Praying the Gospel
41:28 Share

The book of Psalms gives voice to the full range of human emotions. You'll find joy, sorrow, doubt, fear, praise, and lament in its pages. Join us today as Tim Keller shows us how praying the Psalms can help us grow into the people God designed us to be. ♪

Occasionally I'll break into saying, bless the Lord, oh my soul, and all that is within me, bless his holy name. That's not actually the translation we're reading. We're going to read the New International Version. Let me read it for you. This is Psalm 103. Praise the Lord, oh my soul, and all my inmost being, praise his holy name. Praise the Lord, oh my soul, and forget not all his benefits, who forgives all your sins and heals you.

All your diseases. Who redeems your life from the pit and crowns you with love and compassion. Who satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is renewed like the eagles. The Lord works righteousness and justice for all the oppressed.

He made known his ways to Moses, his deeds to the people of Israel. The Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love. He will not always accuse, nor will he harbor his anger forever. He does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him. As far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.

But...

From everlasting to everlasting, the Lord's love is with those who fear him and his righteousness with their children's children, with those who keep his covenant and remember to obey his precepts. The Lord has established his throne in heaven and his kingdom rules over all. Praise the Lord, you his angels, you mighty ones who do his bidding, who obey his word. Praise the Lord, all his heavenly hosts, you his servants who do his will. Praise the Lord, all his works, everywhere in his dominion. Praise the Lord, O my soul.

This is God's Word. Now, we've said that the book of Psalms is the preeminent place to see how to deal with your emotions and how to deal with the conditions of the heart. The Psalms, in a certain sense, is almost God's counseling casebook. And you hear what I said, not his counseling textbook, but his casebook. Not so much something that...

Not a place where you have lots of principles laid out, but lots of actual cases of people struggling with anger and loneliness and doubt and emptiness and grief and fear and anxiety and shame and guilt. Every condition the human heart struggles with and wrestles with. Yet, in the Psalms, you occasionally have a Psalm like this. What do you see here that's different from the other Psalms we've looked at? What do you see?

For example, you notice that there is actually no heading. It says of David at the beginning, but it doesn't identify this as a prayer that came out of a particular situation or specific historical event. Not only that, there's almost no reference to enemies, no reference to specific sins, because what you have here is not exactly a rarity, but it's certainly, there's not lots of psalms like it. It's a general psalm.

about how to handle life in general. It, in a sense, gives you a couple of key approaches, or I should say the key approach, that actually brings you, in a sense, the approach to handle all of life's circumstances, no matter what they are. The principles applied in different ways to despondency and fear and anxiety, all the things we've been looking at. But in here, what you actually have, I'll put it this way, is he is laying out, David's laying out,

the basic key to deal with all conditions, all circumstances of life, any situation. It's in a way the basic way to handle the problems of life. That's what this song is about. Now that I got you interested, you're going to immediately at the beginning feel an anti-climax when I tell you what he says the whole problem is. The whole problem of your heart, the whole problem we have every time we face the issues of life,

He says the problem is, well, take a look. What's the grammatical heart of the structure of this whole passage, of the whole psalm? Look at the first couple of verses. Praise the Lord, O my soul. Praise the Lord, O my soul. And forget not all his benefits. See, in Hebrew parallelism, the same thing is said repeatedly over

And so when you see the word and, it's not talking about when you get to forget not all his benefits. We're not talking about a second thing. We're talking about the same thing. How do you praise the Lord with your entire soul? By not forgetting his benefits. And then you see how the NIV translation rightly puts a dash afterwards. Why? Because everything else in the psalm is just an enumeration of the benefits. And so what we have here is David saying this, the main thing I need to do, the main thing you need to do,

The main way to honor God, the main way to handle life is to not forget. Or the main problem we have is that we forget. We forget what God's done. Now, I know that that's anticlimactic. I know when you say, that's it? That's it? And the problem is our stupid English word, remember. Our word for remember is so much more shallow than the biblical and Hebrew concept that I'm going to have to spend the sermon explaining it.

to show you why David knows where if he speaks. So what we're going to do is we're going to look, because David is calling for something far deeper than mental recall, and he's dealing with something far more transforming than just counting your blessings. He's not just saying, oh, count your blessings. Something else. What is it? Remember. What is that? Well, we're going to learn here why we need to remember, where we need to remember, what we need to remember, and how we need to remember. Okay?

