Introduction to the Life and Work of Tim Keller at TGC Netherlands

The following is an uncorrected transcript generated by a transcription service. Before quoting in print, please check the corresponding audio for accuracy.

Collin Hansen: Greetings from the gospel coalition in the United States and from our, from our president, Sandy Wilson. And the rest of our staff, I’ve just come from Stockholm, Sweden, where we had our second TGC Norden event, I met pastors there and church leaders from the Faroe Islands from Copenhagen, Aarhus, Stockholm, even the First Presbyterian Church of Norway. Just, there’s not a second Presbyterian Church in the entire country. So that was quite an experience to be able to meet that. Meet that pastor, and I’m delighted to be with you. here two years ago, I had just been working all summer on this book. And we’d had a miracle happen right before with COVID 19 restrictions and things like that they lifted, we prayed a lot, they lifted the day before I arrived from Copenhagen. And so it’s a delight to be able to come back, see many familiar faces and friendly faces and to be able to, to celebrate what the Lord has done even in a time of significant grief. For so many of us. We would not be here, I don’t think today without Tim Keller, and yet we miss him dearly. And as our co founder of the gospel coalition and longtime Vice President. It’s a miracle in many ways this book came about because Tim Keller was not the kind of person who loved to talk about himself. And so one of the reasons that we took the approach that we did with this book is because while he does not like to talk about himself, as he, he loves to talk about other people, he loves to talk about what he’s learning, he’s always he always loved to talk about the books that he was reading. And to give credit to all of those many people that he’d learned from over the years. There’s no way we never would have gotten an autobiography out of him and telling his story. But I would say that the closest he ever came to doing that was in his 2008 book, The prodigal God. And it makes sense in a talk here about the person and work of Tim Keller to be able to help set the stage we need to be able to cover some of that ground some of that background in his life. This book was one of his first two best selling books. And this book was, of course, very meaningful to him. If you saw the memorial service from this last summer in New York City at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, you saw that the painting on the front of the program was from the artist, Mako Fujimura, does work the prodigal God. So you know that that was very significant to Tim, you may know of his interpretation of Jesus’s famous parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15, that it’s not about the one son, but it is about two both are lost, even though one of the sons stayed at home. And that older brother, if you’re familiar with the story represents the Pharisees, the listeners, those in the audience, who protest the lavish grace of the Father. Now one of the ways that Tim often talked about this, and I, I trust this is true in the Netherlands in ways that are similar to the United States. But sometimes there are churches or cities that will attract people who either tend toward the personality and the interests and inclinations and the sins of the older brother, or of the younger brother. He used to say to me used to say that younger brothers often will grow up in places like where I live in the bible belt to the United States and Alabama, and moved to New York to be able to escape their older brothers. I suppose that would be Amsterdam or someplace like it here. Many younger brothers had wandered into the doors of Redeemer Presbyterian Church with which he and his wife Kathy had founded with their family in 1989, in New York City. But I think one of the reasons that Tim understood this story so well, why it resonated with him was because he represented both brothers. Because he represented both brothers Tim was born in 1950, the oldest of three children, and his Italian Catholic mother expected a whole lot from him. And he took on that expectation. His family would later nickname him Boy Scout. He was always the one who wanted to do the right thing. Wouldn’t even park in front of a fire hydrant in the city did not want to break those laws. He was a dutiful older brother. But I think And I certainly didn’t know this and some of the same ways until I worked on this book that not many people know that Tim also was the proverbial younger brother that went in went off to Bucknell University in 1968, he had rebelled against what his family and church taught him about, for example, religion, as well as race and in American history, not only in American history, but including in American history in 1968. That year he started I went and I was when I was preparing this book, I did a playlist of all of the famous songs from 1968 was a very memorable year. This is the year of the Woodstock Festival. In the United States. The number one hit when Tim went off to college was hey, Jude from The Beatles, so a very