Timothy Keller Sermons Podcast by Gospel in Life - Word: Teach Us To Pray

Episode Date: February 17, 2025

The Psalms is the divinely inspired prayer book, but when you open this prayer book, the first page is not a prayer. It’s a meditation on meditation. Meditation is not the same as studying the Bible. In studying the Bible you’re just learning information. Meditation takes what you’ve learned and does something with it. And according to the Psalms, meditation is actually the key to prayer.  Psalm 1 tells us 1) the priority, 2) the promise, 3) the products, 4) the practice, and 5) the problem and solution of meditation. This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on November 23, 2014. Series: The Prayer of Prayers. Scripture: Psalm 1:1-6; 2:1-12. 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. What we love shapes who we are. So if we want to change, we have to start by changing what we love, what we're passionate about, what delights us. One of the primary ways we can rearrange the things we love most comes through consistent and faithful prayer. Join us today as Dr. Keller looks at how authentic prayer connects us with God and reshapes what we love. Tonight's scripture comes from the first psalm, verses one through six. Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked, or stand in the way that sinners take, or sit in the company of mockers, but whose delight is in the law of the Lord, and who meditates on his law day and night. That person is like a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season, and whose leaf does not wither, whatever they do prospers. Not so the wicked. They are like chaff that the wind blows away. Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment nor sinners in the assembly

of the righteous. For the Lord watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked leads to destruction." This is the word of the righteous, but the way of the wicked leads to destruction. This is the word of the Lord. So, all fall, we've been looking at the subject of prayer, and up to now we've each day, each week, looked at a part of the Lord's Prayer, but we're going to do one more week and learn one more thing about prayer, very important. We're not looking at the Lord's Prayer. There's a sense in which if somehow you ask what does the Bible give us, what is the main information the Bible gives us about the nature of prayer, I would say it gives you basically

two resources. It gives you the Lord's Prayer in the New Testament and and the Old Testament, it gives you the Book of Psalms. Those are the two basic answers of the Bible to the question, how do you pray? The Lord's Prayer and the Psalms. And if you open the Psalms, which is the divinely inspired prayer book, the Psalms are mainly prayers,

and so here you see how you should pray. It's divinely inspired. But when you open the prayer book, the first page of the Psalms is what you just heard read, and it's not a prayer. Interesting. The very first page of the book that tells you how to pray is not a prayer, but it's actually a meditation on meditation.

It's a call to meditation. It's a ringing calls we're gonna see. A very strong call to meditation. And what most scholars and commentators over the years have pointed out is that what this is actually saying is that the gateway into prayer, the bridge to prayer, the foundation of prayer, the thing that must happen before you pray is you must meditate

on the law of the Lord, on the word of God that is on the scripture. So if the very first page of a book on prayer, which is what Psalms is about, is here's what you must do in order to pray, then this is actually in a sense the key, or a doorway, or an important bridge. Richard Baxter, 17th century British writer, defines meditation. He wrote a book on meditation that's very famous. And listen, it's archaic language, but he does a very good job of defining it.

He says, meditation is distinguished from the study of God's word, in which our aim is to learn the truth. But meditation is the effecting of our own hearts and minds to love, delight, and humility for the things contained in the word. See the difference? Or if not, I'll show you the difference.

Meditation is not the same as studying the Bible, because studying the Bible, you're just learning the truth of it. You're just learning information. What meditation does is it takes what you've learned and does something with it. And he says that actually it's a way of deliberately

affecting your mind and your heart and moving it to love and humility and wonder at what you just have learned. And this according to the book of Psalms by the placement of Psalm 1, this is actually the key to prayer. Now why would that be and how does that work? Let's take a look and see what Psalm 1 tells us about meditation. Because at the very heart of it, it's blessed is the one who knows how to meditate day and night on the word of God. So what do we learn about?

We learn about meditation, I'll just, a whole series of things. In fact, one of my problems today is an embarrassment of riches and what's in the book, in the passage, but we're gonna learn about the priority, the promise, the products, the practice, and the problem. And the solution of meditation. But I'll repeat those as we go.

First of all, this tells us about the priority of prayer, of meditation. That is, meditation happens before prayer. Why would that be? Question, is prayer mainly a flare shot into the air? Is it mainly a note in a bottle? Those are one way communications. If there's anybody up there, help.

