Gospel in Life

Guest (Male): Welcome to Gospel in Life. A common perception of Christianity is that its main emphasis is on living a morally good life. Yet the Bible tells a very different story. The most important thing isn't what we do, but what God has done for us.

Today we continue Tim Keller's series from the book of Ephesians, exploring the foundational truths at the heart of the Christian faith and how they shape our understanding of who we are, why we're here, and where we find hope for the future.

Tim Keller: In Ephesians 2, I'll just read this, and we're actually getting into a new section which we'll introduce tonight, but we'll be able to spend a couple of weeks on this whole area of what it means to receive new life from Christ. Let me read chapter two, verses one through five.

As for you, you were dead in transgressions and sins in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath.

But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions. It is by grace that you have been saved. Now, we've been looking for a couple of weeks at the first part of this passage, which is verses one, two, and three. You were dead in transgressions and sins. Verse three, last week, all of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful flesh and following its desires and thoughts.

We've been looking at this. There's no reason to try to continue on that. Last week, we talked about the word flesh. What does the word sinful flesh mean? And we learned in the Bible a very important thing. In fact, I at least want to repeat this from last week because it's so absolutely critical. Whenever the Bible says the flesh wars against the spirit, do not do the works of the flesh, but do the works of the spirit.

The works of the flesh are gossip and malice and violence and sexual licentiousness, but the works of the spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, meekness, gentleness, self-control. The flesh in those passages is not the body. The flesh is the bent of the whole person to be your own God rather than to be under God.

The flesh is not the body. It's actually the bent of the whole person, body, soul, spirit, whatever, to be God rather than to be under God. Or another way to put it is the flesh is the part of your life, the part of your heart that seeks to devise strategies to make you independent from God so that you don't rely on God as your king and savior, but that you become your own king and savior.

Now, if you don't understand that about the flesh, you will be trapped into what I think most people are trapped into who have been raised in churches. I mean no matter what, whether you were raised Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, or whether you were raised in a conservative evangelical church, you're probably going to think of the flesh as the body.

And you're going to think of the works of the flesh as basically sins that have to do with the body like sex and drunkenness and addiction and so forth, instead of realizing that the flesh is that part of you that seeks to take any good thing and elevate it as a way to avoid making God your king and savior. Now, here's something I didn't say last week. One of my friends, David Powlison, says the essence of sin is an inordinate desire for something good.

If you understand that phrase, you'll understand what the Bible means by the cravings of the flesh. The essence of sin is an inordinate desire for something good. For example, the flesh is that which takes something good and makes it something so important to you that you think if I have that, then I'll be fine. And then actually, you have a way of making yourself your own savior by finding that.

So, we mentioned these sorts of things last week, but I won't go into all of them. Just let me show you how religion is easily done in the flesh. Many people are moral, and it's their morality, many people are religious, and their religiosity is absolutely fleshly. How? If you, for example, look down your nose at other people and you say, "Oh, how awful those people are. They're not religious and they're not moral like me."

"I'm a Christian," you say, "and these people are not." Condescension and rigidity and prejudice and harshness and coldness in a religious person shows that the flesh has taken religion itself and used it as a strategy for you to avoid depending on Jesus Christ as your savior. You're your own savior. That's the only reason you'd have that kind of pride, that kind of rigidity, that kind of self-righteousness, that kind of control, that kind of defensiveness toward people who criticize your religion, and that kind of attitude toward people who don't agree with you.

Churches are full of people like that. And that's the flesh. Being a drug-addicted prostitute working on 23rd Street at 2:00 a.m. is also a person who's under the bondage of the flesh, but so is a Pharisee. In God's eyes, they're really the same. They're both people who have undertaken strategies that say, "If I have this, then I'll be all right. If I can get this, then I'll be all right."

It's a strategy of life without dependence on the Lord. And unless you understand that, you won't understand the depth of our problem. We are all apart from Christ, absolutely in the bondage of the flesh. And the way to find out what your characteristic flesh is, is stop and think about what your greatest horror is. What is the thing that you think, "If I don't have that, I won't be able to live. If I don't get that, my life is over. It's meaningless. I have no reason to go on if I don't have that."

What is that? It's probably something good, probably something that's fine. It might be a job, it might be a relationship, it might be something good. It probably is something good, but the essence of the flesh is an inordinate desire for something that's good. But something that's inordinate, out of order, something up here that ought to be down here. Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and everything else will be added unto you. Seek ye second the kingdom of God, and you lose everything.

