Christ, Our Life - Colossians 3:1-14

By Dr. Timothy Keller

Colossians 3: 1-14

Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.2Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. 3For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.

Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature: sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry.Because of these, the wrath of God is coming. You used to walk in these ways, in the life you once lived. 8But now you must also rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips. 9Do not lie to each other, since you have taken off your old self with its practices and have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge in the image of its Creator. 11Here there is no Gentile or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all.

12 Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.13Bear with each other and forgive one another if any of you has a grievance against someone. Forgive as the Lord forgave you. 14And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.(

      In the previous chapter, the subject was the Gospel and the freeness of God’s love – it’s absolutely free. In fact, we saw that if we try to earn or deserve the favor of God it makes you a Pharisee…makes you a religious person…it makes you a moralistic person…it makes you a big part of what’s wrong with the world. We saw that moralistic people do good…they live good lives, but they do it out of fear, out of pride, and out of a need for control. They do it out of fear of rejection…they do it out of pride of being better than others…they do it in order to control God. But a lot of people when they hear that, the idea that God’s love is absolutely free, it’s unconditional…they say, “well o.k., if I believed that it wouldn’t change the way I live.” If I believed that God just loved me that freely, that unconditionally, then I could live any way I wanted.” This passage shows us that this is not true.

      When you go to the end of the passage, where it says there is no Greek or Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave, free…when it says you’re chosen (verse 12)and by the way, to be chosen does not mean to be “choice…to be chosen simply means that God came after you., He sought you, and it doesn’t matter whether you’ve followed the Bible…followed the law…what it’s really saying, of course, is God’s love is free, and yet, the whole passage is about the fact that your life changes…if you’re a Christian, your life changes…the Gospel changes your life, not just in spite of the freeness of God, but because of it. That’s the message here. If you say that you believe the Gospel and your life does not change in a way that other people can see, then you have not really grasped it. The Gospel brings about radical change in a life. Now, how does it do that?

      In this passage we see (1) the inevitability of radical change, (2) the Gospel method for radical change, and (3) why it works.

The Inevitability of Radical Change

      We should be struck by verses 9 and 10…Paul says “you have put off the old self and you’ve put on the new self.” What’s intriguing about that is the radical nature of the language. Everybody makes changes. But what Paul is saying is, IF you put off certain beliefs…you put

off certain behavior…you put off certain practices, you put on other ones,…and when you’ve made such a shift in your beliefs….your beliefs have changed so much…your view of things have changed so much…your practices have changed so much, then you could say you’re actually a new person.

      Paul deliberately, by saying “you have put off the old self and you’ve put on the new self,” is therein evoking the language of identity, and he is saying that the change the Gospel brings is so radical that you really become another person. You’ve been converted. You don’t just change, you get converted. Now, right away, a lot of people say: “Oh, there you go, you Christians want to convert everyone. Just let everyone be.” I would like to propose to you, that whoever you are, you’re going to be converted…by somebody or something. You’re not just going to go on; you’re going to be converted. What do I mean?

      An article in New York Times Magazine illustrates this point.[xvi] The author, Mark Lilla, a professor at the University of Chicago… a major academic and writer…and an authority in the relationship of religion and society. What’s interesting about the article is that he tells about how for several years as a teenager, and young adult, that he considered himself to be a born-again Christian…but then it “kinda’ went away.” Now he sees himself as a secular person. Yep, from his perspective, conversion didn’t work. Yet, get this, at the end of the article, he says something that very clearly shows he has had a lasting conversion. At the end of the article he tells about the fact that because he’s a writer about religion and society, this past summer he went to the Billy Graham Crusade in Queens, and afterwards he met a young man from Poland, a student at the Wharton Business School, University of Pennsylvania. This young man was in New York City to do a summer internship at a Wall Street firm…from this elite school, a bright young man and all that, and to Lilla’s shock, the young man recounted that what Billy Graham had said made sense and he’d gone forward and given his life to Christ. This just absolutely shocked the Lilla. And, this is what he said:

