Timothy Keller Sermons Podcast by Gospel in Life - Angry Enough to Die

Episode Date: August 19, 2024

How can we explain Jonah’s mood swings, his tremendous emotional instability, how he’s able to praise God and just a few days later say he’s angry enough to die? The answer is a divided heart. To put it another way, Jonah believed in and served the true God, but he also believed and served a rival god. As a result, his heart was divided. And divided hearts create the kind of misery and drive we see in Jonah. So we must ask, is it possible that our own instabilities are due to a divided heart? Let’s ask two questions of this text: 1) what is a divided heart? and 2) how do we solve it? This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on September 2, 1990. Series: Jonah. Scripture: Jonah 4:1-10. 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. The book of Jonah can appear at first glance like a simple fable with an implausible high point. A great fish swallows a rebellious prophet. But the story is about so much more. It touches on racial prejudice, toxic nationalism, and the struggles believers have when it comes to obeying and trusting God. Today on Gospel in Life, Tim Keller continues exploring the fascinating story of Jonah,

the prodigal prophet. But Jonah was greatly displeased and became angry. He prayed to the Lord, O Lord, is this not what I said when I was still at home? That is why I was so quick to flee to Tarshish. I knew that you were a gracious and compassionate God, a God who relents from sending calamity. Now O Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live. But the Lord replied, have you any right to be angry? Jonah went out and sat down at a place east of the city, and there he made himself a shelter, sat in its

shade and waited to see what would happen to the city. Then the Lord God provided a vine and made it grow up over Jonah to give shade for his head to ease his discomfort. And Jonah was very happy about the vine, but at dawn the next day God provided a worm, which chewed the vine so that it withered. Then the sun rose, God provided a scorching east wind, and the sun blazed on Jonah's head so that he grew faint. He wanted to die and said, It would be better for me to die than to live. But God said to Jonah, Do you have a right to be angry about the vine? I do, replied Jonah. I am angry enough to die. But the Lord said, You have been concerned

about this vine, though you did not tend it or make it grow, it sprang up overnight and died overnight. But Nineveh has more than 120,000 people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?" Here ends the reading of God's Word. We've been looking most of the summer at the book of Jonah and we're in the last chapter and we have a couple more weeks left because this is a tremendously surprising chapter. As you know, God called Jonah to go to Nineveh, the capital of Assyria, and preach. And almost everybody

knows the part of the story where Jonah flees away and God reclaims him. And then he goes to Nineveh in chapter 3 and he preaches and we're told there that there was a massive turning to God. Now, we're told in chapter 3 that there was the great mass of the people got up and repented and they turned, quote, from violence and from their evil ways. Now this is amazing. If you read, if you read the paper here in New York, if you listen to the media, if you just talk to people on the streets, you'll see that essentially that's the cry going out over this city right now. Who can turn this city from its violence in its evil ways? Jonah went into a city as big as New York was, proportionally bigger. The greatest

city in the world, the largest city in the world, and he saw a massive change. He saw repentance that was culturally transforming. They turned. The surprise is chapter 4 verse 1. In response to this amazing thing, we're told Jonah became displeased and very angry. And we immediately are confronted with this question. It's a profound theological question. It goes like this. Huh? Jonah! Wait a minute, let me get this straight. You've reached the climax of your career. You've done something that people in New York, all kinds of people, Christian and non-Christian, would give their right hand to see this kind

of culturally transforming repentance so that the violence and and evil ways have been turned from. What are you mad about? What's wrong? I'll tell you what the answer is. The answer actually is in James chapter 1 verse 8, where we're told, the double-minded man is unstable in all his ways. He is like a wave of the sea, blown and tossed by the wind." You see, Jonah is a case study, an illustration of that principle. How could Jonah, how can we explain Jonah's mood swings, his tremendous emotional instability, able to praise God in chapter two and a few days later saying, I am angry enough to die. Why is he like that? And the answer is a divided heart, or put it another way. Jonah believed and served in the true God, but he also believed and served a rival God.

