Most of us know how to restrain a life. We start to get in trouble, so we change. But when the consequences go away, we snap back the way we were. Human nature without supernatural intervention is like a rubber ball that’s squished, but when the pressure is off, it snaps right back. The rubber ball was constrained. It wasn’t actually changed or reshaped. 1 Corinthians 13 is about how you actually change, about how you get a supernaturally changed heart. What is the supernaturally changed heart? ...
Mar 19, 2025•38 min•Ep. 1199
There is nothing that beggars your own sense of wisdom than to study what the Bible says about divine wisdom. Ephesians 5 tells us a lot about wisdom. And it shows us that biblical wisdom puts God in the center in a way that develops three aspects of wisdom. We see in these verses 1) why we need to walk in wisdom, and 2) what it means to walk in wisdom. This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on June 9, 1991. Series: Christian Lifestyle. Scripture: Ephesian...
Mar 17, 2025•44 min•Ep. 1198
Ephesians 5 talks about light and wisdom. Paul says that because you once were darkness and now are light, you should now expose works of darkness and experience the fruit of light. Then in verse 15, Paul says that we are to walk as wise and not as fools, for the days are evil. What Paul is saying is that walking in wisdom is the way in which you expose the deeds of the darkness. In these verses, Paul shows us 1) there are two different realms—darkness and light, 2) we are to have nothing to do ...
Mar 14, 2025•28 min•Ep. 1197
The essence of Christianity is arguing with yourself. What makes you an effective Christian is that you’re continually arguing with yourself, and you’re winning the argument. Because of what Christ did, God can restore the world and restore everything if we come to him through Christ. And in Ephesians 5, Paul uses the imagery of darkness and light to argue with us about how we need to be living: “For you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.” If you don’t get the verse right, yo...
Mar 12, 2025•40 min•Ep. 1196
Christianity is never a mechanical thing. And the church is not a morality agency—it’s a regenerating agency. The real goal of the do’s and the don’ts in the Christian life is always character—growing into God’s holy people. The church does bring about moral behavior but, in a sense, as a byproduct. Because what the church is after is to turn people into saints, to create a kind of person. In Ephesians 5, we learn three things: 1) your Christian faith has to include a saying no as well as a sayi...
Mar 10, 2025•38 min•Ep. 1195
Whenever God turns to you, if you believe in him, all he sees when he looks at you is complete beauty and sweetness. Jesus Christ offered himself up and fulfilled all of the obligations we owe God, so he has completely satisfied God. God sees nothing and senses nothing but sweetness when he regards you. But you still live in a world twisted and broken by sin. And you have to deal with the realities of that. Therefore, there’s always a negative. And Ephesians 5:3-7 tells the negatives: there are ...
Mar 07, 2025•44 min•Ep. 1194
If you look at the particulars Christian teachings, the particulars don’t look that different from many other ethical systems. The difference is that Christianity is never interested in moral behavior simply as moral behavior. In every instance, putting on the new self means to remember your identity. Being a Christian is ultimately about being melted with spiritual understandings of who you are now that Jesus Christ has said, “You are my beloved child,” of who you are now that the Holy Spirit h...
Mar 05, 2025•45 min•Ep. 1193
Christianity has an amazing approach to lying and to anger that almost nobody else has. For truth-telling, it says truth must always be told with love. And for anger, it says, “Be ye angry, and sin not.” Paul doesn’t say, “Well if you get angry, it might be okay.” He says, “Be angry. Do it.” Very often it is wrong not to be angry. But then he turns around and says, “and sin not.” It must mean two things: that anger can easily lead to sin and trouble, and that it’s possible to be angry but not be...
Mar 03, 2025•46 min•Ep. 1192
A good test shows you what you really are, what’s really in you. If you’re in denial, the tests are devastating. If you’re dropping the ball, the tests are traps. Jesus says the only way you’re going to come through the tests of life is if you seek God. How are you doing right now? Are you going through and failing the little tests, and are you setting yourself up for failure of some big test in the future? How can you be delivered from evil in the tests of life? Jesus tells you how. Let’s look ...
Feb 28, 2025•35 min•Ep. 1191
In this passage, we finally get to a particular kind of prayer in which people are very interested: to the place where Jesus says prayer is a way to change our circumstances. Prayer makes a difference. You can come to God and say, “Give us this day our daily bread.” But notice this happens in the very middle of the Lord’s Prayer. It’s surrounded by all sorts of other concepts. And you can’t understand how it works unless you see all of its relationships to the rest of the prayer. Petitionary pra...