I found it hard to conceal my bafflement, since Billy had not said much at all. You must be born again - that was it. I felt a professorial lecture welling up in my throat about the history and psychology of religion. I wanted to expose him to the pastiche of the Biblical text, the syncretic nature of Christian doctrine, the church's ambiguous role as incubator and stifler of human knowledge, the theological idiosyncrasy of American evangelicalism. I wanted to warn him against the anti-intellectualism of American religion today and the political abuses to which it is subject. I wanted to cast doubt on the step he was about to take, to help him see there are other ways to live, other ways to seek knowledge, love, perhaps even self-transformation. I wanted to convince him that his dignity depended on maintaining a free, skeptical attitude toward doctrine. I wanted to save him.
I thought I was out of that business, but maybe not. It took years to acquire the education I missed as a young man, an education not only in books, (and here, Lilla is so self-knowing) but in a certain comportment toward myself and the world around me.Doubt, like faith, has to be learned. It’s a skill. But the curious thing about skepticism is that its adherents, ancient and modern, have so often been proselytizers. Why do they care? Skepticism offers no good answer to that question…and I don’t have one myself.

      That’s quite right and quite brilliant. Don’t you see what he just said…very, very directly. What he said was his doubts about Christianity were really an alternate set of beliefs…about reality, about what it meant to be a dignified person, an authentic person…BUT…none of that could be proven. It’s all a leap of faith. It’s just a leap of faith to something else. And he was sure that the way in which he believed authentic personhood was realized (his leap of faith)…was to become completely detached…and skeptical against any doctrine. He was a strong proponent of “skepticism toward any doctrine…’that’s what makes you a wise person…sophisticated and authentic…AND, if more people were like that, the world would be a better place.’” He suddenly realized that he was no different. He had a view of reality that had converted him. It had given him an identity and that made him want to save others from their wrong views of reality. Everybody has got one. Notice what he said: “his dignity depended on maintaining a free skeptical attitude toward all doctrine.” Except that one…his. You will be converted by something.

Duke University Chaplain William Willimon comments:

The dominant culture in which we live is that of expressive individualism…since the Enlightenment…People like to say, “Well, what the church says might be ok for some, but I think you have to determine right and wrong for yourself.” But they’re not thinking for themselves. They’re doing exactly what the culture tells them. In reality they’re espousing the very way of knowing that’s been imposed on them by their culture…and a very white, Western, individualistic one it is. The question, “Do you think we ought to convert people to Christ?’ assumes there are already untouched, unformed people out there and there are pushy Christians trying to convert them to their way of thinking. No, everyone has been deeply formed into some point of view that is not innate. The real question you must face is “which externally imposed formation will have its way with me?

      You are going to be converted by something. Some comprehensive view of reality will form your very identity. And, whatever that view of reality is, it’s not provable. It’s a leap of faith. How inane to think Christians are wrong to try to convert people. Everybody’s being converted. You’re going to be converted. You’re going to have your life radically changed. You’re going to have a new self. And it’s going to be in response to something that comes into your life. Which is it going to be, though?

The Gospel Method of Radical Change

      How could the Gospel bring such a radical change that it could be said that you become essentially a new self? I would propose that the answer can be found by moving up in the passage, rather than down in the passage… moving from the end to the beginning… …you can see it in the first two paragraphs.

 “Put to death, therefore, whatever belongs to your earthly nature” (v. 5)...and “Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things” (verse 2). There are two things which you do. Two things through the Gospel…that radically change you.

Looking at the first one: Put to death what belongs to your earthly nature, or what is earthly in you. What does that mean? Let’s call these two things (vs. 5 and vs. 2) digging down and looking up.

First of all, digging down. Now there is a long list of things (character traits) in this paragraph that would be better not to have: anger, malice, slander, bitterness, etc. You say, “oh yeah, I’d love to be free from these things,”…yet you find they keep coming back…over and over…you’re just not able to will them away. The key to removing those things from your life is found in two important words smack in the middle of this text, in fact of the whole passage: (1) evil desires and (2) second, idolatry.

Evil desires. Now this is crucial for us…as over the years people’s lives have been radically changed as they’ve come to understand the meaning of evil desires, which is our translation of a single Greek word. This word…evil desires, is an effort on the part of the translators to get across the word epithumia which literally means an epi-desire or an overdesire…an inordinate desire…a magnified desire…an excessive desire. And when you and I see this word, (actually we see two…evil and desire…) it’s almost always it’s translated evil desire or sinful desire, or something like that…it’s very hard to translate.

