Timothy Keller Quotes

Jesus' purpose is not to warm our hearts but to shatter our categories.

God loves you just because He loves you.

The best people often have terrible lives. Job is one example, and Jesus—the ultimate ‘Job,’ the only truly, fully innocent sufferer — is another.

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.

The doctrine of grace and redemption keeps us from seeing any person or situation as hopeless.

Because sin is not just breaking the rules, it is putting yourself in the place of God as Savior, Lord, and Judge just as each son sought to displace the authority of the father in his own life.

Nothing we formulate or do can qualify us for access to God. Only grace can do that- based not on our performance but on the saving work of Christ.

Just because we don't see a reason for evil and suffering doesn't mean there's not a reason for it.

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

Because of the Cross, God can be both just towards sin and yet mercifully justifying to sinners.

Jesus took the tree of death so you could have the tree of life.

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

Every other religion points to answers. Jesus, though, says 'I am the answer'.

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

Cities have more “image of God” per square inch than anywhere else, and so we must not idealize the country as somehow a more spiritual place than the city.

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.

How could a good, all-powerful God allow suffering?

Honor the image of God. Human beings are not accidents, but creations.

If you have to run away from something that used to be an idol, you're actually still enslaved by it. It's still controlling you.

There seems to be a human instinct for prayer. Swiss theologian Karl Barth calls it our 'incurable God-sickness.'

The world can’t save itself. That’s the message of Christmas.

Unless you point to the good news of God's grace people will not be able to bear the bad news of God's judgement.

Power, approval, comfort, and control are meta-idols that hold sway over our daily lives.

The future is already won, and the more hostile the culture, the easier it is to communicate the difference of Christianity.

We were designed to know, serve, and love God supremely - and when we are faithful to that design, we flourish.

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

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

You are a totally loved moral failure.

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.

Christians necessarily believe we depend on God for everything-a prayerless Christian, then, is a contradiction in terms.

All life-changing love is inconvenient.

The world says you are loved because of what you do. Jesus says you can now do all things because you are loved.

The resurrection makes Christianity the most irritating religion on the face of the earth.

Every treasure on this earth says, 'Give your life to purchase me.' Jesus says 'I'm the one treasure who died to purchase you.'

Prayer is continuing a conversation that God has started through his Word and his grace, which eventually becomes a full encounter with him.

It is because of the doctrine of judgment and hell that Jesus' proclamations of grace and love are so astounding.

As things are brought back under Christ's rule and authority, they are restored to health, beauty, and freedom.

Marriage does not so much bring you into confrontation with your spouse as confront you with yourself.

Because we put ourselves in God’s place, He put Himself in our place.

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

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

Prayer can be simple, but it's not easy. Nothing great is.

Jesus is the author of faith, the provider of faith, and the object of faith.

Contextualization is not giving people what they want. It is giving God's answers (which they probably do not want) to the questions they are asking and in forms they can comprehend.

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

Prayer is the way to experience a powerful confidence that God is handling our lives well.

Occasionally God rips aside the veil, and you begin to see this very fact: All things happen for you. All things. Everything is knit together.

Prayer is our way of entering into the happiness of God himself

Prayer is both conversation and encounter with God.

Repentance is like antiseptic. You pour antiseptic onto a wound and, at first, it stings. Then it heals.