On Tuesday, February 7, Lebron Raymone James, Sr. broke Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s career points record — 38,387 points — and became the NBA’s all-time scoring leader.

Perhaps the defining image of the night was captured by Andrew D. Bernstein. Look closely, and you’ll notice the photo has something in common with so many iconic images of the last decade: behind the indelible moment in focus, there’s a towering wall of raised arms holding small, metallic rectangles. Nearly everyone in the frame is reaching, straining to grab their own picture. Why would that be?

Surely all 18,997 in attendance that night knew that this moment would be thoroughly captured from every conceivable angle, by a small army of professional photographers, wielding the best equipment available. So why would thousands of amateur photographers, with less sophisticated cameras, at far worse angles, risk missing the moment for an inferior photo?

Because, deep down, this historic moment was not first and foremost about Lebron James, or the Los Angeles Lakers, or professional basketball, or even history — it was really about me. It was about the Instagram post and a couple dozen likes. Many are not even watching the play they paid hundreds to witness; they’re looking at their phones.

“Sin has always taught us to put ourselves at the center of everything — even the gospel.”

The smartphone, of course, did not invent this pervasiveness of self-centeredness. It’s only given our personal Babel-building newer tools (and fed it plenty of apps). Sin has always taught us to put ourselves at the center of everything — even the gospel.

Unless We Start with God

We can trace this innate self-centeredness back to the first sin. When Satan surveyed Adam and Eve’s vulnerabilities in the garden, notice what hedges he attacks: “God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5). Why are you content to live in his world? Reject him, and all this could be yours. It could all be about you. Satan tries the same play against Jesus in the wilderness (Luke 4:5–7).

Even after Jesus comes and dies for self-exalting, God-belittling sins like ours, we’re still tempted to listen to his gospel and hear a story centered on us. But the gospel from beginning to end — from the garden, through the fall, beneath the cross, outside the tomb, and into glory — is meant to lift our eyes away from self to God. As John Piper warns,

Unless we begin with God in this way, when the gospel comes to us, we will inevitably put ourselves at the center of it. We will feel that our value rather than God’s value is the driving force in the gospel. We will trace the gospel back to God’s need for us instead of tracing it back to the sovereign grace that rescues sinners who need God. (The Pleasures of God, 8)

I remember when this dichotomy first leveled me — and then lifted, thrilled, and strengthened me. Of course I could love a God who bent the universe because he loved me. But could I love a God who loved me because he loved his own glory? Could I love a God who chose to love me, not because I could ever deserve such love, but to display his perfect patience and unrivaled mercy?

Slowly, I came to see that God’s love for me — and he really does love me — was even bigger, stronger, and sweeter than I realized precisely because it wasn’t all about me. I learned to put the phone back in my pocket and focus instead on enjoying him — and nowhere more than in each chapter of his glorious, grace-filled gospel.

Creation: For God

When you were woven together in your mother’s womb — arms, legs, intellect, personality — you were made by God, in the image of God, so that others would see you and worship God. Listen to how God himself describes what he has made:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:26–27)

In one sense, he made everything else — fish and birds and livestock and lady bugs — as one wild, enormous frame for the crown of creation, the ones that would be like him and make him visible, hearable, knowable in his world. That means we are not even the center of our own lives, much less the universe. We were made for God.

Fall: Against God

But we all rejected that God-centered purpose for our lives. We weren’t the images of his glory that we were meant to be. We sinned. As Romans 3:23 says, “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” Before sin says something about us and our guilt, it says something slanderous about God. It throws shade over his value.

Almost everyone alive can acknowledge that they have done, said, or thought things they shouldn’t have. Almost everyone has experienced guilt, shame, and regret. That’s often why the gospel gets the hearing it does. Far fewer, however, know that all of that guilt, shame, and regret is rooted in how they’ve treated God. After committing adultery and conspiring to kill the woman’s husband, King David says to God, “Against you, you only have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight” (Psalm 51:4). In one sense, all of our sin (and any given sin) is first and foremost against God.

This is the only reasonable explanation for hell. Eternal conscious punishment wouldn’t be just for anything less than sin against the infinitely valuable, the infinitely merciful, the infinitely good God.

Redemption: To God

We were made for God, and each rebelled against God, deserving the wrath of God — but God.

