Gospel in Life

Guest (Male): Welcome to Gospel in Life. We live in a culture that encourages us to focus on ourselves, our needs, our goals, our fulfillment. But what if our lives only made sense when we see them as part of a much bigger story?

This summer, we’re featuring one of Tim Keller’s longer sermon series in which he teaches about the core truths of the Christian faith and the big picture of God’s ultimate plan of salvation for humanity, revealing how we can find real meaning, growth, and change in Christ.

Tim Keller: We're going to look at verse seven for the last time. When I get to verse seven, I'll read it slowly, but look at the sentence, look at the unit. Ephesians 1, verses 4 through 8:

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.

Look for the last time at verse seven. In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace. Let's look at the word forgiveness and redemption for one last time. We looked at the first aspect of redemption. Tonight, I'd like to look at the second aspect.

Redemption in Greek is the word *apolutron*, which means a ransom. A ransom has two sides to it. A ransom means, first of all, that the party being paid for is in some sort of bondage. They're in some kind of prison. They're captured. You only pay a ransom if somebody is in slavery or bondage of some sort.

Secondly, a ransom also means that there's an exchange for the life of the person in bondage. You give some sort of payment. You give some kind of exchange. There's some sort of substitution so that the person in bondage can go free. When the Bible says Jesus redeemed you, it means that we were in dire straits. We were in a terrible condition. We were in bondage. We were in slavery. We were under a curse. We were under the threat of death, or we were dead.

It means that there was a tremendous price paid, a substitution, an exchange, something of enormous value so that we could go free. Something was exchanged and given so that we could have our lives. We looked a little bit at what it means to say redemption, what the implications are, and what it means to say that we're in bondage.

The word forgiveness—"we have redemption, we have forgiveness of sins"—shows that essentially, the ransom is paid because we are in bondage to guilt. Guilt is the great problem. It's the first problem that Jesus' death and his blood shed on the cross deals with. Guilt is one of what I call the big five.

If you're not a Christian, you don't have an answer. You have no way to address five major problems in life: the problem of meaning, the problem of guilt, the problem of death, the problem of knowledge, and the problem of suffering. I was just dealing with the fact of the problem of meaning. If there is no God, if we don't know if there's a God, then nothing means anything.

Unless Jesus is who he said he is, there's no way to deal with the problem of meaning. You go down the big five, and one of the reasons that I'm a Christian today is that over the years, I looked at those things that every thoughtful person struggles with. "What does my life mean?" is one of them. "How can I face death?" is another one. "How do I understand the suffering in my life and other people's life?" is another one. "How do I know that I know anything? How does anyone know anything? How can there be any kind of truth?"

Lastly, and most importantly for us tonight: how do I deal with my guilt? Remember Macbeth, where Macbeth sees his wife, Lady Macbeth, who has just gone crazy with guilt? He turns to the doctor and says, "Canst thou not pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, and with some sweet oblivious antidote, cleanse the bosom of that perilous stuff that weighs down the heart?"

The perilous stuff that weighs down the heart is guilt. Macbeth says to his doctor, "Can't you mix up some sweet oblivious antidote to cleanse the guilt?" The doctor says, "The patient must minister to himself." That doctor had a lot more insight than a lot of people today. What he's saying is no human being can give any other human being forgiveness.

I don't care how many groups you go to in which every other person in the group has the same problem you do and has done the same thing you have. You go to that group and everybody sits around and says, "Lower your standards. Don't feel so guilty. We've all done the same thing." You feel better because of the empathy. You feel better because you're not unusual. But ultimately, that cannot deal with the guilt.

Macbeth's doctor was right. Another human being cannot give you forgiveness. That's the reason why when Jesus went around and began to forgive sins and say, "Your sins are forgiven," the religious leaders got so upset. Why didn't they say, "A new therapy! Are you licensed?" They immediately wanted to stone him. They wanted to put him to death. They knew that he was guilty of blasphemy because they realized that if Jesus is forgiving people and giving them forgiveness of sins, he is claiming to be God. They realized that no human being can give another human being forgiveness.

