Timothy Keller Sermons Podcast by Gospel in Life - The Unseen Foundation

Episode Date: January 20, 2025

Hebrews is written to help us have what it takes to face the difficulties of life. And in chapter 11, we’re told one of the keys is to be people of faith. But what is faith? In our cultural moment, conservatives see faith as a moral virtue, while liberals see skepticism as a mark of intellectual maturity. As usual, the Bible’s understanding of faith is much more nuanced, much more sophisticated and complex, than either of those views.  Life-transforming faith, according to this text, has four aspects: 1) it’s rational, 2) it’s personal, 3) it’s foundational, and 4) it’s graceful. This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on April 3, 2005. Series: Christ: Our Treasury (The Book of Hebrews). Scripture: Hebrews 11:1-10, 13. 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.

This is Gospel in Life. The book of Hebrews was written to a group of people who were so exhausted by the sufferings of life that they were shaken to the core and were about to give up. In today's message, learn what the writer of Hebrews teaches to help keep them going. After you listen, we invite you to go online to GospelinLife.com and sign up for our email updates. When you sign up, you'll receive our quarterly newsletter with articles about Gospel-Changed Lives as well

as other valuable Gospel-Centered resources. Subscribe today at GospelInLife.com. This morning's scripture reading is taken from the book of Hebrews chapter 11 verses 1 through 10, then verse 13. Now, faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for. ancients were commended for. By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible. By faith Abel offered God a better sacrifice than Cain did. By faith he was commended as a righteous man when God spoke well of his offerings, and by faith he still speaks even though he is dead. By faith Enoch was taken from this life so that he did not experience death. He could not be found because God had taken him away.

For before he was taken, he was commended as one who pleased God, and without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him. By faith Noah, when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear built an ark to save his family. By his faith, he condemned the world and became heir of the righteousness that comes by faith. By faith, Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know

where he was going. By faith, he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country. He lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God. All these people were still living by faith when they died.

They did not receive the things promised. They only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on Earth. This is God's word. Hebrews, as we've been saying every week, is a book written to people who are being very beaten down by life, by difficulties, by the brutalities of life. And therefore, the book of Hebrews, in a sense, is a piece of public, I should say, intense public pastoral counseling. Intense public pastoral counseling, because it's designed at every spot to help the readers

have what it takes to face the difficulties of life. Handle it, get through it. And today, and actually last week too, is we take a look at chapter 11, we're told that one of the keys to dealing with the difficulties of life is to be people of faith. Okay? But what is faith? And at this point, I really think that our cultural moment doesn't serve us very well, because we are in our culture somewhat divided, polarized between and people who identify with more conservative or more liberal progressive positions. And I think to the conservative temperament, faith is seen almost strictly

as a moral virtue issue. Faith is a moral virtue. You should have faith. You shouldn't doubt. You should be loyal. For the liberal progressive temperament, faith is more of an intellectual sophistication issue. To ask questions, to be skeptical, to have doubts is considered a mark of intellectual maturity. But as we're going to see, as usual, the Bible's understanding of faith is much more nuanced, much more sophisticated, much more complex than that, than either of those views. Life-transforming faith, according to this text, has got four aspects. It's rational, verses 1 to 3. It's personal, verses 4 to 8. It's foundational, verses 9 and 10. And it's graceful, verse 13. It's rational, but also personal, foundational, graceful.

First, verses 1 to 3. Faith is more, but not less, than rational. It takes thinking. As verse 6 says, you can't have faith in God unless you believe that he exists, that the things that the Bible tells you about his existence make sense. Verses one to three have some interesting words in them. It says, faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.

The word certain is a word that means to validate through evidence. And that's why in some of the old translations it actually uses the word evidence. Faith is the evidence. Verse 3 says, by faith we understand, and that word understand is another word that means to think or reason. I think you could paraphrase verses 1 to 3, like this. Faith, by reason, perceives that the seen material world all by itself does not make sense. There must be an unseen supernatural reality as well. Faith, through reasoning and thinking, perceives that the seen material world all by itself does not make sense. There must be a supernatural unseen reality as well.

