Timothy J. Keller Quotes & Sayings

What is more ultimate, the absolute or the particular? The One or the Many? The ideal and eternal or the real and the concrete? Is Plato right or Aristotle? But the doctrine of the incarnation breaks through those binaries and categories. "Immanuel" means the ideal has become real, the absolute has become a particular, and the invisible has become visible! — Timothy J. Keller

Margaret realizes that the demise of her plans had shattered her false god, and now she was free for the first time to worship the True One. When serving the god-of-my-plans, she had been extraordinarily anxious. She had never been sure that God was going to come through for her and "get it right." She was always trying to figure out how to bring God to do what she had planned. But she had not really been treating him as God - as the all-wise, all-good, all-powerful one. Now she had been liberated to put her hope not in her agendas and plans but in God himself. — Timothy J. Keller

The Christian life begins not with high deeds and achievements but with the most simple and ordinary act of humble asking. Then the life and joy grow in us over the years through commonplace, almost boring practices. Daily obedience, reading and prayer, worship attendance, serving our brothers and sisters in Christ as well as our neighbors, depending on Jesus during times of suffering. And bit by bit our faith will grow, and the foundation of our lives will come closer to that deep river of joy. Don't — Timothy J. Keller

The primary theological fact about prayer is this: We address a triune God, and our prayers can be heard only through the distinct work of every person in the Godhead. — Timothy J. Keller

Only the sacrifice of an innocent god could justify the endless and universal torture of innocence. Only the most abject suffering by God could assuage man's agony."208 Berger sees the brilliance of — Timothy J. Keller

I confess that I am simply not changed enough by the great truths of the Gospel that I profess to believe with all my heart. Show me the specific gaps between my faith and my practice, and empower me to close them. Amen. — Timothy J. Keller

there has to be somebody whom you adore who adores you. Someone whom you cannot but praise who praises and loves you - that is the foundation of identity. The praise of the praiseworthy is above all rewards.3 However, if we put this power in the hands of a fallible, changeable person, it can be devastating. And if this person's regard is based on your fallible and changeable life efforts, your self-regard will be just as fleeting and fragile. Nor can this person be someone you can lose, because then you will have lost your very self. Obviously, no human love can meet these standards. Only love of the immutable can bring tranquillity. Only the unconditional love of God will do. — Timothy J. Keller

there is something in us from God that knows we are not alone in the universe, and that we were not meant to go it alone. Prayer is a natural human instinct. — Timothy J. Keller

Do you want to know who you are, your strengths and weaknesses? Do you want to be a compassionate person who skillfully helps people who are hurting? Do you want to have such a profound trust in God that you are fortified against the disappointments of life? Do you want simply to be wise about how life goes? Those are four crucial things to have - but none of them are readily achievable without suffering. — Timothy J. Keller

But Christianity is not just for the strong; it's for everyone, especially for people who admit that, where it really counts, they're weak. — Timothy J. Keller

You are with Another, and he is unique. God is the only person from whom you can hide nothing. — Timothy J. Keller

When we contextualize faithfully and skillfully, we show people how the baseline "cultural narratives" of their society and the hopes of their hearts can only find resolution and fulfillment in Jesus. — Timothy J. Keller

Only if your God can say things that upset you will you know you have a real God and not just a creation of your imagination. So — Timothy J. Keller

David found the heart to pray when he received God's Word of promise - that he would establish his throne and build him a house. Christians, however, have an infinitely greater Word of promise. God will not merely build us a house, he will make us his house. He will fill us with his presence, beauty, and glory. Every time Christians merely remember who they are in Christ, that great word comes home to us and we will find, over and over again, a heart to pray. — Timothy J. Keller

Gifts are things we do, but spiritual fruit or graces are things we are — Timothy J. Keller

Augustine writes: "We love God, therefore, for what He is in Himself, and [we love] ourselves and our neighbors for His sake." That — Timothy J. Keller

