Category: Tim Keller
Tim Keller Sermon: Paradise Lost – Genesis 3:8-24
SERIES: Bible: The Whole Story—Creation and Fall – PART 3
Preached in Manhattan, New York on January 18, 2009
Genesis 3:8–24
8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?” 10 He answered, “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.”
11 And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?” 12 The man said, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it.” 13 Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” The woman said, “The serpent deceived me, and I ate.”
14 So the Lord God said to the serpent, “Because you have done this,
Cursed are you above all the livestock
and all the wild animals!
You will crawl on your belly
and you will eat dust
all the days of your life.
15 And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
and you will strike his heel.”
16 To the woman he said,
“I will greatly increase your pains in childbearing;
with pain you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband,
and he will rule over you.”
17 To Adam he said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat of it,’
Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat of it
all the days of your life.
18 It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
19 By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return.”
20 Adam named his wife Eve, because she would become the mother of all the living. 21 The Lord God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them. 22 And the Lord God said, “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and evil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.”
23 So the Lord God banished him from the Garden of Eden to work the ground from which he had been taken. 24 After he drove the man out, he placed on the east side of the Garden of Eden cherubim and a flaming sword flashing back and forth to guard the way to the tree of life.
We’re looking at what the Bible says about sin. The Bible is not a disconnected set of stories, each of which has a little moral about how to live life. Primarily, the Bible is a single story telling us what is wrong with the human race, what God is going to do about it, and how history is going to end, how it’s all going to turn out. It’s a single story. We’re looking at Genesis 3–4 to give us answers to what’s wrong with the human race, why the human race is so prone to selfishness, violence, wars, atrocity, and corruption all the time.
C.E.M. Joad was a British philosopher. He was an atheist. He was a member of The Brains Trust. He lived in the early twentieth century. He was an atheist but came back to faith later in life and, at the very end of life, wrote a book called The Recovery of Belief. In it he said this very fascinating thing: “It is because we rejected the doctrine of original sin that we on the left were always being disillusioned by the behavior of both the people and the nations and politicians, and by the recurrent fact of war.”
Did you hear that? He says he thought most of the problems were the capitalists, not the common people, because he had rejected the doctrine of original sin. He bought into what Rousseau said, what Samuel Taylor Coleridge said, what almost all of the European intellectuals in the nineteenth century said. That is, that though human beings have their problems, the problems are not hardwired into us. They are lack of education. We can make the changes.
He realized near the end of his life that because he didn’t believe in the doctrine of original sin, he didn’t believe what the Bible said about the universality and the depth of sin in every human heart, he had basically based his whole life on a different view of human nature. He set in motion social policies that didn’t work. Basically, because he didn’t have the Bible’s understanding of human nature, he wasn’t able to navigate life as it was. Isn’t that something?
So let’s see what the Bible has to say about sin (last week, this week, and the next couple of weeks) as we look at Genesis 3–4. We learn four things here: the heart of sin, the breadth of sin, the depth of sin, and the end of sin.
1. The heart of sin
What is sin again? What is the definition of sin? The reason you may find out every week I give you a different definition is that, like the concept of God, the concept of sin is so profound you can’t stick it into one single nutshell definition. Last week we said, in terms of a vertical perspective, sin is putting yourself in the place of God. It’s taking upon yourself prerogatives and rights only God has. We talked about that last week.
Today I’d like to give you a more horizontal perspective. You see it right away. As soon as Adam and Eve have eaten the fruit and now sin has come into their lives and we’re seeing the results of this, immediately we see what I’d like to show you here. When God says here in verse 11, “Did you eat of the tree I commanded you not to eat from?” the man says, “The woman did it.”
Just to show you, by the way, the man is not more sinful than the woman, when God turns to the woman and says, “What do you have to say for yourself?” she says, “The Serpent did it.” We’ll get back to that, the equality here. Here’s the point. When Adam says, “She made me do it; send her to hell; give me another wife,” basically … “You’re talking to the holy God of the universe. What do you have to say for yourself?” “Take her.”
Here we see the essence of sin in a horizontal perspective. Sin is a willingness to throw anybody else under the bus to justify yourself. Sin is justifying yourself at the expense of other people, to feel superior to other people. In order to have a self-image, I have to feel superior to other people. I have to expose other people. I have to exploit other people. Sin is saying, “Your life to enhance mine,” not “My life to enhance yours.” See that’s servanthood.
“Your life to enhance mine. I will suck you dry. I will drain you dry. I will disadvantage you so I can feel good about myself, so I can justify myself, so I can have the significance and security I want.” Philip Roth wrote a novel called The Human Stain. That’s his metaphor for evil. The novel is actually about a man who starts to do very well in life, and everybody feels they have to bring him down. They have to find something wrong with him. They have to ruin his career.
Philip Roth has one of his characters talk about what he calls “the human stain,” which is this proneness to evil in the heart, which is, in a sense, deeper than behavioral actions. It’s this need to pull people down, this need to justify yourself at the expense of other people, to feel better than other people. “I’m good because you’re bad. I’m competent because you’re incompetent.”
At one point one of his characters … She calls this the human stain in the heart, and she says something like, “It’s in everyone, indwelling, inherent, defining. The stain that precedes your acts of disobedience, that encompasses disobedience and perplexes all explanation and understanding. It’s why all talk of cleansing your heart is a joke. The fantasy of purity is appalling, for what is the quest to purify but more impurity? The stain is inescapable.”
What does she mean by that? She says, “If you actually try to purify yourself, that just brings more impurity.” Here’s why. The stain is self-righteousness. The stain is, “I justify myself by pulling you down, by making myself feel superior to you, better than you.” If that’s the case, then to try to purify yourself from the stain only makes you more stained, because you say, “Look, I’m pure,” and you’re not.
C.S. Lewis wrote a little satirical piece called “Screwtape Proposes a Toast.” Screwtape is a senior devil (this is a satirical, fictional piece, by the way) who basically is at a dinner for a college of junior devils who are getting ready to go out there and tempt the human race and make life horrible. So Screwtape suggests a particular method for making people’s lives miserable and making the world a horrible place.
What he suggests is there’s a particular feeling human beings have, and what you want to do is turn the gas up on that feeling. Whatever else you do, make sure you enhance this feeling, because this is the feeling that will really ruin their lives. Then Screwtape says, “The feeling I am talking about is that which prompts a person to say, ‘I’m as good as you.’ ” That’s the essence of sin. That’s the essence of how hell operates. That’s what made the Devil, the Devil. “I’m as good as you.” When Satan started saying that about God, it was all downhill for the universe.
He says, “Anyone who says, ‘I’m as good as you,’ does not believe it. No one says, ‘I’m as good as you,’ if you believe it. You wouldn’t say it if you did. The St. Bernard never says to the toy dog, ‘I’m as good as you.’ ‘I’m as good as you’ is a useful means for the destruction of whole societies, but it has a far deeper value as a state of mind, which necessarily, excluding humility, charity, contentment, and all of the pleasures of gratitude or admiration, turns a human being away from every road which might finally lead him to heaven.”
The impulse that makes you say, “I’m as good as you. I don’t like you getting ahead of me …” The impulse that says, “I’m better than you; that’s how I know I’m okay” is sin, and it’s really at the root of everything from murder to racism to all of our conflicts. This is another view into the heart of sin.
2. The breadth of sin
This is really important. I’ve already alluded to it. What the man does, so does the woman. The man and the woman are both equally ashamed, both equally filled with blame shifting and doing the same behavior, both equally banished. There’s no difference. One is not more sinful than the other. This is crucial.
The Christian doctrine of original sin is that we are hardwired for selfishness and cruelty. It’s not just a problem of we have bad examples or bad environments. We’re hardwired for it. Secondly, the Christian doctrine of original sin is that we’re all hardwired for it, all of us, across the cultures, across the races, across the classes, across the genders. Everybody. Let me show you how important that is.
Remember what Joad said? He said we were on the left, because we denied the doctrine of original sin, thought what’s really wrong with the world was located in the capitalists, in the elites, not in the common people. But life showed him that, no, sin is everywhere. He realized the mistake he made as a member of the left was, because he didn’t believe in the doctrine of original sin, he demonized a certain group of people, he demonized a certain set of folks, and saw that is where the problem is, but the doctrine of original sin is it’s in all of us equally.
On the other hand … I don’t want you to think I’m picking on people from the left. People from the left would say, “Oh, it’s the elites; it’s not the common people.” There are other ways to look at it. What about conservative people, or what about people who just simply are traditional and feel like what’s really wrong with the people is the hoi polloi, the unwashed masses, the common people?
There’s a very famous letter that has come down to us from the Duchess of Buckingham. The Countess of Huntingdon, who had become converted to evangelical religion under the preaching of George Whitefield in the eighteenth century in Britain, tried to evangelize her aristocratic colleagues. She would send sermons by George Whitefield to her friends. She would invite them to come to hear him preach. One of her aristocratic peers, the Duchess of Buckingham, after having been invited by the countess to come and hear George Whitefield, sent her an icy note declining. This is what she said:
“I thank Your Ladyship, but the doctrines are most repulsive and strongly tinctured with impertinence and disrespect toward their superiors in perpetually endeavoring to level all ranks and do away with all distinctions. It is monstrous to be told you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl upon the earth. It is highly offensive and insulting, so I cannot but wonder that your ladyship should relish any sentiments so much at variance with high rank and good breeding.”
She’s right. The doctrine of original sin levels people. The doctrine of original sin makes it impossible for people from the left to say, “It’s those elites up there, not us common people,” and it makes it impossible for the people from the right to say, “It’s you unwashed masses,” or “It’s you criminal element,” or something like that, “not us virtuous people who have good breeding.” She was right. Do you know why? The doctrine of original sin creates a radical democracy of sinners.
If you believe in original sin, nobody is better than anybody else. You cannot look down your nose at a criminal or a drug dealer and say, “There’s a sinner; not me,” because the doctrine of original sin says the same seeds of that kind of behavior are in your heart. Maybe it didn’t sprout because you weren’t in the very same environment as that person out there, but the fact of the matter is you’re no better. We’re all sinners. We all need grace.
The Duchess of Buckingham was right. She says, “This levels everybody, to say that I have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl the earth.” That’s what the Bible teaches. It destroys self-righteousness. That’s the reason G.K. Chesterton says, “Christianity preaches an obviously unattractive idea, such as original sin; but when we wait for its results, they are pathos and brotherhood, and a thunder of laughter and pity; for only with original sin we can at once pity the beggar and distrust the king.”
What does he mean by “brotherhood”? What it means is it’s possible for a society that claims to be Christian to be racist, but if it is, it’s racist in spite of the doctrine of original sin, not because of it. It’s not grasping what the doctrine says. What the doctrine says is it’s a radical democracy. We’re all brothers and sisters in sin. We’re all under judgment. We all have no hope except for the grace of God.
That’s the reason why if you really grasp the doctrine of original sin, it creates a solidarity between you and every single person, even the most wretched people you see on the streets of New York City. When that comes into your heart, no longer do you say, “Oh, who are these people?” You are these people. I read about a discussion that happened here in New York City recently about the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme, which still beggars the imagination. How could it have happened?
They were getting together and they were talking. “Well what does this mean?” One person had the audacity to say, “Look, let’s not call this sin. Let’s not say there was anything wrong. This is the way people are. People are going to do this. People are going to cheat; they’re going to lie. They’re going to do this. This is why we need government regulation. The only hope is government regulation.”
But government is people. Soylent Green is people, but government is people. Oh, that’s terrible. You guys don’t know what Soylent Green is? Unless you’re a real movie geek, you need to go and Google “Soylent Green,” and then you’ll know. It has nothing to do with the sermon at all, so just please don’t even think about it for the rest of the sermon, or you’re going to hurt yourself. Government is people. We are all the same. That is the breadth of sin.
3. The depth of sin
Here’s what we mean. Human beings are radically relational. That’s what we’re made for. Remember, we’ve seen this as we’ve gone through Genesis 1–2. We’re in the image of God. That means we’re built to reflect or to relate to God. We saw we are built to be lonely without other human beings. We’re relational beings. We live for relationships.
What we see in these verses right here is every single relationship being destroyed by sin. Another way to put it is sin is a malignant tumor eating away at our very ability to conduct any relationship. Sin destroys our relationship with God, our relationship with ourselves, our relationship with others, and even our relationship with nature and the world around us. Look carefully quickly.
First of all, we see in these verses it destroys our relationship with God. In verse 8 we’re told God comes walking into the garden in the cool of the day. When the Bible says David walked with Jonathan, or Abraham walked with Lot, or something like that, of course it means they literally walked, but it means more than that. The word walking in Hebrew was an idiom that meant friendship, relationship.
The fact that God walked with Adam and Eve in the cool of the day meant he was coming in wanting friendship, seeking relationship, and we hid. Sin is running from God who wants a relationship with us. Why don’t we want a relationship with him? The answer is (we said already) sin now means our lives are about power, about getting power over other people, about saying, “I’ll have a relationship with you as long as it doesn’t get in the way of my needs, as long as it doesn’t get in the way of my happiness and my fulfillment.”
It’s always, “Your life to enhance me.” You’re happy to have relationships as long as they enhance you, as long as they build you up, as long as they make you feel good. What we don’t like is servanthood. We like consumer relationships. “As long as the cost-benefit analysis is working well and I’m getting as much or more out of you as you’re getting out of me, fine.”
We don’t like covenant, where you are committed to someone to serve somebody whether or not you’re getting anything out of it or not. We hate that. Covenant goes against the grain of the heart, because sin is now all about keeping control and having power. There’s no way for a finite being to walk with an infinite being without losing control, so we won’t have it.
Yes, it’s true most people in the world say they believe in God and they pray, but most people in the world do not actually have in their minds the real God, because most people have a god they can pray to when they want to and doesn’t really demand loss of control of your life, doesn’t really demand that you change your life. Haven’t you seen that? Isn’t that true of a lot of us? In which case, we’re actually running from God and hiding from ourselves the fact we’re running from God by essentially believing in a god who isn’t holy, isn’t infinite, isn’t sovereign.
So first, our relationship with God has been destroyed. As a result, our relationship with ourselves is destroyed. How do we see that? When Adam says, “The reason I hid from you is I was ashamed because I was naked.” In the Bible, just like walking is an idiom for something bigger than just walking, so nakedness is an idiom for something bigger than just being ashamed of being naked.
Nakedness is a sense of guilt, that there’s something wrong with me, a sense of shame, that I need to prove myself, I need to cover, I need to keep people from seeing who I am because they’ll reject me. Nakedness is a psychological dislocation, a lack of ease with who you are. When our relationship with God is severed, our relationship with ourselves is severed. That is to say, we really don’t want to admit what’s wrong with us. We really don’t want to admit the worst about ourselves.
See the one thing we don’t want to believe is that we’re utterly dependent on God. We want to think we need God occasionally or maybe not at all, but in our heart of hearts we know we’re utterly dependent on God, and therefore, we are in denial about who we really are. That’s where the shame comes from, and that’s where the guilt comes from, and that’s where this lack of ease with being able to admit who we are comes from.
Thirdly, our relationship with each other is destroyed. We already saw some of that when the man starts to throw the wife under the bus just to save his neck. Even the making of fig leaves in verse 7 … As soon as sin came into their hearts, they covered up from each other. They sewed fig leaves to cover up their nakedness, but they were covering up their nakedness from whom at that point? God wasn’t even around. From each other.
We cannot bear to have other people really know who we are. We have to control what other people see about us, because we have to maintain power and control. Because our relationships are now power relationships, not love and service relationships, our relationships with each other are messed up. Individually we have superficial relationships, exploitative relationships, but corporately, races don’t get along with each other, the genders don’t get along with each other. Because our relationships with God are messed up and our relationships with ourselves are messed up, so our relationships in the world are messed up.
Lastly, the fourth thing that’s destroyed here is even our relationship with nature, the physical environment. Verse 17 says instead of just going out there and tilling the ground and up comes nothing but, I guess, flowers and food, now thorns and thistles will come up. The dust is no longer your friend. There is a lack of mesh with the physical environment. There is a clash with the physical environment. It’s no longer our friend. Now we age, now we get sick, now there are natural disasters, and now we die. We came from dust, but what’s going to happen at the end?
Erma Bombeck, who used to write humor columns many years ago, generally for women, in newspapers, at one point said something like, “You know, my life is dominated by dirt. At this end of the house there’s dirt. There’s dirt in the bathroom, dirt on the plates in the kitchen, dirt in the rug. So I work to get rid of the dirt, and by the time I get to the other end of the house, the first end of the house is dirty again. It never ends. And in the end, after all of these years of struggling against dirt, struggling against dirt, what do I get? Six feet of dirt.”
That’s almost exactly what God says in Genesis 3:17–20. In the end the dust wins. Every one of our relationships has been decimated by sin.
4. The end of sin
Now, what’s God going to do about it? You know, even though the Bible has all kinds of authors … Every one of the books has a different author, yet the Holy Spirit is the Author behind the author, and therefore the Bible is, in a sense, a single book with a single author, and he, the Holy Spirit, is an incredibly good storyteller. What we have here in the midst of this incredible disaster is the most enigmatic, intriguing foreshadowing. What is the foreshadowing of what God is going to do about it in the future? What are we going to see?
First, look at the mercy of God’s heart. He comes in, and he doesn’t smite them. He says, “Where are you? What have you done? Have you done what I asked you not to do?” What does God want with those questions? God could not be seeking truth and illumination for himself. He knows the answer. The only reason God would be asking questions is if he’s trying to give truth and illumination to them.
He’s treating them as adults. He’s not treating them as objects. He’s not treating them as animals, or even as children. He’s doing what people in AA call an intervention. He is trying to get them to tell him what they should know. “Admit what you’ve done. Say who you are. Own it. Take responsibility.” It’s fascinating. He’s counseling them. He’s seeking them in love, asking the questions instead of just telling them what they’ve done wrong. Isn’t that something?
Notice really carefully, by the way, whereas he asks questions to Adam and Eve, he doesn’t ask any questions to Satan. Do you know what that means? God loves the sinner but hates the sin. God holds out hope for evildoers, but he will not compromise with evil. It’s very interesting. So first of all, we see God makes a distinction between the evildoers and evil, and he seeks in love to change people’s hearts.
Secondly, we see the mercy of his hand. The second thing he does is he makes garments for them. Isn’t that something? See they had sewed fig leaves all over themselves. When God makes garments for them, they need garments psychologically for privacy, now physically they need garments because we have a hostile environment and they need better things than fig leaves, and he makes garments out of animal skins.
Many people over the years have noticed this seems to be God’s hint, a pointer toward the sacrificial system, toward the atoning sacrifices of the temple and tabernacle, and eventually, the atoning sacrifice of Jesus himself. Therefore, when God clothes Adam and Eve, do you know what he’s saying? He says, “Someday I’m going to have to give salvation, but my salvation is holistic. You need forgiveness. You also need shelter from the stormy blast.”
Therefore, human beings who seek to spread God’s salvation out in the world have to deal with all of the results of sin: physical, spiritual, psychological, and social. That’s the reason we don’t just go out into the world to help people get their sins forgiven and connect to God, but we also feed and clothe. Derek Kidner in his commentary on Genesis on this passage says, “The coats of skins are forerunners of the welfare, both spiritual and physical, which man’s sin makes necessary. Therefore, social action could not have had an earlier or more exalted inauguration.” Interesting.
So we see the holistic nature of God’s hand, and we see the mercy of God’s heart, but what is he going to do? He says in verse 15. This is the enigmatic foreshadowing. He looks at the Serpent and he says, “Because you have done this, I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers. He will crush your head, and you will strike his heel.” There’s a lot to be said here, but here’s what we have to see.
Do you know what the picture is? Imagine a group of people, a family, and into the midst of them comes slithering as fast as it can (and you know how fast they can come) a snake, a venomous snake, a poisonous snake, coming right at them. One man goes after the snake, and he begins to stomp on it. Finally he crushes the head and saves the family, but only after, in the process, the snake bites him, the poison goes into him, and he dies. That’s the picture.
What God is saying is … This is amazing if you realize this snake is not just a snake but is Satan. It represents evil. God is saying one of the descendants of Adam and Eve, the seed of the woman, a human being, is going to destroy sin and death itself but get a fatal wound in the process. A human being is going to come, and he’s going to destroy sin and death, and in the process lose his life. I wonder who that could be.
You see, the first Adam should have done something like that, not just stood there and let the Serpent destroy his family. The first Adam should have jumped on the snake or stomped on the snake or whatever. But the second Adam will. It’s Jesus Christ. Keep this in mind. In Romans 4 Paul says, “In Christ your sins are covered.” In Romans 4 Paul says, “Blessed is the one whose sin is covered. Blessed is the one to whom God does not impute sin.”
Now we don’t like cover-up, do we? Cover-up, Watergate … that’s not good. No, cover-up when you’re just sweeping things under the rug is not good, but that’s not what’s happening here. What we’re being told is that Jesus Christ is going to deal with your sin. When he goes to the cross he’s going to deal with your sin so your sins can be covered, pardoned, forgiven. How? Look at the last verse.
When God sends Adam and Eve out of the garden, there’s a sword there, and nobody can get back into the presence of God. Nobody can get back into the garden. Nobody can get back into paradise. Nobody can get to heaven unless you go under the sword. What does the sword represent? The wages of sin, the justice of God. The wages of sin is death. Nobody can get back into paradise unless they go under the sword.
The Bible says in Isaiah that when the Messiah comes, the suffering servant, he will be cut off from the land of the living. Jesus Christ went under the sword. He opened a new and living way back into the presence of God. He went first, and the sword slew him. He has covered our sins. Here’s what it means to be a Christian. It’s not to say, “I’m going to try real hard to live a good life.”
To be a Christian means to say, “Father, cover my sin because of what Jesus Christ has done. Objectively cover it by pardoning my sin, but subjectively deal with the sin in my heart. I don’t feel loved. I don’t live loved. I’m trying to prove myself. I’m trying to get control. Let the love of what Jesus Christ did for me so flood my heart by the Holy Spirit I can start to serve people.”
You know what? A lot of people in New York … If there’s one thing I’ve seen over the years, it’s how hard everybody is working. Everybody is working so hard to achieve, and a lot of people are really upset. “I didn’t get into that graduate school. It’s not the top tier. I’m not there. I didn’t make that much money. I didn’t achieve. I’m gaining weight. Nobody wants to go out with me.” You’re really upset because you’re looking for beauty, and you’re looking to achievement, and you’re looking to accreditation and credentials.
Do you know what these things are? They’re fig leaves. They’re ways you’re trying to deal with the nakedness. You’re trying to deal with the sense that, “There’s something wrong with me, and I don’t quite know what it is.” Let Jesus Christ clothe you with his love. Accept what he has done. Ask God to receive you because of what Jesus Christ has done, and ask the Holy Spirit to make real to your heart what he has done for you.
That will begin not only to cover your sin objectively so God accepts you and you can go to heaven because of what Jesus has done, but subjectively it’ll start to heal your heart of sin, the canker, the cancer, the thing that’s destroying all of your relationships because you’re so nervous and so ashamed and you’re trying to prove yourself and you’re so needy. When the love of God comes in there, it changes everything. Ask God to cover you with the righteousness of Christ now so that someday you can be utterly covered with the very glory of God. Let’s pray.
Our Father, we’re so grateful it’s possible for us to know this horrible spiritual cancer, sin, has already, actually, been dealt with and is eventually going to be dealt with completely and is going to be over. Until then, we ask that you would help us to receive your salvation, your grace, into our lives in such a way that we can begin to more and more die unto sin and live more and more unto righteousness and be conformed to the image of your Son, in whose name we pray, amen.
ABOUT THE PREACHER
In 1989 Dr. Timothy J. Keller, his wife and three young sons moved to New York City to begin Redeemer Presbyterian Church. In 20 years it has grown to meeting for five services at three sites with a weekly attendance of over 5,000. Redeemer is notable not only for winning skeptical New Yorkers to faith, but also for partnering with other churches to do both mercy ministry and church planting. Redeemer City to City is working to help establish hundreds of new multi-ethnic congregations throughout the city and other global cities in the next decades.
Dr. Tim Keller is the author of several phenomenal Christo-centric books including:
Joy for the World: How Christianity Lost Its Cultural Influence and Can Begin Rebuilding It (co-authored with Greg Forster and Collin Hanson (February or March, 2014).
Romans 1-7 For You (God’s Word For You Series). The Good Book Company (2014).
Encounters with Jesus:Unexpected Answers to Life’s Biggest Questions. New York, Dutton (November 2013).
Walking with God through Pain and Suffering. New York, Dutton (October 2013).
Judges For You (God’s Word For You Series). The Good Book Company (August 6, 2013).
Galatians For You (God’s Word For You Series). The Good Book Company (February 11, 2013).
Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Plan for the World. New York, Penguin Publishing, November, 2012.
Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, September, 2012.
The Freedom of Self Forgetfulness. New York: 10 Publishing, April 2012.
Generous Justice: How God’s Grace Makes Us Just. New York: Riverhead Trade, August, 2012.
The Gospel As Center: Renewing Our Faith and Reforming Our Ministry Practices (editor and contributor). Wheaton: Crossway, 2012.
The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God. New York, Dutton, 2011.
King’s Cross: The Story of the World in the Life of Jesus (Retitled: Jesus the KIng: Understanding the Life and Death of the Son of God). New York, Dutton, 2011.
Gospel in Life Study Guide: Grace Changes Everything. Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 2010.
The Reason For God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. New York, Dutton, 2009.
Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Priorities of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope That Matters. New York, Riverhead Trade, 2009.
