Timothy Keller Sermons Podcast by Gospel in Life - Orphans or Children

Episode Date: January 14, 2026

The fifth commandment is talking particularly to adult children. It says, “Honor thy father and thy mother.” What’s intriguing about the Ten Commandments is they are a summary of everything human beings ought to be. Yet in all of the Ten Commandments, there’s no place that talks about how people should relate to the government or to the people above them. It doesn’t talk about authority except right here.  So let’s look a little bit deeper and ask the commandment three questions: 1) what does this commandment tell us to do? 2) why should we do it? and 3) how can we do it? This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on November 12, 1989. Series: Ten Commandments 1989. Scripture: Ephesians 6:1-4. 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 and Life. During January, we're inviting our listeners to consider becoming a Gospel and Life monthly partner. If you'd like to learn more, keep listening at the end of today's podcast for details. Have you ever wondered what it really means to live a great life? The Bible says the Ten Commandments aren't confining rules, but a framework for building a life of true greatness. Today, Tim Keller takes an in-depth look at one of the Ten Commandments and helps us understand what it means to live the way God designed us to, free, whole and rooted in his love. Children obey your parents in the Lord for this is right.

Honor your father and mother, which is the first commandment with a promise that it may go well with you and that you may enjoy long life on the earth. Fathers do not exasperate your children. Instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord. This is the word of the Lord. Now, my wife will be quick to tell you that when I approached this topic a couple weeks ago, I was unhappy about it. I said, I don't want to preach on this. This is one of the great advantages of a series.

It disciplines the preacher. I said, why do I want to preach on this? Maybe it was Mother's Day or Father's Day, but this is New York, and they don't have Mother's Day and Father's Day in New York. It doesn't seem very interesting. Everybody knows about that command, right? I mean, it's pretty cut and dried. What's there to say? And I think Kathy remembers that at the end of the day,

I spent all day working on this, studying this one commandment, honor thy father and thy mother. And I worked on it all day on my son's bed. I spread everything out on his bed. At the end of the day, she came on in, and I looked up, and I was amazed. I was amazed at what I'd learned.

I was amazed at how I'd been convicted and challenged. I was amazed at how I knew that I had changed. I had changed. And I felt like the psalmist who said, Oh, thy commandment is exceeding broad, you see. And thy words are sweeter than honey to my mouth. Let me explain. Have you ever heard a grimm's fairy tale?

It's not a real famous one, but an intriguing one. that is very, very relevant to our subject this morning. It was about a little old man who had gotten very, very, very senile. He got very confused about things, and he was particularly messy at the supper table. He was always dropping things, and he was always splattering things all over himself. And he lived with his married son,

and his son's wife particularly hated the fact that he was so messy and so much of a nuisance. And over the months and years, she had really turned her sons, her husband's, she turned her husband against her father, his father in many ways. And it convinced him that his father was a great nuisance. And his father really was a tremendous father. And his father was a tremendous burden. One day, he was particularly messy in the supper in the dining room and the wife said that that does it you're eating in the other room and she picked him up and they went into the other room and she sat him in the corner and she gave him the earth and where bowl and for weeks and weeks the little old man sat in that corner you know

with his eyes blinking not really sure what was going on far away from everybody else just eating his porridge and one day he dropped the earthenware bowl and he destroyed it and the the the the daughter-in-law, the wife, was very furious. And she came in and she says, that does it. If you're going to eat like a pig, you might as well eat like a pig. And she grabbed a trough out of the pigsty. This was a farm. And she brought it in, and she put it down in front of him and says, from now on, you can eat out of this.

And that's how she served them. And it was some weeks later that the father and the mother, the husband and the wife, son and daughter-in-law, saw their little boy carving something. And they said, what are you working on? And the fairy tale goes like this. He looks up and he says, very proudly, he says, I am carving you and daddy a trough so that when I grow up, when I grow up and you get old,

I can feed you out of it. And, you know, the son and daughter-in-law looked at each other and he said nothing. And they began to weep. And suddenly the son, the son-in-law, the son of the adult son, his memory began to go back. He began to think and he began to think and work overtime and began to smolder. And what happened was that the son and daughter-in-law walked on in

and picked the old man up by the hand and led him back into the dining room and sat him down the most comfortable chair and let him eat there and never, ever, ever got angry at him again. And that's a fairy tale. You know, it's a good fairy tale. Its point is, it sums up the Fifth Commandment. And what is that?

