A Transcription of Tim Keller's "The Gospel-Shaped Life"

 

Transcription:

So the first, this topic is “The Gospel-Shaped Life” and I’m looking at that and I’m saying, “why did I ever agree to that?” “The Gospel-Shaped Life,” that’s Christianity. That’s the whole Christianity. So, okay, how long do I have? So, however, I think the best thing for me to do, sometimes, is to give overviews. Sometimes, not the 30,000 foot view but maybe the 50,000 foot view of a subject as vast as this where you can’t drill down very deep into any part of it is nevertheless a helpful thing. So, to talk about “The Gospel-Shaped Life,” I think you have to actually answer four questions. I hope you don’t think I’m going to answer any of them thoroughly but even to show you what the right questions are to ask is important and to give you some ideas of what the answers are. They are important and I hope it will be helpful, too. But the four questions are, okay, gospel-shaped life, you need to know, what’s the gospel? Does the gospel shape a life or not? Because there’s people who argue the gospel doesn’t shape life, the law does. So, what’s the gospel? Does a gospel shape a life? What does the gospel-shaped life look like? And how does the gospel change and shape our lives? So, let’s just go through them roughly speaking. I’ll try to take about equal amount of time on each one.

What’s the gospel?

What’s the gospel? Now, there’s many ways to go with this but I think I should probably press it this way. As I’ve said earlier today, as I often say, one of the best ways to understand the point of the spear of the gospel is to say the gospel is news, not advice. Advice is counsel that you get to help you get something accomplished. News is a report that something has been accomplished for you. It’s already happened in history, and you must respond to it. Essentially all religions besides Christianity and, to a great degree, a big swathe of Christianity is formatted this way, though it shouldn’t be. Religions besides Christianity are all advice. Christianity is news, gospel, good news. Every other religion was founded by somebody. Every major religion was founded by a prophet, or a sage, or a figure who came and said, “Here’s the way to find God.” Only Christianity, of all the world religions, was founded by a man who came and said, “I’m God, come to find you.” Not, “Here’s the way to God,” “I’m God, come to find you.” “I’m God to come and do what you couldn’t do.” Every other religion says, “Here’s advice on how to do what you need to do to connect to God.” Christianity is the other way around, comes down and says, “I’m God, come to find you.” Another way to put it is that the gospel doesn’t come through Jesus Christ, the gospel is Jesus Christ so that Paul can say, you know, “I know nothing. I made it my object to know nothing except Christ and Him crucified.” For a man to say, “I know nothing, but Christ and Him crucified,” is an exaggeration of course but what he’s actually saying is what Jesus has accomplished for us and our reliance on him, that’s the gospel. Now, this is the point of the spear. This is the point of the spear. The gospel takes burdens off. It doesn’t put burdens on. The gospel is not advice, it’s news. Advice puts a burden on, news takes it off. A couple of historic accounts that have meant a lot to me and help me understand this as I was, over the years, wrestling with this. You know, William Holland, most of the people haven’t heard of him but he was one of the friends of John and Charles Wesley, he was one of those early Methodists. He was converted. He was actually converted at the time when the Wesleys were getting converted too. And one of the things they were doing was they were reading aloud from Martin Luther’s commentary on the Galatians. And one night, William Holland got it. And this is his account. You can read this in Arnold Dallimore’s first volume of his “Life of George Whitefield”. William Holland says this, “Mr. Charles Wesley read the preface aloud. And at the words (these are Luther’s words): ‘What, have we then nothing to do? No, nothing. But only accept of him, who of God has made onto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption.’ And at that moment, there came such a power over me as I cannot well describe. My great burden fell off in an instant. My heart was so filled with peace and love that I burst into tears. I almost thought I saw our Savior. My companions, perceiving me so affected, fell on their knees and prayed. When I afterwards, went into the street, I could scarcely feel the ground I trod upon.” The burden came off when he heard Luther say, “What, have we then nothing to do? No, nothing. But only accept of him, who of God has made onto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption.” At that moment, it hit him. There’s an account of a man named Nathan Coles. Nathan Coles was a man who lived in Connecticut in the 1740s, I forget what year exactly and he heard George Whitefield preach and he was converted. And he was barely literate farmer and so his, if you actually ever read, which I’m sure you, Nathan Cole the account, they’re all in caps, like, no punctuation, a little bit hard to read but this is the key spot where he became a Christian. Here’s how describes it. He doesn’t say, “I accepted Christ as my Savior,” though, that’s okay. That’s okay to say. Doesn’t, I don’t think, get the point of the spear. Here’s what he said, listening to George Whitefield, he says, “My hearing him preach gave me a heart wound. By God’s blessing, my old foundation was broken up and I saw that my righteousness could not save me.” There it is. “His preaching gave me a heart wound. By God’s blessing, my old foundation was broken up and I saw that my righteousness could not save me.” Now, the reason I’m stressing this is because it is extremely easy today for Bible-believing Christians, evangelical Christians to fall into one of two forms of what I would call, “advice-giving,” rather than gospel-shaped ministries and lives. On the one hand, you have what “most of us” know as legalism. There are Christian, there are forms of Christianity, there’s forms of Christian, many Christian churches, they do have a high view of the Bible, but they are legalistic. And what they do is they either explicitly, but usually implicitly make everybody in the ministry believe that unless you are incredibly good, unless you follow every one of these rules, including a lot of these extra-biblical rules, unless you live like this, and do this and believe all these things, you’re not really a Christian, which means you’re, they’re putting burdens on! They’re putting burdens on! They’re taking burdens, and they’re putting them on and saying, “If you bear these burdens, then God will be pleased with you,” which of course is losing the gospel. But there’s also, I would say, a kind of liberal evangelical legalism. And that goes like this: it says, “well, now, look we don’t want to talk too much about wrath, and blood, and atonement like that. We would rather talk about the church as a new people of God and there’s a community of love, joy, and peace and justice and to become a Christian, you join the community, and you become part of this community, and you become part of God’s program to renew the world.” And as great as that sounds, it’s a new kind of legalism. Why? Because it’s putting a burden on you again. “You’ve got to not be bigoted. You’ve got to be inclusive. You got to be spreading out. You gotta be loving people.” Charles Wesley, who did eventually figure out the gospel, he actually didn’t understand the gospel when William Holland was getting it. In fact, Charles Wesley still wasn’t quite sure what was going on, but he eventually got it. And, of course, there’s that great line in that great hymn, where he says, “Long my imprisoned spirit lay, Fast bound in sin and nature’s night; Thine eye diffused a quickening ray, I woke, the dungeon flamed with light; My chains fell off, my heart was free, I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.” Now, is that the language of your heart? If you get either of these kinds of “legalism,” is that the…in other words, if you say what it means to be a Christian is you have to love people, and you have to care for them, you have to do justice in the world, and you have to renew the world. If a person says, “Okay! My chains fell off…” No, they’re not. They’re saying, “Okay…That’s great, I’m excited, but it’s a burden!” The gospel takes burdens off! The burdens of your past, the burdens of your guilt, the burdens of your fear of the future, whether you’re going to be there, the burdens of parental expectations, the burdens of…All burdens are taken off. If the baseline of your life is “My chains fell off, my heart is free. I rose went forth and followed thee,” that sense of release, that sense of amazement of grace that only comes when you get the gospel right. And you won’t be shaped by the gospel unless there’s that bubbling joy all the time. And if you have any version of Christianity that doesn’t get you there…if you feel like you can improve on the propitiation of the wrath of God through the blood of Christ, leading to complete freedom from all guilt, if you can improve on that, whatever that improvement is I don’t think you’re going to be singing, “My chains fell off, my heart is free.” You’re not. You’re putting burdens on people. You have to get the gospel straight. If you can sing that, if that’s the language song, if that’s the language of your heart all the time, the baseline background music of life, you’ll have balanced, you’ll have joy, you’ll have power, and you can have a gospel-shaped life.

Does the gospel shape life?