Heralds of the King: Christ Centered Sermons in the Tradition of Edmund P. Clowney (contributor). Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2009.
The Prodigal God. New York, Dutton, 2008.
Worship By The Book (contributor). Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002.
Ministries of Mercy: The Call of the Jericho Road. Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 1997.
Tim Keller Sermon: Paradise in Crisis – Genesis 3:1-9
Series The Bible: The Whole Story Part 2 – Creation and Fall
Preached in Manahattan, New York, January 11, 2009
1 Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden’?” 2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat fruit from the trees in the garden, 3 but God did say, ‘You must not eat fruit from the tree that is in the middle of the garden, and you must not touch it, or you will die.’ ”
4 “You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman. 5 “For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” 6 When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.
7 Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. 8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the Lord God called to the man, “Where are you?” – Genesis 3:1-9
In this series of sermons we’re trying to get across that the Bible is not a series of disconnected stories, each one with a little moral for how to live, but it’s actually primarily a single story about what went wrong with the human race and what will put it right. Figuring out what went wrong with the human race is actually really important.
Beatrice Webb, who was one of the architects of the modern British welfare system … She and her husband and some others founded the London School of Economics. She was a socialist, an activist, a British leader. She kept a diary, and in 1925 she went back and looked at her older diary, and she wrote, “In my diary, 1890, I wrote, ‘I have staked everything on the essential goodness of human nature.’
Now, 35 years later, I realize how permanent are the evil impulses and instincts in us and how little they seem to change, like greed for wealth and power, and how mere social machinery will never change that. We must ask better things from human nature, but will we get a response? No amount of science or knowledge has been of any avail, and unless we curb the bad impulse, how will we get better social institutions?”
That’s a remarkable statement from somebody who ought to know. She is saying there is something so wrong with us that leads to selfishness and violence, that leads to corruption in business and corruption in government, that leads to war and atrocities, and that’s consistent across history.
She says science hasn’t dealt with it. Education hasn’t dealt with it. Social machinery hasn’t dealt with it. Who will explain it? Chapter 3 and chapter 4 of Genesis do, and we’re looking at them for four weeks. Let’s start with this very famous text, and let’s learn what we can by noticing four features of the narrative: the sneer, the lie, the tree, and the call.
The story starts with a sneer. It says, “Now the serpent was more crafty than any of the wild animals the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, ‘Did God really say, “You must not eat from any tree in the garden”?’ ” Satan is speaking through the serpent. Right away readers say, “Who is Satan, and where did he come from, and what’s wrong with him, and how did he get that way?” but this text is about us. It doesn’t tell us anything about that. It’s here to explain how we got to be the way we are, and how we are now.
If we read it that way, it’s incredibly instructive, but if we ask, “Where did he come from, and what’s all this?” it doesn’t. It’s all right. That’s not what we need to know right now. It’s not the most important thing we ever need to know. What we see is the fall of the human race starts not with an action, but with an attitude, not with an act, but with a sneer. This word translated really, which could also be translated indeed … “Indeed, did he really say …?” It shows the sense of this is not that the Serpent is denying what God said; he’s mocking what God said.
He’s not saying God didn’t say it; he’s saying it’s ridiculous. It’s laughable. The sense of it is if you ever hear somebody say something like this: “Did he really say that?” That doesn’t mean he’s asking, “Did it really happen?” No, he’s saying, “Was he such an idiot, such a jerk, to say that? Did he really say that?” He is not denying God said it; he’s mocking it. He’s trying to get Adam and Eve to laugh at it. He’s trying to change their attitudes toward it. Therefore, the fall of the human race starts not with an action, or even with a thought, but with an attitude of heart.
We’re going to learn two things from this. The first thing (though this doesn’t always happen, I think this happens a lot) is, more often than not, we lose God not through argument, but through atmosphere. For example, here’s a little speech in a novel. It’s about two people who went to college and lost their Christian faith, and then one person gets it back later.
The person speaking got the faith back and is talking to the other person about how they “lost” their faith in college. He says, “Let’s be frank. We found ourselves in contact with a certain current of ideas and plunged into it because it seemed modern and successful. At college we started automatically writing the kinds of essays that got good marks and saying the kinds of things that won applause.
We were afraid of the label ‘fundamentalism,’ afraid of a breach with the spirit of the age, afraid of ridicule. Having allowed ourselves to drift, accepting every half-conscious solicitation from our desires, we reached a point where we no longer believed the faith, in the same way a drunken man reaches a point in which he believes another glass will do him no harm.”
I don’t want anybody to think I’m saying that’s how people lose the faith in college. Very often people lose their faith through argument, but not usually. They usually lose it through sneers. Everybody is sneering. Everybody is snarky. Everybody is saying, “You really believe that?” or “He really believes that?” “Does she really believe that?” You just want to go into your shell. You want to go along. You very often lose God not through argument, but through atmosphere.
Over the years, I have to say, for every one argument I’ve gotten against Christian belief I get 99 sneers. When somebody says, “Do you really believe that?” a proper measured response would be, “Well, that’s an assertion trying to create an atmosphere; it’s not really an argument. So could you please tell me why you think what I believe is untenable?” Just file that. So first of all, I think we learn here we tend to lose God as much, if not more, from atmosphere than argument.
Secondly, humor. The fall of the human race happened through an attitude of the heart that was expressed through a particular kind of humor. Here’s what I’d like us to think about, at least briefly. There’s a kind of humor that is actually an expression of humility. It persuades, it’s humble, and it says we’re all alike. And there’s a kind of humor that is an exercise of the will for power. It’s serpentine. It’s a way of putting somebody else down so it puts you up.
There’s a kind of humor that brings us all down and deflates and gets us to talk, and there’s a kind of humor that puts one group or one person up and smashes everybody to the ground. It’s serpentine. Do you know the difference? One brought about the fall of the human race and will bring about your fall, and one actually can be healing.
W.H. Auden wrote some wonderful essays and did some wonderful lectures on Shakespeare, doing literary criticism of Shakespeare. In a couple of his essays, he says he believed Shakespeare, whether he was personally a Christian or not, had a Christian view of human nature and the world, and therefore, Shakespearean comedy was different than Greek classical comedy.
Auden says in Greek classical comedy, the comedy ends with the audience laughing and the characters on stage in tears, but in Shakespeare comedies, like Much Ado About Nothing, it always ends with everybody laughing. The people out there are laughing and the people up here are laughing. Why? He says the Greek classical idea was what is funny is “Look at those fools up there. They’re not sophisticated like us.” Therefore, the audience is led by the comedy to laugh at the people up there because they lack the sophistication of the audience.
But, he says in one of his essays, there’s a different kind of humor Shakespeare had. He says comedies like Much Ado About Nothing are based on the belief that all men are sinners, and therefore, no one, whatever his rank or talents, should claim immunity from the comic exposure. Then Auden goes on and talks about the fact the Christian gospel turns the Greek idea of excellence and sophistication on its head.
In Christianity the ultimate excellence is to know you need the comic exposure to see your own pretensions and pride exposed and to seek forgiveness. He says, “Therefore, in Shakespeare the characters are exposed and forgiven, and when the curtain falls, the audience and the characters are all laughing together.”
David Denby, a movie critic for the New Yorker, wrote a book that’s coming out this week called Snark. In it he’s talking about how there’s a kind of humor that puts everybody down and says everybody is full of it and everybody is out for themselves. New York magazine this week wrote a snarky review of the book. It says, “When you have a society filled with BS, you just have to get up and say it’s filled with BS, and I’m going to get up and say it’s filled with BS.”
Auden would say that’s classical. That’s Greek comedy. What you’re really saying is, “Everybody but me is filled with BS. Everybody but me is out for themselves.” There is a kind of humility that says we human beings need to be laughed at. Look at our pretensions. And there is a kind of cynicism that is corrosive, that laughs at any truth claims, any claims that this is right and this is wrong, and is, therefore, basically serpentine, putting yourself in the judgment seat.
What will happen is that kind of cynical, corrosive, serpentine humor that says “Everybody is filled with BS but me, everybody is on the take, everybody is out for themselves but me,” leaves you in the end with no meaning in life. That can’t give you meaning in life. It leaves you in the end without friends. It’s serpentine. The Serpent laughs at you. If you laugh like the Serpent, the Serpent in the end will laugh like you.
Secondly, the fall of the human race proceeds with a lie. The next thing you see is after the attitude of the heart comes a lie for the mind. We see it here in verse 4. God has said, “Don’t eat of this tree,” and the Serpent comes back in verse 4 and says, “You will not surely die, for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened.”
Here’s what he’s saying. “God, if you obey him, will keep you down. God knows if you do this and this you’ll broaden your horizons, but he doesn’t want you to.” What Satan is trying to get into the heart of the human race is “If you obey God, you’ll miss out. If you obey God, you won’t be happy. If you obey the will of God, it’ll cut you off from other options. It will keep you from being all you want to be. You will not thrive and flourish.”
What’s so extremely interesting to see here is that Satan knows what is really crucial to destroy. Notice Satan does not go after the existence of God. He doesn’t say, “The only way I’m going to destroy the human race is to get everybody to disbelieve in God.” Heck no. He knows the whole human race can believe in God. Practically the whole human race does believe in God, and it’s a mess. That’s not the issue.
He also doesn’t actually go after the law or the will or the holiness of God. He doesn’t say, “Oh, God doesn’t care what you do.” He doesn’t say, “God doesn’t say you can’t eat of that tree.” He doesn’t deny the existence of God. He doesn’t deny the law of God, the will of God, the holiness of God. He denies the goodness of God. He denies the goodness and the love and the grace and the good will of God behind all of those decrees.
He says, “If you obey God, you can’t trust his good will. You can’t trust him. You’re going to have to take your life into your own hands.” That lie went in, and that lie is in my heart and that lie is in your heart. Do you know what it’s doing? It’s doing a lot. Why is it we say, “I know the Bible says I shouldn’t sleep with this person I’m not married to, but it would be great”? “I know the Bible says I shouldn’t spend all this money on myself; I should give it away, but it would be great to spend it all on myself.” “I know I’m not supposed to hold a grudge against this person and try to seek revenge, but boy, it feels good to seek revenge.” You’re tempted.
Do you know why you’re tempted? There would be no temptation unless, underneath, you already believed you can’t trust God. Your heart is saying, “If you obey, you won’t be happy.” The fact that Satan has destroyed our trust in the love of God is beneath everything else. Remember, in the fall we did our series on the Prodigal Son in Luke 15.
There were two different guys, weren’t there? There was the elder brother. He was very religious. He was very moral. He lived a very good life. He followed all of the rules. Why? So that forced God and everybody else to respect and reward him. Then there was the younger brother. He went off, and he had sex with prostitutes, and he lived it up with all of his material possessions. They look very, very different, but look at the bottom of each one.
Why is the moralist, the moralist? Why does he say, “I’m going to earn my salvation”? Because he doesn’t trust in the grace of God. Why does the younger brother go off and say, “I’m going to live any way I want; I’m going to do what I want to do”? Because he doesn’t trust the grace of God. He doesn’t believe if he obeys God he’ll be happy. They don’t believe in the love of God. They don’t believe in the good will of God. It’s at the root of everything. We’ll talk about this more next week.
Philip Roth has a novel called The Human Stain. It’s a metaphor for evil. At one point, one of the characters in the book talks about it. The human stain is the evil of the heart that makes everybody want to put everyone else down. It’s there before. It’s underneath all our wrongdoing. “I want to put other people down, and I have to prove myself.” Do you know where that comes from?
Erick Erickson in his book Childhood and Society says if a child, in the very earliest years, learns not to trust the dominant personality of the parents because they’ve been abused or because they’ve been neglected or abandoned … If a child in the very beginning of their life cannot trust the dominant personality in their life, then they have a fundamental inability to attach or trust ever again, and it’s a taproot for all other kinds of pathologies.
Now listen. I’m not a psychologist. I have no idea whether Erick Erickson is right about childhood pathologies or not. I do know it’s really weird that Genesis says that is exactly what happened in the beginning of the human race. When we were in our infancy, we believed the Serpent that we can’t trust God, that we can’t trust his love.
There are people right now working themselves to death in their jobs because they’re trying to prove to themselves and everybody else that they’re valuable because they don’t trust the love of God, and there are people putting everybody else down and exploiting and lying to everyone. The human stain. Why? They don’t trust God. If you don’t trust God, you don’t trust anybody. We’ve been ruined by the lie.
So first there was a sneer for the heart. Then secondly there was a lie for the mind. Finally, that leads to an act of the will. But it’s a tree sin. Take a look down here at verse 6: “When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.”
What was the great sin? What was this great horrible action? What is it that ruined the human race? They ate of the tree. What is this thing? What was wrong with that? What in the world could be wrong with a tree? By the way, a lot of people say, “I don’t get it. We have Ten Commandments. Sometimes to not kill somebody is actually rather hard to obey. Sometimes not to steal is hard to obey. But not to eat of a tree?
You can see why stealing could be bad, and you can see why killing can be bad, you can see why adultery can be bad, but not eating from a tree. What was the big deal about the tree? What was so bad about that? What was the logic behind the prohibition? God says, ‘You can do anything. It’s paradise. But you can’t eat from that tree.’ What was so bad about that?” Here’s what’s so bad about that.
What if God had actually given Adam and Eve an explanation? You can see Adam and Eve walking up to the tree and saying, “What’s so bad about eating from this tree?” and God saying, “Well, if you eat from the tree, there will be infinite suffering and misery and death for the rest of human history.” They would have gone, “Never mind. There’s a whole other … I mean, the rest of the world. There are all of these other trees.”
You know what? The reason God didn’t give them the explanation is crucial to why the decree was so important and what it was all about. If he had given them the explanation and they had said, “Oh, I’m not going to eat from the tree …” Why? Because cost-benefit analysis. “It’s not worth it.” That’s not really obedience, is it? That’s cost-benefit analysis. That’s self-interest. You’re still in the driver’s seat.
No, no. Here’s what’s going on. God was saying to Adam and Eve, “My children, I am God, and your life is a gift to you, and this world is a gift to you. I want you to live as if I’m God and you are living by my power. I want you to live as if this world is a gift and, therefore, not your possession to do with any way you want. I want you to see your lives are a gift from me and, therefore, not yours and something you can do with any way you want.
Therefore, don’t eat from that tree. This is your chance. You can either choose to treat me as God and to treat your life and the world as if it belongs to me and, therefore, you have to use it as I direct, or you can put yourself in the place of God. You can act as if your life is yours and that you generated it. You can act as if this entire world is yours and you can use it any way you want. You can treat me as God, or you can put yourself in the place of God.”
The Serpent knows that, because the Serpent says, “Take of the tree, and you will be like God.” That’s what Adam and Eve do. What’s so important for us to see is you need to look beyond all of the rules. You have to look through the rules. “Don’t lie. Don’t cheat. Don’t commit adultery. Don’t do fornication. Don’t spend all your money on yourself. Don’t be selfish.” All of the things the Bible says. There are the rules.
Behind the rules is, “Don’t put yourself in the place of God. Obey the rules because you’re not God.” God says, “Obey my rules not because of cost-benefit analysis, not because you see why, but because I’m God.” Do you realize that virtually everything that’s wrong with us in this world is you and I putting ourselves in the place of God? This is the problem.
On the one end, it’s not that hard to see that killing, murder, that kind of thing (which is awful, of course, and happens all the time all over the place in the world every day), is certainly putting yourself in the place of God, but have you ever thought about your anxiety? Some of us are eaten up with anxiety. Some of us are going to the doctor because of the way in which it’s corroding our bodies. We’re so anxious. Why? I’ll speak for myself. You’ve heard me say this before.
I get anxious because I have an idea of how my life has to go, how the church has to go, how things have to go in history, and I’m afraid God, who’s in charge of history, isn’t going to get it right. He’s not going to do it the way it needs to be. I know better. What am I doing? Why am I eaten up with anxiety? I’m in the place of God. See this is the sin behind these other sins. This is the thing that’s staining us.
Because of the mistrust, we put ourselves in the place of God. “I can’t trust God, so I have to do it myself.” How do I deal with worry? I deal with worry by saying, “I don’t know; God knows.” I pull myself a little bit out of the place of God, and I start to feel better, and by tomorrow I’ll be back. See, from anxiety on the one hand to murder on the other hand to grudges …
If you won’t forgive somebody, it’s because you’re putting yourself in the place of God. You think you know what they deserve. How do you know? You think you have the right to see them until they get what they deserve. You don’t have the right. You’re putting yourself in the place of God. All of our problems are coming because we’ve done what the Serpent asked us to do.
Do you know what this means? Let’s get down to nitty-gritty. One thing New Yorkers hate doing … They don’t mind obeying the will of God. They see what the Bible says. They don’t mind obeying the will of God as long as it makes sense to them, but if they feel like, “This is not very progressive,” or “This doesn’t meet my needs …” Do you know who William Borden is? You probably don’t.
William Borden grew up in Chicago in the late nineteenth century and went off to Yale in the 1890s, I believe. Yes, he was one of those Bordens. He was extremely wealthy. The Borden’s dairy. He was part of that family, and he was the heir of a great wealth. When he was at Yale, he sensed God’s call to the mission field, and he decided he was going to go to North China and work amongst Mongols and Chinese people.
It was very, very dangerous at the time, and when he announced to his family he was going to go into missionary work, this was appalling to everybody. A man of his stature, of his wealth, of his station in society didn’t do that. He got opposition from his family. He got opposition from his class of people. But he was absolutely resolute. When he graduated from Yale, he gave his entire inheritance (which at that time was $1 million, which was a heck of a lot of money) to mission agencies. He gave it away.
Now in relative poverty, he moved to Cairo to learn Arabic. Just out of college, with his whole life ahead of him, bright … Within a few weeks he had contracted spinal meningitis, and within a few weeks after that he was dead. Scratched on an ordinary piece of paper, which he wrote in his diary as he lay dying, found in his bedroom after he died, were these three phrases: “No reserve, no retreat, no regrets.”
Why wouldn’t he have written in his diary, “God, what are you doing? All my obedience, all my commitment, all my promise, all of my money, all of this preparation. Why would I die now? What possible good …? What are you doing?” Oh no. “No reserve, no retreat, no regrets.” Why? Because he didn’t obey the will of God for reputation. He didn’t obey the will of God for results. He didn’t obey the will of God for impact. He obeyed the will of God just for God’s sake. Not because it made sense, not because he understood it, just because it was God, because God is God and he wasn’t.
Don’t you see that is the ultimate deconstruction of the human will to power that’s ruining the world? If you say, “I’m going to be religious,” or “I’m going to believe in God and I’m going to obey,” but it’s calculated, it’s part of a career move, it’s part of a way of helping you get the inner strength so you can get out and do all of the things … There has to be at some point, “I’m doing this because God says so, because he’s God and I’m not. Period.”
That’s the ultimate deconstruction of the human will for power, which the Serpent got into our systems and poisoned us with. Even though I’m not saying William Borden overcame sin in his human nature, in that one act, where he was faithful to the end, he completely overturned the will of the Serpent. He disbelieved the lie that you can’t trust God. He refused the action of putting himself in the place of God.
By the way, we happen to know he ended up inspiring thousands and thousands of other missionaries over the next generation to go into missions. But he didn’t know that, and you don’t have to know that. See this is the stain. This is the thing that has come into our lives. In the next couple of weeks we’re going to see how this plays out, but we want to end with this. What does God do? Here’s the end.
At the very end, in verses 8–9, you see the rest of the history of the human race in a nutshell. Do you know that? The rest of the entire history of the world in a nutshell. “Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the LORD God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the LORD God among the trees of the garden. But the LORD God called to the man, ‘Where are you?’ ”
Please notice two things. The first thing is we are now hiders. If you take that idea and go back over your entire life and think about it, if you rethink your life in terms of that, you’ll see a lot. It’ll be an illuminating exercise. Because we don’t trust God, we now hide from ourselves. We cannot bear to know who we really are. We can’t have a realistic honest appraisal of ourselves. That’s what therapy is all about. If it wasn’t for verse 8, you wouldn’t have a job, therapists.
We hide from ourselves, we hide from each other (spin, dishonesty), but most of all, we hide from God, because in the presence of God we see what we don’t want. We’re hiding. We’re running from the truth, from God, from each other, from our very selves. We’ll look at more of that in the next couple of weeks.
The other thing that is so remarkable is that while we hide, according to these texts, God seeks. It’s our nature to hide; it’s God’s nature to seek. God comes back saying, “Where are you?” Now does he really need information? Does he really not know what happened? Of course not. If he knows what happened, what is he doing?
He’s engaging. In love he’s coming after them. In love he’s counseling them. He’s trying to get them to answer. We learn two things. The first thing we learn is we hide; God seeks. If we ever find God it’s because God found us. There’s that little hymn that goes like this:
‘Tis not that I did choose thee,
For Lord, that could not be;
This heart would still refuse thee,
Hadst thou not chosen me.
My heart owns none before thee,
For thy rich grace I thirst;
This knowing, if I love thee,
Thou must have loved me first.
Anybody who ever finds faith with God feels like that. “You must have come after me; I never would have come after you.” That’s just a fact. The Bible from the very beginning to the end teaches that. More importantly, God going out in love finds its ultimate expression in Jesus Christ. It’s in Jesus Christ all of the things the Serpent gave us are dealt with. Jesus comes back and smashes the Serpent’s head, because he deals with the tree, he deals with the lie, and he even deals with the joke.
First of all, how does Jesus Christ deal with the tree? In the garden of Gethsemane, he’s struggling. There’s a garden. See centuries after Adam and Eve are struggling in the garden over a command about a tree, Jesus is in a garden, and he’s struggling over a command about a tree. It’s called the cross. He knows he has to go to the cross and die for our sins and pay the penalty we owe, and he’s struggling.
Think about this. Adam and Eve were in a bright sunny garden, and God said, “Obey me about the tree, and you will live,” and they didn’t. Jesus Christ was in a dark garden, and God said, “Obey me about the tree, and you’ll be crushed,” and he did, for us. Here’s what he did. He climbed the tree of death and turned that tree of death, the cross, into a tree of life for you and me. There’s the reversal of the tree sin.
What’s the tree sin? Us putting ourselves where only God deserves to be, putting ourselves in the place of God. The tree salvation is God putting himself where we deserve to be, on the cross. See the original tree sin was us putting ourselves where only God deserved to be, taking prerogatives only God deserves to have, putting ourselves in the place of God, but the tree salvation, which is a salvation of Jesus Christ, his death on the cross, is God coming down and putting himself where we deserve to be and taking it for us.
That not only deals with the tree, but that deals with the lie. The lie is, “You can’t trust God,” and all the poison in your life is because you don’t believe God loves you. You don’t believe in the grace of God. What’s going to overcome that? “Well I just believe in a god of love.” That will never overcome it. That’s too weak. It’s weak tea. It won’t work. This is the only thing that will overcome it.
You have to see Jesus Christ climbing a tree of death and turning that tree of death for him into a tree of life for you and me. That will finally begin to take the toxins out of your soul, and you’ll finally start to actually believe God loves you. This is the only thing that will take that out. It’s the only crowbar strong enough to wedge out of your heart the belief that “Basically I’m on my own.”
Lastly, Jesus even deals with the joke. He turns the sneer into something else. Dr. David Martyn Lloyd-Jones used to say the way in which he could tell the difference between a person who was a Pharisee, who believed they were saved by their good works, because they lived a good life, and a Christian who understood the gospel of grace, was to ask them, “Are you a Christian?”
If you ask a pharisaical, moralistic person, “Are you a Christian?” the person gets very … “What do you mean? Of course. Why would you even ask? How dare you ask?” But if you ask anybody who understands the gospel of grace, “Are you a Christian?” they laugh. They say, “Yes, what a joke. Me, a Christian. But it’s true.”
If you’re not a joke to yourself that you’re a Christian, that God is in the middle of your life, that God is using you … If that doesn’t make you laugh, you don’t understand the gospel. It’s a whole different kind of laughter than the laughter of the Serpent. Jesus Christ has dealt with the tree, he has dealt with the lie, and he has even dealt with the sneer and turned it to laughter. Let’s pray.
Our Father, we have a lot to plow through this next month as we try to understand how we got to be the way we are and as we begin to try to understand the various aspects of that and to know how to try to overcome it using the grace and the gospel of Jesus Christ. So we pray you’d be with us, and we pray you will remind us of what a great joke it is that we belong to you because of your grace. Help us to smile. Help us to laugh at that. Help us to rejoice for the rest of our lives that your Son did what he did. We pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.
ABOUT THE PREACHER
In 1989 Dr. Timothy J. Keller, his wife and three young sons moved to New York City to begin Redeemer Presbyterian Church. In 20 years it has grown to meeting for five services at three sites with a weekly attendance of over 5,000. Redeemer is notable not only for winning skeptical New Yorkers to faith, but also for partnering with other churches to do both mercy ministry and church planting. Redeemer City to City is working to help establish hundreds of new multi-ethnic congregations throughout the city and other global cities in the next decades.
Dr. Tim Keller is the author of several phenomenal Christo-centric books including:
Joy for the World: How Christianity Lost Its Cultural Influence and Can Begin Rebuilding It (co-authored with Greg Forster and Collin Hanson (February or March, 2014).
Romans 1-7 For You (God’s Word For You Series). The Good Book Company (2014).
Encounters with Jesus:Unexpected Answers to Life’s Biggest Questions. New York, Dutton (November 2013).
Walking with God through Pain and Suffering. New York, Dutton (October 2013).
Judges For You (God’s Word For You Series). The Good Book Company (August 6, 2013).
