John MacArthur's Lavish Lifestyle? An Interview With Phil Johnson

hello ladies and gentlemen my name is justin peters i hope that you and your family are doing well today i want to thank you very much for watching this video and i do apologize for the rather drab surroundings here but i'm recording this in a hotel room in columbia south carolina i'm preaching at covenant baptist church just outside of columbia pastored by charles swann if you happen to be living in this neck of the woods and are looking for a good doctrinally sound church to call your church home i would highly commend it to you very very good search very document sound and pastor charles is just a wonderful great great guy so on to the subject matter at hand in the last several weeks there has been a lot of discussion online about john mcarthur's wealth and this is largely resultant from a from an article that julie royce wrote and in this article she portrays john mcarthur's lifestyle as one of opulence and she said it's really no different between there's no difference between john mcarthur's lifestyle and the lifestyle of the prosperity preachers whom he criticizes and other well-known and vocal critics of john mcarthur have taken this and run with it and they're plastering it all over social media and calling john mcarthur a hypocrite and all of that kind of stuff and um and so i saw all this and i thought you know i'm just gonna i'm gonna contact phil johnson and see if he would like to discuss some of these things and so i did and he was he was actually very eager to do so uh he said yeah absolutely and so i'm going to ask him about all this stuff in the article i'm going to ask him if if these things are true or if they are distortions and i tell you i learned a lot just in doing this interview with phil i did not have any question about john mcarthur's character or integrity but i think when when by the end of this interview i i really want proverbs 18 17 to ring loudly in your mind in your heart and your mind the first to plead his case seems right until another comes along and examines him so phil's going to shed a lot of light on these issues and we're not only going to talk about you know john mcarthur's supposed lavish lifestyle and nepotism and board members you know his board is stacked with family members and all that kind of stuff i'm also going to ask him about the mark of the beast now that's another thing that i get frequently uh asked about and um and also the issue over whether or not he was really in memphis tennessee when martin luther king was assassinated and that controversy that sprung up a couple of years ago now so so we're going to cover a lot of territory here and i think you will find this interview very helpful so i know that i did all right dear ones without any further delay here is phil johnson phil uh brother thank you so very much for joining me for this interview and i really appreciate you taking your time and i'm doing this just to to give you an opportunity to answer some of these questions that have been floating out there that uh largely come from a recent article by julie roy's in which she alleges that macarthur john mcarthur is is paid this exorbitant salary because from his part-time work at gty and then that's in addition to what he earns from the church or the master seminary of course he's not in the he's no longer the president of that but uh and the gist of our article is that even though john mcarthur undeniably teaches against the prosperity message uh that his lifestyle is pretty much one and the same with the prosperity preachers so um you know this article has been picked up by a number of john's critics and things like that so take it away phil what would you have to say so to some of what she alleges yeah first of all i have deliberately not answered these questions online because i don't want to drag out a uh a bunch of questions that actually better would have been directed specifically to our ministry by individuals who who really have a legitimate uh reason for asking when when these questions came in from someone you know pretending to be a investigative reporter who already had a long track record of trying to torpedo john mcarthur's reputation uh i refuse to answer him and i'm not gonna give her publicity uh by responding to you know people who who are championing her cause or going along with that or whatever but i'm happy to answer the questions and for you i'll even answer them on a podcast so i appreciate it but as to the as to the question you raised about john mcarthur's lifestyle i think it's significant and notable that no one who actually knows him no one who's ever been to his house or or uh spent time with him on any significant level no one has ever accused him of living a lavish millionaire's lifestyle i think that was one of the criticisms that came from a video that that you uh had encouraged me to watch just because it is so bizarre and over the top this guy was exaggerating everything he'd read in uh some of the online articles and and that was the terminology he used john macarthur lives a lavish uh millionaires lifestyle and just for fun if you don't mind phil tell tell me what you tell us what you just told me about uh what he said about austin duncan oh he's trying to prove that uh that nepotism is a rife problem at grace church that all you know lots of people hire their kids on the staff at grace church here's where it starts getting interesting pay attention a family affair the nepotism you need to understand in the mega church world is it's almost unheard of that there isn't nepotism let's put it that way the pastor's children are employed by the church and they're usually in a prominent position they're usually waiting to take over the reigns it happens at grace community church not only with john mcarthur's sons but with friends of his amazing every word of what you just said was wrong the truth is not one of john mcarthur's kids is on staff at grace church not one the truth is not one of john mcarthur's kids is on staff at grace church not one uh and um uh the example he gave was that uh another example he gave says john even hires his friends kids austin duncan is the son of ligand duncan uh i believe austin duncan is an elder there and his father is league and duncan a longtime friend of john mcarthur it's a family affair and it's a if you're friends you're going to be promoted and into some high position well that's that's the most bizarre accusation i've ever heard as far as i know uh austin duncan is not at all related to ligand duncan i know ligand duncan well enough to know that if anybody accused him of that he would he would