The Pietistic Influences on Tim Keller

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Michael Keller: I planted a church out of Redeemer, it’s Redeemer Lincoln Square. We did that in 2017. Before that, I was working in college ministry, and between college ministry and planting that church, I actually got my PhD at the Free University of Amsterdam. So I’ve been here. And I’ve enjoyed my Dutch friends. And it’s a joy to come here. When I when case first said, Hey, do you want to do this conference? I said, sure. But I don’t want to talk about my father, that’d be kind of strange and weird. You know, I like to talk about the influences and Redeemer and, and whatnot. And interestingly, after he died, I was like, actually, nothing would give me more joy to be able to talk about him, and what he saw and how we can use some of the things that he found out. And so I believe it’s strategic for us to analyze and to ask the questions that he asked, and we can look at Tim Keller and Redeemer over the past 30 years and say, what can we learn from them? What can we see that they saw? And for clarity, I’m not gonna call Dad, dad, I’m gonna call him Tim Keller for everybody here. Just make it easy. Luckily for us. Before Tim Keller passed away, I asked him, I said, Hey, I’m doing this conference. What do you want me to talk about? What do you think? And I said, What are your thoughts on how you present the gospel between 19? You know, the 1980s and the 2020s? And what are the effects of the Puritans and Jonathan Edwards and John Owens on your formative years, light, Father, Son, talk, and I actually a lot of this happened, while he was in the hospital doing medical procedures. And he just started talking, he was he was talking about, he knew this was happening in the Netherlands. And he started talking about how that he didn’t have the English translations of Kiper or bavinck, particularly about their piety. So he had actually find works on piety in English translations or English. Individuals like Jonathan Edwards and John Owens, he was pontificating, wondering if maybe the reason why there was not the writings of copper and bobbing that were from those pipes, thereby artistic readings, if it was because that the translators back in the 20th century. You know, when the rise of liberalism in America, was it possible that they didn’t feel like those were as needed as what was translated. So, he had to look to English authors for all his works on the inward piety, and particularly Edward sermons and John Owens content, they asked people to not just have head knowledge, but heart knowledge. They distinguish between the religious practice of, of, you know, intellectual belief between that and experiential heart change by the relationship to Jesus. This from this. In his mind, he’s then from his Neo Calvinism interlocutors, he found a Reformed faith that answered how Christians were to live out the life. I actually believe the thing that was really interesting that I think Tim Keller did was he fused this, I guess, English reformed view of inward piety and individual experiential faith with actually a continental Dutch tradition, theology about how to live that life out in the world. And most nobody’s actually ever done that before to bring those two things together. He was affected by Kuyper and Van til and later bavinck. And I think pulling these two layers together and using them as the as the compilation of what the gospel is, and how to meet the rising secular world in America in the 1980s to 2020 was the powerful thing that we see and have experienced ourselves. So I know that James is going to talk about the his influences from the continent but therefore I’m what I’m going to do is I’m going to look at his formation through his pi artistic sensibilities. And I’m going to first do a brief historical overview about how did we get here? How did we get to where he was at in the context that Tim Keller ministered, then we’re going to look at the values, the main PI artistic values that he used to present the gospel clearly in his historical moments. And then lastly, I’m gonna I’ll make a couple of observations about what this means for us going forward some kind of some applications for us. So first, the historical context. Nobody, not none of us in this room ministers in a historical vacuum. Everybody has to think critically and strategically about our own context. And therefore we need to know, what was the context that Tim Keller ministered in? And and how did that lead to how he presented the gospel. I think it’s noteworthy that he was very aware of his historical moment. And I’m going to give you a summary that he gave me, highlighting what he thought were the key historical moments that led up to his context in New York in the latter half of the 20th century. And he used Mark Knowles work on American evangelicalism. And this is what what, how these are the key things at that point in two, he said, Go back to the 1740s get the Great Awakening, Jonathan Edwards. And what you have there in the Enlightenment is a movement where the new lock in psychology about how individuals thought on themselves, the Great Awakening met individuals that were having these experiences in between George Whitfield and Jonathan Edwards, there was this renewed focus on personal belief, church renewal, and an emphasis on the experiential in the life of the individual. This led to a renewed American piety, it led to revival. But it also was one more step towards focusing on the individual. There was a loss of the corporate and the communal, and it was more on the individual. Then 100 years from then, the civil war in America, you had Christians on both sides of the war, arguing using the Bible for slavery and against slavery. What that did is that since the war ended, not by thought but by military might, because of that, what ended up happening is public reliance on the