The Sacrifice
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Welcome to Gospel and Life. This month on the podcast, Tim Keller is preaching through the book of Hebrews to answer this essential question. If God loves us so much, why is life so hard? The scripture reading is taken from Hebrews 9, verses 11-14 and 10, verses 11-18.

But when Christ appeared as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and more perfect tent, not made with hands, that is, not of this creation, he entered once for all into the holy places, not by means of the blood of goats and calves, but by means of his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption. For if the sprinkling of defiled persons with the blood of goats and bulls and with the ashes of a heifer sanctifies for the purification of the flesh, then

How much more with the blood of Christ, who through the eternal spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purifying our conscience from dead works to serve the living God. And every priest stands daily at his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices which can never take away sins. But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, waiting from that time until his enemy should be made a footstool for his feet,

For by a single offering, he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified. And the Holy Spirit also bears witness to us. For after saying, this is the covenant that I will make with them. After those days, declared the Lord, I will put my laws on their hearts and write them on their minds. Then he adds, I will remember their sins and their lawless deeds no more. Where there is forgiveness of these, there is no longer any offering for sin.

Therefore, brothers, since we have confidence to enter the holy places by the blood of Jesus, by the new and living way that he opened for us through the curtain, that is, through his flesh, and since we have a great priest over the house of God, let us draw near with a true heart and full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. This is the word of the Lord. We're looking at the book of Hebrews and we come...

to chapters 9 and 10, sort of the heart of Hebrews, where we learn the basic message, Jesus saves through sacrifice. Jesus saves through his blood. In fact, chapter 9, verse 22 goes so far as to say, without the shedding of blood, there's no forgiveness of sins. And right here,

Modern people have a problem, a big problem with Christianity. When contemporary people hear it said that God requires blood in some way to turn aside his wrath from sin, it sounds offensive, it sounds disgusting, it sounds primitive, it sounds obscene.

And this has been, Christianity has sometimes been called, disdainfully of course, the religion of the slaughterhouse. And this doesn't seem to be what we need in this world. It's filled with blood and violence. Surely we need a religion of moral uplift and love, not a religion of violence and blood. But the book of Hebrews says there's power in the blood.

There's explanatory, at the very least, power in the blood. Without the shedding of blood, we wouldn't know three things that this text tells us. The depth of our problem, the power of God's solution, and the extent of the transformation that can happen to you. The depth of the problem, without the shedding of blood, we wouldn't know the depth of the problem, the power of God's solution, and the extent of the transformation that can happen to you. Let's look at these three. First of all, without all this talk of blood...

we wouldn't know the depth of our problem. Let's start here at the top.

It's talking about the Old Testament tabernacle worship. It talks about it. It calls it, in verse 11, the tent made with hands. And in that tent made with hands, we see in verse 13 that there was no way to go in to worship God in the tabernacle without the blood of goats and calves and bulls and the ashes of a heifer for the purification of the flesh. And that means ritual cleanliness. And what this is talking about is this. If you wanted to go worship God, you walked into the tabernacle.

And if you try to walk from the entrance of the tabernacle back to the Holy of Holies, the place where God's presence dwelled, what you'd have to do is you'd have to pass three altars.

There was the first altar on the front with the altar of burnt offering. There was the altar of incense. And finally, the Ark of the Covenant in the holy place had a slab over it, a gold slab called the mercy seat on which only the high priest could do this. But one day a year, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, you had to bring the blood of a sacrifice in order for the high priest to go back in there. In other words, there was absolutely no way you could just go in to worship. The tabernacle was not a house of worship. You just walked in. Nobody could just go in.

You couldn't approach God without blood. You couldn't get anywhere near without blood. And yet, as verse 11 tells us here in the middle of chapter 10, they had to do this over and over and over and over and over again. Now, what does that mean? What is all that about? In ancient times...

Blood had both a very negative and a very positive signification. It was a symbol of both. It had both positive and negative symbolic value. But for the moment, let's talk about the negative, just for a moment. If you have blood gushing into your eyes or out of your mouth or out of your chest, it's a bad sign. It's a very bad sign. It's something broken, something seriously broken, maybe something mortally broken.

