Ministry Lessons from Tim Keller

Matt Smethurst

Don’t make getting a big name in New York City your main thing. Lift up Jesus name, hallowed be thy name. Forget yourself, forget your reputation. Do what you can to lift up God’s name. So Tim was he was far from perfect, but he loved nothing more than pointing people to the Savior who is and to the gospel that can transform their lives.

Welcome friends to this special episode of the everyday pastor on the nuts and bolts of ministry from the gospel coalition. My name is Matt smitherst and I’m Luke Duncan, and two years ago today, our brother Tim Keller, co founder of the gospel coalition, went to be with the savior he loved. And we would like to just take the next several minutes to reflect on his ministry, some of the themes that animated his ministry, and in particular, ministry lessons for everyday pastors, for those of you listening who may not be deeply familiar with Keller’s life or ministry. He was a pastor for over 40 years in the PCA. He served his first basically decade in a small town in Virginia, actually only about 30 minutes away from where I am in Richmond, and that’s where he really cut his teeth and learned to, as has been said, Put the cookies on the bottom shelf. That was kind of his first foray into contextualization, making the gospel clear, not dressing it up to make it cool, but breaking it down to make it clear. And then, of course, in 1989 after a few years of teaching practical Theology at Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia. He and Kathy and their three young sons moved to New York City, which at the time was far more dangerous than cool. It was a difficult place for any church planer to go. In fact, the PCA was trying to send someone, and Keller volunteered to help find someone to go, but was unsuccessful, and the Lord actually ended up working on his heart, giving him a burden for that place. And so from 1989 through 2017 he was the senior minister at Redeemer Presbyterian Church, as I mentioned. He co founded with Don Carson the gospel coalition, 20 years ago this month, and like you knew Tim for many years through the PCA, so talk to us just a little bit about your relationship with him and how it developed over the years. Yeah.

Ligon Duncan

I mean, Tim was a little bit older than me, and so when I became a minister in the I was licensed in 1985 to preach, which is sort of a part of the Presbyterian process that would be strange to my Baptist and Bible Church friends. But then five years later, I was ordained into the pastoral ministry, and by that time, Tim had already left Westminster seminary and had started Redeemer church. So I started at RTS as a professor in 1990 he started Redeemer church in 1989 and within just a matter of a few years, there was already he was, he was sort of like a well kept secret among certain parts of the PCA, and especially, there were some young Ruf ministers that started listening to his preaching because they were Trying to figure out, how do I express Biblical Christianity and reformed theology on a college campus, which is always sort of a cutting edge part of any culture, at least has been for the last 300 years. And here’s Tim trying to do it in New York City. And so they found Tim a helpful voice to listen to as they were trying to communicate the gospel on college campuses. And Tim was already really well known in church planning circles in the PCA that he had taught practical Theology at Westminster Seminary. He was really tied into a lot of different church planning movements in the OPC, in the PCA and elsewhere. As as a young professor, I knew of him, but but would have never rubbed shoulders with him. Then around the year 2000 I was actually trying to look that up a few minutes ago to see when it was around the year 2000 he and I were chosen to debate the issue of women Deacons in the PCA at that time, there was a big discussion, should we have women deacons? The Bible obviously sees women involved in diaconal work, but should there be women deacons, or should there not be women deacons? And he represented one side, and I represented the other, and I’m sure he had experienced in a lot of polemics. And Tim didn’t like polemics. Tim. Tim loved apologetics. He did not enjoy internal squabbling in in churches. And I think, you know, I’m not sure what Tim thought to expect when we had that first debate, but we really enjoyed one another. We it was, it was invigorating. Tim is really smart. And he’s really well read. And I think he came away thinking, you know, gosh, this is a this is a person that I could have a conversation with. And it ended up being a really unifying thing in the PCA, there sort of lines were being drawn. And I think the conversation itself let some of the fear and the steam out of things and allowed us to talk with one another again. And right from that point on, I enjoyed my interactions with Tim, and then we were actually called together to do a couple of more of those in the PCA on different topics. And then we started getting thrown together for this and that. Not long after that, of course, the Gospel coalition is holding its first meetings, and Tim and Don sort of picked their list of people to invite, and I’m on that list, along with lots of other friends of yours and mine. Mark dever was on that list. Al Mohler was on that list. Phil reichen was on that list. You know, we can go down a long, long list of folks that are still involved in TGC and some that are doing other things now, but so I was connected with Tim through that. And then Tim had, for a number of years, wanted to have theological education in New York City for people who were going to work in New York City. And he talked to a number of different seminaries. He talked to my predecessor, Rick Canada, who was, at that time, the Chancellor of Reformed Theological Seminary about coming to New York City. And finally, while I was the champ, after I had become the chancellor, Polly mcreynold Stone, who’s now home with the Lord who was my chief institutional assessment officer, figured out how to meet all the requirements that the New York Board of Regents for education required, and RTS started in New York City, and Tim and I team taught the introduction to pastoral and theological studies course for RTS New York City for about seven years together, and it was really during that time that I got to know Tim at a deeper personal level and to appreciate him more than ever before, because I got to see him at work whenever he was teaching. I would always sit in on his classes, Matt and just I’d learned something every time and and so we had a wonderful time teaching that course together. I I got to serve on a denominational committee with Kathy, who’s an impressive person in her own right. I know that you recently got to talk with Kathy, and I know that you enjoyed that. And then, of course, our mutual friend Colin Hanson wrote that wonderful book on on, Tim,

