Dr. Tim Keller

“If you get to know any Christian well, getting to know a Christian is a little like trying to look for a mountain on a cloudy day. You watch and you watch and you see the wind swirls and blows things around and at a certain point you can make out the peak and other times it’s completely cloudy. Then all the sudden the wind could just rip right through a cloud and you can see the snow on the mountain; and you see the sun just briefly shinning on it and it takes your breath away and than the next thing you know is back has come the fog. Getting to know a Christian is like that…You get a glimpse every so often of the gorgeous, radiant, perfect, the glory person, the glory self, that this person is becoming. You get a vision of what this person would be if this person was not shackled and fettered by his or her sins and faults. You get an idea of the beauty of it and the glory of it and you catch glimpses of it at certain times and you get committed to it and you say, ‘the spirit of God is working to make that person become that and I want to be a part of that, I want to be a part of the synergism of the process.’…you say, ‘I’m committed to that, I want to be like a candle stick on which this candle is placed, I want to find through prayer and service and helping, I want the light. The radiant person who’s locked inside here, I want the light of that person to be evident. I want other people to see the beauty of this person, I want this person to grow and develop in that direction as fast as possible.’ Now, that we said is the way any Christian friendship should go…’Do you do that?…I know it is very hard to think about that when you live in New York and your friendships last 8 months and then someone moves. But that’s the way all friendships should be and in particular that’s the way marriage has got to be, it has got to be that kind of friendship.”

-Tim Keller-