Attendees of the Desiring God 2008 national conference received a bag of goodies at check in.  Here are a few highlights….

The Desiring God Conference is now over.  Unfortunately, I wasn’t feeling well this morning, so I missed this morning’s session with John Piper.  Fortunately, all of the sessions are available on the Desiring God Resources Page.  you can access the messages for this conference here:  LINK.  I’m sure I’ll watch several of the messages again.  I was personally challenged by each message and will be unpacking the things I learned in the coming weeks.  This was a very well run conference.  The Desiring God staff and 100+ volunteers ran a seamless “show”.  There were many great vendors and ministries in the book area.  I especially enjoyed browsing materials from Crossway, Banner of Truth and Reformation Heritage Books.  The folks from LOGOS Bible Software had a table as well.  They very graciously answered questions and did demonstrations for all of us curious conference attendees.  LOGOS Bible software carries a large number of John Piper’s books as well as his sermon manuscript library.  You can learn more at www.logos.com/piper.  All in all, this was a good experience.  I’ll have to invite a few friends to tag along with me next time.  The 4.5 hours alloted for lunch and dinner break got a little lonely.

The audio of Sinclair Ferguson’s talk at the 2008 Desiring God National Conference is available here:  LINK.  They are trying to get the audio of each session posted within an hour of the presentation and hope to have the video of each session posted within a day.

I’m still a bit groggy & not yet through my first cup of coffee, but I wanted to take a minute on jot down my thoughts on day 1 of the Desiring God 2008 Nation Conference.  There are over 3000 people in attendance this year.  There seemed to be a nice mix of folks from all of the U.S. and all over the world.  the book area has a decent selection of materials.  I noticed an illustrated book on Job by John Piper that looked pretty interesting.  I was happy to see Mark Driscoll’s Death by Love available as well, even though it doesn’t actually realease until Tuesday.  The highlight of last night was getting to listen to Sinclair Ferguson.  He spoke on James 3:1-12.  His talk was broken up into 3 parts:  1.  Walk-through / explanation of James 3:1-12, 2. James 3:1-12 in the context of the book of James, 3. James 3:1-12 in the context of the gospel of Jesus Christ.  The most significant part of the talk focused on the difficulty of taming the tongue.  And just as Job made a convenant with his eyes, a similar covenant could be made with our own eyes, tongue, hands etc.  The talke finished with a call to saturate ourselves in the word of God as it is the key to transforming the tongue.  Following Ferguson’s talk they had a speaker panel hosted by Justin Taylor.  The speakers were sinclair Ferguson, John Piper & Mark Driscoll.  Many of you read Mark Driscoll’s post earlier in the week about whey he loves John Piper.  In that post, he noted that he though John Piper only had 1 coat, so in the context of answer a question about that post, he actually presented John Piper with a tweed jacket that has the Desiring God logo embroidered on it.  John Piper put it on and wore it for the remainder of the evening.  I’m looking forward to day 2 of the conference and will be hitting the road shortly.

Looks like there are 50+ bloggers that will be sticking around after the Saturday night session for the open house for bloggers.  I’m sure a few of these individuals will also be live blogging the event.

• Justin Taylor, Between Two Worlds
• Carolyn McCulley, Radical Womanhood (if she can make it after her book signing)
• Abraham Piper, 22 Words
• Molly Piper, The Pipers
• Mike Anderson, The Resurgence
• Marc Heinrich, Purgatorio
• Johnathan Bowers, The Fool’s Gold
• Josh Etter, Of First Importance
• Steve Spearman, The Fat Triplets
• Mark McDaniel, The McDaniel Blog
• Chris Roberts, Seek the Holy
• Michael Dewalt, Gospel-Centered Musings
• Tim Crummett, Small Man Big God
• Michael Krahn, A Mind Awake
• Brian Phillips, One Thing
• Kassie Phillips, A Living Hope
• Ben Seal, Unbreakable Joy
• Nick Kennicott, Reforming Students
• Chris Meirose, Because I Said So
• Ben Janssen, From Christian Legalism to Christian Hedonism
• Charles Jannace
• Nancy Guthrie, Random Thoughts
• James Pruch, Beneath the Cross
• Eric Schumacher, An Infant in a Cradle
• Dave Herding, Momento Mori
• Michelle Keller, The Adventures of a Mommy Missionary
• Anna VanEaton, Ingrafted Counselor
• Jonathan Shupe, Shupe Shire
• Adam Evers, The Legend
• Benjamin Oetken
• Amber Burger, The Currency of Grace is Where My Song Begins
• Shaun Tabatt, Bible Geek Gone Wild
• Shannon Jordan, A Reforming Mom
• Steve Spray, Old Red Hat
• Latisha Grady, In a Few Words
• John Murphy, High Fliers
• Harry Kraus, Grace from the Cutting Edge
• Nick Jackson, Backstage
• Kevin and Janice Evans, The Evans Family
• Chris Maddocks, Gospel Logic
• Christy Tennant, Ferry Dust
• Mike West, Stage Fright
• Kathy Doremus, Hungry Women
• Robert Minto, The Veil Away
• Tope Koleoso, Adrian Warnock
• Cory Dahl
• Andrea Sprague, Our Adoption Road
• Jane Swanson, 54 and More
• Jenna Scheetz, All the Way Home
• Phyllis Nelson, Confessions of a Pastor’s Wife
• Scott Williams, FamilyLife Culture Watch
• Tracey Lanter, FamilyLife MomBlog

