The Gospel Coalition

Beginning tonight people all over the world will intensify their celebration of newness. Below is a brief meditation from my book Do I Know God? on why Christians are the ones who should be celebrating newness louder than anybody.

When God saves us, we gain a new beginning, a new family, a new purpose, and a new power.

A New Beginning (Justification)
One of the reasons people celebrate the beginning of a new year is because it promises a clean slate. That’s why we make New Year’s resolutions, out of our desire to start over. Sadly, though, most of the resolutions we make on January 1st are long abandoned by the middle of February.

But God promises that  “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” (2 Corinthians 5:17). That is, when we trust in Christ, God gives us a permanent fresh start, an everlasting new beginning, regardless of what we’ve done or who we’ve been. Our deep desire to “begin again” is satisfied once and for all because of what Christ has done for us on the cross.

A New Family (Adoption)
“You are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God’s people and members of God’s household,” Paul said. In other words, when God adopts us, we not only gain a Father, we gain a whole new family: the Church. The biblical word for “church” does not mean a building or institution, it means “the called out ones.” It refers to those whom God calls out of slavery and into sonship. The Church, in other words, is people: people adopted by God, people who know God as their heavenly Father. When God saves sinners he saves them into a whole new community — the “family of God.” As Frank Colquhoun wrote in his book Total Christianity, “When Christ saves a man he not only saves him from his sin, he saves him from his solitude.” He brings us into meaningful fellowship with others who will help us along the way in our relationship with God.

A New Purpose (Mission)
Paul wrote, “Whether we eat or drink or whatever we do, we do it all to the glory of God” (1 Corinthians 10:31). When God saves us, we no longer have to settle for manufacturing our own fleeting legacies. He gives us a new reason to live—to glorify him. We live, in other words, for something huge and significant — to display God, to spread his fame, and to build his everlasting Kingdom.  We become part of an infinitely larger story than our own personal history. We no longer have to work for our own puny causes, but for God’s universal cause. Paul said, “We are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Ephesians 2:10).

In his book Orthodoxy, G. K. Chesteron wrote, “How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it.” Nothing makes you more aware of your smallness and life’s potential bigness than being in relationship with the Living God. God promises a big purposeful life to everyone who knows him.

A New Power (Sanctification)
When God enters into an everlasting relationship with us, he not only promises to pardon us for the past, he promises us a new power for the present. Just before Jesus ascended back into heaven after his resurrection, he told his disciples, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you” (Acts 1:8).

Most of us know we’re imperfect and need to change. Most of us want to live better lives. But no matter how hard we try, we can’t. We don’t have the power to change.

But God does. In The Contemporary Christian, John Stott writes, “Is God really able to change human nature … to make cruel people kind, selfish people unselfish, immoral people self-controlled, and sour people sweet? Is he able to take people who are dead to spiritual reality, and make them alive in Christ? Yes, he really is!”  And when God’s Holy Spirit enters us, we receive all the power we need to become the people God always intended for us to be. The Bible makes it clear that in Christ, God provides us with everything we need for godliness.

C. S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity: “God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man. It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature.”

New, unimaginable changes await all God’s children because God promises a new, unimaginable power.

Because God has given us a new beginning, a new family, a new purpose, and a new power, let us celebrate true newness tonight. And in doing so we will point a watching world to the only One who can “make all things new.”

Happy New Year!

At our two Christmas Eve worship services here at Coral Ridge, I read a small portion of John Piper’s excellent Advent poem, The Innkeeper. And I promised you that I would post a link to the entire poem which is now available online. As I have told many people for years now, this is one of the most gripping pieces of modern Christian literature I’ve ever read.

Fathers, Mothers: please read this to your children before the day ends. It will be the most sanctifying Christmas gift they (and you) receive this year.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Though our world is in turmoil and the future in many ways uncertain, the light of the gospel gleams as brightly as ever; and one day–in his own time and by his grace–the Savior who came to redeem us will return to make all things new. “Even so, come Lord Jesus.”

