If we’ve experienced God as a God of grace, how does that change our attitude toward money? The early church was an economic subculture that was radically different from the culture around it. In fact wherever the early church is described, we see the Christians’ drastic generosity—so drastic that it seemed unreasonable to those outside the church. Why were they so different? The answer is an experience of God’s grace. Grace revolutionizes 1) our attitude toward money, 2) our procedure, and...

Guilt and shame, having your heart broken under a sense of failure and general unworthiness—I feel this is probably more rampant in places like New York than anywhere else. Do you know why? Because we have so many successful people in New York, people who, in many ways are driven more acutely than other people by this fear of failure or unworthiness.  In Psalm 130, we see guilt and shame likened to a hole, to something we’ve sunk down in. And then we’re shown a way out that’s available for a...

Your first sound, our first sound, is a wail of fear. The baby comes out saying, “Why is it so cold? Who has a finger down my mouth? Who’s grabbing me? What’s going on?” That’s the way you come into the world. Fear, therefore, is maybe the most primal of all emotions.  In Psalm 3, David has something to be afraid of. He has literal armies after him, trying to kill him. But right in the middle of the psalm, he says he will not fear and he will sleep in the midst of this. He’s found a way of...

What do you do with your tears? This is a psalm about weeping, about suffering, about grief. If you were to break the 150 psalms into categories, one of the categories will will be lamentations: psalms of tears, psalms of weeping and grieving. There are many other kinds of psalms, but I’ll tell you, every commentator says there are more lamentations than any other kind. This is the biggest piece of the Psalter. Tears.  What do we learn here what to do with our tears? We’re told three things:...

The anger, the fear, the hostility, the rawness, the white heat of the emotions expressed in the Psalms really just disturb people today. You look at it, and you say, “What is that doing in the Bible?” The answer is the psalmists are not discussing feelings, and they’re not expressing feelings. They’re praying their feelings. They’re processing their feelings in the presence of God.  What we’re going to look at today is doubt. Doubt always masquerades as more intellectual than it is, but...

If you want the flourishing, thriving life depicted in Psalm 112, you need to know the God of Psalm 111. They can’t be separated. They are linked. These two psalms are each 10 verses. Psalm 111 describes the great God, and Psalm 112 describes a great, happy human life. If you know the unshakeable God of Psalm 111, you become unshakeable yourself. To truly know the God of Psalm 111 leads to the life seen in Psalm 112.  Looking at Psalm 111 itself, we see a key link between knowing God and...

Psalm 96 is an astonishingly happy psalm. It depicts the whole human race and even the trees, the earth, and the sea just filled with joy and rejoicing.  That actually raises a question. This isn’t the world the way we know it. Not everybody is filled with joy, and the world itself is a broken place with natural disasters, disease, and death. How could we get from where we are to what we see in this psalm? Is this nothing but just an inaccessible, crazy idea of a world like this, or is it...

On the weekend before I had surgery for thyroid cancer, I wrestled with this question: “How do you face troubles with peace?” I came to realize it’s not petitionary prayer that helps you face troubles.  Of course the Bible is filled with petition, where you go to God and make your needs known. And you should do that. But the ultimate and main way to handle the troubles of life is not just through petitionary prayer, but through worship.  Psalm 95 is the classic text about worship. It tells us...

Adoration is a practical skill, one we need to engage in if we’re going to grow into the people God designed us to be. Psalm 27 teaches us about individual, personal, contemplative adoration. And in the center of Psalm 27, it says, “one thing I ask, one thing I seek.” What is that one thing?  We learn three things from this psalm about this one thing: 1) why it’s so important, 2) what it is, and 3) how to do it. This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on...

Psalm 81 tells us how to handle the wilderness times of life. It tells us how to use various spiritual disciplines as practical skills in order to handle our times of suffering, our times of pain, our times of difficulty.  There are four things we learn here: 1) life is a wilderness, 2) there’s a rock in the wilderness, 3) there’s honey in the rock, and 4) there’s something else that I’ll tell you when we get to it. This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian...

When you know you’ve screwed up, when you know you’ve failed, how do you get up again in such a way that you have more joy and power than before?  There’s a secret basis of confession: it’s a secret only because most of us don’t know about it. And it’s a crucial missing piece in most people’s thinking. Let’s look at what Psalm 32 says about 1) the need for confession, 2) the way of confession, and 3) the secret basis of confession. This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer...

What are you going to do with the anger that comes when you face serious mistreatment, serious injustice? Modern readers expect the Psalms to give inspiration, so when they read the searing pain and anger in Psalm 137, they say, “What’s this doing in the Bible?” But this passage, in spite of how disturbing it is, tells us some important things about how to handle our anger over mistreatment. Let’s look at 1) the context of this psalm within the message of the Bible, 2) the three things the...

