A Transcription of Tim Keller's "How to Change Deeply"

Transcription:

So hold on, I’m at the end of a great morning but a long morning, so my topic this morning as you, “How to Change Deeply”. It’s got to be practical though, I’ll try to end on an inspirational note if I can. But, the order of these talks is crucial. My talk last night on identity, John’s talk this morning on enjoying God, on finding our pleasure in God are, you have to know them in order for me to even bear what I’m about to tell you. You have to understand them to even bear what I have to tell you. Because I want to talk to you about what sin is still doing in your life and unless you have an extraordinarily deep understanding of not only God’s grace but as I’m going to try to show you, unless you are more and more learning to have actually practically enjoy him, existentially learning to more and more love him, and find him more glorious than anything else, that takes time, it takes prayer, it takes worship, it takes years. Unless your doing that, what I’m about to tell you will not make sense. In some ways they are the secret to change deeply. Uh, so let’s remember again, kind of what I said last night, you have to know that you’re in him. When David Martyn Llyod Jones, when he was a minister, you know the great British minister in the middle part of the 20th century in Britain, in London. But when he was very sick, near the end of his life, he was interviewed and somebody said to him, “hey, what uh, it doesn’t bother you that your own the shelf? You used to be, preaching all the time, everyone wanted you to speak, you spoke everywhere, you were writing, you were…” he was a very very prominent and dominant voice of the Christian world and now he was on the shelf, literally, he was shut in, he was sick. And they said, “doesn’t that bother you?” and he looked at them and he said “rejoice not that the demons are subject to your name but your name are written in heaven.” It’s the place where in Luke chapter 10, Jesus sends 70 disciples out and they come back after a day, and they say, this a paraphrase, “wow lord! even the demons are subject to our name.” In other words, he sent them out with miraculous powers and they were going like, “zoop, zipp”, you know and they were healing people and they were casting out demons and they came back and they said, “we’d had an incredible day! We went from success to success! The world, the flesh and the devil they are all in retreat!” And Jesus looks at them and he actually rebukes them and he gives them a command and this is the Old King James Version. He says, “rejoice not that the demons are subject to your name.” I mean you had a great week this week, right? The demons were on the run but next week (laughs*), the demons might come back, and they might overcome you. He says, “you had a good week but what would you do when you have a bad week?” he says “don’t rejoice in that! You know you are going to be up and down, spiritually bipolar.” He says, “rejoice in that your names are written in heaven”, the reason I’m remembering this is because last name at our table this was called to mind; your names are written in heaven, J.I. Packer years ago, I heard J.I. Packer give a talk in which he said, the bible tells us in the Old Testament that the priests, the high priests went back into the holy of holies and he was wearing the ephod, the breastplate with precious stones, precious stones on his breastplate and on the stones were inscribed the names of the tribes of Israel. And J.I. Packer said the New Testament is very adamant on saying that Jesus Christ is our actual high priest, whose actually before the throne of God and I remember him saying, “it’s not too much to consider this, to draw out that, it’s not spelled out exactly in the New Testament but here’s what you need to know, that when you become a Christian, your name is inscribed into the heart of Jesus Christ, bearing on before, bearing it before the Father, when the Father sees your name, He sees an absolute beauty.” And Packer said, “here’s what it means to be spirit-filled; it’s to be melted with the spiritual understanding that that is what God’s see when he sees you, that the only eyes, whose opinion matter in the whole universe, finds you more precious than all the jewels that lie beneath the Earth.” And he says, by living on a platform of that, and by, this is actually really, and by having your heart, ablaze by the fact that God loves me like that and then define your own heart being evoked into love back. And so you find there’s nothing more joyful, nothing more pleasurable than to simply be in love with my savior, my Lord. He says, that’s what it means to be spirit-filled. The degree in which you understand that, to the degree in which you’re living out of that, that my names already written in heaven. It’s not like at the end of life, if I’m really good all my life, God will write my book, my name in the book of life, no your name is already written in heaven, over the breast of Jesus Christ standing before the Father. Now you got to know that, I just spent five or six precious minutes on that. Because unless you know that, you will not have the emotional strength to admit how much sin is still in your life. There seems to be, well, you can read it in the book of Romans, there’s two false approach to spiritual life, the one is to say,”if I live a good life God will accept me. If I live a good enough life, if I’m surrendered enough, than God will hear my prayers and then he’ll bless me and he’ll take me to heaven.” And if your self image is based on you being a good person, a moral person, a decent person, a religious person, a obedient person, I’m a good guy. If that’s the basis of your self