Archive: June 18th, 2008

Resolved

I just got back from a conference called Resolved - an amazing gathering of some of the strongest pastors/authors/speakers in the US and thousands of Bible-believing young people eager to hear them expose God's word. It was my 3rd year attending and it was so good to be back.
This year's topic was Heaven and Hell. Yeah. Intense. I went with certain expectations and came away with my world changed. And as has been the case each year before, it seems impossible to process the truth that I heard and sum it all up. There were 12 different sessions, and each one opened my eyes to see something about God, about me, about Heaven, about Hell, or about this world in a way I never had before.
I'd hoped to have time to sit and dissect my journal and find one thing from each sermon that I could pull out and put in this blog. but now I have 15 minutes before I need to go back to work, so that's not going to happen. Instead, I'm just going to ramble a bit about some of the things that affected me.
I believe in the sovereignty of God. I never gave much thought to it until college, and since then have seen it more and more, have seen it in scripture, have seen it play out in my life and in the lives of my friends. I think a lot about God's sovereignty in electing some to salvation, in His sovereignty in the every day happenings of my life, in His sovereignty in each story I read in the Bible. This conference, though, helped me to see what I can only describe as the longevity of the sovereignty of God. One of the speakers pointed out that nothing on earth exists for its own purposes but is in one way or another contributing to the glory of God. How true! God has sovereignly ordained every element of our universe as a part of his perfect plan. Another speaker (or maybe the same one?) pointed out the symmetry of the Bible: The perfect earth without blemish in the 1st 2 chapters of Genesis, the world in its fallen state as a result of sin, then the perfect new earth (Heaven) that He has ordained for those who would depend on the blood of Jesus to cover their sins. Beautiful! From beginning to end, the end is in sight - a glorious end where those to whom the Father has granted saving faith will worship their Savior for eternity, free from sin and suffering forever.
But of course, the conference was not only about Heaven. Hell is terrifying and it is real. both of those points were driven home in very real ways. John Piper spoke on Sunday night, though, about the insufficiency of Hell - that fear of Hell alone is not a saving fear. One cannot just run from Hell but must run toward Jesus. O, that God would give me the words to convey to the people around me how desirable this Jesus is - how perfectly holy, how perfectly just, how perfectly loving. O, that Hell's reality would be apparent and the reality of Jesus as Christ would be even more so!