Listening to the Word
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If you attend a church regularly, have you ever paid attention to the structure of the worship service at your church? Often, we move through the same order of service each Sunday. But do we realize what each aspect means? Today, Tim Keller is preaching about liturgy, that is, about what happens during worship and why it's helpful to our understanding of the gospel. ♪

The scripture reading for today is from the book of Psalms, Psalm 19, verses 1 through 14. The heavens declare the glory of God. The skies proclaim the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech. Night after night they display knowledge. They have no speech. There are no words. No sound is heard from them.

Verse 1.

The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy, making wise the simple. The precepts of the Lord are right, giving joy to the heart. The commands of the Lord are radiant, giving light to the eyes. The fear of the Lord is pure, enduring forever. The ordinances of the Lord are sure and altogether righteous. They are more precious than gold, than much pure gold. They are sweeter than honey,

Then honey from a comb. By them is your servant warned. In keeping them, there is great reward. Who can discern his errors? Forgive my hidden faults. Keep your servant also from willful sins. May they not rule over me. Then will I be blameless, innocent of great transgression.

May the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer. This is the word of the Lord. We're in a very brief series of sermons in which each week we're looking at one of the elements of worship. When we gather as a body on a Sunday in gathered worship, what do we do? We're called to worship.

We confess our sins. We listen to the reading and then to the teaching of the scripture and so on. And each week we're looking, only five weeks, we're looking at one of these elements so that when we gather, we can participate more meaningfully, more actively, and also understand the worship service as a whole and not just show up for the sermon, for example. And therefore, what we're going to do is today look at, this is kind of ironic, this is a sermon on how to listen to sermons.

Better be good. And what I want to do is look at what it means to listen and read, listen to the scripture read and taught. And I want to see what we can learn from Psalm 19. Psalm 19 is a great psalm. And the last part of it, for example, almost every word is theologically important, but we're only going to be looking at the text as it bears in this question. How do we listen to the scripture read and taught? And we're going to learn three things here.

that we need a word, a real word from God. Secondly, why we need that word. And thirdly, how to receive it. That we need that word, why we need that word, and how to receive it. First, the message of the psalm is that we need real, literal, actual words, a word from God. Verses 1 to 6 is a very, very important passage.

It tells us there that the heavens, the stars, the sun, the moon, and the natural order in general reveals the glory of God. It tells us, as it were, about God. Every human being is getting information from the magnificence of the created order of nature. Romans 1 elaborates on this a bit.

and says what this means is that the nature and the magnificence of nature is evidence that there's a designer and there's a creator behind it all. It's evidence that our minds and our hearts can intuit or infer from.

Now, what's important to see here is, now we could have a whole series of sermons on the implications. This is marvelous. But if you look at verse 6, 1 to 6, in light of the entire psalm, you'll see that the message of the psalm is that though nature is going to tell you about God, that with your unaided heart and mind and intuition and reason, looking at the world as it is, you can learn about God. But the message of the whole psalm is, but it's not enough.

You need real literal words. Why? See, look, for example, at verses 1 and 2. It says, the heavens are telling the glory of God. The skies are proclaiming. Okay. Day after day pour forth speech. Night after night they display knowledge. In verse 3, they have no speech. There are no words. No sound is heard from them. And then verse 4 goes on and says, their voice goes into all the earth. You see the paradox. There's words, but they're not words. What does that mean? Not that hard to understand.

There's information coming, but it's nonverbal. You can get information across. Can you not? Without words. People can infer and intuit information without words. Nature is not giving you literal words. There's no literal words to hear about God. There's no literal words to read about God. And you're getting information. Now, the problem with that, the limitation of that,

is that it's very mistakable. So, for example, if you were out in the woods and you wanted someone to follow you and you knew somebody was going to be coming along that you wanted them to find you, what if you wanted to leave them a message and the message was, I'm three miles away, go west and make the first right and you'll find me. Now, the best way to get that information across to the person following behind is to write a note with literal words, real words on it.

