Together for the Gospel 2012 by Jeremy Bennett
Wednesday, May 9, 2012 at 9:30AM This past April 10-12, ten men from Randolph Street attended a conference in Louisville, KY, called Together for the Gospel (T4G). T4G was started in 2006 as a conference focused primarily on encouraging and equipping local church pastors and leaders. The first conference was a result of four pastors from different church denominations and affiliations that enjoyed conversations around the things that they had in common, most specifically the gospel. The conference has continued to be held in Louisville, KY every two years, and has grown to over 8,000 attendees from all over the US and many other countries. The four pastors who started the Together for the Gospel Conference are Mark Dever, senior pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C.; Ligon Duncan, senior minister of First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, MS; C.J. Mahaney, leader of Sovereign Grace Ministries in Gaithersburg, MD; and Albert Mohler, President of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY.
The conference was made up of nine general sessions and one elective breakout session. The three days allotted for the sessions passed at a fast pace with squeezing time in to peruse the bookstore and meeting new people or catching up with old friends over meals. There are so many wonderful aspects to this conference that it’s hard to say what the "favorite thing" was, but I would be safe to say that a highlight of the conference was singing praises to God before and after each general session. Bob Kauflin of Sovereign Grace Ministries lead the worship time with a grand piano accompaniment. Ask one of the men who attended what they thought of the singing.
Day 1
The opening session of the conference was given by C.J. Mahaney titled, The Sustaining Power of the Gospel from 2 Corinthians 4. The message was a powerful encouragement to pastors when they lose heart. C.J’s humble spirit is a great example and encouragement to anyone who hears him preach. Al Mohler brought the second message, The Power of the Articulated Gospel from Romans 10. The call to preach the gospel was illustrated well from one of Al's quotes. “We are not in the soil management business, but rather in the sowing business.” The last session of the first day was given by Mark Dever. The title of his message was False Conversions: The suicide of the Church given as a systematic message pulled from several texts including 1 Timothy 4:16. Mark’s message was a great exposition of the need for regenerate church membership.
Day 2
Thabiti Anyabwile opened the second day with “Will Your Gospel Transform a Terrorist?” from 1 Timothy 1:12-17. He opened his message with the statement, “The greatest hindrance to the gospel is the Christian’s lack of confidence in the gospel itself.” This was the underlying theme throughout the whole conference—the Underestimated gospel. A new addition to T4G 2012 was personal testimonies from about a dozen different people who shared the power of the gospel in their lives. The testimonies ranged from radical transformations from the vilest of lifestyles to those raised in a Christian home. It was a great reminder that the gospel is powerful to save, no matter what the circumstance or how hopeless the situation. The next speaker, one of the new, younger men to bring a general session message, was Kevin DeYoung, senior pastor of University Reformed Church in East Lansing, Michigan. He spoke on The Spirit-Powered, Gospel-Driven, Faith-Fueled Effort from 1 Corinthians 15:10. Kevin opened up identifying all the good things that we see in the Young, Restless, Reformed movement (or the New Calvinism, or the Reformed Resurgence, or whatever you want to call it). Yet, he presented two critical areas in which we need to grow: (1) a commitment to global missions and (2) a commitment to personal holiness. Kevin spent his time on the latter and informed the audience that David Platt would be speaking on the former in an upcoming session. Kevin’s message was a powerful call to strive for holiness while addressing the equal errors of legalism and antinomianism.
After lunch break, each attendee attended a breakout session of their choosing. There were 10 different breakout sessions ranging from biblical manhood and womanhood to church planting to evangelism. All the breakout sessions were held at the same time so you could only pick one to attend. That was probably the biggest dilemma of the conference. The organizers of the conference had pity on those of us who wanted to be in 10 different places at once by making all of the breakout sessions available in audio for free on the T4G.org website (All of the general sessions are also available for free on the website in audio and video formats as well). I made the tough decision to attend the breakout session given by Carl Trueman on Why the Reformation Isn’t Over. Carl is Professor of Historical Theology and Church History of Westminster Theological Seminary in Glenside, Pennsylvania. This breakout session was a great message on the contributions of the Reformation that are still embattled in our contemporary churches.
