Gospel in Life

Guest (Male): Welcome to Gospel in Life. Where do you turn when you need clarity or strength in a difficult situation? In Luke's Gospel, we see how Jesus confronted his own temptations and trials through Scripture and prayer. Today, Tim Keller explores how we can claim these same powerful resources and how we can live with hope and resilience in a difficult world.

Guest (Male): The scripture reading is taken from Luke, chapter 4, verses 1 through 13. Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry.

The devil said to him, "If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread." Jesus answered, "It is written: Man shall not live on bread alone." The devil led him to a high place and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And he said to him, "I will give you all their authority and splendor; it has been given to me, and I can give it to anyone I want to. If you worship me, it will all be yours."

Jesus answered, "It is written: Worship the Lord your God and serve him only." The devil led him to Jerusalem and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. "If you are the Son of God," he said, "throw yourself down from here. For it is written: He will command his angels concerning you to guard you carefully; they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone." Jesus answered, "It is said: Do not put the Lord your God to the test." When the devil had finished all this tempting, he left him until an opportune time. The Word of the Lord.

Tim Keller: Now, this very famous passage about the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, he's assaulted by the devil and then how he deals with it through the Word of God, through the Scripture, the use of the Bible. That's what we're going to look at here tonight. We're going to be looking at how this Scripture actually functions in our lives, but there's way more to say about that than we can do here. In fact, I'm glad that later on, actually later this spring, we're going to get back to the subject.

But here, we learn in a very practical way when you are being assaulted, when you're in the wilderness, how do you handle the trials, the difficulties, the temptations? And we're going to see how Jesus uses the Scripture, how we can too. So let's look at this this way. We're going to learn here the depth and complexity of evil. Secondly, some of the strategies of evil. And thirdly, how to defeat it using the Scripture. The depth and the complexity, the strategies, and the defeat of evil.

Now, first of all, the depth and complexity. This story, this account, is about the devil. It says in verse 2, "where for forty days he was tempted by the devil." And I think we're in New York City, and so for some of you who are listening, you're saying, "Do you really expect that we should today believe in the actual existence of a devil? Do you really expect that?" And my answer is, "Yeah, I wish you would believe in a devil." In fact, I would go so far, I would stick my neck out so far that I would say it's dangerous not to believe in the devil.

To illustrate what I'm trying to say, I'm thinking about a pretty sad chapter in American history in World War II. Our president was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, FDR. And FDR, like most people, especially most leaders and most educated people in the middle of the 20th century, had the modern view that evil was always the result of some kind of psychological or sociological condition, that evil always had a natural explanation.

If people or nations were violent, were cruel or evil, it was because either they were desperate for better living conditions, or it was because they were mistreated, and that if you wanted to deal with evil, what you needed to do was have enlightened social policy, education, you needed to bring about economic prosperity, you needed to create a just society, and then people would live together peacefully and they would live together generously.

And because of that view of evil, FDR and many other American leaders did not believe the early reports of the Holocaust, of what became the Holocaust. They did not believe the reports of what was going on in Nazi Germany until they came to see it was true. And they didn't take any steps at the time. Near the very end of FDR's life, and at the very end of near the end of World War II, of course, there's a story, a true story about how when FDR would go up to his weekend house up on the in upstate New York, he went to a church on the weekends and he spoke to one of the young ministers there about the fact that he was reading Christian theology.

He was reading Kierkegaard at least, and some other Christian philosophers and theologians about original sin and about the devil. And he said to the minister that finally he was coming to understand. Because he said he didn't understand how the most educated country in the world practically, a culture that gave us the research university, that invented modern scholarship to a great degree, so cultured, so educated, how could they do such evil? It just seemed impossible.

But then he actually said by reading about original sin, about spiritual and supernatural evil, he was beginning to understand. Whenever you get into a place where you think you can reduce evil to biological, sociological, or psychological factors and therefore we can fix it, we can control it, we can manage it, the results are deadly. Because there are aspects to evil that go beyond things like the economics, they go beyond the social, they go beyond the psychological. It's not manageable, it's not controllable, and when you think you can do it and you can fix it, you're in for not just disappointment but in many cases tragic, tragic, tragic missteps.