And as a result of that, his heart was divided between worshiping two different things. And we're told, therefore, in James 1, a person like that is finding constant emotional turmoil, tremendous instability, praising God one day and virtually cursing Him the next. And this morning I want to ask you this question. Look at your own hearts and ask this question. Do you ever experience what Jonah is experiencing? What about your own instability? What about your own bitterness? What about the fact that sometimes you also, along with Jonah, sense and feel like there's

nothing to live for? Why is it that very often your belief in God is of no comfort to you Why is it that very often your belief in God is of no comfort to you in times like that? Is it possible that your own instability is due to a divided heart? Is that a possibility? Divided hearts, hearts divided between more than one God, create that kind of instability. They create the kind of behavior you see in Jonah. They create the kind of misery and drivenness of Jonah. And the thesis is that it could be true of us as well. Now, let's just ask two questions of the passage. Let's just ask, what is a divided heart? What is a divided heart? And then secondly, how do you heal it? What is a divided heart?

Actually, in James chapter 1, the word divided heart is a great little Greek word, dipsikos, which means two psychos, two souls, a double-hearted person. What is a double-hearted person, and then how do you heal it? So let's take a look. First of all, verses 1 to 3, but Jonah was greatly displeased and became angry. He prayed to the Lord, ìO Lord, is this not what I said when I was still at home? That's why I was so quick to flee the first time. I knew that you were a gracious and compassionate God, a God who relents from sending calamity, now take away my life, it's better for me to die than to live."

What do we see here in Jonah that's a sign of a divided heart? Well, first of all, the most clear thing to see is his racism. And we've talked about this earlier, but here's what it is. He says, this is why I fled the first time, I knew you were gracious. Jonah was a Jew, and God had come to Israel and had shown him, I've shown Israel, his grace. It's a very important word, keseth, which means steadfast love, covenantal love, commitment love, saving love. God had come to Israel and had chosen

Israel and had forgiven Israel and had poured out his favor on Israel. And now Jonah says, I was afraid of this. I was afraid you might give your grace to them too. I knew that you were a God that's kind of promiscuous about your graciousness. I was afraid that you might forgive them. Therefore, he says, that's what I was mad about to start with, that's what I was afraid of originally, that's why I fled the first time. I don't want them to have your grace." Now that's, you know, bigotry of the most obvious sort and on the surface you see racism and you say, yeah, that's what Jonah's sin is, but my friends, there's something deeper going on. Because he also says in verse 3, not only did he not want them to get the

grace of God, and now it looked like they might be getting the grace of God, but he also says, therefore, O Lord, take away my life, for it's better for me to die than to live. And at this point, we've got an idea about what a divided heart is. When a person says I would just as soon die, he's saying I don't have any meaning in life. Something was in my life that gave my life meaning and now it's gone so I've got no purpose left. Whatever that is, it has to be a God. It has to be something he got his identity from, a life referent, something that gave him meaning and purpose, something that gave him a reason for being, and it's gone. That's why he's able to say, it's better for me to die than to live. And here's

God, look at who he's saying this to. God is talking to Jonah. God is talking to Jonah. And Jonah is saying to God, I've got no meaning in life. Jonah is looking at the only source of meaning in life and saying, I've got no meaning in life. Jonah is looking at the only reason to get up in the morning and he's saying, I've got no reason to get up in the morning. Something has been more of a god to Jonah than God. And he's really kind of an unconscious fool to be sitting and saying to God, I've got no reason in life, looking right at the only reason there is for life. And so what happens is, he's saying, now listen, you yourselves may not have used such words as this. What Joan is saying is, I don't feel like getting up in the morning.

Why? I've got no reason to get up. I have no reason. I've got no motivation. Why get up? What is there out there for me? You've not had that kind of feeling? Actually there's a good philosophical name for that.

