Tim Keller (pastor) Quotes

177 Sourced Quotes

Marriage is so much like salvation and our relationship with Christ that you can't understand marriage w/o looking at the gospel.

Tim Keller
Suffering dispels the illusion that we have the strength and competence to rule our own lives and save ourselves.

Tim Keller
Jesus' claims are particularly unnerving, because if they are true there is no alternative but to bow the knee to him.

Tim Keller
In the secular view, suffering is never seen as a meaningful part of life but only as an interruption.

Tim Keller
The most liberating act of free, unconditional grace demands that the recipient give up control of his or her life.

Tim Keller
Jesus is the only Lord who, if you receive him, will fulfill you completely, and, if you fail him, will forgive you eternally.

Tim Keller
The determining factor in our relationship with God is not our past but Christ's past.

Tim Keller
We don't merely need the money from work to survive. We need the work itself to survive and live fully human lives more than money.

Tim Keller
Without immersion in God's words, our prayers may not be merely limited and shallow but also untethered from reality.

Tim Keller
Anything can serve as a counterfeit god, especially the very best things in life.

Tim Keller
Only if you first seek inner forgiveness will your confrontation be temperate, wise, and gracious. Only when you have lost the need to see the other person hurt will you have any chance of actually bringing about change, reconciliation, and healing. You have to submit to the costly suffering and death of forgiveness if there is going to be any resurrection.

Tim Keller
To discover the real you, look at what you spend time thinking about when no one is looking.

Tim Keller
We are so evil and sinful and flawed that Jesus had to die for us... But we are so lobed and valued that he was willing to due for us.

Tim Keller
The prerequisite for receiving the grace of God is to know you need it.

Tim Keller
Remember that according to the Bible, the heart is not primarily the emotions but rather the seat of our fundamental commitments and trusts, and therefore it is the control center of the whole life. So to preach to the heart means to go right for the commanding commitments of people's lives that drive their desires, thinking, feeling, and action.

Tim Keller
The world is polarizing over religion. It is getting both more religious and less religious at the same time.

Tim Keller
Rejoicing and repentance must go together. Repentance without rejoicing will lead to despair. Rejoicing without repentance is shallow and will only provide passing inspiration instead of deep change.

Tim Keller
The simple fact is that only if I love Jesus more than my wife will I be able to serve her needs ahead of my own.

Tim Keller
On the cross Jesus was treated as an outcast so that we could be brought into God's family freely by grace.

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

Tim Keller
Jesus's teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day.

Tim Keller
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.

Tim Keller
We must neither confuse evangelism with doing justice, nor separate them from one another.

Tim Keller
Jesus Christ, who had all the power in the world, saw us enslaved by the very things we thought would free us... He laid aside the infinities and immensities of His being and, at the cost of His life, paid the debt for our sins, purchasing us the only place our hearts can rest, in His Father's house. Knowing He did this will transform us from the inside out.

Tim Keller
You can't live the Christian life without a band of Christian friends, without a family of believers in which you find a place.

Tim Keller
Ironically, the insistence that doctrines do not matter is really a doctrine itself

Tim Keller
If the church does not identify with the marginalized, it will itself be marginalized. This is God's poetic justice.

Tim Keller
Jesus warns people far more often about greed than about sex, yet almost no one thinks they are guilty of it.

Tim Keller
Christianity offers not merely a consolation but a restoration - not just of the life we had but of the life we always wanted but never achieved. And because the joy will be even greater for all that evil, this means the final defeat of all those forces that would have destroyed the purpose of God in creation, namely, to live with his people in glory and delight forever.

Tim Keller
There is a direct relationship between a person's grasp and experience of God's grace, and his or her heart for justice and the poor.

Tim Keller