Matt Smethurst

I want to first of all show our listeners who are tuning in on YouTube a picture of you guys way back in the day, probably doing one of those. Wow, do you? Do you know where this would have been? Probably,

Ligon Duncan

yeah, that’s it. That’s at 1166, Avenue of the Americas in New York City, so right on, on Sixth Avenue, not far from 30 rock their, their building was in that big city bank bill, their, their floors were in that big city bank building there, and that’s in the corner office. That’s a great office. And we shot some video just talking about theological education in New York City, and Tim was riffing off the cuff, and it was solid gold.

Matt Smethurst

Yeah, absolutely. And shortly after he died, you said something which made me chuckle. You said Tim in the PCA was a little bit like Gandalf in the Shire. We think he’s just a guy that does fireworks at birthday parties when he’s actually out there in the world, slaying dragons and taking on evil wizards. Yeah, elaborate on what you’re getting at with that. Well, I mean,

Ligon Duncan

the PCA is a small world, Matt, you know, we’re not like the Southern Baptist Convention. You know, they’re not millions upon billions of people spread across North America in PCA churches like there are in the Southern Baptist Convention. So we’re, we’re a fairly small place, 400,000 or so folks, and we tend to all know one another, and everything can feel a little bit, you know, in house and and parochial, and Tim, you know, Tim, Tim was widely known and respected in the PCA, but I think folks inside the PCA perhaps did not perceive the kind of influence that he had in the larger evangelical world, and how many people were looking to him for encouragement and for instruction on how to reach a lost, secularizing, resistant culture with the gospel, because in the End, him was an evangelist, and he wanted to make a case for Christ. He wanted to make a case for the gospel. He wanted to make a case for the Bible to a world that was that had a certain inherent belief system that was resistant to the truth claims of Christianity. And I think that’s something you see in him all the way from. Gordon Conwell days, you know, I bump into people all the time outside the PCA. Oh, do you know Tim Keller? And I thought, Boy inside the PCA, there’s probably not near the sense of the sort of the shadow that he casts than there is outside of the PCA. And that just makes me happy that a brother would be used that way to encourage other people around the world for the sake of the gospel? Yeah, absolutely.

Matt Smethurst

And I believe it was Colin Hanson who pointed out to me once that Tim was this unique three dimensional voice in a two dimensional world, meaning that if we’re if we’re borrowing philosophical categories, the normative, the situational, the existential you think of in a pastor’s ministry, the normative, that’s keen biblical insight, the situational studied, cultural awareness and the existential, searching heart application, Bible teacher meets cultural analyst, meets biblical counselor. And most great pastors, not just good pastors, most great pastors tend to do two of those. Well, yeah. But Tim had a way of excelling at all three. Yeah. I mean, and I think the first and the third, the the biblical insight and the heart application, the Bible teacher and biblical counselor ones are actually where he’s least appreciated a lot of people. I think, I think the less familiar you are first hand with his ministry, with having actually listened to his sermons and read his books. You may think from a distance, oh, he he quoted philosophers and New York Times columnists. And his preaching was kind of scholarly and fancy, but it really wasn’t, you know, his illustrations again, after 10 years under his belt, ministering to blue collar people in Virginia, his illustrations were incredibly vivid and concrete, and his applications penetrating precisely because they were so down to earth

