Farewell, Tim Keller. And thank you for my ministry today.

Eighteen years ago, as I was heading to the exit of my disgusting high school cafeteria, my friend Chris flags me down, catches up with me, and hands me a burned CD. “Have you heard of this guy before? You should listen to his sermons.” 

Chris and I were on the ultimate frisbee team together, and because we also lived around the same area of the city we spent a lot of our long commutes home talking and arguing with each other about the things that high school students found deep and philosophical. He said, “I think you’ll really like the way that this guy thinks”. 

I was in my final year of high school at the time, months away from graduating and going to a Christian college, ostensibly to get a head start on my training to become a Christian minister. But I was about to find out that I hadn’t even understood the most basic aspects of the faith that I aspired to teach. 

The church that I grew up in had a rule about baptism: You could not choose to be baptized until you turned twelve. That was their attempt to make sure that those who got baptized “really understood it”. The day that I turned twelve I asked my parents to register me to baptism class. In his stuffy office I listened to my senior minister explain to me that Jesus was like a rocket ship who takes me to heaven, and that baptism was about me getting on that rocket ship. 

I suppose I should give him the benefit of the doubt. If I were to be really, REALLY charitable, I guess… in a broad conceptual sense, the rocket ship analogy is not strictly wrong. But it told me nothing about what I believed. It told me nothing about the God that I believed in. 

When I started listening to Tim Keller’s sermons, the couple hundred that were burned into that CD, I started to understand my faith more. I started to understand the heart of my faith more. If you are not familiar with the art of preaching you might think that every sermon’s gotta be different. If this week you preached about forgiveness, perhaps next week you might choose patience as a topic, and then compassion the week after. But Tim didn’t preach that way. Every week, no matter what he was talking about or what Bible passage he was preaching on, his subject was always the same, and it was the gospel. In every sermon, the heart of his message was the heart of Christianity: Jesus Christ and his work. 

In the coming weeks and months (and years), many pages will be written about the monumental contributions of Tim Keller’s ministry to the evangelical world. Much better writers and thinkers than me will break down how he approached the gospel message and why it was so effective for so many people. But I want to tell you that Tim Keller’s ministry touched me deeply and personally. He was the one who finally helped me understand what the gospel was all about. He shaped not only my thinking but also my heart. Everyone who’s familiar with his sermons knows that they tend to follow a similar flow. If his subject was X, his three points would be:

1. The way X works in our world

2. The problem we have with X

3. How Jesus deals with/redeems/restores/subverts X

Whenever I listened to his sermons, the first two points would engage me in a deeply intellectual way. I would say, “I never thought of the concept of X like that before!” X could be anything: Justice, suffering, friendship, grief, the city. He always loved talking about cities. Tim Keller loved the city. He loved HIS city, which was also my city. I think one day his sermon on Jeremiah 29 will be spoken of in the same breath as Jonathan Edwards’ Sinners in the hands of an angry God and John Piper’s Don’t waste your life. 

Also, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the Lord for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper. - Jeremiah 29.7

The first two points would feed my head, but the third point would always stir my heart. There would always be a moment when he said, “You know, when Jesus was on the cross….” and then like scales falling from my eyes I would suddenly know and understand the truth, that Jesus really was the Lord of everything, that his death was not just about forgiveness of sins but about the total healing of what was broken by sin, and that his resurrection meant not just eternal life in the future but cosmic restoration for the world beginning today, in my heart. 

Yesterday when I read that Tim Keller was in hospice care, I surprised myself because I wept harder than I ever have for anyone that I didn’t know personally. There wasn’t another person on earth whose life and works impacted my own so deeply. When I was just a teen with no direction and no clue, he told me the purpose for which I would later devote my entire life. He taught me that you can always speak the truth in a loving and winsome manner. He showed me that the gospel was for everyone. He showed me the power of exegeting your people. He impressed upon me (WAY before all the conferences and organizations that cropped up after him, he was first) the importance of church planting. He made me proud to be a New Yorker (him and Derek Jeter). And he made me see how beautiful Jesus was. He made me fall in love with Jesus. 

Ever since my own ministry began in earnest, my relationship with Tim Keller’s preaching has shifted into another season. Even though he got me started, his preaching style became a shadow that I now had to get out from under. I was part of a whole generation of preachers who were inspired and shaped by him, and now many of us struggled to NOT become a clone of Keller. Tim Keller was effective because he spoke the right words into his own context, but now here I am in Sydney ministering to people who were not Keller’s flock. I have spent the last few years trying to find my own voice and style so that I wouldn’t just imitate the best, but I would adapt the best in the hopes of becoming the best that I can be. 

But tomorrow, when I preach Ruth 1, I will make no attempt to hide how much of his style has influenced me. I guess it’s my small way of honoring him and his gospel legacy. Farewell, Tim, and see you soon.