Heidegger calls it angst, existential despair, a sense of feeling like, what am I really here for, alienation. There's nothing out there for me. If you haven't felt like Jonah, you're young, maybe. You haven't lived a very long time. Or you've lived so far a charmed and unreflective life, and I can absolutely guarantee you it won't last. Jonah has lost his meaning in life, and when that happens it's because he's lost his God. There was some other God. Now what was that other God? Well, without taking too much time on it, because we want to really be looking at ourselves here, that other god was the national security of his people. We know that Assyria eventually did sack the northern ten tribes. There were twelve tribes

of Israel and Assyria, Nineveh, eventually came down, made war against Israel, basically sacked the northern part of it and led them off into captivity, never to return. Israel was a tremendous, pardon me, Syria was a tremendous international political threat, military threat to Israel. Jonah knows that. Now Jonah loves his people, that's good. Jonah is a patriot, that's good. But when it has turned in to bloodlust, when it has turned in his heart so that now he wants to see these dirty pagans nuked by God, that good thing had become an idol. That good thing, which is love for his people, had become a god. When he realized that Israel was not certain to win this power play, this power struggle,

when he realized that Israel's national interests had not been secured, he lost all of his meaning in life. And he got angry at God, which shows this. In Jonah's heart, there was a true God and there was a rival God. And as long as serving the true God enabled him to serve his rival God, everything was fine. But on the day that to serve the true God meant he'd have to stop serving his rival God, which was the national security of his people, his own pride and his ethnic pedigree and so on, his religiosity, his respectability. On the day in which he had to choose between the true God and the rival God, he turned

on the true God. He was using the true God to serve his rival God. He was making the true God a means to an end. Can you look at yourself for a moment here? You don't see that? Do you see this in yourself? Do you see why Jonah was full of instability? Why he could praise God one day and the next day he could turn and curse because

he had more than one God down in there. That's pretty amazing. You know, I've seen women that just had twins and they were carrying twins. And when you're carrying twins before they're born there's a lot of kicking and screaming in there. It's nothing like carrying two gods. Nothing. There's a lot of kicking and screaming in there. It's nothing like carrying two gods. Nothing. What, therefore, do we have to look at if we're talking about ourselves?

Look at it like this. Do you have anything in your life that you simply must have to be happy? You simply have to have it. You may be Protestant, Catholic, Jewish. You may say, here's what my faith is, but what I want to know today is not what you say you believe, but what is your real religion? What is your real salvation? What are you really living for? What are you, not your, what your, your

your professed God, don't tell me who your professed God is, who is your functional master in your day-to-day life? Your functional master in your day-to-day life? Your functional master. Those gods, those things that you must have, if you don't have, they drive you into the ground with despair. To get them, they'll drive you in your goals and in your schedule. What are your functional masters? You know, Becky Pippard, in that great quote, puts it so perfectly, she says, whatever quote controls you is your Lord. The person who seeks power, you're controlled by power. The person who seeks acceptance, you're controlled by the people you want to

please. We do not control ourselves. We are controlled by the Lord of our life. If Jesus is Lord, he's the one who controls, he has the ultimate power. There are no bargains, there's no in-between. How do you know who your functional masters are? Somebody says, well, you know, you're scaring me. Alright, I know what you're talking about. I sense this loss of meaning. The true God that I think I believe in has no comfort to me. Alright, I understand. How do I know what these functional masters are? Well, I'm going to give you two little tests, and they're very brief. One, look at

how you respond to unanswered prayers and frustrated hopes. You see, if you ask God for something, or if you're not a praying person, if you just hope and work real hard for something and you don't get it, you get sad. You feel down. But then you go on. Hey, life's not over. Those are not your functional masters. But when you pray for something and then you work for something and you strive for something

and you don't get it, and you respond like Jonah does, I am angry enough to die. Existential despair. Loss of any future orientation. Nothing to live for. The only reason I had to get up in the morning. At that point, what you're seeing is you're looking at God and you're saying, I have no security, and you're looking at the only security that there is in the universe. One of my, you know, one of my teachers at seminary used to tell a story that I've never forgotten and he says,

look, think of it like this, think of reality my dear friends, all of us on a little ball of rock called Earth and we're spinning through space at billions of miles an hour and if fairly soon we don't run into anything it doesn't matter because there will come a day for every single person in this room that underneath us a trap door will open and we will fall off of this little ball of rock. And underneath are either the everlasting arms of the Father or nothing. And you don't have any security?

