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Timothy Keller Quotes - Page 7

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Christians tend to motivate others with guilt. We tend to say: You would do this if you were really committed Christians, indicating that we are committed and all that is needed is for others to become as good as we

Christians tend to motivate others with guilt. We tend to say: You would do this if you were really committed Christians, indicating that we are committed and all that is needed is for others to become as good as we are! This is why so many churches quench the motivation of people for ministry. In our shoes, Paul would say: Remember the grace God has showered on you—what does living out and enjoying that grace look like in this situation?

Christian, Motivation, Shoes

The human heart is an idol factory that takes good things like a successful career, love, material possessions, even family, and turns them into ultimate things. Our hearts deify them as the center of our lives, because, we think, they can give us significance and security, safety and fulfillment, if we attain them.

Love, Family, Success

Jesus says, "I want you to follow me so fully, so intensely, so enduringly that all other attachments in your life look weak by comparison"

Jesus, Attachment, Looks

Faith in the gospel restructures our motivations, our self-understanding, our identity, and our view of the world. Behavioral compliance to rules without heart-change will be superficial and fleeting… We can only change permanently as we take the gospel more deeply into our understanding and into our hearts. We must feed on the gospel, as it were, digesting it and making it part of ourselves. That is how we grow.

Motivation, Heart, Self

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

Christian, Needs

If you didn't earn your salvation how are you going to un-earn it?

Salvation, Ifs

Christianity does not set faith against thinking. It sets faith against assuming.

Thinking, Doe, Assuming

The gospel shows us that our spiritual problem lies not only in failing to obey God, but also in relying on our obedience to make us fully acceptable to God, ourselves and others. Every kind of character flaw comes from this natural impulse to be our own saviour through our own performance and achievement. On the one hand, proud and disdainful personalities come from basing your identity on your performance and thinking you are succeeding. But on the other hand, discouraged and self loathing personalities also come from basing your identity on your performance and thinking you are failing.

Spiritual, Lying, Character

Unless you believe the gospel, everything you do will be driven by either pride or fear.

Believe, Pride, Driven

No one is so good that they don’t need the grace of the gospel, nor so bad that they can’t receive the grace of the gospel.

Grace, Needs

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.

Pain, Suffering, Pain And Suffering

Timothy Keller (2013). “Walking with God through Pain and Suffering”, p.13, Penguin

We tend to see God as a means through which we get things to make us happy. For most of us, He has not become our happiness.

Mean

Timothy Keller (2014). “Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God”, p.52, Penguin

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.

Hurt, Real, Believe

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

Prayer, Self, Giving

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

Jesus, World, All Things

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

Christian, Believe, Contradiction

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

Friendship, Marriage, God

Timothy Keller (2011). “The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God”, p.85, Penguin

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.

Christian, Compassion, Justice

If you can't show the difference between religion and the Gospel, people will confuse morality with a changed heart

Heart, Differences, People

Forgiveness always comes at a cost to the one granting the forgiveness. To not retaliate is to absorb the cost.

Cost

If you aren't constantly astonished at God's grace in your solitude, there's no way it can happen in public.

Grace, Solitude, Way

Timothy Keller (2015). “Preaching: Communicating Faith in an Age of Skepticism”, p.168, Penguin

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.

Smart, Believe, Reflection

When you listen and read one thinker, you become a clone… two thinkers, you become confused… ten thinkers, you’ll begin developing your own voice… two or three hundred thinkers, you become wise and develop your voice.

Wise, Confused, Two

We only fully grasp the gospel when we understand, as Paul did, that we are the worst sinner we know

Worst, Knows, Sinner

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

Self, Centeredness, Problem

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