What is Freedom?

True freedom is not being able to do whatever we desire to do. Honestly, who would be really happy with that anyway? It might initially seem like a lot of fun, but does it really satisfy the deepest desires of our hearts?

Rather, true freedom appears to be the ability to choose those restrictions that best suit our design and thus fulfill us the most. It is the ability to do what is right regardless of our circumstances in life. If you are truly free, you are able to forgive when others hurt you. You are able to stretch out your hand in friendship regardless of how much wrong the other side has caused you. It is the ability to overcome evil by doing good.

How can we attain this true freedom?

Deep Inner Peace - Being Safe, Significant and Unconditionally Loved

Such peace is something that we all long for. We might not always be aware of it but it is such a deep human need that it drives much of what we think and do on a day-to-day basis. Such peace comes from knowing that we are safe, significant and unconditionally loved.

But how can we trust that this is the case in the reality we live in?

Many things in today's culture attempt to offer us meaning, belonging, safety and love. Just consider the dominant themes of advertising promising that everything will be well if we just buy this one more product. Alcohol, excessive parties and online role playing games are a few more examples with which many people today try to find meaning, love and security. But no matter how hard we try to find peace in worldly things, it just leaves us empty again and hungry for even more of the same.

The reason why worldly things in themselves do not satisfy, is that we need to go to the source of all life first. This leads to the question of God's existence and how he can be known today.

The Good News that followers of Jesus Christ have proclaimed for the last 2000 years is that God can indeed be known. Jesus' death and resurrection established a way for everyone who believes to be free from guilt, condemnation, stress and strive and experience the deep inner peace, which comes from realising that our lives are indeed in God's hands.

Communication with God helps us to rid our lives of all worries and do as much as we can while letting go of the outcome of a particular situation in our lives:

"Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." (Phil 4:6-7, TNIV)

Following Jesus does not mean that everything in our lives always turns out the way we want it. Nevertheless it is the most satisfying way of living as it is the way, which suits our design:

"Our parents disciplined us for a little while as they thought best, but God disciplines us for our good, that we may share in his holiness. No discipline seems pleasant at the time, but painful. Later on, however, it produces a harvest of righteousness and peace for those who have been trained by it." (Heb 12:10-11, TNIV)

God's peace also includes freedom from other people's opinions as God is the only legimitate ultimate judge of our lives but chose out of love to forgive us:

"I care very little if I am judged by you or by any human court; indeed, I do not even judge myself. My conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent. It is the Lord who judges me." (1 Cor 4:3-4, TNIV)

However, this wonderful peace, that comes from a personal relationship with God through Jesus, is not an excuse to be lazy and complacent about improving the world that we live in. True Christianity means living with the wonderful peace that ultimately all things will be made right by God and doing as much as we can to improve this world until Jesus returns.

Epilogue of Tim Keller's book: "Where Do We Go From Here?"

Can you believe it? We have finally reached the end of the book :-)

It is possible though by no means certain that Christianity may be more plausible to you now that you've read this book. You may have been personally moved by some of the descriptions of our world's need, your own condition, and Christ's mission in the world. What if you are ready to explore that it means to put your faith in Christ? Where do you go from here?

Motivations are nearly always mixed. If you wait until your motives are pure and unselfish before you do something, you will wait forever. Nevertheless, it is important to ask what is primarily moving you toward an action, especially when it comes to faith commitment.

For example, you may be at a time of great difficulty and need. You are sharply conscious, maybe for the first time in your life, that you need God and some kind of spiritual help in order to make it. There's nothing mistaken about that, but it would be very easy in that condition to approach God as a means to an end. Are you getting into Christianity to serve God, or to get God to serve you?

We have to recognise that virtually all of us begin our journey towards God because we want something from him. However, we must come to grips with the fact that we owe him our entire lives just because of what he has done for us already. If Jesus' death for us was the only thing he ever did for us - and he has done and still does so much more - even then he would deserve our eternal gratitude.

Importantly we need to remember that becoming a Christian is not simply a matter of ticking off a list of things to believe and do. Behavioural changes alone will not make you a Christian. Lots of people in the world are socially and personally ethical but do not have a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. Repentance is not less than being sorry for individual sins, but it means much more.

