Timothy Keller Quotes
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Living is giving....If you spend your money on yourself, you are just surviving. But if you want your life to count, if you want to really live - give.
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Not everyone is your brother or sister in the faith, but everyone is your neighbor, and you must love your neighbor.
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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 .
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We do not have to make ourselves suffer in order to merit forgiveness. We simply receive the forgiveness earned by Christ. 1 John 1:9 says that God forgives us because He is ‘just.’ That is a remarkable statement. It would be unjust of God to ever deny us forgiveness, because Jesus earned our acceptance! In religion we earn our forgiveness with our repentance, but in the gospel we just receive it.
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It is because Jesus Christ experienced cosmic thirst on the cross that you and I can have our spiritual thirst satisfied. It is because he died that we can be born again. And he did it gladly. Seeing what he did and why he did it will turn our hearts away from the things that enslave us and toward him in worship. That is the gospel, and it is the same for skeptics, believers, insiders, outcasts, and everyone in between.
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If God wiped out all sources of evil in the world we would no longer be here, the evil is inside us.
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If God does not have our highest allegiance, we will use prayer to try to get things that have that designation.
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How could a good, all-powerful God allow suffering?
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The targets of this story are not wayward sinners but religious people who do everything the Bible requires. Jesus is pleading not so much with immoral outsiders as with moral insiders. H wants to show them their blindness, narrowness, and self righteousness, and how these things are destroying both their own souls and the lives of the people around them.
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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.
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The resurrection of the body means that we do not merely receive a consolation for the life we have lost but a restoration of it. We not only get the bodies and lives we had but the bodies and lives we wished for but had never before received.
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Life changing repentance begins where blame shifting ends.
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...the essence of gospel-humility is not thinking more of myself or thinking less of myself, it is thinking of myself less.
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The church should be a place where people can be free to say that they are sinners.
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A god of less wrath than the God of the Bible is necessarily a god of less love. His anger is a product of his love.
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If you love anything in this world more than God, you will crush that object under the weight of your expectations.
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If you say: I believed in God, I trusted God and He didn't come through - You only trusted God to meet your agenda.
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Trust is accepting what God sends into your life whether you understand it or not.
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The sin under all other sins is a lack of joy in Christ.
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Contextualization is not giving people what they want. It is giving God's answers (which they probably do not want) to the questions they are asking and in forms they can comprehend.
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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.
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If we have not seen our sin and sought radical forgiveness from God, we will be unable to forgive and to seek the good of those who have wronged us.
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The world is a dark place, and yet the coming of Jesus Christ shows us no one and nothing is hopeless.
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You can only afford to be generous if you actually have some money in the bank to give. In the same way, if your only source of love and meaning is your spouse, then anytime he or she fails you, it will not just cause grief but a psychological cataclysm. If, however, you know something of the work of the Spirit in your life, you have enough love "in the bank" to be generous to your spouse even when you are not getting much affection or kindness at the moment.
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If you come from insignificance and when you die you return to insignificance, then nothing is significant now.
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How you experience your present is completely shaped by what you believe your ultimate future to be.
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At the cross, we see the worst that sin can do, as humanity - of which each one of us is a part - crucified the Lord. But at the cross, we also see that the most that sin can do cannot thwart God's salvation.
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Occasionally God rips aside the veil, and you begin to see this very fact: All things happen for you. All things. Everything is knit together.
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How do you change your behavior? Change what you worship
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If we say, 'I believe in Jesus,' but it doesn't affect the way we live, the answer is not that now we need to add hard work to our faith so much as that we haven't truly understood or believed in Jesus at all.
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