In ancient times, flowing blood meant brokenness. Another thing that blood meant in ancient times was guilt. There's many, many places, and not only in the Bible, but in other ancient literature, where the term guilt

You have blood on your hands. Or your blood is on your own head. Always meant what? Your guilt, your responsibility. And then thirdly, blood stains. Blood tends to stain. And you put all of these metaphors together into places like Isaiah 59 where God says, your sins have separated you from me and your hands are stained with blood.

Now, what does this mean? It actually says something very powerful. What were all these blood sacrifices done? You couldn't get near God without blood sacrifices all through the tabernacle. Why? First of all, this was your way of learning.

that what's wrong with life on this earth is serious. It is really serious. It's not going to take education, moral uplift, religion, morality, therapy, social change. It's going to take something much more radical than that because the violence and the brokenness and the woundedness of life is deep, deep.

And we're not going to be able to fix it with anything less than some solution that's very deep. That's one thing that the blood offerings meant. Secondly, the blood offering meant guilt. Yeah, the world is terrible. The world is broken. And we are complicit in it. We're part of it. A big part of the reason, as you know, why the world is such a bad place to live is because of me, because of you, because of us. We're complicit in it. We're guilty. We're responsible to a great degree for it.

And last of all, the stain, or you notice there's a very important theme in the book of Hebrews, is that blood sacrifice meant something is seriously wrong, and there's a guilt, and there's a shame, and we can't seem to get rid of it. We're all sort of like Lady Macbeths. We've got damn spots on us that we just can't seem to get out.

Because we have to do it over and over and over again. We're doing all sorts of things to deal with our conscience, to deal with our conscience, and nothing seems to work. There's an indelibility about our sense of failure.

Now, notice this word conscience. In fact, the word conscience comes up in the book of Hebrews more than any other book of the Bible. And we're told in verse 14, one of our problems is we don't have peace in our conscience. We're told that all the animal sacrifices didn't give us peace in the conscience. And down in verse 22, at the very end, it says our big problem is evil conscience. Well, what is a conscience? In the Bible, the word conscience has to do with your self-evaluation of how fit you are for the presence of someone.

You notice it says, let us draw near in spite of getting rid of an evil conscience. It means this. Your conscience is, are you fit for the presence of God? Are you fit for the presence of other people? And a bad conscience means a profound self-consciousness and a sense that you could not survive close examination, a sense that if people really know who you were, really knew what was wrong with you,

really knew what was really in your mind, really knew the motives of your heart, really knew what you were like, you'd be rejected. That's conscience. And religious observances, we're being told here, and moral efforts and good deeds will never get rid of a deep problem we've got, very down deep, that we're not fit. We're not fit for the eyesight. We're not fit for the presence. We're not fit for examination that we have to hide. You know, guilt...

has to do with what we've done, but shame has to do with what we are. And shame, though it's sort of inchoate and it's sort of very general and not very, very specific, in some ways is worse because it's a sense of self-consciousness that we could not survive

Real close examination. And according to the book of Hebrews, this is not just a criticism of Old Testament animal sacrifice. This is saying that we're all in the tent, the tent made with hands. We're all doing what we can do to cover up a sense that we're not what we ought to be.

to deal with the fact that our consciences are not at rest, that we know if people really looked inside and really could see what we were like, they'd see how weak we were, how wrong we were, out of kilter we were, how proud we were, how scared we were. We would never want people to see that, and therefore we have bad consciences. We're not transparent. And so we're all in the tent. There are so many stories in literature. Of course, I already mentioned Lady Macbeth, whose conscience drove her crazy, and she walked around at night

with blood on her hands, not physical blood on her hands. It was spiritual blood, conscience. My favorite Lady Macbeth in modern cinema is Jeff Bridges in The Fisher King.

If you remember that 1991 movie where Jeff Bridges plays a New York City trash-talking radio host, and one night he makes an incredibly proud, contemptuous, sarcastic remark to a poor, troubled listener and challenges him to do something, and he actually sets the man off. He goes into a restaurant, he starts shooting people, killing people, and kills himself, and it breaks Jeff Bridges' life. And he's wandering now, you know...

sort of an alcoholic, but he finds Robin Williams, who's a homeless man whose mine had gone after his wife was killed in that restaurant. And Jeff Bridges does everything he can to atone for his sins, to deal, he's in the tent because he's trying to get Robin Williams off the street, this homeless man, to sort of help him and to get him straight and doing everything, and he can't. At one point he says in the movie, why can't I just pay the price and go home? But he can't.