Why we need to remember, where, what we need to remember, and how. First, and this is the key to everything, the key to handling life, I mean. Now, number one, why do we need to remember? Why would this whole magnificent psalm be completely dedicated to remembering or to not forgetting? Forget not, of course, is a kind of double negative. When he says forget not, what he means is remember. Remember.

So what is forgetting, as far as God's concerned? What is forgetting and remembering? What is it, and why is it so hard, and why is it so important? If you go into the Bible, and if you just look up in the concordance, you're amazed at the prominence of the terms remembering and forgetting. So, for example, in Isaiah 51, this is what God says. He says, You are afraid of mortal men who are but grass, and you forget the Lord your Maker who stretched out the heaven and laid the foundations of the earth.

See, God says, if you're afraid of anybody, you're forgetting me. Forgetting me. 2 Peter 1 verses 8 to 11. There's a kind of long catalog, and here's a sort of gist of it. I don't want to read the whole thing. But Peter is saying, grow in faith, goodness, knowledge, self-control, perseverance, kindness, and love. And if you are not growing in these things, if you're not adding these things, he says, it is because you have forgotten you were cleansed from your past sins.

Look, even if you just took those two verses and we didn't get to anything else, he says if you're afraid of anything, if you're lacking self-control in any way, if you're lacking perseverance, if you're lacking kindness, if you're lacking goodness, if you're lacking anything, you're forgetting. And then, of course, God is constantly talking about forgetting and remembering himself. He actually, there's a number of places, as you know, he says, I will remember your sins no more. Now, right there, you put that with the other things we just looked at, and you right away realize,

The Bible's talking about something far more profound than just mental recall. I mean, it can't be. When God says, I will remember your sin no more, what does that mean? Does he mean he looks at you sometime and say, in 1980, that person did something wrong. What was it? I remember that no more. That can't be what it means. So what is he talking about? In the Bible, remembering is controlling consciousness.

In the Bible, remembering is to have something so central to your consciousness that it affects you completely, in particular, they ask to test your behavior. To remember something means to have it so central to your consciousness that it controls how you act. Now, how many times have you said, I will never, ever do that again?

Why? Because at the moment, it's so obvious how destructive that is. It's so obvious how wrong it is. And within weeks, within days, sometimes within hours, you're doing it again. What happened? Did you forget that it happened? No. What's happened is it was controlling you. It was vivid. It was immediate. It was gripping you. And even though you can mentally recall it, it no longer controls you. It no longer is at the center of your consciousness. There is nothing more...

discouraging, and there's nothing more humiliating, and there's nothing more embarrassing than to actually go back over the list of things that you said to yourself or other people, where you have resolved, and whether you've promised, and you said, I'm going to do this, it's so important to me. And even though you can maybe remember, mentally recall, the fact that you felt that way, you can't remember the feeling. And if you can't remember the feeling, it means you're not acting on it, which means it's not central to your consciousness anymore.

And over and over again in the Bible, it talks about the fact that there's something about us that though even we can mentally recall, we almost immediately begin to forget. That means things that were so important to us lose their immediacy, and they lose their vividness, and they lose their grip on us. Now, there's a few of you out there, rightly so, saying, wait a minute, wait a minute. This isn't exactly right. Some of you are going to say, there are some horrible things that were said to me or done to me, or there's some terrible things that I said or I did.

Or there's some sites that I have seen, or even some pictures I've looked at, that I would dearly love to forget, and I can't. They continue to grip me. I don't just mentally recall them. They affect me. They grip me. They're still there in technicolor. I wish I could forget them, but I can't. Well, see, that's actually part of the problem.

The problem is that what the Bible calls sin, and I know a lot of people wrestle with that very word, but what the Bible calls sin is a dislocation of the heart, and one of the effects of this dislocation is that your memory is all screwed up in that, listen, the things...

that should keep you confident, that should keep you affirmed, that should keep your heart soft and humble and filled with joy, they are things that almost immediately after you've experienced them, they fade. And the cruel things and the disgusting things and the ugly things, they stay there in technicolor. I mean, if somebody says to you something mean, something bad, something about your appearance, something about your intelligence...