Galatians For You (God’s Word For You Series). The Good Book Company (February 11, 2013).
Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Plan for the World. New York, Penguin Publishing, November, 2012.
Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, September, 2012.
The Freedom of Self Forgetfulness. New York: 10 Publishing, April 2012.
Generous Justice: How God’s Grace Makes Us Just. New York: Riverhead Trade, August, 2012.
The Gospel As Center: Renewing Our Faith and Reforming Our Ministry Practices (editor and contributor). Wheaton: Crossway, 2012.
The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God. New York, Dutton, 2011.
King’s Cross: The Story of the World in the Life of Jesus (Retitled: Jesus the KIng: Understanding the Life and Death of the Son of God). New York, Dutton, 2011.
Gospel in Life Study Guide: Grace Changes Everything. Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 2010.
The Reason For God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. New York, Dutton, 2009.
Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Priorities of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope That Matters. New York, Riverhead Trade, 2009.
Heralds of the King: Christ Centered Sermons in the Tradition of Edmund P. Clowney (contributor). Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2009.
The Prodigal God. New York, Dutton, 2008.
Worship By The Book (contributor). Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002.
Ministries of Mercy: The Call of the Jericho Road. Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 1997.
Tim Keller Sermon: The First Wedding Day – Genesis 2:18-25
Series The Bible: The Whole Story Part 1 – Creation and Fall
Preached in Manahattan, New York, January 4, 2009
Genesis 2:18–25
18 The Lord God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.” 19 Now the Lord God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air. He brought them to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name.
20 So the man gave names to all the livestock, the birds of the air and all the beasts of the field. But for Adam no suitable helper was found. 21 So the Lord God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and closed up the place with flesh. 22 Then the Lord God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man.
23 The man said, “This is now bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman,’ for she was taken out of man.” 24 For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and they will become one flesh. 25 The man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame. – This is the Word of the Lord
We’re looking over a period of weeks and months at the central story line of the Bible. We’re trying to trace out the big picture of what the whole Bible is about. We’re starting in Genesis. We come to this very famous passage, the first wedding. Indeed, you can’t understand the story line of the Bible unless you understand something about marriage, because the Bible begins with this marriage, and at the end, in Revelation, it ends with a marriage, the wedding supper of the Lamb.
In some ways, you can understand what the whole Bible is about and what the gospel is about in terms of marriage too. We’re going to see that tonight. Now let’s start this way. There’s so much in this passage. It’s very famous. Almost everybody has heard of it or heard it or parts of it. Let’s be practical tonight. Let’s ask the text a question. I look out there and I know a number of you are not married but you are open to it. A number of you are married.
What do we need to be successful in marriage seeking and in marriage executing? What do we need to be successful in seeking out marriage and/or actually being well-married? How can we seek or be married well? We need three things, I think, according to the text. There are actually more than that, but it’s all we have time for tonight. There are three things the text tells us you really need if you’re going to be married well: attentiveness to idolatry, patience for a very long journey, and supernatural humility.
1. Attentiveness to idolatry
This is a wedding. You know how the father brings the bride down the aisle to the groom? In this case, the father is God. God is doing the honors, and he’s bringing the wife to the husband. When Adam sees Eve, he literally explodes into art. This is the first piece of art in the history of the world, according to the Bible. The reason it’s printed out on the page the way it is is because this is Hebrew poetry using parallelism, assonance, word play, and a chiastic structure. It’s a song. He’s exploding into poetry and song, and he’s saying two things.
First of all, the first Hebrew word in the poem is at last. I know it comes out in the English here as “This is now,” but that word now, which can be translated at last or finally, means Adam is saying, “This is what I’ve been looking for all my life.” Some of you might say, “Well it hasn’t been a very long life, has it?” All right, all right, but the point is he’s saying, “At last,” meaning, “This is the thing I’ve been looking for. This is what I’ve been looking for all my life.”
Well what is it? “Bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” That’s weird. What is that? It’s a poetic way of saying, “As I see you, I now know who I am. I have found myself in you. I’m not just coming to another; I’m coming to someone who is helping me see who I am. At last, finally, by discovering you I have found out who I am.” That’s what he’s saying. That is powerful. Let’s just spend a moment noticing that here we are in paradise, where Adam has a perfect relationship with God, yet he’s responding to romance and marriage like this.
What that means is that John Newton, whom you probably know as a hymn writer (he wrote “Amazing Grace”), but who was actually a great pastor in eighteenth-century Britain, was right when he said (which he regularly did to newlyweds), “You may think your biggest problem, spiritually speaking, is the prospect of a bad marriage.” He says, “Every bit as big a spiritual danger is the prospect of a good marriage.”
In one of his letters he wrote to this young couple who had just been married. I’ll read it to you, but it’s eighteenth-century English. He uses jargon. I’ll have to explain it. To paraphrase, he says, “Permit me to say to both of you with regard to marriage, ‘Beware of idolatry.’ I have smarted for it. I have found my choicest mercies have been the principal occasions of drawing out the evils of my heart and causing me to walk heavily and in darkness, because the old leaven, a tendency toward the covenant of works, still cleaves to me.”
What? Here’s what he’s saying. What is “covenant of works”? It’s an old theological term for a system in which you earn your salvation through perfect performance. In other words, “The reason I go to heaven and get blessed is that I’m living this good life. I’m doing everything perfectly, and therefore I get blessed.” That’s called the covenant of works.
What is he saying? He says his biggest problem, practically, in his life has been idolatry with regard to his wife and his marriage, which helps him slip back into a covenant of works. He says there is (or can be) something so powerful about marriage, so fulfilling about marriage, that unless you deliberately stop it, this is what’s going to happen. You will look to your spouse to give you the things only God can really give you.
You will look to your spouse’s love, your spouse’s respect, your spouse’s affirmation, to give you meaning in life, and to give you a foundation for your own sense of value, all of the things you should only be getting from God. In other words, you will be looking to your spouse to save you. It’ll slip you back into the covenant of works. Oh, you won’t say that. You won’t say that to yourself, and you won’t say that to other people, but you’ll be doing it.
In fact, you’ll be doing it unless you know you’re doing it and stop it, because marriage is this powerful a thing. It’s this attractive a thing. It’s this great a thing. “O Lord,” says John Newton, “save us from the wonderfulness of marriage.” If you do it (and we will do it, to some degree) … In fact, as I’ll show you in a minute, the idolatry happens even if your marriage is bad. No human relationship can bear the weight of those kinds of expectations.
You will crush your marriage with those expectations. Nobody can bear the weight of the expectations and the hopes of ultimate joy. The criticism of your spouse will crush you. The problems of your spouse will crush you. They will devastate you much more than they should, because you’re looking to your spouse and to marriage to save you, to make everything right in your life. Now there are a whole lot of ways this plays out. Let me just give you a couple.
When you’re married, the way it plays out is you just feel that your spouse isn’t perfect. “My marriage isn’t perfect, and I don’t like it.” You cannot live with imperfection. You can’t ever settle for anything other than this incredible picture you have in your mind of absolute blissful love. You have to have it, because you’re looking to it to give you what only God can give you. So when you’re not able to actually handle mediocrity in marriage, and you get all bent out of shape about the imperfections of your spouse and your marriage and refuse to be content with the good things you have, it’s idolatry.
How do unmarried people do it? There are a lot of ways. One of the ways unmarried people make an idol out of marriage and think it’s going to save them and fix them is by being incredibly picky as they evaluate spousal prospects. You say, “Oh, I want a marriage, and it’s going to be like this, and it’s going to be like this. This person has to be so this and this.” You’re looking for virtually perfect spousal prospects, but there aren’t any out there. And you’re not perfect spousal prospects. Hypocrite! You want something you’re not, and that’s idolatry.
Or maybe the most frequent form of idolatry I know is a single person who wants to be married and who so pines after being married that they cannot enjoy their present condition. What are we going to do? This is just plain common sense. There’s a tendency for us to say, “So are you trying to say I shouldn’t love my spouse too much, or hope to love my spouse too much?”
C.S. Lewis says it is probably impossible to love any human being too much. You may love him too much in proportion to your love for God, but it is the smallness of your love for God, not the greatness of your love for the person, that constitutes the inordinacy. Do you know what that means? Marriage will strangle us unless we have a really great, true, existential love relationship with God.
You must not try to demote your love for your spouse or the person you think you’re going to marry. You can’t at all. You have to promote your love for God. Otherwise, it’ll strangle you. Don’t you see that? So married people, you have to do that, or you are not going to be able to settle for the imperfections of your marriage and of your spouse, and single people, you have to remember Christianity is the only major religion that was started by a single person. Do you know that?
Traditional societies believe you’re nobody unless you’re somebody’s spouse, but our faith was started by a single man. Another one of the great founders of Christianity, Saint Paul, has an interesting place in 2 Corinthians where he says, “You want to be married? Great. You’re not married? Great.” That was unique in antiquity, because in ancient times and in traditional cultures, you’re nobody unless you’re married.
But Paul says the relationship every single Christian has with God through Christ is so intimate and so great, and the relationship Christian brothers and sisters have inside the family of God is so great, no one who’s single should be seen as being a second-class person. You are fully human as a single person. After all, the person who saved us was single. I mean, all of this works against idolatry. Use it. But that’s only the first thing we need.
2. Patience for the long journey
A very long journey. Verse 18: “The LORD God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.’ ” This little word, “a helper suitable …” Let’s look at this, and let me show you why I’m saying this is telling us marriage is a long journey.
The Hebrew word used here that’s translated to the word helper is regularly used in the Bible in Hebrew to refer to military reinforcements. So here’s an overwhelmed little army. You’re outnumbered five to one, and you’re about to be destroyed, and in come reinforcements. That’s help: military reinforcements. In fact, several times God uses that term for himself and says, “You were about to be wiped out, O Israelite army, but I came in and smote everybody with blindness, or I knocked them out, and I saved you. You would have been destroyed without my help.”
Help is a military word, help is a strong word, help is a divine word, and God has the audacity to use it to refer to Eve. What the woman brings into the man’s life is a strength, but here’s a certain kind of strength. Do you see that word suitable? Some translations try to translate it “I will make a helper fit for him.” “I will make a helper meet for him.” That’s the old King James, a helpmeet. “I will make a helper that is suitable for him.”
There are actually two Hebrew words there the word suitable is trying to translate. The Hebrew word literally says, “I will make a helper like opposite him.” Like opposite? Wait a minute. Make up your mind here. Is it like or is it opposite? You can’t be like and opposite. Oh yes, it can, if it’s a complement. See, two pieces of a puzzle fit together not if they’re identical. If they’re identical, they don’t fit. Right? On the other hand, they can’t just be different in general. They have to be rightly different. They have to be like opposite. They have to be perfectly complementary.
Now here’s what we’re being told. God is sending into Adam’s life (and therefore, God is sending into Eve’s life by definition) somebody with enormous power but power that is very different. Like opposite. This help does what? The poem tells you what’s happening. Into your life in marriage comes a person of a different gender, a person with mysteriously profound differences that are really almost impossible to define.
As soon as you start to try to define the difference between male and female, it never quite fits. Yet there it is, and it’s irreducible, and it’s inexorable. In marriage, into your life comes a person with a very radically different view of you, of the world, a person of different gender, of equal power, equal resources, but incredibly different, and you’re thrown into an incredibly tight, close relationship.
Do you know how close? One flesh. “A man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife. The two shall become one flesh.” That word flesh is not what you think. It’s not talking about the bodies. When God says, “I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh,” he’s not saying, “I will pour out my Spirit on all bodies.” He’s saying, “I will pour out my Spirit on all persons.”
What it is saying is marriage puts you into the same space. You literally occupy the same space. You hold things in common. You’re raising your family together. Two people, very different, like you, not you, opposite you, put together in the same tight location. What’s going to happen? Constantly butting heads. It has to be. This is a military word. Let me put it like this. I’ve used this illustration before, but I hope this’ll be even more illuminating under these circumstances.
My wife and I have had 34 years of marriage. Neither my wife nor I are particularly gender-stereotyped. I’m not a particularly masculine-type guy. My wife is not a particularly feminine kind of girl. Yet you get into marriage, and you find you see the world differently, and you see each other differently. She sees things in me I would never see, but she sees because she’s a different gender and she’s in close, and I see things in her, and I see things in the world.
After 34 years of conflict, of arguing, of head-butting (it’s military, you know), now every single day when I get out into the world and things happen to me, I have a split second to react. What am I going to say? What am I going to do? What am I going to think? For years, even halfway through my marriage, I only thought like a man, but now, after years and years of head-butting, here’s what happens.
Something happens, and for a split second, I not only know what I would do, what I would think, how I would respond, but I know how Kathy would think, and I know what Kathy would do. For a split second, because it’s so instilled in me, I actually have a choice. Which of these approaches would probably work better? You see, my wisdom portfolio has been permanently diversified. I’m a different person, and yet I’m me. I haven’t become more feminine. In fact, probably in many ways I’ve become more masculine as time has gone on.
What’s going on? She came into my life, and now I know who I am. I’ve become who I’m supposed to be only through the head-butting, only through having a person who’s like me, not me, opposite to me, in close. Now here’s what worries me a great deal about marriage in our culture. We are consumers. We are trained to be consumers. Consumers do a cost-benefit analysis, and you do it in your head automatically. You don’t even realize how much you’ve been trained to do it.
You want a product that satisfies. You don’t want a product that fights back. You want a product that does exactly what you want, customized. You don’t want someone who’s like you, not you, opposite you. I’m afraid we get into our marriages and we say, “This isn’t right. This is supposed to be blissful. This is supposed to be beautiful. It’s supposed to be wonderful. Why are we always having these confrontations?” Because marriage is meant to, or you’ll never become the person God wants you to be. You’ll never finally get there.
It’s not just Eve who’s brought into Adam’s life with her gender resources to help him be who he’s supposed to be. Go to Ephesians 5. Do you realize it’s the same thing as Genesis 2, reversed? “Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church. Give yourself for her. Help her become who she ought to be. Make her a radiant person. Find ways of helping her overcome her flaws.” It’s the same thing. He’s using his gender-differentiated resources to bring her to who she should be, but it’s a long journey. Will you have the patience to stick with it?
This is the reason one of my favorite quotes that I always read every time I can when I’m preaching on marriage … Stanley Hauerwas says there’s an assumption out there in the culture that there’s someone just right for us to marry, and if we look closely enough we will find that right person. That’s the consumer mindset.
“This overlooks a crucial fact about marriage. It fails to appreciate the fact that when you get married, you always marry the wrong person. We never know who we marry; we just think we do. Even if we first marry the right person, just give it a while, and he or she will change. For marriage, being the enormous thing it is, means we are not the same person after we’ve entered it.”
Do you get that? You know, you’re looking. “Oh, I want to marry the right person.” So you’re trying to evaluate who that person is, but how do you know who that person is going to be when you get in there? Once you get in there, marriage is so incredibly powerful it’s going to change the person. You always marry the wrong person, as it were. You always marry somebody who’s going to be butting heads with you.
Where will you get the patience to stick with it and to understand what the confrontation is there for? Marriage is not designed to bring you so much into confrontation with your spouse; it’s actually designed to bring you into confrontation with yourself, to show you your sins, to show you what’s wrong with you, to show you ways to change that otherwise you never would find.
Remember how Ulysses during his odyssey at one point had to navigate his boat right through the center between the Scylla and the Charybdis? The Scylla is idolatry, because that’s romantic naïveté, this incredibly beautiful high view of marriage that is so unrealistic, and the Charybdis is the disillusionment of actually finding out what marriage is like and being afraid of it and being cynical about it because it’s always so much work. How are we going to get what we need to have a vaccine against the idolatry but, at the same time, a patience so that marriage will pay off in the end?
3. A kind of humility only the gospel can give you
It’s indicated here at the beginning where it says, “The LORD God said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone.’ ” Most commentators will tell you that is a very surprising statement. It’s first of all surprising because it’s a departure. Up to now, everything God has been saying is, “It is good.” It keeps saying, “He saw this, and it was good. He made this, and it was good.” This is the first thing to which he says, “Not good.” Everything else was a benediction, a good word. This is the first malediction, a bad word. This is bad. So that’s surprising.
What’s really surprising about it is it’s inexplicable. How could you be unhappy in paradise? Why would Adam be lonely? Why would he be unhappy in paradise? There’s only one possible answer, really. God deliberately made him to need someone besides God. Oh, don’t get me wrong. We all need God. He made us to need him, and that’s the foundation of a relationship, but think about this. Several theologians have put it like this.
This is the most humble act you could imagine. This is the most un-self-centered act you could imagine. God made human beings to need not just him, but other human beings, other relationships, other selves, other hearts. How humble of God, how un-self-centered of God, how other-oriented of God, how sacrificial, in a way, of God. It’s nothing compared to what we see later. Here’s what we see later. When in the Bible God says repeatedly in Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Hosea, “I am the bridegroom, and you, my people, are the bride,” do you know what that’s teaching? It’s teaching two things.
First of all, it’s teaching you need to have God in your life, not just as someone you believe in, not just as someone you try to obey; you need God in your life as your spouse. He’s the ultimate helpmeet you need. He’s like you but not you. He’s like you because you’re in his image. That means you’re personal and relational. He’s personal and relational. But he’s not like you because he’s holy. There is no other helpmeet you need in your life like God.
You’ll never become the person you’re supposed to be unless he comes into your life, not just as a kind of abstract principle of love or somebody you kind of obey in a general way. He has to be in your life as your lover. He has to be in your life intimately. There has to be interaction. There has to be prayer. There has to be listening to his Word. All that has to be there. Why? You need him. That’s the main help you need. He has to be in your life. He’s like you and not you. You’ll never become the person you ought to be unless that’s the case. So we need to have that relationship. He is the ultimate spousal relationship we need.
The second thing this teaches when he says, “I am the bridegroom and you are the bride,” is he has given us his heart. A groom does not ask a woman to marry him unless he has lost his heart, as it were. His heart is bound up with her. This is God’s way of saying, “I have given you my heart, and how you act and how you live and how you treat me now hurts me.”
Think about this. The Bible says when you say, “Oh, I believe in God,” but you really live for your career, or you really live for this or you live for that, that’s called spiritual adultery. You’ve given the deepest passions and love of your heart to someone besides God. The Bible says God has a sense of betrayal and grief far greater (because he’s perfect and holy and his love is perfect) than you would feel if your human spouse was unfaithful to you.
By the way, there are people in this room that has happened to, and you know how bad it is. Therefore, you know how incredible it is for God to say, “What you have felt is nothing like the grief I feel when I look at every one of you every day.” This means we are the spouses from hell, and God is in the longest-lived, worst marriage in the history of the world. Now you can understand the whole history of the Bible.
Why did God come to earth in the form of Jesus Christ? John 1, says he came to his own, but his own received him not. He was trying to get us back. He was trying to get his wayward bride back. But we didn’t just spurn him; we nailed him to the cross. Some of you may be in bad marriages and you think, “Oh, my spouse is crucifying me,” but in God’s case it really happened.
When he was on the cross looking down, realizing what it would take for him to stay and love us to the end, guess what? He stayed. Here’s the ultimate spousal love. Here’s the man, here’s the spouse, who has no illusions. He doesn’t expect us to be perfect. He knows we’re not perfect. He’s loving us not because we’re lovely and not because we’re going to give him so much affirmation. He loves us to make us lovely. He loves us for our sakes, not for his sake, so he’s the perfect spouse, and he’s the perfect helpmeet.
He has come into our lives, and he has gone to the cross, and he has died on the cross for our sins. When he did that … Martin Luther says, “Now you understand the gospel.” Martin Luther has a great little essay he wrote called “The Freedom of a Christian.” In it he tries to give the essence of what it means that you’re saved by faith, not by works. He says there’s no better way than understanding what Jesus Christ did when he died on the cross for our sins and says, “Now believe in me.”
Listen to this paraphrase from “The Freedom of a Christian.” This is incredible. “The third incomparable grace of faith is this: it unites us to Christ as a wife and a husband are made one flesh. When two people are married, it follows that all they have becomes theirs in common, good things as well as evil things, so that whatsoever Christ possesses, that now belongs to you, and whatever belongs to you, that Christ claims as his.
Oh, if we compare these possessions we shall see how infinite is our gain. For Christ is full of grace, life, and salvation, and we are full of sin, death, and condemnation. But let faith step in, and then sin, death, and hell belong to Christ, and grace, life, and salvation come to us. For if he is a husband, he must needs take to himself that which is his wife’s and, at the same time, impart to his wife that which is his.
Therefore, we the believing, by the wedding ring of faith, become free from all sin, fearless of death, safe from hell, and endowed with this eternal righteousness, life, and salvation of our husband Jesus Christ. Oh, who can value highly enough these royal nuptials? Who can comprehend the riches of the glory of his grace? Do you not see the importance of faith, which is a wedding ring, and that it alone can fulfill the law and justify without works?”
If you know our spouse, Jesus Christ, died for us, that he had the patience to stick with us to the end, that he didn’t come and love us because we were lovely but to make us lovely, that’s everything you need for two reasons. First of all, there’s the patience you need for the journey. The main thing you need to really stick with a marriage is you need to over and over and over again look at your spouse and say, “You wronged me, but I wronged my great spouse, Jesus Christ, and he kept covering me and forgiving me, so I’m loved enough by him that I can offer the same thing to you.” That’s the only way you’ll have the patience for the journey.
Here’s the other thing. It’s the vaccine against idolatry. If you look at your spouse and say, “He or she isn’t very incredible, is he or she?” and if you look at your own life as an unmarried person and say, “Why can’t I be married?” now look at this spouse. This spouse, Jesus Christ, is the only spouse who’s really going to save you. He’s the only one who can really fulfill you. The great wedding day on which we fall into his arms is the only wedding day that will really make everything right in our lives, and it awaits you if you put on the wedding ring of faith.
So don’t get too upset about the flaws in your current life. Single people, here’s one last thing to say. You say, “How am I ever going to become myself and figure out who I am if I don’t get married?” Think about this. When you get married, it pulls you away from all of the brothers and sisters out there in the church. I mean, there are a lot of men and women out there who can be your friends, people of a different gender as well.
When you get married, it gets you into a deep relationship with one person of the other gender, and it pulls you away from all kinds of other relationships with men and women. Therefore, there are a lot of ways in which God can get you help through the body of Christ that you can’t get once you’re married. It’s up to God to know what you need to grow in grace and what you need to grow into the person he wants you to be. Only he knows whether you should be married. Only he knows whether you should not be married. So let him rule your life.
The Bible begins with a wedding, and this wedding’s original purpose was to fill the world with children of God, and it failed. Why? Because the husband in that marriage failed to step in and help his wife when she needed him. But at the end of time there will be another wedding, the marriage supper of the Lamb, and its purpose is to fill the world with children of God, and it will succeed where the first marriage failed. Do you know why? Because the first husband failed, but the second husband will not. The true Adam, Jesus Christ, will never let his wife down. He hasn’t. He won’t. Let us love him for that. Let’s pray.
Our Father, we thank you for giving us insights into the gospel through the metaphor of marriage. We thank you that now, as we partake of the bread and the cup, we actually have a foretaste of that wedding feast. We just need to come closer to you and have a closer walk of love with our true spouse, Jesus Christ, so we can be, in all of our relationships, who we need to be. We ask that you would meet with us now. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
ABOUT THE PREACHER
In 1989 Dr. Timothy J. Keller, his wife and three young sons moved to New York City to begin Redeemer Presbyterian Church. In 20 years it has grown to meeting for five services at three sites with a weekly attendance of over 5,000. Redeemer is notable not only for winning skeptical New Yorkers to faith, but also for partnering with other churches to do both mercy ministry and church planting. Redeemer City to City is working to help establish hundreds of new multi-ethnic congregations throughout the city and other global cities in the next decades.
Dr. Tim Keller is the author of several phenomenal Christo-centric books including:
Joy for the World: How Christianity Lost Its Cultural Influence and Can Begin Rebuilding It (co-authored with Greg Forster and Collin Hanson (February or March, 2014).
Romans 1-7 For You (God’s Word For You Series). The Good Book Company (2014).
Encounters with Jesus:Unexpected Answers to Life’s Biggest Questions. New York, Dutton (November 2013).
Walking with God through Pain and Suffering. New York, Dutton (October 2013).
Judges For You (God’s Word For You Series). The Good Book Company (August 6, 2013).
Galatians For You (God’s Word For You Series). The Good Book Company (February 11, 2013).
Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Plan for the World. New York, Penguin Publishing, November, 2012.
Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, September, 2012.
The Freedom of Self Forgetfulness. New York: 10 Publishing, April 2012.
Generous Justice: How God’s Grace Makes Us Just. New York: Riverhead Trade, August, 2012.
The Gospel As Center: Renewing Our Faith and Reforming Our Ministry Practices (editor and contributor). Wheaton: Crossway, 2012.
The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God. New York, Dutton, 2011.
King’s Cross: The Story of the World in the Life of Jesus (Retitled: Jesus the KIng: Understanding the Life and Death of the Son of God). New York, Dutton, 2011.
Gospel in Life Study Guide: Grace Changes Everything. Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 2010.
The Reason For God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. New York, Dutton, 2009.
Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Priorities of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope That Matters. New York, Riverhead Trade, 2009.
Heralds of the King: Christ Centered Sermons in the Tradition of Edmund P. Clowney (contributor). Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2009.
The Prodigal God. New York, Dutton, 2008.
Worship By The Book (contributor). Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002.
Ministries of Mercy: The Call of the Jericho Road. Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 1997.
