Timothy Keller Sermons Podcast by Gospel in Life - Worship

Episode Date: November 18, 2024

On the weekend before I had surgery for thyroid cancer, I wrestled with this question: “How do you face troubles with peace?” I came to realize it’s not petitionary prayer that helps you face troubles.  Of course the Bible is filled with petition, where you go to God and make your needs known. And you should do that. But the ultimate and main way to handle the troubles of life is not just through petitionary prayer, but through worship.  Psalm 95 is the classic text about worship. It tells us almost everything we need to know: 1) what is worship? 2) why should we worship? and 3) how can we worship? This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on July 7, 2002. Series: Psalms: Disciples of Grace. Scripture: Psalm 95:1-11. 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.

The book of Psalms gives voice to the full range of human emotions. You'll find joy, sorrow, doubt, fear, praise, and lament in its pages. Join us today as Tim Keller shows us how the Psalms can help us grow into the people God designed us to be. This is Psalm chapter 95 verses 1 through 11. Come, let us sing for joy to the Lord. Let us shout aloud to the rock of our salvation. Let us come before him with thanksgiving and extol him with music and song. For the Lord is the great God, the great King above all gods. In his

hand are the depths of the earth and the mountain peaks belong to him. The sea is his, for he made it. In his hands formed the dry land. Come, let us bow down and worship. Let us kneel before the Lord, our maker, for he is our God, and we are the people of his pasture, the flock under his care. Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts as you did at Mariba, as you did that day at Massa in the desert, where your fathers tested and tried me,

though they had seen what I did. For 40 years, I was angry with that generation. I said, they are a people whose hearts go astray, and they have not known my ways. So I declared an oath in my anger, they shall never enter my rest. This is God's word. As a reward for that, I'll give you a little update. I've been away, I've been sick.

In the middle of June, I was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, I think most of you know that. So in the middle of June, they took my thyroid out. There it is. I was hoping it was about, wait, weighed 50 or 60 pounds. It would have been a wonderful way to, but I think it was like five or six ounces or something like that. I'm not back to full strength at all.

However, I wanted to come because I ran out of thank you notes. There's been so many prayers, there's been so much support, there have been so many innumerable little kind of gifts. Everything from the more organized, those of you who brought us food to… I can't enumerate them, I used the word innumerable and that means I can't list them all. We finally got to the place where I felt I had to come at least today and just at every service thank people for all the support.

And I also want to give you a kind of progress report. I'll be going on vacation this week. I'm strong enough to go. I'm weak enough to really want to go and really need it. In August, the last part of the treatment will kind of consume most of August for me because not only do I have to get my chemistry re-regulated with thyroid and all, but they also have to give me radioactive iodine as a kind of final treatment for the cancer. But I'm here also to tell you that what the doctors say is that my recovery, my complete

recovery is for all practical purposes certain. It's a very high success rate. And, but don't stop praying till Labor Day because I've got a tough August. So, you know, the day after Labor Day you can stop praying for me, but up until Labor Day. And I should be, in September, the plan, the goal, which shouldn't be too difficult to reach, is that I would just be back in the regular schedule. So now, here's a question.

How do you turn this little introduction into this into an introduction for a sermon on Psalm 95? Watch. Nothing up my sleeves. A lot of people have faced harder things than this, but for me and for my family, this is the toughest thing we've ever had to face. And on the weekend right before the surgery when a good prognosis wasn't quite as certain, one of the things I wrestled with is the question, how do you face troubles

like this with peace, with rest, with equilibrium? And I came to realize that weekend that it's not mainly through petitionary prayer. See, of course the Bible is filled with petition where you go to God and you make your needs known and you cry out and you ask for success and you ask for healing and you ask for all that. You should do that, you will do that, and we did do that, and that's in the Scripture, of course. But the ultimate and main way to handle the troubles of life with peace is not just through petitionary prayer but through worship.

