Timothy Keller Quotes

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 The assumption that society will improve simply be more Christian believers being present is no longer valid.

When the institutional church gives attention to cultural engagement - the fourth and final ministry front - it does so primarily by discipling a community of believers who work as the church organic. By teaching the Christian doctrine of vocation, the goodness of creation, the importance of culture, and the practice of Sabbath, it should be inspiring and encouraging its members to go into the various channels of culture.

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

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 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 life of faith is not the perfect life; it is the life which clings on to what God has said he will do.

Sin is the despairing refusal to find your deepest identity in your relationship and service to God. Sin is seeking to become oneself, to get an identity, apart from him.

The essence of sin is "I do not want to have God in my life." And the essence of God's judicial wrath is to give us what we have asked for.

Living a self-absorbed life will always be at the cost of everyone else.

In the Bible there are three human institutions that stand apart from all others - the family, the church, and the state. There's nothing in the Bible about how schools should be run, even though they are crucial to a flourishing society.

Anyone who wonders if a Christian can sin is ignorant about sin's enslaving nature.

It takes more than a great church to reach a city, it takes a great movement of churches.

Praying the Lord's Prayer forces us to look for things to thank and praise God for in our dark times, and it presses us to repent and seek forgiveness during times of prosperity and success. It disciplines

We need his kingdom to "come." Calvin believed there were two ways God's kingdom comes - through the Spirit, who "corrects our desires," and through the Word of God, which "shapes our thoughts.

God is very patient with us when we are desperate. Pour out your soul to him.

The church is not a museum for pristine saints, but a hospital ward for broken sinners.

When that happens you'll say, like Jewel the Unicorn at the end of The Chronicles of Narnia, "I've come home at last! This is my real country ... This is the land I've been looking for all my life."15

We must praise God or live in unreality and poverty. We cannot merely believe in our minds that he is loving or wise or great. We must praise him for those things - and praise him to others - if we are to move beyond abstract knowledge to heart-changing engagement.

I am so bad that He had to die. I am so loved that He was glad to die.

THE DANGER OF NOT CONTEXTUALIZING (OR OF THINKING YOU AREN'T) All gospel ministry and communication are already heavily adapted to a particular culture. So it is important to do contextualization consciously. If we never deliberately think through ways to rightly contextualize gospel ministry to a new culture, we will unconsciously be deeply contextualized to some other culture. Our gospel ministry will be both overadapted to our own culture and underadapted to new cultures at once, which ultimately leads to a distortion of the Christian message.23

Cosmic ingratitude is living in the illusion that you are spiritually self-sufficient. It is taking credit for something that was a gift. It is the belief that you know best how to live, that you have the power and ability to keep your life on the right path and protect yourself from danger. That is a delusion, and a dangerous one. We did not create ourselves, and we can't keep our lives going one second without his upholding power.

Most people want Jesus as a consultant rather than a King, and He does not come that way.

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

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.

True citizens of the heavenly city are the best residents of the earthly city.

The gospel, if it is really believed, removes neediness - the need to be constantly respected, appreciated, and well regarded; the need to have everything in your life go well; the need to have power over others. All of these great, deep needs continue to control you only because the concept of the glorious God delighting in you with all His being is just that - a concept and nothing more. Our hearts don't believe it, so they operate in default mode. Paul is saying that if you want to really change, you must let the gospel teach you - that is to train, discipline, coach you - over a period of time. You must let the gospel argue with you. You must let the gospel sink down deeply into your heart, until it changes your motivation and views and attitudes.

The world is a dark place, and yet the coming of Jesus Christ shows us no one and nothing is hopeless.

The very fact that we have access to God's attention and presence should concentrate the thoughts and elevate the heart.

Covenant community is like air. We don't miss it until we need it.