Then they'll get the note and they'll do it. But what if you can't leave a note? What if you can't leave words for some reason? Okay, so you put three stones in a row and maybe a broken branch at an angle. And they're supposed to infer from that, I'm three miles away, go west and turn right. But they might say, maybe it's a three-day away journey. And maybe the branch doesn't mean go west and turn right. Maybe it means go south and turn left. It's much easier to misinterpret.

And that's what Romans 1 and the Bible says about the book of nature. That is to say, God does, without the scripture, you can know things about God. You can intuit things about God. You can imagine things about God. You can get real ideas about God. And yet, the information that nature gives you is very mistakable because there's a lot of people who go out and they look at the stars and they see the handiwork of God and other people go out and they look at the stars and they see flaming balls of gas.

That's all. I mean, people don't get the message. Lots of people don't get the message. Lots of people say there is no message. Why? Of course, it's because there is no voice. There are no words. There is no real sound. And the message of Psalm 19 as a whole is, as great as nature is, it can't revive the soul.

It can't give you what your heart most needs. It can give you information about the glory of God, but it can't revive the soul. What does that mean? We'll get to that point too, but right now let's tie up point one. Here's what point one is. The Bible here is telling us that the smallest verse in the scripture, that the smallest statute or precept in the scripture is more valuable and soul transforming than all the gold in the world.

It's more nourishing and soul transforming than all the honey in the world. And so as great as nature is, and for all it can tell you about God, it can't revive the soul. We need a word, a real word, real sound. Point one. But point two is, well, why? The answer is twofold here.

Without the scripture, without actual words from God, we can't know about the love of God in general or the grace of God in particular. We can't know the love of God in general or the grace of God in particular. Let me show you first. The psalmist is saying we can't really know about the love of God. In the first six verses, you see the word God, right? The heavens are telling the glory of God. That's the Hebrew word Elohim. It's the generic word for great God.

But as soon as it begins to talk about the scripture in verses 7 and following, as soon as it begins talking about the law of God and the precepts of God and the scripture, all through there, instead of God, we have the word Lord. Notice L-O-R-D in caps. And that, in English translations, translates the Hebrew word Yahweh. And Yahweh is the personal name of God, the name that God gave to Moses in the burning bush.

It's the covenant name. It's God's name that he gives to people who enter into a personal covenant love relationship with him. And so as clear as can be, Psalm 19 says, if you want to know about God and a glorious God and a great magnificent God, go take a look at the magnificence of nature. But if you want to know...

that that infinitely high and transcendent God loves you, and you can enter into an intimate personal love relationship with you. The only way to find that out is in the scripture. Why? Now, some people say, what do you mean only in the scripture? That doesn't really make sense. Sure, you don't need to believe that God is love by reading the scripture. In fact, lots and lots of people in New York over the years have told me this. I don't believe in the Bible because I believe in a God of love.

They say, when I read the Bible, I see this God of judgment and he's got his laws and all this sort of thing. But I don't believe in a God of judgment. I believe in a God of love. That's why I don't believe the Bible. And here's what I always do. This is very Psalm 19-ish to do. I say, oh, really? Okay. It's interesting you believe that God is a God of love. Where did that idea come from? Where did you get the idea that if there is a God, he must be a God of love? Did you look at nature with all of its hurricanes?

and volcanoes, you see, and all of its forest fires, and all of its avalanches, and all of its tsunamis, and its tornadoes. Did you just look at nature? Did you look at natural selection? Did you look at how nature really works? Did you see the animals in a pack, and then one of them is diseased, and they all turn and eat it? Bye, mom. You know, you're holding the pack back. You know, Annie Dillard...

who wrote Pilgrim of Tinker Creek, won a Pulitzer Prize for it, went out into the woods by a creek in Virginia years ago to observe nature, thought it was going to fill her soul with a sense of love, and it didn't because she saw that nature is red in tooth and claw. She saw it's incredibly violent. Do you just look at nature with all of its hurricanes, all of its volcanoes, and the strong eating the weak, and nature red in tooth and claw, and just say, it's so obvious that if there is a God, he's a God of love.