Ligon Duncan

and just a really Good biblical expositor. So yeah, amen. I think a lot of people love him because of the cultural analysis, and that’s obviously important to him, because Tim was concerned with what he called defeater beliefs, things that the culture had sort of imbibed and thought that made Christianity untrue or irrelevant, right? And Tim was really desirous, in his, in his sort of cultural engagement, to defeat those defeated beliefs and to undermine the sort of the confidence of the of the secular mind. And but he did not do that at the expense of being a really good expositor, and as you say, a good applier of Scripture. I, a friend of mine was the he was the headmaster of the Stony Brook school on Long Island. And one I was giving the Staley lectures at Stony Brook and the and then I preached somewhere that Sunday morning, that Sunday afternoon, we drove in from Long Island to Manhattan to hear Tim preach at the evening service. What year are we talking roughly? My Oh, I wish I could tell you exactly the year, but it’s maybe around the 2000s some, okay, okay. And, and we drive in, and Tim’s expert it was he was preaching on Jacob wrestling with the angel, and I could have delivered that sermon verbatim for the next six months. It was so the outline was crystal clear. It was clearly anchored in the text. It challenged the defeater beliefs of the folks that were sitting there listening to it, and it applied the word in a way that George Whitefield or or, you know, a great Puritan Richard Sibbes would have said, Yes, that’s exactly how you apply the word. And Tim did all three, and it was just Tim just doing what he did every Lord’s Day. Amen to your your point about how Tim was able to do all three of those things. So Matt, you’ve, you’ve written a book focusing on how Tim addressed the issue of the Christian life, and I got to read this when it was a manuscript, and was thrilled to get my copy the other day. So I’d like to walk through the book, just so that the folks that are listening to us will know the content of the book. Your first chapter is called one hero, Jesus Christ in all scripture. Now that does not surprise me that you would start there with Tim’s teaching on the Christian life, but maybe clue everybody else in. Why would you start there when you’re talking about Tim Keller on the Christian life?

Matt Smethurst

Well, because it is a book on the Christian life. So it’s not a biography, it’s not an assessment or evaluation of his legacy. It really is just meant to distill and synthesize his best teaching on Christian living, because, as I said earlier, I think his teaching on these timeless bread and butter topics of everyday discipleship are. What will most stand the test of time, and also where people underestimate his teaching a bit. And so I just wanted to go deep, not just to his books, but also listening to hundreds of sermons and conference messages and interviews in order to bring out the best of his teaching for ordinary Christians. And so I wanted to start with that theme in chapter one of Jesus, the hero of all of Scripture, because the Bible is the foundation for a fruitful Christian life. Finding Jesus in Scripture, in the Old Testament, for example, it’s not a game. It’s not like trying to find Waldo in a Where’s Waldo puzzle. It’s more like finding water for your deepest thirst. I mean Jesus, Jesus Christ is present. It’s, you know, was said that the Old Testament is Jesus Christ concealed? The New Testament is Jesus Christ revealed? And Tim had a had an uncanny way of showing the glory and the beauty of Christ from all of Scripture, yeah, in a way, that left you wanting more.

Ligon Duncan

I know he learned a Christ centered biblical theology when he was at Gordon Conwell seminary. In fact, sometimes Tim would would say, I’m not sure exactly when I was converted, but he speculated it may have been in Meredith Klein’s class at Gordon Conwell seminary. That’s another discussion for another day. But I also know his colleague, Ed Clowney, one of his big emphases was Christ in all the scriptures. So from you’ve listened to a lot

Matt Smethurst

more tear Alec here and Ed Clowney, well, that’s

Ligon Duncan

what I was going to ask you. What Who do you think are the influences on Tim with it, because that’s definitely a theme of his Christ. In all the scriptures I know about Ed, you mentioned Alec mate and by the way, that’s m o, t, y, E, R, Alec Mathieu really well known in Britain, not as well known over here as he should be pastors by anything by Alec Mateer that you can get your hands on. It’s solid gold. And by the way, I think Christian focus published Alex book on preaching, and I think Tim wrote a blurb for that too, because so talk to us a little bit about where that came from, and

Matt Smethurst

at the risk of just overloading our poor listeners with with trivia, at least, I think it’s interesting. Tim met Alec Mateer at RC Sproul Study Center in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, back in the 70s. RC Sproul officiated Tim and Kathy’s wedding. That’s right in 1975 and Tim describes that experience speaking with Alec Mateer about the Old Testament and how a an Israelite could share their testimony in a similar way to the way we would, in terms of being, you know, brought out of slavery and and redeemed by the blood of the Lamb and journeying through the wilderness. We’re not yet, we’re not yet home to the promised land, but we’re on the way with the Spirit to guide us and the and all the rest, and he was thunderstruck. It was a huge breakthrough for him in terms of seeing Christ in the Old Testament. But one of the things about the way Tim preached Christ, which I think is sometimes lost in the Gospel centered crowd, is that it wasn’t just here’s the problem, Jesus is the solution. Let’s close in prayer. There was also the turn from Jesus is the solution to and therefore you can now live in a way pleasing to God, because He is for you and by the Spirit he is in you. And I think that that final turn to moral application is so important. Otherwise, we leave people with a glorious Savior, but they’re left unsure of how to follow Him as King. But Tim just had a really unique way of pressing on people the demands of Christ, which don’t just have to do with how you get into the kingdom. He would say the gospel is not the ABCs of Christianity. It’s the A to Z. And he would sometimes reference the message he heard when he from a woman named Barbara Boyd, who helped teach inductive Bible study, and she had this illustration, which I’ve shared before in sermons, where she said, if I showed up to your house and knocked on the door and you said, Oh, hi, come in, Barbara, stay out. Boyd, why? Wouldn’t know what you mean, because I’m all Barbara and I’m all boy you either get all of me, or you get none of me. In a similar way, she says, if we, if we say, I want the loving Jesus, the helping Jesus, the Compassionate Jesus, but not the Holy Jesus, who makes demands. In other words, come in, Savior. Stay out, Lord, we get none of him. Mm. And he just had a way of communicating that at least the all the hundreds of sermons I’ve listening to, leaving me at the end, not so much wowed with, oh, Tim Keller found Jesus in that passage, but rather, oh, my goodness, Jesus is beautiful. I want to, I want to live for him this week, because I realized that if he faced the ultimate furnace, the ultimate suffering, then I’m going to be okay in the smaller furnaces, the smaller sufferings that come my way this week.

