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.
– Tim Keller
Affliction | Jesus
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 or less of myself. Instead, I think of myself less.
– Tim Keller
God | The Gospel | Humility | Pride | Sin
As many have learned and later taught, you don’t realize Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you have.
– Tim Keller
Jesus
Jesus took the tree of death so you could have the tree of life.
– Tim Keller
Jesus
God will only give you what you would have asked for if you knew everything he knows
– Tim Keller
Inspiration
You (Millennials) are the generation most afraid of real community because it inevitably limits freedom and choice. Get over your fear.
– Tim Keller
Church | Community | Fear | Relationships
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.
– Tim Keller
Anger | Bitterness | Forgiveness | Happiness | Idolatry
A lack of generosity refuses to acknowledge that your assets are not really yours, but God’s.
– Tim Keller
Giving
[Spiritual friendship] is eagerly helping one another know, serve, love, and resemble God in deeper and deeper ways.
– Tim Keller
Friendship | Love | Marriage
Men, you’ll never be a good groom to your wife unless you’re first a good bride to Jesus.
– Tim Keller
Marriage | Relationships
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. But in talking this way, there is a danger of falling into the opposite error that characterized many ancient and traditional societies. It is possible to see marriage as merely a social transaction, a way of doing your duty to family, tribe and society. Traditional societies made the family the ultimate value in life, and so marriage was a mere transaction that helped your family’s interest. By contrast, contemporary Western societies make the individual’s happiness the ultimate value, and so marriage becomes primarily an experience of romantic fulfillment. But the Bible sees GOD as the supreme good – not the individual or the family – and that gives us a view of marriage that intimately unites feelings AND duty, passion AND promise. That is because at the heart of the Biblical idea of marriage is the covenant.
– Tim Keller
Love | Marriage | Sacrifice
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.
– Tim Keller
Believing | Resurrection
The reason that marriage is so painful and yet wonderful is because it is a reflection of the Gospel, which is painful and wonderful at once. 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.
– Tim Keller
The Gospel | Marriage
A faith without some doubts is like a human body with no antibodies in it. People who blithely go through life too busy or indifferent to ask the hard questions about why they believe as they do will find themselves defenseless against either the experience of tragedy or the probing questions of a smart skeptic. A person’s faith can collapse almost overnight if she failed over the years to listen patiently to her own doubts, which should only be discarded after long reflection.
– Tim Keller
Faith | Doubt
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
Pain | God
What keeps the marriage going is your commitment to your spouse’s holiness.
– Tim Keller
The Gospel | Marriage
There is an inequitable distribution of both goods and opportunities in this world. Therefore, if you have been assigned the goods of this world by God and you don’t share them with others, it isn’t just stinginess, it is injustice.
– Tim Keller
Giving
If our identity is in our work, rather than Christ, success will go to our heads, and failure will go to our hearts.
– Tim Keller
Idolatry | Work
If the Christian faith gets too identified with a party, it reduces Christianity to a political position
– Tim Keller
Faith | Christianity | Politics
The Gospel, if it is really believed, removes neediness – the need to be constantly respected, appreciated, and well regarded; the need to have everything in your life go well; the need to have power over others. All of these great, deep needs continue to control you only because the concept of the glorious God delighting in you with all His being is just that – a concept and nothing more. Our hearts don’t believe it, so they operate in default mode. Paul is saying that if you want to really change, you must let the Gospel teach you – that is to train, discipline, coach you – over a period of time. You must let the Gospel argue with you. You must let the Gospel sink down deeply into your heart, until it changes your motivation and views and attitudes.
– Tim Keller
God | The Gospel | The Heart
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 remained 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.
– Tim Keller
Work | Vocation
A common vision can unite people of very different temperaments.
– Tim Keller
Friendship | Unity | Vision
Those who believe they have pleased God by the quality of their devotion and moral goodness naturally feel that they and their group deserve deference and power over others. The God of Jesus and the prophets, however, saves completely by grace. He cannot be manipulated by religious and moral performance–he can only be reached through repentance, through the giving up of power. If we are saved by sheer grace we can only become grateful, willing servants of God and of everyone around us.
– Tim Keller
Christianity | Faith | Grace | Religion | Repentance
Ultimate reality is a community of persons who know and love one another. That is what the universe, God, history, and life is all about. If you favor money, power, and accomplishment over human relationships, you will dash yourself on the rocks of reality.