Tim Keller on “THE WOUNDED SPIRIT” – Proverbs Series
SERIES: Proverbs: True Wisdom for Living
Preached in Manhattan, N.Y. on December 5, 2004
Book of Proverbs
Proverbs 12:
25 An anxious heart weighs a man down, but a kind word cheers him up.
Proverbs 13:
12 Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.
Proverbs 14:
10 Each heart knows its own bitterness, and no one else can share its joy.
13 Even in laughter the heart is sad, and the end of joy is grief.
30 A tranquil mind gives life to the flesh, but passion makes the bones rot.
Proverbs 15:
4 The tongue that brings healing is a tree of life, but a deceitful tongue crushes the spirit.
13 A happy heart makes the face cheerful, but heartache crushes the spirit. 14 The discerning heart seeks knowledge, but the mouth of a fool feeds on folly.
Proverbs 16:
2 All a man’s ways seem innocent to him, but motives are weighed by the Lord.
Proverbs 18:
14 A man’s spirit sustains him in sickness, but a crushed spirit who can bear?
Proverbs 28:
1 The wicked man flees though no one pursues, but the righteous are as bold as a lion.
We’re looking at the book of Proverbs every week, and we continue to do that. We’re looking at the subject of wisdom. We’ve said wisdom is competence with regard to the complex realities of life. It means being not less than moral and good, but more. For example, if you want to help a poor family out of poverty, that’s wonderful. That’s right. That’s good. It’s moral.
If you’re a simpleminded conservative and you think poverty is completely the result of lack of personal responsibility or if you’re a simpleminded liberal and you think poverty is completely the result of unjust social structures … In other words, if you’re reductionistic, if you’re simplistic, if you’re not savvy about the complex realities of poverty, though you mean well and you’re being moral and right and good, you can ruin that poor family’s life.
Tonight what we want to do is talk about wisdom with regard to the complex realities of the inner being, the inner life, or what we would today call the psychological life, which is, as we’re going to see in a moment, a modern category that’s actually itself too reductionistic. Nevertheless, what are we talking about?
We all at certain times just have a lot of trouble understanding and dealing with the very deep, conflicting, confusing, powerful, sometimes warring dynamic impulses and feelings that just roll through our hearts, roll through ourselves. Sometimes we don’t feel we have any power over it. We feel helpless, and we don’t know how we got to feeling like that. We know there’s something deeply wrong with it. We don’t know what to do about it.
Tonight maybe we’ll get some wisdom because we’re taking a look at what the book of Proverbs says about this subject, and I’d like to look at the passage under four headings. Let’s see what we learn from these collected proverbs. You’re not going to be wise unless you understand the priority of the inner life, the complexity of the inner life, the solitude of the inner life, and the healing of the inner life.
1. The priority of the inner life
Take a look at the second from the last proverb in the list, and we’ll learn something about the priority of the inner life. “A man’s spirit sustains him in sickness, but a crushed spirit who can bear?” What does the word spirit mean? In the Hebrew Scriptures, in the Old Testament, the word spirit is actually literally the word for wind.
Whenever the word wind, ruwach, is used in the Old Testament it has to do with force, with power, with energy. When it refers to your inside, the human inner being, the human spirit is roughly analogous to what we would call today emotional energy, passion for life, that which propels us out into life, makes us want life, makes us want to take it on, navigate, deal with it.
What’s a crushed spirit? A crushed spirit then is to look out at life and to have no desire for it, have little or no joy in it, have no passion to get out there and deal with it. Of course, there are degrees of a crushed spirit. It can be anywhere from listlessness and restlessness to discouragement to despondency to being very, very cast down and to losing all desire to live.
What is this proverb saying? Look at it again, and here’s what it’s saying. There is nothing more important than maintaining your inner being. When it says, “A man’s spirit sustains him in sickness, but a crushed spirit who can bear?” here’s what it’s saying. “A broken body can be sustained with difficulty by a strong spirit, but a crushed or broken spirit can never be sustained or carried by the strongest body of all.”
In other words, this proverb is getting at something actually the whole Bible gets at. We human beings are obsessed with the idea that our happiness is determined by our external circumstances, that our happiness is completely determined by whether our body is healthy or whether our body looks good, whether we have money, whether people are treating us right, whether things are going well out there. That’s what makes us happy, or that’s what makes us unhappy.
The Bible actually says, “No, it has nothing to do with your circumstances. Happiness is determined by how you deal with your circumstances from inside, how you process, how you address, how you view them.” That’s the reason why Paul’s prayers for the churches he’s writing in the New Testament letters are amazing.
When you consider when he’s writing all these churches, he’s writing churches that were in great difficulty and straits. He’s writing churches that were persecuted. He’s writing churches where civil magistrates had broken in and pulled off some of the Christian families to jail. Yet whenever he says, “I’m praying this for you” or “I’m praying this for you,” he never mentions things like that.
He never says, “I’m praying that civil magistrate won’t come and take any more of you off to jail.” He doesn’t pray for protection. He doesn’t pray against suffering. What does he pray for? He prays this sort of thing. Here’s Ephesians 3. He says, “I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being …”
Do you know what he’s saying? “If your life is all broken, all things are wrong, and your spirit is strong and powerful, you move out into the world in strength, but if everything about your life is going fine, just all the circumstances are doing fine but your spirit is crushed, you move out into the world in weakness.”
Do you believe that? Do you understand the priority of that? The Bible says, Proverbs says, if you don’t, you’re a fool. I’ll put it another way. Are you far, far, far more concerned to deposit grace in your spirit than you are to deposit money in your bank account? If you’re not, you’re a fool.
2. The complexity of the inner life
After having said what we just said, it’s natural to ask a question like, “All right. So what do you do to keep your inner being from deteriorating? What goes wrong with a spirit? What causes a crushed spirit? Why do our emotions and our feelings seem to get out of control? Why do we get so downcast sometimes? Why do we lose all passion for life? Why do we struggle so much? What is our problem?”
Do you know what the biblical answer is? It’s complicated. I want to show you this for the next couple of minutes. In fact, the Bible’s understanding of human nature, understanding of what goes wrong inside is more nuanced, more multifaceted, more multidimensional, more complex than any other answer I know of, any other counseling model, any book on despondency or what’s wrong or how to have emotional health or how to have a happy life.
You read them all, and compared to the Bible they are one-dimensional. They are reductionistic. They boil everything down. They’re too simpleminded. They’re too simplistic. They’re not savvy. They’re not wise. The Bible gives you the most fully nuanced, the most complex assessment of what can go wrong and lead to despondency and lead to a crushed spirit. Let’s take a look at five of them. They’re right in here.
A. A crushed spirit may have a physical aspect. I know that sounds very weird. For example, let’s take a look at 14:30. “A tranquil mind gives life to the flesh, but passion makes the bones rot.” The word passion means literally a hot feeling. That word can refer to anger or bitterness or envy or fear or something like that. What it’s giving us here is a very nuanced and sophisticated understanding of the relationship of the body to the emotions.
Emotional unhealth leads to physical unhealth in all kinds of ways, disintegration, deterioration, but what’s the implication? The implication, of course, is since the body and the emotions are united, then bodily weakness can lead to emotional unhealth. If you’re weary, if you’re not eating right, if you have chemical imbalances, there’s a physical aspect to being crushed in spirit. There can be. There often is.
You say, “How could that be?” For example, I had a thyroid problem a couple of years ago. Of course, the problem is gone, as well as the thyroid. That’s why it’s gone. One of the things I learned about is what happens when you don’t have the thyroid hormone or you don’t have enough of it. Oh my word! Even though I didn’t experience anything like this, here’s something I can just tell you the truth of.
If you don’t have enough thyroid hormone in your body, you’re going to eventually want to kill yourself. You say, “Of course, that’s all in your head.” Of course, it’s all in your head! The crushed spirit is in your head, but the point is if you lose all desire to even live because of something wrong with your body, you have a crushed spirit. It doesn’t matter what the cause is, and one of the causes can be the physical.
B. A crushed spirit may have an emotional, relational aspect. Look at the very first proverb on the list. “An anxious heart weighs a man down …” That’s synonymous with a crushed spirit. It’s talking about literally sinking. “An anxious heart weighs a man down, but a kind word cheers him up.” Don’t trivialize it. In English it comes across a little bit trivial-sounding.
What is it saying you need sometimes? What do you need? You need an outside word of love, of kindness. You need support. Sometimes you don’t need medicine. Sometimes you don’t need therapy. You don’t need an answer. You don’t need complicated reflection. You need love sometimes, because we have an emotional, relational nature. You just need arms around you. You need a shoulder. You need intimacy. You need support.
C. A crushed spirit may have a moral aspect. Take a look at the last of the proverbs in the list. “The wicked man flees though no one pursues, but the righteous are as bold as a lion.” What’s that talking about? It’s a quote from Leviticus 26, where God says, “If you disobey me, you will flee though no one pursues.”
My word, look how nuanced this is. It’s talking about conscience. It’s talking about guilt. It’s talking about what can go wrong inside, in your spirit, in your emotions, what can go wrong inside if you know you’re not living right, if you know you’re not living up to standards, if you feel guilt, if you feel shame, if you feel like a failure in any way.
Look how nuanced it is. It doesn’t say you flee when someone pursues; you flee when no one pursues. Guilt just generalizes a sense there’s something wrong with you, so you not only feel guilty for some things you ought to feel guilty for, but you also can’t help then feeling guilty for all kinds of things you shouldn’t feel guilty for.
Someone criticizes you, and you feel assaulted, attacked. It’s a bad conscience. You make a little failure, and you feel like a total failure. It’s a bad conscience. There’s a moral aspect. There’s a conscience aspect. That’s not all. Do you realize how wrong it would be if you treat a crushed spirit that’s basically a physical problem as a moral problem?
D. A crushed spirit may have an existential aspect. Go to the fourth proverb down. “Even in laughter the heart is sad, and the end of joy is grief.” When you first read that, do you know what you’re automatically doing? You say, “Oh, I think I know what that’s talking about,” and you’re relativizing it.
You’re saying, “Sometimes some people are laughing and they’re having fun, but down deep they’re still sad. They’re putting on a happy face. They’re trying to forget their troubles. Though they are laughing, down deep they’re sad. Though they’re trying to be happy, in the end they’re still grieving.”
It doesn’t say, “Some people in laughter the heart is sad,” does it? It’s an absolute statement. What amazed me was every single Hebrew commentator, every Hebrew scholar, I looked at about this verse says we mustn’t relativize it. We must realize what a profound thing it’s saying. This is true of everybody. Why?
Do you not realize there’s an existential angst that comes down deep from under …? Everybody knows all parties eventually are going to be over. All joy really does end in grief. You say, “What are you talking about?” Let me just give you some examples. Here’s the happy family, sitting around the dining room table. The simple reality is one of those people is eventually going to see every other member dead.
Death ends everything. Everything your heart wants out of life eventually will be taken away from you. If you don’t die a tragic young death, eventually your health will be taken away from you. Your loved ones will be taken away from you. Everything will be taken away from you. It’ll all be gone.
Some of you are saying, “Gee, I’m so glad I came tonight. This is a wonderful … I guess that’s right. I guess that’s true, but do you have to tell me about it? Do we have to think about it?” Guess what? Try not to think about it. This is saying down deep you know about it. There is a ground note of sadness you cannot overcome.
New York is filled with people who say, “Well, I don’t believe I was created. I believe I’m here by accident, and I believe when you’re dead, that’s it. You rot. That’s it. You’re gone. I understand that, but the point is have fun while you’re here.” Wait a minute. If your origin is insignificant and your destiny is insignificant, which means someday nobody will even remember anything you ever did, have the guts to admit your life is insignificant.
What that means is unless you have some way of dealing philosophically with this, unless you have some way of ascribing meaning to the daily things you do, which is really pretty hard, you’re going to have this ground note of sadness that underneath all your laughter you’re going to be sad, because you know all joy eventually ends in grief. I’m not exaggerating. Do you see what’s happening now? This is a philosophical problem, and a lot of people have it.
In fact, we all have it until somebody helps us deal with death. If you’re not able to deal with the idea of death, if you’re not able to overcome your fear of it, if you’re not able to find some way in light of death you can ascribe meaning to the things you’re doing now, today, do you see there’s a medical possibility for a crushed spirit?
There’s an emotional, a relational, a moral, an existential, a philosophical … Do you see, by the way, doctors don’t want to think about philosophy, and friends don’t want to think about medicine? They just want to love you. Do you know what Christians do? We turn everything into moral.
We say, “Oh, you’re downcast? You’re down? Well, have you claimed all the promises? Have you confessed all known sin? Are you having your quiet time? Are you praying? Are you thanking God? Are you doing everything right?” Check, check, check, check. Checklists. We turn everything into a moral issue. We’re reductionistic.
Of course, the people who are into self-esteem, what do they say? “It’s all emotional and relational.” Of course, the people who think we’re just a body, what do they say? “It’s all the physical.” That’s not all. There’s a physical aspect, but not only a physical aspect. There’s an emotional aspect. There is a moral aspect. There’s an existential aspect.
E. A crushed spirit may have a faith aspect. Here’s what I mean. Look at 15:13. “A happy heart makes the face cheerful, but heartache crushes the spirit.” A lot of people would say, “Wait a minute. I thought the heart and the spirit are pretty much the same thing.” In English heart means emotions versus head which means the reason. That’s why we would say, “Wouldn’t the spirit, which seems to be emotional passion, and the heart be the same thing?”
No, in the Bible the heart means something quite a bit more than that. The heart is your core commitments, the things you most fundamentally trust, the things you most fundamentally love, the things you’re most fundamentally living for, the things you most fundamentally hope in. That’s why the second proverb that we’ll get back to in a minute says, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.” That word longing means a desire from the depths of your personality.
When your heart has been set on something … It has to be set on something. You have to set your heart on something as your ultimate hope, your ultimate trust, the thing you’re looking for to really make yourself happy, really make yourself feel significant, the thing you say, “If I have that, then my life means something, then I know I’m somebody, then I know I’m all right.”
You have to put your heart on something because that’s the kind of beings we are. This is telling you if you put your heart on something in the most fundamental way and any problem happens to it, anything threatens it in any way, it’s deferred. You won’t even want to live. You’ll be crushed in spirit.
For example, if you’re dating somebody and you’re starting to really love them and then they break up with you, you break up, that’s going to create great sorrow, but if romance, having somebody love you, is the ultimate hope of your life, if you really do believe down deep what the Righteous Brothers said years ago, “Without you, baby, what good am I?” There’s another one. “You’re nobody till somebody loves you …”
Listen, if you really look at somebody else and say, “You’re my fundamental hope. You’re the thing that really makes me know I’m okay,” and you break up with that person, you won’t even want to live. Heartache creates a crushed spirit. A bad conscience creates a crushed spirit. Existential angst creates a crushed spirit.
Look at this. Go into Barnes and Noble, and you’ll never find a book that will tell you how complicated you really are. Every book on emotional health, every book on counseling, every book is going to reduce you. It’s going to simplify you, because some people think you’re basically a body. “That’s basically what you are.” They don’t believe in a soul, “So let’s deal with it physically.”
Some people are going to say, “You’re really your emotions. Your deepest feelings are the real you, not your conscience, not your beliefs, your emotions. We just have to nonjudgmentally support people to just follow their feelings.” You’re not just a body. You’re not just your emotions. You’re not just your conscience. You’re not just a will. You’re not just your thinking.
Of course, you have object relations, then you have cognitive therapy, you have psychoanalysis, and every one of them does something the Bible won’t do, because you are not mainly a body or mainly your emotions or mainly your conscience or mainly any of these things. You are a man or a woman in the image of God, and God’s image is stamped on absolutely every aspect of your being.
Unless you’re living with every aspect of your being before God, you are going to have despondency. You are going to have out-of-control emotions. You’re going to have despair. You’re going to have a crushed spirit you will not be able to remedy. You’ll get the books, and you’ll go and listen to people who tell you the way to emotional health. They’ll always be too simple. They’ll always be foolish.
When I read the books compared to the Bible, I want to look at those books, and I want to say what Hamlet said to his friend Horatio: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
3. The solitude of the inner life
If you take a look at the third proverb in the list, it’s a very interesting proverb. “Each heart knows its own bitterness, and no one else can share its joy.” What in the world does that mean? You say, “Well, I have friends. They can share my joy. I have people who understand me.”
Do you know what this is saying? Again, don’t relativize this. Here’s what this is saying. Your insides, the movements and motions of your heart, are so complex, they’re so inward, and they’re so hidden there’s an irreducible, unavoidable solitude about human existence. Nobody will ever completely understand you.
Do you know what they’re going to do? They’re going to do the same thing to you you’re doing to them. You’re going to think you understand them. You’re going to put them in a category and say, “It’s just like what happened to me” or “It’s just like what happened to so-and-so.” No, this is saying you are so unique and you are so hidden and you’re so inward nobody in the end, in the final analysis, will ever really understand you.
You’re going to have to basically go through life alone. Nobody can completely … Even the people closest to you very often just will not understand you. You can sense that, and it’s horribly disappointing. This is saying get over that. Don’t be shocked at being misunderstood, especially in light of the fact … Look at the third proverb from the bottom. It says, “All a man’s ways seem innocent to him, but motives are weighed by the LORD.” Do you know what that’s saying?
You don’t even understand yourself. You have absolutely no idea what’s all down there. You have a better idea than anybody else, but nothing compared to what God can see. You are alone. There is no human being who can walk with you everywhere you go. There is no human being who can help you interpret really everything you’re going through. Do you know what this means? Here’s what it means. Listen carefully.
If God is only somebody you believe in, if he’s an abstraction or maybe he’s somebody you don’t believe in at all, but if God is not a friend, if God isn’t someone you know personally, if God isn’t someone you have a personal relationship with, if you don’t have sometimes a sense of God really with you, putting his love and his truth palpably on your heart, if you don’t have an intimate, personal relationship with God, you are utterly alone in the world. You are absolutely alone in the world, and human beings can’t live in that kind of isolation. They cannot.
He’s the only one who can walk with you through every dark valley. He’s the only one who can understand. He’s the only one. If you don’t have him … It’s not good enough to be good or moral or even to believe in God in some general way. If you don’t have him as a personal friend, if you don’t have an intimate, personal relationship, a sense of real dealing with him, you are utterly alone.
4. The healing of a crushed spirit in the inner life
What happens then? If you have a crushed spirit, what do you do? Do you see? I’ve actually set up (on purpose) how hard it is to heal a crushed spirit, and here’s the reason why. We just said we need a kind word from outside. We can’t heal ourselves. We need someone from outside to come in with love. Yet we also just said nobody really understand you.
We said we have a conscience. Years and years and years of therapy … You can go to therapy for 30 or 40 years. I know people who have. Some of you have and have been told almost every week, “Stop feeling guilty about everything. Don’t let them put that guilt trip on you. You don’t have to feel guilty. Don’t feel guilty.”
Guess what? You still do after 30 or 40 years, because even when no one is pursuing, you flee. There is something indelible about a sense that, “I’m just not right. I’m not living up. I’m not doing what I ought to do.” What are you going to do about that? What are you going to do about existential angst in the face of death, and how in the world are you going to stop your heart from putting its ultimate trust and ultimate hope in things you can lose?
Here’s the answer. The secret is the Tree of Life. What do I mean by the secret being the Tree of Life? The Tree of Life, which is mentioned twice here, actually three times in Proverbs, is an interesting reference because the Bible talks about the Tree of Life in Genesis and the Bible talks about the Tree of Life in Revelation, but there’s nowhere else in all of the Bible where it’s discussed except in the book of Proverbs.
Through wisdom, the book of Proverbs says, you can actually get a taste of it. If you go back to Genesis, the Tree of Life was in the middle of the garden of Eden, Paradise. What does the Tree of Life mean? What does it represent? It represents, not just eternal life being endless; it represents fullness of life, absolute satiation of the deepest desires.
You have creative desires to accomplish things. You have aesthetic desires for beauty. You have romantic and relational desires for love. You have epistemic desires for knowledge. The Tree of Life represents absolute satiation a million times over, a million times magnified, of the greatest amount you could think you could want. That’s the Tree of Life, but the book of Genesis also tells us we lost it.
The end of Genesis 3, says there is a flaming sword that turns and sweeps back and forth keeping us from the Tree of Life, because when we turned to be our own masters, to be our saviors, to be our own lords, when we decided we want to be in charge of our own lives, we lost the Tree of Life. What does that mean? Here’s what it means. What is this saying here? Look at the second proverb. “Hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life.”
It would be possible to read this as just saying, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick. Okay, when you really have your heart set on something, it’s a disappointment,” but it’s talking about something different. What it’s really saying is the things we put our hearts on to fulfill our deepest longings will never fulfill them because what we’re really looking for in everything we do is the Tree of Life.
In other words, when you get into your career and you get so excited about the new career, when you get a new boyfriend or girlfriend, when you get into a new relationship, when you go on a vacation, when you travel to some place you’ve never been, there’s always something. It promises something it can never actually deliver. Why? One commentator says this Tree of Life image in the Bible is not simply referring to eternal life.
One Hebrew commentator puts it like in the Bible the Tree of Life is an image of immortal, eternal life, but also it’s an image of irretrievable loss. It’s an image of cosmic nostalgia, a longing for something we remember yet we’ve never had. In all of the music you go to to kind of give yourself a high, you’re actually looking for a song you remember but you have never heard.
What you’re looking for in love is you’re looking for arms you remember but you never really had. That’s what the Bible is saying; that’s what the Tree of Life is. Unless you understand what you’re looking for in everything you’re looking for is the Tree of Life, you’re not going to be wise.
Of course, there’s nobody who has put it like Lewis, who says, “Most people, if they had really learned to look into their own hearts, would know that they do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. […]
The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of some foreign country, or first take up some subject that excites us, are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy. I am not now speaking of what would be ordinarily called unsuccessful marriages, or holidays, or learned careers. I am speaking of the best possible ones. There was something we grasped at, in that first moment of longing, which just fades away in the reality.”
In another place Lewis writes, “… our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside, is no mere neurotic fancy, but the truest index of our real situation.” Once you get a little older … Some of you look like you have a ways to go. Some of you look like you don’t. You start to realize every single thing you looked for to give you a sort of satisfaction it never really delivers, and there are several things you can start doing.
One is you can be really stupid and say, “I need a new city. I need a new job. I need a new wife. I need a new husband. I need a new lover. I need a new place to go,” and you’re just constantly changing all the time. You could just get mad at yourself and blame it on yourself. “You’re a failure. It’s something wrong with you.” You could just get cynical and say, “You shouldn’t expect anything out of life.” In every case you’re going to have a crushed spirit or at least an atrophied spirit.
What’s the solution? Do you know the New Testament continually says Jesus died on a tree? “Yeah, in the book of Acts and 1 Peter 2 and Galatians 3. They hung him on a tree. He was nailed to a tree. He died on a tree.” Have you ever wondered about that? Have you said, “That’s kind of an exaggeration. It was a cross. Obviously, there was a big trunk, but it wasn’t really a tree, was it? Why do they say a tree?” Oh, it’s so significant, and I’ll tell you why.
In the garden of Eden, God comes to Adam and Eve and says, “Obey me about the tree. Don’t eat it, and you will live.” They didn’t. Centuries later, Jesus comes into a garden, the garden of Gethsemane. God comes to Jesus and says, “Obey me about the tree.” He did, but look at the difference.
To the first Adam God said, “Obey me about the tree, and you will live,” but to the second Adam God says, “If you obey me and go to the tree and go to the cross and do what I’m asking you to do, you will be crushed, crushed in spirit, crushed in body, crushed eternally,” and he did it. In Psalm 22, which he quotes from the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” there’s a place in verse 14 where it says, “My heart has turned to wax; it has melted away within me.”
There is a crushed spirit. Jesus lost his ultimate hope. He put all of his hope in his Father, and the only person in the history of the world who put his ultimate hope in his Father, the Father, lost the Father eternally on the cross. He was crushed in spirit. He was infinitely crushed. He went through all that agony. Why? For us, to pay the penalty.
George Herbert, the great poet, puts it perfectly, sums up the whole Bible in one stanza in that great poem “The Sacrifice,” in which he depicts Jesus speaking from the cross, and there’s that one stanza where Jesus says …
O all ye who pass by, behold and see;
Man stole the fruit, but I must climb the tree;
The tree of life to all, but only me …
The cross was a tree of death, but because he climbed the tree of death, we have the Tree of Life. Actually, he turned the tree of death … The cross was a tree of death to him; therefore, it was a tree of life for all of us. To the degree you let that melt your heart, to the degree you see what he did for you, to the degree you rejoice in that, to the degree you orient your heart toward that and it just melts you at the thought of that love, to that degree you will experience what Tolkien calls, “… Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.”
There is a joy. It’s the foretaste to the Tree of Life. That’s the gospel. When you take the gospel and you start to use it on your spirit, that’s what you finally need. That’s the ultimate kind word. It’s the ultimate good word. We just said, “Do you need to get rid of your isolation? Do you need emotional connection and yet nobody understands you?” The only eyes in the universe who can see you to the bottom love you to the skies. Use that on your emotion. Use that on your relational aspect. Use that on your conscience. This last verse I was looking at a minute ago …
Howell Harris, I think it was, was an old Welsh preacher 200 years ago. When he was a young man, he wasn’t a Christian yet. He was like 14 or 15. His aunt was dying, and the family was all gathered around her. Back in those days they were waiting for her to die, and it looked like she was dead.
