Timothy Keller Sermons Podcast by Gospel in Life - Runaway Believer

Episode Date: August 2, 2024

We all run away from God. It’s in our nature. And the book of Jonah is all about Jonah running and God pursuing. Most of us are familiar with the words sin and grace, but what they mean is another thing. And here it is: essentially sin is running away from God, and grace is God’s effort to pursue and intercept self-destructive behavior. That’s it. Running and chasing. And the first step in any relationship with God is to admit you’ve run and that even now, to some degree, you’re running. So let’s look now at how 1) Jonah is called to do something, 2) Jonah runs away from it, and 3) God pursues him. This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on July 22, 1990. Series: Jonah. Scripture: Jonah 1:1-10. Today's podcast is brought to you by Gospel in Life, the site for all sermons, books, study guides and resources from Timothy Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church. If you've enjoyed listening to this podcast and would like to support the ongoing efforts of this ministry, you can do so by visiting https://gospelinlife.com/give and making a one-time or recurring donation.

Welcome to Gospel in Life. The book of Jonah tells the story of a man running away from God and about God pursuing Jonah despite his rebellion. This highlights what Tim Keller will be teaching this month, that Jonah is one of the best places to go in the Bible if you want to understand the depth of our sin and the extravagance of God's grace. away from the Lord and headed for Tarshish. He went down to Joppa where he found a ship bound for that port. After paying the fare, he went aboard and sailed for Tarshish to flee from the Lord. Then the Lord sent a great wind on the sea and such a violent storm arose

that the ship threatened to break up. All the sailors were afraid and each cried out to his own God and they threw the cargo into the sea to lighten the ship. But Jonah had gone below deck where he lay down and fell into a deep sleep. The captain went to him and said, how can you sleep? Get up and call on your god. Maybe he will take notice of us and we will not perish. Then the sailors said to each other, come let us cast lots to find out who is responsible for this calamity. They cast lots and the lot fell on Jonah. So they asked him, Tell us, who is responsible for making all this trouble for us?

What do you do? Where do you come from? What is your country? From what people are you? He answered, I am a Hebrew and I worship the Lord, the God of heaven who made the sea and the land. This terrified them and they asked, what have you done? They knew he was running away from the Lord because he had already told them so.

The book of Jonah, as we saw by reading all the way to verse 10, is a very simple story. It's a book about a man running away from God and about God pursuing him. And as a result of that, the book of Jonah is one of the very most concrete ways to learn what the Bible means by sin and grace. You see, the word sin and grace almost everybody is familiar with, but what they actually mean is another thing. And here it is, essentially, as concretely as you can put it, sin is running away from God, and grace is God's

effort to pursue and to intercept self-destructive behavior. That's it. Running and chasing. Sin and grace. Got that? That's as simple, that's as concrete as it can be made. Running and chasing.

Sin and grace. Now what we're going to have to see as we look at this is that in a place like New York City, almost everybody can relate to Jonah. I would say you look around our congregation on any given Sunday and everybody looks relatively like New York, everybody looks different. We all look very different from each other, and yet I say there's two fundamental kind of divisions. Some of you have a religious background. Some of you don't. Some of you have been far away,

running away as much as you possibly can from religion. You may have come to New York, and you may have said, I'm trying to get away from my family's constraints. I'm trying to get away from my family's constraints, I'm trying to get away from my culture's constraints, I want to come to a city with fewer taboos, with more freedom, more toleration. But I've talked to a lot of people who now realize that to a great degree, they came not to get rid of away from their family,

but to run from God, even if they weren't sure who he was. So a lot of us can relate to Jonah. We don't really know if there's even a God there, but we're running as far away from where he ought to be if he exists. So we move. And there's others of us that actually have what you might call a religious background, and we're still fairly straight arrows, and we're relatively moral and upstanding. And if somebody asks you what your beliefs are, you can give the right answers and you can say, well, I'm a human being and I'm weak and I'm needy, but Jesus died for me and you give all the right answers. And yet you're like Jonah too, because you know that by and large, God to you is more of an idea and a

