Timothy Keller Sermons Podcast by Gospel in Life - Our Ransom (Part 1)

Episode Date: July 1, 2026

This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on May 10, 1992. Series: Salvation From the Outside In. Scripture: Ephesians 1:3-14. 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. Modern culture often says that our beliefs are secondary as long as we live like decent people. But the Bible insists that what we believe shapes our day-to-day lives. All summer long, we are sharing a series from Tim Keller which unpacks the core beliefs of the Christian faith. Dr. Keller looks at how the truths that shape our understanding of God, ourselves, and our salvation can transform us and free us in every part of our lives. I'd like to read to you again from this first chapter of Ephesians, and we'll elaborate and spread our thoughts out a little bit more on the subject. We said last week that Ephesians 1, which we're beginning to look at, is Ephesians 1 verse 3 to 14.

In the Greek original was one long sentence. Boy, now what am I doing wrong? It was one long sentence. and therefore it's a massive build-up. It's a statement in which Paul is trying to give us the entire scheme of how God saves us. And I'd like to read just verses 3 to 14, but we're only going to look at verse 3, 4, and 5 here tonight for a minute. Paul says,

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ. For he chose us in Him, before the creation of the world, to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love, he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will, to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the one he loves.

In him, we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of sins, in accordance with the riches of God's grace that he lavished on us with all wisdom and understanding. and he made known to us the mystery of his will, according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times have reached their fulfillment to bring all things in heaven and on earth together under one head, even Christ. In him, we also were chosen, having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything in conformity with his purpose, the purpose of his will, in order that we, who were the first to hope in Christ,

might be for the praise of His glory. And you also were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation. Having believed, you were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit, who is a deposit guaranteeing our inheritance until the redemption of those who are God's possession to the praise of His glory. This is God's word. again, this is only the second week.

We just started looking at the early chapters of Ephesians, and let me remind you of something. This is about being saved. Are you saved? Now, the way you can tell how long you've lived in New York City is the longer you've been in New York City, the more irritated you are with that question. There's something about Manhattan

that makes people very upset with people who talk like that. To talk about being saved or to ask you if you're saved, or to say that I'm saved, at least in this particular culture, is seen to be very shallow, narrow-minded, superficial. And yet, the Bible will tell us that being saved is actually the richest, the deepest, the broadest reality that's possible for a human mind to conceive of. And you see, this entire sentence that I just read to you is the gospel of our salvation. In verse 13, Paul says, when you heard the Word of Truth, the gospel of our salvation,

and that's what he's giving us in verse 3 to 14. But he's giving it to us in a particular way. He's giving it to us from God's point of view. Last week, I spent four or five days at a conference full of church planters, and many of them were planting churches in cultures that weren't native to them. That is, they were doing cross-cultural missionary work. And many of the people spent time saying that there is almost nothing more transforming and more revolutionizing than to have to live in a culture that you weren't raised in.

Plenty of you here in New York know something about that, but plenty of you don't really. We were at one of the meals, a number of people who had lived in Africa for 10 years. They were Americans, they'd gone there and they planted churches. They were saying there is nothing more transformed. than to live in another culture because you don't realize how ethnocentric you are. Now, what is ethnocentrism? It means you have a whole series of shared assumptions that you share with your ethnic group. Lots and lots of assumptions about what is flexible and what is not flexible,

what is rude and what is courteous, what is respectful and what is not respectful, what's decent and what's not decent, and so on. And there's nothing more transforming than to go into a world. another culture where nobody shares those same assumptions. And it means every day you get confronted and you have to examine what you've always taken for granted. And what you've always taken for granted is that your ethnic group's point of view is the right one in every area. It's not until you go cross-cultural, they say, that you really begin for the first time a thinking person. This is frightening for some of us who have not. But they made a very good case. So you really don't know

what it's like to be a reflective, thoughtful person until you go a place where all of your assumptions are assumed. Now, some of them, all of your assumptions are confronted and challenged. Now, some of them are funny, but they're little things. You remember Elizabeth Elliott, our friend who was a missionary in the jungles of Ecuador, says, gives the perfect illustration of this sort of thing on the small scale. And she said, she thought it was pretty interesting to see that the Alka Indians that she worked with, what they did when they had a cold. What they did with the, when they blew their nose, what did they do with it? And what they did is they would put two, you know, two fingers right here beneath their nostrils and they'd blow their nose onto

their fingers. And then they would go, and by the way, some of you might try this. It really works very well. They would go, yeah, they would blow their nose down to their fingers, and then they would go into a bush. At one point, she had a little bit of a discussion with some of them, And she explained that where she came from, the idea of blowing that stuff, that particular secretion onto your own skin and fingers and hand was just really appalling. And they said, well, what do you do? I said, well, we don't even touch our fingers with it. Well, they were excited.