No. Okay, well, let's try something else. Let's read history. Let's read the history of the human race. Let's read the history of the 19th century or the 18th century or the 10th century. Let's read any book of history of any era in human history. And as you close the book, when you've really come to grips with what happened in that era of history, do you say, it's just so obvious that God, if there is a God, is a God of love? No. Well, do you go to the text of other religions? I mean, when I was a

In college, I was very naive and I thought, oh, all the religions teach as a central message that the main thing about God is he's a God of love. And it's just not the case. There is no other religious text. There is no other religion that puts love as the central message at the very center of what God is. And I've been taken down by, you know, very respectfully and graciously by friends who are Buddhists, friends who are Muslims, who said that's not what we would say about God at all.

Where did you get the idea? Where did anybody in the world ever come up with the idea that this infinite transcendent God behind nature is the God of love? Did you get it by looking at nature? No. Did you get it by looking at history? No. Did you get it by looking at other religious texts? No. I'll tell you where it came from. The idea of this great God loving, being a loving God, came into the world through the Bible. And there's a whole lot of other ideas in the Bible you're going to have to come to grips with besides that. But that's where you got it. So it's kind of ironic that

You don't believe the Bible because you believe in God as a God of love when that's what you got from the Bible. Be consistent. Take the rest of it with it, please. Why? It's only in the scripture that gives you that unbelievably counterintuitive thing. There is really, frankly, no evidence, if it wasn't in the Bible, by looking at nature and history and other religious texts, that God is a God of love. It's a word directly from the scripture that tells you that. That's how you know. And that's what restores the soul.

See, when it says the law of the Lord is perfect, reviving the soul, that word reviving is the same word that's translated in Psalm 23, restoring the soul. He restoreth my soul. And so the soul is your essence. It's your very inner spiritual being. It's your heart. It's who you are. And the word restore or revive indicates there's something wrong with it.

It's a word for a house that's so derelict and so dilapidated and so falling down that you can't even live in it. And so the implication is that our souls have been crushed. Our souls are in disrepair. They desperately need to be restored. Why? Well, according to the Bible, our souls are crushed and in dereliction partly because we're crushed by the troubles outside of us, the troubles of just living in this world.

And partly we're crushed by the troubles that are within us, our own sins and our own flaws, and we desperately need to have our souls restored and reinvigorated and refreshed. And looking at nature and seeing, even inferring, that there's a glorious God out there, incredibly huge, who made the stars, that doesn't restore the soul. That'll just make you feel smaller. The only thing that will restore the soul is the idea that this infinite, transcendent God loves me.

and that you can enter into a personal relationship with Him. That revives the soul. That restores the soul. And the only place you're going to find out about that is in the Scripture, words. This month, we're excited to let you know about a brand new resource based on Tim Keller's best-loved books. Go Forward in Love, a year of daily readings from Timothy Keller, features a short passage each day from one of Dr. Keller's books to use for daily reflection.

Each day's reading offers deep insight, biblical wisdom, and spiritual encouragement. The passages are meant to lead you into worship, help you reflect on God's attributes, and encourage you to live more missionally. Go Forward in Love is our thanks when you give to Gospel in Life in December. To receive your copy, just visit gospelinlife.com slash give. That's gospelinlife.com slash give. And thank you for your generosity, which helps us share the love of Christ with more people. ♪

But it's not just that the scripture tells us about words in general, pardon me, love of God in general, but it's in the scripture and in the words of the scripture that we learn about the grace of God in particular. Now, C.S. Lewis wrote a great book called Reflections on the Psalms, and when he got to Psalm 19...

And he sees David, the psalmist, saying, I delight in the law of God. It's like honey. It's like gold. The law of God. The perfect law of God. I just love it. C.S. Lewis said in his own, you know, little better fashion, what's up with that? And here's what he said. One can well understand this being said of God's mercies. But what David is actually talking about is God's law, his commands, his ordinances, which mean his rulings about conduct.

