A (19:20)

We always say the gospel changes everything. And we believe it really does. That's why here at Gospel and Life, August is Go and share month. Throughout August, we're inviting thousands of our listeners to take a small step in sharing the gospel with someone God has placed in your life. For those of you who make a gift to gospel and life, this month we'll send you two copies of Making Sense of God by Tim Keller. It's a Powerful resource that explores how Christianity makes emotional, cultural and rational sense in today's world. It's our thanks for your gift and provides a way you can do a small act to share the gospel by reading the book with a friend, giving one to a co worker, or passing on both copies to people who are exploring the Christian faith. It's a simple way to start a gospel conversation or continue it. To request your two copies of Making Sense of God, simply go to gospelandlife.com give again. That's gospelandlife.com give now here's Dr. Keller with the remainder of today's teaching.

B (20:21)

Instead he says, and this is what's so interesting, he says, it's not over the sea. You don't go over the sea to get it. What then? What is it? He says, it's in your mouth and in your heart. See, your heart is where you believe. Your mouth is what you confess. And what does he say? He says this relationship with God is not something you achieve, it's something you receive. It's not something that you prove your worth. You just get it. And therefore he's talking, he's saying that this relationship with God is not something that you go to heaven to get. You go over the sea to get. You don't go on some kind of quest. You don't have to be some heroic warrior. You receive it by grace. Now, this is threatening and this is our second problem we have with it. If you want a perfect example of this, and it's a great example, and is the biblical story of Naaman in 2 Kings, chapter 5. In 2 Kings, chapter 5, we're told about Naaman, who was a Syrian general and he was stricken with leprosy and he knew he was going to die if he wasn't healed. And he heard about the God of Israel and his power. So he decided to go to Israel and find the prophet Elisha and seek his healing and salvation. And the text tells us the way he sallied forth to do so. And what he brought with him showed that he understood himself being on a quest. He went with gold and treasure, you know, to buy whatever and purchase whatever he had to. He went with a sword ready to do a great deed because he was a man of prowess and valor. He went with letters of recommendation from his king and so on. And he gets to the prophet's house and Elisha doesn't even come out. Instead he's told by the valet of Elisha, go wash in the Jordan River. And Naaman is furious and he runs away. In fury, and his servants go after them and they say, master, Master, if you were told by the prophet to do some great deed, wouldn't you have done it? And that's the point. He's like all people, all ancient people, all modern people. If there's salvation, we're gonna achieve it. We have to prove our worth. We have to leap from the lion's head, we have to bring out our sword, we have to do some great deed. He was expecting Elisha to come out and say, bring me the broomstick of the Wicked Witch of the West. And he would have been. He says, you see, here's what he's saying. He says, I'm a man of valor, I'm a man of wealth and means, hard won. And it wouldn't be insulting to say, go get the broomstick of the Wicked Witch of the west, get the golden fleece from the dragon. You know, it wouldn't be wrong if you asked me to purchase with my great wealth my healing and my salvation, or to win it by slaying a dragon. But any idiot can wash in the Jordan River. Any child can wash in the Jordan River. What kind of God has a bar of salvation so low? You know, Kathy and I remember the first person I ever shared the gospel faith with in our little town in Hopewell, Virginia, where I first went as a 24 year old pastor. And it was a really hurting young mother on welfare, single mother. And I shared the gospel and she said, it can't be that easy. You know, same thing. What kind of God would have the bar of salvation so low? Oh, but it's. The answer is, on the one hand, we have a God so incredibly inclusive that you've got grace. And that's a bar that anyone can step over. Any murderer, any broken person, anyone can step over the bar because it's a bar of grace. But it's actually not low. It demands and it requires that you lose your pride. Come on, Naaman, you say this is too low for me. No, you're not stepping over it, are you? Why not? It's too high for you. Because there's two things that the offer of free grace, the graciousness of this offer. There's two things that it demands you give up. One is your right to look down on anybody else the rest of your life. You have to give up your pride. You have to give up forever your right to look at anyone else and say, you don't understand. You rabble, you unclean, you fools. You're the reason that things are the way they are in this country. He takes away forever the idea, you know, the pride. Because you have to say, I'm just a sinner. I need to be saved by grace. The other thing you have to give up is control of your life. Because, you see, if you had sallied forth and if you had won your salvation with the kingdom or eternal life on a great quest, then God couldn't just ask anything of you. You know you have your rights. You know you've done what you should be doing. But if you owe everything, everything, everything to his mercy, you owe him everything. You can't call the shots in your life anymore. Don't you see the incredible inclusiveness at the same time, the threatening costliness of the free grace of God. It is so simple, it is so easy that we can't take it. We're threatened by it. You see how this. See, here's another aspect of this incredibly difficult simplicity. It's threatening graciousness. Our pride. Because of our pride, the absolute graciousness of the gospel throws us. Don't let it throw you. But we're not done. First aspect of this difficult simplicity is the deceptive ordinariness. The second aspect is the threatening graciousness. But the third aspect is the unimaginable promise. What