Leads to the second question. Second question is, does the gospel shape life? Now the reason I bring this up…but this of the three, well, no, maybe not, of the four questions, I guess I would like to spend the least time on it, but I think I need to address it. There are plenty of folks who say, “The gospel doesn’t shape the life. The law shapes the life.” That is to say, you have gospel and you have law. We mustn’t confuse them and that’s right and the gospel would save you. You believe in the gospel, and you rest in him, and you’re saved. But then, what actually directs the way in which you live should be the law. Now that I’m saved, see, I turn and then say, “Lord, how can I please you?” And here’s the law, and the law tells you how to live, and that’s how you should live. You know, as far as it goes, that’s actually true that the law is still our guide…as a good reformed Presbyterian I believe that the law of God now, though I am saved by grace, it doesn’t mean that I don’t want to please God. And how do I please God? I look at the law, that’s how to please God, that’s His will. However, it’s actually too neat to say, “the gospel doesn’t shape your life, only the law does.” Not only doesn’t it really line up, there are too many biblical texts that talk about the obedience that flows from the gospel and things like that, not only is it not biblically warranted, but I want to show you that it actually is pretty impractical, too, and here’s why? Let me give you a couple of examples, biblical examples. One example I like to talk about, true story that when I’m speaking on the integration of faith and work, I virtually always use this story. Some years ago I saw a young woman who clearly wasn’t a believer, didn’t seem to know anybody else, would come in and run out at the very end of the service. She looked like a lot of other people that I knew that would do that. And one time I caught her after the service and I said, “Hi” and she says, “well, I come in and now, I’m not sure if I believe what you guys do, but I’m intrigued.” So I basically said, “fine, how did you find out about Redeemer?” and she told me this story. The story is she worked for a network, TV network in New York City and she hadn’t been with the network very long when she made a really bad mistake, a very bad mistake, a career-ending kind of mistake. And she thought she’d get the axe and that would be it. But her boss, who had a lot of credibility, a lot of credibility with his superiors and everyone else, went in and took the blame for her and said, “I didn’t train her. I didn’t prep her. If you’re going to be mad at somebody, be mad at me. Don’t fire her.” Now when he did that, he lost credibility. He lost social capital. No doubt about that but obviously she kept her job and that was over. So she went in to try to thank him, he says, “No, no, no, don’t thank me.” And she wasn’t satisfied, actually with him just saying, “Don’t even worry about it.” She said, “I’ve had bosses in the past take credit for things that I’ve done. That happened all the time. I’ve never had a boss take the blame for something I had done. That’s not human nature. The human nature is to take credit for what the people underneath me have done but if somebody does something underneath me wrong, then you blame them.” So, take credit for what’s good. Blame them for what’s bad. “You took the blame, and I’ve never seen that before.” And so of course, he still was trying to be modest and talking. “Yes, how nice?” But finally, she pressed him enough and he says, “Okay, I’m going to say this once, and you’ve made me say it. I just want you to know, I’m a Christian and my whole life is based on a man who took the blame for me and that actually tends to shape the way in which I do everything in my life.” And she said, “Where do you go to church?” Now, let’s think about this for a minute. Would you say that that man basically was just doing what the law of God requires? Could you say that the law of God requires him to take the blame, maybe even sort of get himself closer to losing his own job? It wasn’t his fault, it was her fault, he goes and takes the blame - Does the law of God require that? And I actually think that if you really really think about it, yeah, if you go down deep enough into the golden rule. Because the golden is there, it’s in the law, you know? Treat others the way you’d want to be treated. And so you think about it, would you want somebody to go in and really take an amazing hit to their own social credibility? There’s a sense in which the law of God would not really require that. It wouldn’t be a sin for him not to go in and take the blame. On the other hand, you could say the law of God requires, but don’t you see, that’s not how he thought about it. He thought about it, he was being shaped by the gospel. And there is a sense in which through the gospel, with the lenses of the gospel, he looked into the law and he saw things that you would never see otherwise. Not only that, he had a motivation. See, the law of God cannot give you the motivation, it can only give you a standard. And he had a motivation now. And as a result, he was gospel-shaped at that spot. A biblical example, Galatians 2 verse 14 and that area and some of you, if you’ve read anything that I’ve ever written on this, you know, I get there eventually. It’s a great example of a place where Peter, being raised as a Jewish man, would have considered the Gentiles just unclean to eat with. He becomes a Christian. There are other Gentiles that are Christians. He’s a Jew and he’s a Christian and yet he can’t overcome the feeling like, “Yeah, you guys might be Christian but you’re still Gentiles.” And he stopped eating. There might be a lot of different motivations for why he stopped eating with Christians who were Gentiles. But when Paul confronts him, he doesn’t actually say, “Peter, you’re breaking the no racism law.” He confronts him and says, “You’re not in line with the gospel.” How can we Jews, who know that you’re justified by faith alone and not by anything we do, how can we look at the