Or and sometimes prayer can be that of course, but is prayer rightfully a two-way conversation between two persons in which there's both speaking and listening. Of course the answer according to the Bible is that's what prayer is supposed to be. It's supposed to be one half of a two-way conversation which means you got to listen before you can speak. Otherwise you'll say stupid things. I mean, for example, one of the great ‑‑ you know, back before cell phones, if your phone didn't work, it just didn't work. But now there's all these creative ways your phone doesn't work. So sometimes you're talking to somebody and they're going da, da, da, da, da, and you say, well, I don't think that's a good idea and they keep going da, da, da, da,-da and you say, well, I don't think that's a good idea. And they just keep going da-da-da-da. And you say, well, I mean this and then da-da-da-da.

And you realize you can hear them and they can't hear you. And what do you do in that situation? You hang up. And you see, I'll put it this way, that must be what a prayer is like to God that's not accompanied by meditation. Because you see, meditation means I'm listening to what God has to say in his word before I respond to it.

That's a two-way communication. Eugene Peterson has this great book on the Psalms and on how the Psalms relate to prayer, and he actually talks about in Psalm 1, the fact that the bridge to prayer is you have to meditate on what God has said to you before you can rightfully speak. And he says something really powerful here. Let me just read you.

He says, essential to the practice of prayer is to fully realize that the first word is always God's word. There is a massive previousness to God's speech, pardon me, of God's speech to our prayers. Let me say that sentence again. There is a massive previousness of God's speech to our prayers. Left to ourselves, we will pray to some God who speaks what we like hearing or to the part of God that we manage to understand. But what is critical is that we speak to the God who speaks to us and to everything that he speaks to us. There is a difference between praying to an unknown God whom we

hope to discover in our praying and praying to a known God revealed through Israel and Jesus Christ who speaks our language. In the first, we indulge our appetite for religious fulfillment. In the second, we practice obedient faith. The first is a lot more fun. The second is a lot more important. Because what is essential in prayer is not that we learn to express ourselves but that we learn to answer God. See, the one way prayer in which you just say what's on your heart, you just pour out, not really listening to him, not listening in his word to who he is and what he said to you, just praying. That fits in with our culture, a culture in which

self-expression is everything. But as Eugene Peterson says, that's not how you have a personal relationship. In a personal relationship, you've got to listen to the other person so that what you say is really to the person and not to who we hope the person is. We'll get back to that. But you see, the very first thing,

it is unless you learn to meditate on the word of God so you know who it is you're talking to, prayer is a note in a bottle or a flare in the air, and it's not an actual interaction, it's not an actual give and take, a dialogue, a relationship. So first of all, that's the priority of meditation. Secondly, the promise. What is a promise?

It's an amazing promise. The first word here is blessed, right? And many of you have probably heard that the Hebrew word that's usually translated blessed does not just mean happy. It means deep satisfaction and deep fulfillment. Deep satisfaction and fulfillment. But now look very carefully. Because it's such a long sentence and there's so many ideas in it, you might miss what Psalm 1 is telling you about the

key to a satisfying, fulfilling life. Blessed is the one who doesn't do this and who doesn't do this and who doesn't do this. That's where you kind of lose the train of thought. But who what? Gets down to the bottom, who meditates on the law of the Lord day and night. Psalm 1 is trying to say if you want an absolutely satisfied, fulfilled life, you need to meditate on the law of God, that is on the scripture. We'll get back. The law of God is not just talking about the Ten Commandments or the Torah, you know, the first five books of Moses, it's the whole Bible. We'll get back to that in a minute. But it's saying scripture meditation is the key to a satisfying life. It's the key to blessedness. You realize that's an astounding statement. How could such an amazing promise be made about something

that's just a kind of, you know, what we might call a spiritual discipline? Well, it's more than that. It's really more than that. You know, you could say there's three kinds of people in the world. There's people who don't believe there's a personal God of love. And there's people, forgive me, you're the people here who don't believe in a personal God of love. And then there's people who believe there's a, no, who believe there's a personal God of love, but have never experienced that love. And then there's the people who know and experience it. Now let me tell you what meditation is basically.

