Gospel in Life

Guest (Female): Welcome to Gospel in Life. What keeps your faith from unraveling when trouble comes your way? On the night before his crucifixion, Jesus told his disciples to not let their hearts be afraid. Today, Tim Keller shows us how Jesus offers a new kind of confidence that is rooted in something far more secure than our circumstances.

Guest (Male): John chapter 14, verses 1 through 3. Do not let your heart be troubled. You believe in God; believe also in me. My father's house has many rooms. If that were not so, would I have told you that I'm going there to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am. This is the word of the Lord.

Tim Keller: Christians want to represent Jesus Christ to the world, and Redeemer people want to represent Jesus Christ to their city. On the night before Jesus died, he gave his disciples this long, intensive training session. John chapter 13 to 17 is the longest piece of teaching we have in the Bible from Jesus. He was getting them ready to represent him in the world, and that is why we are studying it this year.

When we get to John 14, which we just have done, we are just entering into chapter 14. The chapter starts with this: "I don't want you to be troubled. Don't let your heart be troubled." It ends, by the way, with Jesus saying, "I don't want your heart to be troubled or afraid." Why is Jesus saying he wants to give them something so that their hearts are not constantly troubled and afraid? The answer is because trouble comes.

John 16:33 says, "In this world, you will have trouble." Because you are going to have trouble all the time, I want to give you something so that your hearts are not troubled all the time by the trouble. I want to give you something that will give you confidence and strength so that the normal trouble life gives you is not going to overthrow you.

What is it that Jesus does to give us this confidence and strength so we can face life as it is? He actually gives us a few things. That is why we are going to have a series of sermons on John 14. In these first three verses, he gives us one of the things without which you cannot face life in an untroubled way. He says, "I go to prepare a place for you."

The first thing he gives us to help us deal with the troubles of life is the knowledge of a place. In verses 1 through 3, he talks to us about home, about heaven, and about hell. When he says, "I'm going to prepare a place for you," twice he says it. That is home. There is a real home he is preparing. Secondly, it is in heaven. It is in the Father's house. Thirdly, the road to it is through hell.

What do we mean by home? He says, "In my Father's house there are many rooms, and I'm preparing a place for you there." Think about the power of the idea of home. In the movie *Up*, Carl Fredericksen refuses to sell his home. There are all these big high-rises going up all around, and they are offering him zillions of dollars, but he refuses to sell it.

It is a cartoon, but he represents thousands of people every year who create such headaches for developers and for governments. There are all these laws in which governments and developers can actually force people to sell their land or their home. Generally, it does not matter how much you offer them. They are set for life, but they won't sell because it is their home. It is their place.

Homelessness for both adults and children is uniquely, psychologically devastating. I am not talking about the hunger that goes with homelessness or the bad health that comes from exposure to the elements. Homelessness itself is devastating. Paul Tournier, who was a Swiss counselor and doctor, wrote a book called *A Place for You* based on these verses.

Children who do not have a good sense that they ever had a home, with no good memory of a place where they were completely safe and completely loved, develop an inability to attach. It creates a restlessness and an inability to settle down that goes with them throughout life. Why is homelessness so wounding? Why is home so powerful?

One of the best movies with the simplest plots is the 1985 movie *A Trip to Bountiful* with Geraldine Page. It is a story about a woman named Carrie Watts, an old woman who is living with her son and daughter-in-law in a little apartment in Houston. She thinks about Bountiful, the little rural town on the Gulf Coast of Texas where she grew up.

She decides things will be better if she can get back to Bountiful. First, she finds out there are no trains that go to Bountiful anymore. Then she finds out there are no buses that go to Bountiful. She finds out there is no post office there, and she cannot even send a letter. Finally, she runs away and finds a way to get a bus to a town and finds someone to drive her.

Finally, she gets to Bountiful, and there is nobody there. The person she was hoping to visit and live with, the last person living in Bountiful, has died. She sits down on the porch of her ruined home where she grew up. Her son finally comes and finds her, and he takes her back to Houston. That movie gets at something that is hard to describe. We have a longing for home that is so powerful.

Even those of us who have memories of a great home find the memories always exceed how good the place really was. You can never truly go home. The fact is there is nothing on earth that actually satisfies the desire for home. There is no earthly home that can satisfy our desire. Home is a place where everything fits, where you are accepted, where you belong, and where you can always be as you are.