concept than a person. And what happened to Jonah here may have already happened to you or may about to happen to you. Here was a man who had served God, been religious for years but when the test came, the doctrine of God with which he had been familiar for years was of no help to him. Why? Because he had never actually experienced the reality of God. He froze. He slid. He fell badly. And so a lot of us can relate to Jonah from that angle too. No matter who you are, you can relate well to him. And so here's what we're going to look at today. The essence of sin is running from God. And I might as well start off by saying the first step of Christianity, the first step in any relationship to God at all, is to admit

that you have run away from God and that even now to some degree everybody in this room is running from God. It's our nature to run from God. Until you're willing to admit that, you can't get anywhere. That's the first step. You have to recognize and admit that step. You have to recognize and admit that you have run from him and that you've tried to get away from him. And I would say this, the most profound kind of self-knowledge you can know is the particular strategies that you have for running and hiding from God. Every one of us in this room have got those strategies. Every one of us has a unique pattern to it. Look at Genesis. What are we told in Genesis? As soon as Adam and Eve sinned, what's the first thing they did? As soon as they reached out and ate the fruit, as soon as they disobeyed

God, what's the first thing they did? They hid. And every one of us has the same deep down inherent nature. We run and we hide and if you don't see that, you don't know yourself. Here's the first step of Christianity. If you want to have a relationship with God, you must not primarily see yourself as a self-sufficient person. Beyond that, you must not primarily even see yourself as basically a hurting or essentially a hurting, suffering person. You must see yourself primarily as a fugitive. Someone who's running from God and until you see that, you cannot take the first steps toward him. My wife will tell you that I, when I'm lost or when I can't find something in a grocery store,

I will not ask anybody where it is. I will not ask anybody where I am. And therefore, I can tell you, from first-hand experience, nobody is as hopelessly lost as a man who won't admit that he's hopelessly lost. Don't you see? That makes sense. Unless you see that you run from God, unless somebody, unless everybody in this room will be willing to say, I have run from God, I am running from God, even now, this week, I can see the patterns in my life. Until you're willing to admit that, you can't move on. And not only that, the sermon won't help you much. But I hope that you will be open, at at least to seeing how the Bible here teaches us what it means to run from God and how that can be remedied.

Now look, we're going to see first of all, Jonah is called to do something. Secondly, Jonah runs away from it and then we'll thirdly see how God pursues him. Number one, what's Jonah's calling? The word of the Lord came to Jonah, son of Amittai, and it said, go to the great city of Nineveh and preach against it because its wickedness has come up before me. Jonah opens his orders from God and he's told, go to Nineveh, to that great city. Now, God does not pull any punches. He's telling a preacher to go to the biggest, baddest, meanest, most

powerful city in the world and go to the center of it and tell everybody to repent and turn to God. Now, let's admit what he's really being asked to do. It's an unreasonable, irrational thing to be asked. Can you imagine going to Berlin in the middle of World War II and getting up in the center and preaching that they should repent? Can you imagine going to Moscow at the height of the Cold War and going into Red Square and getting up and telling everybody to repent. What are the chances? What will happen? I'd say the best that could happen is you would be derided. The best that could happen is people would laugh at you and throw tomatoes and dead cats at you. That would be the best thing. The worst thing that could happen to you is incarceration and death. And this is exactly what Jonah's being asked to do.

Now before moving on, let's see how this practically applies to us. In a battle, when a general is, I'm thinking, actually I'm thinking of Gettysburg, because I recently read something about the battle of Gettysburg and the Civil War, the United States. There was a general who looked down at all of his young men along the line, and he decided that what he needed was one regiment to go forward and attack the enemy lines, draw their fire and to distract them so that he could bring another couple of regiments up around the side and squeeze them in a vice. How does the general give the orders to that regiment? Does he go by and sit down with every young soldier and say, now son, let me ask you,

let me tell you what I'm going to do. I'm going to send you right into the middle of enemy lines and I know it's going to look like a really, really difficult and dangerous thing to do. It might even look suicidal to you, but I want you to know I've got a plan and I know that I want you to know exactly what that plan is going to be and how it's going to work out. And I want you to personally know that I care about every single man in my army." And then he hugs him and he says, son, have a good day tomorrow. And he says, general, thanks. Is that how the general communicates? What does the soldier on the line hear? One word, charge. That's it. And out they go. And in a good army they go because

each of those young men on the line takes refuge in the record and the character of the general. They say, look, we've been through many battles with this guy before. We know that he's smart. We know that he's wise. We know that he's smart. We know that he's wise. We know that he's good. We know that he cares about us. So they take refuge in that, and they go. Now God can do the same thing to us. We open our orders, and it looks crazy.