Bible’s authority lessened, because both groups were arguing for their view using the Bible. So people in public said, You know what, we can’t trust this as a way to gauge and mitigate cultural conflict. Also, after slavery was outlawed, legally, lynchings and segregation continued in America. And it was often enforced, or at least it was ignored by the majority culture, which were Christians. What that did was it saw a continued decrease of the application of faith in the public square, inside the moral conscience, and that became less and less of a need of having a public faith. The emphasis then on science moved to the 1900s, the emphasis on science, the de emphasis, emphasis ation of miracles, pointing out to questions about the virgin birth and miracles, and authority of Scripture, were regularly voiced in the public. And so Christian voices were not that engaged, they actually pulled out of the public square, and created their own institutions and denominations. Again, this led to it furthering privatization of faith and a decrease of Christians in the public square, using their Christian thought. Tim Keller was born in 1950. As American public Christianity was on the decrease, it was on its way down. And in that space, what the moral authority of the Bible and of faith was being regulated to just private faith. So his public ministry began in the 1970s, in a very religious part of America in the south. But by the late 1980s, he was in the most hostile part of America, New York City that was against Christianity and the individualism that started with Edwards. Well, I guess it was John Locke and Descartes would start in the Enlightenment had continued to progress into extreme individualism that was now present in the 1980s in New York City. And when Tim Keller arrived in New York, who did he meet, he met

professionals who were the most unreached people group in the city. And these professionals were highly sexualized, they were upwardly mobile, they tended to only think about self in individualistic terms. They hated commitment. They were very private. In fact, I remember when Redeemer first got started, they tried to do a photo album, where they put everybody in the directory, who’s part of the church, nobody signed up. Nobody wanted to have their picture taken because they didn’t want to be associated with the church, or for them to be found out that they were actually part of that place. They were very lonely. They were busy. And overall distrustful of organized religion, particularly Christianity, because of the historical space that Christianity had in America. And yet, these individuals were in New York City, and they’re not finding answers to the big questions of life. Who am I? What’s the point of everything? Who should I be with? What should I do? And so these individuals are asking these questions. At a time when Christianity had been privatized. And the and in New York City was considered passe something not to, to be to use anymore. At the same time, he also met Christians in the city, who were struggling how to relate their faiths or to their career, they were struggling with the ethical pressures of the city. And they didn’t know what postures they should take to culture, should they be against culture? Should they be for it? Should they be somewhere in between? And we get to ask now, with that historical and cultural context that Tim Keller was in, how did he meet people with the gospel? What did he do there? And particularly in regards to piety, I want to focus on two innovations that he got from Jonathan Edwards, and the Puritans that Tim Keller used to meet his context. As an aside, I actually became a Christian later in life. I tell parents this a lot, actually, that I probably I joke about this, I had the best articulation of the gospel growing up. And that wasn’t enough that didn’t, that that didn’t save me. And the reason why is just because you hear the Gospel doesn’t, that’s not actually what saves you, right? It’s still a movement of the Holy Spirit in your life. So I became a Christian actually in college. And when I became a Christian, I asked my father, I said, Hey, what’s the most important book that you read? That changed your life? I want to read it too. I want to I want to, I want to start growing in this area. And he said, it wasn’t actually a book, it was a class he took at Gordon Conwell by Dr. Richard Loveless, which now you can get in book form. It’s called dynamics of spiritual life. And in it loveless this professor details how Jonathan Edwards revivalist intuition, is effective for, for revival. And the first innovation out of that class that I think my father got was from Jonathan Edwards, which has an emphasis that every individual needs to rediscover justification by faith, that leads to obedience that leads to repentance that leads to prayer. That is justification has to be the means to sanctification. And the biggest problem that people have is they rely on their sanctification for their justification, that we reverse it. And so during Edwards time, what was happening, the Great Awakening was happening, and all these people were getting these very emotional experiences, saying, I can prove that I’m a believer, I can prove that I am a Christian, because look at all these things that are happening to me. But then Edward saw that there was no fruit in their life. He didn’t see the fruit of the Spirit, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, self control. And, and so what Edwards came up with was, he said, Without nullifying the idea that you can have an experience of God. Which, by the way, people in that time, Charles Chauncey said that revivals were just emotionalism. So Edwards rejected that idea. And at the same time, he said, that proof of faith can’t be rooted in any kind of potential outward manifestations. It can’t be just what you see your deeds, your actions, your