Friends, God comes to you and says in His Word and in the Gospel, my dear friends, if I'm not your security, if I'm not your meaning in life, you've got none. There's nothing there. See, it's a puff of smoke, anything else. You can't look at me and say, I've got no security. I am the only security you could have. I'm the only meaning that you possibly have. Now, that's something that you've got to understand. God says, every tree in this forest of life is coming down, build your nest in the rock. The second little test, the first test is how do you respond to unfulfilled dreams and unanswered prayer? The second little test is, look at when you get the most down on yourself. An idol, a false god in your life, speaks like a god.

It talks to you like this, and it says, if you satisfy all my standards, then you can feel good about yourself. You're an acceptable person, but if you do not, if you fail to live up to my standards, you're not a worthwhile person. You are nothing." He speaks like that. And when you feel the most down on yourself is when you are dissatisfying one of these gods that is operating in your life. Don't you see? These things are the things that drive you. And Christianity has kingdom power to topple those gods that drive you. Chances are you've heard some version of the story of Jonah,

the rebellious prophet who defied God and was swallowed by a great fish. In his book, Rediscovering Jonah, Tim Keller reveals hidden depths within the story, making the case that Jonah's rebellion also provides one of the most insightful explorations into the secret of God's mercy. As you learn what the book of Jonah teaches about prejudice, justice, mercy, self-righteousness, and much more, you'll gain fresh insight into how to become a bridge-builder in today's culture, how to foster reconciliation across lines of division, and with God's help bring peace where there is conflict. how to foster reconciliation across lines of division, and with God's help bring peace where there is conflict.

This month when you give to Gospel in Life, we'll send you Dr. Keller's book, Rediscovering Jonah, as our thanks for your gift. Just visit gospelinlife.com slash give. That's gospelinlife.com slash give. And thank you for your generosity, which helps us reach more people with Christ's love. Christianity is a whole new approach to your life. The psychologizer and the moralizer

will both come at you and that's pretty much who you've heard. The psychologizer says the reason you're unhappy is because you have low self-esteem, you're acceptable just as you are, guilt feelings are bad, kick them out. The moralizer says, on the other hand, the opposite. He says, oh no, no, no, no, no. The reason you feel bad is you're not living according to the rules. Obey the rules and then you'll feel good. And the Christian comes and says, listen, the reason you feel bad is because like all human beings, you want to be your own savior. And so you choose certain things that if all human beings, you want to be your own savior.

And so you choose certain things that if you do that, if you accomplish that, then you can feel good and acceptable about yourself. But most of our deepest desires for success are efforts for us to try to be to ourselves what only Jesus Christ can be for us. In other words, we find some area of life that we say, I'll do well there and that will be my life and that will be my righteousness and those are gods that are in your life and they are driving you and until you turn from them and turn to Jesus Christ, whose burden is light, these gods will crush you. That's what it

means to have a divided heart. That's a couple of tests to look for those gods. They're there. If you know yourself, you know they're there. The second question is, how can we heal a divided heart? See, that's what we've seen. In Jonah, we see the signs of a divided heart. Don't forget, the superficial signs usually, the superficial signs are not the same as the underlying problem. You may have superficial problems like Jonah who was a bigot.

Jonah was a racist. Jonah was a nationalist, but underneath it came from a divided heart. So in your own case, you may need spiritual discernment to look beneath the superficial problems and look underneath and say, well, my real problem is a divided heart, a rival God to God, a real God and a true God, and they have to have it out in my heart. No wonder my heart feels like a battleground. Unite my heart to fear thy name. All right. What is the next thing? How do we solve it? What is the solution? I'm going to suggest three that we get from this chapter. Three ways that a divided heart is healed. Three ways that God helps Jonah with a divided heart.