God can send in some strange things into our lives that look suicidal and there's no word of explanation or comfort. Something like that happened to Abraham. God came to Abraham one night and he said, Abraham, take your son, your only son, whom you love, and slay him as a sacrifice for me. You see? Charge! You know, God was saying, Abraham, get going!

No explanation, no word of comfort. What did Abraham do? Abraham went. Why? He took refuge in the character of comfort. What did Abraham do? Abraham went. Why? He took refuge in the character of God. He said, shall not the judge of all the earth do right? I know who my God is. I know what His promises are. I know His character. I know His record. Okay, I'll do it." When God came to Abraham and said, charge, and Abraham opened his orders and saw what they were, Abraham took refuge in God. When God came to Jonah, Jonah took refuge in his own wisdom and his own feelings. When God sends you crazy orders, those are the only two things you can do.

It's up to you what you're going to do. Have you been opening any orders lately that look pretty silly? Do they look kind of crazy? Do they look suicidal? You may not know what to do, but there is one thing that you really have already got. You've got something that you can do with your will. You can either go Jonah's way or you can go Abraham's way. You can either take refuge in his record and say, I'm gonna trust you in this and I don't know what I'm gonna do, but I'm not going to disobey you.

Or you can say, I want to boat in the other direction. That is something, that is a choice that we all have in front of us. We need to do what Abraham did. We need to take refuge in God's name and in his record. It's the only thing in times like that that won't go to dust in your hand. Why trusted generals? Lots of guys trusted generals who do make mistakes and who are corrupt sometimes and who are selfish. Yet millions of men over the years have charged because they trusted their generals. Why won't we trust the one captain who can't do wrong? Now that's Jonah's calling, but what does Jonah do about it? Jonah's response we can look at at both a motivational level and at a behavioral level. Now in Jonah chapter one we only see the behavioral level.

We only see what he did on the outside. But first of all I like to tell you what he did on the outside. But first of all, I'd like to tell you what he did on the inside. And we can't know by reading Jonah chapter 1 what his motives were for turning and fleeing. But we do know from Jonah chapter 4. And even though when we get to Jonah chapter 4 some weeks from now, we'll look at this more in depth, for a moment we've got to look at it now. Jonah in chapter 4 tells us why he fled the first time. And this is what he says.

Jonah says to God in Jonah chapter 4 verse 2, Didn't I say this would happen? That's why I fled toward Tarshish to start with. I knew you might spare the Ninevites. I knew you were a the Ninevites. I knew you were a compassionate God and merciful, and that's why I fled. And here's the astonishing reason that Jonah took off. He was not afraid of failure. No. He wasn't really afraid of going and failing. He was afraid of success. He was afraid they might repent.

He wanted those dirty Ninevites absolutely destroyed. He knew that Israel was not safe until Nineveh was decimated. And so he says, the reason I didn't want to go the first time was because I don't want to do anything nice for those dirty pagans. Now what we see here is something pretty serious. At the root of Jonah's disobedience is something the Bible calls self-righteousness. Paul says every human being goes about trying to patch up a righteousness of their own.

Now let me again be as concrete as I can be. You know what that means? It means all of us have to feel superior to somebody somehow, or we can't live with ourselves. Paul says, the nature of the human heart is that we all have to feel superior to somebody some way, or we can't live with ourselves. And the more people we feel better than, the better we feel about ourselves. That's what self-righteousness is. Now Jonah's particular form of self-righteousness in his case was racism. You know, it's a very typical way to feel better than everybody else. Even if you're at the sort of the bottom of your own society, if you're of a particular race or ethnic group,

you can look down on some other race or ethnic group. That's a fine way to be self-righteous. It works for lots and lots of people, and lots of people do it. But that's not the only way to be self-righteous. For example, if you are absolutely appalled by the horror of racism and bigotry, you can turn your enlightenment into self-righteousness. You can look down your nose at the bigots. You can scorn the people and do the very thing that you scorn them for doing.

