Pastor/Theologian Tim Keller passed away today from cancer at 72 years old. He founded Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City and his life and ministry had a profound impact on me and on so many pastors of my generation. I'm not one to venerate pastors or theologians because at their best, they are all just people who point to Jesus, but Tim Keller did that exceedingly well and his ministry blessed my life. I have read and taught through his books for Bible studies in my church ministry and I thank God for his unfaltering focus on Christ and the gospel. Here are a few quotes from his book, The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith. This book, as well as The Reason for God and King's Cross were life changing for me. I have seen Keller as akin to our generation's C.S. Lewis and I am grateful for his life and legacy.
From The Prodigal God, which is an exposition on the heart of the gospel in Jesus's story of the Father and Two Lost Sons in Luke 15. Keller uses the term ‘Prodigal’ for God in that God is the one who spends extravagantly and prodigiously, even to his own expense and humiliation, to bring his children back to himself, to his house and table.
"Act 1 then, demonstrates the lavish prodigality of God’s grace. Jesus shows the father pouncing on his son in love, not only before he has a chance to clean up his life and evidence a change of heart, but even before he can recite his repentance speech."
"The person in the way of moral conformity says, “I’m not going to do what I want, but what tradition and the community want me to do. The person choosing the way of self discovery says: I’m the only one who can decide what is right or wrong for me. I’m going to live as I want to live and find my true self and happiness that way.”
"So we have two sons, one “bad” by conventional standards and one “good,” yet both are alienated from the father. The father has to go out and invite each of them to come into the feast of his love."
"Do you realize then, what Jesus is teaching? Neither son loved the father for himself. They both were using the father for their own self-centered ends rather than loving, enjoying, and serving him for his own sake."
“Religious people commonly live very moral lives, but their goal is to get leverage over God, to control him, to put him in a position where they think he owes them. Therefore, despite all their ethical fastidiousness and piety, they are actually rebelling against his authority.”
"If, like the elder brother, you believe that God ought to bless you and help you because you have worked so hard to obey him and be a good person, then Jesus may be your helper, your example, even your inspiration, but he is not your Savior. You are serving as your own Savior…Why? Because sin is not just breaking the rules, it is putting yourself in the place of god as Savior, Lord, and Judge just as each son sought to displace the authority of the father in his own life."
“Sin is not just breaking the rules, it is putting yourself in the place of God as Savior, Lord, and Judge… There are two ways to be your own Savior and Lord. One is by breaking all the moral laws and setting your own course, and one is by keeping all the moral laws and being very, very good.”
“If you think goodness and decency is the way to merit a good life from God, you will be eaten up with anger, since life never goes as we wish.”
“We must learn how to repent of the sin under all our other sins and under all our righteousness – the sin of seeking to be our own Savior and Lord. We must admit that we’ve put our ultimate hope and trust in things other than God, and that in both our wrongdoing and right doing we have been seeking to get around God or get control of God in order to get hold of those things.”
"Elder brothers base their self images on being hardworking, or moral, or members of an elite clan, or extremely smart and savvy. This inevitably leads to feeling superior to those who don’t have the same qualities…It is impossible to forgive someone if you feel superior to him or her."
“Our Western society is so deeply divided between these two approaches (moralism, self-discovery) that hardly anyone can conceive of any other way to live. If you criticize or distance yourself from one, everyone assumes you have chosen to follow the other, because each of these approaches tends to divide the whole world into two basic groups. The moral conformists say: "the immoral people -- the people who 'do their own thing' -- are the problem with the world, and moral people are the solution." The advocates of self-discovery say: "The bigoted peole -- the people who say, 'We have the Truth' -- are the problem with the world, and progressive people are the solution.”
“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. This means that Jesus’s message, which is “the gospel,” is a completely different spirituality. The gospel of Jesus is not religion or irreligion, morality or immorality, moralism or relativism, conservatism or liberalism. Nor is it something halfway along a spectrum between two poles—it is something else altogether.”