No therapy, no group, nothing can give you forgiveness for guilt. It can help you understand why you feel guilty. It can help you understand the roots of your guilt. It can help you understand a lot of things, but it cannot get rid of your guilt. It's the big problem. Forgiveness is something that we cannot deal with.

Remember Paul's wonderful statement in Galatians 6, in which he says, "God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of Christ, my God." The reason that forgiveness is such a problem is that sins are debts. Some people ask me why when we pray the Lord's Prayer at Redeemer, we say "forgive us our debts"? Why don't you say "forgive us our trespasses"? There's a sense in which the two words mean the same thing.

I like the word debts because I think it gets something across that the word trespass doesn't. Sin always has cost somebody something, and sin always creates an outstanding debt. If I say I'm going to meet you at this restaurant at noon, and I forget all about it—very thoughtless—I didn't take the trouble to remind myself. I didn't take the trouble to organize. I forget. Afterwards, I feel awful and I say, "Will you forgive me?" The person says, "Forget it. Of course, I forgive you."

You're out two hours because of my sin. My sin has a cost to it. My sin is a debt. I owe you two hours. You've lost something. If you lend me your coat, and I say thank you, and it's a very cold night, you lend me your coat, and then I lose it, you're out the amount of money of the coat. If I slander you—it gets harder now because you can't quantify these things monetarily—if I slander you, if I tell somebody something about you which is true but it really puts you in a bad light, or is not true, or is exaggerated, again, you're out something. You're out some amount of reputation, if you could somehow measure it.

Every sin is a debt, and that means that when you forgive, you can only forgive somebody by absorbing the cost. There's no way to forgive somebody and have the sin go into thin air. There has never been a sin that was forgiven without at the same moment the forgiver paying the cost. If you say to me, "You lost my coat. Forget it." If you forgive me for losing your coat, you are out whatever amount of money it's going to cost you to replace that coat. When you forgave me, the debt didn't go into thin air. You paid it. What you mean when you say "I forgive you" is "I will pay it. I will absorb the cost."

Debts don't go into thin air. It gets harder when you're thinking of non-monetary things. For example, if you know somebody is slandering you, if you know somebody's putting you in a bad light, and you talk with that person, and that person says, "You're right. I'm sorry." Let's just say that you say, "I forgive you." I'll tell you what it must mean or you don't mean what you're saying.

A lot of people when they say "I forgive you," what they mean is "I'm not going to actively hurt you." That's what people mean when they say "I forgive you, but I won't forget." It means "I'm not going to actively hurt you. I'm going to passively hurt you." Let me tell you what it means to forgive that person. A week later, you have an opportunity to tell somebody else what they did to you. You have an opportunity to do that, and you refrain. What are you doing? You're paying the debt. You're absorbing the cost.

You see the person several days later, and you really just want to walk away. You just want to walk around the other side of the auditorium, but you go up and you're warm and you say, "Hi, how are you? What's going to happen?" You act warm when you don't want to act warm. You hold your tongue when you want to say something. You say something nice about them when you really could undercut them. What you're doing is you're paying the debt yourself.

You're absorbing the cost. There's never been a sin forgiven that wasn't at the same moment paid for by the one forgiving. If you say, "I forgive you for having said all these things about me," but you avoid the person, you're cold to them, you let other people know what they did to me—then you haven't forgiven. Every sin is a debt. Every sin means somebody is out something. Every sin there's a cost to, and no one can forgive without absorbing that cost, or you haven't really forgiven.

If you say "I forgive," but you continue to down the person, you avoid the person, what you're doing is you continue to hold that person liable and you're making that person pay—maybe in tiny little increments. You're not punching them in the nose, nothing big, but you're still making them pay. You haven't forgiven them.

Imagine your car goes out of control and you run into somebody's house and you do more damage to the house than you could ever pay for. The debt that you owe is greater than your net worth. Then what do you do? Instinctively, we know that many of the sins we've committed and the sins that have been committed against us are greater than our net worth. We realize that we couldn't pay it back if we wanted to. We realize we couldn't pay it off if we wanted to.

