HOPE FOR YOUR LIFE THE GOSPEL, HOPE, AND THE WORLD. [ DR. TIMOTHY KELLER Sermon transcript, 11 October 2009]

Transcription

1 HOPE FOR YOUR LIFE THE GOSPEL, HOPE, AND THE WORLD [ DR. TIMOTHY KELLER Sermon transcript, 11 October 2009] 1 Peter 1:3 13 Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time. In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that your faith of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls. Concerning this salvation, the prophets, who spoke of the grace that was to come to you, searched intently and with the greatest care, trying to find out the time and circumstances to which the Spirit of Christ in them was pointing when he predicted the sufferings of Christ and the glories that would follow. It was revealed to them that they were not serving themselves but you, when they spoke of the things that have now been told you by those who have preached the gospel to you by the Holy Spirit sent from heaven. Even angels long to look into these things. Therefore, prepare your minds for action; be self-controlled; set your hope fully on the grace to be given you when Jesus Christ is revealed. We are in a season of looking at what we are here to do as a church community in the city. We are looking at our vision, our calling and one of the key aspects of that vision has always been that the gospel changes everything. In 1 Peter 1:3 13 we have one of the most fundamental ways in which the gospel changes the individual life and the individual heart. It is in this significant and well-known phrase: In his great mercy, he has given us new birth. Born again that is one of the key ways in which the gospel changes us. We are immediately at a disadvantage here, because in our culture the term born again has a connotation that is pretty far removed from what the Bible means by it. So we are going to have to make a particular effort to get down into the text and ask: What is the ancient meaning? What is the prevailing meaning? What is the real meaning of being born again? Because if you want to understand how the gospel affects everything, you have to understand this. I would like to show you five things. There are five things we learn about the new birth: its necessity, its source, its nature, its growth, and how it begins and proceeds. THE NECESSITY OF THE NEW BIRTH One little word is very significant, and you may not consider the implications of it unless we do this together. It says, In his great mercy he has given us new birth. Who is Peter talking to? He is writing to a church, to redeemercitytocity.com The Gospel, Hope, and the World Hope for Your Life 1

2 a set of Christians, and he doesn t say, In his great mercy he has given some of us a particular experience. He says us we. That means he is assuming anybody who is a Christian has experienced the new birth. John in his letters, Paul in his letters, Peter here, James in the first chapter of his letter, and even Jesus himself, when talking to Nicodemus in the gospel of John chapter three all of these writers (which is pretty much the whole sweep of the writers and sources of the New Testament) say if you are a Christian at all, you must be born again. The connotation of a born-again Christian today means a particular kind of Christian a particularly conservative kind of Christian, or a particularly emotional kind of Christian, or somebody who has had a dramatic conversion experience. But this shows, and everywhere in the New Testament it shows, that this is not something for certain types of people, for certain temperaments, for certain stripes of Christians. As Jesus says, if you want to be a Christian at all, you must be born again (cf. John 3:7). The person who pushes that home most strongly is Jesus himself, because in chapter three of John he meets a man named Nicodemus. Nicodemus is a member of the Sanhedrin, and that means he would have been very successful in life, wealthy, a pillar of the community. We also know he would have been a paragon of moral excellence and religious observance. He would have known the Scriptures (cf. John 3:10), and he would have been completely observant of all the laws of God. On top of this, Nicodemus, a religious leader in Israel, is open to Jesus. Here is Jesus this young man who rises up without credentials, without background and he starts to teach spiritual things. Most of the class that Nicodemus was a member of had nothing to do with Jesus, but Nicodemus comes to Jesus and says, Rabbi (a term of respect), I would like to learn from you. Let s talk about the kingdom of God (John 3:2). Here is about as good a man as you could ask for. Here is a man who, on top of his moral excellence and religious excellence and success in life, is humble and is open to Jesus. What more could you want? He starts to say to Jesus, Let s talk about the kingdom of God. I would like to learn from you, and Jesus immediately says bang You must be born again to even see the kingdom of God! (v. 7) Jesus doesn t say to Nicodemus, Look, you are about as good as we have, and you need to be sort of topped off. You need to be supplemented. You have made a great start, and I can help complete you. Oh no. You must be born again means you have got to start over. You have to be completely converted. Nothing you have done counts at all. You have to start out as a spiritual baby. You must be born again! What does that mean? If Nicodemus has to be born again, everybody has got to be born again. When Jesus says you must be born again, or when Peter says we need the new birth (1 Peter 1:3), that is not a call to morality and religiosity. It is a challenge to morality and religion. It is saying to a guy like Nicodemus that what you have done is not enough it doesn t help at all. You must be born again. That is the necessity. It doesn t matter what your personality is; it doesn t matter your type; it doesn t matter what party you vote for; it doesn t matter what stripe of person, ethnicity, or temperament you must be born again if you want to be a Christian, if you want to have a relationship with Christ. That is the message of the New Testament. THE SOURCE OF THE NEW BIRTH Verse 3 says, In his great mercy. Jesus has given us new birth into a living hope. This whole sermon series is about hope, and therefore, we are not going to drill down too much into what hope is, because we are getting something about it almost every week. But what is important to recognize is we are told here that it is the hope the living hope that God gives us that has such an amazing effect on us that we call it the new birth. redeemercitytocity.com The Gospel, Hope, and the World Hope for Your Life 2