They said, well, this is maybe a new breakthrough in civilization. Tell us about it. So she showed a modern invention called a handkerchief. and she got the handkerchief out and she showed you blow your nose into it and you never, it doesn't touch your fingers and they said, well, okay, what do you do with your handkerchief then? Well, you put it back in your purse or your pocket.

She says, you mean you don't touch your fingers with it but then you save it? Oh, you know, that's really civilized. That's great. What do you do with it? You know, and there was an assumption. She never thought of it. that. Now, to go cross-cultural means that you become a reflective person. You think about everything. You have to think about everything. You begin to realize there's a lot of things I always assume that

are stupid. And that's the reason why you live in another culture and then you come back to your own culture and you find that you really don't belong in either one. Why? Because you've become thoughtful. You're not into reflex reactions anymore. What Ephesians does is it refuses to let us continue to look at life or what's happened to us from the human point of view. It doesn't deal so much with ethnocentrism. It deals with, you might say, the ultimate ethnocentrism. It deals with anthropocenthrism. In other words, it deals with the fact that we always, always, always insist on the human

point of view. We try to understand everything from the human point of view. We have all sorts of assumptions that make us the center of the universe. And so many of you struggle because you only and always center everything around yourself. So, for example, if God is not working things out in the way that seems logical to you, if he's not giving you the things that you feel that you really need, if he's not doing things in accordance with a plan, if he appears cruel to you by human standards, by your standards, if he seems unfair by human standards, by your standards, you're ready to

say, well, he doesn't know what he's doing. And Ephesians won't allow that. Ephesians, instead of of looking at things from your point of view is continually saying this is the real perspective from God's point of view and is continually challenging your man-centered, your anthropocentric way of looking at things. Now the first way they do it in Ephesians is we looked at last week. Ephesians verse three, as we read, says, if you're a Christian, you've received every spiritual blessing in Christ. And everybody says, okay, that's great. I'm a Christian and I've received these blessings. Why have you received these blessings? What is the reason for it? And verse four says, because you've received all these blessings in Christ because he chose you. He chose us in him

before the creation of the world to be holy. Remember, the word holy means to be set apart. From God's point of view, you don't set yourself apart and then he chooses you and loves you. Oh no. He loves you and chooses you. And then you say, you. set yourself apart. Very clear. That is not the way it seems to us. From our point of view, all we remember about Christianity was that it was extremely hard to get into. It seemed to us like we had to use an awful lot of our own exertion that we read and we studied and we thought and we struggled and we knew it was going to cost us a lot. But with great effort, we sought him and we reached out to him and we pressed toward him and we chose him.

And now, from God's point of view, in all of that struggling and all of that seeking, you really weren't seeking him, he was seeking you. You weren't only seeking him to the degree that he was seeking you. You were only seeking him because he sought you. You were only seeking him because you were empowered by his seeking you. Do you find that insulting? Do you find the idea that you're a Christian only surely because of grace alone, not because of anything you've ever done,

not because of your exertion, not because you purified your heart, but it was only and completely on the basis of what God's choice and God's seeking of you, if that irks you, if that upsets you, I fear it's because you need a cross-cultural experience. You tend to see everything

from the assumptions of all human beings. All human beings have these native assumptions, knee-jerk assumptions. They haven't reflected, they haven't thought about it. And the Bible insists, on making you think about it. Ephesians is constantly insisting that you see things from God's point of view. And that's the reason why Ephesians, in a sense, puts you on the top of a mountain and makes you look down. You know, you could live in a town, you could live in a region all of your

life and know it very well, but if you'd never seen it from the air, in a sense, you never can understand it. You may have lived there for years and years, but somebody takes you up in a helicopter, somebody takes you up on the top of a mountain, you look down, and for the very first time in your life, you see how it all fits together. You understand it in a new way, and not only that, the panorama overwhelms you. And that's the reason why there is no other letter that Paul writes. There's no other book of the Bible in which you see Paul continually, unable to continue his discourse and breaking into spontaneous pageants of praise. He'll be going along, and all of a sudden he'll say praise be to the Father and God of our Lord Jesus Christ who has done this.

