This conference took place on November 7, 2015. The excellent lectures provided challenging instruction, and the attendees created an amazing and encouraging fellowship. Thank you to all who came out and made this event a success. Each of the lectures have been posted below. Click the arrow to the left of the title to view the files.
OUR SPEAKERS
Joe Rigney is assistant professor of theology and Christian worldview at Bethlehem College & Seminary in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He is the author of The Things of Earth: Treasuring God by Enjoying His Gifts. He is a pastor at Cities Church, and he writes regularly for Desiring God Ministries and The Gospel Coalition.
Conference Audio (Click the Arrows for Mp3s)
Flesh and Bone · Pastor Doug Wilson
Paul tells us that we are to speak the “truth in love.” Truth is like a skeletal bone — hard, rigid, unyielding, and frequently dead. Love is like flesh, but if there are no bones to give it structure, it is like an amorphous bean chair. In an era that has rejected the truth and forgotten love, how are we as Christians to recover both together?
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Gracious Speech, Salty Language, and the Sexual Revolution · Pastor Joe Rigney
Jesus’s treatment of sinners is notoriously complex. He graciously welcomes tax collectors and prostitutes while unloading both rhetorical barrels on the Pharisees and scribes. Paul commands us to love and serve our neighbors immediately after wishing that his opponents would castrate themselves. Discerning how to reconcile these biblical strands is no easy task. When do we thunder and deploy our cutting words, and when do we bind up and heal with words of comfort? If all our speech is to be gracious and seasoned with salt, how shall we then speak?
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Prayer as the Shaper of Desire · Dr. Ben Merkle
Few things feel more fundamental and inescapable than our own desires. In a world where perverse desires are increasingly justified by the fact that they simply represent who you are, how does a Christian break through the prison of a will that wants what it ought not to want? Prayer is God’s design for turning our desires to serve the triune God.
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Bone of My Bone, Flesh of My Flesh · Pastor Doug Wilson
The first recorded words of a man are are those of Adam, spoken when he saw the first woman . . . and these words are poetry. How can we make our marriages scan like a good poem? How can we teach them to sing?
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Intentional Community Without All The Cultyness · Pastor Steven Wedgeworth
In the face of growing cultural opposition, many Christians are issuing calls to strategically retreat from mainstream culture and form intentional communities centered on religious conviction and shared values. While there is obviously much that is right about this desire, many of us who grew up in conservative Evangelical and fundamentalist communities are familiar with the ways in which this can go very wrong. How can we be “intentional” without becoming legalistic, controlling, or ingrown?
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Q&A and Discussion
Our speakers answer questions submitted by the audience and discuss in more detail some of the major themes raised in the preceding talks.
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