Timothy Keller (1950–2023), founder and pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City and New York Times bestselling author, was a powerful voice for Christian truth in a secular world. He also co-founded The Gospel Coalition with D.A. Carson and helped plant gospel-centered churches around the world through Redeemer City-to-City.
From reading and searching, I have compiled many of the best Timothy Keller quotes. Most come from his books while a few come from his Twitter @TimKellerNYC. (A quick Google search will help you find the origin of a quote if you want it.)
“Any person who only sticks with Christianity as long as things are going his or her way, is a stranger to the cross.”
“If you are intolerant of intolerant people then you are intolerant and doing the same thing you accuse of others.”
“It is no more narrow to claim that one religion is right than to claim that one way to think about all religions (namely that all are equal) is right. We are all exclusive in our beliefs about religion, but in different ways.”
“Believers should acknowledge and wrestle with doubts… It is no longer sufficient to hold beliefs just because you inherited them.”
“If Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all that he said; if he didn’t rise from the dead, then why worry about any of what he said? The issue on which everything hangs is not whether or not you like his teaching but whether or not he rose from the dead.”
“Ironically, the insistence that doctrines do not matter is really a doctrine itself.”
“Properly understood, Christianity is by no means the opiate of the people. It’s more like the smelling salts.”
“Two things we want so desperately, glory and relationship, can coexist only in God.”
“Underneath all notions of justice is a set of faith assumptions that are essentially religious, and these are often not acknowledged.”
“If the evolutionary mechanism of natural selection depends on death, destruction, and violence of the strong against the weak, then these things are perfectly natural. On what basis, then, does the atheist judge the natural world to be horribly wrong, unfair, and unjust?”
“Community service has become a patch for morality. You can devote your life to community service and be a total schmuck.”
“To stay away from Christianity because part of the Bible’s teaching is offensive to you assumes that if there is a God he wouldn’t have any views that upset you. Does that belief make sense?”
“How could you possibly know that no religion can see the whole truth unless you yourself have the superior, comprehensive knowledge of spiritual reality you just claimed none of the religions have?”
“The basic premise of religion—that if you live a good life, things will go well for you—is wrong. Jesus was the most morally upright person who ever lived, yet he had a life filled with the experience of poverty, rejection, injustice, and even torture.”
“Certainly we should be very active in seeking God, and Jesus himself called us to ‘ask, seek, knock’ in order to find him. Yet those who enter a relationship with God inevitably look back and recognize that God’s grace had sought them out, breaking them open to new realities.”
“Christian communicators must show that we remember (or at least understand) very well what it is like not to believe.”
“To move from religion to secularism is not so much a loss of faith as a shift into a new set of beliefs and into a new community of faith, one that draws the lines between orthodoxy and heresy in different places.”
“The declaration that science is the only arbiter of truth is not itself a scientific finding. It is a belief.”
“As long as you do not begin with an imposed philosophical bias against the possibility of miracles, the Resurrection has as much attestation as any other ancient historical event.”
“The problem with self-esteem – whether it is high or low – is that, every single day, we are in the courtroom.”
Why is the Bible reliable?
“The gospel is not just the A-B-C’s but the A-Z of Christianity.”
“You don’t realize Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you have.”
“A lack of generosity refuses to acknowledge that your assets are not really yours, but God’s.”
“God’s grace does not come to people who morally outperform others, but to those who admit their failure to perform and who acknowledge their need for a Savior.”
“God’s salvation does not come in response to a changed life. A changed life comes in response to the salvation, offered as a free gift.”
“…God’s grace and forgiveness, while free to the recipient, are always costly for the giver…. From the earliest parts of the Bible, it was understood that God could not forgive without sacrifice. No one who is seriously wronged can “just forgive” the perpetrator…. But when you forgive, that means you absorb the loss and the debt. You bear it yourself. All forgiveness, then, is costly.”
“The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.”
“Love without truth is sentimentality; it supports and affirms us but keeps us in denial about our flaws. Truth without love is harshness; it gives us information but in such a way that we cannot really hear it. God’s saving love in Christ, however, is marked by both radical truthfulness about who we are and yet also radical, unconditional commitment to us. The merciful commitment strengthens us to see the truth about ourselves and repent. The conviction and repentance moves us to cling to and rest in God’s mercy and grace.”
“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.”
“God’s Kingdom is “present in its beginnings, but still future in its fullness. This guards us from an under-realized eschatology (expecting no change now) and an over-realized eschatology (expecting all change now). In this stage, we embrace the reality that while we’re not yet what we will be, we’re also no longer what we used to be.”
“We modern people think of miracles as the suspension of the natural order, but Jesus meant them to be the restoration of the natural order. The Bible tells us that God did not originally make the world to have disease, hunger, and death in it. Jesus has come to redeem where it is wrong and heal the world where it is broken. His miracles are not just proofs that he has power but also wonderful foretastes of what he is going to do with that power. Jesus’ miracles are not just a challenge to our minds, but a promise to our hearts, that the world we all want is coming.”