Now, if one of your parents said when you were 13, you'll never amount it to a hill of beans, you can't forget that. It is right there. It's immediate to you. It's gripping you. It's central to your consciousness. And yet it outweighs hundreds of compliments people have made to you. Why does somebody have to tell you you're great a hundred times before you believe it, but only once do they have to tell you you stink before you believe it? What's going on? Why is it? Because there's something wrong with our hearts, something wrong with our minds, and this is it.

What you remember, what you mind, what's central to your thinking, what's central to your consciousness sets the course of your life as a whole. If your mind is centered on the mercies you've received, you'll be a happy person. If it's centered on the injustices you received, you're a bitter person. It all depends on what you remember. See, remember means what engages you, what is sewed on, what is grabbing you at the time. And one of the problems we have with our hearts is that the good things, the best things,

The kind things, the noble things, the things that ought to be controlling our hearts fade immediately. And the things that make us feel terrible, the things that make us feel put upon and cursed are the things that control and they stay there. Now, somebody might say, why? Why is this? I mean, it's hard to argue with that. And it's, you know, the Bible says it in common sense tells us why is it? This is really what the scripture says about that. And let's go back to this word sin.

What the Bible over and over and over again says is our forgetting, our need to forget, the way our heart forgets the good, and the way our heart forgets God. God is always saying, you're going to forget me. In Deuteronomy, he says, when you get in the promised land, you're going to forget me. In Joshua, when they cross the Jordan, God dries up the Jordan. There's a miracle. He dams up the water. And as they're walking across, he says, grab a stone.

And he gets to the other side, and the water comes on down. Everybody says, what a miracle! And God says, heap the stones up. Why? So that whenever you go by them, you'll remember I did this because you're going to forget it. Why do we forget? It doesn't mean that it won't mentally recall, but it won't control them anymore. It won't be vivid anymore. It'll just pass away. And the answer is, the Bible says, that it's an unconscious and semi-conscious desire on our part. For example, in Deuteronomy 8, it says, when you come into the promised land...

It says, "Beware lest your heart becomes proud and you forget me." Or in Romans 1, which is really the key place, Romans 1 tells us that the human heart wants to be its own master. The human heart wants to be in charge. You want to call your own shots, do you not? Of course that's natural. But because of that, the human heart cannot bear to see the greatness of God, cannot see what we owe Him.

You just can't bear to do it. And therefore, we're semi-consciously always needing to forget. And what that does is, according to Romans 1, it says you hold down the truth in unrighteousness. You can't bear, on the one hand, the thought of the glory of God and the greatness of God and what you owe him. And therefore, you're trying to forget. And yet, at the same time, you're made in the image of God and you desperately want to remember. If you want a great example of this,

There's an old 1947 movie with Rex Harrison and Gene Tierney. It's called The Ghost and Mrs. Muir. And by the way, this is not the television sitcom, but rather the movie and the book, the novel, the 1945 novel. In The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, this is the story. There's a woman, Mrs. Muir, who first has a husband that she doesn't love, but she's faithful to him, and then he dies young.

And she has a little girl, and she's alone. And then she falls in love with another man that she thinks is going to save her, basically, and then she finds out he's married and he's a cad. And that breaks her heart. Then they move into Gull Cottage, high up on the cliff, looking down on, I guess, the Cornish coast, seeing the sea and seeing the beaches down below. And she meets the ghost in the house. There's a house, and it's haunted, and the ghost is Captain Greg, who's a sea captain, who built the house.

And it turns out that the captain is so dashing, so daring, so brave, so lusty in the best sense of that old term, so brilliant, so wise, that she recognizes this is the one I've always wanted. And she falls in love. But there's a problem. And one night, it's just too painful to realize this, and one night when she's asleep, the ghost, Rex Harrison, comes and says to her, I'm going to leave.

And I want you to forget. I want you to think it was all a dream. I want you to forget that I was real. I want you to just think that it was nothing but a dream. And then he fades away. And she wakes up and she forgets because she wants to forget. She forgets because it's too painful to remember. And so she goes right along and she represses it. But what's so interesting, the movie shows the years go by, the decades go by. And she walks on the beach. And she's now in this situation.

On the one hand, she wants to forget. It's too painful to remember. And so she has forgotten. And yet, deep, deep down inside, she remembers that she's forgotten something. That on the one hand, it's painful and she can't bear it. On the other hand, it's wonderful and she wishes she could get close to it. And when she walks on the beach and she looks at the sea, the sea reminds her of a tremendous love and she doesn't know why. So she needs to forget. She wants to forget. And yet, she doesn't want to forget.