I hope and pray that this Christmas you will be comforted and fueled with hope by the glorious truth expressed in this hymn by Horatius Bonar called “The Church Has Waited Long”:

The Church has waited long,
  Her absent Lord to see,
And still in loneliness she waits,
  A friendless stranger she.
  Age after age has gone,
  Sun after sun has set,
And still in weeds of widowhood,
  She weeps a mourner yet.

 Saint after saint on earth
  Has lived, and loved, and died;
And as they left us one by one,
  We laid them side by side;
  We laid them down to sleep,
  But not in hope forlorn;
We laid them but to ripen there,
  Till the last glorious morn.

The serpent’s brood increase,
  The powers of hell grow bold,
The conflict thickens, faith is low,
  And love is waxing cold.
  How long, O Lord our God,
  Holy, and true, and good,
Wilt Thou not judge Thy suffering Church,
  Her sighs, and tears, and blood?

We long to hear Thy voice,
  To see Thee face to face,
To share Thy crown and glory then,
  As now we share Thy grace.
  Should not the loving bride
  Her absent bridegroom mourn?
Should she not wear the signs of grief
  Until her Lord return?

The whole creation groans,
  And waits to hear that voice
That shall her comeliness restore,
  And make her wastes rejoice.
  Come, Lord, and wipe away
  The curse, the sin, the stain,
And make this blighted world of ours
  Thine own fair world again.

In C.S. Lewis’s masterful children’s story The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, he tells of a country, Narnia, which is under the curse of the White Witch. This evil queen places a spell on the land so that it’s “always winter and never Christmas.” Under her control, the future of Narnia looks bleak until word gets out that “Aslan is on the move.” In the story, Aslan is a noble lion who represents Christ. He’s coming to set things straight. He’s coming to destroy the White Witch and thus reverse the curse on Narnia. The first sign of Aslan’s movement toward this cursed land is that the snow begins to melt–“spring is in the air.” The cold begins to fade as the sun rays peer through the dark clouds, promising the dawn of a new day. Everything in Narnia begins to change.

You’ll have to read the book to see how the story ends, but when I’m asked to describe the true meaning of Christmas, I like to say that the birth of Christ is the sure and certain sign that “God is on the move.” The arrival of Jesus two-thousand years ago ensured that God had begun the process of reversing the curse of sin and recreating all things. In Jesus, God was moving in a new way and, in the words of C.S. Lewis, “winter began stirring backwards.”

All of Jesus’ ministry—the words he spoke, the miracles he performed—showed that there was a new order in town: God’s order. When Jesus healed the diseased, raised the dead, and forgave the desperate, he did so to show that with the arrival of God in the flesh came the restoration of the way God intended things to be. New life was given, health was restored; God was reversing the curse of death, disease, and discomfort. The incarnation of Christ began the “great reversal.”

Tim Keller observes that Christ’s miracles were not the suspension of the natural order but the restoration of the natural order. They were a reminder of what once was prior to the Fall and a preview of what will eventually be a universal reality once again—a world of peace and justice, without death, disease, or conflict.

To be sure, when Christ comes again, the process of reversing the curse of sin and recreating all things will be complete (1 Cor. 15:51-58). The peace on earth that the angels announced the night Christ was born will become a universal actuality. God’s cosmic rescue mission will be complete. The fraying fabric of our fallen world will be fully and perfectly rewoven. Everything and everyone “in Christ” will live in perfect harmony. Shalom will rule.

Isaiah pictures it this way:

The wolf shall dwell with the lamb,
and the leopard shall lie down with the young goat,
and the calf and the lion and the fattened calf together;
and a little child shall lead them.
The cow and the bear shall graze;
their young shall lie down together;
and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra,
and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder’s den.
They shall not hurt or destroy
in all my holy mountain;
for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD
as the waters cover the sea. (Isaiah 11:6-9)

For those who have found forgiveness of sins in Christ, there will one day be no more sickness, no more death, no more tears, no more division, no more tension. The pardoned children of God will work and worship in a perfectly renewed earth without the interference of sin. We who believe the gospel will enjoy sinless hearts and minds along with disease-free bodies. All that causes us pain and discomfort will be destroyed, and we will live forever. We’ll finally be able “to enjoy what is most enjoyable with unbounded energy and passion forever.”

