Gospel in Life

Guest (Female): Welcome to Gospel in Life. During January, we're inviting our listeners to become a Gospel in Life monthly partner. If you'd like to learn more, keep listening at the end of today's podcast for details.

Guest (Male): Do you ever wish life came with an owner's manual? A guide to follow when you're facing difficult decisions or just trying to live with integrity in the small, everyday moments? Today on Gospel in Life, Tim Keller shows us how the Ten Commandments help us align our lives with God's will, not by restricting us with outdated rules, but by laying the foundation from which we can live a life of true freedom and flourishing.

Guest (Male): Hebrews chapter 4, verses 1 through 12. Therefore, since the promise of entering his rest still stands, let us be careful that none of you be found to have fallen short of it. For we also have had the gospel preached to us, just as they did. But the message they heard was of no value to them because those who heard did not combine it with faith. Now we who have believed enter that rest, just as God has said, "So I declared on oath in my anger, they shall never enter my rest."

And yet his work has been finished since the creation of the world. For somewhere he has spoken about the seventh day in these words: "And on the seventh day, God rested from all his work." And again in the passage above he says, "They shall never enter my rest." It still remains that some will enter that rest, and those who formerly had the gospel preached to them did not go in because of their disobedience.

Therefore, God again set a certain day, calling it "Today," when a long time later he spoke through David, as was said before: "Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts." For if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken later about another day. There remains, then, a Sabbath-rest for the people of God; for anyone who enters God's rest also rests from his own work, just as God did from his.

Let us, therefore, make every effort to enter that rest, so that no one will fall by following their example of disobedience. For the word of God is living and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the thoughts and attitudes of the heart. Nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account. The word of the Lord.

Tim Keller: We're in a series of sermons on the Ten Commandments, and today we're talking about the commandment that says, "Honor the Sabbath day, the day of rest." One of the most important themes in the Bible is the theme of rest. Psalm chapter 3 is one of my favorite chapters. In the psalm, the psalmist David is talking. He says, "O Lord, how many are my foes? How many there are that rise up against me? But thou, O Lord, art a shield for me, my glory and the lifter of my head. Therefore, I lie down and I sleep, and I awake, for you sustain me. I will not fear," he says, "though tens of thousands would encamp against me."

That's an amazing passage. You know what the picture is? Here is a man who goes to sleep the night before a battle, knowing full well that he's greatly outnumbered. And he sleeps. He rests, and he rests. A lot of us have a lot of trouble sleeping because of the thousands of people that are out there. You know, New York City is not a very restful place. There's a relentlessness about it, an activity about it, a competitiveness about it. And in many ways, it can really be a very, very disturbing place to live.

And yet, as bad as it can be, at least when you come out in the morning, you don't think that the thousands of people living around you are all aiming their guns at you. But David knew that, and yet he says, "I lie down and I sleep." Now, there's a sense in which the Bible says, because it brings this subject up again and again and again all the way through it from Old to New Testament, that the great question in life is: Do you know how to lie down and sleep?

The great question is that, because anybody can lie down, but can you sleep? Can you rest? And I would propose to you that this is the real way for you to tell the validity of your faith. Because it's one thing to say, "I believe in God, I believe in this, and I believe in that, and I believe in that." But when you come to the situation, you're in a position of tenseness or of danger. You're in the situation, you're in the position. Now, is your faith working? Now we can see what good it is. Now we can see whether it's there really.

And you know this very test, this is the great test of whether your faith is real faith. But it's also the thing the world wants the most. And what is it? Rest. What is rest? What is the Sabbath rest? It's the REM of the soul. You know what REM is? Rapid eye movement. Scientists will tell you that the thing that restores the body is not the length of your sleep, right? It's the depth. It's not how long you're sleeping, but whether you get into those periods of deep sleep, which they call rapid eye movement sleep. That's what restores.

