Encounters with Jesus: Unexpected Answers to Life's Biggest Questions, by Timothy Keller
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Encounters with Jesus: Unexpected Answers to Life's Biggest Questions, by Timothy Keller
Best Ebook Encounters with Jesus: Unexpected Answers to Life's Biggest Questions, by Timothy Keller
New York Times bestselling author of The Songs of Jesus 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 started to change immediately 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.
Encounters with Jesus: Unexpected Answers to Life's Biggest Questions, by Timothy Keller- Amazon Sales Rank: #17972 in Books
- Brand: Keller, Timothy
- Published on: 2015-03-03
- Released on: 2015-03-03
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.10" h x .80" w x 5.00" l, 1.00 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 256 pages
Review Praise for Timothy Keller "Tim Keller's ministry in New York City is leading a generation of seekers and skeptics toward belief in God. I thank God for him." --Billy Graham "Rev. Tim Keller [is] a Manhattan institution, one of those open urban secrets, like your favorite dim sum place, with a following so ardent and so fast-growing that he has never thought to advertise." --"Newsweek" "The most successful Christian Evangelist in [New York City]." --"New York "Praise for Timothy Keller "Tim Keller's ministry in New York City is leading a generation of seekers and skeptics toward belief in God. I thank God for him." --Billy Graham "Rev. Tim Keller [is] a Manhattan institution, one of those open urban secrets, like your favorite dim sum place, with a following so ardent and so fast-growing that he has never thought to advertise." --"Newsweek" "The most successful Christian Evangelist in [New York City]." --"New York "
About the Author TIMOTHY KELLER was born and raised in Pennsylvania, and educated at Bucknell University, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, and Westminster Theological Seminary. He was first a pastor 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 more than five thousand regular Sunday attendees and has helped to start nearly three hundred new churches around the world. Also the author of The Reason for God, The Prodigal God, Counterfeit Gods, Generous Justice, King's Cross, The Meaning of Marriage, and Every Good Endeavor, Timothy Keller lives in New York City with his family.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. IntroductionI 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 idea—that you should love your enemies—came from Christianity and nowhere else. And as we will see, there are plenty of other ideas we would consider valid, or noble, or even beautiful, that came solely from Christianity.Therefore, if you want to be sure that you are developing sound, thoughtful answers to the fundamental questions, you need at the very least to become acquainted with the teachings of Christianity. The best way to do that is to see how Jesus explained himself and his purposes to people he met—and how their lives were changed by his answers to their questions. That was the premise of the Oxford talks, which became the basis for the first five chapters of this book.Yet I had to continue on, because once you have studied these accounts of life-changing encounters with Jesus in the flesh, and have seen the beauty of his character and his purpose, and have heard his answers to the big questions, you are still left with another question: How can I encounter Jesus all these centuries later? Can I be changed just as these eyewitnesses were changed?The Christian gospel says that we are saved—changed forever—not by what we do, and not even by what Jesus says to people he meets, but by what he has done for us. And so we can best discover the life-changing grace and power of Jesus if we look at what he has accomplished in the main events of his life: his birth, his sufferings in the wilderness and the garden of Gethsemane, his last hours with the disciples, his death on the cross, and his resurrection and ascension. It is through his actions in these moments that Jesus accomplishes a salvation in our place that we could never have achieved ourselves. Seeing this can move you from an acquaintance with Jesus as a teacher and historical figure to a life-changing encounter with him as redeemer and savior.So the second half of the book will look at some of these pivotal events in Jesus’ life. The basis for these chapters was a series of talks I gave at the Harvard Club of New York City, where I spoke at regular breakfast meetings to business, government, and cultural leaders over a period of several years. As with the Oxford talks, many of those in the room were highly educated and accomplished people who helpfully shared their own doubts and questions with me. And in both sets of talks, I was going back—as I have again and again through the decades—to these Gospel texts where I first felt the “alive and active” character of the Scriptures (Hebrews 4:12). Just as my instructor had taught me, every time I discovered more and more within them, and every time I was more excited to share what I had learned.There is one more reason I wanted to write this book. When my granddaughter Lucy was eighteen months old, it was clear that she could perceive far more than she could express. She would point at something or pick up something and then stare at me in deep frustration. She wanted to communicate something, but she was too young to do it. All people feel this kind of frustration at various points throughout their lives. You experience something profound and then you come down off the mountaintop or out of the concert hall or wherever you were and you try to convey it to somebody else. But your words can’t begin to do it justice.Certainly all Christians will feel like that when they want to describe their experiences of God. As a teacher and preacher, it is my job and greatest desire to help other people see the sheer beauty of who Christ is and what he has done. But the inadequacy of my words (or perhaps any words) to fully convey this beauty is a constant frustration and grief to me. Yet there is no place in the world that helps us more in this difficult project than these accounts of Jesus’ encounters with people in the Gospels.I hope that whether you are looking at these accounts for the first time or the hundredth, you will be struck again by the person of Christ and what he has done for us.
