Welcome to the Desiring God 2009 National Conference! We're excited to worship and learn with you and look forward to an amazing weekend. When the conference kicks off on Friday evening, watch this space for live blog updates, photos, and summaries of each session posted by DG staff and volunteers.

We trust this site will help both those in attendance and those following along at home to feel even more connected to what's happening during this year's conference. Thanks for your interest and support. We thank God for you all!

-Eric Johnson, Director of Marketing

The DG International Outreach tables at the Convention Center.

The DG International Outreach department is all about "Packing Hope." They want to load you up with books if you're willing to take them overseas. You could even get them on the spot this weekend if you stop by their conference booth. Read the blog post for more info.

The DG Marketing and Internet team gearing up for the conference.

The Desiring God Philippian Fellowship meeting. (in this photo: John Piper, David Mathis, Jon Bloom, John Knight)

Ready, set, go! Scott Anderson opens up the first session.

John Piper explains where the theme "The Theater of God" originated.

Julius Kim: I'd like to begin by reading a passage of Scripture that I'd like to believe was Calvin's favorite. As I've been reading Calvin getting ready for this talk, a common theme kept coming up over and over again: John 17:3. "Now this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent."

Kim: Calvin was a faith-possessed pilgrim with a singular passion to know God and to make him known. Through this brief introduction to Calvin, my prayer is that you as a Christian pilgrim would also be able to taste and see the same grace and glory that thoroughly transformed this 16th century Christian pilgrim.

Dr. Julius Kim: John Calvin was a faith possessed pilgrim with a passion to know Christ and make him known.

Kim: Calvin was born into a middle-class family. He father wanted him to study law. He went to different schools for four or five years. The switch in schools provided for John the sharpening of his mind as well as the Renaissance pursuit of ancient sources. John published his first work, a commentary on Seneca, at 23 years of age.

Sometime in his 20's he came into contact with the writings of people like Luther and started to study the Scriptures. He came face to face with the depth of his sin and the wrath of God. Then he discovered the gospel and the grace of Jesus. A student and scholar of the classics became a student and scholar of the Word of God.

Kim: Calvin's conversion marked the writing of his first major Christian book: The Institutes of the Christian Religion. The Institutes was an introduction to the Christian faith and was an outline to what Calvin himself saw as important: the sufficiency of Scripture and submission to those Scriptures.

Kim: As heirs of the Reformation, do our churches today have the same confidence in the truthfulness and the authority of the Word of God? How important is it in our lives? In many of our churches the Bible has been functionally rejected in place of what we could gain from some sort of rational exercise or emotional experience. Our minds and our experience thus become the final judge of what is true and right.

Kim: Calvin said that what the Scriptures principally teach is that God alone deserves glory. At the end of the day, what's most important is that God is glorified, not only in his creation but also in his plan of redemption.

Kim: Calvin believed that once a Christian saw the glory of God as central then a proper discussion of salvation could follow. He wrote, "We are born first of all for God and not for ourselves."

Calvin believed God's glory was most tangibly seen in the work of salvation.

He argued that a correct understanding of the doctrine of justification by faith alone was central.

He argued that for God to be glorified in the saving work of his children, two things need to happen.

1. A sinner must come to see his utter helplessness and hopelessness, and the coming judgment.
2. A sinner must hear the knowledge of God's way of salvation.

Kim: Calvin sought to glorify God primarily through his pastoral ministry. During his time in Geneva he ministered to a community of Protestant French refugees. These refugees didn't know how difficult life would be. So Calvin, a pilgrim, became a shepherd to fellow pilgrims.

There were two foundational themes to Calvin's ministry. First, the doctrine of providence and its importance for the Christian life. Second, his theology of worship.

Kim: Calvin believed that the doctrine of providence was a very practical reality that every Christian needed to know and embrace. Because God's care is powerful, purposeful, and personal. He is intimately involved in the affairs of his creation. He also has a purpose. And when you realize that God is purposeful, then no matter what happens in your life you can persevere. God is sovereign and he is good.

