You Missed Something Extraordinary
If you weren’t with us at the Ocean City Tabernacle on Sunday, May 31st, consider this your personal invitation to press play — because what happened in that room was the kind of morning that stays with you.
Dr. Crawford Loritts — pastor, author, national voice, and proud New Jersey native — returned to the Tabernacle stage and delivered a message so timely, so honest, and so grounded in Scripture that it felt less like a sermon and more like a conversation you didn’t know you needed to have.
His message: how to keep discouragement from becoming your identity. And the room listened like their lives depended on it.
Who Is Dr. Crawford Loritts?
Dr. Crawford Loritts is one of the most respected voices in American Christianity — a pastor, author, national radio host, and mentor who has spent more than five decades proclaiming the Gospel with clarity, depth, and conviction.
A native of Plainfield, New Jersey with deep roots at Cairn University in the Philadelphia area, Dr. Loritts served for 27 years on the staff of Cru (formerly Campus Crusade for Christ), taking the Gospel to college campuses across the country and around the world. He has been the featured speaker at the Super Bowl, the NCAA Final Four Chapel, and the Pentagon with senior military officers. For 15 years he served as Senior Pastor of Fellowship Bible Church in Roswell, Georgia.
He is the author of nine books and the host of two national radio programs. He now leads Beyond Our Generation, a ministry focused on raising up the next wave of leaders who will carry the torch of biblical faithfulness well into the future.
And on Sunday, May 31st, he stood on the Tabernacle stage — a Jersey kid coming home — and delivered a message that this room needed to hear.
The Question He Came to Answer
Dr. Loritts opened with a disarming directness that set the tone for everything that followed. He wasn’t interested in safe, soft inspiration. He was after something deeper.
“Preaching is not speech making,” he told the congregation plainly. “There’s a huge difference between the two. Preaching is a word from God for the people at a moment in history.” And then he named the moment: discouragement.
“How do we not be branded by what has happened to us?” he asked. “How do we not become and look like the pain and disappointments — all of the stuff that unfortunately is part of this thing called life?”
“The issue in life is not whether or not we’re going to be discouraged. The issue is what do we do when we are discouraged.”
Disappointment, Discouragement, and Depression — Not the Same Thing
Before diving into his five-part framework, Dr. Loritts did something rare from a pulpit — he made careful, clinical distinctions that gave the room language for what they were actually feeling.
Disappointment, he explained, is simply an unmet expectation. It’s daily, it’s normal, and if you’re curling into a fetal position every time it happens, that’s a separate problem.
Depression, on the other hand, has thrust you beneath the hope line entirely — and the hardest thing about it is that the path out requires doing the very thing you least want to do: reach out and ask for help.
Discouragement sits in the middle — more than disappointment, not yet depression. “It’s like you’re dragging anchor,” he said. “You haven’t thrown in the towel and you haven’t lost hope, but you’re going at maybe 60%, maybe 50%. And if you’re not careful, that discouragement can become part of who you are.”
“When you’re born, you look like your parents. But when you die, you look like your decisions.”
Five Choices That Break the Grip
Dr. Loritts then walked the congregation through five deliberate choices — not feelings, not circumstances, but decisions of the will. He was clear: “Your will determines your movement. Your will determines your progress.”
• Choose Truth — Face the situation honestly, then open the Bible and let God’s voice recalibrate your thinking. “When I’m discouraged, I need to have God’s voice recalibrate my thinking. I need to choose it to be my delight.”
• Choose Joy — Not as a denial of pain, but as an anchor to what cannot be shaken. He pointed to Paul writing Philippians from a prison cell, headed toward execution, and yet the entire letter is “baptized in joy.” Joy in Scripture, he said, is not attached to circumstances — it is attached to what can never be affected.
• Choose Faith — Biblical faith, he argued, is not denial. “Faith in the Bible is not denial, but faith in the Bible is defiance. It looks through the difficult, faces it, but looks through it to see God as greater than what is in front of me.”
• Choose Community — “The church of Jesus Christ was never meant to be a coalition of independent contractors.” Isolation, he warned with force, “always, always, always, always breeds distortion.”
• Choose Service — Even in seasons when you cannot share what you’re carrying, you keep showing up and doing the work God has set before you.
“Faith is the expression of people who are delightfully desperate to get to Jesus.”
A Personal Story That Stopped the Room
To illustrate the fifth choice — service — Dr. Loritts shared something he rarely speaks of publicly. Years ago, his oldest daughter went through a devastating experience. Because of the sensitivity of the situation and the people involved, he couldn’t share it broadly. And yet, in the middle of that silent heartbreak, he had to preach.
“I remember pulling up to the church before our early morning service, sitting in my car, tears going down my cheeks. I’m a fixer and I couldn’t fix this. And I didn’t want to preach.”
“I would say, ‘Holy Spirit, please — one more time.’ And I would go and preach.”
Months later, he went back and listened to those messages — the ones he thought were a disaster — and made a stunning discovery.
“They’re the best messages I ever gave in my life.”
To be discouraged, he told the congregation, is not a call to quit. And then he landed the plane with a passage from Psalm 126 — the image of a farmer sowing seed in a parched, cracked land, weeping as he goes — and the promise that follows: those who sow in tears shall reap with shouts of joy.
“Your tears have become holy fertilizer that will produce a bumper crop.”
A Closing Word — and a Room That Responded
Dr. Loritts closed not with a dramatic altar call, but with a charge: keep moving. “God has not called us to park the car.”
“Who told you to give up on your marriage? Who told you to give up on that grandchild or that child? Who told you to stop because you don’t like the doctor’s report? Who told you to quit? If God can raise a dead Jesus, he can handle any issue, any challenge that we face.”
It was the kind of morning that reminds you what the Tabernacle’s summer season is really about — not just a great speaker on a Sunday morning, but a word from God for the people, at a moment in history. This was that.
And appropriately, as the service closed, Tom Sherf reminded the room that Dr. Ron Matthews — President of Eastern University — would be taking the stage the following week. The summer is just getting started.
Watch the Full Service — Ocean City Tabernacle on YouTube
If you missed Dr. Crawford Loritts’s message in person, the full service is available now on the Ocean City Tabernacle’s official YouTube channel. Watch it, share it, and come back next Sunday.
Watch Dr. Crawford Loritts: “How Not to Be Branded by Discouragement” — youtube.com/watch?v=o3skG2mkASs
Subscribe — new messages all summer long: youtube.com/@OceanCityTabernacle
Partner With Us
Each season, the Tabernacle becomes a place where people gather to hear the Word of God, worship together, and be renewed in their faith. Your support helps make that possible—strengthening a ministry that proclaims the Gospel, invests in the next generation, and provides a place where residents and visitors alike can encounter truth, encouragement, and community. By partnering with the Tabernacle, you are helping ensure that this work continues with clarity, purpose, and lasting impact.
