Good evening everyone and a very warm welcome to Uncover. My name’s Josh. I’m a member of the Christian Union and it’s my pleasure to welcome you here this evening. It’s fantastic to see you all. Well, Uncover is a week of events examining some of the big issues of life and faith. And so every lunchtime we have been and will be uh looking together at some of life’s big questions. And in these evening events, we’re considering the life that Jesus offers and the claims that he makes about himself. Well, this evening’s title is Uncovering Freedom and in thinking about that topic, we’re really pleased to be joined once again by Dr. Tim Keller who has been with us and will be with us for the whole of this evening series. Tim has led a church in the heart of New York City um for a number of years now and has spoken in many countries and cities around the world including Oxford uh on a couple of different occasions. Well, this evening Tim will speak for about 30 minutes and then after that he’ll be glad to answer your questions. So please be texting your questions in throughout this evening. The number will be on the screen um for the duration. So so do be texting those in even as he’s speaking. We’ll also hear from Charlotte who’s a student at Univ about how she began to think about some of these issues for herself and then at the end we’ll enjoy some more live music together. But now Tim, can I invite you up and while you’re on your way, it’d be good to ask you a few questions to get to know you a little bit better. Great. So you’re here with your family. Um could you tell us a little bit about who’s here with you? My wife Kathy who is a I promise she’s actually here but she’s not where she she will be here soon. Uh and uh my uh son Michael uh who’s helping with the tech and my daughter-in-law Sarah uh one of three sons and um also uh uh Craig Ellis who uh is on the staff of the church and who’s our friend and who works with me. They’re here today. Well, you mentioned yesterday that you’ve been to Oxford more than once. I’m interested what um what particularly appeals to you as somebody from New York about being in Oxford? Well, there’s the there’s the objective and the subjective. The objective is that um is A, a beautiful town. B, I really respect the tradition of learning here and I’ve read so many books over the years by Oxford scholars and so appreciated their scholarship. The subjective is that uh my wife, who is actually only now getting to her seat. Sorry to call attention to you, honey. Uh that at the when she was 12 years old, she read a a a book, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis. And being my wife, she uh wrote Yes, she wrote the author, who was a C.S. Lewis, who was a a uh a teacher here at Oxford and had been a student and been teaching here for years. And she just wrote him and said, “Loved your book.” And being a good British gentleman, he wrote her back. And he wrote this uh 12-year-old girl in Pittsburgh back four times and never never talked down to her. So, one time she said uh she was describing a maddening experience she’d had because she had submitted a short story to her uh school newspaper. She was a 12-year-old in sixth grade at the time. And uh to in order to make it fit, the editor took the uh the the last paragraph off, which was the denouement, you know, of the story. So, she wrote C.S. Lewis about it. And he wrote back and said, “I uh I uh I can sympathize with your maddening experience. Uh this is the one of the occupational hazards of authorship. The same thing has happened to me more than once. There’s nothing to be done about it.” And uh the uh that’s rather winsome. And we’ve read my wife and I both read many of his works and some there’s there’s a subject of affection we have for Oxford partly because his works and how they have played a great role in our life. And how in your life in particular has C.S. Lewis who you have sort of quoted a couple of times has he been an influence on you subsequently? Yes, because I’m a Christian minister and so I’m supposed to be schooled in theology and C.S. Lewis though he is a brilliant scholar was a layman a lay person and and he taught me how to be clear and I owe that to him. When I am clear you can you can attribute it to an Oxford Don. When I’m not clear you can attribute it to my theological education. Tim, thank you. We’re really grateful to have you with us again. Thanks for joining us. Over to you. So we’re going to be talking about freedom and I really like the way Josh said for about 30 minutes. I appreciate that. Um every night in the these meetings in here this week we’re looking at one of five very important themes meaning satisfaction freedom tonight identity and hope. And these are five things that human beings need they can’t live without and my case to you every night is that Christianity not only explains these needs very well why we have them but also supplies these needs with arguably at least I’m arguing unparalleled resources. Christianity makes some tremendously powerful offers and tonight we’re looking at freedom and whereas when I go through that list meaning and satisfaction and freedom and things like that I hope I’m not doing that. Um uh when you get to freedom, even though it looks similar to the others, it’s not quite because though in some ways all five of these things are are perennial human needs, freedom in particular is the baseline cultural narrative of our Western culture. Uh it’s always been important, but now it’s ultimately important. It’s essentially some people have said the only moral imperative we have left. Freedom. And that freedom is now seen almost as an absolute value. Uh uh here’s a couple of expressions of it. It’s just people talk about it all the time. They use this baseline cultural narrative without thinking in those terms, but some years ago, I just saw this recently, uh 1994, there was a a Woody Allen movie called Bullets Over Broadway. It became a Broadway um musical, too. And in it, one of the characters who’s played by Rob Reiner, a a very well-known um actor and uh writer. His character says this, “Guilt is petty bourgeois crap. An artist creates his own moral universe.” An artist creates his own moral universe. Now, a little more recently, and I I guess a little bit less uh you know, a little bit more accessibly, recently there was a a Walt Disney movie called Frozen. And um there’s a character in there, Elsa, and if any of you know any 5-year-old to 10-year-old girls, little girls, you know what I’m about to tell you. There’s a very famous uh song in which she says this at one point. Elsa says, “It’s time to see what I can do, to test the limits and break through. No right, no wrong, no rules for me. I’m free.” You’re very lucky I didn’t break into song on that. Because I’ve heard it so often. But it’s the same thing as Rob Reiner’s saying. This is This is the This is the baseline cultural narrative. Uh no right, no wrong, no rules for me. I’ve got to break through to be free. The arch enemy, it seems, of that kind of freedom is Christianity. In our Western culture, if that’s the cultural narrative, Christianity is seen as almost the arch enemy of freedom. Mark Lilla, who teaches um humanities at uh Columbia University, a couple of years ago wrote in the New York Times magazine an interesting essay about Billy Graham. And he he he he talked to a man who was a Wharton Business School graduate. Uh I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, Wharton Business School, very prestigious school. And he shocked discovered that he had gone forward at a Billy Graham crusade and been born again. And he talked to him a little bit about this uh and he was shocked partly because when he was a teenager, he had flirted with what he called born-again Christianity. But he says, “When I When he actually sat down, evidently years ago, and looked at the place in the Bible, John chapter 3, where um Nicodemus, uh a religious leader, and Jesus have a conversation where Jesus tells Nicodemus, ‘You must be born again.’ This is what Mark Lilla says about that chapter. He says, “Jesus seems to be telling Nicodemus that he must recognize his own insufficiency, that he will have to turn his back on autonomous, seemingly happy life, and be reborn as a human being who understands his dependency on something greater.” That seems like a radical challenge to our freedom. And it is. And then he went on to say, “That’s the reason why he just couldn’t be a born-again Christian because it was a radical challenge to our freedom.” So, the question is, is a relationship with Jesus Christ uh is that a radical challenge to our freedom? Does that mean that you really can’t be free if you’re a Christian? And here’s the answer. I’m thinking about another movie. This is the last of my movie references, I promise. Brendan Gleeson in a new great movie called Calvary. There’s a place where he’s a he’s a Catholic priest gone into the ministry late in life. He has a daughter who recently failed in her suicide attempt and he’s talking to her and she looks at him and says, “My life is my own.” Now, this is another expression of the cultural narrative of freedom. My life is my own. I belong to myself. It belongs to nobody else. And he looks at her and he says, “True.” “False.” And he wasn’t changing his mind. What he was saying is, “True to a degree, but ultimately false.” And see, the he’s right when he talks about the the the cultural narrative of freedom is actually true, but largely false. And the question, does uh does a relationship with Jesus Christ uh impede your freedom? And the answer again is, “True, but ultimately false.” Let me explain. Let me read you a short passage again, as I usually do at night, uh from John chapter 8. I’m going to read verses uh just uh 31, I think, 31 to 37. Uh I will only be referring to it, not unpacking it. Uh but it’s about freedom. Let me read it to you and and talk about three points that I think we can learn from the passage. “To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, ‘If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.'” They They answered him, “We are Abraham’s descendants, and we have never been slaves of anyone. How can you say that we shall be set free?” Jesus replied, “Very truly I tell you, everyone who sins is a slave to sin. Now, a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever. So, if the son sets you free, you’ll be free indeed. I know that you are Abraham’s descendants, yet you’re looking for a way to kill me because you have no room for my word. Now, here’s three things I just like to try out on you. The complexity of freedom. The anatomy of unfreedom or slavery. And how the Jesus can set you free. Did I hit all three? Don’t remember. The complexity of freedom, the anatomy of unfreedom or slavery, and how Jesus can set you free. Number one, the complexity of freedom. When when Jesus uh interrogators say, “We are Abraham’s descendants, and we have never been slaves of anyone.” A lot of people wonder what in the world they’re talking about. Surely they knew they’d been slaves in Egypt. Um that that the Hebrews had been slaves in Babylon essentially. The fact in some ways they were slaves now. They They certainly weren’t politically free because they were under the boot of Rome. But, uh on the other hand, they had asserted themselves. They had never lost their cultural identity. There’s a sense in which that even in those situations, they had asserted themselves. And in that sense, as far back in history as these folks are, that is very much what I think the baseline cultural narrative of our culture right it is to. And that is freedom is the absence of all constraint. Freedom is the absence of all restraint. So, here’s a here’s a helium balloon and it comes up to here, but it’s it it it would go up if I could get rid of the barrier. So, I remove the barrier and it goes as far as it can. And our modern understanding of freedom is freedom is self-assertion. Freedom is uh having no restraints. So, I do what I can do and I do what I want to do and there’s no limits on it. That’s freedom. I’m here to start by saying right away that that is an unworkable definition. Because freedom is actually not like that at all. It’s an an impossibility. It is something that is extraordinarily um it it’s a slogan. I mean, you say, “I’ve got to test test the limits and break through. Got to see what I can do. No right, no wrong, no rules for me. I’m free.” Uh Atul Gawande, who’s I’ve quoted him before, he’s an Indian American doctor who’s written a book recently called Being Mortal and he says, “There are different concepts of autonomy. One is autonomy as free action, living completely independently, free of coercion and limitation. This kind of freedom is a common battle cry in our culture, but that is a fantasy. Our lives are inherently dependent on others and subject to forces and circumstances beyond our control. Just as safety is an empty and even self-defeating goal to have or live for, so ultimately is autonomy. Now, why? Why would I say that the basic idea that freedom means my will be done. Freedom means I am not constrained. I can choose what I want to do and I want to live in the way I want to live. I create my own moral universe. What’s wrong with that? I say it’s unworkable. In fact, that’s not how freedom works at all. Quick example right away. Uh here’s a here’s a man in his 60s, let’s say. And uh he likes to eat what he wants to eat, and it’s not a it’s not a to say he likes to eat what he wants to eat, it’s not a superficial desire. Uh eating with friends, eating certain kinds of food, uh very satisfying. Uh a very important part of his uh daily joy and delight. But a doctor comes along and says, “Unless you severely restrict what you’re going to eat uh from now on, uh you are going to have a heart trouble, you’re going to have a heart attack, you’re going to end up in bed, or you’re going to end up uh uh having a a rather shorter life.” And now immediately we see the question is, what is the free What is freedom for that