feelings. And that was actually against most of the revivalist who came after Jonathan Edwards. And the revivals afterwards. Instead, Edwards said, one can only rest on and be assured of one’s eternal acceptance based on the finish work of Christ. Similarly, Tim Keller shows up at his new church in the 1980s. And what did he see he saw Christians and non Christians believing that if you obeyed, then you will be accepted that the the, the way most people thought of faith is, well, you know, you’re a Christian, if you do Christian things, and both Christians and non Christians thought that’s what it meant to be a Christian, that if you had the outward signs of obedience, that would be the way of knowing that you were saved. But he pointed out by looking at Jonathan Edwards is that’s actually not what justification is. Love was points out that most people believe they’re justified because of their sanctification. Rather, that their sanctification supposed to come out of a life centered on their justification of justification is what Jesus did in time once in a moment. And belief on that, where sanctification is the growth and the process by which you become more like Christ in life. That the way to bring spiritual renewal dynamic into practice. And the way to wake up sleeping nominal Christians. And the way to convert non Christians and secular non believers was to translate what what Tim Keller did was he translated into the New York vernacular, that you are not accepted, because you obey, that you obey because you’re accepted. And that phrase that actually became very big and Redeemer is really just a manifestation of Jonathan Edwards pi to six sensibilities. The simple idiom summarized love was his insights of Edwards emphasis, that all obedience must come from a grateful heart of acceptance, or it’s not real obedience. And so why is that different? It’s different because modernists Christians at the time, they they divided discipleship to Christians, and evangelism to non Christians into separate spaces. In fact, I think a lot of churches still do that. But the insight, and what was radical in the 1980s, is to say that the core problem of the non Christian is the core problem of a Christian, which is unbelief, that the reason why non Christians or non Christians is because they don’t believe. But the reason why Christians don’t act like Christians is because essentially, they don’t believe either, not not really, both didn’t trust that they were justified in love by the Creator God of the universe, all unbelief, then all lack of sanctification comes from this. And I think it was in the 1980s and 90s. And Redeemer, it was powerfully convicting to Christians to realize, a that they may never have had saving faith, originally, if they’re just looking to their sanctification, for their justification, be, if they did look to their sanctification, only, then they’re going to find inconsistencies. And they’re going to doubt their faith. And therefore see, they had to read they realize that Christianity was not trihard and be good. And then God will love you, but that God loves you. It’s written into the story of the Bible. And as he pursues his way where people as you realize that to you, that changes your life. That’s not just for Christians, though non Christians realized that whatever Christianity was, it wasn’t just a new moral praxis, it wasn’t just a new moral way to have to be good and try hard. And then you’ll be accepted. Because of this, non Christians realized that actually, what was they were being told was that spiritual renewal from Edwards was, was a stress on grace alone, by faith alone. It’s very, it’s very simple. And

yet what was so profound was in the 1980s, at least in New York City that wasn’t being stressed. And so what ended up happening was that this barrier to belief for both Christians and non Christians was taken away. And and Tim Keller used this phrase, right, you’re not, it’s you. It’s not you obey and then you’re accepted, you’re accepted, and then you’re a bait. That’s justification. But he didn’t even use the word justification because even that word can often be a tribal Christian subculture word, which we can use in a conference. But to his people, I don’t think most people under knew what that Word justification meant, even though it was a theologically correct term. Instead, Tim Keller created a summary phrase of the gospel, right? His famous phrase that I’m more sinful, and fault flawed than ever dared believed. But I’m more loved and accepted than ever dared hope. He took that phrase. And he used that as the basis by saying this is what we mean by the gospel. It was a riff off of Jack Miller. But it was a new way to put it together. And here’s what was different old mainline churches, like the old Presbyterians, the old mainline in America, they saw the same historical change where faith was privatized, and miracles were doubted. And Christians were not really believing in the inerrancy of Scripture. And so what the mainline liberal churches did was they continued to D supernaturally, D super naturalizing, the Christian faith, they only ever talked about grace and love. They didn’t want to talk about the bad news. They didn’t want to talk about you that you’re more flawed than you ever did believe. At the same time in America, conservative fundamentalists, the more they were very happy to talk about God as judge, and God as as the individual who’s going to judge you this, the man is sinful, and in need, but they didn’t actually ever want to talk about to the same degree, the love and the hope, and the goodness and the grace that was offered for you. And so what ended up happening is, Tim Keller was able to hold both together with this pied cystic emphasis of justification through Edwards, to create this spiritual renewal. And it happened because the bad news you’re more sinful, and flawed, and yet the good news of