Today is my father’s 89th birthday. He’s been in heaven for ten months. But I can’t shake the thought that I should keep giving him gifts. Perhaps it would be an honor to him to let him speak as his birthday passes by.

Here is what I think he would like to say about two things we stand for at Bethlehem: 1) God’s command that we hallow (sanctify) God, which we talked about in the message on December 30; and 2) God’s command that we be happy in him...

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One of my Muslim friends was offended recently. Two Jehovah’s Witnesses had visited his family a few times and had spent hours telling his family about their religious group and their views.

In return, my friend’s family offered to give the women information about Islam. The two women agreed to come back and learn more. My friend and his family put a great deal of time and effort into collecting useful information for them.

However, after some time, only one woman came back. And even though she showed up, she showed little interest in discussing Islam. Not surprisingly, my friend had zero interest in her religion either.

Granted, I wouldn’t be excited about him becoming a Jehov…

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It's hard to say what my favorite part of the pastors conference is.

I love the singing. I love to hear 1300 men sing at the top of their lungs about the greatest reality in the universe. So that's a big one. But I don't think that's the biggest.

Probably my favorite part is sitting with the other pastors under the preaching of the word of God around some great theme and growing in it myself.

A third thing would be that I love preparing my message. I love doing the biographies, so that I can stand up in front of these guys, with some great Christian saint behind me, and tell their story in a way that encourages me and them.

I also love getting reconnected with…

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May I encourage you to build a global dimension into your daily prayers? “Grant that your name be hallowed. Grant that your kingdom would come. Grant that your will would be done on earth as it is in heaven.” These are global prayers—with personal implications. Both kinds of prayer are good: specific, local, personal prayers, and general, global, sweeping prayers for the church and the nations.

Here is the way I keep the world in my prayers. I use the Online Operation World. I keep it in my bookmark bar on the browser and click it every day. If you go there, click in the left hand column “Pray Today.” Each day there is a different global focus. On February 7, they will start to lead us …

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James Henley Thornwell, the Southern Presbyterian theologian who died in 1862, got somethings very wrong, like slavery. But this he got right and it is amazingly up to date:

Our whole system of operations gives an undue influence to money. Where money is the great want, numbers must be sought; and where an ambition for numbers prevails, doctrinal purity must be sacrificed. The root of the evil is the secular spirit of our ecclesiastical institutions. What we want is a spiritual body; a Church whose power lies in the truth, and the presence of the Holy Ghost. (B. M. Palmer, Life and Letters of J. H. Thornwell, p. 291).

Eric Redmond, pastor of Hillcrest Baptist in Temple Hills, MD, helps us see the lay of the land in the African-American church by doing two things.

• He celebrates Anthony Carter’s and Thabiti Anyabwile’s books as rallying points for a different hope than the black mega-churches offer (giving credit also to Carl Ellis, Bruce Fields, Ken Jones, and Wy Plummer).
• And He points us to a paper he wrote in 2006, “Megachurches and Megaphones,” where he describes what he sees as the difference between these two ways of seeing the Christian faith fleshed out in African-American life.

Read and rejoice and say yes to God for these good things.

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The target audience for our pastors conference is church leaders. We call it a conference for pastors, but in the small print it is for church leaders. We don't make anybody show their credentials at the door.

Our goal is to encourage pastors. The way we go about encouraging them and strengthening their hands to press on in the work is by focusing on theological issues rather than how-to issues. It's not a conference mainly on how to do church. It is mainly a conference about who God is and what are his ways in the world.

So it's reflective and theological. It involves a lot of singing, worship, prayer, and a big bookstore. We love to get pastors together and have them …

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I am writing this on New Year’s Eve. The ending of 2007 moves my mind to other endings—like the final judgment. Ponder with me, if you wish, what it will be like to go through the last great judgment. It is good to settle in our minds what it will be like. If we could see it clearly, it would make those who trust Christ the happiest and bravest people in 2008.

I do believe we will all face a final judgment with the rest of the world. “We will all stand before the judgment seat of God” (Romans 14:10; 2 Corinthians 5:10). When Jesus says, “Whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life,” I take him to …

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It seemed to us that if the focus of the pastors conference is going to be on the pastor as father—both of a church and a family—then having the sons along could enable them to catch a vision of what it is that their fathers are called to and what the challenges are that their fathers face.

Asking the fathers to come is, in part, a means of showing respect. And wouldn't it be awesome to see a few hundred three-generation teams at the conference, all hearing messages about God as our father, pastors as fathers, and missions as fathering? Asking fathers and sons to come is a way of building into the manhood of sons, fathers, and grandfathers a sense of what a great calling it is…

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