So, the biblical doctrine that there are demons and that there is a devil is actually not naive, but frankly, it avoids naivete about evil. But not only does it teach us about the depth of evil, we also learn here about the complexity of evil, I said. See, there's many people who think that if you really believe in a devil like the Bible says, then you have a simplistic view of evil, that you always think the devil made them do it, that you're not understanding all the nuances. And I would like you to see, no, the way the Bible understands the demonic, the way the Bible understands the devil, actually brings you into a more nuanced and more complex and more sophisticated understanding of evil than I think modern people have.

How so? Well, even take a look here. We're going to look at these temptations in a second, but in every case, you don't see Satan trying to put Jesus in a headlock and say, "You are going to obey me." No, he's going inside, he's using psychological factors. He's using physical factors, he uses his hunger. Aren't you hungry? Let's turn these stones into bread. He's using the fact that he had come in order to be King. Jesus came into the world to be King of the world, he's the rightful King of the world, and Satan's saying, "I can arrange that."

He's going inside and using psychological factors, he's using physical drives and he's trying to create a kind of alliance between himself and those inner things. In other words, evil even here in this text, you can see is complex. So, for example, this is not simplistic. When in Luke chapter 22, verse 3, it says that Satan entered into Judas. I was reading this the other day, and it said, "Satan entered into Judas" and then he looked to betray Jesus. What does it mean Satan entered into Judas?

Now, if you think the Bible's simplistic, you think, well, he was possessed. You know, like in the movie *The Exorcist*. So I guess three or four days later after Satan entered into Judas and he was trying to betray Jesus, I can imagine a couple disciples walking along saying, "Hey, have you noticed anything different about Judas lately?" The other disciple says, "Yeah, you know, sometimes his head turns completely around and he vomits green stuff at you and he talks in all these strange voices." And the other disciple says, "Yeah, what's up with that?" And is that what happened? Of course not. That's not what you see in the text.

What you see is that Judas's envy and resentment that he gave into on the inside became a foothold for something quite evil on the outside and took him someplace that maybe he didn't even really want to go. See, Ephesians 4:27, "Don't let the sun go down on your anger, don't give the devil that kind of foothold." Now isn't that a strange statement? To let the sun go down on your anger means to hold a grudge. It means not to deal with your anger. Let the sun go down on it means to hold a grudge. You say, "Well, that's not so bad."

Well, no. If evil was nothing but psychological, if there was no other dimensions to it, maybe it wouldn't be so bad. But what we're told here is that if you nurture spiritual darkness in you even by just holding onto a grudge, it gives an opportunity for the supernatural darkness outside to create an alliance and to take you places you may not want to go. To lock your emotional dungeon double-locked and doubly deep. And you might find yourself surprised that you just can't seem to let go of the anger and you find you let it let you do things that you wouldn't really want to do.

First Timothy 3 says, "Don't promote a new believer too quickly into leadership." Why? Because it says he might become conceited and fall into the trap of the devil. Not just conceited, not just he gets a big head, but that's used by those forces of darkness in the world. Or Hebrews chapter 2:14 says as long as you're afraid of death, you're under the power of the devil. Interesting. Anyway, here's the point. The point is, according to the Bible, evil is not simple at all.

It has a physical aspect, it has a social aspect, it has a spiritual aspect, it has a sociological aspect. You know, when the Bible talks about the world, the flesh, and the devil? The world, the flesh, and the devil. The world means you're sinned against, that's the social aspect. You're sinned against by all sorts of individuals and classes and systems in society. But at the same time, the flesh means you also have a self-centeredness. So you're sinned against and you sin, and those things are bad.

But then there's not just sin inside you and sin outside you, there's sin above you. There's someone orchestrating it all. There are forces that are trying to intensify and complexify and make the relationships between the various aspects of evil magnify the whole. See, I only believe unless you bring in the demonic you can really come to grips with how it is so often that the whole of evil is greater than the sum of its parts.

Hannah Arendt went to see the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel in the early 1960s, I think it was 1961. Adolf Eichmann had been a major Nazi war criminal who was hiding out and they found him and they brought him back to Israel and he had done tremendous evil. And when he was being tried, Hannah Arendt was there and she was shocked at what she saw and she wrote an essay about it called *The Banality of Evil*.

