Timothy J. Keller Quotes

...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.

~ Timothy J. Keller

When anything in life is an absolute requirement for your happiness and self-worth, it is essentially an ‘idol,’ something you are actually worshiping. When such a thing is threatened, your anger is absolute. Your anger is actually the way the idol keeps you in its service, in its chains. Therefore if you find that, despite all the efforts to forgive, your anger and bitterness cannot subside, you may need to look deeper and ask, ‘What am I defending? What is so important that I cannot live without?’ It may be that, until some inordinate desire is identified and confronted, you will not be able to master your anger.

~ Timothy J. Keller

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

~ Timothy J. Keller

Friends become wiser together through a healthy clash of viewpoints.

~ Timothy J. Keller

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.

~ Timothy J. Keller

The gospel of Jesus Christ is an offense to both religion and irreligion. It can't be co-opted by either moralism or relativism.

~ Timothy J. Keller

I asked her what was so scary about unmerited free grace? She replied something like this: If I was saved by my good works -- then there would be a limit to what God could ask of me or put me through. I would be like a taxpayer with rights. I would have done my duty and now I would deserve a certain quality of life. But if it is really true that I am a sinner saved by sheer grace -- at God's infinite cost -- then there's nothing he cannot ask of me.

~ Timothy J. Keller

...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.

~ Timothy J. Keller

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.

~ Timothy J. Keller

If your fundamental is a man dying on the cross for his enemies, if the very heart of your self-image and your religion is a man praying for his enemies as he died for them, sacrificing for them, loving them - if that sinks into your heart of hearts, it's going to produce the kind of life that the early Christians produced. The most inclusive possible life out of the most exclusive possible claim - and that is this is the truth. But what is the truth? The truth is a God become weak, loving and dying for the people who opposed him, dying forgiving them.

~ Timothy J. Keller

In many areas of life, freedom is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones, the liberating restrictions. Those that fit with the reality of our nature and the world produce greater power and scope for our abilities and a deeper joy and fulfillment. Experimentation, risk, and making mistakes bring growth only if, over time, they show us our limits as well as our abilities. If we only grow intellectually, vocationally, and physically through judicious constraints–why would it not also be true for spiritual and moral growth? Instead of insisting on freedom to create spiritual reality, shouldn’t we be seeking to discover it and disciplining ourselves to live according to it?

~ Timothy J. Keller

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.

~ Timothy J. Keller

Everyone will be forgotten, nothing we do will make any difference, and all good endeavours, even the best, will come to naught. Unless there is God. If the God of the Bible exists, and there is a True Reality beneath and behind this one, and this life is not the only life, then every good endeavour, even the simplest ones, pursued in response to God's calling, can matter forever.

~ Timothy J. Keller

The main problem in a person's life is never his suffering, it's his sin.

~ Timothy J. Keller

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

~ Timothy J. Keller

The answer is that their confidence was actuallh in God, not in their limited understanding of what they thought he would do. They had inner assurance that God would rescue them. However, they were not so arrogant as to be sure they were reading God right. They knew that God was under no obligation to operate according to their limited wisdom.

~ Timothy J. Keller

As I took up life as a minister, I tried to understand why so many people resisted and rejected God, I soon realized that perhaps that main reason was affliction and suffering. ...But at the same time, I learned that just as many people find God through affliction and suffering. They find that adversity moves them toward God rather than away. ...When pain and suffering come upon us, we finally see not only that we are not in control of our lives, but that we never were.

~ Timothy J. Keller

Certainly we should be very active in seeking God, and Jesus himself called us to 'ask, seek, knock' in order to find him. Yet those who enter a relationship with God inevitably look back and recognize that God's grace had sought them out, breaking them open to new realities.

~ Timothy J. Keller

Those who believe they have pleased God by the quality of their devotion and moral goodness naturally feel that they and their group deserve deference and power over others. The God of Jesus and the prophets, however, saves completely by grace. He cannot be manipulated by religious and moral performance--he can only be reached through repentance, through the giving up of power. If we are saved by sheer grace we can only become grateful, willing servants of God and of everyone around us.

~ Timothy J. Keller

Properly understood, the doctrine of sin means that believers are never as good as our true worldview should make us. Similarly, the doctrine of grace means as messed up their false worldview should make them.

~ Timothy J. Keller

Many say that it is ethnocentric to claim that our religion is superior to others. Yet isn't that very statement ethnocentric? Most non-Western cultures have no problem saying that their culture and religion is best. The idea that it is wrong to do so is deeply rooted in Western traditions of self-criticism and individualism. To charge others with the sin of ethnocentrism is really a way of saying, Our culture's approach to other cultures is superior to yours.

