Top 90 Timothy J. Keller Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “An idol is whatever you look at and say, in your heart of hearts, “If I have that, then I’ll feel my life has meaning, then I’ll know I have value, then I’ll feel significant and secure.”

— Timothy J. Keller

2. “The true god of your heart is what your thoughts effortlessly go to when there is nothing else demanding your attention.”

— Timothy J. Keller

3. “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

4. “This pattern of the Cross means that the world’s glorification of power, might, and status is exposed and defeated. On the cross Christ wins through losing, triumphs through defeat, achieves power through weakness and service, comes to wealth via giving all away. Jesus Christ turns the values of the world upside down.”

— Timothy J. Keller

5. “Money is one of the most common counterfeit gods there is. When it takes hold of your heart it blinds you to what is happening, it controls you through your anxieties and lusts, and it brings you to put it ahead of all other things.”

— Timothy J. Keller

6. “What many people call “psychological problems” are simple issues of idolatry. Perfectionism, workaholism, chronic indecisiveness, the need to control the lives of others – all of these stem from making good things into idols that then drive us into the ground as we try to appease them. Idols dominate our lives.”

— Timothy J. Keller

7. “While marriage is many things, it is anything but sentimental. Marriage is glorious but hard. It’s a burning joy and strength, and yet it is also blood, sweat, and tears, humbling defeats and exhausting victories.”

— Timothy J. Keller

8. “The same sun that melts wax hardens clay.” In.”

— Timothy J. Keller

9. “At the root of each and every sin, and each and every problem, is unbelief and a rejection of the gospel.”

— Timothy J. Keller

10. “We can’t overcome workaholism if we love money and status too much. We can’t overcome bitterness or slander if we love our reputation too much. It is not just willpower but a reordering of our desires that will bring wisdom.”

— Timothy J. Keller

11. “He is both the rest and the storm, both the victim and the wielder of the flaming sword, and you must accept him or reject him on the basis of both. Either you’ll have to kill him or you’ll have to crown him. The one thing you can’t do is just say, “What an interesting guy.”

— Timothy J. Keller

12. “The usual place to learn the greatest secrets of God’s grace is at the bottom.”

— Timothy J. Keller

13. “If God were impersonal, as the Eastern religions teach, then love – something that can happen only between two or more persons – would be an illusion. We can go further and say that even if God were only unipersonal, then love could not have appeared until after God began to create other beings. That would mean God was more fundamentally power than he was love. Love would not be as important as power.”

— Timothy J. Keller

14. “The more we take God out of the picture, the more we will feel things are meaningless.”

— Timothy J. Keller

15. “While Christianity was able to agree with pagan writers that inordinate attachment to earthly goods can lead to unnecessary pain and grief, it also taught that the answer to this was not to love things less but to love God more than anything else. Only when our greatest love is God, a love that we cannot lose even in death, can we face all things with peace. Grief was not to be eliminated but seasoned and buoyed up with love and hope.”

— Timothy J. Keller

16. “So Paul does not look to the Corinthians for his identity. He does not go to them for the verdict that he is a ‘somebody’. He does not get that sense of identity from them. But he does not get it from himself either. He knows that trying to find self-esteem by living up to a certain set of standards is a trap.”

— Timothy J. Keller

17. “There has never been a gift offered that makes you swallow your pride to the depths that the gift of Jesus Christ requires us to do. Christmas means that we are so lost, so unable to save ourselves, that nothing less than the death of the Son of God himself could save us. That means you are not somebody who can pull yourself together and live a moral and good life.”

— Timothy J. Keller

18. “God loves and defends those with the least economic and social power, and so should we. That is what it means to “do justice.”

— Timothy J. Keller

19. “Idols give us a sense of being in control, and we can locate them by looking at our nightmares. What do we fear the most? What, if we lost it, would make life not worth living? We make “sacrifices” to appease and please our gods, who we believe will protect us.”

— Timothy J. Keller

20. “Only Jesus says, “I have come for the weak. I have come for those who admit they are weak. I will save them not by what they do but through what I do.”

— Timothy J. Keller

21. “Our greatest motive for surrendering to him cannot be for what he will do in us. It must be to love him for what he did for us. In.”

— Timothy J. Keller

22. “So if someone asks you if you are a Christian, you should not say, “Of course!” There should be no “of course-ness” about it. It would be more appropriate to say, “Yes, I am, and that’s a miracle. Me! A Christian! Who would have ever thought it? Yet he did it, and I’m his.” SHE.”

— Timothy J. Keller

23. “When you indulge yourself in bitter thought, it feels so satisfying to fantasize about payback. But slowly and surely it will enlarge your capacity for self-pity, erode your ability to trust and enjoy relationships, and generally drain the happiness out of your daily life. Sin always the conscience, locks you in the prison of your own defensiveness and rationalizations, and eats you up slowly from the inside.”

— Timothy J. Keller

24. “The lesson is that the medium is not the message, that we must not ignore uncomfortable truths just because they come through an unimpressive messenger.”

