Timothy Keller Sermons Podcast by Gospel in Life - An Old Woman’s Laughter

Episode Date: October 4, 2023

We’re looking at laughter and bitterness by looking at a particular experience, and that is a woman laughing because her only child has been born. It’s an incredibly old woman we have here: a woman who’s 90 years old. We’re told in the Bible that this laughter is a clue to who God is and what he has done and how you find him.  This passage is actually the key, because all of Abraham and Sarah’s lives and all of their fascinating incidents can be understood in terms of the name of their son. The name “Isaac” means laughter. You can understand all of their lives, and actually I think eventually you’ll be able to understand all of your life, through the word “laughter.”  There’ve been three kinds of laughter in the story of Abraham and Sarah. They had to go through the first two to get to the third. Let’s look at these three kinds of laughter: 1) the laughter of scoffing, 2) the wild laughter of addiction and fixation, and 3) the laughter of grace. This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on September 14, 1997. Series: Pointers to Christ – Directional Signs in History. Scripture: Genesis 21:1-7. Today's podcast is brought to you by Gospel in Life, the site for all sermons, books, study guides and resources from Timothy Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church. If you've enjoyed listening to this podcast and would like to support the ongoing efforts of this ministry, you can do so by visiting https://gospelinlife.com/give and making a one-time or recurring donation.

Welcome to Gospel in life. Throughout the Bible, there are signs that point us to the Gospel. Today, Tim Keller is looking at how we can discover them and what they teach us. The passage on which the teaching's basis found in your bulletin, let me read it to you. Genesis 21, verses 1 to 7. Now the Lord was gracious to Sarah, as he had said, and the Lord did for Sarah what he had promised.

Sarah became pregnant and bore a son to Abraham in his old age. At the very time God had promised him. Abraham gave the name Isaac to the son Sarah bore him him. And when his son Isaac was eight days old, Abraham circumcised him as God had commanded him. Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him. And Sarah said, God has brought me laughter. And everyone who hears about this will laugh with me." And she added, Who would have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age. This is God's word. Why in these morning services here in the fall are we rummaging around in documents that

are so ancient that they're called the Old Testament? I mean, how relevant is that? Very relevant. My wife Kathy Torade, an article for me out of Madame was on magazine September 97, very up to date. And surprising article, because it was by Naomi Wolf, who's a very sharp and pretty well-known feminist author, and the title of the article is, coming out for God, subtitle, okay, I pray, so why do I feel so funny talking about it?

And in the article, she basically says that she has come into a spiritual search. She has decided there's got to be more, and she is looking for God and she's searching for God and she's searching for spirituality. And at one point, she says, it's really all coming down to this. And she's not saying she arrived, but this is what she says she's coming down to. She says, beyond it all, I have the increasingly pressing

question. This is the increasingly pressing question. What the heck does God want me to do? And how do I figure it out the heck does God want me to do and how do I figure it out? What does God want me to do and how do I figure it out? And when you ask the question, how do you figure out what God wants of me? That's the question of sources. Where do I go to find out what God's will is? And there's really classically, there's really only two basic answers over the years.

The one answer is look outside to some authoritative text, to some authoritative resource. Look outside to the objective. And on the other hand, the other kind of answer that has been what you look inside, you look to the inner light, you look to the subjective, you look to your heart, you look to your experience. Now, the wonderful thing about the Old Testament that really needs to be understood besides the fact that it's a book that's considered holy by Jews and Christians and Muslims is with the Old Testament you don't have to choose. What's great about the Old Testament is you have a faritative theological teaching, but it's always teaching in the

form of stories, always teaching in the form of real human experiences. So last week we looked at the existential despair of the teacher and ecclesiastes. This week we look at laughter, we will look at bitterness, you look at real human experiences. And the Old Testament says look at real human experiences, and the Old Testament says, in those real human experiences, you've got pointers to God, you've got clues to God, but by going to the Old Testament, you not only look at human experience, you also do it in a way that people have been going to for years through the centuries, the Old Testament. Instead of being self-accredited, instead of just saying, well, I've looked at my heart,

now I know what God wants, you're looking into the human heart, into human experience, and therefore into your own experience, but in the Old Testament, a place where millions of people over the centuries have found God. And that way you can trust. So you don't have to choose. And that's why we're going to these great accounts. Now in this account, we are looking at a particular experience, and that is a woman laughing because their only child has been born. But it is an incredibly old woman we have here. We have a woman who's 90 years old here.