memorable time. It was memorable because of a tremendous amount of social upheaval, especially in the United States related to the civil rights movement, the sexual revolution and the Vietnam War protests. It is the year that both Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated. And at Bucknell, Tim Keller studied other world religions, existentialism, from the likes of Albert Camus was in the air. And the cover story of Time magazine was asking the question Is God dead? That was 1968. And in his frustration with his his church, and to a certain level, his family, Tim Keller had decided that he did not want to be a Christian, he did not want their moralistic religion, that community had discouraged him from the faith. But this book is all about the community of saints who encouraged Tim Keller over the years in his faith, to our benefit into the benefit of many others. And it was other Christians, namely his college classmates, especially with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, who led him to a born again, faith in Jesus. And we come back again, then to his book, The prodigal God, and the importance of a community of faith. He said this, there is no way you will be able to grow spiritually, apart from a deep involvement in a community of other believers. You can’t live the Christian life without a band of Christian friends, without a family of believers in which you find a place. So my book then introduces readers to Keller’s community, to his friends, his family and his mentors, but also the authors who encouraged and challenged him, as they have for many of us throughout the centuries, the community of the saints who have passed, and gone to be with the Lord. And the way I came to think about this, and to describe this came from Tim himself. It’s the concept of rings on a tree. And so think this book, what it does met, his most essential is that cuts open, Tim Keller’s life and his ministry so that we can look inside and examine the different rings that formed him as a believer and as a pastor. And I can say, in more than 20 years of this ministry, that I have never met a more mature tree, a more solid oak with more rings.

The concept I picked up here actually came from Tim Keller in a conversation with Don Carson and John Piper, for the gospel coalition in 2014. You can see the video and he said, I don’t he’s talking here again about his community. He said, I don’t just mean individuals, multiple individuals, I think you have to have multiple sources. Now, I’m going to take this as an aside, one of the reasons this is significant, is because John Piper is famous for saying that you find one mentor, and you study everything you possibly can from that one person. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad strategy. I’m simply trying to point out that John Piper and Tim Keller were exceedingly different from each other. When it came to this, if John Piper’s said to focus on one, Tim Keller said to focus on many. So Tim Keller went on to say, I would say if you don’t appreciate any of the Puritan writers, you’re missing out. There are some tremendous Puritan writers. But I also know people who only seem to care about the Puritans. They went into the Puritan forest and they’ve never come out It’s the only thing they read and when they speak, and when they preach, they start me thinks they talk like the Puritans. And then he said, I think the fact that you Piper and I have learned so much, both from CS Lewis and Jonathan Edwards, to people who almost certainly would not have gotten along, they’re so different. I think that has corrected me at a number of places where I get too much into the one guy, and the other guy comes in and reminds me, no, he’s not the only way. It’s almost like if you cut a person, a good minister, for example, like a tree, there should be a lot of rings, that gives that Minister his own distinctive voice, and perhaps really helps him listen to what God is calling him to be as a minister. Whereas if you only have one or two individuals or even kinds of sources, you really become almost a clone. Of all the things you could accuse Tim Keller of being a clone was not one. One of the most common responses I get from readers is that I didn’t just make them buy that one book about Tim Keller. They ended up having to buy a whole bunch more other books about Tim Keller, it’s not so much one some one person said, a biography of Tim Keller, it’s more of a bibliography of Tim Keller. It’s the list of all of the books that he read. And I think that’s because I think that’s how Tim would have wanted this to be. He did not see himself as a destination as the fulfillment of of everything that we could imagine. He was a guide for us in our spiritual journey. He showed us the blessings of a lifelong curiosity. So he would grab over here from John starts preaching in London and grab over here from Herman banks worldview over there, he would reach for the new urbanism of Jane Jacobs for New York City, as he combined that with the existentialist philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard no long before he’d ever been