– Tim Keller
Friendship | Relationships
Only with time do we really learn who the other person is and come to love the person for him- or herself and not just for the feelings and experiences they give us.
– Tim Keller
Love | Marriage | Time
We believe the world was made by a God who is a community of persons who have loved each other for all eternity. You were made for mutually self-giving, other directed love. Self-centeredness destroys the fabric of what God has made.
– Tim Keller
For indeed, grace is the key to it all. It is not our lavish good deeds that procure salvation, but God’s lavish love and mercy. That is why the poor are as acceptable before God as the rich. It is the generosity of God, the freeness of his salvation that lays the foundation for the society of justice for all. Even in the seemingly boring rules and regulations of tabernacle rituals, we see that God cares about the poor, that his laws make provision for the disadvantaged. God’s concern for justice permeated every part of Israel’s life. It should also permeate our lives.
– Tim Keller
God | Justice
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.
– Tim Keller
Forgiveness
Have you heard God’s blessing in your inmost being? Are the words, ‘You are my beloved child, in whom I delight’ an endless source of joy and strength? Have you sensed, through the Holy Spirit, God speaking to you? That blessing- the blessing through the Spirit that is ours through Christ- is what Jacob received and it is the only remedy against idolatry. Only that blessing makes idols unnecessary. As with Jacob, we usually discover this only after a life of ‘looking for blessings in all the wrong places.’ It often takes an experience of crippling weakness for us to finally discover it. That is why so many of the most God-blessed people limp as they dance for joy.
– Tim Keller
Blessings
How you experience your present is completely shaped by what you believe your ultimate future to be.
– Tim Keller
The Future
If you want God’s grace, all you need is need, all you need is nothing. But that kind of spiritual humility is hard to muster. We come to God saying, ‘Look at all I’ve done,’ or maybe ‘Look at all I’ve suffered.’ God, however, wants us to look to him – to just wash.
– Tim Keller
Grace
When we look at the whole scope of this story line, we see clearly that Christianity is not only about getting one’s individual sins forgiven so we can go to heaven. That is an important means of God’s salvation, but not the final end or purpose of it. The purpose of Jesus’ coming is to put the whole world right, to renew and restore the creation, not to escape it. It is not just to bring personal forgiveness and peace, but also justice and shalom to the world. God created both the 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.
– Tim Keller
sin | Jesus | resurrection
Sociologists argue that in contemporary Western society the marketplace has become so dominant that the consumer model increasingly characterizes most relationships that historically were covenantal, including marriage. Today we stay connected to people only as long as they are meeting our particular needs at an acceptable cost to us. When we cease to make a profit – that is, when the relationship appears to require more love and affirmation from us than we are getting back – then we ‘cut our loses’ and drop the relationship. This has also been called ‘commodification,’ a process by which social relationships are reduced to economic exchange relationships, and so the very idea of ‘covenant’ is disappearing in our culture. Covenant is therefore a concept increasingly foreign to us, and yet the Bible says it is the essence of marriage.
– Tim Keller
Love | Marriage
Jesus’ teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day. However, in the main, our churches today do not have this effect. The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even our most avant-garde ones. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated or the broken and marginal avoid church. That can only mean one thing. If the preaching of our ministers and the practice of our parishioners do not have the same effect on people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did.
– Tim Keller
Jesus | Preaching
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?
– Tim Keller
Religion
The essence of Gospel-humility is not thinking more of myself or thinking less of myself, it is thinking of myself less.
– Tim Keller
Humility | Pride
In the Christian view, the ultimate evidence for the existence of God is Jesus Christ.? If there is a God, we characters in his play have to hope that he put some information about himself in the play. But Christians believe he did more than give us information. He wrote himself into the play as the main character in history, when Jesus was born in a manger and rose from the dead.
– Tim Kelle
Jesus
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?
– Tim Keller
Atheism
Reason can get you to probability, but only commitment can get you to certainty.
