Gospel in Life

Guest (Female): Everyone builds their life around something, whether it's success, family, or the pursuit of happiness. These are good things, but can they really support the full weight of our lives? This summer, we are going through an extended series of teachings from Tim Keller that explore the central claims of Christianity, showing us how the gospel speaks to our deepest questions about meaning, identity, and hope.

Tim Keller: Verses 13 to 18: "Now in Christ Jesus you who were once far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ. For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility, by abolishing in his flesh the law with its commandments and regulations.

His purpose was to make 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, by which he put to death their hostility. He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit." And let's end our reading of God's word right there.

Now, we're going to enter into a new subject. We're going through the book of Ephesians and looking at it verse by verse. We're going to open up a new subject tonight, and we won't get very far in it because we need to be a little briefer than usual because we've got to meet God at his table over the bread and the cup.

But to prepare ourselves for that, I'd like to at least begin to delve into a new area. What we've seen for the last two weeks is that one of the evidences of God's power in the world—one of the key evidences that God is powerful—is how in the church he can get people who ordinarily could not live together, could not get along, and in the church, he makes them one.

He talks about that in the early verses. They are all about how Paul talks about Jew and Gentile, the circumcision and the uncircumcision, but it's just a case illustration. What Paul is saying here is God gives you, when you receive Christ as your savior, a bond with other Christians which is so strong that it overwhelms other relationships, other links with people.

What links you to people if you're not a Christian? Well, your language, your career, your social status, your ethnicity—all those things make us feel one with someone. When you become a Christian, it's not like those other things fall away or become indifferent or become unimportant, but what does happen is you get a new bond that overwhelms the other ones.

We've talked about that for a couple of weeks. A good illustration is a professor of mine who is now dead and was an inspiration to me when I was a seminary student, Dr. Leitch. He was a PhD from Cambridge, and he was a born-again Christian. Because he was educated and cultured, he liked many refined tastes.

He told us a story one day of how he was driving through a state and listened on the radio to a poor, inarticulate radio preacher. He was uneducated and inarticulate. He said a lot of silly things, but he obviously had a good heart and he believed well. Dr. Leitch realized that culturally and educationally, he had nothing in common with this man.

And yet, as he listened to him, he said, "And yet, that's my brother." He realized that he had more in common with a person who was a Christian, though in a different social class and different educational level. He sensed a bond there. When he turned to people who were educated at the same place, who had the same tastes, who had the same cultural background, and in many ways was just like him, yet did not believe in Christ, he sensed there was a gulf between him and them.

That is one of the marks that you really have been growing in Christ. It's one of the marks that Christ has really come in and done a number on you, because you find people that ordinarily you wouldn't have anything in common with. You not only are able to get along with them, but you find as you grow in Christ, those older kinds of links—the career links, the racial links, the gender links, the social class links, and so forth—become overwhelmed by the common bond you've got in Christ.

We said last week also, however, that the way that you overcome these class and race divisions that ordinarily are there between people is a deep kind of surgery on the heart. We made fun of that ad campaign—which I don't see anymore—where all the little black and white and Asian and various sorts of babies are all sitting alongside of each other, and over the top, it says, "No one's born a racist."

The implication is that racism doesn't come out of the sin of the heart; you're only a racist if you're taught. We suggested that that is illogical. Who teaches the babies to be racists? Somebody else. Who taught them? Well, somebody else. If racism didn't come out of the human heart, where did it come from? Somebody from Mars? The answer is no.

So, the point is the only way to overcome these racial and class divisions—the only way to get people in the position where Dr. Leitch was when he realized these other people here are more my brothers than the people like me—the only way that God can get people inside the church to live together and to create a kind of community and unity that is inexplicable and unique and unavailable anywhere else is through some kind of radical surgery done on the heart.

What is that? What has God done to us that can turn us into people that can have this kind of unity and community? The answer in the passage is two things that have to happen to us. First of all, we all are able to be brought together because we have a new common position.

Look in verse 13. It says, "Now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ." If you go back up just one verse higher, look at this: "Remember that at one time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel, foreigners to the covenants of promise, without hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who were once far away have been brought near through the blood of Christ."

Then down in verse 17, it says, "He came and preached peace to you who were far away and peace to those who were near. For through him we both have access to the Father by one Spirit." Let's just talk about one thing tonight, and only one. Paul is talking about people who were far away and people who were near.

He's talking about the Jews and the Gentiles, and he says to the Gentiles, "You were strangers to the covenants of promise, without hope and without God in the world. You were far away. But Jesus Christ came and preached peace both to you who were far away and you who were near, and by one Spirit we both have access to the Father."

