On Losing Tim and Why Kathy Keller Published His Sermons on Sin

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0:00:00 – (Kathy Keller): The sin behind the sin or the sin underneath the sin, the desire to be comfortable or the desire to be empowered, the desire to avoid criticism or the desire to be accepted. All of those things are the actual sins, the soil out of which the small actions that we identify as sins grow out of. But it’s the big things that stay hidden.

0:00:39 – (Collin Hansen): Tim Keller preached a series of sermons in the 1990s called the Faces of Sin. It did not go over well with everyone in New York. Angered by the Deemer Presbyterian Church’s liturgical confession of sin, one woman waited until after the sermon and yelled at Tim, quote, neither I nor any of my children will ever confess to being sinners. Well, naturally, Tim’s wife, Kathy, decided these would be good sermons to turn into a book. And that’s what we have in the new book, what Is Wrong with the World? The surprising, hopeful answer to the Question We Cannot Avoid, published by Zondervan.

0:01:20 – (Collin Hansen): There’s a quote here that I think captures the book’s argument, and it’s this quote. When we realize we are not a victim of our circumstances, but a sinner who can call on someone much greater than ourselves to care for us, we can begin to truly live. And that, of course, is the surprisingly hopeful message of the Gospel. Our sin is the problem with the world, but we can all be saved by grace when we confess of that sin, repent of that sin, and trust in Christ.

0:01:48 – (Collin Hansen): I mean, easy enough, right? But remember that woman in New York, it’s no small thing to confess your sin, and all of us must confess our sin. Here again is what Tim wrote. No other religion says that the lowest person in the gutter and the most moral, upstanding citizen in the world are equally lost, equally need to be saved by grace, and can only be saved by grace alone. Well, what an honor to be joined again on Gospel Bound by Kathy Keller to talk about sin, grace, and the Gospel.

0:02:21 – (Collin Hansen): Kathy, welcome back.

0:02:22 – (Kathy Keller): Thank you so much for having me, Colin.

0:02:25 – (Collin Hansen): Now, Kathy, this quote from the book is true to my life and experience. It’s this. If you feel like nothing after you lose something, it’s. It means that the thing you lost was your every thing. It’s sort of a personal question, Kathy, but I’m wondering, how have you walked in that truth over the years, over your life?

0:02:45 – (Kathy Keller): Tim and I used to jokingly quote John Newton where he says the biggest danger of a happy marriage is idolatry. But until he died, I don’t think I realized the depth and the power of that. I don’t know whether even Newton would have. Until you have lost the thing that you have made, the idol. And I certainly did with Tim. It was deep idolatry. And I am so glad I have a savior who can deal with that. I remember as a young Christian, you know, you say, I’m going to read the Bible, and you start in the Old Testament and go forward, bogged down a little bit in Leviticus and numbers, etc.

0:03:31 – (Kathy Keller): But at some point in there, I remember thinking this book needed a good editor because there’s so much in it about idolatry. And we don’t have an idolatry problem anymore. Who has little idols in their house and, you know, burning incense or whatever to them. And that’s just not a problem anymore. And that’s just another example of the Kathy Keller gps, which is whichever direction I’m pointing, go the opposite direction if you want to find the truth.

0:04:03 – (Kathy Keller): Because that was just completely wrong. I mean, God was talking about idols made by hands, but the ones that are not made by hands are deeper because they’re invisible.

0:04:15 – (Collin Hansen): Well, here’s another quote here from the book, and that is, we never see what is obvious to others. How do we build the kind of community. Kathy, and that’s one thing I know with your friends over a long period of time, your church in so many ways, how do we build the kind of community that can help us then with those blind spots? Because that goes back to idolatry, right? So obvious to others, not always obvious to us.

0:04:42 – (Kathy Keller): That is a very hard thing. You’ve heard. Everybody’s heard the little proverb, but you can’t see the forest for the trees. And I think we’re all familiar with sins that are small. If you kick a puppy or if you steal a kid’s lollipop or if you shoplift something from, you know, the Duane read or the Walgreens or something like that, that’s wrong, that’s bad. That was a sin, okay? But the sin behind the sin or the sin underneath the sin, the desire to.