– Tim Keller
Commitment
We must say to ourselves something like this: ‘Well, when Jesus looked down from the cross, he didn’t think ‘I am giving myself to you because you are so attractive to me.’ No, he was in agony, and he looked down at us – denying him, abandoning him, and betraying him – and in the greatest act of love in history, he stayed. He said, ‘Father, forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing.’ He loved us, not because we were lovely to him, but to make us lovely. That is why I am going to love my spouse.’ Speak to your heart like that, and then fulfill the promises you made on your wedding day.
– Tim Keller
Jesus | Love | Marriage
Both men and women today see marriage not as a way of creating character and community but as a way to reach personal life goals. They are looking for a marriage partner who will ‘fulfill their emotional, sexual, and spiritual desires.’ And that creates an extreme idealism that in turn leads to a deep pessimism that you will ever find the right person to marry.
– Tim Keller
Love | Marriage | Relationships
To the degree you experience God’s love towards you – seeing you as beautiful and radiant – to that degree sex won’t ruin your life.
– Tim Keller
Relationships
All real, life-changing love is costly, substitutionary sacrifice
– Tim Keller
Love
The great danger is to always single out some aspect of God’s good creation and identify it, rather than alien intrusion of sin, as the villain.
– Tim Keller
Creation | Sin
If you do nothing but urge people to ‘look out for number one,’ you will be setting them up for future failure in any relationship, especially marriage.
– Tim Keller
Failure
The Gospel is neither religion nor irreligion – it is something else altogether. Religion makes law and moral obedience a means of salvation, while irreligion makes the individual a law to him – or herself. The Gospel, however, is that Jesus takes the law of God so seriously that He paid the penalty of disobedience, so we can be saved by sheer grace.
– Tim Keller
God | The Gospel | Religion
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.
– Tim Keller
Providence | Success
The text says that when the Lord saw that Leah was not loved, he loved her. God was saying, ‘I am the real bridegroom. I am the husband of the husbandless. I am the father of the fatherless.’ This is the God who saves by grace. The Gods of moralistic religions favor the successful and the overachievers. They are the ones who climb the moral ladder up to heaven. But the God of the Bible is the one who comes down into this world to accomplish a salvation and give us a grace we could never attain ourselves.
– Tim Keller
The Bible | Grace
Every artifact of human culture is a positive response to God’s general revelation and simultaneously a rebellious assertion against His sovereign rule over us.
– Tim Keller
Grace | Culture
In Ephesians 5, Paul shows us that even on earth Jesus did not use his power to oppress us but sacrificed everything to bring us into union with him. And this takes us beyond the philosophical to the personal and the practical. If God had the Gospel of Jesus’ salvation in mind when he established marriage, then marriage only ‘works’ to the degree that approximates the pattern of God’s self-giving love in Christ.
– Tim Keller
Jesus | Love | Marriage | Sacrifice
Humility is so shy. If you begin talking about it, it leaves.
– Tim Keller
Humility
The weekly worship service can be very effective in evangelism of non-Christians and in edification of Christians if it does not aim at either alone but is Gospel centered and in the vernacular.
– Tim Keller
Evangelism | Worship
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.
– Tim Keller
Redemption | Work
Our hearts love to manufacture glory for themselves.
– Tim Keller
Neither son loved the father for himself. They both were using the father for their own self-centered ends rather than loving, enjoying, and serving him for his own sake. This means that you can rebel against God and be alienated from him either by breaking his rules or by keeping all of them diligently. It’s a shocking message: Careful obedience to God’s law may serve as a strategy for rebelling against God.
– Tim Keller
Rebellion
It seems almost oxymoronic to believe that this new idealism has led to a new pessimism about marriage, but that is exactly what has happened. In generations past there was far less talk about compatibility and finding the ideal soul mate. Today we are looking for someone who accepts us as we are and fulfills our desires, and this creates an unrealistic set of expectations that frustrates both the searchers and the searched for.
– Tim Keller
Love | Marriage | Compatibility
This principle – that your spouse should be capable of becoming your best friend – is a game changer when you address the question of compatibility in a prospective spouse. If you think of marriage largely in terms of erotic love, then compatibility means sexual chemistry and appeal. If you think of marriage largely as a way to move into the kind of social status in life you desire, then compatibility means being part of the desired social class, and perhaps common tastes and aspirations for lifestyle. The problem with these factors is that they are not durable. Physical attractiveness will wane, no matter how hard you work to delay its departure. And socio-economic status unfortunately can change almost overnight. When people think they have found compatibility based on these things, they often make the painful discovery that they have built their relationship on unstable ground. A woman ‘lets herself go’ or a man loses his job, and the compatibility foundation falls apart.
