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The book of Judges shows us that the Bible is not a "Book of Virtues"; it is not full of inspirational stories. Why? Because the Bible (unlike the books on which other religions are based) is not about following moral examples. It is about a God of mercy and long-suffering, who continually works in and through us despite our constant resistance to his purposes." --
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Timothy J. Keller |
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While Christianity was able to agree with pagan writers that inordinate attachment to earthly goods can lead to unnecessary pain and grief, it also taught that the answer to this was not to love things less but to love God more than anything else. Only when our greatest love is God, a love that we cannot lose even in death, can we face all things with peace. Grief was not to be eliminated but seasoned and buoyed up with love and hope.
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Timothy J. Keller |
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As future citizens of heaven, Christians must see and avoid the idolatries and injustices of their culture, even as they continue to enjoy its common-grace blessings.
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Timothy J. Keller |
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Do you want to know who you are, your strengths and weaknesses? Do you want to be a compassionate person who skillfully helps people who are hurting? Do you want to have such a profound trust in God that you are fortified against the disappointments of life? Do you want simply to be wise about how life goes? Those are four crucial things to have--but none of them are readily achievable without suffering.
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Timothy J. Keller |
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Christians don't face adversity by stoically decreasing our love for the people and things of this world so much as by increasing our love and joy in God.
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Timothy J. Keller |
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When love of one's people becomes an absolute, it turns into racism. When love of equality turns into a supreme thing, it can result in hatred and violence toward anyone who has led a privileged life. It is the settled tendency of human societies to turn good political causes into counterfeit gods. As we have mentioned, Ernest Becker wrote that in a society that has lost the reality of God, many people will look to romantic love to give the..
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Timothy J. Keller |
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Christmas and the incarnation mean that God went to infinite lengths to make himself one whom we can know personally. What
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Timothy J. Keller |
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The usual place to learn the greatest secrets of God's grace is at the bottom.
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Timothy J. Keller |
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when the Spirit enables us to understand what Christ has done for us, the result is a life poured out in deeds of justice and compassion for the poor.5
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Timothy J. Keller |
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Aristotle very famously said in his Politics I.V.8 that some people are born to be slaves. He meant that some people are not as capable of higher rational thought and therefore should do the work that frees the more talented and brilliant to pursue a life of honor and culture. Modern people bristle with outrage at such a statement, but while we do not today hold with the idea of literal slavery, the attitudes behind Aristotle's statement ar..
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Timothy J. Keller |
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God varies his strategies too, and continually extends mercy to us in new ways, even though we neither understand nor deserve it.
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Timothy J. Keller |
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The classic Old Testament example of these two ways to run from God is right here in the book of Jonah. Jonah takes turns acting as both the "younger brother" and the "older brother." In the first two chapters of the book, Jonah disobeys and runs away from the Lord and yet ultimately repents and asks for God's grace, just as the younger brother leaves home but returns repentant. In the last two chapters, however, Jonah obeys God's command t..
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Timothy J. Keller |
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You are loved for Christ's sake, not because your heart and life are perfect.
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Timothy J. Keller |
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In the secular view, this material world is all there is. And so the meaning of life is to have the freedom to choose the life that makes you most happy. However, in that view of things, suffering can have no meaningful part. It is a complete interruption of your life story- it cannot be a meaningful part of the story. In this approach to life, suffering should be avoided at almost any cost, or minimized to the greatest degree possible. Thi..
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Timothy J. Keller |
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You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words:. . . . Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling . . . of that something which you were born desiring . .
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Timothy J. Keller |
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The same sun that melts wax hardens clay." In"
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Timothy J. Keller |
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But perhaps the clearest symptom of this lack of assurance is a dry prayer life. Though elder brothers may be diligent in prayer, there is no wonder, awe, intimacy, or delight in their conversations with God. Think of three kinds of people--a business associate you don't really like, a friend you enjoy doing things with, and someone you are in love with, and who is in love with you. Your conversations with the business associate will be qui..
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Timothy J. Keller |
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Even if we accept responsibility for wrongdoing, we believe "we can fix this." The most common way we try to do that is to apply the technology of morality. We believe that with hard work and/or fastidious religious observance, we can repair our relationship with God and even put him in a position where he "can't say 'no' to us."7"
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Timothy J. Keller |
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The manger at Christmas means that, if you live like Jesus, there won't be room for you in a lot of inns. In
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Timothy J. Keller |
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Do you realize that it is only in the gospel of Jesus Christ that you get the verdict before the performance? The atheist might say that they get their self-image from being a good person. They are a good person and they hope that eventually they will get a verdict that confirms that they are a good person. Performance leads to the verdict. For the Buddhist too, performance leads to the verdict. If you are a Muslim, performance leads to the..
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Timothy J. Keller |
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I cannot live up to my parents' standards - and that makes me feel terrible. I cannot live up to your standards - and that makes me feel terrible. I cannot live up to society's standards - and that makes me feel terrible. I cannot live up to other societies' standards - that makes me feel terrible. Perhaps the solution is to set my own standards? But I cannot keep them either - and that makes me feel terrible, unless I set incredibly low st..
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Timothy J. Keller |
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He sees all kinds of sins in himself - and all kinds of accomplishments too - but he refuses to connect them with himself or his identity. So, although he knows himself to be the chief of sinners, that fact is not going to stop him from doing the things that he is called to do.
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Timothy J. Keller |
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The second thing Mary does is to express her doubts openly.
