Tim Keller’s book, King’s Cross, is the compilation of his sermon series through the Gospel of Mark. The book is divided into two parts, corresponding with the major shift in Mark 9: Part 1 is “The King: The Identity of Jesus”, and Part 2 is “The Cross: The Purpose of Jesus”. In this work, Keller has truly mastered the art of turning a sermon series into a single book. (I should say that he has given me hope that, one day, I too could write a book from a sermon series. But that’s a journey for another day.)

King’s Cross “is an extended meditation on the historical Christian premise that Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection form the central event of cosmic and human history as well as the central organizing principle of our own lives.” (x) His aim, which I believe he accomplishes, is to show that the life of Jesus (and his death and resurrection) explains our lives. This theme appears again and again as, in each chapter, Keller brings the reader around to the love of God we find only in Jesus. If you’ve read any of his other recent books, you know that this is vintage Keller.

The book is truly an exegetical sermon on the Gospel of Mark. Keller never deviates from the text, but walks slowly through Mark’s Gospel with an insightful and engaging style. This is not an academic book, but as we’ve come to expect from Keller’s books, you will be intellectually challenged and emotionally broken. He has a way of speaking to both the heart and mind that is extraordinary, and is one of the marks of a truly great preacher. In fact, young and aspiring preachers would do well to study Keller’s style and work, learning from him all that they can. His books have taught me to, above all, remain Christ-centered in my preaching, no matter the text. If all of Scripture points to Jesus, then so must all of our preaching.

King’s Cross has also inspired me to preach through the Gospel of Mark from Christmas to Easter, even though there is no birth narrative in his Gospel. Shoot, I may just stand up and read a chapter a week! (Just kidding, that would be plagiarism.)

If you want to understand Mark’s Gospel or if you want to get to know Jesus much, much better, you should read King’s Cross. I would also highly recommend this book to those who don’t know Jesus, but are curious about him. While it’s not the shortest book in the world, Keller’s style is very accessible to people from all walks of life.

I had an epiphany a while back. Some of the leaders of Ember Church were gathered in our backyard, praying for one another, and it came to me: One of the reasons that Ember Church exists is so that people can learn to find Jesus in the shit of life. While I won’t claim that as a “word from the Lord” (for obvious reasons), it immediately struck me as true. That’s not going to become our mission statement, nor will you see it on any t-shirts, but it has really resonated with me and the leaders of our community.

Life isn’t fair. Sometimes life doesn’t simply hand you lemons, it hands you big, steaming pile of shit and says, in its best Ron Burgundy voice, “Deal with it.” The authors of the Bible, especially of Job, Ecclesiastes, and many of the psalms, understood this reality well.

Of course, it’s human nature to lament the injustice of life. I’m a good person, so why did I wind up with [cancer] [a cheating spouse] [a child with autism]? And there’s never an answer to this question. It’s almost as though the heavens are mocking us, replying in a booming baritone, “Deal with it.”

So we live through these difficult circumstances with a sense of God-forsakenness. We throw up our arms in exasperation and cry out, “God left me! I don’t know what I did to drive him away, but clearly he’s not going to bless me now. He must not want me anymore!” We instinctually believe that God and the shit cannot coexist. We are wrong.

Ask yourself a question: What is the essence of my prayers? For many of us, myself included, our basic prayer is this: Lord, please take this away. Whether it’s a sickness, a trial, or some other kind of obstacle, our basic message to God is essentially, “Make this stop.” We want our lives to be shit-free, and we look to God to be the one to clean it all up.

If that’s your most common prayer, you shouldn’t feel guilty. You’re not alone. The apostle Paul prayed that same prayer to God. Three times he cried out to God for some affliction (unknown to us now) to be removed. Heck, even Jesus prayed the night before his crucifixion, “If it’s possible, let this cup be taken from me.”

Unfortunately, God’s answer to both Paul and his Son was a resounding, “No.” But it was a “No” with a reason. For Paul it was so that God’s power could be made perfect in that man’s weakness. For Jesus it was so that all the world could be saved from sin, death, and the powers of hell.

Now back to our prayers. What if, when we ask God to take our trials away, he is saying back to us, “No, I’m not going to take this away or make it stop, because this is where you’ll find me.” What if what God really wants us to learn in this life is that he can be found in the shit? Where else would we expect to find the God who was homeless, broke, and sentenced to die as a criminal but in the muck and mire – the total shit – of our lives?

