Here is the full transcript of Tim Keller’s sermon titled “How To Change Deeply” which was delivered at the New Canaan Society Washington DC 2015 Weekend Retreat.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
So, hold on, I’m at the end of a great morning, but a long morning. So, my topic this morning is, as you know, how to change deeply. I want to get right into it. This has got to be practical, though I’ll try to end on an inspirational note if I can.
The Importance of Sequence in Understanding
But the order of these talks is crucial. My talk last night on identity, John’s talk this morning on enjoying God, on finding our pleasure in God, you have to know them in order for me to even bear what I’m about to tell you. You have to understand them to even bear what I have to tell you. Because I want to talk to you about what sin is still doing in your life.
And unless you have an extraordinarily deep understanding of not only God’s grace, but as I’m going to try to show you, unless you are more and more learning to actually practically enjoy Him, existentially learning to more and more love Him, and find Him more glorious than anything else. That takes time. It takes prayer. It takes worship. It takes years.
Unless you’re doing that, what I’m about to tell you will not make sense. And in some ways, they are the secret to how to change deeply. So, let’s remember again kind of what I said last night.
The Foundation of Our Identity
You have to know that you’re in Him. When David Martyn Lloyd-Jones, who was a minister, you know, a great British minister in the middle part of the 20th century in Britain, but when he was very — in London, excuse me — but when he was very sick near the end of his life, he was interviewed and somebody said to him, “Hey, what, doesn’t it bother you that you’re on the shelf? You used to be preaching all the time. Everyone wanted you to speak. You spoke everywhere. You were writing. You were,” he was a very, very, very prominent and dominant voice in the Christian world. And now he was on the shelf, literally.
He was, you know, he was shut in and he was sick. And they said, “Doesn’t it bother you?” And he looked at them and he said, “Rejoice not that the demons are subject to your name, but that your names are written in heaven.” It’s the place where in Luke chapter 10, Jesus sends 70 disciples out and they come back after a day and they say, this is a paraphrase, “Wow, Lord, even the demons are subject to our name.”
In other words, He sent them out with miraculous power and they’re going, and, you know, and they were healing people and they were casting out demons and they came back and they said, “We’ve had an incredible day. We’ve gone from success to success. The world, the flesh, and the devil, they’re all in retreat.” And Jesus looks at them and He actually rebukes them and He gives them a command.
The True Cause for Rejoicing
And this is the old King James version, He says, “Rejoice not that the demons are subject to your name. I mean, you’ve had a great week this week, right? The demons, you know, were on the run, but next week, the demons might come back and they might overcome you.”
And He says, “You’ve had a good week, but what when you have a bad week? Don’t rejoice in that. You know, you’re going to be up and down, spiritually bipolar.” He says, “Rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” Now, the reason I’m remembering this is because last night at our table, this was called to mind. “Your names are written in heaven.”
J.I. Packer, years ago, I heard J.I. Packer give a talk in which he said, “The Bible tells us in the Old Testament that the priest, the high priest, went back into the Holy of Holies and he was wearing the ephod, a breastplate with precious stones, precious stones on his breastplate.” And on the stones were inscribed the names of the tribes of Israel. And J.I. Packer said, “The New Testament is very adamant in saying that Jesus Christ is our actual high priest who’s actually before the throne of God.”
And I remember him saying, “It’s not too much to consider this, to draw out that, it’s not spelled out exactly in the New Testament, but here’s what you need to know, that when you become a Christian, your name is inscribed over the heart of Jesus Christ.” He’s bearing it before the Father. When the Father sees your name, He sees an absolute beauty. And Packer said, “Here’s what it means to be Spirit filled.”
The Impact of Divine Love
“It’s to be melted with a spiritual understanding that that is what God sees when He sees you, that the only eyes whose opinion matters in the whole universe finds you more precious than all the jewels that lie beneath the earth.” And he says, “By living on a platform of that, and by, this is actually really, and by having your heart ablaze with the fact that God loves me like that, and then to find your own heart being evoked into love back, and so you find there’s nothing more joyful, nothing more pleasurable than to simply be in love with my Savior, my Lord.” And he says, “That’s what it means to be Spirit filled.”