The reason that people who never before could get along now get along in Christ is because they receive a common position in Jesus. What I want to do tonight—again, I can't open the whole thing up; this is the one thing we will talk about—is address what Paul means. The Bible teaches us that we Gentiles, those of us who are not Jewish, were strangers to the covenants of promise, without hope in the world.

But Christ came and preached peace to us and brought us near. Let me open that up for you. What does Paul mean? What does it mean to say that we were strangers to the covenants of promise and therefore without hope? The principle is something let me just repeat it and explain it and elaborate on it until you get it.

Unless you're in a covenant with God, there's no hope. If you're a stranger to the covenant of promise, there's no hope for you. You're living a hopeless life. Let's explain it. First of all, what is a covenant? That's not a word that's that easy for us to grasp. The word "covenant" in the Bible means a legal contract that's the basis for a personal relationship.

The word "contract" doesn't quite get it across because the word "contract" we've got here today in English only refers to the legal part. But a covenant is a legal contract which issues in a personal relationship. The only real analogy we've got is a wedding. What is a wedding? A wedding, obviously, is a legal contract. It's the making of a legal contract, but it's obviously a lot more than a legal contract. It's basing a new personal relationship on a legal contract. That's the closest thing we've got.

Now, the Jews had the covenants of promise, Paul was pointing out. What are the covenants of promise? When God would come to Abraham, to Moses, to David, he made covenants with them. What's a covenant? We said he entered into a covenantal relationship. Now, a covenantal relationship is a binding, legal thing. It means you lose your freedom.

When you get married, you say goodbye to a lot of freedom—or didn't you know that? You say hello to new kinds of love and intimacy, a new personal relationship that's impossible unless you get rid of some of your freedom. You can't say, "I want perfect intimacy and I want total freedom." You can't have them together. A covenant means I get a new level of intimacy with you by giving up freedom that I used to have.

I'm exclusively yours. That's what we do when we get married. What does it mean to have a covenant with God? It means that you come into a covenant relationship. That means God comes to Abraham or to David or to Moses and says, "I want you to obey me. I want you to serve me. I want you to swear allegiance to me. I want you to give me your exclusive love and allegiance. I want you to enter into a covenant relationship with me. And if you do, your future will be bright because I'm in charge of history."

"And I'm working all history out to judgment day, and on the day of judgment, I will put everything right that's wrong with this world. And so I will be with you and I will guide you. I am sovereign over history, and I'm bringing all history to a head. And on that day, those who are in covenant with me will be vindicated, will be received, will be welcomed, will be exalted to my right hand."

The covenant of promise is God saying, "If you want hope, if you want to know that your future is certain, if you want to know that everything that's happening to you is all coming together and will issue in my glory and your glory—if you want to have hope—you've got to give up some of your freedom."

"You've got to come to me and you've got to give yourself in a covenant." He comes to Abraham and he says, "Abraham, if you give yourself to me, through your descendants all the families of the earth will be blessed." He says to Moses and David, "If you give yourself to me, there will be a Messiah coming in the future, and he will save his people from their sins and you will be blessed."

So, the point is, if you give up freedom in a covenant with God, you can have lots of hope. What Paul is saying is that the Jews alone up until the time of Christ and up until the time of Paul—the Jews were the only ones that really had the covenants of promise. That means they're the only ones that understood that God was a God of history, who was in charge of history, that was bringing all of history to an apex and to a climax in which everything wrong was going to be put right.

And when Paul says, "You Gentiles, you were far off and you were strangers to the covenants of promise and you were without hope," this is a profound teaching. He is simply stating the fact. Is he saying that the Gentiles—and let's just think of the people with the greatest civilizations up to that time: the Greeks, the Romans, and the Chinese?

Was he saying that those civilizations—that the Gentiles, the people that didn't have the covenants of promise—that they were living in degradation, that they were uncivilized barbarians, that they had no culture, that they were cruel and violent people, that they were all depraved? Of course not. Of course not.

The fact is—and we spent some time on this back before Christmas—the Bible teaches that God gives every human being a conscience, which means that a great deal of the righteousness of the moral law of God is intuitive. We've all got consciences; we have a basic knowledge of righteousness. Lots of gifts and talents. God gives gifts and talents to everybody so that we can enrich the world with wonderful art and building and architecture and engineering and science and so forth.

