T4G Day 1...

Day one of Together for the Gospel 2010 is drawing to a close, and I think just today's events would be worth the trip. For those of you who don't know, T4G is a conference aimed at leaders in the Christian church and focused on placing the gospel at the center of Christian ministry. Here are a few of my highlights so far. First, the books- we've been given a lot of books (eight and counting). For those of you who are nerds like me, this is a very exciting thing. Second, getting to hang with guys like Brett Sweet, Jason Wakefield, Dan Morse, Chris Smith, Jason Pancheau, and my little bro is a good thing. Getting to sing praises to God with them and almost 7,000 other men is a great thing. And of course, the lectures from Mark Dever, R.C. Sproul, and Al Mohler, to understate a little, were compelling. Dever spoke on the church and its evangelistic role as the bearer of the gospel. Speaking of the universal relevancy of the gospel to a fallen world, he mentioned that "we give them the diagnosis that finally makes sense of their condition". Sproul later gave a talk that assuredly went over the heads of half of us in attendance, speaking on how we have over the years attempted to 'improve' the gospel by synthesizing it with earthly idealogies. A couple of quotes to give you an idea of what he was talking about; "..the church is to stand in the awful, awful discomfort of antithesis", "the unvarnished Word of God... doesn't need to be made more palatable with the brass of pagan philosophy", and quoting Francis Schaeffer, "The problem that is facing the church is that it has lost its sense of antithesis". This is one I'm going to want to listen to again. Finally, Mohler expounded on the ways in which the church tends to adjust the gospel, listing modern, postmodern, moral, aesthetic, therapeutic, pragmatic, emotional, and materialistic lines of thought that distort the gospel. I really recommend everyone listen to this talk, I'll have a link on my blog to where you can download it once it becomes available. And I recognize that I have used the word 'gospel' quite a bit in this post without really defining what it means. Maybe I'll succinctly define that in another post, but for now I'll recommend that you do some searching on your own and see what comes up. Also, I may put pics up here if I figure out how to post them on this here blog. Peace out, I'll try to give an update tomorrow.