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Encounters with Jesus: Unexpected Answers to Life's Biggest Questions - Softcover

Keller, Timothy

 
9781594633539: Encounters with Jesus: Unexpected Answers to Life's Biggest Questions
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1594633533 ISBN 13: 9781594633539
Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

New York Times bestselling author of The Prodigal Prophet Timothy Keller explores how people are changed by meeting Jesus personally—and how we can be changed encountering him today.

The people who met Jesus Christ in person faced the same big life questions we face today. Like most of us, the answers handed down to them didn’t seem to work in the real world. But when they met Jesus, things immediately started to change for them. It seems he not only had the answers—he was the answer. In Encounters with Jesus, Timothy Keller shows how the central events and meetings in Jesus’ life can change our own lives forever.

"Keller's work belongs on the bookshelf of every serious Bible student." —Examiner

"Keller has mined the gold from these texts of Scripture, and any Christian is bound to have their minds expanded and hearts stirred." —Grace for Sinners

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Timothy Keller was born and raised in Pennsylvania and educated at Bucknell University, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and Westminster Theological Seminary. His first pastorate was in Hopewell, Virginia. In 1989 he started Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City with his wife, Kathy, and their three sons. Today, Redeemer has nearly six thousand regular Sunday attendees and has helped to start more than three hundred new churches around the world. He is the author of Hidden Christmas, Making Sense of God, The Songs of Jesus, Preaching, and Prayer, as well as The Meaning of Marriage, The Prodigal God, and The Reason for God, among others.

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Introduction

I was raised in a mainline Protestant church, but in college I went through personal and spiritual crises that led me to question my most fundamental beliefs about God, the world, and myself.

During those years I fell in with some Christians who were active in small-­group Bible studies. In these groups the leader would not take the role of teacher or instructor; instead he or she would facilitate the entire group’s reading and interpreta­tion of the chosen Bible text. The ground rules were simple but crucial for the integrity of the exercise. The Bible was to be given the benefit of the doubt—­the text was to be treated as reliable and its authors as competent. No one person’s inter­pretation was to be imposed on the passage; we were to come to conclusions as a group. We sought to mine the riches of the material as a community, assuming that together we would see far more than any individual could.

Before I was even sure where I stood in my own faith, I was asked to lead a group and was provided with a set of Bible studies entitled Conversations with Jesus Christ from the Gospel of John by Marilyn Kunz and Catherine Schell. It cov­ered thirteen passages in the book of John where Jesus had conversations with individuals. Those studies helped my group uncover layers of meaning and insight that astonished us all. Moving through these accounts of Jesus’ life, I began to sense more than ever before that the Bible was not an or­dinary book. Yes, it carried the strange beauty of literature from the remote past; but there was something else. It was through these studies of encounters with Jesus that I began to sense an inexplicable life and power in the text. These conversations from centuries ago were uncannily relevant and incisive to me—­right now. I began to search the Scriptures not just for intellectual stimulation but in order to find God.

I was taught that patience and thoughtfulness were keys to insight. At one point I went to a conference for Bible study leaders. I’ll never forget one of the exercises. The instructor gave us one verse, Mark 1:17 (ESV): “And Jesus said to them, ‘Follow me, and I will make you become fishers of men.’ ” She asked us to spend thirty minutes studying the verse (which, naturally, was taken from an encounter with Jesus). She warned us that after five or ten minutes we would think we had seen all there was to see, but she challenged us to keep going. “Write down at least thirty things you see in or learn from the verse.” Ten minutes into the exercise I was finished (or so I thought) and bored. But I dutifully pushed on and kept look­ing. To my surprise there was more. When we all returned she asked us to look at our list and circle the most penetrating, moving, and personally helpful insight. Then she asked us a question: “How many of you discovered your best insight in the first five minutes? Raise your hands.” No hands. “How many after ten minutes?” One or two hands. “Fifteen?” More. “Twenty?” A large number now raised their hands. “Twenty-­five?” Many of us now raised our hands, smiling and shaking our heads.

Those initial experiences with patient, inductive study of the Biblical text changed my spiritual life. I discovered that if I spent the time and assumed the proper attitude of openness and trust, God spoke to me through his Word. They also set me on my vocational course by giving me the tools to help other people hear God’s Word through the Bible. For nearly forty years I’ve been teaching and preaching the Bible for peo­ple, but the basis for every talk, lecture, or sermon has always been what I learned in college about how to sit with a text and carefully plumb its depths.

I still accept the authority of all of the Bible, and love learn­ing and teaching from all of it. But I first felt the personal weight of the Bible’s spiritual authority in the Gospels, partic­ularly in those conversations Jesus had with individuals—­the skeptical student Nathanael, Jesus’ bewildered mother at the wedding feast, the religion professor who came at night, the woman at the well, the bereaved sisters Mary and Martha, and many others.

I suppose you could say that many of my own formative encounters with Jesus came from studying his encounters with individuals in the Gospels.

Several years ago, I wrote a book called The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism. As a pastor in New York City for many years, I’ve always appreciated skeptics’ argu­ments and the invaluable role they play in defining and clari­fying what is unique about Christianity. It bothers me when Christians dismiss these questions glibly or condescendingly. I remember very clearly the doubts and questions I brought to those Bible study groups back in college and how grateful I was to have them taken seriously. I’ve seen that taking the time and effort to answer hard questions gives believers the opportunity to deepen their own faith while creating the pos­sibility that doubtful people may become open to the joy of Christianity.

So I was delighted to be asked to speak for five nights to students—­most of them skeptics—­in Oxford Town Hall in Oxford, England, in 2012. We agreed that I would explore encounters that individuals had with Jesus Christ in the Gospel of John. I felt this was a good choice for the setting because the accounts of these encounters reveal the core teachings and personality of Jesus in a particularly compelling way, as I had discovered personally so many years before. As I prepared to give the talks, it struck me that these encounters were apropos for another reason. In many of them we see Jesus addressing the big, universal, “meaning of life” questions: What is the world for? What’s wrong with it? What (if anything) can make it right, and how? How can we be a part of making it right? And where should we look for answers to these questions in the first place? These were the big questions that everyone must ask—­and that honest skeptics are particularly keen to explore.

Everyone has a working theory about the answers to these questions. If you try to live without them, you will soon be overwhelmed by how meaningless life seems. We live at a time when some insist that we don’t need any such answers, that we should admit that life is just meaningless busywork in the grand scheme of the universe and leave it at that. While you are alive, they say, just try to enjoy yourself as much as you can, and when you are dead, you won’t be around to worry about it. So why bother trying to find the meaning of life?

However, the French philosopher Luc Ferry (who, by the way, is in no way a Christian himself), in his book A Brief His­tory of Thought, says that such statements are “too brutal to be honest.” He means that people who make them cannot really believe them all the way down in their hearts. People cannot live without any hope or meaning or without a conviction that some things are more worth doing with our lives than others. And so we know we do have to have answers to these big ques­tions in order, as Ferry puts it, “to live well and therefore freely, capable of joy, generosity, and love.”

Ferry goes on to argue that almost all our possible answers to those big philosophical issues come from five or six major systems of thought. And today so many of the most common answers come from one system in particular. For example: Do you think it’s generally a good idea to be kind to your enemies and reach out to them rather than kill them? Ferry says this...

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Verlag
Penguin Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2015
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1594633533
ISBN 13 
9781594633539
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
256
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Harder
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