Top 450 Timothy Keller Quotes (2025 Update)
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351. “At the cross, we see the worst that sin can do, as humanity – of which each one of us is a part – crucified the Lord. But at the cross, we also see that the most that sin can do cannot thwart God’s salvation.”

— Timothy Keller

352. “To preach the gospel is to show people their need for salvation against a backdrop of God’s nature and the character of sin, and then present Jesus as the only remedy for what ails them and the world. In my weekly preaching in the worship services I always call people to believe in Christ.”

— Timothy Keller

353. “If you have a small view of your sin, God’s grace will be small to you.”

— Timothy Keller

354. “There seems to be a human instinct for prayer. Swiss theologian Karl Barth calls it our ‘incurable God-sickness.’”

— Timothy Keller

355. “If God does not have our highest allegiance, we will use prayer to try to get things that have that designation.”

— Timothy Keller

356. “If you’re a Christian how do you deal with stress without Jesus? You don’t.”

— Timothy Keller

357. “If you’re avoiding sin and living morally so that God will have to bless you and save you, then you may be looking to Jesus as a teacher, model, and helper, but ironically you are avoiding him as Savior. You are trusting in your own goodness rather than in Jesus for your standing with God.”

— Timothy Keller

358. “Only in Jesus Christ do we see how the untamable, infinite God can become a baby and a loving Savior. On the cross we see how both the love and the holiness of God can be fulfilled at once.”

— Timothy Keller

359. “We are regularly in danger of having too light a view of our sin and also too light a grasp of what Jesus has done to free us from our sin.”

— Timothy Keller

360. “When the world sees us doing evangelism, they just see us recruiting. When they see us doing justice, they see God’s glory.”

— Timothy Keller

361. “We should let Scripture interpret us more than we interpret Scripture.”

— Timothy Keller

362. “In the end, we love people into belief. We do not argue them into belief.”

— Timothy Keller

363. “There is no sin that is a match for God’s grace.”

— Timothy Keller

364. “The sin under all other sins is a lack of joy in Christ.”

— Timothy Keller

365. “To say doctrine doesn’t matter, only how you live matters, is itself a doctrine. It’s the doctrine of salvation by works.”

— Timothy Keller

366. “The more you understand how your salvation isn’t about your behavior, the more radically your behavior will change.”

— Timothy Keller

367. “To the degree you experience God’s love towards you – seeing you as beautiful and radiant – to that degree sex won’t ruin your life.”

— Timothy Keller

368. “All I know is, if I don’t care about the poor, if my church doesn’t care about the poor, that’s evil.”

— Timothy Keller

369. “Suffering is the stripping of our hope in finite things, therefore we do not put our ultimate hope in anything finite.”

— Timothy Keller

370. “Jesus’s teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day.”

— Timothy Keller

371. “When people say, “God is love,” I think they mean that love is extremely important, or that God really wants us to love. But in Christian conception, God really has love as his essence.”

— Timothy Keller

372. “The gospel has supernatural versatility to address the particular hopes, fears, and idols of every culture and every person.”

— Timothy Keller

373. “Prayer is a recognition of the greatness of our God.”

— Timothy Keller

374. “If the evolutionary mechanism of natural selection depends on death, destruction, and violence of the strong against the weak, then these things are perfectly natural. On what basis, then, does the atheist judge the natural world to be horribly wrong, unfair, and unjust?”

— Timothy Keller

375. “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.”

— Timothy Keller

376. “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.”

— Timothy Keller

377. “The main human problems often are that we misidentify what will make us happy; and we ask people and things to save us beyond their ability.”

— Timothy Keller

378. “As long as we think we are not that bad, the idea of grace will never change us.”

— Timothy Keller

379. “Pride is that which claims to be the author of what is really a gift.”

— Timothy Keller

380. “God has become human. The absolute has become particular. The ideal has become real. The divine has taken up a human nature.”

— Timothy Keller

381. “It is possible to avoid Jesus as Savior as much by keeping all the Biblical rules as by breaking them.”

— Timothy Keller

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

— Timothy Keller

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

— Timothy Keller

384. “We are called not simply to communicate the gospel to nonbelievers; we must also intentionally celebrate the gospel before them.”

— Timothy Keller

385. “You should not begin to pray for all you want until you realize that in God you have all you need.”

— Timothy Keller

386. “The human race doesn’t need more books telling them what to do. They need the power to do what they already know.”

— Timothy Keller

387. “The Gospel is news of what God has done to reach us. It is not advice about what we must do to reach God.”

— Timothy Keller

388. “If we pick out which parts of the Bible we dislike, we actually have a god we’ve created. How can that god ever call you out on anything?”

— Timothy Keller

389. “Holiness gives us new desires and brings old desires into line with one another.”

— Timothy Keller

390. “Without the gospel we hate ourselves instead of our sin. Without the gospel we’re motivated through all sorts of awful fear and pride to change and it doesn’t really change our hearts; it just restrains our hearts.”

— Timothy Keller

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

— Timothy Keller

392. “To love our success more than God and our neighbor hardens the heart, making us less able to feel and to sense.”

— Timothy Keller

393. “The life of faith is not the perfect life; it is the life which clings on to what God has said he will do.”

— Timothy Keller

394. “The Christian faith gives us a new conception of work as the means by which God loves and cares for his world through us.”

— Timothy Keller

395. “One of the signs that you may not grasp the unique, radical nature of the gospel is that you are certain that you do.”

— Timothy Keller

396. “The cross is the place where the Judge takes the Judgment.”

— Timothy Keller

397. “God loves and defends those with the least economic and social power, and so should we.”

— Timothy Keller

398. “Jesus is not asking us to do anything for him that he hasn’t already done for us, under conditions of difficulty beyond our comprehension.”

— Timothy Keller

399. “If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did.”

— Timothy Keller

400. “Ministry to the poor is a crucial sign that we believe the gospel.”

— Timothy Keller