The degree to which you understand that, the degree to which you’re living out of that, that my name’s already written in heaven. It’s not like at the end of life, if I’m really good all my life, God will write my name in the book of life.
No, your name’s already written in heaven over the breast of Jesus Christ standing before the Father.
Now, you’ve got to know that, and I just spent five, six of my precious minutes on that, because unless you know that, you will not have the emotional strength to admit how much sin is still in your life. There seems to be two, well, you can read it in the book of Romans, there’s two false approaches to the spiritual life, but one is to say, if I live a good life, then God will accept me.
“If I live a good enough life, if I’m surrendered enough, then God will hear my prayers, and then he’ll bless me, and he’ll take me to heaven.” And if your self-image is based on you being a good person, a moral person, a decent person, a religious person, an obedient person, “I’m a good guy.” If that’s the basis of your self-image, then when any data comes to you that threatens that self-image, you’ll screen it out, you’ll go into denial, it won’t be there. And the data that is threatening that self-image is data about your sin.
In other words, you will be in denial, you will not be able to admit how flawed you are, how much sin still lives in you. If the basis of your self-image is that I’m a good Christian, not I’m in Christ, that I’m an obedient, decent, moral person, not I’m righteous only in Him. See, unless you really know who you are in Him, you will not be able to admit what’s wrong with you. In fact, three things you won’t be able to do.
The Path to Deep Change
Unless you really know who you are in Christ, and unless you’re learning how to, what John said, it’s not just know that God accepts me, but that should be the means to the end of actually having a love relationship with Him, an existential, joy-filled love relationship with Him. To the degree that you move into that, then you will be able to do three things. You will be able to admit how sinful you still are, which is crucial to change, because you’ve got to be realistic. Secondly, you’ll be able to avoid the false solution to your sin problem. And thirdly, you’ll be able to deploy the true solution.
So there’s my three points. Let’s run through them. First of all, only if you really understand who you are in Him, you’re really grounded in that assurance, number one, will you be able to admit how much sin is still left in you.
Understanding Our Sin Nature
What do I mean by that? Let me give you two verses, Romans 7, verse 18 to 20, Romans 7 says this. Paul says, this is Paul talking, “I have a desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out.” And then one or two verses later, he says, “Now I do what I do not want, because it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me.”
So, in that section, Paul is talking about the fact that he’s got something in his life that is keeping him from doing what he ought to do. He calls it sin. And he says it dwells in him, which means sin is not something that comes at you from outside. It doesn’t tempt you from the outside. Sin is constitutive to who you are. It’s part of who you are. It’s dwelling in you. It’s residing in you.
And the other verse, which is, to me, one of the most bone-chilling verses in all of the Bible, because it’s God Himself saying this, and God Himself using this metaphor. God comes to Cain in Genesis chapter 4, Cain is getting angry, jealous, and resentful toward his brother Abel, something bad is about to happen. And God comes to Cain and says, “If you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door. It desires to have you, but you must rule over it.”
If you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door. Its desire is to have you, but you must master it. Now, first of all, it’s God’s metaphor. First of all, He says sin is crouching.
Understanding Sin’s Deception
Now, to be crouching means to hide, to get low so you’re not seen. And so the first thing God is telling us here is that your sin always hides itself. Your sin, what’s wrong with you, will always, your sin, you generally know about your sins, but they always will appear to you to be less serious and smaller than they really are. So, for example, in your heart, you say things like this, “I’m not irritable, I just have high standards. I’m not ruthless, I’m just a sharp business person. I’m not stingy, I’m just prudent.” I’m not, in other words, I’m not obsessed with physical appearance, I just appreciate good grooming.
In other words, what you do is sin is always crouching. You never see it. The other thing, though, is the idea of sin crouching down means God is likening sin in your life to a predator, an animal, like a crouching tiger, hidden dragon. And what He’s saying is that when you are selfish instead of serving, when you worry instead of trust, when you pay back instead of forgive, when you tell a half-truth instead of the truth, whenever you do anything like that, that doesn’t just pass away. Sin becomes a reality in your life. It stays with you.
Sin doesn’t pass away when you do them. They somehow take shape and they shadow you, and they become a presence within your life. It’s not surprising that haters are hated, that cowards are deserted. It’s not surprising that gossips are gossiped about. When you sin, it has a boomerang effect. It stays in your life.