grace become sweeter, and, and more needed than ever before. Because of that bad news. It was within God’s unconditional love and grace that created a safe space for unconditional love. It was within God’s unconditional love to create a safe space to see one’s need in the first place. And that is what led to transformation. All right, it’s number one. Now, the second pie artistic innovation that affected Tim Keller the most was Edward stress on the intellectual understanding of doctrine was not enough. It was Jonathan Edwards who said, then the notional knowledge of truth is not the same thing as the experiential knowledge of that truth in your life. As Christianity became less public, and those who grew up in Christian households, di D identified with the faith. The question TIMCO was asking is, how is it gonna be possible for concepts of Christianity that are floating around? How is it possible that to know those concepts, but not really be a Christian? Another question people were asking is, if you grew up in a Christian household, how’s it possible that you learn all the concepts, you know, the intellectual gospel, you hear it set at home as I did, but then walk away from the faith? How is that possible? And this answered that possibility that the problem was it was only a notional idea. The number one question Tim Keller guide, and I get now as a pastor in New York City is this. I believe in God, but I don’t feel His presence. Most Christians say that to some form in their life. I believe in God, but I don’t feel His presence. This addresses that, that Edwards concept of how one can get a notional understanding of faith, without a personal experience of the gospel solves both those questions. The affectional must be combined with the notional John Edwards had a very famous sermon called a divine and spiritual light. And this is what he says in there. He says, There is a twofold knowledge of good of which God has made the mind of man capable, the first, which is merely the notional, and the other, which consists of a sense of the heart, as when the heart is sensible of pleasure and delight in the presence of the idea of it. Thus, there is a difference between having an opinion that God is holy and gracious, and having a sense of the loveliness and the beauty and the holiness and grace of it. Then, that’s the end of the quote, There is a difference therefore, between having a rational judgment This is the Famous Jonathan Edwards image, there’s a difference in having a rational judgment of that honey is sweet. You know the consistency, you know the concept of it. But there’s something very different than actually having a sense of that sweetness. In other words, for Jonathan Edwards, a mere emotional experience, is not a sign of faith. That’s what he saw people falling on the ground, he said, That’s not faith. Because that’s not rooted in a real spiritual reality. At the same time, merely having an intellectual idea, the spiritual concept of it does not mean that you really understood it, because there’s no experience. There’s no product of the experience in your life. It doesn’t mean one really, as a Christian. One way I tried to explain this to my churches, hey, demons, intellectually believe in God, but they clearly haven’t had an experience of God’s love and grace in their life, or they wouldn’t be demons. And so in the same way, dead Orthodoxy in a church is when you can believe in your head, but not experience that same truth in your heart. It’s also why you can be raised as a Christian and then walk away from the faith, that the grace that you learned, is not actually Grace tasted, and a grace, if you haven’t tasted, it isn’t really grace. Because if you had tasted it, you never would have left. It’s too good of a taste that you would never walk away from. How did this affect Tim Keller’s preaching profoundly. The sermon was never meant to be a place where you just imparted information. Nor was it a place where you just got an emotional response from people. Instead, the purpose of the sermon was designed not just to make the truth plain. The goal of the sermon was to make the truth real, not just understandable, but experiential. Edwards believed that the spiritual realities are not the same of our earthly experiences. But through the imagination, one could access those spiritual realities through the images and illustrations that are given. Edwards would not have grasped the phrase as this happens in America, just priests preach the scriptures. You hear that phrase in America, he wouldn’t have understood that because he saw the role of the preacher not just making the truth evidence, but to make the truth real. Tim Keller said this, once I found this, in one of his files, he said Edwards would say that if the truth about Jesus doesn’t thrill, move, melt, electrify and change you. You haven’t really understood it. He also said this in a personal note about Edwards about his influence on him. He said this, Edwards showed me how inadequate much of 20th century expository preaching really is. It was highly cognitive, and highly abstract. But the solution was not to simply go after sentimental stories that moved with feelings. The solution wasn’t get a smoke machine and loud music and lots of, you know, powerful imagery. He said, The solution was to learn to embody the truth in concrete ways. During my seminary years, I learned about Christocentric preaching from Ed clowny. And about Edwards revivalism from Richard Loveless, but none of this really affected my preaching. As long as I looked, as I was locked into an evangelical subculture. There was there I was rewarded for traditional exposition that often lacked all these things. I would have certainly professed that I was doing Christocentric preaching. So he said, I was preaching Christ. But really, I was just lifting up Jesus as just an example. And urging people to live like Him.

