Tim Keller’s Gospel Coalition Talk “Ministry Implications of the Gospel”

Tim Keller spoke at The Gospel Coalition’s inaugural conference on the topic Ministry Implications of the Gospel.”

Here are two links to his talk:

Audio and video at The Gospel Coalition website
Audio posted at The Resurgence

Here’s a synopsis of his talk very briefly. Keller, pastor of Manhattan’s Redeemer church, a congregation of the Presbyterian Church in America, the number one most multiplying church in the US, spoke on the text of 1 Peter 1:1-12 and 1:22-2:12. What does ministry that is profoundly shaped by the Gospel look like? Tim Keller gave his seven point outline, saying that the Gospel is:

1. Historical
2. Doxological
3. Christocentric
4. Personal
5. Cultural
6. Massively Transformational
7. Wonderful

So what do all these points mean for Gospel-Centered Christian service? Each of the points in the outline bears directly on how we ought to be Christians in a post-Christian world — not just religious people. The passage doesn’t so much express the Gospel as refer to the truths of the Gospel, and what those truths make manifest in those of us who believe, and so Keller looked at these aspects individually, reminding us:

The Gospel is Historical

The Gospel is good news about something that’s been done in history. It’s good news, not good advice. Keller cites D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, who pointed out that in ancient battles, when the king or commander was victorious, he didn’t send advice back to headquarters; he sent the good news of the victory that was won. “The enemy is defeated! It’s all done! Rejoice!” Only a defeated commander sent back military advisors with recommendations on what ought to be done.

Every other religion consists of advice on what we ought to do. Christianity alone sends out heralds of the good news of what Jesus has done, the victory he’s already won. What’s the difference? When you hear the good news of Jesus’s life, atoning death, and resurrection, you want to obey out of joy. When you hear the advice of religion, you want to obey the Ten Commandments in order to earn God’s favor. Do you see the difference? Every other religion (including false Christianity) gives advice. Only the Gospel sends messengers of the victory Jesus has won on our (on your!) behalf. Every other religion is built on fear, not the Gospel.

This means that preaching needs to be foremost declarative, a proclamation of what has been done. Too much preaching is advice, religious how-to — this doesn’t mean that preaching should be impractical — if the Gospel is good news, declaration of the good news of Jesus is irreplacable.

The Gospel is Doxological

People come to full flourishing through worship. Look at the phrase in 1 Peter: Do all to the praise of the glory of God. This puts all we do in the context of worship. Our actions will be to the praise of whatever we count as most important to our happiness, and our joy. If our greatest joy is in Jesus, then our actions will reflect this. When we put anything else as the main source of our satisfaction, our identity, we will put our functional worship toward that functional savior — it will be the thing our heart adores.

Keller relates the story of a young girl he counseled at his first church, a fifteen year old who was struggling with depression. She said she believed in Jesus, she knew she was going to heaven, that Christ had died for her sins and that she had the unmerited grace of God, “But what does all that count for if the boys won’t even look at you!” Keller says that this girl made it clear for him that we often serve functional saviors other than Jesus. For this girl, her joy, her identity, her sense of “self” was tied up in a desire to be attractive to boys. Not so atypical of teenage girls, but very illustrative.

The Gospel doesn’t need to be made clear so much as it needs to be made real. We need to preach Christ vividly, proclaim the truth in a way that shows we ourselves have been transformed by him. Doctrinal soundness that is not manifested in changed life is of little use. Jonathan Edwards said “The primary purpose of preaching is not to impart information, but to make the message live!” The human heart will always have some object of adoration — the only way to displace the power of an affection is to displace it with another…

The Gospel is Christocentric

The basic subject of every sermon ought to be Jesus. Jesus himself said that the Law and the prophets all talked about him, and so our sermons also ought to point to him. Doctrinal sermons that just bring out some theological point of accuracy that don’t point to Jesus may be rational, biblical and exegetical and may show your hearers how they ought to believe. But when Jesus shows up, then the talk isn’t just a lecture; it becomes a sermon not about what you ought to do, but about one who did what we ought to do, and to the degree that we understand what he did, and believe in it, we begin to have hope that we can do so too. Your preaching will never be doxological unless or until it is Christocentric. Doctrine has no power to transform, but Jesus does, and the doctrine comes out in the process of transformation.

