[Repost] Living with Resurrection Power in Our Lives
Reviewing Tim Keller’s Hope in Times of Fear Part 2/2
In Part 2/2 discover:
How the resurrection gives us perspective to live life abundantly.
How the resurrection has a material affect on our present-day circumstances as well as eternal implications.
How the resurrection is hope for us personally, for our relationships, for justice in the world, in the face of suffering and our hope for the future.
Two major areas of importance in which Christians are self-limiting their power and how the resurrection helps overcome this stronghold.
Why the resurrection is a resource for confidence and hope in the face of fear.
Share this post so we can begin conversations with others desiring to live life more abundantly.
If you missed Part 1/2, catch up here:
Tim Keller is an expository preacher who, in my opinion, does two major things really well. One, he preaches so that we understand our true problem, the tension there is in solving the problem, and on how Jesus is the only we can live life abundantly and eternally. Secondly, while preaching Christ, the gospel, and application, Keller has a unique and phenomenal way of drawing out the human dynamic in a palatable way so that we have action steps to love God better and our neighbor better.
Keller writes “Hope in Times of Fear” during the COVID19 pandemic while facing a second diagnosis of cancer. He passed away one year ago, this week. This book has a great blend of practical application, academic insight, and cultural relevancy so that we can understand, “That the resurrection, the Great Reversal, brings us both the power and the pattern for living life now connected to God’s future new creation” (xxiii).
Resurrection Power
Keller says life without Christ is like speaking into a dead mic, the power is there, yet your voice doesn't carry and no one hears you despite how much you lean in to speak (118). However, with Resurrection Power, the mic is on you are spiritually alive, and your voice is amplified.
How do we live life with amplified Resurrection Power?
The resurrection gives us the power and perspective to live life with unfathomable hope. This translates into mental, bodily, and spiritual victory over the pains and corruption that remain before Christ’s Second Coming.
We too are risen with Christ and seated in the heavenly realm (Eph 1-3).
Keller explains that our allegiance to God’s Kingdom is not just a membership in a new religious society, but rather, it is being taken from one realm into another (heavenly) realm (118). We are now, united to Him, in the Spirit and with power. We share in His blessings and participate in His Kingdom come!1 Jesus’ resurrection changes everything! And, this change in you will be evident when the mic is turned on… when Resurrection Power manifests itself.
Resurrection Transformation
We are new creations under new authority. The resurrection gives us a confident assurance of God’s love. When we understand how much we are loved it changes how we approach our time, temptations, treasures, and so. There is now a pleasure aimed towards pleasing God. Yet it is supplemented with a grace that destroys any guilt and condemnation. The Bible describes this worship, joy, and duty as obedience. Keller says, “We must instead see every act of obedience as a little death that leads us to new life – new self-understanding, new levels of trust in God, new growth in love, patience, humility, and self-control. And, most of all, new intimacy and communion with God.” (132) In Christ, there is freedom in obedience. This freedom under the law of Christ enables us to live life abundantly.2
We are saved saints who sometimes sin as opposed to sinners still succumbing to the former life of sin and shame.
Each death we die in our old selves is a small resurrection to new life in Christ with more self-understanding and intimacy with God (132).
The Resurrection and the Power to Change
Your life can be transformed! Your life can have more peace, more joy, more intimacy with God, and complete freedom in Christ. As a Christian tapped into resurrection power, you will want this zealously. One cannot taste of the heavenly gift and go back to what was!
The resurrection is our example for us to know and feel the freedom of God’s love as we die to ourselves, in order to live new life abundantly. Changes that occur from Resurrection Power is about removing the old and replacing it with newness in Christ (125). Both processes (removing and replacing) are necessary. Removing the old is more than 'just saying no.' It also consists of addressing the root cause of the sin. Similarly, ‘replacing the old’ is more than 'just working hard to live as we should' (127). The motivations of your heart that matter in the behavior changes you want to make.
Abundant life resides within the tensions of the divine balance. Christianity enables us to identify appropriately between: too much and too little, saying yes and saying no, pessimism and optimism, liberty and legalism, individualism and community, caring and enabling, Jesus being fully God and fully man.
One must be willing to explore the depths of one's self and sin to be truly sanctified in Christ.
However, our freedom in Christ means that even in our failures, we are not consumed by the consequences of sin more than the sin itself. We are not shaming ourselves but appropriately repenting and experience godly sorrow such that we can overcome whatever troubles and entangles us. Christians have an allegiance to the Kingdom of God and must pursue the values and objectives of His Kingdom. This is true freedom in Christ - overcoming sin, living life abundantly, and doing so with grace and patience. Yet change is not merely spiritual or psychological, it is also material and bodily.
The Power We Are Missing in Christianity
The resurrection transforms our individuality and our community. God manifests Himself through us; he is the center and supremacy of our purpose, direction, and connection. The Bible explains at length what the implications of such radical transformation should produce. It is through Resurrection Hope and Power that God’s Kingdom advances on the earth. This uprooting begins with our transformation. Unfortunately, we have not accessed the power in which we have opportunity and permission to use!