0:05:20 – (Kathy Keller): To be comfortable or the desire to be in power, the desire to avoid criticism or the desire to be accepted, all of those things are the actual sins. The soil out of which the small actions that we identify as sins grow out of. But it’s the big things that stay hidden and to have a church that can help people with that. I think you’ve just got to keep preaching the gospel over and over, and you’ve got to keep saying things like, there’s the sin underneath your sin.

0:05:54 – (Kathy Keller): Tim said it so often that you know, people did say it to one another or they confessed it by themselves. The sin underneath my sin here is not, you know, it is feeling like there was a situation where one woman who did some pro bono work as a lawyer, but she did expect to be compensated somehow, because it was long and arduous, et cetera. But she had volunteered. And the other woman said, no, no, I’m not going to give you anything, and was really pretty catty about it.

0:06:25 – (Kathy Keller): And she was livid, just livid. And she knew you couldn’t take somebody to court if they were another Christian. So she came to the elders and she. She confessed. She said, I think what’s going on, it’s. The sin underneath my sin is that it’s not that I’m angry at not getting paid or thanked or, you know, for the work I did. It’s the sin where I want to be seen as competent and I want to be seen as generous. And I want people to notice that and to be not taken as a person of competence and generosity really hits me where my true sins are.

0:07:14 – (Collin Hansen): Now, here’s a related here, a countercultural statement today. And I’m sure it was countercultural when it was preached at Redeemer, and still maybe even more so, I’m not sure today. But this is again from the book. My problems are because of my sin. The main problem in my life is my sin, not what has been done to me. Now, we know that that’s not necessarily mutually exclusive, that both things can be true at the same time, that the main problem would be this. And then also we can have other problems as well. But I want to focus really on that point, that when we’re looking at our need and our sin and we’re looking at confession, we’re starting with ourselves.

0:07:59 – (Collin Hansen): We’re not always externalizing these problems, but we’re starting with ourselves. I’m just wondering, Kathy, overall, what difference does it make when we approach life this way? My problems are because of my sin.

0:08:13 – (Kathy Keller): I’m sure that everybody. Well, not everybody. I’m sure that many people have heard. I’m sure that you have heard G.K. chesterton’s answer to that question. The newspaper basically put out a questionnaire saying, what’s wrong with the world? We didn’t steal the title from them, but we could have. And G.K. chesterton wrote in, I am signed G.K. chesterton. And, you know, meaning we all are individually, you know, and he was taking responsibility for his contribution to making the world a bad place through his own sinfulness, through his own choices through his own omissions. I mean, the sins of omissions, I think, need to be preached against more than the sins of commission.

0:09:07 – (Kathy Keller): Because the things that you do, you can see them, other people can see them, other people can confront you about them. The things that you’re not doing that you should be doing, the kindnesses that you failed to show and the words of affirmation that you failed to give and the. The generosity that you withhold, all of those things are far bigger than, as I said, kicking a puppy or stealing a lollipop.

0:09:38 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah, I go back to that part of the Anglican liturgy all the time. There’s some sense of delusion, I think, that we have, that we can eliminate the sins of commission. But if you ever think that we can advance toward perfect holiness in this life, it seems like that delusion can be cured pretty easily by considering the sins of omission. How much more loving could we be toward God and to our neighbors? How much more could we do?

0:10:10 – (Collin Hansen): And that’s where all of a sudden, it becomes oppressive and scary to think about how far we fall short of the example that Christ himself gave, let alone the law that is laid out for us in the scriptures.