Kim: Calvin encouraged Christian pilgrims who struggled to turn to their sovereign Father and cry out to him in faith. In fact, he wrote more about prayer than he did about predestination.

You can now read or listen to Julius Kim's message.

And you can listen to John Piper and Doug Wilson's conversation about Collision.

Here are the questions that John Piper asked Doug Wilson earlier tonight. Listen to the audio for the full conversation.

Christopher Hitchens said at the end of the movie that, given the chance, he wouldn't convert the last theist. Why do you think he said that?

What is Hitchens' best counterpoint to the claim that he is getting his morality for judging Christianity from Christians?

What is the relationship between doing apologetics and evangelizing?

In the video you speak about having "copiousness." Describe what that is and whether you think it is important for pastors to cultivate.

What is your hope for this film?

What about the "s" word at the end of the film? Why do you allow for it here but don't tolerate it from your children?

Why the recent upsurge in the New Atheism?

Pictures from earlier tonight: Registering

Pictures from earlier tonight: Singing

Pictures from earlier tonight: Julius Kim

Pictures from earlier tonight: Laughing

You can now watch Julius Kim's message as well as read or listen to it.

Calm before the storm at the conference bookstore.

Doug Wilson and Scott Anderson

Doug Wilson: We should begin with a sentiment that I know the other speakers and you share as well: our business here is to glorify God not Calvin. To glorify Calvin instead of God would be the biggest way to insult Calvin.

Calvin understood and articulatd the greatness and sovereignty of God, but he did it in biblical categories. He wasn't a raw determinist.

We don't start with an a priori God. We start with a God who stoops to reveal himself. A God who lisps, Calvin said, to reveal himself to us.

The university is a Christian concept and depends upon Christian categories to function. Where does the "uni-" come from? It comes from Colossians 1 where Christ is said to tie all things together in himself. You can't have unity without the Son.

Calvin was an integrated thinker, yet we don't like to function in integration. We have multiversities. We like to shatter the world. We've created "traverversities."

Calvin's view of preaching is extraordinarily high. He says that it is the place in which we meet with God. He did not hold that sermons were inspired by the Holy Spirit.

Pulpit ministry has to be grounded in the Scriptures, exposition.The minister should not deviate from what is assigned him. One of the things my father taught me about preaching was, "When you run out of things to say, go on to the next verse."

Wilson: A minister is not up there to develop a relationship with everybody individually. He is not the Holy Spirit.

He is there to declare something that is outside of his control. He's not there to preach himself but Christ.

Wilson: We have fallen for the trap of thinking that the Bible should have to stand up against the standards of Enlightenment ideals, when it's the Bible is the one who should be setting the standards.

The Scriptures are God's scales in which he weighs the whole world.

We aren't writing on the walls of the banquet halls of heaven. He is the one speaking to us.

"Scripture is self-authenticating. Hence it is not right to subject it to proof and reasoning." - Calvin

Signing Wilson's message

Calvin is not embracing a blind-leap fideism. He says that to refute the cavils from the Enlightenment is possible.

But he's not after proving Scripture to reason. He's interested in dethroning reason from making itself the standard.

Doug Wilson

Wilson: What have we learned? Calvin understood what the Scriptures were like and what they are to do.

Scripture is the script of the created theater of God's world. We are not to be extemporaneous actors who try to learn our own lines.

God has given us our lines in his word, and we ought to heed to them.

Wilson: Why did Calvin make such a big dent in the world? He had God's Word in his hand and he believed God.

Wilson: Why does the world not believe? When was the last time we commanded it to?

When was the last time we spoke with authority and not like the scribes?

Wilson: We are not sent to make a few mild suggestions. We are not sent to have a relational dialogue.

We are sent to preach and to declare.

We are commissioned—ordained—to compel every manifestation of worldly power, glory, wisdom, and exaltation to yield to and obey God's word.