This, for me, was very mysterious. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not commit adultery. I can understand that you can and must respect these statutes and try to obey them and assent to them in your heart. But it is very hard to find how they could be to anyone delicious, how they could exhilarate. We may obey them, but surely they could be more aptly compared to a dentist's forceps or maybe to the front line of battle rather than to anything enjoyable or sweet.

And it's not just Psalm 19. Psalm 1 says the mark of a godly man or woman is that they delight in the law, the law of God, and they pour over it day and night. They delight in it. And Lewis concludes this thought. He says, this is not the language of scrupulosity. It's the language of a man ravished by beauty. And if we cannot share his experience, we shall all be the losers. How is it possible for David...

to look at the law of God and the perfect law of God, perfectly demanding, absolutely the righteous life and say, oh, I love that. It's a beauty. It's a delight. How could it be? Why is it reviving his soul? Why isn't it just crushing him? When you look at the law of God, doesn't it tell you all the things that you're doing wrong? Doesn't it give you a standard always, if you understand it, that you could never live up to? How could it revive the soul? Why doesn't it just make it worse? And here's the answer.

It's actually easy to miss. At the very end, David has the audacity to say, may the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart, see that's kind of my outside and my inside, be pleasing in thy sight. Now the word pleasing here in the older translations is sometimes translated acceptable, is a word that's almost always used in the Hebrew Bible to refer to sacrifices.

Because all through Leviticus and the Mosaic law, it says make sure that when you bring your animal sacrifices to the tabernacle to sacrifice, they be perfect. They have no flaws, no blemishes. Don't give us something out of your herd that's not going to cost you. Perfect, acceptable sacrifices. Why is David saying the reason the law of God is perfect is I know that I can turn around and offer myself up

and know that you will be completely pleased with what you see. Now, are we saying David must be very naive? I mean, he doesn't know about his heart like we do. No, you can't read the rest of the Psalms and say that. You can't read Psalm 51 and say he doesn't understand what's in his heart. You can't read the Psalms in which he actually says many places, I was conceived in sin, you know. So how can he do this? And the answer is by the Holy Spirit.

He's channeling somebody else. He's channeling one of his own descendants. When one of David's descendants, sometimes people call him David's greater son, Jesus Christ came, we're told that he said, according to the book of Hebrews, to the father, I delight to do thy will, O Lord. Thy law is in my heart. Here was a man who not only absolutely delighted in the law of God and poured over it day and night, but he obeyed it fully.

He obeyed it absolutely perfectly. And as a result, he deserved at the end of his life to be embraced by God. He deserved the blessing and the embrace of God that comes to anyone who completely delights in and fully obeys the law of God. But that's not what happened at the end of his life, is it? What happened at the end of his life? He wasn't embraced. He was forsaken on the cross. He was tortured. He was abandoned by everybody, including his father.

He was treated as if he hadn't obeyed any of it. Why? Paul puts it perfectly in Galatians 3.10, where he says, Everyone who relies on observing the law is under a curse. For it is written, Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything in the book of the law. Clearly then, no one can be made right before God by the law. But Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. For it is written, Cursed is everyone who is hung up on a tree.

For God made him sin who knew no sin, that we might become the righteousness of God in him. Jesus took the curse of disobedience to the law so we could receive his blessing of his perfect obedience to the law. Now, what does that mean? David couldn't give God a perfect sacrifice. He couldn't say, I can delight in the law of God because I can turn around and give you a perfect, absolute, self-giving sacrifice.

But David's greater son, who delighted in the law of God with his whole heart, and who, as the spotless name of God, offered up a perfect sacrifice in our place, did. He did. And if you get to verse 14 and think of Jesus, then the law of God and everything else in Psalm 19 will be a delight, and it'll start to revive your soul.

See, if you know that when God looks at you, he sees David's greater son offering up a perfect sacrifice, paying for your sin, living the life you should have lived, dying the death you should have died in your place, then he can turn to the law and not be afraid of it condemning you. It can't because all the condemnation you deserve fell on him. And now I turn to the law of God, and why do I turn? I turn because it delights God. It pleases God. It changes me. Now it can revive my soul, finally.