The Necessity of Mortification of Sin
It weakens your will. It blinds you more and more. This is the reason why John Owen, in his great book, “Mortification of Sin,” says one of the great duties of the Christian, a Christian now, is be killing your sin or sin will be killing you. You need to be constantly after it. Do you see why, by the way, now do you see why, in fact, some of you are starting to feel bad? It’s because you actually haven’t completely grasped the first two talks you heard here.
See, if you have grasped that, then now you say, “Okay, this is bad, but you know what? This is all right.” There’s no condemnation for those in Jesus Christ. I finally can admit this. And if you can’t, if you say, “Oh, this is making me feel bad, oh, this is making me feel bad,” better go back and say, “Do you really believe the gospel? Do you understand the gospel yet?”
But once you do, you’re free to admit, “Boy, I am a lot worse than I have ever been able to admit until now.” Now here’s the other thing. I told you the first thing, you have to be able to, without the gospel of grace, of free costly grace, you’re not going to be able to admit your magnitude of the sin that’s still inside you. But secondly, unless you understand the gospel of grace, you’re also not going to avoid the normal way people most often try to change, which doesn’t work.
The Ineffectiveness of Avoiding Sin’s Consequences
And what is that way? Most people try to change by just trying hard to avoid the consequences of sin. They try hard to avoid the consequences of sin. That means you are not going to change deeply. Here’s why. For example, some years ago, the first time I realized this, I was a young minister, my church in Virginia, and there was a couple that came to me over and over again. They had marriage problems. And there was a man in the congregation, it was a man who was a husband, he had his wife, and he was abusive verbally.
He didn’t physically abuse his wife, but he was very verbally abusive. I remember one day, he comes into me in a panic, because his wife had actually literally left. She had just gotten up and left. And he says, “You know what, it’s my mouth. It’s my language. She’s told me, you’ve told me, other people have told me, this is awful, this is terrible, I’m really wrong.” And he was weeping, and he was sorry, and he said, “Would you call my wife up?”
So I called her up where she was staying, and they came in, and he wept, and he wept, and he looked very, very repentant, and so she says, “Okay, okay, you’ve never admitted this before, you’ve never said this before, this is great.” And so she moves back in, and for about five months, six months, he could watch his tongue, and then he went right back into it. And she did leave him for good.
And as I look back on it, I realize something, you know, at the time I didn’t realize it, and that is, he was sorry not for his sin, he was sorry for the consequences of his sin. So as soon as the consequences went away, he went right back into it. Or put it this way, he was sorry for himself, not for his sin. He wasn’t sorry for the grief it caused his God, and he wasn’t sorry for the grief it caused his wife, which meant he didn’t love God or his wife enough to change. He essentially said, “Boy, this is going to be embarrassing, this is going to be trouble, this is going to be difficult, in fact, it was a problem with his pride.”
And because his heart hadn’t changed, what he loved hadn’t changed, he was working directly on the will. And what that meant was, he really didn’t find the sin odious. He found the consequence of the sin very troubling. So what he did was he tucked in, and basically what he did was he basically cut off, he cut down the tree but didn’t take out the roots. Because the roots was his need, frankly, as a man, to always be respected and to have people bowing and kowtowing to him all the time, and he was a Christian up here, but not underneath.
See, I mean, you know, I remember a man, I remember a man who became a Christian when I was in college, and I was a new Christian, we were in a college fellowship together. Well, actually, he had been a big man on campus, and he was a real, real sexually active man, and he was very good looking. And he certainly had a lot of girlfriends, and he had lots and lots of sex and lots of affairs. And then suddenly he becomes a Christian. He comes on into the church, into the campus fellowship, and everybody was excited. And by the way, he cleaned up his life, no more sex outside marriage, none of that stuff.
And yet inside the fellowship, I remember, he was awfully domineering, you know, in every Bible study, he always was right. And he actually eventually was always basically throwing his weight around. In hindsight, here’s what I realized. There’s two ways to be your own Savior and Lord. One is just to kind of break all the rules.