And as a result, for the rest of her life, she's more haunted than she was when he was there. And that's a perfect picture of a human being. It's a perfect picture of the human race. Romans 1 says, we desperately want to forget God, and yet we desperately want him. On the one hand, we just cannot stand the idea that there's someone to whom we owe everything, so we can't stand the truth about our need, the truth about our sin, the truth about what we owe him. And on the other hand, when we see the mountains, when we see the sea, when we see the stars...

We know that our lives are not a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing. We know that there is a love out there for us. So we're stuck. We have hearts that need to forget, don't want to forget, but have to forget. And that's the reason why we need intervention desperately, spiritual intervention. Because all the best things, the true, the good, and God himself will not stick. We've got Teflon hearts when it comes to the good. And we've got, on the other hand, very sticky hearts, you know, when it comes to the bad.

Now, what are we going to do about it? Well, take a look. First of all, the first thing you have to see is where do we need to remember? In other words, where does the psalm say is the real problem? Where is the seat of the forgetting? Where is the place we've really got to work? And the answer is right there in verse 1. Praise the Lord, O my soul, and all my inmost being praise his holy name. Oh, what's this? Now look, who is Psalm 103 addressed to? It's a magnificent psalm.

It's incredible. It's lofty. It's eloquent. And who is it addressed to? This is the key. Is he talking to God? No. Is he talking to other people? Only kind of at the very, very end. And then he goes back to his primary addressee at the very, very end. Who is he talking to? His soul. And suddenly we have, listen, what we're being told here is, in my inmost being, in my inmost being, there is unbelief.

In my center of center of centers, in spite of what I might know on the rind of my life, down in my core, I can't take the truth. 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. ♪

And it's not enough to simply subscribe. It's not enough to simply say, I believe that. It's not enough just to intellectually believe it. You have to do what Psalm 103 is, which is a vigorous, disciplined meditation and contemplation. This is not a prayer about your feelings. This is not just reasoning about your feelings. This is praying the truth into your heart until it catches fire in the presence of God. This is something that many of us never do.

You say, I pray. You say, I study the Bible. This is neither of them. You say, I think about what I believe. This is not that either. This is something else. This is a cross-section of all of them. Let me show you what it is, first of all. John Newton has a perfect example, a perfect example, and a funny example of what meditation and contemplation is. It's not just saying, well, I believe that.

Imagine you go into a room and you see your friend and he's reading his newspaper. He's reading his paper, okay? And he's very engrossed in his story. And you notice that crawling up his sleeve toward his neck is a big, hairy, ugly tarantula. And so you say to him as he's sitting here like this, Crawling up your sleeve toward your neck is a big, ugly, hairy tarantula. And your friend says, Yeah, uh-huh.

And you say, did you hear me? He said, oh yeah, I heard you. What did I say to you? You said that crawling up my sleeve toward my neck is a big, hairy, ugly tarantula. And then he keeps reading. Five seconds, ten seconds passed. And then he says, crawling up my sleeve toward my neck is a big, hairy, ugly tarantula. And he jumps up. Now he said it twice. What was different about the first time and the second time? It was different. The second time, he heard it in his inmost being.

The first time it was only an intellectual idea. The second time he had taken it all the way downtown. He had gone all the way down where it affected him. It was central to his consciousness. He understood all the ramifications, all the implications of it. He thought it all out. In a second, of course, it's easy with tarantulas. And up he went and he was galvanized into action. Now, what John Newton says is, if you say, I believe that God loves me, but you are afraid or you are bitter about it,

or you're scared, or you're worried, or you're despondent. You are like the guy who says, "Oh yeah, I know there's a hairy tarantula crawling up my..." No, you don't. You know it, but you don't know it. Meditation and contemplation is taking the truth downtown. Meditation and contemplation is praying your heart hot with the truth till it catches fire. You're taking it into the center. And if you look carefully, you'll see what this is. He is preaching to his heart.