The Bible says there is not only a horizontal dimension to sin. The Bible says there's a vertical dimension to sin. That's something that is absolutely important for you to recognize. If there is any meaning in life, that means there's a divine law. If you say there's no God and there's no right and wrong, that means that nothing means anything and that any discussion of categories like compassion versus violence and oppression are all subjective and relative and they mean nothing.

Nobody in this room can live like that. We all deeply sense that there is a real distinction between right and wrong because we know the Bible says that there is a God. Anybody who believes that some things are really, really right no matter what you believe, and really, really wrong no matter what you believe, essentially what you're saying then is that there is a law deeper than nature. There's a law behind nature. There's a divine law.

We all know that to be true. Therefore, we know when you read the Golden Rule—"do unto others as you would have them do unto you"—there are really two golden rules. There are the two commandments that Jesus said were the summary of all the law: love your neighbor as yourself, and love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. Those are both golden rules. If God has created you and you owe him everything, then you owe him everything. And if you want your neighbor to treat you in this way, then you must treat your neighbor in the same way.

Nobody has to teach you that. Everybody knows that intuitively. It's right in the conscience. That's the divine law. We have an obligation to God, and when we break those laws, when we break the Ten Commandments, when we fail to love God with all our heart, soul, strength, and mind, when we fail to love our neighbor as ourselves, we are running up debts to God, not just to our neighbors.

How can God forgive us by simply saying "Forget it"? He cannot do it anymore than you can do it. If somebody has wronged you and you say "Forget it," you're atoning for that sin. If you refuse to take it out of that person's hide, if you refuse to hold that person liable, you're paying for it. In the same way, if here on earth between human beings there's no such thing as forgiveness without payment, how much less can there be forgiveness between God and human beings without payment?

God could not simply say, "Let there be forgiveness." He could not just say "Forget it" and let the sins go off into the air. There had to be payment. He had to absorb the cost himself. Forgiveness of your sins and my sins is the greatest problem. I know I'm skating on thin ice to talk like this about God. God's all-powerful, and I'm just trying to be true to his revelation in the Bible. Forgiving your sins and my sins was the greatest problem that God ever faced.

How could that be a problem for God? The answer is because he is both holy and because he is also loving. He's perfectly loving and perfectly holy, and those two things cannot play against each other. They cannot contradict each other, and that created a problem. In Genesis, all God had to do was say, "Let there be light," and there was light. God had to say, "Let there be water," and there was water. God had to say, "Let there be animal life," and there was animal life.

Why is it that God couldn't just say, "Let there be forgiveness"? Why do we know from the Bible that it took him thousands of years in the fullness of time, when the time was ready, his Son had to come to earth and in a very carefully laid out plan had to be put to death for our sins? That proves that even though God is loving, he is holy. On the one hand, if God's not a holy, perfect judge, there's no hope for the universe because there's no solution for evil. But if God is a holy, perfect judge, then there is no hope for us unless payment was made. On the cross, both the holiness and love of God were perfectly joined, and they shine forth.

Unless you understand it, you really don't understand Christianity. As a matter of fact, I can prove to some of you you don't understand Christianity. For example, some of you believe that Jesus Christ is wonderful, Christianity is a wonderful religion, but there are plenty of other people in other religions who are decent and they're loving and they're kind and they're humble and they ask for forgiveness for their sins and God forgives them, right?

Isn't that what you believe? You think it's tremendously narrow-minded to say that only Christians who believe in Jesus would ever go to heaven. That proves you have no idea about the difficulty of forgiveness. Why on earth would God ever put forth his Son as a redemption if there was any other way to be saved? When you say a person in another religion without believing in Christ, without relying on his blood, can get to heaven—what you really say is what Jesus did is not absolutely necessary.

