Generous Justice Quotes

“We instinctively tend to limit for whom we exert ourselves. We do it for people like us, and for people whom we like. Jesus will have none of that. By depicting a Samaritan helping a Jew, Jesus could not have found a more forceful way to say that anyone at all in need - regardless of race, politics, class, and religion - is your neighbour. Not everyone is your brother or sister in faith, but everyone is your neighbour, and you must love your neighbour.”
― Timothy Keller, Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just

“If a person has grasped the meaning of God's grace in his heart, he will do justice. If he doesn't live justly, then he may say with his lips that he is grateful for God's grace, but in his heart he is far from him. If he doesn't care about the poor, it reveals that at best he doesn't understand the grace he has experienced, and at worst he has not really encountered the saving mercy of God. Grace should make you just.”
― Timothy Keller, Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just

“If you have money, power, and status today, it is due to the century and place in which you were born, to your talents and capacities and health, none of which you earned. In short, all your resources are in the end the gift of God.”
― Timothy Keller, Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just

“A lack of generosity refuses to acknowledge that your assets are not really yours, but God's.”
― Timothy Keller, Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just

“For indeed, grace is the key to it all. It is not our lavish good deeds that procure salvation, but God's lavish love and mercy. That is why the poor are as acceptable before God as the rich. It is the generosity of God, the freeness of his salvation, that lays the foundation for the society of justice for all. Even in the seemingly boring rules and regulations of tabernacle rituals, we see that God cares about the poor, that his laws make provision for the disadvantaged. God's concern for justice permeated every part of Israel's life. It should also permeate our lives.”
― Timothy Keller, Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just

“Christ literally walked in our shoes and entered into our affliction. Those who will not help others until they are destitute reveal that Christ's love has not yet turned them into the sympathetic persons the gospel should make them.”
― Timothy Keller, Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just

“There is an inequitable distribution of both goods and opportunities in this world. Therefore, if you have been assigned the goods of this world by God and you don't share them with others, it isn't just stinginess, it is injustice.”
― Timothy Keller, Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just

“Underneath all notions of justice is a set of faith assumptions that are essentially religious, and these are often not acknowledged.”
― Timothy Keller, Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just

“By depicting a Samaritan helping a Jew, Jesus could not have found a more forceful way to say that anyone at all in need—regardless of race, politics, class, and religion—is your neighbor. Not everyone is your brother or sister in the faith, but everyone is your neighbor, and you must love your neighbor.”
― Timothy Keller, Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just

“While clearly Jesus was preaching the good news to all, he showed throughout his ministry the particular interest in the poor and the downtrodden that God has always had. Jesus, in his incarnation, “moved in” with the poor. He lived with, ate with, and associated with the socially ostracized (Matt 9:13).”
― Timothy Keller, Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just

“Reweaving shalom means to sacrificially thread, lace, and press your time, goods, power, and resources into the lives and needs of others.”
― Timothy Keller, Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just

“What is the definition of “love”? Jesus answered that by depicting a man meeting material, physical, and economic needs through deeds. Caring for people’s material and economic needs is not an option for Jesus. He refused to allow the law expert to limit the implications of this command to love.”
― Timothy Keller, Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just

“Though some are more able “gatherers”—that is, some are better at making money than others—the money you earn is a gift of God. Therefore, the money you make must be shared to build up community. So wealthier believers must share with poorer ones, not only within a congregation but also across congregations and borders. (See 2 Corinthians 8:15 and its context.) To extend the metaphor—money that is hoarded for oneself rots the soul.”
― Timothy Keller, Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just

“If believers in God don't honor the cries and claims of the poor, we don't honor him, whatever we profess, because we hide his beauty from the eyes of the world. When we pour ourselves out for the poor—that gets the world's notice.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just

“God loves and defends those with the least economic and social power, and so should we. That is what it means to “do justice.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just

“Instead, God directs that each person should bring what they can, and if their heart is right, that will give them access to his grace. For indeed, grace is the key to it all. It is not our lavish good deeds that procure salvation, but God’s lavish love and mercy. That is why the poor are as acceptable before God as the rich. It is the generosity of God, the freeness of his salvation, that lays the foundation for the society of justice for all. Even in the seemingly boring rules and regulations of tabernacle rituals, we see that God cares about the poor, that his laws make provision for the disadvantaged. God’s concern for justice permeated every part of Israel’s life. It should also permeate our lives.”
― Timothy Keller, Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just

