2014 Expositors Summit: A Conversation with John MacArthur and H. B. Charles, Jr.

AHP thank you for that message this morning and dr. MacArthur thank you for the whole day yesterday we're all just filled to overflowing with all that you gave us there I want to ask a couple of questions they get to the heart of why you are who you are let's start you dr. MacArthur and just say that you have been at Grace Community Church for forty-five years which means that the average pastor is somewhere around five years you've had nine of them in one place you could have had nine of them in different places your life could have taken you from place to place coast to coast you could have been in different churches in different places why one church for 45 years why does that make your preaching ministry different than it otherwise would have been it makes it different because you accumulate a body of work out of necessity because you're preaching to the same congregation week in and week out for 45 years you can't repeat yourself so you wake up one day and you realize you've just gone through the entire New Testament verse by verse and it's taken you 42 years I'm pretty confident knowing just human nature and and knowing the the compulsion that you you you want to cover certain subject that if I'd have moved around I'd have gone back over the same things again and again and again and again because I would have felt that various congregations needed to hear that when I started there was no such thing as a cassette tape so you could repeat yourself now it's a different world so I think it's I guess it was the Lord's purpose for me and I was mentioning to you that this last Tuesday I wrote the last chapter of the last book in the whole commentary series well this is the first week of my life I haven't had commentary chapters to write so I I don't know I think I you know God had a purpose God had a plan you knew he was taking me I never intended to be one place my whole life I but I never questioned that I did not only did i pastor nine churches in terms of five year blocks i pastored maybe seven or eight churches just by staying in one place and having the congregation change so I woke up this morning with this on my mind so I did a thought experiment I wrote down the name of every major preacher that I thought was just intergenerationally for some period of time respected known as a preacher and beside their name I wrote down every Church I knew they've been associated with and almost in every case it was one man in one church I think those great free do you think of Martyn lloyd-jones Charles Spurgeon just go back and your realization about one man one church one lifetime and that's an enormous statement I think it's something that a lot of younger preachers sometimes don't think about they're not even sure you thought about it on the front end by what you just said no I didn't think about it but you know I I lived past the time when you're supposed to leave you know I just I just kept going maybe there's a certain amount of ignorant about that but yeah I can just say incoming at that same issue another way I'm living really in a kind of a ministerial millenium I mean there's a there's just short of euphoria in the ministry of Grace Church now because as you know when when you get past all the criticism and you get past all the the maturity and you get past all the levels of conflict and and you keep pouring out the word and pouring out the word it creates its own environment it creates its own culture and that culture is so deep and so far-reaching and so wide you know I remember reading biography of pink Arthur pink and he died this broken angry hostile man living in a flat somewhere up in a coastal city in Scotland it's mad at the whole world and and I even you know I know a little about Tozer Xin you know he was bitter and angry and all of that and and I think I mean there that can happen with a lot of people but it doesn't happen with people who stay in one place a long time because you outlive your critics in one sense and you you see the long term work of the word so might you know how do I translate that into encouragement to you be very patient be very patient see if God will let you get through those early battles and survive all of that and your end will be far more wonderful than your beginning so I want to trace that out just a little bit further because when I made that list this morning thinking of this conversation and I realized that it almost every one of these cases where you had I guess what we could call for one of a better way putting it peak preaching you know when the this person came to prominence like a Lloyd Jones or or even a Spurgeon you're talking about one church for a very long period of time and then it struck me you know we really need to talk about one other aspect and that is that preaching is not a man standing at a pulpit with no one in front of him there's a partnership with the congregation and so to what extent would you say that your preaching ministry at Grace Community Church has been shaped by the fact that there has been a congregation trained and ready and eager to hear the kind of preaching you're bringing I'm not sure know exactly what you're driving at but there are only so many things you can preach on in the Bible and if you keep talking to the same people for half a century you got to think of different ways to say it they have to feel like they just heard something new when in fact they heard something very old that you've told them 