Meditation is an effecting of the heart through an intense use of the mind. Guess what Richard Baxter says, that fits in with what the Hebrew word means, it fits in with how the word is used in The Bible isn't it's an effecting of the heart with an intense use of the mind

In first Thessalonians 1 5 Paul's talking about to the Thessalonians. He says remember when I preach the gospel to you Remember when I told you biblical truth about the Gospel? And he says, he says, our Gospel came to you not simply in words, but with power, with the Holy Spirit and with deep conviction. Or Romans 8 16 says, sometimes, this is Paul again, sometimes the Spirit bears witness with our spirit

that we're children of God. You see, you may be a Christian and you may say, well, I believe I'm a child of God because John 1.12, I receive Christ and I'm a child of God. So your spirit, that is your mind, your spirit, your heart, believes you're a child of God, sometimes the spirit comes alongside and bears witness with your spirit.

What does that mean? Paul says, sometimes the spirit comes and takes the words that bears witness with your spirit. What does that mean? Paul says sometimes the spirit comes and takes the words that you know with your head and brings them all the way home and changes your life with them and infuses them deep in your heart where they catch fire and explode in there and you get delighted about it in your mind and your heart is moved by it and it changes your life. What is the difference? Well, it's the difference between just knowing something with a mind and having your whole being infused with it through the Holy Spirit. And when you meditate, you're preaching to yourself. You're doing what Paul

did to the Thessalonians and praying that as you preach to yourself, sometimes the Holy Spirit will come alongside of your spirit and bear witness to it. So that you won't just say, well, I know I'm a child of God, kind of a, you know, as a kind of concept. Instead, sometimes you'll say, I know I'm a child of God, and sometimes the Spirit will come and say, yes, you are my beloved child in whom I'm well pleased. So the idea is, why is blessedness the result of meditation? It's only through meditation that the things that you may believe about God and the things that you may believe about the love of God actually become real. And Martin Luther has a great study on the subject, it's called The Simple Way to Pray. It's a short essay on how to pray

that you can find online by the way in a number of different translations, a simple way to pray. And in it he says he always meditates on something in the Bible before he prays. He meditates until it affects his heart, until his heart is warmed by it. He thinks about, he's listening to what God is saying and he thinks about it, meditates on it. We'll talk about that in a second how. Until it warms his heart and then he responds to God. It's a personal thing, it's not a note in the bottle,

it's personal, but he actually says, and you can read it there, sometimes when he is in a sense meditating and bringing this truth home to his heart and in a sense preaching to himself, sometimes he says the Holy Spirit starts to preach to him and then he says you stop everything and you write it all down. And by the way that doesn't mean that suddenly you hear a voice that says go to Grand Central Station and go to the lockers and get locker 23 and the

combination is, now we're not talking about something we're talking about something that's in the Bible not just a voice What he says is when the Holy Spirit starts preaching to him It doesn't mean well you ought to you know you ought to start you ought to move to another town or something No, it's the Word of God that That comes home and you sense not it's just words on the page But it's God it's God's Word to you and it becomes real to you And that's the promise of what can happen in meditation.

Thirdly, that's the priority, first of all. Secondly, the promise. Thirdly, what it can produce. Now, here's what it can produce. It tells you in verse three and four, that person, who's that person? The person is someone who learns how to meditate on the law of the Lord day and night.

That person is like a tree planted by streams of water which yields its fruit in season, whose leaf does not wither, whatever they do prospers, not so the wicked. They're like chaff. The wind blows away. Now these are I think I told you these are meditations on meditation. That is to say metaphors are being given to you that as you think about and reflect on you see all these various aspects. And so here's the metaphors. They're horticultural metaphors.

