It may be the summer of Tim Keller for me. His death a few weeks ago stirred me to revisit several of his books and put others on my summer reading list.
Tim Keller (1950-2023) was the founding pastor of Redeemer Church in Manhattan along with his wife, Kathy, and the best-selling author of multiple books. One of his first books I read was Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering.
Ten years after writing this book on suffering, Keller was diagnosed with stage IV pancreatic cancer. Last month, after three years of treatments, Tim Keller entered hospice and just a day later, went to his heavenly home.
In the weeks since, I re-read his book on suffering as well as a few others, pulling my favorite Tim Keller quotes on suffering and hope.
(I’m a quote collector for sure. I’ve curated my favorite Elisabeth Elliot quotes on suffering and 50 best quotes of Billy Graham.)
A theology of suffering is vital to walking through suffering well. It’s not that understanding the Biblical basis for suffering answers all of our questions, but that in the middle of crisis or tragedy, we can trust God is in control and our hope is sure.
Books with Tim Keller Quotes
These aren’t pithy little quips. Keller’s writing is Biblically-rich, culturally-relevant and well-reasoned. Many of these quotes are meaty and take considerate ruminating. If you’d like to read these quotes in context of the full work, nearly all of these quotes have been pulled from the following excellent Tim Keller books:
Walking with God through Pain and Suffering
Making Sense of God: Finding God in the Modern World
Prayer: Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God
Hope in Times of Fear: The Resurrection and Meaning of Easter
Tim Keller Quotes on Suffering
1. “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.”
2. “Suffering is unbearable if you aren’t certain that God is for you and with you.”
3. “Any person who only sticks with Christianity as long as things are going his or her way, is a stranger to the cross.”
4. “Why should we be surprised, then, asked Luther, that our lives are often filled with darkness and pain? Even God himself in Christ did not avoid that.”
5. “Everything in this life is going to be taken away from us, except one thing: God’s love, which can go into death with us and take us through it and into His arms.”
6. “God is very patient with us when we are desperate. Pour out your soul to him.”
7. “Just because you can’t see or imagine a good reason why God would allow something bad to happen doesn’t mean there can’t be one.”
8. “Only when our greatest love is God, a love that we cannot lose even in death, can we face all things with peace.”
9. “Jesus was patient under even greater suffering for us, so that we can be patient under lesser suffering for him.”
10. “…the deepest revelation of the character of God is in the weakness, suffering, and death of the cross. This is the ‘exact opposite of where humanity expected to find God.’”
11. “Christ’s miracles were not the suspension of the natural order but the restoration of the natural order. They were a reminder of what once was prior to the fall and a preview of what will eventually be a universal reality once again–a world of peace and justice, without death, disease, or conflict.”
12. “If you have ever been on a coast in a storm and seen the waves come in and hit the rocks, sometimes the waves are so large that they cover a particular rock, and you think, “That is the end of that rock.” But when the waves recede, there it is still. It hasn’t budged an inch. A person who feels the “peace that passes understanding” is like that. No matter what is thrown at you, you know it will not make you lose your footing.”
13. “You will never really understand your heart when things are going well. It is only when things go badly that you can see it truly. And that’s because it is only when suffering comes that you realize who is the true God and what are the false gods of your lives.”
14. “Only the true God can go with you through that furnace and out to the other side. The other gods will abandon you in the furnace.”
15. “[I]t is because God is all-powerful and sovereign that his suffering is so astonishing.”
16. “So suffering is at the very heart of the Christian faith. It is not only the way Christ became like and redeemed us, but it is one of the main ways we become like him and experience his redemption. And that means that our suffering, despite its painfulness, is also filled with purpose and usefulness.”
17. “And yet one of the main teachings of the Bible is that almost no one grows into greatness or finds God without suffering, without pain coming into our lives like smelling salts to wake us up to all sorts of facts about life and our own hearts to which we were blind.”
18. “As a man who seemed about to lose both his career and his family once said to me, “I always knew, in principle, that ‘Jesus is all you need’ to get through. But you don’t really know Jesus is all you need until Jesus is all you have.”
19. “It takes the entire Bible to help us understand all the reasons that Jesus’ death on the cross was not just a failure and a tragedy but was consummate wisdom. It takes a major part of Genesis to help us understand God’s purposes in Joseph’s tribulations. Sometimes we may wish that God would send us our book—a full explanation! But even though we cannot know all the particular reasons for our crosses, we can look at the cross and know God is working things out.”