And it gets that way. It comes to that understanding through thinking, through reasoning. Well how does that work? Well, let me just give you some examples recently because actually faithful thinkers have been thinking about this for centuries. But let me give you a couple of the more recent ways people have been doing that. I've used this illustration I think before, but it really helps understand this principle. Alistair McIntyre, the great Catholic philosopher, puts it like this, imagine I've got a radio here, okay? How do

I know if this is a good radio? Now I can't answer the question, is this a good radio, unless I answer the prior question, what is the radio built for? What is its purpose? What is it made for? So I can't be mad and say, this is not a good radio because it won't open my garage door. Or it won't hammer the nail.

That's wrong. The only way I can evaluate whether it's a good radio or not is I have to evaluate it in accordance with its purpose. Does it or does it not receive radio signals and make them audible to me? If it does, then it's good. If it doesn't, it's bad. And if I don't know the purpose of a radio,

I can't even begin to judge whether it's good or bad. Now, let's ask this question. How do you to judge whether it's good or bad. Now let's ask this question. How do you know a human being is good or bad? How do you know that a human action is good or bad? And McIntyre says, you can't possibly even begin to answer that question unless you can answer a prior question, what are human beings for? What are human beings made for? And if this world is all there is, this scene world is all there is, if there's

no God, if there's no supernatural, if there's no soul, if everything has a natural cause, if this scene world is all there is, then we're here by accident, right? We're not here with any purpose, and that means it's impossible to judge any action as right or wrong. You may feel that violence and oppression is wrong but that's just a feeling because if this scene world is all there is there's no such thing as right and wrong. All statements of right and wrong are just a matter of opinion. And yet we have this unavoidable knowledge, it's really knowledge

that certain actions are wrong but if the scene world is all there is we can't make any sense of that. Not only if the scene world is all there is, we can't make any sense of that. Not only if the scene world is all there is, the material world is all there is, can we make no sense of our moral knowledge, but we also can't make sense even of pleasure. Not even of pleasure. I was reading Chronicle of Higher Education just this last month, had an article in it by a professor of psychology who does believe that this world is all there is, that everything has a natural cause, everything is physical basically, and he loves to tweak his students in class by reading the beginning of a book by Francis Crick, who just died last year, who

was the scientist who discovered DNA. Francis Crick wrote a book called The Astonishing Hypothesis, and these are the opening lines of the book. And he loves to read this to his students. Quote, you, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. You are nothing but a pack of neurons. Which of course is the case. Everything that you feel, everything you experience is really nothing but chemistry. Chemistry is why you feel that way. And he

goes on, he says, now most of his students just hate it when he reads that, and here's a quote, most of my students are very troubled when I tell them that love, quote unquote, is on one level an evolutionary mechanism that ensures an inclination to invest in individuals suitable to help maximize one's fitness, and on another level, love is nothing but a consequence of appropriate amounts

of oxytocin in women and vasopressin in men released in conjunction with sexual satisfaction. That's just not acceptable, one young lady in one of my classes said. I want my boyfriend to love me on his own. And not because his genes or chemicals are telling him to do so, but because of him and me.

And whenever she said that, the professor just laughed and said, well, sorry, that's just the way it is. Except, she was onto something. And it wasn't just wishful thinking. Lewis, of course, puts it a lot better. C.S. Lewis always does. And here's how he puts it. But listen very carefully.

It's very tight reasoning, and it's a perfect example of what we have in verse 1, 2, and 3. He says, if you assume that nature is all that exists, that means you know that a meaningless play of atoms in space and time by a series of hundredth chances has produced you, a conscious being who now knows that your own consciousness is an accidental result of the whole meaningless process and therefore itself is meaningless, though to you, alas, it feels significant. Now what do you do once you know this?