Through worship. This particular psalm is the classic text in the Bible through worship. Through worship. This particular psalm is the classic text in the Bible about worship. It's the Venite because in Latin the first word is Venite, O come. And through the history of the through the centuries of the Christian churches look to this maybe more than any other single place in the Bible to inform our worship. This text tells us almost everything we need to know. It tells us what worship is, it answers the question, what is worship, why should we worship,

and how can we worship? What is it, why should we do it, and how can we be skillful at it? First, what is it? And the answer of the Bible and the answer of this text, worship is the act of ascribing ultimate value to something in a way that energizes and engages your whole person, your whole being. Worship is an act of ascribing ultimate value to something in such a way that engages your entire being. Let me break that down for you. First, worship according to this text is something that engages every aspect of your being, mind, will, and emotions. It's very easy to outline the text and notice there's three calls, verse one, verse six,

verse eight. Verse one, we're called to worship him with our emotions, our will, because the language is that of submission, of volition. Come, kneel, bow down. Lastly, in verse 8, it's the language of reason, it's the language of thinking. Hear his voice, listen to his voice, accept what he says. It's the language of thinking and of understanding. In other words, worship is something that engages you, mind, will, and emotions, your

entire being. And this is extremely important to understand because if you go to some kind of ritual and you go through the ritual and you affirm the doctrines and beliefs. And if you do that, without ever experiencing in your inner being a ravishing sense of beauty and joy, it's not worship. Or let me just flip that over. You could go to a service and experience great emotion. You could weep. You could have an aesthetic experience.

You could have an emotional experience. But if it doesn't change the fundamental way in which you live, if it doesn't change your character, if it doesn't change the life patterns, your life patterns, it's not really worship. Because see what the text says, bowing and kneeling, bowing and kneeling without joy or on the other hand, shouting and singing without bowing and kneeling in the life, without change in the life. It's not real worship. You may be having a cultural experience. You may be having an emotional experience. You may be having an aesthetic experience. But it's not worship. Worship entails the entire being. But what is it that engages

the entire being? It's an act of assigning ultimate value. Now, what do I mean by that? If you take a look at the psalm, you'll see that all of the emotion and all of the great engagement is stemming from something the Psalmist is doing. In verse 1 and 2 it says, sing and shout and come before Him with singing. And then look at verse 3. Look at the first word, for, because He's great, He's king, in His hands are the depths of the earth, the sea is His, His hands for the dry land. Now look down at verse 6, come let us bow down and worship. Let us kneel. Verse 7. Four. He is our God. He's not just a great God. He's

our God and he's a shepherd. And he entered into a relationship with us and he's made us his people. All of the emotion, all of the worship, all of the life transformation is coming from something that Psalmist is doing. He's taking an inventory of the worship, all of the life transformation is coming from something that Psalmist is doing. He's taking an inventory of the excellencies of God. He's going over them. He's going through them. He's enumerating them. He's reflecting upon them until there's an explosion in his life. The best illustration of this I can give you is this one. Imagine a woman and she's inherited a piece of jewelry, a brooch, let's say from her mother and she got it

from her mother. And it's been around the family for years but nobody quite knows where it came from and nobody quite knows you know what it's worth and half the time they don't even know where it is and one day the woman sort of finds it and says, oh yeah that old thing I think I'll go get it appraised. So she takes it to a jeweler. And he gets his little jeweler thingy, the little eye thingy that he puts in his eye. And he begins to look at it.

Now, in getting ready for this illustration last night, I went on the internet and I looked at the ways in which jewelers can tell a real diamond from a fake diamond. It's pretty interesting. And I can't use them in the illustration because I can't remember them all. However, he starts to look at things like he notices the way the facets refract the light. He notices colors, he notices texture, and bit by bit as he's looking at it and he's thinking about it all of a sudden after several minutes of this his little eye thingy pops out

and he starts to have labored breathing and he begins to feel faint because he realizes that this is this is some lost ancient unique piece of jewelry the craft with which it was made has vanished from the face of the earth nobody even knows how to do it anymore this is unique in its beauty. It's priceless. And the reason that he's suddenly experiencing, how do you say,

all his mind, his will, and his emotion is all engaged. The reason why that is happening is because he realizes the value of what he has in his hand. He realizes in his hand is something more valuable than all the jewels in his shop, all the jewels he's ever had in his shop for 30 years. And of course when the woman comes to understand the true value of what this thing is, she also is just astounded. She's thunderstruck and she realizes she has not been living in accordance with the value of what she had. Because she didn't understand the true value of it, she wasn't living it all the way she ought to be living. I mean, her entire life has changed now that she sees the value of it. That illustration, better than any illustration I can think of,