Christmas is the celebration of this process begun and the promise that it will one day be completed.

(For a detailed expansion on the theme of God’s mission, see chapters 5-8 of my book Unfashionable: Making a Difference in the World by Being Different.)

Every year around this time people ask me what Advent is. The word “Advent” literally means “coming” or “arrival.” It’s the four weeks of the year leading up to Christmas when Christians all over the world look back to the first coming of Jesus and look forward to his second coming. In one sense, Christians are always to be doing this. But these four weeks are meant to be an intensified celebration of Christ’s first arrival which, in turn, is meant to fuel our anticipation of his second arrival. This means that Advent is a season marked by hopeful anticipation.

With Advent in mind, I was thinking a lot this week about the nature of anticipation. There were three things in particular that I was looking forward to, things I was anticipating: the wedding of a friend, a football game, and the arrival of out-of-town guests. Whether it’s something as significant as the wedding of a friend or something as trivial as a football game, the capacity to anticipate is a gift from God–God designed us to anticipate. So it’s fine to anticipate things like the ones I mentioned. But, as I thought a bit harder, I realized that those anticipations are never meant to serve as ends in themselves. They are intended to nurture and expand our God-given anticipatory capacities so that we will anticipate something greater: secondary anticipations are designed by God to point to the primary anticipation.

To borrow a thought from John Piper, the weakness of our anticipation for Christ’s return is not because it is uneventful or unimportant. It’s because we keep ourselves stuffed with smaller anticipations. As C.S. Lewis said, “We are far too easily pleased.” A friends wedding, a football game, and the arrival of out-of-town guests will never fulfill our deepest anticipations. These are shadow like anticipations; Christ is the substance. These are stream-like anticipations; Christ is the ocean. These are beam like anticipations; Christ is the sun.

So the next time you find yourself anticipating everything from a good meal to a good vacation, take a moment to trace that anticipation to its end: Jesus. This is what Advent is meant to do. Anticipating Jesus fulfills every other anticipation because the arrival of anticipated weddings and football games cannot change a human heart; they can’t take away our guilt and cleanse our conscience; they cannot make all things new. Only Christ can do these things.

May the remainder of this Advent season fill you with hope filled anticipation realizing that Christ’s first coming was his pledge that he will one day return to “make all things new.”

Matt Chandler, pastor of The Village Church in Dallas, had a seizure on Thanksgiving. He fell, hit his head, and was taken to the emergency room. The doctors discovered a small brain tumor on his front lobe. He had surgery and just yesterday received the pathology reports. The following letter was written by the pastors of The Village Church updating the church on the results.  

Dear church, 

In the first chapter of Philippians, the Apostle Paul writes that whatever imprisonments, beatings and trials he may have suffered, they all “serve to advance the gospel” of Jesus Christ. We implore you to keep the gospel of Christ as the main focus as we walk with Matt and Lauren through this trial. 

On Tuesday, Dr. Barnett informed Matt and Lauren that the findings of the pathology report revealed a malignant brain tumor that was not encapsulated. The surgery to remove the tumor, the doctor said, was an extremely positive first step; however, because of the nature of the tumor, he was not able to remove all of it. 

 Matt, who is being released from the hospital today, is meeting with a neuro-oncologist this week to outline the next steps of the recovery process. There is a range of treatment possibilities but the exact course of action has not yet been determined. He will continue outpatient rehab. 

The Lord is calling Matt and Lauren and The Village Church body to endure this trial. It will be a challenging road for Matt, his family and our church body. The gospel is our hope and the Lord is our strength. Matt and Lauren continue to find solace and hope in Christ. They weep facing this trial, but not as those without hope and perspective. The gospel clarifies their suffering and promises more of Christ through it all. 