— Timothy J. Keller

25. “When Christian believers care more for their own interests and security than for the good and salvation of other races and ethnicities, they are sinning like Jonah. If they value the economic and military flourishing of their country over the good of the human race and the furtherance of God’s work in the world, they are sinning like Jonah. Their identity is more rooted in their race and nationality than in being saved sinners and children of God.”

— Timothy J. Keller

26. “Jesus doesn’t tell us to tolerate our enemies. He says to love them. And thank God that Jesus does not merely tolerate us – he embraces us across difference and welcomes us into his arms.”

— Timothy J. Keller

27. “He sees all kinds of sins in himself – and all kinds of accomplishments too – but he refuses to connect them with himself or his identity. So, although he knows himself to be the chief of sinners, that fact is not going to stop him from doing the things that he is called to do.”

— Timothy J. Keller

28. “The manger at Christmas means that, if you live like Jesus, there won’t be room for you in a lot of inns. In.”

— Timothy J. Keller

29. “Do you want to know who you are, your strengths and weaknesses? Do you want to be a compassionate person who skillfully helps people who are hurting? Do you want to have such a profound trust in God that you are fortified against the disappointments of life? Do you want simply to be wise about how life goes? Those are four crucial things to have – but none of them are readily achievable without suffering.”

— Timothy J. Keller

30. “Jesus declares not that he has come to reform religion but that he’s here to end religion and to replace it with himself.”

— Timothy J. Keller

31. “Modern culture, then, is the worst in history at preparing its members for the only inevitability – death. When this limited meaning horizon comes together with the advance of medicine, it leaves many people paralyzed with anxiety and fear when confronted with a dying person.”

— Timothy J. Keller

32. “If believers in God don’t honor the cries and claims of the poor, we don’t honor him, whatever we profess, because we hide his beauty from the eyes of the world. When we pour ourselves out for the poor – that gets the world’s notice.”

— Timothy J. Keller

33. “As future citizens of heaven, Christians must see and avoid the idolatries and injustices of their culture, even as they continue to enjoy its common-grace blessings.”

— Timothy J. Keller

34. “A superiority complex and an inferiority complex are basically the same. They are both results of being overinflated.”

— Timothy J. Keller

35. “Christmas and the incarnation mean that God went to infinite lengths to make himself one whom we can know personally. What.”

— Timothy J. Keller

36. “Everywhere God is, prayer is. Since God is everywhere and infinitely great, prayer must be all-pervasive in our lives.”

— Timothy J. Keller

37. “You are loved for Christ’s sake, not because your heart and life are perfect.”

— Timothy J. Keller

38. “So no one is really neutral about whether Christmas is true. If the Son of God was really born in a manger, then we have lost the right to be in charge of our lives.” – Tim Keller.”

— Timothy J. Keller

39. “Christians don’t face adversity by stoically decreasing our love for the people and things of this world so much as by increasing our love and joy in God.”

— Timothy J. Keller

40. “Evolution, therefore, cannot account for the origin of our moral feelings, let alone for the fact that we all believe there are external moral standards by which moral feelings are evaluated.”

— Timothy J. Keller

41. “The choice is ours. If we want to be sure to experience this vision by sight hereafter, we must know it by faith now. If we want freedom from being driven by fear, ambition, greed, lust, addictions, and inner emptiness, we must learn how to meditate on Christ until his glory breaks in upon our souls.”

— Timothy J. Keller

42. “While we may be able to demonstrably prove to any rational person that substance X will boil at temperature Y at elevation Z, we cannot so prove what we believe about justice and human rights, or that people are all equal in dignity and worth, or what we think is good and evil human behavior. If we used the same standard of evidence on our other beliefs that many secular people use to reject belief in God, no one would be able to justify much of anything. The.”

— Timothy J. Keller

43. “If, like the elder brother, you believe that God ought to bless you and help you because you have worked so hard to obey him and be a good person, then Jesus may be your helper, your example, even your inspiration, but he is not your Savior. You are serving as your own Savior. Underneath.”

— Timothy J. Keller

44. “God varies his strategies too, and continually extends mercy to us in new ways, even though we neither understand nor deserve it.”

— Timothy J. Keller

45. “He argues that science cannot provide the means by which to judge whether its technological inventions are good or bad for human beings. To do that, we must know what a good human person is, and science cannot adjudicate morality or define such a thing.”

— Timothy J. Keller

46. “The gospel assures me that God cares about everything I do and will listen to my prayers. He may not answer them the way I want, but if he doesn’t it is because he knows things I do not.”

— Timothy J. Keller

47. “It is rearranging the raw material of God’s creation in such a way that it helps the world in general, and people in particular, thrive and flourish.”

— Timothy J. Keller

48. “Forgiveness, then, is a form of voluntary suffering. In forgiving, rather than retaliating, you make a choice to bear the cost.”

— Timothy J. Keller

49. “Everything sad is going to come untrue and it will somehow be greater for having once been broken and lost.”

— Timothy J. Keller

50. “There is a difference between believing that God is holy and gracious, and having a new sense on the heart of the loveliness and beauty of that holiness and grace. The difference between believing that God is gracious and tasting that God is gracious is as different as having a rational belief that honey is sweet and having the actual sense of its sweetness.”13.”

— Timothy J. Keller