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Timothy J. Keller |
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Everywhere God is, prayer is. Since God is everywhere and infinitely great, prayer must be all-pervasive in our lives.
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Timothy J. Keller |
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Un matrimonio que se basa no en la negacion del propio yo, sino en una autorrealizacion, exigiria una pareja que apenas necesitara atencion personal y que satisficiera todas las necesidades propias sin esperar nada a cambio. Dicho de forma sencilla, hay quien espera demasiado de su pareja.
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Timothy J. Keller |
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Jesus declares not that he has come to reform religion but that he's here to end religion and to replace it with himself.
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Timothy J. Keller |
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A common image of hell in the Bible is that of fire.10 Fire disintegrates. Even in this life we can see the kind of soul disintegration that self-centeredness creates. We know how selfishness and self-absorption leads to piercing bitterness, nauseating envy, paralyzing anxiety, paranoid thoughts, and the mental denials and distortions that accompany them. Now ask the question: "What if when we die we don't end, but spiritually our life exte..
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Timothy J. Keller |
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whatever you have set your mind on shapes your lifestyle and character. What
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Timothy J. Keller |
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The essence of other religions is advice; Christianity is essentially news. Other religions say, "This is what you have to do in order to connect to God forever; this is how you have to live in order to earn your way to God." But the gospel says, "This is what has been done in history. This is how Jesus lived and died to earn the way to God for you." Christianity is completely different. It's joyful news."
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Timothy J. Keller |
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When God is asked: "Remember your great mercy and love," he is being asked to act according to his character. When someone asks God to "remember not [my] sins," he or she is asking that God would not act on what he knows. Therefore, to say that the Israelites "forgot" God is to say that they no longer were controlled by what they knew. We could put it another way. Though they knew who God was and what he wanted, those things were not real t..
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Timothy J. Keller |
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Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others...but you are still distinct from it. You may even criticize it in yourself and wish you could stop it. But there may come a day when you can no longer. Then there will be no you left to criticize the mood or even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself, going on forever like a machine. It is not a question of God "sending us" to hell. In each of us there is somet..
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Timothy J. Keller |
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Tolkien has helped my imagination. He was a devout Catholic -- and I am not. However, because he brought his faith to bear into narrative, fiction, and literature, his Christianity -- which was pretty 'mere Christianity' (understanding of human sin, need for grace, need for redemption) -- fleshed out in fiction, has been an inspiration to me.
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Timothy J. Keller |
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Prayer: Lord, I praise you--though with fear and trembling--that you are the judge of all the earth. Deliver me from the temptation to want to sit in judgment on certain people. I cannot see into anyone's heart or into their past enough to know what they deserve. Help me put these matters into your hands. Amen.
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Timothy J. Keller |
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Salvation is not merely forgiveness and admission to heaven. It means life is healed, slowly but surely, in all its dimensions.
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Timothy J. Keller |
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La doctrina biblica del pecado explica por que el matrimonio, mas que cualquier otra empresa humana, es algo tan dificil de conseguir que triunfe.
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Timothy J. Keller |
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Prayer plunges us into the fullness of who he is, and his love becomes more real than the rejection or disappointment we are experiencing. Then we can handle our problems, and we can hold our heads up again. What could be more practical than that?
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Timothy J. Keller |
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I think that people will definitely go on holding to their beliefs in human dignity even when conscious belief in God is gone. Why is this the case? I have a radical thesis. I think people in our culture know unavoidably that there is a God, but they are repressing what they know.
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Timothy J. Keller |
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Evolution, therefore, cannot account for the origin of our moral feelings, let alone for the fact that we all believe there are external moral standards by which moral feelings are evaluated.
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Timothy J. Keller |
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Everything we know in this world is "contingent," has a cause outside of itself. Therefore the universe, which is just a huge pile of such contingent entities, would itself have to be dependent on some cause outside of itself. Something had to make the Big Bang happen--but what? What could that be but something outside of nature, a supernatural, noncontingent being that exists from itself."
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Timothy J. Keller |
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What is God's glory? It is his infinite weight, his supreme importance. To glorify God is to obey him unconditionally. To ever say, "I'll obey if . . ." is to give something else more importance or glory than God. But while glorifying God is never less than obedience, it is more. God's glory also means his inexpressible beauty and perfection. It does not glorify him, then, if we only ever obey God simply out of duty. We must give him not on..
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Timothy J. Keller |
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Let me put it another way. There is a "stupid peace" and then there is a "smart peace." The stupid peace comes from refusing to think about your overall situation. If you go that way, you can pop a cork, sit under a tree or on the beach, and try not to think about the grand scheme of things."
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Timothy J. Keller |
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Prayer , then, is both awe and intimacy, struggle and reality. These will not happen every time we pray, but each should be a major component of our prayer over the course of our lives.
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Timothy J. Keller |
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In the Old Testament book of 2 Kings, we read the story of Naaman, a wealthy and powerful general of the Syrian army.149 He was suffering terribly, dying slowly of leprosy. Hearing of a powerful God in Israel, he traveled there with both money and a threatening letter from his own ruler. He went to the king of Israel and demanded to be cured of his leprosy. Like so many of us today, Naaman thought money, influence, and expertise could addre..
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Timothy J. Keller |
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Haz de la comunion constante con Dios una prioridad. Deja de vagar como un ave y aprende a vivir cerca de Dios
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Timothy J. Keller |