How banal this man was. She said, "This man doesn't seem like a monster. What he is is he's a kind of a small-minded little guy and he just he didn't really he wanted to do well, he didn't care about other people, all he was trying to do was move ahead, but he was small, he was cowardly, all he did was he said 'I see nothing, I know nothing,' that kind of thing." And yet, he did enormous evil and he doesn't seem like a monster. No, the sum of evil is always greater than the parts.

You know, if you were part of, if you're old enough to know a very evil social system like racial segregation in the South of the United States, if you're old enough to have been there and know that, and know the kind of devastation that it caused to so much, so many people. And yet, if you actually talk to the individuals who were in the system that supported the system, none of them seemed like such bad people. Why? The magnification.

There is a chaos in your heart and there is a chaos in the world. There is a spiritual darkness inside and there is supernatural darkness around, and they work together. The supernatural darkness, personal supernatural evil of the demonic, magnifies the evil inside of us and makes the world a much worse place than it would be otherwise. Do you understand the depth and the complexity of evil? The Bible does. Okay, number one.

Number two. Let's figure out what the strategies of evil are. Now one of the things that's interesting about this passage is it's very famous but if we look at it, we're going to see some of the strategies of evil. How does evil mess you up? How does it take you down? How does it ruin your life? How does it happen? How does the demonic work? Well, first of all, I'd like to show you a main strategy and then a couple of weapons that evil has. A main strategy and a couple of weapons.

First, the main strategy is, what do all these temptations have in common? They all have in common that they are good things that are being held up to Jesus, not bad things. Satan is not asking Jesus to break one of the Ten Commandments. He is not saying, "I want you to commit adultery, I want you to lie, I want you to steal." Martin Scorsese thought that *The Last Temptation of Christ* was Mary Magdalene. Satan didn't get the memo.

Or even if he had got the memo, he would have known, "Give me a break, I know how to really destroy the Messiah, I know how to really destroy a person. Don't give me that." No, I'm not trying to say adultery is fine and I'm not trying to say that lying is fine, but notice he is not going after Jesus in that way. He's not saying, "I want you to do bad things." What's he doing? He's taking good things and holding them up. What are the good things?

Well, first of all, he says, "Aren't you hungry? Let's use your miraculous power to turn these stones into bread." Is there anything wrong with bread? Is there anything wrong with food? No. Then look at the second thing. He says, "I can give you all the kingdoms in this world." Now maybe you and I, that wouldn't be quite fair or right, I'm not sure you and I are cut out to be king or queen of the world, but Jesus was.

In fact, Jesus had come to be King of the world. And so the second thing he offers him is also for Jesus a very good thing. And the third thing, of course, is what he's asking for is he says, "I want you to trust God for your safety, and I want you to see the whole world, I want the whole world to see how you trust God and how God is faithful to you." So he takes him up to the top and he says, "Throw yourself off this pinnacle and let the world see the miraculous way in which God bears you up." Are these bad things? No.

But in each case, Jesus would have to disobey God to get those things. So first of all, you say what's so disobedient about turning the stones to bread? If you read the Gospels, you know that Jesus never did anything like that. He never said to the disciples, "Oh, looks like it's raining, watch," and then he snaps and suddenly there's a roof over their head or something like that. Jesus never uses his power for himself.

He only uses his power in sacrificial service for others because that's the mission, that's what he came to do. He came not to accrue power, but to give it up. He came not to be served, but to serve and to give his life. And therefore, this is a complete denial of that way in which he was supposed to use power.

Jesus was the most influential man to ever walk the earth, and his story has been told through books, movies, and articles in hundreds of different ways. Can anything more be said about him? In his book *Jesus the King*, Tim Keller journeys through the Gospel of Mark to reveal how the life of Jesus helps us make sense of our lives. Dr. Keller shows us how the story of Jesus is at once cosmic, historical, and personal, calling each of us to take a fresh look at our relationship with God.

During the month of March, we'll send you a copy of *Jesus the King* as our thanks for your gift to help Gospel in Life share the transforming love of Christ with people all over the world. So request your copy today at gospelonlife.com/give. That's gospelonlife.com/give. Now, here's Dr. Keller with the remainder of today's teaching.