do I mean by that? Well, look, if you're smart people, this is New York. So if you're reading that passage, you realize that I've been concentrating on the first part of the passage, which seems to be all about grace. You don't have to go to heaven. You don't have to go over the sea. You don't have to. It's right there in your mouth and your heart. You have to believe in your heart and confess with your mouth. And it's there. It's right there. But then you get to that last part, and it seems like the second part totally contradicts what was just said. Because it says, you see, if your heart turns away and you are not obedient, and if you are drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship them, I declare to you this day you will certainly be destroyed. You will not live long in the land. This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you. That I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life, or else all these curses will come upon you. And Wait a minute. We say, wait a minute. That seems like we're back to the quest thing. We're back to going over the sea again because we've been through this all the book of Deuteronomy. We see what we're supposed to do. We see how we're supposed to live. We see how we're supposed to treat God. We see how we're supposed to treat everyone else. And we'll never live up to that all the time. We'll never live up to that all the time. So it almost seems like the second part of this text poses a huge problem. It seems to contradict the first part, but it doesn't because of the note that there is hope. You know what the hope is? It's in the very final verse. It's in the very, almost the final word of Moses where he says, for the Lord is your life. Let me tell you what's going on there. Let me tell you what an incredible promise that is. It's the first time in the Bible that that statement is made, and I think it's the last time in the whole Old Testament. See, up to now, life. And we're not talking about biological life, right? Choose life. They already have biological life. So what are they saying? It's spiritual life. It's eternal life. It's the new heart. And all that talked about that last week. Okay, so choose life. Up until this point, life is connected with obedience, and death is connected with disobedience. If you obey, you'll get life. In other words, your obedience is your life. And if you disobey, you'll get death. In other words, your disobedience is your death. So choose life. So obey. And all the way through the book up to now, that's what it's been telling you. Your obedience is your life. Every time this word life, this spiritual life thing comes up, it says, if you obey, you'll get life. Your obedience is your life. Your obedience is your life. But verse 20, suddenly, suddenly, Moses basically says here, your obedience would be your life. And it could be your life, but because it can't be your life because you're not going to keep it up, the Lord will be your life. What does that mean? Not that the Lord will give you life if you obey. That's not what it's saying. It says, the Lord will be your life. The Lord himself will be your life. What does that mean? Paul explains it in Romans 10. In Romans chapter 10, Paul comes to this very passage when he's proclaiming the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the readers of the book of Romans. So the Romans, he goes to this very passage and he interprets the passage in the most unbelievable way. Here's what he says. This is Romans 10. Christ is the end of the law, says Paul, as a means of righteousness for everyone who believes now about this righteousness that comes through faith. Moses has said, quote, do not say in your heart who will ascend into heaven, for that would bring Christ down. And he says, do not say who will descend into the deep, for that would be to bring Christ up from the abyss. But what does it say? What does Moses say? He says the word is near you. It is in your mouth and in your heart. That is the word of faith. We are proclaiming that if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. Did you hear that? Look, first of all, he says Christ is the end of the law, not period. He says Christ is the end of the law for righteousness. It's still there to please God, to change your life. But it's no longer a means to stand before God, righteous and accepted. No. No, no. Why not? Jesus went into the abyss. Jesus went on the quest for eternal life. Moses says. Paul says. Moses says you don't have to go to heaven. No, because Jesus has come down from heaven. Paul says. Moses says you don't have to go over to the sea, because Jesus went into the depths of the sea and he took the destructive forces and he received the destruction that we deserve. He took the curses in himself. He was destroyed. He went on a great quest. He went on the quest. He. He won eternal life. And now he gives it to us as a gift. But I want you to know one thing. The quest of Jesus Christ was different than any other quest that's ever happened. I read a scholarly article some years ago that really blew my socks off. It was amazing. First of all, it was a scholarly article. It was by a scholar who was actually trying to look and. And speak broadly about almost all the ancient mythic prehistories of all the different cultures, whether Northern European or Mediterranean, Greek and Roman or Asian. And they were looking at all these stories and all these legends, and they all had. There was a certain pattern to all of them, and that was you had these strong heroic figures who went on quests to win something. They were all about that. All the legends were like that. Strong, heroic figures who went on quests to win something. And then the article, amazingly, said this. The scholar of the last generation, who knew the most in the entire world about these ancient myths and legends, knew them in the originals and all that. The scholar of the last generation, who knew more about them than Anybody else alive was JRR Tolkien, who was an Oxford professor. And this article said, secondly, he loved them so much that he wanted to write his own. He wanted to write his own mythic story about a quest. And he did. But point three, he was so saturated with Christianity and