Every priest stands daily at his service offering repeatedly the same sacrifices over and over which can never take away sins. Now, by the way, somebody out there is saying, now hold it. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Of course, there's people with guilt. There's people who are pathological. But wait a minute. Wait a minute. That's their problem because we're modern people now, you know. And nobody can make you feel guilty unless you let them because you decide what's right or wrong for you. You decide. You decide.

We, we have, you have to determine your own standards and you can write your own scripts and you can, you, you, uh, march to the beat of your own drummer. This, we're modern people. We don't, you know, nobody has to make you feel guilty. You don't need to feel guilty. Franz Kafka knew better than that. And there's a very cryptic place in Kafka's diary where he says, the state in which we find ourselves today is sinful, though quite independent of guilt. We feel sinful, but not guilty.

And most biographers know what he was doing. He was saying something cryptically, but here's what he was saying. He says, we're modern people and we've lost the category. We've lost the category of guilt because we're relativists. And who's to say what is right? Who's to say what's wrong? You have to decide what is right or wrong for yourself. And yet we can't get rid of the shame. We can't get rid of a sense of condemnation. We can't get rid of self-recrimination.

Andrew Delbanco, who teaches at Columbia, wrote a book a few years ago that really puts it incredibly well. Because Delbanco himself says in the book, he's a secular person, but secular people don't know what to do with guilt. And yet you can't just write it off. And he has this very powerful place in one book where Delbanco quotes a dialogue from a Walker Percy novel called

called Love in the Ruins. And in this novel, Max, a psychiatrist, for whom pleasure without guilt is the essence of happy, enlightened life, has a patient named Tom, and he's having trouble understanding him. So here's the dialogue between Max, the psychiatrist, and Tom, the patient. Psychiatrist, so what worries you if you don't feel guilty? Tom, that's what worries me, not feeling guilty. Psychiatrist, why does that worry you? Tom, because if I felt guilty, I could get rid of it.

psychiatrist but why does that worry you i don't see how if there's no guilt after your fair what problem you have tom it means that you don't have life in you if you don't feel guilty psychiatrist life tom yes psychiatrist i'm having trouble seeing it as you see it tom says i know you are and del banco concludes this

What the psychiatrist does not understand is the guilt Tom no longer feels had been Tom's last reassurance that there exists something in the world that transcends him. You see the point? It's amazingly a good point. Let me put it in a nutshell for you. Everything is relative. If it's really true that there's no divine transcendent power above you by which you are to be judged, sure, there's no guilt. Of course you're free. But then nothing matters.

Life has no meaning. When you die, you rot. When the sun dies, everything goes away. And in the end, no, it makes not a bit of difference whether you're a nice person or a cruel person for the rest of your life because in the end, it's going to make no difference. What Del Bocco is saying is guilt is the last possible link you have with any assurance that you're significant. If you want to get rid of guilt, fine. The price is all significance and meaning in life. But if life has meaning, if you were made not just, if you're not an accident, but you were made for a purpose, right?

If you're made in the image of God, then you need to love God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. You're supposed to love your neighbor as yourself, the golden rule, and we've got a problem with guilt. So we do have a problem. We have an enormous problem. It's deep. It's indelible. That's the depth of the problem. The second thing we learn here from the shedding of blood is the power of God's solution.

The power of God's solution. Now, I just said that in ancient times, blood was a very negative symbol. But blood is also a very positive symbol, an incredibly positive symbol, because the blood represents the life. There's no life without blood. And by the way, if any of you have ever seen a baby being born, and most, I guess all of you were at one point babies being born, you were born through the shedding of blood. Lots and lots and lots of blood.