You have done a wonderful job respecting the family, and we ask that you continue to do this. They are processing all of this together and need you to give them precious space. Please do not visit them at their house unless personally invited by the Chandlers. The best way to serve the family is to continue to be faithful in prayer. Specifically, pray for the following:

• Wisdom for all the coming decisions
• Strength and peace to endure
• The kids’ (Audrey, Reid and Norah) hearts; pray the Lord is merciful as they process and that their little hearts do not grow embittered
• The Chandlers and The Village would suffer well because of the gospel and for the sake of Christ’s name

As you hurt and weep for the family, do not do it alone. Gather with your home group and with other believers in homes and pray together. This is a time to walk together with others and to endure this trial in community. If you wish, send cards and letters to Matt and Lauren at 2101 Justin Road, Flower Mound, TX 75028. 

We will continue to keep you informed as new information is made available. Please be patient with the frequency of the updates. May God strengthen us all and may His glory shine brightly through this.

Please keep Matt and his wife Lauren and their three children in your prayers.

My book Do I Know God? Finding Certainty in Life’s Most Important Relationship is now available in Spanish.

I wrote Do I Know God? to answer two basic questions: 1) is God knowable, and, if He is, 2) how can I know that I know Him. In the book I say that if you don’t know God, He wants you to know it. And if you do know God, He wants you to know it. The two things God does not want is for you to think you know Him if you don’t and for you to think you don’t know Him if you do. Knowing that you belong to God–having a deep sense of your eternal security–not only provides a sure and steadfast anchoring for your soul, but it radically changes the way you live here and now. There’s nothing more vital, nothing more satisfying, than knowing God and knowing that you know God.

So, if you know a Spanish speaking friend or family member who is unclear about their relationship with God, this little book is now available.

Contrary to what many Christian’s have concluded, the gospel doesn’t just ignite the Christian life; it’s the fuel that keeps Christians going every day and in every way. Once God rescues sinners, his plan isn’t to steer them beyond the gospel but to move them more deeply into it. After all, the only antidote to sin is the gospel—and since Christians remain sinners even after they’re converted, the gospel must be the medicine a Christian takes every day. Since we never leave off sinning, we can never leave the gospel. 

In the debut issue of Commit, my friend Justin Buzzard interviewed D.A. Carson about this. He asks him about the gospel, the upcoming generation, and doing ministry in unchurched regions. I’ve pasted the interview below:

1. In a paragraph, what does it mean to be gospel-centered in one’s Christian life?

Some think of the gospel as so slender it does nothing more than get us into the kingdom. After that the real work of transformation begins. But a biblically-faithful understanding of the gospel shows that gospel to be rich, powerful, the wisdom of God and the power of God, all we need in Christ. It is the gospel that saves us, transforms us, conforms us to Christ, prepares us for the new heaven and the new earth, establishes our relations with fellow-believers, teaches us how to work and serve so as to bring glory to God, calls forth and edifies the church, and so forth. This gospel saves — and “salvation” means more than just “getting in,” but transformed wholeness. It would be easy to write many pages on how a gospel-centered ness affects all of life, but one must begin with a full-orbed understanding of what the gospel is and does.

2. What do you see happening with the gospel and my generation, the twentysomethings of the American church? Are you encouraged?

Cautiously, yes. It is still a day of relatively small things. But it is always encouraging to observe the substantial number of twentysomethings who want to learn what the Bible says, who are looking for faithful mentors, who are tired of the endless openness of some strands of postmodernism but who do not want to drift back into isolationism or privatized religion. Some from very culturally conservative Christian backgrounds are engaging in a pendulum swing toward “hip” stances that are barely orthodox, but they are winning almost no one except other people like themselves. In God’s grace, the future lies with that part of the younger generation that is passionate to understand, believe, and obey the truth, and who to that end are diligently studying the Word of God for themselves and learning lessons in contrition and joy, in humility and courage, in faith and obedience, that every generation of believers must learn.

3. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area we have a lot of work to do. This is a highly unchurched metropolitan area with great hostility to the gospel. What are a couple brief points of counsel you’d give to church leaders wanting to build (or re-build) a gospel ministry in a region like this?