3 Hope means this: human beings are absolutely shaped by their understanding of the future. What you believe the future to be completely shapes how you are living now. One example of this is a book that was written over ten years ago. It never got a lot of attention, but it is a terrific book by Andrew Delbanco, who is a very prominent professor at Columbia University. He wrote a little history of American culture, a pretty ambitious thing to do. It is called The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope, 1 because he says the heart of any cohesive culture the thing that makes a culture different from some other culture is the hope at the heart of it. Delbanco says these things in the introduction: Hope is the way we overcome the lurking suspicion that all our getting and spending amounts to nothing more than fidgeting while we wait for death. 2 Is your life absolutely meaningless? If not, then it is because you have a hope; otherwise, it is meaningless. So what is that hope? He goes on and says that the philosopher Michael Oakeshott concludes hope depends on finding some end to be pursued more extensive than a merely instant desire. 3 In other words, you must have something more important than yourself and your own selfish desires to live for and sacrifice for, or you have no hope. And he says, The premise of this book is that human beings need to organize [their lives] into a story. [that] gives us hope.without some such structure by which hope is expressed, one would be, as the anthropologist Clifford Geertz has put it, a kind of formless monster with neither sense of direction nor power of self-control, a chaos of vague emotions. 4 Clifford Geertz was a pretty interesting guy; he was a very prominent anthropologist. He says if you have no hope, if you don t have anything bigger than your own selfish desires and needs that you are living for something you are sacrificing for, something bigger than yourself you don t have any hope. He says you have neither sense of direction nor power of self-control, [and you are] a chaos of vague emotions, which means you don t have any kind of strong emotions at all. You don t really love anything. You don t really hate anything. You are not really sad about anything. Just to prove Clifford Geertz completely right, I was reading a review of a new musical that is playing in Berkeley (it was in the New York Times yesterday) called American Idiot. 5 It is based on the music of a rock band, Green Day. The review says it is the depiction of a new American generation: bored, disaffected, cynical about their own cynicism. The line of a chorus of one song is I don t care if you don t care, and That catchy chorus typifies their default attitude to life in 21 st -century America. Raised in front of glowing screens, their experience mediated by technology, they abdicate responsibility even for their own affectlessness, and expect everyone else to feel the same way. [Their] generation mistrusts words and doesn t use them with any particular grace or conviction. The story arc (though the reviewer says the music is great) is a bunch of people who basically have nothing to live for other than their immediate desires, so they waste years and years of their lives. He says because they actually have no hope (because they have nothing to live for more than their own desires), the only relationship that really works is the relationship between the main character and his beat-up guitar. I am reading the review, and I keep thinking, how do you have a story arc? How does the story end? The reviewer says, Mournful as it is about the prospects of 21 st -century Americans, at the end, when the main character returns home with nothing to show for the years of anxious searching at all, I was moved to ring a variation on the Woody Allen joke the only thing sadder than wasting your youth is not wasting it. 1. Andrew Delbanco, The Real American Dream: A Meditation on Hope (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1999). 2. Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., All quotes below from Charles Isherwood, Staging Youth s Existential Quest With Green Day Variations. NYTimes.com: reviews/10isherwood.html (accessed November 13, 2009). redeemercitytocity.com The Gospel, Hope, and the World Hope for Your Life 3

