Timothy Keller Sermons Podcast by Gospel in Life - Money: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

Episode Date: June 4, 2025

The Bible says probably 20 times more things about money than it does about sex, maybe more than that. So if you’re trying to know the Bible, you’re gonna know a little bit of something about money. We all have our own filters. We all have mental maps, assumptions about God and the universe and human nature and what’s important in life. It’s what we call a worldview. So what is the Christian worldview when it comes to wealth creation? The real question is whether wealth creation is good or bad or halfway in the middle? And we’ll see that the Bible is more nuanced on that answer. In the Christian worldview, wealth creation 1) is not bad, 2) is not good, and 3) is not something in the middle. This talk was given by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on February 27, 2004. Series: Center for Faith and Work. 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. Are you struggling to find meaning and purpose in your work? We spend much of our lives at our jobs, but our work can often be the area where we feel the most frustration and fut joy in our vocations. My son also said, he works for Bear Stearns, he's out here somewhere, and he said, why is all these people coming to hear you? What do you know about money? And the, it's a, you know, but I studied. I studied for tonight. But, you know, but I studied. I studied for tonight.

But, you know, it may surprise us, I suppose, that the Bible, you know, I, my job is to, not to know money, it's to know what's in the Bible and Christian texts. And the Bible says probably 20 times more things about money than it does about sex. Maybe more than that. So it was hard for me not to know a little bit of something about money just by trying to get at it in the Bible.

I want to talk to you about filters for a second. Everybody comes at life feeling like, well, I'm just going through life in a kind of common sense, objective way, but actually you've got mental maps, you've got mental maps, you've got assumptions about God and the universe and human nature and right and wrong and what's important in life and the relationship between individuals and community, you've got all kinds of assumptions working, it's what we call a world view. So you're not walking through life making common sense decisions. You're not being objective. You've got a world view. You've got a bunch of deep faith assumptions about things and that's how you're reading things. That's how you're looking at things.

Now, from now on, I'll talk about money, but let me just give you one illustration of this. It has nothing to do with money. Like yesterday in the newspaper I just read in New York Times, it said, it was a guy that said, what I don't like about religion is everybody thinks they've got the right God. Every religion thinks I've got the right God. Every religion says I've got the right God. They're all equally right. I don't like religion. Now the problem is, the only way that all religions can be equally right is if A, there is no God, and therefore all religions are subjectively helpful but none of them are objectively true, or B, the other possibility is there is a God but the God is sort of a nebulous force and has no

concern about what you believe, no concern about doctrinal accuracy. So the only way that all religions could be basically true or equally valid is if one of those two views of God are true. So to say, well, I think all religions are true and it's stupid to think you have the right view of God is based on an assumption about God that you think is right and you think you're recommending it. There's no way to make any statement. There's no way to make these kinds of statements without all sorts of assumptions, deep assumptions about the nature of God and reality. Now let me give you one that has to do with money. Some years ago a guy I knew who worked for MTV discovered that his boss, who obviously also worked for

MTV discovered that his boss, who obviously also worked for MTV, didn't let his teenage daughter, it might have been daughters, I can't remember, it was one or the other, it's been a long time, I can't remember if it was one or two, but would not let his children, his teenage daughters, watch MTV. Thought it was bad for them. So my friend asked the guy and said, don't you think there's some inconsistency? You think you're creating a cultural product that's bad for people, but you are making money by producing that cultural product. And the guy says, well, maybe it is bad, but what the heck?

Business is business. Now there's a set of, there's a web of assumptions, a lot of assumptions in there. There's a mental map the guy's working off. First of all, there's an assumption about his responsibility, or the relationship between an individual and the common good. Basically, even though the common good is not something that he's working on, he thinks economically my job is to make money. I don't really have to think about the social fabric. I don't really have to think about the effect on other

people. I don't really have to think about the employees, customers, environment. I don't have to think of any of those things because profit is the only bottom line. It's the only bottom line. But that's based on all sorts of assumptions. For example, it's based on an understanding of the responsibility of the individual to the community. It's based on all sorts of assumptions. For example, it's based on an understanding of the responsibility of the individual to the community. It's based on certain assumptions about what is right and wrong, kind of a relativistic approach. It's based probably on certain assumptions about God. It certainly doesn't assume that God will hold anybody accountable for things like that. In other words, when he says business is business, that sounds very common sense, very hard-nosed, but it's actually an enormous web of assumptions about God and about morality and about right and wrong and about the relationship of individual community. It's a worldview. Nobody can make decisions.

