#gc2011

[littlebig-sackboy]

LBP 2 Move Pack Trailer from GC2011! AWESOME!

[joelbain-blog]

God is not standing around wondering if people like him.

Crawford Loritts @ GC2011

[joelbain-blog]

Let's not a la carte his attributes. To leverage one attribute over another is to prostitute God.

Crawford Loritts @ GC2011

[joelbain-blog]

A holy God does not need to be justified. There are sinners who need to be justified by a holy God.

Stephen Um @ GC2011

[joelbain-blog]

Go to the word of God. God does not have a speech impediment.

Crawford Loritts @ GC2011

[joelbain-blog]

"Where is Jesus in this passage? Jesus Christ is everywhere in this passage, yo! He owns this passage!"

James McDonald @ GC2011 - referring to Psalm 25

[joelbain-blog]

GC2011 - Post-mortem of Day 1

As briefly as I can, these are my impressions of the first day of the Gospel Coalition 2011 conference. 

This conference has been immaculately organized and so far has ran seamlessly, despite the clear logistical nightmare of running an event this size. The planning team deserves commendations and I hope we at CLF can learn from people like these. We make things too hard for people to be blessed by when they are poorly organized.

Worship with the Getty's has been very meaningful. I see great value in their modern hymns and I'll have to take them back with me to teach at church. Even though I'm fairly well exposed musically I didn't think I'd find an Irish worship band as comfortable as I have.

The preaching has been substantial and exemplary. Here's my guide if you want to listen to something. Albert Mohler was solid and clear but was saying a whole lot of things so he requires some digestion. It was a great intro to the conference. If you can only listen to one message and you want most to hear Jesus preached from the Old Testament, listen to Tim Keller preach from Exodus 14. "Insightful" doesn't begin to describe. "Theological-box-shattering" and "huge-spontaneous-gasp-eye-opening" (even though none of that is English) is more like it. If you want to begin to learn how to preach Jesus from the OT, listen to Alistair Begg - who was hilarious and excellent - lay an excellent foundation and draw 3 sketches of the gospel in the book of Ruth. All the audio and video (I think) is available at the Gospel Coalition website.

None of the speakers struggled to stay within the appointed time. Alistair Begg was the only one who even mentioned needing to contract a part of what he wanted to say. So many of us back home need to learn that discipline and skill.

The food here is mostly served in Kevin Hamilton-sized portions. I only had one proper meal yesterday - at lunch - and then a sandwich for lunch. I want to grow by feet spiritually but not by inches physically while I'm here.

So that was day one. I went back to the hotel exhausted by thoroughly satisfied. I expect the same today.

[joelbain-blog]

What D.A. Carson said to me

Yesterday I shook hands and exchanged a few words with D.A. Carson. I need to tell you a couple of things however, so that you understand the sort of meeting it was even though you were not there. I'm not generally captivated by people. I can find people tremendously interesting, but that for me has nothing to do with whether the world at large says they're interesting. What that means is that I'm not into celebrity or celebrities. It doesn't mean I don't have heroes in any sense. What it means is that in my eyes my heroes are people - people tremendously helped by God and used by God, but always people, with all the frailty that comes with that. 

So yesterday I shook hands and exchanged words with one of my heroes. I feel comfortable admitting this to you (and several other things I will admit in this post), and to myself, having explained what I have about myself. In the first place I was amazed how easy it was in a gathering of over 5000 people to get the opportunity to speak with Carson. There was no thick crowd around him. Perhaps that was because Tim Keller had just spoken and said thick crowd was around Keller. So maybe it was a well-timed moment. Definitely it was providential. 

I introduced myself and said to Carson that I just wanted to express my gratitude to him for the work that he has done - the little of it that I've taken in to-date. He is a bit taller than I am - a fact that I noted with a bit of surprise. I hadn't thought about how tall he might be but somehow I wasn't expecting to have to look up a bit to speak with him. I told him that I was from Jamaica. I told him that I had recently listened to the audio of him speaking at the Desiring God conference for Pastors some sixteen years or so ago, and of how incidentally amusing it was to hear him mention Jamaica as a part of an illustration while driving through my hometown of Kingston. He reacted. I could see that he was thinking, quickly made the connection and remembered. Admittedly I was quite surprised that he remembered the occasion, and all the more that he remembered and admitted that he had chosen Jamaica as an example completely off the top of his head at the time.