You don’t have to get all fixed up to find God; God got completely broken in order to find you. Nobody knows rejection and suffering better than Jesus. Nobody bore the weight of evil, sin, and death more heavily than Jesus. His life was harder than yours. His death was more excruciating than yours will be. Jesus didn’t step out of heaven and into some Roman palace in order to live the most opulent lifestyle available at the time. He came out of a woman’s womb, grew up as a blue-collar handyman in a tiny corner of the world that lived under oppressive, foreign rule. In his hour of greatest need, all his closest friends either betrayed him or abandoned him. And as he died on the cross, he suffered the judgment of God the Father, the one with whom he had had perfect, harmonious communion from eternity past.

Jesus knows what the shit looks like, smells like, and feels like. Jesus is in the shit.

Your trials and diseases and crappy circumstances are not a sign of your God-forsakenness. Instead, they’re the signal that God is near at hand, that he can be found here, and that he understands. Your circumstances don’t need to change in order for you to draw close to God, just your attitude.

Whatever it is that you’re going through, Jesus is with you. You can turn to him, right now, and he will be by your side. I would even go so far as to say that it’s easier to find him when life sucks than when everything is going great, if only we would humble ourselves enough to speak his name.

God’s not looking down from heaven, arms folded and brow furrowed, watching while you wallow in the crap of life, exclaiming with divine self-satisfaction, “Deal with it!” No, he’s down here with us, feet and clothes covered in shit, his hand on our shoulder and a look of infinite empathy and reassurance on his face, speaking tenderly, “I’m here, too.”

Agape love is a topic I write and talk about often. One of the most formative sermons I’ve ever preached (formative for me, at least) was on agape love. Agape is one of Ember Church’s core values. I blog about it frequently. We’re talking about it at Ember Outdoors this summer.

Agape love is a major theme of the New Testament, especially the writings of John. In John 13, the apostle writes:

34 “A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. 35 By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

Of course, every instance of the word “love” in that passage is a translation of the Greek word agape. So you might as well write it like this: A new command I give you: Agape one another. As I have agaped you, so you must agape one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you agape one another.

Jesus said this before he went to the cross, but he referred to his demonstration of agape love in the past tense. What was he talking about? He was talking about how he had just washed his disciples’ feet. That was an act of agape love, one that resonated deeply within their own souls, and should be paradigmatic for the way in which they ought to relate to one another.

But washing their feet wasn’t the only act of agape love Jesus would commit that week. It was the very next day that he was brutally tortured and killed on a roman cross, dying as the final sacrifice for the sins of all humanity.

The sweet spot of agape love is between the washbasin and the cross. In the washbasin, Jesus set aside his rights, privilege, and honor as the world’s true king to perform the duties of the lowliest household servant–washing the filthy feet of 12 nomads, one who would, just hours later, betray him. At the cross he laid down his life and forgave the sins of humanity.

Jesus didn’t just talk about agape love, he defined it. He demonstrated it. He lived, and yes, died, it. The agape love of Jesus encompasses the washbasin and the cross, and this is the same agape love which he demands of us.

“A new command”, he said. Like the first two: “Love YHWH your God…”, and “Love your neighbor.” Now a third. “Love one another.” Agape one another. Agape one another with a washbasin, and with a cross. The love of Jesus was no sentimental affection; it was both dirty and bloody. And that’s the kind of love he expects from us: agape love.

Whenever you’re not sure how to love somebody, just remember how Jesus loved us, and that the sweet spot of agape love is between the washbasin and the cross.

People hated Jesus. They tried to trap him. They wanted to kill him. This passage represents one of their best efforts at trapping him.

13 Later they sent some of the Pharisees and Herodians to Jesus to catch him in his words. 14 They came to him and said, “Teacher, we know that you are a man of integrity. You aren’t swayed by others, because you pay no attention to who they are; but you teach the way of God in accordance with the truth. Is it right to pay the imperial tax to Caesar or not? 15 Should we pay or shouldn’t we?”

But Jesus knew their hypocrisy. “Why are you trying to trap me?” he asked. “Bring me a denarius and let me look at it.” 16 They brought the coin, and he asked them, “Whose image is this? And whose inscription?”

“Caesar’s,” they replied.

17 Then Jesus said to them, “Give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.”

And they were amazed at him.

So now the religious leaders are pretty upset. They’re trying to trap Jesus with this question. If he said that it’s not right for the Jews to pay taxes to Caesar, then he would be arrested by the Romans, and potentially tried for insurrection. If he said that it is right to pay taxes to Caesar, then the people would reject him because they despised the pagan Romans, and deeply resented their presence in Israel. What’s he supposed to do? What can he say? There’s no way out of this conundrum.

Well, you can’t trap Jesus. He knew exactly what was going on, and he wasn’t going to be caught in their trap. So he had someone bring him one of the Roman coins, a denarius. “Whose image is this?” he asked.

“It’s Caesar’s,” they responded.

“Well then, give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s.”