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95 of 100 people found the following review helpful. CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE MOST IMPORTANT KIND By Dr. David P. Craig The foundation for the writing of this book was laid when Tim Keller was in college. He had recently come into a personal relationship with Christ and learned how to study the Bible guided by a book entitled Conversations with Jesus Christ from the Gospel of John by Marilyn Kunz and Catherine Schell. In close proximity to this study he learned how to read and study the Bible inductively. He attended a conference for Bible study leaders where one of the instructors had each student take 30 minutes to make 30 observations from Mark 1:17, “And Jesus said to them, ‘Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” In the first 10 minutes he thought he wrote down everything he had observed about the surrounding passage from the text. However, the gold was mined in minutes 20-30. It was through the patient and inductive wrestling with the text where the gold was found.In this book of encounters with Jesus Tim Keller mines spiritual gold.The first five chapters are based on talks given by Keller to students – most of whom were spiritual skeptics – at the Town Hall in Oxford, England in 2012. These first five chapters reveal the foundational teachings of Christianity and the astonishing character of Jesus in particular as he encounters Nathanael, the Samaritan Woman and a Pharisee, Mary and Martha, Guests at a Wedding Party, and Mary Magdalene. In each of these encounters important questions are addressed to and by Jesus and one learns how to read the Scriptures copiously and glean the answers to life’s greatest questions. Questions such as: What is the world for? What’s wrong with the world? Can anything or person make the world right? How can we be part of the solution to making the world right?Keller’s thesis is that “if you want to be sure that you are developing sound, thoughtful answers to the fundamental questions, you need at the very least to become acquainted with the teachings of Christianity. The best way to do that is to see how Jesus explained himself and his purposes to people he met–and how their lives were changed by his answers to their questions.” Therefore, the first half of this book is devoted to encounters “others” had with Jesus.The second half of the book is devoted to how we can encounter Jesus today in the 21st century. How can we be changed by Jesus? How can we know Jesus intimately and personally? How can we discover what the people discovered in the biblical encounters with Jesus in my own life? The second half of the book is based on talks that Keller delivered at the Harvard Club of New York City over a period of several years. Keller was addressing business, cultural, and governmental leaders – highly educated individuals who shared their doubts and questions with Keller. Therefore, by highlighting pivotal events’ in Jesus’ life – his temptation with Satan, his sending of the Holy Spirit, his road to the cross, his ascension, and his incarnation – we learn of the significance of the Person and work of Jesus Christ in the Gospel.I think this book is an especially good book to give to spiritual skeptics. With the holidays coming upon us it would make a great gift for friends, people you work with, and loved ones whom you desire to know Jesus personally and intimately. Keller writes cogently, concisely, and compellingly. He wisely interprets and applies each encounter with Jesus and highlights why we all need Jesus in our lives. For each human being there is no greater encounter that we can have than with the person and work of Jesus in and on our behalf. I highly recommend this book to quench your thirst for the only One who can satisfy our thirst – the Lord Jesus Christ.