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

Let's think back for a moment to the boring sermon. Sometimes the sermon we hear is boring because it went on for too long (or it was not long enough) to engage the listeners. One of the most culturally sensitive areas of human life is this area of time. What various people and cultures consider "late" and "too long" varies widely. In the United States, African-American and Hispanic Christians have services in which singing, prayer, and preaching go on at least 50 percent longer than the attention spans and comfort zones of most Anglo people. Anyone who leads worship services will, then, unavoidably be contextualizing toward some people and away from others.

If you add anything to Jesus as a requirement for being happy, that's your real king.

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

We must go back again and again to the Gospel of Christ crucified, so that our hearts are more deeply gripped by the reality of what He did and who we are in Him.

The purpose of Jesus's coming is to put the whole world right, to renew and restore the creation, not to escape it.

I hate the moment when suddenly my anger turns into tears

Covenant. We were made for relationship with God. We were created for covenant relationships, relationships made more intimate because they are more binding. We were made to be his people, he our God. If we keep the covenant, there is the blessing of love and unity and peace. If we break the covenant, there is the curse of separation, aloneness. How can God be holy and still remain faithful to his people? Only through the death of Jesus on the cross - where both love and law are fulfilled, where the Lord became the perfect servant and fulfilled the covenant perfectly and fully on our behalf. Home and exile. The world was made

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

Read and listen to one thinker and you become a clone; Read two and you become confused; Read ten and you get your own voice; Read a hundred and you start to become wise.

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

We have talked about the manner and mode of preaching, but contextualization also has much to do with the content. A sermon could be unengaging to a person because, though expressing accurate biblical truth, it does not connect biblical teaching to the main objections and questions people in that culture have about faith.

In Craig Blomberg's survey of the Mosaic laws of gleaning, releasing, tithing, and the Jubilee, he concludes that the Biblical attitude toward wealth and possessions does not fit into any of the normal categories of democratic capitalism, or of traditional monarchial feudalism, or of state socialism. The rules for the use of land in the Biblical laws challenge all major contemporary economic models. They "suggest a sharp critique of 1) the statism that disregards the precious treasure of personal rootage, and 2) the untrammeled individualism which secures individuals at the expense of community."38

Important reminder: It's not fair of you to demand more proof of Christians for their beliefs than you demand for your own.

God's love and mercy (like liberal preachers). Only when people see God as absolutely holy and absolutely loving will the cross of Jesus truly electrify and change them.

Perhaps the scarlet cord that Rahab hangs from her window (Judges 2:18) reminds you of the blood of Christ, but that does not mean that is what it represents.

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

Ministry. Sadly, there has never been a city on earth that is not saturated with human sin and corruption. Indeed, to paraphrase a Woody Allen joke, cities are just like everywhere else, only much more so. They are both better and worse, both easier and harder to live in, both more inspiring and oppressive, than other places. As redemptive history unfolds, we begin to see how the tension of the city will be resolved. The turn in the relationship between the people of God and the pagan city becomes a key aspect of God's plan to bless the nations and redeem the world. In the New Testament, we find cities playing an important role in the rapid growth of the early church and in spreading the gospel message of God's salvation.

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

Life changing repentance begins where blame shifting ends.

The resurrection of the body means that we do not merely receive a consolation for the life we have lost but a restoration of it. We not only get the bodies and lives we had but the bodies and lives we wished for but had never before received.

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.

If we are not deliberately thinking about our culture and our context, we will be conformed to it without ever knowing.

When the woman said, "I don't need a piece of paper to love you," she was using a very specific definition of "love." She was assuming that love is, in its essence, a particular kind of feeling. She was saying, "I feel romantic passion for you, and the piece of paper doesn't enhance that at all, and it may hurt it." She was measuring love mainly by how emotionally desirous she was for his affection. And she was right that the marital legal "piece of paper" would do little or nothing directly to add to the feeling.

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

I wouldn't venture to say which kind of sin is more prevalent. I wouldn't even want to try to characterize certain 'circles.'

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

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

If you don't love the poor, you don't know what God's done for you.

I have long profited from Adele Ahlberg Calhoun's gifts in the field of spiritual development, and I am delighted that she has compiled her experience with spiritual disciplines into book form. I highly recommend it and I look forward to using it as a resource at our church.