0:10:22 – (Kathy Keller): Well, I think it’s interesting when you read those verses in Romans, no one seeks God. No, not one. You know, everyone falls short. Blah, blah, blah. I always thought falling short was kind of a lame definition of sin, but when you’re considering the sins of omission, it’s actually perfect because you have failed to do positively those things that God enjoins on you. We. We are kind of aware when we do something negative, but we’re able to sort of gloss over the things that we just have failed to do for God, for our neighbor. I mean, Jesus boiled it down to loving God with all your heart, soul, mind, spirit. I get them out of order.

0:11:08 – (Collin Hansen): Strength. Yeah.

0:11:08 – (Kathy Keller): And your neighbor as yourself. Well, there’s a lot of omission there. All in everybody’s mind.

0:11:15 – (Collin Hansen): All of your heart.

0:11:16 – (Kathy Keller): Yeah, all. All. So there’s. There’s a lot of room for omission there. It doesn’t list a whole bunch of. Not even the Ten Commandments, because it’s all subsumed under the positive things you should be doing.

0:11:31 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah, absolutely. Another quote here from the book and talking to Kathy Keller about what is wrong with the world. A surprising, hopeful answer the question. We cannot avoid what is wrong.

0:11:45 – (Kathy Keller): Actually, that has to be pronounced a certain way. We should have given a little audio clip to go with. It needs to be pronounced what is wrong with the world?

0:11:56 – (Collin Hansen): There you go. That’s right. Little pronunciation guide to go along with it. Well, here’s another part that stood out. The demands of the gospel. This is a quote. Demands of the gospel and its tearing down of our pridefulness are insulting. The outside of the gospel is bitter at first bite, but the inside is infinitely sweet. Again, sort of a personal question. How have you experienced, Kathy, the sweetness over the years?

0:12:21 – (Kathy Keller): Good question. I’ve been heard to say on many occasions that my joy meter doesn’t really go past just contentment. It doesn’t really go all the way to joy. And that, I think was because there were sins of omission in my relationship to God. I knew my theology, I knew I was saved. And you know, let’s get on with the what the to do list for today. There wasn’t enough worship in my life. The sweetness that I’m experiencing now in my later years and without Tim, and I so wish I could tell him about this, is that God came for me anyway.

0:13:11 – (Kathy Keller): He didn’t cast me out. I think any rational person who’s been a Christian for a few years, many years in my case, should be asking themselves the question, have I committed the unforgivable sin? You know, I know all these things about truth and about God’s grace and about Jesus dying for me, and yet I keep on going to the wrong place. I keep on doing the wrong things. You know, God certainly is fed up with me by now, but I don’t often go to Instagram for my theology.

0:13:46 – (Kathy Keller): But I did see a post the other day that said this should be a comforting thought. When God put a calling on your life, he factored in your stupidity. And I could. You could change the word stupidity to sinfulness. I mean, I just did a talk for City to City on eternity and time and all this stuff in it about Jesus being slain before the foundation of the world and the grace that was ours before the foundation of time, and all the things that seemed to indicate, to use a more superlapsarian kind of point of view, which I would never have done, dreamed myself of espousing, but that redemption was always going to be a consequence of creation. As soon as there was something besides God, as soon as there was God and the first molecule, not God, there was going to be a choice in front of people and we were always going to make the wrong choice. So that when Jesus says tetelestai from the cross, he’s definitely saying, your redemption has been accomplished.

0:14:59 – (Kathy Keller): But what if he’s also saying creation has finally reached its conclusion. I have, you know, instead of having the separate categories of creation fall, redemption, restoration, what if it’s all one moment from the viewpoint of eternity? That when the triune God said let’s make a world, the absolute consequence of that was always going to entail the Son voluntarily dying to redeem it. And thinking along those lines has been very sweet that.

0:15:41 – (Kathy Keller): I’m secure. God factored he knew me and put my name in the book of life before I’d done all those stupid sinful things. So it didn’t come as a surprise to him.

0:15:55 – (Collin Hansen): Amen. You mentioned things you wish you could tell Tim. Are there other things?