Resurrection Power Manifested Personally
No other religion espouses a resurrection of the body as well as the world (208).
As a new creation (Gal 6:16), your body is a temple for the Holy Spirit (1 Cor 6:19). In the resurrection, “Our bodies are part of who we are, and they belong to the Lord, who died and rose to redeem them, and we must honor our Savior with our bodies” (149). Our spiritual union with Christ is a covenantal, divine bond, between God and human, in which we respond to Christ’s sacrifice with exclusivity for Him (152). This serves as a model for our sexual unions between human beings (1 Cor 6:13-19). Thus, your entire approach to life, including sex, has the utmost significance and cannot be relegated solely to being ruled by one’s pursuit of individual pleasure or personal satisfaction. This gives far more value to one’s actions and considerations because of who you are in Christ (150-2).
Your actions are informed and inspired by being a divinely integrated and embodied soul.
Not only are our bodies given more consideration and value but so is the world given more value because of our resurrection theology. In the same way we can have confidence that our mind, body, and spirit are being made better, more fully like Christ, we can also have confidence that our environment and social institutions are also being transformed!
Resurrection and Justice
Keller proclaims, “Not only will there be physical liberation from disease, aging, and death, but there will be social liberation from the poverty, war, racism, and crime that infest our world now, as well as psychological liberation from the fear, guilt, shame, and despair that infect us now. All things will finally be mended, put fully right.” (156) Why do so many Christians bristle at this notion? Particularly given the material, mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual impact of the Resurrection. The new Creation that is being reconciled to Christ includes the physical earth as well as societal institutions. “Christians are not to be passive in the face of injustice. ... We have not been saved just to be safe, but saved in order to serve.” (156). The resurrection means God is renewing all of nature; therefore, we hate what’s wrong with nature.3
The God of the Bible is for equality, radical generosity, and justice.4 As our relationship to creation and others have been significantly transformed in light of the resurrection, so does our accountability to steward them. Christians cannot remain ignorant of, nor inactive towards injustice, “The Bible indicates that [injustice] happens both directly (individually) and indirectly (systemically and corporately)” (163). Keller highlights how God has held ‘families, groups, and nations corporately responsible for the sins of other individuals even though they did not personally commit them’ (163).5 He also makes sure not to overemphasize neither the individual nor the community in the face of sin.6 Keller suggests that ‘the biblical view of justice gives full weight to both personal responsibility and social structures’ while also understanding the nature of sin, ‘evil in the heart and in the world’ (166).
I appreciate that Keller gives practical examples of how to practice justice: 1) ‘Christians can be active agents for change while avoiding political polarization and rancor that creates gridlock and blocks wholesome change,’ 2) testify verbally and without self-righteousness through serving, and 3) work on injustices locally (168). The bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ means your body, this world, and your material existence matter greatly. We must respond accordingly by not tolerating something for which God is opposed and is actively healing. This radical transformation through out institutions can take place because of the calling to live in radical gospel community.
Resurrection and Relationships
Christianity is the first multiracial, multi-ethnic, and multi-generational faith community.
That communal unity (aka community) is possible because your faith in God is more fundamental to you than your identities (138). The resurrection removes the barriers to relationship – race, class, gender, status, wealth, personal hurt, etc. (Gal 3:26-28). Community is a dance of self-giving divine love and connectivity between all of us who are eternal beings and are also integrated with the divine (Holy Spirit).
Religion was and is tied to your community, culture, heritage, and ethnicity, yet it is given new light from the resurrection.
We can have a vulnerability, grace, patience, and confident assurance in our relationships when the Resurrection is our foundation. We have a divine power to forgive, resolve, reconcile and heal disputes between us. Divine, gospel transformed community becomes a Christian-common-sense approach to life.
Community is the most underrated power we are not tapping into at Christians.
To unleash the Resurrection Power for life-changing personal growth, gospel-transformed community, and social justice requires the redemptive reversal.
The Upside-Down Kingdom
Most theo-bros, and the like, expect the Kingdom to advance through a masculine dominated aggression and nationalism, oftentimes viewed through an American lens only. This is antithetical to God’s gospel. God’s Kingdom will advance in the way Jesus demonstrated through the resurrection. Think about it, Jesus lived the life of a loser! He had no home, no savings plan, no insurance, wrote no books, and died with no money. He was abandoned by his friends, considered a threat by political and religious leaders, and suffered a gruesome death. Why are we following this loser?
And Yet…
It is by giving up power that He ruled, by serving that He is now served, by humbling Himself that He gained everything, by being last He is now first, by descending into Hell that He is not lifted up above all. It is by the foolishness of our preaching that we are saved! It is faith, not works. It is by the proclamation of and sacrifice for the gospel and not by military might that His Kingdom comes. We die daily in order to live. "Only to the degree that you see you are weak are you strong" (105).
