According to RC Sproul, “The big idea of the Christian life is coram Deo. Coram Deo captures the essence of the Christian life.”
Read this short entry from Dr. Sproul’s blog to understand more about why we chose this name for our church, and what we are seeking to communicate in using it.
Yesterday I preached on “Gospel-Growth” from Colossians 1:6-8. At the end of the sermon I worked through four questions that help us apply the gospel in various life situations (see list below). This is not the only way to think about gospel application, but it is a good start. Your ability to answer these questions depends on your understanding of the gospel and your expectations about what the gospel can accomplish. You will gain more insight if you ask and answer these questions in community.
1. How does the gospel confront the way you think and feel about a particular situation in your actual life?
The gospel is a body of truth, a revelation from God that sets forth the good news about what God has done in His Son Jesus. In a nutshell, this is “the grace of God in truth” declared in the gospel: A holy God created the world and everything in it. The first people had perfect fellowship with God, but they rebelled against God and fell into sin. And everyone after them has done the same. We are all under sin. We are separated from God and we deserve His eternal wrath. But God, because of His great love, offered up His own Son as a sacrifice for sin. God poured out His wrath against our sin on Jesus, who bore it on our behalf so that God could accept us. Jesus got what we deserve (shame, loneliness, beating, wrath, death), and we get what He deserves (favor and life eternal). God forgives sin and reconciles sinners to Himself so that we can worship and enjoy Him forever, as we were made to do. We did nothing to earn this immeasurable act of love. It is from beginning to end a work of God’s grace. So what truths about our salvation in Jesus confront the way we think and feel about our identity, worth, rights, expectations, performance, fears, needs, etc.?
2. How does the gospel convict me of sin with regard to that situation?
In every circumstance, even when we are wronged, we still bring something to the table. The gospel forces us to humbly consider our own thoughts and actions and attitudes. So how do you need to repent of the ways in which your sin has come to light in this situation?
3. How does the gospel comfort me in this situation?
The grace of God is not to overlook sin, but rather to forgive sin and empower us to turn from sin and trust in the hope of the gospel. So what realities set forth in the gospel enable us to rest in God’s provision, hope in Jesus’ coming, trust God’s character, experience His love and mercy, etc.?
4. How does the gospel challenge me in this situation?
The gospel is not only a body of truth, but also a power let loose in the world that transforms people and communities. It prevails upon your very identity to change you from the inside out. The gospel doesn’t merely instruct you about how to obey God. Rather, it changes you and makes you the kind of person who obeys God. It challenges you to expect supernatural change in your life and in those around you, the kind of fruit that cannot be accounted for apart from God’s divine activity. And this vision compels you to action. So what does the gospel challenge you to expect and do in this situation?
Situations addressed in the sermon: Job loss, Unforgiveness, “Mom Identity”, Frustration that things aren’t going your way, You don’t want to confess sin, You’re in great need, You’re a perfectionist.
I also mentioned five questions that indicate what John Ortberg calls pseudo-transformation in his book The Life You’ve Always Wanted. I have attached some excerpts from that book with the questions here.
Focusing on our gospel identity as servants has raised a number of good questions in MC’s this week. Shouldn’t I serve in areas where I’m gifted? How can we call everyone to serve in the same ways (setup, refugee ministry, children’s ministry) if God has gifted people differently?
On these questions and others, Dr. Ed Clowney offers some perspective:
The possession of [spiritual] gifts for service in Christ’s church constitutes a call for their use… Stewards must be trustworthy. We use our gifts in order to serve God, not in order to advance ourselves, attract the admiration of others, or even find satisfaction and fulfillment. We cannot demand that the Lord provide precisely the socket into which our gifts may best be plugged. Our first goal is to get the job done, and only secondarily to find the best use of our gifts. To be sure, the Lord who calls us will provide opportunities for the use of the gifts he has given. Paul sought open doors of gospel witness and urged Christians to do the same… but Paul did not disdain tent-making when that served Christ’s mission.
In advancing the work of the Spirit, we cannot sharply separate natural gifts from spiritual gifts. Both come from the Creator Spirit… our spiritual gifts are often renewed and heightened forms of natural gifts.
