When God speaks, it happens. God's Word is a power. It's not
like God's word is not like our word. We say something, but then
we have to do it. God's word is his active power. And when you
hear God speaking to you, in His Word, when you study his word,
when you hear his voice to you in His Word, that is his power
coming into your life, that is his reality coming into your
life. If you want to make sure your prayer life is meaningful,
you need to be deep into the Word of God. When you study the
Word of God, God is speaking to you and then you respond in
prayer.
Tim Keller's legacy is in that powerful combination of both
pastoral sensibility and cultural awareness with Keller
you've got an example of what it means to be in exegesis of the
culture, not just the scriptures, and that exegesis of
the culture is always to be in service to the exegesis of the
scriptures of, of making the application of Christian
teaching more incisive, more compelling, more carefully tuned
to the aisles of our time.
One thing that I'm grateful for in the ministry of Tim Keller,
how the Lord has used him, to not only help me understand the
gospel well, but helped me understand myself by helping me
explore and discover idols that were keeping me from, from
delighting in Christ from trusting in Him, and for this, I
will be eternally thankful.
I still remember the first time I listened to a Tim Keller
sermon that was walking down the street in Edinburgh back in the
days when we still used iPods. And as I listened to him, talk
about how grace changes everything. It was effective
almost felt like a, like a weight lifted off my shoulders,
to hear the gospel described like that. And it was life
changing.
Jonathan Edwards says, Your good deeds cannot keep you out of
hell. In other words, you can't say yourself. So he says, Your
good deeds cannot keep you out of hell. Okay, that's a true
proposition. But then he says any more than a spider web can
stop a falling rock. And when he says that he's connecting a
propositional truth to an actual sensory experience you've had,
which is spider webs are so absolutely frail and fragile and
flimsy. But they can't stop a thing. And it's his way of
saying your good deeds are like, they're like a spider web.
They're like nothing. And what he did there was he connected a
an abstract proposition with a sensory experience, and it grabs
you.
Tim Keller set out there as an aim for the teacher or preacher,
to cause your audience to adore Christ, that we would put Christ
forward in such a way that would help people to see his beauty
and his necessity, and his significance in such a way that
it would cause people to adore Christ. That's now always at the
heart of what I do when I teach. And I'm just grateful to have
learned that from Tim Keller.
It's been such a profound blessing in what he's written,
and also what he's built really on the ground in the church. And
the way he's ministered in ordinary Sunday settings, has
helped 1000s and 1000s of pastors, I know minister well in
a post Christian environment, and we are so grateful to him
for that.
He has a really great guy, or people who have a really big
name and sell a lot of books and are well known. And then to meet
them personally is somewhat disappointing. But Tim has
always been very kind to me. And I know not just to me, but to a
lot of all sorts of people and people a generation younger than
him like myself and people generation below me.
It's easy to look at non-Christians and I think the
climate of our world today would have us look at non-Christians
with sort of sarcasm with put downs. I mean, look at these
secular idiots. I can't believe what they believe. I mean, the
thing I appreciate about Tim is that that's, that's never been
his posture. He cares about them because he wants them to know
Jesus. He's always been about Jesus. And so what I've seen
from Tim is an ability to enter into their world to see where
they're coming from, to see their concerns and their
questions to, to meet them where they're at. So that he might
better lead them to where Jesus is at and that's what it should
be all about.
One time, we were at a meeting together, and he took the time
to come over and made a beeline for me, and came over and said,
"Hey, Melissa, I just want to encourage you keep writing". And
while Tim is so significant and so encouraging, in a broader
sense, he also took the time to encourage me personally.
There is no pastor I know, in the past 100 years, who has done
what Tim Keller has done, to take the Reformed faith, and to
take it to the street, and to take it to the academy, the way
he has done is truly extraordinary. Tim also has the
character of humility and kindness, which has enabled him
to influence hundreds of 1000s of people. We are all indebted
to Tim for the way that he has brought the pastoral Heart of
Jesus Christ, and the truth of God's word to our culture in our
day.
The level of respect that he shows when he's trying to reach
and the unbelievers, I think it's something that is a model
for many people, and something that we should copy. Especially
in this time in this generation, where we have so many people who
have no credibility in the Gospel, or even in churches.
I love the fact that Tim Keller's influence is born out
of love for men and women, brothers and sisters in Christ
in a local church, love for a city a desire to reach a city
like New York City, with the gospel, and then for the fruit
of his life to then expand far beyond cities around the world
and brothers and sisters in all kinds of local churches. I thank
God for His faithfulness to the word and to the church in ways
that have served the broader church with the world including
my life, I think in ways far beyond what he could imagine.