A Transcription of Tim Keller's "Beholding the Love of God"

Transcription:

The passage the teaching is based on is printed in your bulletin. It’s a 1 John 3 and we got a long section, fairly long section printed there but tonight we are just going to look at the first verse and even, well, the first verse. Because as we begin looking at this section last week, what you have in this is an outburst. John the Apostle is writing a letter, a letter of instruction, when he gets to this spot he suddenly has an outburst. Let me read it to you and then we are going to look at it. And he says, “how great is the love, the Father has lavished on us that we should be called Children of God and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us, is that it did not know Him. Dear friends now we are Children of God in what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know when he appears we shall be like Him for we shall see Him as He is. Everyone who has this hope in Him, purifies Himself just as He is pure.” But let’s just take a look at this outburst. “How great is the love of the Father that He has lavished on us, that we should be called Children of God and that is what we are.” Now let’s put this in context. John when he writes this letter, we’ve been looking at this letter ever since last September, he’s an old man and he’s an old man who’s a rather extraordinary old man because only one thing matters to him. You know, some of you probably heard this before, John, there’s an interesting letter, pardon me, there’s an interesting historian named Eusebius who was from the 3rd century A.D., he was one of the first church historians of the christian church and he preserves a story about John’s ministry and the last years of his life, it’s very intriguing, it’s not in the bible, it’s in this particular history and I have used it before but it gives you, it sets things well for understanding him. According to Eusebius, this, John had a, as an old man, had won a man, a young man to Christ and was discipling him and he was about to go on a trip, and he was about to go out traveling, he said to the bishop of the town, please take care of that young man. So when I get back I’ll take up the discipling again and take care of him and then he went on his trip. And he came back and he said to bishop, “where’s that young man I have left in your care?” And the bishop said, “oh last he’s dead.” And John says, “what do you mean?” And the, according to Eusebius, the bishop said, “well he is dead to God.” In other words he has fallen back in with old friends and he’d gone back into a life of crime and now he lived as a leader of a band of robbers up in the mountains where no one can go because if anybody try to get near the hideout they were killed. So he says “he is dead to God.” According to Eusebius, at that point, John ripped his cloak in an effort, in an expression of grief. And he says, get me a horse. So this old man gets on his horse and rides up into the mountains where it’s death to go. And when he gets up there, of course the robber who keeps watch come out and they grab him and he says that’s ok I wanted to be captured. Take me to, the leaders. Take me before the judgement seat. And so they bring this old man and they bring him to the leaders and one of the leaders of course is this young man who immediately recognizes him and this is what Eusebius says, he says, “at that point, this young man, though armed began to run away.” He took off. This old man John runs after him and he cries out, “why flee from me? I’m an old unarmed man, don’t you see there’s still hope of life for you. I’ll gladly suffer death for you as the Lord suffered death for us. I’ll give my own life in an exchange for yours. Stop! Listen, trust me.” And Eusebius says, “hearing these words, the man stopped, he hurled away his weapons and trembling, began to weep bitterly and he came back.” Now if you knew a guy like John, you would say, “man where do you get that kind of guts? Where do you get that kind of freedom? Where do you get that kind of confidence, that kind of courage?” Where John explains it. And in the book of John, that we’re reading, in the very first four verses, he says what the secret is. He says, “we have fellowship with God.” You can the eternal the God, not just know about Him. He says, you can know the presence of His glory in your heart and soul and if you know God, you have an impregnable, unassailable, joy, that nothing take away from. There’s nothing that can bother this, there’s nothing that you have to worry about, if you have this you can face anything. I’m an old man says John in a sense and I know how many problems can happen in life but if you have this, you’re not afraid of anything. And so the whole book of 1 John, is about what it means to know God and in the first chapter he shows us how to know God by receiving the gospel, Christ is savior, we talked about that, september and october and then in most of chapter 2 is about how you know you can know God. But here at the end of chapter 2 and into chapter 3, he starts to explain why it’s possible to know God. And we looked at this a little bit last week in verses 28 and 29, he says, knowing God is not a matter of just efforts and mechanics, it’s not a matter of trying harder, you have to be born again and adopted into his family. And then all of a sudden, John begins to emote, he’s instructing us, you know he’s going through, he’s being a good teacher, he’s instructing us but all of a sudden he begins to emote. You can’t too well from the translation that