Secondly, what's wrong with getting all the kingdoms of the world? Well, the only problem is Satan is saying, "I can get you the kingdoms of the world without you going to the cross. I can get you the kingdoms of the world without suffering." And of course, that was part of the mission. And so what he was saying is, "I can give you this, but you have to disobey God, of course."

And even the last thing where he's saying, "I want you to be a spectacle, I want you to show the world how great you are," and all that sort of thing. Again, what he's really trying to do is he's trying to knock Jesus off of his mission. And so here is the point. Any good thing that becomes more important than God, that's what Satan's trying to do, he says, "These are good things, don't you want these things? But of course, if you have to disobey God to get them, what you're making them is they're more important than God."

Any good thing that is more important than God to you will become a demonic force in your life. You'll be aligning yourself with the forces of evil and destruction. If you take any good thing and you elevate it so it's really more important than God. If you for example, I've had plenty of people say to me over the years, "You know, I believed in God and I went to church, but then I asked for this and I asked for that and he didn't give it to me and I said, 'What good is it to serve God if he won't even give me those things?' and I walked away."

In other words, what are you saying? I had this in my life and I had God in my life, and when I couldn't have both, what went? I decided to get rid of God. In other words, this is more important than Him. And honestly, friends, everybody does this unless you realize you do this, unless you stop doing this. I'm not talking to people who are really messed up, you know, you might fall into the clutches of the devil. I'm saying that this is the trajectory of all of us unless you see that you're in this trajectory.

You're going to be giving demonic forces free play in your life. If you put your children over God, if your children are more important to you than God, if a spouse is more important to you than God, if a career is more important of course, but I mean if even some great political or social cause, it's a great social cause but it's more important than God.

See, here's how it becomes demonic. Anything that's more important than God is going to ruin your life, it's going to drive you, you're becoming an addict, you're actually already enslaved. You have to have it. You know, if career's more important than God, my career's got to go well. If my children are more important than God, they've got to be okay, they've got to and you'll do anything to make it so, including stepping on people, breaking the law, doing things immoral or illegal. You'll be filled with anger and bitterness toward anybody who gets in your way. Oh my. Anything more important than God, any good thing made more important than God becomes demonic, and that you can see in the way in which Satan assaults Jesus.

Also, we learn here two weapons that Satan uses, two specific weapons. And the two weapons are temptation and accusation. Temptation and accusation. Now, one of the problems I think is the English word here that translates the Greek word that probably should be translated "test." It says forty days he was tested by the devil, and the Greek word here really means to put pressure on somebody, real pressure to try to break them.

But the fact is that the things that Satan is doing to Jesus are not strictly only temptations. Jesus is being subject to both temptation and accusation. What is that? Well, temptation is what you think. It's an enticement to do something wrong. And generally speaking, temptation works through overconfidence. The devil tempts you by saying, "Hey, everything will be okay, just just do it. It'll be okay, nobody will know, or if they do know, you can do this, you can do that, God will accept you, it'll be all right."

It basically temptation is overconfidence and playing down the holiness of God. Well, yeah, it's probably wrong but who knows, other people believe this and that about it. Do it. Okay, that's temptation. Accusation is completely the other side. In accusation, Satan comes to you and says, "Look what you have done, look what a failure you are, look at how awful, God cannot love you anymore. How can you even look at yourself in the mirror?"

So what you have to do is realize that these two things are almost opposite. In one case, you're being made overconfident. God is seen strictly as love but not as holy. "Oh, God will accept you, go ahead and sin." In accusation, God again is being made one-dimensional. He's being seen only as a holy judge and not as a forgiving Father.

And actually, Thomas Brooks, 17th-century Puritan who wrote a great little paperback which you can get very inexpensively by the way, it's called *Precious Remedies Against Satan's Devices*. Nice long title. And in it he talks about the fact that very often temptation and accusation go hand in hand. And it works like this. It's a one-two punch. One-two punches are very devastating.

The temptation goes like this. On your way into sin, Satan is saying, "Don't worry, don't worry, God will forgive you, God will forgive you." And the minute you sin, he turns and says, "And you call yourself a Christian. God will never have anything to do with you now. One time too many. Go find some little hole somewhere, you shameful thing, and just curl up in a ball and die." So first, "everything will be fine, you're fine, it's okay, don't worry about it." As soon as you sin, "you wretch."

