King's Cross by Timothy Keller

KING'S CROSS by Timothy Keller I read this book in 2 days journaling as I read. I have to say that each chapter in this book is like a sermon in itself and sometimes you need to read it a couple of times to get the gist of what Timothy Keller is saying. I have decided in reviewing this book to quote whole chunks simply because it is the easiest way at times to understand what he is saying. Chapter 1 The Dance When Jesus came out of the waters of baptism the Father envelops him and covers him with words of love "You are my Son whom I love with you I am well pleased." Meanwhile the Spirit covers him with power. This is what has been happening in the interior life of the Trinity from all eternity. Mark is giving us a glimpse into the very heart of reality, the meaning of life, the essence of the universe. Instead of self centeredness, the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are characterised in their very essence by mutually self-giving love. No person in the Trinity insists that the others revolve around him; rather each of them voluntarily circles and orbits around the others. Different views of God have different implications. If there's no God - if we are here by blind change, strictly as a result of natural selection - then what you and I call love is just a chemical condition of the brain. Evolutionary biologists say there's nothing in us that isn't there because it helped our ancestors pass on the genetic code more successfully. If you feel love, it's only because that combination of chemicals enables you to survive and gets your body parts in the places they need to be in order to pass on the genetic code. That's all love is - chemistry. On the other hand, if God exists but is unipersonal, there was a time when God was not love. Before God created the world, when there was only one divine person because love can exist only in a relationship. If a unipersonal God had created the world and its inhabitants, such a God would not in his essence be love. Power and greatness possibly, but no love. But if from all eternity, without end and without beginning, ultimate reality is a community of persons knowing and loving one another, then ultimate reality is about love relationships. Why would God create us? There's only one answer. He must have created us not to get joy, but to give, He must have created us to invite us into the dance, to say: If you glorify me, if you center your entire life on me, if you find me beautiful for who I am in myself, then you will step into the dance, which is what you are made for. You are made not just to believe in me or to be spiritual in some general way, not just to pray and get a bit of inspiration when things are tough. You are made to center everything in your life on me, to think of everything in terms of your relationship to me. To serve me unconditionally. That's where you'll find your joy. That's what the dance is about. Mark treats Satan as a reality, not a myth. To us, Satan is a personification of evil left over from a pre-scientific, superstitious society. He's just a symbol now, an ironic way to deflect personal responsibility for evil. But if you believe in God, in a good personal supernatural being, it is perfectly reasonable to believe that there are evil personal supernatural beings. Satan never stops testing us. We look at Adam and Eve and say "What fools - why did they listen to Satan?" Yet we know we still have Satan's lie in our own hearts, because we're afraid of trusting God - of trusting any body, in fact. We're stationary, because Satan tells us we should be - that's the way he fights the battle. But God didn't leave us defenseless. God said to Jesus "Obey me about the tree - only this time the tree was a cross - "and you will die." And Jesus did. He has gone before you from the heart of a very real battle, to draw you into the ultimate reality of the dance. What he has enjoyed from all eternity he has come to offer to you. And sometimes, when you're in the deepest part of the battle, when you're tempted and hurt and weak, you'll hear in the depths of our being the same words Jesus heard "This is my beloved child - you are my beloved child, whom I love; with you I'm well pleased." Chapter 2 The call The essence of other religions is advice. Christianity is essentially news. Other religions say "This is what you have to do in order to connect to God forever, this is how you have to live in order to earn your way to God." But the gospel says, "This is what has been done in history. This is how Jesus lived and died to earn the way to God for you." Christianity is completely different. It's joyful news. The gospel is that God connects to you not on the basis of what you've done (or haven't done) but on the basis of what Jesus has done, in history, for you. Mark is showing us that Jesus has a different type of authority than a regular rabbi. You can't have a relationship with Jesus unless he calls you. Jesus is saying, "Knowing me, loving me, resembling me, serving me must become the supreme passion of your life. Everything else comes second." In many of our minds, such words cast the shadow of fanaticism. People in our culture are afraid of fanaticism - and for good reason really. In this world considerable violence is being carried out by highly religious people. Even setting aside such extremism, almost everybody knows someone, personally or by reputation, who is very religious and who is also condeming, self-righteous or even abusive. Most people today see religion as a spectrum of belief. On one end are people who say they're religious but don't really believe or live the tenets of their religion. On the other end you've got the fanatics, people who are too religious, who overbelieve and