Coral Ridge Presbyterian: Fort Lauderdale, FL

Welcome to the brand new Coral Ridge website! We are grateful to our friends at Church Plant Media for partnering with us to create our new web presence. There’s still a lot of that needs to be done to the site–it’s definately a work in progress. And if you have any suggestions, we’re all ears! Seriously, we’re interested in your feedback.

So, thank-you for your patience. And thank-you Kal Hendry (our communications director) for working so tirelessly to give us a web makeover. 

My friend Elyse Fitzpatrick has taught me a ton about the gospel. Through her many excellent books, she has taken me to gospel depths that have changed my life. During the most difficult year of my life (2009) Elyse provided gospel-drenched counsel and insight that, in a very real sense, saved me. Thanks Elyse!

This morning, as I was re-reading a portion of her book Because He Loves Me: How Christ Transforms Our Daily Life, I was recaptured by a truth that I preached just yesterday. In my sermon on Colossians 1:9-14, I said:

It’s important to note that in these verses Paul doesn’t pray for something the Colossian Christians don’t have. Rather, he prays they will grow in their awareness and understanding of what they do have. Christian growth doesn’t happen by working hard to get something you don’t have. Christian growth happens by working hard to live in the reality of what you do have.

I used to think that when the Bible tells us to work out our salvation, it meant go out and get what you don’t have—get more patience, get more strength, get more joy, get more love, and so on. But after reading the Bible more carefully I now understand that real gospel fruit happens, not as we “work harder” but only as we continually rediscover the gospel. You could put it this way: rediscovering the gospel is the hard work we’re called to.

You see, the secret of the gospel is that we become more spiritually mature when we focus less on what we need to do for God and focus more on all that God has already done for us. The irony of the gospel is that we actually perform better as we grow in our understanding that our relationship with God is based on Christ’s performance for us, not our performance for him.

With this same idea in mind, Elyse writes:

One reason we don’t grow in ordinary, grateful obedience as we should is that we’ve got amnesia; we’ve forgotten that we are cleansed from our sins. In other words, ongoing failure in sanctification (the slow process of change into Christlikeness) is the direct result of failing to remember God’s love for us in the gospel. If we lack the comfort and assurance that his love and cleansing are meant to supply, our failures will handcuff us to yesterday’s sins, and we won’t have faith or courage to fight against them, or the love for God that’s meant to empower this war. If we fail to remember our justification, redemption, and reconciliation, we’ll struggle in our sanctification.

I guess you could say that Christian growth does not happen first by behaving better, but believing better–believing in bigger, deeper, brighter ways what Christ has already secured for sinners.

I closed yesterday by saying:

Let me summarize what Paul is saying in this whole section (v.9-14): You will grow in your understanding of God’s will, be filled with spiritual wisdom and understanding, increase in your knowledge of God, be strengthened with God’s power which will produce joy filled patience and endurance (v.9-12a) as you come to a greater realization that you’ve already been qualified, delivered, transferred, redeemed, and forgiven (v.12b-14)

As I prepare to preach my own father’s funeral today at 3 pm (a surreal and unique privilege–please pray for me), I was helped by these words from Charles Spurgeon in a blog post by my friend Justin entitled “Here and There“:

Charles Spurgeon on life “here” vs. what life will be like “there”:

Here, my best joys bear “mortal” on their brow;
My fair flowers fade;
my dainty cups are drained to dregs;
my sweetest birds fall before Death’s arrows;
my most pleasant days are shadowed into nights;
and the flood tides of my bliss subside into ebbs of sorrow.

“But there,” he writes, “everything is immortal”:

The harp remains in tune,
the crown unfading,
the eye undimmed,
the voice unfaltering,
the heart unwavering;
and the immortal being is wholly absorbed in infinite delight.

Source: Morning, January 18

As soon as my dad died on Saturday night I texted my oldest son Gabe telling him that Papa T had passed away. He and my middle son Nathan were at Nathan’s championship basketball game (Nathan’s middle name is Stephan–after my dad). Thirty minutes after Gabe received word and passed it on to Nate during the game, Nate (wearing number 14) made this shot to win the game - and the championship. I was so sorry I missed it. But it was so sweet of God to grant my grieving boys, and my dad’s namesake, something to cheer about.

My dear father passed away tonight at 6:46 pm at the age of 70. He had been in the hospital since having liver transplant surgery on September 8th. He fought long and hard but tonight his fight is over. We loved him. He will be missed. We are crying. He is rejoicing. As God sweetly reminded me last night, for those who are in Christ, the best is yet to come.

