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Guest (Male): What comes to mind when you hear about the Ten Commandments? For many people, they bring up feelings of guilt and shame, or they seem like a list of rules that are impossible to follow. In today's sermon, Tim Keller shows us how God didn't give us the Ten Commandments to crush us with unattainable moral standards, but to point us to Jesus Christ, the only one who perfectly fulfills God's law.

Guest (Male): The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles. Therefore, God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.

Tim Keller: Suppressing the truth is not admitting there’s a God there. The reason that people are suppressing the truth is because, what’s it say in verse 21? They won’t thank him. The thing that gets this God angry—a God as great as this, the Creator God who sifts the stars through his fingers like sand, to whom the Milky Way is a piece of lint—what gets this great and good being angry? Ingratitude.

Now, a question comes up. Is God being petty? Why would God get angry about ingratitude? It seems like a petty thing. The answer is, we ourselves take it quite seriously. Listen. For example, what happens if you’re a musician and you take something that was written by somebody else? If you’re an author and you take something that was written by somebody else? If you’re a scholar or you’re a student and you take something that was written by somebody else? And you publish it as if you were the author?

And therefore you act as an authority, because the word authority comes from the word author. You say, "I’m the author of it and therefore I’m an authority." When you publish it as if you’re the author, that is illegal. Why? It’s plagiarism. You can be sued into the ground for it, and rightly so. What it is, it’s ingratitude.

Because all plagiarism is is ingratitude. What it is, is saying instead of saying, "I am in debt to someone else. I acknowledge that I am a dependent person. At this point, I am dependent on the work of someone else." Instead, you set yourself up as the authority and say, "No, I’m an independent person, and I needed no one’s help to write this thing." That’s ingratitude. It’s plagiarism. It’s illegal. It’s serious.

Let me go up to another level. During World War I, when the Germans are fighting against the Americans, if you caught a German prisoner trying to bring down the United States government because he was a soldier out there and he was fighting on the lines, if you capture him, what did you do with him? You weren’t allowed to torture him. You weren’t allowed to execute him. According to the international laws, what you had to do was treat him with respect, put him in a prisoner-of-war camp.

However, if you caught an American fighting against you, if you caught an American trying to bring down the United States government, that person could be executed. Why? Because that’s treason. Well, why? What’s the difference? If an American does it and a German does it, the difference is the American’s a citizen. The American owes a debt of gratitude to the country and therefore he should be executed. Why? He should be executed for ingratitude.

You can be sued for ingratitude. You can be executed for ingratitude. Now let’s take it up one more level. What is Romans chapter one talking about? Are you beginning to get the drift of this? Though you may believe in God in a general way, do you go through life as your own authority?

Even though God created you, even though the Bible says in Hebrews 1:3 he holds the universe together with the word of his power, even though he keeps you together every moment, he keeps your heart pumping, he keeps your molecules from going out in about 10 billion different directions and you vaporizing, here’s this God upholding you every single minute. He is your author.

And yet do you, though in a general way you acknowledge him that he exists, but do you give him the mastery of your life? Do you give him authority, or do you live as your own authority? Do you submit every part of your life to his will and his word? Your heart, your life? Or do you go about making your own decisions, legislating your own standards?

Do you go about saying, "I’m an independent person, I am my own authority"? That is cosmic plagiarism. You can be sued for that. You are being sued for that. When the prophets come in the Bible and they say, "Thus saith the Lord," they are bringing a lawsuit.

Let's take it up one more step. If there is a God who created you and therefore since that God gave you everything, you owe that God an eternal debt, an absolute debt. The only due that you can give to a person who’s given you everything is everything.

Do you work for his agenda? Do you work for his goals? Do you work for his business? Or do you take all the things he’s given you? Your mind, your body, your abilities? Do you take all those things? In a sense, he’s given you the business charge card and you’re going off to the Bahamas with it.

In other words, are you basically living for your own interests? Are you basically living for your own goals? Are you basically doing your own business? My friends, that is treason. You say, "I want to be governor of my own life. What’s wrong with that?" That’s treason. It’s cosmic treason. It’s ingratitude of the highest order.

And this passage says it’s secret treason because the passage says something very, very profound. And that is that the wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against the wickedness of men who suppress the truth. Since they can see in nature, it says, since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities have been clearly seen in what is created, though they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks, but suppressed the truth.

The reason this is a secret treason is because you keep it secret from yourself. It says that even though you know there’s a God, no matter who you are, who created you, that owns you, to whom you owe a debt, we all press that truth down to some degree. We suppress it. We know we’re committing treason, but we keep it secret even from ourselves. And yet we know it.