overlive their faith. What's the solution to fanaticism? Many would say, "Well, why can't we be in the middle? Moderation in all things. Not too zealous and not too uncommitted. Being right in the middle would be just right." So is that the way Christianity works? Does Jesus say "Moderation in all things?" Jesus says "If anyone comes to me." He doesn't say to the crowd "Look, most of you can be moderate, but I do need a few good men and women who really want to go all the way with this discipleship." He says "anyone". There's no double standard. "If anyone wants to have anything to do with me, you have to hate your father and mother, wife and children, brother and sister, and even your own life, or you cannot be my disciple." That's what it means to follow Jesus. Jesus is not calling us to hate actively; he's calling us to hate comparatively. He says, "I want you to follow me so fully, so intensely, so enduringly that all other attachments in your life look like that by comparison." If you say, "I'll obey you, Jesus, if my career thrives, if my health is good, if my family is together," then the thing that's on the other side of that if is your real master, your real goal. But Jesus will not be a means to an end; he will not be used. If he calls you to follow him, he must be the goal. Understand the difference between religion and the gospel. Remember what religion is: advice on how you must live to earn your way to God. Your job is to follow that advice to the best of your ability. If you follow it but don't get carried away, then you have moderation. But if you feel like you're following it faithfully and completely, you'll believe you have a connection with God because of your right living and right belief, and you'll feel superior to people that have wrong living and wrong belief. That's a slippery slope: If you feel superior to them, you stay away from them. That makes it easier to exclude them, then to hate them and ultimately to oppress them. And there are some Christians like that - not because they've gone too far and been too committed to Jesus but because they haven't gone far enough. They aren't as fanatically humble and sensitive or as fanatically understanding and generous as Jesus was. Why not? They're still treating Christianity as advice instead of good news. The gospel isn't advice: It's the good news that you don't need to earn your way to God; Jesus has already done it for you. And it's a gift that you receive by sheer grace - through God's thoroughly unmerited favour. If you seize that gift and keep holding on to it, then Jesus' call won't draw you into fanaticism or moderation. You will be passionate to make Jesus your absolute goal and priority, to orbit around him yet when you meet somebody with a different set of priorities, a different faith, you won't assume that they're inferior to you. You'll actually seek to serve them rather than oppress them. Why? Because the gospel is not about choosing to follow advice, it's about being called to follow a King. Not just someone with the power and authority to tell you what needs to be done - but someone with the power and authority to do what needs to be done and then to offer it to you as good news. Come, follow me, Jesus is saying "Follow me because I'm the King you've been looking for. Follow me beause I have authority over everything, yet I have humbled myself for you. Because I died on the cross for you when you didn't have the right beliefs or the right behaviour. Because I have brought you news, not advice. Because I'm your true love, your true life - follow me. Chapter 3 The Healing When the Bible talks about sin it is not just referring to the bad things we do. It's not just lying or lust or whatever the case may be - it is ignoring God in the world he has made; it's rebelling against him by living without reference to him. It's saying, "I will decide exactly how I live my life." And Jesus says that is our main problem. The Bible says that our real problem is that every one of us is building our identity on something besides Jesus. Whether it's to suceed in our chosen field or to have a certain relationship - we're saying "if I have that, if I get my deepest wish, then everything will be okay." You're looking to that thing to save you from oblivion, from disillusionment, from mediocrity You've made that wish into your saviour. And if you never quite get it, you're angry, unhappy, empty. But if you do get it, you ultimately feel more empty, more unhappy. You've distorted your deepest wish by trying to make it into your saviour, and now that you finally have it, it's turned on you. Jesus says, "You see, if you have me, I will actually fulfill you and if you fail me, I will always forgive you. I'm the only saviour who can do that." But it is hard to figure that out. Many of us first start going to God, going to church, because we have problems, and we're asking God to give us a little boost over the hump so that we can get back to saving ouselves, back to pursuing our deepest wish. The problem is that we're looking to something besides Jesus as saviour. Almost always when we first go to Jesus saying, "This is my deepest wish," his response is that we need to go a lot deeper than that. Chapter 4 The Rest Jesus declares not that he has come to reform religion but that he's here to end religion and to replace it with himself. In Mark 3 the story of the man with the shriveled hand being healed on the Sabbath day, Jesus became angry with the religious leaders. Why? Because the Sabbath is about restoring the diminshed. It's about replenishing the drained. It's about repairing the broken. To heal the man's shriveled hand is to do exactly what the sabbath is all about. Yet because the leaders are so concerned that Sabbath regulations