Tonight ended with me singing a hymn over and over in my mind–a hymn that my dad is singing louder now than ever before: “It is not Death to Die”…

It is not death to die
To leave this weary road
And join the saints who dwell on high
Who’ve found their home with God

It is not death to close
The eyes long dimmed by tears
And wake in joy before Your throne
Delivered from our fears

It is not death to fling
Aside this earthly dust
And rise with strong and noble wing
To live among the just

It is not death to hear
The key unlock the door
That sets us free from mortal years
To praise You evermore

Original words by Henri Malan (1787–1864).

What a comfort to know when staring in the face of death that, for those who have placed their trust in the finished work of Christ, it is not death to die.

Thank-you all, my friends, for your prayers over the last few months. They have been answered! 

In my opinion, there’s way too much needless debate in Reformed theological circles on whether the finished work of Christ–the gospel–effects salvation for individual sinners (the “penal substitionary atonement” group) or if it brings about a renewed creation (the “God is on a mission to restore all things to Himself through the person and work of Jesus Christ” group). In my book Unfashionable, I address this issue. Maybe I’m missing something, but it just doesn’t seem that complicated to me.

In the book, I write:

Jesus is the divine curse-remover and creation-renewer. Christ’s substitutionary death on the cross broke the curse of sin and death brought on by Adam’s cosmic rebellion. His bodily resurrection from the dead three days later dealt death its final blow, guaranteeing the eventual renewal of all things “in Christ.”

The dimensions of Christ’s finished work are both individual and cosmic. They range from personal pardon for sin and individual forgiveness to the final resurrection of our bodies and the restoration of the whole world. Now that’s good news—gospel—isn’t it? If we place our trust in the finished work of Christ, sin’s curse will lose its grip on us individually and we will one day be given a renewed creation. The gospel isn’t only about reestablishing a two-way relationship between God and us; it also restores a three-way relationship among God, his people, and the created order. Through Christ’s work, our relationship with God is restored while creation itself is renewed. This is what theologians mean when they talk about redemption. They’re describing this profound, far-reaching work by God.

Of course none of this is available for those who remain disconnected from Jesus. Sin’s acidic curse remains on everything that continues to be separated from Christ. We must be united to Christ by placing our trust in his finished work in order to receive and experience all the newness God has promised. For, as John Calvin said, “As long as Christ remains outside of us, and we are separated from him, all that he has suffered and done for the salvation of the human race remains useless and of no value for us.” But for all that is united to Christ, everything false, bad, and corrupting will one day be consumed by what is true, good, and beautifying—and this includes the material world. 

Update: In the comment section below, Bill points out an excellent quote from Mike Wittmer’s book Dont Stop Believing. Wittmer sums up the whole thing well, in my opinion, when he writes: “Penal substitution explains the heart of Christus Victor–how exactly Christ defeats the Devil. Christus Victor supplies the larger context for penal substitution.”

My friends Justin Taylor, Josh Harris, Greg Gilbert, Collin Hansen, and Kevin DeYoung are down visiting. Each year, we all try and get together for a few days to talk, pray, think, and encourage eachother. I’m so grateful for these friends. We have a great time together. Just being with them (I’m the oldest) is a great encouragement to me that God continues to raise up young men who love the gospel, care about the Bible, evangelism, expository preaching, sound doctrine, and attempting great things for God. 

As I was showing Josh that his new book, Dug Down Deep (it comes out today–it’s excellent) is sitting on my bedside table (almost at the top) he took a picture. Pastors, if your wives are tired of your many books lying around the house, show them this picture and maybe, just maybe, they’ll not only have great sympathy for my wife, Kim, but they may not bug you as much. 

Over a year ago, my friend Mike Wittmer, author of Heaven is a Place on Earth and Don’t Stop Believing, blogged about how postmodern innovators in the church (”emergents”) are challenging the age old asssumption that people are born broken, crippled by the guilt and pollution of original sin. He deals with emergent leader Doug Pagitt’s book A Christianity Worth Believing where Doug “devotes fifty pages to debunking the myth of total depravity and the Reformed standards, such as the Westminster Confession, which teach it. He says that original sin implies that people ’suck’, and if there is one thing we know from watching a newborn child, it is that people ‘don’t suck.’”