Life doesn't even come into the world without the shedding of blood. But most of all, the shedding of blood, if the blood represents the life, when it's voluntary, means redemptive power of self-giving, the redemptive power of self-sacrifice. Ernest Gordon was a prisoner of war in Thailand. He was one of the Allied prisoners of war in a Japanese POW camp in Thailand. And he wrote a book called Through the Valley of the Kwai.

A true story. And at one point he tells this really happened, that one day the POWs were out working. And this is a quote from the book. The day's work had ended. The tools were being counted as usual. As the party was about to be dismissed, the guard shouted that a shovel was missing. The guard insisted that someone had stolen it. And, of course, it was very serious because if a shovel was stolen, it could be used for escape. Everybody could have escaped it.

Striding up and down before the men, the guard ranted and raved, working himself into a fury. Screaming in broken English, he demanded that the guilty one step forward to take his punishment. No one moved. The guard's rage reached new heights of violence. "Then all die, all die!" he shrieked. And to show that he meant what he said, he cocked his rifle, put it on his shoulder, aimed at the first man in the rank, prepared to shoot, and work his way down the line. At that moment, a soldier from the Argyle Regiment stepped forward.

stood stiffly to attention and said calmly, I did it. The guard unleashed all his whipped-up hate, kicking the helpless prisoner and beating him with his fists. Still the Argyle stood rigidly to attention, chin up, though now his blood was streaming all down his face.

They were saved by his blood.

Amen.

The key to home, and the very heartbeat of the Christian faith itself, is that we find ourselves in Christ. For the New Testament writers, this phrase was so important that instead of using the term "Christian," they referred to followers of Jesus as those who are in Christ.

Jesus is not only our Savior, Lord, Teacher, and Friend, He is also our home and our location. Each chapter of One with My Lord is short enough to be read as a devotional, and in it, Aubrey examines what being in Christ means, giving us a fresh lens to view the gospel and all that it means for our hope, purpose, and identity.

We believe this new book will help you grow in your relationship with Christ. To request your copy of One With My Lord, visit gospelandlife.com slash give. That's gospelandlife.com slash give. Now, here's Tim Keller with the remainder of today's teaching. And do you feel the power of His blood?

Of course you do. First of all, think of this. He not only, obviously he was innocent, and obviously he knew that if he didn't step forward, they would all have died. All these other people would have died. So he says, me for them. But he didn't just save them physically. You don't think, do you not know, don't you know, that those men would never have been the same. They couldn't live the rest of their lives the same way, knowing what had happened. They would never be able to live their lives as selfishly as they would have otherwise.

And actually, when you read it, even though the blood wasn't shed for you or me, don't you feel it's power, doesn't it? It doesn't make you want to be a better person. It doesn't make you want to live in a different way. But what if the blood was shed for you? And that's what the Bible says is the meaning of history. The ancient gods who were always asking for blood sacrifice. Barbaric. Yes. Agamemnon was trying to get to Troy, but he had offended Artemis, the goddess Artemis.

And so she sent a contrary wind so he couldn't get to Troy. So what did he do? Well, the oracle said, Artemis will only be appeased in her wrath if you sacrifice one of your daughters. So he does human sacrifice and he sacrifices Iphigenia. He sacrifices his daughter and then Artemis' wrath is assuaged. Is that the God of the Bible? It seems like it. Is that the God of the Bible who demands our blood? No, not at all.

Because the whole point of this passage, the whole point of the Bible, is here in chapter 9, verse 12, where it says, Jesus entered once for all, not by the means of someone else's blood, like every other high priest who ever lived, but he came offering his own.

And the book of Hebrews, as we've been looking at it for these weeks, says that Jesus Christ is the creator. Jesus Christ is the one through whom the world was created. Jesus Christ is the very image and the embodiment of the glory of God. And so what we have in the Bible is not just, this is the opposite of the old religions. It's the opposite. Here you have not a God who demands blood but offers his own. Acts chapter 20 actually says it this way. The church of God which he purchased with his own blood.