That’s what’s so weird about this passage. It says they knew God and yet it says they suppressed that they know God. So you know it and you don’t know it. You know that there’s a debt of absolute seriousness and joy that you owe to a Creator God and yet you don’t know it.

And I think any psychologist will tell you things that you sort of know, that you hold down, but you don’t know, but you do know, are unhealthy and they can run your life. And this profound passage is actually doing a deep kind of therapy on us.

This passage is saying, "Come to grips with what you know to be true about yourself, or it’s going to always, always keep you bound in shallows and misery and confusion." And so the passage says let’s look at the structure of this repression. Let’s look at the structure of this secret treason that’s operating in every person’s life. And the structure is right here. Let me just outline it for you then we’ll go through it.

The outline is very interesting. First of all, it says ingratitude leads to repression. See, it says they suppress the truth because they’re ungrateful. Ingratitude leads to repression. And then we’re told repression leads to darkness. It says in verse 21, because they refused to thank him, it says their thinking became futile and their minds became darkened.

Ingratitude leads to repression, repression leads to darkness. And then darkness leads to every one of—this darkness leads to all of the problems in your life, all your behavioral problems, all your bad habits, all of your sins. Ingratitude leads to repression, repression leads to darkness, and darkness leads to all the sin problems that we’ve got.

And the only answer this passage tells us is to exchange the lie for the truth of who God is to us and the debt we owe him. Exchange the lie for the truth of gratitude. And when you take that truth and put it back in the center of your life, joy explodes again. Now, that’s what the passage says. But let’s break it down. Let’s go back to each of those steps.

Number one. It says here ingratitude leads to repression. You see this word "for" at the beginning of verse 21? It says "for," the reason they repress and suppress the truth, even though they look out into nature and there’s a Creator God obvious, Paul says, because they don’t want to glorify him as God or give thanks to him, they hold down the truth. That's very important.

It’s one thing to say, "I agree that there’s a God." It’s another thing to let him be glorified as God, let him be God in your life. You see, to glorify in the Bible literally means to give weight to something. What Paul says is not that people want to deny that there is a God, but they want to deny who that God really is to them.

They want to deny God’s being God. They don’t want to take him with absolute, complete seriousness. They want to be their own masters, they want to call their own shots. And when they look out and they see there’s a God behind the universe, they don’t draw the logical implication of that. If there’s a God behind the universe, then I shouldn't be my own authority. I should give him the mastery.

Now, Paul, by the way, here in verse 20, when Paul says, "For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse." He’s using an old and very unanswerable argument for the existence of God.

He says, "Look out there. Look at the design. Look at nature. Look at the design." What he’s really—he’s using this old argument. He says, imagine an explosion in a paint factory creating the Mona Lisa. By accident, of course. Everything goes up and down it comes and it just happens to fall on the canvas in such a way that it paints this lovely picture.

What are the chances of that? Well, you say there’s no chance of that. And of course any mathematician will tell you that’s not true. Of course there’s an infinitesimal chance of that sort of thing happening. But Paul is saying there’s a far greater chance of that happening than the idea of all of this order and all of this design and all of this beauty happening by accident.

And yet, he says, what’s amazing is that there’s many people who will bet their whole lives on that chance. Whenever I’ve used the argument on people, whenever I’ve said, "What are the chances of all this happening by accident?" they say, "Well, that doesn’t prove God."

No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t prove that the Mona Lisa couldn’t be painted by an explosion in a paint factory. But what kind of fool would bet your life on that? And what Paul is saying is anybody who does shows a bias. Paul says if you really are that willing to suppress the truth, it shows a bias. Freud, Marx, Feuerbach, and Nietzsche all said that Christians need God. They’ve got psychological needs for God.

They all had different approaches, of course, to it. Marx said the rich needed God to keep the poor down. Sigmund Freud said people needed God because they need to have a deity to whom they can atone for their rebellion against authority figures. Nietzsche had his own view, and Ludwig Feuerbach. They all said there’s psychological reasons why people need to believe in God. And by the way, that’s true.

But Paul’s pointing out here is there’s far greater and deeper psychological reasons for people to disbelieve in God. Because you see, even though we look out there and we say, "Yeah, obviously there must be a God." But if there is a personal God who created all this design, then we would owe him authority. There’s no in-between. Either there’s no God and all this is an accident, or there is a God and we owe him everything.

We don’t want that. And so you see, Paul says there’s very deep psychological reasons to deny God. And that makes sense to me because over the years, when I’ve talked to folks, when you just share in a nutshell what the Christian message is, it goes like this. The Christian message goes like this.

