The Most Powerful Message Tim Keller Ever Preached

Photo credit Andrew Walker, used by permission of River Road stewardship

Facing Cancer

Tim Keller’s teaching shone brightest when the topic was the darkest. But it wasn’t just his teaching that glimmered in the dark.

Ultimately, it was his life.

In May 2020, two months after the world shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Keller was diagnosed with a particularly invasive and lethal form of cancer. The following year, in an essay for The Atlantic titled “Growing My Faith in the Face of Death,” he gave powerful voice to his sadness—and his unshakable hope.¹ He began by recalling the immediate aftermath of receiving the news:

One woman with cancer told me years ago, “I’m not a believer anymore—that doesn’t work for me. I can’t believe in a personal God who would do something like this to me.” Cancer killed her God. What would happen to me? I felt like a surgeon who was suddenly on the operating table. Would I be able to take my own advice?

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.

Facing such a serious diagnosis, Keller was forced to reexamine not only his “professed beliefs” but his “actual understanding of God.” He writes,

Had [my ideas about God] been shaped by my culture? Had I been slipping unconsciously into the supposition that God lived for me rather than I for him, that life should go well for me, that I knew better than God does how things should go? The answer was yes—to some degree. I found that to embrace God’s greatness, to say “Thy will be done,” was painful at first and then, perhaps counterintuitively, profoundly liberating. To assume that God is as small and finite as we are may feel freeing—but it offers no remedy for anger.²

Suffering offers a rare kind of gift, ripping away our respectable illusions of piety and forcing the issue in our hearts: “Theoretical ideas about God’s love and the future resurrection [have] to become lifegripping truths,” Keller contends, “or be discarded as useless.” And what he discovered, as he clung to truth and fought for faith, was Jesus’s costly love becoming “not just something I believed and filed away, but a hope that sustained me all day.”

As he worked through the real prospect of facing death, Keller found he could “sincerely say, without any sentimentality or exaggeration, that I’ve never been happier in my life, that I’ve never had more days filled with comfort. But it is equally true that I’ve never had so many days of grief.” Those juxtaposed emotional realities—immense sorrow and irrepressible joy—make sense (and only make sense) if the world is fallen and the gospel is true. No wonder the people of Jesus for two thousand years have been “sorrowful, yet always rejoicing” (2 Cor. 6:10).

In his 2021 book Hope in Times of Fear, completed in the shadow of his bleak medical prognosis, Keller pondered the implications of the empty tomb:

The resurrection means not merely that Christians have a hope for the future but that they have a hope that comes from the future. The Bible’s startling message is that when Jesus rose, he brought the future kingdom of God into the present.³

And this changes everything. “There are the good things of this world, the hard things of this world, and the best things of this world—God’s love, glory, holiness, beauty,” notes Keller. And Scripture is straightforward: “the road to the best things is not through the good things but usually through the hard things.”⁴ Keller is emphatic: “Our bad things will turn out for good, our good things cannot be taken away, and the best is yet to come.”⁵

Such invincible hope! What, then, is there to fear? What can mere humans do to us (Ps. 118:6)? What can death do to us (1 Cor. 15:55)? Scripture declares that no power on earth—not even death—can rob us of Christ’s love. It can only usher us further in (Rom. 8:38–39).

Despite Keller’s terminal diagnosis, the promise of resurrection was powerful enough to keep him and Kathy from grieving “like the rest of mankind, who have no hope” (1 Thess. 4:13 NIV). Consider his response to being asked what he’d say to a young Christian who’s nervous about the future:

If Jesus Christ was actually raised from the dead, then you know what? Everything is going to be all right. Whatever you’re worried about right now—whatever you’re afraid of—everything is actually going to be okay. . . . If Jesus Christ was raised from the dead, then the whole world is going to be, in a sense, resurrected. . . .

Kathy and I cried a lot together last night. Sometimes the reality of the shortness of what we have left just overwhelms us. . . . [But] if Jesus Christ was raised from the dead—and he was—you’re going to be okay.⁶

Around the same time, nearly a year after the diagnosis, Keller revealed in another interview what the Lord was teaching him.⁷ With a relaxed, even cheerful demeanor, he testified to the disease’s purifying effects on his own heart and life. Two comments emerged as particularly poignant.

First, he insisted that he was not primarily fighting cancer but fighting his sin. Why? Because if

it wasn’t for my sin, I would be completely resting in Christ, and the resurrection would be spiritually real to me, and I would be absolutely fine—spiritually and emotionally and in every way. . . . [But] it’s my sin that keeps me from the spiritual realities that [should] buoy me up. And therefore . . . the way I handle imminent death is by fighting my sin and [pursuing] deeper communion with God.

As for the cancer, Keller hastened to say, “That’s not the fight. I’m going to die of something. [But what] I have to do is fight my sin so that I’m actually ready [to die and be with God].”

