The Gospel Coalition

“Newsweek called Tim Keller ‘a C.S. Lewis for the twenty-first century’ in a feature on his first book, The Reason for God. Now, in The Prodigal God, he uses one of the best-known Christian parables to reveal an unexpected message of hope and salvation.”

“The Prodigal Son is the most well-known parable in the Bible. Incredibly, it is also almost universally misunderstood. Taking his trademark intellectual approach to understanding Christianity, Keller uncovers the essential message of Jesus, hidden in plain sight for centuries. Within this parable is the lost message of Jesus–where he outlines just how his followers are supposed to love and accept one another so they can join him in Heaven. With this book, both the devout and skeptics will see Christianity in a whole new way. ”

Wow! Having heard Tim on this numerous times, I promise you, it will change your life. Seriously. You can pre-order it here.

“A passionate discussion is unfolding in public and in private among Evangelical leaders and communities. Should Christians be involved in politics and if so, how? What has gone wrong, and what has been learned from the Moral Majority up until now. In this live public conversation, Krista Tippett probes these ideas with three formative Evangelicals (Chuck Colson, Greg Boyd, and Shane Claiborne).”

You can tune in here.

On March 11 Westminster Bookstore and the Westminster Gospel & Culture Project hosted Tim Keller for two events speaking about his book The Reason for God. Here is the video of a one hour roundtable discussion between Keller and the Westminster Theological Seminary faculty.

I was happy to arrive back home late last night from a three day excursion to Louisville where I was attending a conference (Together for the Gospel). It was a great time catching up with friends and hearing from men that I admire (R.C. Sproul, John Piper, etc.). But now I’m back and life resumes it’s normalcy, at least for one week until I have to leave again for a few days.

Anyway, below is the fifth post in a series which began last week outlining six ways one might be decieved into thinking they know God when in fact they don’t. These “deceptions” are taken right out of my book Do I Know God? If you missed the first four posts you can click here, here, here, and here.

Deception 5: “I’m a good person. Isn’t that enough?”

In Romans the apostle Paul said something that seems at first glance to be downright inaccurate. He said that no one does good. Referring to a number of Old Testament verses, he wrote:

“None is righteous, no, not one;
no one understands;
no one seeks for God.
All have turned aside; together they have become worthless;
no one does good,
not even one.”
“Their throat is an open grave;
they use their tongues to deceive.”
“The venom of asps is under their lips.”
“Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness.”
“Their feet are swift to shed blood;
in their paths are ruin and misery,
and the way of peace they have not known.”
“There is no fear of God before their eyes.” (Romans 3:10–18)

No one does good? No one? Surely there are kind mothers, faithful fathers, obedient children, and honest businesspeople out there. Yes, there are. And Paul wouldn’t argue with that. But when the Bible speaks about a “good work,” it means specifically a good work that is motivated by love for God. It is an act of moral virtue done with a purpose: to glorify God. That’s why Jesus condemned the Pharisees’ so-called good works: Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. You blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and the plate, that the outside also may be clean. Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which outwardly appear beautiful, but within are full of dead people’s bones and all uncleanness. So you also outwardly appear righteous to others, but within you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness. (Matthew 23:25–28)

Jesus admitted that the Pharisees’ works looked beautiful on the outside, but inside, the Pharisees were spiritually dead. They weren’t motivated to do good out of love for God or a desire to glorify him.

In the same way, you and I see admirable people who do admirable things for families, friends, communities, and the poor. But unless those admirable deeds are motivated by love for God and have as their goal the glory of God, they cannot be considered good in an ultimate sense. Only someone who has a heart for God can do good in this sense. The problem is, as we’ve seen, we can’t gain a heart for God on our own. Only an act of God can remove our “heart of stone” and give us a “heart of flesh” (Ezekiel 11:19). This is why the prophet Isaiah said that, apart from God, “all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment” (Isaiah 64:6). Our only hope is to place our faith in what Jesus Christ has already done.

This beautiful, liberating truth raises two questions. First, what has Christ done? And second, what is faith? Let’s start with the first.

What Has Christ Done?
The foundational notion behind every world religion except Christianity is humanity’s ascent to God. They are all, to one degree or another, bottom-up religions; they require believers to work their way up into a relationship with the divine, however that idea is understood. Believers can attain salvation only by trying harder. Everything depends on individual effort.

In contrast, the foundation of Christianity is God’s gracious descent to humanity. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14, emphasis added). Christianity is not a bottom-up religion but a top-down relationship: “God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16, emphasis added). God descended to us in the person of Jesus Christ because we could not ascend to him. In Jesus, God physically came into our world to rescue us from the penalty, power, and eventually the presence of sin.