500 times so that the the challenge is just an ever Challenge is an ever enriching enriching enriching approach to Scripture repetition about familiarity breeds contempt ret repetition of saying the same thing in the same way to the same people Tunes them out so how do you keep these people some of whom are still there from the beginning not not many but but many 20 years 25 years 30 years over there there is a there is a demanding reality of freshness so people say do you do you have to study like you always did yeah not to understand anymore but to say things in a way that is fresh and and that's what the Word of God allows me to do and if I wasn't an expository I would have run out of topics and I would have run out of saying things the same way long long ago and you never would have addressed a lot of things you had to well and that's the other thing yeah I mean you cover absolutely everything I often say that you we have the mind of Christ it's in the scripture and certainly the pastor ought to be the one who can always speak the mind of Christ on every issue I mean that's what we offer to not only the church but the world when asking the question I can just simply say his background when I travel from church to church preaching I can tell the minute I get up to preach what they think preaching is sure and I can tell whether they are listening regularly to preaching and have been trained to do so and whether they're eager and hungry to hear exposition or whether they plan to be entertained or whatever when I preach phrase be Charles I can tell your congregation is pretty hungry for preaching and and your congregation makes a little easier to understand that because they will say that right out loud you know white churches just planned for you to understand with their eyes get a little more feedback at your church what a great great experience to preach at your church there down in Jacksonville how did you train them to listen to preaching that way I arrived though however at a hurting Church that was living in the aftermath of a moral fall but I and for that reason among others I didn't want anything to do with this church when I arrived and someone would ask me what is the joy of pastoring this church it was that by God's gracious favor I arrived at a church where preaching is in season and they wanted to hear me preach they wanted to hear the word and so it's a both an encouragement and a challenge I would say in the church that I grew up in in the church I served in Los Angeles my father was more of an orator of de King Manuel Scott Gardiner Taylor type of preacher and I was learning exposition and I just think what dr. MacArthur said is wise just to be patient they they put up with me for 18 years and helped make a preacher out of me encouraging me week after week to keep at they wanted to hear explanation of the word and I would just say throughout a place where that's not the norm I think Bible exposition is an acquired taste like you said last night people don't have patience for it because they've never heard it but once they get it and get a taste for it they don't want anything else so I had a question for a long time having so much love for the tradition of preaching in the african-american church I did have a question that question was answered for me fairly recently the question was I know how an african-american congregation lets you know they agree with you but how did it let you know they disagree with you and I found that out because I was in a conference not too long ago where a preacher was preaching and he was missing the point he was maligning the text hey I didn't know that he knew he was he was he was really miss preaching and this elderly african-american preacher stood up in the back of the room and said you gotta send a mess brother clean it up I want that man sitting in every congregation I want that alarm system built-in in my my first congregation in Los Angeles I had a old Saint Deaconess who would sit on the second row and if I was preaching if I was getting at it she would say help us lord help us Lord and if I was missing and she say help him Lord help you see I have a friend who has twin boys are now about ten and one of them's quiet one of them isn't and I said how's that work he said well this one's just saying what that one's thinking all right I can just tell you that I think the african-american church is just saying what I think the white church is we can learn from each other in this respect communicate a little better you left a church you became pastor of at age 17 now I have to tell you I enjoy talking about that because people talk about how young I was when I became president of the seminary at age 33 okay and you became pastor of a church at age 17 and you were there for a number of years and then you and that have been your father's church and you left that talk about how the Lord brought about that calling in your life yeah I often say I was the last person to know the Lord was sending me to Jacksonville I went to Jacksonville I've been pastoring the church I served for almost 18 years not so much just me nurturing them over those years they had nurtured me from 17 to 35 and I had no intention of going anywhere I just went to fill the pulpit in Jacksonville the leaders made it clear that that's all that was happening and I was on the same page and afterward the church had been in prayer and they said we're not gonna pray anymore he told us to pray until the Lord identified our next pastored I thought next pastor go get