Mike offers a corrective to Doug’s radical misunderstanding by writing:

As with most of the issues raised by postmodern innovators, the solution is not to opt for one side or the other but to embrace both.  We must follow Augustine, who learned from his battles with Manicheism on one extreme and Pelagianism on the other, to say that people are created but fallen, and fallen but created. People are created in the image of God, and so they have enormous value and, through common grace, the ability to do good to others.  But people are also born rebels. We may often be good to each other, but none of us is good toward God.  Adam and Eve bit the fruit in a futile bid to be like God, and their children have not stopped chasing the dream.

Mike is saying the same thing that Cornelius Plantinga wrote in his book Beyond Doubt:

People tend to make two mistakes when they think about the redeemed life. The first is to underestimate the sin that remains in us; it’s still there and it can still hurt us. The second is to underestimate the strength of God’s grace; God is determined to make us new. As a result, all Christians need to say two things. We admit that we are redeemed sinners. But we also say boldly and joyously that we are redeemed sinners.

Read the rest of Mike’s insightful post here. 

I’m a die-hard believer in unction. Unction is an old fashioned word which describes an effusion of power from the Holy Spirit as one preaches. It is the one thing preachers need above everything else. It is the accompanying power of the Spirit. This is what Charles Spurgeon dubbed “the sacred annointing.” It is power from on high. 

In his book on the preaching of Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, The Sacred Annointing, Tony Sargent describes unction well. He writes:

[Unction] is the afflatus of the Spirit resting on the speaker. It is the preacher gliding on eagles’ wings, soaring high, swooping low, carrying and being carried along by a dynamic other than his own. His consciousness of what is happening is not obliterated. He is not in a trance. He is being worked on but is aware that he is still working. He is being spoken through but he knows he is still speaking. The words are his but the facility with which they come compels him to realise that the source is beyond himself. The man is overwhelmed. He is on fire.

Oh how my heart burns for this sacred annointing, this unction! I hope and pray that preachers all over the world would spend much of their sermon preparation time begging God for this power on high. For, it is preachers who are borne along by the Holy Spirit that are used to effect a deep and sobering awareness of God and his truth that transforms. 

In his book Lloyd-Jones: Messenger of Grace, Iain Murray writes:

Preaching under the annointing of the Holy Spirit is preaching which brings with it a consciousness of God. It produces an impression upon the hearer that is altogether stronger than anything belonging to the circumstances of the occasion. Visible things fall into the background; the surroundings, the fellow worshippers, even the speaker himself, all become secondary to an awareness of God himself. Instead of witnessing a public gathering, the hearer receives the conviction that he is being addressed personally, and with an authority greater than that of a human messenger.

Given the fact that the ultimate factor in the church’s engagement with society is the church’s engagement with God, my earnest prayer is that, for the sake of the world, more preachers would come to know and understand what Andrew Bonar meant when he wrote: “It is one thing to bring truth from the Bible, and another to bring it from God himself through the Bible.”

Please pray, dear friends, that God would annoint my mind and mouth on Sunday as I preach so that God’s people would hear from God. Please pray that God’s Spirit would so inhabit my words that everyone would leave worship tomorrow being able to say, “God was surely in that place.”

I can’t manufacture unction regardless of how well crafted my sermon is and how well prepared I may be. The biggest work must come from God.

So, come thou fount of every blessing and do for your people what I cannot. Amen.   

Here’s another gospel-drenched prayer from Scotty Smith. I suggest we all make this prayer our own every day:

Heavenly Father, in Rome I saw the statues of various gods that filled the temples and lifestyle of that great ancient city. In London, I visited the biggest Buddhist temple in the city and wandered from station to station as worshippers offered prayers and gifts to deities that looked so strange to me. In Israel, I studied decaying remains of various idols which competed for the worship of the people of God.

Yet for me to obey John’s command to keep myself from idols requires so much more than simply staying away from ancient sites, pagan temples and man-made idols. Father, I’ve never been more aware of the invisible pantheon of idols that are constantly angling and clamoring for my heart’s worship.

Sometimes the approval or rejection from people has more sway over my heart than what you think about me. Sometimes my need to be right is more compelling to me than being righteous in Christ. Sometimes my desire to be in control of my world and circumstances claims much more of my time and energy than seeking you and basking in your love.

Have mercy on me, Father, and free my foolish heart from giving anything or anyone the attention, allegiance, affection and adoration you alone deserve. That I am your “dear child,” forgiven, secure, righteous and beloved in Christ, should be all the motivation I need to keep myself from any form of idolatry. May the gospel of your grace relentlessly expose and dethrone all “empty nothings” from my heart. So very Amen, I pray, in Jesus’ name.