This is a sermon. It's not a prayer. This is a sermon. It's not rationality. It's not just simply an essay. This is a sermon. It's not a lecture. But it's to himself. And this is the first key to how you can get over your problem of forgetting and keep the things central to your consciousness that need to be there. See, if you look carefully, you'll see... Let me give you a couple of ways in which this is different than anything else. And we don't know much about this, modern people. We're too busy. We're too busy. We're too rationalistic. We're too emotionalistic. This is none of those things. For example...

On the one hand, what you have here in meditation and contemplation, these words, meditation, contemplation, I'm using them as synonyms, and the trouble is nowadays they don't mean what the Bible writers use them to mean, and the biblical writers use them a lot. Meditation, on the one hand, is not anti-rational. Eastern religions see meditation as the end of analysis.

But look carefully, and you'll see this is furious analysis. This is unbelievably rational. What is he doing? He's breaking down the benefits. He's saying, let's look at it this way and this way and this way and this way, because you're forgetting them. So it's incredibly rational. But on the other hand, it's not only rational, because why, when you could read this thing a hundred times and not know it's a meditation, you think of it as a prayer. Why? Because it's fused with the presence of God. He is not just reflecting. He's not just thinking. He's thinking in the presence of God.

He's taking his soul, as it were, his self, and he's putting his soul and saying, look at him. Not just, oh, by the way, here's the things I believe. And so there's this remarkable balance. It's really an overlap between reasoning and praying, but it's really not either. It's meditating. Or another way to put it is, it's also an overlap between deep listening to your heart and, on the other hand, taking your heart in hand and arguing with it.

You see, on the one hand, unlike Barnes and Noble kinds of meditation, which is be very gentle with yourself, he's not being gentle with himself. Psalm 42 is a perfect example of meditation. There David says, Why art thou cast down, O my soul? And why art thou disquieted within me? Hope thou in God, for you shall praise him again. Who's he talking to? His soul, himself. He's not being very gentle, is he? He's talking to himself, not just listening to himself. But I want you to know, and I'll tell you because I am a preacher,

You know how ineffective preachers are, don't you? Very often we're ineffective. And you know why we're ineffective? And you know when we're ineffective? When we say something and you say, that's not me. We say, da-da-da-da! You say, well, I never felt like that. And you say, well, this is why you... Well, that doesn't make any sense to me. In other words, we're going to be lousy at talking to you if we don't listen to you. The more I listen, the better preacher I am. The more I listen to you, the better I can talk to you. If I only listen to you...

That's no help, is it? You want some help. But if I don't listen to you, then my help won't help. And so here's what you're going to do. If you want to learn to preach to your heart, you have to take a deep journey into your heart. You have to listen to your feelings. Religious people don't like that. We've been talking about that all month. But on the other hand, once you learn what's going on in your heart, you grab hold of it and you take hold of it. And you don't just listen to it. In fact, depression, somebody once said, and I'm talking about the non-biological type,

It's caused by listening to your heart too much rather than talking to it. Or talking to your heart when you actually haven't first listened to it. Meditation is listening to your heart and then arguing with your heart with the truth, praying it hot in the presence of God. And you know what's interesting is, I keep using that word heat because of this. Take a bar. Imagine an iron bar and it's bent.

What if I want to redirect the bar? I want it to be straight. If I just bend it, it looks straight on the outside, but it's been weakened because inside I've broken a lot of the little fibers. Have I not? In other words, I changed the direction, but I didn't deal with the internal structure. And when you look at your heart and you're filled with fear, you can say, stop being afraid. I won't be afraid. I'm going to trust God. You just, in other words, if you just bend it, stop being worried. Hmm?

Stop sinning. Get your self-control. Suck it up. You're just bending it back. Well, you've weakened your heart because inside you haven't changed the internal structure. You haven't blasted it hot with the truth of God so that it's malleable and changes along with the direction.

So what you have to do here is you have to not just see why we need to remember, but you see where we need to remember by taking the truth and taking it downtown into the center of your being through meditation and contemplation. It's wonderful. You know, all psychological systems that I know, all that aren't based on the scripture either, find their locus in the emotions or the will or the mind and the thinking. This does it all. Thirdly, we see why we have to remember and we see where we have to remember, but now...

What do we have to remember? So I've deliberately been vague. I've been talking about what? The truth. Take the truth. But that's not exactly what he says. He's more specific. What is it we have to remember? He doesn't say forget not his attributes, even though I'm sure that absolutely anything that's true about God, you know, would be a help. He doesn't say forget not his attributes. He says forget not what? His benefits. Forget not his benefits.