The repentance that really changes your heart and your relationship with God begins when you recognise that your main sin, the sin under the rest of your sins, is your self-salvation project. As we have seen previously, humans have the tendency to create their own 'gods' even though we do not call them that.

Moreover, becoming a Christian always has both an individual and a corporate aspect. Being part of a community of believers is important. At this point it is vital to acknowledge that so many people's main problem with Christianity has far more to do with the church than with Jesus. They have had bad experiences with churches before. The church of Jesus Christ is a bit like an ocean, enormous and diverse. Like the ocean there are warm and clear spots and deadly cold spots. But there is no alternative. You cannot live the Christian life without a band of Christian friends, without a family of believers in which you find a place.

What if you have reached the end of this book and, as the result of reading it, you wish you could have faith but you don't? This questions is probably best answered by the following example. During a dark time in her life, a woman of a local church complained that she had prayed over and over "God, help me find you" but had got nowhere. A Christian friend suggested to her that she might change her prayer to "God, come and find me! After all, you are the Good Shepherd who goes looking for the lost sheep." She concluded when she was recounting this to me, "The only reason I can tell you this story is - he did."

Based on: Tim Keller (2008), The Reason for God, p.213-226

Chapter 14 of Tim Keller's book "The Dance of God"

I believe that Christianity makes the most sense of our individual life stories and out of what we see in the world's history. It is time to draw together the various threads of the narrative we have been examining and view the story line of Christianity as a whole. The Bible has often been summed up as a drama in four acts - creation, fall, redemption and restoration.

1. Christianity, alone among the world faiths, teaches that God is triune. God is one being who exists eternally in three persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Trinity means that God is in essence, relational.
2. Ultimate reality is a community of persons who know and love one another. That is what the universe, God, history and life is all about. If you favour money, power and accomplishment over human relationships, you will dash yourself on the rock of reality. The world was made by a God who is a community of persons who have loved each other for all eternity. You were made for mutually self-giving, other-directed love. Self-centredness destroys the fabric of what God has made.
3. The ultimate reason that God created the earth and its inhabitants is not to remedy some lack in God, but to extend that perfect internal communication of the triune God's goodness and love. We were made to centre our lives upon him, to make the purpose and passion of our lives knowing, serving, delighting and resembling him.
4. However, human have failed as we became stationary, self-centred. Self-centredness creates psychological alienation. Nothing makes us more miserable than self-absorption, the endless, unsmiling concentration on our needs, wants, treatment, ego and record. In addition, self-centredness leads to social disintegration. It is at the root of the breakdown in relationships between nations, races and classes, and individuals. Finally, humanity's refusal to serve God has led to our alienation from the natural world as well.
5. If the beauty of what Jesus did moves you, that is the first step toward getting out of your own self-centredness and fear into a trust relationship with him. When Jesus dies for you he was, as it were, inviting you into the dance. He invites you to begin centring everything in your life on him, even as he has given himself to you. You can make him the new centre of your life and stop trying to be your own Saviour and Lord.
6. The purpose of Jesus' coming is to put the whole world right, to renew it and restore the creation, not to escape it. The story of the Gospel makes sense of moral obligation and our belief in the reality of justice, so Christians do restorative and redistributive justice wherever they can. The story of the Gospel makes sense of our profoundly relational character, so Christians work sacrificially to strengthen human communities around them as well as the Christian community, the church. The Gospel makes sense of our delight in the presence of beauty, so Christians become stewards of the material world, from those who cultivate the natural creation through science and gardening to those who give themselves to artistic endeavours, all knowing why these things are necessary for human flourishing. True Christians are then true 'revolutionaries' who work for justice and truth, and we labour in expectation of a perfect world in which:

"He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things is passed away" (Revelation 21:4)

Based on: Tim Keller (2008), The Reason for God, p.213-226

Next chapter in Tim Keller's book: Chapter 13 titled "The Reality of the Resurrection""

Sometimes people approach me and say "I really struggle with this aspect of Christian teaching. I like this part of Christian teaching. I like this part of Christian belief, but I don't think I can accept that part." I usually respond: "If Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all he said; if he didn't rise from the dead, then why worry about any of what he has said?"