man in that context? You say, “Freedom is being free to do what you want.” Well, here’s the problem. He wants to live, he wants to be in good health, and he wants to eat these foods, which means his desires contradict. One of the main problems with defining freedom is doing what you want to do, doing what you can do, no limitations, is your desires contradict. And deep desires contradict, and strong desires contradict. And almost immediately you begin to see this. You have to choose between desires. Another way to put it is, which of the desires you have are the liberating desires, and which ones are the enslaving desires? Which ones are the desires where maybe superficially and and uh uh initially seem to bring you joy, but will end up putting you in bed? Do you want the freedom of health? See, there’s freedoms. There’s not just freedom. There’s the freedom of health. There’s the freedom of uh actually uh might say uh you know, the pleasure of eating food. And what you’re going to have to decide, I think you should, of course, is real freedom comes from a strategic loss of some freedoms in order such to to strategically gain other freedoms. That’s how freedom really works. Uh how are you going to Look at Look at yourselves. How are you going to get the freedom of a great job or professional knowledge of a field every day at a place like Oxford you were saying no to all sorts of uh other kinds of desires. You can’t you you you you’re not running your own life anymore. You’re under constraint. You’re And you’re choosing those constraints. Why? Cuz the reality is you’ll never get to musical the freedom of musical skill, the freedom of professional um uh skill. You’ll never get to the freedom of health unless you say no to all sorts of things. And so actually freedom is not the absence of constraints. It’s finding the liberating constraints. It’s not the free freedom is not being able to do what you want. It’s It’s basically sifting through your desires and saying which of these desires are the liberating desires. And freedom isn’t a thing. There’s lots of freedoms and you have to decide which are the strategic ones. Because you only gain strategic freedoms by strategically losing other ones. And that’s just the way it works. Now you might say, “No no no no no. I I I hear what you’re saying, but nevertheless these are restraints that I have chosen. And therefore I am really free.” No, you haven’t chosen them. You’ve come up against reality. Physical reality is that if you live any way you want, you’re going to die quickly. If you way If you live any way you want, there’s a physical reality and you actually have to conform to that reality. And if you don’t conform to your physical design, you will lose freedom. You won’t be gaining freedom. I mean initially you might be gaining freedom, but it would be very very short-lived. And so once we understand that and you begin to see freedom isn’t an absolute. It’s not It’s finding the liberating desires. It’s finding the right constraints, the constraints that fit in with reality. You say, “Well, of course that’s true of physical reality.” Okay, no. Not only that, it’s also true of metaphysical reality. What do I mean? However you define freedom, and I don’t think it’s I think it’s way too simplistic and reductionistic to just define it as self-assertion, my will be done, the absence of restraints, get rid of the limits, no right and wrong, no rules for me, I’m free. The problem with that, among other things, is a person who actually enters into that definition and really embraces that, will never know the freedom of being in a loving relationship. Here’s what you However you define freedom, there’s nothing like being in a love relationship. Of of various sorts, not just romantic love, but in a strong love relationship. There’s nothing more freeing, there’s nothing more liberating, there’s nothing that makes you feel more like whatever we mean by the word freedom. But the minute you get into a love relationship, and the deeper you get into it, the more intimate it gets, the more wonderful it gets, the more you have to give up your independence. You didn’t notice that? Let’s just say you started into a relationship, you know, it’s a kind of a relationship, you already you can’t just decide when to leave town for the weekend, you have to check. You’ve already lost your independence. And if you don’t check, you know, you could say, “I’m leaving town next weekend.” And the person you’re in into the relationship said, “Well, that wouldn’t be very convenient for me. I need Well, sorry, I I got to be free. No right, no wrong, no rules for me, I got to break through.” Uh uh you know, look, hey, I want to have a relationship, but I want to be able to leave town when I want to leave town. And the other person saying, “I think we’re breaking up.” Because basically, when you to get to know the freedom of love, not one person See, if one person that says this, and not both people, you’ll never know the freedom of love. But if both people say to each other this, I will adjust for you. I will change for you. I will give up my freedom for you. I will serve you even if it means a sacrifice for me. If one person says that in a relationship, so one person’s doing all the sacrificing and the other person’s doing all the receiving and the ordering around, then you have an exploitive and it’s you have exploitation. But on the other hand, if both people are saying, I will change for you. I will adjust for you. I will give up my freedom for you. I will sacrifice for you. If both people are doing that and you’re losing freedom as it were. In fact, you’re losing enormous amount of freedom. Not just can’t go to town. That’s how you find love. One of the most striking things about the inability of the modern cultural narrative, the idea of absolute freedom, you create your own moral universe. Um the the limitations of it came through in a in a very old now, many years old, um interview that I read some years ago. Uh it was actually uh translated for me because my French is nonexistent. But uh in Le Monde magazine, it was an interview with uh Françoise Sagan, who was uh as you know, a novelist. And at one point, the interviewer was asking her a question and said, “Then you have had the freedom you wanted in life. Have you had the freedom you wanted in life?” And Sagan says, “Yes. Now, I was obviously less free when I was in love with someone, but fortunately, one’s not in love all the time. Apart from that, I’m free.” And what she was saying was, “If you want to have freedom from self-denial, if you want to have freedom from self-donation, if you don’t if you do not want to give up your independence, then you can have an affair, and which is wonderful, you know, it’s a have an affair, but you don’t lose your independence. And that’s why she says, even when she was having an affair, even though it was temporary, she said, you know, I wasn’t free, of course. So, you have to dip into love every so often to kind of recharge your batteries, but