Therefore, the Gentiles built wonderful civilizations, and they in many cases achieved tremendous amounts of moral decency and moral excellence. Paul is not saying that because they were without the covenants of promise that they weren't great. He wasn't saying that they weren't moral. He wasn't saying that they weren't civilized.

My goodness, I think it's fair to say that the Greeks, the Romans, and the Chinese, without the covenants of promise, built in many ways greater civilizations than the people did who had the covenants of promise—in the sense of the architecture and the building and the science and all those sorts of things. But Paul is trying to say is unless you know the God of the Bible, you can be good, you can be moral, you can be great, you can be brilliant, but you can't have any hope.

Now, listen. He's right. If you look at the Roman and Greek gods and their deities and their religion, there was all this fighting going on between the gods, but the whole idea that history is coming to a conclusion, an apex, a climax, was something very foreign to them. Eastern religions were the same thing. Eastern religions basically see history as cyclical. There's not going to be any real solution for evil except that eventually everything is going to go back into the all-soul.

And what Paul is saying is something that I would just like to—I would recommend it to you—just think about it. Isn't it true to our experience? Apart from the covenants of promise, the most brilliant, the most civilized, the greatest poets and the greatest philosophers and the greatest minds—they've been in many cases moral, they've been great, they've been brilliant, but they've always been utterly pessimistic. You look at them.

Guest (Female): Why does God allow suffering in the world? How can one religion be right and the others wrong? Hasn't science basically disproved Christianity? Tim Keller addresses these questions and many more in his book, The Reason for God. Drawing on literature, philosophy, real-life conversations, and potent reasoning, this book will challenge you to gain a deeper understanding of the Christian faith.

Whether you're a believer seeking to understand your faith better, whether you're exploring Christianity yourself, or whether you're reading it with a friend who's searching for answers. When you give to Gospel in Life during the month of August, we'll send you two copies of The Reason for God: one for you and one to give to a friend.

It's our hope that through reading the book with a friend, you can have conversations about the claims of the Christian faith. To receive your two copies of The Reason for God as our thank you for your support, simply make a gift at gospelinlife.com/give. That's gospelinlife.com/give. Thank you for partnering with us. Your gift helps the message of Christ's love go out all over the world because the gospel truly changes everything.

Tim Keller: You know, you have Wordsworth, and he has a very interesting little phrase. He says—in one of his poems he says—he has been listening to the "still sad music of humanity." And that's the way the great people are apart from the covenants of promise. The most brilliant artists and poets and philosophers, here's the rest of us running around very busy, trying to have pleasure, trying to have accomplishments.

And so we don't see what things are really like. But here's the great artist, here's the great poet, and she or he is sitting there and listening to the still sad music of humanity and realizes the meaninglessness of it all. That's the way it always is. You can be great without the covenants of promise. You can be great, but you can't have hope.

Paul is not saying you can't have a coherent worldview apart from Christianity. He's not saying that you can't be intelligent and that there were great philosophies and religions and points of view that were coherent. He's not saying that you can't be moral, you can't achieve greatness. All he's trying to say is unless you understand the God of the Bible, unless you're in a covenant relationship with the God of the Bible, you will be without hope.

This is inevitable if you're smart enough. I'm not being pessimistic; I'm being realistic. Bertrand Russell, in his early days, he rejected Christianity. In his article, in his book Why I Am Not a Christian, in the early days, he thought that science was going to make the world a better place. Eventually, he realized everything was going to extinction in the death of the sun.

He realized that everything that was civilized, everything that human beings loved and cherished and believed in, was all going to perish in the death of the sun. Eventually, everything's going to die, everything's going to burn up, and there won't be anybody around even to remember it. And Bertrand Russell says, therefore, the only valid foundation for the soul is a foundation of unyielding despair. The only safe foundation.

Let me illustrate my point. Tolstoy, the great Russian writer who wrote War and Peace—you know, that novel that nobody's ever read all the way through? No one. The reason he's so great is the smartest person in the whole world has not been able to finish that book. Anna Karenina. In his book The Confession, written in 1879, he describes how in his early days he was caught up in celebrity and wealth and activities, and suddenly he crashed.

He began to question meaning in life. He says in his confession, listen, he says: "I didn't even want to discover truth anymore because I guessed what it was. The truth is that life is meaningless. I could see that there was nothing ahead except the deception of life and of happiness and the reality of suffering and death and of complete annihilation."

And he went on and said this. See, Tolstoy is listening to the still sad music of humanity. Everybody else is running around. He was very busy for a long time, and he thought life was meaningful, and then he realized this: "My question that had brought me to the edge of suicide when I was 50 years old is this: What will come of what I do today and tomorrow? What will come of my entire life?"

