What Tim Keller Taught Me

Tim has taken his rest, and he left thousands of us to fight the good fight. I never knew Tim personally, but he taught me a lot, as he did so many others.

Tim Keller, the influential pastor and author, died on Friday from pancreatic cancer. He was 72. The death of a public figure has never wet my eyes, until Friday. Honestly, the sense of loss and grief surprised me. It felt like that moment in Star Wars when Yoda dies and leaves Luke Skywalker the apprentice alone to fight the good fight of the Jedi. Tim has taken his rest, and he left thousands of us to fight the good fight. I never knew Tim personally, but he taught me a lot, as he did so many others. I can bundle (some of) the things I learned from him into two groups.

The Priority of Depth

Tim taught the priority of the depth of the gospel. Tim’s teaching transformed so many with his clear explanation of the depths of God’s grace in the gospel of Jesus Christ. “The gospel says you are simultaneously more sinful and flawed than you ever dared believe, yet more loved and accepted than you ever dared hope,” he reminded us. Tim made the gospel the center of everything, because the gospel is the center of everything. All other Christian teaching spokes off of this hub: “God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself” (2 Corinthians 5:19). Tim took us deep into the depths of God, way under the waters of grace and glory. He taught us how to swim down there for a long time without needing any additional oxygen. He taught us that the gospel is oxygen.

I heard Tim preach in person for the first time at the 2006 Desiring God conference in Minneapolis. He said:

For eighteen years I lived in apartment buildings with vending machines. Very often you put the coins in but nothing comes out. You have to shake or hit the machine on the side till the coins finally drop down and then out comes the soda. My wife, Kathy, believes this is a basic parable for all ministry. Martin Luther said that the purpose of ministry was not only to make the gospel clear, but to beat it into your people’s heads (and your own!) continually.

Tim’s teaching shook our vending machines so that the gospel’s coins would clink into our hearts.

Tim exemplified the priority of depth in ministry. Before Tim planted one of the most successful churches in the history of the most important city in the world (Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City), he pastored for nine years in relative obscurity in a small, rural congregation in Virginia. This story resonates with my own story, because I pastored a small church in relative obscurity for the first nine years of ministry. Now, Tim afterward soon skyrocketed to fruitfulness and then to prominence, and that’s not my story. I’m still hanging out in obscurity. And that’s perfectly ok, because the point is that Jesus meets us in the obscure places just as much (maybe more) than the prominent ones. Obscurity is the training center for Christians and Christian ministers. God elevated Tim when Tim’s obscurity had done its work. Whatever God plans to do with me—or you—our season right now is with him, and that’s enough.

Closely related, Tim published almost nothing until The Reason for God in 2008. When I was in seminary I ordered his church’s church planting manual in 2006. It was a $40, spiral-bound notebook, and you had to get it from their church directly. You could find Tim’s sermons and articles online, but we hadn’t yet whiffed the prolific publishing career Tim would soon have. He published (I counted) a zillion books from 2008 until before he died. When the time was ripe, in his late 50s, Tim opened a vein and out flowed the riches of a lifetime of walking with Jesus and working with Jesus. As someone who felt a desire to write before I felt a calling to preach, I find a lot of hope in Tim’s story. The best strategy is: go deep and then if God wants to take it wide, let him. That’s up to him. We are called to dive deep, to dig deep.

The Priority of Building

Tim didn’t build a preaching or writing ministry. Tim built the only institution that will last—the church. Both directly and indirectly, thousands of churches exist today because of Tim’s commitment to building the church. Our new, little church here in South Florida wouldn’t exist today if not for Tim’s ministry and influence. Tim showed us the difference between building a platform and building a foundation. A platform exists for the person who will stand on it, to be seen and heard. A foundation exists for the building that will stand on it, to be inhabited. Tim built institutions, starting with the church, that will long outlast him.

Tim built a church that he pastored until just a few years before he died. Tim invested in building a denomination, the Presbyterian Church in America. Tim invested in building a church planting network, City to City. Tim invested in building a gospel coalition, The Gospel Coalition. These are institutions that people can inhabit for generations. I think here of the contrast with the ministry of Ravi Zacharias. Tragically, after his death around the same age as Tim, Zacharias was revealed to be a sexual predator. The global ministry he founded, Ravi Zacharias International Ministries, imploded. How different the legacy and strategy of Tim Keller! First, Tim Keller was a man of character and humility, as witnessed by thousands of people across the world in the last few days. Second, Tim didn’t name his church or his ministry after himself. He purposely divested himself of the power to make himself the thing, even while strategically leveraging his influence to further the gospel.

In a world where everyone is trying to be an influencer, Tim actually influenced people. In a world where everyone is using institutions to platform themselves (as pointed out by Yuval Levin), Tim built foundations and institutions that others could inhabit.

I am not and will never be Tim Keller, of course. And neither will you. But we can still live life well, like Tim did. Let’s let Jesus love us, let’s love him back, and then grab a shovel and get back to work.

See you soon, Tim.