Timothy Keller Sermons Podcast by Gospel in Life

You can’t talk publicly about Christianity unless at some point you get down to say, “Well, what is it?” 

There’s great consensus that 1 Corinthians was written just 20 years after the death of Jesus Christ. So when Paul says he’s summarizing the message the Corinthians heard and believed before this, he’s talking about something that happened a handful of years after Jesus’ death. If you want to get down to the irreducible core of what Christianity is about, here it is in this passage. 

This is the gospel. The gospel is about 1) Jesus, 2) sin and substitution, 3) history and resurrection, and 4) astonishing, transforming grace.

This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on November 10, 2013. Series: A Public Faith. Scripture: 1 Corinthians 15:1-11.

Today's podcast is brought to you by Gospel in Life, the site for all sermons, books, study guides and resources from Timothy Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church. If you've enjoyed listening to this podcast and would like to support the ongoing efforts of this ministry, you can do so by visiting https://gospelinlife.com/give and making a one-time or recurring donation.

One of the best ways of having a discussion about faith is to not simply talk about what you believe, but also how you came to believe it. Not just the content, but the process or the journey you went on. It’s often very helpful, because everybody is on a journey. 

We’re looking now at a famous passage: Moses and the burning bush. Moses already believes in God, but until this, he’s never encountered him. This is Moses’ conversion experience: he actually meets God. 

Four things bring Moses to this moment, and they’re the same four things the Bible says usually have to happen if you’re going to meet God. What are they? They are 1) a disrupting sight, 2) an expanding concept, 3) a personal problem, and 4) a surprising grace.

This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on November 3, 2013. Series: A Public Faith. Scripture: Exodus 3:1-14.

Today's podcast is brought to you by Gospel in Life, the site for all sermons, books, study guides and resources from Timothy Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church. If you've enjoyed listening to this podcast and would like to support the ongoing efforts of this ministry, you can do so by visiting https://gospelinlife.com/give and making a one-time or recurring donation.

We all have very strong moral convictions about what we think is right and wrong. And in a pluralistic society, we need to find ways of sharing our beliefs and being honest about who we are in a way that’s respectful and promotes peace.

One of the ways we can make for a more civil conversation is to ask a more fundamental question: Where do you get your moral convictions? How do you determine what is right and wrong? 

There’s almost no place I know that has a more interesting answer to this question than Romans 2. It tells us three things: 1) no one can succeed in being a relativist, 2) no one can really succeed in being a moralist, and therefore, 3) this is our only hope.

This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on October 27, 2013. Series: A Public Faith. Scripture: Romans 2:12-29.

Today's podcast is brought to you by Gospel in Life, the site for all sermons, books, study guides and resources from Timothy Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church. If you've enjoyed listening to this podcast and would like to support the ongoing efforts of this ministry, you can do so by visiting https://gospelinlife.com/give and making a one-time or recurring donation.

If we’re going to have a truly open society, we have to learn how to be public about our deepest faith beliefs, and yet to do so in a way that’s respectful to others and promotes peace. 

So how do you talk about God and God’s existence? One way to talk about this with more reflection is not to ask, “Does God exist?” but to ask, “How do you know whether God exists?”

I don’t think there’s any more brilliant answer to the question, “How can we know whether God exists?” than in Romans 1. Paul actually gives four answers, all at once. He says, 1) we can know God, 2) we do know God, 3) we don’t know God, and 4) we can truly know God.

This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on October 20, 2013. Series: A Public Faith. Scripture: Romans 1:16-21.

Today's podcast is brought to you by Gospel in Life, the site for all sermons, books, study guides and resources from Timothy Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church. If you've enjoyed listening to this podcast and would like to support the ongoing efforts of this ministry, you can do so by visiting https://gospelinlife.com/give and making a one-time or recurring donation.

To become a mature society in which we’re able to talk about faith, we also have to be able to talk about doubt. We don’t get much help here from either religious people or secular people. Religious people tend to see doubt as a bad thing. And secular people tend to think perennial doubt is the only sophisticated position. 

However, what the Bible says about doubt is unique, nuanced, and multidimensional. The Bible sees doubt as something that’s not all good and not all bad. Only when you begin to see it in a nuanced way can it be something through which we make progress. 

Let’s look at doubt in this famous psalm of Asaph: 1) what is it? 2) what causes it? and 3) what transforms it?

This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on October 13, 2013. Series: A Public Faith. Scripture: Psalm 73:1-3, 12-26.

Today's podcast is brought to you by Gospel in Life, the site for all sermons, books, study guides and resources from Timothy Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church. If you've enjoyed listening to this podcast and would like to support the ongoing efforts of this ministry, you can do so by visiting https://gospelinlife.com/give and making a one-time or recurring donation.