Nobody can even do business without doing it off of a worldview, out of a worldview. Now what I want to do tonight is I want to say what's the Christian worldview when it comes to wealth creation? What does the Bible have to say about it? If you are convinced that Christianity is true, if you're convinced in your Christianity, you need to think this out because you probably work in environments that do not have the same mental maps. The people you work for, the people you work with, don't have the same worldview about money. And there's a great danger that you will seal off your faith from the way you work. In fact, there's more than a great danger. You know, every day you'll be asked to do that, to seal your beliefs about the nature of the world off

from how you work. Tonight, what we're just going to do is we're going to look at some of that and we're going to look at the Christian worldview and just to help us reorient ourselves to what the Bible says about wealth creation. If you're not sure Christianity is true, it's always helpful to have somebody put forth a particular worldview because it forces you to think about your own worldview. It forces you to think about your own underlying assumptions. So it hopefully should be pretty helpful. Now, the real question is, is wealth creation good or Or is it bad? Or is it halfway in the middle? The Bible is more nuanced than other worldviews on this. The answer is none of the above. It's not good. It's not bad. It's not something in the middle. We'll see that. Interestingly

enough, when you go to the Bible, you'll see that wealth creation and wealth itself is well thought of. Let me give you three or four theological, biblical reasons why being wealthy and enjoying the material creation, material pleasures and making money and wealth creation is a good in the Bible. First of all, quickly just to make some, give you some, oh I don't know, some basic planks. First of all, the Bible has, the Judeo-Christian worldview is more positive about the material world, about food and drink, about money, about nature, about the material

world than any other of the great religions. Now that's a little bit, you know, and if you're a member of another one of the great religions, you know, you might say, now wait a minute here, but I'm saying consider these things. It's at least as good and probably better. First of all, Buddhism and Hinduism believe the material world is an illusion and basically that when we get over the illusion it won't be there. When it comes to the Western tradition, the Greek and the Roman worldview, understood the material creation is something that is basically bad and the spirit is good. That's Hellenistic thought.

If you go look at almost any of the old myths about or legends, whether they're Northern European or Near Eastern about how the world was created, they're all very entertaining. But you ever notice the world is never created deliberately. It's always created as a result of a huge battle and somebody kills someone and then they take the body and they make something or they create a place where the gods can go have a good time. Only in the Bible do you have the idea that you have a deity, God, who makes the material world on purpose and over and over and over and over and over again says it's good. And then on top of all that, even Islam thinks that our future is going to be an immaterial, non-material, heavenly place where we don't have bodies. But the

Bible says that the goal of God is to renew the heavens and the earth, so even our future is going to be material. That we're going to eat and drink in the future. We're going to have bodies in the future. Jesus Christ, His body is resurrected and He says, this is what it's going to be like. Give me a fish. He eats the fish. It's a material future. What that means is the Bible gives no support to the idea that material deprivation is a good, is an ennobling thing, is something that just being poor and not having is necessarily something that ennobles you and no, pleasures, material pleasures are to be enjoyed. Here's another thing. When you look at the creation account and God in the Bible creates Abba and Eve, He makes them

gardeners. He has them tend a garden. And this is again unique. If you look at all the other creation accounts of any of the other religions or philosophies or cultures. You don't have anything like this. When God creates a garden, which is a natural resource, puts the human beings in there and says, make it productive. The very essence of what we're built to do, the very essence of what the Bible says is our relationship to the natural resource, the material universe, is we're supposed to not is we're not park rangers. Park rangers just sort of make sure it stays the way it is. They're gardeners.

