In Depth:  Tim Keller

In Christianity God is both a God of love and of justice. Many people struggle with this. They believe that a loving God can’t be a judging God. Like most other Christian ministers in our society, I have been asked literally thousands of times, ‘How can a God of love be also a God filled with wrath and anger? If he is loving and perfect, he should forgive and accept everyone. He shouldn’t get angry.’

I always start my response by pointing out that all loving people are sometimes filled with wrath, not just despite but because of their love. If you love a person and you see someone ruining them — even they themselves — you get angry. As Becky Pippert puts it in her book Hope Has Its Reasons: ‘Think how we feel when we see someone we love ravaged by unwise actions or relationships. Do we respond with benign tolerance as we might toward strangers? Far from it. … Anger isn’t the opposite of love. Hate is, and the final form of hate is indifference. … God’s wrath is not a cranky explosion, but his settled opposition to the cancer … which is eating out the insides of the human race he loves with his whole being.’

Three practical tasks

2. Getting unbelievers into worship

The numbering is not a mistake. This task actually comes second, but nearly everyone thinks it comes first!

It is natural to believe that they must get non-Christians into worship before they can begin ‘doxological evangelism’. But the reverse is the case. Non-Christians do not get invited into worship unless the worship is already evangelistic. The only way they will have non-Christians in attendance is through personal invitation by Christians. Just as in the Psalms, the ‘nations’ must be directly asked to come. But the main stimulus to building bridges and invitation is the comprehensibility and quality of the worship experience.

One of the basic features of church life in the US today is the proliferation of worship and music forms.

This, in turn, has caused many severe conflicts both within individual congregations and whole denominations.

As more and more people become city-dwellers it is imperative that the church understands how to reach out to the expanding cities of the 21st century. Here Tim Keller shares some biblical insights.

THE MEANING OF THE CITY

God designed the city with the power to draw out the resources of creation (of the natural order and the human soul) and thus to build civilisation.