You know, this is a letter. It was a circular letter. It was a letter written to the churches, but he can't contain himself. You know why? Because that's how it feels when you're at the top of a mountain. You don't just write in a dispassionate way what you see. You're amazed, you're astonished. The panorama just overwhelms you.

And if you are willing to climb to the top of the mountain, it means being willing to listen to him and to set aside your human point of view. to set aside your complaints, because from the human point of view, it doesn't look like it makes sense, it doesn't seem to be fair. But if you want that cross-cultural experience, if you want God's point of view, you read the book of Ephesians, you listen, you submit to it, and wait do you see what happens, where do you see how it transforms you, way to see how it picks you up out of your little ethnocentric way of thinking of things. Now, this first way in which the Bible tells us,

gives us God's understanding of our salvation, we last week called the Doction of Election. It's there in verse three. It says, for he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless. Then, look, and just to make sure we don't miss the point, he then says, in love he predestined us to be adopted as son, Sir Jesus Christ. And just so you don't miss it again, down in verse 11, it says, in him we were also chosen having been predestined according to the plan of him who works out everything and can form. with his will. Now, let's go back and break this down into four statements, okay? And then we'll try to apply it if we have time and see how this really affects the way in which we live day in

and day out. The four statements of this doctrine. First of all, and this is something we mentioned last week, this clearly says, from God's point of view, which is the right point of view, you do not make yourself a Christian. God makes you a Christian. No one can make him or herself a Christian. If you're a Christian, you're a Christian sheerly and completely and exclusively because of the grace of God. Pride and superiority are utterly excluded. In Colossians 1, verse 6, Paul says, The gospel is bearing fruit in you since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in all its truth. Listen, listen. The gospel is bearing fruit in you since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in all its fullness, in all its truth.

What does it mean to be a Christian? A lot of you, I think, could confess this. A lot of you could say, all my life I thought I was a Christian, and this is what I thought it meant to be a Christian. It meant to be good. See, our brother, for example, who was up here giving a testimony, said, I just wondered about Christianity and me because I thought Jesus could only handle good people

and really only wanted good people. And that's the way many of us are raised. We understand what it means to be a Christian is to be good. Paul says, the gospel does not bear fruit in you until the day you realize it's all of grace. Every bit of grace. The word grace, you know what a Christian is? A Christian is somebody for whom the word of grace has stopped only being a word. Paul says, until it bear more fruit in you since the day you heard it and understood the grace of God in all of its truth.

The day you said, it's all of grace. and you understood the fullness of grace. When Paul says, by the grace of God, I am what I am, he means it's because God chose me, and that's why I believe today. It has nothing to do with anything in me. God did not choose me because I was better or there was something better in me. He opened my eyes. In John 6, Jesus says, no one can come to me unless the Father draws him. And we looked at all that last week.

So that's the first statement. There's no reason to go on over it. The first statement of this doctrine is, you cannot. make yourself a Christian. The second statement is, this must also teach that you can't want God, and that's why God has to choose you. You can't want him. There's nothing in the Bible that says human beings can't choose God. There's nothing wrong with your little chooser. You know, I don't, you know, I'm not sure what your little chooser looks like. It's the Bible calls it the will. Some people call it your volition. There's nothing wrong with your chooser. Your choosers is fine.

In fact, every day you're choosing what you most want. One teacher once showed me that no one ever, ever, ever chooses except what they most want at the moment. Some people say, oh, that's not true. That's not true at all. I didn't want to go to the park with my little child. I didn't want to go to the park with my daughter. I really wanted just to, you know, stay home and read the paper.

But she wanted me to go, and so I went. See, I did something. I chose something that I didn't want. That's not true. You wanted to please your daughter more than you wanted to read the paper or you wouldn't have gone. Or I put it another way. You wanted to avoid the discomfort of displeasing your daughter more than you wanted the comfort of reading the paper. But the fact is no one ever chooses anything other than what you most wanted at the moment.

Well, someone says, but somebody had a gun to my head and said, I want you to do this awful thing or I'll kill you. And so I did it. But I didn't want to do it. But he forced me to do it. I didn't choose what I wanted to do. I chose the very thing I hated. No, no, you didn't.

You chose exactly what you most wanted. You wanted to live more than you wanted to not do that awful thing. In every situation, your chooser works fine. You always want. You always choose what you most want. The Bible, see, therefore is teaching that you can never, ever, ever want to submit to the authority of God unless God changes your heart. Do you struggle to find the words to share your faith effectively with others?