If Jesus Christ was actually raised from the dead, then you know what? Everything is going to be all right.

The second lesson he described as one that he and Kathy were learning together. Instead of trying to “make a heaven out of this earth”—whether through things like vacations (in Kathy’s case) or ministry productivity (in Tim’s)—they were coming to apprehend a surprising truth: When you stop trying to manufacture heaven, it actually enhances earthly joys:

The joys of the earth are more poignant than they used to be. . . . There’s a whole lot of things [Kathy and I] never really enjoyed that much. But the more we make heaven into the real heaven, the more this world becomes something we are actually enjoying for its own sake—instead of trying to make it give us more than it really can. So oddly enough . . . we’ve never been happier. We’ve never enjoyed our days more. We’ve never enjoyed hugs more. We’ve never enjoyed food more. We’ve never enjoyed walks more. We’ve never enjoyed the actual things we see, touch, taste, hear, and smell more. Why? What’s the matter with us? And the answer is, we got our hearts off those things and so, weirdly enough, we enjoy them more.⁸

Facing Death

For years Keller loved to paraphrase the seventeenth-century poet George Herbert: “Death used to be an executioner, but the gospel has made him just a gardener.”⁹
In other words, Keller insisted, “All death can now do to Christians is to make their lives infinitely better.”¹⁰ What a consoling thought! Yet while easy to profess and to preach, it’s much harder to believe. But Keller clung to this hope to the very end.

And that was possible because, long before, he’d embraced this one preeminent fact: His life didn’t belong to himself. This idea is now more countercultural than ever. But it’s the essence of Christian living. “If you want to know what it means to live as a Christian,” Keller once remarked, “I would probably go to the place in 1 Corinthians 6 where it says, ‘You’re not your own; you’re bought with a price.’ Frankly, every part of being a Christian is a derivative of that one verse.”¹¹

In his final three years on earth, Keller’s occasional updates focused on his spiritual condition. This one is representative: “I have Stage IV pancreatic cancer. But it is endlessly comforting to have a God who is both infinitely more wise and more loving than I am. He has plenty of good reasons for everything he does and allows that I cannot know, and therein is my hope and strength.”¹²

Eventually, his body weakened until it finally stopped responding to treatment. As Keller lay on his deathbed, his son Michael wrote,

Over the past few days, [Dad] has asked us to pray with him often. He expressed many times through prayer his desire to go home to be with Jesus. His family is very sad because we all wanted more time, but we know he has very little at this point. In prayer, he said two nights ago, “I’m thankful for all the people who’ve prayed for me over the years. I’m thankful for my family, that loves me. I’m thankful for the time God has given me, but I’m ready to see Jesus. I can’t wait to see Jesus. Send me home.”¹³

The following day, May 19, 2023, Timothy James Keller was promoted to eternal glory. Michael provided a glimpse into his father’s final moments:

Dad waited until he was alone with Mom. She kissed him on the forehead and he breathed his last breath. We take comfort in some of his last words: “There is no downside for me leaving, not in the slightest.”¹⁴

Keller’s most eloquent testimony to God’s all-sufficient grace in suffering wasn’t a sermon or an essay, a seminar or a book. It was his death. He faced it with bravery and hope, and it was the most powerful message he ever delivered.

Better Than Life

Tim Keller is not unique. With the help of the Holy Spirit, you can suffer well too. But something must be settled in your heart: The love of Jesus Christ is even “better than life” (Ps. 63:3). Perhaps it’s not surprising that this was one of Keller’s favorite verses. After all, suffering “tears us apart if we are uncertain of God’s love for us.”¹⁵ So we must fight to rest in this truth: We can lose our lives, but we can never lose his love.

When it comes to evil and suffering, we serve a God who is personal and purposeful. Nothing takes him by surprise. Nothing thwarts his plans. And the ultimate proof of his love was unveiled on a hill outside Jerusalem, where Jesus suffered and bled for rebels like us so that we could enjoy everlasting life with him. His tomb is now empty—but the throne of the universe is not. You won’t find more galvanizing news than that.

“Either Jesus is on the throne ruling all things for you,” Keller once said, “or this is as good as it gets.”¹⁶

Thank God he’s on the throne.