Gentiles like this? How can we see ourselves as superior to the Gentiles? Now what is Paul doing at this point? First of all, can you look in the law of God, just the law, and the things that the Bible says, God says, “Here’s how you should live,” and see that the law of God requires that you not be a racist? I think, yes, actually. There’s plenty of places where the Bible talks about not treating people on the basis of race, and not being prejudiced, and not being irrespective of person. There’s all sorts of things like that. But what the gospel does with justification…see racism isn’t simply a breaking of the rule. Racism is motivated by something. What’s it motivated by? It’s motivated by a desire to bolster your own sense of superiority. You’re insecure yourself. You need to feel like, “I’m right and they’re wrong.” And so, there’s all sorts of things going on in the inside. Not only does the gospel…especially the gospel that you’re saved by grace alone, that you are no better than anybody else, that you’re a sinner, there’s no more amazingly leveling thing than that. You know, James chapter 1:8,9, and 10 and that area talks so much about the fact that the rich and the poor. In some ways, now that you’re Christian, if you’re poor, you have to think about your high position. If you’re rich, you have to think about your low position. There’s something about the gospel, the gospel that changes class attitudes and changes racial attitudes. Could you get that out of the law? Yes, but with the gospel and the spectacles of the gospel, you look at the law and you see it in a way you never would have seen before. And there’s a motivation, there’s a deep motivation because of what Jesus did for you. It’s powerful. I can give you a couple more before we move on. Obviously, my answer to my second question is starting to shape into the third question, what it looks like. I find it fascinating that, in 2 Corinthians 8 and 9 where Paul is trying to get Corinthians to give lots of money, lots of money to this offering. He says, “I don’t want to order you. I don’t want this offering to simply be the response to a demand.” I don’t want to order you, I’m not telling you you have to give. Now, he’s got a lot of reasons why he could. I mean, I don’t know where they were on tithing but I do think you can go to the Bible, to the Old Testament, and you can say to Christians, Old and New Testaments, I think you’d make a case, you say that you should tithe. You should give 10% of your income away. That that’s in the law of God. I think Paul here though, well first of all, he’s not going to the law, he actually says it, he says, “Not only am I not going to the law, I’m not even going to my apostolic authority. I could order but I’m not going to order you.” Then, what does he do? He says, “You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes, he became poor so that you, through his poverty might become rich.” What’s he doing? He’s bringing the gospel to bear on those people. See when anybody says, “Oh, the gospel doesn’t shape your life. The gospel is just something you believe in. It’s the law that shape your life.” What is Paul doing? Paul knows the gospel shapes. And, here’s the thing. If you stick with the law, you get the 10% of your income, and you will say, “I’m doing everything God wants me to do,” but in the light of the gospel and of what Jesus gave, and He gave everything, He didn’t tithe His blood. And for Paul to say, “Jesus’ generosity is the basis for your generosity,” blows right past that 10%. It’s got very, very specific ethical, practical consequences, the gospel. You know what, just one more example that I often like to use. In Ephesians 5, when Paul’s talking, especially the husbands, I mean, he talks to wives but he talks more to husbands as far as I can tell. Some of you know, in the last couple of years, I’ve been studying the passage pretty deeply, pretty closely. And to some degree, I feel this - that he was talking to people from a pagan background, in which the husbands were surely being, I don’t think Paul was just trying to say to these men, with a pagan background, “Be faithful to your wives.” I think they probably knew that, but he was going further, and he was saying, “you need to be cherishing them, you need to be loving them, you need to be looking at them and saying, ‘What can I do to help my wife grow and become beautiful and spiritually, and every other way?’” That is not the pagan understanding of marriage - that’s not in the background. Marriage was very often pretty much a business relationship - you married well, you know, for your family, and of course, in rank paganism, you had your wife, and you had your mistress over here. The wife couldn’t do that, she’s not allowed to, that would be wrong. Men could do that. Well, I don’t get the impression that the Ephesian Christians or the people that Paul was writing to were into all that but I think what Paul is trying to say is this, “Don’t be cold to your wife, make your wife…you minister to your wife. Love your wife. Cherish your wife. Make her your best friend.” All of that is alien. Can you get that from the law? Probably, you can get that from the law, but from the gospel, from what Jesus Christ did to us, to say, “Look at Jesus Christ’s spousal love for you. Think of yourself as the bride, Him as the husband, you’re the wife. Look at how he loved you. Now, go and do likewise.” Could you get all of that ethical freight, all that ethical power? Could you get the practical implications of how I should live with my spouse just from the law? No. No. Hey, you want a gospel-shaped life. I believe that the law of God still guides us, I believe I’m still bound to the law of God, the moral law of God and yet it’s the motivation. I’ll give you one more example. Look at Titus 2:11 to 15, where actually Paul says this, “The grace of God that brings salvation teaches us,” the Greek word, paideia, “the grace of God teaches us to say, ‘No’ to ungodliness.” Isn’t that interesting? The grace of God teaches us to say, “No.” The grace. “Now, wait a minute,” we