As we saw in chapter 2, because of sin, we’re born without a saving relationship to our Creator. Ephesians 2:1 tells us that we are born dead in our trespasses and sins. Due to sin, none of us can choose God or love him on our own. We are morally, spiritually, and relationally dead to God.

Theologians use two words to describe this deformity of our natures: total depravity. 

Total depravity does not mean utter depravity. Utter depravity means that someone is as bad as he or she could possibly be. Thankfully, God graciously prevents even the worst of us from becoming utterly depraved—we could all be worse. Total depravity, on the other hand, means that sin has corrupted us in the totality of our being.

In other words, sin affects every part of us. Sin corrupts all our thoughts, all our feelings, and all our behavior. Nothing we think, feel, or do is as good as it should be. So, contrary to what positive thinkers and some psychologists would have us think, humans are not fine just the way we are. Paul wrote that apart from Christ we’re hostile toward God; we don’t even want to choose him (Romans 8:7–8). (Do you see why it’s impossible for people to work themselves into a relationship with God?)

This brings us back to what Jesus Christ has done to make a relationship with God possible. Paul wrote, “A person is not justified by works of the law but through faith in Jesus Christ, so we also have believed in Christ Jesus, in order to be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified” (Galatians 2:16).

Justification is a legal term that, in Paul’s time, was commonly heard in courtrooms. To justify someone was to declare that person innocent, acquitted of all charges.

What does this legal term have to do with working our way toward God? You and I stand guilty in God’s courtroom. And God is the only one with the power to declare us guilt free. But God’s pardon comes at a great cost. A just God could not ignore or overlook sin and remain just. Sin is a serious offense that requires a serious penalty. In order for God to adopt someone into his family, God requires payment for that person’s sin, and the payment is death (Romans 6:23). But since the penalty for offending an infinite, holy God requires an infinite, perfect price, then God—and only God—can pay it. And that’s where the cross of Jesus Christ comes in: the only reason God can adopt you and me into his family forever is because of Christ’s sacrifice. None of our so-called goodness has anything to do with it.

Perhaps now you see why down through the centuries the cross of Jesus Christ has stood at the center of what Christians believe about God and the relationship he offers to sinners like you and me. The cross reminds us of our great sickness while at the same time reminding us of God’s great salvation. Christ did for sinners what sinners could never do for themselves. This is the gospel, the good news.

In his remarkable book Jesus Ascended, Gerrit Scott Dawson gives an illustration that might help you understand what Christ accomplished: “A child is conceived through the loving communion of husband and wife. The child grows inside the sheltering womb of the mother. But the wee one cannot live there for ever. He is made for another world, a world of daylight and air, starlight and sky. So in the hours of her labour, the mother offers a new and living way. The way to life as a human being in the world passes through the curtain of her flesh.… The curtain must be torn that the child might live and reach the daylight world. She is the new and living way. By her pain, the child is born.”

That’s exactly how the Bible speaks of Christ’s work on the cross. In the same way we were brought into this world through the pain and suffering of our mothers, Christ delivers sinners into fellowship with God through his own pain and suffering. The way to everlasting life passes through the curtain of Christ’s flesh.

So God’s gift to the world was to send Jesus into the world to reconcile sinners to himself and invite them into an eternal relationship with him. The only way to obtain that eternal gift is to believe. The Bible says, “Without faith it is impossible to please God” (Hebrews 11:6, NIV). But now we must explore what the Bible means when it refers to faith.

What Is Faith?
The Bible defines faith as “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). Faith is believing with the eyes of your heart what you cannot see with the eyes of your head. In regard to a relationship with God, “faith is transferring your trust from your own efforts to the efforts of Christ,” says Tim Keller, pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City.

This faith, however, is no blind leap in the dark. Far from it. The Bible teaches that faith is an exercise of reasonable trust in a God who is really there and has proved himself to be completely trustworthy. In fact, it would be utterly unreasonable and irrational not to trust in someone who has proved himself to be infinitely dependable. The whole Bible bears witness to the reality that God has been, is now, and will always be truthful and worthy of our trust. We may not always understand what God is doing or why he is doing it, but we have no good reason to doubt him.

But what does all this talk of faith (or lack of it) have to do with Christ’s work on the cross? Just this: in order for someone to enter into a relationship with him, God requires faith in what Christ did on the cross for sinners. Relationship with God depends on our whole-souled response to what Christ has done. A true step of faith involves believing in Christ’s work with our minds, embracing it with our affections, and trusting it with our wills. Christ’s sacrifice on the cross all by itself does not bring us into a relationship with God. (Think about how many people dismiss who Christ is and ignore his work on the cross!) You and I must act. We must choose to exercise faith—reasonable trust—in what Christ accomplished on the cross in order for us to receive and experience a relationship with God. John Calvin said, “As long as Christ remains outside of us, and we are separated from him, all that he has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value for us.”

