Tim Keller | May 1, 2005
When you embrace God by faith two things come into your life: a transforming power and a deep tension. It’s a duality. If you try to resolve the deep tension, you lose the transforming power.
The writer of Hebrews says the great believers in history were resident aliens on earth. In Greco-Roman society, a resident alien was a permanent resident but not a citizen. That is the tension that anyone who wants the transforming power of God must live with.
If we want to understand the message, we need to see four things we learn in this passage: 1) there are two cities, 2) each city has a conflict with the other, 3) only one city is for the other, and 4) how to become citizens of the one city that’s for the other.
This Month's Featured Book
In this book, Tim Keller goes to the Gospel of Mark and walks through it to help readers see how Jesus is at once cosmic, historical, and personal. As you read, you’ll discover that we can only make sense of our own life by looking at the life of Jesus.