If I'm on a boat and we're in a swift river and I'm in a boat with a friend and the friend says to me, "I just don't know how to tell you how much I love you. I know what I'll do. I'll jump out of the boat and drown myself. Then you'll know how much I love you." If the person jumps out of the boat, will you be moved? Will you say, "Now there's a man who really loves me"? Or will you say, "What? I wish I'd grabbed him so I could have taken him to a hospital." The poor man's obviously deranged.

Why? Because your life wasn't in jeopardy. If he didn't have to die, then for him to voluntarily die is not an act of love. It's an act of derangement. If he didn't have to die, then his death is ridiculous. It's senseless. It's illogical. It's frivolous. It's trivial. It's perverted. But on the other hand, if the boat's sinking and I can't swim, and he drowns but saves my life, and it's the only way that I would have been saved—then I know that he loved me. He gave his life for me because I really was in peril. He gave his life for me because I was really dead unless he got me out.

If you say that God could forgive sins apart from faith in Christ, you have no idea of the Christian understanding of sin as a debt. You have no idea what a difficult thing forgiveness is for God. You also have completely trivialized and made absolute mincemeat of the logic behind the death of Jesus Christ. It is now evacuated of its glory. You cannot have it two ways. Either Jesus Christ's death is the only way to God, or Jesus Christ's death is utter absurdity. You choose. You tell me.

I'm trying to prove to a lot of you that you really don't understand the glory of what God did on the cross. If you think anybody else apart from faith in Christ could possibly come to God without it, then you have no idea its cruciality. The English word for crucial comes from the Latin word for *crux*, which means cross. You don't understand the cruciality of the cross.

A lot of you say, "I'm a Christian, and I believe Jesus died for me on the cross." But let's be honest, your lives are not transformed. One of the most interesting things about this text is right here, actually right in front and right after the verse. It says he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, to the praise of his glorious grace. In verse seven, it says, "In him we have redemption through his blood, according to the riches of his grace." It's saying that the greatest manifestation of the glory of God is the transformed lives of the people that he's redeemed.

He has adopted you, he has redeemed you to the praise of his glorious grace. That means that you are the greatest evidence of the glory of God in the universe. This is not the only place it says this. Ephesians 3:10 says that we have become a display case for the glory and grace of God. The angels long to look at the wisdom of God that's manifested in the church.

Every so often, I look around the congregation. One of the problems as the church has gotten bigger is it's more and more my job to feed the shepherds and the shepherdesses who are feeding the sheep. As a result, I don't talk as much to people who are just coming over the line into faith in Christ as I used to. To some degree, I have to actually go back a year or two. I can look around the congregation on Sundays and other days, and I especially look at a lot of you that I've known for two or three years. I look at you sometimes and I say, "What a trophy of grace that is."

In some ways, being a pastor, I was privy to an awful lot of your pasts. I know what revolutions have happened in some of your lives. I begin to realize when I look around that you are trophies of God's grace. The Bible says ultimately, the transformed lives of the people who have been redeemed standing in the church is the greatest evidence of the glory of God in the universe. The angels long to look into it. They're amazed with what he's done to you. Knowing where you were and where you are now, we're supposed to be a people whose lives are so changed that people on the outside look at us and say, "What a glorious God those people must have."

Have you been adopted? Have you been redeemed really? That means that you will be bringing praise to the glory of God as people see what the grace of God has done in your life. Everything that's happening to you is to the praise of his glorious grace. Everything that's happening to you is evidence of his glorious grace. You are the greatest thing in the universe that shows forth the glory of God. There's nothing else like a redeemed man or a redeemed woman. Nothing. The angels don't know about it. They long to look into it. They say that we're experiencing sides of God's glory that they cannot even understand yet. They're looking into us like clear glasses.

Down in Florida, you look down. If you're on the boat and you're just trying to look down, you have all this reflection. The surface makes it impossible to look down, but the glass-bottom boat helps you look all the way to the bottom and you see all kinds of wonders. We are glass-bottom boats on the surface of the heart of God. The universe and the principalities and powers of the universe long to look into it.