43 of 46 people found the following review helpful. Helpful for the skeptic and the Christian By Dave Jenkins It’s popular today to hear people say, “You believe what you believe but I don’t believe that”. When you ask people to elaborate on what they believe and why they believe it, you are likely to get them to state something to the effect of “I feel this way”. Are our beliefs based on only on our feelings? Moreover, many people also state that religion is private and doesn’t need to be shared publically. Others earnestly contend that Jesus is just another religious teacher or prophet. So who is Jesus and what has He come to do? Does it even matter if we believe in Jesus at all? The historical Christian answer to that question is it does matter. It matters because Jesus came as the God-man to live a sinless life, to bled, to die, to rise, ascend, and serve as the Mediator of the New Covenant, Intercessor, and High Priest of His people. Since all of that matters what could be better than a book that tackles not only what our culture is saying about Jesus, but also what Jesus Himself said. Dr. Tim Keller’s book Encounters with Jesus: Unexpected Answers to Life’s Biggest Questions, tackles these important questions.Encounters with Jesus is essentially a collection of ten encounters of Jesus with people in the Gospels. As Dr. Keller examines these encounters, he takes both a wide and narrow lens. With a wide lens, he zooms out to see what the culture is saying about Jesus. On the narrow lens, Keller takes us into the world of the Bible. The combination of understanding what people are saying about Jesus and what Jesus Himself has said is a potent and explosive formula that will help both Christian and skeptics better understand the work of Jesus. Books like this are important for several reasons in our culture so as I conclude this book review, I’d like to focus on two specific reasons why I think you should read this book.First, reading this book will help you understand that Jesus is not just some teacher or prophet. Conversely, He is the Son of God, Son of Man, and the Lord Jesus Christ. He was not defeated at the Cross, but rather rose from the dead and now serves as the High Priest and Intercessor over His redeemed people. This is especially important to understand because people are increasingly coming into our churches with limited to no biblical framework on how to understand how Jesus desires to invade their lives with His story of redemption and why he seeks reconciliation of them with Himself. It is precisely for this reason why Encounters with Jesus is so important.Finally, many Christians, even those with a background in the Church, do not understand what our culture is saying about Jesus. Some of this is because they reject everything the culture says as unhelpful or ungodly, so they toss it out immediately never trying to interact with or understand the cultural perspective with a view to engage those views with the Word of God and the Gospel, demonstrating the superiority of the Christian worldview. Keller does a masterful job with keeping one ear to the culture and his eyes firmly entrenched on the Word of God. The culture today is rapidly changing, but the Church has a timeless message in the Gospel because behind that message is an unchanging God whose promises are yes and amen in Jesus Christ. As Keller engages the person and work of Jesus Christ, his model for how we engage others with the Gospel is noteworthy, demonstrating the need to not assume anything, to be as clear as you can, and above all, to be explicitly biblical and gospel-centered. Encounters with Jesus is an excellent book because it helps seekers and those who think Jesus is just some teacher or prophet to understand that He is in fact who He claimed to be, the Son God and the Son of Man, the Lord Jesus Christ who bled, died, rose, and ascended for His people.To read Encounters with Jesus is to step into a world where Jesus is King, to come to grips with who He is and what He has done, and His claims on all of our lives. The Puritans taught Jesus often divided the audience between those who were playing religious games and those who were serious about following Him. It is in this spirit that Encounters with Jesus shines the most and why I recommend you read it. Keller’s effort will help you understand the claims of Jesus, the person of Jesus, and why that matters. I recommend this book for seekers and for every lay Christian or scholar to read and digest so they can come face to face with the risen Christ. Even as a Christian of many years, I was challenged and blessed by this book and I pray the Lord will use this book in the life of His people. Furthermore, I pray Jesus would use this book to open the eyes of the blind to what He has done in His death, burial, and resurrection so they might come to know and serve the risen Lord Jesus.