There's potentialities in the soil. There's potentialities, and the gardener's job is to make it productive. Or put it another way, if you give a million dollars to a brink security man, his job is just to watch it and give it back. Exactly one million dollars. That's his job. You give him a million dollars, he says, I'll watch it, I'll be careful with it, and a month from now I'll give it to you back. But if you give a million dollars to a broker, you want to see it be productive.

You want it to produce jobs, you want it to produce new products, you want it to produce all sorts of things. The essence of what God created us to be is to take resources, natural resources, undeveloped resources, and make them productive. And you know what this means? I mean, here's a, maybe this is a slightly funny way to put it, is imagine the new heavens and new earth. In other words, the Christian understanding, the Judeo- Christian understanding of the future is not you're going to be in heaven in a sort of a non-material, ethereal world forever, but that God is going

to renew this world so that it works right. It's not we don't have disease, we don't have oppression, we don't have injustice, but it's still going to be a material world. And you know what this means? We're still going to need bankers. We're still going to need artists. We're still going to need musicians. Why? What does a musician do? A musician, a farmer, and a banker are all basically doing the same thing. We're taking something undeveloped and we're pooling the potentialities of creation and we're mining them. So for example there's new sounds. There's new music. Music's never been created. God created, in a sense, the potential for that music when he made the world and we haven't gotten to it yet. In the new heavens and new earth, there will

be farmers, there will be bankers, there will be scientists and physicists, you know, people constantly studying and developing the natural world, and there's going to be artists, but there will not be ministers. There will not be counselors. There will not be social workers. There will not be doctors. In other words, we're the white corpuscles. You're the red corpuscles. We're only here because there's something wrong. I'll be out of a job. You won't be. Okay? And you say, how could, do you understand, from a Christian worldview, do you see how surprisingly positive wealth creation, material pleasure, productivity, brokering, taking undeveloped things and developing

them? Do you see how positive it is? It's remarkable. In fact, in some ways, it's probably more positive than the evolutionary idea, because in naturalism, we only have, you know, until the sun burns out and everything on the planet dies, you know, we might as well, we only go around once in life and we've got to grab Father Augusto, we can. That's a beer commercial. Only people my age would know that. But that was what used to be said.

But you see, the Christian understanding is considerably more positive toward material prosperity and wealth creation. Fortunately and unfortunately, I think it's mainly unfortunately, the power of money to corrupt you isn't generally that obvious. For most of us it's not that obvious. At least it's not that obvious, it comes at you more subtly, but I say that's actually unfortunate. Let me talk to you a little bit about another aspect of the Bible gives us, another perspective on money.

There's a sense in which the Bible does not fit any economic theory right now, any view of money at all that I can tell, because the Bible is incredibly positive about wealth creation and incredibly negative about wealth creation at the very, very same time. It is enormously positive about it in a way that more socialistic and centralized understandings of economic theory says we need to control, we need to stop capitalism, you know, big companies and wealthy people are the problem. It's considerably more positive than those folks and that theory, but it's considerably, considerably more negative than people who are real major promoters of the free enterprise system.

In other words, if somebody said, well, what is the Christian economic theory? It's really not something in the middle. It's not as positive or as negative. It's both positive, incredibly positive, and incredibly negative about wealth creation at the very same time. And as confusing as that might be if you're writing a paper on economic theory you know for your MBA program it's still profoundly wise and right because you see money does have a power as Hal Holbrook there said I think that was what no is that how Holbrook yeah as he said trouble with money is it makes you do things you don't want to do now let's

let's get back to that but There's no doubt you can build your identity on anything and you can make anything an idol. But the fact is that when you do your very first deal and you suddenly make ten times more money than you've ever made in your life, you can sense that there's a greater kind of spiritual energy going on there than if you do your first operation. I mean, I'm sure there's a greater kind of spiritual energy going on there than if you do your first operation. I mean, I'm sure there's a high after you've done your first operation. Hey, I can do this. It's not the same.