David Platt, senior pastor of The Church at Brook Hills in Birmingham, Alabama, brought the closing message of the day after dinner break on Divine Sovereignty: The Fuel of Death-Defying Missions from Revelation 5:1-14. David’s passion for missions is contagious and his heart to reach the unreached is undeniable. He opened up his message with three underlying premises to ground the direction of the message: (1) Local ministry and local mission are totally necessary, (2) Global missions is tragically neglected and (3) Pastors have the privilege and responsibility to lead the way in global missions. David then shared the heart breaking statistics that there are 2 billion unreached people representing 6,000 different people groups. After reading through Revelation 5:1-14, David discussed four theological truths from the text. I encourage you to watch, or listen, to his message to be challenged and encouraged by these truths.
Day 3
The final day of the conference began with Ligon Duncan, senior minister of First Presbyterian Church in Jackson, Mississippi, speaking on The Underestimated God: God’s Ruthless, Compassionate Grace in the Pursuit of His Own Glory and His Minister’s Joy from 1 Kings 19. This was an awesome message on how we are to learn in our disappointments.
The text served as a great encouragement to those of us who have been discouraged. Three points were focussed on: (1) Even people who believe in God’s sovereignty can fail to believe that the Lord is God, (2) Even people who fight against idolatry can succumb to it, and (3) Even when it looks like God is being hard on his servants, you can be assured that his provision is staggeringly and lavishly loving, generous, good and kind. Listen to this message to hear how God pours out his love on Elijah amid his discouragement and disappointment. Matt Chandler, lead pastor of The Village Church in Dallas, Texas, brought the eighth message on The Fulfillment of the Gospel from Revelation 21-22. Matt began his message remembering back two years earlier where he stood on the platform at T4G 2010 after finishing six weeks of radiation treatment for brain cancer and was preparing to begin an 18 month long treatment of high-dose chemotherapy. The doctors did not have high hopes for a long life for him, but Matt identified God’s plans to defy the statistics and to continue to advance his ministry as one of the many mercies on his life. Matt continued with his message on the hope of the glorious finish line that John describes in Revelation 21-22. His call to us, as with Paul, was to be “all in” and to not put your hope in yourself, but rather to cling to Christ as the fully dependent beings that we are.
The final message of the conference was given by John Piper, pastor for preaching and vision at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on Glory, Majesty, Dominion, and Authority Keep Us Safe for Everlasting Joy from Jude 1:24-25. John opened his message by dividing it into two parts. The first part was his amazement that he was still a Christian and still loved the ministry of the Word. The second part was to analyze how that happened. In John's first part, he reviewed some milestones this year would bring: (1) 60 years as a believer, (2) 32 years pastoring Bethlehem Baptist Church, (3) 44 years of marriage to Noel, and (4) 40 years of being a father. He also shared that Bethlehem is planning for his successor to assume his responsibilities at Bethlehem so that this was his last T4G as a pastor. John shared his amazement that he has lasted as a Christian, pastor, husband and father as he considered these laps in his race. He shared an excerpt from his journal in 1986 that typified his emotional vulnerability that he has dealt with all his life. That vulnerability dealt with questions of being under attack from Satan to whether God was calling him to another ministry to church building programs to his inability to lead the body at Bethlehem. John then made clear that if all the fruits in his life were dependent on him and his ability to cause them to be, he would have failed, and worse, at them all. He compared his amazement to that of what Jude must have felt as he demonstrated in his doxology. John then describes the way doxologies work. They refer first to something that God has done or will do, and then they ascribe attributes to God that account for that action, or are expressed in the action. In other words, the attributes that you ascribe to God are the ones that account for the action you are praising, or that come to expression in the action you are praising. These attributes account for the actions you are celebrating. John ended his first part with, “If the decisive cause of my faithfulness to Christ must come from me, it will not come because it’s not there. Christ created it by coming.” The difference between our absolute inability and God's absolute ability is immeasurably great. John then pointed out what it takes for God to sustain our spiritual life, as given in Jude 1:25: it took glory and majesty and power and authority. None of which, we have in our own ability. The second part of John’s message was how this happened. I'm going to leave it up to you to find out that part by encouraging you to listen, and maybe re-listen to the message.
T4G 2012 was an edifying and encouraging conference to experience. Let us never under-estimate the power of the gospel. The next T4G will be held in Louisville, Kentucky, on April 8-10, 2014. Mark your calendars. All general sessions and breakout sessions are available free online at www.t4g.org.









