Archives for January 21, 2023

Founders Conference 2023: A Smashing Success!

The final day of the Founders Conference in Fort Myers went very well, by God’s grace, and we are now winging our way home. The conference opened this morning with another enjoyable panel discussion with the speakers covering a variety of subjects (photo 1). I then gave my final address on “Glorified Humanity,” focusing on the spiritual marriage between Christ and His people in glory from Revelation 19:6-9. Voddie Baucham then gave the closing and a most enlightening address of the conference on the role of created man and woman from Genesis 2 and its implications for today (photo 2 includes most of the speakers). I caught a good photo, too, of Paul Washer speaking with Tom Nettles (photo 3). We spent the final hour selling several dozens of sets of Brakel’s 4-volume systematic theology and the 3-volume set by Paul Smalley and me. Here I am with our RHB employee, Justin Genus, holding hundreds of back orders (photo 4–in addition to selling every book we sent down to Florida). Many thanks to Justin, and praise God with me that we sold more books at this conference of 2000 attendees than any conference I have done in my life!

After the conference was over, we had lunch in downtown Fort Myers. When walking back to our car, we heard a street preacher proclaiming God’s Word from the story of the rich man and Lazarus. As we got closer, we were surprised to hear him suddenly call out my name! It was a man named Tom who had attended the conference and is a member of Tom Ascol’s church (photo 5)! We prayed for God’s blessing on his weekly street sermon.

Our Grandson, Ezra, was Born! Praise the Lord!

We are thanking the Lord abundantly for the safe arrival of our little grandson, Ezra Martin. He was born to Isaac and Lydia Thursday morning. They chose his name from Ezra 7:10, and providentially, he weighed 7 pounds 10 ounces! They just moved to Alberta, Canada, and we are overjoyed that everything went well. Mary hopes to head up there on Monday and we plan to visit them together in April. Please pray that little Ezra will soon be born again and become a stalwart soldier of Christ’s living church!