“We are going to keep praying UNTIL JESUS RETURNS! We will pray…ALL NIGHT LONG!”
It was 1 a.m. According to our pamphlet schedule, the last worship service of our 1994 summer youth group retreat should have ended three hours ago. We had long passed the time for kimchi ramen and were cutting into time for games of Uno and Thirteen.
But there we were, a group of fifteen students—half of us sleeping and the other half desperately trying to keep pace with our youth pastor, who was strumming away on his guitar while singing Lord, I Lift Your Name On High with no end in sight.
We prayed for another ninety minutes, until Jundosanim’s voice gave out. He dismissed us, and we made our way into our cabins in the Santa Cruz mountains. I was only fourteen at the time, so I didn’t know how to verbalize it then. But as I was laying in my bunk bed, the muscle spasms in my leg and my aching back were telling me, “This is not Good News.”
The strengths of the Asian immigrant church are undeniable: fervent prayer, life-on-life community, and a strong sense of cultural identity within the kingdom of God. It’s why I’ve served as a youth leader and EM pastor of a Korean immigrant church for more than 19 years. But oftentimes the robust practice of the “Good News” in real life seems contrary to our spiritual reality. Our good news is work.
We need work for everything we want to get out of life. Work for survival. Work for salvation. For those of us who grew up with this version of the gospel, we carried it into our spiritual devotions and even burgeoning ministries. If we pray hard enough, fast long enough, and merit enough sacrificial brownie points, then we can finally prove to God that we love him, and he will bless us.
But like it did for many others, a Tim Keller book fell into my lap while traveling on the road to Da-merit-scus. I was assigned to read Counterfeit Gods for a seminary course, and even before getting to the first chapter, Keller’s explanation of idolatry in the book’s introduction gripped me.
I read on feverishly, captivated by his interpretation of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son, Isaac, in Genesis 22. Our pastors and bible teachers have traditionally used this narrative to get us to serve on the praise team, pick up the trash around the sanctuary, or practice for our Christmas performances. “Abraham was willing to give up his only son, Isaac, but you can’t even give up one hour of your Saturday morning to practice our Christmas break-dance/lip-sync rap?”
Keller, however, presented the heart of the Father in this narrative… and the scales fell from my eyes:
God saw Abraham’s sacrifice and said, “Now I know that you love me, because you did not withhold your only son from me.” But how much more can we look at his sacrifice on the Cross, and say to God, “Now, we know that you love us. For you did not withhold your son, your only son, whom you love, from us.” When the magnitude of what he did dawns on us, it makes it possible finally to rest our hearts in him rather than in anything else.
We had always heard we were sons and daughters of God in Christ, but to many of us who had grown up in an Asian immigrant household, being a good child meant to honor the sacrifices of our parents by working hard and proving our worthiness. Naturally, we would read of Abraham’s extreme resolve and assume this was our gospel-destiny as well: Prove to God that the sacrifice of his own son was not in vain.
The good news for us, modeled in our homes and reinforced in our churches, has always been the future relief of a distant hope. It was a dangling promise that through our merits, we might be able to offset their great cost and ensure their sacrifice was not in vain—both the sacrifice of our parents and the sacrifice of God.
But Keller turned this narrative into something else altogether. For the first time, I received a glimpse into the heart of the Father, and instead of work, I was invited to rest. Rest in his love. Rest in his sacrifice. Now, we know that you love us.
This narrative wasn’t about proving how much we love God, but God proving how much he loves us. Keller wrote that “Jesus is the true and better Isaac.” This gospel he presented gave the immigrant church members tangible spiritual rest, not just more work disguised in a rest-themed Halloween costume.
It was an irresistible grace moment. It was liberating. It was Good News.
As pastors and young seminarians, we were enthralled. Our immigrant communities needed to hear this. So, we binged Keller. We were gluttonous for everything Keller. So we consumed and imitated him. Even though I hate fantasy novels, I tried to pick up Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, simply because Keller quoted from the novels so often. To this day, the series remains, collecting digital-dust in my Kindle library.
I will admit that we might have gone too far. Some of us might need to apologize to our congregations for imitating him too much in those early years. We apologize for all our thrift store “true-and-betters” that we sprinkled through our sermons, and we apologize for scheduling our small group studies to align with his book release dates. But one Keller influence for which we will not apologize is the presentation of the gospel as it was meant to be heard for our generation and our people: Good, truly good.
Everyone has a handful of favorite Keller quotes. One of mine is “We never get beyond the gospel in our Christian life to something more advanced. The gospel is not the first step in a stairway of truths, rather, it is more like the hub in a wheel of truth. The gospel is not just the ABC’s of Christianity, but it is the A to Z of Christianity.”
Keller’s legacy will be that he introduced many church communities to a new plaster cast of the gospel into which we pour our loves and lives. It is a message of good news that is more like honey on our lips than yokes around our necks—and for that, we will always be grateful.