4 The point is if you are actually in a wasted, hopeless life, and not up on a stage singing about it and getting applause, it is hell. If you have no hope, there is nothing moving about it. You can t be moved. Clifford Geertz is right. What could move you? You have to have something more important than yourself to be moved. If hope is that crucial to a cohesive culture, to a cohesive life, then you can imagine that when you get a new hope, it is life transforming. That is the reason it says into a living hope. What is the living hope? Into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade kept in heaven for you, who through faith are shielded by God s power until the coming of the salvation that is ready to be revealed in the last time (vv. 3 5). When a person actually comes to realize that is true, when you get that hope, it is the new birth. Why? It changes your life completely, because how you live now is completely affected by what you believe the future to be. If you believe that is the future, it changes everything. The German theologian Jürgen Moltmann says this beautifully about what it meant to become a Christian in the early days and what it means now. From early on, Christians associated the beginning of their experience of God with an overwhelming new experience of their own selves. Christian faith isn t just a conviction, a feeling and a decision. It invades life so deeply that we have to talk about dying and being born again. The experience of the Holy Spirit makes Christ s resurrection present [and that] wakens a living hope for God s future The moment of rebirth is the eternal moment in which eternity touches time and puts an end to its transience. When a song or poem assures us that there is always a May to follow December, it sounds comforting. But in actual fact the precise opposite is true, and ultimately transience triumphs over every hoped-for futurity. A truly new life begins only as the beginning of the new world of the resurrection. 6 THE NATURE OF THE NEW BIRTH What is it? There is a lot to say here, but I would like to direct you to verse 8: Though you have not seen him, you love him; and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy. In the old King James Bible it says, joy unspeakable and full of glory. You don t see him, but you love him, and you rejoice with joy unspeakable and full of glory. Think about the metaphor of birth. It is the entrance into a new life and the unfolding of the nature you were given at conception. For example, if you are born a bird, you are not going to develop into a human, because to be born means that you have a nature. It is called DNA, and the rest of your life is the unfolding of that DNA into becoming the being you have the nature to be. That means when it says to become a Christian you have to be born again, it doesn t mean having a dramatic experience, and it certainly doesn t mean turning over a new leaf and moral reformation. No, no, no! It can t just mean that. It means you have a new nature implanted in you. Something is being put into the very roots of your heart, which is going to change you from the inside out, organically, for the rest of your life. What do I mean? Let s think about this idea of life. What is the difference between a rock and a plant? Now some of you have Ph.D. s in all sorts of things, so be generous to me as I use my illustrations. There are orders of life. A plant can sense its environment to some degree; it can sense heat and cold, light and darkness. But an animal can sense more of its environment; it can sense an object coming at it, and it can escape a predator in a way that a plant can t. The plant can sense some of its environment, but the animal has a different nature, and it has the ability to sense more of reality, and therefore, actually act in the real world more effectively than a plant. 6. Quotes taken from Jürgen Moltmann, The Source of Life: The Holy Spirit and the Theology of Life, transl. Margaret Kohl, First Fortress Edition (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1999), 26, redeemercitytocity.com The Gospel, Hope, and the World Hope for Your Life 4

5 On the other hand, think about a human being. Human beings have this thing called reason, which means we can do deduction. We can actually see things that are happening. We can even know certain things are going to happen in a way that an animal can t. But not only that, human beings are another order of life because we perceive good and evil. To prove that to you, we would never hold an animal particularly responsible for, or say it is evil for, killing and eating weaker animals. But when we find a human being killing and eating weaker human beings, or when we see a group or a tribe or a nation just killing and destroying weaker nations, we hold them responsible. Why? Because we believe there is such a thing as injustice. We don t expect animals to be able to see it, but we expect human beings to be able to see it. Every order of life can perceive more of reality and act effectively in that reality. So it is with the new birth. Because when you show a pig (you can read about this in Matthew 7) a pearl, a diamond, or a murder, it just goes on munching its corn, because it can t sense the full reality of what it is looking at. We can, but it can t. And, without the new birth, you can look at the words God, holiness of God, grace of God, love of God, Jesus dying on the cross and you can believe those I believe them; I believe in God or you might not believe in them, but they are just abstractions. You can t sense the full reality of them. They are not real to your heart. They are not electrifying. They are not galvanizing. They are not life changing! They don t change your life. You don t act on the basis of them. For example, here is a person who says, I believe God is in control of everything, but I am worried. I am anxious. I am frightened. I am frightened by what is going to happen to me financially. And here is a person who says, Because I believe God is in complete control, even though I feel like I am about to go off a cliff financially, I am really okay. I have a peace. What is the difference? They are looking at the same thing, and one senses the reality of it and one does not. The new birth means you are now able to sense the reality of things that before were nothing; you actually didn t see the reality. The new birth is a new order of life in which you finally begin to sense the full reality of what is out there in the universe, and you act in accordance with it. It is an incredibly powerful thing. This is such a simple example of it (because maybe you are still thinking of the new birth in terms of emotion). Frank Barker is a retired pastor who is a friend of mine. I just love the story he once told me. He actually studied theology and religion before becoming a Christian, and even took a course in which he studied the writings of Martin Luther. However, he came to faith in Christ later on when he finally began to understand the gospel. The gospel is, I am not saved by being a good person. I am saved by grace Jesus died for me. It changed his life. At one point he was talking to the chaplain who had helped navigate him to faith. He said, One of the things I don t understand is why nobody ever told me this gospel before, and what I really don t understand is why Martin Luther didn t understand the gospel. The chaplain said, What do you mean? Frank said, I studied his works, but I never saw the gospel in there. The chaplain said, Now that you have been born again, maybe you need to go back and reread some of those books. And Frank said, I went back to Luther s preface to the Commentary on Galatians, and on every page I had it underlined. I had it highlighted. On every page was the gospel and I hadn t seen it! It had made no difference to me. I didn t get it. The penny didn t drop. It didn t make a bit of difference. And now it means everything! It has brought my whole life together. It has changed everything! Everybody asks, What happened? I was born again. redeemercitytocity.com The Gospel, Hope, and the World Hope for Your Life 5