even moderately, moderately famous. Tim Keller’s rings to also grew to include the great revivalist and prayer warrior Jack Miller, the theologian and the apologist RC Sproul, well known Christian writer, Elizabeth Elliott and missionary as well as Barbara Boyd, who helped to introduce generations of students around the world through InterVarsity, to inductive Bible study, as well as Richard Loveless, the expert on at Jonathan Edwards and revival in Harvey Kahn, the Michigan missionary to South Korea, come home to Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia. But those rings also include little known pastors, like Kennedy smart to actually outlive Tim Keller, and was the person who invited him to come to this small church in Hopewell Virginia. And when he was coming out of seminary, Tim Keller only had one personal mentor, and that was Ed Clowney, but through Ed Clowney, he learned an entire world of perspectives in especially biblical theology. And the Christ centered preaching of your heart is Voss of Princeton seminary. Sometimes what you’ll see, especially with younger leaders is a tendency toward following the fads. It’s, it’s almost like the it’s almost like fashion. One day everybody over here is reading this guy and but then the next day that guy has been canceled, you can’t read him anymore. And Keller did make one major shift in his life. It was against the wishes of his mother, who was a strong Wesleyan holiness pilotis at this time, that one shift was into Presbyterianism during his studies at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary between 1972 and 1975. No doubt, as Tim would often credit, he was influenced in this direction by one of his fellow students, Cathy Christie, who would go on to be his wife. And from this early change, though, we see a consistent pattern with Tim Keller, that he would opt for synthesis about bringing ideas together, over antithesis of pushing them against one another, so that when he added rings on his tree, he did not subtract other rings from that tree. Almost all of his major convictions had already been reached by the end of 1975, by the end of his seminary and he did not change those beliefs. What I’ve come to see with Tim Keller is that he was settled and curious and I love that At posture for the Christian and for the minister, being settled in convictions, and yet still curious about people about ideas about what the Lord is doing in the world, settled and curious, I liked that posture. Think this is again why the concept of rings on a tree works so well to describe a killer. Because if you go back even to his conversion in 1970 at Bucknell, that core never changed. It was the gospel of Jesus Christ, His unmerited favor towards sinners, his grace. If you had met Tim Keller in college, he would talk to you about justification by faith alone. And you would have heard the same thing from him in his hospital room at the end of his life. Younger students who had mentored at Bucknell talked to me even in their 70s as people who looked up to Tim Keller, as an older student who had mentored them, classmates from Gordon Conwell, they recognized his teaching style, because after class, they would all go back to his dorm room. And he would redo the entire lecture, they said, and it would be even better than what they got in the classroom. He was doing this already he was popularizing, and translating the professors and the ideas, even in 1972 that remained consistent in his life. Church members from Hopewell, Virginia remembered his zeal to see revival breakout in their community. And early Redeemer members remember the powerful packaging of complex thinking that he could take these big ideas and explain them in a way that made sense to the rest of us. I think that Tim Keller’s contributions have thus far been underestimated, precisely because he was so consistent. Because he was so consistent his theology, his relationships, his personality, they were all stable. There was remarkably little change in them. Plus, he was quick to be able to credit his influences, in part because he exercised his prodigious gift for recall, for being able to remember. So when he would cite so many other people, Tim Keller made the rest of us think that perhaps he wasn’t original. And he broke with the common advice that preachers get against naming too many outside sources or references. But yeah, that’s in part because his context in New York City, these footnotes to his sermon help skeptics know that he was listening to and engaging with the outside world. But it’s exactly in these widespread references in the footnotes of his books, that you also see his originality, his originality that comes through and how he synthesized all of these different influences. He pulled the sources together for unexpected insights

