← Timothy Keller Sermons Podcast by Gospel in Life
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Welcome to gospel and life. What we love shapes who we are. So if we want to change, we have to start by changing what we love, what we're passionate about, what delights us. One of the primary ways we can rearrange the things we love most comes through consistent and faithful prayer. Join us today as Dr. Keller looks at how authentic prayer connects us with God and reshapes what we love.
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Tonight's scripture comes From Psalm chapter 63, verses 1 through 11. You, God, are my God. Earnestly I seek you, I thirst for you. My whole being longs for you. In a dry and parched land where there is no water. I have seen you in the sanctuary and beheld your power and your glory because your love is better than life. My lips will glorify you. I will praise you as long as I live. And in your name I will lift up my hands. I will be fully satisfied as with the richest of foods, with singing lips, my mouth will praise you. On my bed I remember you. I think of you through the watches of the night because you are my help. I sing in the shadow of your wings, I cling to you. Your right hand upholds me. Those who want to kill me will be destroyed. They will go down to the depths of the earth. They will be given over to the sword and become food for jackals. But the king will rejoice in God. All who swear by God will glory in him, while the mouths of liars will be silenced. This is the word of the Lord.
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Now, as you know, this fall, we're looking at the subject of prayer. And we're taking the Lord's Prayer, which is Jesus own instruction to the human race on how to pray. And each week we're taking one of the phrases and looking at what in the Bible, at the teaching in the Bible that helps us understand what that phrase means and therefore how we can actually make good on it in prayer. Tonight we're going to look at hallowed be thy name. Hallowed is an old English word, but it means to treat something as sacred, to treat something as holy. And everyone who's ever expounded, if you go back to St. Augustine or Martin Luther, John Calvin, or anybody who's ever tried to explain what this means, they say that it means to treat God as being as glorious, as holy, as infinitely, majestically beautiful as he really is, to treat him as glorious and as great as he actually is. John Calvin in his commentary on the Lord's Prayer, when he gets to hallowed be named, he says it is to have your Entire heart captivated with wonderment for Him. To have your entire heart captivated with wonderment for him. So hallowed be thy name means to praise and adore. It means to be captivated, astonished to be melded with grateful joy for who he is and what he's done. So we're here to talk about tonight. How do you do that? How do you praise and adore God? And we're looking at Psalm 63, a very famous psalm about praise. You see verse four, it says, I will praise you as long as I live. It's all about praise, but it tells you quite a lot that is very specific about prayers. Actually, for many years I always felt I didn't really know how to do it because nobody ever gave me specifics. Well, here's five aspects, not steps, though I'll show you that I'm trying to give them to you in a logical order in some ways, five aspects to praise and adoration. They are thinking, expressing, appraising, beholding and resting. Got to do all five if you're going to praise him, if you're going to hallow his name. First of all, thinking. The first thing you see here is that David. That's a psalm of David. We'll get to. We'll explain a little bit more about when this happened. And this is a psalm of David. David doesn't just say you're great. He breaks it down. He analyzes it. He enumerates the glories. He does this analysis. It's called the old word for this is called recollecting. He doesn't just say you're great. He says, I see your power, I see your glory, I see your love. He's breaking it down. And the reason all praise starts like this, you break it down into specifics. You enumerate and list the glories of God. You go on and on about how all the different ways in which he's glorious, you don't just say, you're great. You know why? Because praise is very linked to love. When you fall in love with somebody, your mind goes into overdrive about what's great about the person. And you're specific. You know, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnet 43, very famous, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. That is the language of love. Not, oh, you're great, it's let me count the ways. You get specific. You go into detail. You know that great classic, wonderful, well done comedy movie Groundhog Day. And you know, the character played by Bill Murray is someone who has to have the Same day repeated over and over and over and over again. And of course, during this time, he falls in love with the character played by Andie MacDowell. He, of course, has actually spent years with her, years of days in which he's seen everything that he loves about her. Whereas, on the other hand, she doesn't realize that's happened. And at one point, he