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The first time I met Tim Keller I asked if we could be friends.
I said to him, “I quote you so often to my congregation. I tell them that I’ve listened to you so much that I don’t know where your thoughts end and mine start. It would mean a lot—since I quote you so much—if I could call you my friend. Do you mind if, next time I quote you, I say ‘my friend Tim Keller’?” He laughed and said yes.
My congregation is familiar with the story and still laughs when I reference “my friend Tim Keller’’ in a sermon. When I wrote my first book, Gospel—which had been influenced so much by Tim—he wrote the foreword. In fact, if you were to read the foreword, you would see evidence of this rather public inside joke we share. In the last paragraph, he calls me “my fellow pastor, J.D.”
I’m grateful for the humor infused into our friendship. But I’m also grateful for the ways Tim Keller encouraged me. One such occurrence was at the conclusion of a conference when I was walking him out of the venue. As we made our way toward the exit, he stopped. When I turned around and walked back to him, this six-foot-five man extended his arm, pulled me in, and said, “You’re doing really good work here.” It was the most awkward, most affirming hug I’d ever received.
Yet, what’s equally important to the humor and the encouragement is the way Tim Keller shaped me as a preacher. Before I encountered him years ago, my messages were heavy on how-tos and performance. Do this. Become that. But in every single sermon I preach today, I strive to direct people to worship Jesus and adore him more as opposed to inspiring them to work harder as Christians.
I believe Tim was quoting D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones when he said, “There ought to come a time in every message where the pen goes down and the eyes go up and you stop saying, ‘Oh my God, look at all the things I have to do for ...