Gospel in Life

Guest (Male): 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: I'd like to read to you again from this first chapter of Ephesians and we'll elaborate and spread our thoughts out a little bit more on the subject. We said last week that Ephesians 1, which we're beginning to look at, Ephesians 1:3-14, in the Greek original was one long sentence. Therefore, it's a massive build-up. It's a statement in which Paul is trying to give us the entire scheme of how God saves us.

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will, to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the one he loves.

In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God’s grace that he lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding. And he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times have reached their fulfillment, to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ.

In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his will, in order that we, who were the first to hope in Christ, might be for the praise of his glory. And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation. Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God’s possession, to the praise of his glory.

This is God’s word. Again, this is only the second week we’ve started looking at the early chapters of Ephesians. Let me remind you of something. This is about being saved. Are you saved? Now, the way you can tell how long you’ve lived in New York City is the longer you’ve been in New York, the more irritated you are with that question. There’s something about Manhattan that makes people very upset with people who talk like that.

To talk about being saved, or to ask you if you’re saved, or to say that I’m saved, at least in this particular culture, is seen to be very shallow, narrow-minded, superficial. And yet, the Bible will tell us that being saved is actually the richest, the deepest, the broadest reality that's possible for human mind to conceive of. And you see this entire sentence that I just read to you is the gospel of our salvation. In verse 13, Paul says, "When you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation." And that's what he's giving us in verse 3 to 14. But he's giving it to us in a particular way. He's giving it to us from God's point of view.

Last week I spent four or five days at a conference full of church planters, and many of them were planting churches in cultures that weren't native to them. They were doing cross-cultural missionary work. Many of the people spent time saying that there is almost nothing more transforming and more revolutionizing than to have to live in a culture that you weren't raised in. Plenty of you here in New York know something about that, but plenty of you don't really.

We were at one of the meals, and a number of people who had lived in Africa for ten years, they were Americans, they'd gone there and they'd planted churches. They were saying there is nothing more transforming than to live in another culture because you don't realize how ethnocentric you are. Ethnocentrism means you have a whole series of shared assumptions that you share with your ethnic group. Lots and lots of assumptions about what is flexible and what is not flexible, what is rude and what is courteous, what is respectful and what is not respectful, what's decent and what's not decent, and so on.

And there's nothing more transforming than to go into another culture where nobody shares those same assumptions. It means every day you get confronted and you have to examine what you've always taken for granted. What you've always taken for granted is that your ethnic group's point of view is the right one in every area. It's not until you go cross-cultural, they say, that you really begin for the first time to be a thinking person.

They said you really don't know what it's like to be a reflective, thoughtful person until you go to a place where all of your assumptions are confronted and challenged. Some of them are funny, but they're little things. Elizabeth Elliot, our friend who was a missionary in the jungles of Ecuador, gives the perfect illustration of this sort of thing on the small scale. She thought it was pretty interesting to see what the Auca Indians she worked with did when they had a cold.

When they blew their nose, what they did is they would put two fingers right here beneath their nostrils and they'd blow their nose onto their fingers. Then they would flick it into a bush. At one point she had a little bit of a discussion with some of them and she explained that where she came from, the idea of blowing that particular secretion onto your own skin and fingers and hands was just really appalling. They said, "Well, what do you do?" She said, "Well, we don't even touch our fingers with it."

Well, they were excited. They said, "Well, this is maybe a new breakthrough in civilization. Tell us about it." So she showed a modern invention called a handkerchief. She got the handkerchief out and she showed you blow your nose into it and you never touch your fingers. And they said, "Well, okay, what do you do with your handkerchief then?" She said, "Well, you put it back in your purse or your pocket." She said, "You mean you don't touch your fingers with it, but then you save it? Oh, that's really civilized. That's great. What do you do with it?" There was an assumption she never thought of.

To go cross-cultural means that you become a reflective person. You think about everything. You begin to realize there's a lot of things I always assumed that are stupid. That's the reason why you live in another culture and then you come back to your own culture and you find that you really don't belong in either one. Why? Because you've become thoughtful. You're not into reflex reactions anymore.

What Ephesians does is it refuses to let us continue to look at life or what's happened to us from the human point of view. It doesn't deal so much with ethnocentrism. It deals with what you might say is the ultimate ethnocentrism. It deals with anthropocentrism. It deals with the fact that we always insist on the human point of view. We try to understand everything from the human point of view. We have all sorts of assumptions that make us the center of the universe.