You look down your nose at the unenlightened, narrow-minded, bigoted people. That's not the only way. You can also do it, you can be self-righteous through your religion. Possibly that was also part of Jonah's trouble. We're religious, we're immoral, so we look down our nose at all the people who are heretical, all the people who are immoral, and that makes us feel better than other people.

So you can do it with religion, as well as race, or as well as enlightenment. Or get this, what if you've had a messed up hurting life? You can look down your nose at all those insensitive people who don't know how hurting you are. And if you've suffered a lot, you can look down your nose at all the people who haven't. You're so much more deep and special

than all these people that live these successful, charmed lives. If you're educated, you can look down your nose at popular culture and at the masses. Look at the sort of books that they buy. Or if you're one of the masses, you can look down your nose at the effete snobs. You can and you do take any particular thing and make it a way to feel superior to other people. You have to feel better than other people somehow. And that's what Jonah does. And that's the reason he flees. He says, this is why I fled originally.

I was afraid that you might help those awful, wicked, terrible people. Now, the point is that Jonah was not in a position to preach grace. He couldn't call people to repent. He couldn't preach about sin and grace because he was a stranger to it himself. Because the gospel, have you heard the word gospel? Here's what the gospel is. The gospel is this, that all people, all human beings, every one of us is completely fallen away from God, every one of us, and it's only by the sheer mercy

of God that we can be lifted up into His family and welcomed into His presence by free grace. If you know that, and to the degree that you know that, you cannot feel superior to anybody else. If you feel superior, that pride blocks the grace. Because Jonah had never been in a position, nothing had ever come into his life, to show him that his self-definition was based on his pride of his national pedigree and on his race. But now it's revealed his pride had blocked the grace of God into his life so he could not feel compassion for these people, and he was now gutless. Chances are you've heard some version of the story of Jonah, the rebellious prophet

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

reconciliation across lines of division, and with God's help bring peace where there is conflict. This month when you give to Gospel in Life, we'll send you Dr. Keller's book, Rediscovering Jonah, as our thanks for your gift. Just visit gospelinlife.com slash give. Just visit GospelInLife.com slash give. That's GospelInLife.com slash give. And thank you for your generosity, which helps us reach more people with Christ's love. Now the practical application of our lives is this. Everybody in this room, everybody,

all of us, have got some way of going about to patch up a righteousness of our own and feel superior to people. We all do it. At least we certainly feel superior to people who we see going around feeling superior to people. You know, we do it. And because of that, the human heart has got one of two modalities. We've got an A drive and a B drive that we're all in outside of Jesus Christ. The A drive is this. You try to feel superior and you work through your accepted standards, whatever you decide, whether it's race, whether it's enlightenment, whether it's education, whether it's lack of education,

whether it's sensitivity or whatever. And if you've made the grade, then you see your heart says, good, go around, feel superior to everybody else. You've made it, baby. That's A drive. B drive is you haven't lived up to the standards, and you have nobody or hardly anybody to feel superior to. And so in B drive, your heart says, despise yourself. You should despise yourself and everybody else should too. So you live either with an inflated view of yourself or you're full of self-hatred. That's A drive or B drive.

The gospel comes in and destroys the system. The gospel comes into the ego and says, ego, A drive and B drive are both insane. Sin has made you deranged. It's done a frontal lobotomy on you. Listen to the way it is. This is the way it is. You are far more fallen than any of your standards reveal, and yet it's all been paid for. God will welcome you and receive you if you'll admit how far you have fallen. If you don't see that, and you try to have higher standards than God, don't you

see it's your pride alone keeping you from God? You want to be your own master, you want to be your own savior, and that's what's keeping you away. And when you're finally willing to listen to the gospel, and to break out A drive or B drive into C drive, and the C drive is you're that wicked, yes, of course, but it's been paid for. When you do that, you know grace. You've received it. It changes the way in which you operate. And you can feel superior to nobody again, and you also aren't as afraid of things. Now, pride destroys grace. Imagine if somebody had come to you. This is what Jonah was doing. Imagine if somebody came to you and gave you

a tremendous gift, a diamond. Here, a person gives you a diamond. What do you do with it? What if you are deeply embarrassed? What if you say, this guy doesn't think I can afford this? And not only does that embarrass you, but you know he's right. You can afford it, and it makes you even matter.