that transcended the disciplines. Now, you might think that if he I mean, as he said it himself, if he had only quoted CS Lewis, then he might have been derivative. There was a fun story that Mako Fujimura shared with me. He said, we always knew when Tim Keller did not have time to prepare his sermon. And that’s because he would show up, he’d stand up behind the pulpit, and he would just quote CS Lewis. And that is how we knew he didn’t have time. However, it was still a great sermon because Lewis was great. That was the comment that I got from them. But he didn’t, of course, course quote, just CS Lewis, you knew that he read widely when he would quote 100 Different sources over the years from the New York Times bestseller list all the way to the Puritan classics. Now what he warned about only reading the Puritans, though, I think we could also say, reflects people who would only quote those urbane periodicals and today, I often see pastors who make a mistake on either side. But I think it’s best in the best sense of the Neo Calvinist tradition to be modern and Orthodox at the same time, rooted in our tradition, and yet applicable to the present. You need them together. I’ve said before already this god given in ability to integrate vastly different sources and then share those insights with others has been observed by just about anybody who ever knew Tim Keller going all the way back to his college days which made Tim our guide to the gurus. Our guy Add to the Guru’s always adding than Tim Keller’s unique twist. You and I probably will not be able to thrive with 100 different sources, or whatever Tim was able to pull off. But I do think it’s wise for us to follow in his lead and have varied influences, from novelists, to theologians, to cultural commentators to visual artists, always with God’s word, always with the Bible as the undisputed ultimate authority. It’s interesting that another story that was shared by how will some of the Keller’s dearest friends, pertain to the 25th anniversary of Tim’s ordination, his ordination had happened at Hopewell, but by this time he was in New York City, and then went back to hope well, and one of the things that that stood out that the house had recalled for me is that when people would stand up and testify to the difference that Tim and Kathy Keller had made in their lives, not one single person mentioned anything that Tim Keller ever said, or taught. It’s not because he was not a gifted preacher. He grew a lot he preached 1500 sermons, Wednesday, Sunday morning, Sunday evening, different messages over the course of nine years and hope. Well, he wasn’t he was a gifted preacher and teacher even back then. But I think what’s interesting here is that we have to learn which of the of the proper lessons to derive from Tim Keller, because his own ministry is situation adapted. When he was in Hopewell, he understood that to be able to teach these people anything that they would remember, or even if they wouldn’t, mainly what he needed to do was to love them physically, tangibly, to show up for them to be there at their bedside, in the hospital had to learn that way of pastoral ministry. And New York City was dramatically different. In New York City, essentially, he had to first show people that he was reading what they were reading, before they would then come around and respect how he would love them. interpersonally. And so I think that’s one of the important things if you’re here today. And you’re thinking that your ministry context, your personal context, is nothing like New York City. I think that’s why hopefully, this book will be helpful to introduce you to how Tim Keller’s ministry adapted, depending on the different ministry environment, they’re a third ministry environment, not just church planter in New York City, traditional church pastor in the American South Hopewell, Virginia. But a third position that Tim Keller also occupied, was as a seminary professor. He did this at Westminster Seminary. He actually replaced his mentor at clowny. When Ed Clowney retired at Westminster, Tim Keller replaced him in the 1980s. And I think if Tim had stayed in Philadelphia his whole life, I think we probably still would remember him. He was a gifted teacher, other professors told me that in their little mentor groups that would meet with the professors, students would leave all of their groups and go join Tim’s group. So even then, in the 1980s, there was still a real draw from students to his teaching and to his ministry. And he wrote even at that time, with uncommon insights on just about everything, including the first topic that he became an expert in, and that was mercy ministry. He wrote his Doctor of Ministry dissertation, which I’ve not been able to prove this, but I’ve been told is the longest Doctor of Ministry dissertation in the history of Westminster Theological Seminary, maybe case can check for me at some point on that. But this work was specifically about recovering the work of the Presbyterian Deac in it in charity, essentially, in many ways, but recovering that vision for the local church, and also rooting it in the broader history of the social welfare system across the west. So Tim Keller’s expertise became studying the reformed Deac in it in places like Amsterdam, Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Geneva. It was his first first major work. So we probably would have remembered him if he had remained an academic. But I think