Quotes by Timothy J. Keller

Those who believe they have pleased God by the quality of their devotion and moral goodness naturally feel that they and their group deserve deference and power over others. The God of Jesus and the prophets, however, saves completely by grace. He cannot be manipulated by religious and moral performance--he can only be reached through repentance, through the giving up of power. If we are saved by sheer grace we can only become grateful, willing servants of God and of everyone around us.

Properly understood, the doctrine of sin means that believers are never as good as our true worldview should make us. Similarly, the doctrine of grace means as messed up their false worldview should make them.

Many say that it is ethnocentric to claim that our religion is superior to others. Yet isnt that very statement ethnocentric? Most non-Western cultures have no problem saying that their culture and religion is best. The idea that it is wrong to do so is deeply rooted in Western traditions of self-criticism and individualism. To charge others with the sin of ethnocentrism is really a way of saying, Our cultures approach to other cultures is superior to yours.

Every artifact of human culture is a positive response to Gods general revelation and simultaneously a rebellious assertion against His sovereign rule over us.

If we get our very identity, our sense of worth, from our political position, then politics is not really about, it is about US. Through our cause we are getting a self, our worth. That means we MUST despise and demonize the opposition. If we get our identity from our ethnicity or socioeconomic status, then we HAVE to feel superior to those of other classes and races. If you are profoundly proud of being an open-minded, tolerant soul, you will be extremely indignant toward people you think are bigots. If you are a very moral person, you will feel superior to people you think are licentious. And so on.

Our Western society is so deeply divided between these two approaches (moralism, self-discovery) that hardly anyone can conceive of any other way to live. If you criticize or distance yourself from one, everyone assumes you have chosen to follow the other, because each of these approaches tends to divide the whole world into two basic groups. The moral conformists say: the immoral people -- the people who do their own thing -- are the problem with the world, and moral people are the solution. The advocates of self-discovery say: The bigoted peole -- the people who say, We have the Truth -- are the problem with the world, and progressive people are the solution.

Community service has become a patch for morality. You can devote your life to community service and be a total schmuck.

The popular concept–that we should each determine our own morality–is based on the belief that the spiritual realm is nothing at all like the rest of the world. Does anyone really believe that? For many years after each of the morning and evening Sunday services I remained in the auditorium for another hour to field questions. Hundreds of people stayed for the give-and-take discussions. One of the most frequent statements I heard was that Every person has to define right and wrong for him- or herself. I always responded to the speakers by asking, Is there anyone in the world right now doing things you believe they should stop doing no matter what they personally believe about the correctness of their behavior? They would invariable say, Yes, of course. Then I would ask, “Doesn’t that mean that you do believe there is some kind of moral reality that is there that is not defined by us, that must be abided by regardless of what a person feels or thinks? Almost always, the response to that question was silence, either a thoughtful or a grumpy one.

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.

The infallible test of spiritual integrity, Jesus says, is your private prayer life. Many people will pray when they are required by cultural or social circumstances. Those with a genuinely lived relationship with God as Father, however, will inwardly want to pray and therefore will pray even though nothing on the outside is pressing them to do so. They pursue it even during times of spiritual dryness, when there is no social or experiential payoff.

While your character flaws may have created mild problems for other people, they will create major problems for your spouse and your marriage.

No one has ever been deeply changed by an act of the will. The only thing that can re-forge and change a life at its root, is love.

Underneath all notions of justice is a set of faith assumptions that are essentially religious, and these are often not acknowledged.

For indeed, grace is the key to it all. It is not our lavish good deeds that procure salvation, but Gods lavish love and mercy. That is why the poor are as acceptable before God as the rich. It is the generosity of God, the freeness of his salvation, that lays the foundation for the society of justice for all. Even in the seemingly boring rules and regulations of tabernacle rituals, we see that God cares about the poor, that his laws make provision for the disadvantaged. Gods concern for justice permeated every part of Israels life. It should also permeate our lives.

The proper biblical understanding of sin is much more radical and far-reaching. It can never be used as a weapon, because it will recoil on anyone who tries to deploy it that way.

The Christian Gospel is that I am so flawed that Jesus had to die for me, yet I am so loved and valued that Jesus was glad to die for me. This leads to deep humility and deep confidence at the same time. It undermines both swaggering and sniveling. I cannot feel superior to anyone, and yet I have nothing to prove to anyone. I do not think more of myself nor less of myself. Instead, I think of myself less.

The great danger is to always single out some aspect of God’s good creation and identify it, rather than alien intrusion of sin, as the villain.

Every one of our sinful actions has a suicidal power on the faculties that put that action forth. When you sin with the mind, that sin shrivels the rationality. When you sin with the heart or the emotions, that sin shrivels the emotions. When you sin with the will, that sin destroys and dissolves your willpower and your self-control. Sin is the suicidal action of the self against itself. Sin destroys freedom because sin is an enslaving power.

...the essence of gospel-humility is not thinking more of myself or thinking less of myself, it is thinking of myself less.

In other words, we are only proud of being more successful, more intelligent or more good-looking than the next person, and we are in the presence of someone who is more successful, intelligent and good-looking than we are, we lose all pleasure in what we had. That is because we really had no pleasure in it. We were proud of it.