So you reach into your pocket and you say, No, no, no, I couldn't possibly take this gift. Here, here, here's $30. Now does that make everything okay? You insult the gracious person, you destroy the gift, and you completely miss the joy and the wonderful relationship that could be yours. The same thing happens when it comes to you and God.

If you say, well, I can't admit where I really am. I can't admit just how far I've really fallen. And it just seems too easy to come and say, oh Lord, I give you my life and I ask you to forgive my sins and I throw myself on your wrist. That seems too easy. What do you mean it seems too easy? What you're trying to do is you're saying, let me do something to clean my life up.

It's like pulling out $30 and saying, here's $30 for this $3 million diamond. There, that makes me feel better. What an insult. How do you receive a gift like that? You know what you do? You admit your poverty, you swallow your pride, and you enjoy it. You don't just take it begrudgingly, you enjoy it.

And until you've taken God's grace with joy. You're still in poverty. In fact, the weird thing about a Christian is you're both rich and poor at the same time. Because the diamond really is yours. It's part of your net worth, but at the same time it was a free gift, so you can't feel superior to people who are walking around wearing rhinestones. Because of Jonah's self-righteousness, he ran the other way. That was his motivation. But the actual activity, what he actually did is pretty interesting. He immediately went to Tarshish. Now, you know where Tarshish is? Well, you know where Nineveh is. Basically, here's Israel, okay? Here's Israel. Here's Nineveh. Here's Tarshish. See, Nineveh was in, you know, basically, Nineveh

is over there in Iraq or Iran or someplace like that. But over here, Tarshish is in Spain. Essentially, what Jonas said was, if Nineveh is that way, I want to go in the exact opposite direction. And he went down to look for a ship, and there lo and behold there was one to take him. Now the teaching is this. If you want to flee from God, if you want to take refuge in your own feelings and in your own wisdom, if you want to run away from God, there will always be a ship to take you. There will always be someone or something ready to take you. Imagine if your doctor came to you and said, the only way that you will survive, because

of your physical condition, which is so bad, the only way you will survive is if you cut out all fats, all cholesterol, and stay on this very very strict diet completely strict the only way you'll survive. Now to obey your doctor means on the one hand you are going to have to cut against the very grain of our society especially in New York. Because if you walk down the street on every block not only is there wicked wrong food that will enable you to disobey your doctor, but it's out there where you can see it. It's not like the suburbs. You know it's in there, but you can't see it. It's out where you can see it. It's out where you can smell it. And so you're really going against society to stay on a strict

diet. Just to walk through life and try to stay on a strict diet in a place like New York is very, very, very difficult. So superficially it looks like what you're doing is cutting against the grain. However, if you disobey, if you go ahead and eat the fat and the cholesterol, what you're actually doing in a very real way when you disobey your doctor, when you move against your doctor's orders, you move against yourself. You're cutting against the grain of your own physical being in the same way. Just like if you want to break your diet, there's always a ship that'll take you to

Tarshish. I mean, if you want to break your diet, on every block there's something that will be willing and ready to help you disobey your doctor. In the very same way, a superficial analysis will always make it look like to obey God is hard and to disobey God is easier. If you don't understand your own heart, if you don't understand your own soul, if you don't understand God, then it will always look't understand your own soul, if you don't understand God, then it will always look, in the short run, like it's easier to obey, to disobey.

But actually, just as to disobey your doctor is to cut against your physical being, to disobey God is to cut against your very being. Friends, if you want to disobey God, there will always be somebody to help you. There will always be a ship to Tarshish. Always. If you harbor impure thoughts, eventually there will be a bed. If you harbor resentful thoughts, eventually there will be a stone to throw or a knife to stab with. If you harbor self-pity and depression thoughts, there will be eventually an opportunity to embezzle or to steal. It'll get you. Your sins will find you out. And Jonah goes to Tarshish. He runs away. Finally, what does God do in response to that? What does God do? God sends a storm.

