Understanding more with Tim Keller

Pastor Timothy Keller died in May 2023, one of his gifts was an ability to communicate the Christian faith with love and compassion.  Among the many famous quotes, are these:

 

“[These are] Christianity’s unsurpassed offers—a meaning that suffering cannot remove, a satisfaction not based on circumstances, a freedom that does not hurt but rather enhances love, an identity that does not crush you or exclude others, a moral compass that does not turn you into an oppressor, and a hope that can face anything, even death.” 

 

“Everything in the Hebrew worldview militated against the idea that a human being could be God. Jews would not even pronounce the name ‘Yahweh’ nor spell it. And yet Jesus Christ—by his life, by his claims, and by his resurrection—convinced his closest Jewish followers that he was not just a prophet telling them how to find God, but God himself come to find us.” 

 

 “When you come to Christ, you must drop your conditions. You have to give up the right to say, ‘I will obey you if . . . I will do this if . . .’ As soon as you say, ‘I will obey you if,’ that is not obedience at all. You are saying: ‘You are my adviser, not my Lord. I will be happy to take your recommendations. And I might even do some of them.’ No. If you want Jesus with you, you have to give up the right to self-determination. Self-denial is an act of rebellion against our late-modern culture of self-assertion. But that is what we are called to. Nothing less.”

 

“When you say, ‘Doctrine doesn’t matter; what matters is that you live a good life,’ that is a doctrine. It is called the doctrine of salvation by your works rather than by grace.”

 

“It’s in death that God says, ‘If I’m not your security, then you’ve got no security, because I’m the only thing that can’t be taken away from you. I will hold you in my everlasting arms. Every other set of arms will fail you, but I will never fail you.’ Smelling salts are very disagreeable, but they are also very effective. But as you’re waking from your illusions, be at peace, because here’s what Jesus Christ offers to us if by faith we have him as our Savior.”

 

“If you want to understand your own behavior, you must understand that all sin against God is grounded in a refusal to believe that God is more dedicated to our good, and more aware of what that is, than we are. We distrust God because we assume he is not truly for us, that if we give him complete control we will be miserable. Adam and Eve did not say, ‘Let’s be evil. Let’s ruin our own lives and everyone else’s too!’ Rather they thought, ‘We just want to be happy. But his commands don’t look like they’ll give us the things we need to thrive. We’ll have to take things into our own hands—we can’t trust him.’”

 

To read some of the many others, visit https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/50-quotes-tim-keller/