And we're told in the Bible that this laughter is a clue to who God is and what He's done. And how do you find Him? The reason that I read this little section, which many of you may not have even ever heard, even though you may have heard the story of Abraham and Sarah, is I think this is the full-crum, this is actually the midpoint, this is actually the key, because all of Abraham and Sarah's life and all the fascinating incidents can all be understood in terms of the name of their son because the word Isaac means laughter. It means laughter. God has brought me laughter and all who here will laugh with me

and you can understand all of their life and actually I think eventually build understand all of your life through the word Yisak, Isaac, laughter because there's been three kinds of laughter if you read the the story of Abraham and Isaac there's three kinds of laughter and only the last one is the best. They had to go through two other kinds to get to the third. What are these three kinds of laughter? First of all first you see in the history of Abraham and Sarah, you see the laughter of scoffing, the laughter of disbelief, the shallow laughter of disbelief. If you go way back into the passage, go deep,

you'll see back in Genesis 12, God comes to Abraham and says, I'm going to give you a son. A son will be born to you through Sarah, and that's through that son you will have a descent, a group of descendants will become a great nation and through that nation, all the nations of the world will be blessed. And of course when Abraham first gets that promise, it's a wonderful promise. He's excited because Sarah cannot conceive. And because Sarah cannot conceive, in those days, and in that culture, a woman's ability to bear children was her worth.

It was her honor, it was her dignity. And for a woman to be barren, and not be able to produce children, it meant it was at the very best of tragedy and at the very worst of disgrace. And so when Abraham hears God come and say, I'm gonna give your wife a child, he's excited, of. He's excited.

Of course, he's excited. And if God had given this child to Abraham and Sarah, back when Sarah was of childbearing years and Abraham, you know, back during the normal sort of age frame, they would have just rejoiced with amazement, but the world wouldn't have, because they would have said, well, it's about time. So God comes and gives the promise,

but as time goes on, God keeps giving the promise, and they get older and older and God keeps giving the promise, and the promise keeps not coming true. Which is one way to look at it. And finally, in Genesis 17, when Abraham is a 100 years old, nearly in Sarah's 90 years old, nearly, God shows up at Abraham's door and says, Abraham, I will come and I will give you a son. And what does Abraham the Man of Faith do?

In Genesis 17, 17, it says, when Abraham heard the promise, he fell face down. Why? To worship? To praise? To prostrate himself before? You've based himself before the majesty of God. No, it says Abraham, the man of faith fell, face down and laughed. He was doubled over with laughter. He couldn't, he laughed. And then not long after that, God shows up in the form of a human being and two companions. There's three people.

It's God and a couple of angels, we guess, shows up with a tent of Abraham. And Sarah stands behind as the customs of modesty of the time prescribed. She stood behind the tent flap and listened to Abraham speak with these men. And at one point, the Lord says, the one who is the Lord says, Abraham, next year I will return, and Sarah will have a son. And in Genesis 18, down in verse 12, it says, So Sarah laughed to herself and said, After I am worn out, and my master is old, Well, I now have this pleasure, she laughed to herself. And she laughed too. Now, what had happened?

Here's what had happened. What had happened was Abraham and Sarah had lost their belief in the supernatural power of God. They become skeptical of the transcendent power of God. They could accept the idea of a promise in which God came and opened Sarah's womb when she was in her 30s or even her 40s or even her 50s. They could accept that.

That would have been a miracle, but the idea that he could send a child in their old old age, they couldn't accept that. So what they had done is they had become intellectually skeptical about the supernatural power of God. They believe maybe God could work through natural processes, but not supernatural processes, and they're very, very, and they pull back, you see.

Now why? Why they pulled back? Because they were afraid of the vulnerability of hope. They were afraid to hope. See? And that's the reason they laughed. The reason Sarah laughed, she hears them say. She says, she says, that old promise, a little late, isn't it? I mean, she's laughing, but what's she doing?