20. “The only love that won’t disappoint you is one that can’t change, that can’t be lost, that is not based on the ups and downs of life or of how well you live. It is something that not even death can take away from you. God’s love is the only thing like that.”
21. “But if there is a God great enough to merit your anger over the suffering you witness or endure, then there is a God great enough to have reasons for allowing it that you can’t detect. It is not logical to believe in an infinite God and still be convinced that you can tally the sums of good and evil as he does, or to grow angry that he doesn’t always see things your way.” The Atlantic
22. “… it is one thing to believe with certainty that honey is sweet, perhaps through the universal testimony of trusted people, but it is another to actually taste the sweetness of honey. The sense of the honey’s sweetness on the tongue brings a fuller knowledge of honey than any rational deduction. In the same way, it is one thing to believe in a God who has attributes such as love, power, and wisdom; it is another to sense the reality of that God in your heart.” The Atlantic
23. “Death was not part of God’s original design. We were not created to age, weaken, fade, and die. We were not created for love relationships that end in death. Death is an intrusion, a result of sin and our human race’s turning away from God. Our sense even now that we were made to last, that we were made for love without parting, is a memory trace of our divine origins. We are trapped in a world of death, a world for which we were not designed.”
24. “While other worldviews lead us to sit in the midst of life’s joys, foreseeing the coming sorrows, Christianity empowers its people to sit in the midst of this life’s sorrows, tasting the coming joy.”
25. “So while Christianity never claims to be able to offer a full explanation of all God’s reasons behind every instance of evil and suffering — it does have a final answer to it. That answer will be given at the end of history and all who hear it and see its fulfillment will find it completely satisfying, infinitely sufficient.”
Tim Keller Quotes on Hope
26. “God’s reckless grace is our greatest hope.”
27. “Christ’s resurrection not only gives you hope for the future; it gives you hope to handle your scars right now.”
28. “Suffering is the stripping of our hope in finite things, therefore we do not put our ultimate hope in anything finite.”
29. “Human beings are hope-shaped creatures. The way you live now is completely controlled by what you believe about your future.”
30. “The glory of the Christian life is that we have a hope that overwhelms grief. It doesn’t eradicate it. It sweetens it. It overwhelms it.”
31. “Only an imperishable hope can satisfy the human heart.”
32. “But resurrection is not just consolation — it’s restoration.”
33. “The gospel is this: We are more sinful and flawed in ourselves than we ever dared believe, yet at the very same time we are more loved and accepted in Jesus Christ than we ever dared hope.”
34. “Christians see hard things as indeed hard and not to be sought, but we have been armed with this great truth, namely that when received with faith in God, hard things lead to the best things.”
35. “The resurrection of Christ promises us not merely some future consolation for the life we lost but the restoration of the life we lost and infinitely more. It promises the world and life that we have always longed for but never had.”
36. “When Jesus Christ was in the garden of Gethsemane and the ultimate darkness was coming down on him and he knew it was coming, he didn’t abandon you; he died for you. If Jesus Christ didn’t abandon you in his darkness, the ultimate darkness, why would he abandon you now, in yours?”
37. “The implications of this are significant. If we overstress the ‘already’ of the kingdom to the exclusion of the ‘not yet,’ we will expect quick solutions to problems and we will be dismayed by suffering and tragedy. But we can likewise overstress the ‘not yet’ of the kingdom to the exclusion of the ‘already.’ We can be too pessimistic about personal change. We can withdraw from engaging the world, too afraid of being ‘polluted’ by it.”
38. “In short, God will either give us what we ask or give us what we would have asked if we knew everything he knew.”
39. “To pray is to accept that we are, and always will be, wholly dependent on God for everything.”
40. “If we can’t say ‘thy will be done’ from the bottom of our hearts, we will never know any peace.”
Thank you, dear sister, for these truth filled quotes. They’re the balm my troubled soul needed this morning.
Thank you for putting this list together! I look forward to diving in 🙂
Thank you so much. Always amazing to think of God’s love and presence whatever we face in this life.
I read Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering years ago, and I still remember some of the truths I learned and others that it reinforced. The world will miss Tim Keller.