0:16:00 – (Kathy Keller): Oh, lots of things. Every day. I mean, it’s been almost three years and I still, when I read something or hear something, I think, you know, I want to call him to come in and look at what I’m looking at or see this paragraph that I just read or something and. And I’ve taken to telling myself, if he needs to know, Jesus would have told him. So it’s not like he’s going without this information that you wanted to so kindly impart.

0:16:31 – (Kathy Keller): He might not need to know it from the viewpoint of eternity and glory. So don’t worry about Tim didn’t get to see.

0:16:41 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah, he sees now through a glass clearly, Right. Or face to face, I should say for sure.

0:16:47 – (Kathy Keller): Right.

0:16:48 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah. Another part related in here, in the book, Tim writes, I’ve been fortunate enough to marry one of my Nathans. I wondered if you wanted to talk about what he meant by that.

0:17:01 – (Kathy Keller): I did not know that he said that. I mean, I thought I had heard every sermon that he did, but there are plenty of times I was in the hospital or at home with a sick kid or something like that. And I was surprised when I read that. I hope I was that Nathan for him. And I wish really a lot more people, Tim at the top of the list had been Nathan’s for me. I mean, I used to go on vacation with my really good friends. We’d go to the beach or something and I’d say, now look, we’re going to be together, sort of forced together for a week.

0:17:38 – (Kathy Keller): If you see something I’m doing in my marriage or in my child rearing that isn’t exactly right or it’s not useful or it’s counterproductive, would you please tell me? And nobody ever did. I don’t know if they didn’t believe I really wanted to hear it or they. I mean, it’s not possible that they couldn’t see it. But I really wish that they had been more forthcoming and saying, you know, I’m not sure that xyz.

0:18:07 – (Kathy Keller): I wish that. And this goes back to your question about how do we have churches and communions and fellowships where people really, as Tim used to call it, give each other hunting licenses to say, I think you’re making a mistake here. I think, you know, this is going to take you in a direction you don’t want to go.

0:18:30 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah. I mean, what is it? What do you think it would have helped you with to have more of those? Nathan’s just being able to course correct.

0:18:37 – (Kathy Keller): Or their marriage and my child rearing.

0:18:43 – (Collin Hansen): Oh man. I have to say I did talk in with your friend Louise, hear about one of those with childrearing on a vacation with the kids, and it came out of them giving a hilarious story about the kids fighting and things like that.

0:19:00 – (Kathy Keller): And.

0:19:00 – (Collin Hansen): And then you and Tim being in the front giving a lecture about the gospel to the kids. And I remember Louise saying, I just told them, you guys talk too much. You talk too much to your kids.

0:19:14 – (Kathy Keller): That was true. And I wish she had extemporized on that a little further because in retrospect, we did. We over explained. And my brother in law, Jim Pickert, who I admire enormously, showed me when it was a little bit too late to really do much about it, the bad foundation had been laid. He was very calm, very quiet and he raised those kind of kids, my nieces and my nephew. But we were all at Lake Erie one time and he was setting up a little plastic wiffle ball game for the kids to play with.

0:20:01 – (Kathy Keller): And one of my sons, I won’t tell you which one was, had one of the rackets and was whiffing it through the sand that he was planting the net in. And Tim said, you really shouldn’t be doing that because it’s going to break that racket. It’s not very expensive and it’s going to break and then no one can use it. And this child used to our parenting style, which is you keep saying it in a louder voice and then you start saying, you know, there are going to be penalties and you escalate and they don’t pay any attention until, you know, things are nuclear.

0:20:40 – (Kathy Keller): He just kept doing it. And so Jim, without saying a word, without saying, well, now you’ve done it and now you’re going to take the consequences. He just went from putting up the net to rolling it back up, taking it apart, putting it in the trunk of his car. And this son of mine realized what was happening about midway through the point and started saying, no, no, no. I stopped, I stopped. It’s okay, you don’t have to do that. And Jim’s just saying, no, we’ll do it another day. We can play with it another day. We’ll do something else right now. Just said nothing. And this child grew up in utter. He didn’t remember the incident, but he grew up in utter terror of his Uncle Jim because Uncle Jim was.

