Timothy J. Keller is a pastor, theologian, and Christian apologist who was born in the United States on September 23, 1950. He is the co-founder and chairman of Redeemer City to City, an organization that prepares pastors for service all over the world.
Aside from being the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, he is also the author of three New York Times bestselling books: The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism (2008), The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith (2008), and Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God (2014).
71 Timothy Keller Quotes
- “Real love, the Bible says, instinctively desires permanence.”
2. “It is not the strength of your faith but the object of your faith that actually saves you.”
3. “The church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.”
4. “A common vision can unite people of very different temperaments.”
5. “If our identity is in our work, rather than Christ, success will go to our heads, and failure will go to our hearts.”
6. “Friends become wiser together through a healthy clash of viewpoints.”
7. “If the Christian faith gets too identified with a party, it reduces Christianity to a political position”
8. “You are more wicked than ever dared believe and yet, you are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than you ever dared hope.”
9. “In short, God will either give us what we ask or give us what we would have asked if we knew everything he knew.”
10. “Our daily work can be a calling only if it is reconceived as God’s assignment to serve others.”
Famous Timothy Keller Quotes
11. “God will only give you what you would have asked for if you knew everything he knows”
12. “Humility is so shy. If you begin talking about it, it leaves.”
13. “Tolerance isn’t about not having beliefs. It’s about how your beliefs lead you to treat people who disagree with you.”
14. “Do not waste time bothering whether you “love” your neighbor; act as if you did.”
15. “Only when our greatest love is God, a love that we cannot lose even in death, can we face all things with peace.”
16. “God always gives you what you would have asked for if you knew everything that He knows.”
17. “One of the main ways we move from abstract knowledge about God to a personal encounter with him as a living reality is through the furnace of affliction.”
18. “Community service has become a patch for morality. You can devote your life to community service and be a total schmuck.”
19. “Reason can get you to probability, but only commitment can get you to certainty.”
20. “Suffering can refine us rather than destroy us because God himself walks with us in the fire.”
Timothy Keller Quotes About Life
21. “To pray is to accept that we are, and always will be, wholly dependent on God for everything.”
22. “Two things we want so desperately, glory and relationship, can coexist only in God.”
23. “What keeps the marriage going is your commitment to your spouse’s holiness.”
24. “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.”
25. “If this world was made by a triune God, relationships of love are what life is really all about.”
26. “When you see him dying to make you his treasure, that will make him yours.”
27. “God will allow evil only to the degree that it brings about the very opposite of what it intends.”
28. “Properly understood, Christianity is by no means the opiate of the people. It’s more like the smelling salts.”
29. “Men, you’ll never be a good groom to your wife unless you’re first a good bride to Jesus.”
30. “To discover the real you, look at what you spend time thinking about when no one is looking, when nothing is forcing you to think about anything in particular.”
Timothy Keller Quotes About Faith
31. “Any person who only sticks with Christianity as long as things are going his or her way, is a stranger to the cross”
32. “Prayer turns theology into experience.”
33. “Gratitude is what you feel. Thanksgiving is what you do.”
34. “And if you determine to run your marriage your way, you’re in for a lot of trouble, because marriage is God’s institution.”
35. “If you wait until your motives are pure and unselfish before you do something, you will wait forever.”
36. “If you remember with grateful amazement that Jesus was thrown into the ultimate furnace for you, you can begin to sense him in your smaller furnaces with you.”
37. “Work is a major instrument of God’s providence; it is how he sustains the human world.”
38. “Prayer is continuing a conversation that God has started through his Word and his grace, which eventually becomes a full encounter with him.”
39. “Like a surgeon, friends cut you in order to heal you.”
40. “You don’t realize God is all you need until God is all you have.”
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Timothy Keller Quotes About Marriage and Purpose
41. “The Gospel worldview equips the artist with a unique combination of optimism and realism about life.”
42. “Underneath all notions of justice is a set of faith assumptions that are essentially religious, and these are often not acknowledged.”
43. “Marriage is so much like salvation and our relationship with Christ that Paul says you can’t understand marriage without looking at the gospel.”
44. “The basic purpose of prayer is not to bend God’s will to mine but to mold my will into his.”
45. “You have been saved through a dying sacrifice, so you are free to be a living one.”
46. “Freedom is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones, those that fit with the realities of our own nature and those of the world.”
47. “Forgiveness is negative. Righteousness is positive. Forgiveness is you may go. Righteousness is you may come.”
48. “All change comes from deepening your understanding of the salvation of Christ and living out the changes that understanding creates in your heart.”
49. “Nearly all wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.”
50. “Faith gives you a concept of the dignity and worth of all work, even simple work, without which work could bore you.”
A Must Read: The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God by Timothy Keller
Great book for those who are single or married and want relevant and practical advice on what to expect from marriage, the key components of a successful marriage, and God’s overall purpose for this covenant. I think both Christians and non-Christians can benefit from reading this book.
51. “All work, according to God’s design, is service.”
52. “The only person over whom you have control is yourself.”
53. “It is hard to get a good perspective on marriage. We all see it through the inevitably distorted lenses of our own experience.”
54. “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. Over”
55. “If we look to some created thing to give us the meaning, hope, and happiness that only God himself can give, it will eventually fail to deliver and break our hearts.”
56. “Only when we see we cannot keep the rules, and need God’s mercy, can we become people who begin to keep the rules.”
57. “Hope comes not in the solution to the problem but in focusing on Christ, who facilitates the change.”
58. “Our hearts love to manufacture glory for themselves.”
59. “Think about this. The God of the universe became a wiggling baby in order to get close to you.”
60. “Prayer brings you into God’s presence, where our shortcomings are exposed.”
Thought-Provoking Timothy Keller Quotes
61. “God is very patient with us when we are desperate. Pour out your soul to him.”
62. “Christians are people who let the reality of Jesus change everything about who they are, how they see, and how they live. Taking”
63. “The thing we would remember from meeting a truly gospel-humble person is how much they”
64. “The usual place to learn the greatest secrets of God’s grace is at the bottom.”
65. “No suffering is for nothing.”
66. “How you experience your present is completely shaped by what you believe your ultimate future to be.”
67. “Through Jesus we don’t need perfect righteousness, just repentant helplessness, to access the presence of God.”
68. “Reweaving shalom means to sacrificially thread, lace, and press your time, goods, power, and resources into the lives and needs of others.”
69. “God relentlessly offers his grace to people who do not deserve it, or seek it, or even appreciate it after they have been saved by it.”
70. “The way the normal human ego tries to fill its emptiness and deal with its discomfort is by comparing itself to other people.”
71. “The only way to doubt Christianity rightly and fairly is to discern the alternate belief under each of your doubts and then to ask yourself what reasons you have for believing it.”
Read More about Timothy Keller:
Tim Keller: Growing My Faith in the Face of Death