We’re about 13 hours from the first session at the Desiring God 2008 National Conference.  Tonight we’ll hear from Sinclair Ferguson.  He’ll be speaking on:

“The Tongue, the Bridle, and the Blessing: An Exposition of James 3:1-12”

This will be the second time I’ve heard Sinclair Ferguson speak.  I also had the opportunity to hear him during chapel when I visited the Reformed Theological Seminary Charlotte campus back in February.  Barring any technical snafus, I’ll be live blogging this event, so you can follow me here and also on Twitter:  www.twitter.com/stabatt.

Abraham Piper posted today about an open house for bloggers following the Saturday evening session of the upcoming Desiring God national conference.

Open House for Bloggers at NatCon
September 15, 2008 | By: Abraham Piper
Category: Conferences

After the Saturday evening session at our upcoming national conference, we’ll be having a time for bloggers and blog readers to get together and meet in person the folks who we otherwise only run into online.

I’ll be there; Justin Taylor will be there; and hopefully there’ll be a couple dozen others from this small niche of the blogosphere. So if you’ll be at the conference, and you blog or simply enjoy perusing blogs, come on by.

It might also help us connect better to know in advance what sites will be represented, so respond to this post below with your name and website if you intend to be there and I’ll keep a list going here.

You don’t have to sign up to come, but at the event, Crossway will be giving a copy of The New Media Frontier to the first 20 of you who let us know you’re coming.

You can read Abraham’s original post here:  LINK.

How does Pastor John handle spiritual training in the home?

Looking back over 31 years of parenting, the things that have been constant are related to the fact that we always knew that the Bible and prayer had to be woven into the life of our family, both between me and Noël privately, and with our children together.

Let me just mention what we aimed to do on a daily basis:

1. We encouraged our children from the very beginning to be alone with the Lord in the morning. That can start as soon as you can prop a child up with a pillow so that he doesn’t topple over and bonk his head. You can set a tape recorder beside him with a song about “Jesus loves me, this I know” or a Bible story.

So a child can have devotions from age 1 on, as strange as that may sound, if you train him to have a little time alone to be with God. He can’t read yet, obviously, and he won’t read yet for another 4 or 5 years. But he can listen and he can enjoy that time. So we did that, and then it turned into Bible stories. Then it turned into giving them their own Bible that they could read, which went on up through teenage devotions.

2. We were at the table together every morning, and I led devotions at breakfast with the children. And if the child is little he just says “Jesus” and that’s all he says. But we used to work our way through the Global Prayer Digest so that there was a missions component. And then we read a short passage of Scripture, and I would pray. It might not take more than 5 minutes, because of the children being little.

3. Then in the evening we had family devotions, which was a little longer. We read a longer portion of Scripture, and all the children–if they were able–would pray, not just me. Noel would pray, I would pray, and each of the children would pray. And as soon as they could talk, we taught them to pray.

4. And then when we put them to bed, we tucked them in, blessed them with

The Lord bless you and keep you.
The Lord make his face to shine upon you and be gracious to you.
The Lord lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace,
and joy, and hope, and love, and a good night’s rest,
and someday a godly husband. (Talitha will always laugh when I say this last line.)

And then I sing a song for Talitha. And then I give her a big hug. There is a very definite routine that we walk through. And there is a word component even as you tuck the child in bed at night.

That has been the routine for 31 years, basically, though I don’t want to create the impression that it is flawless or that we didn’t miss mornings or evenings. We did, but this was the goal and the routine. And pretty much we have been able to keep with it.

Originally posted at DesiringGod.org on 9/28/08.