say, “when you tell me that I’m loved and forgiven, no matter how I live, that doesn’t make me want to say no to ungodliness.” That tempts me to say, “Hey, I’m saved. I’m saved, I’m okay. I can’t be condemned. Ungodliness? Maybe, a little, here and there because I’ll be forgiven later.” That’s not how Paul says, Paul says, “If you understand grace,” see he’s talking about costly grace, “you don’t think of grace in the abstract, you think of grace coming from a crucified Savior.” He says, “The grace of that teaches you to say no to ungodliness.” You know, how does that work? Well, like this. There’s a lot of ways to say no to ungodliness. You can say, “No, because I’ll look bad. No, because I’ll be excluded from the social circles that I want to belong to. No, because then God will not give me health, wealth, and happiness. No, because I’ll hate myself in the morning and disappoint myself, and I’ll have low self-esteem.” But you realize what all those motives are? They’re selfish! Everyone of them is selfish! “No, because it won’t pay off for me in some way.” And, you know, if you use a selfish motive to try to keep yourself from being ungodly, when ungodliness is selfishness, basically - it’s a house of cards, and it’s going to fall down. And if you’re trying to keep yourself from this or that temptation just by saying, “Don’t do that. You know you’ll be punished, something bad will happen, people will find out about it, da, da, da, da,” instead of saying, “Jesus Christ died so I wouldn’t do that. For me to do that is like taking Jesus Christ’s blood and throwing it back in His face. How can I treat my savior like that? See, the grace of God does teach you to say no to ungodliness in a way that it makes you really hate the thing out there, that, you know, in other words, sin loses its attractive power. It withers only when the gospel is brought to bear on your temptation. Just beating yourself over the head with bad consequences, telling yourself how dangerous it is. I know how your heart works because it’s like my heart. You’re going to want it more, and more, and more, and more. Only the gospel withers the desires for it, makes you loathe it, sees the grief it causes God, makes you weep about it. Does the gospel shape the life? Yes. Oh, yes, the gospel shapes the life. 

What’s the gospel-shaped life look like?

Okay, third. What’s the gospel-shaped life look like? Well, I’d like to give you a little bit, I’d like to give you a kind of macro look and some specific examples. Here’s what I mean by macro. Well, like this: I have been reading, re-reading Calvin’s Institutes this year and when you get to the section on the Christian life, I love Calvin’s brevity in spite of how massive the Institutes are, he can be awfully, awfully, awfully terse in a great way. And he says, “You want to know the Christian life? It’s 1 Corinthians 6:19a. You are not your own, you’re brought with a price.” You’re brought with a price - that’s grace. You’re brought with a price. Therefore, you’re not your own, which means toward God and toward everyone around you, that’s how Calvin expounds it, you now live a life of deep unselfishness. You don’t do things for yourself. You’re living for God. You’re living for others. You live a life of deep unselfishness. Now, Andrew Delbanco, in his book, he’s an academic professor at Columbia University, not very well known, but he’s written some fascinating books of cultural criticism. He’s not a believer. He’s a secular Jewish man. But he wrote, some years ago, a book called “The Real American Dream, a Meditation on Hope,” and he traces the history of American culture out into three eras. And he calls them, you can see it in the, it’s three chapters, it’s a short book, basically takes the first part of American History, second part, and the third part. And he says, “What are we living for? What are we doing things for? What is the meaning of life? What is everything moving toward?” Three chapters: first chapter, God, second chapter, nation, third chapter, self. Now what he says is, in the beginning, that largely, people that came to America were largely animated by a Christian understanding of things. So, why do we get up in the morning? Why do we work? Why do we do things? Why are we building a country? Why are we doing anything? Glory of God. That morphs into by the, you know, early 19th century, America becomes somewhat secularized, and more and more people are living for, he puts it this way, that the United States actually gets put into the place of God in the American culture. The idea is democracy is what’s going to make the world a better place. We have a manifest destiny to get to the Pacific Ocean. We’re the greatest country in the world and he says that lasts almost up in the middle, you know, World War 2. When basically, though people believed in God, essentially, what they…he makes the case that patriotism, national pride, those things took the place. And then finally he says, “Now, people are living for self.” They’re living for themselves. Now, his point though, and it’s a very powerful point is this, let me read you this, you know it says, “Americans first believed that life had meaning in our nation had a purpose because we lived for the glory of God. That later changed to a narrative of scientific and moral progress, and particularly of democratic values promoted in the world through the growth of the United States. However today, hope has narrowed to the vanishing point of the self alone so that America’s history of hope is now one of diminution. The self-fulfillment narrative has created a cultural crisis. To say that the meaning of life is mere self-fulfillment cannot give a society the resources necessary to create a cohesive healthy culture. A narrative must give people, a cultural narrative must give people a basis for values, a reason for sacrifice, for living and dying. The self-fulfillment narrative cannot do that.” You hear what he is saying? In a culture, people have got to have something more important than their own happiness and their own interest. They have