God created you. And even though you lived your whole life as your own authority, making your own decisions, legislating your own morality, setting your own goals, God loves you still and he’s entered into your situation and he’s come down into history in the person of Jesus Christ and he took the punishment that our ingratitude deserved so that we can enter into an unending love relationship with our Creator and have a life dominated by joy and grateful love.

That’s the message. And you know, the rational approach if you were going to reject that would be to say, "I can’t accept that because it’s too good to be true. Oh, how great it would be if it was." That’s not what the response has been to me over the years. The response has been, "There you go, trying to tell me what to do with my life." And that shows, I’d say, a deep bias.

And that’s what Paul says. Here’s people who are willing to bet their lives on a fairly slim chance. Ingratitude leads to repression. But then it goes further. Repression leads to darkness. Since it says here, verse 21, since they would not give thanks to him, their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened.

Now, the word futile means pointless. It means not being able to see the purpose in something. And that is the truth. What Paul is saying here is if you reject a personal God because you don’t want to give him mastery of your life, you’re put in this terrible position. If there’s no personal God, there’s no right and wrong, there’s no moral structure to things, no moral structure to things. And you are left with darkness.

Let me give you three case studies. Now, one is a little hard to give because you’re not allowed to give away a movie, but Woody Allen’s new movie, *Crimes and Misdemeanors*. Basically, the plot goes like this. There’s a man who’s a moral man but not a religious man. He’s a moral man with a conscience, but he doesn’t really have much in the way of a religious basis for it.

And he’s moving along through life all right until he has a small affair with a stewardess and the stewardess looks like she’s going to tell on him to try to get his wife to leave him. And he’s in this position, this man’s stuck. His life may come down around his ears. And he begins to contemplate what somebody suggests to him as the way out, and that is that he have this woman murdered.

He goes to a rabbi, and the rabbi says, "Well, there must be a moral structure in the universe. If there wasn’t, there would be no meaning to things, there’d be no way to live. And so what you have to do is do the right thing." I can’t go any further. I can’t give away the movie. It’s wrong, right?

But I’ll tell you this. The message of the movie—it doesn’t end with a good resolution. It leaves it in the air like the book of Ecclesiastes does. The message of the movie is there’s no way to know that there’s a moral structure to the universe, but there has to be one. There’s no way to know, but there’s got to be one and we’re stuck.

Because you see, morality without religion doesn't work. A moral structure without a personal Creator doesn't work. We know it doesn't work. Let me give you a case study. A few years ago, do you remember there was a whole rash of these miniseries and movies on nuclear holocaust? Remember *The Day After* was a miniseries, but then there were a couple of—and that wasn’t a particularly good miniseries, but there were a number of other good movies about that time.

And everybody began writing and said, "Wouldn't it be awful if civilization was destroyed by a nuclear catastrophe? Wouldn’t that be terrible?" I read about that time an essay that floored me and I want to share it with you. What this man said in the essay was, to even suggest that it would be awful for a nuclear catastrophe to end civilization assumes the existence of a personal God.

And he says since most educated people either disbelieve in God or at least believe that there’s no way to know if there’s a God, and therefore since most educated people believe that the only thing you can be sure is here is nature. Paul says in verse 20, behind nature there’s a personal God, but this man was saying since most educated people know that there’s nothing really but nature.

He says, what difference does it make if civilization ends today or about a billion years from now? Because in relationship to the oceans of dead time before civilization and after civilization, it’s insignificant whether our civilization goes another thousand years or another million years, because civilization will be an infinitesimal, insignificant, accidental flicker in the eons of time.

No one will even be around to even understand or remember it. So he says, who cares? To even say it’s awful that civilization might end on the basis of a nuclear holocaust assumes and presumes that there’s a personal Creator God. That’s what he said. And he says if you don’t know that, there’s no reason to wring your hands over it.

And you know what? I don’t know how you feel about that, but if you say, "I don’t know if there’s a Creator God, but I reject that argument," you’re fighting against the darkness. Because what Paul says is if you suppress the idea of a Creator God, you’re left with the darkness that that essay tells you about. There’s no in-between. Either there’s a Creator God to whom you owe everything and mastery of your life and authority, or there’s darkness.

In fact, let me give you a third case study. C.S. Lewis, who was a Christian, but he was writing an essay once trying to point out to people, if there’s nothing but nature, if there’s no Creator God, if there’s no supernatural reality, if there’s nothing but nature, what does it mean to fall in love?

