Timothy Keller Sermons Podcast by Gospel in Life - First of All

Episode Date: January 9, 2026

If you have any other gods before God—and we all do—to that degree that you have other gods before him, you’re in bondage, co-conspirator with your own jailers. God in his grace seeks to liberate us—with the most liberating of all of the Ten Commandments: “I am the Lord thy God … thou shalt have no other gods before me.” What he’s saying there is, “I’m the only God there is; all others are imposters. My yoke is easy, and the yoke of any other god is bondage.” Let’s look at Jonah as a case study and see 1) how you can detect the things in your life that are controlling you, and 2) how you actually abandon those gods. This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on October 1, 1989. Series: Ten Commandments 1989. Scripture: Jonah 1:1-10. 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. During January, we're inviting our listeners to consider becoming a Gospel and Life monthly partner. Monthly partners are an important part in helping us to plan for how we can be the most effective in reaching people all over the world with the gospel. If you'd like to become a monthly partner, just visit gospelonlife.com slash partner. That's gospelonlife.com slash partner. What comes to mind when you hear about the Ten Commandments? For many people, they bring up feelings of guilt and shame, or they seem like a list of rules that are impossible to follow.

In today's sermon, Tim Keller shows us how God didn't give us the Ten Commandments to crush us with unattainable moral standards, but to appoint us to Jesus Christ, the only one who perfectly fulfills God's law. Jonah chapter 1, verses 1 through 10. But Jonah was greatly displeased and became angry. He prayed to the Lord, oh Lord, is this. 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 are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love,

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. 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 that made it and made it grow 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, at dawn the next day, God provided a worm, which chewed the vine so that it withered.

When the sun rose, God provided a scorching east wind, and the sun blazed on Jonah's head so 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, he said, 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? This is the word of the Lord. 1974, Patty Hurst, remember? 19 years old, millionaire heiress of a fortune, the Hurst. newspaper fortune was kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army, I remembered. And within just a few weeks, her life was so empty that within a few weeks, they were able to take the cuffs off of her, and they were able to take off the ropes and to take off the guards, and she joined them, and she took the name Tanya, and she was involved in a bank robbery in which a woman was killed. By the way,

It was a woman, a Seventh-day Adventist woman who was just depositing the weekly offerings at the bank, and that group blew her away. And what was so intriguing about this is that Patty Hurst became a co-conspirator in her own kidnapping. She became enamored with her jailers. And after a while, they could take the cuffs off because her idolization of her jailers was her. chain. And when anybody tried to free her or liberate her, she sneered and snarled at them. She was a co-conspirator in her own kidnapping. Jonah was an extremely prominent religious figure in his day. He might have been the leading prophet and preacher and religious figure in Israel. And when we meet him here, he has just gone

to Nineveh, which was the New York City of the era. It was the capital of the world. It was the largest city of the largest and most important empire in the whole world, Assyria. And he goes there, and he's not a preaching campaign. And the entire city has turned to God in repentance, led by the king himself. And that's what we read in chapter three. And certainly we would expect that at the end of chapter three, at verse, it only goes to verse 10, but we would have expected that Jonah, the book of Jonah, would have ended at chapter three, verse 11.

and chapter 3 verse 11 would have read like this and Jonah went home to his own home rejoicing right but instead we read verse one that says he was exceedingly angry now here's a question what had gotten Jonah this great prophet so tied up in knots so messed up inside that he is suicidal he He says, I'm ready to die. I don't have any purpose in life anymore. What could have so distorted his vision that he couldn't rejoice in this great triumph, not just of the kingdom of God, but of his own career? What had this man so controlled and tied up in knots?

Well, we'll talk about that in a minute. But just for a moment, let's realize what the principle is. Because this, we're not here today to talk about Jonah. We're here to talk about you and me. Jonah was a co-conspirator in his own kidnapping. When God came to him a couple of times to try to liberate Jonah, he sneered and he snarled at him. In all of our lives, we have little lords, small L, little gods, pseudo-gods, idols, things that we worship. And we're bound by those things.