Wilson: We come to declare that all men need to repent and believe. The kingdom of God is here.

We declare what has been accomplished, not what we would like to be accomplished.

We are ordained to feed the sheep and drive away the wolves.

And if needs be, we have been ordained to preach the word as if we were thunder and lightning. How can we not? The Scriptures are thunder and lightning.

Wilson: May God have mercy on us and give us only what he can give. He did this for Calvin, and 500 years later we are still talking about it.

He was a real man made out of real clay. But he had a real heart and held a real Bible in his hand.

He had what we should call a real ministry.

"Graveyards are full of indispensable men." – Charles DeGaulle

You can now listen to Doug Wilson's message or read the notes from the session.

Marvin Olasky: I grew up in a kind of dutyism that emphasized focusing on customs. I became an atheist and participated in anti-war demonstrations at the time. I cared about the poor in an abstract way.

I joined the Communist Party and learned Russian to communicate with my Russian big brothers. I eventually ran across a Russian New Testament.

What struck me as a writer was how Jesus resisted Satan's temptations in Matthew 4 by turning to what was written.

Olasky: Many Christians throughout Medieval times had learned that working in a monestary was the best kind of work in the world.

But Calvin wrote, "No one ought to doubt that civil authority is a calling, not only holy and lawful before God, but also the most sacred, and by far the most honorable of all callings in the whole life of mortal men."

It's thinking like that that led many of the founders of the American Republic to enter politics.

Many Christians throughout Medieval times had learned that they shouldn't go to court at any time. The weak seldom had any redress against the powerful. Calvin wrote against this, as well as against authorities who used their positions to gain wealth or do as they pleased.

Many Christians in that time thought they shouldn't vote for their leaders. Calvin wrote otherwise after studying Deuteronomy and seeing that "Moses awaited the consent of the people and that nothing was attempted that was not pleasing to them all."

Many Christians thought it was unbiblical to rebel against those who presumably ruled by divine right. But Calvin wrote that magistrates "must not wink at kings who violently fall upon and assault a lowly folk."

Olasky: Work in politics and law can sometimes glorify God. Monarchies can, and probably will be, ungodly. With republics there is plenty of sin to go around as well, but they are probably going to be better.

Olasky: Calvin emphasized that all honest labor glorifies God. People who are engaged in ordinary life are not ordinary. Work itself is not part of the curse. No work done to God is secular.

Olasky: Christians throughout Medieval times had heard that disciplines such as penance and self-flagellation were the way to get closer to God.

Calvin wrote that God didn't require this. He asked, "Why substitute unproductive and unnecessary hard practice for productive hard practice?" Why force men to perform unnecessary disciplines when God had called them to do hard things in their everyday lives?

In a commentary on Deuteronomy 24, Calvin wrote, "Any removal of work throws human life into ruin." Many people today retire while they are still healthy and realize the truthfulness of Calvin's quote.

Olasky: All honest labor, not just church work, is good. Self-flagellation is bad. We don't need to make life harder than it is.

Hard work is good. Interest-bearing loans that help people start businesses are good.

We should help the poor learn a trade. We should not aid people who are physically able but unwilling to work.

Olasky: Calvin instructed all his followers to pay attention to the events around them.

The theater was not the monastery or the church building. The theater was all around.

Jesus told his disciples, "Look at the birds of the air."

Olasky: Calvin had weaknesses that grew out of his strengths.

For example, Calvin could not stomach grand parties and rich clothes amidst poverty. He wanted people to spend more money on opening businesses rather than buying fancy clothes.

I think, however, that Calvin went too far on this point. He regulated compassion, which has the effect of causing resentment. We must aim at changing the consciences of the people more than at making laws.

Marvin Olasky

Olasky: Calvin advocated a different understanding of government, politics, business, and economics.