Most Christians, pastors included, have moments where we have trouble articulating what we believe and why our faith matters. In his book preaching, communicating faith in an age of skepticism, Tim Keller shows how to communicate the Christian message in a way that's clear, compassionate, and accessible, whether you're speaking to a group or having a casual conversation, with a friend. Drawing from his decades of experience connecting the gospel to real life circumstances, Dr. Keller shows how the gospel message can speak even to the most skeptical or spiritually curious people. During the month of July, we'll send you a copy of preaching as our thanks for your gift to help Gospel in Life share the transforming love of Christ with more people. So request your copy today

at gospelonlife.com slash give. That's gospelandlife.com slash give. Now here's Dr. Keller. with the rest of today's teaching. There's nothing in the Bible. This is something I was trying to get across last week, and I'm doing what you asked in elaborating. There's nothing in the Bible that says that human will isn't free. Some people say, oh, you don't believe in free will. You don't believe that anybody has a choice

between good and evil between God and rebellion. And I've had some people come up to me and say, you believe that no one really has free choice that God just predestined some people. But I believe in free will. No, no, no, no, you don't understand. I believe in free will, too. The Bible teaches that you have the choice, and your chooser works fine. It's your desires that have gone astray. You can choose God, but you can't want God. And therefore, you'll never choose God unless he changes your desires. You know, last week we used the example of the lion. If you give a lion who's carnivorous, a choice between oats and meat,

a thousand times he'll always choose the meat because he's carnivorous. Does anybody remember a year ago, I used an illustration that has lived in infamy, if I put in front of you a nice succulent steak on the right hand, on the left hand, fried monkey brains covered with animal excrement, you have the ability to eat both of those things, but you probably won't take the monkey brains. Why not? You're repulsed by it. And you will always a thousand times choose the stake. The Bible says, and we talked about this actually a couple of months ago, in Romans 8, the natural mind is enmity against the law of God. Unless God changes your heart,

unless Jesus changes your heart, you will always hate the law of God. Now I've had many people who say, look, I'm not a Christian, but I believe in the Ten Commandments. I don't hate the law of God. and the answer is you don't mind the principles, but listen and look at yourself. You'll tell the truth until telling the truth means you lose the authority over your own life, you lose control. And whenever that happens, you will find that you will fudge on the Ten Commandments. You like the Ten Commandments in general, but the Bible says that you are incapable of really going to God and saying, I'm going to unconditionally obey the Ten Commandments. in all circumstances, in all situations, I will never, never, never disobey, even if it means the loss of my life, even if it means the loss of my job, even if it means the loss of relationships, I will always obey the Ten Commandments. I will never lie. I will never be impure. I will never do any of these things. Do you like the Ten Commandments like that? And people don't do that. You know why? They can't do that without Christ changing their heart. Because that is more than just enjoying the Ten Commandments as moral

principles, that is actually submitting to the law and taking away the authority you have over your own life and putting it in the hands of the lawgiver. And you are incapable of that. And because you're incapable of that, you cannot possibly come unless he opens your heart. A perfect example of that is Acts 16, verse 14. Lydia was a woman who Paul and Silas, Paul came to and he preached. And what does it say in the book of Acts? It says, God open Lydia's heart to give heed to the words of Paul. God opened Lydia's heart to give heed to the words. The opening comes, then comes the giving heed.

You see? The drawing, then the coming. No man can come to me unless my father draws. It doesn't say first the coming, then the drawing. The drawing is the basis for the coming, not the coming for the drawing. Now, you know what the problem is? And again, when I talk to folks about this, this is wonderful, this is sweet for you.

But the thing that screws people up so badly is they think about other people. The thing that really keeps you from being able to rejoice in the fact that you're saved by the grace of God is that you look around and say, okay, okay, okay, I can handle the idea that I'm a Christian

because I was drawn. I was a Christian because of the grace of God. But what about the other people that don't believe? won't God draw them? That doesn't seem fair. Now, what's the biblical answer for that? You know what the biblical answer for that always has been? It's almost humorous. It's mind your own business. In John 21, now listen, in John 21, we were talking about this at the 4 o'clock service. It's really a humorous situation. At the end of the book of John, God, Jesus comes to Peter and says, Peter, let me just tell you something. You are going to do.

die a martyr's death. Someday, because you are confessing my name and you're a preacher, and because you're an ambassador for me, someday they're going to come and take you away and they're going to kill you. You're going to be put to death. And this is really fairly comical. You know what Peter does when Jesus says that? He notices John the Apostle going by and he says, what about him? I mean, it's hilarious.