And in the same way, the Bible is putting forth here, it says look, there's all kinds of ways that in a shallow way you can sort of get rid of tension. You know, you can slow down and take those deep cleansing breaths. You can go jog. You can do relaxation techniques. You can think positive thoughts. You can distract yourself. Or you can say to yourself, "Stop worrying, get a hold of yourself." But all of those things, none of those things, all those things are shallow and none of those things are the deep rest that really restores the soul.

You see, when the psalmist says, "He restoreth my soul," he's talking about that. He's talking about the REM sleep of the soul. And that is what this passage is talking about. It says there remains a rest for the people of God. Now what is that? That's what we want to look at. Just for a moment, okay? Let's look at it. First of all, let's see what this passage tells us what the rest is. It helps us understand the rest and then it also helps us understand how to enter the rest, okay? How to understand the rest. The key verse perhaps in this passage is right here in verse 10. It says there is a rest, there remains a Sabbath rest for the people of God, for anyone who enters God's rest rests from his own work as God rested from his.

Now you know that work, that word "work." When it talks about resting from your works, the Hebrews writer here is bringing us into the courtroom, bringing us into the area of the legal again. Because many times the New Testament talks about something it calls "the works of the law." And the works of the law are your efforts, my efforts, to live up to standard, to legal standard. And therefore, the rest that's being discussed here is a legal rest, or put it another way, this rest has to do with people who are striving and working very hard to get a good verdict.

Now, I think to really get a handle on what the restlessness is that needs to be remedied is to go to one of the great writers of the 20th century. A strange man but a brilliant man named Franz Kafka. And he wrote many things, but he wrote a novel I'd like to think about here for a moment with you. It's called *The Trial*. And that is a strange novel. Some of you are saying, "Yes, yes, I remember college literature courses, something. Remind me, remind me." Okay.

*The Trial* is about a man named Joseph K. And he wakes up one morning on his 30th birthday, by the way, on his 30th birthday, and he discovers that he has been arrested. And he's under house arrest and he's waiting trial. And he's on probation, so he's able to move around, but he's under house arrest and he's waiting trial and they will not tell him what he's arrested for. He knows he's under arrest, but he doesn't know what it's for. Now, the novel in the early stages talks about how Joseph K uses the kind of clichés, the pat answers about life that he'd always relied on and he tries to apply it to this situation.

You see, friends, nobody likes you, nobody likes people to give them pat answers, except that most of us live our lives and base our lives on pat answers about life. And the pat answers that Joseph K uses are things like this. He says, "Well, I know that if I just sit down and think it out, I know I'll come to the solution, I'll figure it out." Another one he says is, "I'm just sure that as time goes on, we'll see that there's a rational explanation for this." Another one is the people that he talks to who are trying to arrest him, his probationers and his wardens and the police, they don't seem to, they won't tell him anything. But he says, "But I know that the people in authority are intelligent. I know that they will certainly be open to reason."

In other words, Joseph K falls back on two clichés that many of us use in order to make sense of life. He says, "The world is a rational place, and I am basically a decent person." But what happens is his life unravels because they don't work. These clichés don't work anymore. And he cannot find a reason, and he cannot talk to anybody, and people aren't being reasonable. And worse than that, he begins to look his life over. And he begins to think his life over and he begins to realize, "You know, there's lots of possible reasons I could be on trial."

And he remembers dishonesties, and he remembers betrayals. And he remembers ways that he cut corners, and he remembers all sorts of things and he begins to realize these things might be things that I'm being hauled up on charges for. I don't know how they could have known about it, but maybe. And eventually, he begins to feel more and more of that anxiety, that sense of guilt and that sense of condemnation. And at the end, it's a great novel, you remember something about Kafka. You know how it ends? You want to know the happy ending? At the very end, he can never get an answer and at the very end, his warden, the man who's been taking care of him and tailing around, takes him into a quarry.