0:21:25 – (Kathy Keller): Was a. An unknown adult in the sense that he didn’t have a fix on what he was going to do. He. He just followed through. He didn’t argue, he didn’t try to persuade. He just, you know, there’s consequences. I’ll put it away now. I wish I had known that at the get go.

0:21:50 – (Collin Hansen): I mean, our lives are just simply full of these regrets. And especially I think as parents, it’s unavoidable, even if we imagine it’s not. And I think that leads back to the theme of the book, of the hopefulness of the gospel. We’re condemned in that. I mean, we’re right. We do mess up. We make all sorts of mistakes. We hurt the people that we love the most. And that’s the beauty of the gospel, though, is that there is a provision, the forgiveness of sins and ultimately a resurrection to make all things new in the end.

0:22:22 – (Collin Hansen): So, yeah, it’s bitter because you’ll be condemned. You have to admit a sinner. But it’s sweet because there’s hope on the other side. Hope for change and ultimately hope for redemption. Talking again with Kathy Keller here about what is wrong with the world. There you go. A surprising hopeful answer to the question we cannot avoid. I know, Kathy, you and I have talked about this in some private venues and you’ve written about this as well.

0:22:52 – (Collin Hansen): I’m wondering what are some of the most common ways you think Tim is misunderstood today?

0:22:58 – (Kathy Keller): Well, there’s a whole mythology that’s grown up around Tim saying, oh, yes, he’s winsome, he’s nice, et cetera. But the world has changed, and Tim’s approach is just no longer valid anymore. We’ve got to fight fire with fire. We’ve got to, you know, to man up and, you know, no more Mr. Nice Guy. And I’m afraid I got fed up with that and wrote an article in the goss in the Life in the Gospel Journal, which is easily found by going to gospelinlife.com

0:23:35 – (Kathy Keller): for the winter quarterly. It’s entitled Major in the Majors and But get to Everything. So Tim’s the re. Part of the reason that people think that is they go through the logo software or the sermons or whatever, and they hear Tim, you know, preaching the gospel and, you know, he talks about wrath, he talks about hell, but nowhere near to the percentage that would have satisfied them. And they think he was sidestepping the hot button issues in order to avoid being vilified in New York City.

0:24:19 – (Kathy Keller): Well, the news is, folks, that New York City, when we got here in 1989, was not a nice place. It wasn’t a place where Mr. Nice Guys survived. It was the middle of the, the Jimmy Swaggart and Tammy Faye and Jim Baker scandals. And to use the word evangelist was like death. In the article I mentioned that because Tim was a church planter in the pca, you’re technically known as an evangelist because that means you can admit people to membership without having a board of elders.

0:24:54 – (Kathy Keller): And when Alan heard that, he almost left the church because he didn’t want anything to do with an evangelist. Fortunately, he stuck around. But the thing that people don’t know is that after every sermon for years until he started preaching in multiple sites, Tim would have a Q and A after every service and invite people to stay and ask whatever questions they had that either arose from the sermon or that they just came with whatever whatever.

0:25:28 – (Kathy Keller): And 100 to 200 people would stay after every service and just, you know, for different reasons. Some people had real honest questions. Other people just thought, oh man, this is just too good of an opportunity to pass up an evangelical orthodox Christian standing in the middle of Manhattan saying, hit me with your best shot. And they did. Every single week there would be, you know, some hot button issue and then, you know, the, the foundation hot button issues.

0:26:00 – (Kathy Keller): Do you really believe that Jesus is the only way to get to God? You know, do you really believe that people without Jesus are going to go to hell? Then there were all the subsidiary issues. But often Tim would say, do you think Jesus. In response to a question, he’d ask a question, do you think Jesus rose from the dead? And they’d kind of like, well, that’s not the question I asked. And Tim would say, well, no, you just. Because here’s the thing, if he did, then you have to re examine everything in your life.