In other words, the main thing you and I need is that we may believe the gospel, we forget the gospel. The good news. That's the main thing we need. That's the thing that we have to always be pushing central. And that is the problem behind all of our problems.

is that we don't remember the gospel. It's not vivid. It's not central to our consciousness. Well, what is the gospel? Well, take a look here. You can see it. It's incredibly well laid out. First of all, the gospel is some good news. And boy, in verse 10 and 11, you have good news. He does not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities. For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him. And then, look, as far as the east is from the west, so far has he removed our transgressions from us.

Look at that metaphor. Look, stand here. Look to your west, look to the east. You see the eastern horizon, the western horizon. Okay, go toward the eastern horizon. Go five miles, go 50 miles, go 500 miles. How far? Now stop. Look around. How far is your eastern horizon from your western horizon now? Infinitely apart because they never come together. And what David is saying is, if he has removed your transgressions as far as the east is from the west, that means they're infinitely gone, they're unconditionally gone, they can never come back.

Now you say, "Oh, that's great news. God loves me." But that's not enough. That's not going to heat your heart. And here's why. That's an abstraction. Do you think it's enough to say, "God loves me"? And that'll be enough to get rid of fear, that'll be enough to get rid of doubt, all the things we've been talking about this month? That'll be enough to get rid of anger, that'll be enough to get rid of guilt? "I know God loves me." That's not what does it. You can tell yourself that and tell yourself that, and it's nothing but stoicism. It doesn't really melt, it doesn't really heat the internal structure and motives of the heart.

Here's what does it. The true story of what is love cost. There's a true story. The gospel is a true story of how the good news came. And what's intriguing, even here, David makes the plot thicken. Where? Well, it's what's so intriguing is verse 8 starts exactly the way Exodus 34 starts. It says, "...the Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love."

That's exactly the way God begins when he speaks to Moses on Mount Sinai in Exodus 34. But it's almost David does this deliberately. I'm sure he does it deliberately because he's creating a plot here. He says, God starts off by saying, the Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in love. But on the Mount Sinai, what he says next to Moses is, and I will by no means clear the guilty. Everybody will get what they deserve. And yet David writes down here,

He will not treat us as our sins deserve or repay us according to our iniquities. Now, what has David done? If you're reading through this thing and you know the Old Testament, you know the Bible, you know the Hebrew Scriptures, suddenly you stop. You say, what? What?

Moses said, the Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love, but he will not clear the guilty. You always get what you deserve. Never clear the guilty. Never, never, never. Never remove your sins from us. On the other hand, here David says, the Lord is compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love, and he will not make you pay for your sins. So do we believe David or Moses? That's a plot. That's a problem. Do we believe David or Moses? Are we going to do what Moses said or are we going to believe what David said? Or...

We can believe both David and Moses if we believe what Isaiah said. Because Isaiah said, all we like sheep have gone astray. We've turned everyone to our own way. And God put upon him the iniquities of us all. God put, where did those sins go that he removed? See, here's the true story of the gospel. We want to forget God. We try to forget God. And what's the most fair penalty for that? Think about it.

What would be natural consequence? What would be absolutely fair? If you tried to forget somebody who was good and great, somebody who loved you, somebody who... If you were trying to forget them, what would be the right penalty? For that person to forget you, of course. But what happens if you would actually be forgotten by the only one who is the source of all significance? See, to forget somebody is to treat them as insignificant, give them less weight. What if someone...

who is the source of all significance, treats you as insignificant. What would that do to you? What would happen to you? C.S. Lewis is absolutely right in saying he believes he has a better metaphor for hell than fire. He says when he reads people talking about the fire of hell, fire and brimstone, he says, I know something that hurts more. It's to be ignored. There's nothing worse than to be away and come back and everybody says, oh, you were away. When you're treated as insignificant, when people have forgotten you, they didn't even notice you were gone. You feel like a nobody.