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful. Clear, Concise, and Engaging Look at Life's Biggest Questions By Zack Ford ** This review originally appeared on longing4truth.com **Tim Keller has established himself as one of the top evangelical writers of today, especially in writing to an audience of skeptics and unbelievers. He has been given a unique gift and ability to interact with the intelligent skeptics on their level, which is most clearly seen in his bestseller, The Reason for God. Because of his church's placement in the middle of Manhattan, surrounded by the young, intellectual-type, Keller has honed his ability to interact on their level with the truths of Scripture and Christianity.In his new book, Encounters with Jesus: Unexpected Answers to Life's Biggest Questions, Keller is at it again. The book comes out of two series of lectures that Keller presented a couple of years ago. The first series of lectures was given at an Oxford Town Hall in Oxford, England in 2012. Over 5 nights, Keller spoke to a group of students — most of them skeptics — on the various encounters that individuals had with Jesus in the Gospel of John (xii). These make up the first 5 chapters of the book, where in each chapter Keller looks at a different interaction that Jesus had with people in John. These include the conversation (1) with Nathaniel in John 1; (2) with Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman in John 3-4; (3) with Mary and Martha in John 11; (4) with Mary, Jesus' mother, in John 2; and (5) with Mary Magdalene in John 20.In each of the five conversations, Keller looks at a different fundamental life-question that Jesus is addressing in his conversation with the individual.Chapter 1 - Where should we look for answers to the big questions of life? Where shouldn't we look for answers?Chapter 2 - What is wrong with the world the way it is?Chapter 3 - What, or Who, can put it right?Chapter 4 - How can He put things right in the world?Chapter 5 - How should we respond to what He has done?As you read each chapter, Keller exegetes the passage at hand in the clear and concise way that we have all come to expect from Keller, which is what makes reading his books so profitable and enjoyable.The second section of the book transitions from the conversations Jesus had with individuals in the Gospel of John and moves to how we, today, can encounter Christ — how we can encounter Him as savior. The basis for these chapters was a series of talks that Keller gave at the Harvard Club of New York City, where he "spoke at regular breakfast meetings to business, government, and cultural leaders over the period of several years" (xv). In these final five chapters, Keller looks at some of the pivotal events in the life of Jesus as they are presented in the Gospels.Chapter 6 - He overcomes evil for usChapter 7 - He intercedes for usChapter 8 - He obeys perfectly for usChapter 9 - He leaves earth to reign for usChapter 10 - He leaves heaven to die for usNow, you may be thinking, "Why didn't Keller include the 3 best-known event in Jesus' life — His birth, death and resurrection??" Keller addresses this on page 104, saying that these events are more familiar to us, and generally more clearer to us. It is not, by any means, that he does not view these as "pivotal events" in the life of Jesus. Rather, he focuses on 5 pivotal events that are less known to us, and because they are less known to us, their significance to the Christian faith is less clear to us.Not really knowing what the book was all about when I first got a copy of it, I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. It was written, as I've already said, in a very clear and concise manner, as well as in a very engaging manner. As with many of Keller's other books, I think I could use this for a variety of contexts. I could use it with a believer to think more deeply about the truths of Christ, who He was, and what He has done. But I could also use it with an unbeliever. Because of Keller's writing and teaching style, I think that the book would not be, on the surface, intimidating and threatening to an unbeliever. But I think that as an unbeliever worked through the book, he would come face to face with the Jesus of the Scriptures and the truths of the Gospel. Keller says, as he ends the introduction, that his hope is that "whether you are looking at these accounts for the first time or the hundredth, you will be struck again by the person of Christ and what he has done for us" (xvii). His hope certainly became a reality for me as I read the book, and I trust it will for you as well. I would definitely recommend you getting a copy for yourself, and if you have an unbelieving friend who would be willing to read this with you, get them a copy too. You'll be glad you did.In accordance with FTC regulations, I would like to thank Dutton Publishers for providing me with a review copy of this book in exchange for a fair and honest review.
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