And so many of you struggle because you only and always center everything around yourself. So, for example, if God is not working things out in the way that seems logical to you, if he's not giving you the things that you feel that you really need, if he's not doing things in accordance with a plan, if he appears cruel to you by human standards, by your standards, if he seems unfair by human standards, by your standards, you're ready to say, "Well, he doesn't know what he's doing."

And Ephesians won't allow that. Ephesians, instead of looking at things from your point of view, is continually saying, "This is the real perspective from God's point of view." And it's continually challenging your man-centered, your anthropocentric way of looking at things. The first way they do it in Ephesians is what we looked at last week. Ephesians verse 4 says if you're a Christian, you've received every spiritual blessing in Christ. And everybody says, "Okay, that's great. I'm a Christian and I've received these blessings." Why have you received these blessings? What is the reason for it?

Verse 4 says you've received all these blessings in Christ because he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy. Remember, the word holy means to be set apart. From God's point of view, you don't set yourself apart and then he chooses you and loves you. Oh, no. He loves you and chooses you and then you set yourself apart. Very clear. That is not the way it seems to us.

From our point of view, all we remember about Christianity was that it was extremely hard to get into. It seemed to us like we had to use an awful lot of our own exertion, that we read and we studied and we thought and we struggled. We knew it was going to cost us a lot, but with great effort, we sought him and we reached out to him and we pressed toward him and we chose him. And now, from God's point of view, in all of that struggling and in all of that seeking, you really weren't seeking him; he was seeking you.

You were only seeking him to the degree that he was seeking you. You were only seeking him because he sought you. You were empowered by his seeking you. Do you find that insulting? Do you find the idea that you're a Christian only purely because of grace alone, not because of anything you've ever done, not because of your exertion, not because you purified your heart, but it was only and completely on the basis of God's choice and God's seeking of you?

If that upsets you, I fear it's because you need a cross-cultural experience. You tend to see everything from the assumptions of all human beings. All human beings have these native assumptions, knee-jerk assumptions they haven't reflected on, they haven't thought about. And the Bible insists on making you think about it. Ephesians is constantly insisting that you see things from God's point of view. And that's the reason why Ephesians in a sense puts you on the top of a mountain and makes you look down.

You could live in a town, you could live in a region all of your life and know it very well. But if you'd never seen it from the air, in a sense, you never can understand it. You might have lived there for years and years, but somebody takes you up in a helicopter, somebody takes you up on the top of a mountain, you look down and for the very first time in your life you see how it all fits together. You understand it in a new way and not only that, the panorama overwhelms you.

And that's the reason why there is no other letter that Paul writes, there is no other book of the Bible in which you see Paul continually unable to continue his discourse and breaking into spontaneous pageants of praise. He'll be going along and all of a sudden he'll say, "Praise be to the Father and God of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has done this." This was a letter written to the churches, but he can't contain himself. You know why? Because that's how it feels when you're at the top of a mountain.

You don't just write in a dispassionate way what you see. You're amazed, you're astonished, the panorama just overwhelms you. And if you are willing to climb to the top of the mountain, it means being willing to listen to him and to set aside your human point of view. To set aside your complaints because from the human point of view it doesn't look like it makes sense, it doesn't seem to be fair. But if you want that cross-cultural experience, if you want God's point of view, you read the book of Ephesians, you listen, you submit to it, and wait till you see what happens.

Wait till you see how it transforms you, wait till you see how it picks you up out of your little anthropocentric way of thinking of things. This first way in which the Bible gives us God's understanding of our salvation, we last week called the doctrine of election. It's there in verse 3. It says, "For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless." Then, just to make sure we don't miss the point, he then says, "In love he predestined us to be adopted as sons through Jesus Christ."

And just so you don't miss it again, down in verse 11 it says, "In him we were also chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with his will." Now, let's go back and break this down into four statements. And then we'll try to apply it if we have time and see how this really affects the way in which we live day in and day out.

The four statements of this doctrine: First of all, this clearly says from God's point of view, which is the right point of view, you do not make yourself a Christian; God makes you a Christian. No one can make him or herself a Christian. If you're a Christian, you're a Christian purely and completely and exclusively because of the grace of God. Pride and superiority are utterly excluded. In Colossians 1:6, Paul says, "The gospel is bearing fruit in you since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in all its truth."

Listen. "The gospel is bearing fruit in you since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in all its truth." What does it mean to be a Christian? A lot of you could confess this. A lot of you could say, "All my life I thought I was a Christian and this is what I thought it meant to be a Christian. It meant to be good." See our brother, for example, who was up here giving a testimony, said, "I just wondered about Christianity and me because I thought Jesus could only handle good people and really only wanted good people."