image, then when any data comes to you that threatens that self image you’ll screen it out, you’ll go into denial, it won’t be there. And the data that is threatening that self image is the data about your sin. In other words, you’ll be in denial, you will not be able to admit how flawed you are! How much sin is still lives in you! If the basis of your self image is, “I’m a good Christian”, not “I’m in Christ”. That “I’m an obedient, decent moral person”, not “I’m righteous only in Him”. See unless you really know who you are in Him, you will not be able to admit what’s wrong with you. In fact three things, you won’t be able to do. Unless you really know who you are in Christ, and unless you are learning how to, what John said, it’s not just, not just know that God accepts me, but that should be a means to the end of actually having a love relationship with him. An existential joy filled love relationship with him. So to the degree that you move into that, you won’t be able to do three things. You won’t be able to admit how sinful you still are, which is crucial to change, because you got to be realistic. Secondly you’ll be able to avoid the false solution to your sin problem. And thirdly you’ll be able to deploy the true solution. So there’s my three points, let’s run through them. First of all, only if you really understand who you are in him, you’re really grounded in that assurance, number one, will you be able to admit how much sin is still let in you. What do I mean by that? Well, let me give you two verses. Romans 7, verse 18 to 20, Romans 7 says this; Paul says, this is Paul talking, “I have the desire to do what is right but not the ability to carry it out.” And then one or two verses later he says, “now I do what I do not want, because it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me.” So in that section, Paul is talking about the fact that he’s got something in his life that’s keeping him from doing what he ought to do. He calls it sin and he says it dwells in him. Which means, sin is not, something that comes at you from outside. It doesn’t tempt you from the outside, sin is constitutive to who you are. It’s part of who you are. It’s dwelling in you, it’s residing in you. And the other verse which is, to me one of the most bone chilling verses in all of the bible because it’s God himself saying this and God himself using this metaphor. God comes to Cain in Genesis chapter 4, Cain is getting angry, jealous, resentful towards his brother Abel, something bad is about to happen, and God comes to Cain and says, “if you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door. It desires to have you but you must rule over it.” If you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door, its desire is to have you but you must master it. Now first of all, it’s God’s metaphor, first of all he says sin is crouching. Now to be crouching means to hide, to get low so your not seen. And so the first thing God is telling us here, is that your sin always hides itself. Your sin, what’s wrong with you will always, your sin, you’ll generally know about your sins, but they always will appear to you to be less serious and smaller than they really are. For example, in your heart you say things like this; “I’m not irritable, I just have high standards. I’m not ruthless, I’m just a sharp businessperson. I’m not stingy, I’m just prudent.” In other words, “I’m not obsessed with physical appearance, I just appreciate good grooming.” In other words what you do is, sin is always crouching. You never see it. The other thing to know is, the idea of sin crouching down, means God is likening sin in your life to a predator, an animal. Like a crouching tiger hidden dragon. And what he’s saying is is that when you sin, when you are selfish, instead of serving, when you worry instead of trust, when you pay back instead of forgive, when you tell a half truth instead the truth. Whenever you do anything like that, that doesn’t just pass away, sin becomes a reality in your life, it stays with you, sin doesn’t pass away when you do them, they somehow take shape and they shadow you. And they become a presence within your life. It’s not surprising that haters are hated, that cowards are deserted. It’s not surprising that gossips are gossiped about. When you sin, it has a boomerang effect. It stays in your life, it weakens your will, it blinds you more and more. This is the reason why John Owen in his great book Mortification of Sin says, one of the great duties of a Christian, a Christian! Now is, be killing your sin, or sin will be killing you. You need to be constantly after it. Do you see why, by the way, do you see why, in fact some of you are starting feel bad is because, you actually haven’t completely grasped the first two talks you’ve heard here. See if you’d grasped that, now you say, ok this is bad but you know what, this is alright, there is no condemnation for those who are in Jesus Christ. I finally can admit this. And if you can’t, if you say “oh this is making me feel bad, oh this is making me feel bad, you better go back and say, do you really believe the gospel, do you understand the gospel yet?” But once you do, you’re free to admit, “boy I’m a lot worse than I have ever been able to admit until now.” Now here’s the other thing. I told you the first thing, you have to be able to admit, without the gospel of grace of free costly grace, you’re not going to be able to admit your magnitude that sin is still inside you. But secondly, unless you understand the gospel of grace, you’re also not going to avoid the normal way people, most often try to change, which doesn’t work. And what is that way? Most people try to change by just trying hard to avoid the consequences of sin. They