Now what is the significance of the storm? The storm is a way of, the storm gives you the good and the bad news about what it means to live in God's world. Here's the bad news first. Whenever you sin, whenever you disobey God, whenever you rebel against your heavenly doctor's orders, there is a storm cloud that is attached and it will catch up to you. Sin is very much like a lethal dose of radioactivity. You see, Jonah is not immediately beset with a storm. At first, he's in the boat and he's asleep. He's peaceful. Disobedience doesn't immediately have a bad effect. And in the same way, sin is more like, it's more like

a lethal dose of radioactive matter than it's like a bullet or a sword. So there's different kinds of ways to kill somebody. You shoot them. You stab them. Or, you open up a can of some kind of radioactive matter, and radioactive matter does not tear into your body like a bullet. As soon as you get in the presence of some lethal dose of radioactivity, you don't immediately go, wow, doesn't do that, does it? You don't feel a thing. But inside, your insides are decaying. In the same way, in the very same way, sin comes on in the inside and begins to do the same thing. Initially, sexual amorality feels wonderful, but it masters you and you lose the joy. Initially, the first rush of cocaine feels wonderful,

but then, initially, sitting around and harboring resentful thoughts, plotting and thinking and fantasizing about the demise of somebody feels good but eventually you're in a prison of bitterness sin has always got a storm cloud attached to it there's a posse

that's attached to sin you cannot baffle it, you cannot bribe it, you cannot get away from it it's there that's the bad news you cannot get away from it, it's there. That's the bad news. You know what the good news is? This. In the middle of the storm, God sends a big fish. Now what that means is, the posse, the storm that God has sent, is a storm that's sent to reclaim Jonah. God, unlike the forces of darkness, wants you to see who you really are. Friends, if you are far away from God, the forces of darkness who are trying to keep you far away from God,

they don't want you to have a hard life. You know why? They don't want you to see how dependent a creature you really are. They don't want you to see how out of control of your life you really are. They don't want you to see those things. But God wants to wake you up to your true condition, and he does it out of love. There's an old fairy tale, an old story that goes like this. There was a wicked witch in the middle of the forest, and she had a wonderful bed bed and when a wayfaring stranger would come, she would feed him and say, sleep in my bed. And it was the most comfortable bed you can imagine. But, if you were asleep in it when the sun came up in the morning, you turned to stone.

Typical fairy story, right? Unfortunately, you knew that you were stone. Your heart and soul stayed trapped in there. And she made you a statue out in her, you know, her statuary. And you lived, you know, to all eternity trapped. I mean, it's a great story, isn't it? Wonderful story. Once a young man comes to the witch, she feeds him, and there's a servant girl. The witch is a servant girl.

And the servant girl sees the young man and loves and feels sorry for him. And so when he goes, before he goes to bed, she throws thorns and sticks and stones and thistles and all kinds of awful things underneath his mattress. And when he gets into bed trying to sleep, she keeps throwing all kinds of nasty things in there so he can't sleep. And in the morning, he gets up before dawn. And I don't know if any of you know just how, there's a wonderful feeling of tremendous despair that lays on you when you couldn't sleep at all, right?

You get up and you realize you've got the whole day to face and you have hardly had any sleep and there's this tremendous despair and tremendous grumpiness and paranoia and anger and so on. And he sees her at the door and he grumps at her and he yells and he closes the door, what kind of place is this? And he walks out and she looks at him. The servant girl, and she says, yeah, the misery you know now really bothers you because you can't compare it to the misery that your comfort would have bought.

Don't you see that those were stones of love I threw in there? God, by giving you those tough orders, by putting things in your life that make you see how weak you are, that make you see how helpless you are, that you're not a self-made man or woman, that you're not in control of your own life, that nobody is. The reason God lets those storms come into your life is because those are sticks and stones of love. They're trying to wake you up until the end of history or to the end of your life overtakes you and you're still away from Him and you turn to stone. In the middle of the storm, there's loving intentions. There's a fish. And when Jonah

stops fleeing from the storm, and if he continued to run from God, the storm would have drowned him. Instead, he throws himself into the middle of it, which is his way of trusting God in it, and by hurling himself into the middle of it, he's saved. Because there's love under the waves. There's always love under the waves. And the storm that's in your life has got God's loving intention in the middle of it. And the only way that it can really drown you is if you keep running from it. And now maybe here finally we see what grace is. Do you know what grace is? Imagine right now someone you love very much.