What do you do once you know that everything that you feel is meaningless? He says, well, it's possible that you could try to have a good time. Let's have pleasure now, quote. But you can't truly be in love with a girl if you know and keep on remembering that you believe that all the beauties of both her person and of her character are an accidental pattern produced by the collision of atoms and that your own response to them is only a kind of psychic phosphorescence arising from the behavior of your genes. You can't go on getting any pleasurable pleasure from music if you know and remember that the air of significance is

A pure illusion in music that you like it only because your nervous system is a rationally conditioned to like it So every time pleasure threatens to push you on from air-cold sensuality into real warmth and enthusiasm and joy You will be forced to deny that this universe is all there is in order to keep the pleasure. Can you see what he's saying? He says, if you really do believe that everything is meaningless in life, then pleasure is meaningless. Love is just a chemical. The great transport that music brings is just because it's a chemical.

But if you actually believe what you say you believe, at that moment it destroys the ability to have pleasure. So even your pleasures make no sense as pleasures, if this world is all there is. So as soon as you say there is right and wrong, love is better than hate, and then realize that if the seen world is all there is, those statements, which of course are absolutely right, make no sense, then you begin to realize this world cannot be all there is.

Faith is beginning to help you make sense of what you see. So the first layer you might say in faith is reason. Faith is more, as we're going to see in a minute than reasoning and thinking, but it's not less. Faith helps you make sense of things. You can't have faith unless the things the Bible tells you about God and about the unseen world make sense. So the unseen world makes sense of the seen and you can't have faith unless what the Bible tells you about the unseen world makes sense. But that's not all. First, faith is rational.

Secondly, faith is personal. Because you move on here and you look at verses four to eight and we see, by faith, Noah warned about things to come, not yet seen, by the way, in holy fear, bill, and ark. By faith, Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive his inheritance, obeyed and went, though he did not know where he was going. Now what you see in this list, you have Noah, you've got Abraham, you've got later on Moses,

we haven't read the entire chapter. Something extremely, extremely interesting. You know, most people tend to think of faith as a lack of questioning. Just have faith, don't ask questions. I mean, in a place like New York, people of faith are considered people who don't ask a lot of questions. That's not the way the Bible sees it at all. Here's Moses. He's doing well. He's a prince of Egypt, you know? Great name for a movie, isn't it? He's a prince of Egypt, and he's a everything the world is his oyster and

Yet something comes in and begins to disturb him and next thing you know He's identifying with the slaves and the poor Abraham has great a great life and err of the cow duties and he's it's a fertile place and He's got a prominent family and his whole life is laid out in front of him, safety, security, status and everything like that and then something comes into his life and disturbs him. Next thing you know he's off running off into the wilderness. See we all tend to go with the flow, you know that?

We go to the flow, we try to go to college. We try to get a good job. You know, we try to do well financially. We're all going with the flow. Faith is a personal encounter with God. It's a call. A call comes into Noah's life. A call comes into Moses' life. A call comes into Abraham's life. It's God saying, I want you personally. And when that call comes into your life, it makes you question. It makes you think about, well, why am I doing what I'm doing?

It makes you question everything. It makes you say, what am I living for? What am I going to college for? What am I making money for? It makes you radically question, and it can change the entire direction of your life. The most, to me, one of the most interesting examples of this, and let me show you why it's sort of kind of ironic.

I have a tape of a sermon, it was 50 years ago it was preached in London, on this very text, on this text, by faith Abraham when called to go to a place he would later receive, obeyed and went, even though he didn't know where he was going. And it was a sermon by Dr. David Martin Lloyd-Jones who was a great preacher in the mid-20th century in London. It was on this idea that Abraham heard the call. And Lloyd-Jones preaching on how when the call comes in, when you move from just rational belief in God to a personal encounter with God. He says when that call comes in,

it makes you think about your life in a way that you just didn't before. It makes you start to say what is everything for? And the example he gave was the fact that he himself was a nominal Christian. That is, he had the rational. He believed in God. It all made sense to him, but he had not had a personal encounter with God. And he was a physician, and he was a young

physician in London, and he was on his way to the top, and he felt like, if I make it to the top, you know, I'll have money, I'll have status, I'll have everything I want. And a friend of his, who was actually about 20 years older than he was, who was at the top of the medical profession, who he looked at with great admiration, suddenly had a great tragedy in the man's life. And the man, a woman he was dating, probably expecting to marry, had suddenly got ill and died.