try hard to avoid the consequences of sin. And that means you are not going to change deeply. Here’s why. For example, some years ago, first time I’ve realized this. I was a young minister, my church in Virginia, there was a couple that came to me over and over again and they had marriage problems and there was a man in the congregation, it was man who was a husband, he a wife and...He was abusive verbally. He often, often, he didn’t physically abuse his wife, he was very verbally abusive. I remember one day, he comes into me in a panic, because his wife had actually literally left, she just gotten up and left. And he says, “you know what, it’s my mouth, it’s my language, she has told me, you have told me, other people told me, this is awful, this is terrible, I’m really wrong” and he was weeping and he was sorry and he said, “would you call my wife up” and I called her up, where she was staying, they came in, he wept and he wept and he looked very very repentant and she says, “ok, ok, you’ve never admitted this before, you’ve never said this before, this is great” and so she moves back in. And for about five months, six months, he could watch his tongue and then he went right back into it and she did leave him for good. And as I look back, I realize something, at the time I didn’t realize it, and that is, he was sorry, not for his sin, he was sorry for his consequences of his sin. So as soon as the consequences went right away, he went right back into or put it this way. He was sorry for himself! Not for his sin. He wasn’t sorry for the grief that caused his God and he wasn’t sorry for his grief for his wife which meant he didn’t love God or his wife enough to change! He essentially said, “boy, this is going to be embarrassing, this is going to be trouble, this is going to be difficult”, in fact it was a problem with his pride. And because his heart hadn’t changed, what he loved hadn’t changed, he was working directly on the will. And what that meant was, he really didn’t find the sin odious. He found the consequences of sin very troubling. So what he did was he tucked in and he basically what he did cut off, he cut down the tree but didn’t take out the roots. Because the roots was his need frankly as a man to always be respected and to have people bowing and kowtowing to him all the time. And he was a christian up here, but not underneath, see I mean, I remember a man who became a christian when I was in college and I, he was a new christian, we were in college fellowship together, well actually he had been a big man on campus and he was a real real sexually active man and he was very good looking and he certainly had a lot of girlfriends and had lots and lots of sex and lots of affairs and then suddenly he becomes a christian, he comes on into the church into the campus fellowship, and everybody was excited, he by the way cleaned up his life. No, more sex outside marriage, and yet inside the fellowship I remember he was a awfully domineering, and every bible study he always was right. He actually eventually was always basically throwing his weight around it...in hindsight, this is what I realized, there’s two ways to be your own savior and lord. One is to just kind of break all the rules. Why are you breaking all the rules? I remember he once told me, he says, “it wasn’t sex, it wasn’t like I really liked the girls so much as I needed to know I had the power to get any girl in bed that I could.” And he said, “I would after them and once I slept with them, I lost all interest. Because I wasn’t really attracted to them, I just liked the power of knowing that I could get anybody in bed I wanted.” So what actually what made him feel good about himself, you might significance and security is found in power. And he wasn’t a christian, he was very easy to see, oh yeah he’s a self-savior, you know, he’s living for himself. but when he came into christianity, so called, he came in, he was still not really trusting in God for his salvation or Christ for salvation, he still needed that power, he now was just finding a religious way of doing it. He still needed to always be right, be still needed to be in charge, he still needed to be the leader, he still needed people to not be contradicting him. He stopped a lot of bad behavior but he hadn’t changed underneath and new behavior came, new deeper versions of his power idolatry, his need to be in charge, his need to push people around, his need, that was really where his salvation was. Not in Jesus Christ. And he came in and he was a professing Christian and then he said he believed and he asked Jesus into his heart and all that stuff but hadn’t changed, down deep he really hadn’t changed. I don’t know how, it’s kind of difficult at this point to get this across as much as I like to but I can tell you one other thing before moving onto the third, you know “how to”. I have my own version of John’s, John Piper’s story about his wife and about you know, giving her flowers out of duty and how incongruous that is, I didn’t make this one up though, I wasn’t smart enough, I got it from somebody else. I listened to a minister some years ago preaching Deuteronomy chapter 7 where God says, basically Moses says to the children of Israel, God did not set his love upon you because you were one of the greater nations, in fact you were the smallest nations but it was because he set his love upon that you brought you out of Egypt. And the preacher said, “did you hear that circular reasoning?” “Did you hear that circular reasoning?” He said, “God didn’t love you because you were great. You were actually not great at all. You were a kind of, you were a loser country. A loser nation. But he loved you and then he brought you out of Egypt”, it was circular, he says, “basically what God is saying is, I loved you because I loved you because I loved you because I love you.” “I didn’t love you because you were serviceable to me, I didn’t love you because you did this to me, I just loved you because I loved you.” Then the preacher went on to say, “some day your wife is going to come to you and say, “do you love me honey?” and you of course are going to say, “of course I love you sweetheart” and then she’s going to say, “why?