You were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked. . . . But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ — by grace you have been saved. (Ephesians 2:1–5)

Notice how little we contributed to our own resurrection. Yes, we were physically moving, breathing, talking, living before we found Christ, and yet we couldn’t offer God more than a dead man could. Spiritually, we were colorless, unmoving. But God — he stepped between the fallen image of God and the burning wrath of God and did what only God himself could do. He sent his Son to bleed and die in our place so that we might sit with him in his — “to the praise of his glorious grace” (Ephesians 1:6).

And nothing makes this grace sweeter and more glorious than that we get God. Jesus “suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God” (1 Peter 3:18). Forgiveness isn’t the final prize of this good news; neither is escape from hell. No, forgiveness means that souls made by God to know and enjoy God, who then rejected and insulted that God, still get to have God.

Commission: From God

When grace invades and brings life, one of the clearest evidences is that God has replaced self as the sun in the galaxy of our soul. Notice how we used to live before Christ: “He died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised” (2 Corinthians 5:15). This verse describes who we were by default — and by recreation. We’re born living for me, making all our decisions, big or small, based ultimately on what will serve, satisfy, and advance self. But then we’re raised to live for him. We spend our time and money differently. Our neighbors and coworkers watch and wonder why we live like we do.

This is true no matter how and where God has gifted us. “As each has received a gift, use it to serve one another, as good stewards of God’s varied grace: whoever speaks, as one who speaks oracles of God; whoever serves, as one who serves by the strength that God supplies — in order that in everything God may be glorified through Jesus Christ” (1 Peter 4:10–11). Gifts (and lives) stewarded well, whatever they are, inspire others to give greater attention and devotion to God. If you dig deep enough into the happiest, most fruitful, most fulfilling lives, the driving engine and center of gravity will be the grace and glory of God.

Consummation: With God

The God-centeredness of heaven was my first discovery on the way to seeing the God-centeredness of everything else. The life-shattering quote came from (God is the Gospel)[https://www.amazon.com/God-Gospel-Meditations-Gods-Himself/dp/1433520494/]:

Christ did not die to forgive sinners who go on treasuring anything above seeing and savoring God. And people who would be happy in heaven if Christ were not there, will not be there. The gospel is not a way to get people to heaven; it is a way to get people to God. (47)

“The only heaven to come, the one Jesus bought with his blood, is one orbiting around God.”

It would be hard to overstate how much these lines shook my still young faith — in the very best ways. I imagine it was like Jesus upending the tables in the temple. It was forceful and merciful. You will not make this house of worship about you. And to me, two thousand years later, you won’t turn heaven into a flea market for your hobbies and cravings. The only heaven to come, the one Jesus bought with his blood, is one orbiting around God.

This is the paradise God has prepared for those who love him: “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God” (Revelation 21:3). If you can imagine a world better than that one, if you think you would prefer an eternity built around you, you haven’t yet grasped what it would mean to live with this God.

Audio Transcript

Good Monday morning, everyone. Well, we are Christian Hedonists, and that’s something we have dedicated several episodes to explaining on the podcast. You could look at, for example, APJs 958, 1201, and 1281.

For those of you who want to teach this glorious truth, how do we take Christian Hedonism and make it our own? Or even more broadly asked, how do any of us take the key teachings of others and incorporate them into our ministry so that we’re not simply mimicking our teachers? That’s an important question faced by any budding Christian communicator, writer, teacher, or preacher. And it’s the question today in the inbox.

“Dear Tony and Pastor John, hello to you both! My name is Gabriel, an international student studying in Australia. I praise God for your ministry and for the realities you have pointed to in the Bible, especially in opening my eyes to the connection between our joy and God’s sovereign glory. My question is this: How do I make Christian Hedonism my own, especially when it comes to teaching? I’m young, but I hope to teach one day, maybe even preach the word. But often I find that I’m checking myself to see if I’m simply copying what you said. I see that the realities are there in the text and the Bible, but your ministry is so thorough and wholesome I almost feel I can’t say anything without echoing you. Perhaps I think incorrectly. How can we carry on encouraging, teaching, preaching this reality in our own voice? I would be honored to hear your thoughts.”

Gabriel’s question touches on a tension that every teacher feels when he has found something true and precious in God’s word, and desires that it be seen and loved by others, and that those others, generation after generation, preserve and pass on the truth and the preciousness of the reality that he has seen.

Tension of Treasured Truth

And the tension is this: On the one hand, we want the very thing we have seen in Scripture to be preserved and not distorted or corrupted or lost. And on the other hand, we know that if it is to be preserved for generations, the people that preserve it must have a grasp of it that is deeper than simply imitating the words of those who taught them the reality, showed them the reality. So, there’s a tension between holding fast to what is fixed and having freedom to give fresh and vital expression and application to that fixed reality.