And he says, pretty interestingly, he says you can’t, except in the lowest animal sense, be in love with a girl if you know and keep on remembering that all the beauties both of her person and of her character are a momentary and accidental pattern produced by a collision of atoms. And that your own response to them is only a kind of psychic phosphorescence arising from the behavior of your chromosomes.

And you can’t get serious pleasure from music either—and it gets worse, all right—you can’t get serious pleasure from music either if you know and remember that its air of significance is a pure illusion and that you like it only because your nervous system is irrationally conditioned to like it.

You may still in the lowest sense begin to have a good time, but just in so far as it ever threatens to push you on from cold sensuality into real warmth and real joy, so far you will be forced to feel the hopeless disharmony between your own emotions and the universe that you believe you really live in.

Now, down deep do you start to say, "No, that’s not the way things are"? Listen, you’re fighting against the darkness. Either there’s a personal Creator God to whom you owe a debt of gratitude, which means everything, you owe that God everything and authority in your life, or there’s darkness. And what Lewis says is right, and what that man said about nuclear destruction is right.

Ingratitude leads to repression, repression leads to darkness. And darkness leads to every other problem. Because you see, in verse 24 and 25 it says something very weird, I think. It says after it says that their hearts were darkened because of ingratitude, first it says they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images and they worshiped idols.

Then it says down in verse 24, God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity. Now, how in the world could all cultic religions and all sorts of moral distortion come from ingratitude? That’s what the Bible says. That’s what Paul says. And rather than try to go into any esoteric intellectual arguments, let me finally get down to the nitty-gritty.

You can see it in your own life. Ingratitude is the mother of self-pity. You see, the only way to get rid of self-pity is gratitude. If you sit around saying, "I deserve a better life than this. Things haven't been fair. I shouldn't be treated like this. Nothing is going right." That’s ingratitude, that’s self-pity, and that is the mother of almost every immorality that you do.

Because it enables you first to do little evils and then later on bigger evils. And when I have done ministry in prisons, and even though there’s a lot of fine folks in the prisons, there’s an awful lot of incredibly cruel, harsh people there too. And almost all of them justify what they’ve done. "Well, I know I maybe, I raped her because she was like this. I stole because that’s the way that those people always have treated me."

And you see, the ingratitude leads to the self-pity, leads to the bitterness, and it leads to prison. But even if you’re not in the real prison, self-pity is a prison. And everything comes from that ingratitude. On the other hand, if you get up in a day and you stand on the Christian platform, and the Christian platform is this: I have a Creator God who created me, I owe him everything, I’ve never even begun to repay him for what he’s done for me.

And therefore never on any day have I ever gotten what I deserve. I’ve only gotten better than I deserve. And because of that, everything I receive today is the mercy of God. On the basis of that, your life becomes a mainspring of grateful joy. You see, here’s the answer to the whole problem. This terrible secret that goes down and down and down and down.

Ingratitude leads to repression, repression leads to darkness, darkness leads to self-pity and all sorts of evil behaviors that kill your own conscience. You go against what you know is right. The only answer, it says here, the secret treason comes, it says, from exchanging the truth of God for a lie. Well, then the only answer is to exchange the lie for the truth.

The lie is this: I am my own person, I’m an independent person, I need no one else and I don’t need God. That’s the lie. The truth is: I owe God everything. I need him. Where is he? And friends, if you make that the center of your life, the joy begins to run through your life like lightning.

You see, the mainspring of the Christian life is gratitude. I mean it’s the mainspring. In fact, the way you can tell the difference between a real Christian and a just generally religious person is whether or not gratitude is the mainspring of your life. Listen, many times I’ve talked to folks who sense a need for God.

And so they say, "I know I’ve got an emptiness in my life, I need God. I need God." So they come and they say to me, very often I’m a pastor and they may come and ask, they may say, "What do I do? Do I go to church, read the Bible, clean my life up? I’m ready, I’m ready." But they don’t know whether I’m connecting with God or not.

Now, the problem with that, even though they feel that need, they’re being driven by selfishness and they’re even being driven by fear. They’re afraid that God’s going to reject them. They’re afraid they’re going to miss out on something and so they do everything they can to clean their lives up and then they say, "Okay, I’ve given myself to God now, so now I really, really want him to be working in my life."

And the way you can tell whether you’re that kind of manipulator is as soon as bad things come into your life, you’re ready to kick God out. "What good is this? I’ve started coming to church and now look." Some of you might be in that mode right now. Some of you might have come today because you’re in that mode.