They control our lives. And we're co-conspirators on our own kidnapping. We're bound by them. and if somebody tries to come in and liberate us from them or talk to us about them, we snarl at them. Because you see, the fact that we're enamored with them, it's our very adoration, our idolization of them is what binds us. God, in His grace, seeks to liberate us, and he seeks to liberate us with the most liberating of all the commandments of the Ten Commandments, which is what we're looking at today. The first, I am the Lord thy God, he says, thou shalt have no other gods before me. What he's saying there is, I'm the only God there is. All others are impostors. My yoke is easy. My burden is light. And the yoke of any other God is bondage. Or as John Dunn put it, and we printed this little classic quote by the Christian minister John Dunn in the front of the bulletin, take me to you, imprison me. He's talking to God. Take me to you, imprison me. For I, except you enthrall me, never shall be free.

nor ever chased except you ravish me. That's what the first commandment's about. If you have any other gods before God, and we all do, to that degree that we have got other gods before him, we're in bondage. Co-conspirators were their own jailers. Now, let's take a look at Jonah. I said, let's step away from Jonah for a minute, but now let's look at him because Jonah is a case study. And those of you from law school, from business school, from medical school, a lot of different schools, use case studies. It's one of the best ways to learn principles, so let's use Jonah. Let's use his case study, and let's look at it and tear it apart. Let's break it down. First thing we see is in the first three verses, though Jonah does not yet detect the idol controlling

his life, his heart idol, we can detect it. But Jonah was greatly displeased and became angry. He prayed to the Lord, oh, Lord, is not this what I said when I was still at home? That is why I was so quick to flee away to Tarshish the first time you called me to go to Nineveh. I knew you were a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger, abounding in love, who relents from sending calamity. Now, O Lord, take away my life. It's better for me to die than to live. What is going on? Let's recap the setting.

If you want to get the hang of what Joan has done, he has gone to the greatest city in the world. The mortal enemy of Israel. Here he, an Israelite prophet, goes and calls everyone to repentance and to turn to the God of Israel, and they do. And the king sends out a royal decree and calls everyone from the poorest to the richest to bow the need to God. Now, if you want to get the hang of what that kind of accomplishment that was, you have to recognize that it would be something like if the mayor and the city council of New York called everybody in the Times Square for a prayer meeting and said, we've got to repent for the sin of the city. Let's get down on our knees. Are you getting the

hang of the accomplishment? Are you getting the hang of what actually happened? But Jonah is ready to slit his wrists. Why? Jonah was proud of his nationality. He was proud of his people. He was proud of his heritage. But the pride in his people had gone wrong. You see, because he was proud of his people, he was deeply concerned for the national security of Israel. And yet this good thing, this love for his people, had become racism. Because what is he complaining about? He's saying, I knew that this might happen. Lord God, I knew you're the kind of God that relents from sending calamity. I wanted these dirty Assyrians to be wiped off the map. And I was afraid of this. I knew that you have this bad habit of forgiving people.

Look at it. I knew you were a compassionate God. This is the reason I get so upset the first time. You see, his natural and good love for his own people had become racism because he wanted the annihilation of his enemies, not the rehabilitation

of his enemies. And I'll tell you what had happened. What it happened was it'd become racism because that love for God had turned into an idol. He now got his identity from his Jewishness, his identity from his national heritage. Because when he says, I am angry enough to die, that means what? It means that his real purpose in life was gone. Now that Israel's national security was not secure. He says, now that's the thing obviously he was living for because he says, now my life is no meaning. I have no purpose, I'm ready to go. I'm ready to die. You see, even though he had said, I believe in God,

he served God as long as he could use God for his real purpose. And his real purpose, his real goal, his real God was the interest, the political interests of Israel. And as long as serving God fit in with that goal, he looked very religious. But as soon as God called him to do something that went against his real goal and his real God, suddenly Jonah screened out what God was telling him, and he said, I won't do it. Now, friends, we've all got those screens. We've all got those screens. What are we talking about?

