Gospel in Life

Guest (Female): Welcome to Gospel in Life. Modern culture often says that our beliefs are secondary as long as we live like decent people. But the Bible insists that what we believe shapes our day-to-day lives. All summer long, we're sharing a series from Tim Keller which unpacks the core beliefs of the Christian faith. Dr. Keller looks at how the truths that shape our understanding of God, ourselves, and our salvation can transform us and free us in every part of our lives.

Tim Keller: Ephesians 1, and we're looking especially at this long section that is printed in your bulletin. Ephesians 1, we've been looking at for a number of weeks and we have said that the chapter is explaining, in some ways, what is in the treasure chest you get when you become a Christian.

Chapter 1, verse 3 of Ephesians says that, "Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing." And that means that when you become a Christian, you get, in a sense, an enormous trust fund, the greatest trust fund in the history of the universe.

And it's up to you to figure out just what's in there so you can draw on it, so you can make use of it. And as we've been looking at the chapter, we've seen in the early verses of the chapter that the first great thing that God gives us is He gives us a new family. We're adopted, and He becomes our Father. We talked about that. Then secondly, He gives us a kingdom and we become citizens in it. We talked about that. Then thirdly, He gives us an imperishable inheritance of glory. And we talked about what it means that Christians can live knowing that the future is full of glory and what impact that has on the way we live now.

Lastly, this last section, Paul talks about actually prays a prayer after saying that in Christ we have adoption, in Christ we have a kingdom, in Christ we have an inheritance of glory. Then suddenly he prays a prayer. And if we look at the prayer, we'll see he's teaching us one last thing in this chapter. He says Christians need to ask God for a spiritual knowledge of what they actually have.

You see, let me read it to you with you. Read it with me now. It's Ephesians 1:15-23. And you'll see the whole thing is basically a prayer. Listen: "For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers. I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the spirit of wisdom and revelation so that you may know Him better."

"I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which He has called you, the riches of His glorious inheritance in the saints, and His incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is like the working of His mighty strength, which He exerted in Christ when He raised Him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly realms, far above all rule and authority, power and dominion, and every title that can be given, not only in the present age, but also in the one to come. And God placed all things under His feet and appointed Him to be head over everything for the church, which is His body, the fullness of Him who fills everything in every way."

This prayer is for what? It's for knowledge. Again and again, it says, "I pray that you may know, I pray that you may know." I saw one Bible that I had looked at, a study Bible that had a title over this paragraph and it said, "Paul's Prayer for Knowledge and Power." That's misleading. Beware of what your study Bible tells you. The footnotes are not divinely inspired. The headings are not divinely inspired. Even the chapter and verse divisions are not divinely inspired.

That's misleading because Paul does not pray for knowledge and power. He prays for knowledge that you have power. He prays for knowledge that you have a hope of your calling. He prays, having told us about all the incredible things we have in Christ, that we might have a spiritual knowledge of it. He says the only thing you lack is a spiritual knowledge of it.

There's a sense in which Paul is saying that we are like little children paddling in the shallowest edge of a vast ocean of truth. Not only must Christians realize that's our position so that we never feel we've arrived, so we never have arrogance, but we also have to realize that because when we look at our life and when we look at what faces us in life and when we look at the difficulties of those things, we need to realize that we have not yet begun to draw on the ocean of things that God has told us about ourselves and the ocean of things that God has given us. We haven't even begun.

The amazing prayer here is not for power, but for the spiritual knowledge. "I pray," he says, "that the eyes of your kardia, your heart, would become enlightened." Literally, that means, "I pray that your heart would be sensitive to the light of what God has done for you." Paul does not pray for power. Paul does not pray for inheritance. He does not pray for glory. He does not pray for adoption. He doesn't pray for those things. They're already yours. He prays that you'll know them.

He says, "I keep asking the God of our Lord Jesus Christ will give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation so that you may know Him better. I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened that you may know the hope, the riches, and the incomparably great power." The word "knowledge" in the Bible is a richer word than the word "knowledge" in English.

