Thank you, Tim Keller

“The gospel says you are more sinful and flawed than you ever dared believe, but more accepted and loved than you ever dared hope.”

~Tim Keller

A friend shared the above sentence with me sometime in the late nineties. She told me that it came from a person named Tim Keller, who was the pastor of something called Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, but I’d never heard of that church, and I didn’t think much of those details.

What stayed with me was that summary of the gospel. It was both simple and challenging, naming what I’d heard all my church-going, Jesus-loving life, but at the same time making it all feel so much more extreme.

I didn’t want the first half of the sentence to be true. I didn’t want the second half to be false. I knew I couldn’t pick and choose.

“The central basis of Christian assurance is not how much our hearts are set on God, but how unshakably his heart is set on us.”

~Tim Keller

Over the years, I heard about this Tim Keller from time to time, but I didn’t pay him much attention. I was homeschooling children. I was going to graduate school. I was starting a new job and my children were starting school and I was spending my late afternoons on the sidelines of soccer fields or waiting out someone’s music lesson.

It wasn’t until the 2016 presidential election that I recalled a friend saying he listened to Tim Keller sermons all the time. I could find them on YouTube. I listened to one, then another. Soon I spent my near daily, hour-long walks with my dog listening to Tim Keller sermons, a practice that continued for years. In the outpour of anger and fear from media outlets of every stripe, I found that listening to Tim Keller gave me hope.

I know I was drawn, in part, by his delivery. If he had preached through shouting, if he’d been a pound-the-podium type, I doubt I’d have stuck with him. But Dr. Keller talked like a regular person, and as if I, too (listening while my dog sniffed the pachysandra), was a regular person, capable of reason and careful thought. He was avuncular, perhaps, professorial. The kind of person I could have chatted with after class if I’d had any questions.

But more than that, I was drawn in by the cogency of his teaching. He was preaching from Ezekiel, from Matthew, from Genesis, and in doing so was making sense of my 21st century world. More than that, he was making sense of me and the reasons I found life difficult, the reasons I found myself and my relationships difficult, the reasons the world was on edge.

At the same time, he was making the best sense I’d ever heard of what I’d always believed: that God existed still, in charge of it all. That the chaos we’ve surrounded ourselves with is our own doing, and that the love and reason countering it— no matter how it comes— is ultimately all his, coming from God himself.

No matter the topic, no matter the text, Keller insisted on the believable, triumphant goodness of Jesus, God’s Son, who was crucified for me, out of love for me, and raised from death to live forever. Dr. Keller declared this again and again, always with a frank gladness.

I listened to every one of his sermons that I could find, and then I went back and listened to them again.

“Describe the God you’ve rejected. Describe the God you don’t believe in. Maybe I don’t believe in that God either.”

~Tim Keller

Despite my inattention to Dr. Keller throughout most of his ministry, he was certainly what many people would call successful. He published more than a dozen books on theology and life, many (all?) of them becoming best-sellers. The church he started in New York City in 1989 grew by 2007 to over 5000 regular attendees and spawned a dozen more in the New York City area.

His church helped to found numerous organizations, one of which helps to provide volunteers and funds to social service ministries, and another which helps professionals integrate theological meaning into their work.

Over the years, he’s become what many people would call a celebrity. In my church and among many Christians I know, Tim Keller is the man to read and listen to, as if he has somehow tapped into the way that church ought to work. People understandably want to know him, talk with him, be mentored by him, learn from him. To my mind, his life and ministry will find him named among the “greats,” people like Charles Spurgeon and Dwight Moody, Beth Moore and Billy Graham.

But to hear him teach— as I did on my daily walks with the dog— or to read the testimonials that have poured forth since his death on Friday morning, celebrity seems to have been the furthest thing from his mind. As his sermons suggested, so he was in real life: interested in others, unassuming, willing to help where he could, to encourage where it was needed and, often enough, unanticipated.

So it should be for a person who believed what he believed, who believes what I believe: that no one is better or more important than anyone else, that all of us are naturally and deeply flawed. And all of us are supernaturally and deeply, deeply loved.

I never met Dr. Keller in person, but I did get to hear him preach once at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in May of 2010. I was sitting in the second row. The sermon was on humility.

Death, be not proud

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

For those whom thou think’st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,

Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee do go,

Rest of their bones, and soul’s delivery.

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, sickness dwell,

And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well

And better than they stroke; why swell’st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

~John Donne

That’s all for this week, friends. As ever, thank you so much for reading.

With joy,

Rebecca