– Tim Keller
Love | Marriage | Romance
All change comes from deepening your understanding of the salvation of Christ and living out the changes that understanding creates in your heart.
– Tim Keller
Change | Jesus
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.
– Tim Keller
Sin
Underneath all notions of justice is a set of faith assumptions that are essentially religious, and these are often not acknowledged.
– Tim Keller
Justice
Believers should acknowledge and wrestle with doubts. It is no longer sufficient to hold beliefs just because you inherited them.
– Tim Keller
While your character flaws may have created mild problems for other people, they will create major problems for your spouse and your marriage.
– Tim Keller
Character | Marriage
Faith gives you a concept of the dignity and worth of all work, even simple work, without which work could bore you.
– Tim Keller
Work
Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did.
– Tim Keller
Love
As C. S. Lewis points out, the journey to hell is a process, which can begin with something as apparently innocuous as a grumbling mood.
– Tim Keller
Hell
Any person who only sticks with Christianity as long as things are going his or her way, is a stranger to the cross
– Tim Keller
The Cross
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.
– Tim Keller
Christianity | Faith | God | Grace | Repentance
Even if 80 percent of the population of a country are Christian believers, they will have almost no cultural influence if the Christians do not live in cultural centers and work in culture-forging fields such as academia, publishing, media, entertainment, and the arts. The assumption that society will improve simply be more Christian believers being present is no longer valid.
– Tim Keller
Evangelism
Friendship is a deep oneness that develops when two people, speaking the truth in love to one another, journey together to the same horizon.
– Tim Keller
Friendship
Lord, make me happy enough in the grace of Jesus to avoid being proud, cold, scared, and hooked.
– Tim Keller
Grace | Happiness
Marriage has the power to set the course of your life as a whole. If your marriage is strong, even if all the circumstances in your life around you are filled with trouble and weakness, it won’t matter. You will be able to move out into the world in strength.
– Tim Keller
Love | Marriage | Strength
If you try to add to God’s salvation you subtract. If you try to add to God’s salvation you subtract. If you try to merit God’s salvation you haven’t believed at all, even if you try to do a little bit.
– Tim Keller
The Gospel | Inspiration | Salvation
It is not the strength of your faith but the object of your faith that actually saves you.
– Tim Keller
Faith
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.
– Tim Keller
Without the Gospel we hate ourselves instead of our sin. Without the Gospel we’re motivated through all sorts of awful fear and pride to change and it doesn’t really change our hearts; it just restrains our hearts.
– Tim Keller
The Gospel
You can avoid Jesus as Savior by keeping all the moral laws. If you do that, then you have ‘rights.’ God owes you answered prayers, and a good life, and a ticket to heaven when you die. You don’t need a Savior who pardons you by free grace, for you are your own Savior.
– Tim Keller
Grace
Churches that are filled with self-righteous, exclusive, insecure, angry, moralistic people are extremely unattractive. Their public pronouncements are often highly judgmental, while internally such churches experience many bitter conflicts, splits, and divisions. When one of their leaders has a moral lapse, the churches either rationalize it and denounce the leader’s critics, or else they scapegoat him. Millions of people raised in or near these kinds of churches reject Christianity at an early age or in college largely because of their experience. For the rest of their lives, then, they are inoculated against Christianity. If you are a person who has been disillusioned by such churches, anytime anyone recommends Christianity to you, you assume they are calling you to adopt ‘religion.’ Pharisees and their unattractive lives leave many people confused about the real nature of Christianity.
– Tim Keller
Church
If you wait until your motives are pure and unselfish before you do something, you will wait forever.
– Tim Keller
Christianity | Faith | The Heart
Work done by non-Christians always contains some degree of God’s common grace as well as the distortions of sin. Work done by Christians, even if it overtly names the name of Jesus is also to a significant degree distorted by sin.
– Tim Keller
Grace | Work
Older forms of indentured servanthood and the bond-service of biblical times had often been harsh, but Christian abolitionists concluded that race-based, life-long chattel slavery, established through kidnapping, could not be squared with biblical teaching either in the Old Testament or the New.
