Podcast: The Life and Legacy of Tim Keller (Matt Smethurst)

This article is part of the The Crossway Podcast series.
In this episode, Matt Smethurst talks about the life and work of Tim Keller, particularly in his role as a pastor, preacher, and evangelist. Matt reviews the way that Keller’s teaching and convictions developed over the course of his life and the ongoing influence that he continues to have in the realm of evangelicalism today.
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Tim Keller on the Christian Life
Matt Smethurst
Matt Smethurst distills over 40 years of Tim Keller’s teaching topic by topic—drawing from popular books to lesser-known conference talks, interviews, and sermons—to present practical insight for generations of readers eager to grow in their walk with Christ.
Topics Addressed in This Interview:
- Synthesizing Keller’s Teaching on Christian Living
- Contradictory Perspectives on Keller’s Legacy
- The Fundamental Sin of Idolatry
- Preaching Christ
- Suffering and the Christian Life
01:01 - Synthesizing Keller’s Teaching on Christian Living
Matt Tully
Matt, thanks for joining me today on The Crossway Podcast.
Matt Smethurst
It’s good to be with you again, Matt. Not talking about deacons this time.
Matt Tully
Not talking about deacons.
Matt Smethurst
Though I’m fine with deacons, it’s good to move on to something else.
Matt Tully
You are pro-deacons.
Matt Smethurst
Yes, I’m still pro-deacons.
Matt Tully
Tim Keller will likely go down in history as one of the most significant and influential evangelical church leaders of his generation. He wrote dozens of books. He preached hundreds of sermons over his decades-long career as a pastor. And most of those are all readily available online. People have heard, I’m sure, much of his teaching over the years. So I think it’s fair to say that we know a lot about Tim Keller in some ways, but I know in writing this new book that you’ve, you spent countless hours immersed in many of Keller’s lesser-known sermons, things that are not available online, interviews he did, correspondence that he wrote, unpublished materials of all sorts. So I wonder as a first question for you, what do you feel like you learned about Keller that you didn’t previously know? Were you surprised by anything through all the research that you did for this?
Matt Smethurst
Well, it was interesting to see how certain themes developed over the years and others were there from the very beginning. So I did have the chance to listen to some of his sermons from his first pastorate in small town Virginia (1975 to 1984), where he really cut his pastoral teeth there at West Hopewell Presbyterian Church. In his church of 300 people by the time he left, there were only two college graduates. Both of them were elementary school teachers. So we’re talking very salt of the earth, blue collar people. But he loved them, he listened, he learned to contextualize the gospel, as it’s been said, to put the cookies on the bottom shelf there in Hopewell. And you really can’t understand New York Keller apart from Hopewell Keller.
Matt Tully
That’s so interesting to hear because it seems like such a contrast in terms of the demographic, we’ll say, of the people who were there.
Matt Smethurst
Yeah, it’s really interesting to think about that contrast. He said that in a small town, your pastoring sets up your preaching; but in a big city, your preaching sets up your pastoring. So in a small town, people aren’t really going to care what you preach unless they first trust you as their pastor. But in a big city, people aren’t going to trust you as their pastor unless they first respect you as a preacher. Now, obviously there are exceptions to that, but he really did pastor in both contexts. And even people struggling with different kinds of idols and sins, though of course, we (humanity) have more in common across those kind of cultural boundaries than we don’t. But to understand what Keller was able to do in New York, just to put it in perspective, Matt, he preached every Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night for almost ten years, which is upwards of 1,500 expository messages. I’m on pace as a pastor to hit that number when I’m seventy. He had that at age thirty-three. So when you look at all the stuff he became known for, like the cultural analysis, you’ve got to realize you’re looking at the tip of an iceberg underneath of which there is a ton of experience when it comes to handling the word of truth and making it accessible and compelling to people.
Matt Tully
I know people have reflected on when he published his first book. Wasn’t it when he was forty or something like that? He was much older than I think we typically might assume.
Matt Smethurst
Yeah, exactly. His first book that few know of was in 1985, Resources for Deacons. And then in 1989 he published Ministries of Mercy. But yes, it wasn’t actually until he was well into his 50s, and I’d have to do the math to think how old he was, but he would’ve been 58 in 2008 when The Reason for God came out. And then it was just a quick succession.
Matt Tully
That’s when it kind of blew up.