Those dreaming of the perfect match are outnumbered by those who don't really want it at all, though perhaps they can't admit it. After all, our culture makes individual freedom, autonomy and fulfillment the very highest values, and thoughtful people know deep down that any love relationship at all means the loss of all three. You can say, 'I want someone who will accept me just as I am,' but in your heart of hearts you know that you are not perfect, that there are plenty of things about you that need to be changed, and that anyone who gets to know you up close and personal will want to change them.

We often forget how thirsty we are because we believe we will fulfill our dreams.

Do you ever notice that if you are doing a task, and you hear voices or music or other sounds on audio only, you can tune it out? If, however, you are trying to do a task, and you are trying to watch something on video, it is almost impossible to tune out the video. That is what prayer does - it takes something you believe about God that is ignorable and detached from how you live your life and makes it vivid.

How do you change your behavior? Change what you worship

I had then, and at other times, the greatest delight in the holy scriptures, of any book whatsoever. Oftentimes in reading it, every word seemed to touch my heart. I felt a harmony between something in my heart, and those sweet and powerful words. I seemed often to see so much light exhibited by every sentence, and such a refreshing food communicated, that I could not get along in reading; often dwelling long on one sentence, to see the wonders contained in it; and yet almost every sentence seemed to be full of wonders.

If your god never disagrees with you, you might just be worshipping an idealized version of yourself.

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

Whoever wants to be great among you must be your servant and whoever wants to be first must be servant of all

At Gethsemane: Jesus is subordinating His loudest desires to His deepest desires.

All that we know theologically must be "accessed" by our heart with all the joy, peace, self-control, love, durability, patience, and graciousness that it should produce in a human being.

If anyone insists on his own goodness and despises others . . . let him look into himself when this petition confronts him. He will find he is no better than others and that in the presence of God everyone must duck his head and come into the joy of forgiveness only through the low door of humility.

The product of a true, growing, gospel-centered nature is often gentleness.

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

Tim Keller once said that God gives us what we would have asked for if we knew everything that He knows. The idea that the prince of Heaven would empty himself and become poor, to live and dwell among us is humbling. The idea that there is nothing in the human experience that God himself has not suffered, even losing a child, is sustaining. And the idea that in His resurrection, Jesus' scars became His glory is empowering. God will use these scars for His glory, as they become our glory. Indeed, the end hasn't been written.

There is a twofold knowledge of good of which God has made the mind of man capable. The first, that which is merely notional . . . and the other is, that which consists in the sense of the heart, as when the heart is sensible of pleasure and delight in the presence of the idea of it. In the former is exercised merely . . . the understanding, in distinction from the . . . disposition of the soul. Thus there is a difference between having an opinion that God is holy and gracious, and having a sense of the loveliness and beauty of that holiness and grace. There is a difference between having a rational judgment that honey is sweet and having a sense of its sweetness. A man may have the former that knows not how honey tastes; but a man cannot have the latter unless he has an idea of the taste of honey in his mind.

Marriage [is] two flawed people coming together to create a space of stability, love and consolation, a haven in a heartless world.

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

No one has ever been deeply changed by an act of the will. The only thing that can re-forge and change a life at its root, is love.

God's grace does not come to people who morally outperform others, but to those who admit their failure to perform and who acknowledge their need for a Savior.

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

When the gospel does take root in the heart, the sign of it is that Christians are led to "establish their complete happiness in him." Unless people experience this, "they will never give themselves truly and sincerely to him."154 You don't have true saving knowledge of God until you long to know and serve him. Such a soul "restrains itself from sinning, not out of dread of punishment alone; but because it loves and reveres God as Father. . . . Even if there were no hell, it would still shudder at offending him.

Happiness is a by-product of wanting something more than happiness-to be rightly related to God and our neighbor.

Money isn't an idol. It just shows you where your idols are.

Christians need the gospel as much as non-Christians do.