we’re especially blessed because we got to see his academic insights applied as a practitioner, as somebody who built institutions and instilled his vision then through a number of organism nations including the gospel coalition, but I think you can see this best at Redeemer Presbyterian Church, which as I mentioned, he and Kathy founded in 1989, because you’ll see so clearly in the book the way all this vision came together, the combination of small groups with vocational training with evangelistic preaching with Mercy ministry, all of these combined, hopefully I’m sure we’ll hear more from Michael Keller about how this continues in their ministry today. But you can see a church that aim to be both intellectual, but also pious, reformed, but not sectarian, where young life would meet with Labrie founded by Francis Schaeffer, of course in Switzerland as an as an outreach to skeptics and young people. Francis Schaeffer was one of Keller’s major influences mediated by RC Sproul and Ligonier Valley Study Center in western Pennsylvania, during the 1970s, which both Tim and Kathy Keller had participated in. One of the things I’ve actually seen people implement from my book is what RC Sproul had described as gab fest. And that’s what Tim Keller also picked up on, they would have this evening session where people would show up and they could ask the pastor, anything, ask him anything, anything’s on the table. And when Tim would do this, and hope well, Virginia, if you didn’t have any questions, that was okay, because Tim had about 100 or more ready for you to ask, in case you needed to list in some help. But you can see then, that through these institutions as a practitioner, Tim Keller left behind a significant legacy that Lord willing, will long outlast him. Consider his church planting work through Redeemer city to city. And I think it’s fair to say that among this generation, no one did more than Tim Keller did to prepare evangelicalism for a global, multicultural, and urban future, a global, multicultural, and urban future. And so that’s for all for all of us. It’s hard to imagine Tim Keller apart from New York City. And I think the closest parallel would be John Stott from the previous generation. But I think there’s a hidden lesson in this contribution to the church of urban church planting. Because when you consider for the first half of Tim Keller’s life, there were three things that he had no experience with global, urban, multicultural, church planting, I

had no experience with any of those things. And in first major book would not release until 2008, when he was 57 years old. Just for context, it was the same year that my first book had come out. He was much more seasoned, much more experienced by that time was first major book, his ministry as Mercia come out earlier to a smaller release. But first major book was when he was 57 years old. So I think even if you’re your mid career, and you’re not quite sure what the Lord has prepared for your what he’s doing right now, you don’t know how all of your experiences and insights and studies might ultimately cohere. But we can see from Keller’s example how he patiently built out the rings on his tree by God’s grace, as he waited on the Lord, for that future that only the Lord knew. In the remainder of our time, I want to share these five particular insights, in addition to what I’ve learned, is writing about Tim Keller that we can apply to ministry. And I know that, especially these days, there’s can be a lot of skepticism about about church leaders, especially them not finishing well. And I think maybe all of the rest of us have been chastened about this about thinking, Am I going to finish? Well, when we think about high profile scandals with apologists who have done great harm, unfortunately, around the world, we’ve seen too many examples of pastors who said one thing from behind the pulpit, and another thing away from the cameras. So it’s safer for us to keep these people at a distance from us. Perhaps maybe not to look up to them or perhaps to assume something cynical of them. We didn’t take me very long to realize that Tim Keller was far from perfect, but I had long before I had started writing the book in 2000 and 20 I’d been working with him for 15 years. So I didn’t need to be told that he admitted to a consistent fear of man, the fear of other people and their views of him. He hated conflict, tried to avoid it at all costs. And one of the things I found is that the colleagues and family who were closest to him were, were not those who idolized him. But it’s not because of his inconsistency. It’s precisely because of his consistency. Because he was the same person in both settings. They actually knew too much about his weaknesses and strengths as a manager, as a father, or as a friend. And yet somehow those imperfections, those sins, those patterns actually increased the affections for him. Because they didn’t venerate just an image on screen. They knew the real person, they knew that he depended on God’s grace, just like the rest of us must, and he did not boast. Just think about the memorial service