This Sunday morning I woke up to my alarm clock telling me it was time to get into the shower in order to get to church on time. Upon opening my eyes I noticed that for the first time since I moved to Texas it was pouring rain outside my window. The other day it had rained for most of the evening, however by the morning the rain had stopped and people were able to pretend like the wet stuff had never touched the ground. However, this morning my window was stained with water marks streaking down the glass and it made me feel like I was at home. My fan had been blowing all night and giving me the morning chill I love so much. The one where all you have to do is readjust your position under your blanket and suddenly a burst of warmth you didn't realize was there encapsulates your being and makes it that much more difficult to get out of bed.
After hitting the snooze button a couple times and debating how to move forward with this Sunday morning, I finally got out of bed and made my cup of coffee and decided that rather than going to church this morning, I would spend my time this Sunday by myself listening to a sermon by Tim Keller. My wonderful father, before I left on my road trip down here to Texas gave me an iPod full of sermons by Tim Keller and highly recommended a few of the sermon series that he placed on there.
I listened to a couple of the sermons on my way down and since then have even spent some of my quieter mornings just sipping my coffee and listening to one of these sermons as well. Generally speaking, I'm pretty active in terms of my devotional ritual. On Sunday mornings I like to go to church for Sunday School, then the actual service, and then stay for lunch and talk to people about the sermon before having to go to work. Even in my daily devotional ritual I usually spend at least an hour reading and writing about the book of Acts. (For those who don't know, I've been working on and off for the past two years on a personal commentary on the book of Acts.)
Every once in a while though, usually after a pretty exhausting couple of days, I can't seem to cope with the idea of focusing in on worshiping God in my usual determined, goal oriented way. And on those days I take comfort in knowing that God does not require of me to worship Him in the same way every day. And so this morning I decided to simply relax and listen to a Tim Keller sermon from his series on Repentance.
What's funny to me is that at times I feel like my experience as a Christian and my father's experience as a Christian are so different that there is almost no way we could both find the same pastor to be so edifying. And yet, low and behold, here I am writing about how clear and easy to understand Tim Keller is, while at the same time retaining his dedication to a biblical exegesis of Scripture. Although he is preaching to a congregation in the heart of NYC, his words expand to all who call upon Christ as their Lord and Savior. He has a tremendous gift for understanding that in our 21st century culture we are so bogged down by false pre-suppositions and poor nomenclature, that all understanding of truth has been distorted to the point where we have millions of people in the USA who have no idea what life is all about and how to live it. This is not solely an American problem, however, it is one that must be tackled and I think Tim Keller does an amazing job of not only tackling it, but doing so efficiently and with clarity.
In his sermon on repentance this morning this morning he makes a statement that struck me for a few different reasons and it is on this point that I would like to continue. He says, when something bad happens to people, i.e. a tower falls over in Siloam and 18 people are killed, the question asked by people either consciously or sub-consciously is, "Why did that happen to those people and not others or me?" "Were those people greater sinners/worse people than me that they deserved to die and I do not?"
The response that Tim Keller has to this question is remarkable because it is so backward thinking from what we are used to today, because in truth the idea is so prosaic, that we've forgotten its truth.
The question isn't "Why do bad things happen to good people?" But rather, "Why don't bad things happen more often?" Meaning, why does God spare us from calamity rather than allow us to be killed in the tower in Siloam? The pre-supposition that Dr. Keller accurately points out that most Christians today hold to is that somehow God owes us a comfortable life. Somehow, somewhere in the course of history, we got it into our heads that we deserve good things to happen to us. When in reality, if you are a Christian and you understand the radical destructive nature of sin, then you understand that you need an even more radically powerful Savior with the power to break you of your addiction to sin and turn your feet towards the path of righteousness.
We do not deserve a comfortable life. By no means. We have done nothing to deserve it, and yet the statement, "When Bad Things Happen To Good People" would imply that we deserve good things to happen to us, that God somehow owes us a good life. But the reality is that it is God's grace that spares us from calamity and suffering. We deserve to suffer because we are sinners. We do not deserve God's grace, and yet we are so fundamentally self-centered and sinful that we have totally forgotten that all that we have comes from God's hand, and nothing we have done enables us to say, "I deserve these good things."
And yet we act like that! We say in our hearts, "I've worked so hard for these good things to happen to me." But there is no satisfaction in that. There is no joy in that. What Tim Keller tells us is that repentance is a necessary doctrine for all times in our lives. When we are sad we repent. When we are happy we repent. When we are mad we repent. We need to always be repenting. And not in a sense of, "I feel guilty and God needs to forgive me because I did something wrong." But in the truest sense of repentance where we recognize how unworthy we are of the good things that God has given us, and how lucky and grateful we should be to know that we have a Savior in Jesus Christ who intercedes on our behalf to the Father that we might live. True repentance, as Tim Keller puts it, comes when you recognize how truly terrible and unworthy you are, and at the same time how perfectly loved and received you are into Christ's Kingdom as a result of His shed blood on the Cross.
"You are more evil than you could ever imagine and at the same time, you are more loved than you could ever know." This is the amazing tension of Christianity that ought to cause us to be continually repenting. It's this worldview and framework that reveals to us the true nature of our relationship to Christ and how desperately we need Him. I hope you find this encouraging Reader. I encourage you to find this sermon series and be blessed by it, just as I have on a lazy, rainy Sunday morning.
That's all for now. Ciao and God Bless!
No comments:
Post a Comment