Matt Smethurst
Yeah, a quick succession of books thereafter.
Matt Tully
Wow. Tim died in 2023. Through your work at the Gospel Coalition or other contexts, did you ever have a chance to sit down with Tim and talk with him and get to know him on a personal level?
Matt Smethurst
Yes. Tim was always very generous to me personally. I didn’t know him super well, but we interacted in person. I got to make a couple of trips to New York in 2015 and 2019 to visit with him alongside some other TGC colleagues. And we corresponded a bit over email. When I asked a few people to endorse my book on evangelism, Before You Share Your Faith, he was the first one to respond with a very kind endorsement. But I’m not unique. When he died, I was struck by how many people came out with these stories of just quiet ways that Tim had reached out to them and encouraged them, even from afar.
Matt Tully
We won’t need to spend too much time talking about the craft or the process of writing this book, but tell us a little bit about the access that you had as you spoke with his wife and his family and other ministry partners. What kinds of resources were you able to tap into as you worked on this book?
Matt Smethurst
Well, the title of the book is really what it is: Tim Keller on the Christian Life. So just to be clear, this is not a biography, it’s not a critical evaluation of his legacy. It really is an attempt to summarize or distill and synthesize his best teaching on Christian living. It’s up to readers to determine if I succeeded. But as Jonathan Leeman said in his endorsement, it’s kind of like a greatest hits album. And that is, in some ways, what I’m trying to do because here’s the reality. Some people—actually, more than we probably realize in our churches these days—have never engaged Keller’s work firsthand. They may have heard things secondhand, thirdhand, or maybe heard him quoted in a sermon or seen a tweet that’s quoting him. But they are vaguely familiar, at best, with his work. They’re going to be intimidated by seeing thirty books he’s released. Where do I start? Well, maybe they’ll start with one. That was kind of what I’m wanting to do is to provide, in a sense, an on-ramp into his teaching. And if I’ve succeeded, it’ll leave people wanting more. But Matt, I didn’t want to just regurgitate his books. I didn’t want to just write a book that’s a string of block quotes from Tim Keller that leaves you thinking, Man, I could have just read Counterfeit Gods or The Prodigal God or The Meaning of Marriage or Walking with God in Pain and Suffering*. I wanted to also go deep into the sermon archives, because so much of Keller’s best material that never made it into the books is in those sermons.
Matt Tully
Because he was a preacher first and foremost.
Matt Smethurst
Exactly. I actually reference over 100 sermons in this book, as well as interviews, conference messages, and courses. And that’s why Kathy’s endorsement in particular was so meaningful to me and gratifying, because that’s what she pointed out is that I was able to find resources even she was unfamiliar with. And I’m hopeful that some of those resources, which I don’t want to say they’ve never seen the light of day, but are little known or lesser known, will be an encouragement to readers.
08:25 - Contradictory Perspectives on Keller’s Legacy
Matt Tully
Keller occupied a really interesting space within American evangelicalism. Many secular progressives—people that were living in the context similar to where he was living in ministry in New York City—viewed him as a backward Christian fundamentalist. I think of the whole situation with Princeton Theological Seminary, how they awarded him this prestigious Abraham Kuyper prize in Reformed Theology and Public Life, and then they rescinded the award because of some blowback on his views on sexuality and gender and ordination and what have you. And yet on the other end of the spectrum, there were some conservative Christians who were skeptical of Keller at times because of what they perceive to be some kind of squishyness theologically. As you look back on his life and ministry, his teaching on the Christian life, what do you make of those seemingly contradictory perspectives on his legacy?
Matt Smethurst
That’s a big and good question. To the first part of it, we should not have an idealized view of what New York City was like in 1989 when Tim and Kathy, with three young sons, decided to move to the city. It was a courageous and, frankly, ridiculous thing to do in the eyes of many people. At one point in the book, I think I say that in 1989, New York City was far more dangerous than cool. So it wasn’t a hip destination for church planters. In an article titled “The Life and Times of Redeemer Presbyterian Church,” Sarah Zylstra writes, “Tim mentioned the idea of moving to his wife, Kathy, who laughed, ‘Take our three wild boys (the victims of below average parenting, as well as indwelling sin) to the center of a big city? Expose them to varieties of sin that I hope they wouldn’t hear about until say, their mid thirties? My list of answers to what’s wrong with this picture was a long, long one.’” And then Zylstra writes, “New York circa 1990 wasn’t the ideal place to raise a family. Homicides peaked at 2,245 during Redeemer’s first full year, right in line with the rising violence in other American cities as crack cocaine flooded the streets. On a typical day in 1989, New Yorkers reported nine rapes, five murders, 255 robberies, and 194 aggravated assaults. ‘Starting a church in New York City,’ Keller said, ’was something not just beyond my talent and ability, but pretty much beyond the talent or ability of anybody that I knew. Therefore, if God was going to do it, he would not be doing it through the talent of the minister but through a person who loved and depended on him.’”
