Top 90 Timothy J. Keller Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “It is only when you see the desire to be your own Savior and Lord – lying beneath both your sins and your moral goodness – that you are on the verge of understanding the gospel and becoming a Christian indeed. When you realize that the antidote to being bad is not just being good, you are on the brink. If you follow through, it will change everything: how you relate to God, self, others, the world, your work, your sins, your virtue.”

— Timothy J. Keller

52. “There is legitimate guilt that is removed through repentance and restitution, and then there is irremediable guilt. When people say, “I know God forgives me, but I can’t forgive myself,” they mean that they have failed an idol, whose approval is more important to them than God’s. Idols function like gods in our lives, and so if we make career or parental approval our god and we fail it, then the idol curses us in our hearts for the rest of our lives. We can’t shake the sense of failure.”

— Timothy J. Keller

53. “The birth of a new baby is a wonderful event. The birth of a new life in Christ is an eternal event. Hallelujah! Born once, die twice. Born twice, die once.”

— Timothy J. Keller

54. “Jonah so loathed the Assyrian race that he saw God’s forgiveness of them to be the worst thing that could have happened. He was willing to confront and denounce the Ninevites, but he could not love them. He didn’t want them saved; he didn’t want them to receive God’s mercy.109.”

— Timothy J. Keller

55. “Bernard of Clairvaux is reputed to have once said, “To see a man humble under prosperity is the greatest rarity in the world.”

— Timothy J. Keller

56. “Fools cannot bear to have anyone over them, and so they ignore God or deny he exists. Some of this rebellion exists in every heart. Every sin is a kind of practical atheism – it is acting as if God were not there. That also means that belief in God must be a gift.”

— Timothy J. Keller

57. “God does not love us because we are serviceable; He loves us simply because He loves us. This is the only kind of love we can ever be secure in, of course, since it is the only kind of love we cannot possibly lose. This is grace.”

— Timothy J. Keller

58. “You have heard the phrase in “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing” – “Mild, he lays his glory by.” What does that mean? He did it voluntarily, willingly, and lovingly. No one forced him. It wasn’t just a duty. He faced unimaginable pain and death out of love for you.”

— Timothy J. Keller

59. “But if you are unwilling to risk your place in the palace for your neighbors, the palace owns you.”

— Timothy J. Keller

60. “A God who substitutes himself for us and suffers so that we may go free is a God you can trust.”

— Timothy J. Keller

61. “She must be able to say in her heart, “My desire for completely successful and happy children is selfish. It’s all about my need to feel worthwhile and valuable. If I really knew God’s love – then I could accept less-than-perfect kids and wouldn’t be crushing them. If God’s love meant more to me than my children, I could love my children less selfishly.”

— Timothy J. Keller

62. “One of the signs that an object is functioning as an idol is that fear becomes one of the chief characteristics of life. When we center our lives on the idol, we become dependent on it. If our counterfeit god is threatened in any way, our response is complete panic. We do not say, “What a shame, how difficult,” but rather “This is the end! There’s no hope!”

— Timothy J. Keller

63. “David shows us straightaway. He doesn’t say, “I will take refuge in God,” but rather shows that he already has, that he is already safe. How can he feel that way before he knows whether the smear campaign will be thwarted? The answer: if we trust in God’s wisdom and will, then we have peace regardless of the immediate outcome.”

— Timothy J. Keller

64. “Whatever controls us is our lord. The person who seeks power is controlled by power. The person who seeks acceptance is controlled by the people he or she wants to please. We do not control ourselves. We are controlled by the lord of our lives.15.”

— Timothy J. Keller

65. “Everything in this life is going to be taken away from us, except one thing: God’s love, which can go into death with us and take us through it and into His arms.”

— Timothy J. Keller

66. “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

67. “If you are filled with shame and guilt, you do not merely need to believe in the abstract concept of God’s mercy. You must sense, on the palate of the heart, as it were, the sweetness of his mercy. Then you will know you are accepted. If you are filled with worry and anxiety, you do not only need to believe that God is in control of history. You must see, with eyes of the heart, his dazzling majesty. Then you will know he has things in hand.”

— Timothy J. Keller

68. “Because grace is grace. If it is truly grace, then no one was worthy of it at all, and that made all equal. And with that realization, he added, “Salvation comes only from the Lord!” It doesn’t belong to any race or class of people, nor do religious people deserve it more than the irreligious. It does not come from any quality or merit in us at all. Salvation is only from the Lord.”

— Timothy J. Keller

69. “Money has the power to make you think that ruthlessness is just normal. Where have you seen the power of money to make us ruthless?”

— Timothy J. Keller

70. “Unless Jonah can see his own sin, and see himself as living wholly by the mercy of God, he will never understand how God can be merciful to evil people and still be just and faithful.”

— Timothy J. Keller

71. “Without prayer that answers the God of the Bible, we will only be talking to ourselves.”

— Timothy J. Keller

72. “What makes a person a Christian is not our love for God, which is always imperfect, but God’s love for us.”

— Timothy J. Keller

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

— Timothy J. Keller

74. “Pride makes you a predator, not a person.”