"Expressed differently, why should I live? Why should I wish for anything or do anything? Or to put it differently again, is there any meaning in my life that will not be destroyed by my inevitably approaching death?" And then he goes on: "My deeds, whatever they may be, will be forgotten sooner or later, and I myself will be no more. Why then do anything? Why do anything?"

"I therefore could not attach a rational meaning to a single act in my entire life. The only thing that amazed me was how I had failed to realize this from the very beginning. How can anyone fail to see this? That's what's amazing. It's possible to live only as long as life intoxicates us. Once we are sober, we cannot help seeing it's all a delusion, nor is there anything funny or witty about it. It's only cruel and stupid."

Is Tolstoy right? Woody Allen does a lot of things; he makes fun of the meaninglessness of life. There's a place in Love and Death—Woody Allen's character is talking to the Diane Keaton character—and Woody Allen says, "Sonia, what if there's no God?" And Sonia says, "Boris Dimitrovich, are you joking?"

Boris says, "Well, what if we're just a bunch of absurd people who are running around with no rhyme or reason?" Diane Keaton says, "But if there's no God, life has no meaning. Why go on living? Why not just commit suicide?" "Well," says Woody, "let's not get hysterical. I could be wrong; I'd hate to blow my brains out and then read in the papers the next day they'd found something."

Tolstoy, however, says, "What's amazing is it's possible to live only as long as life intoxicates us. Once we're sober, we cannot help seeing it all as a delusion, nor is there anything funny or witty about it at all." Now, I find what Woody Allen wrote pretty witty, but Tolstoy's probably right.

He is trying to say you can be good, apart from the idea that there's a God at the end of history and that anything good that I do now is going to last forever. That the wicked and the bad is going to crumble away, and in the end, truth will triumph and we will live forever, and everything will be put right.

The God of history, the God of the Bible, the God of judgment gives life hope. But you can't know that God of judgment unless you enter into a covenant with him and lose your freedom. A couple of weeks ago, I put this in the front piece of the bulletin, and you might have read it. Aldous Huxley puts it perfectly. He is a case illustration of what Paul is saying. Without a covenant, there is no hope.

Aldous Huxley says this: "When I was growing up as a philosopher and I was deciding whether or not there was a God, whether the universe had meaning, whether there was a judgment day, or whether the universe was meaningless, I had motives for not wanting the world to have meaning. Consequently, I assumed that it had no meaning, and I was able without difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption."

"The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem that is purely academic. The philosopher is also also concerned to prove that there's no valid reason why he should personally not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way they most want to do. For myself, belief in the meaninglessness of the universe was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political."

Now, here's what he's saying, and this is what Paul is saying too. Either I can be absolutely free, not in a covenant with anybody—I can be totally free, do anything I want, I can decide there is no God, there is no judgment day, who knows if there's a God, I'm just going to live and enjoy myself—in which case, I have to face up to the fact that there is absolutely no hope or meaning in anything I do.

Evil will triumph. Good will not. Nothing I do in the end will matter at all. Nothing I do, everything will be forgotten. Ultimately, nothing I do will make any difference, whether I live a cruel life or a compassionate life. Nothing I do in the end will make a difference. I can be absolutely free, no covenant, but then I will have no hope.

Or I can have hope and I lose my freedom. Either there is a judgment day and there is a God at the end of history who is going to judge everything and put everything right, and I have to obey him—so I lose my freedom and I gain hope. Or there is no God, or I don't want to believe in the God, I'm going to act as if there is no God and I have all my freedom and I lose my hope.

Or I can have my hope and lose my absolute freedom. You want personal, sexual autonomy to do anything you want anytime? You have to face up to the fact of the meaninglessness and the hopelessness of existence. Huxley and Tolstoy, the reason that they are not typical of the New Yorker—the average New Yorker comes to New York and says, "Well, I had some religious background, but who knows what God—I don't know, I'm kind of agnostic or I kind of believe in God, but everybody has their own—I'm really not totally sure what I believe, but I'm going to have fun."

"I don't want to be left out. I want to be able to party. I want to be able to have sex when I want to have sex. I want to be able to fudge in the areas of honesty because everybody's doing it." In other words, "I want to have fun. I don't know if there's a God. So I want to have my liberation, but I'm also going to live as if there's hope."

