Audio Transcript

Each of us is a Bible interpreter. Each of us is trying to interpret and understand the meaning of God’s word accurately. So how do I know if my Bible interpretation is accurate or if it is false? It’s another great question from a listener to the podcast. This listener did not give us his or her name. But here is the email: “Pastor John, hello! Paul tells us ‘the law is good, if one uses it lawfully.’ That’s 1 Timothy 1:8. So the Bible is good if one uses the Bible biblically. So how can I know if I’m using my Bible biblically or using the law rightly?”

I would say that there are two ways to go about answering this question. One is you could gather together — and I will gather together — some biblical pointers that give guidance to how the law, or biblical teaching in general, is to be handled. That may be what they’re asking: “Show me some biblical pointers for how to handle the Bible or the law.”

Secondly, the other way to answer this question is to realize that there are people who insist that even the pointers that I give could be questioned, and then we’d have to deal with that problem. I could give, for example, five biblical pointers to how the Bible says we should handle the law. And a certain kind of person could say to me, “But how do I know that I’m reading those pointers correctly?” And I could give an explanation of the pointers and how they work. They could say, “But how do I know that I’m interpreting your explanation correctly?”

Then a Roman Catholic might chime in and say, “You can’t. You can’t be sure of any of those things, which is why Protestants are so divided. You should let the church, the Pope, ultimately decide what everything means and let him instruct you.” To which the person could consistently say, “But then how do I know when I’m reading what the Pope wrote in his encyclical that I’m interpreting the Pope correctly?” And so on, ad infinitum.

“There are spiritual and moral preconditions for a true handling of God’s word.”

There is a kind of person that is like that. You can see that those are two very different kinds of problems. The first person is simply asking, “Could you give me some biblical guidance for how to understand the law in the Bible and to help me know I’m interpreting it correctly?” The second person has a much deeper problem and is basically calling into question whether a human being can know anything. There are skeptics like that. They’re wired to be so suspicious and so skeptical about their own interpretations that they never come to a knowledge of the truth.

Handling the Law

Let me take these one at a time. Here’s the first one: What are some biblical pointers for how to handle the law — I’m thinking Mosaic law first and then Old Testament more generally — correctly?

1 Timothy 1:6–11

Let’s start with the context of the text they’re asking about, 1 Timothy 1:8, where it says this:

Certain persons, by swerving from [a pure heart and a good conscience and a sincere faith], have wandered away into vain discussion, desiring to be teachers of the law, without understanding either what they are saying or the things about which they make confident assertions. Now we know that the law is good, if one uses it lawfully, understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless . . . [to indict] whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine, in accordance with the gospel of the glory of the blessed God with which I have been entrusted. (1 Timothy 1:6–11)

Here are some pointers for how to handle the law in that context:

Don’t swerve from a pure heart, a good conscience, and a sincere faith because there are spiritual and moral preconditions for a true handling of God’s word.
The prohibitions of the law are not mainly for people whose hearts are right with God and are led by the Spirit under the law of love.
The law is mainly for the lawless who need to be shown that there’s an authority outside of them to which they will give an account.
A right use of the law accords with healthy doctrine, which, Paul says in 1 Timothy 1:11, is in accord “with the gospel of the glory of the blessed God.” Make the gospel of Christ crucified the touchstone for the right use of the law.

Romans 3:19–20

Here’s a second cluster of pointers from Romans 3:19–20. Paul says,

We know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For by works of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin.

Here we get pointers like these:

Though the law is given to Israel, it stopped the mouth of the whole world.
It will never be the instrument of justification. No one gets right with God by law-keeping.
Through the law comes the knowledge of sin. That is, the law confronts us with our sin. It’s not the solution to the sin problem. It points away from itself to Christ. If we read the law rightly, we will see that the law points away from the law to Christ.

Matthew’s Gospel

Here’s a third cluster of pointers from Jesus. He says, for example, in Matthew 5, that the law is misused by the Pharisees because they don’t take it deep enough. “The law says, ‘Don’t kill.’ ‘Don’t commit adultery.’ But I say to you — and I’m getting at the real purpose of the law — ‘Don’t get angry’ and ‘Don’t lust.’” There are clues for how you handle the law in Matthew 5 (see Matthew 5:17–48).

“If we read the law rightly, we will see that the law points away from the law to Christ.”

Or another example is when the Pharisees condemned Jesus and his disciples for eating with tax collectors and sinners (Matthew 9:10–13), and when they condemned them for plucking some grain on the Sabbath and eating it as they walked along (Matthew 12:1–8). In both these cases in Matthew, Jesus said that the problem is the Pharisees don’t know how to read; they don’t know how to read their Bibles. He quoted Hosea 6:6: “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.” Then he said, “If you knew what this means, you would not have condemned the guiltless. You wouldn’t have used the Old Testament that way. If you knew what Hosea 6:6 meant, you wouldn’t have used the Old Testament to condemn us.”