tries to say something about he loves her. And she says, you don't love me. You don't even know me. And then suddenly, he looks at her and says, you like boats, but not the ocean. You like a lake in summers, in the mountains. You're a sucker for French poetry and rhinestones. You're very generous. You're kind to strangers and children. And when you stand in the snow, you look like an angel. And it's riveting because he doesn't just say, I love you. He says, here's what I love about you. And he's listening. He's analyzing it. And as you go through the list, your heart expands, and the loved one's heart expands, and that's praise. The first thing you have to do is you have to break it down. You have to have 10 things, 100 things. You don't just say, I praise you, God, for being a God of love. You say, I praise you, God, for being a God of costly love. Because it costs you so much to give me your love. Undeserved love, wise love, tough love, unconditional love. Every one of those things is like a different aspect, a different wonder. And you never learn how to praise unless you think it out, unless you do recollection, unless you analyze it. So, first it takes thinking, but secondly, it takes expression. It's not enough just to see God's glories. You have to articulate them. You have to declare them. You have to express them. You see, he says, my lips will glorify you. He says, my singing lips. With singing lips, my mouth will praise you in your name. I will lift up my hands. He's not just simply thinking about God's glory. He's expressing it. And you notice he's expressing it musically. He's expressing it publicly, overtly. He's also expressing it corporately, because he's talking about praising God in the congregation. Now, one of the things that's maybe not what you might think is that the Book of Psalms does not say, it's enough just simply to praise God in your heart. Though of course, that's praising God. Of course it is. You've thought it out. You've thought it out. You see his glories, and now you tell him directly about his glories. And that is praise. You can do that in your heart. But it's striking how the Bible talks about how important it is to do this skillfully. Do you know how many places the Bible talks about praising God with the harp and with the timbrel, praising him in the congregation with music. And then it says, but play skillfully. Do it well. It's got to be great music, not bad music. Okay, you can praise them with your list, but it's got to be eloquent. Why now? We don't. There's no way to understand praise. I don't think, especially what the Bible says about praise, unless you read an essay by C.S. lewis. It's a chapter in his book Reflections on the Psalms. And one of the chapters is called A Word About Praising. I often cite it. If you've done any research in this area, you'll run into people. Other people cite it all the time because it's just so seminal. In it, he tells about how when he first became a Christian, C.S. lewis, as he first became a Christian, he really was put off by the fact that God's always asking people to praise him. He's inviting people, praise me, glorify me. And, you know, you say, gee, that's pretty conceited. I mean, if you're talking to a woman, for example, and you're talking a little while, and after, suddenly she says, enough about you. Don't you think my dress is beautiful? Don't you think I look great in it? And you might say, yeah, but then you want to get away because, you know, she's conceited. And so why should we treat God any differently? And Lewis actually ended up saying that when he went through that phase where he thought God was conceited. To be asking us to praise him is because I didn't. He said, I didn't understand how praise works. And this is what he says in there. I'll paraphrase and then read you a quote. He says what he didn't understand is that when you enjoy something, that joy always spontaneously overflows into praise. When you enjoy something, that joy overflows into praise. So if you listen to some music that you enjoy, you grab someone and say, listen to this. Or if you find some beautiful landscape, you grab somebody, say, look at this, and you praise it. And you want them to praise it, too. You want them to say, wow, that is great. Why? Lewis says, this is what's interesting. He never realized until at a certain point he did that if you enjoy something, you have to praise it to others. It's almost a visceral desire, need to praise it to others. Because he says, expression of praise completes the joy. And here's this quote. We delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise does not merely express but completes the enjoyment. It is its appointed consummation. So God, in commanding us to glorify him, is simply inviting us to enjoy Him. You can't get at the joy until you get out the joy. Now you see what he's saying. He says, it's not like I enjoy something, then I praise it. You enjoy it by praising it. In fact, your joy is completed as you praise it. And the better you praise, the better the joy. Have you not noticed that you feel joy or you feel, you know, admiration for God? And one of the ways you get that you actually, in a sense, experience that joy is when you sing a great