tells you what worship is. The psalmist is calling us to do exactly what the jeweler does. It starts rationally. It starts with thinking. It starts with looking at who he is, what he has done. It enumerates, it inventories, it goes through until it dawns on you It goes through until it dawns on you the value, the beauty of who God is. The reason you can't come up with a better illustration than that is the very English word worship comes from the old English worth-ship. Worship is to see what God is worth and to give him what is worth, to see and grasp his worth in such a way that you begin to live in accordance with it. Most of the people in this country, we know from the polls, believe in God.

In a sense, they have God. They say, I pray to God sometimes, I believe there's a God, I believe there's a creator, and most people believe in God. But they have God the way that woman had the brooch—completely unaffected, completely unaware of the value of it. The difference between a limp-along life, a common kind of just limp-along, just get along life, and a transformed life, a life just shot through with thanksgiving and joy, is not the difference between believing, not believing in God and just believing in God.

It's the difference between not believing and believing and worship. It's worship that does it. Worship is an act of ascribing ultimate value to God, seeing what he's worth and living in accordance with it in such a way that it transforms your whole life. That's worship. Nothing less. It's not just a little inspiration. It's not just a little pick-me-up. It's not just something that makes me feel like I'm, you know, part of a community, which we'll get to in a minute. It's existential essence.

It's ascribing ultimate value to God in such a way that it galvanizes, electrifies, and changes your whole life. That's what worship is. Secondly, the text also tells us why we should worship. Why should we worship God? Why should we work at this? And the answer of the text, though you may not see it at first, it's in verse 3. The answer to the text, why worship God? The answer to the text is because you're already worshiping something. You're already ascribing ultimate value to something. You're already, your whole life is already controlled

and oriented towards something to which you've ascribed ultimate value. Put it this way. The world is not simply divided into people who worship and people who don't. The world is divided into people who worship things that will distort your life, people who worship the wrong things, and people who worship the only proper object worthy of the worship of your soul. Those are the only two prospects.

You're either worshiping the wrong things or you're worshiping the only one whose worship will not distort your life. You see, look at verse three. Here's the answer. Why should we worship? For the Lord is the great God and the great King above all gods. Now, do we say, oh, that's just an antiquarian, you know, that's just a leftover from the

primitive times in which people believed in many gods. They were animists. They believed there was a mountain god and there was a sea god and there was a land god. And of course, what the psalmist is doing in verse three, four, and five is he's saying, no, the Lord God is the great God above all the gods, over the mountain. The mountains are his, the sea is his, the land is his. And of course it's of mere antiquarian interest to us because we're not primitives, we're not animists, we don't believe in many gods and that's all there is to it. Wrong. Verse 3 tells us,

the very essence of worship is to recognize. You will not be able to worship unless you recognize. Your heart has already ascribed ultimate value to something. And the process of true worship of God is to recognize where your worship already is and transfer your ultimate value to God. In other words, true worship is not whomping up something that you don't have already. It's transferring the ultimate value, a scription that your heart has already made from the things where it already is to God. And that's what changes your life. Now I know, I gotta do a little bit of work on this

because the average New Yorker says, what are you talking about? The average New Yorker says, I'm not religious. I don't really engage in worship. That's not true. In the Harry Potter first book and in the Harry Potter first movie, I wonder how many movies there are going to be, there's an object called the Mirror of Erised.

Now, it's a children's book so it's not terribly subtle. Erised is the word desire spelled backwards. And Harry Potter comes upon this mirror and he looks at the mirror and to his amazement he sees his parents. Now the reason that's so amazing to Harry is because his parents are dead. In fact, he's never really met them. They died when he was just an infant. But in the mirror, he sees them looking at him, loving him, putting their hand upon his shoulder. And he's so excited. He says, this is obviously magic, so he runs to get his friend Ron Weasley. And he drags Ron back and he says, look in the mirror, thinking Ron will see his parents, but instead Ron looks at it and says, I'm a sports champion.

