150 free Tim Keller sermons

The gospel is like a great lover and wretched street girl who had been abused by all her old boyfriends. The lover loved the street girl and said to her "if you will believe that my love is better than any other's, I will give you my love forever and never take it away."

Two relationships

In the first, the husband was unfaithful but deeply regretted it because he had great passion for his wife in his heart.

In the other, the husband never cheated, but couldn't care less for his wife.

Which marriage has hope?

The Gospel and Prayer

Speaking loosely, I've begun to find that prayer is the most important means of living the Gospel.

This is because my understanding of the Gospel is that the human experience is the quest for deliverance from Evil, and the good news is that God, in his perfect capacity, acts to deliver us from evil. Our role is almost a passive one, except that we are to simply believe that God is, in fact, acting to save us.

And prayer is the perfect way to experience this. By making a petition to God, we acknowledge our need (or, in other words, it's an act of repenting from the sin of self-sufficiency, aka, believing we can save ourselves, aka, believing that we are God). In that act, we also are expresssing our faith that God can and will save us. And then we wait on God, in His infinite wisdom and capacity, to answer, knowing that either He will do as we've prayed, or else it wouldn't have been good for us if He had.

Tim Keller resources

So, here's my 2-cents (and really, this is just my personal speculation). The postmodern person is in crisis, no less the postmodern Christian. In response, there's a New Church Movement (home churches, emergent churches, traditional denominational churches that feel like emergent churches). But I think the church iteration that is going to best meet the exigencies of day is the young Reform church.

In that vein, I came across a cool blog that stockpiles Tim Keller resources. Keller is probably the brightest light in the Reform church right now, and his stuff is really the good stuff. Of course, to my mind, the good stuff is just the book of Romans, restated.

The Gospel and self-control

So, I've claimed that a Christian's job isn't to be self-controlled (or do any particular work), but to believe in Jesus. But I'm also claiming that believing in Jesus will improve your self-control.

How?

Why do we lack self-control? Why do we eat too much, or drink too much, or gossip, or act-out sexually. Is it really because we literally cannot control ourselves? I don't think so. Think of your typical instance of lacking self-control – if someone were there with a gun to your head, you could probably refrain from whatever action.

The real reason we don't control ourselves is that we don't really believe it's in our best interest. We believe (trust, have faith) that our happiness will actually be best accomplished by gratifying ourselves. We don't believe our happiness is best served by Jesus – in short, when we act badly, it's not really so much that we can't control ourselves as that we don't want to. And we don't want to because we don't believe in our hearts that it's good for us.

But believing in Jesus entails believing that He is our shepherd, and under his care we shall not be in want. We indulge ourselves to satisfy a felt need, but trusting in Jesus convinces us that our felt need will best be met by Him.

Imagine you are hungry. You're told by your friend that he's taking you to the best restaurant in town so you can eat. On the way, you stop at 7-11. You have the opportunity to eat a large candy bar. Do you do it? It largely depends on whether you trust that your friend is really taking you to the best restaurant in town. If he is, then you'll control your appetite for a little while longer; if you don't trust your friend, you'll satisfy yourself with a Snickers.

It's the same with Jesus. If we trust Him, we'll control ourselves. If we're failing to control ourselves, the solution isn't to try harder. It's to know Jesus better.

Job Description of the Christan

Your job as a Christian isn't to try harder.

Your job as a Christian isn't to do more.

Your job as a Christian isn't to read your Bible more.

Your job as a Christian isn't to pray more. Or serve more. Or give more.

Your job as a Christian isn't to control yourself better.

Your job as a Christian isn't to do less bad things. Or do more good things.

Your job as a Christian isn't to get your act together or clean up your life.

Your job as a Christian isn't to act like a saint.

Your job as a Christian isn't to be more righteous or less wicked.

Your job as a Christian is believe in the One whom God sent, and all these thing will be added unto you.

The Good News

In Christ,

You are perfect and complete.