If there's anything in your life that you say, Lord, I believe in you, but I've got to have that, to be happy. and if you don't give me that, our relationship is negotiable. Now, most of us are hiding from ourselves and we're so subtle about this that we can't even say that very consciously. I've heard people say it right in front of me. I mean, you know, and most people know you never say that in front of a professional Christian type. But a lot of you won't even say it in front of yourselves, and yet you're saying it. We have certain non-negotiable things in our lives we must have. We must have a certain level of financial security, or we must have a certain level of approval and popularity, or we must have a certain level of certainty.

We have to have those things, and if those things are not there, or if those things are even threatened, we experience a loss of meaning in life. Right? We start to say, what am I really living for? We experience that emptiness, that loss of meaning in life, which shows that those are really our gods. Not him. We say, I am angry, yes, I'm angry, enough to die. Now, my friends, everybody's idols are different. There's an infinite variety, and some people ask me a great question.

Where do they come from? Now, not tonight, but the next couple weeks in the evening service, I'm actually going to get into that in some detail. Some people say, well, our idols are fixed from our childhood. And by the way, I'm not sure that's wrong. But the only thing we've got us to talk about here is the Bible says that we've all got them. Romans chapter 1 says, everybody, everybody, lifts up something created and gives glory to it instead of the creator. And that means somewhere, for whatever reasons, for all sorts of complex reasons that probably have to do with heredity and environment and that sort of thing, we've latched on to certain things.

Deep down at some level of our being, we say to ourselves, if I have that, I'll be safe. If I achieve that, I can feel good about myself. If I achieve that, I can have a worthwhile life. And if I don't have these things, I'm angry enough to die. And you see, our idols are very different. Very different. You nervous types. You need certainty.

And you can't live with risk. And when the risk comes in, you lose everything because you've got to have certainty. You relational types, you've got to have approval, and you can't live with disapproval. You don't mind uncertainty, as long as you've got people there telling you, I love you. You achieve her types, you can't live with failure. You don't mind people not liking you as long as you know you've achieved, you see. And we look down our noses at each other if the other person has a different idol than us. When people come into the Christian faith, if they cross the line and they receive Christ's Savior,

they begin to see what is expected of a Christian. And it's so interesting to see how different people's reactions are to the things the Bible requires. One of the first things you learn, the Bible says, is you must give of your substance to the Lord's work and to the needs of people. You must tithe. It's fascinating to see that some people come on in. And when they read that, they say, that's a great idea. You're right. That's good.

I'll do it. And other people have apoplexy. Then there's another thing that the Bible says, and that is, Jesus says, if you deny me before men, I will deny you before my father. In other words, you should be willing to speak up to open your mouth, to identify yourself as a Christian to your friends. She should speak up for him. Some people, they become Christians, they get in and they read that, and some people say, that's right, that's good, I'll do it, and other people have apoplexy. And very often they're different people than the ones who had apoplexy about

the tithing. And we looked at our nose at each other, but it's just idols. Our idols are different. Don't you say? Certain things control us, and they all are different. But whatever our God is, as this great quote by Becky Pippert says, that God controls us. We all chase things like success, true love, or the perfect life, good things that can easily become ultimate things. When we put our faith in them, deep down, we know they can't satisfy our deepest longings. The truth is that we've made lesser gods of good things, things that can't can't give us what we really need. In his book, Counterfeit Gods, the empty promises of money, sex, and power, and the only hope that matters, Tim Keller shows us how a proper understanding of

the Bible reveals the truth about societal ideals and our own hearts, and shows us that there is only one God who can wholly satisfy our desires. This month, we'll send you counterfeit gods as our thank you for your gift to help Gospel and Life share the love of Christ with people all over the world. You can request your copy at gospelonlife.com slash give. That's gospelonlife.com slash give. Now here's Dr. Keller with the rest of today's teaching. Becky Pippert in her book Out of the Salt Shaker writes, whatever controls you, whatever controls us is our Lord. The person who seeks power is controlled by power. The person who seeks acceptance is controlled by the people who he or she wants to please. We do not control ourselves. We are controlled.