I look good. I'm the head prefect of the school and so on. And they can't figure it out. Wait a minute, what is this mirror doing? Until Harry Potter's mentor comes and explains, the mirror shows you the deepest and most desperate desire of your heart. Because every single person has put their hope in something that they say, if I have that, then I'd be okay. Then I'll know who I am. Then I'll have meaning in life.

Then I'll be happy. Everybody will see something in the mirror. And what is that thing? Whatever the deepest desire of your heart is, of course you've got it. I've got one. Whatever it is that you say, if I have that, then I'll have meaning, then I'll

have joy, then I'll have happiness, then I'll know who I am. Everybody's done it. Everybody's living for something. But whatever that thing is, completely orients your whole life. It can completely control you. The mentor says to Harry Potter that we're gonna get rid of this mirror or we're gonna hide it because the trouble is people waste away before it. Waste away looking at it. You know what that's talking about? Becky Pippert, one of my favorite quotes from Becky Pippert in one of her books, she says this, whatever controls us is our Lord. The person who seeks power is controlled by power. The person who lives for acceptance by other people is controlled by the people

that he or she seeks to please. But one thing is certain. We do not control ourselves. We are controlled by the Lord of our life. Do you see what she is saying? Of course. You are going to live for something. You have to live for something. Whatever that thing is, you are so dependent on it. You so desperately want it. You are so afraid of losing it, you're so freaked out when anything goes wrong with it. Be honest, your relationship to it is that of worship. You have ascribed ultimate value to something and your whole life, your entire being is oriented around it. Now you begin to realize why the worship of God is

absolutely transforming and you haven't worship of God is absolutely transforming and you haven't worshiped God unless it is changing your life. Why? Do you know what will really heal you? Do you know what all your problems come from? Why are some people freaked out when they break up? Other people aren't. They're freaked out when something goes wrong with their money. You know, person A gets freaked out over love, not money. Person B gets freaked out over money, not love. Person C is freaked out over something else.

What are they going to do? How are they going to become stronger, happier people? Well, they can try self-help. There are all kinds of things. The Bible says, your ultimate problem is always what you worship. Only when you see God's love is more satisfying and more valuable and more beautiful than any other kind of love will you never be freaked out again over relationships. Only when you see God's honor and a relationship with Him is more beautiful, more powerful than any other form of honor or pleasure.

Will you not be freaked out over getting criticized or failing? And if you keep getting freaked out and if you keep finding yourself just rolled around emotionally, and if you are constantly, just constantly struggling with anxiety or despondency or nervousness or fear of what people think. Nothing less than reassigning the ultimate value of your life from where they are, where it is, to God will heal you and change you and make you infallibly happy. You see it. If you don't understand that this is what worship is, worship is not just sort of coming and doing a duty. Worship is recognizing you already have ascribed something,

you've assigned something ultimate value in your life, and worship is a process of every time you reflect on Him through singing, every time you reflect and praise Him, every time you you under every act of worship is healing yourself, moving yourself, pulling your heart off of those things which control you onto the one thing that will not distort your life. And you see, a Christian, if you looked into the mirror of Eris, you would see yourself perfectly enjoying God. If you could have one perfect act of worship in which you perfectly valued him, in which you perfectly enjoyed him, if you completely enjoyed him as he is, you'd be perfect.

Nothing would get you down. Nothing would destroy you. You could face anything. But of course, all of our acts of worship are imperfect, and therefore, bit by bit by bit as we worship and as we get better and better at worship, we change where our heart looks. We reassign the ultimate value to the one That will satisfy us if we get him and forgive us if we fail him

If if your heart if you're living for achievement and you fail that God it'll never forgive you. You'll hate yourself forever If you are if the thing you're really looking for is love and romance or family and somehow you fail that God, it'll never forgive you. You'll hate yourself forever. This is the only God who's a shepherd. This is the only God, we're the people of this pasture, we're the flock of His hand. He's the one God who forgives you. He's the only God who died for you. This month, we're excited to let you know about a brand new resource based on Tim Keller's best love books. Go Forward in Love, a year of daily readings from Timothy Keller, features a short passage

each day from one of Dr. Keller's books to use for daily reflection. Each day's reading offers deep insight, biblical wisdom, and spiritual encouragement. The passages are meant to lead you into worship, help you reflect on God's attributes, and encourage you to live more missionally. Go Forward in Love is our thanks when you give to Gospel in Life in November. To receive your copy, just visit gospelinlife.com slash give. That's gospelonlife.com slash give. And thank you for your generosity, which helps us share the love of Christ with more people.

