Gospel in Life has made our most popular sermon series — Marriage — available as a stand-alone, short podcast series. We trust that it will be something you can share with friends, family and coworkers who want to learn how to be a better spouse or potential spouse.
At Disney World, I discovered a wonderful city of people, many of whom had never heard the Gospel, but who showed me the joy of sharing it. I watched God’s Spirit working in them: healing marriages, breaking addictions, and lifting burdens. Most of the time I parroted what I had heard on the Gospel in Life podcasts, and it would start the avalanche. By the time I ended up moving off to my volunteer ministry job, I found I hardly wanted to leave.
I began to give my heart to a god I made up in my head, a god who played fair, who gave good little Christians everything they asked for. The cross was something Christ did 2000 years ago, not anything relevant for today. Human ethics taught me I was a pretty good kid, and so I deserved pretty good things.
In an instant, grief and hope, joy and sorrow intersected. I learned that grief and hope aren’t parallel streets that we travel down based on life’s circumstances. They intersect. When God guides us down paths of grief, He isn’t leading us away from hope, He’s trying to lead us to the point where those streets intersect so that we never believe the lie that our joy is tied to our circumstances.
If I felt like I was a sinner, it’s because I was a sinner. If it felt like all the things I was resting my hope in for my own righteousness were disintegrating under my feet, it’s because by His grace, they were disintegrating. “He inflicts wounds that heal,” I remember Tim Keller saying, and God was most definitely breaking my dependence on my own self-righteousness, so He could demonstrate His own righteousness as the justification for my life and salvation.
I cried for two whole years, going to Redeemer. I kept going. I began to hear the word, and I think that the turning point for me was, “This thing you’re feeling down inside of you, that you can’t get to, has a name, and that name is sin.”
Because we are beings created to derive our identity from God, the most important aspect in the practice of self-reflection is understanding our stories within the context of God’s story.
Things change. Life changes. Organizations change. I’m happy to announce one of the better changes of 2023. On January 1, 2023, Gospel in Life changed parent organizations, moving from being part of Redeemer Presbyterian Church, to being part of Redeemer City to City.
Someone at the local small church told me I was the lamb of God. I wanted to believe that, and I kept a toy and a blanket that had lambs on them most of my childhood. When we moved back east, my horrible life went from bad to hellacious. I honestly don’t remember when the sexual abuse started, but I remember it as the beginning of my confusing childhood made up of physical, sexual and emotional abuse.
As I began to go into shock, I heard a shot close by and felt a body collapse on top of me. Blood ran over me, and I tried to crawl out from underneath it. When I got free, I looked back and could see it was an old man who the police had killed. Then I passed out. When word of the violence spread, my relatives raced to every clinic and hospital searching for me (Xolani had made it out ok). They couldn’t find me, and assumed I’d been killed.
I wanted to say thank you for releasing “Questioning Christianity” as a podcast. It has been a very long road to finally “understanding” Christianity and by long, I mean 16 years of deeply pondering these claims. That finally happened last week once I got through this podcast.
“No” she said, “you don’t understand.” She was right, as always. I did not understand grace. And then in the space of maybe a minute or so G launched into this exposition of God’s promise of forgiveness in the Bible. I don’t remember exactly what words she chose, but I know she said that God loved me and that all I had ever done and even all that I might continue to do that was wrong, it could all be forgiven.
Little did I know that, all along, God had been actively pursuing me and calling me to Himself. That book of yours helped me to grasp who Jesus really is, what He really did, and what it actually meant for me. I came to realize that there was not only a different God out there than I had constructed for myself, but that there was also plenty of good evidence to consider the claims of Christianity as sound.
We pulled up to the emergency entrance after days of vomiting while my blood pressure took a nose-dive. I tested positive, resulting in instant banishment into a quarantined room. I pulled out the computer from my backpack and spent three hours asking individuals, community groups, and church prayer lines to pray for me.
On May 3rd, we will begin a new special Podcast series — Questioning Christianity with Tim Keller — specifically designed for people who are exploring Christianity, but don’t yet have a personal faith in Christ.
So long as I persisted in trying to write my own agenda for life, based on my wishes, I met with frustration— so many of my longings simply weren’t going to be fulfilled— not yet, anyway. But whenever I accepted God’s agenda for me (and surely that’s what’s implied in saying “Jesus is Lord”), life became not only bearable but fruitful in unexpected ways. What I perceived as my prison became a field rich with opportunities for knowing and serving Christ.
Following my parents to board a plane to move to the opposite side of the world made it clear that our life isn’t all about me, and that my own desires were not our family’s center of gravity. This act of unsolicited submission proved to be crucial to my future discipleship; it gave me an experiential understanding of myself in relation to God.
My wife has spent almost 30 years in constant and often unbearable pain. And for many Christians, this just doesn’t fit with the faith they’ve been taught in church. For them, Christianity is about overcoming, not about enduring. It’s about dreams coming true, not shattered dreams. And it’s certainly not about persistent suffering.
When my sister walked out of her room and said she met Jesus, my mom knew all that. And here is the part that gets hard to believe: Sima, my mom, read about him and became a Christian too. Not just a regular one, who keeps it in their pocket. She fell in love. She wanted everybody to have what she had, to be free, to realize that in other religions you have rules and codes and obligations to follow to earn good things, but all you had to do with Jesus was believe he was the one who died for you. And she believed.
It’s true, I’m not deficient. There is no moral value to being bipolar. There are merely advantages and disadvantages. But the reason I have value has nothing to do with my job or productivity. It has to do with the incredible and nearly unfathomable fact that the God of this universe deeply loves and values me. Through gospel-centered and cognitive behavioral therapy, I now have a toolset to help me process and understand what I’m going through and prevent relapses.
This Month's Featured Book
In Shaped by the Gospel, Dr. Keller shows how gospel-centered ministry is more theologically driven than program-driven. As you read, you’ll discover how reflecting on the essence, the truths, and the patterns of the gospel leads to renewal in your lives, churches and ministries.