And imagine now that person has a terrible heart condition and the only way he will stay alive is if he takes medicine. And the time is almost up, he's got to take the medicine or he'll die. But he thinks in his bad and weakened condition, he has become deluded and he thinks that the medicine you're trying to give him is poison. So every time you approach him, he fights you. And he tries to hurt you, he tries to put you in the hospital himself. He tries to kill you, and now that he can't seem to keep you away, he's fled from you. What do you do? If you stay away from him, that shows you hate him.

But if instead you go after him, don't you see what tender violence you have to use? If you have to tackle him, if you have to punch him in the mouth in order to knock him out so he doesn't kill you so you can help him, don't you see what tender violence that takes? When you hit him it's like hitting yourself. Gentle power, tender, tender violence, and yet that is what grace is. Grace is pursuing and intercepting self-destructive behavior. Grace is fierce love, dogged love, determined love, and it won't stop until it hurts you just enough to wake you up. And so God comes to every person at some time in life, every person, and says, my dear friends,

Christianity is not the poison you think. My dear friends, the Ten Commandments, Christianity is not the poison you think. You may think it limits you. You may think it cuts you off from so many possibilities. You may think it's narrow. Well, of course, it's because you're deranged. You think it's poison.

It's food. It's life itself. Wake up. So there's only two kinds of people. On any Sunday in a congregation like this, some of you are running from God God and here's how you can stop. Turn around and see that there is no refuge from God, there's only refuge in God. Did you hear that? I know the fans going back there. There's no refuge from God, there's only refuge in God and here's why. The only way to turn to God

is not just to turn around to some general God in a general way and say, I'm going to be a generally good person, but to go to God through Jesus Christ and to say, I want Christ to be my Savior because He died, my sins can be forgiven, and now I can live for you. Here's why. Because, the Bible tells us, Jesus is the real person who was thrown into the storm of God's wrath. And because he was thrown into the storm of God's wrath, the storm of God's wrath has subsided. Jesus is the real one, and that's the reason why we read it in the New Testament. As Jonah was assigned to the Ninevites, so will the Son of Man be assigned to this generation. As Jonah was assigned to the Ninevites, so will the Son of Man be assigned to this generation. And behold, a greater than Jonah is here. It doesn't matter what kind of storm is raging in your

soul. The storm of guilt, the storm of a sense of inadequacy, whatever it is, Jesus Christ will calm the storm. Go. And by the way, there's some rest, the rest of you, some of you, you, Jesus is your Savior, you stand on Him alone as your salvation, and yet there's a storm in your life right now. Something's come into your life maybe that's been very, very difficult to live with. What do you do? Trust Him. There's love beneath those waves. There's love beneath those waves. In your hearts enthrone Him. There let Him subdue all that is not holy, all that is not true. crown him as your captain in troubles hour. Let his will enfold you with his light and power. Let's pray.

Our Father, we thank you for the storms that are really sticks and stones of love. Help us to see that it's your loving intention, that it's at the bottom of all these things that have tried to show us how weak we are. Enable us, Father, to see that we do run from you, but that in spite of that, that you cast your own Son into the fury of justice so that our sins can be forgiven. On the cross, He paid for our sins can be forgiven. On the cross, He paid for our sins. And because of that, we can turn to You and now know that beneath the waves, there's something to hold us up. Beneath the waves, there's love. Beneath the waves, there's a

provision. So Father, we ask now that You would enable us to see that the only refuge from You is in you and in your son, Jesus Christ, in his name we pray. Amen. Thanks for listening to today's message from Tim Keller. If you have a story of how the gospel has changed your life or how Gospel in Life resources have encouraged or challenged you, we'd love to hear from you. You can share your story with us by visiting gospelonlife.com slash stories. That's gospelonlife.com slash stories. Today's sermon was recorded in 1990. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel in Life podcast

were preached from 1989 to 2017 while Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church.