And for some reason, Joseph looks up and he sees in some high room on some balcony a distant figure with his arms stretched out. "Finally," Joseph says, "somebody who will talk to him instead of everybody else being like this with their arms folded. Somebody with mercy, somebody with understanding, somebody who will help me." But just as he looks up and he reaches his hand up, the warden stabs him through the heart. And Kafka says, quote, "He died like a dog." And that's how the book ends. Nice book, huh? What's the message?

Listen, friends, the great art of the 20th century, the great minds of the 20th century, continually drive home the same thing. What they drive home is that there's these little clichés that we tell ourselves. And we've got 1980s versions of them. They go like this, "Honey, you can do anything you put your mind to." You know? That's how almost every TV documentary series, every TV drama, those mini-series, they always end like that. "Honey, you can do anything you put your mind to if you just want it hard enough."

We believe that we're basically decent people and we can set standards, and if we try hard enough, we can reach those standards. But listen, that's not what Kafka's saying. That's not what Freud said. Freud wrote this interesting letter to a Lutheran minister named Otto Pfister. And he's got a great quote in there that's been quoted down to the present day. He said, "Most people are trash." Sigmund Freud. "Most people are trash." Read the end, read Mark Twain's stuff. Watch Woody Allen movies and you'll see what's happening.

Listen, the great minds are saying the world is not a rational place. People are not all that decent. And if you look carefully, you'll see that you're not all that decent either. And you'll see that you're not living up to the standards. You are not. And the more you start to pick the lid up and look beneath the pat answers and the clichés, you will begin to sense a condemnation that we thoughtful people already sense. That's what Kafka's saying.

And you see, they're right. Look, all they're saying is what Romans chapter 2 said. Romans chapter 2 years ago went like this. Paul says, "You have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else. For whatever point you judge another, you are judging yourself because you do the same things." And then he also goes on and says, "The Gentiles who have not the law are a law unto themselves, since they show the requirements of the law are written in their hearts. Their consciences witness their thoughts, and there is an accusing and a defending in the thought."

Now, did you hear that? The language of trial. What Paul is saying is that everybody deep down has an understanding of standards. And he says on the final day, God will judge us by our own standards. Now, let me put it like this. Let me give you the best illustration I know. All of us down deep do not know, the Bible says, everything that the law tells you. But there are some, some residual deep understandings. For example, the Golden Rule. You don't have to teach kids the Golden Rule, do you?

As soon as they can talk, they're saying, "I gave you a piece of my orange, you should give me a piece of yours." They know that Golden Rule. They know to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. It's down there. And that's why Paul says the Gentiles, though they don't have the written word of God, they know in their conscience there is a law down there. There are standards. And Paul also says you will find that as you look carefully, there will be a little trial always going on in your head because you always find yourselves being accused and having to defend yourself because you do not live up to the very things that you call other people to do.

Put it this way: imagine, as it were, that God put a little invisible tape recorder around your necks the day of your birth. Well, better yet, I should say this way: Romans 2 is saying that God did do that. And there is a little invisible tape recorder around your neck, and that tape recorder only clicks on whenever you tell someone else how they ought to be. Whenever you tell someone else, "This is how it ought to be, this is how you ought to be, this is how people ought to be." Whenever there's an oughtness in what you say, it clicks on.

And at the end of time, on judgment day, God will just, he'll come up to you and he'll say, "Excuse me, let me get that tape recorder off." And you'll say, "Oh, what? I didn't even see that there." And he'll say, "Well, listen, I want you to know that I'm not going to be very fair, so fair. I am not going to judge you by the word of God, especially if the person has never heard of the word of God, right?" Somebody who never heard of the Bible or never read it or never had a chance to. Fine. He says, "I'm going to take that off, and all I'm going to do is judge you by your own standards. All I'm going to do is see if you were the person that you demanded other people be."