Trust Christ; believe the power of the gospel; abandon short-term gimmicks; think big but start small and be faithful; meet with, work with, pray with, learn from, those who have a common set of commitments and vision.

4. What are a few key resources you recommend to your average church member who wants to better understand how the gospel is meant to drive the entirety of the Christian life?

Once again, the first step is to understand the gospel, for in doing so, its ties to all of life become luminous. Many of the sermons on thegospelcoalition.org treat such matters. At the risk of calling attention to individuals: (1) Not a few of the sermons of Tom Nelson (on the site) talk about how the believer serves God in the normal responsibilities and cycles of work. (2) Many of Tim Keller’s sermons do the same, with a greater emphasis on working in the arts, journalism, music, and so forth. (3) For a challenge across the field, read John Piper’s Don’t Waste Your  Life. (4) To think through faithfulness in gospel proclamation and doing “deeds of mercy,” begin, perhaps, with a ten-page essay by Tim Keller in Themelios 33/3 (also on the site). (5) For those especially interested in Christianity and the arts, see the lovely 64-page booklet by Phil Ryken, Art for God’s Sake: A Call to Recover the Arts (2006). (6) For those interested in more global/political/theological analysis, try my Christ and Culture Revisited. (7) Similarly, it is worth reading Andy Crouch’s Culture Making: Recovering Our Creative Calling .  (8) There are some workshops that were offered at both the 2007 and the 2009 Coalition conference that bear on these matters, and they are available as acoustic downloads. Some of them are quite moving.

This is but the merest introduction. What you must not do, however, is become so interested in questions about how the gospel should drive our entire life and impact every dimension of life, that one begins to neglect the study of the Bible itself, and remove one’s focus from Jesus, his cross and resurrection, his gospel.

In the June issue of Tabletalk my friend Scotty Smith wrote an article to young Christian leaders exhorting them to be gospel-centered in their various roles (for whatever reason I just saw it and read it today). Reflecting on mistakes he’s made and lessons he’s learned over a 30 year span of fruitful ministry, he outlines his exhortation under three headings:

1. Gospel astonishment versus theological cockiness
2. Chief repenter versus former sinner
3. Preaching Christ to yourself versus preaching yourself

Scotty’s timely cry for “an emerging generation of leaders who will live and lead as genuinely as [the apostle]Paul” is painfully helpful, not only for young Christian leaders but for all Christian’s everywhere.

You can read the whole thing here. Please do!

I’ve always been a pretty ambitious person. I don’t like ceilings or limits. Like the adventurous Star Trekers, “I want to go where no man has gone before.” I love thinking and dreaming about doing great things, about being a part of something great, something world-changing–and I’ve always felt guilty about this.

I have always wrestled with my motives and why I want to do great things. My struggle has always been how to discern the difference in my own heart between selfish ambition and God-centered drive. And to err on the safe side, I have at times tended to reduce the size of my dreams and lower my expectations. Under the banner of trying to be humble, I settle for less. 

I suppose I’ll struggle with this tension for the rest of my fallen life in this broken world but now I’ll have a new tool in my toolbox to help me sort through these things in a gospel-centered way.

Dave Harvey (Sovereign Grace Ministries) has written a book entitled Rescuing Ambition which comes out this Spring. The publishers description captured me immediately: 

Ambition has developed a reputation synonymous with the love of earthly honor and fame hunting. As a result, the organ of ambition—the God-implanted drive to improve, produce, develop, and create—is neglected and well on its way to paralysis. For some Christians, dreams are numbed. For others, there are no dreams; life just happens. One thing is certain: ambition needs help.

Dave Harvey is calling for a rescue. He wants to snatch ambition from the heap of failed motivations and put it to work for the glory of God. To understand our ambition, we must understand that we are on a quest for glory. Where we find glory determines the success of our quest. With his transparent humor and conversational tone, Harvey expounds on insights from Scripture and everyday life as he calls readers to reach further and dream bigger for the glory of God.

I can’t wait to read this!