0:26:31 – (Kathy Keller): But if he didn’t, then I’m just spouting the hot air and there’s no reason for you to take seriously anything I say. It’s just my opinion. So, you know, you got to figure out first whether Jesus is who he says he is. And Then come and ask that question because it makes a difference to the answer. But he would always answer these questions. He would never shy away from them, no matter how hard it was.

0:26:59 – (Kathy Keller): In fact, I’ll tell you a side story about that. His brother Billy was a gay man who died of AIDS when he was 40 years old, and his partner Joaquin. We would always have dinner with them when we went through Baltimore on our way to the beach every summer. And Joaquin had no trouble with Tim being a Presbyterian minister. But then he realized he wasn’t a United Presbyterian minister. He was the other kind.

0:27:21 – (Collin Hansen): The other one.

0:27:22 – (Kathy Keller): Yeah. So his battle plan every time we had dinner was to come with his whole list of mic drop questions that he would lob at Tim like, I’m gonna get you, mister. You’re not gonna be able to answer this. And it was something that Tim had heard 500 times and, you know, was able to answer gently and persuasively, etc. And it just frustrated Joaquin so badly because he wanted so hard. He wanted so badly to just put Tim in a place that he couldn’t wiggle out of. And Tim wasn’t trying to wiggle out of anything. He just knew that the truth is the truth, and when you say it, that’s all there is to it.

0:28:09 – (Collin Hansen): Are there any other misconceptions that come to mind?

0:28:16 – (Kathy Keller): Misconceptions that come to mind? Tim was a very shy person, and not many people would have ever figured that out.

0:28:33 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah, I think part of that, what comes out there is especially the people who knew him in high school and college and in seminary. That was a common, common theme, and a common theme of why he overcame a good bit of that in ways that he had to in ministry. Was people crediting you in his life to help him in those ways?

0:28:56 – (Kathy Keller): No, no. Now Tim’s. The person who helped him was the Holy Spirit, the sacrifice of Jesus. I did lots of administrative tasks and took a lot of. You know, I paid the car insurance and made sure it was inspected and put new tires on it and took care of disputes with the landlord, etc. But people persist in thinking that I had some hand in writing the sermons. And I didn’t even know what he was preaching on until I got the Sunday morning bulletin.

0:29:36 – (Kathy Keller): So that wasn’t true.

0:29:38 – (Collin Hansen): Well, I think everything I’ve ever heard from Tim say is, God works through means. And one of the, if not consistently, the primary means Tim would often credit was. Was his wife. So, anyway, I think that’s true. Speaking of just your life together, when I Had a chance to be able to write about your ministry. My favorite chapter I think was about the Hopewell years, the nine years there. And was just back there last week before we’re recording this. Happened to be visiting our friend Matt Smethurst up in Richmond and visiting some Civil War battlefield including right there in Petersburg near Hopewell. So stopped by the church there and thought about those nine years. Just wondered if there’s anything else you wanted to share about those Hopewell years, how it shaped your life and ministry together for the rest of your lives in New York and Philadelphia or just your family life as well.

0:30:43 – (Kathy Keller): Oh yeah, quite a bit. The people loved us and they allowed Tim to find his feet as a preacher. He was always good in the pulpit starting at the very first sermon. In fact we were only supposed to be there for three months as an interim and about two months in the search committee who was looking for a more seasoned pastor because they had just gone through a church split based on the. Based on a scandal that had taken place between the former pastor and the former choir director.

0:31:23 – (Kathy Keller): Won’t even go into that. The search committee said why are we looking for anywhere else? Let’s just keep this one. But it was nothing like any of from our background. I mean it was a blue collar town. Everyone in the church, the highest education they had was eighth grade except for two elementary school teachers who had gone to teachers college. And at one point Skip Ryan made the remark that Tim. That Hopewell allowed Tim to learn how to put the cookies on the lower shelf meaning how to make himself clear without using a lot of fancy obfuscating words.