we have here. They do use an exclamation point to get the thing across but at the very top of chapter 3 verse 1, John says, “behold, behold how great is the love that the Father has lavished on us.” Now there’s a subject to this outburst and I want to look at that for about 90 seconds, but then I want the fact of the outburst, what does the fact of the outburst teach us? Why does he suddenly begin to emote? The fact of the outburst tells us a great deal about what it means to know God. See the subject of the outburst is a truth, what is he looking at? He says “how great is the love the Father has lavished on us that we should be called Children of God and that is what we are”, now there’s a truth there. As a teacher there’s something there. First of all this word lavished. It’s an odd word to used used with love because it’s a word that literally means to make a present to bestow on someone. In the old King James Bible, it says “behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed on us” and it’s a little odd because ordinarily the word love is something that, you say “I love a person” you don’t usually say “I bestow my love on them” because the word bestow means to give something to someone in an event and the only human analogy we’ve got is this, marriage. You know, you might be in love with somebody and you're loving them but at a certain, you summon up all of your love and you stand before your friends and your family and all of the authority structures of heaven and earth. That’s what you do and you bestow your love on someone, in other words you give your love to someone in such a way that it permanently changes their lives and yours. And so you know, there’s a sense in which God is love and He loves all of His creation and He loves all people in a sense but to be a Christian is not simply to have God love you in a general sense. To be a Christian means there is a moment in which, you cross a line and God actually brings His love at a certain point in time into your life and it changes you forever. It revolutionizes you and what is that? Well, it says, “how great is the love that God the Father is lavished on us that we should be called Children of God and that is what we are”. Now to some degree there’s a repetition there. That we should be called the Children of God and that is what we are but if you look carefully it’s not just a repetition. First of all it says, when God bestows His love on us, He calls us children of God, which means that it gives us a name, He gives us the status, we’re adopted as Jesus puts it in John chapter 17, “Father I want you to love them even as you love me. I want you to wipe out their sins and I want you to receive them as if they were me. I want you to bring them into your family.” So we’re called Children of God, we’re given the title but then John goes on and says, “we’re not just called Children of God, we are!” “We’re not just legally Children of God, we’re actually children of God.” It’s not just that we’ve got the status but God actually puts in us the nature of a child, we’re born again, he gives us his divine nature, the family like-ness his own power comes in and begins to transform us into the image of the Father. And so there’s a moment, being a Christian is to receive God’s love in such a way that you’re legally, your status has changed, so that your sins are wiped out and he accepts you as perfectly righteous in his sight and you're also renewed on the inside. You’re born again, that’s what it means to be a Christian, ok, that’s the truth but what I think is so instructive here and when I want to meditate on with you, is not the subject of this outburst, but the fact of it. Why does he suddenly go crazy? Why does John suddenly go ballistic? What does it teach us? It teaches us three things about knowing God. Ok first, it shows us the way to know God. You know, I’ve been talking about this, I try my best to talk about this, what does it mean to know God? See John is saying, it’s not enough to know about God, you have to know Him. It’s not enough to understand certain truths, being a Christian isn’t that, it’s to personally experience God. And it’s only right for people to say, what the heck does that mean? What do you mean? What’s so wonderful is John doesn’t just tell us to know God, he does it in front of us. Do you know what he’s doing in verse one? He’s doing it. He’s knowing God, right before your eyes and if you see what’s going on, he’s talking about God in all of sudden he’s knowing Him. He’s saying, you know we’re born again, we’re brought into the the family of God and then suddenly he says, “behold.” Now what is going on is this, this is the so wonder, if you look carefully you’ll see this is what it means to know God. Knowing God is when the truth overflows the mind into all the rest of you. Is when the truth about God or the truth who you are as a Christian, or the truth about Christ or when the truth which you got, you know here’s the truth is that, “ok, I know the truth but when in all of a sudden makes your rationality go crazy. So your rationality can’t handle it anymore and it just bubbles up and it flows out. It goes ballistic in your life that you can’t keep it in your mind anymore. It flows out into your feelings, it flows out into your will, it flows out into every part of you. What it means to know God is when the truth overflows into all the rest of you, out of your mind and everything else. When you don’t just know but you see it. See, he doesn’t just say, “I know that God has done this”, he says “behold”. It’s like