First, the first thing you've got to know is that the process of moving from a divided heart to a pure heart is a process. In the Bible, whenever you see the word pure, give me a pure heart, we're not talking about a perfect heart, but about a single heart. The opposite of a pure heart in the Bible is not an impure heart, it's a divided heart. How do you get a pure heart? It is a process. Very important to understand that it is a process. If you think in a single catharsis here this morning, you're finally going to get rid of it forever, you're going to keep it. And if I had time, I'd say you can throw one idolatry out for another one.

And I don't have time to explain how you can do that, but I'll just say you need to realize that it is a process. This morning, don't say, do I have a divided heart or not? You do. It's a question of how bad is it? Do you have a rival god? Yes. The question is, is that rival god ascendant over the true god?

Has he gotten the upper hand? On the way from Pittsburgh to Lake Erie on Interstate 79, when they were building Interstate 79 20 years ago or so, there was one spot south of Meadville, Pennsylvania that stayed uncompleted for years. It held up to the completion. And the reason for it was that there was a swamp there that was a particularly nasty swamp. Every time they would build a bridge they thought, you know, in order to build a bridge they put the pilings down through

the muck and through the goop and through the swamp until they hit bedrock. And every time they thought they'd hit bedrock the bridge would sink again because they would find that they hadn't. There would be a crash and a bang and they'd break through that and find out that there was really more goop and more swamp underneath. Then they would put the pilings down further. This time we've reached bedrock and it would sink again. It was a mess of a swamp. They would leave tractors there on Friday and come back on Monday and the tractor would be gone. It would have sunk. They thought, hey, wait, this is solid, isn't it? No, it's not. It would have sunk. They thought, hey, this is solid, isn't it? No, it's not. Jonah's heart was like that. Again and again, it looked like we were reaching bedrock.

See, getting to the bottom, to reach bedrock in a heart is when you get to the place where you're serving God, not for what you're going to get out of Him, but when you're serving God for who He is in Himself. Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, we keep thinking we're going to get to bedrock here. We think we've got the pilings all the way down to the bottom of Jonah's heart, and what you know, there's a crash and there's a bang, and he's back into the same goop, the same anger. And it means we've got to go deeper, we've got to go further. There's a certain sense in which you spend all of your life cracking what you think are the bottoms got to go further. There's a certain sense in which you spent all of your life

cracking what you think are the bottoms and then you find out it's a false bottom. A mature Christian is not somebody who's hit all the way to the bottom, but somebody who's pretty close. And there's other false bottoms that you're finally going to get to. Crashing and banging and finally finding out, wait a minute, I thought that I was serving God for who He was and not for myself.

But look, there's another bottom here. You crash and you bank. Christian life is like that. In the very beginning, almost always, when you first come to God, you come almost completely for selfish reasons. Anybody who has done any kind of growing in the Christian life will look back and realize the original reason you sought God was totally selfish. It might have been because you were a lonely person and there was a bunch of people that you liked and you wanted to be included and

they turned out to be Christians so you tagged along. It could be that you originally went to God because a problem came up in your life and you saw disaster. It was the main God of your life and you saw disaster. So you came and you started bargaining with God and you said, what do you want me to do? I'll clean up my life and will you make sure that you keep my God intact? We almost always come to God like that, but when we do, we end up meeting the real God and the real God, in spite of our bad motives, will actually meet us through those efforts. And he comes to us and he talks like this.

He says, my dear friend, I am not your pet. I'm not somebody that you can put on a leash and get out and do tricks when you want. I'm not somebody who can be negotiated with or bargained with. You can't bargain with me. You've got nothing to bargain with. I created you. Only by my sustaining power, every moment, do your molecules even cohere. And only at the infinite cost of my Son can your sins be dealt with and forgiven and can I know you personally." He comes and says, do not, do not therefore use me.

I am not somebody to be used. Love me and care for me and serve me for who I am. It is stupid, it is immoral, it is unreasonable, and it is impractical for you to use me to some other end and worship anything more than me and make anything else in your life preeminent to me. It is absolutely foolish because your heart was built for a nobler object to worship than that. And if you do worship that, you will find yourself, your soul atrophying, stiffening, and eventually going out. So God comes to us, with all of our bad motives, and says, love me for me.