so saturated with the Christian gospel that his story is almost the antithesis of every other mythic prehistory that ever happened. Because every single other ancient legend has a strong figure going off to save the world by winning something. But in Tolkien and in the gospel, the world is saved by a weak figure who triumphs through losing and goes off in a quest not to gain something, but to lose something. Because you see, at the heart of his story and at the heart of ours is a suffering servant who triumphed through losing, who fell into the dark so we could live in the light. And that's the reason why Jesus quest is different than all these other self saving, self justifying quests of all the other cultures. And that's the reason why there's one Christian poet, Edward Shillito, who, addressing Jesus, spoke to him this. The other gods were strong, but thou wast weak. They rode, but thou didst stumble to your throne, but to our wounds only God's wounds can speak. And not a God has wounds, but thou alone. The other gods were strong, but thou wast weak. They rode, but you did stumble to your throne. To our wounds only God's wounds can speak. And there's no God in any other religion that has wounds, but thou alone. The simplicity is the difficulties. Let me close like this. If you are exploring Christianity or if you have maybe come to, you know, maybe you're raised in a church and now you're trying to think, well, what's my relationship to Christianity? Oh my word. Please realize that in some ways, understanding the difficulty of the simplicity and grasping the simplicity in all of its difficulty is how you become a Christian. You want to know how to become a Christian. You want to know how to get a covenant relationship with God? That's it. You say, well, that's paradoxical. What do you mean? Give me a perfect case study. In 1740s, there were a group of young men who were actually all part of the church. In fact, I think some of them were ordained ministers. They were in the Church of England and they were in London. But they knew there was something missing. They knew they didn't have a personal relationship with God, they didn't have a covenant relationship with God, they didn't have a new heart. And they began a set of evening Meetings in which they read to each other. Luther's preface to the Galatians, Martin Luther's preface to the Book of the Galatians. And on successive nights over a period of a week or so, John Wesley, founder of the Methodist Church, Charles Wesley, a great hymn writer, and his. His brother and a whole lot of their friends got converted when the penny dropped of the simplicity of the grace of God. Here's one of them, a man named William Holland that you wouldn't have heard of, but it's a perfect example of what happened. This is his diary. Mr. Charles Wesley read aloud and at the place where Luther said, what have we then? Nothing to do? No, nothing, but only to accept him, who of God is made unto us, who becomes for us our wisdom, our righteousness, our sanctification, our redemption. And at hearing those words there came such a power over me as I cannot well imagine and describe. My heart was so filled with peace and love that I burst into tears. And when afterwards I went into the street, I could scarcely feel the ground I trod upon. Now, what happened was the simplicity of grace hit him. And the moment that happened and the moment he was willing to pay those two costs to get rid of your pride and to say, from now on I'll never be able to look down at anybody and to get rid of any control over your life. Cause now you know you owe him everything, everything to his mercy. If you're willing to pay those prices. And the simplicity of grace happens at that moment you are becoming a Christian. At that moment you are entering into that personal relationship with God. And you say, well, if. What if I already believe? Do you have a final word for me? Sure. The life. The life that's in you. God is your life because of Jesus. He's your life now. It's guaranteed. It's in you. That's why Colossians 3. Paul says in 1 John 3, it talks about, our life is hid with God. Our life is in God, and we really don't even know what we're going to be. But when Jesus Christ is revealed on the last day, we know we'll be like Him. I mean, it's over the top. The life that started in you is just a seed. You're just a shadow of what you're going to be. CS Lewis describes though what you are going to be. Live in hope of this. He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into dazzling, radiant, immortal creatures, pulsating through with an energy, just joy, wisdom and love, as we cannot now imagine. He can make us all bright stainless mirrors which reflect back to God perfectly, though on a smaller scale. His own boundless power, delight and goodness. That is what we are in for. Nothing less. Let's pray. Thank you Father. Thank you Father that through Jesus Christ you can be our life. We thank you for the life that you've planted in so many of us. We thank you for the hope that that gives us as we think about our future. And we thank you for the difficult simplicity of the Gospel. And we pray that you would keep us from letting our pride throw us, letting our snobbishness overlook it, letting our self satisfaction keep us from working out the radical implications of the Gospel for every area of our life. So we ask that you would help us now to really receive your life through Jesus Christ. We choose it. We ask in Jesus name. Amen.

A (39:24)

Thanks for joining us here on the Gospel in Life podcast. We hope that today's teaching encourages you to share the gospel with someone you know. This offer August is Go and Share Month at Gospel and Life, and we've curated a wide range of free resources to help you take simple steps to share the gospel. You can Access them at gospelandlife.com Share we believe God uses small acts to do great things, and we're inviting you to do simple small acts to go and share the gospel this month because the Gospel changes everything. Today's sermon was recorded in 2007. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel and Life podcast were recorded between 1989 and 2017 while Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church.