Feb 26, 2025•33 min•Ep. 1190
I’ll say it consciously: this is our worst nightmare. More than anyone else in history, modern people believe we ought to have a good life and we ought to have some control over our lives. But Jesus says when you connect with God, you must pray, “Thy will be done.” This means the purpose of prayer is not that we would bend God’s will to meet ours, but that we melt and soften our will into God’s. The Bible says the way to find yourself and your happiness is never to seek yourself or your happines...
Feb 24, 2025•32 min•Ep. 1189
What does it mean to hallow? It’s a word virtually never used anymore in everyday English, but we don’t quite have an equivalent. To hallow something means to treat it as sacred and ultimate. It means to make something your ultimate concern, to make it the most important thing, to make it the most crucial thing, to make it the supreme beauty, the supreme aim of your life. Jesus says this comes first, and I want to show you that praise and adoration is really what life is about. Matthew 6 teaches...
Feb 21, 2025•32 min•Ep. 1188
Jesus doesn’t just point the way to God—rather, he is the way to God because he’s risen. And that means that for Christians, prayer is a unique, radically different process than it is for other religions and philosophies. Prayer is a rather universal thing, and there are many ways to pray. But Jesus says there are really two different bases on which you can approach God. He’s not talking about whether to ask; he’s talking about how to ask, about why you think you’re being heard. And he says ther...
Feb 19, 2025•38 min•Ep. 1187
The Psalms is the divinely inspired prayer book, but when you open this prayer book, the first page is not a prayer. It’s a meditation on meditation. Meditation is not the same as studying the Bible. In studying the Bible you’re just learning information. Meditation takes what you’ve learned and does something with it. And according to the Psalms, meditation is actually the key to prayer. Psalm 1 tells us 1) the priority, 2) the promise, 3) the products, 4) the practice, and 5) the problem and s...
Feb 17, 2025•40 min•Ep. 1186
The Lord’s Prayer is quite a workout. You’re asking for a lot of things: daily bread, deliver us from evil. But at the end, you rest in God. The last phrase in the Lord’s Prayer is, “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever, amen.” Is that just a rhetorical flourish? After all, it doesn’t seem to be a prayer. But ancient commentators have said this is a prayer of repose. You realize all the things you’ve been looking for are already there in God. In Psalm 27 we have ...
Feb 14, 2025•41 min•Ep. 1185
We don’t see that envy is as terrible as it really is. Envy is wanting somebody else’s life. Do you know what that does? It sucks the joy out of the life you actually have. In Psalm 73, the psalmist is living as good a life as he can, and everything is going wrong. And on top of that, he sees a lot of other people who are corrupt and they’re having a great life. What is the solution? A particular kind of prayer. There are four things the psalmist does in prayer that can only be done in prayer: 1...
Feb 12, 2025•42 min•Ep. 1184
What if I told you there was a process and no matter how much you blew up your life, if you used this process, there would be a way to come out the other side whole? Well, here it is. It’s what the Bible calls repentance. You say, “You mean just saying I’m sorry?” But that reveals you don’t understand the power of this kind of prayer. This kind of prayer, if you do it in an ongoing way, will finally enable you to change deeply from the inside out. Looking at Psalm 51, we’ll see 1) what one thing...
Feb 10, 2025•44 min•Ep. 1183
We need every bit of help we can get to learn to pray, “Thy will be done,” because we’re going right into the teeth of our culture. The essence of American culture is the belief that the more free we are to decide for ourselves, the happier we’ll be. But Jesus Christ says every time you pray to God, you need to say to him, “Thy will be done.” That goes right against probably everything you’ve been taught in our culture. To understand this phrase, we need to see that when Jesus himself prayed it,...
Feb 07, 2025•39 min•Ep. 1182
What does it mean to pray, “Thy kingdom come”? Jesus gave us his instruction on how to pray in the Lord’s Prayer, and it’s filled with concepts you need to know from the rest of the Bible. There are two places—Matthew 5 and Luke 6—where Jesus tells us a lot about the kingdom of God and the blessedness of the kingdom. I want to show you 1) what the kingdom of God is, 2) what it’s not, 3) what it’s like, 4) how you enter it, and 5) how that relates to prayer. This sermon was preached by Dr. Timoth...
Feb 05, 2025•36 min•Ep. 1181
Hallowed is an old English word that means to treat something as sacred. It means to be captivated, astonished, melted with grateful joy for who God is and what he has done. For many years, I felt I didn’t know how to praise God, because nobody ever gave me specifics. As we look now at one phrase in the Lord’s Prayer, “Hallowed be thy name,” we’ll look at five aspects that are all needed if we’re going to praise. There are five aspects to praise and adoration: 1) thinking, 2) expressing, 3) appr...