Home is a place of deep rest, well-being, and peace. It is a harbor. Jesus Christ knows that the men he is talking to are apostles. The word apostle means "sent out." He knows that every single one of them is going to start to wander. They are never going home again. They are going to be wandering just ahead of danger, and eventually, all but one will die a horrible death.

Except for John the apostle, who died in exile, every one of them would die a terrible death. What will enable them to go into that kind of life untroubled? Even if you had a wonderful home with a big fire and a window looking at the mountains or the sea, that would never satisfy your longings for home. But this will: Jesus is preparing that place for you right now.

If you are a disciple, you have that place. The place you have been longing for all your life is there. It is reserved and guaranteed. You can live your life knowing that no home here would ever satisfy what you are looking for anyway. When you get there, you are going to say, "I've come home at last. I belong here. This is the country I was looking for all my life, though I never knew it."

Jesus Christ was getting these guys ready for the rest of their lives, which were going to be terrible. He gave them something that would enable them to face life untroubled. It worked. The knowledge that there really is a place for you and Jesus has it in his keeping is what gives that strength.

Where is this place? The answer is heaven. He says, "My Father's house has many rooms in it, and I'm preparing a place for you there." The Father's house exists now with our heavenly Father. He says, "I'm going to it now." He is not talking about just something in the future, though of course, we get to it in the future. It is something that exists right now, and that is heaven.

Heaven means when you die, you go to heaven. This passage is read at funerals, and it should be. Jesus Christ is saying here that he does not just want you to be untroubled at the prospect of his death; he wants you to be untroubled at the prospect of your death. That is one of the great things he gives to his disciples: being able to not be afraid of death.

Jesus is saying that if you are his disciple, this is a guaranteed thing. He does not say that at the end of your life, if you have lived well enough, he might let you come to his place. He says the minute you believe in him, your place is ready. It is guaranteed. It is in heaven. It means when you die, the worst thing that can happen on this earth is actually the best thing.

When you die, you do not leave the light and go into the darkness. You leave this relatively dark world and go into the real world of light and love. George Herbert once said that death used to be an executioner, but the gospel makes him just a gardener. A gardener takes little seeds and plants them, but then they become flowers and fruit.

All death can do to a Christian is make you infinitely greater than you are now. This particular promise is one of the main benefits of being a Christian and one of the main things that differentiates Christians from the rest of the world. We actually do not talk about it enough in churches anymore. If you do not understand or believe the gospel, how do you look at death?

In my experience over the years, having gone to hospitals and talked to many people who knew they were dying, I have seen this. Unless you are a doctor, you probably do not talk to more people who know they are dying than ministers do. When you start getting closer to death, even if you believe in an afterlife, you look back at your life and realize you have not lived the life you should have lived.

If you believe in an afterlife, you might not be sure you were good enough to have a good one. If you do not believe in an afterlife, you think that when you die, you are just gone. Some people find that very upsetting because you lose yourself and you lose love. Others say it is perfectly natural, but they are not happy about it. Rousseau said any man who says he does not face death with dread is a liar.

From a Christian point of view, Rousseau is 20 percent right. First Corinthians 15 says death is an enemy. Genesis 3 shows us that we were not built for death, but it came in because we turned away from God. We should rage against the dying of the light. It is not right, and we know it is not right. We were not made for this. When you face death, you are going to feel sick in your stomach.

It is only 20 percent, however, because a Christian does not have to face death with dread. Indifference is not the answer either. Jesus says that let not your heart be troubled because when you go through that dark door of death, you come into a world of love. Nobody else understands it that way. In Jonathan Edwards' sermon, *Heaven is a World of Love*, he explains this beautifully.

He says heaven is great because of love. Stop thinking only about thrones, harps, and streets paved with gold. What makes a home a home is love. Christians believe in a Triune God who has had three persons from all eternity loving each other. Edwards says Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are united in infinitely dear and mutual love.

The Bible does not say heaven is a stadium or an auditorium. Heaven is a home where you get God's embrace. In heaven, this fountain of love is set open without any obstacle to hinder access to it. It overflows in streams and rivers of love and delight. We cannot imagine how our joy and our glory will multiply exponentially forever with inconceivable ardor of heart.