don’t give up your freedom. But, wait a minute. Where is the environment in which you feel the most free? Isn’t it in a a real love relationship where two people have not They’re not exploiting each other, but they’re giving themselves away to each other instead of self-assertion, no, self-giving. And so, you see the limitations. It’s a It is a It’s a remarkable limitation. And that’s the reason why now we’re right now we’re up to the doorstep of my second point. And here’s why I And the the second point is not going to be an easy one for modern people to hear. I just showed you the complexity of freedom. I just showed you, I hope, that uh if you if you’ve heard these slogans that to be free means you decide what is right or wrong for you, you live as you want to live, no one can tell you what is right or wrong for you. You you create your own moral universe. If you believe that, it’s unworkable. It doesn’t work even on a daily basis. It’s not It’s not the way your life is working. It’s a It’s a completely uh overblown and absolutized understanding of freedom. Political freedom, the freedom of people for self-government and self-rule, all sorts of ways freedom is great. But, when you turn it into an absolute, the only moral imperative, it just doesn’t work. And if you see that, and also, if you see that essentially uh freedom doesn’t Absolute freedom doesn’t work inside love relationships, now you’re actually on the verge on the doorstep of understanding what Jesus says, which you’re going to roll your eyes at. And that is this: The deepest sin slavery is being a slave to sin. Remember what he said? They said, “We are Abraham’s descendants. We’ve never been slaves to anyone. How can you say that we shall be need to be freed?” And Jesus says, “I’m not talking about political freedom. I’m not talking about freedom up there. You can be politically free in every way and still be a slave to sin, which is the ultimate slavery. Now, modern people roll their eyes, but I think you’re on the verge of understanding what he’s saying. Let me show you what Jesus Christ means when he says that the ultimate slavery is sin. What’s that mean? Well, for a moment, think about this. If there’s a god, if there’s a god, then there’s a metaphysical reality a lot like your physical reality. You can’t just live any old way, you can’t just eat anything, you can’t just live anyway. If you want to have health, you have to honor your physical design. You have to honor your physical uh there-ness, that your physical givens. And I’ve shown you that even in love, which is not physical, it’s a metaphysical, it’s a relational, even there the modern understanding of freedom doesn’t work. Let’s push it a little bit. What if there is a god? So, god has moral directives. Let me give you one example of this. Uh first of all, an illustration. Here’s a car. Beautiful car, nothing wrong with the car, but it’s moving down the road and you look inside and you see there’s a 5-year-old driving it. What will happen? It won’t be good. Disintegration of some sort. So, the car’s going to run into somebody, kill somebody, run into a uh a tree, destroy a fence, something bad will happen. Why? Because though it’s a good car, it’s not designed to be driven by 5-year-old. Not at all. The Bible essentially says, when God says, “Here’s the commandments. Here’s the moral directives. Don’t lie. Don’t be selfish. Uh don’t bear false witness.” Or, I’ll give you one just to show you. Basically, God’s moral directives come from your designer and if God’s moral directives come from your designer, then to break them is not Those things aren’t busy work. To break them is to is to actually violate your own nature. And to lose freedom. Just like a person who’s eating the wrong foods and who ends up in a hospital. So, for example, the Bible says, “Don’t don’t bear a grudge.” You’re made in the image of God, who is a forgiver. Therefore, you must forgive. It’s It’s a directive. You must forgive. And if you don’t forgive, what’s going to happen? Uh if you if if you don’t forgive, I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. Like so many If you refuse to um uh to forgive, in the in the short run, it’s going to feel pretty good. It’s It feels good to hate somebody who’s wronged you. It feels very very good to even pay back the person who’s wronged you. But in the long run, what’s going to happen? Disintegration. It It can hurt your body to be angry. It can certainly hurt your all your relationships. If you stay angry at an individual, other people like that individual, you won’t trust. It’ll start to distort your relationships. It certainly will distort your relationship with the person. It’ll distort your relationships with other people like that person. It will actually, in many ways, make it harder for you to trust people if you stay angry. It’ll destroy your commitment apparatus. It’ll destroy your whole life. It could hurt your body. Why? Because when you are disobeying a moral directive from God, you’re actually going against the grain of your own your own nature, going against the grain of the universe. You’re like a 5-year-old trying to drive a car. And it will not work. And so, when Jesus actually talks about you’re a slave to sin, that’s one of the things it means. That when you actually say, “I’m No right, no wrong, no rules for me.” If there’s a God, if there are if there is some moral directives and you break those moral directives, then what you’re doing is you’re you’re enslaved. You The enslavement of someone who’s eating the wrong things. The enslavement of someone who’s not forgiving. All the sort of things all the breakdowns all the disintegration. That’s one aspect of what it means to say sin is slavery. But here’s the other one. Here’s the one that will probably uh it will probably be a little more poignant for most of you. Uh Jesus actually says something pretty interesting here. He says, “Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever.” So if the son sets you free, you’ll be free indeed. Fascinating image. You know Downton Abbey, right? Sure you know Downton Abbey. Everybody lives in home in the home. The inside the home under the uh the leadership of the head of the estate, there’s all sorts of people. There’s sons and daughters, there’s family, and there’s all these servants. They all live downstairs. They all live there. And even if you have if you’re a servant though, that’s what he’s saying here. If you’re a servant in that household, you might have a great relationship with the head of the estate, but you’re he he’s still your boss. He’s not your father. And that means you might be very familiar. They may even talk about we’re just a we’re just a family here, but you’re only on good uh you’re you’re only on good terms with the boss as long as you’re doing your duty. And if you’re not doing your duty, you’re out of there. That’s why he says, you know, the son has a slave has no permanent place in the family. However, a son does. And here’s what I can just tell you as a parent, and