There's a negative spiritual energy. Maybe I'm using a kind of new agey, but it's a perfectly biblical understanding too. That there's a negative spiritual energy in money. So for example, when Jesus talks to the woman at the well in John 4, he talks to her about her sex life. He talks to her about her relationships with men. Doesn't say a thing to her about money. But when he talks to the rich young ruler in Mark chapter 10 and a number of other places, it's in every one of the synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. He says, if you want to follow me, you

have to give up everything. You have to give all your money away, give it all away to the poor and follow me. Now, he never does that to anybody else. He doesn't say that to anyone else. And some people have been trying to say, well, what's going on there? Does it really mean you have to be poor to be a Christian and disciple of Jesus? No, what he's really saying is money has such a negative spiritual power that if you are making it, if you are using it, if you are around it, you need to realize that you've got to put some sort of lead wall around it. You really have to be very careful with it. It

can make you do things you don't want to do. It can make you be somebody that you don't really want to be, and yet it has that kind of power. What kind of power? Basically, in the garden, we were given the garden to tend, but that meant that it was God's wealth that we were to broker. We're supposed to make it productive, but it's not our wealth, it's God's wealth. The real problem is that the sin in the heart, according to the Bible, takes your money and makes you think of it as yours. The money is mine. See, if it's God's money, the biblical understanding is the money you make is not yours, that's the individualistic approach, it's God's money, the biblical understanding is the money you make is not yours, that's

the individualistic approach. It's not the state's, that's the socialistic approach. And it's not your family's, that's the more traditional approach. It's God's. And if that's the case, then there are multiple bottom lines in business. It's estimated that most of us spend half of our waking hours at work. How does the wisdom of the Bible apply to our careers? In other words, how can our work connect with God's work?

And how can our vocations be more missional? In his book, Every Good Endeavor, Tim Keller draws from decades of teaching on vocation and calling to show you how to find true joy in your work as you serve God and others. The book offers surprising insights into how a Christian perspective on work can serve as the foundation for a thriving career and a balanced personal life. Every good endeavor is our thank you for your gift to help Gospel In Life share Christ's love with more people around the world. Just visit www.gospelinlife.com slash give. That's www.gospelinlife.com slash give. Now, here's Dr. Keller with the

remainder of today's teaching. That is to say, profit is definitely a bottom line, but it's not the only bottom line. The good of the community in which the company works. Your own family being strengthened. Jobs for people. There's a whole lot of other bottom lines besides profit. If you understand the way the Bible says in Genesis 1 and 2, we should be looking at the wealth.

The wealth isn't yours. It's not the individual's. It's not the state's. It's not your family's. It belongs to God, and God has all those concerns. Now what does that mean? If you make money the bottom line in your life, if it becomes more important than anything else, if it becomes the way you feel good about yourself, that you're making money, if the status that comes from it makes you feel like now I know I'm really somebody significant,

and you know that's what happens, you know it, here's some of the things that can go wrong in your life. Number one, let me just have a little list here. Number one, it means staying in a job. Very often you'll stay in a job that makes money but you know is not really helping anybody and you know it doesn't really fit in on your own gifts. In other words, you'll stay in very unfulfilling jobs. It really doesn't grow you, and it really doesn't help anybody else.

But the job makes you money. And if you stay in a job like that, it's brutalizing, and it's hardening. But a lot of folks say, but I could never make anything like this kind of money anywhere else, so you stay there. Which means money has become the bottom line, the ultimate bottom line, the only bottom line. It should be one of many equal bottom lines in your life, but it becomes the bottom line. So you find yourself staying in jobs that really you shouldn't be in, but it makes you money.