And this doctor, after his fiance or this woman died, came to see Lloyd Jones and sat down at his fire and said, I think I'm just going to not talk right now, and stared into the fire for two hours and never said a word. It was in Lloyd Jones' rooms and he just was so despondent that he stared into the fire for two hours, didn't even look up, didn't even say a word. Now Lloyd Lloyd-Jones had no problem with the fact the man was despondent. There's absolutely nothing wrong with being despondent like that in such a situation.

But as Lloyd-Jones watched that man look into the fire, he heard the call. And he says, it shook me to the foundations. I saw the vanity of all human greatness. I realized all the success in the world, all the status in the world, all the status in the world, all the education in the world, all the money in the world, was insufficient to face life. He wasn't looking at the man as a weakling or anything like that, but for whatever reason, suddenly at that moment, he heard the call. And instead of just having

a rational faith, his faith began to become personal. We all long for a home, for a place where we can truly flourish and belong. In One with My Lord, a new book by Sam Albury, he shows how the Bible promises that there is a place like that for all of us, but it doesn't have a zip code. Instead, the key to home and the very heartbeat of the Christian faith itself is that we find ourselves in Christ. For the New Testament writers, this phrase was so important that instead of using the term Christian, they referred to followers of Jesus as those who are in Christ.

Jesus is not only our Savior, Lord, Teacher, and Friend. He is also our home and our location. Each chapter of One with My Lord is short enough to be read as a devotional, and in it, Aubrey examines what being in Christ means, giving us a fresh lens to view the gospel and all that it means for our hope, purpose, and identity. We believe this new book will help you grow in your relationship with Christ. To request your copy of One with My Lord, visit GospelAndLife.com slash give. That's GospelAndLife.com slash give. Now, here's Tim Keller with the remainder of today's

teaching. Now, what are we talking about here? I'm saying to you, Lloyd-Jones is saying to you, I think the text is saying to you, that it'sones is saying to you, I think the text is saying to you, that it's not enough just to believe in a kind of general way, oh this makes sense, I think there's a God, he rewards those who seek him. There has to be a call, there has to be a sense that God is coming into your life and personally saying, I want you, I want you to follow me. Now what does that feel like?

And here's what I think it feels like. It's the big either or. It's the big either or. You suddenly, even though maybe you knew this with your head, suddenly it presses down on your spirit. Either there is no God and everything is meaningless, everything is meaningless, or there is a God and if there is a God, nothing is more important than my relationship with him. It's either or. It's extreme.

You suddenly realize there is no other place that you can stand with integrity. Either there's absolutely no God and everything is meaningless, or there is a God and nothing is more important than my relationship to him. And if there is a Jesus Christ who came into the world, how can I come to grips with someone who gave himself utterly for me without me giving myself utterly to him? And you suddenly realize it's all or nothing. And when that begins to happen, you are finally starting to personally recognize what is rationally

there in the Bible. You're beginning to have a personal encounter. Now how can that happen? I want you to be careful. It doesn't have to happen very, very dramatically. The biography of C. Everett Koop, who was the Surgeon General of America for a number of years,

tells a story about how he remembers when he lived in Philadelphia, his wife dragged him to church, to an evening service at a church in Philadelphia. And he said, all right, he went basically just to please his wife. And one year later, he realized he had become a Christian during the year, but he couldn't for the life of him recall what day it was, or what week it was,

or even what month it was. He realized that during that year, he had heard the call. Something rational had become personal. He couldn't even tell where it was. Other times, you have something really, you can remember it forever. I watched this man staring into the fire for two hours and I suddenly realized there's gotta be, I need God. Or maybe, have you ever noticed something, friends?