Now you say, why would he have to do that? Why would he have to do it? I mean, if God wants to forgive, why can't he just forgive? What's with the shed blood stuff? You know, the person who's helped me the most with that question, which is a huge question. People ask it to me all the time. Well, if God wants to forgive, what's the blood? Why? Why does he, why can't he just forgive? Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great martyr who died resisting Hitler,

helped me in the last three years understand this better than maybe anybody in a long time. He said, if you've ever really forgiven somebody, if you've really forgiven some real wrong, all forgiveness is suffering. If you say, I forgave and I didn't suffer, it wasn't that serious or wrong. But if you have ever really, truly been wrong, Bonhoeffer says, and you have forgiven it, you have suffered because all forgiveness is a form of suffering. Why would that be? Well, think. If someone has really, truly wronged you deeply,

There is an indelible sense of debt, an injustice, a feeling that you just can't shrug off. And once you sense this deep injustice, this debt, there's only two things that can happen. One is you can make the perpetrator pay. You can find ways to make the perpetrator suffer and pay down the debt. But the other thing you can do is forgive.

Now, see, if you make the perpetrator pay, there's one problem with it, and it's a huge problem, and that is the evil done to you passes into you, and you become cruel and hard, and you become evil too. Big problem. So what's the only alternative? The only alternative is not to make the perpetrator pay, but to forgive. But when you forgive, when you begin to realize what it means to forgive...

It means not only not making the perpetrator suffer, but not slicing the perpetrator's reputation up to other people and not even sticking pins in that person in your own heart and hating that person in your own heart. In other words, you know what forgiveness really means? If you really try to forgive, really try to forgive so the evil doesn't fall into your own heart, you will suffer. It's agony. It's thorns. It's nails. It's a cross. But get this. If you do the incredibly hard work of forgiveness, which always means suffering,

Only then would you even have a possibility of sometime confronting that person, not for your sake and not for vengeance sake, but for his sake or her sake and God's sake. And the only possible way you'll ever keep that person from getting worse through that confrontation is if you've forgiven deeply, deeply, deeply in your heart. Okay, but now you know what this means? Think about it. When a wrong happens, even to you, even with our underdeveloped understanding of justice,

When a wrong happens to you, either the person suffers or you suffer, but somebody's got to suffer. How much more with God, whose understanding of justice is perfect, and who sees us destroying one another, destroying his creation? When he looks at our sin, there's only two things that can happen. He can judge us, and then we suffer, or he can forgive us, and he suffers. He pays the debt.

When you look at the cross, you see cosmically, infinitely, and in history, something that every single human being, even the worst human being, even the most flawed human being, knows in his or her own heart because real forgiveness is always suffering. And that means that on the cross, Jesus Christ came, God came, and he did not...

come to inflict more violence and evil in the world, but to absorb it without paying it back so he could destroy the power of evil and someday without destroying us, he paid the penalty for our sin. And boy, as John Stott put it, what other kind of God would you want? What other God could you believe in? John Stott says, I could never myself believe in God if it were not for the cross. In a world of pain, how could you worship a God who is immune to it?

He died for you. He shed his blood for you. And that brings us to our last point, and it's crucial. I know for years people have been saying, oh, don't talk about the blood and the sin and the cross. I like to think of Jesus Christ as an example, as a teacher of love. That will conform your life to some ethical principle. It will not transform your life and write the love of Jesus Christ on your heart. That's the whole point of this whole passage of the book of Hebrews. Religious observance, good works, staying in the tent.

doing everything you can to wash off the damn spot, doing everything you can to finally get a sense that I'm all right, I'm okay, to cover up the sense of failure, the sense of not living up. Staying in the tent will not work. Emulating Jesus will not work. Animal sacrifices will not work. The only thing that will put your conscience, your self-knowledge and self-image at absolute and complete rest is to know that Jesus loved you enough to do this.

It's the blood of Jesus Christ that utterly transforms us in two ways. Number one, it utterly transforms us subjectively because it saves us objectively. It utterly transforms us subjectively because it saves us objectively. What do I mean? Well, verse 14 uses a kind of Hebrewism when he says, this is chapter 10, 14.

He says, by a single offering, Jesus Christ has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified. And that word sanctified means to be set apart. It means in spite of the fact that you are flawed, your sins have been put away so that now you can stand in the presence of God anyway. And that's what it says at the very, very end. It says, let us draw near to the throne with full assurance with our evil conscience put aside because of the blood of Jesus Christ. Now, the objective is so critical. Here's why.

