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Welcome to Gospel and Life. During January, we're inviting our listeners to consider becoming a Gospel and Life Monthly partner. Monthly partners are an important part in helping us to plan for how we can be the most effective in reaching people all over the world with the gospel. If you'd like to become a monthly Partner, just visit gospelinlife.com partner that's gospelandlife.com partner 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.
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The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all 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 nature desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. The truth. And suppressing the truth is not admitting there's a God there. And 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, a 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 take. 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, 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. And what it is, it's ingratitude. Because all in 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 were 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, you see, if you capture him, what did you do with him? You weren't allowed to torture him. You weren't allowed to execute him. No. 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? That's how all the international laws go. 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? Don't you. 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 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's 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 her. 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're saying, 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, 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 is 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 suppress 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, any psychologist will tell you things that you. 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, let's say. And then we're told repression leads to darkness. It says in verse 29, 21. Because they refuse to thank him, it says their thinking becomes futile and their minds become darkened. Ingratitude leads to repression. Repression leads to darkness. And then darkness leads to every one of this. 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. That's what the passage says, but let's break it down. Let's go back to each of those steps. Number one. All right. 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. They want to deny God. They want to deny God's being God. They don't want to take him without complete seriousness. They don't. They want. 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, in a sense, he says, imagine an explosion in a paint factory creating the Mona Lisa by accident, of course. But, you know, 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. And 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. You could never say there's no chance of that. Of course, there's an infinitesimal chance of that sort of thing happening. But Paul is saying there's a far less, you know, 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, if you're that willing to suppress the truth, it shows a bias. You know, Freud, Marx, Feuerbach and Nietzsche all said that Christians need God. They've got psychological needs for God. You see this? And they all had different approaches, of course, to it. The Marx said the rich needed God to keep the poor down. And of course, Sigmund Freud said people needed God because they. They need to have a deity to whom they can atone for their rebellion against authority figures. And Nietzsche had his own view in Ludwig Feuerbach. And they all said there's psychological reasons why people need to believe in God. And by the way, that's true. What 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, you see, 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 say, a deep bias. 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 the 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, you are left with darkness.
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We all chase things like success, true love, or the perfect life, good things that can easily become ultimate things when we put our faith in them. Deep down, we know they can't satisfy our deepest longings. The truth is that we've made lesser gods of good things, things that can't give us what we really need. In his book Counterfeit the empty promises of money, sex and power and the only hope that matters, God, Tim Keller shows us how a proper understanding of the Bible reveals the truth about societal ideals and our own hearts and shows us that there is only one God who can wholly satisfy our desires. This month we'll send you counterfeit gods as our thank you for your gift to help gospel and life share the love of Christ with people all over the world. You can request your copy@gospelandlife.com give. That's gospelandlife.com give. Now here's Dr. Keller with the rest of today's teaching.
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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, you know, Woody Allen's new movie, Crimes and Misdemeanors. You know, 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 gets. He has a small affair with a stewardess, and the stewardess looks like she's going to tell on her, 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 upon 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. Oh, 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, see, morality without religion doesn't work. A moral structure without a personal creator doesn't work. That we know 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 was a couple of. And that wasn't a terribly 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 that 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 we can be sure is here is nature. Paul says in verse 20, behind nature there's a personal God. But. 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. This is. 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 is 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. I don't know, maybe some of you are saying, 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, and. Or there's darkness. In fact, I'll 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 now this 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 insofar 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, any more 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 to first to do little evils and then later on bigger evils. And when I've done, 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 you know, 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, 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. 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 I don't know whether I. I 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. And 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 get ready to kick God out. What good is this? I 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 is 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 have 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 are 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. 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 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 see 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? You know, where's the logic and 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. Enjoying 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 you, 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 10 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. 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.
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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 gospelandlife.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@gospelandlife.com you can also stay connected with us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and X. Today's sermon was recorded in 1989. The sermon 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.