be observed, they don't want Jesus to heal this man - an incredible example of missing the forest for the trees. Their hearts are as shriveled as the man's hand. They're insecure and anxious about the regulations They're tribal, judgmental, and self-obsessed instead of caring about the man. Why? Religion. Most people in the world believe that if there is a God, you relate to God by being good. Most religions are based on that principle, though there are a million different variations on it. Some religions are what you might call nationalistic: You connect to God, they say, by coming into our people group and taking on the markers of society membership. Other religions are spiritualistic: You reach God by working your way through certain transformations of consciousness. Yet other religions are legalistic: There's a code of conduct, and if you follow it God will look upon you with favour. But they all have the same logic: If I perform, if I obey, I'm accepted. The gospel of Jesus is not only different from that but diametrically opposed to it: I'm fully accepted in Jesus Christ and therefore I obey. In religion the purpose of obeying the law is to assure you that you're all right with God. As a result, when you come to the law, what you're most concerned about is detail. You want to know exactly what you've got to do, because you have to push all the right buttons. You won't gravitate toward seeking out the intent of the law; rather, you'll tend to write into the law all sorts of details of observance so you can assure yourself that you're obeying it But in the life of Christians the law of God - though still binding on them - functions in a completely different way. It shows you the life of love you want to live before the God who has done so much for you. God's law takes you out of yourself; it shows you how to serve God and others instead of being absorbed with yourself. You study and obey the law of God in order to discover the kind of life you should live in order to please and resemble the one who created and redeemed you, delivering you from the consequences of sin. And you don't violate it or whittle it down to manageable proportions by adding man-made details to it. Most of us work and work trying to prove ourselves, to convince God, others, and ourselves that we're good people. That work is never over unless we rest in the gospel. At the end of his great act of creation the Lord said, "It is finished" and he could rest. On the cross at the end of his great act of redemption Jesus said, "It is finished" and we can rest. On the cross Jesus was saying of the work underneath your work - the thing that makes you truly weary, this need to prove yourself because who you are and what you do are never good enough - that it is finished. He has lived the life you should have lived, he has died the death you should have died. If you rely on Jesus' finished work, you know that God is satisfied with you. You can be satisfied with life. Jesus, however, understands that there is a God who is uncreated, beginningless, infinitely transcendent, who made this world, who keeps everything in the universe going, so that all the molecules, all the stars, all the solar systems are being held up by the power of this God, And Jesus says, That's who I am. The "traditional values" approach to life is moral conformity - the approach taken by the Pharisees. It is that you must lead a very, very good life. The progressive approach, embodied in the Herodians, is self-discovery - you have to decide what is right or wrong for you. And according to the Bible, both of these are ways of being your own saviour and lord. Both are hostile to the message of Jesus. And not only that, both lead to self-righteousness. The moralist says, "The good people are in and the bad people are out - and of course we're the good ones. The self-discovery person says, "Oh, no, the progressive, open-minded people are in and the judgmental bigots are out - and of course we're the openminded ones. In Western cosmopolitan culture there's an enormous amount of self-righteousness about self-righteousness. We progressive urbanites are so much better than people who think they're better than other people. We disdain those religious, moralistic types who look down on others. Do you see the irony, how the way of self-discovery leads to as much superiority and self-righteousness as religion does? The gospel does not say, "the good are in and the bad are out" nor "the open-minded are in and the judgmental are out." The gospel says the humble are in and the proud are out. The gospel says the people who know they're not better, not more open-minded, not more moral than anyone else, are in, and the people who think they're on the right side of the divide are most in danger. Jesus calls people "righteous" who are in the same position spiritually as those who won't go to a doctor. "Righteous" people believe they can "heal themselves", make themselves right with God by being good or moral. They don't feel the need for a soul-physician, someone who intervenes and does what they can't do themselves. Jesus is teaching that he has come to call sinners: those who know they are morally and spiritually unable to save themselves. Chapter 5 The Power Mark 4 records the calming of the wind and the waves. Jesus is demonstrating, "I am not just someone who has power; I am power itself Anyone and anything in the whole universe that has any power has it on loan from me." That is a mighty claim. And if it's true, who is this and what does this mean for us? There are 2 options. You could argue that this world is just the result of a monumental "storm" - you're here by accident, through blind, violent forces of nature, through the big bang and when you die, you'll turn to dust. And