They said, “I think she’s gone. Poor Aunt So-and-So.” She opened her eyes, she looked up, and she said, “Who calls me poor? I am rich, and I will stand before him as bold as a lion.” Then she died. It had a big impact on Howell Harris, who later on wrote a hymn, I think, that went like …
What though the’ accuser roar
Of ills that I have done!
I know them well, and thousands more;
Jehovah findeth none.
Come on. He took the tree of death so you could have the Tree of Life. Use that on your emotion. Use that on your conscience. Use that on your existential angst. That’ll get rid of your fear of death. Most of all, use it on the hope of your heart. Love the people you love and love the things you love, but through them realize the ultimate song, the ultimate beauty, the ultimate arms, the ultimate Tree of Life you’re going to have.
Am I saying to you, “Okay, you really don’t need people now. You just need God. You just need to take this tape home, take this CD home, and listen to it. ‘Just me and God and my Bible, and I’ll be able to overcome all my depression’ ”? No, that’s not what I’m saying. That’s way too simplistic.
Besides that, do you know how hard it is to get the gospel deep down inside every aspect of your being? Do you realize how long it takes? Do you realize how almost always you need somebody to tell it to you over and over and over again? You need friends. You need counselors.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it something like, “It is possible that a person may by God’s grace break through to certainty, new life, the cross, and fellowship without the benefit of confessing to a brother or sister. It is possible a person may never know what it is to doubt his own forgiveness in Christ.
Most of us cannot make that assertion. When the confession of sin, when opening up the heart, is made in the presence of a Christian brother or sister, the last stronghold of self-justification is abandoned. The sinner surrenders. He gives his heart to God and finds the forgiveness of all his sin in the fellowship of Jesus and his brother.
The expressed, acknowledged sin has lost all its power. It has been revealed and judged as sin, and as the open confession of my heart to a brother or sister ensures against self-deception, so too the assurance of forgiveness becomes fully certain to me only when it is spoken by a brother or sister in the name of God.”
Put your hope in him. Take hold of the gospel. Work it into one another’s lives, not just into your own life, and you will know power in your inmost being. Let us pray.
Father, we ask that you would help us now, as we come to your Table, to really taste the Tree of Life. We know the sacrament can be a foretaste of that, and we pray that you would nourish us and feed us in our hearts through our faith in you. We pray this in Jesus’ name, amen.
ABOUT THE PREACHER
In 1989 Dr. Timothy J. Keller, his wife and three young sons moved to New York City to begin Redeemer Presbyterian Church. In 20 years it has grown to meeting for five services at three sites with a weekly attendance of over 5,000. Redeemer is notable not only for winning skeptical New Yorkers to faith, but also for partnering with other churches to do both mercy ministry and church planting. Redeemer City to City is working to help establish hundreds of new multi-ethnic congregations throughout the city and other global cities in the next decades.
Dr. Tim Keller is the author of several phenomenal Christo-centric books including:
Joy for the World: How Christianity Lost Its Cultural Influence and Can Begin Rebuilding It (co-authored with Greg Forster and Collin Hanson (February or March, 2014).
Encounters with Jesus:Unexpected Answers to Life’s Biggest Questions. New York, Dutton (November 2013).
Walking with God through Pain and Suffering. New York, Dutton (October 2013).
Judges For You (God’s Word For You Series). The Good Book Company (August 6, 2013).
Galatians For You (God’s Word For You Series). The Good Book Company (February 11, 2013).
Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Plan for the World. New York, Penguin Publishing, November, 2012.
Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, September, 2012.
The Freedom of Self Forgetfulness. New York: 10 Publishing, April 2012.
Generous Justice: How God’s Grace Makes Us Just. New York: Riverhead Trade, August, 2012.
The Gospel As Center: Renewing Our Faith and Reforming Our Ministry Practices (editor and contributor). Wheaton: Crossway, 2012.
The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God. New York, Dutton, 2011.
King’s Cross: The Story of the World in the Life of Jesus (Retitled: Jesus the KIng: Understanding the Life and Death of the Son of God). New York, Dutton, 2011.
Gospel in Life Study Guide: Grace Changes Everything. Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 2010.
The Reason For God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. New York, Dutton, 2009.
Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Priorities of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope That Matters. New York, Riverhead Trade, 2009.
Heralds of the King: Christ Centered Sermons in the Tradition of Edmund P. Clowney (contributor). Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2009.
The Prodigal God. New York, Dutton, 2008.
Worship By The Book (contributor). Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002.
Ministries of Mercy: The Call of the Jericho Road. Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 1997.
SUNDAY NT SERMON: Tim Keller “Decrees of the King” – Ephesians 2:19-22
Series: The King and the Kingdom – Part 9
Preached in Manhattan, NY on September 17, 1989
How many weeks have I been on Ephesians 2? I’m not sure, but what we’ve been doing is looking at what the Bible says the church should be, what the church can be, and what the church is. Ephesians 2. I’m going to read verses 19-22.
19 Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household, 20 built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. 21 In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. 22 And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit. – Ephesians 2:19–22
The last thing I want to say in this series about what the church is, is about this phrase: the church is “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone.” The foundation of the church, the foundation of all of our lives is the apostles and the prophets.
A lot of you know I live on Roosevelt Island. That’s just 300 yards from Manhattan. We live right around 74th Street. We can look up East 74th Street. What was happening one Saturday is I was noticing you can go … Did you know you can go east in a car on 73rd Street? You can drive from York to the FDR Drive, which, of course, is the expressway down the eastern part of Manhattan. You can come out on 73rd, and as soon as you turn the corner, you get into a little chute. It’s one lane, and it moves you for about two blocks.
You go in front of 71st Street and then you come right out onto the traffic and you’re gone. You’re out. One day I noticed there was a truck backing up at 71st Street, some kind of maintenance truck. As a result, the chute was stopped. The people couldn’t go by 71st Street, and the cars were stopped up, all the way up the chute, all the way onto 73rd. There was even a line of people on 73rd waiting to get into the chute.
I could see with my binoculars that the truck was ready to back up. In fact, as the truck backed up, all the people in the chute started clearing out. Now if you were at 73rd Street and you hadn’t turned the corner yet, and you were about to go into the chute, you could not see what was going. You could see that it was backed up, but you could not see what the problem was or what the prospects were.
What intrigued me was, as the chute emptied out, the first man at the top of 73rd, who could not see … hesitated. He didn’t come on out, and I knew what he was saying to himself. He was saying, “If I get out in that chute and it’s really stopped up in some way … You can’t go backwards. You can’t go forwards. You can’t turn right or left … I’m dead. I’ll be there for who knows long. After all, this is New York.”
So what he did was, even though the chute had cleared out, he began to back up. Now there were tons of cars behind him, and there was at least a 15-minute mess as a result. He backed up. Other people started yelling and screaming. I was watching through the binoculars. It was great … a great show. What intrigued me was he got out, and he began to talk to the people about what he was doing.
Instead of anybody else coming around him, he convinced them. They could’ve come around him and out, but instead he convinced them. I don’t know what he was saying, but he was saying, “Let’s get out of here. Let’s back up.” So there was at least a 15-minute pileup, basically, of cars trying to back away and not going into that chute. They were this close to freedom, but they couldn’t see it.
You know why. What was the basis? What was the foundation for their decision? What was the basis for their course of action? Their foundation was their own perspective. They could only see this far. I guess they were going on their experience. They probably all had been stuck in chutes for two hours in New York City, and on the basis of their experience, on the basis of their perception, on the basis of their reason, they made their decision. It was a faulty foundation.
What they needed was someone with transcendent knowledge. They needed somebody who was above and outside. It wasn’t a driver. It wasn’t someone on the highway but somebody above and outside the highway who could see the whole picture, who could know what the best course of action was, a transcendent person (like me), someone who was above and beyond it all looking at it.
As he was backing away, if I had this great transmitter, what I could’ve done is I could’ve beamed into his car radio and said, “Don’t do what you’re doing. Don’t follow your feelings. Don’t follow your perceptions. Don’t follow your experience. I know, from my perspective, the right thing is for you to go straight down and into that chute. I know it seems like suicide. It’s the only way out.” What that man needed was revelation. Revelation means outside knowledge, knowledge outside of himself, knowledge outside even of his little world, which was the highway.
What God is saying here is it is not a proper foundation for the church; it’s not a proper foundation for any human life to only rely on your own experience, your own wisdom. Anything less than the revelation God has brought to us through apostles and prophets, which is in the Word of God. The only legitimate foundation, the only worthy foundation for any life at all, the only appropriate “bottom” is the Word of God. Everybody in this room has a foundation for your decisions. What is it? I don’t think you’ll get out of here tonight until you know what it is.
If we’re going to understand what our foundation is and what it should be, we have to look at the passage. We’re just looking at these little words right here in verse 20. We should be “built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone.” Okay, let’s examine that phrase by asking some questions. Number one, What is the foundation? Then number two, How can we be sure we’re laid on it?
1. What is the foundation?
The apostles and the prophets were people through whom God spoke, and their revelations from God are written down in this Word. The most intriguing thing about the prophets and apostles, to the human mind, is an incredible incongruity because on the one hand, these men, these apostles and prophets, were tremendously humble people. You have Paul saying, “I am the chief of sinners.” If you read the Bible, you’ll see the people who wrote it were quite willing to tell all about the worst parts of their life, all about their flaws.
You know, one of the most intriguing books to me is the book of Jonah. How again and again and again, God called him to preach to Nineveh. He ran away, and then he was swallowed by a fish. He comes up. He goes to Nineveh, and he’s angry when he has a revival and people start to turn to Christ. His racism comes out. He begins to say, “This is what I was afraid of. The reason I didn’t go to Nineveh the first time was I afraid these people might get converted, and I hate them. I want to see them as dust under my feet.”
The only way we could have possibly ever known what happened between Jonah and God, and Jonah and the whale, Jonah and all that stuff, is if Jonah told somebody. Who would’ve told anybody about that? We all have things in our lives where we were just absolute fools, but we would never want to have it written down, let alone in a book that millions of people are going to read the rest of the history of the world.
You see, the apostles and the prophets were like that. They were willing to say, “This is what I am. This is my weakness. This is what I am,” and yet when they were overshadowed by the Spirit of God, they knew their words were not their words, but they were God’s words, and they acted that way. They said, “Thus saith the Lord.”
Here’s Paul, for example, who says, “I am the chief of sinners,” and yet when he writes, at the end of 1 Corinthians, at the end of 1Thessalonians, he says, “Anyone who doesn’t listen to these words, have nothing to do with them because these words are the words of God.” It doesn’t seem right, because the people who act like that, that say, “What I have said is the word of God.” These are demagogues, you know, the people we have met in the history who talk like that.
They’re demagogues. They’re not humble people. They’re not servants. On the other hand, humble servant people don’t say, “This is the word of God.” But the reason is that the prophets and the apostles were godly people who knew God was giving them a gift for all mankind, and that was the gift of his truth. Basically, again and again and again, these men say, “Thus saith the Lord,” which means, “This is not my idea, friends. You have to listen. It’s not my idea.”
Jeremiah said, “The Word of God is a fire in my bones, and I have to get it out.” They understood what was going on. Because the biblical writers knew these were God’s words, not their words, not their ideas about God, not their experiences of God, but God’s words, as a result, they could talk about themselves as a foundation, because a foundation is something that does not shift. It’s something that does not change. It’s something that is absolutely solid. It’s absolute truth.
You must understand the Bible was just a record of a lot of godly people who had great experiences of God, and therefore, they were able to tell us a lot of good things. Yet, like any other book, there are good things in here and there are bad things. If that’s what the Bible is, it can’t be a foundation, because a foundation can’t have some good stones and others not. You can’t build a house if you have 10 foundation stones, and you say, “Well eight of them will hold the house up. That’s good enough.” No, it isn’t good enough. Every part of the foundation has to be solid and changeless.
This is how the Scripture writers thought of themselves. They said, “We’re a foundation.” For example, Peter says this about Scripture. Peter, in 2 Peter 1, he says, “… no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation.” Did you hear that? “… no prophecy of Scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin in the will of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.”
This was not just the biblical writers’ view of it. All of the church has always seen it that way, for example, Martin Luther. Luther says, “A man’s word is a little sound, that flies in the air, and soon vanishes; but the Word of God is greater than heaven and earth, yea greater than heaven and hell, for it forms part of the power of God and endures everlastingly …” Foundation. That means anything the Bible says is true; otherwise, we cannot talk about it being a foundation. Before we move on (and I want to talk about, How do you make sure you lay on the foundation?), I can’t leave without a couple of words to people who doubt what I’m saying.
Some people say, “Well, I just don’t buy that, and most enlightened pastors and churches don’t buy that anymore, and what we believe is the Bible is one authority, but there are certain things in the Bible we may not be able to accept anymore. Therefore, the Bible is an authority, but we also have other authorities. We have cultural attitudes and the wisdom of modern research. We have a lot of authorities, so the Bible is just one authority. It’s not the only authority. It’s one part of the foundation. It’s not the whole foundation. Does that make sense?”
It doesn’t. You’ve misspoken, my friend. Because when you say the Bible is just one of our authorities, but we might find things in it we can’t accept, you’ve actually shifted to a whole new foundation, because now the foundation is your own judgment. Do you see? When you say, “Well, the Bible is an authority, but it’s only one authority,” what you mean is, “I’m the authority, and I scan through the Word of God. I decide, on the basis of my own judgment and my own sagacity and my own wisdom which things look like they’re great and which things look like they’re a little weird, and I don’t know whether I can buy that.”
You see, it’s a whole new foundation. Don’t say the Bible is your foundation anymore. It’s not even part of your foundation. Your own judgment is your foundation, and it’s a very dangerous condition to be in. Very dangerous. Stop and think about it just for a moment. In the middle of the book of Job, Job begins to question God. He begins to say, “God, I don’t like the way things are going.”
In other words, he begins to find fault with God. God appears. What does he say? He says, “Job, where were you when I stretched out the heavens? Where were you when I scattered the stars? Where were you when I laid the foundation for the earth? In your three score and 10 years, in your few years, have you become wiser than me?” Let me apply that to our understanding of the Word. If you believe there are any parts of the Word of God that are shaky, that you can’t accept, that you believe have mistakes in them, if you believe that, don’t you see what you’ve done is you shifted completely to another foundation?
Look what your foundation is. Your own wisdom. Don’t you remember what you were like 10 years ago? Do you remember the stupid mistakes you made 10 years ago? Do you remember how naïve you were in this and that? Do you remember what a fool you were? You were. You know that. Anybody in this room who has any kind of normal adult-maturation process going on, you’ll look back at 10 years ago, and you’ll say, “I was an absolute idiot 10 years ago.” What do you think you’re going to say about yourself 10 years from now? You’re a fool now! We’re all fools now! We’re fools now. Yes, we are.
As you read through Word of God and you say, “There’s this thing I just can’t stand. This part of the Old Testament is awfully harsh. This part of what Paul says in the New Testament is sexist. I don’t like this.” Ten years ago, you wouldn’t have even known that. You know, it’s maybe in the last 10 years you even came to these great conclusions that now put you in a position to be the foundation, to go through the Word of God and decide where he’s right and where he’s wrong.
My friends, that’s what God was saying to Job. Are you kidding me? Do you really, really believe you’re in a position to be a two-edged sword and to go through the Word of God and scan it and to say, “I like this,” and to take other things out? My friends, the Word of God is a two-edged sword. It should be scanning through us, and it should be saying, “This is what I affirm, and this is what is wrong.” I mean, this is role reversal of the worst kind.
So first of all, if you say, “I’m a believer. I’m a Christian, but I cannot say the Word of God is my absolute authority, and the Word of God is the foundation of the church,” don’t you see what a contradictory position you’re in? Don’t you see how arrogant it is? I’ll go one step further, and that is if you don’t believe the Bible is an authority, if, instead, your foundation is your own wisdom and your own feelings and your own discernment or modern research or cultural opinion or public opinion or whatever, I want you to see you’re in a state of eternal and utter vertigo. I hope you will live with the consequences and be honest enough about it.
Some years ago, my sister’s husband, my brother-in-law, Larry, who is a doctor, was going through residency. This is a different brother-in-law than the one who watched the guy go through the windshield. Remember that one? Yes, those of you with your “perfect attendance” pins and have come to all the evening services will know all about my family, but the rest of you have very spotty knowledge.
Anyway, Larry was in his residency as a doctor. At one point, I guess he did psychiatric rounds, and he was working in a psychiatric unit of a hospital. There was one man who he was consulting with the head resident about (the teacher, the guy over him), and this resident and Larry were talking, “What are we going to do about this guy?”
Now Larry knew this resident just didn’t like the guy. He was a psychiatric patient, but Larry realized the doctor, the resident, didn’t like him. The man rubbed him the wrong way. In the discussion, Larry was sitting there, and he says, “Well, here’s what I think: I think, in some ways, it’s hard but simple what we have to do. We have to convince this man he actually is a worthwhile person. Just let him know he is a valuable, valued, worthwhile person. That’s what we have to do.”
The doctor, the teaching doctor over Larry, looked at him and said, “How do you know that?” Larry just about went back. Larry was a believer, and as he was about to turn to this doctor, he suddenly realized something. He suddenly realized that whereas he could say, “Well, even though I don’t like this young guy either, I have a foundation. I have an authority who tells me he is (regardless of how I feel, regardless of how I perceive him) a valuable human being. He’s not just a piece of rock that has fallen to the bottom of the river, and I have to treat him that way,” he couldn’t appeal to that in this man because this man was his own foundation.
Don’t you see? If every person is their own foundation and you just choose what you want to believe about what’s right and wrong, and you put your own religion together, fine, you have a right to do that. But never call anybody else, never call a country, never call a society, never call anybody else to moral behavior because you have no basis.
Just like that guy said, “How do you know he’s worthwhile? In my estimation, he’s nothing.” In other words, what’s right for you might be right for you, but what’s right for me might be right for me. There’s no basis. We have no basis for society. You certainly don’t have a basis for calling other people to moral behavior.
Larry realized, at that moment, what the consequences were of abandoning the foundation. Don’t you see, friends, if you abandon the foundation, not only have you no basis for church, you don’t have any basis for life? You’re in a state of utter vertigo, never, ever, ever being able to call people to moral behavior.
I see the placards out there that say, “Get your laws off my body.” You don’t have a right to tell me what to do with my own body. I spent 10 years in the South, and I know there are a lot of shop owners who really, really, really bristled under the anti-segregation laws. Why? They said, “I built this shop. It’s mine. It’s private property, and if I don’t want certain kinds of people in here … Get your laws off my shop!” “Get your laws off my body,” basically, they said.
“Well,” the New Yorkers say, “but that’s different. That’s racism. That’s immoral.” On whose basis? How are you going to call anything immoral if everybody is their own foundation, if there’s no transcendent authority, if there’s no revelation from God? You can forget about saying, “Well, racism is immoral.” You can’t say that. But if your foundation is the Word of God, if you believe in revelation, and you accept revelation, then you have a basis for moving on. Then there’s a bottom to life. Do you understand that? That’s what the foundation is.
2. How can you be sure you’re laid on it?
How can you be sure? Well, if you’re going to build on a foundation, you can’t just put a wing of the house on the foundation and the rest somewhere else. The whole house, everything has to be on there. Let me just suggest to you that could be a very long sermon if I tried to take every part of us and put it on there, but let’s just do three. Let’s talk about our minds, our wills, and our hearts. If you want to be built on the foundation, you have to have your mind, your will, and your heart built on it, okay?
First, mind. Do you know what that means? Maybe you think, “Well that means I’m supposed to believe everything the Bible says.” Well, of course, but it goes a lot deeper than that. If you’re built on the foundation, you are thinking biblically about everything. You saturate your mind with the Word of God to the place where you’re thinking biblically about all things. It’s almost like you’re taking the Word of God, and you’re making it like spectacles, like glasses. You put the Word on so everything you see, you’re seeing through it.
Somebody might be saying as they’re hearing me talk, “Am I hearing you right up there? I think I’ve come into a time machine, not a Presbyterian church. Do you honestly want modern New Yorkers to believe everything the Bible says? Never question anything? Are you telling me I have to check my brain at the door with the usher? Are you telling me I have to just accept everything you say dogmatically? What kind of Christians would this sort of view produce? Obviously, it would just be little people who walk along like robots and do everything they’re told. You can have it. I don’t want a religion like that?”
You completely misunderstand the ramification of biblical authority, completely and utterly. First of all, my friends, to think biblically means you are now in a position, finally, to be creative and independent. Absolutely. Look, for example, suppose you become part of this church, and I come in, and I say, “Well, this is how we do things in a Presbyterian church.”
Very politely now, you don’t have to say, “Oh, well, hey, if that’s the way Presbyterians do it, and I’m a Presbyterian, I guess I …” You have to say, “Would you please explain to me … is that the biblical way? Show me in the Bible. I don’t care if you’re Presbyterian. I don’t care if you’re Episcopalian. I don’t care what you are. Show me in the Bible. That’s my basis.” You see, you’re not gullible anymore.
You’re a law student, for example, and you’re reading a legal textbook. It’s a philosophy of law. What do you say? If you’re not built on the foundation of the Word, you have to say, “Well, this man is an expert. This man is the leading thinker in the philosophy of law. Who am I to question him?” But if you’re built on the foundation, you can say, “How does this square with the Word of God?”
Don’t you see? It makes you extremely independent because no longer are you a slave to tradition. You don’t have to do things because that’s the way they’ve done them anymore, because that’s not the basis for your authority. No longer can you be intimidated by experts. If you’re not a Christian, or certainly if you’re not built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, and you go to law school, and you read philosophy of law, what are you going to do? You’ve never worked on a philosophy of law. Who knows? You say, “Well, heck, I mean, why should I question this? This person has studied for 50 years.”
But the Word of God endures everlastingly. It’s transcendent knowledge, and you can say, “How does this square with the Word of God?” No longer are you cowed by experts. Now longer are you cowed by preachers. No longer are you cowed by anybody, tradition. It’s the end of gullibility, friends. Finally, you can be creative.
On the other hand, here’s what is so interesting: Even as it makes you so independent and much more open-minded than you’ve ever been before, to have this view of the Word of God, to be a biblical thinker, makes you humble too. Because if you don’t trust experts, you don’t trust your own expertise either. If you’re not going to listen to anything I say unless you make sure you believe this is biblical, on the other hand, you also have to say, “Hey, why should I even believe myself and my own prejudices and my own views? Let me check out whether I am right on the foundation.”
You see, there’s a humility this view points out, because your expertise, your feelings, your opinions, your prejudices, are no longer authoritative. What your parents told you is no longer authoritative. Nothing is but this, and that gives incredible freedom. Now before anybody says, “Great. Fantastic. I believe that. I want to think biblically. I want to put myself, my mind … Intellectually, cognitively, I want to be right on the Word of God, and that’s where I stand,” or maybe some of you say, “Well, that’s great. You’re convincing me I want to try that,” let me warn you it’s not easy.
Because what we have a tendency to do is to bring in the baggage of our ideologies. Unless you’re constantly reforming your mind, and we’re constantly reforming our church according to the Word of God, we can just, without knowing it, bring the ideologies of the world in. You know what I mean? For example, Christians who are based on the Word of God are always creative and distinctive, and therefore, they stand apart.
Let me give you a quick example: Catholic bishop of New York, Mr. O’Connor. I was reading his position on AIDS. It’s intriguing because there’s a conservative ideology in this country, and I know a lot about it because evangelical Christians, unfortunately, in many, many cases have bought into conservative ideology that says, “Well, you know, the people who get AIDS have gotten AIDS through homosexuality and through drug abuse, and therefore, we never liked those people anyway, so let them suffer.” That’s the conservative ideology. Oh, it’s never, never put out there in print, but it’s there, and it’s thick in many parts of the country.
Then there’s a liberal ideology that says, on the one hand, “There is nothing wrong with this behavior, and we need to fight for these folks and really help these people out.” Then you have O’Connor who has a biblical position in this case and, therefore, is getting creamed by everybody, because what he’s saying is, “We have to go all out, open all the stops to get a cure for AIDS. We have to help AIDS victims against discrimination. We have to be advocates for them. We have to help them. We have to love them. We have to do all that, but homosexuality is a sin.”
He’s getting creamed because anybody who’s biblical steps outside of conservative and liberal ideologies and doesn’t belong to either of them. “Now you’re going to tell me that this view of the Word of God, this view of revelation, makes you … what … a mindless a person? Does this mean you just check your mind at the door?” My friends, finally, you’re free. Finally, you’re free from party spirit, from ideologies, from totalitarian philosophies, from demagogic Presbyterian ministers. Finally, you see that.
Okay, but that’s not enough. Not enough. It’s not enough just to think biblically and get your mind on the foundation. Secondly, there’s the will. The will. Oh, gee. Unconditional obedience. That’s what it means to put yourself completely on the foundation of the Word of God. There’s a big, big difference between 99 percent obedience and unconditional obedience. A huge difference.
Many of us obey Christian principles most of the time. Why? Because most of the time it looks practical, right? You’ve heard since you were little, “Honesty is the best policy,” so most of the time you don’t lie, because when you do, you feel bad. Besides that, you’re afraid somebody might find you out. Most of the time, you obey; 98 percent of the time. Most of the time, you obey, but there are places where what the Word of God says, what Christian principles say, you delay your obedience. Why? Because it looks like it might not be practical.
Let me give you an example. The Bible says a believer should not wittingly marry an unbeliever. That sounds like a pretty impractical thing for a lot of people, doesn’t it? They say, “Are you kidding me? Do you realize how that narrows the field, which already looks like a bottleneck to me?” I just use that illustration, because in a place like New York where everybody is single, it looks like suicide. It looks stupid.