If doctrinal soundness is not accompanied by heart experience, it will lead eventually to nominal Christianity - that is, in name only - and eventually to nonbelief. The irony is that many conservative Christians, most concerned about conserving true and sound doctrine, neglect the importance of prayer and make no effort to experience God, and this can lead to the eventual loss of sound doctrine. Owen believes that Christianity without real experience of God will eventually be no Christianity at all. — Timothy J. Keller

If earthly fathers, who are sinful, ordinarily want to make their children happy, "how much more" committed is our perfect heavenly Father to our well-being and happiness? — Timothy J. Keller

When J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy was published in the 1950s, a woman named Rhona Beare wrote Tolkien and asked him about the chapter in which the Ring of Power is destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom. When the ring is melted, the Dark Lord's entire power collapses and melts away with it. She found it inexplicable that this unassailable, overwhelming power would be wiped out by the erasure of such a little object. Tolkien replied that at the heart of the plot was the Dark Lord's effort to magnify and maximize his power by placing so much of it in the ring. He wrote: "The Ring of Sauron is only one of the various mythical treatments of the placing of one's life, or power, in some external object, which is thus exposed to capture or destruction with disastrous results to oneself. — Timothy J. Keller

to the world. God created both body and soul, and the resurrection of Jesus shows that he is going to redeem both body and soul. The work of the Spirit of God is not only to save souls but also to care and cultivate the face of the earth, the material world. It is hard to overemphasize the uniqueness of this vision. Outside of the Bible, no other major religious faith holds out any hope or even interest in the restoration of perfect shalom, justice, and wholeness in this material world. Vinoth Ramachandra, a Sri Lankan Christian writer, can see — Timothy J. Keller

Our culture tells us that you must look inside to discover your deepest desires and dreams and to express them. You must do this yourself, and must not rely on anyone outside to affirm and tell you who you are. — Timothy J. Keller

There is an old story of a king who went into the village streets to greet his subjects. A beggar sitting by the roadside eagerly held up his alms bowl, sure that the king would give handsomely. Instead the king asked the beggar to give him something. Taken aback, the beggar fished three grains of rice from his bowl and dropped them into the king's outstretched hand. When at the end of the day the beggar poured out what he had received, he found to his astonishment three grains of pure gold in the bottom of his bowl. O, that I had given him all!3 One — Timothy J. Keller

Edmund Clowney observes that prayer involves an honesty that has no real parallel in human relationships, because every human relation necessarily involves only a part of your personality. We relate differently to our spouse, our business partner, and a chance acquaintance on the street because each of our social roles expresses only a part of our personhood. Even our spouse sees only part of who we are. "In relation to God, however, we are 'naked and pinned down' (Heb 4:13). Our masks are gone, pretense is useless: the relationship is not partial, but total. All that we are stands related to our Maker and Redeemer."245 — Timothy J. Keller

He so tempers the outcome of events according to his incomprehensible plan that the prayers of the saints, which are a mixture of faith and error, are not nullified."185 — Timothy J. Keller

It takes the entire Bible to help us understand all the reasons that Jesus' death on the cross was not just a failure and a tragedy but was consummate wisdom. It takes a major part of Genesis to help us understand God's purposes in Joseph's tribulations. Sometimes we may wish that God would send us our book - a full explanation! But even though we cannot know all the particular reasons for our crosses, we can look at the cross and know God is working things out. — Timothy J. Keller

The only time in all the gospels that Jesus Christ prays to God and doesn't call him Father is on the cross, when he says, "My God, my God, why have you forgotten me? Why have you forsaken me?" Jesus lost his relationship with the Father so that we could have a relationship with God as father. Jesus was forgotten so that we could be remembered forever - from everlasting to everlasting. Jesus Christ bore all the eternal punishment that our sins deserve. That is the cost of prayer. Jesus paid the price so God could be our father. Perhaps, — Timothy J. Keller

Many point to the rising percentage of younger adult "nones" in the United States as evidence for the inevitable shrinkage of religion. However, Kaufmann shows that almost all of the new religiously unaffiliated come not from conservative religious groups but from more liberal ones. Secularization, he writes, "mainly erodes . . . the taken-for-granted, moderate faiths that trade on being mainstream and established."67 Therefore, the very "liberal, moderate" forms of religion that most secular people think are the most likely to survive will not. Conservative religious bodies, by contrast, have a very high retention rate of their children, and they convert more than they lose.68 — Timothy J. Keller