by the Lord of our life. If Jesus is our Lord, then he is the one who controls. He has the ultimate power. There are no bargains. Can you detect the things in your life that are controlling you? The things that you must have. The things that are probably before the Lord and that have to be removed if you're ever going to experience freedom.

Now, Jonah doesn't see his, but God turns around and begins to help him. see it. And we see from verses four all the way down through verse nine, God goes into a kind of a program, a campaign through which he's trying to reveal to Jonah his idol. Now, the reason God does that is because until you recognize what your idols are, they will sap you. Anything you add to Jesus Christ as a requirement for being happy is an idol that will sap you. It will kill you. Anything that you add to Jesus Christ as a requirement to be happy. When God sees us saying at some level of our life, I can't live without that, he knows then we can't live with it. And he's got to

remove it. Why? He's got to remove it because it's the only way to freedom. My friends, how can you possibly be free from any fear of loss of power or loss of popularity or loss of love or loss of certainty or loss of status? How can you be free from that? Only if you get rid of all the things that are before him, all the other gods, he wants. He is committed. He is committed to liberating you so that you can weather any change so that you can look any situation or condition in the face. And only by pushing you to pure and pure and more exclusive devotion to him, can he ever bring you to that place? Don't you see? So he's got to do it. Now, he comes to Jonah the first time, and he says in verse four, do you have a right to be angry? He's asking Jonah to

look deeper than his anger. What God does here is he's saying, Jonah, look, what is making you angry? What is the basis for it? Look deeper than your anger, Jonah, and see, what is it that's driving me. But Jonah doesn't do it. And frankly, very few of us do it the first time. God, thank you, Lord, does not come to us once. Or we'd all be dead meat. Unfortunately, the first time, he comes to Jonah very gently, and unfortunately for most of us, he comes to us very gently. In fact, if right now God is putting his finger on something in your life through this worship service, I can assure you, that's a gentle approach.

And if you don't get it, God loves you too much to let you go. And what he has to do here with Jonah is he goes a step further. He brings into Jonah's life a comfort, a vine. And you might say, well, that's nice. You have to realize that in a place like the desert of Palestine, this was a great comfort. God brings it up, lets Jonah's heart get attached to it, and then he removes it. Very often God does the very same thing for us. He pulls things out of our lives that we love.

He pulls things out of our lives that we're leaning on. Why? Because he enjoys to see us squirm? No, he doesn't like that at all. He hates to see us in pain. But he's like the lumberjacks. Two lumberjacks came into a forest, and they were about to cut all the trees down.

And they looked up and they noticed that there were two birds beginning to make a nest in one of the trees. So what they did was they took the, not the, the cutting part of the axe, but the flat part of the axe, and they sock the tree and shook the tree until the birds up there were getting their heads rattled around, and finally the birds moved and flew away to the next tree. But the lumberjacks didn't want them to stop there. That tree was going to come down, too, so they sock that tree, and they rattled the poor birds around until they moved to the next tree, and they continually rattled the birds in the next tree and rattled the birds to the next tree until finally the birds started building their nest on a rock. Now, friends, don't you see things that have been happening in your life

that perhaps you've been pretty angry at God for? And what he's saying to you is, this tree is coming down. This thing that you build your life on, this thing that you say you must have to be happy, don't you realize you will never be free? You will never be free from ups and downs. You'll never have lasting, infallible, unassailable certainty, and joy until you build your nest in some tree that's not coming down. That's me. Abraham and Isaac.