If you say, oh, isn't it wonderful that Jesus Christ died for me? Okay, why? Why? Do you realize unless he actually effected some object of salvation, it's subjectively absolutely stupid, not moving, to see Jesus die for you. I mean, the example of this would be, let's just say two of you, you and a friend are walking alongside of a railroad track, and along comes a railroad train,

And what if your friend says, let me show you how much I love for you, and he throws himself on the railroad train and he's destroyed? Would you say, how he loved me? No. You would say, what's the matter with him? But what if you're walking on a train track and all of a sudden around a corner comes a train and you're about to be run over and your friend, at the risk of his life, no, then at the cost of his life, pushes you away and then is destroyed himself, saving your life, then you know nothing.

Then you say, then you're moved with how he loves you. If Jesus Christ just simply died, but you didn't have a problem, that you weren't all that bad. In other words, if he didn't do something objectively for you, it won't subjectively change you. But he did.

You stand in the presence of God because of the blood of Christ in spite of your flaws. Finally, finally, you can say, I'm that loved. I'm that cared for. I've been bought with a price. And that finally gets rid of all that deep, it gets rid of the tent. It gets rid of the constant sacrifice, the constant efforts to make yourself feel okay. Finally.

See, Dr. David Martin Lloyd-Jones, I used this illustration a couple of weeks ago, but I'll do it again here. He was a pastor and he used to ask people this question. He'd say, are you a Christian? And so many times people would say, well, I'm trying. And then he'd say, in other words, you have no idea what a Christian is. A person who says I'm trying is still in the earthly tent, still doing the sacrifice, is still trying to be a good person.

And he says, here's what it means to be a Christian. Being a Christian is, first of all, primarily, supremely, a standing, a new standing given to you because of, at infinite cost, the Lord Jesus Christ and his blood.

So first of all, it changes you subjectively because it saves you objectively. And secondly, it absolutely changes the motives of your heart. There's a very interesting place here where it says in verse 14, how much more then will the blood of Christ through the eternal spirit offered himself without blemish to God purify your conscience from what? Dead works. Now notice it doesn't say from bad deeds.

It doesn't say from sins. Well, of course it does. But guess this. It's very interesting. Very, very interesting. It doesn't say that the blood of Jesus Christ, though it does some other places say it here, it doesn't say you're cleansed and repenting of your bad deeds. It says you're cleansed and repenting of your good deeds that lead to death. See, the dead works were the religious observances.

The dead works were the religious observances that could never deal with sin. Now why, why would it say you don't need freedom just from sin, you need freedom from your good deeds? And here's, listen carefully, this is the secret to the inner transformation. What's the difference between a Christian and a Pharisee?

A Pharisee is a moral person, a religious person, self-righteous person, and a person who's always, you might say, in the earthly tent, always doing good deeds, trying to deal with a sense that they're not quite what they ought to be, and therefore they're never satisfied. You never feel like you're being good enough. What's the difference between a Christian who's absolutely at rest in his conscience or her conscience, absolutely sure of God's love? What's the difference between a Christian and a Pharisee?

Is the difference that Christians repent of their sins? No, because Pharisees repent of their sins. When they do something bad, they repent too. The difference between a Christian and a Pharisee is not that the Christian repents of their sins, but that the Christian repents of the reason for his or her good deeds. A Christian is somebody who looks back and says, this is how you become a Christian. This is how the change in motivation happens. You look bad, you say, it was not just wrong that I did bad things.

But the reason I did good things was to control God. The reason I did good things was to be my own savior. The reason I did good things. See, religion says live like this, then God will have to bless you. But the gospel is God has accepted you through Jesus Christ. Now you can live like this. In religion, you do good deeds really hard out of fear and for yourself, not for God. And not out of love for God, out of desire to control God.

But the gospel, if you understand the gospel, it absolutely changes your insides. It takes the law and writes it on your heart. The law of God, the things he wants you to do, don't just become things you've got to do, but things you want to do. Not things you've got to do in order to get control of him. The things you want to do to please the one who did this. Not the things you've got to do to avoid condemnation, but to please the one, the things you want to do to please the one who died rather than lose you so that you'll never come into condemnation.