– Edmund P. Clowney, The Church, IVP Contours of Christian Theology series
You cannot open the pages of the New Testament without realizing that one of the things that makes it so ‘new,’ in every way, is that here men and women call God ‘Father.’ This conviction, that we can speak to the Maker of the universe in such intimate terms, lies at the heart of the Christian faith. Through Christ, says Paul, we have ‘access to the Father’ (Eph 2:18). References to God as Father are exceedingly rare in the Old Testament. By contrast there are over two hundred different references to God as Father scattered throughout the New Testament. That is an astonishing testimony to the new sense of God’s grace that came with the message of the gospel.
Yet the Christian church in general has not always maintained this fresh and living sense of the Fatherhood of God. It has often failed to appreciate that the Christian life is a life of sonship.
- from the Preface to Children of the Living God by Sinclair Ferguson
We like to speak of Coram Deo as a gospel-centered missional church. We like to speak of Acts 29 as a gospel-centered church planting movement. But what do we mean when we say “gospel-centered?”
These are the things we’ll consider together over the next few months. We refer to it as shaping “gospel DNA.” Our goal is to work the dynamics of the gospel so deeply into our souls and into our church culture that it gets expressed and replicated in everything we do.
For those of you who have been around Coram Deo for awhile: how would you describe the difference between merely knowing/believing the gospel and really being shaped by the gospel (having gospel DNA)?
Paul (the Apostle): “From Christ the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.”
Randy Frazee: “Consumerism is about consumption – the concentrated effort to consume things in order to meet one’s real and perceived needs and wants. While in its basic form consumption is both necessary and permissible, when it is practiced in an environment where the individual is sovereign, it can easily become an imbalanced obsession that kills community.”
John Calvin: “No member of the body of Christ is endowed with such Perfection as to be able, without the assistance of others, to supply his own necessities.”
J. Hampton Keathley: “Every believer is a joint of supply, a point of contact AND a source of supply through the head, Christ. Paul is saying that every member in his or her contact with other members supplies something the body needs”
John Piper: “You simply can’t read the New Testament in search of what church life is supposed to be like and come away thinking that Worship services and classes are the sum total of what church was supposed to be … The inevitable effect of treating church as worship services and classes is to make the people of God passive and too dependent on ordained experts. And could it not be that this pervasive relational passivity and dependence of millions of Christians—I mean passivity in interpersonal, spiritual ministry—rob us of some of Christ’s precious remedies for a hundred problems?”
This chart is not a comprehensive treatment on this subject, but it is a good starting point for us to begin identifying some of our consumer tendencies. There are all sorts of “finer points” and implications, so jump in with comments regarding your experiences.
The chart is small-ish, but you can click on it to see a larger view.
My whole life is finally converging.
The doctrine of Providence states that “God, the great Creator of all things… directs, disposes, and governs all creatures, actions, and things” (WCF 5.1). Providence means that “all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be” (Psalm 139:16). Occasionally, as you look back over the course of your life and the path God has brought you through to get you to where you are, things all start to make sense. That’s happening for me this week.
(Apologies to the reader: the rest of this post may contain references to people and movements and ideas that are obscure to you. Some more theologically astute readers, or just those who have known me longer, will catch more of the impact.)
Apart from my parents, whose influence upon me has been immense, there have been three shaping influences in my spiritual life: I learned the gospel from Jack Miller, I learned theology from Richard Pratt and John Frame, and I learned church planting from Tim Keller and Steve Childers.
Early on in my marriage and ministry, I was immersed in a missional community around a Bible study called Sonship. That Bible study taught me the gospel all over again. Though I had followed Jesus from my youth, I had never understood that “the gospel is for Christians, too.” Or, to put it more theologically, the gospel does not just justify you, it sanctifies you. It is not just the ABC’s of the Christian life, but the A to Z of the Christian life. The Sonship material (later revised as Gospel Transformation) was the magnum opus of Jack Miller, a pastor, church-planting missionary, and seminary professor who died in the 1990s. The rich truths of sanctification by faith were deeply shaping to me and have marked my life and ministry ever since. When we talk about being a gospel-centered church, when you hear me talk about heart idols, when we repeat the twin truths that “I’m a sinner and Jesus is my only hope,” we are standing on the shoulders of Jack Miller.