disown austin yeah i'm kidding about that of course but they're not related yeah well yeah it goes to some of the shoddy reporting and just carelessness with with these facts so yeah yeah there's a it seems to be a motive to uh exaggerate and make it sound as bad as possible this guy listed a bunch of my misdeeds and and uh each time he he mentioned it he would say uh and there may be even more i don't know you know or maybe he's done something illegal in fact he he seemed to have this was a sustained theme in his video that he uh he seemed to believe that i'm guilty of some felony and that uh the the feds are on my tail it's only a matter of time till i get arrested for some crime or corruption that i'm guilty of uh it's that sort of rhetoric that i don't need to answer and i actually literally have a policy of generally not paying attention to it sometimes uh you know my flesh gets the better of me and i'll fire off a tweet in response and it always reminds me not to do that because then all the all these angry critics crawl out like little cockroaches and and see what they can do the other night they were they there was this sustained campaign of about i don't know eight or nine people who were wanting to say that grace church is trying to cover something up because no announcement about the postponement of our shepherds conference was made on the on last year's shepherds conference twitter feed it's a twitter feed that i think has had three posts made to it since last year's conference was over nobody's keeping it up uh but because the announcement of the cancellation which went viral on friday uh but it wasn't it wasn't noted on that one twitter account and when i pointed out that's a dead twitter account hasn't been posted on you know since last october i think uh all these people angrily said no you're trying to cover something up and they were just certain that something untoward is going on and it's that sort of uh uh cynical purposeful skepticism that i just refuse to uh keep answering acknowledging and whatever i'm happy to point it out for you but but i'm not gonna i'm not gonna play ping pong back and forth with people who have that kind of motive so right yeah one of the points in the article phil was that um and i've heard you address this but so all of our listeners can see in viewers uh this first edition king james bible that was given to macarthur and this you know valued at i don't even know how much couple hundred thousand dollars or something like that and that's evidence of john mcarthur's greed and uh lavish lifestyle what would you what would you say to that point well he's not very he's not a very good uh uh miser if greed is his motivation because he turned around and gave it away he put it in the seminary's rare book collection uh and um somebody somebody saw that and said yeah but he took a tax deduction for that yeah well he deducted the amount that he was charged for the gift in the first place because that's right when you give someone a gift like that they have to report it on their taxes so it was a wash nobody made any money on it but it adds a a rare an important bible to the seminary's collection so yeah the people who actually donated the money for it had no complaint about it that's that's what they wanted to do so so we did it and you know that shows up on a on the 990 for that year and uh muckrakers pull that out and try to make it sound like something really awful is going on but uh i'd like to point out that you know every five years or so we we have some kind of celebration for the for the milestone that john mcarthur has reached he's been at grace church for 52 years and that is extremely rare these days and i don't know of another pastor in the past 200 years that has uh been at the same pulpit for that long and preached through every single verse in the new testament produced a commentary on every single verse in the new testament and we don't send him on luxury vacations or or uh you know buy him luxury items or anything like that we give him a a rare bible and he gives it away and people treat that as if that's proof that he is a agreed monger i i just think the the fact that someone wants to make that into an evil deed just shows that their motives can't possibly be pure what what possible good could come out of uh trying to trying to basically ruin the reputation and disqualify someone who's been faithfully in the same ministry for 52 years has never had a taint of scandal attached to his name and now you have to drum up an artificial scandal why so that some woman can feel like she's you know bumped off her next victim i yeah it's it's irritating yeah no doubt and uh i'm often accused of being uh i think uh to use this gentleman's name which i won't name him because i don't want to drive any traffic to him but uh the same one that said that austin duncan is licking duncan's son you know he often calls me a sycophant for for john macarthur and there's a big difference between being a sycophant and being appreciative of a man's ministry who and phil i've i've told you this before but i've by god's grace i've preached all around the world and i have yet to go anywhere where i do not see the impact of the good fruit that is being born from macarthur's ministry and grace to you grace community church in general yeah i think most people know that justin it's another reason i don't feel compelled to answer every single nasty tweet that people at me with uh right uh i think you know scripture is pretty clear that you know a teacher by his fruits and uh i i don't see how anyone can gain say the actual fruit of john mcarthur's ministry um so or why they would want to even but right yeah there you have it and uh i would encourage anybody to look at the fruit that's born from john mcarthur's ministry and compare that to the fruit or lack thereof to a lot of his critics and there's no comparison not at all but um speaking of scandal uh some of these folks that are attacking macarthur have tried to draw comparisons between uh the board at grace to you and the board of ravi zacharias international ministries and so speak to that for us what would you like yeah i mean that's a really unsavory thing to do while ravi's ministry is in in the news for apparently a lot of secret sexual sins that have come out i i've commented on ravi before mainly to say i don't follow his ministry i didn't i didn't particularly appreciate his approach to apologetics i always thought he was too heavy on philosophy and and not into the word enough in the way he did apologetics so uh we never had any kind of partnership with him as far as i know john mccarthy never endorsed any of his books