We’ve seen that all our good works are worthless in terms of winning us an eternal relationship with God. But does that mean the good things we do count for nothing in this world? If faith is all it takes to spend eternity with God, why bother trying to be good?

I will seek to answer these questions in the next post.

For a while now I’ve been touting the Spirit of the Reformation Study Bible as being the best study Bible available. Well, it will soon have some serious competition. Not long from now the long awaited, years-in-the-making ESV Study Bible will be available. Many of the people involved with this project are people that I know and hold in the highest esteem. They are first rate scholars, writers, artists, and editors. 

I have no doubt that the arrival of this study Bible will be one of God’s great gifts to his church in the 21st century. Seriously. 

Pastor Mark Driscoll from Mars Hill Church in Seattle recently wrote about what he thought of this new study Bible after he got the opportunity to thumb through an early copy. You can read his thoughts here.

To find out more about it you can check the ESV Study Bible website which goes live today.

In my book Do I Know God? I identify six ways a person might be decieved into thinking they know God when in fact they don’t. This post is the fourth installment of a series of posts which began the other day outlining those six ways. If you missed the first three posts you can click here and here and here.

Deception 4: “I’m spiritual. Isn’t that enough?”

From Oprah to Madonna, Tom Cruise to Deepak Chopra, our country is full of people who seem to be serious about exploring the varieties of spiritual experience.

What might be driving our generation’s evident appetite for spirituality apart from religion?3 One explanation points to what has been lost since Enlightenment man traded in the sacred and transcendent for the natural and physical.

People today live in a “world without windows,” explains sociologist Peter Berger. By contrast, he says, in centuries past humanity lived with windows to other worlds. They recognized there was Someone bigger, Someone to appeal to beyond themselves, a larger purpose to life beyond this world. But the modern world, with all its technological advances and scientific sophistication, has turned away from the supernatural and closed the blinds on the unseen world.

In our new world without windows, God, spirituality, and mystery have become less and less imaginable. Everything has become a matter of human classification, calculation, and control. And since there is no reality beyond what we can see, everything is produced, managed, and solved this side of the ceiling.

It seems, though, that the human spirit will have none of it. In a world robbed of mystery, people yearn for transcendence. They sense there must be more to life than the bottom line, and they begin to understand that all our modern technologies and capabilities cannot make us better, more satisfied people or answer our deepest questions.

This may explain why supernatural dramas such as X-Files, Joan of Arcadia, Medium, Ghost Whisperer, Supernatural, and Heroes seem to pop up every new television season. And why people are increasingly fascinated with Eastern mysticism, angels, aliens, psychics, the afterlife, and metaphysical healing—even why the drug ecstasy is so popular among youth. Our generation is crying out for something different, something higher, something out of this world.

This is both good and bad. As C. S. Lewis said in Mere Christianity, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” People growing more conscious of the eternity that God has set in every human heart (Ecclesiastes 3:11) is a good thing, and it’s something we should all celebrate. On the other hand, “people who have been starved of water for a long time will drink anything, even if it is polluted.”5 There are endless varieties of spiritual options available to people today, and spiritual seekers seem willing to try them to satisfy their spiritual thirst.

The Bible warns against any kind of spirituality apart from true relationship with God. Time and again God condemned pagan idolatry, mysticism, and false worship. Paul wrote, “They exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator” (Romans 1:25). And when Paul visited Athens and addressed the people in the Areopagus, he acknowledged how spiritual they were, yet he showed them that while they were deeply spiritual, they didn’t have a relationship with the living God (Acts 17:22–31).

It’s encouraging that so many people are rediscovering their spiritual thirst and are open to spiritual answers to their deepest questions and longings. But just as salt water can’t quench our physical thirst, so false and incomplete spirituality can never satisfy our spiritual thirst. Only true relationship with God through faith in Jesus Christ can satisfy that thirst. True spirituality is the inner experience of an ever-deepening relationship with God the Father, through God the Son, in God the Spirit. Anything less than entering into an eternal relationship with God through Jesus Christ is a false spirituality that cannot save or satisfy.

When we settle for anything less than true spirituality, we are, Lewis said, “like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

Far better to allow our spiritual longings to bring us to Christ. Hebrews 12:2 tells us to “[look] to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God.” In Jesus we begin to understand that this world is not all there is, and he empowers us to live in this world with the next world in view. When we place our faith in Christ and what he accomplished on that “old rugged cross,” he not only satisfies our thirst for God, but he also promises to usher us from this age to the next one safely and soundly—where God’s children will live with him forever.