One of the joys of reading the King James Bible was the perplexity of starting in Genesis. Very often, if you were trying to read the Bible, you'd start in the book of Genesis. And it's very perplexing, especially when a young boy gets to the place where it says, "And Adam knew Eve, and she bore a son. And Cain knew his wife, and she bore him a son. And Ishmael went into her and knew her, and she bare a son." And you're a little kid sitting there going, "What? What do you mean he knew her and she had a baby? Is something here that my parents haven't told me about yet?"

See, the Hebrew word for knowledge, yada, is such a rich word that it always means not only information, but also personal encounter. Now, I don't want to get off on a tangent, but it's pretty interesting and worth a whole sermon someday, and some of you have heard it in a miniature version, that the Bible uses the word "know" for sex.

Do you see the travesty of using sex with somebody you don't know, somebody you're not committed to, somebody who you don't know in depth, down to the bottom? The Bible says, of course, if you're married and you're having a wonderful, loving relationship, you obviously have informational knowledge of each other, right? But you also have personal encounter knowledge. If you have a personal encounter with somebody, you want information. If you get information, then you move to personal encounter. But they're both parts of the Hebrew word "to know."

And so therefore, when Paul says, "I pray that you might know," what? "I pray that you might know that you're called by Him. I pray that you might know that you have glory waiting for you as your inheritance. I pray that you might know that you have power." Well, these people are Christians. These people already know that. But they don't know that.

Are you able to say tonight, "My problems are caused mainly by the fact I don't really know what I think I know." I think I know that, and that means you believe it, but I don't really know it. I know it, but I don't know it with my heart. I know it, but I haven't had a personal encounter with it to the depth that I need for it to really make a difference in my life.

Are you willing to admit that? Are you willing to admit, instead of being angry at God, "God, You haven't given me enough"? If you're a Christian, if you don't know where you stand with Christ, of course, you're in another condition. I'm talking for a minute to people who know that they're Christians. If you're a Christian and you're complaining tonight that God hasn't given you something, look at this. It says that your real complaint, your real problem, is that you don't know what He's given you.

Abraham, chapter 4 of Romans. Paul talks about Abraham and the fact that God came to Abraham and told him, when he and his wife were very old, 70, 80, 90 years old, that they couldn't go here and they couldn't go there, they had to basically stick around and wait until Sarah had a son. Now, they were very ancient. They were very old. And yet God was asking for Abraham to base his whole life on the fulfillment of a promise that seemed very unlikely.

In Romans chapter 4, what did Paul say Abraham did? It said, "being persuaded that God had the power to do what He said, He gave glory to God and staggered not at the promise." Being persuaded that God had the power to do what He had promised, He gave glory to God and He staggered not at the promise. Boy, I love that.

First of all, it says he started with informational knowledge. He knew that God has the power. See, you can be logical with yourself. There may not be any God, in which case there's no use being mad about anything at all, because then everything happens by chance and nothing means anything and there is no right and wrong. Or if there is a God, then He's a God of illimitable power. And if there is a God and He's got power, that means informationally you know that God must have the power and therefore I shouldn't worry about anything.

Abraham starts with the knowledge. It's informational knowledge. And then he works it in. What does he do? It says he gives glory to God. That means he treats God as weighty, as heavy, as important as He really is. He begins to act on the knowledge and he staggered not at the promise. Staggered not at the promise. He took it in. He drank it in. He refused to be overwhelmed by it.

He said, "I'm going to think about this. I'm going to reflect on this." A friend of mine, a man named Edmund Clowney, once wrote a book on Christian meditation. When he wrote it, transcendental meditation was extremely popular. And do you remember all the courses and all the books just called TM, TM? Well, Ed Clowney wrote a book called CM, Christian Meditation.

