T4G - - Some More Thoughts

Last week I had the privilege of attending the Together For the Gospel Conference in Louisville, KY, with our pastor and his dad. We had a wonderful, God-exalting time of praise, worship and preaching. It’s been a long time since I have been so deeply affected by the preaching of God’s Word along with the singing of great old and some new hymns. It’s an amazing thing to hear more than 5000 men lifting their voices in song to the Lord. During one of the sessions they asked us to stand based on the decade of our age and I would guess that half of the men there were in their twenties and thirties. It was encouraging to me to see this many young men together in one place to hear the preaching of the Word. And the preaching was not trivial fluff!

Speakers included Ligon Duncan, Thabiti Anyabwile, John MacArthur, Mark Dever, RC Sproul, Albert Mohler, John Piper and CJ Mahaney. Each one spoke for about an hour with a half hour time when they all sat together on the platform discussing the issues raised in the message. I would strongly recommend that you download the free mp3 files of the messages and listen to them. It will provide a feast for your soul. I especially recommend the following:
RC Sproul – The Curse Motif of the Atonement
John Piper – How the Supremacy of Christ Creates Radical Christian Sacrifice
John MacArthur—The Sinner Neither Able Nor Willing: The Doctrine of Absolute Inability


Thabiti Anyabwile had a very interesting talk explaining in biblical terms the difference between race and ethnicity and the importance for us to have a Christian worldview that denies the category of race, i.e. that there are distinct biological differences between those of different skin colors. His message can be downloaded here.

As I mentioned, the other highlight of our time together was the singing. We sang mostly older, well-known hymns. The list of songs can be found here. We sang one old hymn by Isaac Watts titled, “How Sweet and Awful is this Place.” After we had sung it, many of us with tears in our eyes, all looked at one another as if to say, “where did that song come from?” The words are definitely encouraging. I’ve posted the lyrics here on my blog. I definitely urge you to take a look at this powerful song.

Besides all of that, each time we came back to a new session, there were 3 or 4 books for us on our seats. By the end of the conference we each (5500 of us) had received 15 books! Now I guess I won’t be able to be a slacker.

As you can probably tell, I came away very encouraged and challenged to live a life that would be an example of a Faithful Man.

I trust that you too have had some good times of spiritual refreshment lately either with brothers in Christ or through your churches. It’s so important to hold one another up as we try to be faithful men for the Lord.