Ecclesiastes is one of the most confusing books in the world. It depicts a very disillusioned man. And you may be saying, “Is the Bible really saying all human life is pointless?” 

To understand what’s going on here, we need to keep two things in mind. The author of Ecclesiastes is called qoheleth, which basically means professor. And he’s doing a thought experiment. So Ecclesiastes is a set of thought experiments in which the professor is saying, “Let’s imagine living like this. Does that work?”

If we want to understand what Ecclesiastes is after, we need to look at its thought experiments. So let’s look at it this way: 1) there’s a major thought experiment, 2) with a lesson, and 3) there’s a small thought experiment, and then 4) an arrow or a pointer.

This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on October 6, 2013. Series: A Public Faith. Scripture: Ecclesiastes 2:9-26.

Today's podcast is brought to you by Gospel in Life, the site for all sermons, books, study guides and resources from Timothy Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church. If you've enjoyed listening to this podcast and would like to support the ongoing efforts of this ministry, you can do so by visiting https://gospelinlife.com/give and making a one-time or recurring donation.

We live in a pluralistic society, so we must ask this question: how can people be true to themselves and still get along? No matter who you are, if you care about the social fabric, that’s a huge question to answer. 

My goal is to show Christians how they can be part of the solution. We’re going to look at the subject of public faith. In John 4, we see that immediately after speaking to the Samaritan woman at the well, Jesus talks to his disciples and gets really metaphorical. He talks about spiritual sowing and reaping. What’s he trying to get across? 

If we delve into it, we see that Jesus gives us 1) a call to spiritual sowing of seed, 2) the method of doing it, and then 3) the power, or the inner motivation, for doing it.

This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on September 29, 2013. Series: A Public Faith. Scripture: John 4:27-42.

Today's podcast is brought to you by Gospel in Life, the site for all sermons, books, study guides and resources from Timothy Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church. If you've enjoyed listening to this podcast and would like to support the ongoing efforts of this ministry, you can do so by visiting https://gospelinlife.com/give and making a one-time or recurring donation.

It’s very common for people, even those who want to live the Christian life, to feel they have to check their brains at the door if they’re going to believe.

Often, we hear this basic approach to the Bible: the gospels were written down after years of legends, so we don’t really know how much of them are true. But let me give you a case that the Jesus the Bible shows you is historically reliable. 

Here is the case in three stages: 1) if you look at what the gospels claim, you’ll see they’re not written as legends or fiction; they’re either historical accounts or a deliberate hoax, 2) we now know now that all of the gospels were written within the lifetime of eyewitnesses, and 3) the same rules of historiography that are used on other documents of antiquity show the gospels to be trustworthy.

This talk was given by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on December 4, 1994. Series: Redeemer Open Forums. 

Today's podcast is brought to you by Gospel in Life, the site for all sermons, books, study guides and resources from Timothy Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church. If you've enjoyed listening to this podcast and would like to support the ongoing efforts of this ministry, you can do so by visiting https://gospelinlife.com/give and making a one-time or recurring donation.

We live in a culture of choice. In our individualistic culture, our place and our parents and our social location don’t determine everything that we can do. We have some choices. Choices! What does that mean? 

That means we’ve never needed wisdom more than we do now, because wisdom is the ability to make wise choices.

Proverbs 4 shows us that if we want to lead a life of wisdom, our lives will be characterized by three things: 1) a glorious fight, 2) a guarded heart, and 3) a living word.

This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on September 22, 2013. Series: Wisdom in Life. Scripture: Proverbs 4:5-9, 14-27.

Today's podcast is brought to you by Gospel in Life, the site for all sermons, books, study guides and resources from Timothy Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church. If you've enjoyed listening to this podcast and would like to support the ongoing efforts of this ministry, you can do so by visiting https://gospelinlife.com/give and making a one-time or recurring donation.

We live in a culture in which there are more choices than there ever have been. But you can be incredibly good, moral, and knowledgeable and still make pretty stupid choices. 

Wisdom is knowing the right thing to do in the 80 percent of choices that the moral rules don’t directly apply to. What you need in order to make good choices is wisdom. 

In Proverbs 3 we learn 1) where wisdom develops, 2) the vehicles through which wisdom develops, and 3) the catalyst that sparks and fuels them all.

This sermon was preached by Dr. Timothy Keller at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on September 15, 2013. Series: Wisdom in Life. Scripture: Proverbs 3:1-8, 11-12.

Today's podcast is brought to you by Gospel in Life, the site for all sermons, books, study guides and resources from Timothy Keller and Redeemer Presbyterian Church. If you've enjoyed listening to this podcast and would like to support the ongoing efforts of this ministry, you can do so by visiting https://gospelinlife.com/give and making a one-time or recurring donation.