Tim Keller (pastor) Quotes

177 Sourced Quotes

The very fact that we have access to God's attention and presence should concentrate the thoughts and elevate the heart.

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
To truly become Christians we must also repent of the reasons we ever did anything right.

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

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

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

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
At the end of history the whole earth has become the Garden of God again. Death and decay and suffering are gone.... Jesus will make the world our perfect home again. We will no longer be living 'east of Eden,' always wandering and never arriving. We will come, and the father will meet us and embrace us, and we will be brought into the feast.

Tim Keller
Our moral efforts are too feeble and falsely motivated to ever merit salvation.

Tim Keller
The Bible says that our real problem is that every one of us is building our identity on something besides Jesus.

Tim Keller
Disordered love always leads to misery and breakdown. The only way to 'reorder' our loves is to love God supremely.

Tim Keller
The gospel is not just the ABCs but the A-to-Z of the Christian life.

Tim Keller
The purpose of Jesus's coming is to put the whole world right, to renew and restore the creation, not to escape it.

Tim Keller
Everyone will be forgotten, nothing we do will make any difference, and all good endeavours, even the best, will come to naught. Unless there is God. If the God of the Bible exists, and there is a True Reality beneath and behind this one, and this life is not the only life, then every good endeavour, even the simplest ones, pursued in response to God's calling, can matter forever.

Tim Keller
The gospel has supernatural versatility to address the particular hopes, fears, and idols of every culture and every person.

Tim Keller
Change happens not just by giving the mind new arguments but also by feeding the imagination new beauties

Tim Keller
The deeper the experience of the free grace of God, the more generous we must become.

Tim Keller
Even if 80 percent of the population of a country are Christian believers, they will have almost no cultural influence if the Christians do not live in cultural centers and work in culture-forging fields such as academia, publishing, media, entertainment, and the arts. The assumption that society will improve simply be more Christian believers being present is no longer valid.

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

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

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

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

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