And that's the way many of us were raised. We understand what it means to be a Christian is to be good. Paul says the gospel does not bear fruit in you until the day you realize it's all of grace. Every bit of grace. A Christian is somebody for whom the word of grace has stopped only being a word. Paul says until you heard it and understood the grace of God in all of its truth. The day that you said, "It's all of grace," and you understood the fullness of grace.

When Paul says, "By the grace of God I am what I am," he means it's because God chose me and that's why I believe today. It has nothing to do with anything in me. God did not choose me because I was better or there was something better in me. He opened my eyes. In John 6, Jesus says, "No one can come to me unless the Father draws him." And we looked at all that last week, so that's the first statement. The first statement of this doctrine is you cannot make yourself a Christian.

The second statement is this must also teach that you can't want God, and that's why God has to choose you. You can't want him. There's nothing in the Bible that says human beings can't choose God. There's nothing wrong with your little chooser. Your chooser's fine. In fact, every day you're choosing what you most want at the moment. One teacher once showed me that no one ever chooses except what they most want at the moment.

Some people say, "Oh, that's not true. I didn't want to go to the park with my daughter. I really wanted just to stay home and read the paper. But she wanted me to go, and so I went. See, I did something, I chose something that I didn't want." That's not true. You wanted to please your daughter more than you wanted to read the paper, or you wouldn't have gone. Or put it another way: you wanted to avoid the discomfort of displeasing your daughter more than you wanted the comfort of reading the paper.

The fact is no one ever chooses anything other than what they most wanted at the moment. Someone says, "But somebody had a gun to my head and said, 'I want you to do this awful thing or I'll kill you.' And so I did it. But I didn't want to do it, but he forced me to do it. I didn't choose what I wanted to do; I chose the very thing I hated." No, you didn't. You chose exactly what you most wanted. You wanted to live more than you wanted to not do that awful thing.

In every situation, your chooser works fine. You always choose what you most want. The Bible, therefore, is teaching that you can never want to submit to the authority of God unless God changes your heart. There's nothing in the Bible that says human will isn't free. Some people say, "Oh, you don't believe in free will. You don't believe that anybody has a choice between good and evil, between God and rebellion." I've had some people come up to me and say, "You believe that no one really has free choice, that God just predestines some people. But I believe in free will."

No, you don't understand. I believe in free will too. The Bible teaches that you have the choice, and your chooser works fine. It's your desires that have gone astray. You can choose God, but you can't want God. And therefore, you'll never choose God unless he changes your desires. Last week we used the example of the lion. If you give a lion who's carnivorous the choice between oats and meat, a thousand times he'll always choose the meat because he's carnivorous.

If I put in front of you a nice succulent steak on the right hand, on the left hand fried monkey brains covered with animal excrement, you have the ability to eat both of those things, but you probably won't take the monkey brains. Why not? You're repulsed by it. And you will always, a thousand times, choose the steak. The Bible says in Romans 8, the natural mind is enmity against the law of God. Unless God changes your heart, unless Jesus changes your heart, you will always hate the law of God.

Now, I've had many people who say, "Look, I'm not a Christian, but I believe in the Ten Commandments. I don't hate the law of God." And the answer is you don't mind the principles. But listen and look at yourself. You'll tell the truth until telling the truth means you lose the authority over your own life, you lose control. And whenever that happens, you will find that you will fudge on the Ten Commandments. You like the Ten Commandments in general, but the Bible says that you are incapable of really going to God and saying, "I'm going to unconditionally obey the Ten Commandments in all circumstances, even if it means the loss of my life, even if it means the loss of my job, even if it means the loss of relationships. I will never, never, never disobey. I will never lie. I will never be impure." Do you like the Ten Commandments like that?

And people don't do that. You know why? They can't do that without Christ changing their heart. Because that is more than just enjoying the Ten Commandments as moral principles. That is actually submitting to the law and taking away the authority you have over your own life and putting it in the hands of the lawgiver. And you are incapable of that.

And because you're incapable of that, you cannot possibly come unless he opens your heart. Perfect example of that is Acts 16:14. Lydia was a woman who Paul came to and he preached. And what does it say in the book of Acts? It says, "God opened Lydia's heart to give heed to the words of Paul." God opened Lydia's heart to give heed to the words. The opening comes, then comes the giving heed. The drawing, then the coming. "No man can come to me unless my Father draws." The drawing is the basis for the coming, not the coming for the drawing.

