BOOK REVIEW:
Tim Keller on the Christian Life: The Transforming Power of the Gospel by Matt Smethurst. Crossway. 347 pages. 2025 
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Matt Smethurst writes that this book is not a biography of Tim Keller. He tells us that his aim is more modest – it is to synthesize and distill Tim Keller’s best teaching on the Christian life. The book seeks to show more than tell, to let Keller’s own voice feature most prominently and ring with coherent clarity.
Smethurst tells us that the book focuses on practical Christian discipleship—rather than Keller’s thoughts on more controversial theological or political matters. The target is Keller’s contribution to timeless, bread-and-butter aspects of everyday Christian living.
Smethurst writes that his aim in the book is to synthesize the master synthesizer. Drawing from nearly fifty years of sermons, conference messages, interviews, articles, books, and more, he works to draw out the best of Keller’s teaching where it shines brightest—biblical wisdom for everyday life.

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BOOK CLUB ~What Is Wrong with the World? The Surprising, Hopeful Answer to the Question We Cannot Avoid by Tim Keller
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In the book, Smethurst covers Keller’s teaching on subjects including sin, relationships, work, justice, prayer, and suffering.  The heavily footnoted book is an excellent companion to Collin Hansen’s fine book Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation.
Smethurst writes that Keller was far from perfect. But he loved nothing more than pointing people to the Savior who is, and to the gospel that can transform your life.

Here are 20 quotes from the book that I found helpful:

• From beginning to end, Keller’s teaching is suffused with the good news of Christ’s self-giving love as he absorbs—for our sins—God’s righteous judgment in our place.
• In the final analysis, says Keller, there are two ways to read the Bible: as if it’s all about you, or all about him.
• Sin is what’s wrong with the world. Sin is what’s wrong with our hearts.
• One of the most pronounced features of Tim Keller’s teaching is that the problem of sin is, at bottom, a problem of worship.
• One way to know whether a good thing in your life has been inflated into an ultimate thing—an idol—is to assess how you respond when it’s threatened or lost.
• You can avoid God through immorality, but you can also avoid God through performative morality. The first option is common sense; the second is cancerous.
• So, there are two ways, not one, to be your own Savior and Lord: you can break all the moral rules and chart your own course, or you can try keeping all the external moral rules and seek to earn heaven’s favor. Both are strategies for avoiding God.
• When it comes to pleasing God, both the rebellious path and the religious path are dead ends. But Jesus shows us a more excellent way.
• Authentic friendship will be forged only to the degree that each person is willing to be vulnerable—truly open and honest.
• The cross is the pinnacle of burden bearing—and the burden crushed him to death because he’s the ultimate Friend.
• Work is a divine calling through which we honor our heavenly Master and love our neighbor in tangible ways.
• Practicing a form of Sabbath is both an act of trust and a celebration of our design.
• A life poured out in deeds of justice and mercy, especially for the poor, is an inevitable sign of saving faith.
• We are to show special concern for the poor because that’s what our God does.
• Everything we possess is a gift from a generous God who calls us to deploy his gifts, with sacrificial love, for the good of others.
• One of the most vital takeaways from Keller’s teaching is this: Prayer, essentially, is answering God. He started the conversation—we did not. This means he sets the agenda and dictates the terms. Our voices are responding to his, not the other way around.
• God will either give you what you ask for or give you what you would have asked for if you knew what he knows.
• Suffering isn’t natural. It’s normal, but it’s not natural. It’s not the way things were originally designed to be.
• Even when we cannot fathom any good reasons for our pain, we rest in the arms of the only Savior who has scars. For us.
• 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.

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• My Book Reviews. Enjoy nearly 600 of my book reviews on Goodreads. Read my recent reviews of Strike the Flag: The Significance of Surrender in Leading and Serving Others by Kirk Billiter and Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy: Discovering the Grace of Lament by Mark Vroegop.
• Study, Savor and Share Scripture: Becoming What We Behold. My wife Tammy has published a book about HOW to study the Bible. The book is available on Amazon in both a Kindle and paperback edition. She writes “Maybe you have read the Bible but want to dig deeper and know God and know yourself better. Throughout the book I use the analogy of making a quilt to show how the Bible is telling one big story about what God is doing in the world through Christ. Quilting takes much patience and precision, just like studying the Bible, but the end result is well worth it.”
• A Solid Defense of a Very Defensible Position. Tim Challies reviews Denny Burk’s new book Mere Complementarianism: Male and Female in the Image of God. He writes that the book “Is a solid defense of a very defensible position. But more than that, it lays out a positive vision for complementarianism that will help Christians navigate issues in the home, the church, and far beyond. I highly recommend it.”
• God is God and I’m Not. On this episode of Renewing Your Mind, Timothy Witmer explains how God’s sovereignty brings peace to our anxiety, courage amid temptation, and perseverance in prayer. Listen to this discussion on his book, God Is God and I’m Not.
• Aging Wisely in an Anti-Aging World. Tim Challies reviews Jen Wilkin’s new book Dust to Dust. He writes “The book is full of wisdom, some of it drawn straight from Scripture and some of it from the author’s own experience.” He tells us that it is a book that will bless anyone who reads it.
  

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Won’t you read along with us?
What Is Wrong with the World? The Surprising, Hopeful Answer to the Question We Cannot Avoid by Tim Keller

Please join us in reading the first book of Tim Keller’s that has been released since his death in 2023.
From the Amazon description:
“During his tenure as founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, Timothy Keller explained on a weekly basis how the Bible provides the most comprehensive and sophisticated response to the fundamental questions of life. In What Is Wrong with the World?, based on a series of teachings given at Redeemer, Keller answers the title’s pressing question by revealing that the only thing that can account for the world’s pain and chaos is what the Bible calls sin. This clear-eyed and ultimately hopeful book reveals how sin is not simply a “bad” thing we do but something much more subtle and complex, affecting our relationships, our thinking, and every aspect of our existence. And only when we recognize sin for what it is can we find the profound, life-transforming answer our souls long for.”

This week, we look at Chapter 6: Sin as Leprosy (Part 1). Here are a few helpful quotes from the chapter:

• No matter how good things may seem, sin makes each of our lives a tragedy—unless God intervenes.
• Naaman’s leprosy is pride, and the treatment he’s prescribed is to be humbled again and again and again. But this problem isn’t specific to just Naaman. Pride and self-sufficiency are growing in every one of our hearts, and it eats us up like leprosy too.
• Paul is pointing out that when it comes to the cure of God, there is no difference between the most upstanding citizen and the most hardened criminal.
• The gospel is simple and free because it’s exclusive; if it weren’t, it wouldn’t be either of those things. These attributes all go together because if they didn’t, the claim of the gospel would fall apart.
• The gospel says that anybody can come—good and bad, strong and weak—as long as they’re humble. The exclusivity of Christianity is the requirement of humility.
• A Christian is somebody willing to say, “I could never do what is required to save myself. But someone has done a great thing for me. Somebody has passed through the earth, fire, water, and air so that I may be saved.”
• After we are saved, we can’t simply withdraw from the world and keep the good news to ourselves. If we do, it is proof that we don’t understand the gospel at all.