Ligon Duncan

That’s so good. Your your second chapter Matt is called excavating sin, a tale of disordered loves. This is really important for Tim. Tim believed that a lot of secular people had a baseline fear of legalism and moralism, and thus were dismissive of Christian sin, language, sin speech, and what he wanted to do was try to figure out how he could really bother unbelievers with the truth of God’s Word in ways that they couldn’t easily dismiss. And I’m saying this deliberately, because some people think that Tim was trying to make sin more palatable to secular people. That is the last thing in the world that Tim wanted to do. What Tim wanted to do was make sin more real to secular people. Again, he’s trying to defeat their defeater beliefs. So if they’re suspicious of legalism and moralism, he wants to hit them where they’re not expecting and your subtitle is about disordered loves that that’s coming right out of Augustinian theology. Work that out for us, because idolatry becomes a major theme in how Tim tries to get secular people with the doctrine of sin talk to us a little bit about that. Matt, well,

Matt Smethurst

I used to think that Tim’s way of talking about idolatry was cute and clever, but maybe was sidestepping the severity of sin for sophisticated New Yorkers, but I was ignorant. I actually the more I read and listened to what he actually said, the more I realized that that actually my perspective was simplistic and and the the category of idolatry. Heart idolatry is not something Tim Keller made up. It’s not even something the New Testament authors make up. First John, very last verse, little children keep yourselves from idols. Even in Ezekiel, we see language about the Israelites taking the idols into their hearts, being driven and dominated and captivated, even in their imaginations, by Gods who cannot satisfy or save. And so when I got a more full orbed picture of biblical idolatry from Tim’s ministry, it was like being shown a three dimensional object after only having access to a stick figure. I mean, is sin missing the mark? Like, like a like shooting at an archery target and missing Yes, but that analogy doesn’t make me feel like I have committed cosmic treason against the living God. Whereas when you speak in terms of idolatry, you’re talking about a worship problem. You’re talking about giving your heart, which should be reserved for the living God, to other lesser things. So it actually makes sin all the more scandalous, if you understand it rightly. But he had a way. He was ironic, he was gentle, but he had a way of sneaking up on you. I think the experience of listening to Tim Keller sermon often is he starts out with the survey of the cultural landscape, and he might be talking about idols out there in the culture, and you sit back and you think, yeah, that that is a good assessment of of what’s going on out there. That’s interesting. I haven’t thought about it that way, but before you know it, he’s climbed in here, and he’s poking you in the idols, yeah, and then showing the only hope that it’s found in Christ. And

Ligon Duncan

that’s that’s very important in his preaching, again, because he’s an evangelist, he he wants people to come to faith in Christ. He wants them to put their trust in Christ, and they won’t do it if they don’t see their sin. And so what he’s trying to do is hold up a mirror to them, and as you say it, you know his his he reads so widely in philosophy and culture, he’s able to speak in language that’s interesting to secular folks, but then before they know it, he’s talking about them to them and and holding up a mirror and letting them see themselves in the Word of God, just like James says. A couple

Matt Smethurst

of his influences, there were a particular sermon by Martin Lloyd Jones on for. First John 521, Little children, keep yourselves from idols. That was ground breaking for him, as well as an old essay by David palison, one of Tim’s closest friends, called idols of the heart and Vanity Fair, which was originally published in 1991 and pastors, you can find it online that helped Tim understand that idols are not so much bad things as they are good things gone bad. An idol is a good thing made into an ultimate thing, which I think is a way of getting traction with the Spirit’s help with any listener, no matter where they’re coming from, because we’re all functionally enslaved to something that we’re living for.