Most people think that when it comes to Jesus' resurrection, the burden of proof is on believers to give evidence that it happened. That is not completely the case. The resurrection also puts a burden of proof on its non-believers. It is not enough to simply believe Jesus did not rise from the dead. You must then come up with a historically feasible alternate explanation for the birth of the church. You have to provide some other plausible account for how things began.

Many people today argue that the resurrection was a hoax. It is argued that the two main features of the gospel accounts - the empty tomb and the eyewitnesses - were fabrications. That can't be true.

The first accounts of the empty tomb and the eyewitnesses are not found in the gospels, but in the letters of Paul, which every historian agrees were written just 15 to 20 years after the death of Jesus. Jesus did not only appear to individuals and small groups, but also to five hundred people at once, most of whom were still alive at the time of Paul's writings and could be consulted.

Moreover, the accounts of the resurrection in the Bible were too problematic to be fabrications. Each gospel states that the first eyewitnesses were women. Women's low social status at that time meant that their testimony was not admissible evidence in court. There was no possible advantage to the church to recount that all the first witnesses were women. Additionally, the very idea of an individual resurrection at the time would have been impossible to imagine for both Greeks and Jews.

(...)

After the death of Jesus the entire Christian community suddenly adopted a set of beliefs that were brand-new and until that point had been unthinkable. It is not enough for the sceptic to simply dismiss the Christian teaching about the resurrection of Jesus by saying, "It just couldn't have happened." He or she must face and answer all these historical questions:

1. Why did Christianity emerge so rapidly, with such power?
2. No other band of messianic followers in that era concluded their leader was raised from the dead - why did this group do so?
3. No group of Jews ever worshipped a human being as God. What led them to do it?
4. Jews did not believe in divine men or individual resurrections. What changed their world-view virtually overnight?
5. How do you account for the hundreds of eyewitnesses to the resurrection who lived on for decades and publicly maintained their testimony, eventually giving their lives for their belief?

I sympathise with the person who says, "So what if I can't think of an alternate explanation? The resurrection just couldn't happen." Let's not forget, however, that first-century people felt exactly the same way. They had just as much trouble with the claims of the resurrection as you, yet the evidence - both of eyewitnesses accounts and the changed lives of Christ's followers - was overwhelming.

Each year at Easter I get to preach on the resurrection. In my sermon I always say to my sceptical, secular friends that, even if they can't believe in the resurrection, they should want it to be true. Most of them care deeply about justice for the poor, alleviating hunger and disease, and caring for the environment. Yet many of them believe that the material world was caused by accident and that the world and everything in it will eventually simply burn up in the death of the sun. They find it discouraging that so few people care about justice without realising that their own world-view undermines any motivation to make the world a better place.

Why sacrifice for the needs of others if in the end nothing we do will make any difference? If the resurrection of Jesus happened, however, that means there's infinite hope and reason to pour ourselves out for the needs of the world.

Based on: Tim Keller (2008), The Reason for God, p.201-212

Next in Tim Keller's book: Chapter 12 - The (True) Story of the Cross

The primary symbol of Christianity has always been the cross. The death of Jesus for our sins is at the heart of the gospel, the good news. Increasingly, however, what the Christian church has considered good news is considered by the rest of our culture to be bad news.

Why then don't we just leave the cross out? Why not focus on the life of Jesus and his teachings rather than on his death? Why did Jesus have to die?

Reason 1: Real Forgiveness is Costly Suffering. A good example is the German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He did not ignore or excuse sin. He resisted it head on, even though it cost him everything. His forgiveness was also costly because he refused to hate.

It is crucial at this point to remember that the Christian faith has always understood that Jesus Christ is God. Therefore, the God of the Bible is not like the primitive deities who demanded our blood for their wrath to be appeased. Rather, this is a God who becomes human and offers his own lifeblood in order to honour moral justice and merciful love so that some day he can destroy all evil without destroying us.