Well, why are you breaking all the rules? I remember he once told me, he says, “You know, it wasn’t sex, it wasn’t like I really liked the girls as so much as I needed to know I had the power to get any girl in bed that I could, that I really,”… and he said, “I would go after them, and once they slept with me, I lost all interest, because I wasn’t really attracted to them. I just liked the power of knowing I could get anybody in bed I wanted.” So actually, what made him feel good about himself, you might say significance or security, was found in power.
And when he wasn’t a Christian, it was very easy to see, “Oh, yeah, he’s a self-savior, he’s living for himself,” but when he came into Christianity, so-called, he came in, he was still not really trusting in God for his salvation or Christ for his salvation. He still needed that power. He now just was finding a religious way of doing it. He still needed to always be right. He still needed to be in charge. He still needed to be the leader. He still needed to have people not contradicting him. And so he stopped a lot of bad behavior, but he hadn’t changed underneath, and new behavior came up.
New deeper versions of his power idolatry, his need to be in charge, his need to push people around, his need, that was really where his salvation was, not in Jesus Christ. And he came in, and he was a professing Christian, and he said he believed, and he had asked Jesus into his heart, and all that stuff, but he hadn’t changed down deep. He really hadn’t changed. I don’t know how, it’s kind of difficult at this point to get this across as much as I’d like to, but I can tell you one other thing before moving on to the third, you know, how to.
I have my own version of John Piper’s story about his wife and about giving her flowers out of duty and how incongruous that is. I didn’t make this one up, though. I wasn’t smart enough. I got it from somebody else. I listened to a minister some years ago preaching on Deuteronomy chapter 7, where God says, or basically Moses says to the children of Israel, “God did not set His love upon you because you were one of the greater nations. In fact, you were the smallest of nations. But it was because He set His love upon you that He brought you out of Egypt.” And the preacher said, “Did you hear that circular reasoning?”
“Did you hear that circular reasoning?” He said, “God didn’t love you because you were great. You were actually not great at all. You were a loser country, a loser nation. But He loved you and then He brought you out of Egypt. It was circular.” He says, “Basically what God is saying is, ‘I loved you because I loved you because I loved you. I didn’t love you because you were serviceable to Me. I didn’t love you because you would do this for Me. I just loved you because I loved you.”
Then the preacher went on and said, “Someday your wife is going to come to you and say, ‘Oh man, do you love me, honey?’ And you’re of course going to say, ‘Of course I love you, sweetheart.'”
The Foundation of True Love
And then she’s going to say, “Why? Why do you love me?” And remember the preacher says, “Now be careful, guys, because everything’s on the line now.” And he says, “Here’s what you could say, ‘Honey, I love you because you’ve got a great figure.'”
“You could say, ‘I love you because we have great sexual chemistry. We have just great sexual chemistry. I love you because you’re athletic and we can do all kinds of stuff I couldn’t do with other women. We can go mountain climbing and we can play tennis. I love you because you actually have your own career and so you bring a pretty good amount of money into the family coffers.” And I love you for all, and you know, I remember the preacher says, “Now if she’s stupid, she’ll actually start to like what you’re saying for a minute and then she’ll think about it. ‘What if I don’t want to quit work? What if I gain weight?'”
“What if I get depressed for a while?” You see, when you say, ‘I love you because you’re serviceable to me,’ that’s not love. He says, “The only answer for whatever, you know, something may have attracted you to your wife to start with, but you don’t love your wife unless you look at her and say, ‘Honey, I love you because I love you because I love you.’ That’s sovereign, electing, gracious love.
God’s Sovereign Love
And when God loves you like that, He loves you just because He loves you. He loves you at the infinite cost of His Son. The only true response to that, if you think about it, and that’s what we try to do in worship and if you cultivate your heart in that direction, the only thing you can possibly do is to say, “God, I love you because I love you because I love you.” I don’t love you because you give me this or that.
Because if I do that, if I love God because He’s giving me things, then I’m not loving Him for who He is in Himself. I’m not loving Him because He’s beautiful. I’m loving Him because He’s useful. And as long as you look to God like that, and a lot of Christians do, they say, “I’ve come, I’ve come,” and this is what, this is I think the burden of John’s message this morning.