You’re beginning to sense an emptiness, you’re beginning to feel something more you need. You’re saying, "Well, what do I have to do? What do I have to do?" and you’re driven by need and a little bit by fear. That's not what makes a Christian life go. A Christian life goes like this. The difference between a manipulator and a servant is a servant thinks like this. Now listen.

A servant says, "Yes, I need God, yes, I need God. Yes, things are going to go bad for me if I don’t find God." But before I need God, I owe God. I owe him my life. I owe him my love, regardless of what he does for me from here on in. I owe God. And I see that he has given me everything I need in Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ came and lived and died for me. And I can receive the message of the gospel as I can receive my salvation, my deliverance, my acceptance with God completely as a free gift. And because I see that, now I can live a life of gratitude. And listen, a life of gratitude is a weird thing.

When somebody does something marvelous for you, you feel a sense of obligation. It’s real obligation. It’s not voluntary. You say, "I owe you." So it’s a sense of obligation. You feel bound. It’s not voluntary and yet it’s not slavery either. It’s love. It’s love, it’s driven by love, not fear. That’s what it means to live a life of gratitude.

Now, there’s two kinds of people in this room. Let me conclude this way. And I don’t really know who you are and I’m certainly not trying to ferret you out. In fact, you better not look at anybody else in the room because it’s impossible to work this out. It’s hard enough to work it out on yourself. It’s hard enough to figure out which side of the line you are. Don’t worry about anybody else.

On the one hand, we’ve got people in the room who’ve received Christ as their Lord and Savior and therefore they understand that salvation is a free gift and the mainspring of their life is gratitude. And yet, the fact is that you’re full of problems. I say to you, work thankfulness into the warp and woof of your life.

For example, do you get worried? Are you worried this week? Philippians 4 says have no anxiety about anything but rather give thanks. And you know what that means? It means are you able to say, "Lord, you’ve been in charge of my life up to now. You’ve always worked things out and right now something is there in my life that’s bad but I trust you enough to believe that you’re working it out for good, so I thank you for it. I thank you for it"?

That’s the end of anxiety. What about resentment in your life? Do you realize that you cannot, you cannot stay resentful of people if you’re thankful to God? You see, when you’re resentful, you’re sitting there like this: "I would give anything to let that person get what he or she deserves. I would give anything to see that person get what he or she deserves."

If you live a life of gratitude, here’s what happens. You say, "Father, you’re never giving me what I deserve. Why should I be so concerned about seeing he gets what he deserves? What’s wrong with me? Where’s the logic in all that?" and it’s over. Your bitterness is over. Your worry is over. Even that bad self-image is over.

Because you get power and freedom in your life to the degree that you can say, "Father, thank you for accepting me fully in Jesus Christ. I don’t have to prove myself anymore to anybody." Thankfulness is the mainspring. Power and freedom and joy in your life to the degree you exercise and use the gratitude you’ve got.

But there’s another kind of person in the room. Here’s what you have to figure out. You may be a person with a general belief in God. You may even have been fairly moral and religious all of your life. But unless you see that the salvation that Jesus Christ gives us is an absolutely free gift, one that you receive with gratitude, not something—acceptance with God is not something that you can earn through your striving, you see.

Your life has been mainly, mainly pushed by need and fear instead of by love. What you need to do is you need to come and say, "Lord Jesus Christ, I see that my Father God is the Creator. I owe him everything. I see that what you’ve done is you’ve made it possible for me to come to God because you’ve taken my punishment. I give myself to you. I trust in you. Command me. I’m no longer my authority. Command me. Let your pleasure be my pleasure, your love my love, your joy my joy."

After Jesus Christ healed ten lepers in Luke chapter 17, only one came back and he fell down, which is a posture of obedience. He fell down and he thanked Jesus. And Jesus says, "Where are the nine? This is the only one that thanked me." And he looked at him and he said, "Go in peace, thy faith has made you whole."

Do you know what faith is? Faith is not so mysterious. It’s being willing to respond to the offer of Jesus Christ with gratitude and to say, "Because of what you’ve done for me, I give you myself." Go in peace. Thy faith has made thee whole. Let’s pray.

Guest (Male): Thanks for listening to today's teaching. It's our prayer that you were encouraged by it and that it helps you apply the gospel to your life and share it with others. For more helpful resources from Tim Keller, visit gospelinlife.com. There you can subscribe to the Life in the Gospel quarterly journal. When you do, you will also receive free articles, sermons, devotionals, and other great gospel-centered resources. Again, it's all at gospelinlife.com. You can also stay connected with us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and X.

Today's sermon was recorded in 1989. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel in Life podcast were recorded between 1989 and 2017 while Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church.