Here's the second problem. You will overwork. You'll overwork. In the Old Testament, you had the Sabbath law, which was you deliberately diminish your profits by not working one day a week. There was no other culture, by the way, than the Jews who did that. You couldn't even work slaves on that seventh day. And so what really was happening there was God was saying, I want you to deliberately diminish the profits for the sake of mental health, for your physical health, for your family health,î and all that sort of thing. Multiple bottom lines. If money becomes the main bottom line for you, the main way in which you feel secure about the world instead

of looking to God, the main way you feel like you can handle worry, the main way you feel significant, that's the second problem. So first of all, you'll stay in jobs that don't fulfill you. Secondly, you'll overwork. Thirdly, and I'll be careful how I say this because I'm sort of being a minister, I do counseling too, it'll make you bipolar about money. Now what is bipolar?

As you know, there's a true bipolar disorder which is a kind of, it's a psychiatric, it's a physiological disorder. And in bipolar disorder, normal highs get jacked up into irrational exuberance. I know that's what, I know, isn't that what Greenspan talks about? Yes, that's right. Well, there's something to this. Now listen carefully. Irrational exuberance, a person who's got a bipolar condition, when he or she actually starts, has what you and I would call a normal, a normal good mood, it gets jacked up. It gives unrealistic euphoria, unrealistic expectations, overconfidence, trying to do things you really can't do. On the other hand, in bipolar disorder, when

you get, when you have a bad mood, you get into absolute suicidal despondency and despair. Now, this is what happens if money is too important in your life, and you let it exert that negative spiritual energy. It's bipolar, for example. On the one hand, I have, I guess you know too, but one of the most interesting things is people who make a lot of money and are pretty successful in life are unrealistically, unrealistically confident that they are therefore good in all kinds of other areas. You know that. It's actually somewhat embarrassing.

They feel like they know everything about religion. They feel like they know everything about acting. They feel like they know everything about art. And they really truly do. Because what's happened is that it's bipolar. And you actually are very unrealistic about how you're going to deal with people, how you're going to deal with relationships, how you deal with the rest of your life. On the other hand, if you have an economic failure, or if you stop making as much money, or if you suddenly move into a lower income bracket, it's not just like, �Well, gee, I guess I can't go on the vacations I used to go on.� It's like, �Who am I? Who am I? I don't have an identity left.� You're bipolar. Way too euphoric when things go well financially. Way too despondent when things don't go well.

Fourth, it'll make you seal off your business life from the rest of your kind of life because in the rest of your life, you do have multiple bottom lines. For example, a lot of you, you'll live in a place that actually isn't the best buy, it's not the best deal, but you like the community. In fact, if you really, really wanted to save more money,

if you really wanted to be more economically efficient, you'd move someplace or you'd sell that thing and buy something else, but you don't, Why? Because you value the community, you value the people around you. Maybe your spouse likes certain things and you're so happy to have him or her have those things even though it was really a lousy buy. In other words, because of relationships, because of common good, because of community, maybe you'll patronize a particular proprietor just because you know their family, even though you can definitely get a better deal, you can definitely buy that for less somewhere

else. In other words, in your personal life, you're balanced. But as soon as you get into your business life, suddenly profit is, that's it. It's not the character of the workers. It's not whether or not this product is really helping people. It's not the social fabric. Business is business. I'm producing a cultural product that's bad for people, I kind of know that, but business

is business. So what happens is you become a hypocrite. You become, in fact, if you can seal off the way you live in business and the way you deal with people, very, very ruthless, very cutthroat, very, very competitive, in the rest of your life you're different, but in business it's going to seep out into the rest of your life. It will. Or else you will find that you become a person who's got two personalities, you're not really sure who you are. So for all these reasons, money is a tremendously negative spiritual power and therefore the Bible actually says, you know, when Jesus talks about mammon, you know

what mammon is? You've heard the term mammon. It's actually an Egyptian god. And Jesus was actually saying that money, he doesn't say that about most other kinds of jobs, money can become a kind of spiritual god in your life unless you find all sorts of ways of dealing with it. So money's good, wealth creation's good, wealth creation is also an incredibly dangerous thing that you need to not look at as an undiluted good.

