The Bible, by contrast, sees the heart and its loves, hopes, and faith commitments as the seat of both reasoning and feeling. We are to offer and submit both our thoughts and our feelings in prayer to God. [J. I.] Packer concludes: “Complaints . . . are integral to this new, regenerate life of communion and prayer . . . so complaint will be, or at least should be, a recurring element in the praying of the born again.
Timothy Keller, Prayer, p. 235.
He gives an example of two texts that, you could say, “put it all together”: John 14:21 and 14:23. There Jesus tells his disciples, “Anyone who loves me will obey my teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.” These texts make it clear that the gospel transforms obedience to God’s commands from a legalistic means of acquiring salvation to a loving response to a received salvation. Obedience to God’s law, flowing out of gospel grace, becomes a way to know, resemble, delight, and love the one who saved us at infinite cost to himself. John 14, then, is neither a simple “law” passage nor a “gospel rather than law” passage.
Timothy Keller, Preaching, p. 51.
You would be quite afraid if someone put a beautiful, priceless, ancient Ming dynasty vase in your hands. You wouldn’t be trembling with fear about the vase hurting you but about your hurting it. Of course, we can’t really harm God, but a Christian should be intensely concerned not to grieve of dishonor the one who is so glorious and who did so much for us.
Timothy Keller, Prayer, p. 99.
To preach the gospel in a penetrating way, then, you do not merely want to talk about an abstract concept of forgiveness and acceptance. You want to show listeners Jesus himself and all that he came to do for us. To preach the gospel every time is to preach Christ every time, from every passage. Only if we preach Christ every time can we show how the whole Bible fits together.
Timothy Keller, Preaching, p.56.
This is the love you have been looking for all of your life. This is the only love that can’t let you down. This is bombproof love. Not friend-love, not personal acclaim, not married love, and not even romantic love — it is this love that you are after, underneath all your pursuit of those others. And if this love of active obedience is an active reality in your life, you will be a person of integrity; you will be a person of prayer; you will be kind to people who mistreat you.
Tim Keller, Encounters With Jesus, page 170.
Why does [Jesus] talk about hating your family [in Luke 14:26]? In a number of other places Jesus says that you’re not even allowed to hate your enemies. So what is he saying regarding one’s father and mother? Jesus is not calling us to hate actively; he’s calling us to hate comparatively. He says, “I want you to follow me so fully, so intensely, so enduringly that all other attachments in your life look like hate by comparison.” If you say, “I’ll obey you, Jesus, if my career thrives, if my health is good, if my family is together,” then the thing that’s on the other side of that if is your real master, your real goal. But Jesus will not be a means to an end; he will not be used. IF he calls you to follow him, he must be the goal.
Timothy Keller, King’s Cross, p. 19.
Philosopher Charles Taylor’s critique of this view is compelling. To be a secular person—to believe, for example, that there is no God and yet there are nonetheless human rights — is to base one’s view of the world on a combination of reason and faith, just like religious people do.
Timothy Keller, The Reason for God
“People must believe what they can, and those who believe more must not be hard upon those who believe less. I doubt you would have believed it all yourself it you hadn’t seen some of it.” [Quoting The Princess and the Goblin] What MacDonald is saying is extremely important and profoundly biblical. People who believe more must not be hard on those who believe less.Why? Because faith ultimately is not a virtue; it’s a gift.
Timothy Keller, King’s Cross, p. 56,
quoting George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin, p. 223.
Why would a triune God create a world? If he were a unipersonal God, you might say, “Well, he created the world so he can have beings who give him worshipful love, and that would give him joy.” But the triune God already had that – and he received love within himself in a far purer, more powerful form than we human beings can ever give him. So why would he create us? There’s only one answer. He must have created us not to get joy but to give it. He must have created us to invite us into the dance, to say: If you glorify me, if you center your entire life on me, if you find me beautiful for who I am in myself, then you will step into the dance, which is what you are made for. You are made not just to believe in me or to be spiritual in some general way, not just to pray and get a bit of inspiration when things are tough. You are made to center everything in your life on me, to think of everything in terms of your relationship to me. To serve me unconditionally. That’s where you’ll find your joy. That’s what the dance is about.
Timothy Keller, King’s Cross, p. 10.
Many of us first start going to God, going to church, because we have problems, and we’re asking God to give us a little boost over the hump so that we can get back to saving ourselves, back to pursuing our deepest wish. The problem is that we’re looking to something besides Jesus as savior. Almost always when we first go to Jesus saying, “This is my deepest wish,” his response is that we need to go a lot deeper than that.
Timothy Keller, King’s Cross, p. 30.
Sin is looking to something else besides God for your salvation. It is putting yourself in the place of God, becoming your own savior and lord, as it were.
Timothy Keller, The Insider and the Outcast, Kindle Edition.
The basic purpose of prayer is not to bend God’s will to mine but to mold my will into his.
Tim Keller, Encounters With Jesus, page 167.
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