— Timothy J. Keller

75. “Repentance is not less than being sorry for individual sins, but it means much more.”

— Timothy J. Keller

76. “Today’s outspoken believer may be tomorrow’s apostate, and today’s outspoken unbeliever may be tomorrow’s convert. We must not make settled, final decisions about anyone’s spiritual state or fate.”

— Timothy J. Keller

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

— Timothy J. Keller

78. “Jesus’s own answer to this question, through the parable, is similar. He is on the side of neither the irreligious nor the religious, but he singles out religious moralism as a particularly deadly spiritual condition.”

— Timothy J. Keller

79. “Grace abolishes fear of failure, which may have been part of Jonah’s problem. So many of our deepest longings to succeed are really just ways to be for ourselves what Christ should be for us. Really we are saying, “If I achieve this, then I am acceptable!” But when we stop trying to steal self-acceptance from other sources, we lose our fear. We become fearless without becoming defiant.”

— Timothy J. Keller

80. “If you want to understand your own behavior, you must understand that all sin against God is grounded in a refusal to believe that God is more dedicated to our good, and more aware of what that is, than we are. We distrust God because we assume he is not truly for us, that if we give him complete control, we will be miserable.”

— Timothy J. Keller

81. “Whatever you live for actually owns you. You do not really control yourself. Whatever you live for and love the most controls you.”

— Timothy J. Keller

82. “To some degree the answers to many of our petitions would be facilitated by changes in us, but we usually do not take time to consider this as we pray.”

— Timothy J. Keller

83. “Lord, give me the wisdom to seek skillfulness, but not be taken with my own cleverness. Give me the discernment to perceive excellence, but not be enamored of pedigree and credentials.”

— Timothy J. Keller

84. “Havel puts it well – humanity cannot save itself. In fact, he argues, the belief that we can save ourselves – that some political system or ideology can fix human problems – has only led to more darkness.”

— Timothy J. Keller

85. “Common grace means that nonbelievers often act more righteously than believers despite their lack of faith; whereas believers, filled with remaining sin, often act far worse than their right belief in God would lead us to expect. All this means Christians should be humble and respectful toward those who do not share their faith.”

— Timothy J. Keller

86. “Sin always hardens the conscience, locks you in the prison of your own defensiveness and rationalizations, and eats you up slowly from the inside.”

— Timothy J. Keller

87. “Most of us are either temperamentally direct, bold, and persistent or gentle, calm, and deferential – but never both. Yet the wise learn to be both. They follow the one who always showed boldness without harshness, humility without uncertainty, who spoke truth but always bathed in love.”

— Timothy J. Keller

88. “The doctrine of common grace is the teaching that God bestows gifts of wisdom, moral insight, goodness, and beauty across humanity, regardless of race or religious belief.”

— Timothy J. Keller

89. “Why was God sending a deluge of disappointments? “Tis in this way,” the Lord replied, in essence: “I am ANSWERING your prayers for grace and faith. I am only trying to liberate you from the things that enslave you, drive you, and control you. Do you not see that if you loved me supremely, more than anything else, you’d be truly free? Find your all in me.”

— Timothy J. Keller

90. “Jesus is the prophet Jonah should have been. Yet, of course, he is infinitely more than that. Jesus did not merely weep for us; he died for us. Jonah went outside the city, hoping to witness its condemnation, but Jesus Christ went outside the city to die on a cross to accomplish its salvation.”

— Timothy J. Keller

91. “God’s grace becomes wondrous, endlessly consoling, beautiful, and humbling only when we fully believe, grasp, and remind ourselves of all three of these background truths – that we deserve nothing but condemnation, that we are utterly incapable of saving ourselves, and that God has saved us, despite our sin, at infinite cost to himself.”

— Timothy J. Keller

92. “Everyone gets an identity from something. Everyone must say to himself or herself, “I’m significant because of This” and “I’m acceptable because I’m welcomed by Them.” But then whatever This is and whoever They are, these things become virtual gods to us, and the deepest truths about who we are.”

— Timothy J. Keller

93. “What must we do, then, to be saved? To find God we must repent of the things we have done wrong, but if that is all you do, you may remain just an elder brother. To truly become Christians we must also repent of the reasons we ever did anything right.”

— Timothy J. Keller

94. “Bottomless stores of mercy and unbending demands for righteousness almost never go together in any human being. Our temperament inclines us one way or the other. But these are perfectly combined in God.”

— Timothy J. Keller

95. “Jesus is not a metaphor. He is real. This all happened.”

— Timothy J. Keller

96. “Repentance without rejoicing will lead to despair. Rejoicing without repentance is shallow and will only provide passing inspiration instead of deep change.”

— Timothy J. Keller

97. “A salvation earned by good works and moral effort would favor the more able, competent, accomplished, and privileged. But salvation by sheer grace favors the failed, the outsiders, the weak, because it goes only to those who know salvation must be by sheer grace.”

— Timothy J. Keller

98. “When you say, “I won’t serve you, God, if you don’t give me X,” then X is your true bottom line, your highest love, your real god, the thing you most trust and rest in.”

— Timothy J. Keller