Welcome to the Gospel Coalition podcast, equipping the next generation of believers,

pastors, and church leaders to shape life and ministry around the gospel.

As we celebrate the Gospel Coalition's 20th anniversary and 10th National Conference in 2025,

we'll be revisiting some of our best conferences right here on TGC podcast.

The following is a keynote address from our 2009 national conference,

featuring TGC's co-founder, Tim Keller.

We're here to talk about gospel ministry, and most of the talks, and most of the messages,

the expositions are going to be a consecutive covering of the Book of Second Timothy

on how to steward and communicate the gospel.

But what I'm going to do here at the front and Don Carson

at the end, we're going to do two bookend expositions to reflect on the nature of gospel ministry

in my case because I want to talk about something that is assumed in 2 Timothy, very, very

important to gospel ministry, but it's not explicit there, but it's

explicit in the book of Acts.

I'm going to read to you from Acts chapter 19.

I'm just going to read verses 23 to 41.

It's a very entertaining and extremely interesting and vivid incident in the ministry of Paul,

and one of the very few places in the book of Acts where you have an incident depicted without actually a sermon from an apostle.

There's no actual example of apostolic preaching, except

for a little synopsis, which you'll hear in the middle. Acts 19, starting verse 23.

About that time, there arose a great disturbance about the way. A silver smith named Demetrius,

who made silver shrines of Artemis brought in no

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