That's the reason why there's a great place where C.S. Lewis says, "Aim at heaven and you'll get earth thrown in. Aim at earth and you'll get neither." And that's the only two possibilities. The flesh. And of course, the reason he says the cravings of the flesh is simply because it's a way of saying that anything but God in the center of your life will utterly tyrannize you. Anything but God that you make God will never be satisfied.

When you seek to please God, he says, "Because of what my son has done for you, you're perfect in me. You're perfect in Jesus. You stand complete before me." There's no other God like that. Professional success? You'll never feel like you've quite gotten enough. Money? You'll never feel like quite enough. Physical attractiveness? There will always be somebody who looks better than you.

Because you see anything that's good but becomes an inordinate desire and that you serve, it becomes something that you're in bondage to. You have to satisfy the cravings of the flesh. So, you see, there is nothing about sin that should be seen superficially. We should not look at sin as just a set of violations of rules that God has laid down.

When it says the works of the flesh are gossip and envy and violence, do you know what that means? It means that if you're religious out of a way of trying to avoid God's salvation, or on the other hand, if you're a workaholic as a way of avoiding God's salvation, or if you're a food addict as a way of avoiding God's salvation, or if you're a codependent person who needs to have people depend on you as a way of avoiding God's salvation, even though you're doing something nice.

Codependent people are always trying to be nice. Workaholic people are always trying to be useful and so forth. Those are great things they're after, and yet because they're doing it in the flesh, the works of the flesh are envy and jealousy and violence and anger. The works of the flesh come from putting things in the place of God, and that's what the flesh is. And as a result of that, Becky Pippert, in her book, "Hope Has Its Reasons," which is just trying to explain the basics of the Christian faith to someone who doesn't know anything about the Christian faith, just trying to explain it to outsiders, when she gets to her chapter on sin, what does she call it?

Worshipping the wrong things. That's what the flesh is. And you have to, unless you bow and submit yourself to the Lord. Now, because the flesh is that deep-rooted a thing, unless you're willing to admit, everybody in this room, that you are under the bondage of the flesh in some form, unless you recognize it, the roots of the flesh go through all of your life and they distort you.

They distort your understanding of things. The roots of the flesh are more important than the shoots because the shoots are the sinful behaviors that you can identify and cut off. Yes, that leads me to that, so you stop doing it. But the root, the motivations, the distortions, those false strategies, those things can stay in under very deep and they'll take different forms. And I've seen plenty of people who have been non-Christians and skeptical, and under the influence of the flesh come on into the Christian faith and their flesh continues to dominate them because now they find religious ways of avoiding God, whereas before they were finding irreligious ways.

If all this is true, what's needed is not just a renovation, not just a sort of inspiration. You need your entire nature remade from the inside out. And that's exactly what you have. The last part of this passage says, and here's the essence of the gospel, starts in verse four, but God. Before going on, verse four says, but God in his rich mercy and out of his great love for us has made us alive together with Christ.

But God, out of his great love for us and his rich mercy, has made us alive together with Christ. Now, let's not get past but God. It's the essence of the gospel. The essence of the gospel is God has done something that can undo everything else. But God. He has done what? He's made us alive. He has done it why? Out of his great love and rich mercy. He has done it how? Together with Christ means that he's given us union with Christ.

So you actually have three very important truths about the new birth. This is the new birth. He has made us alive. How? Through union with Christ. We're now together with Christ. Why? Out of his great love and mercy. There are places all over the scripture that talk about this. If you go for example, look, there's an interesting parallel passage where Paul writes to his friend Titus, and he says something that's so clearly the same as Ephesians 2:1 you realize this must be the same guy.

In chapter three, now listen carefully. It says to Titus, "At one time, we too were foolish, disobedient, deceived, and enslaved by all kinds of passions and pleasures." See, just like Ephesians 2. "We lived in malice and envy, being hated and hating one another. But when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy."

"He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit, whom he poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior, so having been justified by grace, we might become heirs having the hope of eternal life." What a packed sentence. But there it is. You see, this is, we were in this state, we were hating and hating one another, but when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared, he saved us. Not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy.

He saved us through the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit whom he poured out on us generously through Jesus Christ our Savior. Same thing. He made us alive. That's the what. He made us alive together with Christ, he united us with Christ. That's the how. He did it out of his great love. That's the why. Now, let's just introduce. The easiest one to talk about, I don't think we have to spend too much time on it, is the why.