hymn. Why? Because usually the words say it better than you can say it. And because the words say it better than you can say it. You, through those better words, because you're praising God, well, you're enjoying him better. Why do you think I, so often, when I'm preaching, will suddenly break into and quote a stanza out of a hymn? Notice how I do that. In fact, I'm going to do it later today. Now you can thank God. I don't actually try to sing it to you, but the reason I quote it, the reason I cite it, is because it says it praises God better than I can. And so the more excellent our praise, the more eloquent the words, the more incredible the music, the more, the better we express praise, the more we actually enjoy God, the more our hearts are engaged and the more he's honored. This is the reason, by the way, why asking for excellence in worship is not just a New York snob factor. It's not like, well, of course we want excellent music. We're New Yorkers. The food's great, the music's great. Everything's great here. You know. You know, it's a snob factor. It's not a snob factor. The Bible actually says, praise him with a timbrel. Praise him with a heart. You can go to Psalm 33 and other places. It says, praise him skillfully because the joy comes out. And the better it comes out, the more eloquent, the more fitting the expression of the praise is. The more God has honored and the more your heart's engaged, the more joy you have. That's the reason why God says, glorify me because I want you to have the joy that you won't have otherwise. So, first of all, praise means thinking and thinking it out and analyzing it and enumerating his glory. Secondly, expressing it. Thirdly, appraising. By the way, the word appraise has the word praise in it. Did you notice? What does it mean to appraise? It means to add up its value and compare it to other things. If you're going to appraise a painting or appraise a piece of land, you're going to compare it to other lands, you're going to appraise a home, you're going to compare it to other homes. And this is what's happening. Where does it say that? Well, look, Verse three. Because your love is better than life, my lips will glorify you. Now, let's talk about this. I'll mention it now, but I'll come back to it in a second. David, as we're going to see. You know, these psalms have headings. They actually don't. Whenever. Whenever you get the psalm out of the software program to put into the bulletin, for whatever reason, generally the headings of the psalms don't come with it. But if you read them in the. In the Bible, you see psalms have headings that describe sometimes who wrote it and the situation. And in this case, it says, when David was in the desert of Judah, he was on. He was running for his life, he was being hunted down. His life was on the line. And he comes in and has an experience of God's power and glory and sees his love and says, it's more important that I have God's love than it is for me to stay alive physically. Your love is better than life. You know what that means? What he's doing is he's thinking out the implications of what he sees. It's not just like, oh, you're a God of great eternity and power and love. What he's saying is, if you are that, then why am I afraid? So what? Doesn't matter if I die here. In other words, he's getting courage. You know, Paul says in Acts 20, verse 24, neither do I count my own life dear to me that I may finish my course with joy. What he's actually saying is, if, you know it's necessary for me to have the love of God, it's not necessary for me to live. It's perfectly okay to lose my life as long as I've got this. And he's actually thinking out the implications of the greatness he sees he's aligning his whole life. See, to praise God means to treat him as if he's as glorious as he is. You see his glory, you express it and then you bring everything in your mind, not only your mind, not only your emotions, but your life in line with that. And you say, if he's really that great. See, look at the place where it says the Lord. This is in the Psalms. The Lord is the stronghold of my life. And then it says, of whom shall I be afraid? You see the he's appraising. If God is this strong, why am I afraid? See, don't just praise him for being a God of love. Say if you really are this loving, why am I afraid? Don't just praise him for being a wise God. Say if you really are that wise, why am I so upset with how my life is going? You know best. Or if you praise God for being merciful, don't just praise God for being merciful. Say if you're really that merciful, why am I still feeling guilty for this thing that I did in the past? See, that's what David's doing. He's praise means not just with your mind enumerating everything that God is all his greatness, and then with your heart and with your mouth expressing it, but then appraising and saying, well, if he's really this, and if he's really this, he's got the ultimate wealth, he's got the ultimate health, he's got the ultimate love. Then all these other things that I'm looking for to give me, that only God can give me, they're not so important, are they? I'm not as upset now about my career. I'm not as upset now about my relationships. I'm not as upset about those things.