You believe in a loving God. Then along comes criticism, or rejection (say, a relationship breaks up), or some failure that's a blow to your reputation in some realm. Anyone in such a situation will feel quite crestfallen and downcast. But there is a difference between being discouraged and being devastated, between sliding into despondency and not being able to function. If God's love is an abstraction, it is of no consolation. But if it is a felt and lived reality through prayer, then it buoys you up.

The church is often like a football stadium where 22 people need a rest and thousands of people need exercise.

Without the gospel, we may come and ask for things. Without the gospel, we may conceive of a holy God who is intimidating and who can be approached with petitions only if we are very good. Or we may conceive of a God whose "love" just means he regards everyone positively. To approach the first kind of "God" is fearsome; to approach the second kind of God is no big deal. Thus without the gospel, there is no possibility of passion and delight to praise and approach the true God.

It is no more narrow to claim that one religion is right than to claim that one way to think about all religions (namely that all are equal) is right. We are all exclusive in our beliefs about religion, but in different ways.

If we give God things in hope that they'll earn us blessings, we're really not doing anything for him. It's for ourselves.

But when the Bible speaks of love, it measures it primarily not by how much you want to receive but by how much you are willing to give of yourself to someone. How much are you willing to lose for the sake of this person? How much of your freedom are you willing to forsake? How much of your precious time, emotion, and resources are you willing to invest in this person? And for that, the marriage vow is not just helpful but it is even a test.

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

We must admit that we've put our ultimate hope and trust in things other than God, and that in both our wrongdoing and right doing we have been seeking to get around God or get control of God in order to get hold of those things.

It is at this very point that the Spirit of God helps us so much. In each text, Paul links a willing "servant heart" to the gospel itself. And what is that gospel? It is that you are so lost and flawed, so sinful, that Jesus had to die for you, but you are also so loved and valued that Jesus was glad to die for you. Now you are fully accepted and delighted in by the Father, not because you deserve it but only by free grace. My reluctance to let Kathy serve me was, in the end, a refusal to live my life on the basis of grace. I wanted to earn everything. I wanted no one to give me any favors.

All people need to be treated gently and respectfully, especially those who have been wounded. They will be unusually sensitive to rough handling. Nevertheless, all people must be challenged to see that their self-centeredness hasn't been caused by the people who hurt them; it's only been aggravated by the abuse. And they must do something about it, or they're going to be miserable forever.

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

The truly gospel-humble person is a self-forgetful person whose ego is just like his or her toes. It just works. It does not draw attention to itself. The toes just work; the ego just works. Neither draws attention to itself.

This reminds me of the place in Genesis 4 where God looks at Cain, who is full of self-pity, and says to him, "Cain, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must master it." What's important to understand is that the principle of self in your life is crouching at your door! It wants to have you, it wants to pounce on you, it wants to devour you. And it's up to you to do something about it. God asks that you deny yourself, that you lose yourself to find yourself. If you try to do this without the work of the Spirit, and without belief in all Christ has done for you, then simply giving up your rights and desires will be galling and hardening. But in Christ and with the Spirit, it will be liberating.

The only love that won't disappoint you is one that can't change, that can't be lost, that is not based on the ups and downs of life or of how well you live. It is something that not even death can take away from you. God's love is the only thing like that.

Our daily work can be a calling only if it is reconceived as God's assignment to serve others.

The gospel is not just the means by which people get converted but also the way Christians solve their problems and grow.

Obviously, to be in the fear of the Lord is not to be scared of the Lord, even though the Hebrew word has overtones of respect and awe. "Fear" in the Bible means to be overwhelmed, to be controlled by something. To fear the Lord is to be overwhelmed with wonder before the greatness of God and his love. It means that, because of his bright holiness and magnificent love, you find him "fearfully beautiful." That is why the more we experience God's grace and forgiveness, the more we experience a trembling awe and wonder before the greatness of all that he is and has done for us. Fearing him means bowing before him out of amazement at his glory and beauty.