So why do we need to worship God? Because we're gonna worship something and anything else, but the real God will distort our life. Now, having said that, and realizing now the importance of worship is not just something you're supposed to do as a kind of duty, it's the ultimate need of your heart. It's the ultimate need of your life. If that's true, but we never do it perfectly, we have to get better and better at it, then now suddenly the last point becomes very important because

the last point is how can we do it well? How can we get more skillful at it? And there's four things the text tells us. There's a lot of things the text tells us, but there's only four things I'm going to tell you because I've been sick and I can't go on forever. But there's four important things to tell you. The text tells us, I don't know if you want to call it tools, they're not really tools. There are four things that you need to have in order to worship well. Number one, community. You know, this is, it's so obvious that you miss it. It's one of the most important things about the psalm. It's all in the plural. Come let us sing for joy to the Lord. Let us shout aloud to the rock of our salvation.

Come let us bow down and worship. Let us kneel before the Lord our maker. He is our God. We are the people. We are being called to worship in a community. We're being called to worship in a group. Now of course, of course, you're supposed to be good at individual worship. Your own personal individual ability to appraise him and pray and so on is very important. But I would have to say that as far as I can understand, I can't make the case for this, I'll just tell you my sense of the scripture over the years is that individual worship is a preparation for corporate worship which is the real transforming experience. C.S. Lewis some years ago put it in a way that is unsurpassed, at least in my reading. He

was part of a little teeny trio of incredibly intimate close friends. Jack, C.S. Lewis, his name was Jack, or call Jack, Jack, Ronald, and Charles. And they were extremely close and then suddenly Charles died. And when Charles died, Jack said, well this is terrible but I guess now my friendship with Ronald will be such that I'll get more of Ronald than I had before. I won't have to share him with Charles. But to his surprise he discovered that there were certain things in Ronald that only Charles brought out. There were certain parts of his heart and personality that only Charles drew out. And so C.S. Lewis realized, ironically, paradoxically to him, surprisingly, that when Charles died, he did not get more of Ronald, he had less of Ronald.

Because no one individual can draw out the entire personality. You can only know somebody completely well in a community. But if that's true of a finite human being, how much more true would that be of God? And that means that unless you are in a worshiping community, unless, in other words, I know this goes against our modern, Western individualistic, consumer understanding of spirituality. I'll drop in on this church, I'll drop in over here, but you know, mainly I have my own spirituality. This is telling you, you will never know God as he is

unless you are in a worshiping community, preferably a small one, a group of people you pray with regularly and a larger one that you worship with corporately. But is this the only way you're ever going to know Him as He really is? The only way you're ever really going to get an accurate vision? The one-on-one thing with God alone doesn't work. It will not really show you all the facets, you know? It won't show you all of the excellencies. It won't give you the great inventory.

And, let's put it this way, the more diverse that worshiping community, the better. Doesn't it make sense? The more you have young and old, male and female, all the races, all the classes, the more diverse your worshiping community, the more you're going to get an accurate picture of God, the more you're going to understand Him. And not only that, a worshiping community will not just heal you psychologically and individually, but it will begin to heal the breaches that divide the human race. It will begin to bridge the gap between cultures. It will begin to bridge the gap between races and classes and so on. So first of all, you need community much more than you think you

do. Secondly, if you want to get better at worship, you need truth. Now, this is a weird one because, again, this does not fit in with New York spirituality from what I can tell, but here we go. How does the prophet know that he is the great God and the great King above all gods? How does he know in his hands are the depths of the earth? How does he know the sea is his? How does he know he's a gods. How does He know in His hands are the depths of the earth? How does He know the sea is His? How does He know He's a shepherd? How does He know He is our God?