I want you to know all those other places where you’re obeying don’t tell you whether or not your will, your volition is built, on the Word of God. It’s at those places where it looks impractical that you can see what your real foundation is. Because, you see, God came to Abraham several times. The first time he says, “Abraham, get out and go to another land.” Abraham says, “Where?” God says, “I’ll tell you later.”
Then later on, he says, “Abraham, wait for a child to be born. Your whole life you must wait, put on hold, until your child is born.” Abraham says, “How? We’re in our 90s.” God says, “I’ll show you later.” Then after the child’s born, God comes and says, “Abraham, Abraham, take your son, your only son, whom you love, and kill him.” Abraham says, “Why?” God says, “I’ll tell you later.”
At every one of those places, what if God had said to Abraham, “Abraham, I want you to obey, but let me explain, before you do this, all that I’m going to show you, all that’s going to happen. You’re going to go up the hill, and you’re going to raise the dagger over Isaac, but at the last minute, I’m going to say, ‘No, you don’t have to do it.’ Or when I told you to get out of Ur of the Chaldees, I could show you this great little suburb I have all laid out for you.”
He could have done that. He says, “So I’ll show you exactly how it’ll work out, Abraham, and then you can obey.” Why didn’t God do that? Because it’s impossible to do that and still have obedience. It’s not obedience anymore, because if your foundation is you, if you were in the position of deciding which of God’s commands look practical and which ones don’t, then the Bible is not part of your foundation. It’s not your foundation at all. Your judgment again, your interest, your comfort, your goals, your schedule, your agenda for your life, that’s the basis, and you’re judging what God has to say?
Don’t you see, those of you who, right now, are disobeying God because you think to obey him would hurt? Or those of you who are delaying obedience because you think to go ahead and obey will be impractical, will be stupid, don’t you see your foundation isn’t the Word of God at all, even though 98 percent of the rest of your life you’re in conformity with God’s Word? It’s just an accident, because the foundation is you.
As long as you find all these areas where it looks practical, yes, you’ll obey, but my friends, you’re not on the foundation. I tell you, you are not a good foundation. All other ground is sinking sand. All other ground is sinking sand. Are you going to be like Abraham who obeyed the bare Word of God? God’s Word and nothing else was enough to get obedience from him.
You know what? What is so lovely is in Romans 4, when it tells us that Abraham listened to God and obeyed, it says in the King James (it doesn’t use this phrase in the modern translations, and, oh, I long for it), “He staggered not at the promise of God …” Isn’t that intriguing? Paul says Abraham “… staggered not at the promise …” What promise? God said, “Take your son and kill him.”
But every command is a promise. It has this promise. Again and again and again, the Bible says, in one way or another, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for …” what? Blessedness? No. Righteousness. Don’t try to find blessedness. Do the right thing, and you’ll get all the blessedness you could possibly want. “Seek first his kingdom, and all these other things will be added unto you.” “Obey my Word, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” That’s the promise.
Friends, the reason we disobey is not because God’s commands are too hard. It’s because we’re too cynical. We don’t believe the promise. We don’t believe when God says, “Obey me, and you’ll get what you need.” We don’t believe it, so don’t you dare say, “The reason I’m not standing on the foundation is because it’s too hard.” Oh, no, my friends. It’s because you don’t believe God. You may believe in God, but do you believe God? A lot of you believe in God, but how many of you believe God? How many of us?
Lastly … this is the end … it’s not enough to simply put your mind and your will, you also have to put your heart on the foundation. By that, I mean this: It says here that Jesus Christ is the Chief Cornerstone. Unfortunately, today, cornerstones are almost what? Embellishments. They’re like decoration.
But in the good ol’ days, when the Bible was written, your cornerstone was very important because your cornerstone was the big stone in the house, and all the rest of the foundation stones were basically pushed up against it. If the cornerstone was left out or brought out, everything else would crumble, and that means, in a sense, the foundation is just an extension of the cornerstone.
Let’s draw that analogy out. If you know the Bible so well, if you’ve memorized the Bible so you could win every Bible test or Bible quiz in the world, and if you have been very diligent to know all those regulations and you’re following them every day, what does that make you? Well, you’re on the way, but if you stop there you’re a Pharisee, because the Pharisees knew the Bible by heart, and the Pharisees did all these things, and yet Jesus comes to them and says, “… you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God?” It’s an amazing thing to say.
“You don’t know the Scriptures? How could he say that of the Pharisees?” I’ll tell you why. Because the purpose of the Bible is to bring you to put your faith in Christ as Savior and Lord. That’s the purpose of all of the Bible. If you just know a lot about the Bible, and if you’re just trying to obey diligently, but you have missed the point of it, you haven’t built on the foundation yet. The point of the foundation is the Cornerstone.
After Jesus Christ had risen from the dead, there were, one day, two disciples, two followers of Jesus, on the road to Emmaus. This is recorded at the end of the book of Luke, and Jesus Christ appears to them at one point. When they do not recognize him, he begins to explain about the Messiah. It says in Luke 24:27, “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.”
Did you hear that? “And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets …” Every one of them; even Obadiah. “… he explained to them what was said in all the Scriptures concerning himself.” What this means is every part of the Bible, one way or another, the purpose of it is to bring you to Christ, to bring you to put your faith in Christ as Savior and Lord. If you haven’t done that, you have not built on the foundation, because Jesus isn’t your Cornerstone. He’s not the thing you’ve built on.
Why is Jesus the Cornerstone? Because if you are relying on your self-discipline or your thoughtful and cognizant spirit that you have, having lived in New York for so long and gone to all the literary cafes, or on your moral record, or just on how true you are to your principles, if those things are your cornerstone, you still aren’t on the foundation.
What does it mean to make Jesus your Cornerstone? Charles Spurgeon, a great Baptist preacher in London in the nineteenth century, wrote about a conversation he had with a man who worked as a longshoreman on the dock. This is the conversation, and this is a perfect example of what it means to make Jesus your Cornerstone. Listen carefully.
Spurgeon says to the longshoreman, “Do you, my friend, have a good hope that if you die, God will accept you? What is your hope?” The longshoreman says, “Well, sir, I do. I believe I’m as good as most folk I know.” Spurgeon: “Oh, dear. Oh, dear. My friend, my friend, I’m very concerned for you. Is this the best you have to rely on?” The longshoreman, now a little bit shaken: “Well, I’m also very, very charitable to the needy.”
Spurgeon: “Oh, dear. Oh, dear. My friend, my friend, I’m concerned for you. Is this the best you have to rely on?” Then he turns to the man and says, “Have you sinned?” The man says, “Yes.” Then he says, “Well, what gives you hope you will be forgiven?” The longshoreman says, “I am very, very sorry for my sins, and I have stopped them.”
Spurgeon says, “That’s what you’re relying on for forgiveness? Now friend, suppose you get in debt to your grocer, and you go to her, and you say, ‘Look, ma’am, I’m sorry I can’t pay all these goods I have bought, but I’ll tell you what. I’m very sorry for all the debts, and I’ll never get into debt anymore.’ Do you think she would accept that? Of course not. Would you even try that with her? Of course not. Do you suppose you can treat the Great God that way, as you would never do to your own grocer?”
Now the longshoreman says, “Well, my dear pastor, what should I be relying on?” Spurgeon says, “Then I told him, as plainly as I could, how the Lord Jesus had taken the place of sinners, and how those who trusted in him and rested on his blood and righteousness would find pardon and peace.” Cornerstone. Your heart is not built on the foundation if you just know a lot about the Bible, but have you transferred your trust from all these other cornerstones to him?
Well, here’s where we are, at the end. My friends, let me just suggest … the Bible, the Scriptures … Jesus says, “Search the Scriptures …” I’ll just end with the two things that are there at the bottom of your outline anyway, two final admonitions.
1. Search the Scriptures
Do you know what that means? “Search the Scriptures …” A lot of you read the Bible like you walk down a path and you notice some flowers. That’s strolling. If you’re searching, you’re down on your hands and knees like you’re looking for a contact lens. That’s how you’re supposed to read the Scripture.
My life was changed forever 15 years ago when I went on a retreat, and a lady who was teaching the Bible said, “Tomorrow I want you all to study one verse for 30 minutes.” One verse. “Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men,” she said. “I don’t want you to stop after five minutes, but for 30 minutes I want you to write down everything you see in that verse, everything you believe you can learn from that verse. I want at least 100 things.”
Let me tell you something. I’ve never been the same, because after five minutes you had four or five things down, and you said, “This is ridiculous. Thirty minutes?” But after you pray, and you look, and you think, and next thing you know, they come, and they come. Everybody came back that day with 100 things. She started saying, “Okay, circle the one thing that was probably the most life-changing, the most thrilling, the most important thing you learned from the verse,” and we all circled it.
“How many of you,” then she said, “found that in the first five minutes?” Nobody raised their hand. “How many of you found it in the first 10 minutes?” Nobody raised their hand. “How many of you found it in the first 15 minutes?” One or two. “How many of you found it in the first 20, then 30?” Almost everybody raised their hands. Search the Scriptures. Look at the diligence you put in to making a living.
Yet I think on the last day, a lot of our possessions are going to get up, and they’re going to speak to us. They’re going to say, “You broke your back for us, and now we’re rust and dust. Here was the Word of God in which imperishable treasure lay, and you hardly broke the cover.” But don’t just stop with that. Don’t just search the Scriptures …
2. Let the Scriptures search you
Let it search you. One of the reasons we’re so confused today is because we don’t know the Word of God. We don’t let it search us. We don’t find ourselves, every day, looking at it and saying, “Lord, let it be a sword that comes through and does surgery on me.”
Remember when Jesus vanished from those two disciples who were on the road to Emmaus? Remember that? He left. They turned to each other, and they said, “Didn’t our hearts burn within us when he opened the Scriptures to us?” When is the last time your heart burned within you as you opened the Scripture? Jesus will open the Scripture. He’ll speak to you if you come to him and say, “I want to be on the foundation, heart, will, and mind, every part of me.” Are you ready to do that? Are you ready to put the time in that it takes, or not? Let’s pray.
Father, we see on the one hand, the gist of this passage is that there is much work we can do. We need to put forth the effort to do the study. We need to put forth the effort to find the time. We need to be diligent in saturating our minds in the Word of God and trusting it and believing it and obeying it, but we also see it’s your Son who will come to us and open the Scriptures for us because we’re too dense, oh, Father. We’re fools, and yet it’s a promise.
Father, we want our hearts to burn within us. We want our hearts to warm up and mountains of ice and snow melt because your Son is teaching us the Word. Father, we want that, and I pray every person in this room will know this soon, but especially those here who need to make Jesus, you, oh, Lord Jesus, their Cornerstone. Enable us all to build on that foundation. For we pray it in Jesus’ name, amen.
ABOUT THE PREACHER
In 1989 Dr. Timothy J. Keller, his wife and three young sons moved to New York City to begin Redeemer Presbyterian Church. In 20 years it has grown to meeting for five services at three sites with a weekly attendance of over 5,000. Redeemer is notable not only for winning skeptical New Yorkers to faith, but also for partnering with other churches to do both mercy ministry and church planting. Redeemer City to City is working to help establish hundreds of new multi-ethnic congregations throughout the city and other global cities in the next decades.
Dr. Tim Keller is the author of several phenomenal Christo-centric books including:
Joy for the World: How Christianity Lost Its Cultural Influence and Can Begin Rebuilding It (co-authored with Greg Forster and Collin Hanson (February or March, 2014).
Encounters with Jesus:Unexpected Answers to Life’s Biggest Questions. New York, Dutton (November 2013).
Walking with God through Pain and Suffering. New York, Dutton (October 2013).
Judges For You (God’s Word For You Series). The Good Book Company (August 6, 2013).
Galatians For You (God’s Word For You Series). The Good Book Company (February 11, 2013).
Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Plan for the World. New York, Penguin Publishing, November, 2012.
Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, September, 2012.
The Freedom of Self Forgetfulness. New York: 10 Publishing, April 2012.
Generous Justice: How God’s Grace Makes Us Just. New York: Riverhead Trade, August, 2012.
The Gospel As Center: Renewing Our Faith and Reforming Our Ministry Practices (editor and contributor). Wheaton: Crossway, 2012.
The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God. New York, Dutton, 2011.
King’s Cross: The Story of the World in the Life of Jesus (Retitled: Jesus the KIng: Understanding the Life and Death of the Son of God). New York, Dutton, 2011.
Gospel in Life Study Guide: Grace Changes Everything. Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 2010.
The Reason For God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. New York, Dutton, 2009.
Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Priorities of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope That Matters. New York, Riverhead Trade, 2009.
Heralds of the King: Christ Centered Sermons in the Tradition of Edmund P. Clowney (contributor). Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2009.
The Prodigal God. New York, Dutton, 2008.
Worship By The Book (contributor). Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002.
Ministries of Mercy: The Call of the Jericho Road. Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 1997.
SUNDAY NT SERMON: Tim Keller “CHRIST OUR HOUSE” – Ephesians 2:14-22
Series: The King and the Kingdom – Part 8
Preached in Manhattan, NY on September 10, 1989
14 For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, 15 by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace, 16 and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. 17 He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. 18 For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.
19 Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household, 20 built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. 21 In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. 22 And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit. – Ephesians 2:14–22
We’re looking, for three weeks, at this passage about the church. Last week, we talked about the fact that the Spirit of God, the life of God, coming into our lives as believers creates a tie stronger than any other tie that can exist between human beings. It’s a tie that transcends the deepest differences that can exist between human beings, differences of family, differences of race, differences of culture, differences of class; therefore, we say the church has a unity and a fellowship, a solidarity the world has been seeking between human beings, for years, in vain.
Tonight, we’re going to look how the same principle relates to our worship. Last week, fellowship and unity; this week, worship. There are volumes in one verse here, verse 18. In fact, all we’re going to look at is verse 18. “For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.” Every word in there is loaded. It reminds me, a hymn writer once talked about a verse like that.
A box where sweets compacted lie.
That’s what it is. Every word is sweet. Look at the first one: for. It’s a sweet word. Why? Look at what comes before it, all of Paul’s discussion of how Jesus Christ died on the cross to reconcile people to God and to reconcile people to one another, but what is the point of it? What is it for? It all boils down to verse 18. “For through him we both have access …” Access is the bottom line of the Christian life. Access.
You may be religious. You may have experienced forgiveness. You may have experienced changes in your life. You may have overcome habits. You may have experienced a certain amount of peace, but listen. All those things are great, but that’s not the bottom line of the Christian life. Those things are symptoms. Those things are sparks, in a sense. They’re results. The bottom line of the Christian life is access. It’s all for this: Through him, we have access, getting in. Getting in.
The bottom line of the Christian life is … Are you in, near God? Are you out on the periphery, or are you in close? Do you experience access to him? Do you enjoy him? Do you know him? Or flip it around. Is he in the center of your life, or is he out on the periphery? Does he enjoy access to you? Do you enjoy access to him, and does he have absolute access to you? Are you in his center, or is he in your center? Access, that’s what the Christian life is about. That’s why we have to look at it. Notice all three members of the Trinity, the triune God, are involved in bringing us this great gift.
For what? “For through him …” Who’s that? Christ. “.… we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.” Three prepositions: through Christ, to the Father, by the Spirit. Three little words. Prepositions of all things, not a noun, not a verb, not even an adverb. Three prepositions on which you can build your whole life. Not only that (and it has been done), on which you can build a whole civilization. Three prepositions. Let’s look at each one of them. This gift of access is to the Father through the Son by the Spirit. Let’s look at what this gift of access is. It’s:
1. To the Father
This word access, it’s one of those few times in which it’s helpful to know Greek. Usually, the Greek word means exactly what the translation says it means. In this case, it’s helpful to look at it, because the word access here, in Greek literature, means to have an introduction to a VIP, to have an introduction to a very important person. Therefore, Paul is, in a very specific way, drawing a picture.
Imagine this. Modernize it a little bit. There’s some great man coming to town, a man of the greatest importance, the greatest significance, the greatest fame, and in this case (which isn’t often the case), you admire this man mightily, so much that you’re willing to go out into the crowd just hoping you’ll catch a glimpse of him. Maybe you’ve even pushed to the front of the police line. You’re waiting there, and along comes the entourage. You haven’t even seen the man yet.
All of a sudden, to your surprise, in the entourage, you recognize somebody. Somebody in his entourage comes over and says, “Oh, I can’t believe you’re here. This is marvelous. Would you like to meet him?” You say, “I can’t believe it. Why, yes.” You’re on the outside. You’re behind the police line. You’re outside just hoping for a glimpse through the door, through the window. Maybe when the limousine comes by, for some strange reason, (you know, if there’s a light on the other side, even those dark glass places you can sometimes see through), maybe just a silhouette.
Suddenly, the friend takes you and leads you in, not just inside the police line but inside the house, not just inside the house but inside the room, not just inside the room but right up to his chair. You sit down, and the man gets the introduction from your friend. He turns to you, and he says, “Why, this is marvelous. I’d love to get to know you better. Could you come back for dinner? Just you and me and my wife.” You’re in. You’re in. You’ve experienced access.
Is that far-fetched? Let me tell you something, friends. If you think that’s far-fetched, the reality Paul is pointing to is as far greater than that story as an ocean is greater than a dewdrop. The reality is far greater than that story, which many of you say, “That’s never happened to me. That sort of thing never will happen to me.” The reality is greater, and that is every person who has received Jesus Christ as Savior has an introduction, not to a VIP, not to somebody in a limo. In New York, they’re a dime a dozen.
There are a lot of others places … a limo … anybody in a limo, anybody in an entourage, anybody behind a police line, that might happen once a year, twice a year, but here, it’s every day. It’s every block. But you say, “Even so, it’s fantastic. That would never happen.” The reality is so far greater because you have an introduction, an irrevocable, permanent introduction, into the courts of the King of the cosmos, the Lord of all life and love and power. He takes you into his heart, into his secrets, into his counsel, into his confidence. You, you’re in.
This is important because whether we recognize it or not, many of us, to one degree or another, are really dominated and influenced by a deep need to be on the inside, and our lives are actually run as much by that as they are by a fear of being left out. There is no worse fear than being left out. See, human society is full of little, what we call inner circles. There are all sorts of inner circles, and the worst thing in the world is to be outside of one if you get near one.
The most famous inner circle, of course, is high society, and a lot of us want to be in high-society circles. Well, we don’t admit that to ourselves until we get near enough to one to get an introduction, and then we go wild over it if it happens to us. Of course, we consider them snobs. Who is we? Anyone outside of that circle. But listen, those of us who are the most disdainful of people who are social climbers trying to get into the inner circle, many of us are just as consumed by a need to be in some other inner circle.
Oh, no, we don’t want tall ceilings and chandeliers. We want the cozy little studio or attic, and just four or five friends and the delicious knowledge we, even we, just we four or five, are the ones who know. Know what? It depends. It depends on if you’re Republican or a Democrat. It depends. But there are all these inner circles, and we want to be in there. Now before any of you say, “Oh, I’m not dominated by that kind of thing. I’m not influenced by that kind of thing,” realize, think about it. We are. It’s one of the great mainsprings of human behavior.
Why … I’m going to say kids, but you know, lots of us were, those of us who weren’t hatched … why is it that most kids have sex the first time? Why is it that most kids use drugs the first time? Why do they have sex the first time? Is it their hormones? Ridiculous. Those of you who remember realize you’re too scared to have your hormones involved at all. It’s the desire to be in. It’s the fear of being out. It’s one of the mainsprings of our professional lives. Let’s face it. It’s one of the reasons we get galled if we’re not brought in, and it’s any profession. It’s my profession too.
Kathy and I know that there’s a particular friend of ours, a pastor friend, who has gotten up and up in the world. Over the years, he’s really developed an inner circle. I’ve never been invited in, and there have been many times in which I was rankled by that. It’s the same cancer. When you start a new church, one of the things that very often happens is in the early stages there is tension between the people who perceive they have not gotten into the pastor’s inner circle and the people who are in. On and on it goes.
I read a very interesting biography not too long ago. It was a testimony of a man who had been gloriously converted to Jesus Christ after a long career as a very highly successful female impersonator. You know, I was just reading through the thing rather quickly. It was rather light reading and interesting and helpful and very glorious in many ways. At one point, he’s telling how, after all his life being a sissy, marginalized, always on the outside, always mocked, the first time he got onto the stage and went into his act … This is what he wrote: “I went into my act. They demanded encore after encore. I was in for once in my life, all those normal people out there clapping.”
The power that lifestyle had for him was that need to be in. You can go into psychoanalyzing him. You can go into checking out his hormones, but the whole idea was … He was out, and now he was in. It does affect us. How can we keep from this sort of thing ruining our lives? There’s only one way. You can sniff and say, “I won’t let that happen,” but then you look around for other people like you who are just as sensible about these inner circles. The next thing you know, you have one.
You have to acknowledge the fact that this is a need for access, and the only way it will not run your life and ruin your life is if you fill that need with the only thing that can truly satisfy it, and that is access into the only circle that counts, the circle of God, the Trinity. He takes you all the way in. It says in the Psalms, “The secret of the Lord is with them that fear him …” The secret. That’s a big part of being in an inner circle, when people tell you secrets, you know, and the Lord tells you secrets.
It says in Revelation 2, to those who overcome, he gives you a white stone, and on it is your name written, the name that is known only to you. If you think I’m so wise, as a teacher of the Bible, that I know what in the world he’s talking about, I don’t know. But all I know is it probably has to do with the fact that God, the longer you work with him, the more he shows you who you are, the more he shows you what gifts he has given you, what your purpose is. He brings you in. He brings you all the way in; therefore, the only thing that is going to satisfy the need for access is access to God.
What is that access? It’s knowing God. See, the word for access and the word for knowing God is the same. Knowing God is the essence. John 17:3, Jesus says an amazing thing. He says, “This is eternal life …” What’s eternal life? Is that kind of esoteric to you? “This is eternal life that they know you, the only true and living God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.” Knowing God is eternal life. What knowing God means is very critical to understand, and the best way I can explain it is to tell you the word knowledge in the Bible always has two layers to it. Two layers.
You can know something at the informational level, but you also can know something at the personal level, and those two things are intertwined. In John 14:9, Jesus says to Philip, “Philip, have you been with me so long and still you do not know me?” What does he mean? He says, “Philip, you have a lot of information about me. You’ve been living with me. You know all about me. You’ve heard all of my words. You’ve memorized all of my teachings, but you still don’t get it.”
What is he talking about? Philip had an informational knowledge, but no more. He was missing something else. Or in Matthew 7 (this is a sermon in itself, but I’ll do it some other time), where Jesus says on the last day people will come to him and they will say, “Lord, Lord, didn’t we do great deeds in your name? Didn’t we cast out demons in your name? Didn’t we prophesy in your name?” And Jesus will look at them and say, “I never knew you …” I never knew you.
Don’t ask me to go into that now, but what he’s saying is this is the all-knowing Creator who is talking. Jesus cannot mean, “I don’t know about you.” It doesn’t mean, “I don’t have all the information on you.” He knows everything about you. He knows the number of hairs on your head, but “I never knew you …” He is talking about personal knowledge. Put it this way: You can know something at an informational level and not personal.
My brother-in-law, I remember, some years ago, hated to wear seatbelts. I used to joke about it. He would say, “I hate seatbelts!” One time I visited him (he lives far away) and he had his seatbelt on. I said, “Ooh, wow.” I joked around in a macho way. You know, guys do. I said, “Hey, what are you doing with the seatbelt on?” He was very serious. He said, “I went to visit a friend of mine in the hospital who was in a fairly minor accident and went through the windshield. He did not have his seatbelt on and had 30 stitches in his face.” He said, “Ever since then, I put on my seatbelt.”
Think about something. Did my brother-in-law, whose name is Jim … Did Jim get any new information about seatbelts? Did he get any new information? He already knew all the stuff about seatbelts. He knew the statistics. Did he get any new information? No. Then what made the difference? The difference was, though he did not get any new information … listen … the information became new. He got no new information; the information became new.
It moved down from the informational level to the personal level. In other words, it got down to the place where it affected him as a whole person. His mind, his will, and his emotions were engaged. He saw how he related to seatbelts as a person (personally), and now it changed him. In the same way, it’s possible to have a whole lot of principles, knowledge about the Lord, knowledge about scriptural teaching, knowledge about God, but the questions is … Has that knowledge ever come down and become personal? Have you ever actually met him?
The Bible talks about this in Ephesians 1:18, where Paul says, “I pray …” He says this to the Ephesians. “… that the eyes of your heart would be enlightened so you might know the hope of your calling.” To me, that’s a locus classicus. That’s a classic text. He tells these people he’s praying they would know the hope of their calling. These are Christians. They know about their calling. They’ve heard it all, and he’s saying, “But you don’t really know it, do you? At the deep level, at the personal level, you haven’t really encountered it, and I’m praying the eyes of your heart would be enlightened.”
Right there, you have it. I can read something in the Scripture, but when the truth begins to shine because of what God’s doing to me, truth that has always been there, truth that has been a letter on the page … it begins to shine … the eyes of my heart are enlightened. I begin to know that truth. There are places where the Bible says, “Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good!” Now there it is.
A lot of you in this room (I would hope most of you, probably) believe in the goodness of God. You believe God is good. You know he is good, but is that truth shining at you? Are you experiencing access to the goodness of God? Is it thrilling you? Is it comforting you? Is it changing you? Is it personal knowledge the way it became to my brother-in-law, Jim? Is it affecting you?