Chaff by the way, for those of you who are not raised on a farm, I know there's three or four of you out there, Chaff are the husks around the grain. So if you have harvested wheat or barley or something like that, you've got the grain that's in the husk. So how do you get the grain out of the husk? Well, the grain is actually heavier than the husk. So what you do is you throw the grain up into the air. And the wind blows away the chaff, the husk, the uninteresting, unimportant part, the non‑nutrient part, and the grain falls to the ground. So the chaff is blown around, you see. It's very light and it's hollow, of course, and that's the chaff. Now here's

what it says. Are you like chaff? Are you like someone who is completely controlled by your circumstances? The wind comes and you're gone. Bad things happen to you, you're just blown away. Terrible things, you're destroyed. Or are you like a person who meditates and therefore like a tree, and not just a tree, of course it's not blown away by the wind, but a tree who's not even got a problem when it is too dry because it says a person like a tree planted by streams of water which yield its fruit in season, that is to say its roots go down to the water even when there's a drought. So here's what it's saying, a meditating person is someone who is not controlled by circumstances,

that stays stable and grows. Because even when things are bad, your roots are in the water. Your roots are in the strength, your roots are in the vitality. See real joy is not the absence of trouble, it's the presence of God. Real joy is something that actually stays with you even when you're sad, even when bad things are happening to you. There's this great spot in Lord of the Rings, actually, where one of the hobbits is looking at Gandalf and he looks really sad and he is sad, but then he looks a little deeper

and this is what he sees. This is describing Gandalf, by the way. It says in his face, in Gandalf's face, he saw at first only care and sorrow. But as he looked, he perceived that under all, there was a great joy, a fountain of mirth, enough to set a kingdom laughing, worried to gush forth. Under the care and the sorrow, see there's real care and sorrow, why?

Due to circumstances. But under the care and the sorrow, there was a deep mirth Almost like a fountain of joy They could set a kingdom laughing were it to gush forth and That is what this is saying you can be When you pray to God is it more like a chat or are you really connecting with Him in a deep and meaningful way? We'd like to help you establish a stronger, deeper, and more personal prayer life.

Tim Keller's book, Prayer, Experiencing Awe and Intimacy with God, offers biblical guidance as well as specific ways to pray in certain situations, such as dealing with grief, loss, love, and forgiveness. In the book, Dr. Keller helps you learn how to make your prayers more personal and powerful through a regular practice of prayer. Prayer, experiencing awe and intimacy with God, is our thanks for your gift to help us reach more people with the life-changing power of the gospel. Request your copy today at GospelInLife.com slash Give.

That's GospelInLife.com slash give. That's gospelandlife.com slash give. Now, here's Tim Keller with the remainder of today's teaching. If you learn how to meditate, you become someone who is very, very, very deep, and you have a joy even when there's a time of drought. Now, by the way, you have to be careful not to read this superficially because it says, whose leaf does not wither yields its fruit in season. See that? It doesn't always have fruit. But its leaf is always green. This is an evergreen tree. But it doesn't always have fruit. And it says, whatever they do, they prosper. And whatsoever he does, he prospers. And at first when you see it saying whatever they do, prospers, it sounds like it's saying

that if you meditate, you'll always be successful. Which means you'd better be an entrepreneur because if you meditate, then every single business you start will make zillions of dollars. But that's not what it's saying. Because what it's saying is you may not always be fruitful. There are winter times when there's no fruit. So sometimes actually you're not successful and yet your leaf is evergreen. What is that saying? Even when things are really bad, if you know how to meditate on the law of God, on the word of God, and your roots are down in him, then

that means even during those difficult times, even during the wintertime, a tree can put on rings, a tree can get its roots down deeper. In other words, you will prosper, even if your plans aren't prospering. It means that you, this is the ultimate defeat of evil. If when evil comes into your life, it drives you down into God. If when evil comes into your life, it's like a hammer that drives you like a nail down into God's love, desperate for it, finding it, see? Then the ultimate triumph of evil is if it actually makes you a better person. Oh, no, if it makes you evil. The ultimate defeat of evil is if it makes you a better person. The ultimate triumph

of evil is it doesn't just do evil to you, it makes you evil, makes you bitter, makes you angry, makes you selfish, makes you hard. That's the ultimate triumph of evil. But the ultimate defeat of evil is when it comes into your life, it actually makes you better and wiser and humbler and more able to depend on God and better able to understand yourself. And that all happens when bad things happen and yet you meditate. Now last, well not lastly, almost lastly, semi-lastly. We said we were looking at, we looked at the priority and the promise, we looked at the

power, what it produces, and then how do you do it, the practice of it. Now I'll tell you what. Three things. Very important. And this is the only practical part of this entire sermon, so you really need to listen. This text tells us three things about how to meditate. Three things. It gives you the object of meditation, it gives you the means and it gives you the method. Now the object is what? What are you supposed to meditate on? It says the law of the Lord. There are some people who ‑‑ there are various forms of meditation in which you're supposed to relax, you're supposed to empty your mind of rational thought, you're not supposed to think thoughts, just be present. And look, there's, that might be very relaxing, I'm sure,

but that's not what the Bible means when it's talking about meditation. When the Bible talks about meditation, it's talking about a dialogue with another person, the personal God, and therefore, you don't empty your mind of rational thought, you fill your mind with God's thoughts, you fill your mind with the scripture.