Heaven is a world of love. Jesus says, "I want you to be with me where I am." He does not just want you to go to a place with great views and gold. He wants you to be with him. That is the reason why you can be untroubled. You can have the way St. Paul spoke in 1st Corinthians 15: "O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?"

The Christian attitude toward death is to taunt it. Paul is not just peaceful in the face of death; he is making fun of it. George Herbert wrote a poem called *A Dialogue-Anthem*, which is a dialogue between Death and a Christian. It is based on 1st Corinthians 15. It is a wonderful dialogue that shows the Christian perspective.

The Christian says, "Spare not, do thy worst. I shall be one day better than before: thou so much worse, that thou shalt be no more." That is a taunt. The older you get, the more you are going to see loved ones and family members go down. Do you have this in your heart, or are you troubled?

The most important thing is that there is a home in heaven, but the road to it was through hell. Twice Jesus says, "I go to prepare a place for you." It is easy to read this forgetting the context, which is the night before he is about to die. He is not just saying he is going to pop over to heaven and get a bed ready.

When he says "I go," he is talking about going to the cross. He is going to die for you. That is why he does not say that if you live a good enough life, he might let you stay in his home. He says, "I'm going to secure a place for you." Why does Jesus have to die to do that? Consider Adam and Eve.

Adam and Eve turned away from God and were cast out of their home. Their punishment was homelessness. That was perfectly just. The wages of sin is loneliness. The more selfish and proud you are, the more alienated you are from other people. The natural and right punishment for sin is homelessness and loneliness.

That is what Jesus took. Jesus said, "Foxes have holes, birds have nests, the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head." He was a wanderer. When he died, he was crucified outside the gate, outside his home. He was not embraced by the Father; he said, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" He took the exile and homelessness we deserve so that we could be brought in.

Of course, we still die. We still see it coming. But the difference is that he really bore the real weight of death and the real separation. Now death only means reunion. Donald Grey Barnhouse was on his way to his wife's funeral with his children and tried to talk to them about the Christian view of death.

He used the analogy of a truck passing by. He asked his son if he would rather be hit by the shadow of the truck or the truck itself. His son said he would rather be hit by the shadow. Jesus Christ was really hit by the truck. He experienced the homelessness and exile so that when we die, we only experience the shadow of the truck because we are with God.

In some ways, Jesus is giving us a watchtower. A watchtower was used to see the lay of the land. If you were down in the city during a battle, things might look bad. But from the watchtower, you see reinforcements coming and realize you are going to win. Every so often, when things look terrible, I want you to read John 14 and get up in that watchtower.

One of the very first people I pastored in death was an older woman. She had a terrible life with children dying and an abusive husband. But she had a wonderful attitude. She told me that God knows what people deserve and will judge the earth. She knew God was going to take her and make everything right. She would get up in that tower and tell me the air was fine up there.

The day before she died, I went to the hospital where she was on a respirator. She seemed to be in a lot of pain. I sat down and read her John 14:1 through 3. I told her not to let her heart be troubled or afraid because Jesus was preparing a place for her. The frown went away and she nodded. I just helped her back up in the tower, and she was able to die peacefully.

Do you know what it is like to get up there? Since Jesus says what makes heaven heaven is that he will be there, realize that even now, he is saying to have fellowship with him and know his love. He is your shelter from the stormy blast and your eternal home. The more you know him, the more you get up in that tower and realize everything is going to be all right.

Our Father, we are meditating on something that is a great comfort to us. We pray that in the midst of suffering and trouble, you would teach us how to remember these promises so that we live in confidence and strength. We pray that you would make yourself real to us now. In Jesus' name, Amen.

Guest (Female): Thanks for listening to today's teaching. It is our prayer that you are encouraged by it and that it helps you apply the gospel to your life and share it with others. For more gospel-centered resources from Tim Keller, visit gospelinlife.com. There, you can subscribe to the Life in the Gospel quarterly journal. When you do, you will also receive free articles, sermons, devotionals, and other helpful resources.

Again, it is all at gospelinlife.com. You can also stay connected with us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and X. Today's sermon was recorded in 2017. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel in Life podcast were recorded between 1989 and 2017 while Tim Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church.