In the English, and easy way to be read, since it pops up throughout the New Testament whenever the author is talking about character change, it’s in there, but seldom do we see how key it is because of the translation issue. When you think of the words evil desires…what do you think that means? You think it means desiring something evil. Wrong! In other words, when you see the words “evil desires” you think, ‘ok, there’s a forbidden list here…things I’m not supposed to do…and an evil desire is to desire one of those evil things.’ But we have a problem here…because in the previous chapter we saw that Pharisees never do anything on the forbidden list, but they are lost. Not only are they lost, but they are very much part of what’s wrong in the world. Not only that, they’re the ones that killed Jesus, not the ones that

were doing the stuff on the forbidden list.

      So we suddenly realize, “ok, I get it…the essence of what’s wrong with me is that I desire something that is evil.” But that’s not what epithumia is. Epithumia is not so much talking about ordinary desire for something that’s bad…it’s an over, inordinate, or excessive desire for something that is good. That is the essence of what’s wrong with us. And right away you say, “now wait a minute, what’s that mean? It actually means addiction, in a sense. And you say “wait a minute, why? What is an overdesire? Why is that the problem?’ Well, that leads us to our second word, idolatry.

      Idolatry. When you read this passage in Colossians, the word idolatry is only related structurally to the word greed, which means an idolatry of money. However, if you go to the parallel passage in Ephesians 5[4], a very similar passage, it’s very clear that the wordepithumia is attached to everything. What the author, Paul, is saying there is that all your bitterness, all your impurity, all of your malice, all of your problems, everything that troubles you, is a result of idolatry. And what is idolatry? It’s taking a good thing and making it an ultimate thing. This is how your heart works psycho-dynamically according to the Bible unless God changes it. In Exodus 20, God says, “I am the Lord your God…You shall have no other gods before me.”

      There are only two options: (a) you either worship the uncreated true God, or (b) you will worship some other created thing as a false god. There is no third alternative. You’re either going to worship God, or you’re going to worship something else. But it’s not possible for your heart to not adore something, not to build its identity on something…not to build its significance on something. Not to make something your life. How do you know what those things are? This passage is telling you…the Bible tells you, that you will never understand yourself, you’ll never understand your emotions, you’ll never be able to make any permanent changes…it will only be superficial and temporary.Unless you understand this!

      You say, “well, how do I know what those good things are that I’ve turned into ultimate things…those things that I’ve turned into saviors…those things that I’ve turned into my meaning…my hope…little gods as it were…how do I know what they are?” Well, the answer lies in a series of questions which you must ask yourself: what ‘thing’ or ‘things,’ if you lost it/them or they failed you…(you could be talking about your financial status, you could be talking about a personal relationship, you could be talking about your family, you could be talking about professional identity…and infinite number of things…human approval or power and influence…or control of your environment…it could be anything), what things if you lost it or them…if that happened you wouldn’t even want to live. What are those things? Every one has something!

      Listen; there are very religious people who say, “I believe in God.” There are very Christian people who say: “I’ve accepted Jesus as Savior. I don’t have any idols in my life.” OH YES YOU DO!! Something is your functional savior…if it’s not Him. There is something you’re looking to functionally…that’s how you know (if you have it) you’re ok! It gives you meaning, it gives you security, and it gives you hope. That’s how you feel good about yourself…that’s how you feel like you have real meaning…security…hope for the future. So religious people don’t think they’ve got them (idols) but they do…and irreligious people say, “oh, I’m a secular person…I don’t worship.” YES YOU DO!! Religious people say, “God is my Savior.” But, He’s not! Irreligious people say, “I don’t worship anything.” Yes you do! This is true of everybody…everybody is like this. And here’s how you know what those idols are.

v            First, you know that if you lose IT, you wouldn’t want to live. It’s your life. You’ve made it your life.
v             Second, follow the inordinate desires, the epithumias back to their source.