She's trying to defend herself from hope. I remember some years ago, a man came into a room with a group of us, and he announced to us that he had cancer on his face. And someone says, can they treat the cancer? Now, this is a man who was a kind of humorist. He was a jokester and what he said is, sure. Of course, no problem. First, they'll cut off my lip.

If that doesn't work, no problem, they'll cut off my jaw. And if that doesn't work, no problem, then they'll cut off my head and that'll solve it all. Nobody laughed. It was funny. But what was it? He was fortifying himself against, he was afraid to hope. And it was a laughter skepticism.

Now before we move on, see what this is saying. What this is saying is something very important to people who don't believe in the Christian faith in general. In other words, there's plenty of people today that laugh. What are they laugh at? They laugh at the idea of the supernatural. They can handle little promises. They can say, well, I can believe in a God, a God of love. And if we pray and we live lives of love,

he can sort of work in us. But I reject the whole idea of what? We reject the supernaturalness of Christianity. We reject the idea that the creator God could have been born as a human being. See, we reject the idea that the creator God could have been born as a human being. See, we reject the idea of a physical resurrection. We reject all those kinds of ideas. We can't believe in that.

But why not? And see, there's something to be said from this text to people who are having trouble believing like that. I can't believe a tomen incarnation, resurrection. I can believe in general that Jesus was a good man and that he lived a good life. And if we follow him and that he had a lot of God in him, but the supernatural, no, I can't. I want you to recognize two things. From Sarah and from Abraham, two things.

Number one, the first thing you have to realize is the reason that people disbelieve in the gospel is not because it promises too little but because it promises too much. If you don't understand that, you don't even know what you're rejecting. To reject the gospel with tears, to say, I can't believe in it with tears, that has integrity and that shows you know what you're rejecting. But to reject it with laughter, to scoff at it, to people like that who believe things like that, that shows ignorance. Well, what is the gospel promise? What the gospel promise is is that there is a world. There is a bright heaven of invention. There is a bright world, an eternal world, and everything that your heart has ever

desired and more is there. And there is a barrier between us, between us and that which everybody can see, all sorts of things that we long for and that we want. See, we want to live, we don't want to die, we want to create, we don't want to be frustrated, we want to love, we don't want to always be breaking up. Oh, and the gospel says that in spite of all of our flaws, in spite of all the ways in which we've treated each other and God, someone has broken through the whole,

the barrier, he's made a whole, broken through the barrier between the ideal unreal and's made a whole, broken through the barrier between the ideal unreal and all of that heaven and all of that power and all of that glory can come into you, how? Only by asking, not by working up qualifications. No, not by working up qualifications. The only qualification for it is to admit

that you're not qualified for it. And if you do that in your life it comes now, you can say, I can't believe that. Fine, but to scoff at it shows you don't understand what it is. You have no idea. The promise of God, the promise of the gospel is too great for you if you're rejecting. It's not too little.

You need to see that. You need to admit that. You need to reject it with tears or use, or I want you to see that you haven't listened. And secondly, the other thing we're taught is not only that you reject the gospel, but you reject Christianity, you're rejecting it because it's too great and not because it's too little. But the second thing is that there's always very deep emotional reasons for rejecting Christianity always. Whenever I have discussions with people who don't believe, they usually say to me, well,

I know Christians, but you say you need to believe in Christianity. You have emotional needs and you have emotional reasons to believe in Christianity, not just rational reasons. And guess what? That's true. Absolutely. I'm not going to deny that. But what you must see is you have just as powerful set of emotional reasons to disbelieve. The reason that Abraham and Sarah

did not believe was because they were afraid to hope. They did not want the vulnerability of hope. Naomi Wolfe does a pretty good job in that article of saying the problem with talking about God is that she says in the social world I inhabit a secular careerist world of people who pride themselves on their cynicism. No subject of conversation, addiction, affairs, and erosies is forbidden, nothing except religious faith. Admitting to an interest in God is a real faux pas, something that provokes the social embarrassment that used to be caused by off-color jokes. Engaging in an active spiritual search is,

for me now, like a private vice, people laugh at it. See, she says people don't engage in it, they laugh at it. And then she goes on, she says, of course, a certain dry existentialism is cool. Witty atheism is very cool. Talking about God makes you uncool, but this is the silliest fear because since we're all 13 years old inside, it's very cool. Talking about God makes you uncool, but this is the silliest fear

because since we're all 13 years old inside, it's very real. The fear that is that if you admit to being a spiritual interest, you'll be demoted from the crowd of cool kids to the lesser place, the crowd of nice kids. Now here's what she says. What is she saying is, people who laugh at meaning in life, at religious faith, are 13 inside. Now, do you hear what's going on? Little kids can be serious, and adults can be serious, but you can't get a third.