– Tim Keller
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.
– Tim Keller
Commitment | Love | Marriage
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.
– Tim Keller
God | Love
Postmodern people have been rejecting Christianity for years, thinking that it was indistinguishable from moralism.
– Tim Keller
Christianity
If your fundamental is a man dying on the cross for his enemies, if the very heart of your self-image and your religion is a man praying for his enemies as he died for them, sacrificing for them, loving them – if that sinks into your heart of hearts, it’s going to produce the kind of life that the early Christians produced. The most inclusive possible life out of the most exclusive possible claim – and that is this is the truth. But what is the truth? The truth is a God become weak, loving and dying for the people who opposed him, dying forgiving them.
– Tim Keller
Christianity | God | Jesus | The Cross
In religion our only hope is to live a life good enough to require God to bless us, so every instance of sin and repentance is therefore traumatic, unnatural and threatening. Only under great duress do religious people admit they have sinned, because their only hope is their moral goodness. In the Gospel the knowledge of our acceptance in Christ makes it easier to admit that we are flawed, because we know we won’t be cast off if we confess the true depths of our sinfulness. Our hope is in Christ’s righteousness, not our own, so it is not as traumatic to admit our weaknesses and lapses.
– Tim Keller
Christ | God | The Gospel | Religion | R | epentance
In short, the enlightenment privatized marriage, taking it out of the public sphere, and redefined its purpose as individual gratification, not any ‘broader good’ such as reflecting God’s nature, producing character, or raising children. Slowly but surely, this newer understanding of the meaning of marriage has displaced the older ones in Western culture.
– Tim Keller
Love | Marriage
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.
– Tim Keller
Salvation
Marriage is so much like salvation and our relationship with Christ that Paul says you can’t understand marriage without looking at the Gospel.
– Tim Keller
Marriage | The Bible
Those dreaming of the perfect match are outnumbered by those who don’t really want it at all, though perhaps they can’t admit it. After all, our culture makes individual freedom, autonomy and fulfillment the very highest values, and thoughtful people know deep down that any love relationship at all means the loss of all three. You can say, ‘I want someone who will accept me just as I am,’ but in your heart of hearts you know that you are not perfect, that there are plenty of things about you that need to be changed, and that anyone who gets to know you up close and personal will want to change them.
– Tim Keller
Love | Marriage
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.
– Tim Keller
Grace
Real love, the Bible says, instinctively desires permanence.
– Tim Keller
Love | Marriage
Tolerance isn’t about not having beliefs. It’s about how your beliefs lead you to treat people who disagree with you.
– Tim Keller
Tolerance
The Gospel worldview equips the artist with a unique combination of optimism and realism about life.
– Tim Keller
In any relationship, there will be frightening spells in which your feelings of love dry up. And when that happens you must remember that the essence of marriage is that it is a covenant, a commitment, a promise of future love. So what do you do? You do the acts of love, despite your lack of feeling. You may not feel tender, sympathetic, and eager to please, but in your actions you must be tender, understanding, forgiving and helpful. And, if you do that, as time goes on you will not only get through the dry spells, but they will become less frequent and deep, and you will become more constant in your feelings. This is what can happen if you decide to love.
– Tim Keller
Love | Marriage | Passion
If you understand what holiness is, you come to see that real happiness is on the far side of holiness, not the near side.
– Tim Keller
Happiness | Holiness
Within this Christian vision for marriage, 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!’ Each spouse should see the great thing that Jesus is doing in the life of their mate through the Word, the Gospel. Each spouse then should give him- or herself to be a vehicle for that work and envision the day that you will stand together before God, seeing each other presented in spotless beauty and glory.
– Tim Keller
Marriage
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.
– Tim Keller
Love | Marriage
Properly understood, the doctrine of sin means that believers are never as good as our true worldview should make us. Similarly, the doctrine of grace means as messed up their false worldview should make them.
– Tim Keller
Grace | Work
God made you to love him supremely, but he lost you. He returned to get you back, but it took the cross to do it. He absorbed your darkness so that one day you can finally and dazzlingly become your true self and take your seat at his eternal feast.
– Tim Keller
Salvation
Friends become wiser together through a healthy clash of viewpoints.
– Tim Keller
Friendship