Quotes by Timothy J. Keller

Conversation with God leads to an encounter with God. Prayer turns theology into experience.

You (Millennials) are the generation most afraid of real community because it inevitably limits freedom and choice. Get over your fear.

...Gods grace and forgiveness, while free to the recipient, are always costly for the giver.... From the earliest parts of the Bible, it was understood that God could not forgive without sacrifice. No one who is seriously wronged can just forgive the perpetrator.... But when you forgive, that means you absorb the loss and the debt. You bear it yourself. All forgiveness, then, is costly.

When anything in life is an absolute requirement for your happiness and self-worth, it is essentially an ‘idol,’ something you are actually worshiping. When such a thing is threatened, your anger is absolute. Your anger is actually the way the idol keeps you in its service, in its chains. Therefore if you find that, despite all the efforts to forgive, your anger and bitterness cannot subside, you may need to look deeper and ask, ‘What am I defending? What is so important that I cannot live without?’ It may be that, until some inordinate desire is identified and confronted, you will not be able to master your anger.

Like a surgeon, friends cut you in order to heal you.

Friends become wiser together through a healthy clash of viewpoints.

Christ literally walked in our shoes and entered into our affliction. Those who will not help others until they are destitute reveal that Christs love has not yet turned them into the sympathetic persons the gospel should make them.

The gospel of Jesus Christ is an offense to both religion and irreligion. It cant be co-opted by either moralism or relativism.

I asked her what was so scary about unmerited free grace? She replied something like this: If I was saved by my good works -- then there would be a limit to what God could ask of me or put me through. I would be like a taxpayer with rights. I would have done my duty and now I would deserve a certain quality of life. But if it is really true that I am a sinner saved by sheer grace -- at Gods infinite cost -- then theres nothing he cannot ask of me.

...the basic premise of religion—that if you live a good life, things will go well for you—is wrong. Jesus was the most morally upright person who ever lived, yet he had a life filled with the experience of poverty, rejection, injustice, and even torture.

We instinctively tend to limit for whom we exert ourselves. We do it for people like us, and for people whom we like. Jesus will have none of that. By depicting a Samaritan helping a Jew, Jesus could not have found a more forceful way to say that anyone at all in need - regardless of race, politics, class, and religion - is your neighbour. Not everyone is your brother or sister in faith, but everyone is your neighbour, and you must love your neighbour.

If your fundamental is a man dying on the cross for his enemies, if the very heart of your self-image and your religion is a man praying for his enemies as he died for them, sacrificing for them, loving them - if that sinks into your heart of hearts, its going to produce the kind of life that the early Christians produced. The most inclusive possible life out of the most exclusive possible claim - and that is this is the truth. But what is the truth? The truth is a God become weak, loving and dying for the people who opposed him, dying forgiving them.

In many areas of life, freedom is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones, the liberating restrictions. Those that fit with the reality of our nature and the world produce greater power and scope for our abilities and a deeper joy and fulfillment. Experimentation, risk, and making mistakes bring growth only if, over time, they show us our limits as well as our abilities. If we only grow intellectually, vocationally, and physically through judicious constraints–why would it not also be true for spiritual and moral growth? Instead of insisting on freedom to create spiritual reality, shouldn’t we be seeking to discover it and disciplining ourselves to live according to it?

A job is a vocation only if someone else calls you to do it for them rather than for yourself. And so our work can be a calling only if it is reimagined as a mission of service to something beyond merely our own interests. Thinking of work mainly as a means of self-fulfillment and self-realization slowly crushes a person.

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 Gods calling, can matter forever.

At Gethsemane: Jesus is subordinating His loudest desires to His deepest desires.

The answer is that their confidence was actuallh in God, not in their limited understanding of what they thought he would do. They had inner assurance that God would rescue them. However, they were not so arrogant as to be sure they were reading God right. They knew that God was under no obligation to operate according to their limited wisdom.

As I took up life as a minister, I tried to understand why so many people resisted and rejected God, I soon realized that perhaps that main reason was affliction and suffering. ...But at the same time, I learned that just as many people find God through affliction and suffering. They find that adversity moves them toward God rather than away. ...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.

Gods 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

Certainly we should be very active in seeking God, and Jesus himself called us to ask, seek, knock in order to find him. Yet those who enter a relationship with God inevitably look back and recognize that Gods grace had sought them out, breaking them open to new realities.