Notes of Faith October 24, 2025
What Is Wrong With The World?
As an admirer of Pastor Tim Keller, I listened to hundreds of his sermons over the years. He was a wise, kind, gentle, and yet fiercely passionate follower of Jesus who taught straight from the Word of God and reached out to the community around him with compassion and hope in Jesus. Enjoy this excerpt from his wife, Kathy, who wrote the introduction to his latest book published posthumously), What Is Wrong with the World?
Tim preached the sermons on which this book is based in the 1990s as a series under the title “The Faces of Sin.” He had preached some of the sermons individually at other times and places, but having a series that examined sin in its many forms and dimensions was important in a place like New York City.
People didn’t like the word.
Once after a service a well-dressed woman came up to Tim and shouted angrily (presumably because of the confession of sin in the liturgy of the worship service), “Neither I nor any of my children will ever confess to being sinners!” She then spun on her heel and marched out of the auditorium.
On another occasion, a new convert invited Tim to meet with several of her friends. Their conversation was cordial until one of the women fixed Tim with a hard stare and said, “You think I’m a sinner, don’t you?” Tim tried to explain that he did not believe she was different from anyone else.
We are all sinners who fall short of what God meant us to be; we are all broken, all in need of grace.
It didn’t make any difference. The conversation was over. She believed sin was a “nuclear” word, reserved for the scum of the earth, applicable only to murderers, rapists, Nazis, and members of the KKK. Nothing Tim said could convince her otherwise.
The need to explain sin in its many dimensions and its universal contagion of all people is clearly necessary. It’s not a concept most people are familiar with, and when they do hear it, there is often resistance. The idea that we have all rebelled, in our own individual ways, against the rightful king of the universe, rejected His love, trampled on His heart... well, it just doesn’t fit in our good/bad, right/wrong, I’m in/you’re out world.
Once, Tim was sharing the gospel with a number of people who lived near our first church in Virginia. One woman had gladly heard the gospel, but when Tim made a second, follow-up visit, he found her sister there, waiting for him.
“You mean to tell me,” the sister said with an incredulous sneer, “that some axe murderer who repented and accepted Jesus would go to Heaven and I, who have led a good life with out any religion, would not?” Tim agreed that that was indeed the case. The sister fell silent, stunned by his response. Determined to avoid further awkwardness, Tim quickly arranged to meet the first woman — the one who had initially welcomed the message — on another day. (The ink was barely dry on his ordination papers at that point, and he had not yet encountered that kind of pushback. He got better as time went by.)
We are all broken, all in need of grace.
In the years since Tim died, I have tried to bring some kind of order to all the books, papers, talks, sermons, lectures, classes, notes, journals, and jottings he left behind. This has not been easy: If an idea struck him and there was no paper at hand, he was just as likely to write down his thought on the inside cover of whatever book he was holding. (And he never went anywhere without a book, even when he took out the trash to the other end of the hall where the refuse chute was located!) Additionally, his computer held around sixty thousand files, and it has been intimidating to make sense of those because of his file-naming system. If he was writing a sermon or a book, each revision or significant editorial change was treated as a new document and given its own name according to a shorthand that made sense to him. So I might encounter a file named “FOS-1.1. 02/96,” which I think might be read as “Faces of Sin, version 1.1, written February 2, 1996.” Maybe.
I felt on surer ground dealing with the papers in the sixteen file drawers, although they were packed so tightly in each drawer (as well as boxes and cupboards) that pulling out one file folder was an exercise in itself, and putting it back defeated even weight-lifting gym rats.
I did, however, manage to extract the folder titled “The Faces of Sin” and, after consulting with a number of knowledgeable people, decided it would be a good start for a book about sin. Since I have been Tim’s oral-to-written-style editor for most of his books, this seemed like it would be an easy task, but of course nothing is as easy as we hope it will be.
Each chapter ends with a prayer because Tim was aware, as all mature Christians are, that we deceive ourselves most concerning our own sinfulness. We treat people harshly and call it “straight talking,” or skip private or corporate communion with God and call it “self-care.” You can’t confess something that you have convinced yourself you aren’t guilty of. So as you read, allow God to probe you for your hidden sins and to give you a contrite and broken heart over the ways you have broken both His law and His heart. Grace is there for the asking.
~Kathy Keller
Excerpted from What Is Wrong with the World? by Timothy Keller, copyright River Road Stewardship LLC.
I will be traveling most of the day Friday, 10-24-25, so I am sending this “Notes of Faith” a day early.
I remember an encounter with a believer that shared with me they believed they did not sin anymore. In making that statement they proved themselves to still be a sinning believer! The Holy Spirit within this pastor convicts my heart and mind often, a thought, a poor choice of words, an angry retort, a snide look, a judgmental comment, not loving those God places around me…
Rom 7:24-25
24 What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? 25 Thanks be to God — through Jesus Christ our Lord!
I want all people to know God and recognize that all mankind falls short of His perfection, meaning all sin, and deserve His just punishment, death, eternal torment, and separation from the God who gave them life. But God, in His love, provided the only way to be saved, redeemed, forgiven, and offered eternal life, was through belief in the sacrificial death, burial and resurrection of Jesus Christ. We will continue to sin until God destroys all sin and death. That day is coming, but is still yet to come. When we go to be with the Lord forever, we will no longer sin.
I wait eagerly and expectantly for that day to come. Are you a sinner. Yes, you are. I am not calling you such. God is. Believe. Receive by His grace through His gift of faith, the forgiveness of sin that you so desperately need. He will love you, guide you, protect you and lead you to His eternal home!
Pastor Dale