“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”
― Timothy J. Keller, Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just

“What if your only hope was to get ministry from someone who not only did not owe you any help—but who actually owed you the opposite? What if your only hope was to get free grace from someone who had every justification, based on your relationship to him, to trample you?”
― Timothy Keller, Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just

“We were willing to help her with that longer-term plan if she would work with us responsibly in the near term.”
― Timothy Keller, Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just

“Those who will not help others until they are destitute reveal that Christ’s love has not yet turned them into the sympathetic persons the gospel should make them.”
― Timothy Keller, Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just

“Samaritans were seen by Jews as racial “half-breeds” and religious heretics, and so there was great animosity between them.”
― Timothy Keller, Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just

“Harvie Conn, who related this story in one of his books, added that gospel preaching that targets some sins but not the sins of oppression “cannot possibly work among the overwhelming majority of people in the world, poor peasants and workers.”
― Timothy Keller, Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just

“I do not think it is unlawful to entertain our friends; but if these words do not teach us that it is in some respects our duty to give a preference to the poor, I am at a loss to understand them.”52”
― Timothy Keller, Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just

“A person who knew he could come to God with nothing more than a cupful of flour and a confession of his sin and still receive forgiveness was learning something fundamental about the grace of God . . . even the most powerful in the land knew that God was not impressed by the most lavish sacrifices. . . .49”
― Timothy Keller, Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just

“the causes of poverty as put forth in the Bible are remarkably balanced. The Bible gives us a matrix of causes. One factor is oppression, which includes a judicial system weighted in favor of the powerful (Leviticus 19:15), or loans with excessive interest (Exodus 22:25-27), or unjustly low wages (Jeremiah 22:13; James 5:1-6). Ultimately, however, the prophets blame the rich when extremes of wealth and poverty in society appear (Amos 5:11-12; Ezekiel 22:29; Micah 2:2; Isaiah 5:8). As we have seen, a great deal of the Mosaic legislation was designed to keep the ordinary disparities between the wealthy and the poor from becoming aggravated and extreme. Therefore, whenever great disparities arose, the prophets assumed that to some degree it was the result of selfish individualism rather than concern with the common good.”
― Timothy Keller, Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just

“In Craig Blomberg’s survey of the Mosaic laws of gleaning, releasing, tithing, and the Jubilee, he concludes that the Biblical attitude toward wealth and possessions does not fit into any of the normal categories of democratic capitalism, or of traditional monarchial feudalism, or of state socialism. The rules for the use of land in the Biblical laws challenge all major contemporary economic models. They “suggest a sharp critique of 1) the statism that disregards the precious treasure of personal rootage, and 2) the untrammeled individualism which secures individuals at the expense of community.”38”
― Timothy Keller, Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just

“The mishpat, or justness, of a society, according to the Bible, is evaluated by how it treats these groups. Any neglect shown to the needs of the members of this quartet is not called merely a lack of mercy or charity, but a violation of justice, of mishpat. God loves and defends those with the least economic and social power, and so should we. That is what it means to “do justice.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just

“Think of the millions of children and teenagers in this country who have grown up in poverty. They attend failing schools and live in an environment unconducive to reading and learning. By the time they are in their teens many of them are functionally illiterate. This locks them into poverty or worse. It is estimated that a majority of convicts in prison are illiterate. Who is to blame?”
― Timothy J. Keller, Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just

“C. S. Lewis expressed it this way: The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. . . . This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of that kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be a real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinner—no mere tolerance or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. . . .81”
― Timothy J. Keller, Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just

“In a sermon entitled “The American Dream,” Martin Luther King, Jr., said: You see, the founding fathers were really influenced by the Bible. The whole concept of the imago dei, as it is expressed in Latin, the “image of God,” is the idea that all men have something within them that God injected. Not that they have substantial unity with God, but that every man has a capacity to have fellowship with God. And this gives him a uniqueness, it gives him worth, it gives him dignity. And we must never forget this as a nation: There are no gradations in the image of God. Every man from a treble white to a bass black is significant on God’s keyboard, precisely because every man is made in the image of God. One day we will learn that. We will know one day that God made us to live together as brothers and to respect the dignity and worth of every man. This is why we must fight segregation with all of our nonviolent might.80”
― Timothy J. Keller, Generous Justice: How God's Grace Makes Us Just