to, otherwise, you have to have something worth dying for. You have to have something worth sacrificing for - you have to or else we can’t be a cohesive society. Not only that, we can’t be a culture. And so Delbanco, he’s a secular man, by the way, pushes, and pushes, and pushes and it’s going to get back the resources…they seem to be spent to get the average American to see that my happiness and my fulfillment is not the most important thing. There’s something more important than that. And if we can agree on that then we can have a culture. Right now, it’s just fragmenting. Pretty amazing. So, you say, “Whoa, Christianity, religion, religion is the way to do it. Why don’t people see we need to get back to religion?” Well, here’s the other thing that Delbanco hints at, “it is true that religion tends to make people less selfish, more charitable, more willing to, more communal,” Jonathan Haidt, I think I’m spelling…I think I’m pronouncing his name right, H-A-I-D-T, University of Virginia, psychologist has recently written a very important book, I think, called, “The Righteous Mind,” and in “The Righteous Mind,” he points out a number of things but one of the things he does is he points out research about how secular people, how secularism, the basic view that there is nothing really to live for than my own happiness, how secularism makes people selfish. He studies the kibbutz, you know, the kibbutz is a commune in Israel and there are some secular ones and there are some religious ones, and there’s been a lot of research that shows that the secular ones don’t last or they don’t do well. What’s the problem? Religion, and we’ve talked about this, let’s not talk about Christianity for a minute, religion, the idea that if you do all these things, you’ll be right with God, religion creates unselfishness because religion comes and says, “You know, let’s give to the poor, you must help your fellow man or woman, you have to do all these things,” religion can make you less selfish than secularism but it makes you more tribal. That’s one of our problems. Religion can create haughtiness. Religion can create the sense of, “You’re the infidel.” Religion can make us feel that the people who don’t believe what we believe are sort of subhuman in some way. So secularism makes us selfish, and religion makes us tribal and because of that, we have a declining society, both fragmenting, polarizing, balkanizing, disintegrating, but guess what? Christianity, and we know this, nobody else does, probably because we’re not telling them, probably because we can hardly recognize it ourselves. Probably because we’re not living this way. Secularism makes us selfish and religion makes us tribal but Christianity fulfills you, and yet humbles you at the same time. See, it fulfills you. You have something bigger than yourself to live for. It makes you unselfish, but the same time, it’s the humility of the gospel, it’s the knowledge that you’re saved by grace that levels, that pulls that pride away. And then turns you outward looking to others, talking to them about the truth but doing it in love and serving. You might say, secularism makes you selfish and religion makes you tribal but Christians, though they are citizens of the city of God, are the very, very best citizens of the city of man. We should be the ones that people say that our character, our attitude toward people who disagree with us, at the same time our unselfishness is astonishing. Now, we’re not seen that way, but honestly a gospel-shaped life will be culture shaping. A gospel-shaped life will actually, if there’s enough people leading gospel-shaped lives, it will be clear, I think, or clearer to more and more people that this is what we need. By the way, I’m not talking about revival, or cultural transformation. I don’t know what will happen. But the fact is that right now there’s a, smart people know the culture is falling apart. And they also know it’s hard to get the genie back in the bottle because we have no basis for moral values anymore. But they don’t want to go back to religion because they know that religion creates the tribalism and the audience, but they don’t see the difference between religion and the gospel. And we have to show them the difference. Now let’s go a little, one more thing. You say, that’s a pretty high picture. What does it really mean to live a gospel-shape life? Let me show you in eight or nine examples of how a gospel-shaped life would be different than either a legalistic or a relativistic way of living. There’s legalism, moralism, to me those are the same word, which we’ve been talking about. And relativism, which says, “you can live anyway you want.” Now, if you take legalism, and you take relativism, and you take gospel, you’ll see that there’s at least three different ways, frankly to live in every area of life, I think. Let me just give you a couple of examples. Discouragement or depression. When somebody’s really cast down, let’s assume it’s not physiologically based. There are plenty of depressions that are based, that have physiological basis. But assuming they’re not, someone get really discouraged, really despond, really down, there’s three ways to go. The moralist tend to say, “You must be doing something wrong, repent. You’re doing something wrong, repent of all known sin.” By the way it’s always a good idea. “Find what you’re doing wrong and repent.” The relativist, “you just don’t like yourself, you need to find people, you need to, you know, indulge your deepest desires will build you up. So the moralist says, “Repent,” focuses just on the behavior. The relativist says, you know, “Enjoy yourself. You know, be good to yourself,” focuses directly on the feelings. But the gospel-believing person focuses on the heart, and the gospel-believing person says, “Something in your life has become more important to you than God. It’s a pseudo-Savior - it’s a form of works righteousness. Find that thing out. It’s probably the reason why you’re despondent because you’re giving something more control of your life than it should if you are really