The thing that screws people up so badly is they think about other people. The thing that really keeps you from being able to rejoice in the fact that you're saved by the grace of God is that you look around and say, "Okay, okay. I can handle the idea that I'm a Christian because I was drawn. I was a Christian because of the grace of God. But what about the other people that don't believe? Won't God draw them? That doesn't seem fair." Now, what's the biblical answer for that? It's almost humorous. It's "mind your own business."

In John 21, it's really a humorous situation. At the end of the book of John, Jesus comes to Peter and says, "Peter, let me just tell you something. You are going to die a martyr's death. Someday, because you are confessing my name and you're a preacher and because you're an ambassador for me, someday they're going to come and take you away and they're going to kill you. You're going to be put to death." And this is really fairly comical.

You know what Peter does when Jesus says that? He notices John the Apostle going by and he says, "What about him?" I mean, it's hilarious. "Peter, you're going to die, you're going to be killed." "Hmm. What about him? What about him?" In other words, before I can assess, Jesus, whether or not this is fair, I want to know how you're treating everybody else. And what does Jesus say? Jesus says, "What is it to you?" which is a very sweet King James way of saying, "Mind your own business."

In the Narnia Chronicles, there's a number of places where Aslan the lion, that represents Jesus, is asked by one of the other children, "Well, what about her? What about him?" And Aslan says, "Sweetheart, I only tell you your own story. Why should I tell you everybody else's story? Trust me. I'm loving, I'm compassionate, I'm fair, I'm wise, a lot more so than you. I don't tell you other people's stories."

So if I come to you and I say, listen, the difference between Christianity and every other religion is the Buddhist can make themselves Buddhist by obeying the standards. The Muslim makes themselves a Muslim by obeying the standards. The Confucianist makes themselves a Confucianist by obeying the standards. The humanist makes themselves a humanist by obeying the standards. But Christianity is completely different. It cuts against all of that.

You're a Christian because God has come to you and opened your eyes and shown you that you're a sinner, and shown you that Jesus died on the cross for you, and that he has done everything for you. He has satisfied the law of God. Jesus has taken your punishment. He opens your eyes and says, "You don't have to do it, I've done it for you. You don't make yourself a Christian, I adopt you into my family. I've chosen you for adoption."

See how different Christianity is? And if you sit there and you can't revel in that, you can't rejoice in that, and you can't say, "I don't believe it, this is wonderful," instead you say, "What about him? What about her?" And what does Jesus say? "Sweetheart, I don't tell you other people's stories." A lot of you are not able to enjoy the sweetness of grace because you're busybodies. And I know what that's like because that's the first reaction of my own heart.

The third truth: the sweetness of it is that God's love is always prior and therefore is unconditional. Remember the prodigal son parable? The son is on his way back to repent to his father. What does the Bible say about the father? Remember the prodigal son, he'd done all these awful things, he's on his way back. And the father, it says, "seeing him a far off," dashes to him, jumps on him, pounces on him in love before he says a word.

"Seeing him far off." This is a picture of election. God does not wait, the father does not wait on the porch and say, "I will be happy to kiss him, I will be happy to accept him, I will be happy to shower him with love the minute he is willing to grovel before me and to admit that he was wrong." Instead, the father's arms are around him before he repents to make it easy for him to repent.

You know it's very hard to repent to somebody who's up there on the porch like this. What does the father do? It's not "you repent and then come the father's arms." No. The father's arms and then comes the repentance. You see, the father loves you in order to enable you to repent. The father comes and puts his arm around you and he kisses you in order to show you, "I'm ready to hear what you have to say." He draws the repentance out. Out it comes. The father's love is always prior. The father's love is aggressive, the father's love is assertive, the father's love is mugging love. He mugs you with it.

The fourth part of this truth is, first of all, you can't make yourself a Christian. Secondly, because nobody can come, God has to change your heart. Thirdly, therefore, God's love is always prior, it's aggressive, it's assertive, it's sweet. You must experience the sweetness of it and not lose the sweetness of it because you're wondering what's God doing with everybody else. Fourthly, you are predestined, you are chosen to be holy. And that means that if you have really received Christ as savior, he will not let go of you.

This means, no, it doesn't mean, for example, that once you realize that God's forgiven your sins, you can live any old way you want. Because you see, if a person says, "I've lost my incentive because I heard him say that since the Father's love is free and is gracious and since we couldn't earn the Father's love to start with, we can't unearn it later. And if we didn't deserve it to begin with, we couldn't stop deserving it later."