I think a lot of you can intuit this whether you’re parents or not. Uh if I’m a boss, as nice as I be with my employees, if they don’t do their job, they’re going to have to leave somehow. If they don’t do their job, they’re going to have to leave somehow. But what happens if you have children and some of them are not doing their jobs? What’s really weird about a parent’s heart is sometimes if you have if you have five children, one of them is starting to act up in very bad ways. If anything, your heart is more engaged to the one that’s that’s messing up. And Jesus says, “You are a slave as long as God is a boss to you. I can make God into a father.” Now, why would he say, “Anyone who thinks of God as a boss is a slave?” Here’s the reason why, two reasons. Number one, let’s just say you’re a religious person and you say, “Well, I’m going to do do good. I’m going to obey the Ten Commandments. I’m going to read the Bible and I’m going to try to live like Jesus. I’m going to do all these things. Then God has to answer my prayers. Then God has to give me a better life because I’m doing all these things.” You’re like a servant. You might be very religious, but God’s like a boss. Why are you doing these things? To get into heaven or to to get him to answer your prayers or to feel like a righteous person. And let me tell you, you are a slave. That’s slavish. You’re not You’re not obeying all the rules out of love. You’re obeying all the rules to get something. They’ll be crushing. You’ll be stifling yourself all the time, things that you’d really like to have, and then feeling like, “Well, you know, I’m I’m doing all these things. Why isn’t God blessing me in more ways?” You’ll be self-righteous. You’ll look down at people who don’t aren’t living the right way and you’ll look down on them to to bolster your sense of self-righteousness, which is always It’s never what it should be cuz you’re never sure you’re living a good enough life. Never living a good enough life. You’re a slave. Even though you’re religious, even though you might believe everything in the Bible, you’re a slave because God’s a boss, not a father. However, let’s just say you are like Rob Reiner or like Elso or whatever and you said, “I’m not religious at all. Not in the slightest. And I’m not going to have I’m not going to I It it it makes me my skin crawl even hear you talking about moral directives and things like that. You know, I believe I have to decide what is a right right or wrong for me. I choose what I’m going to live for. Fine. You’re actually assuming that God is a boss, if he exists. And therefore, you’re actually a slave, too. How so? You got to live for something, do you not? You have to live for something. Here’s what David Foster Wallace, you know, the great post-modern, the late great post-modern uh novelist said in one of his uh a very famous college commencement speech he gave near the end of his life. He says, “There’s no such thing as not worshipping. The only choice we get is what to worship. And pretty much anything you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, you’ll never feel you have enough. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure, and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally take you away. Worship power, and you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, and you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious things about these forms of worship is they’re unconscious, they’re default settings. I hope you heard that. By the way, he’s not writing as a Christian at all. Here’s what he’s saying, you got to live for something, right? You have to. Whatever that is is your master. You wouldn’t call it worship, but if it’s the main thing that gives you significance, if it’s the main thing that gives you security, the main thing that gives you hope, then if anything goes wrong with it, you’re you’re going to melt down. If anything gets in the way of it, you’re going to be furious. If you fail in some way, you’re going to beat yourself up. See, he he says, “If If living for money and things, if that’s where you get meaning in life, you’ll never have enough. Body and beauty, you’ll never be you’ll always feel ugly. Scholarship, you’ll always feel stupid like a fraud, an impostor. But here’s the problem. If you don’t live for God, then you’re going to live for something else as a god, and whatever that god is will be your master. You don’t belong to yourself. And now we’re at the very verge of what Jesus says and what he can do. Here’s what Jesus Christ essentially says. Um I’m the only Lord and master that if you get me will satisfy you, and if you fail me, I’ll forgive you. Your career can’t die for your sins. See, if you’re living for your career and you fail it in some way, it will destroy you forever. It’s It’s a thing. It’s not a person. Your career can’t forgive you. If you’re living for Whatever you’re living for, David Foster Wallace is right. If you don’t believe in God, then you’re going to make something else into a god, and whatever that is, you’ll be a slave to it. You do not belong to yourself. You belong to that. And Jesus says, I’m the only Lord and then the only master who if you get me, I’ll satisfy you, but if you don’t That’s last night’s talk. But he also says, but if you fail me, I can forgive you. And see, at the very very end, he says, I know that you’re Abraham’s descendants, yet you’re looking for a way to kill me. The cross is never far from Jesus’ mind because this is the way he liberates us. How so? Do you remember what I said in the beginning, that there is nothing greater than a love relationship? And clearly, in some ways, if you were here last night, you see the links to last night. What we’re being told here uh uh Saint Augustine, I’ll I’ll I’ll I’ll just use this illustration. In book chapter two of Saint Augustine’s Confessions, he remembers a a time when he was 16 years old where a group of his friends and he broke into a pear orchard and stole some pears. And afterwards, many years later, he reflected and he said, “Why did I steal the pears? Especially considering two things. One is I didn’t like pears. And two is I wasn’t hungry.” And he says, “I know why I stole the pears because I was told I mustn’t go in there.” And as soon as it was forbidden I wanted it. And here’s what he says. He says, “Deep inside me and deep inside all of our hearts, there is something that says, ‘No one tells me what to do.'” And that what Martin Luther calls incurvatus est, that we’re we’re we’re curved in on ourselves. Uh we don’t want anyone to tell us what to do. We want to assert our wills. We want to say, “My will be done. No one else’s will be done.” That is one of the main reasons why there’s misery in the world today. And our baseline cultural narrative does not do anything except accentuate that. And Augustine says, “What I needed was to have my heart captured by something else. I realized that I because I was living for myself, I had to say, ‘Well, I’ll live for learning. I’ll live for