If you've been around, a lot of you've been around Redeemer for a long time, have you ever noticed that certain sermons that I have heard in the past just keep echoing through my sermons? You know, there are phrases, sometimes they're just quotes. There are certain books, because these are the places that I heard the call. And of course, maybe they're not the ways in which you are, but maybe, you know, one of the things that's so exciting about worship is that every time you walk into a worship

service, do you realize that 10 years from now, 20 years from now, 30 years from now, it might be one of those Sundays in which you remember virtually everything that happened that day. Because it's where you got a sense of the call, where God finally pulled you from being a nominal believer in something in general into being his. That's the reason why I think Jack Miller once said, you know, don't be like Thomas, you know, he missed church one day and Jesus showed up. Don't want to miss church, you never know. But it has your faith move from being just rational to being personal.

Personal. Okay, so first of all, faith is rational. Second of all, faith is personal. Third, faith foundational. What do I mean by that? All right, look. By faith, Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance,

obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. I love the old King James. The old King James puts it like this. By faith, Abraham, when he was called to get out to a place he should later receive, obeyed and went out not knowing whither he went. Get out and he went out not knowing whither he went. Do you know that once Abraham got the call, Genesis 12, he's a believer now, right? He knows God.

Everything's fine. Are you kidding? Things have just started. And let me tell you how the rest of his life goes. God says, get out. Where? God says, I'll tell you later. Just go. So he arrives and God says, down and Abraham says when I'll tell you later just wander. God says I'm gonna give you a child I'm gonna give you a son and Abraham says how I'm 99 and my wife is 90 God says, I'll tell you later. Just wait. And finally, God comes and says, Abraham, take your son, your only son, whom you love, and take him on the top of a mountain and sacrifice him.

And Abram says, why? And God says, I'll tell you later. Just start going up the mountain. What's going on here? Let me tell you what's going on here. Abraham came to see, as verse 10 says, that this world has no foundations. This world has no foundations. He was looking for a city with foundations.

This world has no foundations. You know that. The physicists will tell you that. Second law of thermodynamics, everything is winding down, everything is unraveling, everything is burning out, everything. And what that means is if the foundation of your life is your family, they're leaving you.

And eventually, every person you love is going to die if you are so lucky as to actually live a long time. If you build your life on your looks, even as we speak, you're wrinkling and thickening. Everything. The world has no foundations. If you build your life on some intellectual, oh, the latest intellectual cause.

A hundred years ago, all the beliefs that the intelligentsia believed is now looked at as embarrassing. And don't you realize that most of the things that we believe today, that our great grandchildren are going to be embarrassed that we even believe, there's no intellectual foundations, there's no psychological foundations, there's no emotional foundations, there's no physical foundations. So what is God going to do with you? Over and over and over again, you're going to come into a crisis in which to obey God means to lose something that you ordinarily

build your significance and security on, something in this world. That's what God was doing with Abraham. We build our lives on our cultural consensus, we build our lives on public opinion, we build our lives on family, we build our lives on economic settledness, we build our lives on economic security. In every place, God was saying, obey me and leave that behind. He was answering the call away from security

over and over and over again. Now why does God do that? Why is he being so sadistic? It's because we're devastated because we build our lives on things that are going to go. They're sand, they're not the rock. And God is over and over again in our lives saying, don't build your life there. That's got no foundations, that's no foundations, that's sand. Don't put the center of gravity of your life on

that. Shift the center of gravity of your life from anything in this world. Shift your foundations to me, to my word, to my future, and it's the only way you'll be great, it's the only way you'll be unshakable, it's the only way. You know, one of those calls, sermons, that I heard many, many years ago when I was 20 years old, that echoes through my sermons all the time, there was a preacher once years ago that put it like this.

