Timothy Keller
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."Collection: Christian
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.Collection: Reality
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.Collection: Jesus
As many have learned and later taught, you don't realize Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you have.Collection: Jesus
Just because you cannot realize your highest aspirations in work does not mean you have chosen wrongly, or are not called to your profession, or that you should spend your life looking for the perfect career that is devoid of frustration. ... You should expect to be regularly frustrated in your work even though you may be in exactly the right vocation.Collection: Mean
The key to continual and deeper spiritual renewal and revival is the continual re-discovery of the gospel.Collection: Spiritual
Repentance out of mere fear is really sorrow for the consequences of sin, sorrow over the danger of sin — it bends the will away from sin, but the heart still clings. But repentance out of conviction over mercy is really sorrow over sin, sorrow over the grievousness of sin — it melts the heart away from sin. It makes the sin itself disgusting to us, so it loses its attractive power over us. We say, ‘this disgusting thing is an affront to the one who died for me. I’m continuing to stab him with it!’Collection: Heart
It is because of the doctrine of judgment and hell that Jesus' proclamations of grace and love are so astounding.Collection: Jesus
Even if our own troubles are great, we should still serve. Jesus washed His disciples feet on the way to the cross.Collection: Jesus
As things are brought back under Christ's rule and authority, they are restored to health, beauty, and freedom.Collection: Christ
Marriage does not so much bring you into confrontation with your spouse as confront you with yourself.Collection: Doe
But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God.Collection: Commitment
The best people often have terrible lives. Job is one example, and Jesus—the ultimate ‘Job,’ the only truly, fully innocent sufferer — is another.Collection: God
To stand in the presence of God, that is what the Gospel is. The Gospel is not primarily about forgiveness. It’s not primarily about good feelings. It’s not primarily about power. All those things are byproducts, sparks. It’s primarily about the presence of God.Collection: Feelings
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.Collection: People
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.Collection: Inspirational
What greater value could you possibly have than to be delighted in and sacrificed for by the Maker of the universe.Collection: Makers
Disordered love always leads to misery and breakdown. The only way to 'reorder' our loves is to love God supremely.Collection: Love Is
The doctrine of grace and redemption keeps us from seeing any person or situation as hopeless.Collection: Grace
Prayer turns theology into experience.Collection: Prayer
Nothing we formulate or do can qualify us for access to God. Only grace can do that- based not on our performance but on the saving work of Christ.Collection: Grace
If Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all he said.Collection: Jesus
Happiness is a by-product of wanting something more than happiness-to be rightly related to God and our neighbor.Collection: Neighbor
Ministry to the poor is a crucial sign that we believe the gospel.Collection: Believe
The deeper the experience of the free grace of God, the more generous we must become.Collection: Grace
You are worse than you think you are, but also far more loved than you feel you are.Collection: Thinking
The world is polarizing over religion. It is getting both more religious and less religious at the same time.Collection: Religious
If God is treated as God during suffering, then suffering can reveal and present him in all his greatness.Collection: Greatness
There is a direct relationship between a person's grasp and experience of God's grace, and his or her heart for justice and the poor.Collection: Heart
When you forgive, that means you absorb the loss and the debt. You bear it yourself. All forgiveness, then, is costly.Collection: Mean
Careful obedience to God’s law may serve as a strategy for rebelling against GodCollection: Law
Paul reminds us that in the Gospel we are both brought lower and raised higher than we can imagine.Collection: Imagine
We think that idols are bad things, but that is almost never the case. The greater the good, the more likely we are to expect that it can satisfy our deepest needs and hopes. Anything can serve as a counterfeit god, especially the very best things in life.Collection: Thinking
A genuinely persuasive argument does not merely tell you that you are wrong about everything. It doesn't just beat on you from the outside. It comes inside your belief system, as it were, and affirms something you believe strongly. And then it says - well if you believe this (A) then why in the world can't you see that B is true?Collection: Believe
If you and your church were to disappear off the face of the earth tomorrow, would anyone in the community around you notice you were gone? And if the community did even notice would they say 'we are really glad they are gone', or 'we are really going to miss them'?Collection: Community
A triune God would call us to converse with him . . . because he wants to share the joy he has. Prayer is our way of entering into the happiness of God himself.Collection: Prayer
No writer or thinker has taught me as much as James Hunter has about this all-important and complex subject of how culture is changed.Collection: Important
The rich brother needs to let the gospel humble him while the poor brother needs to let the gospel affirm him.Collection: Brother
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.Collection: Christian
When we try and use fear or pride to stop from sinning, we are forgetting that we sin because of either fear or pride.Collection: Pride
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's 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.Collection: Jesus
Idols are often good things that we have made into ultimate things.Collection: Idols
Those who condemn the self-righteous for the sake of self-discovery do so with ironic self-righteousness.Collection: Discovery
A rich, vibrant, consoling, hard-won prayer life is the one good that makes it possible to receive all other kinds of goods rightly and beneficially. [Paul] does not see prayer as merely a way to get things from God but as a way to get more of God himself.Collection: Prayer
The church does not simply have a missions department; it should wholly exist to be a mission.Collection: Church
Jesus does not divide the world into the moral "good guys" and the immoral "bad guys". He shows us that everyone is dedicated to a project of self-salvation, to using God and others in order to get power and control for themselves. We are just going about it in different ways. Even though both sons are wrong, however, the father cares for them and invites them both back into his love and feast.Collection: Jesus
The Cross is not simply a lovely example of sacrificial love. Throwing your life away needlessly is not admirable — it is wrong. Jesus’ death was only a good example if it was more than an example, if it was something absolutely necessary to rescue us. And it was. Why did Jesus have to die in order to forgive us? There was a debt to be paid — God himself paid it. There was a penalty to be born — God himself bore it. Forgiveness is always a form of costly suffering.Collection: Jesus
Faith is not opposed to reason, but it is sometimes opposed to feelings and appearances.Collection: Feelings
So live in the light of the resurrection and renewal of this world, and of yourself, in a glorious, never-ending, joyful dance of grace.Collection: Light