Tim Keller (pastor) - God Quotes

67 Sourced Quotes

View all Tim Keller Quotes
No one is exempt from trials and tribulations. In fact, this is often what happens to people God loves very much, for it is part of God's often mysterious and good plan for turning us into something great.

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

Tim Keller
If we have not seen our sin and sought radical forgiveness from God, we will be unable to forgive and to seek the good of those who have wronged us.

Tim Keller
All human problems are ultimately symptoms, and our separation from God is the cause.

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

Tim Keller
To fear the Lord is to be overwhelmed with wonder before the greatness of God and his love.

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

Tim Keller
The basic purpose of prayer is not to bend God's will to mine, but to mold my will into His.

Tim Keller
If this world was made by a triune God, relationships of love are what life is really all about.

Tim Keller
To pray is to accept that we are, and always will be, wholly dependent on God for everything.

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
God's grace does not come to people who morally outperform others, but to those who admit their failure to perform and who acknowledge their need for a Savior.

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
There are many ways to cover up our sin. We may justify or minimize it by blaming circumstances and others people. However, real repentance first admits sin as sin and takes full responsibility. True confession and repentance begins when blame shifting ends...Just as real repentance begins only where blame shifting ends, so it also begins where self-pity ends, and we start to turn from our sin out of love for God rather than mere self-interest.

Tim Keller
In Ephesians 5, Paul shows us that even on earth Jesus did not use his power to oppress us but sacrificed everything to bring us into union with him. And this takes us beyond the philosophical to the personal and the practical. If God had the gospel of Jesus's salvation in mind when he established marriage, then marriage only 'works' to the degree that approximates the pattern of God's self-giving love in Christ.

Tim Keller
The purpose of Sabbath is not simply to rejuvenate yourself in order to do more production, nor is it the pursuit of pleasure. The purpose of Sabbath is to enjoy your God, life in general, what you have accomplished in the world through his help, and the freedom you have in the gospel-the freedom from slavery to any material object or human expectation. The Sabbath is a sign of the hope that we have in the world to come.

Tim Keller
Sin is the despairing refusal to find your deepest identity in your relationship and service to God.

Tim Keller
Some suffering is given in order to chastise and correct a person for wrongful patterns of life (as in the case of Jonah imperiled by the storm), some suffering is given not to correct past wrongs but to prevent future ones (as in the case of Joseph sold into slavery), and some suffering has no purpose other than to lead a person to love God more ardently for himself alone and so discover the ultimate peace and freedom.

Tim Keller
If a person has grasped the meaning of God's grace in his heart, he will do justice. If he doesn't live justly, then he may say with his lips that he is grateful for God's grace, but in his heart he is far from him. If he doesn't care about the poor, it reveals that at best he doesn't understand the grace he has experienced, and at worst he has not really encountered the saving mercy of God. Grace should make you just.

Tim Keller
To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretense, humbles us out of our self-righteousness, and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us.

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

Tim Keller
A triune God would call us to converse with him... because he wants to share the joy he has. Prayer is our way of entering into the happiness of God himself.

Tim Keller
Jesus does not divide the world into the moral "good guys" and the immoral "bad guys". He shows us that everyone is dedicated to a project of self-salvation, to using God and others in order to get power and control for themselves. We are just going about it in different ways. Even though both sons are wrong, however, the father cares for them and invites them both back into his love and feast.

Tim Keller