      If a good thing in your life is jeopardized, you worry. If an ultimate thing is jeopardized, you are paralyzed and fall apart. If a good thing in your life is blocked by somebody, you get mad at the person or situation…you get angry. But if an ultimate thing is blocked by somebody, you get bitter. Rage! If a good thing in your life is lost, you’re very sad. But if it’s an ultimate thing, you want to throw yourself

off a bridge. Do you understand your emotions? Do you see why certain things just absolutely cast you down? Do you see why your emotions are out of control…do you understand why you find yourself doing certain kinds of things…things you never thought you could do? It’s because these things drive you.

      When you give your heart to a functional savior…a functional lord…a functional god… see, religious people or Christians say, “oh, no no no, Jesus is my Savior” and irreligious people say, “oh, no no no, I’m not worshiping anything,” but everybody is doing it. Until you understand this…until you dig down deep you cannot change, you cannot understand yourself. And whatever you’ve given your heart to, like this, it converts you. It gives you your identity. It gives you a sense of worth. And as a result it drives you and you’ll spend all your life never getting enough of “it.” Always being desperately afraid…always being thrown about by your inordinate desires. Have you dug down to see what those things are? Until you do that, really, you will have all these out of control emotions, passions, lusts, and problems…all these addictions…all these difficulties. So, you see…you must dig down and figure out who you really are! See what’s “down there.” What’s driving you?

      Now, the second thing the Gospel calls you to do is looking up. The Gospel calls you to do this because the Gospel is not a list of rules to obey…dos and don’ts. It’s about making God your Savior and Lord through Jesus Christ. As soon as you see that as the Gospel, it throws everything in your life into a new relief…a new light. And that’s what we’re looking for. Now what do you do? When you begin to realize what’s there…in your heart…and what’s driving you…and what’s controlling you…what do you do?

      You have to believe and have your heart riveted by the things in verses 1-4: Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.2Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. 3For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God. When Christ, who is your life, appears, then you also will appear with him in glory.” Ok, now what does this mean?

      First of all, the idols of the heart cannot simply be removed…they can only be replaced. They can’t be removed, they can only be replaced. I’ve seen many people over the years, very often through counseling, or just through the hard knocks of life, finally start to realize that they were slaves to what their parents had said. They’re slaves to their parental expectations. Or they’re slaves to people’s approval. Or they’re slaves to their need to control the environment. They suddenly realize that they are slaves to something…and they suddenly say, in effect, that they can, by a simple act of the will, no longer be enslaved… “I am not going to be controlled by these things.” That will never work. Not for very long it won’t.

Thomas Chalmers, the famous Scottish Presbyterian minister put it this way:

There is not one personal transformation in which the heart is left without an object of ultimate beauty and joy. The heart’s desire for one particular object can be conquered… but its desire to have some object is unconquerable. The only way to dispossess the heart of an old affection is by the expulsive power of a new one.[xvii]

      What we see here then…it says in verse 2…is ‘to set your mind on something,’…but verse 1 says you have to set your heart on something. Something you grasp with the mind has to rivet and capture your heart. That is the only thing that is going to save you and change you and move you away from the old self, which is basically driven by these idols, to a new self. What is that? The passage says that “you diedand then it says “you have been raised.” Do you see how radical this is? Paul is writing to people who are obviously alive, and he says, “you died.” “You died…”what’s that supposed to mean? You were raised…with Christ, who is seated at the right hand of God. Is that just metaphor? No…it’s not just metaphor. And here is what this is saying…first there’s a truth that you set your mind on, and then it’s that truth you have to bring into your heart…and that’s what actually changes your character.