If you are preaching on the first commandment ("Thou shalt have no other gods before me") or Ephesians 5:5 (which calls greed idolatry) or any of the several hundred other places in the Bible that speak of idols, you could quote David Foster Wallace, the late postmodern novelist. In his Kenyon College commencement speech he argues eloquently and forcefully that "everyone worships. The only choice we get is what to worship."32 He goes on to say everyone has to "tap real meaning in life," and whatever you use to do that, whether it is money, beauty, power, intellect, or something else, it will drive your life because it is essentially a form of worship. He enumerates why each form of worship does not merely make you fragile and exhausted but can "eat you alive." If you lay out his argument in support of fundamental biblical teaching, even the most secular audience will get quiet and keep listening to what you say next. — Timothy J. Keller

Sit for thirty minutes and write down at least thirty things you learn from Mark 1:17," which reads, "'Come, follow me,' Jesus said, 'and I will send you out to fish for people.'" Then she instructed us, "Don't think after ten minutes and four or five things written down that you've figured it out. Take the whole thirty minutes and try to get to thirty things observed. — Timothy J. Keller

The evil we see today was not part of God's original design. It was not God's intent for human life. That means that ultimately, even a peaceful death at the age of 90 yrs old is not the way things were meant to be...The rage at the dying of the light is our intuition that we were not meant for mortality, for the loss of love, or for the triumph of darkness. In order to help people face death and grief we often tell people that death is a perfectly natural part of life. But that asks them to repress a very right and profound human intuition - that we were not meant to simply go to dust, and that love was meant to last. — Timothy J. Keller

Lord, I praise you for being a God who avenges the weak and marginalized. But this truth is a two-edged sword. It comforts me when I see the horrendous inequities in the world. Yet it also confronts me with my own complacency in my comfortable life and my indifference to those in need. Go on dealing with my heart until I change my life. Amen. — Timothy J. Keller

prayerful dependence on the grace of Jesus is our only refuge from our own sin. — Timothy J. Keller

Competency is a basic value. It is not a means to some other end, such as wealth or position, although such results may occur. — Timothy J. Keller

the graven image, the idol of the title, was a God who always acted the way we thought he should. Or more to the point - he was a God who supported our plans, how we thought the world and history should go. That is a God of our own creation, a counterfeit god. Such a god is really just a projection of our own wisdom, of our own self. In that way of operating, God is our "accomplice," someone to whom we relate as long as he is doing what we want. If he does something else, we want to "fire" him, or "unfriend him," as we would any personal assistant or acquaintance who was insubordinate or incompetent. — Timothy J. Keller

Cultural engagement in preaching must never be for the sake of appearing "relevant" but rather must be for the purpose of laying bare the listener's life foundations. — Timothy J. Keller

Both men and women today want a marriage in which they can receive emotional and sexual satisfaction from someone who will simply let them "be themselves." They want a spouse who is fun, intellectually stimulating, sexually attractive, with many common interests, and who, on top of it all, is supportive of their personal goals and of the way they are living now. — Timothy J. Keller

As soon as you express the gospel, you are unavoidably doing it in a way that is more understandable and accessible for people in some cultures and less so for others. — Timothy J. Keller

If we believe the great God of the universe really loves us, it should make us emotionally unshakable in the face of criticism, suffering, and death. In — Timothy J. Keller

Christians don't face adversity by stoically decreasing our love for the people and things of this world so much as by increasing our love and joy in God. — Timothy J. Keller

the abuse of the subjective in some circles cannot exclude the 'mystical' and emotional dimensions of Christian experience. — Timothy J. Keller

Only Jesus says, "I have come for the weak. I have come for those who admit they are weak. I will save them not by what they do but through what I do. — Timothy J. Keller

