Tim Keller is the pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City. Go to the website or download the Redeemer Presbyterian app to hear his sermons!
1. When people say, "I know God forgives me, but I can't forgive myself," they mean that they have failed an idol, whose approval is more important than God's.
2. God's grace and forgiveness, while free to the recipient, are always costly for the giver ... From the earliest parts of the Bible, it was understood that God could not forgive without sacrifice. No one who is seriously wronged can just forgive the perpetrator ... But when you forgive, that means you absorb the loss and the debt. You bear it yourself. All forgiveness, then, is costly.
3. Do not waste time bothering whether you love your neighbor; act as if you did.
4. Suffering can refine us rather than destroy us because God himself walks with us in the fire.
5. Then the Bible says that human beings were made in God’s image. That means, among other things, that we were created to worship and live for God’s glory, not our own. We were made to serve God and others. That means paradoxically that if we try to put our own happiness ahead of obedience to God, we violate our own nature and become, ultimately, miserable. Jesus restates the principle when he says, "Whoever wants to save his life shall lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it (Matthew 16:25)." He is saying, If you seek happiness more than you seek me, you will have neither; if you seek to serve me more than serve happiness, you will have both.
6. If we can’t say "thy will be done" from the bottom of our hearts, we will never know any peace. We will feel compelled to try to control people and control our environment and make things the way we believe they ought to be.
7. Think about this. The God of the universe became a wiggling baby in order to get close to you.
8. To discover the real you, look at what you spend time thinking about when no one is looking, when nothing is forcing you to think about anything in particular.
9. Only when we see we cannot keep the rules, and need God’s mercy, can we become people who begin to keep the rules.
10. We are never as thankful as we should be. When good things come to us, we do everything possible to tell ourselves we accomplished that or at least deserve it. We take the credit. And when our lives simply are going along pretty smoothly, without a lot of difficulties, we don’t live in quiet, amazed, thankful consciousness of it. In the end, we not only rob God of the glory due him, but the assumption that we are keeping our lives going robs us of the joy and relief that constant gratitude to an all-powerful God brings.