Transformative Power of Unconditional Love
He said, “I’ve come into Christianity because God gave me a clear conscience, because God gave me help here, because God gave me, okay, but what are you supposed to do with that?” You’re supposed to turn and say, “Now I love you whether or not you’re helping me, whether or not you give me all these things. I just love you because I love you, because you’re beautiful to me.” And only when that happens will sin lose its power over you.
You know why? See, if this guy had said, “I have a bad mouth, but how could I, how in the world could I treat not only my wife like that, but my God like that, who died so I wouldn’t sin, who did all, and how could I treat, how could I trample on the blood of Christ?” In other words, if you learn how to convict yourself with your joys, the sin will actually lose its attractive power over you. Otherwise, if you only convict yourself with the consequence of the sin, as soon as the consequences go away, you’ll be right back doing what you always did before, because you’re still basically into a form of self-salvation.
Deep Change Requires Introspection and Joy
There’s three things you’ve got to do if you’re really going to change deeply. Here they are. I’ve got about a couple of minutes for each one. Here’s the three things. Number one is you’ve got to learn, because of the strength you have, emotionally, because you know of who you are in Jesus, you’ve got to be willing to take a good look at yourself and talk to other people around you and find out what’s really bad about you. And you’ve still got patterns that create certain kinds of sins. You’ve got patterns that create certain kinds of sins.
So, for example, I’ll just read this. “Some of you are prone to flares of anger, harsh language, and simply being unloving. Some of you, even though you’re Christians, some of you are prone to be ungenerous with money and too cautious about taking risks of any kind with anyone. Some of you are prone to worry and to rash statements and judgments. Some of you are prone to stubbornness and not being able to repent or admit when you’re wrong.”
“Some of you are prone to jealousy, lying, and lack of integrity. Some of you are prone to manipulating people, even abusing power. You’re not a team player. Some of you are prone to get over-committed, inwardly comparing yourself to others. Some of you are cowards. Some of you are prone to divulge confidences and to enjoy confronting others too much. Some of you are, well, figure out who you are. Talk to the people who know you best.”
See the kinds of patterns in your life that actually make you prone to certain kinds of sins. Number one, do you have the ability to do that? Will you do that? Will you learn?
Convicting Yourself with Joy
Secondly, learn how to convict yourself with joy. If you just beat yourself up, “Oh boy, bad things are going to happen to you if you do that,” that’s reminding yourself of the consequences of the sin. It’s basically being self-absorbed and self-centered. It’s basically looking not to Jesus Christ, but to all sorts of other things for your own salvation.
You will find that even though you might sort of force yourself by a power, an effort of the will to stop something for a while, it won’t really change the heart because the sin itself hasn’t become unattractive to you because you haven’t seen it as grieving the one who you love. So what you have to do is you have to learn how to convict yourself with the joy that you have in the gospel.
I’ll give you three examples of this. “Oh Lord, when I fall into pride, when I get so upset about what people are saying about me, when I get so upset about losing face, I have to remember this, that on the cross You made Yourself of no reputation and You gave up all Your power and all Your glory for me.”
And the more I thank and rejoice that You did that, the less I need to worry about my own honor and reputation or whether people are approving me or not. You got to catch yourself doing that and pray that. What you’re doing is you’re taking a joy, a glory, and you’re convicting yourself with it.
“Oh Lord, when I fall into coldness and irritability with people, I remember this, that in the garden just before You died, You were so gentle and affirming of us when we went to sleep on You. On the cross, You were giving yourself for people who abandoned You and mocked You and the more I thank and rejoice that You did that for me, it melts away my hardness of heart and makes me able to be patient, attentive to the people around me.”
“Oh Lord, when I fall into anxiety and fearfulness, I remember that You faced the most astonishing dangers for me. You were torn to pieces so bravely for me so I could be utterly loved and eternally safe in You.” The more I thank You for that, the more I find myself getting calm because I don’t have to prove myself anymore and that gives me a kind of courage I never had before.
The Last Steps to True Change
Do you know how to take what Jesus gives you, the joy, and to use it on yourself to say, “How can I do this sin anymore? I don’t need to do this sin anymore. How can I grieve the one I love?” When He’s given me the very thing that I need, I don’t need to do this in order to get that. You know how to do that. You know how to connect the glories of the gospel, the benefits of the gospel with the particular sin patterns.