And some of you know what I'm talking about. Some of you know very, very well what I'm talking about. There is somebody out there that does not like you, and you can't see him. And he does these things. And he's doing them to Jesus because on the one hand, he's saying, "Don't you want this? I can make you King." On the other hand, he keeps saying, "If you're the Son of God." Twice he says, "If you're the Son of God."

What do you mean, if you're the Son of God? Well, are you sure God really loves you? How do you know? Don't you think you ought to prove it? I'm not sure, are you really sure? See, he uses both temptation and accusation on Jesus, he'll use both temptation and accusation on you. But the main thing he'll try to do is try to get you to take something good and make it a supreme thing, make it a God substitute, and then it will become demonic in your life.

So lastly, what are we going to do about this? What you should do about it, and what's clear and as I told you, we actually get back to this sometime later on in the preaching cycle, later on this spring actually. It's obvious what Jesus does in every case. He uses Scripture every time. It's very striking. And I want you to see why the way to defeat the devil, the way to defeat evil, is through the means and the message of Scripture. The means and the message.

The means is the Scripture itself. Jesus quotes Scripture every time, and he uses the Scripture to answer the things that Satan is saying. He quotes Deuteronomy 8 and Deuteronomy 6 and Deuteronomy 6. Very carefully he quotes them. And he's always doing this when in times of extremity, when in times of crisis. Whenever he's in times of crisis, he always gets out the Scripture. And the most obvious place is when he's on the cross and he's dying on the cross.

Do you know that he quotes Scripture from the cross? "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" is a quotation from Psalm chapter 22, verse 1. And the last thing he says, according to the Gospel of Luke, the last thing he says, "Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit," is actually a quote from Psalm 31:5. Now, thought experiment for a second. Most of the time when you're with people, you are aware of who you ought to be and how you ought to be, and so you pull yourself together, right? And you try to be the person you ought to be or the person you wish to be or the person you're expected to be, don't you as much as you can?

But if you're in agony, if you're in pain, if you're in a crisis, if you're looking at death in the face and you're screaming and crying out, you're not trying to be whoever you think you ought to be. You are just being who you are. At that point, whatever is in you is just coming out, the real you, there's no nothing else, the real you is coming out.

And when Jesus Christ was in these times of crisis and especially when he was in this astounding crisis where he was screaming in the agony of pain, what was coming out? Scripture. Which means he was completely and thoroughly permeated with and saturated with Scripture. It shaped his life, it nurtured him, it was his meat, it was his drink, it was his blood almost. He was literally bleeding Scripture when he was speared and nailed.

It was that crucial to who he was. It was that crucial to how he thought, it was that crucial to how he felt. And that's the reason why he just automatically, when crisis hits, he goes to the Word of God and it guides him and it empowers him. And that's Jesus. But he doesn't simply, by the way, it's not just the means of Scripture, it's the message of Scripture.

See, Jesus is not just waving the book at Satan and Satan backs off like a vampire. It's not like there's nothing magic about the book. It's not like, "Well, if I want to be okay with if I want to be safe from Satan, I'll just put Bibles all around me and I'll stand there and then Satan can't get to me. If he comes near and he tries to get in there, you know, he starts to burn." No.

Jesus Christ knows it's the message of the Scripture. That's the reason why, for example, in verse 8, to Satan he says, "It is written: Worship the Lord your God and serve him only." He's not just quoting any old Scripture, he's not just waving a book at Satan. He's saying, "You're lying. You're telling me that if I put this thing ahead of God, everything would be okay, and I want you to know that idolatry will destroy."

Here's what he's doing. Satan cannot hurt you. In fact, nobody can hurt you unless he can get into your heart false beliefs and lies. What makes you what you are, what determines how you think and how you feel and how you act, is what your main beliefs are about God, about yourself, your main commitments and hopes about life, about right and wrong.

Whatever your most fundamental beliefs are, the things you believe, that is what determines who you are. And you know that to some degree. If years ago, your father said, "You're never going to amount to anything," you may think, "Well, I don't believe that, I'm trying to make myself," and yet you know to some degree you're driven. Why are you driven? And you're upset and you get so upset about this and that. Why? Because you know that belief is down in there and you haven't been able to get it out. And that's having an impact on your, on how you live. Right?

