Quotes from Timothy Keller

Your feelings come from where you find your hope. Where is your happiness and your significance?

What is an idol? It is anything more important to you than God, anything that absorbs your heart and imagination more than God, anything you seek to give you what only God can give.

Change happens not just by giving the mind new arguments but also by feeding the imagination new beauties

If you seek to serve people more than to gain power, you will not only serve people, you will gain influence.

God loves and defends those with the least economic and social power, and so should we.

God will only give you what you would have asked for if you knew everything he knows

Prayer gives us relief from the melancholy burden of self-absorption .

Every single emotion you have should be processed in prayer.

Prayer turns theology into experience.

Prayer-though it is often draining, even an agony-is in the long term the greatest source of power that is possible.

Prayer should be done regularly, persistently, resolutely, and tenaciously at least daily, whether we feel like it or not.

Prayer is never just an emergency flare or desperate anxious gamble. God's attention is not based on our performance but parental love.

There seems to be a human instinct for prayer. Swiss theologian Karl Barth calls it our 'incurable God-sickness.'

Without immersion in God's words, our prayers may not be merely limited and shallow but also untethered from reality.

Prayer can be simple, but it's not easy. Nothing great is.

Prayer is continuing a conversation that God has started through his Word and his grace, which eventually becomes a full encounter with him.

But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God.

The determining factor in our relationship with God is not our past but Christ's past.

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.

Marriage is so much like salvation and our relationship with Christ that you can't understand marriage w/o looking at the gospel.

In religion, you obey because God is useful. In Christianity, you obey because God is beautiful.

Religion: 'My identity is built on being a good person.' Gospel: 'My identity is not built on my record or my performance but on Christ's.'

Secularism and Religion are both all about your personal performance. The Gospel is the performance of another applied to you.

Religion makes us proud of what we have done. The Gospel makes us proud of what Jesus has done.