Peter, you're going to die. You're going to be killed. Hmm. What about him? What about him? In other words, before I can assess Jesus whether or not this is fair, and I want to know how you're treating everybody else. And what does Jesus say? Jesus says, what is it to you? Which is a very, very sweet King James way of saying,

mind your own business. You know, in the book of the Narnia Chronicles, there's a number of places where Aslon, the lion that represents Jesus, is asked by one of the other children, well, what about her, what about him? And Aslan says, sweetheart, I only tell you your own story. Why should I tell you everybody else's story? Trust me.

I'm loving, I'm compassionate, I'm fair, I'm wise, a lot more so than you. You know that. I don't tell you other people's stories. You know? So if I come to you and I say, listen, the difference between Christianity and every other religion is the Buddhists can make themselves Buddhist because it's a matter of, legal, just obeying the standards. The Muslim makes himself a Muslim by obeying the standards. The Confucianist makes himself a confusions by obeying the standards. The humanist makes

itself a humanist by obeying the standards. But Christianity is completely different. It cuts against all of that. It's radically different. You're a Christian because God has come to you and opened your eyes and shown you that you're a sinner and shown you that Jesus died on the cross for you and that he has done everything for you. He has satisfied the law of God. Jesus has taken your punishment. He's satisfied everything. He's done everything. He opens your eyes and says, you don't have to do it. I've done it for you. You don't make yourself a Christian. I adopt you into my family. I've chosen you for adoption. See how different Christianity is? And if you sit there and you can't revel in that, you can't rejoice in that, and you can't say, I don't believe it. This is wonderful. Instead, you say,

what about him? What about her? And what does Jesus say? Sweetheart. I don't tell you other people's stories. A lot of you are not able to enjoy the sweetness of grace because you're busy buddies. And I know what that's like, because that's the first reaction of my own heart. Everybody feels that way. You know what the sweetness is?

This is the third truth. The sweetness of it is that God's love is always prior and therefore is unconditional. Remember the prodigal sun parable? The sun is on his way back to repent, to his father. What does the Bible say about the father? Remember the prodigal son? He's done all these awful things. He's on his way back. And the father, it says, seeing him afar off, dashes to him, jumps on him, pounces on him in love before he says a word. Seeing him far off. This is a

picture of election. God does not wait. The father does not wait on the porch and says, I will be happy to kiss him. I will be happy to accept him. I will be happy to show. I will be happy to shower him with love the minute he is willing to grovel before me and to admit that he was wrong. Instead, the father's arms are around him before he repents to make it easy for him to repent. You know it's very hard to repent to somebody who's up there on the porch like this. What does the father do? It's not you repent and then come the father's arms. No, the father's arms and then comes the repentance.

You see, the Father loves you in order to enable you to repent. The Father comes and puts his arm around you and he kisses you in order to show you, I'm ready to hear what you have to say. He draws the repentance out. Out it comes. The Father's love is always prior. The Father's love is aggressive. The Father's love is assertive.

The Father's love, we say around here, is mugging love. He mugs you with it. He jumps upon you. The fourth thing. the fourth part of this truth is, first of all, you can't make yourself a Christian. Secondly, because nobody can come. God has to change your heart. Thirdly, therefore, God's love is always prior, it's aggressive, it's assertive, it's sweet. You must experience the sweetness of it and not lose the sweetness of it because you're wondering what's God doing with everybody else.

Fourthly, you are predestined, you are chosen to be holy. And that means that if you have really receive Christ's Savior, he will not let go of you. This means, no, it doesn't mean, for example, that once you realize that God's forgiven your sins, you can live any old way you want. Because you see, if a person says, I've lost my incentive, because I went to a Redeemer Presbyterian church, and last night I heard him say that since the Father's love is free and is gracious, And since we couldn't earn the father's love to start with, we can't unearn it later. And if we didn't deserve it to begin with, we couldn't stop deserving it later. So once a person is saved, God says,

My sheep know my voice, says Jesus, and they come to me and no one can pluck them out of my hand. I give them eternal life, and no one can pluck them out of my hand. No one can pluck them out of the father's hand. I heard Tim Keller preach about that, and as soon as I realized that I couldn't lose my salvation, I lost my incentive for living a good life. And anybody who says that shows that the only incentive you had was coercion, was fear of being hit.