rhetoric,’ is what he was, by the way, with a highly highly paid professor of rhetoric. I’ll do this. I’ll do that.” And it didn’t didn’t satisfy, of course. And he always was not liberated. He was mastered by these things. What would free him finally? To love a God who more than anything else. Again, there’s the links to last night. But here’s how it happens. Remember I said that a love relationship has to be two ways. If you go into it and you say, “I will adjust for you. I will give up my freedom for you. I will change for you. I will sacrifice for you.” If one person does it and the other person does not, that’s exploitation. How would you get into a love relationship with God? Wouldn’t you say, “Well, that would have to be exploitation cuz God has got all the power. God wouldn’t change. I have to do all the submitting. I have to do all the repenting. I have to do all the change.” That sounds like exploitation. Well, in other religions, maybe, but not in Christianity because you know when Jesus Christ says, “Here, I’ll set you free because I’m going to die.” Jesus Christ is the son of God. And by coming to Earth in the incarnation, being born as a human being, and by going to the cross and dying for our sins, which we talked about before and and now, if we really uh belong to God and we are exerting our own will, then there’s a debt that we owe to him. God comes and pays the debt. Jesus Christ goes to the cross. That objectively breaks down the barrier between me and God, but subjectively, too. The cross reminds me of something that on the cross God is actually saying and it This is the only God of any religion that says this. I will adjust to you. I will change for you. Incarnation atonement. I will give up my freedom. He’s been nailed to the cross. That’s giving up your freedom. How’s that for giving up your freedom? See, he’s the only God that says, “I will give up my freedom for you. I will sacrifice for you.” And when you sacrifice for him, you’re entering into that love relationship which will finally finally free you. The only way to be liberated is through strategic freedom transfer. You give up some freedoms to get the more liberating freedom. You have to recognize reality and you have to make sure that you restrain yourself uh along the lines of of the grain of the universe. But don’t you see at least I mean a lot of a lot of this is abstract, but don’t you see unless you actually are serving You are serving something. What could be better than this one? What could be better than this? This is the liberation that you really need. I got one more thought that I’m going to wait till afterwards uh to talk to you about. What we’re going to do right now is we’re going to hear from uh an Oxford student who’s going to tell you something about his spiritual journey. When that is over, uh we will come back up here and Josh and I will take questions that you’re texting in, I hope right now, and after that we’ll close up. Throughout my life, I’ve had times when I would experience something, an emotion, um which I always found surprisingly moving. This was usually through music, but the emotion passed and it was usually quite easy to ignore. But when I came up to Oxford on a choral scholarship, I was singing in chapel and I experienced it again. I was suddenly crying and I had no idea why. At the start of my second year, I started talking to a a friend of a friend about his Christian faith, and I realized that although I didn’t believe in God, I couldn’t explain why. I’d never taken the time to think about what I believed about the world, and I decided to try and find some answers to the big questions. I also thought the faith he was talking about could help make sense of my experiences of the world and my emotions. Over the term, I began to accept Christianity on an intellectual level. Although I didn’t believe it yet, I couldn’t immediately reject it, either. I went to a Christian Union event where the speaker told us to look at Christianity from the inside, to explore it properly. This was a turning point for me as it was when I first genuinely let myself think that Christianity could be true on a personal level. There comes a point where you have to stop looking at it on a merely intellectual level and engage with your emotions and will as well. It took me a long time to admit that I’d gradually become a Christian and to realize that I couldn’t ignore that it was true. Becoming a Christian hasn’t been an easy thing. My family aren’t religious, and I think at times it’s hard for them to understand. Though they have been really supportive. It’s also made some things harder. Every decision I now make has this new perspective, and I’ve had to rethink a lot of the decisions I’d already made about my life. But, compared to the joy it’s given me, these things start to seem insignificant. Joy is something I realized that I’d never experienced before. It’s more than happiness. It’s incredible, but also terrifying as well. I wasn’t unhappy before, but my life is just so much fuller and more meaningful now. Knowing that God loves me for who I am has been amazingly liberating, and I’ve learned to accept myself more. I’ve also been able to let go of a lot of the worries I had about pleasing other people and trying to be someone I’m not. The Christian faith has explained a lot about my life, about me as a person, as well as my thoughts and emotions. Great. Well, we’ve now got a few minutes for some Q&A before Tim rounds off the evening with some thoughts as he mentioned. So, let’s have our first question up, please. Can you expand on how accepting Jesus’ love sets us free? The love of an incorporeal God seems like an abstraction when other loves or sins seem more tangible and satisfying. How do you make an abstraction concrete? That’s a great question, but um I was trying to do that tonight. So, um I I said it a little more directly last night, so thank you for the opportunity to say it uh directly tonight. Uh to simply talk about the love of God as an abstraction it never really work um over against the as you said the the other loves or sins are much more tangible. Have you ever tried to listen to something only on audio while at the same time watching something on audio and video. So here’s something on a screen audio and video and yet you’re also listening to audio. If you try to actually listen to both the video will win because it’s multi-sensory. You can see it as well as hear it. Um I would say until the reality of what Jesus Christ did on the cross for me. Uh as offensive as that is in many ways to modern sensibilities uh the very idea that I’m so bad that that nothing less than the death of the son of God could save me. Uh incredibly insulting to modern sensibilities. And yet uh it wasn’t until I believed that that I began to I was able to be moved by what God had done in Jesus Christ. And see that put before the idea of a loving God is you’re right. God is love is on audio only. And all these other more tangible and satisfying things like success and sex