6 THE GROWTH THAT COMES WITH THE NEW BIRTH I should at least briefly say something about the fact that new birth leads to growth. In fact, one of the ways you know you are born again is there is growth because, after all, a baby is not born and then says, I have arrived. No. Those of you who have had babies born know we parents can t wait until they grow. We feel like it is taking forever for them to grow. Of course that just comes naturally, but take a look at verses 6 and 7 to get an idea about how that works. Verses 6 and 7 say, In this you greatly rejoice [In what? In your hope: In the inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade kept in heaven for you ], though now for a little while you may have had to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that your faith of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honor when Jesus Christ is revealed. Look at what he is saying. There is a deliberate paradox in the tense of the verbs that this translation kind of obscures. It says right now you are rejoicing in your hope, but it also says right now you are suffering horrible suffering, grief, and agony present tense. He doesn t say, You have been rejoicing but now you are in agony. Nor does he say, You are in agony but soon you will be rejoicing. He says, You are incredibly filled with joy and you are incredibly filled with pain, at the same time. How can that be? Here is how. If you put your deepest hope (that is what it says, in this you greatly rejoice ) in circumstances of life, then when the circumstances of life go well, you are happy, and if the circumstances of life go poorly, you are sad. It is one or the other. But if your deepest hopes are rooted in God, if that is your ultimate treasure, if that is your ultimate affirmation, your ultimate love, your ultimate value, then, when the circumstances here (your health, your bank account, your reputation) go down, all that does is drive you more into your great hope, in the same way that fire purifies gold. It doesn t eliminate it; it purifies it. If your hope is based in circumstances, when you go through sorrow, it will decimate you. You will be destroyed. You will be incinerated. But if your hope is put in something besides circumstances, then, when you go through sorrow, and it is sorrow it is real pain it will be turning you into gold. I say this with fear and trembling. Many years ago, before I married my wife, Kathy, when we were in a relationship, and I was wobbling and not sure I wanted to keep the relationship going, it put her through terrific agony. One summer we were working in different places, and I went to visit her. We can remember (in fact I asked her last night to make sure my memory was right about this) that we were walking down a road, and she suddenly said, You know, I have really been helped by a verse I found in the Psalms. There are several translations of the verse, but basically the verse that helped her says, Men are all a vain hope. She said it had really comforted her. At first I thought she was joking, but she showed me she wasn t. And then I started to get very insulted and she said, No, I don t think you should be insulted. I am just finding that I am so angry and so anxious because I have been putting too much hope in men. All this that has been going on has helped me realize what my real treasure is. It has really helped me. I feel so much better. And I could see it. But then I asked if she wanted to break up, and she said, Oh no! Not at all! In fact I am more ready than ever. We ll see. She was living verses 6, 7, and 8 (I was the grief). She was rejoicing more deeply even as she was suffering. The suffering produced joy, because that is what the gospel can do. That is what the new birth does. The great irony is I continued to be confused by what she was saying. I continued to be insulted by what she was saying, even though it is one of the main things I have been telling you about for twenty years of preaching here. That is how you grow. redeemercitytocity.com The Gospel, Hope, and the World Hope for Your Life 6