Matt Tully
Wow. It’s so amazing how often when we think about people like Keller, as Christians who have been influenced by him and appreciated their ministries, we can—more than they do—we can attribute so much to them and to their own skill, their own intellect, their own passion. But it’s convicting to hear Keller, in his own words, express just the utter dependence that he had on God to do what he did.
Matt Smethurst
Absolutely. There’s a puritan named William Gurnall who essentially says that it takes more courage of spirit to be a pastor than to even be a captain. And Keller read those words as he was trying, on behalf of the PCA, to find someone else to go to New York City and plant. But those words struck a chord with him and convicted him and ultimately galvanized him with courage to say that if God is with me, then this is something that Kathy and I can do. And so he ultimately took the call himself.
Matt Tully
That’s the one helpful correction to maybe our assumptions or anachronistic view of what he was doing in New York City that we see later in his career. How do you think about the other perspective on him, maybe the concern about his squishyness theologically? How do you wrestle with, those questions?
Matt Smethurst
I do mention in the introduction, just upfront, that I didn’t agree with Keller on everything, not least because he was a faithful Presbyterian, and I’m seeking to be a faithful Baptist, but also in the realm of ecclesiology and philosophy of ministry. In order to understand Keller, you have to realize that at heart he was an evangelist, and a masterful one. And so I think that at times that led him to remain above the fray on certain contested social issues, at least in his public proclamations—more than some may think was wise. But there’s actually a quote I was reminded of the other day from him where he said, “If Jesus rose from the dead, then you have to accept all he said. If he didn’t rise from the dead, then why worry about anything he said? The issue on which everything hangs is not whether or not you like his teaching, but whether or not you rose from the dead.” And Keller actually explained this. His unwillingness to, generally speaking, enter the fray on those kinds of things was not a result of cowardice. It’s not because he was trying to curry favor with social elites. It really was an evangelistic strategy. He wanted people to confront Jesus in the risen tomb, and then once they’ve reckoned with that, once they hopefully have embraced that, to then, through intensive discipleship, come to realize you have to obey all of his teachings—everything God’s word says.
Matt Tully
So it was more of an order of encounter rather than I’m never going to talk about these other things.
Matt Smethurst
More than an abdication. Now, I think one can critique that methodology and critique that approach. They could say that’s shortsighted in terms of how we disciple people. I think you can have conversation about that, for sure. But there are some critics that I hear, and I just think either you sound like a second hander or a third hander. You’ve either not listened to many Tim Keller sermons, or it’s been way too long since you did. Tim would talk about a person’s influences being like rings in a tree. If you cut a tree, you see the rings. If you cut a person, you see the rings, the influences, in them. And I think for many folks, either they don’t have the Keller ring in their tree, or they think they do. They’ve had their Kel phase maybe ten years ago. They think, I got what I needed, and I’ve moved on. But they don’t realize that that ring has grown really faint. And I can just say, Matt, as someone who, again, doesn’t agree with Keller on everything, as I was forced, through this book project, to revisit a whole bunch of stuff I had read years earlier, I was struck over and over by how much what he says is still fresh and rings with relevance and I think will stand the test of time, especially where his teaching is probably least appreciated, and that’s on this everyday, bread and butter Christian living stuff, which is what I focused on in the book.
15:32 - The Fundamental Sin of Idolatry
Matt Tully
And one related topic that I just thought you did a great job helping the reader to understand is Keller’s perspective on sin through the lens of idolatry, that all sin is fundamentally idolatry. And that is such a rich, biblical perspective on this topic of sin. And sometimes I think many evangelicals can have a very shallow understanding of what sin is, what it represents, how to fight it. What are some of the most helpful insights that he has to share when it came to thinking about our sin and what it looks like for us to pursue sanctification in the Christian life?