She says, are you 13 inside? I'll tell you why 13-year-olds laugh at everything. They never want to look weak. They never want to look weak. They never want to look vulnerable. That's why they can never say a straight affectionate word. That's the reason why they can never say straight words about faith. They laugh at everything.

It's adolescence. The reason Abraham and Sarah are rejecting this incredible promise, they're showing intellectual skepticism, but they're afraid to hope because then they'll lose control. And you need to admit that that's one of the reasons why you have so much trouble. There's powerful emotional reasons why you have so much trouble believing Christianity. If I'm reading Caesar's Gallic Wars, I have to decide, do you think this is a stark fact or not?

But it won't matter how I live, whether it is or it isn't. But if I'm reading the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, I sit down and I say, is this historic fact? But if it is, it completely affects the way my life is lived as compared to whether it isn't. Which means there's no objectivity going on here. Absolutely not. Your whole life will be changed if it's true. You've got emotionally very powerful reasons to not want to open it because I don't want to be disappointed. I don't want to be let down. Recognize that. The laughter of scoffing.

One of the biggest obstacles for people to believe in Christianity is that they think they already know all about it. But if we look at Jesus' encounters with various people during his life, we'll find some of our assumptions challenged. We see him meeting people at the point of their big, unspoken questions. The Gospels are full of encounters that made a profound impact on those who spoke with Jesus. And in his book, Encounters with Jesus,

Tim Keller explores how these encounters can still address our questions and doubts today. Encounters with Jesus is our thanks for your gift to help Gospel in life reach more people with the amazing love of Christ. Request your copy of Encounters with Jesus today when you give at gospelonlife.com slash give. That's gospelonlife.com slash give. Now, here's Tim Keller with the remainder of today's teaching

But then there's a second kind of laughter that comes up in their lives You see it we have to jump over chapter 21 Back before Isaac is born they were laughing But it was a shallow laughing of scoffing it was the it was the laughing of self-defense trying to keep themselves of scoffing. It was the laughing of self-defense trying to keep themselves from the hope of the gospel, which was so incredible that they were afraid to believe it. There's another kind of laughing. And the other kind of laughing is the wild laughter of addiction and affixation. Now, if you go to the other side of this incident, you'll see something very, very strange and very weird. And that is, chapter 21, Verse 8, in other words,

if I kept on going, which we didn't, and printed more of this here, in Chapter 21, Verse 8, we're told that when Isaac was weaned, and when he went off breast milk, Abraham had a huge party, a great feast. And you can just imagine the laughing and the food and the drink and the celebration. Can you imagine Abraham and Sarah laughing and doting? However, in verse 9, we're told that Ishmael, who was Abraham's child through the maid servant Hegar,

was making fun of Isaac. And Sarah turned, her laughter turned a fury, and she comes to Abraham and says, throw the maid servant and her son out. Because you see, what's going on here is Sarah is doting on, she's laughing in Isaac, but she's laughing in a way that that laughter turns to rage immediately. If anybody touches the apple of her eye, the light of her life, see, immediately, there's something wrong with her eye, the light of her life, see immediately there's something wrong with her laughter. And there's also something wrong with Abraham's laughter because in chapter 22, God comes

to Abraham and says, verse 1 says, God tested Abraham. And then it says, he came to Abraham and said, Abraham, take your son, your only son, whom you love, and go to the mountains of Mariah and go up into a mountain that I show you and sacrifice him there to me. Why would God know how crushingly difficult this request is? Why would God not just say take your son, but your only son whom you love? Why would He say that? You know, twisting the knife? No, because that's the issue. Whatever heaven Sarah had done is they had taken Isaac and made him now the center of their lives.