that guy from LA and this whole thing kind of moved it was almost a game with chicken the leaders were I kept I'm not coming to Jacksonville we're going to move forward this church is gonna call you and you're gonna have to figure out what to do the other side of that and that was just I just was that my family was in the church I grew up in my faith roots were all there I don't know if I would have been able to the church called I was flying there to tell them no and my wife's prayers really encouragement my wife told me that I'm with you whatever you decide and I really think that was a breakthrough for me to pray honestly to get the sense of clarity so in line with this consideration of being in a place and the importance of that place to preaching how is your preaching changed from Los Angeles to Jacksonville well I forced myself to work on expositions I had not been doing I had not done in LA a part of my sermon preparation there's a part of my personal sanctification studying or Ditchley so I just could not go to Jackson and my wife couldn't understand you got 18 years of preaching just pull a file go to the end and let me tell you something when I'm in a jam I pull the file but for my own Souls like I needed to press forward and I would also just say that what I would say as a young preacher I mean at 25 I think I tried I was in Ephesians seven years ago when I left Los Angeles and the way I would have preached the text I preached today that what I did before is just maybe seven years my faith my maturity my understanding of Scripture I don't sound like that guy then I hope I've grown and I think that reflects I hope is reflected in my preaching dr. MacArthur when you went to Grace Community Church in 1969 and you would recently graduated from Talbot Theological Seminary you were theologically defined you knew who you were and you started to preach but someone has followed your preaching through all those years would say well here's where John MacArthur at least makes a very different emphasis then he would have made in 1969 how do you trace that own development in your thought and in your preaching over time I think the refinement my theology has been the same and it was a historic theology that was basically deposited in my mind by a faithful father and and influential seminary professors system at a systematic theology of biblical theology all of those things the tools to handle the Word of God were all given to me my my theology had stood the test of time it was a historic theology it wasn't a Burin it wasn't quirky so I was standing on some pretty pretty heavy shoulders I was mentioning one of the students that I cut my teeth in seminary on BB Warfield the inspiration authority of Scripture which you're giving away that book was seminal in in my life so that was my tradition of my trajectory even then but what has changed in my preaching is that I've needed to run that theology through every passage in the New Testament and in the process of that I decided that I would look at the Old Testament the way the Apostle Paul doesn't 1st Corinthians 10 where he says these things have happened as examples unto you upon whom the end of the ages have come so that the Old Testament became my illustration book it became it became the shadow book for all the realities of the New Covenant I was a minister of the New Covenant so I would just say whatever widening whatever elevation whatever depth has come to my theology has has been formed by a by the precision of going through every text in the New Testament my theology hasn't changed but it is so much richer I went back to I'm starting I'm preaching through the Gospel of John for the first time in 40 some years I did it first when I came to Grace in 1970 and I'm preaching through it again I went back to some my old notes I interpreted everything the same way at a very shallow level so that that has been the difference that's it's more been the range in the depth and the richness of how I understand these things and so they're far more complete understanding than they were then HP just in terms of your own theological development what would you what would you share out of that yeah I my father was sound and conservative and his theology so I I didn't get exposed to a lot of exotic theology so that was a blessing to me I would say God just brought immediately I was a 17 year old God just works bringing godly men into my life who were just investing in me and teaching me pointing me to books and in the process of that I got pointed to dr. MacArthur's ministry and for many years I was preaching on Sunday mornings twice and then driving out to the valley to sit under dr. MacArthur and then reading and learning from what I was being exposed to so I would say over the over the years I hope there's a growing understanding of scripture maturity a greater depth but God I praise God he kept me from exotic error confusing stuff in just his Providence a very fragile time he kept me from from those things and I'm grateful for it yeah I think in my own thought of my own life that the biggest change that has come has been a greater reliance upon biblical theology trained in my doctoral work in historical and systematic theology I my first theological instinct as a theologian was to organize systematize root in the theological and historical argument but to have the scripture come alive in such a way that a biblical theology is formed out of a relentless pursuit of the text and to be doing that now for so many decades you really do realize