“You don’t realize Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you have.”
“If a person has grasped the meaning of God’s grace in his heart, he will do justice. If he doesn’t live justly, then he may say with his lips that he is grateful for God’s grace, but in his heart he is far from him. If he doesn’t care about the poor, it reveals that at best he doesn’t understand the grace he has experienced, and at worst he has not really encountered the saving mercy of God. Grace should make you just.”
“Religious people find God useful. Growing Christians find God beautiful.”
“The Bible says that our real problem is that every one of us is building our identity on something besides Jesus.”
“If a person has grasped the meaning of God’s grace in his heart, he will do justice.”
“Jesus himself is the main argument for why we should believe Christianity.”
“If you want God’s grace, all you need is need, all you need is nothing.”
“Christ’s miracles were not the suspension of the natural order but the restoration of the natural order. They were a reminder of what once was prior to the fall and a preview of what will eventually be a universal reality once again–a world of peace and justice, without death, disease, or conflict.”
Tim Keller: What is the Gospel?
“If our identity is in our work, rather than Christ, success will go to our heads, and failure will go to our hearts.”
“What is an idol? It is anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give.”
“If God is not at the center of your life, something else is.”
“Fear-based repentance makes us hate ourselves. Joy-based repentance makes us hate the sin.”
“When people say, “I know God forgives me, but I can’t forgive myself,” they mean that they have failed an idol, whose approval is more important than God’s.”
“Humility is so shy. If you begin talking about it, it leaves.”
“If you understand what holiness is, you come to see that real happiness is on the far side of holiness, not the near side.”
“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.”
“If you wait until your motives are pure and unselfish before you do something, you will wait forever.”
“God will allow evil only to the degree that it brings about the very opposite of what it intends.”
“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 secret to freedom from enslaving patterns of sin is worship. You need worship. You need great worship. You need weeping worship. You need glorious worship. You need to sense God’s greatness and to be moved it — moved to tears and moved to laughter — moved by who God is and what he has done for you.”
“If you have a God infinite and powerful enough for you to be angry at for allowing evil, then you must at the same time have a God infinite enough to have sufficient reasons for allowing that evil.”
Keller’s definition of idolatry: “What is an idol? It is anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give.”
Tim Keller Speaking on his book Counterfeit Gods
“Friends become wiser together through a healthy clash of viewpoints.”
“Friendship is a deep oneness that develops when two people, speaking the truth in love to one another, journey together to the same horizon.”
“To be loved but not known is superficial. To be known and not loved is our great fear—but to be known and loved, that transforms you.”
“Our culture says that feelings of love are the basis for actions of love. And of course that can be true. But it is truer to say that actions of love can lead consistently to feelings of love.”
“Marriage [is] two flawed people coming together to create a space of stability, love and consolation, a haven in a heartless world.”
“In many areas of life, freedom is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones, the liberating restrictions.”
“We would be more patient and kind with people and less hurt if we regularly remembered that we all have deep core faults.”
“It is the illusion that if we find our one true soul mate, everything wrong with us will be healed; and no human being can live up to that.”
“In sharp contrast with our culture, the Bible teaches that the essence of marriage is a sacrificial commitment to the good of the other. That means that love is more fundamentally action than emotion.”
“Marriage is so much like salvation and our relationship with Christ that Paul says you can’t understand marriage without looking at the gospel.”
“Here’s what it means to fall in love. It is to look at another person and get a glimpse of the person God is creating, and to say, “I see who God is making you, and it excites me! I want to be part of that. I want to partner with you and God in the journey you are taking to his throne. And when we get there, I will look at your magnificence and say, ‘I always knew you could be like this. I got glimpses of it on earth, but now look at you!'”
“What marriage is for: It is a way for two spiritual friends to help each other on their journey to become the persons God designed them to be.”
Timothy Keller: “The Meaning of Marriage” | Talks at Google
“When you listen and read one thinker, you become a clone… two thinkers, you become confused… ten thinkers, you’ll begin developing your own voice… two or three hundred thinkers, you become wise and develop your voice.”
“God directs his people not simply to worship but to sing his praises “before the nations.” We are called not simply to communicate the gospel to nonbelievers; we must also intentionally celebrate the gospel before them.”
“If a group believes God favors them because of their particularly true doctrine, ways of worship, and ethical behavior, their attitude toward those without these things can be hostile.”
“Sermons aren’t just to make truth clear to the mind-but to make it real to the heart. Change happens by feeding the imagination new beauties.”
“The church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.”
“Churches that are filled with self-righteous, exclusive, insecure, angry, moralistic people are extremely unattractive.”
“While the difference between a bad sermon and a good sermon is mainly the responsibility of the preacher, the difference between good preaching and great preaching lies mainly in the work of the Holy Spirit.”