There was a laughter in Isaac, but it was a laughter of addiction, it was a laughter of fixation. He was now the light of their lives. He now. And here's something we've got to consider. This laughter, just like the first kind of laughter, isn't really laughter. The first kind of laughter is really filled with fear, and feel filled with a kind of adolescent fear of loss of control and a loss of vulnerability.

I mean, and a vulnerability, a loss of independence. This is a different kind of laughter. It turns to rage very quickly. It turns to terror very quickly. If anything goes wrong with the thing that you've put your hope in. You see, the first kind of laughter comes when you're afraid to put your hope at anything.

The second kind of laughter comes when you take something or someone or something and put all your hopes in it. And this kind of laughter is also wrong. It's also bad. It's not real laughter. There's no real joy under it, as you can see. Now for a minute we have to stop and say, the word addiction is pretty strong,

and I'm afraid that some of you are going to miss the point. First of all, let's take a look at the case, but then I'll show you the principle. The case of building your life on your children. You know what happens if your children become the life of your eyes? If the children become the savior of your children. You know what happens if your children become the life of your eyes? If the children become the savior of your souls. You know what happens? Several things can happen. First of all, because your child is the very first thing in your life, you may

be so afraid of displeasing your child, you may be so absolutely afraid of the child's anger that that leads to under discipline. You're afraid to ever get the child angry, and therefore, under discipline, the child grows up spoiled, self-indulgent, undisciplined. Or, it's also possible that because you build your whole life around the child, that what happens then is that you do over discipline, because when your child is displeased with you, it's like a death, it's like a spiritual death, it's like an emotional death, and you just snap. But worst of all, the child will grow up knowing that you are living your life out through that child, and that you are not really loving that child, but you're loving yourself

through the child. And the child will sense that unless they succeed or are beautiful or successful or athletic or whatever, that you don't love them, that you're let down, They can't take the pressure, they won't be able to take the pressure. There's nothing more destructive than that. Now, some of you, your whole life just flashed before your eyes, I know. But we've got to get on, we've got to get on very quickly because that's just the psychological manifestation of the real problem, which is a theological distortion. The theological distortion is.

The first kind of laughter, I'm afraid to even, I'm afraid to hope in anything. But in the second kind, you zip over the giver and you put all of your heart in the gift. And both kinds of laughter are just ways of avoiding resting and rejoicing in the giver himself. They're both ways of, in a sense, of staying in charge. In fact, what's really interesting is how Sarah,

originally, three or four chapters ago, like chapter 16 and so on, Sarah came to Abraham and said, Abraham, you know what, I don't think, that God's ever going to give you a son through me. The promise is too great. Why don't you sleep with Hegar? And very interesting.

He sleeps with Hegar, and they try to fulfill the promise, not in God's way. Here's what's interesting. They say, we're going to get a son, but we're going to get a son, not through God's work, but through our work, not through God's grace, but through our human effort, not in God's time, but in our time. They're trying to save themselves. What's interesting is, even though they seem to understand grace in chapter 21, when Sarah says, God has brought me laughter, yet in practice they're doing with Isaac, what they did with

Ishmael and principal. And just like most of us who are Christians, remember before we understood the gospel that we were trying to save ourselves through our own effort, after we become Christians, in principle we seem to understand that we're saved by grace, not by works, but in practice we continue on the same way.

I mean, that's the reason why God tested Abraham and said, take your son, your only son whom you love and go up the mountain and sacrifice. Why is it a test? When I was a teacher, I would give my lectures, and then I would test them. And the reason I was testing was not because I didn't think they heard anything I said.

I figured they heard it. I was testing them, so because I wanted them through the test to work it in, to think it out, to get it down, see. And God had to come to Abraham and Sarah, and he had to say, Isaac was the gift, but Isaac's not the giver, I'm the giver. And as a result, there was this wild laughter

of addiction in their life. There was this wild laughter of fixation, but it still wasn't the laughter of grace, it still wasn't the laughter of addiction in their life. There's this wild laughter of fixation, but it still wasn't the laughter of grace. It still wasn't the laughter of joy. See, thirdly, the laughter of grace is what? God has made me to laugh. Who would have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse a child, yet I have. Now it's all there. And if you want to understand what this means, you've got to go back to that beautiful little place where God is talking outside the tent.