Matt Smethurst
When it comes to idolatry, this is one of those topics where he did develop in his thinking. His sermons in Hopewell, Virginia didn’t hum with that theme, but when he got to New York, he read a sermon by Martin Lloyd Jones on one John 5:21, “Little children, keep yourselves from idols,” which had a significant effect on his thinking, as well as an article by the late David Powlison—a wonderful biblical counselor, founder of CCEF—who wrote an essay, “Idols of the Heart and “Vanity Fair.’” Both of those kind of unlocked a new world of insight for Keller, and he went on to really teach and preach eloquently on how sin is fundamentally a worship problem, a worship disorder. And I’ll just be honest, Matt. Years ago, I kind of thought Keller’s emphasis on idolatry is interesting, it’s sophisticated, it’s cool; but I kind of wondered to myself, Is it a little too clever? A little too cute? Maybe a way to sidestep the severity of sin in order to make it more palatable to late modern skeptics?
Matt Tully
Intellectualize it or something.
Matt Smethurst
Exactly, but the more I actually grappled with his teaching, the more I realized, no, actually, my perspective was simplistic. Coming to reckon with idolatry as it’s articulated in the pages of God’s word is like being given a three-dimensional object after only having access to a stick figure. Because sin is not merely missing the mark, as if we’re mere arrows flying past a target. Sin is a personal affront against the God who made us. That’s why the Bible constantly describes Israel’s sin as spiritual adultery, or our sin as spiritual idolatry, because we are choosing, preferring, running to counterfeit gods that can never satisfy or save.
Matt Tully
And that’s such a helpful correction to—and we certainly hear this from non-Christians today, but even Christians—where we kind of wonder, Why does God care so much about who I sleep with? Why does God care so much about this or that? And when we think of sin as something as simplistic as missing the mark, where it’s just like a little off, it’s like, Why is God such a stickler for this target? We’re so missing the gravity, the personal affront that is sin, because it is idolatry. It’s worshiping something else, anyone else, other than than God.
Matt Smethurst
And it’s usually a good thing. So Keller hastened to point out idolatry is making a good thing into an ultimate thing. And how do you know you’ve done that in your life? Well, look at how you respond when that good thing is threatened or lost. If you respond with sorrow, that’s natural. If you respond with despair or utter devastation—as if you can’t imagine life without your child walking with the Lord or your spouse meeting all of your emotional needs, or you getting that promotion, fill in the blank—that’s evidence that you’ve turned a gift into the giver. You’ve given a good thing a promotion it didn’t deserve and have turned it into an ultimate thing.
19:29 - Preaching Christ
Matt Tully
Another thing that Keller is very well known for and that you highlight in the book is that his goal with every sermon he preached was to preach Christ. He wanted Christ to be evident in all of his preaching. And in our circles today, this Reformed evangelical world in which we live and move, that’s not a super novel thing to hear anymore. It can almost be a cliche sometimes.
Matt Smethurst
Thanks, in large part, to his influence.
Matt Tully
And that’s what I wanted to get at is how did he help to shape that and to maybe even recover this Christ-centered emphasis in preaching that now has become, to the praise of God, more normal in our circles?
Matt Smethurst
Two people in particular who helped him realize that Jesus is the hero of all Scripture would be Alec Motyer and Ed Clowny. Keller loved to show how Jesus is not just the main character, but in many ways, he is the main point of the Bible. That the Old Testament is driving us toward him. Not like finding a Where’s Waldo answer—
Matt Tully
Not that simplistic.
Matt Smethurst
It’s like finding water for our deepest thirst. And understanding that Scripture is ultimately about Christ, first of all, ought not be an excuse to leapfrog over texts to get to Christ too quickly. That’s one danger—to preach Christ without preaching the text. But the other danger is to preach the text without preaching Christ. And Keller would sometimes say that—or I think it was Kathy, actually—would say that the best sermons are those that by the end, people are not taking notes. They’ve dropped their pens because they’re just caught up in the wonder and the beauty of who Christ is.