“To reach people gospel preachers must challenge the culture’s story at points of confrontation and finally retell the culture’s story, as it were, revealing how its deepest aspirations for good can be fulfilled only in Christ.”
“To reach people gospel preachers must challenge the culture’s story at points of confrontation and finally retell the culture’s story, as it were, revealing how its deepest aspirations for good can be fulfilled only in Christ.”
“Change happens not just by giving the mind new arguments but also by feeding the imagination new beauties.”
On gospel-logic moves in a sermon, use: “‘Here’s what you must do,’ then ‘Here’s why you can’t do it,’ then ‘Here’s the one who did it for you,’ and finally ‘Here’s how faith in him enables you to do it too.’ Following this logic in a sermon means that often you bring in practical application in more than one place.”
“John Frame’s ‘tri-perspectivalism’ helps me understand Willow. The Willow Creek style churches have a ‘kingly’ emphasis on leadership, strategic thinking, and wise administration. The danger there is that the mechanical obscures how organic and spontaneous church life can be. The Reformed churches have a ‘prophetic’ emphasis on preaching, teaching, and doctrine. The danger there is that we can have a naïve and unBiblical view that, if we just expound the Word faithfully, everything else in the church — leader development, community building, stewardship of resources, unified vision — will just happen by themselves. The emerging churches have a ‘priestly’ emphasis on community, liturgy and sacraments, service and justice. The danger there is to view ‘community’ as the magic bullet in the same way Reformed people view preaching.”
Sermon: The Centrality of the Gospel
Related Resource: Preaching to the Soils: The Kinds of People to Consider as You Apply Scripture in Preaching (Expansive List)
“God always gives you what you would have asked for if you knew everything that He knows.”
“To pray is to accept that we are, and always will be, wholly dependent on God for everything.”
“Prayer turns theology into experience.”
“Prayer is awe, intimacy, struggle—yet the way to reality. There is nothing more important, or harder, or richer, or more life-altering. There is absolutely nothing so great as prayer.”
“Prayer is continuing a conversation that God has started through his Word and his grace, which eventually becomes a full encounter with him.”
“To fail to pray, then, is not to merely break some religious rule—it is a failure to treat God as God.”
“God is very patient with us when we are desperate. Pour out your soul to him.”
“By praying with friends, you will be able to hear and see facets of Jesus that you have not yet perceived.”
“Jesus Christ taught his disciples to pray, healed people with prayers, denounced the corruption of the temple worship (which, he said, should be a ‘house of prayer’), and insisted that some demons could be cast out only through prayer. He prayed often and regularly with fervent cries and tears (Heb. 5:7), and sometimes all night. The Holy Spirit came upon him and anointed him as he was praying (Luke 3:21–22), and he was transfigured with the divine glory as he prayed (Luke 9:29). When he faced his greatest crisis, he did so with prayer. We hear him praying for his disciples and the church on the night before he died (John 17:1–26) and then petitioning God in agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. Finally, he died praying.” (27)
“Our prayers should arise out of immersion in the Scripture. [We] speak only to the degree we are spoken to. . . . The wedding of the Bible and prayer anchors your life down in the real God.”
“Prayer—though it is often draining, even an agony—is in the long term the greatest source of power that is possible.”
“Suffering can refine us rather than destroy us because God himself walks with us in the fire.”
“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.”
“While other worldviews lead us to sit in the midst of life’s joys, foreseeing the coming sorrows, Christianity empowers its people to sit in the midst of this world’s sorrows, tasting the coming joy.”
“Just because you can’t see or imagine a good reason why God would allow something bad to happen doesn’t mean there can’t be one.”
“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.”
Tim Keller – The Theology of the Cross and Walking with a Limp
“If the God of the Bible exists, and there is a True Reality beneath and behind this one, and this life is not the only life, then every good endeavour, even the simplest ones, pursued in response to God’s calling, can matter forever.”
“A job is a vocation only if someone else calls you to do it for them rather than for yourself. And so our work can be a calling only if it is reimagined as a mission of service to something beyond merely our own interests. Thinking of work mainly as a means of self-fulfillment and self-realization slowly crushes a person.”
“If you have money, power, and status today, it is due to the century and place in which you were born, to your talents and capacities and health, none of which you earned. In short, all your resources are in the end the gift of God.”
“The material creation was made by God to be developed, cultivated, and cared for in an endless number of ways through human labor. But even the simplest of these ways is important. Without them all, human life cannot flourish.”
“If God’s purpose for your job is that you serve the human community, then the way to serve God best is to do the job as well as it can be done.”
Tim Keller on Faith and Work
Other entries in the “100 Quotes” Series: C.S. Lewis, J.I. Packer, and Charles Spurgeon.
You may also enjoy: 100 Book Recommendations for Christians and Please Stop Saying, “Christianity Isn’t Religion, It’s a Relationship.”
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