Keller calls this the redemptive reversal, in that ‘God saves through weakness not despite it’ (61). He summarizes it as such, “Good things received without God will become a curse. On the other hand, people who receive hard things with faith in God will discover that the seeming curses will turn out to be blessings.” (176) Christians see that in Jesus, the way up is down, the way to true power is to give up power, in serving we are being served, the way to true riches is to be radically generous with all you have, and the way to lasting happiness is to not seek your own happiness so much as the happiness of others (178). That was how Jesus saved the world and changed your life, and now it becomes our way of bring His Kingdom come and living life abundantly.
Resurrection and Suffering
The redemptive reversal changes how we approach ourselves, others, social institutions, this world, and most intimately our suffering. Keller uses the story of Joseph, Jacob, the Psalms, and 2 Corinthians to show that God is working things out in this complex world and it will be for good. To summarize inadequately, when it comes to suffering, a Christian is either being renewed to be more like Christ or being prepared for future eternal glory (187). Nothing is ever a loss. In the face of our suffering we have the example of Jesus whose suffering, agony, and weeping redeemed us and produced joy. “There are the good things of this world, the hard things of this world, and the best things of this world – God’s love, glory, holiness, and beauty. The Bible’s teaching is that the road to the best things is not through the good things but usually through the hard things, as Jesus himself shows us in Philippians 2:5-11.”7 In Christ, we know that God never abandons us, we have perspective in our suffering. We also have hope and understanding because we know God is working (189-190).
The Resurrection and Confidence in Hope for the Future
Resurrection Hope is a bold statement with claims of hopefulness in a realistic yet non-cynical view of life and history (209). “If Jesus Christ’s resurrection had happened, and it did, it means our resurrection is going to happen. And it will. Then it means everything sad, everything horrible is going to be brought up into our future glory and resurrection and make it infinitely better than it would have been if we’d never had any of those experiences. That’s the final and ultimate defeat of suffering and death.”8 We have confidence to face the temporary trials of this present age because of our future confidence. The past is ensured by our future making our present manageable.
When you know you are going to win, you can tackle the complexities of the world confidently.
We are united to Him legally, justified by faith, and regenerated to live a newfound life… guaranteed (112, 115)! We can speak boldly because we have a confident hope in God who raised Jesus from the dead. There is a certainty we have because of our assurance in the future, "But if he did rise from the dead, then Christianity and its gospel is true, and while we don't yet have solutions to all those other objections, we can move forward knowing that answers to those questions exist." (111) We may not know or have it all now, but we know for sure that we will in Christ’s resurrection! Amen!
God’s Kingdom is already here – the political peace, social improvement, and a restoration of the earth (Isaiah 11:6-9) – but not yet in its fulness (25, 29). We cannot expect complete healing until He returns, but we must anticipate ‘substantial’ healing now in our knowledge of truth, personal change and growth, church change and growth, social change, etc. (29-30)
The law of Christ is love (Gal 5-6).
Timothy J. Keller, The Timothy Keller Sermon Archive (New York City: Redeemer Presbyterian Church, 2013). I WILL RAISE IT UP (EASTER) The “Amens” of Jesus; The Challenge of the Cross—April 15, 2001 Mark 11:1–11; John 2:19–21
Keller, in a brief overview, uses Lev 24:22; Is 1:23; Gen 1:27; Prov 22:2; James 3:9; 2:1-7 in support of equity. In condemnation of theft, which includes kidnapping, Keller cites Deut 24:7; Lev 19:11; Ex 21:6. Keller shows that God owns all things and that property and wealth rights were not absolute in Ps 24:1; 115:16; 1 Chron 29:14; 1 Cor 4:7; Lev 25:23. The Bible’s advocacy for justice is emphasized by Keller using Prov 31:8-9;; Jer 22:3; Zech 7:9-10; Ps 41:1; Mt 6; Luke 16:14; 20:47 which also shows prophets and Jesus calling out injustices. (160-161)
See 2 Samuel 21; Amos 1-2; 1 Sam 15:2; Deut 23:3-8; Acts 2:14, 23, 36; Luke 14; 1 Tim 1:8-11; Joshua 7; Num 14.
See also the counterbalance of individual responsibility and corporate accountability in Deut 24:16; Ezek 18 which Keller points out. (164)
Keller gives several biblical examples of God choosing the weak, undesirable, and flawed person to bring about His plans and purposes. 62-70.
SUFFERING - IF GOD IS GOOD, WHY IS THERE SO MUCH EVIL IN THE WORLD? The Trouble with Christianity: Why It’s So Hard to Believe It—October 1, 2006 1 Peter 1:3–12 Timothy J. Keller, The Timothy Keller Sermon Archive (New York City: Redeemer Presbyterian Church, 2013).