He says you're on a little ball of rock, right, called Earth and you're spinning through space at a million miles an hour. And even if it doesn't run into anything, someday under every single one of us, a little trap door on Earth is gonna open and we're gonna fall off of the Earth, it's called death. And underneath are either the everlasting arms of God

or millions of miles of nothing. And do you think a PhD is gonna help you? Do you think a sharp is going to help you? Do you think a sharp spouse is going to help you? Do you think your bank account is going to help you? And I remember almost certainly he said this, either you're connected with God and everything is secure no matter how chaotic your life looks, or you're not connected to God and nothing is secure no matter how orderly your life looks. And God is in the business of showing you that. And at every point in your life where to obey him, to put him first, means to walk away from something in the world on which you build your security.

It's a mercy. Every time it's a mercy and it's an opportunity to become slowly bit by bit a person of greatness because faith, it's rational, then it becomes personal, you cross the line, you connect to God, but then you're not over. Then it's a foundational shift for the rest of your life into a person of greatness, into a person of faith, into a person that can handle life. But now lastly, lastly, some of you are out there being the thoughtful people you are, I know you are, and saying, I don't think I can do this.

You know, you kind of lost me, I haven't quite made it to rational. A lot of New Yorkers say, I'm still struggling with the rational part and here you're on the personal and the foundation I can't do this. I could never be this kind of sold out. This sounds impossible. Why? I know why. Number one I'm afraid of trusting God I'm afraid if I really lay down my life unconditionally before him he'll let me down or

I'm afraid of trusting me. I'm afraid if I give myself like this I just won't be able to keep it up and I'll fail. Or combination, so I can't possibly do it. There's an answer for you. You know, years ago, years before this was written, Abraham had the same question. Abraham actually said after one of the times in which God was making his calls and giving him his promises, at one point in Genesis 15, Abraham looks up to the sky and says, Oh Lord, how can I know?

How can I know? Which I think means, how do I trust you? How do I trust me? And God said, cut a bunch of animals in half. Now when you and I read that, as modern people we say, what in the world are we talking about here? But of course Abraham immediately knew what that was because in those days that's how you made a contract with somebody or a covenant.

If you had some solemn covenant you were making with somebody, you would cut an animal in half and then you would walk between the pieces and then your companion would walk between the pieces, and you'd both say the words of the contract, and by walking between the pieces you were saying, this day I make this promise, and if I do not keep my word, may I be as this animal. It was all through the Middle, the Near East in those days, it was a way of identifying with the dead animal, and it was a way of really binding yourself to say, I am not going to let down on my word.

So Abraham starts to cut these animals in half, and he figures that he's gonna have to walk through the pieces, and he's gonna have to make some kind of promise. But to his shock, two things happen. Two things are shocking. One is, God appears as a smoking pillar and passes through the pieces himself

and says, I will be your God. And secondly, God never asks Abraham to go through the pieces at all. And Abraham suddenly realized that what God was saying is, if I don't keep up my end of the bargain, I will pay the penalty. I will be torn to pieces. But if you don't keep up your part of the bargain, I will pay the penalty, not you. I will pay it. And therefore, no matter how much you lapse, I'm never going to give up on you. No

matter how much you fail, I'm going to bring you into the blessing. And Jesus Christ says in John chapter 8, Abraham rejoiced to see my day. And what that could only mean is this, that when Abraham got that promise, Abraham said, so I can trust you, because this is a God of grace, a God of grace, not a God who says, well, if you live on up, if you do all this just right, then, you know, if you're really faithful, if your faith is a work, if you really are faithful and really committed to me, then I will bless you. If that was, who wants to get into that? But this is a God of grace who says, if I don't

fulfill my word, I will pay the penalty, but if you don't fulfill my word, I will pay the penalty, but if you don't fulfill your word, I will pay your penalty. And Abraham said, how could this be? And Jesus says he was looking to me, verse 13. These people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised, but they welcomed them from afar. But you know what? If Abraham had the power to live the kind of big life he lived just in anticipation of this grace, how much more can you and I, by looking at it directly,

he couldn't see it, but we can, and you know what we see, here's what we see. Jesus Christ had the ultimate security, did he not? He lived in his father's house. He had the ultimate security, the ultimate security, did he not? He lived in his father's house. He had the ultimate security, the ultimate status, the ultimate, but in a sense, in a sense, the father came to Jesus and said, if these people are gonna be saved,