~”, “why do you love me?”. And I remember the preacher says now, “be careful guys because everything's in the line now.” And he says, “here’s what you could say, honey I love you because you got a great figure. I love you because we have great sexual chemistry, we have great sexual chemistry. I love you because you’re athletic and we could do all kinds of stuff that I couldn’t do with other women, we could do mountain climbing, we could play tennis. Uh, I love you because you actually have your own career so you bring a pretty good amount of money into the family coffers. Uh, and I love for…” And I remember the preacher saying, if she is stupid, she will start to like what you’re saying for a minute, then she’ll think about it. “What if I don’t want to quit work? What if I gain weight? What if I get depressed for a while?” You see when you say, “I love you because you are serviceable to me, that’s not love.” He says, the only answer for whatever, you know, something you are attracted to your wife to start with, but you don’t love your wife unless you look at her and say, “honey, I love you because I love you because I love you.” That sovereign, electing gracious love. And when God loves you like that, He loves you just because He loves you, He loves you at the infinite cost of his son. The only true response to that, if you think about it and that’s what we try to do in worship and if you cultivate your heart in that direction. The only thing that you could possibly do is to say “God, I love you because I love you because I love you.” “I don’t love you because you give me this or that.” Because if I do that, if I love God because he’s giving me things, I’m not loving him for who He is of himself. I’m not loving him because he’s beautiful, I’m loving him because he’s useful. And as long as you look to God like that, a lot of christians do, they say and this is what John, I think the burden of John’s message this morning, he says “come into Christianity because God gave me a clear conscious, because God gave me help here.” Ok, but what are you supposed to do with that? You’re supposed to say, “now I love you whether or not you are helping me, whether or not you are giving me all these things, I just love you because I love...because you are beautiful to me!” And only when that happens will sin lose it’s power over you, do you know why? See, if this guy had said, “I have a bad mouth, but how could I, how in the world could I treat, not only my wife like that but my God like that, who died so I wouldn’t sin. How could I trample on the blood of Christ?” In other words, if you learn how to convict yourself with your joys, the sin will actually lose the attractive power over you. Otherwise if you only convict yourself with the consequences of the sin and as soon as the consequences go away, you’ll be right back doing what you’ve always been doing before. Because you are still basically into a form of self-salvation. There’s three things you’ve got to do, if you’re really going to change deeply. And here they are, I’ve got about couple minutes for each one. Here’s the three things, number one is that you’ve got to learn, because of the strength you have, emotionally, because you know who you are in Jesus, you’ve got to take a good look at yourself and talk to other people around you and find out what’s really bad about you. And you’ve still got patterns that create certain kinds of sins, you’ve got patterns that create certain kinds of sins. For example, I’ll just read this, some of you are prone to flares of anger, harsh language, and simply being unloving. Some of you, even though you are christians, some of you are prone to be ungenerous with money and too cautious about taking risks of any kind with anyone, some of you are prone to worry and to rash statements and judgements, some of you are prone to stubbornness and not being able to repent and admit when you are wrong. Some of you are prone to jealous, lying and lack of integrity, some of you are prone to manipulating people even though abusing power, you’re not a teamplayer, or some of you are prone to get overcommitted and really comparing yourself to others, some of you are cowards, some of you are divulge of confidences and enjoy confronting with others too much. Some of you are, well...figure out who you are, talk to the people who know you the best, see the kinds of patterns in your life that actually that make you prone to certain kinds of sins. That’s number one. Do you have the ability to do, will you do that? Will you learn? Secondly, learn how to convict yourself with joy. If you just beat yourself up, oh boy you know, bad things are going to happen to you when you are going to do that, but that’s reminding yourself of the consequences of the sin, it’s basically being self-absorbed and self-centered, it’s basically looking not to Jesus Christ but to you know all sorts of other things for salvation, and you will find that even though you might sort of force yourself by a power an effort of the will to stop something for a while, it won’t really change the heart, because the sin itself hasn’t become unattractive to you. Because you haven’t seen it, grieving the one who you love! So what you have to do is to convict yourself with the joy that