The Fifth Commandment teaches this. A society that destroys the family destroys itself. The Fifth Commandment is this. If you eliminate honor in the family, you will eliminate honor, period. And what amazes me over the years is I have preached on this commandment four times before. Obviously, I must have preached at least four other series of things. on the Ten Commandments. Every time I addressed the commandment to parents, every time I preach a sermon on it, I would get to that place and I would talk about what Christian family life

ought to be like. But if you read the commandment, you see it does not address parents at all. It says, honor thy father and thy mother. It's talking to children, and particularly it's talking to adult children. And what's intriguing about the Ten Commandments is you have to realize that The Ten Commandments are a summary of everything that human beings ought to be. We're saying all along that the Ten Commandments are like our high steel. When you think about a skyscraper going up, you see the high steel. And then on top of the, after they put the steel framework up there, they build the skyscraper on it. And we've said that the Ten Commandments are like high steel on which you can build a life of greatness and a society of greatness.

And yet in all of the Ten Commandments, there's no place that talks about how Christians should relate to the state, or Christians should relate to the government, or how people should relate to their people above them. It doesn't talk about authority except right here. And I think it's because God knows that if we honor our parents, all kinds of other things will fall into place. Now, you say it's awfully cut and dried. I know we're supposed to honor our parents,

but let's look into it a little bit deeper. And let's ask the commandment three questions. What? Why and how? And let's just blip right through. What does this commandment tell us? Why does this commandment tell us? And how can we go about obeying it? What, why and how?

What should we do? Why should we do it? And how can we do it? All right? Let's take a look. Number one. What does this commandment ask for? Think.

It is absolutely stubborn. It's absolutely single-minded. it commands honor. Notice what it does not command. This text does not command affection. Now, that doesn't mean that affection isn't appropriate, but it doesn't command that you have affection for, that you confide in, or that you even trust your parents.

Number two, it does not command admiration. It doesn't command that you think that they're the greatest thing. Number three, it does not command obedience. It does not command that you always do what they wish. But it always commands honor. Now, why? The reason it commands honor and not these other things is because the relationship between a child and a parent is incredibly complex. It changes. In the earliest stages, we must be totally dependent on our parents and we must obey them. It says so. In fact, this passage in Ephesians says, obey your parents, but the word children there means little children.

And we know the Bible says that at a certain stage we should leave our parents. That means we no longer obey them. We're supposed to be raised up. We're supposed to become adults. In fact, to continue to depend on your parents and to continue to be intimate with your parents into adulthood can be very pathological. So you see things change. And obedience is not always something that's good.

is not always something which is good. Another thing that can differ is your parents themselves. Some parents are quite admirable people. Some parents are downright evil. All right? And for you to obey them, or for you to even trust them, or for you to try to admire them, would be to live a lie, and would be very unwise.

But you see, the command is so wise, because it doesn't say, you must love your parents, in the sense of admiring them or having deep affection for them. In some cases, yes, in some times, yes. But the one thing you must always, always, always give them, no matter what age you are, no matter what condition they are in, no matter what kind of person you are, no matter what kind of people they are, is honor.

The Bible says that there's no excuse under any condition for you not to honor your parents. And do you realize how important that is to separate honor from all these other things? A lot of us are thinking, well, if I continue to honor my parents, that means I have to obey them. And I shouldn't. And since I just shouldn't obey them, why do I have to honor them? Your conscience tells you that you don't have to obey them, but your conscience does tell you that you have to honor them. And you've got to separate these out, or you'll never be able to really honor your conscience or this law. Honor your father and your mother.

That's what it asks for. Nothing more and nothing less. That's the what. Now, why does it command this? And that's interesting. You see, some cultures and some traditions and some religions will say, you should honor your father and your mother because of the mystery of the blood. You know what the mystery of the blood is?