You're supposed to be meditating, not on your hand, which maybe that's fine, or not on the ocean, but if you want a relationship with God, you meditate on his word. If it's personal, you meditate on the words. You want to hear from him so you can speak to him. That's how the dialogue works. But I want you to notice that it calls the scripture the law of the Lord. When you first read this, you think that's talking about

the Ten Commandments or maybe the law of Moses, certainly the didactic parts of the scripture. And yet when Jesus, there's one place or two places I think where Jesus says, in your law does it not say, and then he quotes the Psalms. And you say that's strange, I would, you know, why would he consider the Psalms part of the law, well, the word law of the Lord actually is a word that is often used to describe all of scripture. Now why would it do that, here's why, because all of scripture is normative. The Psalms are normative. The narratives are normative. The stories about Abraham and Isaac are normative.

What does that mean? It means they have authority over your life. They tell you how you're supposed to live. So it doesn't just say you're supposed to meditate on the scripture, though it could have said that. It doesn't just say find things that inspire you to meditate on the law of the Lord and delight in it means you treat all of scripture as authoritative. Why would that be important for a personal relationship with God? Have

you ever ‑‑ you probably have. You know very often very wealthy people and very powerful people sometimes surround them what we call yes men. There's no real ‑‑ they don't have real personal relationships with those yes men. The yes men want to keep their job, they want to keep their cushy position. So when the big dog says something, they all say sure. They never push back. They may have a different opinion but they're going to hide that different opinion. They're never going to contradict the big dog because they don't want to lose their position. So we talk about them as yes men. If you just say I want to have a relationship with God but I don't want to meditate on the scripture or though I will meditate on parts of the scripture, not all parts because

some parts of it I don't believe in because some parts of it are regressive or offensive. Some parts of scripture I accept, some parts I don't. Then I want to ask you a question. How does your God contradict you? How does your God push back? If you're gonna have a personal relationship, the two Pearsons have to be agents, that personal agents, they have to be able to argue.

Right? Otherwise, here's what I mean. If you don't have a Bible in which you accept all of it as authoritative, how can your God ever offend you? How can your God ever contradict you? Sounds to me like you have surrounded yourself with a yes God. And if you want a personal relationship with God, you've got to be able to let him sometimes really upset you with things that he tells you. And the only way to get that is to accept everything in the Bible as authoritative. And by the way, I can guarantee you that if you accept everything in the Bible as an authoritative word of God, there will be some things in there that really bug you. Some of you know that already. Now you've got the start of a personal relationship with God.

Isn't that right? Isn't every real good friendship, every real good love relationship, don't you argue? Of course you argue. Why? Because you're both persons. And therefore, unless you meditate on the scripture as the law of the Lord, unless you let the scripture sometimes tell you things, bad news that you don't like, unless you let the scripture tell you sometimes bad things that you don't like, how will it tell you good things that you can't accept like, you're my beloved child and I'm well pleased. When you don't feel lovable and the Bible says, I love you, you know, there's a place where the Bible says when our hearts condemn us, God is greater

than our hearts. But you see, if you don't have an authoritative scripture that on the one hand can tell you the bad news you don't like, then how can it tell you the good news that you don't believe you're worthy of? Unless the scripture is a word of law, it'll never be a word of love to you. So you have to meditate on the scripture, not just the scripture, but the law of the Lord. And that's the object of it. The object of your meditation must be the scripture.