Here’s the last thing. It’s not going to be easy. It is not at all going to be easy for you to be this realistic. I think there’s a danger that at first we hate ourselves, we find Jesus Christ, we realize that God loves us anyway, and then to some degree we say, “Well, I don’t have to worry that much about these things that are still wrong in my life. Why did Jesus go to the cross? Why did He suffer all that?”
You say, ‘Well, because He loved me.’ That’s not the only reason, because if He only loved you, He could have just said, ‘Hey, you sinned, but that’s all right, just forget about it.’ He went to the cross because the law, His moral norms are so important, and He is so holy and sin is so heinous that He had to die because all sin has to be punished.” He can only forgive you for it because He was punished for it. That’s how bad sin is.
And therefore, it’s not right for you to say, ‘Well, He accepts me, so okay, you know, I got problems, but that doesn’t matter.’ No, no. But then you can’t go back and start beating yourself up. You have to use grace on your sin. And you have to say, “Because Jesus Christ died for me, even though I’m admitting I’m doing these bad things, that doesn’t mean I’m stained.” So what I’ve often found is people get the idea that they’re saved and they’re loved by God in spite of their sin, and then they kind of diminish their understanding of the sin. But if you come on back and say, no, the sin is really, really serious, but God’s grace is greater.
The Power of Redemption
Jesus Christ died to take the stains out of me that nobody else could take out. There’s an interesting story. It’s called “The Black Bull of Norway.” It’s an old Scottish fairy tale. And it’s about a prince who goes into battle and he kills somebody he regrets. And when he gets home, he finds he can’t get the blood out of his tunic. And he makes a declaration. He says, “If there’s any girl, any young woman in this kingdom who can get the stain out of my tunic, I’ll know she’s my true love and I will marry her and she’ll be my queen.”
So, all the various girls of the kingdom try to get the stain out. Nobody can do it. But there’s a Cinderella kind of person in this story. There’s a girl who’s kind of a slave, works for this kind of evil stepmother who’s got her own daughters. And the girl doesn’t know about the promise, doesn’t know about the challenge. One day she finds this tunic. It’s got blood on it. She washes it and it comes clean.
But she doesn’t realize the significance of it. There’s this mom, this mother, this evil stepmother kind of person who sees what she did but she doesn’t tell her. Instead, she grabs one of her daughters, takes the tunic, goes to see the prince and says, “Look, my daughter got the stain out.” And the prince kind of looks at the girl and realizes, “Wait a minute, something’s not right here.”
And eventually, the way the story works, it’s a kind of Cinderella story. In the end, the prince discovers who it really was who got the stain out. Now, what is all that? It’s a fairy tale. But you know, when I first got married, I thought that Kathy was the one who was — Kathy accepted me in spite of my flaws and in some ways she was my true love because she made me feel better. But in the end, Kathy and I both talked about this and she says, “No, no, no, I can’t do it. Jesus is your true love. Jesus is the only one who can really get the stain out.”
And Jesus Christ went to the cross to get that stain out. You need to know that if you are going to face what’s still wrong with you. And He’s taken it away. There’s no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.
Embracing Grace for Transformation
So, I’m only here to say, don’t be afraid to get back into the muck. Admit what’s wrong with you. Use grace on it. Don’t be afraid to say, “Oh, I don’t want.” If you can’t handle looking at your sin, you have to go back to the grace. The more you see your sin, the more you’ll be forced to see the wonders of His grace. That’s how you change deeply. Let’s pray.
Our Father, we thank You that in this conference, You have both taken us high, shown us the greatness of Your grace. And yet now here, Lord, I’m asking that my brothers around me here would take very seriously the fact that, that the grace enables change. And I pray, Lord, that You would keep us learning, keep us learning more and more how we can use grace on our hearts so that we truly can become the men You want us to be. We are here to be, to know we’re accepted and we’re here to enjoy You. And that should change us. Let it change us. Let us have the guts to admit how little it has changed us. And let us have the wherewithal in order to bring to bear Your grace on our lives so we can be conformed more and more into the image of Jesus Christ, in whose name we pray, Amen.