and romance and and acclaim all these other things are they’re on they’re on video. The death of Jesus Christ the reality of his atoning work for me put God’s love on video. And finally I was able to say if I serve this more than I serve these other things. Don’t don’t get me wrong. There’s no reason why you can’t really want to do well in a career. If Jesus is more important to your identity that’s tomorrow night. Uh if Jesus is more important to me than my career the career becomes something that I can just enjoy. It’s not my it’s not like life or death to me whether my career goes well or not. It enables me just to enjoy it. It doesn’t enslave me anymore. I can enjoy it. And if Jesus really would be the supreme love of my heart, I wouldn’t be enslaved by anything. There’d be nothing that I’d have to have. Everything I’d be able to walk away from in a pinch, even if I loved it quite a lot. So, it was it’s it’s I would say Jesus love, if you understand actually the cross, it’s not an abstraction. It’s actually on video, not just on audio. If I’m free to choose Jesus, then why does it matter if I go to church? Surely I can continue to choose Jesus, yet all the same remain free from an institutional religion. Yeah, that’s uh uh that’s What you’re doing is I want to I want to embrace Jesus, but I actually don’t want to let go of the baseline cultural narrative that says I shouldn’t really be beholden to other people. I need to be free. Uh it it’s it’s good for you to be in love with somebody and not to be able to go out of town any old time. To actually have to um uh just simply not live a selfish life. Frankly, if you’re part of a the the I have to say the word institutional religion, that’s a rather pejorative way to put it. Why don’t you think about this? Christianity is a communal religion. Because by being in a community, you actually learn to uh the uh the the nuances of a complex freedom. That is to say uh learning how to give to other people, learning how to uh give up for other people, learning how to serve people. When you’re in a just a plain friendship, you know, you you really can’t live your life any old way. Your friend has a need, you got to do something about it. It’s inconvenient, but you do it. That’s And you know, in the end, boy, that makes you really a much freer person in the long run because you have those connections. I would say institutional religion it sounds like you’re saying tradition. The important thing is you do want to be part of a communal religion cuz it’s part of what I’ve been talking about tonight. That your freedom is actually going to strangle you if you’re not willing to give it up in loving relationships. Even though I used romantic relationships as the most and and marriage and things like that as a the most poignant examples. Any kind of love relationship, friendships are just as important to learn the habits of how to use your freedom in a way that actually doesn’t undermine community, doesn’t undermine your relationships, and doesn’t undermine you in the long run. And so it’s a great way of learning not to be too self-assertive and to be more self-giving. So uh I certainly, by the way, I’m a Protestant which means I do believe that you can have a a saving relationship with God through Jesus Christ without belonging to a church, but I actually think that that’s what Jesus actually says if you That’s not me, I don’t think. But anyway, uh however, if it is me, I’m forgiven. I don’t think I’m doing it, but anyway, um and I don’t care what you think. You know, I’m Jesus I’m into Jesus. Uh Was that funny? So I I I would I would say that uh being part of a community is a command. Uh Jesus actually talks about that that you’re supposed to be part of a community. It’s how you actually learn to love him better. Uh and I actually I I have not been able to love Jesus Christ very well all by myself. And if you’re not part of a community, you won’t learn how to do that. Let’s go to something else before I make another noise. What if I’m content to be consumed by what I live for now? This was the hardest question for me to answer last night. You might not have been here last night whoever asked that question. Last night I tried to make the case that in the long run you won’t be content with what you’re consumed with right now. That ultimately you’ll find that it doesn’t deliver what you think. And the problem is even though I live in Manhattan, it’s actually a very young place. Uh the average group of people that I speak to there would be in their you know, 25 to 40 age group. Uh a lot of young professionals, a lot of people uh from places like Oxford and that sort of thing. So, this isn’t an alien milieu for me, and yet you’re a younger crowd than I ordinarily uh talk to. And a lot of people came up and said, “I don’t think I’m this discontent. I feel like you know, you’re you’re acting as if I’ve got these deep needs, and I actually don’t feel that.” And I just all I can do What can I do? I can look at you and say, “Time will tell.” I think I’m right. In fact, I think most people who are in your you know, a a few years older will say that you will not remain content to be consumed by what you live now for now. In fact, I I’m sorry. I I You probably didn’t mean to do this, but the word consumed is a pretty negative word. Uh will you be burned out by anything that you live for other than Jesus? I think so. In the end, every master is a taskmaster except Jesus. That’s my thesis tonight. Time for another? Would you say life as a Christian is a state of freedom, the journey of becoming free, or both? Both. I love this one. Yeah, because the the simple fact is um the simple fact is that I’m becoming more free from the things that enslave me. And I’ve been at Christianity now for quite a number of decades, and I still see that um uh things that I thought I was over. Uh things bother me too much. Uh your reputation can bother you too much. Your your ministry, your in my case a career success can bother me too much. Uh but the the important thing to see is that you’re becoming more liberated. So, 3 years if you’re a Christian and you’re growing journey, 3 years ago you could look back and say these are things that bothered me, things that just really hurt me, things that depressed me, things that angered me, things that frightened me that still bother me but nothing like they used to. Because more and more I’m finding I’m my real master is Jesus and not these other things. So, it’s clearly both. Though I do think you cross the line. And there is a spot, you know, Charles Wesley great hymn. My chains fell off, my heart was free, I rose went forth and followed thee. There’s an initial freedom as you begin your Christian journey which is really pretty intoxicating till you realize it wasn’t as complete as you thought and then the journey begins. Great, time for another question. Compared to the massive glorious universe, I’m a small insignificant person. Why on earth would God care about individual persons like me when I know I’m