In other words, there are key interpretive passages in the Old Testament that give guidance for how to rightly handle the law. There are many, many more pointers in the Bible to the right handling of the law. Just one example would be the book of Hebrews. Oh my — almost every page of the book of Hebrews is written to help us understand the limits of the law and the right use of it.

But How Can We Know?

Let me close by saying a brief word about this other kind of person who responds to virtually every effort you make to explain the Bible or help them understand the Bible by saying, “But I can’t really know if I’m interpreting you or the Bible rightly. How can I know?”

Now, Jesus has something to say about that person and to that person. His claim was blunt and unsympathetic. He said, “You don’t live that way.” That was his answer to people like that. “You don’t live that way. Your life shows that you really do live on the basis of your confidence in your interpretation of things. Yes, it does. When you talk that way, you’re a hypocrite.”

Here’s where I’m getting that. Listen to Matthew 16:1–3: “The Pharisees and the Sadducees came, and to test him they asked him to show them a sign from heaven.” They needed more signs. “We can’t understand what you’re doing. We don’t know where your authority comes from. We don’t get it. We need signs.” Here’s what Jesus said: “He answered them, ‘When it is evening, you say, “It will be fair weather, for the sky is red.” And in the morning, “It will be stormy today, for the sky is red and menacing.”’” To which Jesus says, “You know how to interpret the appearance of the sky, but you cannot interpret the signs of the times.”

In other words, they were saying they could not know how to interpret Jesus and his words and ways. “It’s all so uncertain. Who can know? We need more signs, more explanation.” But when it comes to their livelihood, they trusted their powers of interpretation just fine. “Red sky in the morning, sailor’s warning. Red sky at night, sailors delight. We can tell the one from the other, and we’ll stake our lives on it. We’re not going fishing today — there’s going to be a storm.” They were hypocrites. They were just plain outright hypocrites.

So I would say this to the person who is claiming not to be able to know how to read anything with confidence: you are probably inconsistent, and you may be a hypocrite who is just using feigned helplessness to avoid the clarity and conviction of Scripture.

Sometimes, the solution to our spiritual struggles is less spiritual than we imagined.

Maybe you walk in a spiritual wilderness, afflicted by distressing doubts. Maybe a dull apathy settled upon you some time ago. Maybe you live in a land where joy feels far away.

You might imagine that the main solution to these spiritual struggles is, well, spiritual: hold more firmly to God’s promises; draw near to him more regularly; search out hidden sins. And you might be right. But maybe, just maybe, you need to hear counsel like John Newton’s (1725–1807):

Sometimes when nervous people come to me, distressed about their souls, and think that is their only complaint, I surprise them by asking if they have no friend in Cornwall, or in the north of Scotland, whom they could visit; for I thought a ride to the Land’s End, or John o’ Groat’s House, might do them more good than all the counsel I could give them. (Letters, 389)

Sometimes, our spiritual struggles come not because we have neglected God’s word but because we have neglected his world. We have walked through life wearing sunglasses and wondered at the darkness. We have lived with headphones on and questioned why we can’t hear.

We may indeed have spiritual issues to address. But our first solution may simply be this: open your eyes and ears and wonder at the world God made.

Where Wonder Dies

By wonder, I mean a wide-eyed awareness of God’s creation that leaves us hushed, self-forgetful, and brimming with joy. Such wonder quiets cares and awakens worship. It gilds ordinary moments and dignifies daily labors. It composes and calms, reminds and recalibrates, adds poetry to prose. Even a little wonder can do wonders for the soul.

But some of us rarely look through the window of wonder. We are too distracted by other attractions, even though they lend far less cheer to heart and mind. Perhaps two allure your attention.

The first is probably not surprising. On average, we Americans check our phones some two hundred times a day, or about once every five waking minutes. “With the smartphone,” Nicholas Carr writes, “the human race has succeeded in creating the most interesting thing in the world” (The Shallows, 233). But this “most interesting thing” has a way of rendering the real world uninteresting. Life looks drab in the smartphone’s glow.

You don’t need to be addicted to your phone, however, to lose your wonder. Another more surprising attraction draws and keeps many for far too long. Some have called it “the devilish onrush” of the modern world; others, “the cult of productivity and efficiency” (The Art of Noticing, xv). Many of us really like getting things done — and fast.

People made in the image of a creative God ought to value productivity. But “the cult of productivity” is something different. Those shaped by this cult don’t simply like getting things done; they dislike not getting things done. And so they have little patience for stillness and silence, meditation and marveling. Unproductive feels unbearable.

So then, the phone and the to-do list, entertainment and efficiency, digital bombardments and hustle-bustle busyness — often, these are the enemies that steal our wonder.