at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, you couldn’t find a picture of him anywhere. There was practically no no picture of that no grave to visit or to venerate. Similar to Calvin’s own death. He wanted a sermon that was all about the gospel. And that’s what Sam alberi delivered. There were all kinds of famous people. If you knew who you were looking for in this crowd of 2000 people at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, there are all kinds of famous people who could have stood up and sort of shared their celebrity glow with Tim Keller. But all we got instead were a few words from Kathy, and his first friends in Hopewell, Virginia, and then on Roosevelt Island in New York. So Tim Keller reminded us that the best ministry leaders don’t aim for perfection. They lead the way, in repentance. They don’t aim for perfection, they lead the way in repentance. It wasn’t Tim Keller’s many accomplishments that impressed his friends. It was his humility. And it was his depth of character. So let me share these five things that I’ve learned before we conclude the first first point here, and so many of these we’ve already covered one way or another, but I just wanted to summarize them, I think appropriately with five points here in the Netherlands. So the first one then is not to judge potential in young leaders too quickly. Not to judge potential in young leaders too quickly. You would not have identified Tim Keller as most likely to succeed in his seminary class. He wasn’t the most outspoken student professors did not recognize him with awards. You got to see in his preaching class. Mentors did not line up to take him under their wing. And this was hurtful to Tim, that he was not recognized in these ways. After seminary, he and Kathy didn’t know if they’d find a ministry position. So they took the civil service exam to join the US Postal Service as mail carriers. And the best man at their wedding. Bruce Henderson, who talked with me for the book, told me that well, they must have been desperate. And I said, Well, sure they were I mean, Tim Keller and Tim McCarthy. They studied to carry the mail. I mean, they must have been desperate to get a job. And Bruce responded and said, No, I mean that the church must have been desperate. Because Tim and Kathy were not impressive at the time for a three month position in Hello, Virginia. I think the lesson here is to remember that ministry is a long game, at least until Jesus returns so don’t give up on young leaders even if they don’t make the best first impression you don’t know when they’ll blossom. Between the ages of 57 and 71. Tim Keller released an entire library full of Evan Jellicle classics that you can find here back on the book table. Just you don’t know exactly what the Lord is going to do in his timing. The second lesson then is that you can borrow from sources without buying everything that they can sell. You can borrow without buying. Tim Keller was ordained in the Presbyterian Church in America. He was a conventional reformed evangelical who taught the inerrancy of Scripture, the penal substitutionary atonement of Jesus Christ, and justification by faith alone. He disagreed quite strongly with NT right about the Reformation. about Martin Luther. And yet Tim Keller still recommended rites landmark book on the resurrection of Jesus, the resurrection and the Son of God. He didn’t reach Timko didn’t reach all the same conclusions as the missiologists, Leslie Nijmegen, and yet he’s still borrowed and engaged with new McGann to be able to build on the work of a previous generation to set an agenda for Western Christians in the 21st century. And I’ll talk a little bit more about that when I come back from my making sense of God talk. The simple lesson here is that you don’t have to agree with everything, to learn something from anyone. You don’t have to agree with everything to learn something from anyone. Tim Keller was not a tribal thinker, or a narrowly American thinker. You can attribute the breadth of his influence and part to his seeing the best in others. He’s seeing the best in others, he could disagree with you. Without dismissing all of your work. He could quote you without endorsing you. And he worked behind the scenes in dialogue with many, especially younger writers, many of whom had opposed his very deeply held treasured beliefs, trying to encourage and challenge them. I mentioned earlier that pastors don’t usually cite their sources in their sermons they’re told not to because it can often be confusing to people a lot of names and ideas that they’re not familiar with. But Keller broke that mold from talking to Taylor Clowney to con Tim Keller showed his work, which is one of the main reasons why we can carry on his project, because he left behind all of these footnotes of where he got the ideas, which is what I tried to do in my book. And I think one of the best things we can also learn from this is that we don’t have to agree with Tim Keller on everything he wouldn’t expect us to. That was how he of course, had studied others. The third point here is that you need to admit your weaknesses and ask for help.