Christians come to see that both their sins and their best deeds have all really been ways of avoiding Jesus as savior. They come to see that Christianity is not fundamentally an invitation to get more religious. A Christian comes to say: “Though I have often failed to obey the moral law, the deeper problem was why I was trying to obey it! Even my efforts to obey it has been just a way of seeking to be my own savior. In that mindset, even if I obey or ask for forgiveness, I am really resisting the gospel and setting myself up as Savior.”

To ‘get the gospel’ is to turn from self-justification and rely on Jesus’ record for a relationship with God. The irreligious don’t repent at all, and the religious only repent of sins. But Christians also repent of their righteousness. That is the distinction between the three groups–Christian, moralists (religious), and pragmatists (irreligious).

Tim Keller

When my buddy Duane who lives in California sent this to me last week my wife and I laughed so hard we began to cry. It is a sarcastic, brilliantly comedic way of comparing our society in 1957 with our society in 2007. Nothing here is intended to offend. If it does, it probably means you take yourself too seriously and need to pray and ask God to enhance your sense of humor. Enjoy…

Scenario: Jeffrey won’t be still in class, disrupts other students. 

1957 – Jeffrey sent to office and given a good paddling by the Principal. He returns to class, sits still, and does not disrupt class again.

2007 – Jeffrey is diagnosed with A. D. D. and given huge doses of Ritalin. He becomes a zombie. School gets extra money from State because Jeffrey has a learning disability.

Scenario: Billy breaks a window in his neighbor’s car and his dad gives him a whipping with his belt.

1957 – Billy is more careful next time, grows up normal, goes to college, and becomes a successful businessman .

2007 – Billy’s dad is arrested for child abuse. Billy is placed in foster care and joins a gang. State psychologist convinces Billy’s sister that she remembers being abused herself, and their dad goes to prison. Billy’s Mom has affair with psychologist.

Scenario: Johnny and Mark get into a fist fight after school.

1957 – Crowd gathers. Mark wins. Johnny and Mark shake hands and end up best friends. 

2007 – Police called. SWAT team arrives. Johnny and Mark are arrested and charged with assault. Both are expelled even though Johnny started it.

Scenario: Mark has a headache and brings some aspirin to school.

1957 – Mark takes aspirin in lunchroom and headache goes away.

2007 – Police called. Mark is expelled from school for drug violations. Car is searched for drugs and weapons.
 

Scenario: Pedro fails English in high school.

1957 – Pedro goes to summer school, passes English, goes to college, and becomes a well-known micro-biologist .

2007 – Pedro’s cause is taken up by state. Newspaper articles appear nationally explaining that teaching English as a requirement for graduation is racist. ACLU files class action lawsuit against state school system and Pedro’s English teacher. English banned from core curriculum. Pedro is given a diploma anyway but ends up jobless because he cannot speak English.

Scenario: Johnny takes apart leftover firecrackers from 4th of July, puts them in a model airplane paint bottle, blows up a fire ant hill.

1957 – Ants die.

2007 – Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, Homeland Security, and FBI called. Johnny is charged with domestic terrorism. The FBI investigates parents; siblings are removed from home; computers are confiscated. Johnny’s dad goes on Terror Watch List and is never allowed to fly again.

Scenario: Johnny falls while running during recess and scrapes his knee. He is found crying by his teacher who hugs him to comfort him.

1957 – In a short time, Johnny feels better and goes on playing.

2007 – Teacher is accused of being a sexual predator and loses her job. She faces three years in state prison. Johnny undergoes five years of therapy.

This is the third installment of a series of posts which began the other day on ways people might be decieved into thinking they know God when in fact they don’t. These are taken from my book Do I Know God? If you missed the first two posts you can click here and here.

Deception 3: “I’m religious. Isn’t that enough?”

As we saw in Jesus’s remarks in Matthew 7:21–23, it’s possible—in fact, easy—to do much good in the name of God without having real affection or love for God. The Bible describes many deeply religious people who didn’t really know God. Probably the clearest example is the Pharisees.

An Ancient Problem
During Jesus’s day, the Pharisees were a large, well-respected, rigorously devout religious group within Judaism. They were particularly influential in Galilee, where Jesus conducted much of his early ministry.