0:32:07 – (Kathy Keller): And I think that’s really true. We were too over over educated northerners and you know, with small groups and intervarsity etc in our background. We came down to Hopewell and the first thing you do is you start a small group program. Well, some of these people were illiterate. One of our elders was illiterate when he had to read the scripture in the service. He got tapes and he memorized what he had to read because he couldn’t actually read.

0:32:39 – (Kathy Keller): And so that was kind of a non starter. Small groups. You know, Bible study wasn’t going to be one of the hallmarks of West Hopewell Presbyterian Church. But those people knew mercy. And that’s where all of Tim’s interest in mercy, his doctor of ministry program was on mercy. His first two books were on mercy Ministries of mercy and how to turn your diaconate into a mercy army of your church. It was like watching a scene out of the movie Witness with Harrison Ford. If there was an older widow in the church whose roof was leaking, come Saturday morning, 8am There’d be 12 pickup trucks parked around her house, and by evening there’d be a new roof.

0:33:28 – (Kathy Keller): And so, you know, the light bulb went on like the deacons are supposed to be the mercy wing of the church. And so West Hopewell Church became known as the church that knew about Mercy. So that was hugely. That was. Had a huge effect on Tim that, you know, you don’t. Word ministry and deed ministry are both part of what Jesus did. And some congregations, you can emphasize one and some the other. I don’t think if you went to Charlottesville, where Skip had his church, you would find 12 guys who owned pickup trucks, much less knew what to do about putting a new roof on.

0:34:15 – (Kathy Keller): It was much more of a word ministry.

0:34:18 – (Collin Hansen): My mentor when I was in college there in Evanston, Illinois, much more like Charlottesville, told me that when he was in rural Minnesota or just kind of exurban Minnesota, he said if you had a problem, people showed up with their pickup trucks to help. Said in Evanston, they show up with a business card for their therapist. The difference, the two places. So I think when I think about Hopewell, that comes to mind. And I grew up in a place a lot more like Hopewell, and it’s a real thing and a real beautiful thing.

0:34:55 – (Collin Hansen): You mentioned, Kathy, just some of the ways that you did not collaborate with Tim on sermons, but when it came to books, you served as his stylist in the transition from an oral delivery to a written word. And I’m wondering if you go back over those books, do you have any favorites from Tim’s books?

0:35:13 – (Kathy Keller): Jonah. I wanted Jonah to be his first book.

0:35:16 – (Collin Hansen): Okay.

0:35:17 – (Kathy Keller): And right now I think it’s the most un. Misunderstood book. Everybody thinks, oh, yeah, the whale, you know, the fairy tale about the whale. That’s not what Jonah is about. The fish gets a mention, but that’s not the point of Jonah at all. And we tried. I mean, we, we. There’s a woman in the congregation that paid someone to try and transition, translate the oral sermons into written. Part of the problem was when Tim would preach, he would preach a sermon, and then the next week he would recap what he had preached the previous week. You know, like on a television series, there was this. There’s always the Skip recap button.

0:36:07 – (Kathy Keller): Well, you didn’t get to skip it. You got to hear it. And by. Tim had usually thought about it and he could put it better in the second sermon. Than he had actually said it in the first sermon and condense it. But that meant, well, what do I do? Do I put in the second chapter, do I put 50% of what was in the first chapter? Or do I go back to the first chapter and alter the first chapter anyway? It went through a couple of different iterations. One of them was me trying to turn it into a readable book. And nobody got anywhere. So he moved on and did. He wasn’t actually worried about it himself. He was thinking about other things at the time, not about having a book published. But when he did Reason for God, it did all those other things. He finally got around to Jonah. And people were.

0:36:54 – (Kathy Keller): People at Penguin were a little. They didn’t really encourage it. They didn’t think it would be a big seller. And it wasn’t because everybody thought, okay, I get the story, you know, big fish, et cetera. And it’s not about that at all. It’s about nationalism and racism and

0:37:18 – (Collin Hansen): enemies. Gospel to the enemies. Yeah, it ended up being a very timely book. 2018 Prodigal Prophet ended up being timely.