I love you for you. Love me. Don't use me. I didn't give you my love to use you because I don't need you. I'm God. You're a human being. I love you for who you are. Love me for who I am. That's how I came to you. Love me for me. I love you for you. Don't you see how reasonable it is to say, �Oh Lord, reign without a rival in my heart.� We always come using Him. We always come trying to use Him to get to our real God, trying to play the true God against the real God. But when we meet the real God, He comes and says, forget it. That'll be bad for you. I'm so glad that your bad motives enabled you to finally find out who I am. Now listen to who I am. It's

a process. It goes on the rest of your life. If you think you've gotten to the end of it, you have hardly begun it. And that's the reason why you must be very careful not to be too amazed and too astonished and too crestfallen when you find yourself crashing through a false bottom and there's more goop down there. First thing, it's a process. Second thing, second thing you have to know if you want to be healed of a divided heart is that you must see that God tends to take away a comfort. He tends to take away comforts so that we can see what we really rely on. Now, we'll talk much more about this next week, but God put a little comfortable thing in Jonah's life. It was a vine. It grew up and created shade. And if you think that's

a small thing, if you know… I mean, if you right now were a military person in Saudi Arabia and you know what it's like to be in 120 degrees every day. You realize what a wonderful comfort it was to have a shade tree like that. God takes it away. Why? To show Jonah his divided heart. We'll look at it next week. But a perfect example of it is what happened to Job. Same thing happened to Job. Job was a prosperous man. One day Satan comes to see God, and in the book of Job we're told that what he says is, he comes to see God, yes, and he says, God says to Satan, hast thou seen my servant Job? There is no one like him on earth. He

fears God and shuns evil. And Satan turns around and says, does Job serve God for naught? Does Job serve God for nothing? What is Satan saying? He's saying, he doesn't serve you. As long as everything is going good in life, as long as his true God and his real God are working together, everything's fine. But he worships his wealth and he worships his prosperity. Get rid of it and then we'll see. And what happens is, God does allow his wealth to be swept away and Job does spend a good deal of time running around and getting angry and finally God, you know, appears to him in the whirlwind and he says,

Job, Job! Job was saying, I'm angry enough to die. And God comes to him and says, why? Because I stopped serving you? Because I stopped helping you reach your goals? Is that it? Is that it? Who's the servant in this religion? Let me get that straight now again. Who's the servant and who's the God? Job served me for who I am. And when Job finally sees who he is, he says, I see you with my eyes and I repent in dust and ashes. What happened was crack bang! Job had broken through to bedrock.

And sometimes the only way God can get you down to bedrock is by taking away a comfort to get you looking to see that there by taking away a comfort to get you looking to see that there's still a lot of goop down there. Lastly, last thing, a heart is divided not only by a process, I mean, a divided heart is healed not only by a process and not only by generally God bringing discomforts into your life, but lastly, a heart is only healed when you finally get a grasp of the radical grace of God. The first time Jonah broke through to a kind of bedrock was in Jonah chapter 2. The climax of that prayer was where Jonah says,

those who cling to worthless idols forfeit the grace that could be theirs. Salvation is of the Lord. And what he said is, I finally and now see that salvation is completely of God, is totally of grace. And whether you're a dirty pagan or a respectable moral person, we both need the grace of God. And when Jonah finally saw that, he was free from his earning his own acceptability and he was empowered to preach. But he's forgotten about that, but he has to remember it and God's trying to bring him back to it again.

In the Bible, in the New Testament, in Hebrews it says, drawn near with a pure, a single heart that's sprinkled clean from dead works. Now here, this is the bottom line. This is the bottom line. If you want a pure heart, if you want a single heart, it's got to be sprinkled clean from dead works. What that means is we have got all a desire, as we've been saying here all along, to earn our salvation, to be acceptable through our own performance. And until we see that these idolatrous pursuits are crushing us because we can never live up to them, we're going to always find our hearts divided.