insignificant? It seems weird that God would love me. I love this question. And I don’t want I don’t I don’t want to I actually don’t want to do much to change your mind. Except to say um the wonder you are on the verge of getting it. If you if you say God loves me uh, and it doesn’t change your life then you probably need to think more. I give you one example and that is if you believe in the if you believe that the Christian teaching about what Jesus Christ did on the cross, that’s one way for the wonder of God’s love to start to actually affect you. Here’s another way to do it. Um Uh, some years ago I went to I I went to a conference where the teacher looked at me like this. She said She said if the um if the if the 93 million miles between Earth and and uh the Sun were reduced to a the thickness of a piece of paper. So, that’s 93 million miles, just the thickness of a piece of paper. She says um the distance to the nearest star would be a stack of paper 70 ft high. And she says the the the the diameter of the galaxy, just our little galaxy, would be a stack of paper 360 miles high. And the galaxy is essentially a a like a a speck of dust compared to all the other galaxies that are out there, and that’s how vast it is. If there is a God uh and he holds all that together with the word of his power, it says in Hebrews chapter 1. He holds it together with the word of his power. He’s like his pinky. Uh he says then she This is the way she put it. She says you don’t ask a person like that into your life to be your assistant. Uh if if if a person like that comes into your life and you believe the Bible when it says, “I love you.” And you look to the cross as proof of that. And the resurrection of proof that there was a cross. We’ll talk about later. Uh then then that question can just stagger you. And you if you were here the first night, I said uh a Christian if you’re ever ever in a bad mood or you’re having a bad day or even having a bad week or even having a bad year, just think. Just think until the glory of what you believe about the universe starts to break in on you. And you’re very close to that. So, I don’t want to I don’t want to your your wonder, but just don’t let the incredulity keep you from the reality. Because if the incredulity goes together with a uh of the reality, my goodness, what what you’re going to experience and what you’re going to know. Great. I think we’ll we’ll leave it there for questions this evening. Thank you very much for those questions. Just to say, if you do have further questions, Tim will be around at the front for a little while um after the end of this evening. So, do go and grab him. There’s also a a book stall again um on your on your way out um with titles relating to some of the things that Tim’s been talking about. So, do check that out. That might be useful to you. Um there’s also a gospel or was a gospel on your seat when you arrived. That’s a a copy of John’s account of the life of Jesus. That’ll be the most useful resource for you in in thinking through um some of the the things that Tim’s raised and exploring your questions. Well, Tim, over to you to close out the evening. Just just a brief wrap up and then Josh will come up to really close. I know this I know this this is a little bit like the end of a Peter Jackson movie. Every time you think it’s over, then there’s another ending, another ending. So, uh but this is the third from the last ending, okay? If uh I I have been pushing the analogy of a relationship with God being a lot like a love relationship that we have between human beings where uh two individuals say to each other, “I will adjust for you. I will sacrifice for you.” Yes, of course, to enter into a relationship with with with Jesus Christ does, this is going back to the Brendan Gleeson uh uh illustration, it does mean the curtailment of freedom. Of course, it does. Jesus says uh “If you want to follow me, you have to take up your clock your your cross, excuse me. You have the You have to uh deny yourself.” In that sense, of course, you give up your freedom. It means you give up the right to self-determination. You give up your right to call the shots in your life. You assume you’re God and I’m not. You know things that I don’t know. Yes, of course, it’s giving up your freedom, but not ultimately. Not ultimately. It’s very much like the freedom you give up in order to get into a love relationship, which is the which is the richness of your life. And one of the ways to understand a love relationship goes like this. If you if if if you’re loved but not known, in other words, the person loves you but they don’t really know who you are, that’s superficial. If you’re known but not loved, if somebody sees you who you are and then rejects you, that’s that’s our greatest nightmare. But to be known to the bottom and yet loved to the sky, that’s life itself. And you know, when Jesus was in the Garden of Gethsemane, the people he was dying for were represented by his wonderful disciples who kept falling asleep on him. And he kept saying, um, “Won’t you Won’t you keep awake? This is the This is the hour of my greatest need. I’m about to die. I’m in the Garden of Gethsemane. Would you please stay awake with me?” And every time they kept falling asleep and uh you know, at one point he says, “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.” How tender. You might say the human race is letting him down at the moment of his greatest need. And you know what he says to us? “I know you meant well. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.” So tender. And then he goes to the cross and he looks down at people denying him, betraying him, abandoning him, mocking him. And in the greatest act of love in the history of the world, he stayed. He looked all the way into the bottom of our hearts. He knew exactly what we were capable of. He saw the weakness. He looked He looked He saw us to the bottom but he loved us to the skies. And the knowledge of that can liberate you from the things that enslave you and I hope you see that something is something’s enslaving you. You do not belong to yourself. Jesus Christ is I’m the only master that will not that I will not disappoint you if you get me and I will forgive you when you fail me and you will fail me. Uh I certainly hope that you can keep coming to the evening messages. I hope you can come here to this very place and hear Guinness’ lunchtime messages. Uh the more you do it, the more you hear some overlap every day, some things that you’ll be hearing more than once and with different perspective, different things it begins to the penny begins to drop more. And if you if you care to understand Christianity and I hope that there’s been some reason for you to say maybe I should be exploring it. Uh please keep coming because this is in a sense is a one-week temporary learning community of people at all stages in spiritual journeys and I hope you stay with this learning community to the very end. Uh now Josh is going to come up and th- this is the second last ending.