Well, it caused him to speak in ways that make absolutely no sense to the world.

So for example, when he was suffering from stage four pancreatic cancer, a really lethal and invasive

form of cancer.

At one point, he, in an interview, he said, cancer is not my main fight.

My main fight is against sin. Because I'm going to die of something at some time. But I need to

fight my sin so that I'm ready to meet God and to be with God. But when we try to make a heaven

out of this world, it's like we're squeezing a rock, expecting it to yield water. When in reality it's a rock, we shouldn't try to

derive from it something it was never intended to give.

Matt's mother serves as lead pastor of River City Baptist Church in Richmond, Virginia,

and is the author of several books,

including Tim Keller on the Christian Life, The Transforming Power of the Gospel from Crossway.

Matt, thanks for joining me today on the Crossway podcast.

It's good to be with you again, Matt. Not talking about deacons this time.

Not talking about deacons. No, I'm fine with deacons. It's good to move on to something else. You're pro deacons. Yes, I'm still pro deacons. So Tim Keller will likely go down in history as

one of the most significant and influential evangelical church leaders of his generation.

And he wrote dozens of books. He preached hundreds of sermons over his decades-long career as a pastor.

And most of those are all readily available online. People have heard, I'm sure, much of his

teaching over the years. So I think it's fair to say that we know a lot about Tim Keller in some

ways. But I know in writing this new book that you've done, you spent countless hours immersed in many of Keller's lesser known sermons, things that are not available online, interviews he did, correspondence that he wrote, unpublished materials of all sorts.

So I wonder as a first question for you, what do you feel like you learned about Keller that you

didn't previously know? Were you surprised by anything through all the research that you did for

this? Well, it was interesting to see how certain themes developed over the years and others were

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