When I was a pastor, people would come on in, and I would see they were eaten up with worry, eaten up with it. This was back in the days when I was fairly naïve about this. I would open the Bible, and I would read places where it talked about God being good. “Oh, there are so many places about God being good, and worry is a complete mistrust, a throwing out the window, of the whole idea of the goodness of God. You can’t worry without denying it,” and I would say, “You know God is good.” The people would look at me, and they would say, “I know that, but it doesn’t help.”
I began to realize, as I began to read what the Bible said about knowledge, what it meant to know God, what it meant to have access, I realized you can’t say that. If you say, “I know about the goodness of God, but it doesn’t help,” you’re contradicting yourself. If you know about the goodness of God, you wouldn’t be worried. If you really knew it … I’m not saying that Christians don’t worry, but it’s because of a lack of access.
If the truth begins to shine, if the eyes of your heart are enlightened, if you know it, if you experience access to the goodness of God, it wipes out that kind of anxiety. Nobody has perfect access, but to the degree you have access, to that degree, there’s peace. The truth shines. That’s what this great gift is. It’s a remarkable gift. It’s unbelievable. Do you see it? Just before I go on, real quickly, there are two opposite errors churches fall into about this idea of knowledge.
There’s informational knowledge, and there’s personal, experiential knowledge. There are some churches that put all the emphasis on informational, and the emphasis is all on learning the doctrine and understanding it and knowing it inside out and mastering it and being accurate but without a commensurate emphasis on working that truth into the life before God in repentance and prayer so the truth shines and changes you. If you don’t have that commensurate access, if you put too much emphasis on the informational knowledge, what happens is you develop a legalistic church, an authoritarian church, a heresy-hunting church.
On the other hand, if a church puts much more emphasis on experience, and actually even eschews dogma, always saying, “We don’t believe in doctrine and dogma. We just want to bring you to Jesus,” the danger with that, first of all, that’s silly because as soon as you say, “I don’t believe in doctrine, just Jesus,” I say, “Who is Jesus?” “Oh, Son of God, fully God, fully Man, Savior, Mediator. But I don’t believe in doctrine.” You can’t. You can’t have personal knowledge without informational knowledge. Real knowledge, real access is based on informational knowledge. It’s more than informational knowledge, but it’s never less.
I mean, that’s not the way it works. If you sit down with somebody and you’re trying to get to know them personally, you ask for information. You want to know where they are, where they live, what job they have, and so on, don’t you? Then of course, you use the informational knowledge to build personal knowledge, and that’s the way it goes. But it’s more dangerous than that.
You have to realize that Christian mysticism (if I can use the word), Christian experience, is utterly different than Eastern experience. Eastern mysticism puts all the emphasis on destroying, frustrating the one side of your brain, the analysis side, the rational side, the logical side, and says, “Let’s frustrate it.” You know, all the things you’re supposed to meditate on, like, What is the sound of one hand clapping? And so forth. You’re supposed to meditate on that because it frustrates the logic. It frustrates the one side of your brain until the intuitive side is brought out.
That’s absolutely unbiblical, because Jesus said to the woman at the well of Samaria, “You must worship in spirit and truth, with your left and your right brain, with your analysis and your intuition.” I can’t go into more detail on that now, but do you see why there are these opposite errors? Knowledge is always more than information but never less. This is the gift. We have access, but how do we get it? How do we get it? There are the last two prepositions, which we actually have to look at together.
Why is it that most of us do not experience that access very much? And why is that some of you have never experienced? You know it as I’m describing it. Okay. There is the gift to the Father. That’s the gift, but the gift comes through the Son and by the Spirit. In other words, the gift is bought by the Son and delivered by the Spirit.
2. Bought by the Son
It says what? It says, “For through him we both have access to the Father …” Go back to the illustration about the entourage. Remember the key? Why is it that you got in to see the man? It was the friend, and that friend just can’t be any friend. You don’t think just anybody in their entourage could have gotten you in. It had to be a friend with tremendous standing with the VIP, with the very important person, right? It had to be a person with great standing. Why? Because a great person who doesn’t know you has to trust the introducer, so then he knows he can trust you.
If you try to introduce yourself, that’s tremendously arrogant, because what you’re doing if you try to introduce yourself, is you’re actually granting this person an audience. It’s tremendously arrogant. You say, “I’ll tell you who I am, and I don’t need an introduction,” which, of course, is just setting yourself up over top that person. The only way to get in is to have an introduction by somebody whom the great person trusts. It’s the only way.
Who is Jesus Christ? We’re told, “He is the One who stands before the Father.” Right here in this same passage, up in verse 13, we’re told we’re brought nigh. “We’re brought nigh by his blood.” He died in our place. He took our punishment for our sins. “Now,” the Bible says, “he stands before the Father.” Hebrews 7:25: “He stands. He lives to intercede for us.” We read a little earlier in the service he stands as one making our defense. In other words, we have a permanent, irrevocable introduction.
Anyone who approaches God through Jesus has access, and only through Jesus. Because if you go any other way, you try any other religion, you’ll have to be introducing yourself. You are your own reference. Do you realize how arrogant that is? To come to someone who you’re trying to get a job from, or you’re trying to get in with, you’re trying to get an audience from, and you refuse to even come up with a reference. No one else introduces you … I introduce myself.
Do you realize how incredibly insulting that is to the other person? Do you realize why you’ll never get a job that way? Just try to go see the president of the United States without an introduction. You’ll come down with bullets in you. It’s the same thing with the Father. You have two choices. There are only two approaches. You can introduce yourself, or you can go through Jesus. When you go through Jesus, you don’t have to introduce yourself ever again. Ever again. Then we’re told …
3. By the Spirit
What that means is though the Son has bought it, the Spirit has actually brought it. The Son has bought it, and the Spirit has brought it. It says, for example, in John 16, Jesus says, “The Spirit will come and take of mine and show me to you. He will glorify me.” The Spirit’s job is to melt you under the truth.
Back in the old days, before we had wonderful glued envelopes, do you know how you sealed an envelope if you wrote it? What you had to have is you had to have a little piece of wax, right? You had to have a seal (usually a signet ring), and you had to have a flame. So you softened the wax with the flame, and what the flame did to the wax was it made the wax susceptible to the seal.
If you tried to put the seal on the wax without the flame, there are only two things that could happen. What? It could break the wax, or it could just leave only a superficial outline on the surface. But if the wax is changed, it’s softened by the flame, then the wax is susceptible, and it’s changed in the image of the seal. Now that illustration, transform it. The wax is your heart. The seal is the Truth, the Word of God, and the flame is the Spirit.
When I go to the Truth of God, and the Spirit is giving me access, do you see what happens? You can read about the power of God. If you just read about the power of God, without the influence of Spirit, you say, “Oh, God is powerful.” Without the influence of the Spirit, all that can do is make a superficial impression on the top of you, but when the Spirit of God is there, you read about the power, and there’s access. The truth begins to shine. It begins to change you, and what happens is your heart develops courage.
When you read about his goodness, it develops peace in you. When you read about his forgiveness, it develops relief in you. You shake off your guilty fears. When you read about his forgiveness, it develops generosity and mercy in you. When you read about his holiness, it develops conviction of sin and humility in you. Don’t you see? Only when the Spirit of God is doing that do you see real access happening. Only then.
I told you, by looking at these two things, these two prepositions, through Christ and by the Spirit, we can understand why some of us in this room are not experiencing access. Do you know why? A lot of us are saying, “I’ve been trying to do a good job. I’ve been working at being religious. I’ve been coming to church for a number of years. I’ve never had anything like what you’re talking about. Never!”
The answer is there’s no influence of the Spirit. There’s no softening. In fact, I’d have to say you have to be careful because the more and the more you try so hard to be religious and to be moral without the influence of Spirit on you, you push that seal in the wax, and you push that seal in the wax; all you get is a superficial outline. Eventually what happens is you crack it. That’s why we have people running around forming Fundamentalists Anonymous groups, people who have been cracked under the legalism, cracked under the Word without the Spirit.
Oh, you say, “Well, okay, why isn’t the influence of the Spirit in my life?” The only answer could be you’re not coming through the Son. It’s the only possible answer. You might say, “Well, I believe in Jesus,” but are you trying to introduce yourself? Are you coming to God, making yourself your own reference? Are you coming to him and saying, “Father, I’ve had a hard life, so I deserve …” I mean maybe you don’t use the words, but, “I’ve had it tough. I’ve tried. I’ve worked. I’ve worked.”
Or are you saying instead, “Oh, Lord God. Oh, Lord God. The audacity of someone like me to come to you, you have the right just to throw me out, but the gospel is Jesus has paid it all, and now he stands before the throne for me. He is my introduction. He is my reference. No other. All the other things I’ve ever done are worthless in your sight. Save me for Jesus’ sake?” If you’ve never done that, you’ve never come through him.
Do you understand that? For as hard as you’ve tried to be a Christian, if you’ve never done that, if you’ve never stopped your introductions, you never come through him; therefore, you’ve never really had access to the Father by the Spirit. Where does this leave us? Let me just finish by applying what we’ve learned, access to the Father through the Son by the Spirit, to three kinds of people here. Ready? If the shoe fits …
1. There are those of you who know about this access because you’ve experienced it, but you don’t experience it that much
You know, some tests of the experience … quick … just to make sure you know you’re alive. When you have access, when the Spirit is working on you, when the truth is shining, number one, when you go to God in prayer, you feel the burdens come off. “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” You feel the burdens come off. You can feel the needs and the troubles come off when you’re praying.
Another mark of access is there’s a confidence and boldness. Instead of saying, “Oh, gosh, why would God even listen to me?” there’s a boldness. There’s an eloquence. Besides the confidence and besides the sense of burdens coming off, number three, the real mark of access is surprise. There’s that hymn writer who wrote …
Sometimes a light surprises
The Christian while he sings;
It is the Lord who rises
With healing in His wings.
When you’re looking at the Word of God and it begins to sparkle out truth, your mind gets eloquent. That’s access. You start to see new beauties you hadn’t seen before, things that surprise you. They sparkle out like sun on the water. Your mind gets eloquent. You’re surprised by new beauties.
Another mark of access, and the most important one, is you find it really changes the way in which you live. Do you know that access? Do you know what I’m talking about? Every real Christian knows about it, but I also know every real Christian in this room also says, “I wish I had more of it. In fact, I’m really missing it lately. What can you do?” Here’s what I tell you to do: Even you need to make sure you’re going through the Son by the Spirit.
Through the Son means … Do you rejoice in the access you have through the Son? Do you rejoice in it, or do you run right into God’s presence with your “gimme” prayer list, and you say, “Oh, Lord, I have a lot for you to work on today?” Or do you walk in recollecting, thinking about the fact the only reason you’re not struck dead as you walk into prayer is because you’re coming through the Son and to say, “Oh, Lord, look at the standing I have. Even you can’t bring a charge against me because of the great salvation you brought for me in Jesus Christ?”
To the degree you rejoice in that access, to the degree you’ll experience that access, do you see? Do you just run into God’s presence, or do you enjoy? Do you reflect on what you have? The Bible says, again and again, you must pray in Jesus’ name. Do you know what that means? Do you think it’s just a little thing you say at the end in perfunctory way? To come in the name of Jesus means you know the only reason God will hear you is because of the irrevocable, permanent introduction you have before the throne of God. You relish that, and you revel in that. Are you doing that?
The other thing, of course, is you have to be by the Spirit, and one of the reasons many of us are not experiencing access is not only are we asking the Spirit for that access and yearning for it, a lot of us are grieving the Spirit in our lives. If access to God is by the Spirit and yet in our lives, by sins of omission or commission, by a lack of Christian duties or by actually breaking God’s commandments, you grieve the Spirit, and then you wonder why there’s no access. You can’t do that.
My friends, don’t be too discouraged here. You have to realize sometimes God doesn’t give you high access, and it’s a way for him to test you, because God values obedience given when there’s very little feeling in the heart. When you don’t feel close to him, but you obey, he knows how hard that is, and he knows how valuable that is, and he likes it. But on the other hand, I must point out to you God wants us to have access, and the reason many of us don’t is simply because of our disobedience and our laziness. You have to recollect coming through Jesus. You have to go by the Spirit.
2. The people who are trying to start a new church here
Not all of you are. An alive church experiences access to the Father. That means an alive church is just as big on defending the faith and truth as spreading it. An alive church is not afraid of surprise, because access means surprise. An alive church isn’t afraid of surprise. I mean, it’s creative. It’s not rigid. An alive church is a church that is ready to expect great possibilities because they have access to God, but I can’t go into that right now.
3. There are those of you who are here who have never experienced access, and you know it
In New York City it’s possible to be in some mighty elite circles. I don’t care what kind of circle you’re in, if you’re just getting in or if you think you’re about to get in, it’s awfully exciting, isn’t it? You’re sure this is going to satisfy that need for access. Nuh-uh. No matter what circle you’re in (and if you’ve been in it long enough, you know this), you’re nowhere unless you’re in God’s circle. The only way to do that is to come to the Father through Son by the Spirit.
Psalm 84 says, “How lovely is your dwelling place … My soul yearns, even faints, for the courts of the Lord; my heart and my flesh cry out for the living God.” Everybody in this room, whether you admit it or not, that is the language of your deepest self, and the door is open. Let’s go in. Let’s take time to pray silently, time to say, “Lord, here’s what I have to do to put into practice what I’ve learned tonight.” Let’s pray.
If you’re a believer who is really dry, come through the Son. Remind yourself of who is there for you. Stop trying to introduce yourself. Don’t worry about that. At the same time, be willing to quit with those things you know grieve the Spirit and have blocked off your access. If there’s anybody here who knows you have no access; you really need to receive Christ as Savior, pray this prayer with me:
Lord, I’ve tried, off and on, to reach you, but I see how it has all been my own efforts, really, to introduce myself to you. I thought many things I did could get me in, but only Jesus Christ and his work can get me in. Now I receive him as Savior. Master, accept me for his sake. In Jesus’ name we pray, amen.
ABOUT THE PREACHER
In 1989 Dr. Timothy J. Keller, his wife and three young sons moved to New York City to begin Redeemer Presbyterian Church. In 20 years it has grown to meeting for five services at three sites with a weekly attendance of over 5,000. Redeemer is notable not only for winning skeptical New Yorkers to faith, but also for partnering with other churches to do both mercy ministry and church planting. Redeemer City to City is working to help establish hundreds of new multi-ethnic congregations throughout the city and other global cities in the next decades.
Dr. Tim Keller is the author of several phenomenal Christo-centric books including:
Joy for the World: How Christianity Lost Its Cultural Influence and Can Begin Rebuilding It (co-authored with Greg Forster and Collin Hanson (February or March, 2014).
Encounters with Jesus:Unexpected Answers to Life’s Biggest Questions. New York, Dutton (November 2013).
Walking with God through Pain and Suffering. New York, Dutton (October 2013).
Judges For You (God’s Word For You Series). The Good Book Company (August 6, 2013).
Galatians For You (God’s Word For You Series). The Good Book Company (February 11, 2013).
Every Good Endeavor: Connecting Your Work to God’s Plan for the World. New York, Penguin Publishing, November, 2012.
Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, September, 2012.
The Freedom of Self Forgetfulness. New York: 10 Publishing, April 2012.
Generous Justice: How God’s Grace Makes Us Just. New York: Riverhead Trade, August, 2012.
The Gospel As Center: Renewing Our Faith and Reforming Our Ministry Practices (editor and contributor). Wheaton: Crossway, 2012.
The Meaning of Marriage: Facing the Complexities of Commitment with the Wisdom of God. New York, Dutton, 2011.
King’s Cross: The Story of the World in the Life of Jesus (Retitled: Jesus the KIng: Understanding the Life and Death of the Son of God). New York, Dutton, 2011.
Gospel in Life Study Guide: Grace Changes Everything. Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 2010.
The Reason For God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. New York, Dutton, 2009.
Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Priorities of Money, Sex, and Power, and the Only Hope That Matters. New York, Riverhead Trade, 2009.
Heralds of the King: Christ Centered Sermons in the Tradition of Edmund P. Clowney (contributor). Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2009.
The Prodigal God. New York, Dutton, 2008.
Worship By The Book (contributor). Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2002.
Ministries of Mercy: The Call of the Jericho Road. Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing, 1997.
TIM KELLER ON CHRISTMAS AND SUFFERING
When September 11th happened and New Yorkers started to suffer, you heard two voices. You heard the conventional moralistic voices saying, “When I see you suffer, it tells me about a judging God. You must not be living right, and so God is judging you.” When they see suffering they see a judgmental God. The secular voice said, “When I see people suffering I see God is missing.” When they see suffering, they see an absent, indifferent God.
WHAT CHRISTMAS DOES FOR SUFFERING
But when we see Jesus Christ dying on the cross through an act of violence and injustice, what kind of God do we see then? A condemning God? No, we see a God of love paying for sin. Do we see a missing God? Absolutely not! We see a God who is not remote but involved. We sometimes wonder why God doesn’t just end suffering, but we know that whatever the reason, it isn’t one of indifference or remoteness. God so hates suffering and evil that he was willing to come into it and become enmeshed in it. Dorothy Sayers wrote:
For whatever reason, God chose to make man as he is—limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—he [God] had the honesty and the courage to take his own medicine. Whatever game he is playing with his creation, he has kept his own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that he has not exacted from himself. He has himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When he was a man, he played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace, and thought it was worthwhile.
The gift of Christmas gives you a resource—a comfort and consolation—for dealing with suffering, because in it we see God’s willingness to enter this world of suffering to suffer with us and for us. No other religion—whether secularism, Greco-Roman paganism, Eastern religion, Judaism, or Islam—believes God became breakable or suffered or had a body. Eastern religion believes the physical is illusion. Greco-Romans believe the physical is bad. Judaism and Islam don’t believe God would do such a thing as live in the flesh. But Christmas teaches that God is concerned not only with the spiritual, because he is not just a spirit anymore. He has a body. He knows what it’s like to be poor, to be a refugee, to face persecution and hunger, to be beaten and stabbed. He knows what it is like to be dead. Therefore, when we put together the incarnation and the resurrection, we see that God is not just concerned about the spirit, but he also cares about the body. He created the spirit and the body, and he will redeem the spirit and the body.
Christmas shows us that God is not just concerned about spiritual problems but physical problems too. So we can talk about redeeming people from guilt and unbelief, as well as creating safe streets and affordable housing for the poor, in the same breath. because Jesus himself is not just a spirit but also has a body, the gift of Christmas is a passion for justice. There are a lot of people in this world who have a passion for justice and a compassion for the poor but have absolutely no assurance that justice will one day triumph. They just believe that if we work hard enough long enough, we’ll pull ourselves together and bring some justice to this world. For these people, there’s no consolation when things don’t go well. But Christians have not only a passion for justice but also the knowledge that, in the end, justice will triumph. Confidence in the justice of God makes the most realistic passion for justice possible.
WHAT CHRISTMAS DOES FOR THE DESPISED (& THE DESPISER)
Lastly, in the package of Christmas, there’s the ability to reconnect with the part of the human race you despise. Have you ever noticed how women-centric the incarnation and resurrection narratives are? Do you realize that women, not men, are at the very center of these stories? For example, in the story of the resurrection, who was the only person in the world who knew that Jesus Christ had risen from the dead? Mary Magdelene, a former mental patient, is the one Jesus tells to take this news to the world. Everyone else in the whole world learns it from her. Women are the first people to see Jesus risen from the dead.
In the incarnation, the annunciation comes to a woman. God penetrates the world through the womb of a poor, unwed, Jewish, teenage girl. The first theological reflection group trying to wrap their minds around this to figure out what this means and what is going on is Mary and Elizabeth. We know that in those days women had a very, very low status. They were marginalized and oppressed. For example, we know that a woman’s testimony was not admissible in court. Why? Because of prejudice against women.
We say to ourselves, aren’t we glad we’re past all that? Yes, but here’s what we have to realize: God is deliberately working with people the world despises. The very first witnesses to his nativity and resurrection are people whom the world says you can’t trust, people the world looks down on. Because we don’t look down on women today, we don’t look at this part of the story and realize what we’re being told. But here’s what we’re being told: Christmas is the end of snobbishness. Christmas is the end of thinking, “Oh, that kind of person.” You don’t despise women, but you despise somebody. (Oh, yes you do!) you may not be a racist, but you certainly despise racists. You may not be a bigot, but you have certain people about which you think, “They’re the reason for the problems in the world.”
There’s a place in one of Martin Luther’s nativity sermons where he asks something like, “Do know what a stable smells like? You know what that family would have smelled like after the birth when they went out into the city? And if they were standing next to you, how would you have felt about them and regarded them?” He is saying, I want you to see Christ in the neighbor you tend to despise—in the political party you despise, in the race you despise, in the class of people you despise.
Christmas is the end of thinking you are better than someone else, because Christmas is telling you that you could never get to heaven on your own. God had to come to you. It is telling you that people who are saved are not those who have arisen through their own ability to be what God wants them to be. Salvation comes to those who are willing to admit how weak they are.
In Christmas there is a resource for something most of us don’t even feel the need of. We might be able to admit we have trouble being vulnerable or that we need help handling suffering or that we need more passion for justice. But almost nobody says, “What am I going to do about my prejudice and snobbery? I really need help with that.”
Do you remember what an incredible snob you were when you were a teenager? Teenagers generally want nothing to do with people who don’t dress right and look cool. Do you think you ever got over that? You’re not really over that. You just found more socially acceptable ways to express it. You see, teenagers let that aspect of human nature out and don’t realize how stupid they look, and after a while they get rid of it. But really they are just papering over it. There are all kinds of people you look down on and want nothing to do with—and you know it. But in Christmas you have this amazing resource to decimate that—to remove it and take it away.
These are the gifts that come in the package of Christmas— vulnerability for intimacy, strength for suffering, passion for justice, and power over prejudice. And you are blessed if you open this gift and take it into your life. If you do, you’ll be blessed. You’ll be transformed.
SOURCE: This adapted sermon is an excerpt from Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus: Experiencing the Peace & Promise of Christmas. Edited by Nancy Guthrie, Crossways. Copyright © by Timothy Keller, 2007.
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Tim Keller is the founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, which he started in 1989 with his wife, Kathy, and three young sons. For over twenty years he has led a diverse congregation of young professionals that has grown to a weekly attendance of over 5,000.
SUNDAY NT SERMON: Tim Keller “Politics of the King” – Ephesians
Series: The King and the Kingdom – Part 7
Preached in Manhattan, NY on September 3, 1989
We’ve actually been studying Ephesians 2 for a few weeks now because it tells us so much about the church:
14 For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, 15 by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace, 16 and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility. 17 He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. 18 For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit.
19 Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household, 20 built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. 21 In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. 22 And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit. – Ephesians 2:14–22
What we’re doing these last few weeks of the summer in these messages is envisioning the church, getting a clear picture of what the Bible says the church ought to be. I want that picture to be so clear and bright that it burns a hole in your mind and ignites a passion in the core of your being to see that picture realized.
Recently, I read two different accounts of two individuals who lived in two different centuries, on two different continents, and yet the same thing happened to them both. They had lived all their lives in abject poverty. For one reason or another, both of them found someone died and left them a fortune. Millions. They were dressed, and it was brought to their attention now there were millions of dollars in the bank in their name, and each one of them said, “Ah, that’s great. Fine. I’ll get it when I need it,” and never drew a cent for the rest of their lives and continued to live in abject poverty.
Interesting stories. Maybe you’ve heard of one of them, and probably there are more cases than that. The reason that happened was not that they disbelieved it, but I believe, because after years and years of living on nickels and dimes and quarters, their imaginations couldn’t comprehend those figures. They knew there was something in there they could draw on when they had a need, but they really couldn’t get their imagination around it.
We’re exactly like that when it comes to the church. Exactly. Because the things the Bible says about the nature of the church are so magnificent they beggar the imagination, and without God’s help, our puny, shriveled little imaginations cannot get around it. So over the next three weeks, we’re going to take a look at Ephesians 2. For three weeks, we’re going to look at these verses I just read.
Many of you (those of you especially with a church background) have heard these things before. “The church is a holy temple. The church is the family of God. The church is one new man,” which means a new humanity. “The church is a colony of heaven. We’re citizens of heaven, and we’re a colony of heaven.” You’ve probably heard these things, right? They’re in the bank. They’re there to be drawn on, and we sit there, and we go, “Uh-huh,” and we live like beggars. Aren’t you tired of going around in rags yet?
Now Ephesians 2:13–22, is a bank account for a Christian, and all we’re going to look at this particular evening are the first few verses, especially verses 14–17, where it talks about the peace of the church. One of the things the church has is peace. It comes up three times: “For he himself is our peace …,” in verse 14; “In this one body, he reconciled both of them, and he made peace,” in verse 15; and in verse 17, “He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near.”
The teaching of this passage, in summary, is the church is a place of supernatural unity and solidarity, and that supernatural unity and solidarity is craved by the world. They’re dying for it, but only the church can realize it. That is what the teaching is. Now let’s break it down.
In these verses, Paul, first of all, explains there’s a major problem mankind has with peace, a major problem, and then he gives a solution. The problem he talks about by giving us a case. He’s a casuist here. He’s giving us a case study, and what he’s doing is he gives us one particular case of the great hostility that exists between man and man, between men and women, between labor and management, between races and races. In this one case, he gives the example of the hostility between Jew and Gentile, and he talks about how that has been solved by the church, so let’s take a look at that.