Secondly, how do you do it? Well, you know, the word meditation, I've been telling you, the word meditation means to ruminate, you know, to reflect, to think out the implications. But let me just give you three ways to meditate. It means to think out, to think in, and to think up what's in the text that you're meditating on. To think out the implications of it, to think in the implications of it,

and to think it up. What? Yeah, okay. Think out means you think of all the implications, you think of all the aspects of its meaning. I learned how to meditate under a Bible teacher in July of 1971 at a camp. I was in college, it was the year between my junior and senior years of college. There was a woman who was a great Bible teacher and she said over the next ‑‑ she was telling everybody in the class over the next 30 minutes, I want you all to stop where you are right now for the next 30 minutes, I want you all to stop where you are right now. For the next 30 minutes, I want you to meditate on one verse, Mark chapter one verse 17. Jesus said,

follow me and I will make you to become fishers of men. I want you to take 30 minutes, and I want you to write at least 50 things down that you see in that text. 50 aspects of the meaning, 50 implications. And if you're having trouble, you stay with it the whole 30 minutes, but he says one of the things you could do

would be to emphasize each word. You say Jesus, Jesus said, Jesus said follow, Jesus said follow me, Jesus said follow me and, Jesus said follow me and I. And when you take every one of those words, think what are the four or five things that wouldn't be part of the meaning of this text if that word was missing? If you take that word out, how does that change the meaning

of the text? What are the four or five things that that word brings to the text? Write down 50 things. At the end of the 30 minutes, she came back and she said, now circle the two or three most important ones, the ones that mean the most to you? We all did that. Then she said, how many of you found one of those two or three most important ones in the first five minutes? No hands. In the first ten minutes?

No hands. In the first 15 minutes, a couple of hands. Do you see? How long would you spend on Mark 1.17? Would you spend 15 minutes looking at that verse? No. Then you don't know how to meditate. By the way, I didn't. I learned that day. Just thinking it out. But that's not all. You think it in. How do you think in? Well, Psalm 42 and Psalm 103 are examples of thinking it in. Psalm 42 says, why are you cast down, oh my soul?

And why are you upset? Or Psalm 103, praise the Lord, oh my soul, and forget not all his benefits. He forgives your sins, he redeems your life from the pit. Who is the psalmist talking to? He's not talking to his listeners. He's not talking to God, it's not a prayer. He's talking to his soul, and what he's doing is he's talking to his listeners. He's not talking to God. It's not a prayer.

He's talking to his soul. And what he's doing is he's talking to himself. He's taking the things that he's learned as he meditated. And he says, he's saying to himself, now, if you really took that seriously, why, if you really believe this, this is really true, why would you justify doing this? Why would you be upset about this? Why would you be treating this person this way? He's thinking it in in and finally you think it up, which means you ask the question, and this by the way again is in Martin Luther's simple way to pray. In a simple way to pray

Martin Luther says, after you've done meditating on the text, ask it three questions. How can after you've done meditating on the text, ask it three questions. How can I praise God because of what I've read? What sin can I confess because of what I've read here? And what thing do I need to ask God for? In other words, rejoice, repent, request. Rejoice, repent, request. How can I rejoice on the basis of this text?

How can I repent on the basis of this text? How can I request on the basis of this text? And now you're ready to go. You're ready now to pray. Not just to read the Bible and then go pray, but to read the Bible and then pray in response to what you heard. And now you got a dialogue going.

And you're supposed to do it day and night. And that doesn't probably mean just twice. It means regularly. It means discipline. Not just episodically, not impulsively, not when you feel like it, even when you don't feel like it. Because only if you meditate on the law of God and then pray, even when you don't feel like it, will eventually you feel. And like it. Alright, lastly, there's a problem here. And this problem arose when the man who was doing my wedding, Kathy and I got married, you know, something like 40 years ago, and the man who preached at the

wedding preached on Psalm 1. And he said, you know, there's a problem in this Psalm. I had never seen it before. And he said, it says here that the mark of the blessed, godly person is not that he prays day and night, or that he stands on the street corner day and night preaching, or that he even goes to church day and night, it's that he delights in the law of God, which means the mark of a godly person is that you loved if God tell you how to live. You loved if God crossed your will.