saved by grace.” It goes into the heart, not just the feelings, not just the behavior. I don’t have time to spend much time. Here, let me give you another one. I’m not going to give you eight. I’m going to give you some. Parents. Parents. If you come from more traditional cultures, you’re never going to be able to overcome your need to live up to what your parents say. I remember some years ago, talking to a young woman whose parents wanted her to be a concert violinist world-class and she tried and tried, never did a very good job. And she was depressed and she was in an institution. And I remember talking to her doctor who was Christian who said, he said, “she would be out of there tomorrow if she could get her parents out of the center of her life and put Jesus there.” But I must say, and by the way, as some of you may guess, that was a non-white person because we, white people, we don’t care. We don’t care. “You can’t tell me how to live my life, you know?” In fact, get out of my face. The fact of the matter is, we are afraid of our parent’s expectations, and we’ve said, “Get away from me.” But see, honestly, the gospel frees us from, on the one hand, making our parents’ opinion of us into a kind of pseudo-salvation. It frees us from that, but it also frees us from the anger that white people, by the way, and individualistic western people feel because their parents didn’t give them what they deserve. They didn’t love me like I should. They didn’t give me the things I should. They clipped my wings. If you’re so angry at your parents or you’re actually so guilty before your parents, it’s because, what? You know, basically, when Jesus becomes your brother and through his grace, God becomes your Father, and it’s God’s love which is the main thing in your life that frees you to either actually love your parents without worshiping them, or forgive your parents without hating them. There’s no doubt about that. There’s three ways. Let me give you a couple more. Race. Oh yeah. Until you get the gospel deep, it’s going to be very hard not to be racially superior. I mean, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve done a wedding, okay, I’m doing a wedding between, again, say, you’re a white westerner and a non-white person. So what happens is the white person, especially if they’re from Europe, especially from Northern Europe, they are right there in the pews. It’s a 2 o’clock wedding, they’re there, 2 o’clock and everybody on their side of the church is there too and nobody from the Asian, or Hispanic, or the African, or the Korean, nobody’s there! 2 o’clock, they’re not there. The bride or the groom is not there. And about 20 minutes later, they start filtering in. And, you know, the non-white folks can see the white people, you know, fuming at them, looking at them and so everybody gets what happens. Everybody starts to moralize; adiaphora. They moralize cultural differences. So, the white people are sitting there saying, “These people aren’t punctual. You know, no wonder they got the problems they do in their part of the world.” You know, “They can’t keep on. What’s the matter?” In other words, they’re taking something which is a particular approach to time and turning it into a moral thing and meanwhile the other folks are there saying, you know, the other people are looking at them and saying, “they’re so uptight, you know, they’re the oppressors, no wonder they’re the oppressors, they’re in trouble now, I can’t wait until white people get down to about 25% of the world population, it’ll be a better place.” And so, everybody is taking their cultural differences and turning it into a moral thing when it’s not, it’s not. Unless the gospel goes in really, really deep, you turn your moral differences into righteousness. On the other hand, you can be a relativist that say, “Oh, it doesn’t matter, all cultures are wonderful, all cultures are the same.” “You mean the ones that do child sacrifice?”  “Well, yeah, all cultures are wonderful.” And the gospel pulls you out of your paternalism and then gives you a truth by which you can judge cultural differences and you can judge cultural, there are some things about a culture that are right, some things that are wrong, we were talking about it earlier this afternoon. Let me give you, yeah, let me talk about humor, and then I have to finish. “Humor,” you say, what do you mean humor? Well, moralistic and legalistic, one of the ways you can tell a person doesn’t get the gospel, they’re very religious, really know their bible, big into doctrine, they don’t have a good sense of humor. Well, some years ago, somebody said, “the way I can tell a pharisee is this, they go around looking at people saying, ‘That’s not funny.’” There’s another kind of humor. I would call it the relativist humor which is actually very cynical, very skeptical, very bitter, but also sometimes, very cutting to people they don’t like, which shows that they are actually, in the end, everybody is actually self-righteous, even the so-called “open-minded” people. You know, they say, “Oh, I’m open-minded, I hate bigots, I hate self-righteous people, I can’t stand them, I feel much superior to them, you know, I wouldn’t want my daughter to marry one.” And so, the gospel takes that all away because the gospel makes you able to laugh at yourself and it’s the only kind of humor that’s funny. It’s the only kind of humor that’s healing. And you can laugh at yourself without cutting. There’s people who make fun of themselves. You can tell that they’re bitter. They’re upset. They’re kind of into self-loathing. That’s not the gospel, of course. As you know, the gospel makes you not think too much of yourself or too little of yourself, it just makes you think of yourself less often because you’re full. You’re not worried. You’re not having to steal self-acceptance from what everybody else says. And as a result, what? Well, it means you can actually…you poke fun at yourself but not in a way that you’re really trying to bring your own self down, and you’re funny. You’re finally funny. Tweet that. I dare you.