Ligon Duncan

Yeah, and again, the idea is to get at people who are going to say to themselves as the pastor is speaking to them, but pastor, that’s a good thing that I want. And Tim comes back and says, Yeah, but it’s not as good as the greatest thing. And when you reverse those orders, you mess everything up. So before we move on, talk about disordered loves. What? Because that’s how he does it. You know, there’s, there are, there are orders of love, and getting those out of order, that’s what happens in idolatry. So talk about that just a little bit. Matt,

Matt Smethurst

yeah, and, well, it’s also what Thomas Chalmers talked about in his famous sermon, the explosive power of a new affection. The way to get rid of an idol in your life is not so much to remove it as it is to replace it. Replace it with something more glorious, more satisfying, more beautiful. And so Tim was constantly wanting to show in that Augustinian tradition, we see it also in Edwards and Lewis and others that our hearts are malformed, which means that we love it’s not that we love other things too much. It’s that we love them too much, in relation to God, who ought to be our chief love. It’s like we’ve fallen in love with this little tributary, and we’ve forgotten about the headwaters. And

Ligon Duncan

this famous CS Lewis quote, our problem is not that we want too much, it’s that we’re satisfied with too little. And boy, does Tim embody that in the way that he tends to attack our heart. Idolatries, you know, you think you found this good thing, and you think it’s the greatest thing, but it’s not nearly the greatest thing. God is the greatest thing. And he just, he, you know, he does such a wonderful job of magnifying our Savior, as well as as the one you know, who’s fairer than 10,000 and and that’s, that’s what he’s trying to get at in our sin, our sin that sets itself on something lesser and makes it the best thing instead of

Matt Smethurst

God. Tim came to see in his ministry, and oddly enough, just the other day, I was listening to a sermon, sermon of his on First Peter four, because I’m preaching through First Peter right now, and the title was two ways to live. So in 1994 he’s preaching a sermon called Two ways to live. By 2017 he’s preaching a sermon called Three ways to live. It’s not that his theology has changed, but it’s that he’s, I think, come to see that one way to help people understand lostness is to understand there’s more than one way to be lost, so there’s only one way to be saved, but there are actually two ways to be lost. And so Tim’s, I think, most distilled gospel presentation is found in his book The prodigal God, which is his reflection on the parable of the prodigal sons, plural, I mean the whole point of that parable. I mean that parable is addressed to Pharisees. It’s it’s addressed actually, to not younger brother types, the older brother, it’s addressed to older brother types. And so there are two ways to be alienated from the Father, and it’s not just Luke 15, but you also think of a place like Romans one, chapter one, we see how one can be lost through idolatry, blatant immorality. But chapter two, we see how people can also be lost through trying to keep all the moral rules and being prideful in doing that. And Tim even even talked about how Dick Lucas, the Anglican minister, help him understand that even the Sermon on the Mount, which ends with these very dichotomous warnings, there are two trees, there are two foundations, there are two roads, etc. So how in the world do we account for this three ways to live stuff? Well, Dick Lucas pointed out, this is at the end of the sermon on the mount, which means we should probably expect that Jesus is summarizing things he said throughout the sermon. And sure enough, when you go back, you see what’s being contrasted. It’s not God’s way versus man’s way in general. It’s God’s way versus the Pharisees. Way, the younger brother of Luke 15 isn’t in view at all. The pagans of Romans one aren’t in view at all. So when Jesus is talking about two ways to live in the Sermon on the Mount, he’s he’s contrasting self religious religion, self righteous religious types, yeah, with and the grace that is only found in the Gospel. And John Piper said, after Tim went to be with the Lord, that this insight revolutionized John’s own understanding of preaching, because at first, John was confused when he heard Tim say that when you’re speaking to younger brother types, the type that moved to New York City, that you need to be preaching against legalism. And John thought, well, Legalism, that’s not their problem. They don’t care about the law at all. But Tim pointed out that their assumption is going to be that the only alternative to their license is legalism, that the only alternative to immorality is a kind of white knuckled morality. So you have to actually show them that both are alternatives to God’s grace. Yeah,

Ligon Duncan

by the way, Tim’s introduction to Sinclair Ferguson’s book the whole Christ meditates on this as well, because this is an issue in the history of Scottish theology, even as it was an issue in the religion of first century Judaism and the struggle between legalism and antinomianism and nominalism. Tim’s way of talking about this, again, is born of a pastoral concern to reach people whose trust is in themselves. They’re self justifying themselves in their religious performance, and that’s just as deadly as as as throwing off all restraint and and living a reckless antinomian life. There’s just two different ways of not finding your rest and trust in Christ alone as he is offered in the Gospel. And so Ferguson famously says both the antinomian and the legalist fails to see that God is father. And so the the solution to antinomianism is not legalism. The solution to legalism is not antinomianism. The solution to both is the realization that God is father. And so the prodigal God, the in, that story, that’s that’s how that factors in Tim’s teaching. Who influenced Tim in this area? We’ve been asking resources in Tim’s thinking. So who influenced him in this area? Matt,