It was then that I said things I didn't plan to say. I spend most of my life very aware of how people can come across to other people. I'm very deliberate with my words most of the time. I think though that in the moment I was overwhelmed by how I felt. I wasn't overwhelmed by Carson or by talking to Carson (I'll explain why a bit later). I was overwhelmed by my own heart and a bit surprised and disarmed by how strongly I felt my own feelings of gratitude in the moment. I told him he had taken me (and I also meant that he was taking me) from being a teacher to becoming a preacher (and I meant that now I'm both). I told him, or at least tried to tell him, in a most unplanned and somewhat awkward but deeply heart-felt way, that he was responsible for some of the most significant growth in my life.

He responded. 

He did seem slightly uncomfortable at my praise. That was what I detected at the time and I think I understand it after hearing some of his peers, including John Piper, praise him later in the day while introducing a book dedicated to him, in gratitude for the work he has done over decades of writing, teaching and speaking. It would appear such a discomfort is a part of who he is. 

So for a brief moment I watched the discomfort ripple across his face and twist his stance slightly. Then he thanked me and said this in response.

"We all stand on the shoulders of others." 

I must interject one more time and talk about myself, so that you will understand my reaction to what DA Carson said to me. One of the peculiar things I've found about myself is that I'm generally oblivious of charisma. If I had said "immune to charisma" you might get the impression that I thought it was some sort of super-power. I don't. I think it has some benefits but I've also seen some disadvantages to this quality. I've come to see over time that I don't detect charismatic people the way some around me do, therefore I don't gravitate towards charismatic people. I'm still largely unaware of whether I'm charismatic or not, or the extent to which I am. So I don't truly know whether people find D.A. Carson to be charismatic or the extent to which they do. 

But I am now awed by DA Carson. I was not before, despite great admiration for his clear intellectual prowess, his commitment to accuracy and truth, and his deep love for God which always breaks through in his writing and teaching. But now I am awed by him. When he said what he said to me I heard the humility of a man whom God has used powerfully to shape me. I tried to express to him how much he had helped me. He in the most succinct way told me how much he had been helped himself - how much he had been helped by other men to whom surely, he would consider himself deeply indebted. In his response I see this great wisdom, but I suspect it is built into the nature of how he responded -  if I had been tempted to idolize him those few words had the potential to be corrective. I don't think that that was what he was doing in a direct sense though (even though he was almost surely aware of that potential). What I heard him do was to honestly acknowledge the fact that he was no different from me in a real sense. Great saints are not self-taught. By God's design, any man who has grown to any stature in Christ has done so by benefiting greatly in the Holy Spirit from those who have gone before him into the presence and towards the vista of God.

I think humility can be seen and I don't think it evaporates when we point it out. I am awed by the humility of D.A. Carson, which I think is a peculiar, yet appropriately holy thing to be awed by. You can't idolize a person for being humble. Humility always points away from self and points ultimately to God.

I am proud to say that I stand on the shoulders of others - men like Carson and Piper in the main and J.I. Packer too, but to a slightly lesser extent that the two mentioned before him - and I am deeply indebted to them. And already at this conference I've found several more men who's shoulders I plan to climb on. If by standing on the shoulders of men like these I can get a better view of the glory of God, particularly seen in the cross of Jesus Christ, then I shall do so proudly. I thank God for them. I'm also now more comfortable with the fact that in God's peculiar wisdom others have found mine to be shoulders that they can climb on. And I'm resolved to make it my goal in and by the Spirit, to give them as unobstructed and as clear a view of the grandeur of the majesty of the God of the universe and his Son, the God-man, Jesus Christ.

Selah.