Always, in the book of Titus, here, always the mercy and love of God appears as the cause of our new birth. The reason we're alive is because of the rich love and mercy. I mentioned this this afternoon. Kathy and I rented, I don't know why Kathy thought I needed this, but she did, Beauty and the Beast. You know the Walt Disney movie?

It's a fine movie, by the way, just one of the best animated movies ever made, I think. But what's great about it, we sat there and watched it. It's an old story. Do you realize how often, if you're a Christian, you're the only kind of people anywhere in the world who can watch fairy tales and when it's all done turn to each other and say, "Guess what? It's all coming true."

There's no one else with any kind of intellectual integrity could possibly say such a thing. But Christians have the intellectual framework, we have the understanding of the reality that says what's actually going to happen is better than this. All the castles, all of the beasts becoming handsome princes and princesses, all the castles that turned out from being haunted houses into fairytale castles, all of the glorious rebirths, all of the salvations in the nick of time, all of the magical rescues, every one of those things is coming true, only more.

Fairy tales are true. They're not exactly true, but it's not because they're more true than reality in all they promise. It's that they're less true in reality in all they promise. There are going to be crowns, there is going to be glory, there is going to be a throne, there are going to be castles. We're really all going to look like that at the end. We're all going to look like beauty. We're all going to look like the prince. We're all going to be like it.

Listen, here you and I are. I'm sure there are people here who don't know what they think about Christianity, so you must think this is absolutely crazy. Here we are, people in the middle of New York City, most of us with more than a second-grade education. We can read and write, we know what's out there, and from the bottom of our hearts, we know because of the love of God and because of what he has begun to do in us and because what he says is going to happen, imperishable glory, we're going to shine like the stars in the kingdom of our father.

We're going to be priests and kings and queens before him. We're going to stand before his throne. We're going to cast our crowns before him locked in wonder, love, and praise. It's all going to happen. It's all going to happen literally. We're the only people who can say fairy tales, every one of them is coming true. Every one, literally. But what's interesting in fairy tales, so often you have not just in fairy tales but even in modern stories and parables, you have the idea of gracious and rich mercy magically and completely transforming people.

The whole idea behind Beauty and the Beast is you've got to find somebody whose love is a love of grace. If a beautiful woman, see this beautiful woman, her name is Beauty, comes into the parable. The point is that she's looking for somebody who's as beautiful as she is. And she says, "Ah, I got somebody here who's a matched attractiveness. I'm a 10, he's a 10. We're going to tear up this town if we get together." That's a normal way somebody would think.

But in the fairytale, what you have is can this woman love this being in spite of what he is? Can she love him not because he's lovely, but to make him lovely? Can she love him into loveliness? Can she love him into princehood? Can she love like that? Now, the fact of the matter is, I mean, come on, look at her, dancing around with this thing eight feet high and slobbering and fangs coming everywhere.

You say that's the fairy tale. Well, you see what I'm saying about Christianity says fairy tales do come true. Of course, there's no human woman walking around like that or human man walking around that could do that, and yet there is somebody perfect, flawless, without any stain or blemish, the lamb without blemish. There was a perfect one who came and looked at us as beasts and loved us anyway.

And as a result of loving us in spite of our beastliness, the beastliness falls away. Some of you were here at Easter and you heard a similar modern parable. Harold Hill goes into every single town and he always gets the music teacher in love with him so that she is so enamored with him that she doesn't discover that he's really a fraud.

And at the very end, Harold Hill thinks that he's done the same thing to Marian the librarian, and he's just about to get out of town when he suddenly realizes she knows all about him. She knows he is a fraud. She's known he was a fraud for a long time, and when it dawns on him that here is somebody who knows I'm a fraud and yet loves me anyway. Here I thought I had gotten her to love me because of my savoir-faire.

Here is the one I thought I had gotten to love me because of what I had done, but instead she's loving me freely. Instead, she's loving me in spite of what I am. She loves me because in spite of my being a fraud. And at that moment, he can't be a fraud anymore. Gracious love transforms us. The minute he finds out she loves him because he's a fraud, he can't be a fraud anymore and he stays put and he lets himself get arrested.

He's been changed. The beast has become a handsome prince because somebody loved him as a beast. Because of his great love, rich in mercy, he's made us alive when we were dead, we were locked in disobedience, we walked according to the prince and power of this world. Remember two weeks ago we were talking about spiritual death, how much it's like physical death.