0:37:28 – (Kathy Keller): Yep.

0:37:29 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah. Thinking. I mean, I love to answer that question myself because there’s so many different ways to be able to go in so many different kinds of books and so many different approaches and such a wide variety of topical or exegetical different things like that, or apologetic and even more philosophical in some ways, or practical with Center Church. But I’m wondering, are there any books that you wish Tim could have lived to write?

0:37:57 – (Kathy Keller): Well, he had on his way to approach writing a book is, first of all, what. Whatever interested him that he ran across in a magazine or a newspaper article or in a book, he would keep a file on that subject. So there. There were always, I don’t know, 20 or 30 file folders going so that if he felt moved to write a book on that subject, he would have those things to draw quotes from. But when he died, on top of the dresser in the guest bedroom, there were seven, maybe eight piles of books on different subjects, stacks of books, maybe 8, 10 books high of things that he.

0:38:53 – (Kathy Keller): Topics that he was going to turn into book. He had a list of 20 that he was hoping to get to, but he had the front runners in the beginning of the landing pattern was about eight or nine books. And I haven’t moved those stacks. I think the librarian who’s trying to catalog Tim’s library finally did take them off and start putting them in categories. But I just left the stack sit there because I didn’t want to Take them apart.

0:39:25 – (Kathy Keller): Yeah, I wasn’t going to write the book either, but

0:39:31 – (Collin Hansen): any. Any of those that were topics that came to mind that.

0:39:34 – (Kathy Keller): Oh, I don’t even know what the topics were. They were. They were probably deducible. Could probably have deduced maybe one Direction. I mean, he had one stack that had John Owen books, Mortification of Sin, and. And several other of his titles. So that one was probably on how to deal with sin in your life. But, I mean, they didn’t have, like, labels. This is the book on this. This is the book on that.

0:40:06 – (Collin Hansen): Gonna be able to develop some of the transition from idolatry being one of the primary ways that we talk about sin, to the pursuit of identity being one of the primary ways that we talk, we converse in our culture and the way it goes wrong. That would have been one that I would have loved to hear more from him on.

0:40:25 – (Kathy Keller): Oh, I think he was planning on that, actually. He told Francis Collins when we were down at the NIH at the last time, Francis wanted to co author a book with him. And he said, well, Francis, I’m going to work on a book called Identity Received or Achieved.

0:40:44 – (Collin Hansen): There you go. Yeah.

0:40:46 – (Kathy Keller): And he had been preaching on that for a while. He’d done the lectures over in Oxford. He’d been invited by Oikiu to come over and he’d preached on that for a couple of years and done sermons on it. But, I mean, that was probably, if I had to name a book, that was likely to be the first one that he worked on. Had he recovered, that would probably have been it.

0:41:09 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah. Well, we’ve done our best to take some of those conversations that we had with Tim at the Keller center, turn it into our Making Sense of US curriculum, which is building on those cultural narratives. And I know Michael and Tim have a book coming out later this year that’s on some of those same themes on cultural narratives. And no doubt identity is part of that as well. So ways that we can try to help carry on a little bit of that work.

0:41:35 – (Collin Hansen): Well, Kathy, this has just been a delight to be able to talk. Thanks for sharing and thanks for your work on. On this book. What is Wrong with the World? The surprising, hopeful answer to the question we cannot avoid. New from Zondervan. Again, Kathy, just appreciate you. Love you. And just grateful for the chance to talk.

0:41:52 – (Kathy Keller): Thank you very much, Colin.

0:42:02 – (Collin Hansen): Thanks for listening to this episode of Gospel Bound. For more interview and to sign up for my newsletter, head over to tgc.org gospelbound Rate and review Gospelbound on your favorite podcast platform so others can join the conversation. Until next time, remember when we’re bound to the gospel, we abound in hope.