So once a person is saved, God says, "My sheep know my voice," says Jesus, "and they come to me and no one can pluck them out of my hand. I give them eternal life and no one can pluck them out of my hand, no one can pluck them out of the Father's hand." I heard Tim Keller preach about that, and as soon as I realized that I couldn't lose my salvation, I lost my incentive for living a good life. Anybody who says that shows that the only incentive you had was coercion, was fear of being hit.

You see, I have no incentive to live a good life anymore because I used to think that if I got out of line, the Father would hit me, the Father would cast me out. And so now I don't have any incentive anymore. You never really had Christian incentive to start with. You're a stranger to grace. The incentive that anybody has in a love relationship is not fear that the person's going to hit you. If you got into a relationship like that, it's called an abusive relationship.

If we find out that the husband has been handcuffed and no longer can hit, she has no incentive to do anything good. That is exactly what you're saying when you say, "Oh, now that I discovered that I can't lose my salvation, I don't have any incentive to listen, to obey, to be holy." The only incentive you ought to have is Christian incentive, to say, "Look at what he's done for me. What can I do for him?"

Somebody says, "Well, yes, it does say that my sheep know my voice and they come to me, and I give them eternal life and no one can pluck them out of my hand. But we still have free will and so you could still leave Jesus. It means nobody else can take them away, but if you really, really fall away, if you really rebel, you can still lose your salvation." Well, a shepherd's job is to protect the sheep, not only from the wolves, not only from robbers, but also from the stupidity of the sheep.

If a shepherd comes home and the supervisor says, "Hey, I gave you a hundred sheep, you've only got 97." He said, "Yeah, lost three." "What do you mean you lost three? It's your job to protect them." "Well, look, I protected them from the robbers, I protected them from the wolves, but those three went off on their own. You can't hold me responsible for their stupidity." And the supervisor will say, "Of course I can, that's why they need shepherds. You're to protect them from everything. I put them into your hand. Nothing should have snatched them away." If Jesus Christ is your shepherd, he is going to continue to keep your heart close to him.

This doctrine is not that once saved you can live any way you want. But this doctrine is if you've really tasted the grace of God, no matter how many down times you have, you'll always come back. You'll always persevere in seeking to be the holy person that he's chosen you to be, to be the blameless person that he's chosen you to be. There is nothing like the doctrine of election to deal with three things.

First of all, it completely gets rid of self-loathing. You got too low of a view of yourself? You sleep fitfully at night because you're just afraid you're really not worthy? Look at what he's done for you. This is a love that it's its own rationale. He loves you just because he loves you because he loves you. You cannot lose it. You cannot do anything to destroy it. It is infallible. He loves you from before the stars were founded.

Bring your stubbornness, bring your self-loathing, bring anything into the light of that and say, "The stars may fall from heaven, but his love for me will stand and his triumphant grace is going to make me holy. It's guaranteed." All of my problems, all of my sins, all of my bad habits, everything in my heart that I hate has got to eventually fall before his triumphant grace because his grace is infallible. His love for me is not conditioned on anything but his own perfection. And therefore, he is going to make me into something great.

It gets rid of self-loathing. It also gets rid of self-inflation. The reason that you're a Christian today is not because of your degrees, not because of your pedigree, not because of your will, not because of your willingness to surrender. Oh, no. It's purely and strictly and completely because he likes to choose people, especially the weak and the lowly and the despised. 1 Corinthians 1 tells us the only reason that God seems to choose some people over others is he likes the fools. He likes to turn fools into Christians to shame the people who think they're wise.

Lastly, it gets rid of self-pity. You remember the guy who was willing to sell everything he had in order to get the field because in it there was the pearl of great price, in it was the treasure? The reason he was willing to sell everything was because he knew that the value of that field would completely overwhelm any cost. A person who knows that you're a sinner saved completely by grace no longer ever feels sorry for him or herself.

You don't feel sorry for yourself because no matter what suffering you're going through, no matter what hassle or trouble you're going through, it is nothing compared to what's coming. The value of what is guaranteed completely overwhelms the cost of anything God asks you to endure if you see that you're saved completely by grace.

"'Tis not that I did choose Thee for Lord, that could not be. This heart would still refuse Thee, hast Thou not chosen me? My heart owns none before Thee, for Thy rich grace I thirst. This knowing, if I love Thee, Thou must have loved me first." Let's pray. Father, as we take up our offering, enable us to give you the praise of our hearts for your glorious grace. We ask this in Jesus' name, Amen.

Guest (Male): 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.