Matt Smethurst

well, let me, let me just say. Colin Hanson is the expert on Tim’s influences that his book is focusing on who shaped Tim more than more than mine is. But

Ligon Duncan

your footnotes, and you’ve actually done a lot of work on this, in your footnotes, because there’s a lot,

Matt Smethurst

it’s actually so many that they’re in notes. Yeah, they, you know, two reasons. One, to show I’ve done my homework, but two as a little nod to the way Tim himself wrote books, because so many of his his hidden gems were in the footnotes. I don’t expect 90% of readers to read all the end notes of this book, but there are some Easter eggs there for people who want that, but Ed clowneys preaching on Luke 15 the parable of the prodigal sons was transformative for Tim in this regard, as well as Dick Lucas and others. Let me just say to listeners, LIG and I will not be offended. In fact, we will be honored if you stop listening to us, drop everything you’re doing, and you go get the whole Christ by Sinclair Ferguson, the book that leg was just referencing that Tim wrote the forward to. It’s one of the most important books you’re going to read for pastoral ministry. Yeah,

Ligon Duncan

yeah. So good. So good. Your fourth chapter is on how the gospel transforms relationships, and it’s called friends on purpose. Tell us what you mean by that. What are you trying to do in that chapter?

Matt Smethurst

When people think about themes that animated Tim’s ministry, I don’t think friendship is one that immediately comes to mind, but the more I dove into his teaching, the more I realized this is a theme that suffuses his material, really, from beginning to end. So we see an aspect of it in, for example, his book The meaning of marriage. So we’re essentially just talking about how the gospel transforms relationships. His best friend in the world was Cathy. It was a friendship that spanned over 50 years, and he was so deeply shaped. Through Kathy’s own influence by CS Lewis, and specifically Lewis’s teaching on the four loves, I think one of the reasons that Tim thought and taught a lot about friendship is because of where he was ministering in New York. It’s a place that is dizzyingly transient. It’s not a place that is often conducive to thick community and deep relationships. And so he knew one of the ways that Redeemer could be a counterculture, an alternate city within that human city, would be to have relationships that don’t make sense, apart from the gospel, relationships that wouldn’t exist if Jesus didn’t die and rise again, and so Tim was often channeling the best of CS Lewis, but also the biblical writers from Proverbs and other places, and helping people to see that friendship is a journey where two two people are are moving toward the same destination. What they have in common is something that transcends any natural differences they may have. What they have in common is the Lord Jesus Christ and so true friendship is helping someone not becoming their best self in a kind of pop psychology way, but becoming their true self, living into who God has remade them to be, and who he one day will make them to be in the new heavens and new earth. So Keller casts this really soaring, compelling vision for Christian friendship that I think is such medicine for the moment in a society in which loneliness has literally become a health epidemic. According to the US Surgeon General, we are the loneliest people in the history of the world in the late modern West. I wanted to bring forth some of Tim’s best teaching on the subject.

Ligon Duncan

It’s good. The fifth chapter is called when faith goes to work. And Tim was very important to the faith and work movement in the reformed and evangelical world in the last 30 years or so, he was really concerned in speaking to New Yorkers, for them to understand that one of the ways that they glorify God, one of the ways that they walk with God, is in the totality of their vocation. And so there and and he was concerned about the workaholism and the materialism that sometimes goes along with that in Western culture, and he wanted them to have a robust Biblical understanding of work and how that relates to our being. Christians talk, talk to us a little bit about his teaching there in the Christian life. Matt,

Matt Smethurst

yeah, early on, a soap opera actor came to Christ and then showed up in Tim’s office asking for advice on which roles to take or to decline, and specifically asked about method acting, which is when you don’t just act angry. You get angry. You don’t just act lustful. You seek to become lustful in order to really embody the character you’re you’re playing. And Tim realized in that moment, I mean, though he had the wherewithal to say that doesn’t sound like a good idea, he came to realize that he had been trained to help people make the most of their Sundays, but he felt under equipped for helping people apply the gospel to all of life, including that arena in which we live out most of our days. I forget exactly what the stat is, but it’s something crazy, like we spend upwards of 80% of our waking lives at work. So Tim wanted to connect Sunday worship to Monday work in a way that helped people live out the Gospel they professed in though, in a way, again that doesn’t make sense to the watching world. One of his favorite stories to invoke was the lesser known essay by J, R, R. Tolkien Leaf by Niggle. Interestingly, Tolkien was writing The Lord of the Rings saga during World War Two, and he had a case of writer’s block. He stalled out. It had been a multi year project. He was deeply discouraged, and a friend suggested that he kind of work on something else to get his mind off of the Lord of the Rings, and what he ended up writing was leaf by nickel for the sake of time. I won’t share the whole story, but in in the book, I try to bring out how Tim used this little parable, this essay from Tolkien, to show people that even though we’ll be frustrated in our work, in this life because of the fall, work has become toil and and we experience thorns and thistles even in our best endeavors, that one day when we get to glory, all of the aspirations that we had for justice or for beauty, these things that we feel like we barely. Scratch the surface of in this life will come to full fruition, and we will see not just the fruit of our hands, but the the but the beauty and glory of the King we served.