He has given Himself to us and we are the people of His pasture and the flock under His care. How does He know all these things? Does the psalmist say, well, I like to think of God as a shepherd. I just like to think of Him like, no, the psalmist has submitted to what the prophets have said about God. The psalmist is submitting to the scripture as the self-revelation of God, and by submitting to it, he's then able to take it and say, now let's look at this, let's use it, let's inventory, let's look at the excellencies, and it's by booting

off the truth that he has the life-transforming worship experience. Now this is not something that people in New York like to hear. What I hear people saying to me is very ironic. This is ironic. The average New Yorker says this, I would love to have experience of the spiritual, and I would love to be part of a community. But the third thing they say is I want to kind of design my own religion and God. I don't like this part of the Bible, I don't like this part of the Bible,

but I like this part. I like this part of Buddhism, I like this part of Shinto, I like this part of this and I like to put together an understanding of God that suits me. It's a free country. Go ahead. But let me just suggest you'll have two results. Number one, this is not a living God. If you design a God that fits you and you throw out of the Christian tradition, out of this Christian scripture, anything you don't like, you have a God who can never

fight with you, can never disagree with you, can never outrage you. You've got a God that's a cardboard cutout. You will not have a living worship relationship with him. You can't. So the first thing is, you completely, if you are not willing to submit to the truth of the scripture, if you're not willing to submit to a body of truth as self-revelation, the self-revelation of God, if you're not willing to submit to it, but you're going to pick and choose and design your own, the first thing is you've completely cut yourself off from any real ability of having spiritual experience.

Secondly, you've completely made it impossible for yourself to be part of a community. Do you realize if you've created your own personal understanding of God that's unique to you, you've isolated yourself. Because I submit, even to the parts I don't like and don't understand, because I say, I listen to what the prophets and the apostles and the scriptures say about God, I submit to it. You know what that means? When I meet a Nigerian Christian woman from the bush, a person who is in gender different than me, in race different than me, in culture different than me, in economic class different than me, in educational background different than me, and in spite of all those barriers,

if we spend time together, not too much time, but spend time together talking about Jesus Christ, it'll be the same one. I'll be in a community with her because I was willing to submit to the same body of truth she does. You get it? The ironic thing is, if you say, I want to have spiritual experience but I do not want to submit to a body of truth, that seems so oppressive to me. Okay, design your own God. It will not be a God you can have a worship experience with. You will not be part of a community. You will be spiritually absolutely isolated. So the three things that New Yorkers want to have all together can't be had together. You need the truth if you're going to have the transforming experience of worship.

So first you need community. Secondly you need the truth. Thirdly you need the spirit. Now the word spirit doesn't show up in here anywhere. No, it doesn't. However, it does tell us this. The purpose of worship is to come into his presence, to come before him. Look, come let us sing for joy of the Lord. Let us come before him with thanksgiving." Look at verse 6. Let us bow down in worship. Let us kneel before the Lord. Now this is confusing to some people because they say, why are we talking about coming into God's presence? Isn't God everywhere? Doesn't Psalm 139 say, wherever I go, there he is. Isn't God everywhere? Yes. But why does the Bible also say, why does David say in Psalm 51, "'Cast me not away from thy presence'?" Why does Isaiah say in Isaiah 64,

why does he say, "'Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down. Oh, that the mountains would melt at your presence.'" The answer is that in spite of the fact that God is everywhere, by the mediation of the Holy Spirit, if you use the truth, if you do this in community, if you understand the purpose and nature of worship, sometimes the Holy Spirit will make you aware of the very presence of God. You will sense his reality. He will be present, palpable. You can almost feel him. Present in his power, or present in his grace,

or present in his love, or present in his majesty, or present in all of those things. And that's your expectation and your goal, is to sense and come into his presence and know his presence. Now, the spirit, you know, in John John 3 it says the spirit is like the wind and in many ways a Christian whose skillful at worship is like a sailor. Sailors cannot generate the wind. Sailors cannot create the wind. But sailors

are skilled and all set up so that when the wind does show up, great things happen. Sailors are ready for the wind. Sailors are looking for the wind. And sailors know exactly what to do when the wind happens. And that's what it means to be a skillful worshiper. If you come into a time of worship only hoping for a little inspiration and lift up and not saying, Lord, I want to know your presence. I want to experience your presence. If you are skillful at what the psalmist is doing here, if you know how to put on the jeweler's little thingy, if you know how to look at the truth, if you know how to do this in community,

if you know how to worship, you're expecting this, you're seeking this, and you're like a sailor. You can't generate it, but when it comes, you'll know what to do. You're seeking it, you're expecting it, and that's also a skill that you have to have. So you need community, number one. Number two, you need truth. Number three, you need the spirit. And number four, you need gospel Sabbath rest. Last thing, look at the very last part of the passage.