Nobody can hurt you unless they can get some belief, some main belief down, some idea down into your heart that your heart believes. And Satan can't hurt you a bit unless you believe his lies. See, if he comes along and he whispers to you, "If you're thin and if you have a great career, then then you'll be okay. Otherwise, you know, you're going to hate yourself and people are going to look at you funny."

In other words, he comes and he puts these things down in deep into you and you are not able to do anything about them unless you do what Jesus Christ did, which is he was so saturated with the Scripture that the Scripture went down in there and showed those lies to be what they were. And the number one lie is this: that you can save yourself, that you can prove yourself.

Why is it that Satan did not try to get Jesus to break the moral law or the Ten Commandments? He didn't mind if Jesus Christ was a moral example, he didn't mind if we look to Jesus as our example and say, "I'm going to live like Jesus and then everything will be okay." Because as long as you're trying to save yourself, as long as you're trying to say, "If I do this and if I do that, then God will bless me and then I'll feel good about myself," as long as Jesus is only your example, Satan's got you right where he wants you.

You'll be insecure, you'll be afraid, you'll always be trying to prove yourself because deep down inside, you're going to believe the lie. And the lie goes something like this. "I'll only be lovable, I'll only be significant, I'll only be secure if I get this or I accomplish this or I accomplish this."

The thing that Satan wanted to stop Jesus from doing at all costs was to go to the cross. He said, "I'll give you the kingdoms, but don't go to the cross." But he did go to the cross. And because he went to the cross, see, that was the big test. The real test was in the Garden of Gethsemane when it was dark and there was nobody around and he knew he was about to have to drink the big cup of divine wrath and he was supposed to take our punishment for us, and that was the test.

He didn't want to do it, but he said, "Thy will be done," and he went to the cross. And if you see him not as your example, but as your Savior dying for you. See, that's the one thing the devil does not want you to see and doesn't want you to understand.

Because if you see Jesus Christ going to the cross for you, that ends your temptation. Why? Because you see your sin is so serious that Jesus had to die. Sin is not a light thing. Jesus gave his life. Why? He had to. Why? Because sin is so serious. See, Satan knows if you see that and it gets down deep into your heart, it's going to be hard for him to tempt you.

But also, when you see that Jesus Christ died for you so that even when you screw up, God still loves you. He'll never, ever, there's no condemnation for those who are in Jesus Christ. Oh, then that's the end of the accusation too. If that just sinks down into your heart, the Gospel, the Gospel of Jesus Christ who's passing the test not as your example but as your substitute, as your Savior.

Three things. Number one: Are you somebody who actually doesn't believe in the devil or supernatural evil and you think all evil is basically a matter of natural conditions, social and psychological conditions? I urge you to change your worldview.

Number two: If you say, "I'm a Christian" and yet basically you haven't seen the radical, costly grace of Jesus Christ, it hasn't sunk in how completely accepted you are because of what Jesus Christ did and what enormous cost that he bore in order to save you, then you are still going to find the temptation and accusation is still got an awful lot of power over you.

And number three, friends, if Jesus Christ did not think he could handle life without knowing the Scripture, do you think we can? If Jesus Christ didn't think he could handle life without memorizing and meditating on and having the Scripture just dominate his thoughts? He knew it inside out, it knew him inside out, and if Jesus didn't think he could handle life without it, what makes us think we can? How are you doing here? Jesus Christ said, "Heaven and earth may pass away, but my words will never pass away." Let's pray.

Father, thank you for helping us. Thank you for giving us what we need. You've given us your Word, you've given us your Spirit, you've given us everything we need in order to handle the assaults of evil, but we are not using them as we should. We pray then you would help us, because it would heal our hearts and it would glorify you and it would bring honor to your name. So please accomplish this in our lives, for your name's sake. We ask it through Jesus and in his name we pray, 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 connects people all over the world with the life-giving power of Christ's love. To learn more, just visit gospelonlife.com/partner. That website again is gospelonlife.com/partner. Today's sermon was recorded in 2014. 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.