How Then Shall We See?

These enemies are also difficult to resist, even when you know what they take from you. The sight of a real mountain may seem dull compared to a digital mountain — or the mountain of work we’d like to get done. Reclaiming wonder takes effort. It takes a willingness to pin down our twitchy thumbs and endure the sight of unchecked boxes as we reorient our vision to “whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely” (Philippians 4:8).

I find help from two habits that draw from God’s creative pattern in Genesis 1:1–2:3: Daily look upon God’s world and call it good. Weekly rest in God’s world and be refreshed.

DAILY ATTENTIVENESS

Habit 1: At least once daily, attend — truly attend — to one of the wonders God has made.

This first habit borrows from Clyde Kilby’s “means to mental health,” where he gets more specific: “I shall open my eyes and ears. Once every day I shall simply stare at a tree, a flower, a cloud, or a person. I shall not then be concerned at all to ask what they are but simply be glad that they are.”

At least once a day, in other words, find something unentertaining and unproductive, some flower that unfolds its beauty only under the sun of patient attention. Press through the discomfort of undistracted inefficiency and slow down. Look. Listen. Notice. Consider something God created and “be glad” that he spoke it into being.

“Sometimes, the solution to our spiritual struggles is less spiritual than we imagined.”

As the biblical writers show, we do not lack wonders to choose from. The sun gives one reason for gladness (Psalm 19:1–6); insects give another (Proverbs 30:28). Gentle rains show one kind of beauty (Psalm 104:13); stormy winds show another (Psalm 148:8). We find unspeakable variety in God’s world — from sheep to sharks, earlobes to earthworms, tree rings to the rings around Jupiter — but they all share the glory of God’s original “good” (Genesis 1:10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31).

And if the objects of our wonder are many, so too are the means for observing them. The creativity of God invites creative exploration. Maybe journal daily just a line or two about something you observe. Or try your hand at some modest poetry. Or reclaim lull moments (like waiting or walking) for noticing. Or build a five-minute sanctuary in your afternoon where you simply sit, pray, and see.

Throughout Genesis 1, our God took daily pleasure in the world his words had made. So, why not adorn your own days with an answering “good”?

WEEKLY REFRESHMENT

Habit 2: Weekly, set apart extended time to get lost in the wonders of God’s world.

Daily attentiveness has a way of delighting us in the midst of our labors, sending us back to our screens and our tasks a little more free. But our souls cry out for something more than snatches of wonder. We want to hear more than a passing melody, want to see more than a corner of the canvas. We want to give our attention to the wonders of God’s world long enough to get lost in them.

Scripture’s celebrations of creation bear the marks not simply of attention but of extended attention. In Proverbs 30:24–28, the wise man’s appreciation of small creatures is exceedingly big. Our Lord Jesus showed a similarly patient pleasure in creation. He knew the ways of the wind and the signs of the skies (John 3:8; Matthew 16:2–3); he sat before wildflowers with enough awareness to see splendor greater than Solomon’s (Matthew 6:28–29). The wise care about wonder; they also know that wonder can take time.

Some of us feel wonder so rarely because we rarely (or never) walk through a whole day or even afternoon with the phone silent, calendar clear, and to-do list empty. We rarely let creation or those around us set the day’s agenda. And so the trails near home go unwalked, the best of books lie unread, quiet birdsong goes unheard, deliciously complex meals go unmade, and the images of God within our own home go unobserved, unmarveled.

Both in creation and among his old-covenant people, God set apart one day in seven for the rest that leaves room for wonder. Though Christians are not bound to keep the old-covenant Sabbath, God’s original six-and-one pattern still holds wisdom. But even if we choose a different interval, we need some kind of rhythm that refreshes the deepest parts of us.

Wonderers and Worshipers

Creation holds “untold resources for mental health and spiritual joy,” writes John Piper (When I Don’t Desire God, 197). But as he emphasizes, these “untold resources” do not belong to creation itself. They belong to the Creator. And so, we look to creation to see the Artist, not simply the art; we listen for the Author in every line we read.

In Psalm 148, the psalmist’s reflections follow a wonderful pattern: in meditating on sky, earth, sea, and man, he follows God’s creative work from day 4 to day 6 (Genesis 1:14–31). He puts his finger to paper and traces his Father’s lines, seeking to add his creaturely “good” and “very good” to God’s primal pleasure.

He is, in other words, not first a wonderer but a worshiper. Breathless, he beholds trees, clouds, cows, grass, storms, ships, laughs, stars, streams, and comes away saying, “His name alone is exalted” (Psalm 148:13). The countless wonders of the world bear one signature. God has written his name in everything good.

Maybe, then, the solution to your spiritual struggle is less spiritual than you thought. And maybe the God of Genesis 1 calls you to seek him not just through his word but through his world, daily and weekly rejoicing in him.

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.