Sermons by Tim Keller, founder of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in NYC and NY Times best-selling author of ”The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism.” For more sermons and resources, visit www.gospelinlife.com.
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In religion, God is useful. I obey because he's useful. Why? My obedience is useful. I obey. If I obey, then God will give me things. God will bless me. He'll answer my prayers. He'll keep my give me good health. He'll he'll take me to heaven. I obey because God is useful. But in Christianity, you obey because God is beautiful. You don't obey him to get things because in Christ, you've got everything. Why are you obeying him? Aesthetically, you're praising him. You know, c s the way c s Lewis puts it is, in his famous, place in in, Reflections on the Psalms, he says, when you see when you hear a piece of music, or you see a beautiful sight, or you feel like you've got to grab somebody else and praise it with them. You grab your friend and you say, look at this. Isn't this great? Why are you praising it? Because it's beautiful. And the more you praise it, the more you enjoy it. Isn't that right? The more you praise it, the more you enjoy it. And the more you say, look at this. This is great. Look at the lines. Look at the colors. Look at this and that. The more you praise it, the more you're enjoying it, the more the other person enjoying it. Right? What do you why are you praising it? Does it need it? It just it's beautiful. An end in itself. It's Lydia had a God who was useful. But that day, she received a God who was beautiful. On that day, did she before that, she was not bearing false witness, not committing adultery, you know, honoring her father and mother. Observing the Sabbath. And after salvation, what happened? After the gospel came in, what what what happened? Did she start lying? Did she start committing adultery? Did she no. Well, there's no difference. All the difference in the world. All the difference in the world. It's not a burden. It's not crushing. She's not doing it because God is useful. Now she's doing it because God is beautiful. She obeys to enjoy
And suffering and tragedies that come upon us. And how you handle yourself in the storm is crucial to knowing who you are to seeing what your character is and to recognizing how you're going to address and navigate, life itself Now, Luke was actually in the boat. As you can see all the references to We, you can see that we passed to the Lee of a small island you know, we did this. We did that. Luke was there, but there's that's still the question is, though, why did he include this this account. And why was it so long? What is he trying to teach us? And he's teaching us about the problem of evil and suffering. Let's take a look at what he teaches us under 3 headings. He talks about the paradox of the storm, the product of the storm, and the presence in the storm the paradox of the storm, the product of the storm, and the presence in the storm. First, the paradox of the storm. Now, you remember the 2 dominant schools of philosophy at the time of Paul at the time of the early church. We mentioned them when we looked at, act 17. It was the stoics and the Epicureans. The stoics were absolutely fatalistic. They believed that everything was fixed, and it didn't matter what you did So their favorite story is edifice. Remember, edifice, it was it was fated to kill his mother and kill his father and marry his mother. And in spite of everything he did to avoid that and everything, everyone did to avoid that he ended up killing his father and marrying his mother because it was his fate, and it doesn't matter what you do. The fate is fixed. On the other hand, the Epicureans or the opposite, the Epicureans believed the history was random, and it was completely up to you through your choices to create the history and the life you wanted. Stowics believed, therefore, suffering needed to be embraced and accepted. And Epicure
Polytheistic religion believed that gods could become human, take human form that is, and eastern religion was pantheistic and they believed that God was in everything. So eastern religion believed that God could take human form and western religion believed that God could take human form but the Jews did not. Because the Jews were the only monotheists in the world at that time and they it was under penalty of death. Jews would not worship any created thing, any physical being and certainly no human being. And yet, even though they would have been the last people on the face of the earth to do so, within days after the death of Jesus, they were worshiping Him as god. They were worshiping Him as God. Now now now realize this, is it possible that Jewish people would have said, oh, we follow Jesus and we like to think of Him as better than Moses, better than Abraham, better than Confucius, better than Plato, So let's just start to say he's God. No, they would never have done that, never. They they wouldn't they couldn't it wouldn't have occurred to them. They were incapable of that. Well, then why did they start to worship him as God? Well, you know what they said. We saw him. We saw him raised from the dead. He ate with us. He spoke with us. We saw Him over and over and over again for 40 days. It was unmistakable. It wasn't a hallucination. It wasn't an oaks. That's the only possible reason that we as Jewish men and women would worship a human being as God. It's an implication. We didn't think this up. It wasn't just an act of arrogance. It wasn't overreaching. We would never have believed this except we had to believe it. You would have too if you'd seen him. So don't you see to say Jesus Christ will not sit in a row with the other founders of world religions. He won't sit in a in a row because none
Mars Hill in the Areopagus. Now what we actually see in this text is three aspects to the persuasive power of the gospel, that power that was so persuasive it changed that whole culture. And those 3 parts of the persuasions the 3 parts of the persuasiveness of the gospel is its cultural, its intellectual, and its personal persuasiveness and power. We see here the cultural power of the gospel, the intellectual power of the gospel and the personal power of the gospel. Let's look at them and they come just as we go through the text. First of all, you have the cultural power of the gospel. Paul was waiting in Athens and he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the God fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace, day by day with those who happen to be there. Now Athens was, though it was no longer, a military power, it was, you know, the chief city of Greece, but it was conquered by Rome. But it was still the intellectual and cultural center of the Roman Empire, the whole Roman world. That's where the intellectual elites lived. And the center of the cultural center was the agora. Now this is translated marketplace. The agora was the marketplace. But trouble is in English, the word marketplace just gives us the impression of something like a a shopping district. But boy, it was a lot more than that. When Paul went to the agora, he was going to something far more than a shopping district. First of all, it was the media center. Because how before newspapers, televisions, radio, how did you get to know the news? You had to go to the Agara, where the heralds were each day, giving the the bulletins and announcements. So it was the media center. It was the financial center because you didn't you didn't even have paper money. You certainly didn't have the normal ways of doing ways we have now of communication. So it was the it was the stock market. You this is where the investors met the business owners, and
Coon, famous book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He, he talks about the fact that, you know, in the in the middle ages, in the western world, people believed that the earth was the fixed point and that the sun, the moon, the stars, that all other, bodies revolved around the earth. And Kuhn points out the fact that it was for years years years, they were doing astronomy. They were doing they were trying to study what they saw the motions up there. And there was all kinds of information, data that they gathered that didn't fit the worldview, didn't fit their basic construction, their basic mental map of reality. Didn't fit it. But for years, they just screened it out because a worldview is a stabilizing feature, and it just it things that you see that don't fit your worldview, you you sometimes you don't even know you've seen them. You just screen them right out. Or you just won't admit them, or you just discard them, or you just shrug them off, or you just laugh at them. It's very hard to change a worldview, but that's what happened in the 1st century, and here's why. The resurrection. Think. You had 2 basic worldviews among the people there in this story, in this narrative, in this account. The early believers, who were they? Well, there was 2 basic worldviews that they had their feet in to one degree or another. First of all, you had the Greco Roman worldview, and the Greco Roman worldview didn't believe that material reality was a good thing. They thought the spirit was the good thing and therefore, to them the idea of a physical bodily resurrection was absolutely impossible and absurd. When you died, if your spirit left its body behind, that was great. That was good riddance. Why in the world would there be the the idea of a bodily resurrection being a good thing? It's not only impossible, it was absurd. It was a contradiction. So the Greco Roman worldview completely found the idea of a physical bodily resurrection to be impossible. Silly. Ludicrous. The Jewish worldview is a bit different.