Today, surrounded by a media cacophony we often repeat what we hear. But this country would be better if we paused to think about what is written: what is written in the Bible, what is written in our founding documents, and what is written by men who loved the Bible like Calvin.

The Bookstore

Read or listen to Marvin Olasky's message.

Up Next: Mark Talbot

Mark Talbot explains "the broken stage in the theater of God"

You can now watch the video of Doug Wilson's message this morning.

Mark Talbot: Picturing our world as having a broken stage is illuminating.

Seeing everything from Adam to the end is understood as happening on a broken stage.

We can't ever be sure that the floorboards or the speakers or the curtains will always work right.

Talbot speaking about the existence of sin and evil in the world (photo via Scott Anderson)

Talbot: Not only is the stage broken, but we are broken. Not only is the stage treacherous, but we are treacherous. All of us are untrustworthy, even if we are regenerate.

We are bad actors. Not only because we mess up. We mean to act badly.

Calvin assures us that God governs nature and "all [individual natures," including human nature and our individual human natures.

Consequently nothing in the natural or human worlds falls out of God's providential hands.

Does it seem right to say that God willed Luther's spiritual depression? Ought we to believe that God planned from eternity past—that God willed—some of Luther's incredible and sometimes unacceptable crassness?

What about Calvin's ill health or the death of his infant child and wife?

Talbot: These two statements perfectly agree, though in diverse ways: Man is acted upon by God while at the same time he also acts.

"Thieves and murderers are the instruments of divine providence and the Lord himself uses these to carry out the judgments that he has determined with himself.

Yet I deny that they can derive any excuse from their evil deeds on account of this." – John Calvin

Talbot: Often after we have suffered a while, the problem with how God can will something like that suffering resolves itself, because we start to see the good that God is accomplishing by it.

Talbot: Luther himself has said that without the tremendous battles with depression, etc. neither he nor anyone else could come to understand Scripture, faith, fear, or love of God.

He conjectured that King David must have been plagued by a very fearful devil, for he could not have had such profound insights if he had not experienced such great assaults.

Luther felt that his depressions were necessary. Nonetheless, at the same time, he saw them as painful and worthy of being fought against.

But over time he came to see them for the benefit that afforded, and so he was enabled to endure them with more patience and hope.

It's not implausible to think that many of the afflictions in Calvin's life were aimed at making him more reliant on God and his goodness than Calvin's own giftings and abilities.

God has ordained from eternity every moment of our lives so that in the end we each have a unique song of praise that we alone can lead.

The redeemed have an urge to make a chorus. When we lead them there will be no sense of ourselves but only a sense of Christ.

This perfect heavenly father always hears the pleas of his children, and he always responds in what we shall finally know to be a gloriously merciful way, even if, and perhaps especially when it seems the Lord is not hearing or responding to our pleas.

Mark Talbot speaking

Three things to keep in mind:

1) A perfect father will not be deterred by his childrens' quest for merely apparent goods. He gives us what we need and not always what we want.

2) A perfect father is sovereign and this is the story that he has written.

3) What God has ordained will strike us as unsurpassably good, better than whatever we could ask or imagine.

Good times at the info table.

Notes and audio from Mark Talbot's message are now available.

Mark Talbot speaks about Servetus on the Speaker Panel

Sam Storms: It's important to remember that heresy in Calvin's day was considered a public crime, on the same level with robbery or murder.

A photo from behind the Speaker Panel

Doug Wilson: There are sins that should not also be considered crimes. Who wants lust or covetousness police?

Wilson: All societies have blasphemy laws. We just call them hate crimes. Blasphemy is speaking against the god of the system.

Marvin Olasky: Our goal should not be to try to set up a holy land here. Israel never did that in the Old Testament when they were in exile.

David Mathis: Marvin, how would you direct us as Christians to orient ourselves to world poverty?

Olasky: Government to government giving often results in just an increased military and dictatorship on the other end.

Julius Kim: For Calvin, being a pilgrim meant going against the culture.