Where do you learn about the grace of God? It's in the gospel of Jesus Christ, and that takes words. C.S. Lewis wrote a chapter, an essay called At the Fringe of Language. And he said, if your basic message is how to do something, language isn't the best way to convey it. He actually said language isn't very good at describing complex operations. So he said, for example, if you're trying to get across to somebody how to tie a Windsor knot in a man's tie...

Don't write it out in words. Have you ever tried to read the directions, the in words on how to put this? You desperately want a diagram or just show me a picture of the actual assembled thing and I can do it. And so Lewis says, if the basic message of the gospel is,

It's basically, live a good life, do this, and then God will bless you. Then actually, the word isn't necessarily the best way to put it. Just live the life, you know, just be a good example. But we're not saved by what we do. We're saved by what he did, what he has done for us. And that's the reason why ultimately the gospel, the good news, is not live a good life,

That's something you don't even need words to get across. You can just be a good example. It's Jesus Christ has done for you everything necessary. And only when you grasp that in his grace can you be sure he loves you and will love you forever. John Updike wrote an article

wrote a short story called Pigeon Feathers about a boy named David. He's 15 years old, and he's desperately afraid of dying. And he goes to his minister and says, how can I be sure that there's a God who loves me and I'll live with him forever? And the minister doesn't really believe the Bible and says, well, it's like Abraham Lincoln. You know, his goodness lives on. So you mean when I die, that's it? Well, yeah, that's it.

And there's one place, I think, in Pigeon Feathers where David has a kind of nightmare vision of, you know, if there is no God of love, this is what we're in for when we die. It's quite vivid prose. There's a long hole in the ground, no wider than your body, down which you were drawn while the white faces receded. You try to reach them, but your arms are pinned. Shovels pour dirt in your face.

And there you will be forever, blind and silent. And in time, no one will remember you, and you will never be called. As strata of rock shift, your fingers elongate, and your teeth are distended sideways in a great underground grimace indistinguishable eventually from a strip of chalk. And the earth tumbles on, and the sun expires, and unaltering darkness reigns where once there were stars. If nature is all there is, that's your future. Revive the soul? I don't think so.

How can you know that you have a place in God's heart forever? It's the gospel of Jesus Christ. That's how you know that this infinite, transcendent God loves you and will love you forever to the praise of his glorious grace. And the way you find that out is in the gospel, the words, the declaration of the gospel in the Bible. Now, if that's true, that you desperately need to hear the words of the scripture,

Just for your own soul's sake, just to be, that's what you need. How are we going to receive this word? Now, at the very end, let me tell you something about a practical application about how to listen to a sermon. The end of the text is all about searching. Search me. You know, look at me. And here's what I'd like you to consider. There's two things.

balanced. There's two principles you have to keep in balance. And if you don't do both of them, you'll be out of balance and you won't actually receive God's word the way you should when you hear the word of God read and preached. On the one hand, you have to examine your heart with a sermon to hear God's message. And you have to also examine the message with the scripture to hear God's message. See, you have to examine your heart with the sermon if you want to hear the message God has for you.

And you also have to examine the sermon with the scripture if you want to hear God's message for you. And you've got to keep those in balance. Most people don't. Here's why. First of all, you have to examine your heart with a sermon. You've got to be willing to sit humbly under the sermon and really listen for God's message in it. Now, that's not what most people do. That's not what I do when I go to hear a sermon. What we do is we sit in judgment on the preacher.

Now, listen, my wife and I are worse than anybody at this because, you know, I'm a preacher and I've taught preaching and we've been everywhere. So when I'm on vacation, I listen to a sermon. It's awful. Because the first thing you say is that was way too long an introduction. And what that was a terrible illustration. And but, you know, it's not just me. It's not just me. Those of you who are have been in churches a long time, you go and you sit there like this and you say, I don't know whether I really trust this person's doctrine.

And if you haven't been there as long, if your background, you don't have as much background in church, if you come and listen to a sermon, you're sitting there saying, what about this person's politics?