And Romans 2 says, and Kafka says, and Freud says, and everybody who really thinks about it says, nobody, nobody will pass that test. And anybody who's thinking about it begins to grow in the knowledge of that condemnation, and there's a restlessness. And there's a sense of guilt. It's a non-specific guilt, just like Kafka's friend Joseph K. Because when you begin to look at your life, you see all kinds of problems. It's non-specific. It's difficult to get a grip on. And by the way, it gets worse as you get older. And that's the reason that Joseph K woke up on his 30th birthday and suddenly realized he was on trial.

Now, listen, every single person in this room knows about that trial. Some of us, it's very conscious in our lives. And what happens is you're going to find that some of you are perfectionists, you're workaholics, you're very, very sensitive to criticism. You've got a very tender conscience because this sense of the trial is very, very close to the surface in your life. Some of the rest of us are a whole lot more self-assured looking, a whole lot more cool-looking, and maybe a lot more successful. And in that case, the same anxiety is down there, but it sleeps deep. It's more like an underwater oil leak that messes things up, but you can't really tell where it's coming from.

And you see, everybody's got it. Some people, the sense of the trial drives them away from religion. They say, "I want to get as far away from religion as I can because all religion does is make me feel guilty." In some cases, the sense of the trial drives you to religion, and it's not necessarily good. Because you can come into religion and do everything you can to defend yourself against this sense of guilt. And the reason you may be into your religion and into your church or into whatever faith you're in is a way of defending yourself from the little prosecution that you always hear up there in the conscience. And this is what your way of saying, "I'm okay, I'm a decent person, look at all the things that I've done."

There's no rest for you because you haven't rested from your works. You can't be rested from your works. Your works haunt you. Your standards haunt you. Your failures haunt you. But the Bible says the reason for that is because it's true. And the reason that Freud says what he says, and Woody Allen says what he says, and Franz Kafka says what he says is because they're seeing something that's really there. Romans 1 and Romans 2 says all people, regardless of the Bible, can begin to sense in their own consciences that sense of condemnation.

Guest (Female): We all chase things like success, true love, or the perfect life. Good things that can easily become ultimate things. When we put our faith in them, deep down we know they can't satisfy our deepest longings. The truth is that we've made lesser gods of good things, things that can't give us what we really need. In his book, *Counterfeit Gods: The Empty Promises of Money, Sex, and Power and the Only Hope that Matters*, Tim Keller shows us how a proper understanding of the Bible reveals the truth about societal ideals and our own hearts and shows us that there is only one God who can wholly satisfy our desires. This month, we'll send you *Counterfeit Gods* as our thanks for your gift to help Gospel in Life share the love of Christ with people all over the world. You can request your copy at gospelinlife.com/give. That's gospelinlife.com/give. Now here's Dr. Keller with the rest of today's teaching.

Tim Keller: But there's hope. Because you see, just looking at yourself and looking at the world and looking at the newspaper will always give you a sense of condemnation. But the only place to find the rest is here in the word. Because the Bible says there remains a rest for the people of God. What does the Bible say that rest is? First of all, we're told here in this passage that God rested on the seventh day. He spent six days creating, and then we're told he rested. Now what does that mean? Does that mean he stopped being active? No.

Because John chapter 5 tells us that God, well, John chapter 5, Jesus says, "I am working and my Father is working." And it doesn't mean God is inactive. If you look at the word "rest" in the Old Testament, you'll see again and again God's rest is his rule. There are many places where it says, "My throne room is the place of my rest." And if you want to pull all this together, here's what it means. On the seventh day, after God was done creating, he rested from creation and he began to rule his creation. It's sort of like making a boat. If you've been working at making a boat, and you've been slaving away at it, and you've been hammering, and you've been sawing, and you've been planing, and you've been, you know, screwing, and you've been doing everything. When you're all done with it, you rest from the creative work. But what do you do? You go take a nap? Probably not. You jump in the boat. You run the boat.

