Christianity Today September 22, 2026 7 min signal 2026-09-22

How Tim Keller rearranged his life in his final years

Archived text mirror, captured for personal reading when the Signal ran. Formatting is approximate — read the original at the source.

Christianity Today

September 22, 2026

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Illustration by Christianity Today / Source Images: Getty, Zondervan

A few years ago I visited a friend who serves as a pastor in Hawaii. The moment I stepped off the plane, I understood why they call it paradise. Warm breeze. Turquoise water. Lush mountains draped in greenery.

## The Stories We Live By: Seven Cultural Myths That Fail Us and the Story That Never Will

Timothy Keller (Author), Michael Keller (Author)

Zondervan

256 pages

$22.98

I said to my friend, “Everything is so great here! If people are living in paradise, how will anyone ever realize their need for Jesus?”

Without hesitation he replied, “In Hawaii, everyone knows they should be happy because they’re in paradise. But they know they’re not happy, which is when they start to ask questions.”

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Notice how we only ask questions when the story isn’t working. C. S. Lewis suggests in Mere Christianity that if nothing in this world satisfies us completely, perhaps we were made for something beyond this world. It is right and good to look for happiness, but we’re inevitably looking for something that ordinary life can’t provide. In other words, unmet longings aren’t a curse; they’re a clue.

Lewis wrote, “A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. … If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.”

Christianity observes that we’re discontent because our loves are disordered. It’s not that we love our work, our spouse, or other things too much; it’s that we love God too little in relation to those other things. The problem isn’t the intensity of our loves; it’s the order.

Stoic and Eastern thought says our problem is loving material things in the first place; we need to detach ourselves from them. Our current culture says material things are all that exist, so we must latch on to them. Christianity says the problem is that we love the most important things too little and the least important things too much. We need to reorder them.

My dad, Tim Keller, said, “Reordering love means we do not need to love things less, but love God more than anything else.” When we love God first, all other loves fall into their rightful place.

For instance, if you love your career more than your family, you’ll damage your family—not because you don’t love them but because your love for your career has become disordered. There’s nothing wrong with loving your career, but this love must be rightly ordered.

Alternatively, as you seek to be a loving family member, if you start making your family your god, hoping they will complete you, you’ll put impossible demands on them and be crushed by every disappointment while crushing them with unrealistic expectations. Ironically, by loving your family more than God, you end up harming your family, because you’re asking them to provide what only God can give.

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If God is your greatest love, you can love your work and love your family—believing that success and failure in both endeavors matter—but neither love will destroy you because your worth is rooted in God’s love, not in what happens at work or in your family. You can value your work and care for your family without asking them to cure you or give you ultimate purpose.

How do you know if you have disordered loves? Three questions reveal your priorities. First, what makes you most anxious in life? The things that steal your peace often reveal what you’re depending on for security. Second, where does your mind go when it wanders? Your daydreams reveal your desires. What you fantasize about reveals the things you believe will make you happy. And third, what do you spend money on most freely? Bank statements don’t lie. Where you put your expendable income often points to the things you believe will give you life. Asking yourself these questions can reveal the areas where your loves are out of order.

I watched this reordering happen in my father’s life during his final years of illness. As cancer made clear that his days were numbered, his habits changed. He was both less driven and more focused. The things he cared about most—time with my mother, finishing projects that mattered, and connecting with his sons—he enjoyed more than ever, even as his time for everything else contracted. There was a lightness to him I can only now name: He no longer needed any of his pursuits to make him complete. He was not, in those last years, a man who had learned to love less; he was a man who had learned to put his love in the right order.

What does it mean to “love God more than anything”? You can’t just flip a switch or repeat this phrase to make it happen. Nor can you guilt, yell, or command your heart into it. What you need is to experience something that captivates your heart and reorders your love.

How can we do that? Dad pointed to John 6:27–35: “Jesus doesn’t say, ‘I will give you the bread of life,’ as though he is a dispenser of spiritual benefits. He claims to be the bread of life.” What does this mean? When we eat bread, the grain dies so that we live.

This is the logic of substitutionary sacrifice. Jesus doesn’t offer us spiritual products; he offers us himself. On the cross, Jesus truly put aside his own happiness for our sake. Why? Hebrews 12:2 says it was “for the joy set before him.” What is his joy and happiness? You and I are. He made you and me his happiness. He took the loss, pain, and death we deserve for all the ways we focus on our own happiness rather than on the happiness of others, in order for us to have the happiness he deserves.

When we see the God of creation make us his happiness, when we grasp this gift in our hearts, it changes us. Only a love that extraordinary can once and for all shake our self-centered pursuits, melt our cynicism, and calm our fears.

The question for each of us is this: What and who am I looking to for happiness? What story animates my life and moves my imagination? The Christian story does not ask us to suppress our God-given desire for joy, nor does it offer us the lie that created things can ultimately satisfy. Instead, it tells us to reorder our desires by making the one who loves us the most the one we love the most. Then happiness will be ours as well.

Taken from The Stories We Live By: Seven Cultural Myths That Fail Us and the Story That Never Will by Timothy Keller and Michael Keller. Copyright © September 2026 by Zondervan. Used by permission of Zondervan, www.zondervan.com.

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