Because you should be so odd in the presence of the one out of whom loins you sprang. You see, there's something mysterious and awesome. But that's not what the Bible talks about, because, you know, the Bible considers that an adopted father or mother is just as worthy of honor as a natural one. Some people say, well, the reason that you need to honor your father and your mother is because they're wiser than you because they're older than you. And we all know that it's not necessarily true. The Bible doesn't teach that the older you are, the wiser you get.

The Bible teaches that the more mature in Christ you are the wiser you get. And therefore, the fact is, the parents are sinners and children are sinners, the Bible says. And so you can't just say because we should honor parents because parents are less sinful. That's not what it says. In fact, some people would say, well, the reason you must honor your parents is because you should honor your parents out of gratitude for what they've done. The fact is that there are situations in which there's very little gratitude owed because it was very little given. And yet the word honor is there for everybody. So the real question is why do it?

And the answer is right here, actually. Honor your father and your mother. Look, for this is right. For this is right. What's that getting at? Something very profound. Give me about three minutes to develop it. All right?

There's a moral structure in the universe. There's a moral order to things. There's a right and there's a wrong. And there's a God who created us. and when we listen to his word and we come under his authority and we say yes, I believe what you say about me and we listen to what he does,

what he says, we experience the liberty of authority. Now, there are lots of little illustrations you can give here on earth. When a musician, when a bunch of musicians get together and they follow a conductor, they're going to experience the liberty of authority. In other words, if they all do what the conductor, says they may have a symphony on their hands. If a bunch of people get together to play a game,

whether it's basketball or football or whatever, you've got to have a ref. And if they don't listen to the referee and if every single person there says, well, I want to play, you know, by my own rules, there's not going to be a game. But if they listen to the ref, there may be a game. If they listen to the conductor, there may be a symphony. And you may not like the referee or think he's doing a good job. And you may not like the the conductor and think that he or she is doing a good job. But you do know this, you've got to have one. And you give respect to the person and authority knowing that even that person is not doing a good job, it would be far worse if there was no one there because there's got to be somebody there because there's a moral structure to things. And some things like music, some things like sports,

most things don't happen unless you put yourself under someone's authority. The Bible says there's a moral order for life. And God is our creator, and he tells us what is right and wrong. But the first incarnation of that moral order, the first representative that we have of that moral order in the universe is your parents. And that moral order is a teaching authority. Now let me explain that. Over the last few years, there's been a revolution in the modern understanding of the family.

The old understanding of the family was completely authoritarian, where fathers in particular, fathers had the right to kill their children if they wanted to. They had that kind of authority. But over the last 150 years, the authoritarian model is going by the boards, and I'll tell you one of the reasons why. There's lots of reasons. There's ideological reasons. In the East, totalitarianism is weak in the family so that the state can have more control over the child. But in the West, individualism is weak in the family because in the West, we believe so strong. that you should never sacrifice for anybody, but you should always seek to fulfill yourself first.

You've got to look out for number one. You've got to take responsibility for yourself. You know all the cliches. And the most important thing is to find yourself, and a parent should not put the child's welfare over his or her own, and the child should not put the parent's authority over his or her welfare. And so that's undermined. But frankly, the biggest reason that the old authoritarian understanding of marriage has been undermined is the Industrial Revolution, which happened to 100%.

150 years ago. If you read the Bible, you will see that the father and the mother, the husband and the wife, were co-heirs of both the economic provision of the family and the rearing of the children. The father and the mother worked together to provide for the family, whether they were farmers, whether they were craftsmen, they did it together. And the father and the mother together reared the children. But what happened somewhere 150 years ago, because of the way in which, industrialization proceeded in our society, the husband got to the place where he left to go work. And the wife stayed home with the children. And then this unbiblical bifurcation happened, and that was that career and money-making work was man's work, and taking care of the children was women's work. Now, what happened was that on the one hand, men became alienated from child rearing. They became incompetent at it, totally incompetent at it.