Mathis: Considering that at least four of you are vocational pastors, what insights do you have for us on Calvin as a pastor-theologian?

Storms: I have a hard time connecting with Calvin as a pastor. He was so involved with the civic details of life in Geneva, whereas I hardly have any dealings with the government in my city.

Wilson: We have to remember that Geneva was a small town. One reason we don't relate is that we all live in cities with millions of people around us. It makes sense why a pastor wouldn't be engaging with the city counsel.

John Piper: I totally relate with you, Sam. It's that way with all my heroes. I hear their stories and feel discouraged, depressed, and paralyzed. Then I just step back and reconsider what the Lord has called me to do.

Mathis: Mark Talbot, if all things work out for our best, how are we supposed to think about that in relation to our own sin, especially in the moment of temptation?

Mark Talbot: The fact that God uses all things, including our sin, to bring glory to our Son does not excuse us to go against what we see as God's revealed will in Scripture.

Mathis: John, how does the incident last month—the tornado that struck while the ELCA clergy were discussing ordaining people who practice homosexuality—how does that relate to God's providence?

Piper: I always go to Luke 13:1-5. Disasters are reminders by God that we all deserve to be wiped out. They are occassions for us all to repent.

John Piper, Sam Storms, Marvin Olasky, Doug Wilson, Mark Talbot, Julius Kim, David Mathis

You can now listen to the panel discussion.

Singing "Before the Throne" // love this one

Sam Storms: Turn with me to 2 Corinthians 4.

Storms: When John invited me to speak here, I began reading through Calvin's New Testament commentaries. I read through any passage about heaven, the resurrection, or its effect on us.

There was hardly any text on which he spoke with such eloquence and power as 2 Corinthians 4:16-18.

Sam Storms (and a bright stage light)

Calvin once wrote to a woman who was experiencing physical illness. He said, "[Our physical afflictions should serve us as medicine to purge us from worldly affections and remove what is superfluous in us. And since they are to us the messengers of death, we ought to learn to have one foot raised to take our departure when it shall please God."

Storms: Do I live with one foot raised in expectation of seeing my Savior face to face? Calvin did, I'm convinced, and we can learn much from him in this area. I'll mention four reasons why.

Storms: First, Calvin was a pilgrim on this earth. In Colossians 3:1 Paul exhorts us to seek the things that are above. Calvin said that in doing so we can "embrace our identity as sojourners in this world without being bound to it."

Storms: Second, Calvin is a helpful guide because of his physical afflictions. His bodily ailments read like a medical journal.

Storms: Third, Calvin is a helpful guide because of his vision of Jesus Christ as that which makes heaven heavenly.

Storms: Fourth, Calvin is a helpful guide because of the way he instructs us to meditate on heaven and the final resurrection.

Storms: Calvin loved 1 Peter 1:4. We have an imperishable inheritance. One of the most difficult things about this life is that things decay and die. But the glory and splendor of our inheritance in the new heavens and the new earth will never decay and die.

Storms: For Calvin, the certainty of the future influences our approach to the present.

Let's talk about some of the practical benefits of meditating on the coming resurrection.

Storms: First, contemplating the splendor of heaven empowers the believer to patiently endure unjust suffering.

Storms: Second, meditating on the beauty of heaven strengthens the soul to overcome worldliness.

Storms: Third, thinking often of heaven not only enables us to hold onto this life loosely. It also helps us respond to the death of others in an appropriate way and to prepare for our own.

Storms: As much as Calvin wrote about death he never despised life. He did say much, though, about how Jesus talked of us hating our lives in John 12.

"We hate this life only to the extent that it inhibits or detracts from our coming to Jesus. … If we are overwhelmed with the love of the world…it is impossible for us to go to heaven."

Storms: Fourth, setting our hearts on heaven enables us to respond well to the loss of money and property.

Storms: Calvin enjoyed such things as good food and good art, but he never trusted in them.

