Tim Keller Leaves Legacy of Wisdom

On Friday, May 19th, earth lost a warrior and heaven gained a saint. Tim Keller, 1950-2023, founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian in New York City, died of pancreatic cancer at the age of seventy-two. “The Christian leader was an intellectual, but he possessed a pastor’s heart,” states Peter Wehner in The Atlantic.

And, in NPR Obituaries, we read:

Keller helped his congregation and the nation mourn in the days following the September 11th terrorist attacks – a time when so many were asking why God would allow this to happen.

"The Bible indicates," he said to his church in a sermon on September 16th, 2001 "that the love and hope of God and the love and hope that comes from one another has to be rubbed into our grief. And that's what we're here to do."

This collection of quotes reminds us that his legacy lives on.

“Suffering can refine us rather than destroy us because God himself walks with us in the fire.”

“When pain and suffering come upon us, we finally see not only that we are not in control of our lives but that we never were.”

“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 our identity is in our work, rather than Christ, success will go to our heads, and failure will go to our hearts.”

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

“If God is not at the center of your life, something else is.”

“Fear-based repentance makes us hate ourselves. Joy-based repentance makes us hate the sin.”

“Humility is so shy. If you begin talking about it, it leaves.”

“When anything in life is an absolute requirement for your happiness and self-worth, it is essentially an ‘idol,’ something you are actually worshiping. When such a thing is threatened, your anger is absolute. Your anger is actually the way the idol keeps you in its service, in its chains. Therefore if you find that, despite all the efforts to forgive, your anger and bitterness cannot subside, you may need to look deeper and ask, ‘What am I defending? What is so important that I cannot live without?’ It may be that, until some inordinate desire is identified and confronted, you will not be able to master your anger.”

“If you wait until your motives are pure and unselfish before you do something, you will wait forever.”

Thank you, Tim Keller. You will be sorely missed.