you're gonna have to get out. You're gonna have to get out of your father's house. You're gonna have to get out of your security, you're gonna have to get out of your glory, you're gonna have to get out of your father's house. You're going to have to get out of your security. You're going to have to get out of your glory. You're going to have to get out of your invulnerability. Jesus heard the ultimate call away from the ultimate security and he got out not knowing whether he went because it was the abyss of the suffering, the infinite cosmic suffering of the cross that he threw himself into for you and me.

See, Jesus is not asking you to do anything he hasn't done in spades. Infinitely more. Jesus says, I got out of my security zone. I got out. I was crushed. I did it for you. Now when I ask you to get out of your security zone, obey me even if it costs you money. Obey me even if it costs you human approval. Put me first, unconditionally. All I'm trying to do out of your security zone. Obey me, even if it costs you money. Obey me, even if it costs you human approval. Put me first, unconditionally. All I'm trying to do is make you something great. I did it for you and it crushed me.

Now if you do it for me, I'll make you something beautiful. How can we walk away from a deal like that? But we do. But that's the deal. Faith starts rationally, becomes personal, slowly turns you into something great by changing your foundations inspired by the grace of the one who got out, not knowing whether he would go for you.

Now if that's the case, in the end, let me apply this just a couple of ways. Two ways. Number one, if you're doubters, you know, I know some of you are, because I talk to you and you're still wrestling and saying, I don't know if I can handle this Christianity thing and you're thinking, just keep this in mind, this is both rational and personal. Please don't think it's just one or the other. You do have to think, I mean, look at, I try to help you think. You have to read books. You have to think this out. It's not, you can't just close your eyes and say, well, none of it makes sense to me, but I want to be a Christian because I want to feel good.

That's no good. It is rational. But on the other hand, oh, my friends, it is personal. You'll never get all the way there through reasoning. And here's the reason why. If you doubt Christianity, it's only because you're putting your faith in something else. If you doubt Christ as your Savior and Lord, it's only because you're putting your complete faith in something else's Savior and Lord. You have faith in something. You have saving faith in something. Oh yes you do, don't doubt it. And, whatever that is, it won't die for your sins. It can't. It won't pass between the pieces and say, if you fail, I'll pay the penalty. It just can't. So it's both rational and personal. Keep that in mind. Secondly, friends, are you, and I know a lot of us are, are you a Christian and you've

had your personal encounter with God, and yet whenever God calls you to obey and it's really going to cost you something, you're just not answering the call away from security. Some of you, you know that if I do this, it's gonna cost me status and money. I know it's right, and you're not doing it. Some of you, you know this is the right thing to do, but you say if I do it I may never get married.

Every time it's hard to obey, really hard to obey, they call away from security. That's your opportunity for greatness. Obeying when it's easy to obey doesn't help at all. You need to do for Jesus what he did for you infinitely more. You need to do for Jesus what he did for you infinitely more. Abraham when he was told to get out, got out. Not knowing whether he went, but he knew with whom he went. And when God calls you to obey him unconditionally, it is scary because you're going out. You're going out into uncharted territory. You don't know where you're going, but you know with whom you're going. You're going with the one who gave everything for you.

So there's nothing to worry about. Let us pray. Thank you, Father, for faith, which is a gift. And we pray that you would help us to grow in faith, receive faith, personalize our faith, root and ground ourselves in faith. Better because we have heard the word and now we're receiving your supper. And we pray all this in Jesus name. Amen.

Thanks for listening to today's teaching. It's our prayer that you were encouraged by it and that it equips you to know more about God's Word. You can find more resources from Tim Keller at GospelInLife.com. Just subscribe to the Gospel In Life newsletter to receive free articles, sermons, devotionals, and other resources. Again, it's all at GospelInLife.com. You can also stay connected with us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter. Today's sermon was recorded in 2005.

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. you