It's very confusing. The first part of the psalm seems very good and upbeat and seems very obvious and all of a sudden it gets really severe. It's a real downer. Why would you end a psalm on worship with such a downbeat thing? Suddenly God says, you remember what happened in the desert, you know what happened in the wilderness, when the children of Israel were on their way to the promised land, they were on their way to the rest of the promised land. They were in tents and they were in the desert and they were restless and they were homeless. And they were looking for that rest of living in a land of milk and honey.

But there was the first generation that came out of Egypt. They were so stubborn and they were so unwilling to listen to me that they died in the wilderness. They wandered and wandered and wandered it and died in the wilderness. And it wasn't until the second generation that got in to experience my Sabbath rest. Now, why would David stick or why would this psalm end, a psalm on worship end with this? Why would this psalm end with this? Why would it do that? The book of Hebrews in the New Testament makes a big deal about the fact that this is how Psalm 95 ends.

The book of Hebrews asks the question, it says, now if it's really true that Joshua finally got the children of Israel into the promised land and they experienced the rest. Why was it that centuries later, Psalm 95 warns worshippers not to miss out on the rest of God? Hebrews 4 puts it like this. It says, Now God says, They shall never enter my rest. And he said a certain day, calling it today, though a long time later he spoke through David as was said before. Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your

hearts. Now, this is the Hebrew's writer, if Joshua had given them rest, God would not have spoken later through David about rest. There remains then a Sabbath rest for the people of God. rest. There remains then a Sabbath rest for the people of God. We who have believed enter that rest. For anyone who enters God rest, rest from his own work just as God did from his." Let me put this in a nutshell. The Hebrews writer is being very logical. Why would David in Psalm 95 warn worshippers not to miss the Sabbath rest of God when Joshua got the people into the promised land? Well, the Hebrew writer concludes, what this means is the physical rest that the children of Israel experienced must be pointing to a deeper rest that is still available for

us and that we can miss. There must be a deeper spiritual rest. What would it be? Well, just as God on the seventh day rested from his physical work, so in the gospel we spiritually rest from our good works. And what the Hebrew writer is saying is this. The gospel is that Jesus Christ came to earth and he lived the perfect life in our place as our substitute. He lived the life life in our place as our substitute. He lived the life we should have lived.

He died the death we should have died. Religion says, if I live a good life, God will bless me. I give God a perfect life record, and then God blesses me. But the gospel, Christianity, says exactly the opposite. God gives us in Jesus Christ a perfect record which we receive by faith. It's exactly the opposite. But the ultimate rest would be to believe the gospel. Because if you believe the gospel, you rest from your work spiritually. What that means is you don't have to live up anymore. You don't have to be perfect. You don't have to know that everything is going

well in your life for God to bless you. Do you realize that whether you're religious or irreligious, you're working, you're working, you're working. You're working, if you're a moral religious person, you're trying real hard to be good so God will bless you. If you're an irreligious person, you're trying extremely hard anyway because you've got an ultimate value, remember? You're trying real hard to be savvy or to be cool or to be successful or to be cool or to be successful or to be pretty or to be handsome or to be something. And underneath it all is this deep current of insecurity,

saying if I'm really good enough, if I work hard enough, then I'll know I'm somebody. The gospel ends all that tiring work. And the gospel gives you deep and final rest. He already loves you. He already accepts you in Christ. Why would this be at the end of a sermon? I mean, pardon me, I think, well, it is at the end of a sermon, but why would it be at the end of a psalmon worship? Because if you

don't understand gospel rest, you're going to turn worship into one more work. It's going to be a very, it's going to be one more thing on your rat race. You're just going to say, if I come to worship and I do it right and I pray well and I never miss church, then maybe God will bless me. And instead of transforming your life, it'll just be one more load weighing you down. And you won't be really serving God. You'll be serving the God of morality. And you'll be looking to yourself, not to him, and you won't have a life shot through with joy and thanksgiving. Do you have that clear insight?