What is the truth you are supposed to know with the mind? We’re being told here that when you become a Christian…when you say “I believe in you Lord Jesus”…what makes you a Christian is not that you are now living in a certain way (though of course we see change comes)…but what makes you a Christian is that you are now in Christ. It means that God sees you as so one with Him (that is Christ) that He looks at you as if you had died and been raised with Christ, because you have, in a sense. When it says you died with Christ…it means this: God now sees you as free from anything you’ve done wrong, as if you had died on the Cross and paid. It’s already paid…no condemnation. And what does “raised” mean? To be raised, at the right hand…Jesus is sitting at the right hand of God…is a metaphor, of course, but it’s getting at something incredible. Think of what happened…when a King would send his son out into a dangerous mission, and the son would come back triumphant. He’d been noble, he’d been brave, he’d been loving, he’d been sacrificial, he’d been wise…so when the son comes back, the King’s heart bursts with love and delight to see his son, so he puts him at his right hand…the place of honor. The highest, the greatest honor you could give a human being in that kingdom. Jesus has this place of honor, at the right hand of the Father…and we know about all the things Jesus has done…but it says “you’re raised with Him…you’re seated with Him.” What that means is…that if you give yourself to Jesus Christ, God then delights in you as if you had done everything Jesus had done. God delights in you as much in you as He does in His own Son. If you say, “that’s the first time I’ve ever heard that,” OK! OK! But you’ve gotta start here.

      Unless…unless you know these things…the way peoples’ approval…the way family relationships…the way parental expectations…the way the world’s emphasis on money and power and sexual beauty…those things…you’re going to go look into those things, because you’ve got to get a sense of self…you’ve got to get a sense of worth…only if you know this can you begin to be free from those things. Those things that drive you with anxiety…that drive you with addictions…that DRIVE you. The only way is to first know that…. Do you believe that? That’s the Gospel. The Gospel is not that we give God a good record and God blesses us, but rather that God, through Jesus Christ, gives us a perfect record and delights in us in Christ, and then we live for Him out of the freeness of that acceptance…that’s the Gospel[5].

The New Identity

Then, you must set your heart on that. What does that mean? Let me give you the perfect example…the best I know of. Many, many years ago, there was a woman who lived…practically in a little trailer, right up the road from the little church in Virginia where I started my pastoral ministry. She came to the church for a while, and then moved away. She had become a Christian recently, came to my church…and she was going to a counselor because she’d had a very hard life. I remember very clearly that she certainly looked awful because she had been beaten over and over again, by one man after another man over the years. She had been in one abusive relationship after another. She showed the scars. But, she’d become a Christian, she was coming to church, she was going to a counselor, and I would visit her like the “good little pastor boy” I was at the time…25 or 26 years old….knowing almost nothing about how people’s hearts worked. And even though she wasn’t a very educated woman…what I’m going to read you here is a transcript of what I remember her saying…I wrote these things down because they were so weird and interesting and amazing to me at the time. But here’s the sort of things she said as she was trying to tell me how Christ had turned her life around…and it was quite amazing. She said this, and again, I’m putting it in basically my own words…but these are all her thoughts:

I’m going to my counselor and much of what she has said is right. My counselor said I built my very significance and acceptability and identity on men. That’s why I’ve been defenseless with them…I’ve simply needed them too much. All of that is right and helpful. However, my counselor doesn’t have a very good solution for me. My counselor says what I should do instead is to get myself a great career. Get an education. Have a successful career. Well, my counselor means well and of course I absolutely do need to get some training and get myself a job…and career…but what she’s saying, is I should do that so I will also feel better about myself, by doing that. But, that would mean I would be switching from one kind of idol to another.

Now, I’d never thought about this…in my life…so I said, “what are you talking about?” to which she replied:

For many years, my heart has been looking at men and saying unless I’m successful at love I’m nothing. But the therapist wants me to look at my career and say unless I’m a successful independent business woman who’s in control of my own life, I am nothing. I don’t want to be enslaved to my work as I was to men. I don’t want to be as enslaved to my independence as I was to my dependence. I’m actually being asked to exchange a typical female idol for a typical male idol…and I don’t want either.

You see the therapist knew how to help her dig down into seeing what her idols were, but had no way of giving her anything but an alternate idol. And so I said “what are you doing? I mean, how are you doing?” And she actually quoted Colossians 3…when Christ who is your life appears, you will be glorified. She said (and it was actually very practical):

 ..when I go to church…when I’m in worship…when what Jesus did for me is so real, and so wonderful, in my heart I think of the men in my life, and I say…I speak to them, and I say this….’I’m glad to know you…and I certainly wouldn’t mind being married, but you are not my life. Christ is my life. I’m done making anything else my life. You’re a good thing but you’re not an ultimate thing. I would love to have a husband, but if I don’t, I’ve got Jesus. And I set my mind on things above. You can’t give me any of the things that Jesus has given me.’ See, I don’t want to look to men OR a career…a career can’t die for me. If I live for a career and fail it’ll beat me up all my life for having been a failure. But if I fail Jesus, He died for me…to forgive me.