Shortly after my first exposure to Sonship, I began attending seminary. My primary mentor was Richard Pratt, a brilliant teacher who built much of his work on the foundation laid by John Frame (under whom Pratt studied in his early years). Frame had proposed a Bible-based philosophy of knowledge called “tri-perspectivalism.” In its basic essence, tri-perspectivalism holds that there are three objects of knowledge: God, the world, and the self. But when it comes to an act of knowing, the three cannot be isolated from each other. We cannot know God apart from the world and ourselves, we cannot know the world without reference to the God who made it and to ourselves as knowers, and we cannot know ourselves except as creatures who are part of God’s world. So human knowledge involves looking at reality through three interdependent perspectives, or lenses: the normative perspective (what does God’s word say about this?), the situational perspective (what are the facts of the situation?), and the existential perspective (what do I sense?). For God to be Lord means that He is the authority over everything (normative), He is in control of every situation (situational), and He is present everywhere (existential). Frame’s model satisfied all my uncertainty about knowledge and gave me a philosophically rigorous, doctrinally sound grid for seeing the world.
When God began to move me toward church planting, He providentially put me under the tutelage of Dr. Steve Childers, an RTS professor with a massive love for Jesus. Childers often spoke about a church called Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York, led by Dr. Tim Keller. He told his students, “Get your hands on everything they put out and read it cover to cover.” I spent the spring of 2004 soaking my mind in Keller’s writing and teaching. Besides loving everything he said, I began to notice a strange similarity to both the Sonship material and to Frame’s tri-perspectivalism. Coincidence, right?
Wrong. Providence. Today’s featured speaker at the Acts 29 bootcamp was Dick Kaufmann, former associate pastor at Redeemer in NYC. And he put all the pieces together in a way that made me stand back and laugh.
From 1976-1980, Dick Kaufmann was a student at Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia. He and his friend Tim Keller both attended New Life Church, pastored by Jack Miller. They also both studied under John Frame. Keller and Kaufmann have intentionally worked together over the last decade to do two things: 1) apply the gospel-centered paradigm of Jack Miller to preaching and teaching; and 2) use Frame’s tri-perspectivalism as a grid for understanding how the church should relate to God, the world, and the self. In other words: their entire grid for missional church planting – which is now affecting movements like Acts 29 – rests on the foundation laid by Jack Miller and John Frame.
What has God been doing in the last 10 years of my life? I thought He was simply teaching me sanctification, good theology, and good church planting strategy, and getting me under some good people to learn all that stuff from. Now I’m realizing that He was doing much more than that. He was accomplishing a great divine convergence, preparing me to help plant gospel-centered missional churches. The transformation of my heart, the shaping of my theology, and my calling to church planting were not three things, but one. I’m sort of embarrassed that it took me this long to see it.
Only a fraction of the present body of professing Christians are solidly appropriating the justifying work of Christ in their lives. Many have so light an apprehension of God’s holiness and of the extent and guilt of their sin that consciously they see little need for justification, although below the surface of their lives they are deeply guilt-ridden and insecure. Many others have a theological commitment to [the doctrine of justification], but in their day-to-day existence they rely on their sanctification for justification… drawing their assurance of acceptance with God from their sincerity, their past experience of conversion, their recent religious performance, or the relative infrequency of their conscious, willful disobedience. Few know how to start each day with a thoroughgoing stand upon Luther’s platform: you are accepted, looking outward in faith and claiming the wholly alien righteousness of Christ as the only ground for acceptance, relaxing in that quality of trust which will produce increasing sanctification as faith is active in love and gratitude.
In order for a pure and lasting work of spiritual renewal to take place within the church, multitudes within it must be led to build their lives on this foundation. This means that they must be conducted into the light of a full conscious awareness of God’s holiness, the depth of their sin and the sufficiency of the atoning work of Christ for their acceptance with God, not just at the outset of their Christian lives but in every succeeding day.
- from Richard Lovelace’s book Dynamics of Spiritual Life
