2025 Conference Theme: The Bride of Christ
Boasting In Her Beloved: A Conference on the Local Church and Her Lifeblood
When the local church gathers, she gathers as the bride of Christ to boast in her Beloved. The public worship of God is a massive privilege and responsibility. The church gathers to make manifest and thus reveal the worth of Christ, which is to say that we gather to make much of Christ in our community.
The aim of this conference is to refresh and renew our hearts concerning Christ’s church. To draw us all nearer to the heart of God and His purposes for His church, beholding her magnificence in magnifying Christ. Why we do what we do as a local church flows out of our understanding of who we are as a local church. We need to always keep before us why we do what we do, and that begins by meditating on who we are collectively in Christ. We will give ourselves to sacred Scripture with a fresh perspective to see the bride of Christ in her beauty—only then will we rightly do what Christ has called us to as His bride.
Joel Beeke - April 29, 2023
Session 5: Glory at Golgotha
Session 5: Glory at Golgotha | Celebrating the Wisdom and Glory of Penal Substitution | Joel Beeke | Coram Deo Conference 2023; Solus Christus: Wounded and Worthy | April 28-29, 2023 | For more information visit coramdeoconference.org
Scripture References: Matthew 27:46, 2 Corinthians 5:21
From Series: "Coram Deo Conference 2023"
Solus Christus: Wounded and Worthy
More Messages from Joel Beeke...
April 29, 2023
Session 5: Glory at Golgotha
Joel Beeke
Matthew 27:46, 2 Corinthians 5:21
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The Only One
In all of creation, there is only one institution that has been charged with the high responsibility of knowing and making known the person and work of Jesus Christ. That one institution is His church—on earth: physical, visible, tangible. For this reason, the church stands above every other institution under heaven for the promotion of God’s glory and man’s joy.
Magnificent
Understanding the magnificence of the church is vital to her life and labors. The life she lives and the fruit she bears is not her own, her life belongs to her Beloved and her fruit is the work of His Spirit. The church is special, necessary, powerful, beautiful, naturally unexplainable—the church is magnificent! May we treat her this way
Marks
We must picture the ideal in order to aspire. Identifying the church rightly is fundamental to being a church rightly. The high language of the church is intended to elevate our love for her. We will seek to summarize the nature and character of Christ’s church, identifying the order of her priorities, positions, and essential practices. The intention is to help identify a biblically sound, Christ-honoring local church. By doing this we also hope to expose low and “anti” views of the church for what they are: bankrupt. Understanding the marks of the church helps to defeat unbiblical conceptions of both the church and the Christian life.
Preaching
The charter of the church is to know and make known the glorious Christ. She exists to make much of Him, not herself, and she does this first by preaching the gospel. And by preaching we mean more than evangelism. For the first mark of the early church is represented by the fact that “they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching” (Acts 2:42). Apostolic preaching was the first object of devotion for the assembled church of God. In this conference, we will seek to enlarge our understanding of the place and provision of biblical preaching so that the church would make much of Christ through her primary ministry.
The Only Church the World Knows
The only church the world knows is the church they see. Christianity is not made tangible to the world through ideas—life and love are necessary. We may be content with systematic theologies, but that’s not how the world sees Christianity. The world doesn’t even turn to the Bible for its impressions. Indeed, the world will never know true Christianity through ink and paper. Tracts, for instance, may be sufficient to explain the gospel, but tracts do not make disciples or shepherd hearts in wisdom, weeping with those who weep and leading by example. The church is God’s ordained means of communicating Christ to the world through life and love that exercises the high and deep theology that we steward.