Ligon Duncan

The sixth chapter is called do justice, love mercy, embodying the compassion of the king. Tim wrote a book called generous justice. This is something he also thought long and hard about, how does this teaching factor into his teaching on the Christian life? Matt,

Matt Smethurst

because, again, this has to do with how believers live in the everyday, and how we understand that that the gospel of Christ ought to change the way we view others, because to the degree we understand that we are all debtors to grace, to the degree that that the gospel has transformed our hearts, we will seek to live lives of mercy and justice toward others. And of course, Tim started out as a author focusing on the work of deacons. His first two books, 1985 resources for deacons. 1989 ministries of mercy that grew out of his doctoral work in the PCA were focused on how to care for the afflicted and the distressed. And so when Tim came to New York, he very much rejected and opposed a kind of social gospel. He always wanted evangelism to be the leading partner in the equation. And I think the more he wrote on the topic, the more precise he became. So if you look at generous justice, he’s very clear that evangelism and social action are are inseparable, but asymmetrical. Yeah, that evangelism is the way we love people best. It’s not because the spiritual is more important than the physical, but because the eternal is more important than the temporal.

Ligon Duncan

And I think I heard him speak on this in 2010 at the Lausanne Congress in Cape Town. And he loved John Stott. He had enormous respect for John. And John invented the two wings of the bird illustration for for evangelism and social action. And Tim, and his own gentle kind way, disagreed with the two wings of the bird illustration, and he said they’re not equal things. And his his whole presentation, by the way, John Piper also spoke at Lausanne that year, and Tim and John said the exact same thing about the priority of proclamation and word evangelism. And that’s,

Matt Smethurst

that’s the context where John famously said, We Christians care about all suffering, especially eternal suffering,

Ligon Duncan

which beautifully said, really, really powerful. And Tim totally agreed with that. And and Tim, I think, if he were to describe himself, would say, I’m very influenced by sort of the Neo Calvinistic sphere, sovereignty thinking it’s important for us to be engaged in these things as Christians. It’s important for us as pastors to equip Christians to be engaged in these things, but the main thing we need to be doing as the church is evangelism and discipleship, and so that that’s an important chapter to get a feel for how Tim addresses that in the Christian life. The seventh chapter is about prayer, and Tim wrote an entire volume on prayer, thought long and hard about it. I mean, he always was a man of prayer, but I think he felt like his communion with God in prayer was richer later in life than earlier in life, and then, especially after the cancer diagnosis. I remember Tim saying that Cathy and I have remarked to one another that our prayer life has never been better since the cancer diagnosis, and he spoke very realistically about what he saw as the deficits in his own earlier experience. That book on prayer is a profound work talk to us a little bit about prayer and the Christian life. From Tim Keller,

Matt Smethurst

well, it was a theme that he spoke on for His whole ministry. He wrote a book on it in 2014 and yet, three months before he died, in an interview, someone said, looking back on your decades of ministry. What is one thing you wish you had done differently and without missing a beat? He says, I wish I had prayed more. Yeah, it was something he was constantly wrestling with and wanting to grow in, even as he modeled it to others. And I think I’ve maybe mentioned before on this podcast that when he sensed a kind of poverty in his own spiritual experience. In the wake of 911 and Cathy being diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, and Tim just being inundated with all kinds of ministry responsibilities, he was experiencing a bit of a dry period, and really did a deep dive. Of on the topic of prayer, read people from all kinds of Christian traditions as he was yearning, searching for deeper, richer communion with God. And you know what it led him to? It led him to just go deeper in, ultimately, into his own reformed tradition. He realized he didn’t have to choose between theology and experience, but rather the Holy Spirit was wanting to help him experience his theology. And I think Tim’s book on prayer is one of his most underrated. It’s a masterful book not just on prayer, but on spiritual formation, which is a very hot topic today, thinking about the spiritual disciplines for if you have people in your churches, pastors who are reading John Mark comer, make sure they also read Tim Keller on prayer, because that’s going to, I think, help them Make sure that their prayers are answering not a figment of their imagination, but the God of Revelation, who has, who has disclosed himself to us in the Scriptures,