when the truth goes through your life, the way lightning goes through a lightning rod. What are we talking about here? Well, when you can actually see him do it! You can see him, look, look kind of carefully. What does this mean, he says, “how great, behold, how great is the love of the Father that we should be called this and we are, we are, we are”, what’s going on? Knowing God, Paul talks about it, we looked at this couple, you know every year we look at it at a certain point but let’s think of it this way. Knowing God is where the truth, there’s movement from analysis to intuition. The truth moves from something you just understand to something you stand under. It moves from something you know about but then it overshadows you. It moves from, from something that you’re detached. You say, “I know about it in a detached manner”, you see the connections. And you start to say, if this is true, oh my gosh if this is true, how can I be worried about this? How can i be angry about that? How can I be depressed about this? How can, how can I be afraid of that? You knew it. Here’s when you know you’ve moved from knowing about God to knowing God. It’s when the truth suddenly some truth that you’ve known a lot, you know you’ve known that idea before, it suddenly seems on the one, at the very same moment, like something so ancient that you’ve probably never not known it and yet at the same time, you’ve never known it before. It’s like you’ve first perceived it this very second. It seems absolutely new. When you take a truth, it might be a bible passage, it just might be some principles of the Christian faith that you’ve heard, maybe you’ve heard all your life, and all of a sudden it gets more ancient and more knew at the same time. It just get’s absolutely astonishing. It moves from the mind to the heart, it moves analysis to intuition, you see. It moves from understanding to standing under. It moves from seeing in a detached way and to seeing how it connects with everything. Behold, it moves from just knowing to be holy. You know, it’s hard for people to understand this today because since the 1960s, whenever, I read books, whenever people talk about a mystical experience, and when I was a student in college in the 1960s, there was all this difficulty that people had with what they call, “Plastic Culture”, and it talked about organization man. You know the person in the, you know grey flannel suit who went to work everyday and everybody looked the same way and everything was mechanical, everything was robotic, everybody knew their place. Ah they said, “what we need is experience. We need experience and they turned to the east. And they turned to the pagan.” Old Greek Roman pagans and see you there's a kind of mysticism that says if you want to experience the infinite, it has to be anti-rational, or awe-rational. That’s not the way the christian experience works at all, that’s not the way knowing God works. It’s when you take a truth, you don’t say, the important thing is not to study the bible, study all this doctrine, that’s not the important thing, I want to know God. There’s no other way to know God. The way you know God is when the truth makes you go crazy. When the truth goes ballistic, when it overflows into every other part of your life. That’s the important thing, it’s more than rational you say “behold!”. Thomas Goodwin put it many years ago this way, “here’s a child, he says, imagine a little boy walking along with his Father. This boy knows that the Father loves him. This boy knows that he is the son of the Father. But then all of a sudden, the Father picks the boy up, hugs him, kisses him and whispers in his ears, I love you and I will do anything necessary, even die if necessary to give you anything you need and the boy weeps.” What’s going on there. Is he getting any new information? Is he more of a son than he was before? Does he know anything new, not a thing. He doesn’t get any new idea but he gets an idea becomes new. He doesn’t get new information but the information becomes new. He experiences and see, what it means to know God is you feel his hug. What’s going on here? Behold, John is being hugged. In another way to put it, is the truth gets radioactive. Last couple of weeks, you know you can’t control this, you can’t control this, the last couple of weeks something that’s been going on and Kathy in my life is the particular doctrinal truth that we know, I talked about it two weeks ago. Two weeks ago we talked about a kind of Christian theory of art. And the Christian understanding of art is a very profound one. The Christian understanding of art is, all good stories, all the stories that we love, all the stories that move us are really about Jesus. The great thing about being a Christian is that every stories is two stories, every song is two songs. Think of it this way. Are you a Christian? Then you know what? We are going to fly like Peter Pan. Are you a Christian? Then there is a handsome prince who will kiss us and wake us out of sleep. Are you a Christian, then some day, someone will, a beauty will come and kiss us and though we are beasts, make us something gorgeous. You know in the Beauty and the Beast, that Walt Disney movie, when you see the beast, suddenly who’s dead, picked up, remember? And all the lights starts to hit it and he’s transformed into this gorgeous prince and no Christian cannot look at that and say, that’s what’s going to happen to me. Beholding the Lord as in a glass, we are transformed from one degree of splendor to the next, right here! Beloved, we don’t know