Abraham had become the love slave of his son. He loved his son. It often happens sometimes to a child that's born to someone in old age. And he was totally the love slave of his son. That meant when Isaac was happy, he was happy. If something was wrong with Isaac, he was dashed. And God had to do something about that. So he comes to Abraham and says, I want you to slay Isaac as a sacrifice on the amount for me. And we're told both in Genesis and in the book of Hebrews that Abraham wrestled and wrestled. Can you imagine his agony? Until finally, the book of Hebrews tells us,

he got up in the morning and said, well, I guess God will have to just raise him from the dead. I guess that's what God's going to do. I'm going to kill him and then God will raise him from the dead. Now, it's very typical that when you try to figure out, when God is shaking your life up, If you try to figure out what he's doing, you won't get it right. Because Abraham was wrong. But you can be sure about the why, and you've got to proclaim it again and again. And that is, he is pushing me to pure devotion. At the end, when he lifted the dagger over Isaac's heart, God said,

No, now I know that you love me. Now you've removed that idol from between you and me. Now I know that you love me because you did not withhold your son, your only son whom you love for me. And listen to this. The only things that God wants you to walk up the mountain with are Isaacs, things that are probably good in themselves. Achievement, desire for friendship, desire for a spouse. What's wrong with those things? Nothing.

And yet God says they're Isaacs, walk up the mountain, and you say, yes, well, are you going to take them out of my, life, are you going to put it back in my life? That's not your job. The offering, the act of offering, cleanses you and frees you. After all, remember when the angel showed up to Mary, the mother of Jesus, and said, Mary, you're going to become pregnant with Jesus. You're going to become pregnant out of wedlock. You're going to have into your life a child that's actually the son of God. And all Mary wanted was a normal life. All Mary wanted was a decent reputation. And when God came and called her away from those things, did she say, I'm angry enough to die? No, she said, let it be unto me according to thy will. And was she the worst for that? Now, the last thing,

how do you actually abandon those gods? How did Jonah do it? We don't know. You know, one of the frustrating things about the book is that it ends. God is confronting Jonah with his idolatry and his racism and he's confronting Jonah and the book ends. And everybody says, what happened? And does anybody know? Sure we know. Where do you think we got the book from? Nobody could have possibly given us this story, but Jonah himself.

And nobody would ever write a book that made him look so bad except a man who had been so humbled, he was free from his need for approval. He was free from his need to look good. He was cleansed. He was purified. He had removed every other idol from his life. Now, the other thing you have to recognize, not only is it possible, but it's a process. Friends, it is a process. If you read the whole book of Jonah, you realize that this is the second time this happened. The first time is the famous time. God called Jonah to go to Nineveh, and he left the other direction. He was swallowed by a fish. And in the fish, he repents.

And he says at the end of chapter 2, he says, those who cling to worthless idols, now he's thinking of the Assyrians, forsake the mercy that could be theirs, forsake their own mercy. When he was in the fish, he realized that the grace of God was so great that it was the same to respectable Jews

as to dirty idol-worshipping pagans. And he suddenly realized, the grace of God was absolutely free. And that is the gospel. That no matter how respectable you are, no matter how much of a criminal in the gutter you are, you stand in the same place. No one is good, no not one. Anyone can be saved if they humbly ask for the grace of Jesus Christ who died for us. When Jonah recognized that at the end of chapter 2, when he said salvation is of the Lord, when he says it's not of my ethnic group, when he says it's not of me and my, my moral standards when he says salvation of the Lord, his racism was healed and he took off for