~ Timothy J. Keller

Every artifact of human culture is a positive response to God's general revelation and simultaneously a rebellious assertion against His sovereign rule over us.

~ Timothy J. Keller

If we get our very identity, our sense of worth, from our political position, then politics is not really about, it is about US. Through our cause we are getting a self, our worth. That means we MUST despise and demonize the opposition. If we get our identity from our ethnicity or socioeconomic status, then we HAVE to feel superior to those of other classes and races. If you are profoundly proud of being an open-minded, tolerant soul, you will be extremely indignant toward people you think are bigots. If you are a very moral person, you will feel superior to people you think are licentious. And so on.

~ Timothy J. Keller

Our Western society is so deeply divided between these two approaches (moralism, self-discovery) that hardly anyone can conceive of any other way to live. If you criticize or distance yourself from one, everyone assumes you have chosen to follow the other, because each of these approaches tends to divide the whole world into two basic groups. The moral conformists say: the immoral people -- the people who 'do their own thing' -- are the problem with the world, and moral people are the solution. The advocates of self-discovery say: The bigoted peole -- the people who say, 'We have the Truth' -- are the problem with the world, and progressive people are the solution.

~ Timothy J. Keller

Community service has become a patch for morality. You can devote your life to community service and be a total schmuck.

~ Timothy J. Keller

The popular concept–that we should each determine our own morality–is based on the belief that the spiritual realm is nothing at all like the rest of the world. Does anyone really believe that? For many years after each of the morning and evening Sunday services I remained in the auditorium for another hour to field questions. Hundreds of people stayed for the give-and-take discussions. One of the most frequent statements I heard was that 'Every person has to define right and wrong for him- or herself.' I always responded to the speakers by asking, 'Is there anyone in the world right now doing things you believe they should stop doing no matter what they personally believe about the correctness of their behavior?' They would invariable say, 'Yes, of course.' Then I would ask, “Doesn’t that mean that you do believe there is some kind of moral reality that is there that is not defined by us, that must be abided by regardless of what a person feels or thinks?' Almost always, the response to that question was silence, either a thoughtful or a grumpy one.

~ Timothy J. Keller

The targets of this story are not wayward sinners but religious people who do everything the Bible requires. Jesus is pleading not so much with immoral outsiders as with moral insiders. H wants to show them their blindness, narrowness, and self righteousness, and how these things are destroying both their own souls and the lives of the people around them.

~ Timothy J. Keller

The infallible test of spiritual integrity, Jesus says, is your private prayer life. Many people will pray when they are required by cultural or social circumstances. Those with a genuinely lived relationship with God as Father, however, will inwardly want to pray and therefore will pray even though nothing on the outside is pressing them to do so. They pursue it even during times of spiritual dryness, when there is no social or experiential payoff.

~ Timothy J. Keller

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

~ Timothy J. Keller

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.

~ Timothy J. Keller

Underneath all notions of justice is a set of faith assumptions that are essentially religious, and these are often not acknowledged.

~ Timothy J. Keller

For indeed, grace is the key to it all. It is not our lavish good deeds that procure salvation, but God's lavish love and mercy. That is why the poor are as acceptable before God as the rich. It is the generosity of God, the freeness of his salvation, that lays the foundation for the society of justice for all. Even in the seemingly boring rules and regulations of tabernacle rituals, we see that God cares about the poor, that his laws make provision for the disadvantaged. God's concern for justice permeated every part of Israel's life. It should also permeate our lives.

~ Timothy J. Keller

The proper biblical understanding of sin is much more radical and far-reaching. It can never be used as a weapon, because it will recoil on anyone who tries to deploy it that way.

~ Timothy J. Keller

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.

~ Timothy J. Keller

The great danger is to always single out some aspect of God’s good creation and identify it, rather than alien intrusion of sin, as the villain.

~ Timothy J. Keller

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

~ Timothy J. Keller

In other words, we are only proud of being more successful, more intelligent or more good-looking than the next person, and we are in the presence of someone who is more successful, intelligent and good-looking than we are, we lose all pleasure in what we had. That is because we really had no pleasure in it. We were proud of it.

~ Timothy J. Keller

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

~ Timothy J. Keller

Gratitude is what you feel. Thanksgiving is what you do.

~ Timothy J. Keller

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

~ Timothy J. Keller