Ligon Duncan

the last chapter is on suffering, and that’s something that Tim wrote about, and it’s something that Tim experienced, tell us about his approach to suffering in the Christian life, Matt, it

Matt Smethurst

shouldn’t be surprising that this was the most moving chapter to work on, not just because Tim’s work on suffering is so rich, but because of how he himself suffered unto the very end and died. And when you think of resources on suffering, they’re often in one of three categories. They’re They’re either really philosophical, answering the problem of evil, or they’re biblical, theological, a survey of what the Bible teaches, or they’re devotional and meant to give practical help to people in the throes of pain. But Tim had a way of weaving all three. You see that in his book, walking with God through pain and suffering. But Tim just had a way of reminding us that we know Jesus more deeply when we come to know him as a man of sorrows, acquainted with much grief. Jesus didn’t suffer so that we wouldn’t suffer. He suffered so that when we do, we would become more like Him. And so I think that the most powerful message, ultimately, that Tim delivered on this subject was his own life and death, even even to the very end, as he yearned to go be with the savior he loved.

Ligon Duncan

And I can testify, I mean, you know, I had a little bit of a window into Tim’s life. And I know there are a lot of people out there that benefited from Tim that didn’t have that window into his life, but I got to watch him, and he was the real deal, Matt. And I think you have a sense of that too. You talk to talk to Michael, his son, who’s still ministering in New York City, and Michael can testify to that reality, as as can Kathy and we, we all want to be able to believe that our heroes are the real, real thing when the door is closed and Tim was he, Tim would have been the first one to tell you he was a sinner, but he believed what he preached and he lived what he preached, and that is a huge gift to all of us.

Matt Smethurst

Yeah, and God’s providence, the very final words he ever spoke to Redeemer. They were scheduled for video release, actually, on the day he died, and it was a brief video message. You can go watch it online. And what he said, the kind of last note that he wanted to sound, was reflecting on an obscure verse in Jeremiah 45 where Jeremiah is giving a charge to his scribe, Baruch Tim quotes the KJV, seekest thou great things for thyself. Seek them not and then he says, Genesis 11 tells us that people tend to go to the city to make a name for themselves. And by the way, ministers very often come to New York City to make a name for themselves. I’m a minister in New York City. I’m cool. I’m going to do well here. Don’t make your ministry success, your identity, so that if things don’t go well, you feel like an utter failure and freak out. Don’t make getting a big name in New York City your main thing. Lift up Jesus name, hallowed be thy name. Forget yourself, forget your reputation. Do what you can to lift up God’s name. So Tim was he was far from perfect, but he loved nothing more than pointing people to the Savior who is and to the gospel that can transform their lives. And so I do hope that this book will be a helpful on ramp for people who may be familiar with Tim’s ministry. Maybe they have a bunch of his books on their shelf, but and are overwhelmed by. Think the thought of reading multiple but they may be willing to read one. And pastors out there, I want to challenge you, if you feel like you’ve already had your Tim Keller phase, that you’ve kind of been there, done that, gleaned what you need to I’ll just say that having revisited all of his material for this book project, I was freshly struck by how insightful and enduring so much of it is. So I would encourage you to look into his larger body of work.

Ligon Duncan

Yeah, shout out to Tim’s love for Lloyd Jones. He listened to, I think, everything that Lloyd Jones ever preached that’s still available. He was listening to it on tape. Now it’s all available online from Norton Lloyd Jones, trust so Tim was a real Lloyd Jones guy. He was a George Whitfield guy. In fact, one of the things he said at the John Reed Miller lectures was that that he was reading so much Whitefield at some point in his ministry that Cathy was afraid that he was going to start speaking in, you know, 1700s English in imitation of Whitefield and the Puritans. Tim, you know, Tim, not only read cultural analysis Charles Taylor or Jonathan height, he was reading the Puritans. And that’s another uniqueness of Tim. A lot of us kind of get in our little rut, and we read in that area. Tim really read broadly in the Christian tradition as well as in cultural analysis, and it benefited us all.

Matt Smethurst

Yeah. Jonathan Edwards, John Newton, we could go on and on. We’re grateful for our late brother in the Lord, and we should say leg as well. You can’t understand or appreciate Tim’s ministry apart from Kathy. What a dynamic duo they were, and I’m so grateful to her for just enabling him to have such a fruitful ministry over the course of all those decades. Well, thanks for tuning in to this episode of the everyday pastor. We hope it’s been encouraging to you. We hope it may even prompt you to dive deeper into Tim’s work as you think about how the gospel applies to all of life, please take a moment to leave a comment or review so that we can keep helping pastors find fresh joy in the work of ministry.