Nineveh. But when he saw Nineveh being spared, it came back. And I want you to realize that when you become a Christian, you really do a good number on your sins. And you say, nothing else between me and God, but after you become a Christian, you find that those same sins very often will bounce back. You feel like I cut that tree down, but lo and behold, a shoot comes up out of the stump. Then you dig up the stump. It's gone. And next thing you know, there's roots out there. And those roots will bring up a little shoot here and there. You'll spend all of your life going back and having to say, I thought I dealt with that idol, and it's back. And it will continually come back. But every time, you'll deal with another blow and another blow and another blow, those of you who make an idol of

approval and love, you thought you dealt with it a year ago, but now you're going to have to come back and you're going to have to take the gospel, the gospel of grace, and you're going to have to say, the only love I really need is the one love that I cannot lose. Those of you who need certainty, you've got to screw the gospel down in your heart and say, the only certainty I really need is the one certainty I cannot lose, and that is that I'm accepted by the free grace of Jesus Christ.

That's what you've got to do. That's what you've got to continually do. This is the only way to the heights. The Heights, we talked about it in the call to worship. There was a man who was trying to get a bunch of soldiers. I'll finish with this. A man who was trying to recruit soldiers years ago to a mountain campaign. And this is how he recruited them.

He says, I do not want people to come with me under certain reservations. In battle, you need soldiers who fear nothing. The roads are rugged, the precipices are steep, there are feelings of dizziness on the heights, there are gusts of wind, peals of thunder, fierce, eagles and nights of awful gloom. But fear them not. There are also the joys of sunlight, flowers such as are not on the plane, the purest of air, restful nooks, and the stars smile like the eyes of God. You can, if you want, stay down on the plane. And when every so often,

if you have some problem in your life, you can rush off to church or suddenly get out, you dust off, Bible and say, Lord, I'm in trouble. Help me. Or you can decide to go to the mountain. And the only way to the heights, the only way up there where the stars smile like the eyes of God is to say, I see that there are idols in my life. There are things that I add as a requirement to be happy. To Jesus Christ, Jesus is alone. Jesus is my only Lord. Jesus is my exclusive Lord. I'm going to give myself to him absolutely, utterly and totally and put everything else second, that's the only way to the heights. It's a hard process. It's a long process. It's a painful process. But it's the only way out of the fog. It's the only way out of the smog. It's the only way out of the pollution.

It's the only way to the heights. Are you ready? Let's pray. Our Father, this First Commandment is the great one. And we pray, Lord, for two kinds of people here this morning. There are many of us that though we gave our lives to Jesus Christ, we have come to recognize that there's so little joy and excitement and vitality in our lives. And we realize now it's because we have tried to worship not just Jesus, but some other things that we've kept, that we've held on to, that we've continued to bow down to in worship, and they are sapping us of the great spiritual power, vitality, and joy that we can have that we ought to have. Now, Father, everyone in this room needs to detect the idols, the things that come before you.

Help us to do that now. Help us to give ourselves to you. And Father, there are other folk in this room who are for the first time recognizing and need to recognize what Jonah did in the belly of the fish. That salvation is not of their efforts and their strife. that they cannot just hold on to their goals and be saved by their own works and efforts with your help along the way, but that they must turn to you and receive you a Savior and Lord and say salvation is of the Lord. And Father, we pray that you would enable them to really pray from their heart, this prayer. Lord, though, I have often lived according to my

moral standards. I now see that I've never worshipped you, truly, but I've worshipped other things. I now receive you as my Savior, my real hope, and I put other concerns and other goals as secondary. Our Father, enable us to worship you now from the heart, for that's our freedom. We pray it in Jesus' name. Amen. Thanks for listening to today's teaching. It's our prayer that you were encouraged by it and that it helps you apply the gospel to your life and share it with others. For more helpful resources from Tim Keller, visit gospelonlife.com. There, you can subscribe to the Life in the Gospel Quarterly Journal.

When you do, you will also receive pre-article, sermons, devotionals, and other great gospel-centered resources. Again, it's all at gospelandlife.com. You can also stay connected with us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and X. Today's sermon was recorded in 1989. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel and Life podcast were recorded between 1989 and 2017, Well, Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church.