Meanwhile, women became embittered by it because they were bearing the whole brunt on themselves. And so in the last 20 years, we see that in the wisdom of the human soul, women have decided in order to be equal, we're going to be equally alienated from trial very. In order to be equal, what we're going to do is not call the husbands back, but to say career first. 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 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. And now recently the Carnegie Foundation came out with this remarkable study on the family

and it says no longer is the family the place where a child is reared. The family is only a place, that foundation said, for creating warmth and encouragement, emotional nurture in the sense of just support. And that study said this, if I can paraphrase it, I can't quote it. The study said that parents are no longer craftsmen, but they are more like executives. They are executives over a whole plant in which they try to make sure that all the processes are coordinated to come out with a final product. In other words, parents do not rear their children, but they take them to the child development expert, and they take them to the child development expert,

expert and they take them to the child psychologist and they take them to the teacher and they take them to all the people and the child works out what he or she wants to become along with the experts and it's just the parents job to support that so the authoritarian model has been jettisoned for the warm fuzzy model that the the family is not a place where we tell the children what they should be but it's a place where we just simply emotionally support them the Bible will have neither of those. And it doesn't. Right here it says, fathers, bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. And look at that. Look at that balance. First of all, there's

authority because nurture and admonition mean teach your children what is right. But the word bring them up is very important because the whole purpose of teaching your child is not to make them more controlled by you, but to get them up. To bring them up, raise them up means make them independent. Bring them to the place of critical freedom to where the child can make his or her own decisions and gets out from under. The very second you begin to teach your child, you're trying to get ready to have that child not need you. And that is the kind of servant authority the Bible says that the family ought to have. And herein is what the Bible says a parent's authority really is. A parent is called to be a representative of God's teaching authority. A parent's job

is to say to the children, this is what's right, this is what's good, this is what's valuable. And what makes a parent effective is not whether or not he or she is right, but whether or not he or she takes up the office God called the parents to. And most parents intrinsically have always known that it's their job to pass along their values. And a good parent is somebody who does it. And what destroys a child's respect for the parent is not whether or not the parent is wise or smart or profound or orthodox. What really destroys the child's respect for a parent is if the parent doesn't believe what he or she says and doesn't do any teaching at all.

And the experts will tell you, misdirected authority is nowhere near as devastating as no authority. For a parent to simply say, I don't know what's right and wrong and who knows and you can make up your own mind is much more devastating to a child than to be told the wrong thing. And that's the reason why Emil Durkheim, the famous sociologist, says that if you give children the wrong kind of authority, at least they'll grow up and they'll say, that was wrong, that was stupid, I'm going to find the right kind of right and wrong. But if you give the children no teaching authority at all, the children grow up not believing there is right and wrong, and so they can never get to the place of critical freedom, because they never in a position to be able to discern, good from bad, wise, from foolish, you see. and they die for a famine of authority.

Why do you have to know this to honor your parents? You have to know this because look at your parents, most of your adults, look at your parents in your mind. Did your parents give you bad advice? Did they tell you things that now you believe are just wrong? You need to honor them for the fact that they picked up their office and they discharged it. There's nothing that says anywhere that all parents, in order to honor God, have got to be right all the time about what is right and wrong.

But the office is you've got to teach your children. Did your parents teach you the wrong things? At least they taught you. But secondly, what if your parents really booted the ball badly? What if they were the kind of parents that really completely, completely failed in their office? They never saw you. They're never with you. Then you still honor them why?

because of what they represent. The fact is that they were God with you. The fact is they were the first representation of God in your life. And though they did a lousy job at it, you give them what, respect because of what lies behind them, which is the throne of God itself. You just remember that Grimm's fairy tale, and you remember that no matter how bad things are, you have got to see that if we don't honor a parents, there's no honor in the society. If we don't honor that kind of community, there's no community possible.

And therefore, you must honor your parents. Now, the last issue, remember, what? Why? What do we have to do? We have to honor them. Why do we have to do it? Because they're God's first representatives of his moral order in your life. Because they represent him.

Third, how can we do it? How can we do it? Let me be specific. I'm going to tell you there's three things you've got to do to honor your parents. Number one, you've got to take them seriously. Number two, you've got to forgive them. And number three, you've got to make sure that you're a son or a daughter of the real father, the one in heaven. All three.

Now, listen, number one, take your father and mother seriously. The word kaboth is the word for honor. One of my favorite words in the Hebrew, when it says, honor your father or your mother, it says, cabet them. And the word kabboth means wait. It means treat them, not lightly, but as significant. And that's the important thing. You don't have to necessarily do what they say. You don't necessarily have to think that they're marvelous.