This is one of the parts of the book that is most commonly cited to me by people who have read it. Twice at Redeemer Presbyterian Church, Tim Keller needed to admit that he had a significant problem because the church’s growth and complexity outgrew his administrative and managerial skill. He had a prodigious a significant work ethic, many, many more hours a week working than I would ever recommend for a pastor. And his family and others paid a heavy toll for this. You can see Kathy talk about this in their book the meaning of marriage. But twice in his ministry, Tim called on friends to serve as executive pastor. And to lead a restless staff. One of those times was after 911. Catherine Alsdorf, was a longtime colleague of Tim Keller’s, and she struck a really fascinating tone with me when in our interviews, she would weep out of thankfulness for what God had done in her life through Tim. And then she would stop me and she would say she would almost like we were talking about zoom should always like pound the desk in front of her and say, Don’t you dare make him out to be a saint. We were really upset at him on staff, but it was that dynamic of that great appreciation. But one of the ways he was able to lead so well was because he could admit when he had these problems. And so Tim and I disagreed about this, he would insist to me that he was not a good leader. And I said, Well, no, you’re just not a good manager. And that’s a pretty common challenge for church leaders, especially preachers. Just because you’re gifted and preaching doesn’t mean your gift and IT administration. But in the body of Christ, every part has its role. See this in First Corinthians 12, the mouth isn’t more important than the hands. The best leaders empower others, to play their God given roles. I read a recent biography of a Christian leader, and there was no mention of anything he ever did wrong. I don’t know about you, but that is discouraging to me. I know a lot of things that I have done wrong. How can I learn from somebody who was not Jesus and yet was somehow perfect in everything that he did. The color differently instilled confidence in his followers because he didn’t ask them for ultimate loyalty to himself, but to Christ, and he followed fourth, never stop learning. This one I hope is is obvious by now. I Have, I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anyone who extracted more from his three years of seminary than Tim Keller did have multiple chapters on this. Tim wanted me to have a whole chapter that was just focused on the decade of the 1970s, which was the bulk of seminary and his conversion and hope well, I said, No, they’re going to be many chapters, marking out your spiritual intellectual formation on those years because he learned so much from so many people. The books he read and lectures, he heard their set the trajectory of his entire life. And many leaders would be content with that foundation of learning, but not Tim Keller. Even when he had published his best selling apologetics book The reason for God in 2008, he was rethinking his entire theological or internal apologetic method. In light of new reading. This is my second talk. I’ll talk about this more later. 2016 book Making Sense of God, the best teachers never stop learning. Tim Keller could have coasted for decades, we are really grateful that he didn’t, because we again get to learn from those footnotes. And finally, and most importantly, I learned writing about Tim Keller that we must keep pressing for a deeper experience of God. When I worked on the book, Tim didn’t know if he had one more day to live, or 10 more years to write books and mentor the rising generation of Christian leaders. That’s just life with pancreatic cancer. He really wanted to write a book on identity. And I’m sorry that we won’t be able to see it. But of course, none of the rest of us knows what tomorrow will bring either. In the months after his diagnosis in 2020, I noticed a change in Tim, you can hear this in a podcast I recorded with him in January of 2021. With the called life and books and everything, he sounded lighter, like a burden had been lifted. And really it had he could focus on today, and not on tomorrow’s troubles. And he told us I’m not battling cancer. I’m battling my sin. enjoy the company of Kathy, his boys, their families. He redoubled efforts and prayers to search for a deeper communion with God. And even while quarantined on Roosevelt Island, he still was able to catch up with farflung friends digitally. And so in these final years, he’s tree never stopped growing, he never stopped adding rings. And I don’t know how you or I would respond if we knew that we only had months to live. But one thing Tim Keller did was he kept talking about the books that he was reading. Again, the consistency of the personality. I can only imagine the conversations now with those authors. And having the day before he died we learned from from Michael. Tim Keller told his family, I’m thankful for the time God has given me. But I’m ready to see Jesus. Send me home. So in those final years, Tim Keller prepared for eternity. And so should we. None of us knows the length of our days. But we do know this, that sooner than we expect. We will all see God face to face. And that day will be more glorious than we can imagine. Some of the things that I learned in the last several years writing about Tim Keller, let’s pray. God, we thank you for the life and ministry and the person and work of Tim Keller. We thank you God for what we’ve learned about you from your servant. And we rejoice now God that he sees you face to face and we ask God that you would prepare us to do likewise. Even now, even in this conference that will be stirred in our heart to long for that day and too long for others to see that day with joy, as well. We ask these things in Jesus name. Amen.