The problem Paul gives us … He gives us a good analysis of the problem, the hostility you see in verse 14. He says he “… has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility,” and then secondly what Paul says is the answer, what brings peace, and that is he destroys the hostility through what? Verse 16: “… through the cross …”
Let’s look at the problem, then the solution. The problem: Paul points out the hostility, and you could make a great case that the problem of the human condition is the lack of peace. We live in a world of great strife and enmity. We pay billions of dollars to diplomats. Now I know there are some of these in the room: policeman, lawyers, social workers, arbitrators, mediators. What are you all out there to do? To keep us from killing each other. Guess what. You’re failing. You’re failing.
The only reason there is some peace in the world is because of what’s termed enlightened self-interest. The Bible gives us a great analysis of the cause of the hostility and the continual strife. Why is there war? Why is there terrorism? Why is there litigation? Why is there divorce? The Bible says the reason for the lack of peace in the world is the inherent selfishness and pride of every human being.
The only way the world is able to go about getting peace … It can get it in a partial way, in a sort of way. There’s a sort of peace that can be developed when selfish people find they can work for peace because working for peace helps them toward their goals. Enlightened self-interest. It’s a partial, and it keeps the world from being an absolutely unlivable place. When somebody sees it’s beneficial to their goals to work and live at peace with other people, then they’ll do it. So we do everything we can to set that up, and I’m glad we do.
Did you notice, for example, this week, ARCO came out with a new gasoline, which is far more pollution-free than has ever been produced? It was right on the front page of The New York Times. The ARCO spokesman admitted freely they could’ve been doing this years ago but he said they had no incentive. Well, you know what the incentive is. California has passed certain laws about emission control, and now they’re going to be penalized a terrific amount of money if they don’t produce the gas.
Suddenly (isn’t this incredible?), they’re working for peace, peace with the environment, peace with the environmentalists. Why? Because they said, “Now we have incentives.” Well, what that means is … Our selfishness has been coordinated, your selfishness and my selfishness. Now we can work together, because by working together we can both get what we want. Enlightened self-interest.
Some years ago, do you remember a really, really great ad campaign for why people should not drive recklessly, why people should drive cautiously and soberly? “The life you save may be your own.” Why is it that the ad people didn’t put up there on the billboards, “The life you save may be somebody else’s?” Well, because it’s just not as powerful an argument. “The life you save may be some other poor slob.” Okay. “The life you save may be your own.” Oh, well, all right. Ooh, wow. Okay.
Don’t you see? That’s the only way the world can create peace. It’s doomed in the end. It has to be, because it’s only temporary. Eventually, it’s not in your best interest to work for peace. At some point, if you’re trying to reach your goals, the most beneficial thing for your self-interest will be to push somebody aside to cheat, to stab, or just to walk away. Because it’s the selfishness which creates the strife and the enmity and the conflict, and you can only harness it so far. It’s the selfishness and the pride that creates it.
Now Paul, I said, gives us a case study of how that works. He could’ve chosen all sorts of conflicts we have, but he chose one, which is very, very well known, and one, of course, which we have plenty of still in the world today, the conflict between Jew and Gentile. He says something pretty interesting. He says he “… destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations.”
What does that mean? One thing we do know is Jesus Christ never abolished the Ten Commandments. We know that because the Sermon on the Mount is all about the Ten Commandments. You know, Jesus says, “You’ve heard it said, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ but I say unto you, if you hate your brother, you have killed him, and if you ignore and are cold to your brother, you have killed him.”
What is Jesus doing? Is he saying, “Ah, you don’t need to follow the Ten Commandments anymore?” He’s saying, “Oh, my friends, the Ten Commandments are far more broad in their ramifications than you ever thought. It’s critical we live according to the commandments.” So Jesus did not abolish the Ten Commandments, no. The key is Paul is thinking of something else. He is thinking, I think, literally, of a partition, a real wall, a literal wall.
Yes, there are figurative walls between labor and management, and there are figurative walls between male and female and between black and white, but there was a real wall between the Jews and the Gentiles. It was a wall. It was a partition in the temple, and the people inside were the Jews, who had not just the Commandments but the regulations, the ceremonial laws, the clean and the unclean laws, all the regulations by which they kept themselves separate from the world.
The Gentiles, who did not have all those laws, who were uncircumcised, who ate unclean meat, and so on, they were on the outside. What Paul points out is the Commandments and the regulations created hostility. That’s not the reason God gave the regulations. Why did God make Israel a separate people? Why did he set them apart with all those regulations?
Not to create enmity, not to create separation, but to make Israel a holy nation who would attract the Gentiles to God. That’s why so many of the calls to worship we do here … the first thing, when I call you to worship … very often, I read it from the Psalms. These were the calls to worship at the temple. Very often, in the Psalms, you see calls to worship from temple that don’t just go, “Come worship all ye people.” What does it say? “Come worship all ye peoples.”
God expected Israel to be drawing all peoples to the worship of God. But what happened was the regulations were distorted and twisted by the pride and selfishness in our hearts. The Jewish people began to take those regulations, which were a gift, and instead of being humbled by them, they became proud, and they said, “Look at these Gentile dogs who eat the wrong food. Look at these unwashed pagans. Why should we have anything to do with them?”
Their gift became a source of pride, and instead of serving the Gentiles with their gift, they scorn them and look down their nose at them. The Gentiles say, “Well, who needs these stuck-up people?” So they became a dividing wall of hostility.
Listen. Let me say, very clearly, this is only one case. Tonight we are not picking on Jewish people because this is a universal principle. Every person who receives a gift, every strength you have, everything that is good about you, sin will twist it and turn it around and turn it into something that makes you look down your nose at other people.
I remember, for example, the school district in my hometown came up with this brilliant idea. They said, “Let’s take the smartest kids from all the different parts of the school district together, and we’ll put them in one class, because they can really, really study, and we can get them three and four years ahead in math and three and four years ahead in all these things.” They put them all together. They didn’t say, “You are the gifted class,” but everybody in that class knew they were pretty intelligent.
Twelve years later, they evaluated the program, and they stopped it. I remember reading the evaluation, and the reason for that was there was tremendous hostility created between that class and everybody else. The class developed a sense of, “Oh, we know who we are. We are the smart kids, and we know who you are. You’re the ones who couldn’t cut it and get into this class.” Of course, everybody else says, “They’re the snobby, smart kids, and we want nothing to do with them,” and there was violence because of that.
I’ve counseled, and I sure hope I don’t do a whole lot more of it, but I did a lot of marriage counseling when I was in Virginia because the nearest therapist was about 300 miles away from my town, so I did it. One of the things I found in this little blue-collar town was the women were more adaptable than the men, by and large.
Everybody got married at the age of 16 or 17, and then as time went on, the women were more adaptable. They learned. They grew. They took courses. Even though most of them were just high school graduates, they would take other courses, and they changed and grew, and their husbands didn’t.
Ten to fifteen years later, here’s what happened: For whatever reason (and I can’t document this), the women were more adaptable to their environment. They were more responsive. They were more receptive, and the husbands, it was harder for them to admit when they were wrong. This was a gift these women had.
I don’t know if it’s inherent to the female brain. I don’t know. I haven’t read that, but I do know these women, almost all of them, would get together and talk about it, and they turned it into a tremendous source of pride. They would constantly scorn their husbands about their male ego. The male ego … he can’t admit when he’s wrong. The male ego is rigid.
What happened was they turned their gift into pride. Everybody does it. All of us do it. The gifts God gives us become walls of hostility, barriers. Don’t you see? What does God do about it? What does Jesus say is the solution? The solution is in verses 15 and 16: “by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations. His purpose was to create in himself one new man out of the two, thus making peace, and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross …”
The answer to the problem, the inveterate problem, the problem that cannot be solved any other way is here were two people, two groups, Jew and Gentile, at each other’s throats. Jesus reconciled them to God and thus to each other through the cross. Now how does the cross do that? Here we go. The cross does it (and only the cross) because it eliminates boasting.
Have you seen that? One of the problems with the new translations are they get rid of that word boasting? There are a lot of places where Paul says, “No one will boast,” or, “I will boast in nothing.” In fact, my favorite verse, and the verse I need to read you right now, is Galatians 6:14, a very important verse.
He says, “May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world. Neither Jew nor Gentile means anything but a new creation. Peace to all who follow this rule.” Did you hear that? He says, “I boast in nothing but the cross; therefore, Jew and Gentile mean nothing to me. I look at everyone differently, and peace comes to those who follow this rule.”
The cross eliminates boasting. The trouble with the word boast is what? When you think of boasting, what do you think of? You think of a braggart. You think of somebody at a party, huh? You think of the lady in the TV commercial where the lady says, “Now darling, enough about me. What do you think of my dress?” Do you remember that one? Yeah.
Anyway, you think of bragging. You think of somebody who’s always talking about their accomplishments. No. It’s a much deeper word than that. Many times this word boast is translated glory. “I will glory in nothing else but the cross.” You see, the word glory in the Bible means something of weight, and what Paul says here is, “There were many things I used to glory in.” Now what does that mean? “I used to boast in them. I used to glory.”
Does it mean I bragged about them at parties? No. Here’s what it means: To glory in something means to say, “This is what gives me weight. This thing is what makes me count. This thing is what gives me substance. It’s because of this that I am not chaff blown into the wind. I’m not smoke. I’m not an illusion. I’m not a holograph. It’s this thing that makes me real. It’s this thing that defines me. It’s this thing that makes me count.” Paul says that is eliminated by the cross, and only the cross can eliminate that.
He goes into more detail in another incredibly important passage where he gives, virtually, his life story in a few verses, and it’s in Philippians 3. It reads like this: “If any man has reasons to boast, I have more. Of the people of Israel …” He’s talking about himself. “[I was] of the people of Israel … a Hebrew of the Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee; as for zeal, persecuting the church; as for legalistic righteousness, faultless.”
Listen. “But whatever was to my profit, I now consider debit. For the sake of Christ, I consider them all as rubbish that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from obeying the law, but a righteousness that comes from God through faith. I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection.”
He makes a list. He says, “If anybody has things to glory in, I have more.” That list, he says, “I was a Hebrew of the Hebrews.” He’s talking about his family, pedigree, his social status. Then he says, “I was a Pharisee.” He was a scholar, “… as to knowledge, a Pharisee …” He was a scholar. His education was impeccable, all right? Ivy League, see?
Then thirdly, he says, “As to zeal, I persecuted the church.” That’s professional success as a rabbi, all right? Social status, educational excellence, professional success, and then he says, “… as to legal righteousness, faultless.” He says, “In every way, my moral record, all these things, I get glory in them. I looked at them, and they gave me weight. They made me feel like I count. I know who I am. I’m somebody.”
They gave him his identity. He says here, “In order to become a Christian, I had to stop glorying in any of them.” He didn’t just say, “It happened when I became a Christian.” He says, “That I might know Christ, I had to count them all as rubbish.” By the way, that is a euphemism, okay? That’s a euphemism because the Greek word means dung, excrement, urine, all those things that got the art banned in Washington, DC.
He says, “I had to count them as refuse. I stopped looking at them as being things I got my identity from.” Does that mean he threw his books away and stopped being a scholar? No. He enjoyed the fact he was a scholar. Did that mean he stopped being moral? Of course not. Did that mean he stopped being a member his family, stopped being a member of the tribe of Benjamin; he didn’t go to the Benjamin family reunions anymore? What did that mean? It meant they no longer were foundational to his identity. He no longer gloried in them.
Now my friends, when that happened, as a Jew, all the things he boasted in were knocked out, and that meant suddenly there was no difference between the Gentiles and him. It’s not just Jewish people who do that. Friends, every religion other than evangelical Christianity does the same thing. It says, “Here’s what you have to do. Go out and get it. Do it. When you succeed, then you know you count.”
I got an interesting little brochure. I won’t mention the church just in case … You know this is New York, and who knows? I might get sued, but there’s a place full of conflict. There’s not much peace here, you know, strife and litigation … But this particular church believes they can give you spiritual purification.
Here’s how their religion works: In the brochure, it says, “Come take our Purification Rundown. The rundown will return your energy and alertness to its natural, sparkling, clear, fresh state. The program is a strenuous one, but you can complete it by following the rules. The Purification Rundown is not concerned with the body. The aim of the Purification Rundown is freeing the individual spiritually. There are no medical recommendations or claims made for the program. The only claim is future spiritual improvement.”
On the back, there’s a testimony, and this person said, “After completing the rundown, I became vice president of marketing for an international cable company. I was able to complete all my work in just a few hours with my new energy level, and for the first time in years, I had evenings and weekends free.” Don’t you realize …? That’s crass. Of course, it’s crass. “Come. It’ll be hard work, but if you follow our religion you’ll reach all of your goals, and then you’ll feel so good about yourself.”
Of course, that’s crass, but friends, every religion, every philosophy outside of evangelical Christianity, whether you get an old one that’s been around for thousands of years or you make up your own, does the same thing. Can I give you a little more subtle personal example? When I was in college, I was very depressed at a period, and I went to a counselor, and the counselor said to me, “One of the things we have to do to help you in your depression is help your sense of self-esteem,” which, in other words, well, he says, “You’re not glorying in anything.”
Now he didn’t put it like that, of course, but that’s what he meant, and he said, “What are you good at?” I shudder to tell you this, because it was a long time ago, but at the time I was a trumpet player, and I said, “I’m a pretty good trumpet player.” He said, “Now I want you to do this: When you start to get depressed, I want you to imagine yourself playing a solo that brings down the house. Do that whenever you are feeling depressed,” and I tried it.
I can give you this testimony: In the short run, it does make you feel better, but then you’re on a treadmill. There are only two things that can happen to you; either you achieve what you imagine, and you build your identity on your gift, and next thing you know, you’re starting to look down your nose (just like Paul says here) at every other inartistic Philistine, every other boorish person who’s not like you.
If you really get successful, you can put yourself in a power bubble surrounded just by people who tell you how great things are. The only other alternative is you fail. Then what happens to you is you’re eaten up with envy and resentment all the rest of your life. In either sense, in either situation, peace is gone. You’re either eaten up with pride or you’re eaten up with envy and resentment. I’m speaking personally.
Paul says the gospel and the gospel alone, the cross and the cross alone, changes all that because what the cross does is it takes you and shows you all these things you’re glorying in, though good in themselves, are nothing before God. They cannot make you in even one iota acceptable to him. They are nothing before God, and compared to the surpassing worth of knowing Christ, they’re less than nothing.
Years ago (I’ll use him as an illustration), there was a man named David Martyn Lloyd-Jones, one of my heroes, and I’ll quote him as often as I possibly can. He and C.S. Lewis, you’ll hear quotes all the time. Why not? They’re both dead, but they’re like my tutors, my friends, when I read them. Lloyd-Jones was a surgeon in London in the 20s, and he was a man of great standing and distinction. The trouble was, after he became a Christian, he discovered, to his consternation and everybody else’s, he was an incredibly good speaker, a tremendous preacher.
One of the best things you can do if you’re a Christian and a doctor is to be a great Christian doctor, and one of the worst things most Christian doctors could do would be to go out and try to preach. This man was clearly called to the ministry. He had to do it, and he did. He left being a surgeon and he went into the ministry. At that time he took a 90 percent cut in salary. His salary as a minister was one-tenth of what it was as a surgeon.
Some years after that happened, a reporter came to him, and the reporter said, “Dr. Lloyd-Jones, many people were intrigued when you made this choice. You gave up so much. There were so many things in your life you had to give up, and I’m sure there has been a great deal of enjoyment and satisfaction doing what you’ve done, but I’ve come here to find out, on balance, after reflecting and weighing everything up, was it worth it?”
Lloyd-Jones growled at him in Welsh (because he was Welsh), and he says, “I gave up nothing. I received everything.” In other words, let me translate. He says, “My dear man, you don’t even understand the basic nature of Christianity. Christianity is not one way among many that can help you be happy. It’s not just a way that we have to say, ‘Will this help me really reach my goals in life?’ It’s a total reorientation.”
What Lloyd-Jones said is just what Paul said. He said, “All those things I used to glory in, all those things that used to be sources of pride for me, things through which I got my identity, I saw, compared to what I needed to be (acceptable before God), they were nothing. Compared to the surpassing worth of knowing Christ, they were less than nothing, and so I gave them all up.” “I gave up nothing. I received everything.”
By the way, if there is anybody here tonight who has been thinking about committing your life fully to Jesus Christ … I’ll bet you some of you are sitting around saying, “Ah, but will it be worth it? I might have to give up so much.” Oh, you will have to give up some things. Of course, you have to give up some things. You’re weighing it up. My dear friends, you know what you’re weighing up? Good things in themselves, many of them, but compared to the surpassing worth of Jesus Christ, dust balls.
You won’t know this until you do it, until you give yourself to him. You are like a person sitting around saying, “I have millions in the bank, but I’m agonizing. Do I want to spend 25 cents on that stamp to send in my withdrawal request? Oh, I hate to do that.” You know, maybe a 25-cent stamp represents your life savings up to this point, but you have all that in the bank. “I gave up nothing. I received everything.”
The Bible says when a person is like that and when a person does that, there’s a fundamental change in their relationships to all other believers. Don’t you see why? Because now you have an identity which is deeper than your family identity. That doesn’t mean you stay out of your family, but now you have an identity deeper than your family, an identity deeper than your gender, an identity deeper than your race, an identity deeper than your culture.
Why do you think Jesus Christ can say, “You must hate your mother and father and love me?” He doesn’t mean you literally write poison-pen letters to your parents as soon as you become a Christian, but what he does mean is he says, “Now compared to what you feel about me, compared to your commitment to me, your commitment to your family is smaller.” Or put it this way: The Hatfields and the McCoys, remember them? They were fighting and shooting each other and killing each other for years and years back in the hinterland of West Virginia.
As a result, anybody who was a Hatfield, that defined them. If you were a Hatfield, you didn’t shoot at another Hatfield, and if you were a Hatfield, you shot at McCoy. That’s how your life was run. But if a Hatfield and a McCoy both became Christians, then those two people had far more in common with each other than they did with their own families. That is the nature of the gospel because that’s how radically different your identity is in Christ.
In a sense, everything I’m doing now, this passage, is a commentary on the claim I made last week. If you’re a Christian, you’re a Christian first and you’re an American second. If you’re a Christian, you’re a Christian first and you’re a white person or a black person second. If you’re a Christian, you’re a Christian first and you’re a ruling class or a poor person second. Don’t you see that?
Because the relationship you have in Christ is much more fundamental than any other relationship you have. That is absolutely the nature of the gospel. As a result, the unity and solidarity Christians can have is the sort of thing the world has been trying to get for years. It can’t get there because it doesn’t embrace the cross. The cross knocks down the sources of pride, the things that divide us, and unites us. Unites us completely.
Some of you have heard of Matthew Henry. He wrote a very famous commentary. He lived in the 1700s. It’s a very old commentary and a good favorite. His father’s name was Philip Henry. His father and mother were courting. They were dating, and unfortunately, Philip Henry was from the wrong side of the tracks. The girl he was dating, who was going to be Matthew Henry’s mother, was from Society Hill.
At one point, the parents of Matthew Henry’s mother came to her and said, “This Philip Henry who you’re dating, we’re concerned. We don’t know where he’s from. We don’t know who his parents are. We don’t know what part of the city he’s really from. We don’t know where he’s from.” She looked at them and said, “I don’t know where he’s from either, but I know where he’s going.”
You see, that’s all that matters. That’s why Paul can say, “… henceforth we know no man according to the flesh …,” which means, “I know longer think of people the same way.” Christians will find there’s more solidarity with other Christians of other races than they have with non-Christians of their own race. Christians will find there’s more solidarity between themselves and Christians of other families than they have with non-Christians of their own family, and so on, and so on.
The Greek word for church is ekklesia, called out, and you’re not called out of involvement with the world. You’re called out of the identity. That’s the reason why we can say you’re a Christian first and you’re white or you’re black second. You’re a Christian first and you’re this family or that family second. You’re a Christian a first and you’re rich or poor second. That’s the reason why the solidarity Christian can have should be, can be, unsurpassed.
We’re a new humanity. That’s what it means when it says, “The two have become one man.” What does that mean? It means there’s a new humanity, a new race. A new race. In conclusion, I want to just ask, “What are the implications of this?” I’ll give you two. Just two.
1. If this is true, don’t you see the church is not a nice place just to drop in on every so often?
Don’t you see the church is not a club? Do you begin to understand why there are these commands in the Bible who almost no one in this room, including me (because I’m new here), are obeying? I’m not sure I was obeying them in Philadelphia. The Bible says, “Confess your sins to each other …”
Here’s another one: “Exhort one another daily lest you be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.” Do you have relationships that are so strong there’s somebody who understands you well enough to know day to day when you’re falling down on the job, so that person can encourage you and exhort you so you’re not hardened? Are you obeying that verse? Are you making provision to obey that verse?
“Exhort one another daily lest you be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.” Confess your sins to one another. Welcome one another. Bear one another’s burdens. Submit to one another. The reason for this is the church is a place where you forge relationships that are full of accountability.
Do you know what real worldliness is, friends? To be conformed into the image of the world right now means you as Christians bring your Americanism in, and Americanism is, “I’m responsible for my own life. My problems are nobody else’s business. My sins are nobody else’s business because there is no relationship in which I can’t walk out if my needs aren’t being met.” That’s the American way today. That flies right in the face of everything we have been looking at.
An awful lot of Christians will come into the church … In fact, some of you might be considering … Well, you’re coming to listen to me. Because you want to know whether, if you have the need, you’d be willing to confess your sins to me. Okay … Only if you have the need, you know. Whether you would come and let me exhort you weekly, “… lest you be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.”
You’re trying to figure out whether you want to just come to the place where you have one person who you’re doing that for occasionally. The Bible says you are still holding the church at arm’s length. You’re still refusing to come into the church. You’re still refusing to be truly committed because you’re not making provision for other believers to exhort you daily “… lest you be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.” If you don’t obey that verse, you will be hard. You have to be.
It’s not good enough just to come and to say, “Okay, the guy up front, I’ll listen to him. I’ll try to develop a relationship with him.” It’s not good enough. It’s not good enough. We have to be a church in which the truth is spoken in love, and my friends, it’s a church where people can walk up to you and say, “Excuse me. I’ve been praying about this for several weeks. I haven’t talked to anybody else about this. You can hit me. Maybe you will hit me later on. Possibly, we can still talk about. I’m trying my very best to do it right. Do you realize your temper is the talk of the whole office?”
Now you have to get ready. You duck. If you and that other person are a Christian, that’s the nature of the unity you have to have. That other person might hit you and later on come back and say, “Thank you.” Later on, you may find out, if the person hits you, they were right; you exaggerated. You didn’t act on proper information, but a church … That’s the church, a church where you’re forging ties that are as deep as the family.
What else does it mean when it says, “Hate your father and mother and love me?” It can’t mean you really hate your father and mother. It must mean you forge tremendously strong bonds with other believers in the church. Don’t forget, Jesus died on the cross to put you into the body. He didn’t die just to save little individual people to run around and go wherever they get blessed the most. He saved you to put you into the body and make you a new person with other people, okay?
By the way, if I was in New York, I’d probably be doing what a lot of you have been doing for years, but I’m trying to say, once you see what the Scripture says, and once you have opportunities, you need to make provision. You need to make provision. The other thing I just want to say is, keep this in mind. In Ephesians 1, Paul writes to the Ephesians, who he has never met, and he says, “I’ve heard you are true believers because of, one, your faith in Jesus Christ and, two, your love for all the saints.” Now those were the tests.
2. Your love for all the saints
Don’t you see? Some of you may say, “I know I’m a believer because I believe all the doctrines. I believe all the right things. I have faith in Jesus Christ.” But don’t forget the other test of whether you’re really a Christian. Do you love all the saints? All the saints.
David Martyn Lloyd-Jones used to say one of the reasons he realized he had changed … After he became a Christian, he would sometimes wonder, “Have I really changed?” He suddenly realized something really weird had happened. You have to remember England (those of you who are from Britain realize this) is a lot more of a class-conscious society than we have here, though we have classes. Silly to say we don’t have classes, but Britain has that class-consciousness.
As he got into a church in a little mining community in Wales, he used to spend a lot visiting with what he called “old Welsh fisherwomen,” women with no formal schooling at all but who were godly women. He would sit down, and he would talk with them for hours by their hearth. Then he would go and spend time with his old friends, the people he went to Oxford with, the people he went to medical school with.
He suddenly realized one day, he says, “I enjoy, more, hours of fellowship with another Christian who is as opposite as these fisherwomen are to me than I do talking with my peers, the people who are of the same ilk, the same education with me.” He suddenly realized, “What could take a British ruling class person and do that?” Only the gospel, your love for all the saints.
There may be people in here who come in here and because of your gifts and your talents, you’ve always scorned the hoi polloi. Some of you may come here, you respectable types, and you’re not sure how you like to deal with these street types. Other people might come in here who have a kind of disrespectable background, and you’re afraid the respectable types won’t work. You might be the tough guy who kind of hates those artsy types.
My friends, I don’t care whether or not you believe all the doctrine. The way you know you’re a believer is you love all the saints, and you find that as you work for it. This is how I end … My weekly C.S. Lewis quote. He says, “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal …” They’ll end, right?
“… and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors. 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 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. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbour is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat—the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.”
We should be treating each other as infinitely precious vessels, as if you were in a house and you picked up a vase and looked at it, and you said, “Oh, what is this?” Then somebody said, “Oh, that’s a 2,000-year-old vase from the Ming dynasty.” You would be in shock. Suddenly, fear and trembling would overtake you, and you would treat that vase as the precious thing that it is. There’s something infinitely more precious in the pew next to you tonight.
About the Preacher
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