And he says, I'm going to come back and Sarah is going to get a child. And Sarah hears through the tent and says, she laughed to herself. She says, cut it out. Come on, to herself. And the Lord turns to her and says, why did you laugh? And Sarah got scared and said, I did not laugh. And God says, no, but you did. Why

does he do that? Because he wants it on the record. Why did he do that? What was Sarah's sin? If you want to know what Sarah's sin is, you have to see there's a little phrase in the middle of Genesis 18, verse 15, where he says, why did Sarah laugh when I said this? Is anything too hard for the Lord? And every commentator I know says the original Hebrew word, but it's never translated that way,

is anything too wonderful for the Lord. Sarah's mistake, Sarah's sin, Sarah's sin, is that she wouldn't wonder. Now you know, little children wonder. Their eyes get big like Socrates. So I'll just take them to a zoo, take them to an amusement park, take them to any Steven Spielberg movie. Wonder. But when they get to be 13 like Naomi, well said, you can take them to the greatest movie, the most incredible sports event, and they come back,

what was it like? It wasn't terrible. Why? Because we are afraid to wonder. No, because we can't. GK Chesterton wrote an interesting essay some years ago on why fairy tales give us such wonder. It's called the Ethics of Elfland. And he says there's always three things in every one of those stories. Number one, there's an acknowledgement of hopelessness. There's a doom. We're an impossible situation. You know, everybody's an acknowledgement of hopelessness. There's a doom. We're an impossible situation.

You know, everybody's been turned to stone. You know, something's wrong. Doom. And the second thing is, there's also an acknowledgement that there is a world out there, though, of stupendous powers and deep mysteries. You know. But then number three, there's a heroic key,

some way in which, unlocked for, the door is open between that power and it comes into relationship with a impossible situation and there's resolution. So beauty in the beast, impossible situation, what's the heroic key? She sacrifices herself. She loves the unlovely. She gives herself to what looks like to be a nightmare and awe. You see, there's these great powers in the world and they come in and

we didn't realize it. And now everything is redeemed. Don't you see, the gospel story is the story of wonder from which all other fairy tales and stories of wonder take, their cues. You can see it in the structure of this very passage, chapter 21, over and over again, it says, over and over again, there is a God who will definitely do what he said. As he said it, when he said it, there is a God, high acknowledgement of the high realities

and powers in the universe. Secondly, there's an impossible situation. They're old, they're a hundred years old, they're worn out, they're barren. But then there's a heroic key, and that is the son of the promise. You see, see us Lewis and his famous article on hope, he says, there's three kinds of people. He says there's the cynic, and they laugh. What?

They laugh at the idea that there's powers out there. That's the reason they have no wonder. And then there's the fool. And the fool thinks, I can save myself, I can put my life right if I just my career gets like this, if I get into this school, if I have this child, if I have a wonderful little family, if I have children that love me, if I have this great sexual partner, it's the fool. You see, the cynic has no wonder in life because one admit the powers that are out there in the universe, and the fool has no wonder in life because one admit that you're lost. Your situation is impossible. That you will screw up your children, you will screw up your career. That you are weak, that you can't get there. And as a result, both of those people have no wonder.

But in the gospel, we're told, there is a great God. And there is an impossible situation you're sinned, but there's a heroic key, the son of the promise. Who is the son of the promise? He's the one to whom Isaac points. He is the true Isaac, because you see if this Isaac could be born and triumphed through God's grace, all the impossibilities of a situation of a wife who's 90 years old, giving her husband a child, the greater Isaac. You see, it was born the way he was. He was born without any husband at all involved.

And the angel came to his mother and said, nothing is too hard or wonderful for God. and the angel came to his mother and said, nothing is too hard or wonderful for God. And this is the son of the promise. And he has come. How is it possible though? How is it possible? You see, we're like Sarah. If you get over, you're laughter of disbelief.