Matt Tully
Let’s talk a little bit more about his preaching. It’s interesting. I’ve listened to some of his old sermons and listened to some of his new sermons, and he had this unique, almost conversational style to how he preached. And often, when you see some videos of him, he’s kind of leaning over the pulpit, and it’s almost like he wants to get closer to his listeners and speak. He didn’t seem to yell, he didn’t get loud. He was very conversational and quiet. How do you think about the style of preaching that was so common for him?
Matt Smethurst
He certainly wasn’t John Piper stylistically, but I actually do think that the more one listens to his sermons, the more you realize he was animated in his own way with his own temperament. He really did speak forthrightly and step on the toes of ladder-climbing, idolizing, Manhattanites. And I was just struck by that over and over as I was listening to so many of his sermons. Even last week, I was still listening to a 1994 sermon on 1Peter, and man, he was going after the idols that are rattling around Manhattan hearts and in all human hearts. And so I think you’re right. There was a pleading in his sermons, a way of trying to say, “Hey, we’re not just here to engage in some information transfer from me to you. We’re here to encounter and experience the living God.” Jonathan Edwards said that it’s one thing to know all about honey and its properties, but it’s another thing to taste it. And that’s really what Keller was after in his preaching. He wanted us to have a dynamic encounter with gospel grace in the person of Jesus Christ.
Matt Tully
You talked about earlier how he really was at his core an evangelist, and that was just such an animating force in his life. And I’m sure for many of our listeners, maybe the one book that they’ve read of Keller’s is The Reason For God, the book that kind of brought him a bigger audience than ever before and has this overtly apologetic dynamic to it. How did that apologetic angle and interest for him come from, and how did that influence the rest of his ministry?
Matt Smethurst
Well, he was always brilliant, intellectual, and had an amazing memory. He was kind of a master teacher, meaning he just loved taking disparate voices and synthesizing them in a way. And that’s actually what I say in the introduction is I’m trying to synthesize the master synthesizer. And though his preaching in New York certainly had a different texture than it did in Hopewell, I was listening at one point to a 1977 sermon on Romans 5, and he’s not quoting the New York Times, but he does quote from the Richmond Times Dispatch, which is the local paper. But again, the apologetics is coming from the heart of an evangelist, and he got to New York City and he realized that people have all kinds of defeater beliefs, which is what he called them. Things that are basically causing them to not even want to give Christianity a hearing. And The Reason for God is addressing so many of what I would call traditional defeater beliefs. How can you believe Jesus is the only way? The problem of evil. Science and faith. All these things. But a few years later, he realized, actually, he said when The Reason for God was published, it already was, in a sense, outdated. Here’s an amazing thought: The Reason for God was published in 2008, and there’s not a single chapter on sexuality. So, this is a book that is purportedly responding to the greatest objections, but that shows the velocity of cultural change. So he ended up writing, in 2014, a book that he described as a prequel to The Reason for God called Making Sense of God. It’s a dense book, but I think it’s one of his most underrated. And in Making Sense of God, he’s going beneath the surface. It’s a more subterranean work, where he is trying to help modern-day skeptics see that so many of the things they care most about—meaning, identity, freedom, hope—can only find a happy ending in Jesus. And so he’s doing more of that cultural apologetics. Though it’s not the focus of my book, it’s a big part of his legacy.
25:40 - Suffering and the Christian Life
Matt Tully
Another facet of his thinking on a Christian life that you explore in the book is the issue of suffering—the pain that we experience in our lives as Christians and as non-Christians. You have a whole chapter in the book where you reflect a little bit on this whole topic through the lens of his own final suffering and death near the end of his life. I wonder if you could just speak to that. What are some of the concrete ways that this theology of suffering found expression in his life and teaching in those final days?
Matt Smethurst
Well, it caused him to speak in ways that make absolutely no sense to the world. So for example, when he was suffering from stage four pancreatic cancer, a really lethal and invasive form of cancer, at one point in an interview he said, “Cancer is not my main fight. My main fight is against sin. Because I’m going to die of something at some time, but I need to fight my sin so that I’m ready to meet God and to be with God.” Another poignant lesson from those final months was his own relationship with Kathy, where they realized—and this is more in his final couple years, not just final months—where they realized how freeing it is to not try to make a heaven out of this world, but rather to let heaven be heaven and to just embrace this world for what it is. But when we try to make a heaven out of this world—which in Tim’s case was through ministry productivity, in Kath’s case, it was sometimes through vacations—it’s like we’re squeezing a rock, expecting it to yield water when in reality, it’s a rock. We shouldn’t try to derive from it something it was never intended to give.