For physical health, we have trainers and doctors. Through nutrition and exercise, trainers help you get further than you were. And when you get sick or injured, doctors help get you back on track. It’s the same thing spiritually.  There are spiritual disciplines that are like training and spiritual disciplines that treat problems. We look now at a discipline that is a way of dealing with a problem that can be disastrous. Let’s look at Psalm 42 and 43 and see 1) there’s a condition that is...

Paul says you have to work the gift of salvation into every nook and cranny of your life, and that you do that through spiritual disciplines. That’s how you change.  But the modern mind finds some of these disciplines more appetizing than others. The idea of meditation is sort of cool. But obedience? That’s not very appetizing. And yet, this discipline tells us that you don’t get changed unless you’re willing to come in under the authority of God. Let’s look at what Psalm 119 shows us about...

For the first time, in Mark 15, we have Jesus in front of the political establishment, the Roman state. So we have to ask the question, “What is the relationship of Jesus to politics, of Christianity to the government?”  Pilate asks three questions. He asks Jesus, “Are you king of the Jews?” and, “Why aren’t you fighting back?” Then he asks the crowd, “What shall we do with the king?” The answers to these three questions are a lens by which to explore the relationship of Christianity to...

The word “blessed” in Hebrew is much richer than it is English. It means total fulfillment and well-being. How do we get that? The answer in Psalm 1 is that blessedness comes to a person who has learned to meditate on the law of the Lord. That’s an enormous promise. So let’s ask ourselves what we can learn about meditation, which is one of the disciplines by which we work grace into every nook and cranny of our lives. Psalm 1 teaches us four things about meditation: 1) the promise of...

You can’t escape the city anymore. Technology means the kids in the farmlands of Iowa are getting immersed in the culture that’s formed in the cities. The problems of cities dominate the regions and societies in which those cities exist.  But as we see in Genesis, the city is a fundamental part of the human condition. And the Bible has some profound things to say about how Christians should understand the city.  In Genesis 10 and 11, we learn three things: 1) the need for cities, 2) the...

The story of Noah and the flood is about the fact that God is committed to creation, and he’s ready to give new beginnings. He’s ready to give a second chance.  In Genesis 9, God says to Noah and his family the same thing he said to Adam and Eve. In some ways, it gives more detail into what kind of life we’re called into. In a sense, he’s saying, “You’re not really living a fully human life unless you maintain three great relationships.” He’s calling us into 1) a relationship with the earth,...

Some of you are thinking, “The idea of divine judgment is upsetting, outdated, and irrelevant.” My goal is to respectfully show you that you’re absolutely wrong on all three counts.  The story of Noah and the flood is about divine judgment. And if we look at three things being taught in it, we’ll understand the meaning of judgment. And we’ll see what a difference these three things make for our lives. We’re taught here about 1) the violence of man, 2) the pain of God, and 3) the solution to...

It’s fratricide, it’s brother killing brother, it’s a sensational story—the story of Cain and Abel. People call this the first case study of murder, but I think that’s missing the point. It’s actually the first case study of life east of Eden.  In Genesis 4, we see three realities are always present in every day, every part of life east of Eden. It shows that in every aspect of life you always have three things operating: sin, grace, and the possibility of salvation. Let’s look at what this...

The Western romantic idea of human nature was that we’re inherently good. But the problem is over the last century, we’ve discovered that oppression and evil have not gone away but rather have erupted with ferocity over and over again regardless of social and political arrangements. This has created a crisis for the modern secular person. But the book of Genesis not only accounts for what we see, but also gives us enormous hope that there’s something that can be done about it.  Let’s look at...

Earlier in the twentieth century, the intellectuals of the Western world said it was our society and our institutions that were making us bad. If we changed them, then we’d get rid of atrocities, evil, war, racism, and poverty. But it hasn’t worked. More and more, the Western world is looking back at Genesis, and I believe if you’re smart, you will too. In Genesis, we can see how sin and evil came into the world, and we can see the results. What we have here is a diagnosis and then what God...

At street level there’s still this saccharine view that human beings are basically good and our problems come from our environment. But the Western intellectual world is beginning to see evidence that there’s something inherently evil and violent in us. And if that’s true, there’s almost no hope. But if you look at Genesis, you have the only hopeful answer for how evil got here: it’s not natural, and therefore, there’s something you can do about it. The Bible says Adam and Eve lost their...

We are created for relationship. One of the key differences I hope to show you between the biblical idea of God and other alternative views of God is in this whole idea of relationship. Genesis 1 shows us three things: 1) why we need relationships, 2) what kind of relationships we need, and 3) the key to getting relationships. This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on October 29, 2000. Series: Genesis – The Gospel According to God. Scripture: Genesis...