Jesus, they will put too much pressure on their DREAM of marriage, and that will create pathology in their lives as well.

  • Christ's miracles were not the suspension of the natural order but the restoration of the natural order. They were a reminder of what once was prior to the fall and a preview of what will eventually be a universal reality once again--a world of peace and justice, without death, disease, or conflict."

  • Real love, the Bible says, instinctively desires permanence.

  • 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.'

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

  • God gives out good gifts of wisdom, talent, beauty, and skill 'graciously'--that is, in a completely unmerited way. He casts them across all humanity, regardless of religious conviction, race, gender, or any other attribute to enrich, brighten, and preserve the world.

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

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

  • 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.

  • The reason that marriage is so painful and yet wonderful is because it is a reflection of the gospel, which is painful and wonderful at once. 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.

  • In short, the Enlightenment privatized marriage, taking it out of the public sphere, and redefined its purpose as individual gratification, not any 'broader good' such as reflecting God's nature, producing character, or raising children. Slowly but surely, this newer understanding of the meaning of marriage has displaced the older ones in Western culture.

  • Pastors must practice a two-fold program of cultural engagement: deconstruction and demystification of cultural idols, and reconstruction and re-enchantment of a gospel-shaped worldview."

  • The Gospel worldview equips the artist with a unique combination of optimism and realism about life.

  • 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.

  • When you say, "Come in Jesus as my caregiver, stay out as my Lord," he can't. He's both.

  • You can't live the Christian life without a band of Christian friends, without a family of believers in which you find a place.

  • What keeps the marriage going is your commitment to your spouse's holiness.

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

  • Only with time do we really learn who the other person is and come to love the person for him- or herself and not just for the feelings and experiences they give us.

  • The Gospel worldview equips the artist with a unique combination of optimism and realism about life."

  • Fear-based repentance makes us hate ourselves. Joy-based repentance makes us hate the sin."

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Because creation was made in the image of a God who is equally one and many, the human race will finally be reunited and our racial and cultural diversity will remain intact in the renewed world. The human race finally lives together in peace and interdependence. Glory to God in the highest goes with peace on earth.

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

  • Religion poses a danger of creating division or intolerance between groups of people. However, the gospel of Jesus lead us to three things: humble service, reconciling behavior that is neither patronizing nor self-righteous, and a love toward people who hold different beliefs than we do.

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

  • At the end of history the whole earth has become the Garden of God again. Death and decay and suffering are gone. . . . Jesus will make the world our perfect home again. We will no longer be living 'east of Eden,' always wandering and never arriving. We will come, and the father will meet us and embrace us, and we will be brought into the feast.

  • 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.

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

  • Proper wedding vows are more a promise of mutually binding future love than a declaration of your present love.

  • 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.

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

  • When love of one's people becomes an absolute, it turns into racism. When love of equality turns into a supreme thing, it can result in hatred and violence toward anyone who has led a privileged life. It is the settled tendency of human societies to turn good political causes into counterfeit gods.

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

  • God's grace and forgiveness, while free to the recipient, are always costly for the giver..

  • A life of gratitude to God for being saved is far more pleasing than a life based on self-righteousness over being good.

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

  • Only in Jesus Christ do we see how the untamable, infinite God can become a baby and a loving Savior. On the cross we see how both the love and the holiness of God can be fulfilled at once.

  • The simple fact is that only if I love Jesus more than my wife will I be able to serve her needs ahead of my own.

  • 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.

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

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

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

  • 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.

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

  • The God of the Bible takes our misery and suffering so seriously that he was willing to take it on himself

  • The image of God carries with it the right not to be mistreated or harmed.... Regardless of their record or character, all human beings have an irreducible glory and significance to them, because God loves them.... So we must treasure each and every human being as a way of showing due respect for the majesty of their owner and Creator.

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

  • Sin is the despairing refusal to find your deepest identity in your relationship and service to God.

  • Prayer is never just an emergency flare or desperate anxious gamble. God's attention is not based on our performance but parental love.

  • ...Singles, too, must see the penultimate status of marriage. If single Christians don't develop a deeply fulfilling love relationship with Jesus, they will put too much pressure on their DREAM of marriage, and that will create pathology in their lives as well.