a biblical theology is being formed here in which the instincts are now clearly where does this go in the text where does this fall on the narrative where what is this pointing to what pointed to this how is this fulfilled that that's the real excitement that that brings me to every text now so you you modeled that last night perfectly they you you were dead on target on soteriology on the heart and soul of soteriology the substitutionary atonement and the you you you obviously could have developed that systematically you you didn't you and that would be legitimate because there is a system to it and it can be categorized but the explosion of that truth coming out of the text of Scripture carries the full power of the Spirit of God who inspired that text and I mean that was a model of how to preach take one text and then expand it and and move it so it was it it was exegetical theology I would call it and then it was biblical theology because you started in Genesis 22 and he ended up in the New Testament and and that's that's what I think that's the best of expository preaching well that is a very affirming word and I just want to say that that's the kind of text that simply has my heart which I nearly lost at the end of the message simply because just to say those words in context but where's the lamb and then to realize we're here in the name of the Lamb that's just unspeakable there there's certain majestic text like that that just frame our understanding of the entire faith do you get caught up emotionally yes I was afraid that was becoming a little too evident last night and because I I was losing control of my voice at the end of the message which is not something I anticipated but it didn't surprise me either but I think there are those one not that none of these texts are more important but that they are more clarifying perhaps in terms of biblical theology that their ones we go back to again and again what are some of those texts refer you to men you know what what are some of those texts you think of you know if I had one or two sermons to preach and I needed to say everything I felt I needed to say in ministry if I if I just had that stewardship I mean John you've been in Russia you've been in all over the world where you've got okay now you've got you've got to give them everything you can give them where do you go I'm always looking to establish the authority of Scripture and the supremacy of Christ that has ebbed and flowed through the years Psalm 19 has been a very important text to me because it's God's own summarizing definition of how he views his word particularly verses 7 to the end of the chapter that that is a definitive text looking back at our church some 19 which I strung out for a period of time at our church had a pronounced impact on us in the early years and in later years five part series on the the forgiving Father which traditionally is called the prodigal was a stunning five weeks in our church I was reminded that it ended the last two were on a Christmas Sunday and then a new year Sunday people wept because of that I think in in recent years Isaiah 53 I did 10 messages on isaiah 52:13 253 12 it took me 10 messages to move that and i moved through that and our congregation is so fully informed on the realities of the new testament picture of christ I told them I said it's like Where's Waldo if you don't know what Waldo looks like you can't find him so you're not going to find Christ in the Old Testament by looking first there you're gonna have to know him so well from the knew that you can find him in the in the old and so it was after all these years of going through the Gospels years and years in Matthew Mark Luke and John and they knew Christ and then I did this little series on finding Christ in the Old Testament and it was just explosive in the church and it culminated in Isaiah 53 and I would think if our people go back and look at touchstones it would be luke 15 Isaiah 53 would kind of be at the top of the list everyone said well you hear things you think these two things don't naturally go together like John MacArthur and Where's Waldo but the point I have grandchildren yes right hit me made the point emphatically HB what are some of those passages you think you and your people just kind of rested as definitive for who you are and what you believe yeah I so it took me months to move to Jacksonville and I was preaching on the weekends in Los Angeles they asked me to fly during those months to Jacksonville to preach on Wednesday nights and before I moved to Jacksonville I started a series I just wanted to lay down the government I preached through psalm 119 stanza by stanza because I wanted to have to be the first statement about what my ministry there would be about and first series I did when I arrived on Sundays was Luke 15 not knowing the environment the setting and the God gave me a way to present the gospel and to present the gospel and the parables and stories that people assume they know and try to make them live again and those were that that was a that was a big starting moments for us there I think this can come in times and seasons too because I find myself rather continually drawn to give attention to Romans chapter one because of the urgencies of this hour we always didn't realize I need to explain what the Bible says right now about what's going on and situated in biblical theology and Romans one's one of those texts and I think there's so many others I think right now I think an awful lot of evangelical preachers need