We are as strictly and solemnly commanded to pray as in the others . . . not to kill, not to steal, etc."165 We must pray whether we feel like it or not. — Timothy J. Keller

to some parts of biblical teaching," and "B" beliefs, which contradict Christian truth ("B" doctrines) and "lead listeners to find some Christian doctrines implausible or overtly offensive." Take a moment to identify a key "A" doctrine - a teaching from the Bible that would be generally accepted and affirmed by your target culture - and how it expresses itself in the culture through "A" beliefs. What is an example of a "B" belief in your culture, and what "B" doctrines does it conflict with directly? 4. Keller writes, "It is important to learn how to distinguish a culture's A.' doctrines from its 'B' doctrines because knowing which are which provides the key to compelling confrontation. This happens when we base our argument for 'B' doctrines directly on the A.' doctrines." Using the examples you discussed — Timothy J. Keller

Lipton, a professor of history at SUNY Stony Brook, concluded, "In the face of recent revelations about the reckless and self-indulgent sexual conduct of so many of our elected officials, it may be worth recalling that sexual restraint rather than sexual prowess was once the measure of a man. — Timothy J. Keller

The essence of becoming a disciple is, to put it colloquially, becoming like the people we hang out with the most. Just as the single most formative experience in our lives is our membership in a nuclear family, so the main way we grow in grace and holiness is through deep involvement in the family of God. Christian community is more than just a supportive fellowship; it is an alternate society. And it is through this alternate human society that God shapes us into who and what we are. — Timothy J. Keller

OVERCONFIDENCE. We often stroll through life, thinking everything will be fine, until suddenly it isn't. — Timothy J. Keller

Yes, of course, believing in universal moral truths can be used to oppress others. But what if that absolute truth is a man who died for his enemies, who did not respond in violence with violence but forgave them? How could that story, if it is the center of your life, lead you to take up power and dominate others? — Timothy J. Keller

He expects us to come to him for refuge from our grief, fear, and pain and not to dull those emotions with amusements and distractions that promise, but can never deliver, blessing. — Timothy J. Keller

Modern Western readers immediately focus on (and often bristle at) the word "submit," because for us it touches the controversial issue of gender roles. But to start arguing about that is a mistake that will be fatal to any true grasp of Paul's introductory point. He is declaring that everything he is about to say about marriage assumes that the parties are being filled with God's Spirit. Only if you have learned to serve others by the power of the Holy Spirit will you have the power to face the challenges of marriage. — Timothy J. Keller

Theologians sometimes have spoken of the "impassibility of God;" namely that God could not be capable of emotions, of either joy and pleasure or pain and grief.237 But this goes beyond the language and teaching of the Scripture. — Timothy J. Keller

The path Jesus takes you on may look like it's taking you to one dead end after another. Nevertheless, the thread does not work in reverse. If you just obey Jesus and follow it forward, it will do its work. — Timothy J. Keller

While we may be able to demonstrably prove to any rational person that substance X will boil at temperature Y at elevation Z, we cannot so prove what we believe about justice and human rights, or that people are all equal in dignity and worth, or what we think is good and evil human behavior. If we used the same standard of evidence on our other beliefs that many secular people use to reject belief in God, no one would be able to justify much of anything. The — Timothy J. Keller

Christianity's growth, especially in the developing world, has been explosive. There are now six times more Anglicans in Nigeria alone than there are in all of the United States. There are more Presbyterians in Ghana than in the United States and Scotland combined. Korea has gone from 1 percent to 40 percent Christian in a hundred years, and experts believe the same thing is going to happen in China. If there are half a billion Chinese Christians fifty years from now, that will change the course of human history.6 — Timothy J. Keller

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. — Timothy J. Keller

Second, we will not shake our heads and roll our eyes self-righteously at what 'they' are like. Paul has referred to 'they' throughout these verses[...] The function of these verses is to draw out any self-righteous pride in us; any feeling of satisfaction that: 'They are wicked; and I am not like them.' As we will see, Paul will next turn to confront that religious, moral man: 'You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgement on someone else, for at whatever point you judge the other, you are condemning yourself' (2:1). Self-righteousness is always self-condemnatory. — Timothy J. Keller

The Psalms are the prayer book of the Bible, but it is noteworthy that the first Psalm is not a prayer per se but a meditation - in — Timothy J. Keller