And if you get over, you're laughter of addiction. And say, God has made me to laugh. He has brought me laughter. If that happens, then what happens is this power from on high, this Jesus Christ himself is born in you, is born through you. You have to believe the objective, you have to believe that there is a power out there, you have to believe in God, you have to believe the truth, but it's not enough. You have to rejoice in it, you have to rest in God, you have to believe the truth, but it's not enough. You have to rejoice in it, you have to rest in it, you have to take your hearts off the other Isaacs in your life, and you have to rest in it,

you have to give yourself to it. But when that happens, Christ is born in you. Well, how could that be? How could it be that Jesus Christ could come into your life after all the wrong kinds of laughter? You know, a lot of us have done it both. A lot of us have been skeptical, laughed at Christianity, and we've also said, but if all, if everything,

if I just got this, if I just got that, then everything would go right, you know, there's no wonder in our life, we've been laughing in all the wrong ways. How could he come in? I'll tell you how. Because you see the true father took the true Isaac up a mountain,

raised the dagger over his head. And there was nobody there to say, don't. Brought it down. In Proverbs 8 verse 30, it talks about when God was creating the world, that he was creating the world with wisdom at his feet, and wisdom says, I danced and rejoiced before God as we created the world together. And the Hebrew word there is the word Shakok, it's the word for Isaac. I danced before the Lord. I danced before God.

I delighted in Him and in the world that we were creating. Jesus Christ says, I am the wisdom. You will know her by her fruit. John chapter one says, in the beginning was the word, the wisdom and the word was with God and the word was God. Here's what happened. Jesus Christ throughout all eternity was laughing with God. He was laughing and rejoicing with God,

but He lost it. He lost the smile of God. He utterly lost it so that we could have it. That's the reason why George Herbert has that wonderful poem where Jesus is looking down from the cross. Remember how that line goes? Now physician healed myself. Now come down.

Alas, I did so. When I left my crown and father's smile for you to feel His frown. He felt the Father's frown so you could have a laughter, so you could laugh. And how do you know you're a Christian? Here's how you know you're a Christian. If you're a religious person and someone comes up to you and says, are you a Christian?

What you're gonna say is, what do you mean? Am I a Christian? Is something wrong with me? How dare you ask such a thing? There's no sense of humor about it. But if you want to know why, because you're relying completely on your subscription to the doctrine to so on, but if you want to know what a Christian sounds like in your heart all the time, look at Sarah. Ask a real Christian, are you a Christian? And what will the real Christian say? Who would have thought that I would be a Christian,

yet I am? This is the reason why God could actually name her child Isaac, which laughter, which was the sign of her greatest failure. She laughed at God. How is she redeeming that terrible memory, not the way we do it in the world today, which is try your best to forget it?

No. If you know you're saved by grace and not by works, not by your effort, not by your achievement, only because of Jesus Christ losing the laughter of God, taking the eternal justice, the frown of God, that means that memories of your past failures are redeemed. God turns them to gold through the gospel. They become humility in you.

They become compassion in you. They become wisdom in you. They become skill in you. That's how you face your past with a laughter of God. Nothing can wipe this smile off your face. Nothing. Not a thing. Not a thing.

And as you look at the future, nothing can either, because whenever you start to really weep, Jesus wept. That's okay. But when you find yourself in despair, you have to say, what am I delighting in more than the one who lost the laughter of the Father so that I could have it? What is my Isaac? What do I have to demote? What do I have to demote and revel more in Jesus than this so that my laughter will come

back? Do you understand that? Do you see that? There's a place in Isaiah 51 where it says, look to the rock to Abraham and look to the rock from which you were hewn to Sarah, your mother. Have you seen all the pointers, how you can meet him, how you can know him, how you can find him. They're all there.

Let us love and sing and wonder. Let us praise the Savior's name. He has hushed the laws loud thunder. He has quenched Mount Sinai's flame. Let's pray. Our Father, we ask that as we give ourselves to you, you would give yourself to us by opening our hearts to how we can hear the laughter of grace

in Jesus Christ, the true Isaac. That's what we need more than anything else. Give it to us, show us the way. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Thanks for listening to Tim Keller on the Gospel and Life podcast. If you were encouraged by today's teaching, we invite you to consider becoming a Gospel and Life monthly partner. Your partnership helps more people discover the transformative power of Christ's love through this ministry. Just visit gospelandlife.com slash partner to learn more.

This month's sermons were recorded in 1997 and 2017. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel and Life podcast were preached from 1989 to 2017 while Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church. you