to go back to Genesis 1:1 because I think what we've lost in terms of the doctrine of creation is bringing a horrifying harvest a bad doctrine bad theology lack of biblical confidence and and and just messing up the whole flow of Scripture you know from that point onward so I think at times they're different texts that I think a wrong view of Genesis 1 and 2 is a virus that that infects the rest of the text if you learn bad habits they're those bad habits will continue in every subsequent chapter of Scripture so let me turn the tables and then ask another question what's the hardest text that you can think of that comes to your mind and say I think that was a genuinely difficult text to breach I I'd like to have a swing of that one again do any text like that come to mind for me I don't know that I want to do it again so I could buy into your question halfway through what two books stand out as being in well three as being intensely difficult for me I went through verse by verse the book of Zachariah I didn't know what I was getting into but as a sequential expositor I was in I went to the Book of Daniel really daunting daunting experiences another text was a table of Nations and Genesis that was extremely challenging to me to chase down all those identifiable tribes and groups and make sense out of all that and why it's there I would say those were very difficult this might surprise you I found it early in my ministry difficult to go through first John because I kept having to explain that it's not quite this black and white you know what I'm saying everything is he doesn't he does he doesn't he does you won't you will and I mean I'm a little like I'm Johanna it's my name and I kind of lean to being a little bit black and white so I was always bouncing over to Paul for the exception I found that very challenging and I had a very serious low point going through the going through first John when I was much younger because I felt like I I wasn't being faithful to the text and it was it was probably the the lowest point in my ministry just the agony in my own heart of feeling like I had to fix this all the time I needed to mature in my understanding that's really interesting you know I think the table the nation's in the flow of biblical theology is one of the most important texts I appreciate you mentioning that because you get from the table of the nation's eventually to the marriage supper of the Lamb and what gets you from one to the other is the gospel this incredible flow of biblical history but I understand the the by the time you end up with all those names and all those tribes and and kindred and families and clans that's that's a task HB yeah just the first book I preached through in Jacksonville on Sundays was Philippians and I've been meditating on it a lot thinking about it again only because the mood of the church in six years was so different I was hurt divided troubled and I just there I think about how the church would hear Philippians now the great challenge for me last summer I was going to do a brief series on the first six chapters of Daniel you know in between series and had a friend so uh knowledge be all the way fun it's not until you get past chapter six and I listened and almost quit the ministry struggling through through Daniel I just was like one of those one of those latter prophetic chapters to be honest with you I read it and I called this sermon Godwin's and I just reconstructed it it's best not good and I said what do we do with this is at the end Godwin you know what you did you cleaned it up and I will tell you and I've never said this in public before the hardest book in the Bible for me to preach is the Psalms verse by verse song by song and I'm gonna be very explicit and say I think why it's because it wears down my heart in all the wailing of sorrow and the the burden of being persecuted in the the hostility of the enemies and it really leads me to wonder and this is why I'm thinking about it very much right now given the shift in our culture given the shift in our time given the fact that we're going to be experiencing and even are now experiencing some hints of this kind of hostility yeah I'm wondering if the preaching Psalms going to get easier now but you know I realized that I started preaching the Psalms when I was so young and so healthy and when it didn't appear that we were living in a season of that kind of of hostility I couldn't identify directly and personally with a lot of what was being said here and it seemed like David was going up to the heights and then so quickly you'd find yourself down in the valley and I did I didn't feel that fall I wonder honestly if preaching the Psalms is gonna get easier for us because we're gonna identify with a lot more of it in fairly short order you know along that line 2nd Corinthians when I went through 2nd Corinthians and you know I hadn't made a conscious decision to postpone it until deep into my ministry I was so glad that I had been battered and beaten up by my own congregation leaders in the church there had been a mutiny of 250 people who marched out of Grace Church I had a meeting with my elders 35 elders sitting in a room divided over whether I should even be the pastor whether to dismiss me whether I was too involved not involved enough I had been through personal assaults and attacks from inside the church I just was so thankful by that that I had postpones second Corinthians or the Lord never let me get to it until I could get some sense of what Paul was going through and