Make as much as I can any way I want as long as it's legal, but you have to ask yourself the question, how do I make sure that money has redemptive purposes in my life and the life of the people around me? Now, that's the last thing we're going to look at. We talked about money, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Let's talk about is there a way for us to use the Christian worldview to affect the way in which we actually do our business life and the way in which we actually do wealth creation. So, if all your competitors go to one bottom line, then everybody has to go where else you're out of business. When all the businesses used multiple bottom lines to some degree, to some degree, when they were slow to do layoffs

and they tended to hold on to, they were loyal to employees, had been loyal to them, when the entire environment was like that, then you could get away with it and still make a profit. But when some of your competitors go into the kinds of policies where no one's loyal to anyone, as soon as something stops producing, within weeks it has to be cut off and taken out. If your competitors do that, you in a sense have to do it too, and therefore money is a kind of system. And it's a combination of the shareholders and the other employees and the other competitors that push you more and

more into this position where the bottom line is the only thing. Now, what could you do as a Christian in that environment? Let me just suggest two things. The first thing, and I would rather you ask me questions at this point, and we're going to have time in about five minutes for the questions. Maybe you could give me some examples and I could try to apply the principles I've given you tonight. But it's going to take accumulated wisdom for Christians to say, I want to become, I think this was Catherine's term, I want Christians to become thought leaders in how to value

other bottom lines besides profit. Equal bottom lines. Profit is one of the reasons you're in business. But there are other bottom lines, like the environment, like worker flourishing, the flourishing of your employees, like justice and fair play that goes beyond the legal. I mean, there's obviously certain things that are illegal, but there's also justice and fair play inside your firm that if you do it, you may not make as much of a profit. I mean, there are ways to treat employees and coworkers that aren't illegal,

but they're inequitable. You know that you'd probably do better if you just marginalized that person, cut that person off, cut that person right out. There's all sorts of ways of doing that. You're not going to make as much money if you treat that person fairly, but that's a bottom line in the Christian worldview. And ultimately, if justice and equity and integrity, if the common good of the community, if the environment, if worker flourishing, if all those things are equal bottom lines with profit, you're not going to make as much money in the short run. You may, you may make more money in the long run because there's a cutthroat competition, destroying your employee's morale, that can bite you back. But I don't think a Christian says, like I think they say at

most law schools, it will help you maximize profits if you help employee morale. Christianity would say that employee flourishing is an equal good and a sort of end in itself along with profit, you see. It's not a means to an end of profit. If all the things you do, you say, well, of course we're going to help the environment. Of course we're going to do community service. Of course we're going to try to help workers flourish because it's good business.

If you say that, you're into a naturalistic worldview, not the Christian worldview. And ultimately, I'm not sure you actually will be all that helpful to the environment, to the community, to your employees. If all of those things, those other bottom lines are ends in themselves and yet equal, they can't destroy your profits, somehow there has to be a balance. How do you do that? Christians have to work that out. Christians have to show how that can be. It's likely when you are new in a big company that you're many, many ways going to have to just earn your spurs and

to a great degree often find yourself being pushed, like pushed beyond where you could be where you're completely comfortable as a Christian, not doing anything illegal, not doing anything immoral, but clearly being pushed in an environment where you can see that there's only one bottom line. But as you get up the ladder, it's one of the reasons to stay in the financial services industry instead of just making some money and getting out, is as you get up the ladder, there are probably ways for you to work out how do we value other bottom lines besides profit and still do good business and not make these other bottom lines just means to an end but really bottom lines

multiple bottom lines that's the question let me give you a quick example of one i don't know if he's here and you may have heard the story because he goes to Redeemer but i'm not going to use his name just not to embarrass him there's a uh... a man who was uh... working in a financial services, I'll just say, a firm, and there was a company that the firm was going to work with that this particular man, as a Christian, felt

– well, not just as a Christian, but the man said, I don't want to work with this company, because I don't think this company – the way this company makes its money is not good in all sorts of ways. It doesn't value community, it doesn't value the social fabric. Who knows, maybe it was MTV, I'm not sure. But let's just say it was something like that. So what this man said was to the rest of his coworkers, I vote against you working with this company.