Or basically, we just say, do I like the person? You sit there and say, oh gosh, he reminds me of my son-in-law. So what we do is we sit there. This person isn't very eloquent. This person isn't very slick. This person can't pronounce the words right. This person isn't very smart. This person reminds me of somebody I hate. And I don't like the doctrine. I don't like this. I don't like that. Listen, years ago...

He's a young man who had been raised in my little church that I had in Virginia. He was in and out of the church all the time. He was in his 20s at the time, but he was a drug addict and he was a sex addict and he was a mess. Sometimes he came to church, sometimes he didn't. He was in and out of hospitals, in and out of institutions and so on. But one day, not long after I got to the church, he came to see me and he said, I've heard you preach a couple of times and I want you to know that you are just full of pride.

And the way you preach, you act like you have all the answers and all of us are fools and we all have to listen to you and you have all the wisdom. So I went home thinking, oh boy, consider the source. He's a mess. I don't have to listen to somebody like that. And yet afterwards, talking to my wife, Kathy, and talking to other people, I came to realize there's something. No, you don't first look at the source. You listen and ask, is the message true? In the Old Testament, there's a story about a prophet named Balaam.

who is beginning to disobey God and going astray and God can't get his attention. And finally, as a last resort, Balaam is on a trip and he's riding on an ass on an animal on the trip. And God begins to speak through the ass. He touches the ass and he begins to prophesy and speak to Balaam and give God's word to Balaam. And you begin to realize what the lesson of that story is. The lesson of that story is it might be an ass.

But asses prophesy. It still might be God's word. The real question is not, is he an ass, but is he right? And what I had to do was I had this, in that particular case, I had to think about it in a new way and realize that he was. Now, let me speak on behalf of all the preachers in the world. We are to one degree or another asses. We're not perfect, but the law of the Lord is perfect. The law of the Lord is perfect and it can revive your soul.

And if you're sitting, even having an ass read you and preach to you the perfect law of God, then, you know, God's not wasting your time. You're not here by accident. This text, this person, listen for God's message by getting out of your self-righteous judgmentalism and being humble under the message.

But on the other hand, there's the opposite mistake, which is really pretty bad. And the opposite mistake is you can be too uncritical. You know, you idolize the minister. He's so brilliant. So everything he says, it must be true. Or you make an idol out of your denomination or out of your church and you just take it uncritically, in which case you're not comparing what the teaching is with the scripture to see whether or not the person's a false teacher or giving you false teaching. See, almost everybody either sits in judgment or

Or is completely naive and vulnerable and gullible. And only if you get incredibly active and do both. You examine your heart with a sermon and you examine the sermon with a scripture. Both. It's very hard. Almost nobody does it temperamentally. We all tend to do one or the other. Will you grow and have your soul revived? You know, ultimately, keep this in mind. There's a weird place in Ephesians where Paul's writing to the Ephesian Christians. And he says, Christ came and preached peace to you. Now, wait a minute.

He's talking to a group of Christians in Asia Minor and said, Christ came and preached peace to you and that's how you came to know him. What do you mean Christ came? It must have been missionaries. It must have been human preachers. Yes, but you see...

What Paul was able to say is if a human being opens to you the perfect word of God, that can be Christ preaching to you. Like on the road to Emmaus, when after he disappeared, the disciples said, when he opened the scripture, weren't our hearts bubbling and boiling with heat and light? Learn to receive the word of God, the gospel of God, even from asses, and let Christ preach peace to you. Let us pray.

Thank you, Father, for giving us these words, these words. Oh, we need them. And we pray that you would help us now to see that your gospel is our meat and our drink. Teach us how to imbibe it and grow from it all the time. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.

Thanks for listening to today's message from Tim Keller. If you have a story of how the gospel has changed your life or how Gospel and Life's resources have encouraged or challenged you, we'd love to hear from you. You can share your story with us by visiting gospelandlife.com slash stories. That's gospelandlife.com slash stories.

Today's sermon was preached in 2008. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel in Life podcast were preached from 1989 to 2017 while Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church.