Dear Redeemer City to City Team,
I am writing this letter to express my deepest gratitude for Pastor Tim Keller and for all of you who have faithfully served alongside him and carried forward this ministry.
Whenever I look back on my life and my journey of faith, I cannot help but give thanks for Pastor Keller and his extraordinary sermons. His teaching fundamentally shaped my understanding of the gospel and gave me the foundation for a more systematic understanding of theology.
Back in 2014 and 2015, my family and I were going through an extremely difficult season. My husband had lost his job. I was just beginning to recover from severe depression, and we were young parents raising a toddler. At the same time, we were serving as leaders in our home church.
Spiritually, however, we found ourselves in something of a pastoral vacuum. We did not have committed pastors shepherding us, nor had we received systematic theological training ourselves. Years of ministry had left us deeply exhausted, and we were also experiencing difficult relationships with some of the other leaders in our church. After several painful conversations with fellow leaders, I felt helpless and, in many ways, hopeless.
It was during that season that my husband joined the staff of a magazine in China. There he met a brother named Daniel, who was involved in introducing and promoting the church-planting movement connected with Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York to churches in China. In 2014, Daniel led members of the magazine team to attend a gospel conference, and my husband went with them.
My husband came home with Pastor Keller’s “Gospel Theology” sermon series—a collection of one hundred sermons [] [1] Though all of these sermons are available on gospelinlife.com, they are not available as this specially arranged collection. . Those one hundred sermons became a lifeline for both of us. I read every sermon hungrily. At that time in my life, they felt like rain falling on land that had been dry for years. Sermon after sermon nourished my soul. I cannot remember how many times I finished reading one with tears in my eyes.
After I finished all one hundred sermons, I wanted to understand how Pastor Keller was able to explain the gospel with such clarity, depth and consistency. So I read them again. And then I read them a third time.
I was beginning to see how the gospel speaks not merely to our conversion, but to every part of human life.
I began outlining the sermons and tracing the theological reasoning behind them. By the time I finished doing this, I realized that something had changed in me: I had begun to develop a basic framework for systematic theology. More importantly, I was beginning to see how the gospel speaks not merely to our conversion, but to every part of human life.
After that, I began reading Pastor Keller’s books, including Counterfeit Gods, King’s Cross [published in the US as Jesus the King], and The Meaning of Marriage. Each one profoundly shaped my faith in a different way.
Counterfeit Gods was especially personal to me. Through prayer, God showed me that the greatest idol in my life was myself. This was also something the Holy Spirit had begun revealing to me during my battle with severe depression.
At the worst point of my depression, my physical symptoms were overwhelming. At that time, awareness and treatment of mental illness in China were still very limited. I was bedridden for nearly ten months. I experienced panic attacks almost every day, often feeling as though I were dying without understanding why. For ten months, I also suffered terribly from insomnia. There were several times when I wanted to end my life by jumping from our building.
Throughout those months, one question kept coming from my heart: “Why, God?” For the first two months, almost every prayer I prayed was a prayer asking God to heal me. Yet instead, God allowed me to wait in the darkness.
I could not hear His voice. I could not feel His presence. My prayers seemed to receive no answer.
Slowly, resentment began growing in my heart. Every day I felt like [the] living dead. I began questioning God’s love and His faithfulness. Eventually, I became completely desperate. Although I knew in my mind that He alone was the true God, I began wishing that some other god could save me.
One day a thought came into my mind: “I wish Jesus Christ were not the true God. Whichever god can save me now, I will believe in him.”
The moment that thought appeared, something inside me stopped. I suddenly realized that the faith I had always believed to be so strong was not nearly as strong as I had imagined.
I was unwilling to give my life for Him—yet He had willingly given His life for me.
A few nights later, my husband invited me to read Romans with him. I had read Romans many times before, but that night was different. After we finished the first two chapters, the Holy Spirit moved me to pray. During that prayer, God showed me something I had never truly understood before: I was my own idol. My life mattered more to me than He did. I was unwilling to give my life for Him—yet He had willingly given His life for me.