7 Christians aren t stoic ( I am not going to let it get to me ) or sinkable. Christians are both sadder and happier. They grow sadder and happier at the same time. That is emotional maturity. That is spiritual maturity. The happier you are in your true hope, the more it enables you to be involved in suffering people s lives. You can feel the pain of the world. You can even feel your own pain better. But at the same time your pain drives you more into the joy. Who would have thought this up? It must be true the new birth. HOW THE NEW BIRTH BEGINS AND PROCEEDS How does the new birth actually happen? What do you have to do? Here is the paradox. In verse 23 of this chapter, it says you are born again through believing the word through the gospel. Here is the reason why this is so paradoxical. Do babies get born because they want to? Do babies say, I think I will be born tomorrow? No. Babies participate in the birth; they cry and they do all sorts of things. I have seen it happen three times. They definitely participate in the birth, and that is very important, but they are only born through the labor and the suffering of someone else. If you want to understand the new birth, you have to understand your relationship to Jesus in such a way that you don t see him as a teacher. If you see him as a great teacher I am trying my best to live a good life because I am trying to do whatever Jesus wants me to do; I am trying to follow his example that is not going to electrify you or galvanize you. I am going to ask, Are you a Christian? and you are going to say, Well, I am trying. I am trying, and I am anxious about it. If you understand that he is not your teacher, who tells you what you have to do in order to save yourself, but rather he is your Savior, who came to do everything you should have done so you can be saved by grace, so you can just receive it that he died on the cross to pay for your sins then you begin to realize what your relationship to him really is. Jesus Christ actually says to his disciples just before he is about to die in John 16, In a little while you will see me no more. A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her hour has come, but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world (v. 16, 21). This is not only hard for us men to understand, but even women, in an age of epidurals and modern medicine, are going to have a little trouble understanding this. In ancient times, no baby was ever born into the world except at the risk of the life of the mother. It was horribly, horribly painful, and every time a woman gave birth, her life was in the balance. When Jesus says, A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her hour has come, everywhere in the book of John that word hour means the death of Jesus Christ. Jesus is identifying in that metaphor with a woman in labor. He is saying, Women give birth at the risk of their life through their pain and suffering, but I gave you birth at the cost of my life. It is not through its own efforts that a child is born. It is through the efforts of the mother. It is not through your efforts that you are saved. It is through my labor; it is through my work. I brought you from the darkness into the light. I gave you new life because I died. When you see that, and you realize that, therefore, salvation is by sheer grace, and you say, Father, accept me because of what Jesus Christ has done, that is the beginning of the new birth. The beginning of the new birth is to see that it is a birth, to see that you are a baby and he is the one who has brought you in. When that moves you to the depths, all this can be yours. And you have to keep looking at it. Some of you know my favorite line in this text. At the very end, verses 10 12, it talks about the gospel, and then it says, Even angels long to look into these things. Angels are pretty smart. They almost have to be; they are very old, aren t they? And yet angels never get bored looking at the gospel. That is what it is saying. Angels are always eager to reflect on, in new ways, what God has done for us through Jesus. And if angels are always finding new beauties, always finding new wonders, that is the secret of redeemercitytocity.com The Gospel, Hope, and the World Hope for Your Life 7

8 your own growth. You need to look at what he has done for you until it fills you with such joy that you can take things, because we have been born again into a living hope. Let s pray. Our Father, we have so much hope for our lives, we have so much hope for our hearts, we have so much hope for what you can do in our lives when we see what the new birth is. I pray that everybody here will either grow into that new life that they have been born into, or lift their empty hands and say, Lord, because of what you have done, receive me. Implant your life in me. Bring me into your family. Bring me into your kingdom. Thank you that there is such hope, because Jesus Christ lost everything on the cross so that we could have everything in him. It is in his name that we pray, Amen. Copyright 2010 by Timothy Keller, Redeemer Presbyterian Church. This transcript is based on the audio recording and has been lightly edited. The original was part of the Renew Campaign in Fall 2009, and can be found at We encourage you to use this material for study and ministry purposes. If you would like to use quotes or key concepts in a sermon or other ministry resource, please provide credit to the original. redeemercitytocity.com The Gospel, Hope, and the World Hope for Your Life 8