You don't necessarily have to confide all your problems to them. But you do have to treat them as if they are not insignificant. You cannot treat them flippantly. You have to take them seriously. Now there's lots of ways to do that. One, of course, is through all the familiar symbols by giving them the place of honor at the table, by remembering their anniversaries and remembering things like that.

by asking them for their opinion and listening to it seriously, even if you're not sure you're going to take their opinions. Even if you're not sure you're going to take your advice. Familiar symbols. Another way to take them seriously, and listen to this, honor the fact that they need to see themselves in you. You know, I'm only beginning to realize now that when one of my sons gets some kind of award, for some reason I feel awarded. And when one of my sons gets a citation for bad behavior in some way I feel that I have been dissonable, honored. It's a strange feeling. And I realize now why the Bible often says, your children are your image. You know, I always wonder when I'm walking around the subway stations, since there's so many New York personalities that are famous that actually, you know, walk around

New York, and they must see these billboards of themselves up on, down the subways or up on the walls, and they must see how people have defaced them and made them look stupid, you know, putting on mustaches and weird things like that. I mean, it must seem, when you put your image up there like that you are vulnerable. Somebody can make you look like a jerk. And when you go by, you know, in your limousine and you look at it, you must feel like a jerk. But it's a lot worse. It's a lot worse when your children do things that you disapprove of. You feel that they're making you look ugly. And it gets hard when you've adopted a very different set of values than your parents have. Very difficult. But what you must do, one of the ways to honor your parents is to point out to

them things that you have learned from them, point out things that are continuous, things in your you, good things in you that you can attribute to them. It doesn't take much. Sometimes it's getting on the phone and saying, you know, one thing I've always learned from you and I still do it, and that's all it can take. That honors their need to see themselves in you. It's natural.

You're their image. There's so many ways. Take them seriously, number one. Number two. By the way, here's another way to take them seriously. Don't you remember how you used to hate it when you were growing up, that they always acted like they knew you and they knew exactly. what you were doing and they knew exactly what you were thinking. They would never let you change.

They stereotyped you. Remember that? How you used to hate that? Don't do that to them. You've heard of the Golden Rule? There's a tendency after years and years of being with them that you know exactly what they mean, and exactly what they do, and exactly what they're thinking, and you can stereotype them. Honor their mystery. Recognize that they're people, and they still change. Anyway, number one, take them seriously. Number two, you have to forgive them. Now, the problem with forgiveness is great. As I talk to people, I find that they find that they're saying, there's tremendous amount of resentment toward parents. And the reason for that is because the relationship between parents and children is really one like this. The parents start off as big and we start off as small and as time goes on, they get weaker and we get stronger.

And they should. They're supposed to give us more freedom, give us more freedom. But many of us are bitter because our parents thrust us out into the cold world too soon. And either because they themselves were harsh and abusive or because they were alcoholics or they had problems with themselves. or they had marital problems or something like that, we can get very, very bitter because we feel that for one reason or another, we couldn't trust them when we still needed to. And they threw us out too soon.

And we can be pretty bitter about that. And I'm telling you, the only way to honor your parents is to forgive them and do it for two reasons. One is, do it for your sake. Do it for your sake. I remember some years ago going by after we'd had some children come to vacation Bible school at our church in Virginia. And I went by and I knocked on a door and I said to a father who was there and neither he nor his wife came to church.

We said, listen, we'd be very happy to come on by with a car or a van or a bus and give your children a ride to Sunday school and to church on Sundays. And he looked at me and he said, I'm never going to have my children do that because all of my life my father made me go to church and made me go to Sunday school. And I hated it and I'm not going to do that to my children. And his poor guy, because of his bitterness against his father, guess what, was still being controlled by that nasty old man. Because he hadn't forgiven him. And what I say to people is, you know, maybe your father or your mother was really just as awful as you say. But the only way that person can continue to control you is if you stay resentful. They're still winning.

They've won. They're still controlling you. And the only way you can possibly actually get free from them, which is the purpose of growing up. is to forgive them. But do it for Christ's sake. And here's why. You will never be able to love and honor your parents unless you are free from their need for their approval. You see, the whole purpose the Bible tells us here of child raising is to bring them up and get them free from you.