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When you pray to God, is it more like a chat or are you really connecting with him in a deep and meaningful way? We'd like to help you establish a stronger, deeper and more personal prayer life. Tim Keller's book Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God offers biblical guidance as well as specific ways to pray in certain situations, such as dealing with grief, loss, love and forgiveness. In the book, Dr. Keller helps you learn how to make your prayers more personal and powerful through a regular practice of prayer. Experiencing awe and intimacy with God is our thanks for your gift to help us reach more people with the life changing power of the Gospel. Request your copy today@gospelandlife.com give. That's gospelandlife.com give now here's Tim Keller with the remainder of today's teaching.
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St. Augustine says, what really makes you what you are is not so much what you say or what you believe or even how you behave. It's what you love. If you're a driven workaholic, if you are constantly getting into destructive relationships which you can't get out of, I mean, all the things that drive us and we say, I don't know how to change this, it's because our loves need to be reordered. And the only way, therefore, if it's really true that what makes you what you are is not what you think or what you do so much as what you love, then it's only through adoration that you'll ever change. Because adoration changes what you love, changes what captures your imagination, changes what delights you, changes what turns what turns your crank. And see, in the midst of all of your adoration, you say, wait a minute. All these things that I'm looking for to give me what only God can give me, they're not so important anymore. They don't have to drive me, they don't have to tear me apart anymore. You see how absolute life changing adoration is. So now if you have done the thinking and if you've done the expression, expressing, and if you've also done the appraising, then I think, and usually only then you can do the beholding. Very famous phrase here. I have seen you in the sanctuary and beheld your power and glory. I will be fully satisfied as with the riches of food, the richest of food. Now, what he's doing here is he's lapsing into sensory language. When he says, I beheld your glory probably doesn't mean he actually had a vision. I mean, it's possible that he actually had a vision of brightness that he saw with his physical eyes. But there's other places in the psalms that talk about that after death, I will see you face to face. This is not probably talking about that. Here's what it's talking about. He is saying, because I know that your power and glory and love, but I actually experienced your power and glory and love. Now, the reason he uses sensory language, he says, it's not just that I know your love, your love feels like a feast to me. It's satisfying. I don't just know that you have power and glory. I've beheld it. What it means is sometimes praise, and to some degree praise should do. This gives you a sense of God's reality on your heart. Now this, of course, will only be understood if you read the famous sermon. But just like. Just like you can't understand praise without looking at what C.S. lewis says about it in the book Reflections on the Psalms. I don't think you can understand praise unless you read Jonathan Edwards great sermon, A Divine and Supernatural Light. And he uses an illustration. They're very famous. And I'll just show you why it's so famous. It's justly famous. He says, I can rationally tell you that honey is sweet. I can make. In fact, if I am a good wordsmith, I can describe the sweetness of honey to a great degree, and I can make arguments. And so I can give you rational knowledge that honey's sweet. But when you actually taste it on your tongue, the sensation of the sweetness of honey conveys a knowledge beyond what I could give you rationally. So what he says is you can rationally know honey sweet without ever having tasted it and sensed it, but you can't actually sense the sweetness of honey without not also rationally knowing that it's sweet. And then, of course, Edwards turns around and he says, it's one thing to have an opinion that God is holy. It's another thing to sense his holiness, to actually sense you're in the presence of his holiness, to see his perfection and then to see your flaws. It's one thing to have an opinion that God is loving. It's another thing to actually sense his love shed on your heart with as much sensory reality as if you were in the presence of a human being who was hugging you and kissing you. And ultimately your life will not change unless sometimes you get a sense on your heart after thinking and expressing and appraising. Sometimes you behold him. Sometimes it's. You know, it can be light, it can be heavy. Sometimes it doesn't happen at all. But I tell you, the only way that you will ever get into the place where your heart is free from a lot of its fears, a