It took an intense experience of preaching in New York City to wake me up. As I began to confront the changes that I had to make, I began to realize that I had all the theological and historical resources necessary. What’s that about? That little personal note shows us that Tim Keller’s pi autistic learning process was not just, you know, learn these theological truths and apply them. He actually said he learned them in seminary before. But then when he just started preaching, he still preached Christ as just an example and then live like Him. He said that his ability to apply the theological truths from one age from Jonathan Edwards to his people in New York City in the 1980s and 90s and 2000s it Is that he had to first respond to the needs and historical situation that he found himself in. Notice, he said he had the resources from seminary. And he had the content. But it wasn’t until the context demanded this gospel formation that he really change. And so this to me, to be honest, this lesson for us is we should pause and ask ourselves, what resources are available to us right now? Maybe you already have them. But we need to be using them differently to meet the context to meet the needs of the people that are in front of us. That’s what Tim Keller did. That if if we did, it might, it might look like what happened to Tim Keller that the concepts and the categories that he had, and the content he had refined, but he needed an experience of the need of the new contextual space of the New York City, the 1980s, or whatever, Almere in 2023, to be changed about how to present the gospel in profound ways to his people. So to conclude, I’d like to end with a couple observations and a couple of applications. Number one, analyzing Tim Keller’s pie to sick values, shows us that the good news of the gospel doesn’t need to be reinvented. It’s the good news. I remember when I became a young minister, I moaned to my dad, I said, I have nothing new to offer. And I think he put on the father hat. And he said, There is not an original bone in my body. I really remembered that because it was helpful as a, as a young man in ministry to hear that. But what he was essentially saying is, there’s nothing new here. If at the end of the day, the gospel is still the gospel. And it’s important to note that we do not have to reinvent the wheel. If the Good News of the Gospel is really true, objectively, then it doesn’t need to be changed. And we should take lots of solace in that. Now, secondly, at the same time, what Tim Keller’s ability, what one of his abilities was analyzing the culture and the needs of it, and then synthesizing materially very profoundly how to speak into that culture. And so even though we don’t need to come up with a new content, we do need to push ourselves, to ask ourselves, Is this making sense to our people? You know, how do we we have to push ourselves and say, Are we really making the gospel real to our people? For Tim Keller, 19th and 20th century modernistic Protestant presentations of the gospel, when he when he grew up in the people around them who believed in Christianity. They had a they had a population that believed in this concept of sin. This is why early modern presentations of the gospel could speak about God is holy. And Madison fall and the cross was a way to bridge the divide. But then, Tim Keller, post 1980 shows up into New York City and he runs into people who who say this, they say, sin. Was that evil me? No. You know, God is over on the other side of divide. What is that supposed to mean? Seeing this change meant that Tim Keller did not reinvent the gospel, but he also didn’t present it in the way that he was taught, he did not present it the way everybody else was thinking about it. Instead, he used Augustinian formation of the problem of the human heart is not that, you know, it’s it’s a loving the wrong things. Instead, the problem of the heart is that it’s we’ve Miss ordered our loves, and we need to reorder them, because they’re out of balance for New Yorkers who didn’t see themselves as sinful, this Old Testament language of idolatry. And that said that you’ve made some things more important than other things. They understood that. Right? They didn’t understand the concept of sin, but they could understand of making some things too important that would put your life out of balance, and it’s killing you. And so the gospel is good news. Only if you’re you need to be saved from something. And he spent the time showing his people what they needed to be saved from. Notice he didn’t blame. A lot of times I see this in, in sub Christian subculture. People blame the individuals, they say, Oh, well, they just, you know, they just reject Christianity and there is rejection, but he spent his time translating the gospel into forms, that his people could understand. The narrative of culture change A change in what he did was he changed to respond to the needs of the people in that given age. And therefore, an application for us is, we have to constantly practice the same process of changing and contextualizing the gospel for our people. We have to keep asking what does it mean to present the gospel in ways to the people that they will understand that means analyzing social, economic, cultural, racial, even, you know, there’s so many different ways that we conceive of ourselves that we need to understand, to ask ourselves, How can we put the gospel in the our churches in the relationships we’re in to our people? Thirdly, well, culture is changing. I think there’s still a lot of parallels that we can make to our history. Tim Keller was able to pull from a particular historical context and use it in his Edwards ability to put the gospel to people who saw themselves individualistically parallels with our people today, who still see themselves