The city will challenge us to discover the power of the gospel in new ways. We will find people who seem spiritually and morally hopeless to us. We will think, "Those people will never believe in Christ." But a comment such as this is revealing in itself. If salvation is truly by grace, not by virtue and merit, why should we think that anyone is less likely than ourselves to be a Christian? Why would anyone's conversion be any greater miracle than our own? The city may force us to discover that we don't really believe in sheer grace, that we really believe God mainly saves nice people - people like us. — Timothy J. Keller

Now I know that you love me more than anything in the world." That's what "the fear of God" means. — Timothy J. Keller

when the Spirit enables us to understand what Christ has done for us, the result is a life poured out in deeds of justice and compassion for the poor.5 — Timothy J. Keller

To be a Christian in business, then, means much more than just being honest or not sleeping with your coworkers. It even means more than personal evangelism or holding a Bible study at the office. Rather, it means thinking out the implications of the gospel worldview and God's purposes for your whole work life - and for the whole of the organization under your influence. — Timothy J. Keller

The gospel's power is seen in its ability to completely change minds, hearts, life orientation, our understanding of everything that happens, the way people relate to one another, and so on. Most of all, it is powerful because it does what no other power on earth can do: it can save us, reconcile us to God, and guarantee us a place in the kingdom of God forever. — Timothy J. Keller

Well, someone asks, how can we be sure God is trustworthy? The answer is that this is the one part of the Lord's Prayer Jesus himself prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, under circumstances far more crushing than any of us will ever face. He submitted to his Father's will rather than following his own desires, and it saved us. That's why we can trust him. 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. Luther adds, following Augustine, that without this trust in God, we will try to take God's place and seek revenge on those who have harmed us.203 — Timothy J. Keller

Jesus hates suffering, injustice, evil, and death so much, he came and experienced it to defeat it and, someday, to wipe the world clean of it. Knowing all this, Christians cannot be passive about hunger, sickness, and injustice. — Timothy J. Keller

But what do I love when I love you? Not the beauty of any body or the rhythm of time in its movement; not the radiance of light, so dear to our eyes; not the sweet melodies in the world of manifold sounds; not the perfume of flowers, ointments and spices; not manna and not honey; not the limbs so delightful to the body's embrace: it is none of these things that I love when I love my God. And yet when I love my God I do indeed love a light and a sound and a perfume and a food and an embrace - a light and sound and perfume and food and embrace in my inward self. There my soul is flooded with a radiance which no space can contain; there a music sounds which time never bears away; there I smell a perfume which no wind disperses; there I taste a food that no surfeit embitters; there is an embrace which no satiety severs. It is this that I love when I love my God. (Confessions 10.6.8) — Timothy J. Keller

He argues that science cannot provide the means by which to judge whether its technological inventions are good or bad for human beings. To do that, we must know what a good human person is, and science cannot adjudicate morality or define such a thing. — Timothy J. Keller

Where light leaves the affections behind, it ends in formality and or atheism; where affections outrun light they sink into the bog of superstition, doting on images and pictures or the like. — Timothy J. Keller

The lesson is that the medium is not the message, that we must not ignore uncomfortable truths just because they come through an unimpressive messenger. — Timothy J. Keller

What if your only hope was to get ministry from someone who not only did not owe you any help - but who actually owed you the opposite? What if your only hope was to get free grace from someone who had every justification, based on your relationship to him, to trample you? — Timothy J. Keller

we must not miss the fact that Paul directly tells a local congregation to adapt its worship because nonbelievers will be present. It is a false dichotomy to insist we must choose between seeking to please God and being concerned with how unchurched people feel or what they might be thinking about during our worship services. — Timothy J. Keller

the causes of poverty as put forth in the Bible are remarkably balanced. The Bible gives us a matrix of causes. One factor is oppression, which includes a judicial system weighted in favor of the powerful (Leviticus 19:15), or loans with excessive interest (Exodus 22:25-27), or unjustly low wages (Jeremiah 22:13; James 5:1-6). Ultimately, however, the prophets blame the rich when extremes of wealth and poverty in society appear (Amos 5:11-12; Ezekiel 22:29; Micah 2:2; Isaiah 5:8). As we have seen, a great deal of the Mosaic legislation was designed to keep the ordinary disparities between the wealthy and the poor from becoming aggravated and extreme. Therefore, whenever great disparities arose, the prophets assumed that to some degree it was the result of selfish individualism rather than concern with the common good. — Timothy J. Keller

