Pastor Tim Keller of New York City passed away on Friday at the age of 72. He served the city’s young professionals and served as an example of how successful Christian witnesses may get the Gospel heard in unexpected places. She received a pancreatic cancer diagnosis three years later.
Keller co-founded The Gospel Coalition, started a church planting network, started and expanded a Reformed evangelical church in Manhattan, and has authored multiple best-selling books on God, the gospel, and the Christian life.
We are more wicked and defective than we dare to believe about ourselves, but at the same time, we are more loved and welcomed in Jesus Christ than we dare to hope, Keller said. “That’s the gospel,” he said.
Keller was frequently accused of accommodating cultures, particularly in his final years. He was accused of overemphasizing relevance, underplaying, and even undermining Christian truth out of a misplaced desire for social acceptance. He opposed the cultural wars versus evangelism.
But idolatry was a recurring issue in his sermons and lectures. Keller asserts that people are grieving and are aware of it. However, they are unaware that only Jesus has the power to fully heal them. Their greatest needs can only be met by God’s grace.
Keller criticized the nation’s cultural elite at his church in Manhattan for following false gods.
“We desire to feel lovely. We yearn for love. He preached, “We want to feel significant,” in 2009. That’s why we put in so much effort, and that’s also where evil originates.
According to Keller, it conveys an antiquated idea about sin. He made this statement to New York Magazine. But when many people hear the word “sin,” they only conjure up images of illicit sexual activity, narcotics, and possibly theft. The same contemporary creative elite he aspires to reach is plagued by numerous additional poisonous sins that work to replace God’s love in their life.
The goal of Relevance is to locate icons that touch people’s spirits. then declare their freedom.
Through the life and death of Jesus, there is now no condemnation for anyone who believes in that justice—an amazingly liberating message, Keller recalled in 2021 of the Manhattanite who “has spent his entire life with parents, music teachers, coaches, professors and bosses telling them to do better, better, harder.”
While attending Bucknell University, Keller was a student when he received the news. William and Louise Clement Keller welcomed him into the world in September 1950 in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The household went to a Lutheran church. Young Timothy spent two years attending confirmation, but the most important lesson he took away was that religion is about goodness.
In part because the local Christians seemed to care about the civil rights struggle, he enrolled in college in 1968 and joined the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship. He quickly came to believe that Christianity was true and devoured the writings of English evangelists, particularly those of John Stott, F.F. Bruce, and C.S. Lewis.