Quotes by Timothy J. Keller

Humility is so shy. If you begin talking about it, it leaves.

Gratitude is what you feel. Thanksgiving is what you do.

The Gospel worldview equips the artist with a unique combination of optimism and realism about life.

Tolerance isnt about not having beliefs. Its about how your beliefs lead you to treat people who disagree with you.

A faith without some doubts is like a human body without any antibodies in it. People who blithely go through life too busy or indifferent to ask hard questions about why they believe as they do will find themselves defenseless against either the experience of tragedy or the probing questions of a smart skeptic. A persons faith can collapse almost overnight if she has failed over the years to listen patiently to her own doubts, which should only be discarded after long reflection. Believers should acknowledge and wrestle with doubts — not only their own but their friends and neighbors. It is no longer sufficient to hold beliefs just because you inherited them. Only if you struggle long and hard with objections to your faith will you be able to provide the grounds for your beliefs to skeptics, including yourself, that are plausible rather than ridiculous or offensive. And, just as important for our current situation, such a process will lead you, even after you come to a position of strong faith, to respect and understand those who doubt.

If there is a God, you owe him far more than a morally decent life. He deserves to be at the center of your life.

The weekly worship service can be very effective in evangelism of non-Christians and in edification of Christians if it does not aim at either alone but is gospel centered and in the vernacular.

A common vision can unite people of very different temperaments.

Idolatry means turning a good thing into the ultimate thing.

Now, what happens if you eliminate anything from the Bible that offends your sensibility and crosses your will? If you pick and choose what you want to believe and reject the rest, how will you ever have a God who can contradict you? You wont! Youll have ...A God, essentially, of your own making, and not a God with whom you can have a relationship and genuine interaction. Only if your God can say things that outrage you and make you struggle (as in a real friendship or marriage!) will you know that you have gotten hold of a real God and not a figment of your imagination. So an authoritative Bible is not the enemy of a personal relationship with God. It is the precondition for it.

True love is generative. It is the only kind that makes more of itself as it goes along.

The only way your child will grow out of their dependency into self-sufficient adults is for you to essentially abandon your own independence for 20 years or so.

On Christs attitude toward His disciples: If I gave away My big all to get to you, can you give away your little all to follow Me?

In religion our only hope is to live a life good enough to require God to bless us, so every instance of sin and repentance is therefore traumatic, unnatural and threatening. Only under great duress do religious people admit they have sinned, because their only hope is their moral goodness. In the gospel the knowledge of our acceptance in Christ makes it easier to admit that we are flawed, because we know we wont be cast off if we confess the true depths of our sinfulness. Our hope is in Christs righteousness, not our own, so it is not as traumatic to admit our weaknesses and lapses.

If you try to add to Gods salvation you subtract. If you try to add to Gods salvation you subtract. If you try to merit Gods salvation you havent believed at all, even if you try to do a little bit.

It is not the strength of your faith but the object of your faith that actually saves you. Strong faith in a weak branch is fatally inferior to weak faith in a strong branch.

God made you to love him supremely, but he lost you. He returned to get you back, but it took the cross to do it. He absorbed your darkness so that one day you can finally and dazzlingly become your true self and take your seat at his eternal feast.

Work is so foundational to our makeup that it is one of the few things we can take in significant doses without harm. Indeed, the Bible does not say we should work one day and rest six or that work and rest should be balanced evenly but directs us to the opposite ratio. Leisure and pleasure are great goods, but we can take only so much of them.

We often forget how thirsty we are because we believe we will fulfill our dreams.

There is a third quality to friendship, and it is not as easy to put into a single word. The right word, literally, is sympathy - sym-pathos, common passion. This means that friendships are discovered more than they are created at will.