20 of our favourite Tim Keller quotes

Today, news broke that pastor and evangelist Tim Keller had gone to be with Jesus. His commitment to the gospel and social action, plus his gracious model for cultural engagement and his thinking on justice have been an inspiration for us at CARE. Our thoughts and prayers are with Tim's wife Kathy and the whole family at this time.

Here's 20 of our favourite Tim Keller quotes:

1. “To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretense, humbles us out of our self-righteousness, and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us.”

2. “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.”

3. “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.”

4. “The church is a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints.”

5. “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.”

6. “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.”

7. “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.”

8. “Everyone will be forgotten, nothing we do will make any difference, and all good endeavours, even the best, will come to naught…Unless there is God. 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.”

9. “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?”

10. “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.”

11. "Christians will not, interestingly, benefit society if they’re just like everybody else in society. We’re not going to benefit a society filled with self-actualisers unless we really are different, unless we do believe Jesus died for us, unless we do believe that we live through the self-sacrifice of the great Jesus Christ, and therefore we’re going to live by self-sacrifice. You see, unless we are shaped deeply by that, then we’re really not going to be of any kind of benefit."

12. “Christ literally walked in our shoes and entered into our affliction. Those who will not help others until they are destitute reveal that Christ's love has not yet turned them into the sympathetic persons the gospel should make them.”

13. “While clearly Jesus was preaching the good news to all, he showed throughout his ministry the particular interest in the poor and the downtrodden that God has always had. Jesus, in his incarnation, “moved in” with the poor. He lived with, ate with, and associated with the socially ostracized (Matt 9:13).”

14. “There is something so valuable about human beings that not only may they not be murdered, but they can’t even be cursed without failing to give them their due, based on the worth bestowed upon them by God. The image of God carries with it the right to not be mistreated or harmed.”

15. “But resurrection is not just consolation — it is restoration. We get it all back — the love, the loved ones, the goods, the beauties of this life — but in new, unimaginable degrees of glory and joy and strength.”

16. “The only love that won’t disappoint you is one that can’t change, that can’t be lost, that is not based on the ups and downs of life or of how well you live. It is something that not even death can take away from you. God’s love is the only thing like that.”

17. “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.”

18. “This is gospel-humility, blessed self-forgetfulness. Not thinking less of myself as in modern cultures, or less of myself as in traditional cultures. Simply thinking of myself less.”

19. “All the beauty we have looked for in art or faces or places—and all the love we have looked for in the arms of other people—is only fully present in God himself.”

20. "It’s possible to practice this in the smaller deaths that we all experience, such as the loss of a career, friend, or loved one. In those painful situations, you have to do essentially the same thing that you have to do when you're told you’re going die: You have to take something abstract that you believe about God and make it real to your heart so He becomes your consolation. You're no longer looking to the things of this world to be your salvation.”