individualistically This is why it’s probably premature to start calling art. I think a couple years ago, maybe was 10 years ago, people said, well, we’re postmodern. That’s probably not very accurate, because we’re still in modernity, because people still see themselves with science and logic and individuality that come from that, that age. The foundation might be gone, but the values are still with us. This is why it’s proper to ask, like we are today, what lessons can we learn. But how Tim Keller presented the gospel from the 1980s to 2020s. And I think many of those lessons we can still use, that’s one of the beauties as much as even though he’s no longer with us. I think a lot of his insights we can still use, that I think we can still use, I am more sinful and flawed than ever dared believed and yet more loved and cared for than ever dare to hope, being mindful that we need to translate what sin and what acceptance and love is, we can still use and we should use, that the heart of unbelief is actually in both the Christian and the unChristian. Both the Christian the non Christian, that phrasing it that way, keeps the divide away, keeps the us versus them mentality away, and helps both grow the Christian into their love for Jesus. And it shows the non Christian, that what they’re being called to is not just a simple moral law, but a relationship with Jesus Christ, we should, and can still show people that intellectual knowledge is not the same thing as experiential knowledge. That unless it gets into the heart unless it gets into how we live out our life, and infuses our imagination and our our words and our thoughts and our dreams, that it’s not real knowledge. The Gospel isn’t just fact, it must,

therefore move us to change or it’s not the gospel. And we have to ask, Are we regularly doing that? Are we doing the needed assessments in our historical contexts, where there’s continuity and just continuity from how we’ve done things in the past? Fourthly, some of the critiques of Tim Keller, recently, at least in America hint at how his gospel presentation might have worked back in the 1980s. But today, there’s more of an openly hostile space, and they don’t work anymore. I think that misunderstands the New York cultural context of the 80s and 90s, and open hostility that we met there. But it’s also a warning for us to be careful that we don’t over or under read our historical spaces or cultural contexts. I am not unaware that even in this talk, I only spoke about Tim Keller’s pie artistic gospel presentation. But there are many who will and should emphasize the gospel not just as a personal work of Jesus’s life and death, but also the kingdom impact of of how it affects our relationships, to power and justice and peace. I do not believe that there should be competing positions but rather a combined presentation. Even if there is only one gospel. Tim Keller himself like to say if you push down deep enough in any particular gospel presentation, you should find the other ones there. We must be careful not to sneer at the gospel presentations that may not move in your historical context. Maybe it might not might not move your heart, but it will in other spaces, and then we can learn what we might be missing. From those into for how our people and what they need, let us not be in reaction therefore, against one view, while realizing that we can learn from the different presentations. Last point. Lastly, we need to continue to translate the power of the gospel for both Christians and non Christians alike. Like what Tim Keller popularized. Christians might theoretically believe, Jesus accepted me and therefore, I live a good life. But in my experience regularly, most Christians believe I live a good life, and therefore Jesus accepts me. No wonder many of our churches and communities are filled with Christians who are anxious, and insecure, and overly critical of others. And, and hurt, because they haven’t really experienced God’s love and presence deeply in them. It’s because the gospel isn’t really been lived. It hasn’t settled in their hearts. It’s only when Christians rediscover this good news. And they realize what they thought they understood they didn’t. But now a new they do. That’s when the anxiety and the fear and the anger and the fragility falls away. And you get this new center of contentment, and gratitude and peace. And and I would argue it becomes attractive to non Christians. Only when non Christians at the same time realize that they aren’t being called to another performance model of obey. And then you’re accepted, but rather a new way of seeing all of life through the unconditional acceptance that leads to radical change, will our cultures really change? I miss my father, but holding on to these insights from him glean from Jonathan Edwards, not just the head, but the heart, not accepted and then you not obey and then I’m accepted, but accepted. And therefore I obey these phrases, which are translations of Edwards for our people can help us meet our people and help us understand the radical good news of Jesus Christ. Let’s pray. Heavenly Father, thank you for this good word. Thank you for the work of men and women who have come before us who have taken your good news, your infinite, perfect, and in real good news and applied it in the forms and ways that can change us. I pray for renewed hearts even in this room today, that we will re remember our first love you what you’ve done, what you’re doing what you will do. And I pray that you would move that into our hearts in a profound way so that we can then turn around to others in our mitts and reveal you to them. I pray that we would see some of these great insights from the history past and that we can apply them powerfully in our context. today. We pray these things in your name, amen.