Prepare the preacher more than you prepare the sermon. — Timothy J. Keller

When you see him dying to make you his treasure, that will make him yours. — Timothy J. Keller

Sabbath is therefore a declaration of our freedom. It means you are not a slave - not to your culture's expectations, your family's hopes, your medical school's demands, not even to your own insecurities. It is important that you learn to speak this truth to yourself with a note of triumph - otherwise you will feel guilty for taking time off, or you will be unable to truly unplug. — Timothy J. Keller

To understand the Scripture is not simply to get information about God. If attended to with trust and faith, the Bible is the way to actually hear God speaking and also to meet God himself. — Timothy J. Keller

we can conclude that a professed Christian who is not committed to a life of generosity and justice toward the poor and marginalized is, at the very least, a living contradiction of the Gospel of Christ, the Son of God, whose Father "executes justice for the oppressed, who gives food to the hungry — Timothy J. Keller

Austin Phelps makes this point in a chapter in his volume on prayer. He tells of Ethelfrith, the pagan Saxon king of Northumbria, who had invaded Wales and was about to give battle. The Welsh were Christians, and as Ethelfrith was observing the army of his opponents spread out before him, he noticed a host of unarmed men. When he asked who they were, he was told that they were the Christian monks of Bangor, praying for the success of their army. Ethelfrith immediately realized the seriousness of the situation. "Attack them first," he ordered. — Timothy J. Keller

A marriage based not on self-denial but on self-fulfillment will require a low- or no-maintenance partner who meets your needs while making almost no claims on you. Simply put - today people are asking far too much in the marriage partner. — Timothy J. Keller

You have been saved through a dying sacrifice, so you are free to be a living one. — Timothy J. Keller

Thomas Goodwin, a seventeenth-century Puritan pastor, wrote that one day he saw a father and son walking along the street. Suddenly the father swept the son up into his arms and hugged him and kissed him and told the boy he loved him - and then after a minute he put the boy back down. Was the little boy more a son in the father's arms than he was down on the street? Objectively and legally, there was no difference, but subjectively and experientially, there was all the difference in the world. In his father's arms, the boy was experiencing his sonship. When — Timothy J. Keller

Christmas shows us that Christianity is not good advice. It is good news. THE — Timothy J. Keller

What is the definition of "love"? Jesus answered that by depicting a man meeting material, physical, and economic needs through deeds. Caring for people's material and economic needs is not an option for Jesus. He refused to allow the law expert to limit the implications of this command to love. — Timothy J. Keller

We must not decide how to pray based on what types of prayer are the most effective for producing the experiences and feelings we want. — Timothy J. Keller

The gospel addresses our greatest need and brings change and transformation to every area of life. Let's look at just a few of the ways that the gospel changes us. Discouragement and depression. When a person is depressed, the moralist says, "You are breaking the rules. Repent." On the other hand, the relativist says, "You just need to love and accept yourself." Absent the gospel, the moralist will work on behavior, and the relativist will work on the emotions - and only superficialities will be addressed instead of the heart. Assuming the depression has no physiological base, the gospel will lead us to examine ourselves and say, "Something in my life has become more important than God - a pseudo-savior, a form of works-righteousness." The gospel leads us to embrace repentance, not to merely set our will against superficialities. — Timothy J. Keller

Work is not all there is to life. You will not have a meaningful life without work, but you cannot say that your work is the meaning of your life. If you make any work the purpose of your life - even if that work is church ministry - you create an idol that rivals God. Your relationship with God is the most important foundation for your life, and indeed it keeps all the other factors - work, friendships and family, leisure and pleasure - from becoming so important to you that they become addicting and distorted. — Timothy J. Keller