You are fully accepted and loved. You don't need to be better, more beautiful, funnier, smarter. You are utterly accepted in Christ.

You don't need to succeed. Christ has succeeded for you.

It doesn't matter if you fail. You're failures have been swallowed up in Christ's success. You may, in fact, be better off failing, so you're not tempted to trust yourself and instead can only place you're hope in Christ's success.

You don't need to be strong (you're not strong enough anyway for what is required, which is to be perfect as God is perfect); Christ is strong for you. You're better off weak, so you never forget only Christ is strong.

You don't need to do anything else. Christ has done everything for you.

In his own words: Keller on the Gospel and humility

Since I'm using his framework so much, I'll let him speak in his own words from a recent Christianity Today article (he does his own argument much more justice that I do):

"Humility is a byproduct of belief in the gospel of Christ. In the gospel, we have a confidence not based in our performance but in the love of God in Christ (Rom. 3:22-24). This frees us from having to always be looking at ourselves. Our sin was so great, nothing less than the death of Jesus could save us. He had to die for us. But his love for us was so great, Jesus was glad to die for us."

Read the full article.

The Gospel and the Beauty Myth

Keller offers another example of how the Gospel can apply to an issue in a fresh way by taking on our society's obsession with physical beauty.

Our society is obsessed with physical beauty, but most everyone knows we shouldn't be. But, even though we know we shouldn't care so much about how we look or other people look, we can't not care: it's just too overwhelmingly important in our culture. But the Gospel is that Christ has made us perfectly beautiful in Himself; in Christ, we are more beautiful than we could have ever hoped. By putting our faith in this, the power of our culture's obsession with beauty is broken.

The Gospel and Struggles

The Gospel is the answer to our struggles, and not just by way of ultimate forgiveness of our failures. Tim Keller offers an example: He knows God requires truthfulness, but he struggles with lying and cannot make himself be honest. The reason he lies is because he is afraid of what people think of him. In Christ, however, he's been accepted and approved of by God; believing this, he can let go of his need for man's approval. He is now more able to tell the truth.

This lesson has a four-part structure: 1) the requirement of God; 2) the person's inability to meet the requirement; 3) the Gospel that Christ has met the requirement for us; 4) because of the Gospel, the improved ability to meet the requirement.

I really love several things about this. It magnifies God and the Gospel. Obedience is really primarily about faith in the accomplished work of Christ. It minimizes our "effort" in achieving righteousness while not letting us off the hook for living godly. It offers a route to sanctification for those of us who have, sadly, proved to ourselves that we are truly completely unable to live the way we aspire to as Christians.

I'm going to try to do a series of posts, applying this framework to many different areas of struggle in life. Feel free to suggest topics.

Spontaneous good works

In Philemon 14, Paul sums up how I'm understanding the Christian life: "...let it be spontaneous and not forced from you..." The good life and obedience of the Christian should be a spontaneous result of his experience of God's salvation. Elsewhere, Paul describes this as Christian "freedom."

Yet, there remains a necessary role for deliberate (consider deliberate vs. spontaneous) Christian obedience. Jesus says "if you obey my commands, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth and the truth will set you free." (John 8:31-32). Here, obedience seems to precede freedom. Of course, to obey in the first place, one must have initial faith. So, the Christian life fully flows from faith, but obedience is a sine qua non of that faith-propelled life. And perhaps it can even be said that there may be an intermediate stage where compelling faith and spontaneous obedience have hidden themselves and what the moment requires is deliberate obedience in order to move onto a renewal of spontaneous Christian life.

An important distinction is made by Watchman Nee, who says that in the process of waiting for spontaneous Christian life to occur in us, we need to continue to be spiritually disciplined. However, he says, we do not ultimately trust in our disciplines; we continue to trust (place our faith) in God to bring about our sanctification. In this way, our salvation continues to be "by faith" even though we do "works" as part of our salvation.