What is the Bible essentially about? Is it about me and what I ought to do, or is it about Jesus and what he has done? The trajectory of the text of Scripture is toward Jesus. When Jesus is the center, we read all texts differently. Jesus is the new and better Adam, who succeeded in obeying God. He is the true and better Abel, whose blood does not call out for justice, but having atoned for us, calls out for vindication…and so forth throughout the whole OT. This isn’t typology, it’s an instinctive, gut feeling of who Jesus is.

The Gospel is Personal and Individual

There’s a lot about the new birth in the passage in 1 Peter. You can’t make yourself a Christian. You can make yourself a Muslim, a Buddhist, or an atheist. But you can’t choose to be born again — this is really important for us as North American Christians. The idea that we have sinned against a holy and jealous God, that Jesus Christ has suffered and died on our behalf, atoning for our sin — this idea is in some disrepute nowadays in America. But we need, as J.I. Packer says, to understand a couple of things. The opposite of sin is not virtue, it’s faith. We don’t really understand the depth of our own sin, our transgression against God, and so we don’t really appreciate the wonder of God’s grace expressed in christ. If someone says, “I paid your debt,” you need to know how big the debt was before you know what the proper response is. We have forgotten the size of our debt.

We have also forgotten the size of the provision that’s been made on our behalf. Jesus not only clears the deck and puts us in relationship with God by paying our debt, but he also lived the life we should have lived. Not apprehending this leads either to easy believism — a get out of hell free card, or Phariseeism: legalistic moralism. People who don’t understand both the size of the debt and the magnitude of the provision Christ has made fall into these traps, but when the full dimension of the atonement of Christ and the imputation of his righteousness then there’s an explosion of joy and gratitude, the kind that sings:

My chains fell off, my heart was free
I rose, went forth, and followed thee

The Gospel is Cultural

The Gospel is incarnated in a culture called the church. It’s not just you and Jesus, it is a life collectively lived out together in joy before God. We’re not just a bunch of saved individuals. And the Gospel makes us relate to the culture around us — if we believe in only the individual benefits of the Gospel, we may retreat from the culture around us. But Peter says we should live such good lives that people around you see your good works and glorify God. The Gospel is radical. It says to legalists afraid of being polluted by the culture, who aren’t really right with God but get their identity by feeling superior to others around them and who withdraw from culture, that they need to engage. On the other hand the Gospel says to the secularized, irreligious, liberal Christian who says we can’t believe in things like Biblical inerrancy, the reality of sin, the atonement and so forth because these ideas will offend people, it says to these people that have accommodated themselves to the culture, that they’re not living transformed lives. The two temptations are either to withdraw from the world or to be just like it. Peter says we should expect both persecution and a good reputation, a seeming dichotomy that he brings together.

People who never engage the culture never live the kind of lives that make people glorify God; they’re hidden away in their little Christian enclaves. People who are just like the culture are never persecuted because they never challenge the culture. The Gospel puts us in the place where we should expect some to glorify God because of our manifest justice to the oppressed, help to the poor, assistance in making the community a place of flourishing, and at the same time we can expect persecution from those who reject Christ, and these will be either libertines who don’t want to hear anything about their sin challenged, or Pharisees who don’t want their religious legalism challenged. We are to be a distinct counter-culture, very different from the culture around us, but existing for its benefit. This means being priestly, serving and blessing the culture as God’s instruments of redemption, and prophetic, calling out the culture for its faults, at the same time.

The Gospel is Massively Transformational and wonderful

Peter says the Gospel is something angels long to understand. Angels have been around a long time, they’re pretty smart, pretty wise – they know a lot, but they never get tired of looking into the Gospel. Gospel ministry is endlessly creative, ever fresh and new and amazing. The Gospel is not just the beginning things that get us saved, but the thing by which we live and grow. Even Angels long to look into it. The Gospel is endlessly creative.

We want to be Gospel-shaped people now, not just in the culture of years ago, but people who incarnate the Gospel today, in our time, in our culture, through our ministry.

The summary concludes here. I can only add that Tim Keller continues to demonstrate what Gospel preaching ought to be like in today’s day and age, a message that needs to be repeated again and again, so that it is heard by unbelievers who need to hear that what they have rejected isn’t really Christianity at all, by religious believers who have lost the wonder of Christ in their theological propositions and moralistic dictates, and especially by the culturally weary Christians who long to be more effective at incarnating the message, the character, the transforming power of Christ in a world full of people he longs to love and call to himself.