lot of its addictions, a lot of the things that drive you will be only is if you see God's beauty and you sense his love on your heart. In fact, I'll go this far. The difference between a Christian and just a religious person is almost right here. There's other ways to show that. You know, I sometimes do that to you. I say the difference between a religious person and a Christian, but I think this is one of the key ones, because religious people pray, but they usually don't do a lot of praise. And I'll tell you why. Religious people may confess why. Because when you Confess. The prayer of confession wants forgiveness and the prayer petition wants whatever you're asking for, help, health, protection. But praise wants God for who he is in himself. And most people don't spend much time in praise because they're mercenary when it comes to God. The reason why God is not a reality that basically shapes your heart, because his beauty and his love makes all these other things that drive you and all your other fears go away. Because the reason that doesn't happen is because most people, when they pray, they don't spend much time in adoration. Why? Because adoration basically means I love you for who you are, not for what you give me. You know, imagine you've just gotten married recently and your young wife says to you, honey, why do you love me? Why did you fall in love with me? Why did you marry me? And you say, well, first of all, there are a couple major business relationships that I got into through you. There's a couple incredible deals that happened because of relation doors that you opened for me. And also, I want you to know I did a little bit of research and you have a very, very wealthy uncle who loves you and who has no children and he's old and sick and he makes. Wait a minute, what's going on here? You don't love me. You love what I give you. But you. What does it mean to love someone? It means that I love you just for who you are. Not for the things you give me, not for the status you give me, not for the sex you give me, not for anything, but just for who you are and yourself. See, that's love. And that's the only kind of relationship that actually will reshape your heart and cast out all these other fears and things. Because the love of God replaces the things that you're trying to steal self acceptance from through this way and that way. The love of God, is that real to you? But how do you get that? I mean, how does that really happen? I said it's, it's the mark of real Christianity, not just mercenary religion where you're doing, you're asking God for things and he's giving you things, but where you are able to actually see his beauty and love him for who he is in himself. How does that happen? I'll tell you how it happens. Point five, five points. I did well tonight, don't you think? The fifth point is this. You have to have an experience of undeserved grace, salvation. You've got to understand your salvation is by grace. It's undeserved. And that is what turns God into someone not just who's useful, but who's beautiful to you. Now, where do you see that? If you open your. Don't open your Bibles, you may not have in your Bibles, it'll say at the top that this is a psalm of David when he was in the desert in the wilderness of Judah. That's why in the beginning he's talking about I thirst for you and a dry and parched land. He was out in the wilderness running for his life. Why? I tell you why. All commentators agree his son Absalom had pulled off a coup d'etat and was trying to kill him. And he had run into the wilderness. Now, can you imagine? Do you have any idea how he felt? David knew that the reason why his family was such an absolute mess was largely his fault. It went all the way back to the time when he committed adultery with Bathsheba and had his her husband killed. And then it came out. I mean, his family was a mess. They all hated each other. One of his sons raped one of his daughters. One of his sons tried to kill another one of his sons. His family was a mess. It was toxic. And it was largely because of his own sins and his own foolishness. And now he's running for his life. And it's very intriguing what he says at the very end, verse 11, because he almost certainly went into the tabernacle, went into the sanctuary to pray to God, assuming God had abandoned him. Why not? God seemed to have abandoned him and he probably deserved it. Look at his sins. Look at what he'd done. God had given him everything. And look at all. Look at the murder he did. Look at all the horrible stuff he did. And now he was getting his just desserts. And yet when he gets in there, he says, I have seen you in the sanctuary and beheld your power and your glory, and because your love is better than life. Now, the word love, some of you know from older translations, our NIV translation does not serve us well here because the Hebrew word here is a very, very important Hebrew word in the Old Testament, and it's usually translated steadfast love, because thy steadfast love is better than life. My list will glorify you. Kesed. The