You're a shallow person. You're a young person. Eventually, as you begin to see the implications of what you're doing, you will see that without a covenant of promise, there is no hope. You are far away from God, without God in the world. Paul is not saying you can't be brilliant without Christ. He's not saying you can't be moral without Christ. He's not saying that you can't be great without Christ. He's saying you can't have any hope without Christ.

You can look at other philosophies and you can look at other religions, and you will see they don't talk about a judgment day, they don't talk about a day in which everything is right, they don't have a future by and large. What is your choice going to be? Am I driving you? Of course I'm driving you.

Now, the only other thing I'm going to tell you is, if you recognize that, you recognize that you've only got those two choices. Put it another way. If there is a judge of all the earth, if there's no judge of all the earth, what hope is there for the world? But if you do have a judge of all the earth, what hope is there for you unless you give yourself to him?

Now, the only other thing we have to say is, once you realize that there's a judge, and once you realize that life is hopeless without a judge, you'll start to get serious. Tolstoy, to make a long story short, did embrace Christianity. Why? Because he began to realize that he couldn't account for the fact that he saw and sensed, and everybody else saw and sensed, that there was a hope and there was a meaning in life.

He began to realize that he couldn't live consistent with his principles of meaninglessness, and he began to study the Christian faith, and he began to look at the evidence of it, and he began to see that it was true. He began to realize he either needed to find the covenants of promise and get hope, or he needed to face up to the meaninglessness of life—and he didn't really have a whole lot of defense against suicide at that point.

What am I saying to you? It's not good enough just to decide here tonight there must be a judge. There must be. There must be meaning in life. There has to be. And therefore, there must be a God to serve. I don't want to leave you with the impression that it's enough just to say, "Okay, I'll serve him and I'll be good and I'll try my hardest to live for him and then I'll have hope in life."

Paul says that once you realize you're far away, the only way to be brought near is through the blood of Christ. Let me leave you with this. You know what it means to be a Christian? It means to be near. It means a change of position. It doesn't mean just moral improvement. It doesn't just mean getting your act together, getting your life together.

What it means to be a Christian is you've been brought near. The way you can know whether you're a Christian is whether you realize that you've changed position. Before you give your life to Christ, you know you're far away. You know you're cut off. When you become a Christian, you realize it's not that you've become a better person, but that your status has changed. You're on the inside.

Think about it this way. Along Park Avenue, there's always out in the snow, I'm in my rags, and I look in. I walk down Park Avenue, and there was one place in which there were all sorts of lights on and all sorts of festivities going on. Boy, some of those wonderful big old Park Avenue mansion-kinds of apartments look awfully nice on the inside, don't they?

And you wish, "Boy, I wish I knew somebody who owned one of these things so I could get an invitation to really see the inside of one of them." You walk along. I'm a nice person; I'm a minister. I'm wearing a suit. But I'm on the outside. I don't know that person. I'm moral, I'm decent, I've achieved a lot, but I'm still on the outside, I'm still in the snow. Why? Has really nothing to do with whether I'm a moral person or immoral person.

Right alongside of me might be an ex-convict; right alongside of me might be a mafioso hitman. We're both in the same position. We don't know the person on the inside, so we're both out in the snow. The Bible says the blood of Christ, when you realize that Jesus has died for you, when you receive him as savior, he's the entrée. You're instantly changed in your position; you're brought in.

What it means to receive Christ as savior is to realize I was far away, I was without hope, I give up my freedom by trusting in Jesus's blood to bring me near, by trusting in Jesus's blood to give me that relationship now. Are you without hope tonight in the name of liberation? Won't you see that the liberation you've chosen is really a slavery? It'll catch up with you because you'll start to think.

Somewhere, some place, you will stop being so busy that you can't hear the still sad music of humanity. Give yourself to him. Don't be afraid, because the more you give yourself to him and lose your autonomy, the more you actually become truly free. Let's pray.

Our Father, we just ask that now as we come near to you, that we would do so through the blood of Jesus. Help us to see that your Son died for us and that is the only reason we can draw near. Help us to see only by renewing our covenant with you tonight, renewing our commitment to you, giving you the lordship over our life can we have a renewal of hope. So renew our hope as we renew our covenant. So bring us near as we remember your blood, O Lord Jesus Christ. In your name we pray, amen.

Guest (Female): Thanks for joining us here on the Gospel in Life podcast. If you were encouraged by today's teaching, you can help others discover this podcast by rating and reviewing it. And to find more great gospel-centered content by Tim Keller, anytime visit gospelinlife.com. Today's sermon was recorded in 1993. 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.