And in that book, he said, "If you read and study transcendental meditation, Eastern meditation, it's completely passive. The whole idea behind transcendental meditation is to empty your mind and to stop fighting. But the whole idea of Christian meditation is to fill your mind and to start fighting, to fight the truth in. It's the opposite of transcendental meditation."

Transcendental meditation, Eastern meditation is passive. Christian meditation is active. Transcendental meditation assumes that the best thing for you is to empty your mind. Christian meditation says, "No, that's your problem, that your head's empty. You need to fill it with the truth." And so what Abraham does, you can see it's a cross between meditation and a wrestling match. That's what Christian meditation is.

He gives glory to God. He acts on it, and he takes the promise in and he drinks it in and he thinks about it. He refuses to be staggered by it. He says, "I'm going to open my heart and my mind and make it as big as the promise. I'm going to reflect on it and think about it. I'm going to suck the sweetness out of it." And he does it and he does it and he does it until his heart catches fire, until his heart becomes sensitive to the light of what God has given.

"I pray that the eyes of your heart would be enlightened, that you might know the things that you think you know." That's what Paul's saying. That's what he is asking for. Do you realize that? In a sense, if you would believe that, on the one hand, your troubles are over. You begin to say, "Here I am griping that God's not giving me enough to handle life," when actually I see that my real problem is that I am not actually knowing that He's already given me enough.

I'm not being controlled by it. May the mind of Christ—we're going to sing about that to close the service—may the mind of Christ, you see, may the truth of Christ control me. May it come in. Let me give it glory. For you to pray, "Oh, Lord, give me a spirit of knowledge, Oh, Lord, give me a spirit of wisdom and revelation so I see how all this applies to me," is really the beginning of the end of your search for competence in life.

Now, having said that, the prayer actually—now I already made an allusion to this, let me look at my time here. All right, I made an allusion to this. Before the prayer starts, Paul makes a point which we have to make in any kind of auditorium or congregation like this. Paul says, "This is an amazing claim I'm about to tell you. I'm about to tell you that you have enough hope if you understand your calling. You have enough wealth if you understand your inheritance. You have enough power if you realize it's already operating in you in resurrection proportions, to handle anything, if you just are able to see it."

So you have to say, "I know that my real problem is I don't see it. My eyes of my heart aren't open." But God can do it. And therefore God can give me a life of greatness and grandeur if I'm always able to see these things. That's an amazing statement. But Paul starts off by explaining that it's not a promise that anybody can grab hold on. You've got to be a Christian.

That's why he starts off and he says, "For this reason, ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, I have not stopped giving thanks for you, remembering you in all my prayers, and I keep asking," and so on. Now, he starts off by saying something. He says, "I've heard of you." This is a church that Paul is writing to a church that he's never visited. So he doesn't know these people personally.

Well, how does he know they're Christians? He says, "I've heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and your love for all the saints." Now, let me just conclude in a way, take the remaining time to show what that means. This is a test. Paul says, "This is how I know you're a Christian and this therefore is how I know that the promise is for you." I just expounded in a very brief form the level of living that Christians could be capable of. But I also look out there and I say to you all, "You've got to be careful. This is not something that you can suddenly run out and say, 'Great, all I've got to do is turn to God and ask for this.' You've got to be a Christian."

Guest (Female): Do you struggle to find the words to share your faith effectively with others? Most Christians, pastors included, have moments where we have trouble articulating what we believe and why our faith matters. In his book, *Preaching: Communicating Faith in an Age of Skepticism*, Tim Keller shows how to communicate the Christian message in a way that's clear, compassionate, and accessible, whether you're speaking to a group or having a casual conversation with a friend.

Drawing from his decades of experience connecting the gospel to real-life circumstances, Dr. Keller shows how the gospel message can speak even to the most skeptical or spiritually curious people. During the month of July, we'll send you a copy of *Preaching* as our thanks for your gift to help Gospel in Life share the transforming love of Christ with more people. So request your copy today at gospelinlife.com/give. That's gospelinlife.com/give. Now, here's Dr. Keller with the rest of today's teaching.