That night marked the beginning of my recovery from severe depression. I knew that one of the deepest lies in my life had been shattered by the gospel. I no longer remember whether I read Counterfeit Gods during that exact period or sometime shortly afterward. But I remember clearly that the message of the book brought me back to that same truth. It helped me recognize and expose the lies and idols hidden deep within my heart.
Later, The Meaning of Marriage came into my life during another extraordinarily dark season. My husband and I were going through a serious marriage crisis. It was one of the darkest periods of my life. At one point, I felt that I had only two choices left: divorce or death. Then I read The Meaning of Marriage. One idea from the book has stayed with me ever since: marriage is meant to continually reenact the gospel.
At that time, I could not see a way forward through the gospel. I could not even find comfort in it. But when I encountered this idea, I began asking God, “How can my marriage reenact the gospel?” And God faithfully answered my prayer. In prayer, I sensed Him saying to me: “All the wounds you have received in this marriage have fallen upon Me. I have carried them for you. I know how much pain you have endured. Yet I choose to forgive your husband. Are you willing to forgive him as I have forgiven?”
That prayer completely changed the direction of my marriage. I began choosing to trust God again. And, by His grace, my husband also became willing to return to God and seek His help. Yet there was still a very practical problem. We ourselves were church leaders, but we did not have spiritually mature elders or mentors above us who could walk with us and counsel us through our marriage crisis. So I prayed a very bold and simple prayer: “Lord, please send angels to help us.” Not long after that prayer, Daniel returned to China for a staff gathering of the magazine, and my husband brought me with him. It was the first time I met Daniel in person.
During the gathering, he shared with the staff about a serious marriage crisis that he and his wife had once gone through, and he shared their testimony of how God had worked in their marriage. As I listened, I knew immediately in my heart, “This is the angel God has prepared for us.”
After the meeting, my husband and I approached Daniel and asked whether he would be willing to provide marriage counseling for us. He graciously said yes. Over time, he and his wife became some of the spiritual elders and mentors we trusted most deeply.
For many years, I had hoped that while Pastor Keller was still alive, I might someday meet him in person and tell him these stories myself. I wanted him to know how God had used his sermons, his books, his theology, and his faithful proclamation of the gospel in the life of one ordinary woman and one struggling family on the other side of the world. I did not have that opportunity.
But I believe that one day, in heaven, I will still be able to tell him. Until then, I want to share this testimony with you—his colleagues, friends and fellow servants who labored alongside him and who continue this work today. Perhaps when you are engaged in ministry, translating a sermon, organizing a conference, publishing a book, training a church planter, or doing the countless ordinary tasks required to sustain a ministry, you do not always get to see where that work eventually goes.
I want you to know where some of it went. It reached a young family in China who was exhausted, wounded, and desperately in need of the gospel. It reached a woman reading sermon after sermon with tears in her eyes. It reached someone lying in bed after months of depression, struggling to believe that God was still good. It entered a marriage that seemed to have reached its end. And God used it to help rebuild faith, restore hope and save a marriage.
So I want to say thank you. Thank you to Pastor Keller for faithfully preaching the gospel with such extraordinary clarity and depth. Thank you to those who recorded, transcribed, translated, published, distributed, and shared
those sermons and books. Thank you to Daniel and his wife for becoming God’s answer to a desperate prayer from a young couple who needed someone to walk beside them. And thank you to every person on your team whose name I may never know. Your work mattered to us.
It still does.
With deepest gratitude in Christ,
Sarah
Editor’s comment: As I said in my article announcing The Global Reach Project (an initiative to translate Tim’s sermons into 30 languages), and as this testimony demonstrates, the gift that God gave Tim of making the gospel clear is something we believe God is leading us to make as widely available as possible. —Kathy Keller
