Heaven Board #20

Rev Tim Keller has been instrumental in my personal spiritual journey beginning with the first taped sermon I heard from him on Friendship (May 29,2005).   Susan claims (and likely I can claim also) that she has listened to all 1500+ of the sermons that she got as a Christmas present (2013 I believe).  It was a very sad day  May 19, 2023 (we were volunterring at a J.H. Outback weekend) that we learned of his passing.  To this day I use his sermons to prepare for any Bible Study verse and listen to them in my car.  Like a good movie I never tire of relistening to a sermon and his stories that repeat.  

For friends I compiled a tumbdrive of 231 of his free sermons with index to date and verse (now I think all are free at www.gospelinlife.com/sermons/).  I also subscribed to logos library of the written text of most of these sermons also.

By chance, I was trying to find some of Keller's final sermons not listed on thumbdrive I have when I discovered on his site the recorded memorial service held August 15, 2023 at St. Patricks Cathedral. What a moving homily by Rev. Sam Allberry.  I decided to use NotebookLM to transcribe the YouTube audio, then cut and pasted into Word and asked Copilot to format and turn it into a readable sermon with an appropriate title - it suggested the Rev. Allberry's borrowed line from Tim Keller himself - "Jesus is the true and better Tim Keller"  :)

But what struck me most about this message was this statement:

 

 "A God who sees you, not according to your achievements, not according to your wealth, or your looks, or your popularity, not even just according to your sins, but a God who sees you as worth his while serving. Some of us here this afternoon will be unsure whether we believe in God. Some of us may be very sure we don’t believe in God. But I wonder if the God you don’t believe in is like this. And if God did exist, wouldn’t you want him to be just like this?  Jesus came to serve."

Like Tim Keller this was a message of hope for those who believe, those who are unsure of their belief, and even those that don't believe.  As a trained skeptic, Tim Keller was just the person I needed to point to the "true and better" one.