Hebrew word steadfast love means unconditional love, covenant love, committed love, undeserved love. And David, to his shock, comes in and God meets him. He has a sense of God's presence. He has a his love, his steadfast love is shed abroad in his heart. And he can't believe it. And he says, I'm astounded after all I've done. Why are you still with me? Why are you still blessing me? Why are you still loving me? It's undeserved. It's grace. But you are. Thank you. And that's the reason why verse 11 is so interesting. He says, the king will rejoice in God. You know what? He's. He's the king. Well, what does that mean? He's reasserting his identity. God is still with me. I'm still the king. He's still with me. So he has an experience of grace. And that's the reason why he can praise God this way. But don't you know that you and I, you and I today have a far greater resource for that experience of grace than David? See, David didn't know why God could still love him in spite of his sin. But you and I know why God can still love us in spite of our sin. David was a king who was driven into the wilderness because of his sins. And God did not abandon him. But centuries later, one of his descendants, Jesus the king, was driven into the wilderness, tempted by Satan, was crucified outside the gate. He was driven out not for his own sins, but for our sins. And God did abandon him. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? And why did God abandon him? Because Jesus was getting the abandonment that David deserved and that I deserve and that you deserve, so that God will never abandon you now. Because he took the penalty that you deserve. He took the penalty for our sins. And when you see him doing that, that is the experience. That is what makes God not just useful, but beautiful. Not just someone who gives you things, but someone who becomes beautiful for who he is in himself. And the beauty of the beauty of God and the adoration and the sense of his love on your heart really can change you. Simone Weil was a French Jewish intellectual during World War II. But she had migraine headaches. And one of the ways that she dealt with those migraine headaches is she would meditate on great poetry. She would read great poetry and meditate on every word. It was a way of dealing with her migraines. And she was meditating on the poetry of George Herbert, the 17th century metaphysical poet, Christian poet. And one of his poems is called Love three, Love colon three. He actually had Love one, Love two, Love three. And in Love Three, he's depicting Jesus as an innkeeper and the human soul is a weary traveler. And Jesus is asking the soul to come in and rest and eat. And the soul keeps saying, no, no, no, I'm not worthy. I'm not worthy. At the very end of the poem, this is what the soul says. Let my shame go where it doth deserve. No, I bore the blame. Jesus says, so I will serve. You must sit down and taste my meat. And the soul gives in and says, so I did sit and eat. And as Simone Weil meditated on Jesus Christ bearing the blame for our sin, as she meditated on him bearing the blame, you see Kay Seth, unconditional love. This is what she says. She says, I felt Christ come down and took possession of me. In this sudden possession of me by Christ, neither my senses nor my imagination took part. But it was like the sight of a friend's face. She says, it wasn't something I saw with my eyes and I wasn't imagining it. There was a reality that just took me over. She experienced what David experienced and what you can experience if you see him bearing the blame for you dying on the cross for you. That turns God from a useful person that we pray to for things to a beautiful person that we adore for who he is in himself. And that will change the very shape of your heart. Of course that's going to be in the future perfectly. But we can get some of it now. The great feast is in the future in heaven, right? But there's a lot of hors d'oeuvres available now through prayer and adoration. As the hymn says, the hill of Zion yields a thousand sacred sweets before we reach the heavenly fields and walk the golden streets. Let's pray, Father. This is the foretaste of that great feast. And we pray that as we take the bread and take the cup that you would meet us and you would teach us more and more how to hallow your name and change us thereby. In Jesus name we pray. Amen.
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Thanks for listening to Tim Keller on the Gospel and Life Podcast. If you'd like to see more people encouraged by the Gospel center teaching and resources of this ministry, we invite you to consider becoming a Gospel and Life Monthly partner. Your partnership allows us to reach people all over the world with the life giving power of Christ's love. To learn more, just visit gospelandlife.com partner. That website again is Gospel Life. Today's sermon was recorded in 2014. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel and Life podcast were preached from 1989 to 2017 while Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church.