So Gabriel has discovered the truth and the beauty of what we call Christian Hedonism — namely, the thought and the life that flow from the truth that God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him. And as he grows in his understanding and seeks to share with others what he’s seen, he finds himself sounding like his teacher, like me in particular. And he wonders if there are steps he can take so that he isn’t what I would call — he didn’t use this language, this is my language — a secondhander, a mimic. We don’t want him to be that; he doesn’t want to be that.

Moving from Imitation to Maturity

Now, what would I point out to Gabriel first if he’s going to be helped beyond being a secondhander? What I would point out to Gabriel first is that he’s probably at a particular point in an inevitable process that moves from discovery, through imitation, through the maturity of creative expression, and onto more and more discovery, and so on.

So his question is really, I think, “How can I move along in a natural process that I’m in?” Let me use an analogy. Compare the mystery and the wonder of how little tiny children learn language. The first thing they do is listen, look, and feel; listen, look, and feel. So you’ve got this two-week-old baby — listen, look, feel, with some very uncreative crying to express inarticulate desires.

And then one day they echo back, “Mama.” “Dada.” You just burst with the thrill that they made the connection between the reality of a person and a word coming out of their mouth: “Mama.” “Dada.” And all of it right now is simply imitation, echoing, copying — but oh, how real it is, right? It’s real. You don’t say, “Oh, he’s just copying me.” This is an awesome point in his development.

And then, within a year or so, an absolutely astonishing thing happens. All of the reality that this baby has been processing quietly (eyes, ears, touch) suddenly comes together, miraculously it seems, in his mind and out comes a sentence — two words, three words — that the baby put together out of his own little head, imitating nobody. Nobody had just spoken that sentence to him. It emerged out of his own mind. Absolutely amazing. And the rest of their lives, they’ll be turning observed and desired reality into sentences, some of which have never been spoken in the history of the world. Amazing.

1. Imitate for a season.

Now that pattern of listening, then echoing, and then creating and ongoing discovery is the way we learn for the rest of our lives. So, my first piece of advice for Gabriel is this: don’t begrudge a season of discovery and imitation. When someone helps you see a reality that you hadn’t seen before, it is inevitable that you will describe the reality in the words of the one who helped you see it. That’s normal; it’s good. But you are right to be concerned that you should not remain in this early phase of understanding and expression. So how do you move on to find your own voice and not lose the reality?

2. Press through words to experience.

So my second piece of advice is that you practice pressing through language to reality, that you never settle for mere words — not my words, not even Bible words. When the Bible speaks, uses words, you press into those words, and through those words, to the reality — the reality of love, the reality of joy, the reality of faith, the reality of Christ, the reality of God. These are not mere words. This is the rock-bottom necessity of not remaining a child or a secondhander.

“Before you can find your authentic voice, you must have an authentic experience.”

Have you tasted the reality expressed in the words of your teacher or the Scriptures? That’s what everyone should ask. Have I tasted the reality, or is it just words? Before you can find your authentic voice, you must have an authentic experience of what you are trying to give voice to. This is a matter of earnest prayer, earnest study. O Lord, “open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law” (Psalm 119:18).

3. Observe the truth from different angles.

The third piece of advice I would give is that you not only press through your teacher’s words to that reality, but that you be constantly on the lookout in Scripture for more reality — realities that when they are brought together with the reality of Christian Hedonism will cause you to see it in fresh light, and the diamond will reveal more of its facets than you knew existed, perhaps even more than your teacher has ever seen.

4. Find fresh language for old reality.

The fourth piece of advice I would give is that you make a studied effort to find fresh, faithful, compelling, culturally appropriate language to describe the reality that you have come to love. This studied effort at creative expression will almost certainly go off the rails if the biblical reality is not clearly seen and firmly rooted in Scripture, and gladly embraced with your heart and your mind. Without this, the effort at creativity will almost certainly degenerate into creating new reality, rather than new expressions of old, unchanging reality.

5. Don’t despise tried-and-true expressions.

The fifth piece of advice I would give is that none of us be put off by old, tried-and-true expressions of reality. That is, we shouldn’t feel the need to always be saying things in new ways, as if old ways are inevitably inadequate. Some of the language describing a wonderful reality is so rooted in Scripture, and so well-suited to the reality, and so compelling in its application that it shouldn’t be left behind just because it’s been around for a long time.