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

  • [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.

  • Faith in God's promises means not always following the expected, rational path.

  • We've got at least two other streams of that are filled with good, helpful material on meditation - the Catholic stream and the Quaker stream that are not primarily based on meditating on the Scripture.

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

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

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

  • Fear-based repentance makes us hate ourselves. Joy-based repentance makes us hate the sin.

  • 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.

  • Revival occurs when those who think they already know the gospel discover they do not really or fully know it.

  • If you try to add to God's salvation you subtract. If you try to add to God's salvation you subtract. If you try to merit God's salvation you haven't believed at all, even if you try to do a little bit.

  • To let the gospel of Jesus shape how we work means to heed the influence of both the psychological idols within our hearts as well as the sociological idols in our culture and profession.

  • 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.

  • Jesus Christ says, 'Kill me and in 3 days, not only this temple, but all temples in the whole world will be out of business.' This is the most stunning thing any human being has ever said.

  • Friends become wiser together through a healthy clash of viewpoints.

  • Ironically, the insistence that doctrines do not matter is really a doctrine itself.

  • If there is a God, you owe him far more than a morally decent life. He deserves to be at the center of your life.

  • The weekly worship service can be very effective in evangelism of non-Christians and in edification of Christians if it does not aim at either alone but is gospel centered and in the vernacular.

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

  • Mercy and forgiveness must be free and unmerited to the wrongdoer. If the wrongdoer has to do something to merit it, then it isn't mercy, but forgiveness always comes at a cost to the one granting the forgiveness.

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

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

  • There is no way to have a real relationship without becoming vulnerable to hurt. Christmas tells us that God became breakable and fragile. God became someone we could hurt. Why? To get us back... No other religion-whethe r secularism, Greco-Roman paganism, Eastern religion, Judaism, or Islam-believes God became breakable or suffered or had a body.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • The key to continual and deeper spiritual renewal and revival is the continual re-discovery of the gospel.

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

  • 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..

  • The gospel has supernatural versatility to address the particular hopes, fears, and idols of every culture and every person.

  • Preaching is compelling to young secular adults ... - not if preachers use video clips from their favorite movies and dress informally and sound sophisticated, - but if the preachers understand their hearts and culture so well that listeners feel the force of the sermon's reasoning, even if in the end they don't agree with it.

  • I am a Christian resident of New York City. I simply read things the other Manhattanites read (NY Times, New Yorker magazine, Wall Street Journal, and many of the books they read) plus all my Christian reading. I don't do anything special to understand skeptics. I also talk to a lot of skeptics and read things they point to.

  • 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.

  • Big cities have a lot of 'younger brothers' who have left traditional parts of the world and their families for a more liberal lifestyle. But cities are filled to the gills with 'elder brothers' too.

  • Generosity is not only about money. There is more than one currency. Let your generosity be pervasive in life.

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

  • A Christian is one who stops working to be saved, not one who stops working!

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

  • 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.

  • A common vision can unite people of very different temperaments.

  • 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.

  • 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?

  • A god of less wrath than the God of the Bible is necessarily a god of less love. His anger is a product of his love.

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

  • 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.

  • 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.

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

  • A triune God would call us to converse with him . . . because he wants to share the joy he has. Prayer is our way of entering into the happiness of God himself.

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

  • Adam wasn't lonely because he was imperfect but because he was perfect. The ache for friends is not the result of sin.

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

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

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

  • All human problems are ultimately symptoms, and our separation from God is the cause.

  • All I know is, if I don't care about the poor, if my church doesn't care about the poor, that's evil.

  • All life-changing love is inconvenient.

  • An idol is something that we look to for things that only God can give. Idolatry functions widely inside religious communities when doctrinal truth is elevated to the position of a false god. This occurs when people rely on the rightness of their doctrine for their standing with God rather than on God himself and his grace. It is a subtly but deadly mistake. The sign that you have slipped into this form of self-justification is that you become what the book of Proverbs calls a 'scoffer'.

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

  • Are you living to justify yourself, or are you living because you are justified?

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