when the sun goes out, there won't be anyone around to remember anything that you've done, so in the end whether you're a cruel person or loving person makes no lasting difference at all. However, if Jesus is who he says he is, there's another way to look at life. If he's Lord of the storm, then no matter what shape the world is in - or your life is in - you will find Jesus provides all the healing, all the rest, all the power you could possibly want. If you have a God great enough and powerful enough to be mad at because he doesn't stop your suffering, you also have a God who's great enough and powerful enough to have reasons that you can't understand. You can't have it both ways. If you're at the mercy of the storm, its power is unmanageable and it doesn't love you. The only place you're safe is in the will of God. But because he's God and you're not the will of God is necessarily, immeasurably, unspeakably beyond my largest notions of what he is up to. Is he safe? "Of course he's not safe. Who said anything about being safe? But he's good. He's the King." We have a resource that can enable us to stay calm inside no matter how the storms rage outside. Here's a clue: Mark has deliberately laid out this account using language of the famous Old Testament accounts of Jonah. Both Jesus and Jonah were in a boat, and both boats were overtaken by a storm - the descriptions of the storms are almost identical. Both Jesus and Jonah were asleep. In both stories the sailors woke up the sleeper and said, "We're going to die." And in both cases, there was a miraculous divine intervention and the sea was calmed. Further, in both stories the sailors then became even more terrified than they were before the storm was calmed. Two almost identical stories - with just one difference. In the midst of the storm, Jonah said to the sailors, in effect: "There's only one thing to do. If I perish, you survive. If die, you will live." And they threw him into the sea. Which doesn't happen in Mark's story. Or does it? I think Mark is showing that the stories aren't actually different when you stand back a bit and look at them with the rest of the story of Jesus in view. In Matthew' s Gospel Jesus says "One greater than Jonah is here" and he's referring to himself: I'm the true Jonah. He meant this: Someday I'm going to calm all storms, still all waves. I'm going to destroy destruction, break brokenness, kill death. How can he do that? He can do it only because when he was on the cross he was thrown - willingly, like Jonah - into the ultimate storm, under the ultimate waves, the wave of sin and death. Jesus was thrown into the only storm that can actually sink us - the storm of eternal justice, of what we owe for our wrongdoing. That storm wasn't calmed - not until it swept him away. Chapter 6 The Waiting What is patience? Patience is love for the long haul; it is bearing up under difficult cirumstances, without giving giving up or giving in to bitterness. Patience means working when gratification is delayed. It means taking what life offers - even if it means suffering - without lashing out. And when you're in a situation that you're troubled over or when there's a delay or pressure on you or something's not happening that you want to happen, there's always a temptation to come to the end of your patience. You may well have lost your patience before you're even aware of it. Jesus displayed patience not just in the way he faced his execution and his enemies. He also displayed remarkable patience with his disciples - think of his patience with them in the storm and with the people he met throughout his life. God's sense of timing will confound ours, no matter what culture we're from. His grace rarely operates acording to our schedule. When you go to Jesus for help, you get from him far more than you had in mind. But when you go to Jesus for help, you also end up giving to him far more than you expected to give. There's all the difference in the world between being a superstitious person who gets a bodily healing and a life-transformed follower of Jesus for all eternity. If you go to Jesus he may ask of you far more than you originally planned to give, but he can give to you infinitely more than you dared ask or think. If God seems to be unconscionably delaying his grace and committing malpractice in our life, it's because there is some crucial information that we don't yet have, some essential variable that's unavailable to us. If I could sit down with you and listen to the story of your life, it may well be that I would join you in saying "I can't understand why God isn't coming through. I don't know why he is delaying." Believe me, I know how you feel, so I want to be sensitive in the way I put this. But when I look at the delays of God in my own life, I realize that a great deal of my consternation has been rooted in arrogance. I complain to Jesus, "Okay you're the eternal Son of God you've lived for all eternity, you created the universe. But why would you know any better than I do how my life should be going?" Right now is God delaying something in your life? Are you ready to give up? Are you impatient with him? There may be a crucial factor that you just don't have access to. The answer is to trust Jesus. In the story of Jesus raising Jairus' daughter to life in Mark 5, Jesus understands the little girl is dead - not just mostly dead; she's all dead but why does he tell everyone she is just sleeping? When you were little, if your parent had you by the hand you felt everything was okay. You were wrong of course. There are bad parents, and even the best parents are imperfect. Even the best parents can slip up, even the best parents make wrong choices. But Jesus is the ultimate Parent who has you by the hand and will