“God gave us the language of Christian Hedonism, and we don’t need to be ashamed of repeating his old, happy language.”

“Delight yourself in the Lord” has been around for three thousand years (Psalm 37:4). “Satisfy me in the morning with your steadfast love” has been around for three thousand years (Psalm 90:14). “We have this treasure,” treasure in earthen vessels, has been around for two thousand years (2 Corinthians 4:7). “Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice” has been around two thousand years (Philippians 4:4). “In your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore” — that’s been around for three thousand years (Psalm 16:11). These aren’t John Piper’s words. God gave us the language of Christian Hedonism, and we don’t need to be ashamed of repeating his old, happy language.

6. Read widely.

And the last thing I would say is that you read widely concerning the things you care about. It is good to find a teacher who shows you things you’ve never seen. It is also good to listen to a half a dozen other teachers who can help you see the same thing from different angles, or other things that put the thing you love in an even brighter perspective.

No Longer a Secondhander

And I’ll just end by saying that in the mid-to-late ’70s, anybody who listened to or looked at the twentysomething John Piper, and also knew his teacher, Dan Fuller — they laughed. They laughed because my mannerisms, my tones of voice, my peculiar expressions, they all echoed my most influential teacher. I didn’t begrudge that. Frankly, I considered it a badge. I liked it. I was very happy to be the inadvertent imitator of the man who showed me so much glory. But I grew out of that, and there came a day when nobody saw me as an imitator anymore.

Tim Keller didn’t write a book on prayer because he felt like an expert. By his own admission, he embarked on his yearslong study out of a sense of deficiency and necessity. He opens the first chapter by saying,

In the second half of my adult life, I discovered prayer. . . . It became clear to me that I was barely scratching the surface of what the Bible commanded and promised regarding prayer. (9)

When I first read those lines as a recent seminary graduate, I could hardly believe them. Tim Keller, a spiritual giant, preaching to thousands, publishing books, and yet barely scratching the surface?

He ties his prayer-life-changing discovery to his diagnosis of thyroid cancer in 2002. When the news came, he was in his early fifties and nearly thirty years into pastoral ministry. He had been pastoring Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City for more than a decade. And then cancer did what adversity often does: it sparked something of a revival in his heart, an awakened sense of both his spiritual neediness and the powerful privilege we enjoy on our knees.

His prayer crisis sent him on a quest deep below the surface to experience the awe and intimacy that God promises to those who pray. Twelve years later, he sketched out a map, in fifteen chapters, of all he’d tasted and seen for those who want to go deeper themselves.

Emboldening Humility

Part of the power of the book is in its endearing humility. At one level, it really is an extended confession of how (unconsciously) inadequate his prayer life had once been. In an interview after the book released, he shared,

My wife and I would never want to go back to the kind of prayer life or spiritual life we had before the cancer. I really thought that I had a good prayer life. And when I broke through into another dimension, I realized that, frankly, my prayer life wasn’t very good.

His own personal humbling, and the subsequent years of concerted effort to grow, make the book both convicting and emboldening. Convicting, because we may find ourselves receiving the same diagnosis he received: frankly, our prayer lives aren’t very good. Emboldening, though, because he makes a vibrant prayer life feel wonderfully possible again. He’s relentlessly realistic about the difficulties of genuine prayer, but he also models grace-filled, joy-hungry perseverance in prayer.

“I can think of nothing great that is also easy,” he writes. “Prayer must be, then, one of the hardest things in the world” (24). He’s after a deeper experience in prayer that he himself had neglected and forfeited over many years. In the first pages, he tells us what he wants the reader to feel when we pray:

This book will show that prayer is both conversation and encounter with God. . . . We must know the awe of praising his glory, the intimacy of finding his grace, and the struggle of asking his help, all of which can lead us to know the spiritual reality of his presence. Prayer, then, is both awe and intimacy, struggle and reality. (5)

This quest sent him deep into church history, where he knelt beside spiritual forefathers like Augustine, Luther, and Calvin (along with Owen, Edwards, Lewis, Lloyd-Jones, Packer, and more). He uncovers a letter Augustine wrote to a woman who feared she was failing in prayer. He comes alongside Luther as he counsels a barber broken by sin and tragedy. He sits in on Calvin’s “master class” on his five rules for prayer. He listens to the similar and distinct ways all three pastors prayed the Lord’s Prayer. All of this makes the book a treasury of help from ancient prayer closets.

