To love our success more than God and our neighbor hardens the heart, making us less able to feel and to sense.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that prioritizing success over love for God and others desensitizes us emotionally.
Timothy Keller emphasizes the importance of love and community over individual success. He warns that when we allow our achievements to take precedence over our relationships with God and our neighbors, we risk becoming emotionally calloused and disconnected from the vital aspects of our humanity that foster empathy, compassion, and genuine connection.
In practice
This quote can be a part of a motivational speech on balancing ambition and personal values.
Falling in love in a Christian way is to say,'I am excited about your future and I want to be part of getting you there. I'm signing up for the journey with you. Would you sign up for the journey to my true self with me? It's going to be hard but I want to get there.
Only in Jesus Christ do we see how the untamable, infinite God can become a baby and a loving Savior. On the cross we see how both the love and the holiness of God can be fulfilled at once.
All human problems are ultimately symptoms, and our separation from God is the cause.
While your character flaws may have created mild problems for other people, they will create major problems for your spouse and your marriage.
To be loved but not known is comforting but superficial. To be known and not loved is our greatest fear. But to be fully known and truly loved is, well, a lot like being loved by God. It is what we need more than anything. It liberates us from pretense, humbles us out of our self-righteousness, and fortifies us for any difficulty life can throw at us.
God's Kingdom is "present in its beginnings, but still future in its fullness. This guards us from an under-realized eschatology (expecting no change now) and an over-realized eschatology (expecting all change now). In this stage, we embrace the reality that while we're not yet what we will be, we're also no longer what we used to be.
Love creates bridges where it would seem they were impossible.
There can be no excess to love, none to knowledge, none to beauty.
Money cannot buy the fuel of love but is excellent kindling.
Love, which is the essence of God, is not for levity, but for the total worth of man.
All you need in the world is love and laughter. That's all anybody needs. To have love in one hand and laughter in the other.
Seriously, though, I think I never ceased to be grateful of the fact that I am able to do a job that I really love - I never got over that.
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