Tim Keller: How do you know if you're a Christian? Look at these two tests. One of the things I love about the test—let me look at them in general then in particular and then we're done. In general, the beauty of the test is one is a doctrinal test and one is a practical, a life test. One is your doctrinal beliefs and the other is your practical character in life.

In this city and especially in our culture, these two things are pitted against each other. So many people say, "It doesn't matter what you believe as long as you're a loving, compassionate person." Other places I've been, it's the other way around. Many, many churches make the mistake of saying all that matters is that you believe just like us.

We've got 75 points of doctrine and you can be part of our church as long as you sign off on every one of them. Yes, we're cranky, yes, we're always fighting, yes, we're always pulling each other's hair, yes, there's lots of gossip here, yes, of course there's always power struggles. But the point is we all believe the doctrine. You see, you can't pit these things against each other. God will never say right doctrine proves that you're a Christian, nor will He say a loving, sweet life will prove you're a Christian.

There's plenty of wonderfully benevolent and just merciful by temperament people who are not Christians because they don't believe. And there's other people who are tremendously knowledgeable about theology and the Bible and they understand the doctrines of the faith so well and they're not Christians either because it's not a matter of their heart and life.

Now let me just take a look at these two. First one: "For this reason, I've prayed for you ever since I heard about your faith in the Lord Jesus." That's the first one, that's the doctrinal one. Why? The beauty of this, Paul is able to summarize their entire faith by saying, "You believe in Jesus." Not Jesus plus, Jesus. That's the difference between a Christian and other sorts of religions.

There's a place in Philippians where Paul says he's dealing with a group of people that say if you want to be right with God, all you need is Jesus plus circumcision. And Paul says if you add to Jesus, you subtract from Him. You can't add to Him without subtracting from Him. He is the Savior. He has done everything necessary. Jesus is your all in all.

As soon as you say Jesus plus something, you've actually eliminated Jesus altogether. What you've really said is what makes the difference between a person who's saved and a person who's not is not Jesus so much as that little addition that I tack on there. Paul says no, no, no. What it means to be a Christian is to see that you have your all in Christ.

If a church says you need Jesus plus you need to be baptized by us and you're saved, that's a denial of the orthodox Christian faith. You need faith in Jesus and you need to come to us and go through this or that ritual, or you need to come under the authority of our leaders, or you need Jesus and you also need this. There's all sorts of ways to add to Jesus.

When I first came to Christ as part of kind of the Jesus movement during the counterculture days, I remember I had a good friend of mine who went home after college, a new believer, and went to some little Southern town where he was from and he went into the local church. Won't tell you what kind of church, but you can guess what kind of church. And he walked in the door and a man met him at the door and said, "Son, you'll have to have a haircut before you worship in here." This was 1970 and all, but that church wasn't a cult.

That church didn't say you've got to be baptized three times upside down in a particular tub in Idaho in order to be saved. I mean, that's a cult. And yet I'm not sure that there's much difference there. Jesus plus anything is heterodoxy. Jesus is your all. But notice it doesn't just say Jesus, it says the Lord Jesus.

And what's great about the New Testament is Jesus is Lord. Jesus is Lord. Now, the New Testament was written in Greek and whenever it says Jesus is Lord or the Lord Jesus, it uses the word, a particular Greek word for Lord, Kurios. Jesus is Kurios. That word was a tremendously powerful word. It really meant worshipful Lord.

When Caesar began to claim that he was God and he set up his own temple and his own cultus and he demanded that people worship him, his creed was Kaisar Kurios. And when the Old Testament was translated into Greek for Greek-speaking Jews, whenever the word Yahweh, the word Jehovah, appears in the Old Testament, whenever the Hebrew word Yahweh appears, it was translated into Greek Kurios. For Jesus to call Himself Kurios and for Paul to call Him Kurios was to say He's God. He is to be worshipped.

