I heard the news Monday night. It didn’t surprise me at first—his age and declining health has been no secret. The next day, the weight and significance settled in: John MacArthur is gone.
I first heard John preach on 800 CHAB while growing up in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. A country (now oldies) station by day, for two hours each evening they play back-to-back Christian programming. Haven of Rest, Back to the Bible, or the inimitable drawl of J. Vernon McGee often filled our car speakers while we waited for our mom to come out of the grocery store. To my young ears, it sounded like the kind of stuff people in a seniors’ home would enjoy. Nothing I was interested in.
At some point, though, a specific voice stood out. I’d sit up straighter and pay attention when he would come on. He was different than the others. Instead of treacly platitudes, he often criticized the Western church, and as someone who had grown up in that church, his criticisms resonated with me. Instead of telling stories, he asked you to look at the next verse, and told you what it meant. Passages of scripture came to life as their meaning and application were opened up with clarity and passion.
Somewhere along the line I put a name to the voice: John MacArthur. When I was 17 or 18, I started listening even more deliberately and intently to his preaching, tuning in to CHAB at 7:30 on purpose. Thanks to the internet, I began to devour his sermons on demand. Though I had attended evangelical churches most of my life, I had never (to my memory) been exposed to expository preaching, and it was like being introduced to the Bible all over again. Rather than being the domain of sleepy Sunday school classes, milquetoasty Sunday morning pep talks, or guilt-ridden but fruitless quiet times, I encountered Scripture as a book through which the living Christ addressed his church with authority and relevance.
Then a friend recommended I read MacArthur’s landmark book “The Gospel According to Jesus,” which recalibrated my whole conception of the gospel. Next, the same friend pointed me to “The Coming Evangelical Crisis,” a volume to which MacArthur had contributed an essay, and which helped me understand the environment I had grown up in as never before. Next up was his two-volume commentary on Romans, which I read slowly and carefully over several months. Convictions were being shaped, and theological foundations were being formed.
Is it any surprise that it was during this season I began to experience a tug towards pastoral ministry myself? I read through MacArthur’s “Rediscovering Expository Preaching” the summer I was 19, and a preaching opportunity that September gave me the chance to apply what I’d been learning. I rode on the high of that sermon for months, and became fully convinced that proclaiming the word of God was what I wanted to do with my life.
At that early stage, anybody who watched me walk into church with my big MacArthur Study Bible might have mistaken me for a textbook MacArthur-ite. What cured me from hero worship was actually two trips to Sun Valley for the Shepherd’s Conference in ’06 & ’07. The teaching at those conferences had a profound impact on my developing philosophy of ministry, but staying in the homes of two families from Grace Community Church helped me recognize that this place was not Heaven. These were real people with real imperfections, as was true of John himself. As I interacted with conference attendees who did revere him in an unhealthy way, I thought a lot about how to learn from someone without worshipping them.
As the years have gone on, there’s no doubt that I’ve parted ways with MacArthur on many points, whether on theological matters (like dispensationalism), his handling of cultural or political issues, or what seemed to me like an increasingly combative approach to just about everything. Ministry apprentices at our church have heard me criticize him more than once over the years. And honestly, that’s probably why I’m writing this piece. I want to set the record straight: when I criticize John MacArthur, I do so in the way that a son might criticize his father. Some things may drive him nuts, but he dearly loves the man who has shaped him in more ways than he is aware—and to whom he owes his life.
If it wasn’t for John MacArthur, I doubt I would be a pastor (if not a Christian), and I certainly wouldn’t be the pastor (or Christian) that I am. I have a hard time thinking of a single conviction I hold that he did not have some role in shaping. At the foundation of all of my philosophy of ministry (and approach to life itself) is the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture, and nobody did more than John MacArthur to help me understand and embrace that central tenet. In the Lord, I owe him a great debt, and my gratitude for him is profound.
The day after John died, I opened up the Grace to You podcast and played “What Heaven Is” for my kids at the breakfast table. It was classic MacArthur, and a great introduction for their first time hearing him preach. I hope it won’t be their last.
So thank you, Lord, for John MacArthur. Thank you for the gift that he was to so many of us. Keep me, and the many others who follow in his footsteps, faithful to you until the end of our own earthly races. To you be the glory forever. Amen.
