Pastor, author, and seminary professor Dr. Sinclair Ferguson opened our Pastor’s Conference with the message "Consider Jesus." His title, his main theme, and his aim were all summed up in that brief phrase from Hebrews 3:1. After reading Hebrews 2:5–3:1, he opened his message this way:

Many of you have come some distance, and you're simultaneously tired from the journey and excited to see one another. At the beginning of a conference like this, there is always a sense that there is little profit in visiting Jerusalem unless we see the King's face. And there is certainly, it seems to me, nothing more vital for not only our lives, but our ministries, than that we are men and women who have learned, in the words of Hebrews 3:1, to be able to "consider Jesus"—to fix our gaze on Jesus. Or as the author says in more famous words in Hebrews 12:1­–2, as we run the race to be able to do so "looking to Jesus," whom he describes in the same way he does in these verses: as the pioneer, the ἀρχηγός, the file leader, of our salvation (Hebrews 2:10, 12:2).

And I don't take it for granted that because so many of us here are ministers of the gospel, or in preparation for gospel ministry, that we are masters of fixing our gaze upon Jesus. We read through the New Testament, the Gospels, and the Epistles, and as we think about the history of Christian biography and our own personal lives, I think we come to recognize that that from which the evil one most desires to divert us is our Lord Jesus Christ. And in our ministries as preachers and teachers of the gospel and as pastors, we live in a world in which we are encouraged to be experts in all manner of things, but not necessarily experts in having communion with the Lord Jesus and especially in being able to preach the Lord Jesus and pastor our people to him.

For the next 70 minutes Dr. Ferguson modeled how this can be done, walking through Hebrews 2:5–18 to show five reasons "that encourage me, yes, almost force me, and enable me, in all my frailty, sinfulness, privation, and need, to see Jesus as all-sufficient."

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