All this means is that, yeah, you have to believe in Jesus, but you can't just believe in Jesus any old way you want. You've got to believe in the Jesus who revealed Himself to be the second person of the Trinity, the Son of God Himself, God incarnate. And so what you have here in this beautiful little passage, this little phrase, is the two cardinal doctrines of the faith.

Martin Luther said both of them are the articles on which the church stands or falls and they're the articles on which the Christian stands or falls. If you deny—you can deny a lot of other things, but if you deny these, you've ripped the heart out of what the gospel is. Do you believe Jesus is God Himself, and do you believe He and He alone stands as your Savior? Do you believe in the doctrine that you're justified by faith alone and not through any works, and do you believe that Jesus is God incarnate?

Those are the two doctrines that you have to believe to be a Christian. If you take any one of them away, you're into all sorts of other things. You're into any other kind of faith. All the other faiths say be good. If you deny either of those truths, you're basically saying Christianity is a matter of being good. Martin Luther believed that the essence of Christianity was to offer a righteousness to God, and then he realized in reading Romans that the essence of Christianity was to receive a righteousness from God.

And if you deny either of those doctrinal truths, if you can't buy the idea that Jesus is God come to earth, if you can't buy the idea that faith in Christ alone creates a miracle of the new birth, you're born again and all of your sins are forgiven and none of them can condemn you, if you can't believe that, you're not a Christian. That's not, you know, certainly that's your right, I'm just saying that you're not a Christian. Don't claim to be. You have to have faith in the Lord Jesus. And then the second test. The second test: love for all the saints.

Now, you know why love has to be added to doctrine? There's a lot of bad reasons why people believe the orthodox faith. Some people believe the orthodox faith out of familiarity. They were raised in it. Their parents taught them that, and it's very clear that there's many people who can subscribe to the Apostles' Creed and they can subscribe to all these things and they believe in the Lord Jesus, they believe the doctrines, but they believe it almost out of a sense of nostalgia, they believe it out of a sense of a need for security.

When you're growing up and you're being taken care of and everything seems to make sense when you're little because you believe your parents are always right, you can get very, very nostalgic about those days. And you can become unbelievably attached to places and things that go way back into your childhood. Almost every year since my kids were little, they've gone for the last week of July to a particular little downtrodden resort on Lake Erie.

And it looks like we're never going to be able to go back because it looks like it's being sold and it's no longer going to be open for a tourist. My kids and even I, because I've been there for something like 23 years in a row, you get unbelievably attached to things that have happened when you were young. It feels so secure to be there. And many people buy into the orthodox faith simply because of that. They buy into the beliefs, but there's no real change in their life.

They haven't actually been had their hearts opened by the Spirit, been convicted of their sin and out of love for Christ received the truth of Christianity. They just love the familiar feeling of it. They just have always believed it. You can tell these kinds of people because they don't have doubts. They also don't ask questions. They never change their mind about anything. In fact, they don't like you to ask questions. They just want to believe.

Anybody that has to believe like that, never wrestles with doubts, never changes and probes and thinks, has no real love of truth and no real love for Christ but just needs to hold on to the faith of their childhood. Other people just love certainty. Some people are attracted to Christianity because it's the most intellectually satisfying religion. And I would be happy to debate that with anybody.

Other religions are either mystical or authoritarian. They either don't have a whole lot of doctrinal truth to them because they're kind of just mystical experiences, or else they're very authoritarian. They say this is the way it is because an angel came down and told our master this and that's that. Don't question. Sure, it makes no sense, just believe. Christianity isn't like that. I think as anybody who's been coming to this church realizes that.

And as a result, if you just have a tidy mind and you just love intellectual certainty and intellectual coherence, you might be attracted to Christianity. But truth is never an end in itself. A real Christian finds that you have to—you love a lot of the doctrines of Christianity, but you also have to submit to your Master who tells you a lot of things in the Bible that you don't like and that don't even make sense.