Have you been changed? Have you been revolutionized? A lot of you haven't. A lot of you say you're Christians, a lot of you recite the creed, a lot of you have been professing believers for a long time, and a lot of you know darn well that you're not trophies of grace. You know darn well when the angels look at you, they do not see a whole lot. They surely do not see much unique. I believe it's because many of you still do not understand the doctrine of the cross.

Paul says, "God forbid that I should glory except in the cross of Christ, my God." Some translations say, "God forbid that I should boast." If you understand that forgiveness was impossible apart from the cross, that it was the greatest problem in the history of the universe—how to forgive you and me. It was so great that even the almighty God could not snap his fingers but took years to bring it about. And there is no other way possible for you to be forgiven except through the cross and what Jesus Christ did on it and the shedding of his blood.

If you believe that—which means, of course, Jesus is the only way to God—if you believe that, which means complete commitment to him is necessary, then when you look at what Jesus did on the cross, you'll be transformed. You'll boast in it. What does it mean to boast in something? It means this is the thing I turn to when I feel weak. This is the thing that I turn to when I feel unworthy. What do you really boast in? What do you look at that you can really be proud of? For a Christian, it's the cross. It's the blood.

To please God, to be a real ingredient in his joy, to be loved by God, not just pitied, but delighted in as an artist delights in her work or a parent in his child, that is a weight of glory our thoughts can hardly sustain, but so it is. I believe that if you're willing to accept the doctrine that this verse teaches—that you were guilty, that you were under penalty of death, and that only shed blood could possibly save you—unless you're willing to admit those doctrines, the cross will never melt you. The trouble with those doctrines is that they're completely unpopular. They're completely unmodern.

Some people hate the idea that Jesus had to shed his blood for you to be forgiven. It means that your sins are capital offenses. The ransom was not money. It says in 1 Peter 1, it was not with silver and gold that you were ransomed, but with his own blood he bought us. It means that the penalty we owed was death. Only his life poured out, his violent death—that's what blood represents—could have saved us. That means that your sins are capital offenses. Every one of your sins deserved death and damnation.

Am I in Manhattan in 1992 talking to somebody that probably has more than a high school education who's saying that? Do you really believe that? I'm telling you, yes, I believe that. But until you believe that, the cross will never be a glorious thing to you. It will never melt you. It will never transform you. You will never be a trophy of grace. You will never see changes in your lives. To boast in the cross, in order to have it lift you up high, first you have to get down awfully low. The only way to be exalted is to be humbled and admit, "Yes, I deserved to die for my sins. Forgiveness was such a problem to a holy God. I was so wicked and I was so lost that he had to put forth his Son as a propitiation, as a sacrifice, as a substitute for my sin."

In a single acorn, there is enough power to fill the earth with wood. If there was not a tree in the whole world, one acorn would be all it would take. Out of that one acorn would come a tree, which would come other acorns, which would come other trees. The entire world, the entire universe, all the plants could eventually be filled with the wood that came out of one acorn cup.

The Bible tells us that every one of your little resentments is like an acorn, and inside there is murder. Under the right conditions, every lustful thought wants to be adultery. Every resentful thought wants to be murder. Every doubt wants to become atheism. Every sin is cosmic treason against the throne of God. And when we finally got our hands on God, when he was finally made himself vulnerable for a little while, we killed him.

Do you understand that your sins—your desire to live your own life, your resentments, your impurities, your dishonesties—they're masquerading and they look like little acorns, but inside them is every possible violent thought, every possible sin? You are worthy of death. The only way for you to be freed from your guilt was for Jesus to shed his blood.

If you believe that, then when you look at the cross you say, "For me?" There was a great Scottish seminary professor who was such a great teacher that he was nicknamed Rabbi Duncan. There is a famous story about how Rabbi Duncan would get caught up when he was lecturing on the doctrine of the death of Christ. At one point, he got overwhelmed and he lost his voice, and then suddenly he said, "Do you know what Calvary is? It's damnation, and he took it for us lovingly."