But until you finally hear God coming to you in the gospel and God comes and says, listen, aren't you tired of being driven by what your parents say, by what your culture says, by what your peers say? Aren't you tired of being driven by these gods because you feel like that you won't be acceptable unless you live up to the standards? If you come to me in Jesus Christ, I accept you now. And my opinion is the only one that matters. Do you hear me? This is what God is saying to you. He says, sprinkle your heart clean from dead works and the idol's power is broken. Let me just conclude. A radical grasp of the grace of God, coming to God during times of

suffering when your comforts are removed, realizing it's a process, that's how you have to get rid of a divided heart. Thankfully, God will keep after you until you break down through the bedrock. You know why He will do it? Because, my dear friends, Christian believers, anything you add to Jesus Christ as a requirement to be happy, anything you add to Jesus Christ, beyond Jesus Christ, as a requirement to be happy, that thing or those things will strangle you, they will kill you, it will make it impossible for you to really get any of the sweetness and joy out of your Christian faith. God has got to break their hold on you. They are crushing burdens of dead works, those things that you

must have. It doesn't matter that you're a Christian. I've got to have that too. Anything you add to Jesus Christ as a requirement for being happy will develop a stranglehold on you, and it will kill you. And until God breaks their stranglehold on you, you will be a miserable person. Look at those things as burdens of dead works that you've got to fling off before they crush you. Lay your deadly doing down, down at Jesus' feet. Stand in him, in him alone, gloriously complete.

And if there's anybody here who says, wait a minute, let me get this straight, if I want to receive Jesus Christ as Savior, I've got to love him perfectly from the heart with no bad motives? That's not what I'm saying. Absolutely not. Do you hear the radical grace of God? You are not accepted by God on the basis of the purity of your heart. Oh no. No way. Instead, you have to turn and trust. Turn means to say, Lord, I see these things in my life.

I recognize now that I'm trying to be my own Savior and I'm serving other things. So forgive me for that. I intend to forsake them." And then you turn around and trust and you say, Lord, I see now that Jesus has lived a life of greatness for me. Jesus has taken my punishment for all my sins. And therefore, if I come to you now, you can accept me finally and conclusively because of what he's done. That's what it means to become a Christian. And on that day, you'll know what John Donne says is perfect freedom. He says, remember, take me to you, imprison me, for I, except you enthrall me, never shall

be free, nor ever chaste, except you ravish me." Friends, if you want to make some kind of commitment to him, whether it's saying, Lord, break me through to bedrock, or maybe for the first time I want to receive you as Savior, let's take some time to pray now. And afterwards we're going to hear a musical offering. And during that musical offering we'll take up the gifts. If you're a guest, please feel under no obligation to give financially. Give your heart.

And put those cards in if you want prayer or if you want us to respond to you in some way. Are you ready? Let's pray. Our Father, we thank you that you're a God who loves us in such a way that you put up with the, you put up with how we've used you, you put up with how we've abused you. When we've treated other people like that in our lives, they have gotten out. When we've treated other people the way we've treated you, O Lord, they have gotten out. When we've treated other people the way we've treated you, oh Lord, they have gotten out. But you're still here. You stay with us. You continually come back and you say, love me for me. I love you for you. Our Father, we ask that everybody here might now be willing and ready to say,

Lord, I serve you for who you are. I give you preeminence in my life, reign without arrival there. And I ask that you would enable us to do that either for the first time or the hundredth time until we finally break through to the bottom and our bridges stop sinking. And Father, deliver us from the Jonas Syndrome, even as you delivered him and made us, made him like your Son. It's in his name we pray. Amen. Thanks for listening to Tim Keller on the Gospel in Life podcast. If you found today's teaching helpful and something you'd like more people to hear,

we invite you to consider becoming a Gospel in Life monthly partner. Your partnership helps more people discover the hope and joy of Christ's love. Just visit gospelinlife.com slash partner to learn more. Today's sermon was recorded in 1990. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel in Life podcast were preached from 1989 to 2017 while Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church.