“Any person who only sticks with Christianity as long as things are going his or her way, is a stranger to the cross.”1
“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.”
“Properly understood, Christianity is by no means the opiate of the people. It’s more like the smelling salts.”
“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.”
“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.”
“The irony of the gospel is that the only way to be worthy of it is to admit that you’re completely unworthy of it.”
“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.”
“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.”
“If God is not at the center of your life, something else is.”
“If you understand what holiness is, you come to see that real happiness is on the far side of holiness, not the near side.”
“If you wait until your motives are pure and unselfish before you do something, you will wait forever.”
“In many areas of life, freedom is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones, the liberating restrictions.”
“All death can now do to Christians is to make their lives infinitely better.”
“The central basis of Christian assurance is not how much our hearts are set on God, but how unshakably his heart is set on us.”
“You don’t fall into love. You commit to it. Love says, ‘I will be there no matter what.’”
“When Jesus Christ was in the garden of Gethsemane and the ultimate darkness was coming down on him and he knew it was coming, he didn’t abandon you; he died for you. If Jesus Christ didn’t abandon you in his darkness, the ultimate darkness, why would he abandon you now, in yours?”
“God will either give us what we ask or give us what we would have asked if we knew everything he knows.”
“Friendship is a deep oneness that develops when two people, speaking the truth in love to one another, journey together to the same horizon.”
“Men, you’ll never be a good groom to your wife unless you’re first a good bride to Jesus.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Everything in this life is going to be taken away from us, except one thing: God’s love, which can go into death with us and take us through it and into His arms.”
“It’s impossible to have met the real Jesus and be indifferent. You either bow down in wonder OR go away offended.”
1 All of these quotes are from the websites below:
100 of the Best Timothy Keller Quotes | Anchored in Christ