And now you're resting, but you see you're not inactive. And the Bible tells us that after God was done creating, he began to rule his creation, and his rest is his rule. And everything enjoys God's rest that is under his rule and under his dominion and under his power and under his sovereignty. And we're told that in the beginning, mankind experienced that rest. We were completely under his mastery, and so we knew the joy of his rest. And we walked with him in the cool of the garden, the Bible says. But we lost it because the minute we decided to be our own king, our own ruler, our own master, the minute we decided, "I want to live my own life my own way," we lost that rest.

So God, the Bible tells us, gave us a day, hmm? One day a week to remind us of the rest that we've lost. One day a week to remind us of the rest of Eden. But what's interesting about this passage is it points out that yes, on the Sabbath day, on the Lord's Day, on one day a week, we're supposed to rest from our work. We're supposed to worship God, we're supposed to come and see him and delight in him. But then it says here, down here it says, "If Joshua had given them rest in verse 8, God would not have spoken later about another day. There remains then a Sabbath rest for the people of God."

Listen, there's this commandment that says, "Remember the Sabbath day." But this passage is saying, as important as it is to take time one day a week to worship God, it points out here that there must be more to it than that. It says if Joshua had given them rest, there wouldn't be this continual call in the Bible to enter the Sabbath rest. In other words, it's possible to be going to church on Sunday and still be lacking the rest. The rest of God is a principle before it's a day. And on the day that we're supposed to rest, we only can honor that day of rest if we really understand the Sabbath rest of God, if we've entered it.

How do you enter it? Here's how to enter it. You have to hear the gospel. You see that twice? In verse 2, it says, "We also had the gospel preached to us, just as they did, but the message they heard was of no value because those who heard it did not combine it with faith." And then down in verse 10, it says, "Anyone who enters God's rest rests from his work just as God did. Let us, therefore," the point is that we enter the Sabbath rest when we hear the gospel. What's the gospel? Two parts. To enter the rest of God means you have to hear the gospel. But let me break it down into two pieces. The one piece is we have to learn to rest from our hiding of our sin. And the second is we have to rest from our striving and our works.

Now, let's just run through this quickly and then we'll see what you're supposed to be doing today. This is the day of rest, but are you doing it? Number one: rest from hiding. You see verse 13? It says nothing can be hid from God. Nothing. Now, this might seem paradoxical to you. There is no rest, there is no deep REM of the soul until there's conviction of sin. I hate to use that old and maybe awful term "conviction of sin." We're back in the courtroom, aren't we? The Bible teaches there's no peace and rest for the soul unless first there's conviction of sin. Conviction, not just a charge, conviction. A charge means maybe you're guilty and maybe you're not, but a conviction means you are.

Now, what this is saying, what the Bible says is that unless you come to recognize your sin, unless you come to see how wicked you are, you'll never get rest in your soul. Another way to put it is this: the reason you feel a sense of condemnation is because in your conscience you overhear God. In your conscience you overhear him. I don't know about you, but I find that when I overhear conversations, when I'm listening to Kathy talking to somebody on the phone, and I can't hear what they're saying and I can only hear what Kathy's saying, and sometimes I only hear one or two things, you can get some really strange impression of what's going on, right?

To overhear, sometimes you come in saying, "What was that? What happened? Who died?" And she'll say, "Oh no, when I said this and this, I didn't quite mean this, it was serious but it was only this." In other words, overhearing, you can get things garbled, it can be very, very distressing. One of the problems with the conscience, the human conscience, can get it wrong. We just said that the conscience understands basically what God required. But the conscience is full of all kinds of contradictory things: what your parents told you, what the world told you, what your Sunday school teacher told you, what your rabbi told you. I mean, there's all sorts of things in that conscience.

And that's not the point. Your conscience will just make you feel bad. You've got to go straight, straight to the law of God and see what God says about you. Does that sound awful? Maybe there's somebody out here asking this: "Wait a minute, I thought this was supposed to be about peace. I thought this sermon was about peace and joy. Now, are you going to make me feel bad about my sin? Are you going to help me find peace and joy?" And what's the answer? Yes.