Righteous Lord, I have many who falsely accuse me. Defend me from them! But I also know my sin, and my heart rightly accuses me. I rest in Jesus's atoning death for me. — Timothy J. Keller

But this is an impossibility.23 You cannot get an identity through self-recognition; it must come in a great measure from others. — Timothy J. Keller

The gym exposes deficiencies in our bodies' strength and stamina - and appearance. You can wear all kinds of daytime clothes that hide or minimize aspects of your body that you would like to be less visible to the eye. But in the gym, you cannot hide them. There you and your coach (and unfortunately everyone around you) can see where you bulge where you shouldn't. It's an incentive to get to work. And so this metaphor tells us that when life is going along just fine, the flaws in our character can be masked and hidden from others and from ourselves. But when troubles and difficulties hit, we are suddenly in "God's gymnasium" - we are exposed. Our inner anxieties, our hair-trigger temper, our unrealistic regard of our own talents, our tendency to lie or shade the truth, our lack of self-discipline - all of these things come out. — Timothy J. Keller

the only character flaws that can really destroy you are the ones you won't admit. — Timothy J. Keller

Science is a magnificent material force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. . . . Science does not [and cannot] teach brotherly love."19 Secular, scientific reason is a great good, but if taken as the sole basis for human life, it will be discovered that there are too many things we need that it is missing. — Timothy J. Keller

Some sermons are like "a bridge to nowhere." They are grounded in solid study of the biblical text but never come down to earth on the other side. That is, they fail to connect the biblical truth to people's hearts and the issues of their lives. Other sermons are like bridges from nowhere. They reflect on contemporary issues, but the insights they bring to bear on modern problems and felt needs don't actually arise out of the biblical text. Proper contextualization is the act of bringing sound biblical doctrine all the way over the bridge by reexpressing it in terms coherent to a particular culture. — Timothy J. Keller

The gospel of Jesus Christ is an offense to both religion and irreligion. It can't be co-opted by either moralism or relativism. — Timothy J. Keller

The alternative to this truce-marriage is to determine to see your own selfishness as a fundamental problem and to treat it more seriously than you do your spouse's. Why? Only you have complete access to your own selfishness, and only you have complete responsibility for it. So each spouse should take the Bible seriously, should make a commitment to "give yourself up." You should stop making excuses for selfishness, you should begin to root it out as it's revealed to you, and you should do so regardless of what your spouse is doing. If two spouses each say, "I'm going to treat my self-centeredness as the main problem in the marriage," you have the prospect of a truly great marriage. — Timothy J. Keller

Here Calvin is appreciating the way God blesses all those who are made in his image. Yet just prior to this, Calvin also writes that while "in man's perverted and degenerate nature some sparks still gleam, [the light is nonetheless] choked with dense ignorance, so that it cannot come forth effectively. [His] mind, because of its dullness . . . betrays how incapable it is of seeking and finding truth."173 — Timothy J. Keller

In other words, some people in our culture want too much out of a marriage partner. They do not see marriage as two flawed people coming together to create a space of stability, love, and consolation - a "haven in a heartless world," as Christopher Lasch describes it.37 This will indeed require a woman who is "a novelist/astronaut with a background in fashion modeling"38 or the equivalent in a man. — Timothy J. Keller

Christians have their attitude toward God changed from one of duty to free, loving self-giving because of what Jesus did for us on the cross. — Timothy J. Keller

When you say, "I'll serve, as long as I'm getting benefits from it," that's not actually serving people; it's serving yourself through them. That's not circling them, orbiting around them; it's using them, getting them to orbit around you. — Timothy J. Keller

the city is humanity intensified - a magnifying glass that brings out the very best and worst of human nature — Timothy J. Keller

When you claim to have the truth, you are trying to get power and control over other people. — Timothy J. Keller

Only when our greatest love is God, a love that we cannot lose even in death, can we face all things with peace. — Timothy J. Keller

Christians are confronted with ethical and theological issues every day in the workplace. Preaching and ministry in urban churches must therefore help congregants form networks of believers within their vocational field and assist them in working through the theological, ethical, and practical issues they face in their work. — Timothy J. Keller