How does the gospel change and shape our lives?

Here, ending. In some ways, the reason why…partly, I’ve left this fourth question, I didn’t give it much time probably because of a lack of self-control as a speaker. But also because in some ways, I’ve written plenty of stuff about it and there’s stuff to look at. But here’s the issue, let me read you two quotes: Thomas Chalmers, “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection,” Chalmers was channeling Edwards when he was saying this, he says, “There is not one personal transformation in which the heart is left without an object of ultimate beauty and joy. The heart’s desire for one particular object can be conquered, but its desire to have some object is unconquerable. The only way to dispose the heart of an old affection is by the expulsive power of a new one.” It’s a little of a paraphrase but did you hear that? He says, “you want to transform yourself? You want to be shaped differently? You want to become a new kind of person? It’s not enough just to work on the will. It’s not enough just to beat on yourself and say, ‘I got to change because I’m going to disappoint people, I’m going to have a problem,’ or something like that.” He says, “The heart’s desire for one particular object of ultimate beauty and joy can be conquered but its desire to have some object is unconquerable.” So, the only way to dispossess the heart of an old affection, the only way to get rid of one drive, your workaholism because of career, your desire, “if I can just get married to the right person, then everything will be okay,” I mean there’s all these desires, these idols that are distorting your life, the only way you can really, really change is through worship. Is through, not just loving Jesus with, you know, in the abstract but giving love and experiencing love of Christ. Seeing him as an ultimate beauty. Some years ago, I learned a tremendous amount from this one woman that was living about four blocks away from my church when I was in my late 20s. It was a trailer park and there were a lot of people in there that my folks in my church didn’t want to have anything to do with but I remember getting to know the woman. She was probably in her 40s and she had been very, very beautiful as a younger woman and because of that, she had actually become kind of like a …what they used to call in the old gangster films, a gun moll. A girl that basically drove around North Carolina with criminals as they robbed banks, almost a Bonnie and Clyde kind of person. And one of the problems was she’d always been pretty when she was younger and as a result, she became essentially addicted to guys. She had to have somebody, some man loving her, some man taking care of her. At a certain point she became a drug addict, of course, she went to jail, her life was kind of ruined, and when she ended up in a trailer court in Hopewell, Virginia, on food stamps, she started going to a counselor and she also started going to a church. It wasn’t my church but it was a church where she did heart the gospel and started to believe the gospel. The counselor she was going to, rightly…wasn’t a Christian counselor, rightly identified her idol, her idolatry of men. And she say, “The trouble is when you see a man, you say, ‘I got to have a guy love me, otherwise, I’m nothing. A man’s got to love me or I have nothing.” And the counselor said, “that’s not right, you mustn’t base your identity in men, you mustn’t base your self-worth and your significance in men, you mustn’t do that. What you have to do is you’ve got to do something else.” She said, “what should I do?” And here’s what the counselor said, “You need to finish your education and get a job and become a financially independent woman and a career woman who’s proud of the fact that you’re an independent career woman. Then let your identity be rested in that.” She thought this out and at one point she told me, and I don’t know if she said it just as well, she said that at one point, she said to the counselor, “So you want me to get rid of a female idolatry and adopt a male idolatry. You want me to stop being so fragile by basing my salvation as it were on men, so, if a man drops me, my life falls apart, instead, you want me to base my salvation on my career and making money so that if anything goes wrong with my business, I’ll fall apart. Is that it?” “In other words, you just want me to fall apart over different things. You want me to transfer my fragility to a more politically correct place.” Eventually she figured out a way of taking the gospel and applying it to her life and she based it on Colossians 3. And Colossians 3 is a place where it talks about Christ, “your life is hidden with Christ in God and when Christ, who is our life appears, you will appear in glory.” And she said she started meditating when she would see a guy looking at her, she said, she would see a guy looking at her, and she would feel that old…She says, “I stopped myself, I would talk to my heart and I would say this, I would look at him and in my heart, under my, you know, quietly inside, I would say, ‘Maybe, I would love to be married, I’d love to be married to a great guy, maybe you’re a great guy, who knows? But I can tell you one thing, you are not my life. Christ is my life. Men are not my life anymore, Christ is my life.” And when she would tell herself that she said, “I got the freedom to actually explore the guy rather than just fall for him.” It’s a gospel-shaped life. Go and do likewise. Let’s pray.