It's not so illogical. Listen, friends, if you've got a pain and it turns out your pain is your appendix needs to come out, you go to a doctor and the doctor says, "You're going to get a lot worse before you get better. The only way to help you is by cutting a hole in you and making you feel much sicker right now. You feel bad, but you'll feel much sicker when I'm done with you. And you'll have to be lying in the hospital for a while and your side will be all painful." So you're going to have to let me do surgery and you say, "Okay." Why? Because you know that that is the way it's done.

If I'm going to get better, I've got to get cut deeper. And in the same way, what you've got to do is you have to have a deep conviction of sin or you never, ever, ever will get peace. One of the reasons why you're sad today maybe, friend, is because you've never let God make you sad. You've let your rabbi make you sad, or you let the TV commercials make you sad. You've let all these other people come in and tell you what you ought to be. And you're feeling sad and vaguely guilty, but what you really need is instead of overhearing what the law says, go to God and find out what he says.

And what the law says is that you, you are guilty of breaking the law. You're a lawbreaker. Now, the only way to get a decent conviction of sin is to stop looking at particular sins and start to stand back and look at your relationship to God. John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist church, for years was an extremely diligent church worker. He gave up a fellowship at Oxford to go to Georgia and be a chaplain to prisoners. He prayed six times a day, but he had no peace in his heart.

The reason he had no peace in his heart was that he thought if he worked hard enough and he did enough things, God would surely come down and say, "I will receive you." And you see, because he was working so hard, he had no rest. Why? Because he had no idea of just how far from God he really was. He had no idea about how wicked he was. And the way he came to conviction of sin and was finally converted was not by saying, "Oh my goodness, I've got to stop this habit, I've got to stop this." It was one night on a boat sailing back to England from America.

There was a tremendous storm that came up and on the boat were a number of people who were Christians and they were called Moravians. And during that storm in which it looked for sure everybody was going to be killed and drowned, John Wesley watched these men and women and he saw that they were at absolute peace. They had no fear of death, they had no fear of drowning, they were kind to each other, they were at peace. They looked to God, they prayed, they worked very hard, you see. They didn't just sit around in a docile way. They worked very hard to make sure that the ship stayed afloat, but there was peace. And he looked and he said, "I don't know God like that."

He was convicted when he began to realize that the real commandment is: you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. And the real way to come to conviction of sin is do you love him with all your being? Do you depend on him for everything? Do you know him personally? And when you start asking those questions, you begin to see how far you are and only then can you stop hiding. And you begin to rest from your hiding. Say, "I cannot live up to standard. I admit it."

The only way for the trial to be over is for you to say, "I'm guilty." Instead of going around saying, "I know there's an explanation somewhere, I know there's an explanation somewhere. I'm really a pretty decent person." Or "I know I can make it better, and if I get one more chance." No rest for a person like that. And a lot of you, that's what your whole lives are full of right now. You must first say, "I am guilty."

And then the second part, after you've rested from your hiding, the second part of entering the rest, the second part of the gospel actually, is where you go back to verse 10. You must rest from your works. What does that mean? You have to see why Jesus Christ came. Jesus Christ came not just to be a great teacher and not just to be a great model, but he came to live in your place. He came to do everything necessary that you should do. The principle is this: only Jesus Christ can be a Christian. Only God could really be human.

The only person that could do all that you know deep in your heart you're required to do is what Jesus did. The only one that could ever do that, and he's done it for you. And the moment you receive him by faith, which means the moment you stop trusting in your own works and you say, "O Lord Jesus Christ, it's your work, not mine, that is my only hope. O Father, accept me for Jesus' sake." The minute that happens, you have received the righteousness of Christ into your own life instead of working at your own righteousness and you can begin to feel rest.