Bonhoeffer summarizes this quasi-paradox well when he says "we must believe to obey; we must obey to believe."

"What we find abominable in man...the real man, the real world, this is for God the ground for unfathomable love, and it is with this that He unites Himself utterly...

"God loves the real man. God became a real man."

-- Ethics, Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Good works

The first and highest, the most precious of all good works is faith in Christ, as He says, John vi. When the Jews asked Him: "What shall we do that we may work the works of God?" He answered: "This is the work of God, that ye believe on Him Whom He hath sent." When we hear or preach this word, we hasten over it and deem it a very little thing and easy to do, whereas we ought here to pause a long time and to ponder it well. For in this work all good works must be done and receive from it the inflow of their goodness, like a loan. This we must put bluntly, that men may understand it.

- 'A Treatise on Good Works' by Martin Luther

More Gospel

In repentance and rest is your salvation. In quietness and trust is your strength.

- Isaiah 30:15

Today was one of those days where I couldn't quite remember what the Gospel was, and this sermon, The Rest Quotient, reminded me.

More on abortion...and the centrality of the Gospel

This article sums up well where I am on the abortion issue in which the bottom line is that now is not the time for Christians to lose focus on this cause:

http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2008/may/28.66.html?start=2

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I'm also wondering what the Centrality of the Gospel means for abortion...

The Centrality of the Gospel in Ethics and Morality

We love because he first loved us. 1 John 4:19

Sometimes we’re convicted that we’re not doing a good enough job carrying out the greatest commandment: love. One response to this conviction is to try harder to love the way we should. But I suggest that when we fail in our love, the better method is to saturate ourselves in the fact of God’s love for us. Once we’ve done so, increasingly loving God and our neighbors will be the natural response.

The Centrality of the Gospel as applied to ministry:

Such confidence we have through Christ toward God. Not that we are adequate in ourselves to consider anything as coming from ourselves, but our adequacy is from God, who also made us adequate as servants of a new covenant…

2 Cor. 3:4-6

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Sometimes I think maybe I shouldn't be doing any ministry because I'm not ready or I'm not good enough. Paul in Corinthians says it's not up to us to make ourselves ready or good enough. Our adequacy to be servants of the new covenant is from God.

Centrality of the Gospel

I’ve been blessed to go to a few churches during the past five years that I felt operated on the notion of the Centrality of the Gospel, but I’ve had a hard time explaining how this differed from my previous churches because I’ve never gone some place that didn’t consider Christ’s work on the cross central.

But, I think I’ve figured it out a bit better. The book of Romans makes for a nice illustration. Romans is 16 chapters, the first 11 of which are basically Paul explaining the Gospel, 12-15 are more practical instructions, and 16 is basically an extended good-bye (‘mention me to so-and-so’). So Paul basically spends 60-70 percent of the letter talking about the Gospel before he really starts giving moral instruction, and this to me is a very concrete format for how I’d like my own articulation of the Christian message to sound: the large majority of what I want to say is simply about God’s redemption of us.

However, what sometimes happens is that the Christian message starts with moral instruction and commands: for example, do not covet or lust or be an idolater or whatever, and the whole message ends up being about what to do or not do, and the meaning of Christ’s work on the cross is a footnote. When this happens, what is essentially being preached is Law: do this; don’t do that.

Law isn’t wrong; it’s just not the Gospel, and, further, the Law apart from the Gospel tends to produce guilt and condemnation, but not righteousness. And it turns Christianity into moralism.

So, I’m gravitating more and more to focusing on the message that the Lord is my shepherd, and I shall not be in want. That’s the Gospel, that God has taken care of everything and it’s not on me. It’s on Jesus, and he has done it and he will do it.

Good conduct should more or less simply flow from full acknowledgment of this fact. I’m not against moral instruction. But making the Gospel central perhaps means that it’s the primary thing we talk about, and we don’t talk about anything else, even morality, without shedding the light of the Gospel on that topic.