Praying Well Begins with Listening

For Keller, perhaps the single most important key to prayer is its marriage to the word of God. So many of the dangers of prayer are curbed (or eliminated altogether), and so many of the rewards are unlocked and unleashed, when we pray over and through and from what God has said.

Your prayer must be firmly connected to and grounded in your reading of the Word. This wedding of Bible and prayer anchors your life down in the real God. (56)

Without immersion in God’s words, our prayers may not be merely limited and shallow but also untethered from reality. (62)

Keller doesn’t set the Bible aside to try and have a better prayer life, as if an overemphasis on Scripture somehow undermines our prayers. No, the greater danger is that we can actually lose the true God in our rhythms of prayer. “If left to themselves our hearts will tend to create a God who doesn’t exist,” he warns. “Without prayer that answers the God of the Bible, we will only be talking to ourselves” (62).

After establishing the importance of Scripture early in the book, he circles back and does a whole chapter on how the practice of meditation serves prayer, letting John Owen teach us how to work the truth out with our minds and then work it in to our hearts.

Prayer Closets for Beginners

Keller was a theologian and an apologist, but he was just as much a pastor. And because he was a pastor of people who really struggled to pray, he wasn’t content to merely share ideas and principles. He wanted to offer real practical help on the how.

I wrote this book because, though many great books on prayer have been written, most either go into the theology of prayer, or they go into the practice of prayer, or they troubleshoot. I didn’t have one book I could give people that basically covered all the bases: a biblical view of prayer, the theology of prayer, and some methods of prayer. I didn’t have a good first book to give somebody. (“Prayers That Don’t Work”)

So, after developing a theology of prayer in Scripture and exploring what history teaches us about prayer, he offers ways to actually practice and experience what he’s describing.

For instance, he devotes a chapter to praying the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9–13). That may sound rather straightforward and elementary at first (you may have started praying that prayer even before you were in first grade), but Keller follows Luther in learning to use the prayer less for its exact words and more as a pattern to follow and expand in our own words (93–94). He found that this practice limits the distracting thoughts that inevitably come when we pray. It also teaches us to reach beyond the immediate needs or burdens that so often dictate where we focus in prayer.

Later in the book, he shares how regularly praying the Psalms transforms a prayer life.

Immersing ourselves in the Psalms and turning them into prayers teaches our hearts the “grammar” of prayer and gives us the most formative instruction in how to pray in accord with God’s character and will. (255)

He shares that he would read psalms in the morning and evening and then pray, sometimes praying the actual words of the psalm and other times praying in his own words. Following the The Book of Common Prayer schedule, he would work through all 150 psalms each month. Over time, his prayers (and soul) were slowly and deeply conformed to “the Bible’s prayer book.”

Along with the Lord’s Prayer and the Psalms, he collects and shares a number of other extremely practical paradigms and guides for daily prayer, ranging from short and simple models to longer and more involved ones.

Entering the Happiness of God

Having read a number of Keller’s books, perhaps the most surprising character in this particular book was joy. In fact, rereading the book made me wonder if his battle with cancer freshly awakened him not only to prayer, but also to the prominent place of happiness in the Christian life. Very early, he charts the course:

The Westminster Shorter Catechism tells us that our purpose is to “glorify God and enjoy him forever.” In this famous sentence we see reflected both kingdom-prayer and communion-prayer. Those two things — glorifying God and enjoying God — do not always coincide in this life, but in the end they must be the same thing. We may pray for the coming of God’s kingdom, but if we don’t enjoy God supremely with all our being, we are not truly honoring him as Lord. (4)

For as sweet as the camaraderie was between Tim Keller and John Piper over the years, I don’t think I’ve ever heard them sing with such harmony. According to Keller, the prayers “Hallowed be your name” and “O God, my soul thirsts for you” are not unrelated or at odds, but at their deepest root, the same.

And why would our enjoying God glorify him? Because he is Happiness — Father, Son, and Spirit infinitely and eternally delighting in one another. “We can see why a triune God would call us to converse with him, to know and relate to him. It is because he wants to share the joy he has. Prayer is our way of entering into the happiness of God himself” (68). From his knees, Keller found the only thing big enough, full enough, and intense enough to satisfy the human soul: joy in the happy God.

And now that joy is full. On May 19, 2023, Tim Keller went from prayer to sight. In the sovereign hands of a loving Father, cancer had given him prayer, and now cancer has given him Christ. He has truly entered the happiness of God. Oh, to read a sixteenth chapter from heaven.