Look at a body that's been laying there for say two weeks. You know what a body looks like that's been laying there for two weeks. If you've ever seen one, ever seen the decay, ever seen the absolute horror of it. What do you think your soul looks like to the perfect eyes of the Lord? His eyes are so holy that he cannot behold iniquity, but he does all the time. He knows you. He knows what's in you.

In John chapter two it says Jesus did not trust men and women because he knew what was in their heart. He knows what's in there. He's seen the spiritual death. Do you think that a spiritually dead soul wrapped up in inordinate desires, wrapped up in a desire to be our own savior and our own king, full of rebellion, full of foolishness, full of sin and wickedness and evil, do you think that a dead human soul looks any different to the eyes of the Lord than a two-week-old cadaver looks to us? It's got to be worse.

Yet he dances with us, slobbering all over him, I guess. Yet he hugs us. Yet he kisses us. He loves us though we're beasts. He loves us though we're frauds, and in the action of it, something that no one else is capable of, it changes us out of fraudulent into integrity. It changes us out of beastliness into being princes. Because of his great love, rich in mercy, he makes us alive.

Isn't that amazing? That is just astonishing. Oh, the riches of the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ. Go to the end of Romans 11. There's this incredible thing where Paul just goes into this doxology. "Oh, the depth of the riches of the knowledge of the love of Christ. Who has been his counselor? Who understands his ways? For from him and for him and to him are all things."

So the love of Christ is the basis for the fact that we're alive. As a matter of fact, he doesn't just turn us from death, spiritual death, into new life out of his love. He turns us from death into life through his love. It's the experience of his love. Just as the beast was changed, just as Harold Hill was changed, just as anybody is changed who experiences that kind of love.

All those parables, all those fairy tales are really just memory traces. They're just hints, they're just reflections of this tremendous, tremendous story. J.R.R. Tolkien, the great writer of fantasy and fiction in the 20th century, he has a great, great essay called "On Fairy-Stories" in which he says there's one fairy story that is true, on which all other fairy stories are based. It's the Gospel.

The Gospel is the one story which has come true. It's the one myth that became fact. And it's the one story, just like all the other fairy stories when you see the cavalry come at the last minute, when you see the wicked witch fall finally into the depths, when you see Sleeping Beauty wake up, though I never liked Sleeping Beauty nearly as much as I like Beauty and the Beast, when you see all this happen and you get all excited and you get the rush, it's because Tolkien says all of these stories, though fiction, are actually pointing to the one story that is true.

And he says if you don't understand and believe in that story, you have to live a life of despair. Because all human beings know that story is true, and to deny that story is true just so you can stay in control of your own life will banish you to despair. All these other stories, all the fairy stories are coming true because there's one story on which they're all based, and that's the Gospel. Rich in mercy, he loved us and made us alive together with Christ.

That's the why of our new life: his love, his grace, his richness in mercy. Now, the what. What does it mean to be alive? Just three things, and I'm going to give you a kind of introduction to them and next week I'll go back to them because we need to rather wrap up. What it means to be alive is three things.

There's a huge difference between dead religion and live religion. Or put it another way, there's a big difference between moralism and new life. You can see the differences in many ways. I would like you, not tonight so much but do it on the basis of what I tell you here, but especially next week, I want you to look at your own selves and say, "Do I have this new life or not? Have I been made alive together with Christ?"

First of all, moralism differs from new life religion in its attitude toward the truth. Moral moral dead religion says, "There's the truth. Applaud it, adhere to it, support it, propagate it. Let's all pat ourselves on the back that we believe it. There it is, the truth. We believe the truth. Bravo." But new life people, people with new life, their attitude toward the truth is they don't just applaud the truth. They apply the truth.

They take it on into themselves. They see it as food. It becomes something, it says in Colossians 3:16, "Let the word of God dwell in you richly." And one of the great differences between being a moralistic religious person and having new life is the truth actually begins to shine. It becomes something that actually you feed on, that you take on into yourself, that becomes part of you. You digest it. There's a sweetness to it. There's a relish to it.

You can't believe it. Before you get this new life, you might respect the Bible, but the idea of reading it for pleasure, you just can't even imagine. The hunger, the hunger for it that happens after you have new life, even though you don't understand most of it, you want so badly to. But before you received new life, you don't even really care that much. You know you believe it, maybe.

Many of you without new life are still very religious and you might say, "I believe everything in the Bible," but there's not a hunger for it. It's not food to you. There's not a panting to understand it. You say, "Well, yes, I like reading it so often but so much is hard to understand, but I rely on the clergy to tell me about it." That's not the way somebody with new life understands truth.