Do you see how absolutely this differs from religion? As John Newton says, our pleasure and our duty, though opposite before, since we have seen his beauty, are joined to part no more. Billy Graham, in 1955, was asked to come, he was a young man at the time, was asked to come to Cambridge University in England by a little group of Christians at Cambridge to come and preach to the whole campus, the whole student body.

And so Billy Graham said, yes, this is November of 1955. It was pretty astounded, too. And guess what? So were a lot of other people. Because the Times of London began to run articles that was filled with letters and columns saying how horrendous this was, that someone like Billy Graham was coming to our elite university. One of the letters said, I'm sure Billy Graham is a very sincere person, but he's a fundamentalist.

He's a person who believes you've got to be saved through the blood of Jesus, and fundamentalist Christianity is bad for us, and besides that, it'll never have an impact on the elite young men and women of Europe.

Well, Billy Graham decided he was still going to come, but this freaked him out. I mean, reading all this stuff, it really intimidated him. So he prepared these eight messages because he was going to preach at Great St. Mary's, which is the central church. There were only 8,000 students at the time, and 2,000 every night for eight nights packed Great St. Mary's out.

So he prepared these incredibly brilliant talks, very different than what he usually wrote, very erudite, very intellectual. In fact, he said at one place that he thought he had to preach like John Stott if he was going to come to Cambridge. And the first three nights, the place was packed out and nothing happened. He could tell nothing happened.

They were mostly students, but there were a lot of the Cambridge Dons, you know, the faculty were there. Everybody was sitting there like this and not much was happening. And on Wednesday, Billy Graham threw away his prepared talk, his prepared message, and said, I'm just going to tell you what I know about the cross of Jesus Christ. And Dick Lucas, who was there at the time in 1955, says, he says, I'll never forget that night.

I was in the totally packed chancel sitting on the floor with the Regis professor of divinity sitting on one leg and the chaplain of a college who was a future bishop on the other. Both of these were very good men, but completely against the idea that you needed salvation from sin by the blood of Jesus Christ. So dear Billy got up that night, and this is the night he'd thrown away his prepared message, and he began at Genesis and he went right through the whole Bible and talked about every single sacrifice necessary

You can imagine. The blood was just flowing all over the place, everywhere, for three quarters of an hour. And both my neighbors were terribly embarrassed by this crude proclamation of the blood of Christ. It was everything they disliked and everything they dreaded. But at the end of the sermon, Billy Graham dismissed the audience and invited anyone who wanted to stay behind to make a commitment to Christ. And that night, to everyone's shock, 400 young men and women stayed behind.

Cambridge undergraduates and graduates. And Dick remembers meeting a young curate, a brilliant young Cambridge student who went into the ministry. And he talked to him several years later and said, where did Christian things begin for you? And he said, oh, Cambridge, 1955. And he says, where? It was a Billy Graham mission. What night? It was Wednesday. How did it happen? And he said, I don't know. All I do know is that when I walked out of there that night, finally I realized Jesus Christ really died for me.

He'd been a good person, but that night the blood of Christ wrote all that on his heart. He had known Jesus' example, but never a savior. And that night his life was transformed. And Dick says, it was unbelievable to the dons around me that a man like that, preaching a sermon like that, could have totally changed the lives of young men and women like that. But so it did, because the blood of Christ has power. Let us pray.

Father, we thank you that the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the blood of Christ, still does have power. It's offensive. It offends the intellect. It offends the sensibilities, especially of contemporary people. Yet it continues to change lives as nothing else can and to orient the conscience as nothing else can and to bring a peace and a love and a delight that nothing else can. We pray, Father, that you would help us

to go and learn what this means, that the blood of Jesus Christ cleanses from all sin. In his name we pray. Amen. Thank you for joining us today. If you were encouraged by today's teaching, please rate and review it so more people can discover this podcast. And to find more great gospel-centered content by Tim Keller, visit gospelandlife.com.

Today's sermon was recorded in 2005. The sermons and talks you hear on the Gospel and Life podcast were preached from 1989 to 2017 while Dr. Keller was senior pastor at Redeemer Presbyterian Church.