You love it, you don't just agree to it. You don't just submit to it. You love it. And if God really, really did, if there is a God and he created you and you are alive only because of him and every minute he keeps you alive, he holds you up, then that's absolutely proper and yet is there anybody on the face of the earth who can do that? Who can enjoy having God cross your will all the time? And it doesn't just say you should be delighting in the law of God, it says you delight in the

law of God after you meditate on it, and the more you think about what the law of demands, look at the Sermon on the Mount. Thou shalt not murder, let's meditate about that, says Jesus. It's a meditation on the law, by the way, the Sermon on the Mount. And the more you think about what murder is, it comes from anger and it comes from resentment in your heart. And so actually, if you have resentment towards someone, it's like murdering someone in your heart. And Jesus, the more you meditate on the law of God, the more you see how far you are from what you ought to be. And therefore, how in the world can you meditate

on the law of God and delight in it once you see what it demands? It condemns us. So how in the world could we possibly delight in the law of God? It's just gonna be an everlasting despair to think about the law of God unless you's just going to be an everlasting despair to think about the law of God unless you think about Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, of course, loved the law of God. He meditated

on a day and night. When the devil assaulted him, every time he answers the devil, he quotes something from Deuteronomy. When he's dying, he quotes Psalm 22 verse 1, my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? And even when he says, into thy hands I commend my spirit, that's Psalm 31 verse 5. Listen, if somebody comes down on your foot and you're in agonizing pain, you don't say, gee, what should I say? You scream whatever is really in your heart. The real you comes out at times like that. And when Jesus Christ was in agonizing pain, he bled scripture. It's almost like he was so saturated in the word of God. And by the way, if Jesus Christ didn't think he could possibly handle the problems of life without the scripture. Why in the world do we think we can? But we're still not helped, are we? Because he's just

an example now and we say, I can't live like that. I can't delight in the law of God the way Jesus did. But Jesus did not come just to delight in the law of God as an example. That would just crush us. But as our savior, when he went to the cross, he was honoring the law of God. Why did he go to the cross? Because he knew that our violations of the law could not be shrugged off. They had to be paid for. Going to the cross was Jesus' testimony to the greatness of God's holiness

and the inviolability of his justice and the inviolability of the law of God. There's only two ways that you can fulfill the law. You keep it or you pay the penalty. And Jesus Christ went and paid the penalty for us. And on the cross, do you know what you see in Jesus Christ on the cross? When he quoted Psalm 22,

Psalm 22 says, I am poured out, my strength is dried up, my tongue clings to the roof of my mouth, I thirst. What was happening to Jesus on the cross? He was becoming chaff. He was drying up. He was twisting in the wind. He was being blasted, blown away. He was becoming what the wicked, he was getting what the wicked deserved. He was getting what we deserved so we could have the water, the living water that he offered the woman at the well. And it was him. And when I see him fulfilling the law for me so that now even when I fail, I know God still loves me, now the law is no longer an everlasting despair, it's not just something that condemns me, it's something now, now the law of God is a delight, you know why? It's a way for me to please the one who did this for me. If someone, if you

are in love with someone, you say, what will make you happy? I want to make you happy. The answer is obey the law. Be as wise, be as honest, be as forgiving, be all the things that the law says and you say yes. Now and only, without Jesus Christ, the law of God is nothing but a despair, an everlasting despair. It's just a note of condemnation. But with Jesus Christ, it is a delight. Meditate on the law of God until you're blessed, until you become a tree, until your roots go down into that great water. Let us pray. Our Father, we thank you that you have made it possible for us to know you personally, not just to believe about you, but have a personal relationship with you. And in these weeks we've looked at prayer

and now we've looked at listening to you so that we really can have a dialogue, we can have an interaction. Thank you that that's possible. Thank you that you're a God that we can know like that. And we pray, oh Lord, we pray, that we all hearing this now would move into that kind of relationship, that our relationship

would move into a higher level and we would become more and more like your son, in whose name we pray. Amen. Thanks for listening to Tim Keller on the Gospel in Life podcast. If you'd like to see more people encouraged by the Gospel-centered teaching and resources of this ministry, we invite you to consider becoming a Gospel in Life monthly partner. Your partnership allows us to reach people all over the world with the life-giving power of Christ's love. To learn more, just visit gospelinlife.com slash partner.

That website again is gospelinlife.com slash partner. That website again is Gospelonlife.com slash partner. Today's sermon was recorded in 2014. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel on Life podcast were preached from 1989 to 2017 while Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church. in church.