what we are going to be! But we know, that we’ll be like Him. For we shall see Him as He is. We’ll be transformed, there is a beauty that will kiss us and make us be so gorgeous. There is a superman who comes from another planet into this world with supernatural powers, don’t you see, every story is true. This isn’t symbolic, this isn’t fantasy, if you’re a Christian, this is your literal future. Everyone of those stories. Now. I’ve known that for years but lately it’s so radioactive that Kathy and I almost can’t even think about these stories without choking up. For the time being, this is something that God is showing us. Your mind goes crazy and it flows out of your brain, it flows out of your rationality. You know, it can be very strong, or it can be very weak, it’s subject to degrees. I remember years ago, when we are living in Philadelphia, I was a teacher and in the morning, I would, Kathy would go off work early and I would send the kids off to school and I clean the house up in the morning. And I had a record on and it was a Christian musician and he had put the music, Isaiah 53 and the song went like this, it’s from Isaiah 53, we’re still talking about Jesus and it says “and the results of His suffering, He shall see and He’ll be satisfied.” And I was, I don’t know I was emptying the dishwasher or something and I wasn’t have a quiet time, I wasn’t sitting, I wasn’t even think about this. And then all of a sudden I said, “wait a minute, the results of His suffering, He shall see and He’ll be satisfied?” Wait a minute? Jesus Christ suffered infinitely, Jesus Christ suffered an infinite debt. He suffered the debts that we will never know about. What could be so valuable to Him, what could be so satisfying to Him that it would be compensation for that? Think of His infinite agony, think of His infinite torment, what could be so satisfying and fulfilling and valuable to Him that He could look at it and say, “it’s all worth it.” Me! You! If you’re His. In other words I said, wait a minute my forgiveness, my healing, he looks at me and he’s satisfied? He gets joy, he’s consoled for that? And I said, “wait a minute, my rationality started going crazy.” I started not just knowing this, I’ve known of course I’ve known this, I was teaching at a seminary, I started beholding it! And I said, “wait a minute, this is true, why am I bored, why am I unhappy, why am I worried and why am I mad?” You see? And I knelt down! Now you can’t program that! Now you can’t say, “give me that record please.” I can’t even get it out! It doesn’t help anymore. You see, He’s not a tame lion. You don’t have Him in your pocket. This is the adventure of Christianity, Christianity is not a code. Sometimes, you’ll have a quiet time in the morning and it just warms your heart for a little bit, other times the truth will bubble up and it will overflow your mind, it will electrify every part of you and you’ll never forget it. Somebody says, “how does that happen?” You have to seek it. You have to know it’s possible. You can go back into chapter 2. See John actually says, “if you’re not experiencing God like this, well, if you’re not experiencing God, He says are you obeying God?” Remember the three tests? Are you obeying God, is your conscious clear? If you are obeying God and your conscious is always bad, you’re never going to experience this. And then he says secondly, do you have fellowship with other Christians? Are you praying with them, are you talking with them, are you building each other up? If you have fellowship with other Christians, if you're living your life in isolation, you’re never going to experience this. Then he says, take the doctrine. Study the truth. Sit down and reflect on it. Ask God to show it to you. And at some point you’ll behold it. Now the second thing and I only have time for the second thing. First thing it shows us, this great outburst shows us what it means to know God, is to have the truth, not, this is not anti-rational, the truth makes your rationality go crazy and it flows out into all the rest of your life. And you feel you’re in His embrace. You can know Him and you know Him through the truth through beholding these truths. Secondly and this the only other thing we can talk about. The way, I said that’s the way of knowing God, well the mark of knowing God is that you see God’s love for you is a miracle. You notice this, it says, “how great”. Now here we go again with translation. In the Old King James it says, “behold what manner of love.” Here it says, “behold how great is the love.” There’s a greek word that’s used here that they’re translating as “great” and the problem with the word is, it’s an idiom. Idiomatic expressions are very hard to translate literally. We have an idiomatic expression, “it’s raining cats and dogs”, ok? So if you’re trying to translate that into Cantonese or into German or into Japanese, if you try, if you just say literally in those languages, it’s raining cats and dogs, they’ll look at you, what are you talking about? You’ll have to find an idiomatic expression that is sort of, is a parallel or you know coordinate to that. Well literally it says, “behold, what country does this love comes from?” The word means, “from what country does this love come?” What it really saying is, from what planet? How unreal! Off the scale! Remember in the, well you wouldn’t because hardly anyone saw this. There’s a movie, The Fisher King. Amanda Plummer plays this real klutzy, mousy, wallflower. Has no friends. Robin Williams takes her out. At the end of the day, he says, “let’s