See, I have no incentive to live a good life anymore because I used to think that if I got out of line, the father would hit me. The father would cast me out. And so now I don't have any incentive anymore. You never really had Christian incentive to start with. You're a stranger to grace. the incentive that anybody has in a love relationship

is not fear that the person's going to hit you. If you got into a relationship like that, it's called an abusive relationship. We put people into counseling for that. Yes, you see, I'm married to this man and, you know, says the woman, and the only reason that I do all the things I do, I don't have any particular love, I'm just afraid if I don't do the things he asks, he'll hit me. That's not a marriage, it's an abusive relationship. and if we find out that the husband has been handcuffed and no longer can hit, she has no incentive to do anything good,

that is exactly what you are saying when you say, oh, now that I discovered that I've lost, I can't lose my salvation, I don't have any incentive to listen, to obey, to be holy. The only incentive you ought to have is Christian incentive is to say, look at what he's done for me. What can I do for him? somebody says well yes it does say that my sheep know my voice

and they come to me and I give them eternal life and no one can pluck them out of my hand but you see we still have free will and so you could still leave Jesus it means nobody else can take him away but if you really really fall away

if you really rebel you can still lose your salvation well you see a shepherd's job is to protect the sheep, not only from the wolves, not only from robbers, but also from the stupidity of the sheep. I mean, if a shepherd comes home and the supervisor says, hey, I give you 100 sheep, you only got 97, and said, yeah, I lost three. What do you mean you lost three? It's your job to protect them. Well, look, I protected them from the robbers. I protected them for the wolves, but those three went off on their own. You can't hold me responsible for their stupidity. And the supervisor will say, of course I can. That's why they need shepherds, you fool. You're just to protect them from everything.

I put them into your hand. Nothing should have snatched them away. If Jesus Christ is your shepherd, he is going to continue, no matter how much you wriggle around in there, to keep your heart close to him. You see, this doctrine is not that once saved you can live any way you want, but this doctrine is if you've really tasted the grace of God, no matter how many down times you have, you'll always come back. You'll always persevere in seeking to be the holy person that he's chosen you to be, to be the blameless person that he's chosen you to be. There is nothing like the doctrine of election that deal with three things. First of all, it completely gets rid of self-loathing. You have too low a view of yourself. You sleep fitfully at night because you're just afraid you're

really not worthy. Look at what he's done for you. This is a love that it's his own rationale. He loves you just because he loves you, because he loves you. You cannot lose it. You cannot do anything to destroy it. It is infallible. He loves you from before the stars were founded. Bring your stubbornness, bring yourself loathing, bring anything into the light of that,

and say, the stars may fall from heaven, but his love for me will stand, and his triumphant grace is going to make me holy. It's guaranteed. my problems, all of my sins, all of my bad habits, everything in my heart that I hate has got to eventually fall before his triumphant grace because his grace is infallible. His love for me is not conditioned on anything, but his own perfection. And therefore he is going to make me into something great. It gets rid of self-loathing. It also gets rid of self-inflation. The reason that you're a Christian

today is not because of your degrees, not because of your pedigree, not because of your pedigree, not because of your will, not because of your willingness to surrender? Oh, no. It's sheerly and strictly and completely because he likes to choose people, especially, he says, the weak and the lowly and despised. Remember? First Corinthians 1 tells us the only reason that God seems to choose some people over others is he likes the fools. He likes to turn fools into Christians to shame the people who think they're wise. Lastly, it gets rid of self-pity. It gets rid of self-loathing. It gets rid of self-inflation, but it gets rid of self-pity. You remember the guy who was willing to sell everything he had in order to get the field?

Because in it there was a pearl of great price. In it was the treasure. The reason he was willing to sell everything was because he knew that the value of that field would completely overwhelm any cost. A person who knows that you're a sinner saved completely by grace no longer ever feel sorry for him or herself. You don't feel sorry for yourself. Because no matter what suffering you're going through,

no matter what hassle or trouble you're going through, it is nothing compared to what's coming. The value of what is guaranteed completely overwhelms the cost of anything God asks you to endure. If you see that you're saved completely by grace, tis not that I did choose thee, for Lord, that could not be.

This heart would still refuse thee. Has thou not chosen me? My heart owns none before thee, for thy rich grace I thirst. This knowing, if I love thee, thou must have loved me first. Let's pray. Father, as we take up our offering, enable us to give you the praise of our hearts for your glorious grace.

We ask this in Jesus' name. Amen. Thanks for joining us here on the Gospel and Life podcast. If you were encouraged by today's teaching, you can help others discover this podcast by rating and reviewing it. And to find more great gospel-centered content by Tim Keller anytime, visit gospelandlife.com. Today's sermon was recorded in 1992. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel and Life podcast were recorded between 1989 and 2017, will Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church.