Do you understand that? If you don't have that insight, you need community, you need truth, you need the Spirit, and you need gospel rest. That crucial insight or worship will never change your life. Conclusion. Remember I told you in the beginning that right before the surgery, I was struggling with the question, how do you really face these toughest issues with peace and rest? Well, the answer came to me when I was studying Psalm 57. Psalm 57 is a very

strange psalm. Actually, we sing it here every so often. The reason it's very strange is the psalmist talks about how bad things are in the life. There's enemies here and things are falling apart, but instead of asking God to change it, instead of saying, oh Lord, give me success, give me healing, let the surgery go well, right smack in the middle of all of his inventory

of what's wrong with his life, three times he says the same thing. Three times he suddenly says, be exalted, O God, above the heavens, and may thy glory be over all the earth. Then he goes back to talk about how bad things, and all of a sudden the second time he says, be exalted, O God, above the heavens, and let thy glory be over all the earth. And he goes back. He never asks for anything. He never says,

oh help me here, help me there. All he said is, I see how great you are. I see how majestic you are. Now there's plenty of places in the Bible that show us that when we're in trouble we should ask for things, ask for help. But what struck me about Psalm 57 was this man was calming himself, not through petition but through worship. And I call it my Sam Gamgee Psalm. You know why? That psalm reminded me of that place in Lord of the Rings where Sam, the faithful sidekick of Frodo, is just about

ready to give up because there's so much evil and everything is so overwhelming to him. And then one night he goes out and he looks up and he sees a star and this is the text. The beauty of the star smote his heart and like a shaft clear and cold the thought pierced him that in the end the shadow was only a small and passing thing. There was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach. Many times he had been defiant rather than hopeful. He was always thinking of himself. Now for a moment his own fate and even his master's ceased to trouble him and he fell into a deep untroubled sleep. One of the things you can do in order to face trouble is get defiant. Say, I'm not going to go down.

I'm going to win. I'm going to fight it. I'm going to resist it. That's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. But Sam that night realized there was another way to get peace. Not through defiance, through hope. He suddenly realized there was light and high beauty peace, not through defiance but through hope. He suddenly realized there was light and high beauty forever beyond the reach of all the

evil he was experiencing. In the end, the evil he was experiencing was just a little blip. When he had a sense of the high beauty that was out there, he suddenly realized, it really doesn't matter what happens to me. His own fate ceased to trouble him. And that's what was happening to the psalmist. What he was saying was, if I belong to the great King above all gods, who is such a God of light and high beauty, and I'm his and he's mine and nothing can separate me from him, I don't know what's going to happen in surgery. I don't know what's going to happen to Mara. In the end, it doesn't matter. I don't know what's going to happen in surgery. I don't know what's going to happen to Mara. In the end, it doesn't matter.

I don't know what's going to happen to my friends. In the end, it doesn't matter. Because someday, all of this evil, all the evil in the world will just be a little blip on our memory, we'll hardly remember it. There's so much light and high beauty, so much greater than all the evil there is in the world. Compared to what God is and His majesty and glory, all the evil there is in the world. Compared to what God is and His majesty and glory,

all the evil and suffering in the world is like a pinprick. That comes out when you worship. Worship really gives you rest. Worship really does it. Do you have that rest? Do you know how to worship? Let's pray. We ask, Father, that you would make us more skillful worshipers because we have looked at Psalm 95. Make us a worshiping community. Help us to overcome our allergy to the truth, grant us your Holy

Spirit. But most of all, help us to see that it's the cross of Jesus Christ that is the ultimate little jeweler's glass. And if we look through the cross at the love of God, we see His love in most amazing ways on the cross. We see His grace in the most amazing way. We see His power in the most amazing ways. It's through Jesus that we really see the ultimate power and beauty of God in a way that transforms us. So give us all these things and make us more like your Son, in whose name we pray. Amen.

Thanks for listening to Tim Keller on the Gospel in Life podcast. If you found today's teaching helpful and something you'd like more people to hear, we invite you to consider becoming a Gospel in Life monthly partner. Your partnership helps more people discover the hope and joy of Christ's love. Just visit Gospelinlife.com slash partner to learn more. Today's sermon was preached in 2002. 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.