And that's why, but C.S. Lewis says, what would it be like to be treated as a nobody by the only one who's a somebody? What would it be like to be treated as insignificant by the only person who's really significant? The source of all significance. It would be hell. And he says, to be in hell is to be eternally and permanently and utterly ignored. What happened to Jesus Christ on the cross, though? If that's our penalty, what happened to him on the cross? When he was up there on the cross, he cried out, and I always thought it was interesting.

that in the old rock opera, Jesus Christ Superstar, by Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, the very last cut on that record, it was a record, by the way, Jesus is on the cross, and he says, my God, my God, why have you forgotten me? Now, I know they were just trying to be more colloquial, rather than say the word forsaken, but that's absolutely right. Jesus Christ, on the cross, looked to heaven, and God turned his face away, and what God did was he forgot him. And to be forgotten by the one God,

who is the source of all significance, man, he was plunged into hell, essentially. He was plunged into darkness. He was plunged into spiritual torment and darkness. Why? Forget not.

that he was forgotten so that you and I, verse 17, would always be remembered. What does verse 17 say? But, see, the wind blows over it and its place remembers it no more. That's what we are. That's where we should go, right? As for man, his days are like grass. He flourishes like a flower in the field. The wind blows over it. It's gone. Its place remembers it no more. But from everlasting to everlasting...

His love is upon us. It never forgets us. We will always be remembered. Why? Because we forgot him, we deserve to be forgotten, but he was forgotten, so we would always be remembered. The very last scene of the ghost of Mrs. Muir, she's old. She's very old. She walks on the beach, and she looks out at the water, and she never knows quite why it stirs her so much.

And she's very, very tired. She says, gee, my arm's starting to hurt me, which, of course, is the beginning of a heart attack. And she's so old and she's completely wrinkled up and she's so tired. She says, I'm so tired. And she sinks down in her chair. And just as she's starting to die, the captain shows up. And the one that she forgot, the one that she wanted to forget, the one that she tried to forget, did not forget her. And he shows up.

And he grabs her by the hands and he says something like, come with me, my dear, and be tired no more. And he pulls her up and she's eternal. She's 24, young and beautiful again. That's heaven, I guess, being 24 forever. The one who she forgot did not forget her. It's a beautiful story. And they walk off into the clouds. Incredible. The one that she was trying to forget, but that she couldn't quite forget, does not forget her. But you see, it's not quite that easy in the gospel.

In order for us to be remembered forever, Jesus Christ had to be forgotten for us.

Do you see that? Do you know that? Do you realize the value of you? How much they must value you, the Father and the Son, to do that? If you put that in the center of your heart, it blasts. It blasts the fears. If you are ever doing something wrong, it's because you feel like you've got to. Otherwise, I'm nobody. But this makes you somebody. If you feel like I'm despondent, it's because you don't realize this. This is what will blast the central structure of the heart. This is what will heat you up so that it will move and it will be changed. This is the thing.

You see, that if you put in the very center of your being, the very center of your heart, that if this is the thing you remember, remember that you've been remembered and remember what it costs for you to be remembered forever. Well, that's what will change you. How? Well, all I can tell you is he goes down the list, does he not? He goes down the list. See, for example, he forgives your sins. Are you struggling with guilt? Remember that aspect of the gospel. He heals your diseases. You feel like I'm never going to get any better? You see? You see?

He crowns you with life, with loving kindness and compassion. You're feeling dishonored. You're upset with criticism. There's your honor. He redeems your life from the pit. Are you afraid of dying? There's, you see, your hope. Every problem you've got is because you're failing to take some aspect of the gospel and pray it into the very center. Pray it into the very, very, very center of your heart. Think about it. Are you afraid today, for example? Do you think he would have ripped his heart apart and done all the things that he's done and now he's going to forget you?

He will not forget you. He can't forget you. This is what you do. There's a little hymn by John Newton that's never been put to music, and it goes like this. And though I am despised, forgot, yet God, my God, forgets me not. And he is safe and must succeed for who Christ promises to plead. Let's pray. Our Father, we ask that you would help us to see.

That only through the inspiration of your spirit and the revisitation to, the revisiting and the reconverting ourselves in a sense, and the rehearsing of the gospel story and putting it in the center of our being, in the center of our consciousness, only that way will we face life and change ourselves from the inside out. We ask that you would show us how to do that. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.

Thanks for listening to Tim Keller on the Gospel in Life podcast. If you found today's teaching helpful and something you'd like more people to hear, we invite you to consider becoming a Gospel in Life monthly partner. Your partnership helps more people discover the hope and joy of Christ's love. Just visit gospelinlife.com slash partner to learn more.

Today's sermon was preached in 2000. 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.