Feb 03, 2025•34 min•Ep. 1180
What does it mean to pray, “Our Father”? It’s much more complicated than you think. Everything Jesus Christ came to do—the reason he came, the purpose of his salvation—was that we might receive adoption. We can pray “Our Father” because we’ve been adopted into the family of God. Let’s look briefly at 1) the gift of adoption, 2) what it means to be adopted, 3) the reason we can be adopted, and 4) how it applies to prayer. This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Chu...
Feb 01, 2025•43 min•Ep. 1179
If you’re going to deal with the brutal realities of life, the writer of Hebrews says you have to have shepherds in your life. Hebrews is written to people whose lives are filled with problems. And here, in the last passage of Hebrews, the writer tells us if we’re gonna make it, we have to have shepherding in our lives. The text tells us 1) our insulting need for shepherds, 2) the surprising identity of shepherds, and 3) the secret power of the shepherds. This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy ...
Jan 31, 2025•41 min•Ep. 1178
When you embrace God by faith two things come into your life: a transforming power and a deep tension. It’s a duality. If you try to resolve the deep tension, you lose the transforming power. The writer of Hebrews says the great believers in history were resident aliens on earth. In Greco-Roman society, a resident alien was a permanent resident but not a citizen. That is the tension that anyone who wants the transforming power of God must live with. If we want to understand the message, we need ...
Jan 29, 2025•40 min•Ep. 1177
This passage in Hebrews seems like an anti-climax. Throughout the book, the writer gives us something to help us face the brutal realities of life. But then, Hebrews 13 seems different. At first it looks like a to-do list, like miscellaneous ethical prescriptions, but that’s wrong. This is not an anti-climax. What we’re being told is that we’ll never make it in life without being deeply embedded in a robust community of people who have experienced the grace of God. This passage tells us about 1)...
Jan 27, 2025•43 min•Ep. 1176
Hebrews was written to people who have been shaken by life. Difficulties and sufferings have shaken them to the core. The writer is trying to help them find ways to face the brutal realities of life, to stand solid when everything around them is falling apart. In Hebrews 12, we have the climax. The writer pulls together all of the threads and says, “In an unstable world, here is how you can live an unshakeable life.” This passage depicts 1) the shakable life, 2) the unshakeable life, and 3) how ...
Jan 24, 2025•41 min•Ep. 1175
There’s never been a culture with a lower pain threshold than ours. There’s never been a culture that gave us fewer resources for dealing with the brutal realities of life and death than ours. The writer of Hebrews wants his readers to understand how to become the kind of people who can cope with the brutal realities of life. To a great degree, the climax of his argument is here in Hebrews 12. We’re taught here 1) life is a race, 2) why to run the race, and 3) how to run the race. This sermon wa...
Jan 22, 2025•41 min•Ep. 1174
Hebrews is written to help us have what it takes to face the difficulties of life. And in chapter 11, we’re told one of the keys is to be people of faith. But what is faith? In our cultural moment, conservatives see faith as a moral virtue, while liberals see skepticism as a mark of intellectual maturity. As usual, the Bible’s understanding of faith is much more nuanced, much more sophisticated and complex, than either of those views. Life-transforming faith, according to this text, has four asp...
Jan 20, 2025•39 min•Ep. 1173
The book of Hebrews is written to people who are so beaten down with troubles that they’re ready to give up. The writer is trying to give the readers what they need to handle the brutal realities of life in this world. In Hebrews 11, he gives us something that helps us handle anything. If you have it, you can handle absolutely anything life throws at you: 1) what is it? and 2) how do we get it? This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on March 27, 2005. Seri...
Jan 17, 2025•33 min•Ep. 1172
When modern people hear that God requires blood to turn aside his wrath from sin, it sounds offensive. It sounds disgusting, primitive, obscene. Christianity has sometimes been called the religion of the slaughterhouse. It doesn’t seem to be what we need in a world that’s filled with blood and violence. But Jesus saves through his blood. And the book of Hebrews says there’s power in the blood. Without the shedding of blood, Hebrews says we wouldn’t know three things: 1) the depth of our problem,...
Jan 15, 2025•39 min•Ep. 1171
Jesus Christ did not come to start a new religion. He didn’t come to start the best religion. He came to end religion. Every religion has its extremists. Religion causes an enormous amount of conflict and strife in this world. What are we going to do about it? To embrace Jesus Christ is to end religion, is to move away from all religion. There are two things Hebrews 8 tells us: 1) Jesus came to end all religion and, 2) therefore, Jesus came to give us a radical new covenant relationship with God...
Jan 13, 2025•41 min•Ep. 1170