Physically, it's one thing to grow up. Psychologically, it's another thing they grow up. But spiritually, the only way to grow up to really be free from your parents is if you, are looking beyond your parents to the love of your heavenly father. I'll explain this. Because our parents really did represent God, it was natural that early on in our lives, our parents gave us meaning in life. If our parents said, well done, good and faithful servant in who I am well pleased,

if your parents talk like that, you felt that you were worthwhile, you felt that you were good, you felt that life had meaning, right? But now what happens is you get older, some of you are still locked in that. Some of you are so dependent on what your parents think, and you're dependent in very strange ways. You don't even talk to them, maybe. You may be that unhappy with them. And yet you're driven to achieve, or you're driven to do certain things to show that bitter old person that was one of your father or your mother, that you really can be good.

and you are still not free because you still need their verdict, because you still need their approval. And the only way to be free to honor your parents is if you look beyond and say, no, it's God's verdict, my father in heaven's approval, who I need, and only his that I need.

Now, the Bible tells us that being a Christian is this. It's to have God for your father. You may believe in God. You may believe in him in a general way and lead a moral life, but if you don't know him as your father, you are not really a believer. You want to know what it means to know him as your father?

You go to Luke chapter 15, where we see the parable of the prodigal son. Remember, the prodigal son took all of his inheritance from his father. His father liquidated his inheritance, even though his father hadn't died. He says, I don't want a way for you to die. Father, I want your inheritance now. And so the father liquidated half of his belongings and gave him to the son, and he went off and he wasted it in a licentious life. And as he decided to come back and he decided to ask God, ask his father not just to come back to be his son, but only to be a slave. He says, I will just come to my father and I will say, Father, I have sinned against heaven and in your sight.

I'm not worthy to be called your son. Just make me a slave. But what happens? Do you remember, before the son can even get his confession out of his mouth, the father comes running through the hedges and pounces on him and jumps on him and says, my son, my son, put on the best robe, put on my family ring again. Let's kill the fat of calf. Let's have a banquet because you've returned. And what you learn there is number one, father love is unconditional love. That's what you want. You've never been able to get that from any father or mother.

Some parents are better than others. Some parents are really good at it. Some parents are terrible at it. But the thing that you must have and that you need down deep is that unconditional love. knowing, knowing, knowing what J.I. Packer says. That is that there's a tremendous relief in knowing that God's love to me is utterly realistic, based at every point on prior knowledge of the worst about me, so that no discovery can disillusion him about me in the way I am so often disillusioned about myself and quench his determination to bless me. Father love, family love, is that kind of

absolutely certain unconditional love. You can't get it. from the places you've been looking. You can't. But you can get it from this father. Because if God is your father, you know his love unconditionally. If God is your father, you have access to him and you can talk to him anytime, as great a man as he is, he's your father, so you don't have to go through his secretary, you don't have to make an appointment with him, you have access to him, and you will even have his inheritance, and you will live with him forever. That's what it means for God to be your father. Now, let me just let me just conclude, do you have the marks of sonship in your life? Do you sense God's unconditional love for you

through Jesus? Do you, for example, find that you're constantly needing to prove yourself to others and get approval and defend yourself? Or do you sense a relaxation in the spirit of saying the real verdict is in? The final verdict is in. The real father loves me completely. The only way that's possible is through Jesus Christ, because Jesus Christ is the one, we're told in John 112, as many has received him, he gave power to become the sons of God. You need to be able to go to your parents and say, once you were God to me, but no more. Now God in heaven is my father, so I can finally be free to honor you as I ought. Take them seriously. Forgive them.

but most of all grow up. How do you grow up? To have God in heaven as your father. Let's pray. Thanks for listening to Tim Keller on the Gospel and 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 and Life monthly partner. Your monthly partnership helps us to plan and steward our resources throughout the year

to be the most effective in reaching people all over the world with the life, giving power of Christ's love. And as a small thank you for your monthly support, we will mail you a physical copy of each new life in the gospel quarterly journal that you can enjoy and share with others. To learn more, just visit gospelandlife.com slash partner. That website again is gospelandlife.com slash partner. 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, while Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church.