I think there is that reality in your ministry you know when people say well you're going through the New Testament how do you choose your way through and you would know this 2hb you're listening to your congregation you're looking and seeing what they need you're not really dealing with your own heart and what you're necessarily interested in I mean to a point you do but and so the Lord kind of moves you through you in retrospect you don't have any feeling about that you don't know when the Lord's leading that way but in looking back in retrospect that was one really divine reality that I can see in my ministry that I would never have grasped that book until deeper into my ministry but having preached through the entire New Testament book by book you've made some decisions on the other side of that frankly I've never known anyone I got the opportunity to make decisions on the other side of that other than yourself and you decided to go back to certain portions of the scripture does that imply that you believe there are certain books that commend themselves to be preached to a congregation in such a way that whatever you do you need to make sure you preach these books well I mean the first reality is I'm done I'm supposed to be dead but I'm not so I'm preaching from the hearse it just hasn't arrived yes the answer to the crash I did do Gospel of John in 1970 I didn't give a fair treatment at the Gospel of John if I'm gonna leave a legacy and everybody does I need to do it with with a depth that's reflective of where I am now and particularly the Gospel of John particularly that and that that that was not only my decision that the leaders of the church would just said would you please do the Gospel of John they're probably reflecting the fact that they had listened to those early messages because that was all that was there but the other thing was people in the church came to me and said we would love it if he would take us through the book of Acts I had done that I don't know if 30-some years ago and so at that at the request of the congregation Sunday nights were going through the book of Acts and Sunday morning going through the Gospel of John and I stopped at points and inject and I also on Sunday night some I've got so many gifted young preachers giving them an opportunity to to fill those slots so cuz I'm not in ER I don't I'm not gonna live long enough at the rate I go to get through the book of Acts anyway but there I think the people are more interested in the early chapters than they are all of the history of the Apostle Paul how the church is structured how its set up why it is the way it is HP yeah I would just affirm the Gospels acts Romans I think I was influenced early by dr. MacArthur's work on Ephesians I was trying to get through it when I left I thought it was important I haven't gotten to it now but I think we're living in the time where the the nature of the church is important and the building up of the body of Jesus Christ and what it means to walk as the church for Jesus Christ is important for us to hear these things I think is very helpful I would simply offer this in terms of I think there there are at least two great responsibilities the preacher has for a congregation one is to make sure they're grounded in the story of Jesus and that's where the Gospels are so important be grounded in who Jesus is why he came what he did why were saved then I welcome back to biblical theology for a moment and say that the preacher who walks his congregation verse by verse through two books I'll just offer this is because biblical theology is everywhere but if you did in the New Testament if you go verse by verse to these two books your congregation is going to know more biblical theology than the graduates of most seminaries in this country and that is if you'll take them verse by verse to Roman's and verse by verse to Hebrews they'll know biblical theology they'll know how to read the Old Testament and and and the Gospels that they know will now come alive in a whole new way because they're gonna see him in a bigger picture Hebrews is the first commentary I wrote it was very early in our ministry for that very reason and over the years I preached through Romans three times yeah and I'm trying to resist the temptation to go again so formative I think the times may pull you back into Romans because we are living there living thirty times a year do you preach on Romans one a lot me too I just did the a CBC that's a CBC not a CDC conference making that distinction once again he knows to make that distinction that was the national biblical counseling and they asked if I would speak on understanding the world and you just find yourself sucked into Romans chapter one all the time so definitive yeah well and I think those kinds of passages should be unapologetically where we go because we're not just going there we're training our congregations to go there I want people in the pew to realize when they're looking at the news where they need to go Romans 1 that's where I situate this that's where I know this I'm watching the suppression of truth in unrighteousness right now I'm watching the exchange of the truth of God for a lie right now that's what's happening that's why Paul's not ashamed of the gospel because it's the only rescue from that you're watching you're watching the evidence of the wrath of God that's fallen sexual revolution followed by a homosexual revolution followed by a reprobate mind so HB Lord willin you've got decades ahead of you in ministry dr. John