Timothy Keller Quotes About Identity
-
If anything becomes more fundamental than God to your happiness, meaning of life, and identity then it is an idol.
→ -
Religion: 'My identity is built on being a good person.' Gospel: 'My identity is not built on my record or my performance but on Christ's.'
→ -
Paul sees all kinds of sins in himself and all kinds of accomplishments too, but he refuses to connect them with his identity.
→ -
The gospel shows us that our spiritual problem lies not only in failing to obey God, but also in relying on our obedience to make us fully acceptable to God, ourselves and others. Every kind of character flaw comes from this natural impulse to be our own saviour through our own performance and achievement. On the one hand, proud and disdainful personalities come from basing your identity on your performance and thinking you are succeeding. But on the other hand, discouraged and self loathing personalities also come from basing your identity on your performance and thinking you are failing.
→ -
If our identity is in our work, rather than Christ, success will go to our heads, and failure will go to our hearts.
→ -
Our need for worth is so powerful that whatever we base our identity and value on we essentially 'deify.' We will look to it with all the passion and intensity of worship and devotion, even if we think ourselves as highly irreligious.
→ -
The Bible says that our real problem is that every one of us is building our identity on something besides Jesus.
→ -
Sin is the despairing refusal to find your deepest identity in your relationship and service to God.
→ -
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.
→
Related Authors
-
Rob Bell Author -
Mark Driscoll Pastor -
John Piper Author -
R. C. Sproul Author -
-
John F. MacArthur Pastor -
John Stott Author -
J. I. Packer Christian Theologian -
Kevin DeYoung Author -
N. T. Wright Bishop of Durham -
Matt Chandler Pastor -
C. S. Lewis Novelist -
-
Mark Dever Pastor -
David Platt Pastor -
Ravi Zacharias Author -
Francis Chan Pastor -
John Ortberg Author -
-
Tullian Tchividjian Pastor