“Mercy and forgiveness must be free and unmerited to the wrongdoer. If the wrongdoer has to do something to merit it, then it isn’t mercy, but forgiveness always comes at a cost to the one granting the forgiveness.”
“Faith in the gospel restructures our motivations, our self-understanding, our identity, and our view of the world. Behavioral compliance to rules without heart-change will be superficial and fleeting… We can only change permanently as we take the gospel more deeply into our understanding and into our hearts. We must feed on the gospel, as it were, digesting it and making it part of ourselves. That is how we grow.”
“People whose lives remained unchanged by God’s grace didn’t really understand its costliness, and therefore didn’t really understand the gospel. They had a general idea of God’s universal love, but not a real grasp of the seriousness of sin and the meaning of Christ’s work on our behalf.”
“If a group believes God favors them because of their particularly true doctrine, ways of worship, and ethical behavior, their attitude toward those without these things can be hostile.”
“The younger son’s flight from the father was crashingly obvious. He left the father literally, physically, and morally. Though the older son stayed at home, he was actually more distant and alienated from the father than his brother, because he was blind to his true condition. He would have been horribly offended by the suggestion that he was rebelling against the father’s authority and love, but he was, deeply.”
“Elder brothers’ inability to handle suffering arises from the fact that their moral observance is results-oriented. The good life is lived not for delight in good deeds themselves, but as calculated ways to control their environment.”
“[People] who are no longer sure that God loves and accepts them in Jesus, apart from their present spiritual achievements, are subconsciously radically insecure persons. . . . Their insecurity shows itself in pride, a fierce, defensive assertion of their own righteousness, and defensive criticism of others.”
"Think of the kind of brother we need. We need one who does not just go to the next country to find us but who will come all the way from heaven to earth. We need one who is willing to pay not just a finite amount of money, but, at the infinite cost of his own life to bring us into God’s family, for our debt is so much greater…The point of the parable is that forgiveness always involves a price–someone has to pay. There was not way for the younger brother to return to the family unless the older brother bore the cost himself. Our true elder brother paid our debt, on the cross, in our place."
"At the end of the story of the prodigal sons, there is a feast of homecoming. So too at the end of the book of Revelation, at the end of history, there is a feast, the “marriage Supper of the Lamb” (Revelation 19). The Lamb is Jesus, who was sacrificed for the sins of the world so that we could be pardoned and brought home…Jesus, unlike the founder of any other major faith, holds out hope for ordinary human life. Our future is not an ethereal, impersonal form of consciousness. We will not float through the air, but rather we will eat, embrace, sing, laugh, and dance in the kingdom of God, in degrees of power, glory, and joy that we can’t at present imagine."
Here is another excellent compilation of 50 quotes from Tim Keller by Matt Smethurst of TGC.
From Redeemer City to City:
"We're not saved by what we do, but by what God has done, completely and wholly and fully by what God has done, and we do not contribute to salvation at all. How could that be? The answer is when Jesus Christ came, he came to live the life we should have lived and die the death we should die. He lived the life, a perfect life, the only human being who ever lived a perfect life, and therefore earned God's blessing. But, then at the end of his life, he went to the cross and took the curse that we deserved [mine: the penalty of death because of sin - Romans 3:23; 6:23]. He earned the blessing of a fully obedient human being, but then he took the curse and punishment of imperfect, disobedient human beings. Which means, when you become a Christian, when you put your faith in him, all of your sins and what you deserve fall on him, but then all of his blessings and what he deserves comes to you. And God treats you as if you've done everything that Jesus Christ has done. That's radical. Now, because we have this complete salvation, complete gift, all accomplished by him, we contribute nothing to it, and now we have received this, there's a freedom. First of all, we are free from any sense of condemnation. Romans 8:1. "Now there is no more condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." Do not fear, ever, coming into condemnation from God. And now, we're also free, not just from condemnation, but from, you might say, compulsion. That is, we want to obey God. We want to please him. We no longer are obeying the law of God out of a sense of duty or a sense of being forced or compelled. Instead, we want to please the one who did this for us. We want to resemble the one who did this for us."
2 Corinthians 5:21 "God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God."