MacArthur is going to speak I want to invite you right now to speak at my retirement because I as I said when I like he being dead yet speaking no I mean I mean woe unto the man who tries to stop you you know back when the Shepherd's conference last year when I introduced my message you know you had just preached from we had a power outage and you preached from a an iPhone light over your message you can't be stopped you know I you took a photo of me you went to some drugstore and you had made into and framed it I didn't delivered it it hangs in in my study as a constant reminder that I need to keep going even if the power goes out yeah to me it was just the quintessence Ramona sitting on the front row and he's preaching the lights go out you know most preachers would say okay we're done next thing I know he's holding an iPhone over the biblical text and preaching to thousands of people without any amplification and I just thought you know the energy the Energizer Bunny just retired how's it work but for whatever time any of us have left what we want to do in preaching for me I've sort of redefined myself to pour my energies on the last lap and into the master seminary so that I can invest in the next generation I want to I don't want to make sure that I'm I want to make sure that when I'm gone it's like taking your hand out of a bucket of water there's no hole so I just want to amp up all the investment I can make in young preachers not just by a sort of influence from my preaching but by hands on investment in their lives and I can do that because I have hundreds of them right there and I I want to see them cover the globe you know not only in America but around the world and and reproduce this so I just want to do everything I can on a personal level to interact with them and invest in them there's never an exhausting of material in the Word of God at all I will keep going through these books I'm going through at the church as long as I need to and if I have to go back to Ephesians I'll do that but on a wider scale I'll be drawing from all the years of resources like I'm doing now I have a couple of projects I've just finished a book on parables it's done and part of its being reflected in this I want to finish one more book in a trilogy the Gospel according to Jesus the Gospel according to the Apostles and all the material is collected on the Gospel according to Paul so that would be a three book treatment of the Gospel that that's that's a project it's underway and finished the commentary series so really I don't have any clear objective beyond those things there's an entire Old Testament out there huh yeah I'm in this small window where I'm old enough to know what I need - and I don't have Alzheimer's yet and I just trying to make the most out of that 1 hp what's your passion is just running the race sure I'm 41 years old and turning 14 was traumatic for me I just like go cry somewhere breaking my heart and one of the things just out on a lot of meditation I just I I am passionate about preaching the Word of God and dr. MacArthur has been a model for me and I'm pregnant with years he gives me that I'm able to work through the books of the New Testament but during this time I also just feel like I'm a pastor and even the sermon I preached this morning is in the context of the congregational life of our church it was just in the Providence of God that I was preaching this section of Ephesians 2 through middle of divisions two through history in the pastoral life of where we were as a church and I'm just praying that God will not only let me faithfully preached but God will use that preaching them to nurture a church that'll be healthy and growing to his glory you know along that line you preached what you're preaching to your people I'm preaching this week what I've just preached to our people and that's kind of been a pattern yeah yeah that's a true accountability that what happens at home is what you do on the road what happens on the roads what you do at home well I'll just conclude this by a personal note and say that I've never been more of a premillennialists than now and I sense in my preaching more of a sense of judgment coming as the background everything I do as I'm preparing a message I I think more than I did at an earlier stage in my life of the fact that this is in the backdrop to a massive day of visitation that's coming and that we know not the time nor the hour but the seasons tell us that the urgency is now to preach with the wrath of God and judgement coming as the background and I will tell you that changes the way you think of the text that changes the way you think of the stewardship of the opportunity to preach so I'm far more eschatological in my preaching then I was just 10 or 15 years ago and I sense that that's going to be a coming and not a going thing simply because I think the text does it I think biblical theology doesn't and I think the times are underlining that reality in a way that those who are biblically minded are going to be very judgment minded and very eschatologically minded or we're gonna miss the point well brothers thank you HP and dr. Agard Louise thank you so much for joining us thanks for sharing your hearts

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Rating: 4.8558559 out of 5

Keywords: Albert Mohler, Al Mohler, John MacArthur, H. B. Charles Jr., H. B. Charles, SBTS, Southern Seminary, Expositors Summit

Id: 03AnoJucHvE

Length: 48min 24sec (2904 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 22 2015