A love of tidiness or a love of nostalgic sense of having been raised in a particular truth, that's not the same thing as real Christianity. There's all kinds of reasons why people believe without really having had an encounter with Jesus Christ, without really having been convicted of their sin and seen the wonder of His grace and been born again. And that's the reason why Paul has to add this last test.

If you really are a Christian, not only do you have the test of belief, but you grow into a loving person. It doesn't say you grow into a loving person immediately. He doesn't say I know that you're a Christian because of your faith in the Lord Jesus and how you perfectly loving to everybody all the time. He doesn't say that. But love is patient. First Corinthians 13. Love is kind. Love is courteous. Love is forgiving. Love is humble.

In other words, love is the sum—it's the concise summary of all of the character of Jesus Christ. You see His patience, you see His humility, you see His lack of irritability, you see His calmness and peace in the face of criticism and persecution. What all that is, is love. And if you're a real Christian, you will be finding yourself incrementally, piece by piece, stage by stage, growing into a more loving person. Is that happening? Ask yourself, ask somebody else. It's got to be happening or you're not a Christian.

There has to be a renovation of character along with doctrinal beliefs. But listen, what's beautiful about this is Paul gives you a particular application of the love. He says, not just love in general, "I know that you love all the saints." The saints are other Christians. The word "saints" just means holy ones, not the saints that have been venerated over the years by the Catholic Church. That's not the way Paul uses the word.

Do you know what that means? Here's one of the ways you can tell yourself you're a Christian. First of all, you find there's a lot of people in any other club, any class, any other place you've ever been that you don't like. And when you get into the church, you find it's the same. There's a lot of people who you don't like, you just don't get along, they're just not your kind of person.

They may not be your kind of race. They may not be your kind of class. They may not be your kind of personality. But a Christian, Christians find if you really are saved, whatever you take your identity from, whatever is the most important thing to you in your life binds you to other people who have that as the most important thing in their life.

If the most important thing in your life is money, then you're going to most want to be around people with money. If the most important thing in your life is literature, then you're going to feel most bound to people that also find the most important thing is literature. And if the most important thing is Jesus Christ, you're going to find that other people that you've never gotten along with, people of other races, people of other classes, people of other personalities, people that you shouldn't get along well with, people that no one else in your family or your community would ever want to get along well with, but because you're a Christian and they're a Christian, you find your heart drawn to them and you find yourself making do and even growing in affection.

Dr. Martin Lloyd-Jones, who I often quote, was a doctor in Britain in the early 1900s. He took a church after he left the medicine in a tiny little humble fishing village in Wales. And all the people that he ministered to were uneducated people, five or six rungs down the social scale in Britain, which has much more of a class system than America, though we've got one.

And he sometimes he would wonder when Satan would come to him and suggest, "How do you know you're a Christian?" He wouldn't know what to say to Satan. Then one day he turned around and he said, "I want to know, Satan, why I would rather talk about Jesus with the humblest fisherwoman in Wales than I would talk about medicine with my peers, with other people, with other men who have gone to the same schools as me and are of the same class." He says it was a radical change in his life. He was never trained to do that, but he loved all the saints.

Do you see this renovation in your character? Have you seen that the Lord Jesus is your all in all? Have you seen that Jesus is Lord and have you made Him Lord? Then these wonderful promises, that you've got everything you need if you only know it, is yours. Pray to Him and say, "Give me that spirit of wisdom and revelation so that I might know the hope and might know the inheritance and might know the power." Or if now tonight you realize that you're not a Christian, don't pray for that knowledge. Pray for Jesus.

Say, "Lord, come into my life. I want to believe in the Lord Jesus and I want You to renovate my character and fill me with Your love." Let's pray. Our Father, we thank You for these promises. We pray that You'll teach us by Your Spirit how to apply them to ourselves so that we might know the hope of our calling, so that we might know the glorious inheritance of our riches in the saints, and so that we might know the incomparable power at work within us. We pray all this in Jesus' name, 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 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.