Tim Keller (pastor) Quotes

177 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tim Keller
There's nothing that makes you more miserable (or less interesting) than self-absorption.

Tim Keller
Religion operates on the principle 'I obey-therefore I am accepted by God.' But the operating principle of the gospel is 'I am accepted by God through what Christ has done-therefore I obey.'

Tim Keller
When love of one's people becomes an absolute, it turns into racism. When love of equality turns into a supreme thing, it can result in hatred and violence toward anyone who has led a privileged life. It is the settled tendency of human societies to turn good political causes into counterfeit gods.

Tim Keller
What the heart most wants, the mind finds reasonable, the will finds doable, and the emotions find desirable.

Tim Keller
The way to find your calling is to look at the way you were created. Your gifts have not emerged by accident.

Tim Keller
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.

Tim Keller
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.

Tim Keller
The targets of this story are not wayward sinners but religious people who do everything the Bible requires. Jesus is pleading not so much with immoral outsiders as with moral insiders. H wants to show them their blindness, narrowness, and self righteousness, and how these things are destroying both their own souls and the lives of the people around them.

Tim Keller
Because of Jesus-there is always hope, even in the darkest moments of your life.

Tim Keller
If God is treated as God during suffering, then suffering can reveal and present him in all his greatness.

Tim Keller
What is an idol? It is anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give.

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

Tim Keller
A sense of Jesus' absence might be a sign of his presence- a sign that he's working already in your life.

Tim Keller
If anything becomes more fundamental than God to your happiness, meaning of life, and identity then it is an idol.

Tim Keller
The gospel humbles us into the dust and at the very same time exalts us to the heavens.

Tim Keller
When pain and suffering come upon us, we finally see not only that we are not in control of our lives but that we never were.

Tim Keller
The resurrection of the body means that we do not merely receive a consolation for the life we have lost but a restoration of it. We not only get the bodies and lives we had but the bodies and lives we wished for but had never before received.

Tim Keller