But he left something out. Where is God’s image inscribed? On us. On every human being on the face of the earth. Genesis 1 says that we are made in God’s image. We bear God’s inscription.

So everything that has Caesar’s image on it belongs to Caesar, but everything that has God’s image on it belongs to God. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant. Go ahead and give your money to Caesar. God doesn’t really care about that anyway. But give yourself to God. That’s what he wants. He’s not concerned about your taxes. He’s not concerned about the pagans collecting your money. He’s concerned about your generosity toward him. How much of yourself are you giving to God?

Are you being generous with yourself—your thoughts, your actions, your heart, your will, your talents, your gifts, your being, your future—are you being generous in giving yourself to God? You are made in the image of God. You belong to God. All of you.

There have been some dominant themes that, I believe, God has been trying to pound into our heads and hearts throughout the course of Ember’s existence. One of those themes is that God can change us at the level of our deep heart desires. He changes us through the power of the Gospel, through his grace and mercy seeping into the cracks of our hearts, our minds, our wills.

But in order to be changed we must give ourselves over to his grace. We must throw ourselves down at the foot of the cross, placing all of our trust, all of our hope, all of our dreams, all of our desires upon the broad and broken shoulders of Jesus. We must abandon our way of doing things, our agendas for this life, and throw ourselves fully onto the grace of God found only in his son, Jesus Christ.

I flew on my first business trip yesterday, leaving Columbus at 5:30 in the morning and getting into Savannah at 4:30. (It shouldn’t have taken that long, but that’s another story for another day.) The thing I love most about flying is being able to see the ground from 30,000 feet, especially at night. It’s breathtaking.

I know that God doesn’t live in the clouds, but when I think about God looking out over the earth, I always imagine him having this airplane-level view. He can see far more than we can see on the ground.

Many of Jesus’ parables offer a picture of life from God’s perspective. The parable of the vineyard, in Mark 12, is one of them.

1 Jesus then began to speak to them in parables: “A man planted a vineyard. He put a wall around it, dug a pit for the winepress and built a watchtower. Then he rented the vineyard to some farmers and moved to another place. 2 At harvest time he sent a servant to the tenants to collect from them some of the fruit of the vineyard. 3 But they seized him, beat him and sent him away empty-handed. 4 Then he sent another servant to them; they struck this man on the head and treated him shamefully. 5 He sent still another, and that one they killed. He sent many others; some of them they beat, others they killed.

6 “He had one left to send, a son, whom he loved. He sent him last of all, saying, ‘They will respect my son.’

7 “But the tenants said to one another, ‘This is the heir. Come, let’s kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.’ 8 So they took him and killed him, and threw him out of the vineyard.

9 “What then will the owner of the vineyard do? He will come and kill those tenants and give the vineyard to others. 10 Haven’t you read this passage of Scripture:

“‘The stone the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone;
11 the Lord has done this,
and it is marvelous in our eyes’?”

12 Then the chief priests, the teachers of the law and the elders looked for a way to arrest him because they knew he had spoken the parable against them. But they were afraid of the crowd; so they left him and went away.

Jesus just took the entire history of Israel and turned it into a parable. That’s what this is about. It’s about what the kings and leaders of Israel and Judah did to God’s prophets from the time of Elijah until the time of Jesus. They were stoned. They were impaled on spikes. They were sawn in half. They were thrown into pits and left to die. They were rejected, scorned, mocked, ridiculed. They were treated shamefully, beaten, killed. This was the pattern that existed in Israel for almost a millennium. God’s people killed God’s messengers.

It’s an interesting way to look at it, isn’t it? From God’s perspective? How often do you look at the circumstances and events of your life from God’s perspective? And if you were able to see your life through God’s eyes, what would you see? How would you see things differently?

The other night my wife and I were talking about stress, and the things that add stress to our lives. She talked about how she gets stressed when I’m in a bad mood, or when I’m angry. It doesn’t even have to be at her, but she still feels stressed and guilty. I said I feel the same way. When she’s stressed or frustrated, I have an emotional reaction to that, even when she’s not upset with me.

In that moment we experienced this wonderful thing called empathy. We understood each other. We saw things from one another’s perspective. And that felt like a relational breakthrough.

What we need in our relationship with God is empathy. We need to see things from his perspective. That’s what Jesus offers us in this parable. In fact, that’s what Jesus offers us in himself. He is God’s living and breathing perspective. He is God. Knowing Jesus, having a personal relationship with him, means empathizing with God.

And here’s the amazing thing about Jesus. Yes, he is God. But he is also human. And he empathizes with us. Jesus understands. Whatever you’re going through, Jesus gets it. He knows how it feels to be lonely, rejected. He knows the meaning of suffering. He was victimized. He was tortured. He was mocked. Jesus gets it. Jesus gets you.