come in, I want to talk to you and she says, uh uh uh uh. If you got to know me, you won’t like me. I’m tired of rejection, it was nice to go out, but everybody who gets to know me doesn’t like me so thanks.” And Robin William says, “I do know you. I know that you think you’re awkward, I know that you think you’re clumsy, I know that you are that clumsy but I want you to know that I know who you are and I love you and I will never leave you and I will never forsake you.” And she looks at him and it’s as if she’s looking into the heart of which she thought was an enemy and she sees their understanding and love and she says, “are you real?” This is a miracle that you love me! Now, this is saying, this is the way you can tell whether you’re a Christian or just a moral person. Whether you’re a Christian or just a religious person. A real Christian is a person who says, “it is an absolute miracle that God loves me.” It’s just a miracle that I’m a Christian. This is actually an asset test, let me just, let me just lay it on you here. There’s two kinds of people that go to church, there’s two kind of people. There’s religious people and then real Christians. And the way you can tell the difference is, a real christian is somebody who sees everything that comes as a gift. In other words, a real Christian sees that you’re totally indebted to God but a religious person is someone who’s working hard and making an effort and trying to be good and going to bible studies and just saying no everywhere, you know and denying themselves a lot of pleasure and so forth and a religious person who is someone who is trying to put God in their debt. That’s the difference. A religious person who's trying to save themselves through good works. Religious person is somebody who puts God in their debt, thinks God is in their debt because they tried so hard and a Christian is somebody who sees themselves in God’s debt. Now, here’s the asset test, if you’re a real christian there’s a spirit of wonder that permeates your life. You’re always saying, how miraculous, how interplanetary, how unreal, you’re always looking at yourself and saying, “me a Christian? Incredible! Miraculous! Unbelievable! A joke!” But a person who is trying to put God in your debt, there’s none of that spirit of wonder at all. See for example, when you show up to get your paycheck, I’m assuming that all of you, you know you work hard for your work, you know you work hard for money and you show up and you get your paycheck and what do you, do you say? “HuHhhh?! Behold! You paid me! You’ve given me money! Oh! Are you real!” No you don’t do that, you say, “of course you’ve paid me, I worked. Sure you paid me, of course.” Now, if you ask a religious person, a person who doesn’t understand the grace of God. You say, “are you a Christian? And I saw of course I am.” I’ve always been a Christian. Sure I’m a Christian. My friends if you’re a Christian, there’s no sure about it and there’s no of-course-ness about it. Not a bit. Let me give you, the asset test is, your spirit of wonder stays there even when things go bad. You see when things go bad, when problems happen, here you can tell a difference between a moralist and a Christian. A moralist says, “what good is all my religion, what good is coming to God? What good is all this, I tried hard to be a Christian, I’m trying hard to be obedient to God and what good is it? God owes me!” and you see you get mad! You say, “I’ve been trying real hard and now, look what’s going on in my love life, look what’s going on in my career”, and you get bitter, why? Because God owes you. A Christian keeps that spirit of wonder, a Christian says, “uh, it's just a, yeah my career hasn’t gone to well, my love life haven’t gone too well but it’s astonishing. It’s amazing that God is as good as He is to me. It’s all grace, it’s all grace.” That spirit of wonder. That sense of being a miracle. That sense of everything that comes to you being an absolute mercy. That’s an asset test. In fact, I mean in some ways I’ve made a dichotomy that’s a little bit unrealistic. Christians to the degree that you behold the free grace of God. To the degree that you meditate on it and you let it become a holy fire in your heart. To the degree that you experience in a sense and behold the love of God, to that degree, you’re going to find that difficulties you’ll be able to say, “oh well my Father must have a purpose here because He loves me. And besides that, He doesn’t owe me a good life. He owes me a far worse life than that I have got! You can handle anything!” And when good things come, you say, “behold! what a miracle!” And the very fact you can get up in the morning and say, “I’m a Christian, who would’ve thought it.” There’s a spirit of wonder about you and if you lost that, you’re slipping back into moralism, you’re slipping back into thinking, “oh I guess what it means to be a Christian is to do.” Here’s Christianity and can it be? That I should gain an interest in the savior’s blood? Died, He for me? Who caused His pain? For me?! To Him to death pursued? Amazing love, how can it be? That though my God should die for me? The results of his sufferings shall see and be satisfied, the wonder is a mark that you know the Lord. The ability to handle anything with that sense of almost childlike wonder, a sense of being a miracle that tells you that you know Him. Let us love and sing in wonder. Let us praise the saviours name. He has hushed the law’s loud thunder. He has clinched Mount Sinai’s flame. He has washed us with His blood. He presents us to God.