But everyone else voted against him because their company can make quite a bit of money working with this company. So what this man did was he said, if I lose the vote, here's what I'm going to do. On the one hand, I will work as hard as anybody else on putting the deal together, but on the other, I will work as hard, if not harder, than everyone else. However, I will get none of the profits from it. In other words, when the deal comes through and I'm working with six other guys on it, the other five can divide it to profits. I don't want one cent. I vote against it. I don't think it's a good idea, but I also know that I lost the vote.

Now, you see, a Pharisaical attitude, not a Christian attitude, not a sinner saved by grace attitude, but a Pharisaical moralistic attitude probably would have been to quit the firm or maybe even to try to trash the deal or maybe to undermine or create a very hostile environment. He didn't do that. On the other hand, the other deal would be to say, well, I lost the vote or maybe just not even said anything at all. How do you think his coworkers look at him now? A little nuts? Yeah, but they also, there's an admiration, they don't completely understand it, there's an admiration. Is he going to actually probably grow in his moral influence and authority inside the church, pardon me, inside the church,

inside the firm? Yeah. What he has just done was he showed, even though he was a man in a firm that's operated with only one bottom line, he exhibited a desire to go in another direction, and to some degree he was able to do it and still keep his conscience clear, and was able to do it in a way that other people admired. Now you say, well, okay, that's an interesting case study. We need about a thousand case studies like that. We need to share them with each other as Christian believers till we can accumulate the wisdom. We can share it with each other and say, here are all the kinds of ways in which you can value multiple bottom lines in your job and still

do good business and still do well and still make your firm feel like you're not undermining what they're trying to do. That's got to happen. What I'm going to do at this point is take questions because I think that will be more important than if I keep on rambling because the principles are not too hard to see, but once we... If you ask me back, I mean, you can always ask me back, if you say, okay, that was interesting, the principles are interesting, but we want more practicalities on how to do that, that isn't the sort of thing that happens with 300 people in a room listening to a preacher or a theologian, in fact, or anyone.

This is where you're going to have to find the time to get together. Take the Christian worldview, those of you who believe it, and sit down and say, we've got to figure out some ways of working this out. How do we do this in a way? How do we do this? How do we value multiple bottom lines in an environment that doesn't? Where the system is pushing us away from it, how can we do it with integrity? How can we do it with creativity? How can we do it with creativity? How can we do it with…so that our co-workers trust us? In fact, trust is maybe even more than other co-workers, and yet we still are able to show them a sort of different way of values, a different way of working. How do we do that? You've got to do that together. You've

got to do that maybe with ministers or with people who, you know, maybe know the Bible. But you see, the trouble is, I know the Bible. I don't know your world that well. You know your world. You may not know the Bible as well as me. We have to get together. Christians have to get together, and we can create that kind of accumulated wisdom. And there might be, you might have to start some companies that actually, in a more pure way, operate like this. Doesn't mean, that's not the same thing as a Christian company, by the way. That's not necessarily a company that says, we're Christians, so we do Bible studies at our company. We're Christians, so we invest in overtly Christian, other Christian companies. That's not what a Christian company is. I suppose there's

no reason why you couldn't do that if you wanted to. A Christian company isn't a Christian company per se. It's a company operating out of a Christian worldview. It doesn't have to say it's overtly Christian. It certainly doesn't have to only hire Christians, by any means. And therefore, I think that is not the kind of thing that I see out there yet, and we have to develop, especially in a place like New York. Thanks for listening to Tim Keller on the Gospel in Life podcast. If you'd like to see more people encouraged by the Gospel-centered teaching and resources of this ministry, we invite you to consider becoming a Gospel in Life monthly partner. Your partnership allows

us to reach people all over the world with the life-giving power of Christ's love. To learn more, just visit gospelinlife.com slash partner. That website again is gospelinlife.com slash partner. Today's talk was recorded in 2004. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel in Life podcast were recorded between 1989 and 2017 while Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church.