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Mark Dever was interviewed recently at the New Attitude conference, on daily Bible reading. He had this to say about persistence:
What’s one thing you’ve learned after years of reading the Bible about how to read the Bible well?
That’s it’s more important that I keep doing it than what I get out of it at any [...]

Courtesy of Mark Dever:
How many times did Paul write to Timothy to ask how many people were coming to the church at Ephesus? Let me see (counts on his fingers)… none.
HT: Michael McKinley

Tim Challies has the news that the T4G “Bookstore” list has been posted to the T4G site:
Here is a link to the master bookstore list for Together for the Gospel. “Each of these books were carefully selected for the Together for the Gospel ‘08 book store. Specifically, Al Mohler, CJ Mahaney, Ligon Duncan, and Mark [...]

I blogged the other day on Dever on Dangerous Gospels, and it appears that now, he is posting transcripts of his T4G talk on his own blog. You can find Part 1, “Make the Gospel Public,” here.

At T4G last week, Mark Dever’s session was on the all-too-common attempt to “improve” the Gospel beyond what it is. Tim Challies summarizes it very well:
His talk was built upon five “calls” that are dangerous to the gospel—five ways churches may be tempted to adapt or shrink or expand the gospel message in order to [...]

Got back this afternoon from Together for the Gospel 2008. It was outstanding! I’ll probably post more later about it, but in the meantime, some quick thoughts and observations at least somewhat related to the conference:

The audio is available here. For free. Woohoo! (Already downloaded…)
The conference had an amazing bookstore, with all selections approved by [...]

The Gospel & Personal Evangelism
by Mark Dever.
Crossway Books, 2007. 128 pages.
ISBN 1581348460
Like most Christians, I struggle with evangelism. Being introverted doesn’t help, but a big part of it is that we live in a culture that so values pluralism, uncertainty, etc., that it is an uphill climb to share a universal truth like the Gospel [...]

I finished up Dever’s The Gospel and Personal Evangelism last night. (Review coming soon… Probably. ;-)) I’m following it up with Thomas Boston’s The Art of Manfishing, a short book from a Scottish Puritan on evangelism, from around 1700. Here’s a crumb (emphasis added):
O my soul, then see that gifts will not do the business. [...]

Why do we not evangelize? Mark Dever provides one explanation: it has the potential for immediate discomfort. Someone might get mad at us, they might reject our message, etc.
We typically want to process our experiences immediately, and if they are unpleasant, we are inclined to change course in order to some way avoid the discomfort [...]