Matt Tully
Were there any other things that Tim said while he had cancer that have stuck with you since you worked on this book?
Matt Smethurst
There was one interview with someone in the UK where just in quintessential Keller language, she asked about the problem of evil. What do you say to someone who’s questioning how God can exist, how God can be good if there’s all this pain and suffering? And he said there’s a philosophical answer and there’s a personal answer. The philosophical answer, which you shouldn’t lead with for someone in the throes of pain, is that just because you can’t think of a good reason why God would permit something doesn’t mean there can’t be one. That doesn’t make sense. By definition, there are going to be things that fit into God’s mind that don’t fit into yours. In fact, we should be surprised and disturbed if there weren’t reasons that God has that we haven’t thought of. So that should give us a humility when it comes to questioning how God has run his universe. J Vernon McGee once said God has his universe and he does things his way. You may have a better way, but you don’t have a universe. Which is a cheeky way of getting across the fact that he is God, and we are not. And because he’s God, he’s not just infinitely sovereign; he’s also infinitely wise and infinitely good. Or to quote John Piper, as we talk about his friend Tim, “God is always doing 10,000 things in your life, and you may be aware of three of them.” But Keller went on to say that the personal answer is that we can say I may not know what the reasons are for your suffering, but I can know what the reason is not. The reason is not that God doesn’t love you. And we know that because he himself plunged himself into our pain, into our suffering. Jesus Christ suffered, it’s been said, not so that we wouldn’t suffer, but so that when we do suffer, we would become like him. Keller loved to quote the English poet Edward Shillito, who wrote the words, “The other gods were strong, but thou was weak. They rode, but thou did stumble to a throne. But to our wounds, only God’s wounds can speak, and no god has wounds but thou alone.” And Keller loved to show that Jesus Christ is the only God and the only Savior with scars. And those are scars for us. So we may not know all the reasons for our suffering, but we can know, because of those scars, that it’s not because he’s forgotten us and it’s not because he doesn’t love us.
Matt Tully
That’s beautiful. Matt, as a final question, after all the time that you spent digging into Keller’s work, digging into his life, having conversations with those who knew and loved him, if you could sit down with him today, now that the book is out and you’ve finished your work, and you could ask him any question, what do you think you would ask him?
Matt Smethurst
If he finally likes coffee now that he’s with the Lord.
Matt Tully
Now that he’s with Christ.
Matt Smethurst
No. I’m sad that Tim didn’t live long enough to complete some other projects. There was a book on identity, which was actually so much of what he taught on in his final years, how every other religion, philosophy, and worldview essentially gives you an achieved identity, whereas only in Christianity you have a received identity. So in traditional cultures, they essentially say you are your duties. In modern culture, they say you are your desires. But in Christ and in the Bible, we realize that we’re not reduced to our duties or our desires; we belong to him. Also, I would want to ask him about the topic of spiritual formation. There’s a real resurgence today through the work of John Mark Comer and others about habits and practices and formation. And I just think Keller would’ve had a really brilliant way of wading into that conversation and, of course, synthesizing the best voices out there, but also piercing through some of the noise with distinctly biblical, Reformed wisdom. And I say that because in his 2014 book, Prayer, that’s the closest he comes, I think, to addressing some of this stuff. If you look at that book, he’s very critical of mystical approaches to spirituality that would seek an encounter with God by making an inrun around Jesus. And during a particularly dry period in his life—following 9/11, Kathy having Crohn’s disease, various demands and pressures on him—he set out to read a bunch of books to seek a more vibrant experience with God. But that journey ultimately led him even deeper into his own Reformed tradition because he realized, I don’t have to choose between theology and experience. I just have to ask the Holy Spirit to help me experience my theology, to set it on fire in my heart. So I would’ve loved to see Keller maybe continue some of the stuff he wrote about in the prayer book, with the spiritual formation movement in mind.
Matt Tully
Yeah, that’s interesting. Matt, thanks so much for helping those of us who love Keller and are familiar with Keller to maybe take a step further and get to know him a little bit better. And maybe for those who've never heard a sermon, never read a book, this could be a great introduction for them.
Matt Smethurst
Thanks, Matt.
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