Reason 2: Real Love is a Personal Exchange. If you take away the cross, you don't have a God of love. In the real world of relationships it is impossible to love people with a problem or a need without in some sense sharing or even changing places with them. All real-life changing love involves some form of this exchange.

The gospel is not just a moving fictional story about someone else. It is a true story about us. We are actually in it.

When I realised I was actually inside Jesus' story (and he inside mine) it changed me. The fear and pride that captured my heart was finally dislodged. The fact that Jesus had to die for me humbled me out of my pride. The fact that Jesus was glad to die for me assured me out of my fear.

Based on: Tim Keller (2008), The Reason for God, p.186-200

Next chapter in Tim Keller's book: Chapter 11 titled "Religion and the Gospel"

Christianity teaches that the main human problem is sin. What then is the solution? Even if you accept the Christian diagnosis of the problem, there doesn't seem to be any particular reason why one must look only to Christianity for the solution. You may say "Fine, I understand that if you build your identity on anything but God, it leads to breakdown. Why must the solution be Jesus and Christianity? Why can't some other religion do as well, or just my own personal faith in God?"

The answer to that is that there is a profound and fundamental difference between the way that other religions tell us to seek salvation and the way described in the gospel of Jesus. All other major faiths have founders who are teachers who show the way to salvation. Only Jesus claimed to actually be the way of salvation himself.

This difference is so great that, even though Christianity can certainly be called a "religion" in the broader sense, for the purposes of discussion, we will use the term "religion" in this chapter to refer to "salvation through moral effort" and "gospel" to refer to "salvation through grace".

Basically there are two ways to be your own Saviour and Lord. The first is by saying, "I am going to live my life the way I want". The second is by avoiding sin and living morally so that God will have to bless and save you. The second way trusts in your own goodness rather than in Jesus for your standing with God.

Self-salvation through good works may produce a great deal of moral behaviour in your life, but inside you are filled with self-righteousness, cruelty and bigotry, and you are miserable. You are always comparing yourself to other people, and you are never sure you are being good enough.

Churches that are filled with self-righteous, exclusive, insecure, angry, moralistic people are extremely unattractive. Their public pronouncements are often highly judgemental. Millions of people raised in or near these kinds of churches reject Christianity at an early age or in college largely because of their experience. Such church people and their unattractive lives leave many people confused about the real nature of Christianity.

There are two main differences:

(1) Motivation. In religion, we try to obey the divine standards out of fear. We believe that if we don't obey we are going to lose God's blessing in this world and the next. In the gospel, the motivation is one of gratitude for the blessing we have already received because of Christ.

(2) Identity and self-regard. In a religious framework, if you feel you are living up to your chosen religious standards, then you feel superior and disdainful toward those who are not following in the true path.

When my own personal grasp of the gospel was very weak, my self-view swung wildly between two poles. When I was performing up to my standards - in academic work, professional achievement or relationships - I felt confident but not humble. I was likely to be proud and unsympathetic to failing people. When I was not living up to standards, I felt humble but not confident, a failure.

I discovered, however, that the gospel contained the resources to build a unique identity. In Christ, I could know I was accepted by grace not only despite my flaws but because I was willing to admit them. The Christian gospel is that I am so flawed that Jesus had to die for me, yet I am so loved and valued and that Jesus was glad to die for me. This leads to deep humility and deep confidence at the same time. This means that I cannot despise those who do not believe as I do.

The gospel makes it possible to have such a radically different live. Christians, however, often tail to make use of the resources of the gospel to live the lives they are capable of in Christ. It is critical for anyone reading this book to recognise this fundamental difference between the gospel and religion. Christianity's basic message differs at root with the assumptions of traditional religion.

The founders of every other major religion essentially came as teachers, not as saviours. They came to say "Do this and you will find the divine". But Jesus came essentially as a saviour rather than a teacher (though he was one as well). Jesus says "I am the divine come to you, to do what you could not do for yourselves". The Christian message is that we are saved not by our record, but by Christ's record. So Christianity is not religion or irreligion. It is something else altogether.

Based on: Tim Keller (2008), The Reason for God, p.174-185