Let us diligently work at our jobs and honor our employers, but let us do it with one foot raised.

Let's get married, have children, devote ourselves to our spouses, but do it with one foot raised.

Educate your children, Mom and Dad, but do it with one foot raised.

Weep at the gravesite of a child that has died in infancy, but do it with one foot raised.

Read a book or write a book with one foot raised.

Cheer for your favorite football team with one foot raised.

Plant a garden, plant a church, open a savings account, invest in a stock; but do it with a joy-filled hope and anticipation of the life that will be ours in heaven.

Read or listen to Sam Storms' message.

You can now watch the panel discussion and Sam Storms' message.

Scott Anderson opens the last session of the DGNC.

John Piper: My title is “Jesus Christ as Denouement in the Theater of God: Calvin and the Supremacy of Christ in All Things.” The question I am trying to answer is how Jesus Christ relates to the ultimate purpose of God in creating the universe as the theater of God.

Piper: Denouement is “the final part of a play, movie, or narrative in which the strands of the plot are drawn together and matters are explained or resolved.”

Piper: Unlike anyone else in the universe, the work and the person of Jesus demand that we think of denouement in unusual ways.

Piper: If there are two things that have been burned on my mind with the help of John Calvin it is the majesty of the Word of God—the Bible, and the supreme worth of the glory of God manifest supremely in Jesus Christ.

John Piper provides a definition of "denouement." (photo by: Bill Walsh)

Piper: Calvin would want me to join him in magnifying the glory of Christ at this our last session, and he would want me to do it mainly with the Word of God.

Piper: Ephesians 1:4-6 is the first place I go every time I ask about the ultimate purpose of God in the universe.

Piper: Three times in those verses Paul speaks of the glorious displays of Christ’s greatness before and outside this universe. So it seems inadequate to say that this created universe is the extent of the theater of God.

John Piper preaches through Ephesians 1 (photo by Scott Anderson)

Piper: My conclusion from Ephesians 1:4-6 is that the universe is not large enough or long enough to display the fullness of the glories of Christ.

God must direct our attention back to eternity and outside this universe to find ample scope for the revelation of the glory of his Son. He considers this valuable for us to know.

Piper: QUESTION: What is the ultimate goal of God in the theater of God?

ANSWER: That the glory of his grace should be praised by innumerable redeemed human beings (Ephesians 1:6).

Piper: The apex of God’s glory is the glory of his grace. All his other glories—the glory of his justice and wrath and power and wisdom and truthfulness—serve the glory of his grace (Romans 9:22-23.)

Piper: God has planned eternity to show us more and more of the riches of his glory. So he will satisfy our ever-growing capacities to see and savor and praise it.

Paul calls this “the great love of God” (Ephesians 1:4)

Piper: Jesus is the embodiment of the glory of God’s grace, and Jesus is the means of attaining it.

The glory of the grace of God is Christ's glory (2 Corinthians 4:4; Ephesians 3:21; Philippians 4:19; John 12:41).

Piper: Jesus' role in the theater of God is to display the apex of God’s glory in history for our perfect salvation, and to display the apex of God’s glory in eternity for our perfect satisfaction.

Piper: What difference does all of this make for us? Five things...

Piper: The highest pleasure of the human soul is admiration. To see and savor the glory of Christ—to admire him—is why we were created.

Piper: Second, Christ's beauty in the new heavens and new earth will have no competitor.

Piper: Third, the apex of God’s love is to give us himself for our everlasting enjoyment.

Piper: Four, our glory in the new creation will only be the reflected glory of Christ.

Piper: Five, by the sight of God's glory in the gospel we are already being changed into the likeness of Christ (2 Corinthians 4:4).

Signing

Piper: So already now the age to come—the age of glory—has begun. So with one foot raised, stand in awe of Jesus Christ.

John Piper preaching

You can now listen to John Piper's message from this morning. The manuscript will be posted tomorrow.