My Heroes - Timothy Keller

 
Upon first moving to Europe, I set out to find the top people who were presenting the gospel successfully in a secular, post-christian context such as Europe. My neighbor was an American guy who had come to know Christ through a Church in New York City with a Pastor called Tim Keller. He started giving me access to all of Keller's sermons and my world was rocked. I now have hundreds of his sermons on my computer, all of his books (in Dutch) and my teaching and ministry bare the fingerprints of this master teacher. What makes him so good you may ask:
 
Tim Keller does not ever preach with a us vs. them style. His intelligent discourses cross the huge intellectual gulf that is often present between secular culture and Christian (sub) culture. His constant hammering on grace saving us, not religious moralism or secular autonomy, really cause us to re-evaluate why we do what we do. He is one of the best at teaching with confidence and assertively, while showing respect and understanding to the prevailing secular culture (often anti-Christian) of Manhattan (and Amsterdam).
 
His church (www.redeemer.com) runs over 6,000 people in Manhattan and has planted hundreds of churches in the United States and around the world. I want to be like Tim Keller. I want to engage the culture I live in with civility and respect while articulating the gospel of Jesus Christ in a way people can understand that he shows us the true way to freedom.
 
I can highly recommend all of his books such as: The Reason for God, The Prodigal God, King's Cross, Generous Justice, Meaning of Marriage, etc. You can download his sermons from his churches web site or listen to some great talks/interviews on You Tube. (Check out the Veritas form). Timothy Keller has been and continues to be an important role model for me. This is why I see him as one of my heroes.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
(Pastor Alejandro & Mayra Lopes in a conference in Costa Rica) Yesterday I visited a Hispanic church here in Amsterdam which was celebrating the opening of its brand new temple. Iglesia El Encuentro con Dios was founded 18 years ago by Mayra Lopez, the wife of Alejandro Lopez who is now the senior pastor. Their new church building has cost them more than 2 million euros (3 million dollars). It sits in the middle of a commercial/factory zone, so you don't expect to find a building packed with 400 Latin Americans worshipping God in their native language. It is an unbelievable story. Pastor Alejandro has planted churches in the other major cities of Holland as well as in New York and the Domican Republic (his native land). What I did not expect is that yesterday he called me and two other missionary families to give us awards. One award was to an elderly American missionary who led his wife to Christ 18 years ago. I mentioned to her that she was the spiritual grandmother of so m
Read more

Ten more weeks...

Image
Ten more weeks until my due date, November the 9th, and the pregnancy is going great. I had to be tested for pregnancy diabetes, because Judah weighed 10 pounds at birth (which is usually an indicator for diabetes). But yesterday the results from that came in and my blood sugar is normal! Praise God! No sugar free diet….! We are expecting a little girl. We have picked a beautiful name…Hannah Grace. Judah calls her “Hannah Gracie”. Talking about Judah…we just celebrated his birthday on the 17th of August. He loved it! It was the first time he could realize that this was all for him and he is still singing birthday songs. He is just developing so quickly, he learns new words every day and because I speak to him in Dutch, he is picking up Dutch real fast. Here are some pictures!!
Read more

T. L. Osborn - A Man Who Made God's Message His Own

Image
Then he said, "Son of man, get all these words that I'm giving you inside you. Listen to them obediently. Make them your own. And now go. Go to the exiles, your people, and speak. Tell them , "This is the message of God, the Master.' Speak your peace, whether they listen or not."  Ezekiel 3:10-11 The Message Bible In order to effectively communicate God's message, we need to first digest them; internalize them, make them our own. When we  have allowed them to enter into the deepest recesses of my heart, then they can change us at the core of our being. Nevertheless, we must also be actively listening and internalizing how the culture around us thinks. When this takes place, we will be able to fluently speak God's words to the culture we live among in a way that they can understand. ( The late Dr. T. L. Osborn) A  good example of this comes from the life of the late T.L. Osborn. Osborn was a pioneer in mass crusade evangelism outside of the Uni
Read more