See, she realized something. Jesus is the only Savior who, if you get Him, will satisfy you, and if you fail Him, and we do fail Him, can die for you. In other words…here’s why this works. This is not just cognitive therapy…this is not just will therapy…religious people, when they get downcast…tend to put the emphasis on the will…and they say, “buck up…be strong.” Non-religious people, in the secular world, when they’re downcast, put all the emphasis on the emotions…and they say, “feel better about yourself…do something nice for yourself.” There’s another kind of therapy that essentially uses the head…uses the mind and says, “well, now…you realize you’re doing wrong thinking…that’s self-defeating thinking…and you need to do this kind of thinking…” But, the real solution is worship.

Worship & Why It Works

      What’s interesting about what she would do…she didn’t say that she just walked around and thought about it…she said, during worship,when what Jesus Christ has done for me is real to me…and that’s what Paul is saying. Paul says you died. You were raised. He’s going to the past. He says, ‘go back into what Jesus has done for you…go back into the story…you’re there…He’s doing that for you’. If you saw an artist who’d done a beautiful sculpture…and he threw himself into the path of a bulldozer to die rather than to have the sculpture destroyed, you’d say, “oh my gosh, obviously, if he’s willing to die for a sculpture, then the sculpture must have been his life.” Jesus Christ died for us. We were His life. And when that moves you, when you see him doing that for you, when you see yourself as part of that story, as it is…it changes your heart. You can actually look at anything…things that cow you…things that make you afraid, and say: “You are not my life!”

      Paul’s approach is always that way…in 2 Corinthians 8…Paul is trying to get his readers to be generous. He doesn’t just say “be generous.” He does not work directly on the will. He doesn’t say “oh how awful of you to keep all your money when there are so many poor people in need…” he doesn’t work on the emotions. He appeals to them by saying you know the generosity of Jesus Christ on the Cross. He was infinitely rich and became infinitely poor so that you, through His poverty, could become rich[6]. He is taking you back into the story. He is saying “you were there. He was doing that for you.”

      Think about Jesus’ generosity on the Cross—that’s how you become generous…you don’t get there by working the on will…or by working on emotions. In Ephesians 5, when Paul is trying to get men to be faithful to their wives…what does he say? Be faithful to your wives….don’t’ you dare commit adultery? No, instead he says, in effect, ‘you know Jesus Christ, who was infinitely faithful to you when He went to the Cross. He shoulda gone…He coulda gone…He certainly wanted to go…but He stayed (on the Cross)’. And because you

know the infinitely, wonderful, faithful spousal love of Jesus Christ on the Cross, you now have the freedom…the freedom from the need to go to a prettier woman. Or, the freedom to need to have a lot of money. You’re free from these things. Instead of just being generous…or being faithful because “I want to do a good job, because I want to feel better about myself”…the Gospel utterly changes you in the heart, at the root, and it frees you to live the self-sacrificial, happy, and peaceful life…that you can.

      There was a recent movie review in the New York Times and the movie reviewer was writing about a certain class of movie that is really cool…like It’s A Wonderful Life with Jimmy Stewart and Groundhog Day with Bill Murray…and he listed a bunch of them and called them “metaphysical second chance comedies.[xviii]” He said this about these metaphysical second chance comedies: “(this is) …the kind of movie in which the laws of time and space are bent to give characters access to self-knowledge unavailable in ordinary circumstances”...so they can transform themselves. A metaphysical second chance comedy in which the laws of time and space are bent so that characters that would otherwise be locked in their old selves get self-knowledge unavailable in ordinary circumstances…so they can change themselves. Guess what? The Gospel is telling you…your life can become a metaphysical second chance comedy because God has sent Christ into the world to literally change, bend, and break the laws of time and space to bring you a knowledge and power that would otherwise be utterly unavailable to you. TAKE IT!!

This is an excerpt from the free eBook A Vision for a Gospel-Centered Life by Tim Keller

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