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
Tim and Kathy Keller wrote The Meaning of Marriage to face the complexities of commitment with the wisdom of God. It's written to help spouses use biblical wisdom to grow through the trials of matrimony, but it also gives people who are single a realistic yet glorious view of what marriage is and can be.