you have with the gospel. I’ll give you three examples of this. “Oh Lord, when I fall into pride, when I get so upset about what people are saying about me, when I get so upset about losing face I have to remember this, that on the cross you made yourself of no reputation and you gave up all your power and glory for me and the more I thank and rejoice that you did that the less I need to worry about my own honor and reputation or whether people are approving me or not.” You have to catch yourself doing that and pray that. What you’re doing is you are taking a joy, a glory and you’re convicting yourself with it. “Oh Lord when I fall into coldness and irritability with people I remember this, that in the garden just before you died you were so gentle and affirming of us when we went to sleep on you. On the cross you were giving yourself to people who abandoned you and mocked you and the more I thank and rejoice that you did that for me it melts away my hardness heart and makes me able to be patient and attentive to the people around me.” “Oh Lord when I fall into anxiety and fearfulness, I remember that you faced the most astonishing dangers for me. You were torn to pieces so bravely for me so I could be utterly loved and eternally safe in you. The more I thank you for that, the more I find myself being calm because I don’t have to prove myself anymore and that gives me a courage that I never had before.” Do you know how to take what Jesus gives you. The joy, how can I do this sin anymore, I don’t need to do this sin anymore! How can I grieve, how do I, how can I grieve my one I love when he’s given me the very thing that I need, I don’t need to do this in order to get that. Do you know how to do that? Do you know how to connect the glories of the gospel, the benefits of the gospel with the particular sin patterns? Here’s the last thing, it’s not going to be easy, it is not at all going to be easy for you to be this realistic. I think there’s a danger that at first, we hate ourselves, we find Jesus Christ, we realize that God loves us anyway and then to some degree you say, “well I don’t really have to worry that much about these things that are really wrong in my life.” Why did Jesus go to the cross? Why did he suffer all that? You say, well because he loved me, that’s not the only reason because if he only loved you, he could’ve said, hey you’ve sinned but that’s alright, just forget it about it. He went to the cross because the law, his moral norms are so important, and he is so holy and sin is so heinous that he had to die because all sin, has to be punished. He could only forgive you for it because he was punished for it, that’s how bad sin is! And therefore it is not right for you to say, he accepts me so you know I got problems but that doesn’t matter, no, no, no, no, but then you can’t go back and start beating yourself up, you have to use grace on your sin! And you have to say, because Jesus Christ died for me even though I’m admitting I’m doing these bad things, that doesn’t mean I’m stained. What I’ve often found is that people get the idea that their saved and loved by God in spite of their sin and then they kind of diminish their understanding of their sin but if you come on back and say, you know the sin is really really serious but God’s grace is greater, Jesus Christ died to take the stains out of me that nobody else could take...Umm, there’s an interesting story it’s called The Black Bull of Norroway it’s an old scottish fairytale and it’s about a prince who goes into battle and he kills somebody that he regrets and when he gets to him and he can’t get the blood out of his tunic, and he makes a declaration, if there’s any girl or any young women in this kingdom, who can get the stain out of my tunic, I’ll know she’s my true love and I’ll marry her and she’ll be my queen. So all the various girls of the Kingdom try to get the stain out, nobody can do it, but there’s a kind of cinderella kind of person in this story, there’s a girl who's a kind of a slave, works for these other, this evil stepmother who’s got their own daughters. And the girl doesn’t know about the promise, doesn’t know about the challenge. One day she finds this tunic, it’s got blood on it, she washes it and it becomes clean but she doesn’t realize it’s significance of it. There’s this mom, this mother, this evil stepmother kind of person who sees what she did, but she doesn’t tell her, instead she grabs one of her daughter, takes the tunic, goes to see the prince and says, “look! my daughter got the stain out!” And the princes kind of looks at the girl and realizes, wait a minute something's not right here, and eventually the way the story works, it’s a kind of cinderella story, in the end the prince discovers who it really was, who got the stain out. Now was is all that? It’s a fairytale but know? When I first got married, I thought Kathy was the one who’s, Kathy accepted me inspite of my flaws and in some ways she was my true love because she made me feel better but in the end Kathy and I both talked about this and she says< “No, no, no, I can’t do it, Jesus is your true love. Jesus is the only one who could really get the stain out. And Jesus Christ went to the cross to get that stain out.” You need to know that if you are going to face what’s still wrong with you. That he’s taken it all away. There’s no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. So I’m only here to say, don’t be afraid to go back into the muk. Admit what’s wrong with you, use grace on it, don’t be afraid to say, “Oh I don’t want…” If you can’t handle looking at your sin, go back to the grace, the more you see your sin, the more you’ll be forced to see the wonders of his grace, that’s how you change deeply.