Now, maybe some of you think that you believe that. But as a pastor, my job is to talk to people about it. And I say this sort of thing to people. And they shake their head, and then I ask them a question: "Are you a Christian?" I ask them this very, very very simple question. "Are you a Christian?" And you know what they usually say? What people often say, often: "Well, I'm trying." And the minute they say that, and maybe some of you would say that, I know they don't get it. They don't get the point and there's no rest in their hearts yet.

What do you mean you're trying? Don't you see that you can't try? And don't you see that the minute you realize that the trying will never make it, they have to receive what Jesus has done? The minute you rest from your work, you're at peace. But here's how we have to close this up. We close it up like this: don't you see now that the real thing that keeps you from rest is not your sin, but your best deeds. The thing that keeps you from real gospel rest is not what you've done wrong, it's what you're doing right and which you trust in.

And you hope if I can just do more of it, surely God will accept me then. Or let me put it this way, as one teacher I heard say, the only thing that can really keep you from Jesus is not your sins but your damnable good works. All you need is need. All you need is nothing, but a lot of us don't have that. You see. Remember how David was able to go to sleep? He says, "For thou, O Lord, art a shield for me, my glory and the lifter of my head."

You're my glory. I don't have any of my own anymore. My own honor, my own accomplishments, not there. What are you trying to make your peace? What are you trying to make your rest? What are you resting in? That's my last question to you. You know, don't you, that it's very hard to rest and really fall asleep on things that are moving. Have you ever noticed that? You try to rest on something, and if it moves, you're awake. And if you're resting on your accomplishments, right now things are okay, but they will shift. And if you're resting on relationships, if you get your rest out of some kind of person that you're in love with or you love, that thing is going to change too and it's going to shift and you can't rest.

Even a good marriage is nothing that you should rest in, my friends, because as good of a marriage as you might have or might want to have, no human being is unconditionally loving, always understanding, always there for you. You can't rest in that either. The only thing you can rest in is him. And then you've really come to rest. Then you've really come to rest. Lay your deadly doing down, down at Jesus' feet. Stand in him, in him alone, gloriously complete.

You know, there's a poem called the "Hound of Heaven." And the last line is God talking to the person who's running. And this is what he says over and over again in the poem: "All things betray thee, who betrayest me. All things betray thee, who betrayest me." Anything else that you try to find rest in, it will shake. It will fall, and you will fall out of bed. Do you understand that? Lay your deadly doing down, down at Jesus' feet. Stand in him and him alone, gloriously complete. And then you will have rest. Then you will have rest.

How that works out, I'm going to talk more about that tonight, but listen. Listen. When somebody comes and accuses you of something, they accuse you of something and you're Christian and you have rest, you know how you can deal with that? You can sit there and you can listen to it, and if they're right, you say, "You're right." Because deep down inside you say, "Yes, I am, there's a lot of bad things like that in my life. But you see, God knows it and he accepts me completely, so I don't have to defend myself."

That's rest. Or what if the person has criticized you of something and it's completely wrong? You know what you do? You don't come up biting and snarling and saying, "Oh yeah, you're absolutely wrong and I can't wait to show you you're wrong." Instead, inside you go like this: "Well, they're wrong about this one. But if he only knew all kinds of other things that I've done or could have done, boy, he could take me to the cleaner. I mean, it's just an accident that he happened to point out something in my life that's not really wrong."

I know the way that one hymn goes: "Well may the accuser roar of sins that I have done. I know them all and thousands more, but Jehovah knoweth none." That's rest. Rest from criticism, rest from having to prove yourself, rest from having to defend yourself. You see? That's rest. Do you know that rest? Stand in him and him alone, gloriously complete. Let's close, let's pray.

Guest (Female): Thanks for joining us here on the Gospel in Life podcast. We hope that today's teaching encouraged you to go deeper into God's Word. You can help others discover this podcast by rating and reviewing it. And to find more gospel-centered content by Tim Keller, visit gospelinlife.com. Today's sermon was recorded in 1989. 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.