Unless you see it as damnation, unless you see all these dire doctrines that everybody hates today—that your sin is worthy of death, you ought to be damned for your sins, your sins are capital offenses, that God is a holy God who could not just let go of our sins, that he had to put forth his Son Jesus Christ as a propitiation for our sins—if you don't believe that, you will never understand the power that the cross has in the lives of people whose lives are being revolutionized by it. It's the dynamic of the Christian life. God forbid that I should glory in anything except the cross of Christ. Anything else I glory in, anything else that programs my self-appreciation, anything else that gives me hope, anything else that I base my life on, anything else that I boast in evacuates me from my power. I do not have any power.

But when I boast in the cross, and when I say I matter to the only one that matters, the only eyes that count see me as a beautiful son or daughter of the king because of what Jesus Christ did on the cross—he took my damnation. A Christian looks at that and every time you look at that, your heart melts, your sin is burnt off when you look at the cross like that. Just like putting ore through a furnace, the dross comes off. Look at it and see what he did. How in the world can I fail to be a forgiving person? How can I fail to give God what he's due? How can I feel sorry for myself? How can I be depressed? Until you see the problem of forgiveness and the cruciality of the cross, there is no hope for change. You'll never be a trophy of grace.

If you don't understand how hard forgiveness was, you will not understand why Jesus is the only way to God in the Christian faith. If you don't understand how hard forgiveness is, you will not understand the glory of the cross and you will never be changed by it. If you don't understand how hard forgiveness is, you will not do the work of forgiving your brother and sister and your neighbor.

Here's something that could make our church something that the angels wouldn't mind to come to study: a church of people who are radically forgiving all the time. I love to quote Martin Luther's first thesis of the 95 Theses: "All of life is repentance." I wish he'd added also, "All of life is forgiveness." Are we going to be a group of people who cannot keep a grudge for more than an hour? Are we going to be a group of people who see that the omnipotent God was able to snap his fingers to do everything else, but when it came to forgiveness, it was even a problem for him? It was tremendously expensive for him.

Of course, forgiving the person who's wronged you—your neighbor, your friend, your family member, your brother, your sister—of course it's going to be expensive. But look at what he did. What's holding you back? Until you see the difficulty of forgiveness, you're never going to go through it yourself. If you think it's too hard, you're not looking at what it cost him to forgive you.

Do you believe in the cruciality of the cross? Can you really boast in it? This is the acid test of whether you're really a Christian or just a kind of nominal believer. A Christian doesn't just say "Sure I believe in the cross," a Christian boasts in it. When you listen to that great hymn, "When I Survey the Wondrous Cross," you see the difference between a Christian and a nominal believer. A nominal believer says "I believe in the cross," but a Christian surveys the cross. A Christian revels in its eternal paradoxes. The Prince of Glory died? Thorns compose a crown? Holiness and love intertwining and meeting and both triumphing together?

When you pour contempt on all your pride, you will finally be free. Don't just believe in the cross, survey the cross. Don't just believe in a general way, but see: in him we have redemption through his blood, forgiveness of sins, according to the riches of his grace, to the praise of his glorious grace. Let's pray.

Father, during the offering what we ask is that you would help us to see. Some of us need to give you our grudges and our bitterness because we haven't seen the difficulty that forgiveness of sins was to you. We're not thinking about that, and I pray that you would enable us to forgive. Some people here need to give you their lives, though, because they have up until now never seen what it means to believe in you, to glory in the cross, to boast in the cross. I pray, Father, that if there's people here struggling with the teachings of this verse that run so counter to the modern mindset, that you would help them to see the coherence of your truth. And you would help them see the responsibility they have to commit to that truth. O Lord, make us all, appoint us all, to live for the praise of your glorious grace. We pray this in Jesus' name, Amen.

Guest (Male): Thanks for listening to Tim Keller on the Gospel in Life podcast. If you’d like to see more people encouraged by the Gospel-centered teaching and resources of this ministry, we invite you to consider becoming a Gospel in Life monthly partner. Your partnership helps connect people all over the world with the life-giving power of Christ’s love. To learn more, just visit gospelinlife.com/partner. That website again is gospelinlife.com/partner.

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.