Moralism applauds it. New life eats it, feeds on it. Secondly, moral religion, dead religion, and new life religion are completely different also not only in their attitude toward truth, but in their attitude toward failures. You see, every other religion except Christianity basically says this: "Here's how you must live. Summons up all of your strength, summons up all of your force, get yourself disciplined and focused and do it."

And as a result, every other religion has nothing to say to failures. failures are the people who say, "I've tried everything. I gathered up all of my strength. I've gathered up all of my focus. I've tried as hard as I can, and I can't do it." And the way you can tell the difference between new life religion and dead religion is dead moralistic religion has nothing to say to failures at all.

"Oh, well, I don't know what you should do. I pulled myself together." And you can tell a person who's religious but who doesn't have any new life because when you try to talk to them about a problem and they're successful and you're not, they have nothing to say to you. All they know is, "Well, I guess you have to try again." But a person with new life knows that you are a failure spiritually regardless of what you look like on the outside.

A person with new life has come to understand what sin really is: the flesh, that you were spiritually dead, that even if you were a disciplined person, you graduated from the right schools, you made out very well, you look good, you're in the right crowds, you made out pretty well financially, you're a disciplined moral person, you still know that that was all done in the flesh. You still know that the works of the flesh, the envy and the unhappiness and the emptiness and the anger has all been happening inside of you anyway, and you know you're a failure.

And so if you look at somebody who's not only a failure on the inside like you but also a failure on the outside unlike you, you know that that person's really no different. And what do you say to failures? You say God loves to start with people like you. Because it says in 1st Corinthians, "Not many of you are wise. Consider your calling, brothers," says Paul. "Not many of you were wise when you were called. Not many of you were powerful. Not many of you were of noble birth or of influence, but God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise. He chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the foolish and despised things, even the things that are not, to bring to nothing the things that are, that no one would boast."

When you get in the presence of a person who's been saved by grace, who's got the new life, they do not affect you like a moralistic person. A moralistic person may be very moral, but their morality is like that of a snowflake, beautiful, intricate, and freezing. But when you get into the presence of a person with new life, you get the sense that that person knows that he or she is what he or she is by the grace of God alone and that you can be too. That person is not always standing on his own dignity. The person's approachable and has incredible hope even for the most messed up cases.

That's a huge difference. In a church that's really full of dead religion, there's no hope held out for people who are really failures, really messed up. But in a church full of new life, there's every bit of hope, and as a matter of fact, there's actually a glee about finding somebody who's a real wreck because we look at you and you say God loves especially to start with people like you. He loves to show forth his glory in people like you. He chooses the foolish things of the world and the weak things and the things that are not to bring nothing the things that are, to show the world its stupid and topsy-turvy and superficial understanding of what is strength and power.

That's as far as I can get tonight. I'm going to get back next week on it. But don't you see, because of his great mercy and because of his great love, he has made us alive. Are you alive, or are you just a moralist? Are you alive? Do you feed on the truth, or is it just something that you believe? Are you alive? Do you have hope for failures? Do you see yourself as a failure regardless of what happens on the outside, or is your morality like that of a snowflake, beautiful and intricate, admirable, gorgeous, and freezing?

Dear friends, he made us alive with Christ. It's the one fairy story, the one fairy tale that is coming true. Will it come true for you? Let's pray. Lord, we ask if you would grant that this week and next week we might see the amazing and remarkable mercy which actually can make us alive though we were dead. We pray that everybody here will either come to savor their new life better because of this time we spent tonight.

I pray that people with the new life will see that it's the greatest thing in the world, they'll understand the greatness of what's happened to them, they'll savor it and relish it and rejoice in it and go into the week with tremendous confidence knowing what you have done in their souls. But Father, we also pray for people who don't know tonight whether they have that new life or not, and I ask that you would show them whether they do or not, that you'd open their eyes, you would let them see what they can be in you and what incredible love awaits them. We pray in Jesus' name, Amen.

Guest (Male): Thanks for listening to today's teaching. It's our prayer that you were encouraged by it and that it helps you apply the gospel to your life and share it with others. For more helpful 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 great gospel-centered resources.

Again, it's all at gospelinlife.com. You can also stay connected with us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and X. Today's sermon was recorded in 1992. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel in Life podcast were recorded between 1989 and 2017 while Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church.