Notes:

Keller, “Growing My Faith in the Face of Death.” This was Keller’s second bout with cancer. In 2002, he was diagnosed with thyroid cancer and underwent surgery to remove it. He recounts in his book on suffering, “There have not been many times in my life when I felt ‘the peace that passes understanding’ [Phil. 4:7]. But there was one time for which I am very grateful. . . . On the morning of my surgery, after I said my goodbyes to my wife and sons, I was wheeled into a room to be prepped. And in the moments before they gave me the anesthetic, I prayed. To my surprise, I got a sudden, clear, new perspective on everything. It seemed to me that the universe was an enormous realm of joy, mirth, and high beauty. Of course it was—didn’t the Triune God make it to be filled with his own boundless joy, wisdom, love, and delight? And within this great globe of glory was only one little speck of darkness—our world—where there was temporarily pain and suffering. But it was only one speck, and soon that speck would fade away and everything would be light. And I thought, ‘It doesn’t really matter how the surgery goes. Everything will be all right. Me—my wife, my children, my church—will all be all right.’ I went to sleep with a bright peace on my heart.” Keller, Walking with God, 318.
Keller, “Growing My Faith in the Face of Death” (first emphasis original; second emphasis added).
Timothy Keller, Hope in Times of Fear: The Resurrection and the Meaning of Easter (New York: Viking, 2021), 24 (emphasis original). In the acknowledgments at the end of the book, Keller reflects, “Writing in such dark times helped me see in the resurrection new depths of comfort and power. This is not to claim that this is a better book than others I have written. Let readers be the judge of that. But it is the one in which I felt the most divine guidance and help.” Keller, 217 (emphasis added).
Keller, Hope in Times of Fear, 62 (emphasis removed).
Keller, Walking with God, 301.
Tim Keller in, “A Conversation with Pastor Tim Keller About Hope in Times of Fear,” Russell Moore, March 31, 2021, YouTube video, https://www.youtube.com/
Tim Keller, “Tim Keller on Reformed Resurgence,” interviewed by Kevin DeYoung, Collin Hansen, and Justin Taylor, Life and Books and Everything (podcast), Clearly Reformed, February 3, 2021, https://clearlyreformed.org/
Keller made the same point in his 2021 Atlantic essay: “Since my diagnosis, Kathy and I have come to see that the more we tried to make a heaven out of this world—the more we grounded our comfort and security in it—the less we were able to enjoy it. . . . [But] to our surprise and encouragement, Kathy and I have discovered that the less we attempt to make this world into a heaven, the more we are able to enjoy it. No longer are we burdening it with demands impossible for it to fulfill. We have found that the simplest things—from sun on the water and flowers in the vase to our own embraces, sex, and conversation—bring more joy than ever. . . . As God’s reality dawns more on my heart, slowly and painfully and through many tears, the simplest pleasures of this world have become sources of daily happiness. It is only as I have become, for lack of a better term, more heavenly minded that I can see the material world for the astonishingly good divine gift that it is.” Keller, “Growing My Faith in the Face of Death.”
See “George Herbert, “Time” (1633), in The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. Helen Wilcock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 432. The third stanza of Herbert’s poem reads, “And in his blessing thou art blest: / For where thou onely wert before / An executioner at best; / Thou art a gard’ner now, and more, / An usher to convey our souls / Beyond the utmost starres and poles.” Keller first paraphrased Herbert’s quote in “Death of Death,” preached on May 16, 1993.
Timothy Keller, Making Sense of God: An Invitation to the Skeptical (New York: Penguin, 2016), 166.
Tim Keller, “Questions About Jesus,” Questioning Christianity, Q&A at Redeemer Presbyterian Church on March 13, 2014. Technically he is invoking two verses (1 Cor. 6:19–20). Or as the apostle Paul elsewhere puts it, “For if we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord. So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s” (Rom. 14:8).
Tim Keller (@timkellernyc), “I have Stage IV . . . ,” Twitter, December 3, 2021, 1:33 p.m., https://x.com/
Tim Keller (@timkellernyc), “Health Update: Today, Dad is . . . ,” Twitter, May 18, 2023, 4:44 p.m., https://x.com/ (emphasis added)
Tim Keller (@timkellernyc), “Timothy J. Keller, husband, father . . . ,” Twitter, May 19, 2023, 11:17 a.m., https://x.com/
Keller, Walking with God, 52. Elsewhere he writes, “Everything in this life is going to be taken away from us, except one thing: God’s love, which can go into death with us and take us through it and into his arms. It’s the one thing you can’t lose. Without God’s love to embrace us, we will always feel radically insecure, and we ought to be. . . . It’s in death that God says, ‘If I’m not your security, then you’ve got no security, because I’m the only thing that can’t be taken away from you. I will hold you in my everlasting arms. Every other set of arms will fail you, but I will never fail you.’ ” Keller, On Death, 26, 27–28.
Keller, Walking with God, 299.

This article is adapted from Tim Keller on the Christian Life: The Transforming Power of the Gospel by Matt Smethurst.

Matt Smethurst is lead pastor of River City Baptist Church in Richmond, Virginia. He is the author of several books, including Tim Keller on the Christian Life; Before You Open Your Bible; Before You Share Your Faith; and Deacons. He also cohosts, with Ligon Duncan, The Everyday Pastor podcast from the Gospel Coalition. Matt and his wife, Maghan, have five children.

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