bring you through the darkest night. The Lord of the universe, the One who danced the stars into place, takes you by the hand and says "Honey it's time to get up." Why would we want to hurry somebody this powerful and this loving, who treats us this tenderly? Why would we be impatient with somebody like this? Jesus holds us by the hand and brings us through the greatest darkness. What enables him to do that? In his letter to the church in Corinth, 2 Corinthians 13 verse 4 the apostle Paul says Christ was crucified in weakness so that we can live in God's power. Christ became weak so that we can be strong. There's nothing more frightening for a little child than to lose the hand of the parent in a crowd or in the dark, but that is nothing compared with Jesus' own loss. He lost his Father's hand on the cross. He went into the tomb so we can be raised out of it. He lost hold of his Father's hand so we could know that once he has us by the hand, he will never, ever forsake us. Are you trying to hurry Jesus? Are you impatient with the waiting? Let him take you by the hand, let him do what he wants to do. He loves you completely. He knows what he's doing. Soon it will be time to wake up. Chapter 7 The Stain Mark 7 - the cleanliness laws. According to the cleanliness laws, if you touched a dead animal or human being, if you had an infectious skin disease like boils or rashes or sores, if you came into contact with mildew (on your clothes, articles in your home, or your house itself), if you had any kind of bodily discharge, or if you ate meat from an animal designated as unclean, you were considered ritually impure, defiled, stained, unclean. That meant you couldn't enter the temple and therefore you couldnt worship God with the community. Such strenuous boundaries seem harsh to us, but if you think about it, they are not as odd as they sound. Over the centuries, people have fasted from food during seasons of prayer. Why? It's an aid for developing spiritual hunger for God. Also people of various faiths kneel for prayer. Isn't that rather uncomfortable? It's an aid for developing spiritual humility. So the washings and efforts to stay clean and free from dirt and disease that were used by religious people in Jesus' day were a kind of visual aid that enabled them to recognise that thy were spiritually and morally unclean and couldn't enter the presence of God unless there was some kind of spiritual purification. Spiritually, morally, unless you're clean, you can't be in the presence of a perfect and holy God. According to Jesus, in our natural state, we're unfit for the presence of God. We often say today "if there is a God, we don't believe he is a transcendently holy deity before whom we stand guilty and condemned. " And yet, we still wrestle with profound feelings of guilt and shame. Where do they come from? We live in a world now where we don't believe in judgment, we don't believe in sin, and yet we still feel that there's something wrong with us. We still have a profound inescapable sense that if we were examined we'd be rejected. We have a deep sense that we've got to hide our true self or at least control what people know about us. Secretly we feel that we aren't acceptable, that we have to prove to ourselves and other people that we're worthy, lovable, valuable. Why do we work so very hard, always saying, "If I can just get to this level, then I can relax?" And we never do relax once we get there - we just work and work. What is driving us? Why is it that some of us can never allow ourselves to disappoint anybody? We have no boundaries, no matter what people ask of us, how much they exploit us, trample on us, because to disappoint somebody is a form of death. Why does that possibility bother us so much? Where are all the self-doubts coming from? Why are we so afraid of commitment? There's no escaping the fact that we all have a sense we're unclean. What's really wrong with the world? Why can the world be such a miserable place? Why is there so much strife between nations, races, tribes, classes? Why do relationsips tend to fray and fall apart? Jesus is saying We are what's wrong. it's what comes out from the inside. It's the self-centeredness of the human heart. It's sin. Sin never stays in its place. it always leads to separation from God, which results in intense suffering, first in this life and then in the next. The Bible calls that hell. That's why Jesus uses the drastic image of amputation. There can be no compromises. We must do anything we can to avoid it. If our foot causes us to sin, we should cut if off. If it's our eye we should cut it out. But Jesus has just pointed out that our biggest problem, the thing that makes us most unclean, is not our foot or our eye; it's our heart. If the problem were the foot or the eye, although the solution would be drastic, it would be possible to deal with it. But we can't cut out our heart. No matter what we do, or how hard we try, external solutions don't deal with the soul. Outside in will never work, because most of what causes our problems works from the inside out. We will never shake that sense that we are unclean. Time after time the Bible shows us that the world is not divided into the good guys and the bad guys. There may be "better guys" and "worse guys" but no clear division can be made between the good and the bad. Given our sin and self-centeredness, we all have a part in what makes the world a miserable, broken place. Yet we're all still trying to address that sense of uncleanness through external measures, trying to do something that Jesus says is basically impossible. Religion doesn't get rid of the self-justification, the self-centeredness, the self-absorption, at all It doesn't really strengthen and change the heart. It's outside in.