No one doubted the Pharisees’ religious commitment. They organized every part of their lives around God’s Law as it had been revealed through Moses in the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Bible). They were so serious about their religion, in fact, that they created an immense body of secondary rules for how the Mosaic Law should be understood and applied. For example, the Jewish Talmud, a collection of oral rabbinic teachings, lists thirty-nine categories of work that were prohibited on the Sabbath. Each of these categories was further subdivided into thirty-nine sections, creating more than fifteen hundred rules and regulations that the Pharisees tried to obey for the sake of the Sabbath.

No detail of life seemed to escape their religious scrutiny. Here’s a sampling of their Sabbath rules: “It was forbidden to unfasten a button, cut your toenails, or carry anything heavier than a dried fig. A man could not wear false teeth, because if they fell out, he would have to carry them, and that would be work. A tailor could not carry a needle in his pocket on the Sabbath because that was one of the tools of his trade, so carrying it would be work.”

Without question, the Pharisees were dedicated, religious people. Yet Jesus reserved his harshest criticisms for them. Why? Because Jesus saw that while on the outside they were religiously devout, inside they were relationally devoid. (He called them “whitewashed tombs” [Matthew 23:27]) He knew they were obsessed with practicing their religion but careless about knowing the God of their religion. They were devoted to the religious letter of the Law (dos and don’ts) but not the relational spirit of the Law (captured in Jesus’s commands to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and strength and to love your neighbor as yourself).

Rebuking the Pharisees for their arrogant double standards, Jesus said, “You hypocrites! Well did Isaiah prophesy of you when he said: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their heart is far from me; in vain do they worship me.’ (Matthew 15:7–9)

It’s easy to be hard on the Pharisees, but have you noticed how easy it is for church activities—especially when we deeply invest our time, energy, and money—to give us the feeling that we’re on intimate terms with God? Many pastors I talk to see how deluded we can become. The truth is, rather than guaranteeing a relationship to God, religious activity can actually hinder us from knowing him. We can easily fall into the trap of thinking that religious achievements are all he wants.

But God wants so much more. He isn’t primarily interested in our religious activities. Rather, he wants us to know, love, and serve him. As an old hymn states, “Love so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my all.”

A Contemporary Problem
My friend Steve recently told me a story about his childhood pastor. He was a devoutly religious man. He had served the same church for more than twenty years. One morning he was preaching a sermon about the cross of Christ and the salvation God had secured for his children. In the middle of his sermon, the pastor broke down and wept, then bowed his head and prayed out loud, asking God to save him. He became a Christian through listening to himself preach! Here was a man who had ministered in God’s church for years but who suddenly realized that he did not know God.

My grandfather says that when he invites people to enter into a relationship with God through Christ at the end of his messages, many pastors and church leaders often come forward. They, too, finally recognize that while they’re devoutly committed to religious activities, structures, and institutions, they don’t have a living relationship with God.

Many today believe they are right with God simply because they are connected to a religious institution or perform religious or charitable acts such as tithing, fasting, being baptized, or eating the Lord’s Supper. These people aren’t terrorists, child molesters, or thieves. They’re decent and devout people who spend their time, talents, energy, and money doing things for God. Yet they can wrongly conclude that because of their religious deeds, they have a relationship with God. The apostle Paul warned Timothy of people like this, people who have “a form of godliness but [deny] its power” (2 Timothy 3:5, NIV).

I pastor a church where several hundred people gather weekly for worship. Many come week in and week out because they know God and long to experience his presence in public worship. But I fear that some assume they know God merely because they show up regularly, enjoy the music and the message, and put some money in the offering plate.

It’s possible to be in church without being “in Christ,” as the New Testament describes that relationship. It’s possible to be connected to religion while remaining disconnected from God. Why would walking into a church make you a Christian any more than walking into a garage makes you a car?

Please understand, I’m not saying that religious activities such as church attendance and caring for others are unimportant or unnecessary. The Bible strongly encourages children of God to invest themselves in the local church: “Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching” (Hebrews 10:25, NIV). A real relationship with God will show itself in a real relationship with his people (more on this in chapter 9). But as important as church attendance and other religious activities are, they don’t mean that someone has an eternal relationship with God.

My friend Luder Whitlock (former President of Reformed Theological Seminary) has written a short review on Jonathan Aitken’s recent biography of John Newton (Crossway 2007). He says:

The [recent] attention to [William] Wilberforce justifies the timing of this volume because, as Aitken argues, Newton’s role in Wilberforce’s life “as a mentor, confidant, co-campaigner, and close friend has often been underestimated” and now deserves reassessment. As is generally recognized, it was Newton who persuaded Wilberforce not to abandon his career in politics to pursue ministry in the church. It was also Newton who provided vivid descriptions of the slave trade from his experience as the captain of a slave ship.