or anything about him there was no hostility there but we just didn't intersect because we our philosophies of ministry really pointed in different directions but as these charges against him come out and and and it seems like they are more than charges that there's ample evidence there at least to say he's not above reproach and in an area that uh uh it involves you know the sexual abuse of women and all of that to to try to draw some tenuous connection between that and john mcarthur because of the fact that one of john's sons is on our board again that's that's somebody reaching for a scandal that frankly isn't there uh and it's the sort of thing that really people ought to be ashamed to even pay any heed to the facts of our board are there is one family member on the great seaboard uh john's eldest son and and john himself uh and we want to keep it that way for the simple fact that john at age 80 is probably not going to be here in 30 years and so we want the future of grace to you which is uniquely the ministry of john mcarthur it's we exist in our purpose statement it even says this exists to expand the scope of john macarthur's teaching ministry through various means of mass media and john's teaching because of how it is he doesn't exegete pop culture or or make references to current news events things like that he just opens the word and teaches and because of that his ministry is timeless in the sense that you can listen to a john mcarthur tape from 1973 and it's just as relevant today as it was then which means in all likelihood it's going to be just as powerful and just as relevant in another 40 years so yeah uh we expect to continue to broadcast and distribute john mcarthur's teaching long after i'm gone from the scene and we want to make sure that someone in john's family who has the family's best interests at heart uh still has a hand in the ministry i the worst thing that could happen would be what has happened to other uh legacy ministries ministries that were on the radio for 40 50 years but when their key figure passed on and they replaced them with somebody else the new people changed the whole character and thrust of the ministry and we don't want that to happen with grace to you so we have we have made it a point to keep at least one member of john's family on the board at all times at one point two of his sons were on the board mark and matt right now it's matt and um we intend to keep it that way we are our board is consists of mostly disinterested parties meaning not that they're uninterested but they have no personal interest in any of the finances or whatever at grace to you i'm not a disinterested person because i'm an employee matt's not a disinterested person because he's related to john but the rest of our board members are business men and church leaders from elsewhere who have no vested interest in grace to you and and they make the financial decisions that govern things like my salary i have a son who works here and they even set his salary i don't have a voice in that the same thing is true with anyone who's related to john so we follow all of those guidelines that are set up by the ecfa and we follow them faithfully all the way down um so uh we're as accountable as we can reasonably be i'm not going to send out a list of all of our employees salaries uh so but other than that our financial reports are available to any donor who asks for them i'm not going to put them on twitter and i'm not going to give them to an investigative reporter but if a person is a has a legitimate interest in seeing the financial reports of grace to you they can write to us and we'll send it to you but i should say also i i think common sense ought to tell people that that is the appropriate way to ask these sorts of questions if you have even a even a nagging concern maybe it's really even none of your business but okay you you wonder or you're thinking of donating to a ministry and you want to find out the character of the ministry the proper way to ask that question is to write to them for their information right and see what they send you and if it's if it's trustworthy and reliable questions answered uh stirring up a controversy with innuendo and and suppositions on twitter or in a so-called investigative news article that's making speculations about people's salaries and things like that that's totally inappropriate and and you know the reason i refuse to respond to it is i don't think it deserves the sort of respect that would get a response right indeed i was really glad you said that about uh john's oldest son on the board and his his role there i think that's very very helpful and and makes perfect sense and so just in listening to you this is really a proverbs 18 17 kind of a thing yeah let me say one other thing about that too because if you look at the list of our officers he's the treasurer and has been for a while there's a simple reason for that and it has to do with geography he's the one who's close by who can sign checks and do things like that when it needs to be done and so he serves as a treasurer which would be uh a logistical nightmare if one of our board members from say atlanta was our treasurer getting things signed in a timely way would be a pretty difficult thing so but nothing is done secretly uh nothing nothing people in the office do is uh hidden from the board and nothing the board does that needs to be made public is secret even from our donors so yeah and the same kind of dynamic is at work with corey welch because i know that was another point in the article john's son-in-law that's right i should address that too because that comes up a lot he uh he has a video production company located not far from here i've never actually been to his office so uh i don't know exactly how far away he is but he's in the neighborhood here and of course he's john's son-in-law and so he was one of the people who bid we took bids on and we we review these on a semi-regular basis not every year but frequently we'll review the costs and take bids for the video work that we do uh television is a sort of recent addition to our ministry we decided to go on television because nrbtv uh started a channel on directv and offered us time at no cost and it was uh ligand duncan's brother actually who worked for ligonier at the time uh who came out to meet with me and said you you need to be on television grace to you needs to be on television i said you know we don't even videotape john and he was like shame on you you know and i know what he meant because it has always irritated me that nobody thought to ever to uh record charles spurgeon's voice we don't have a single recording of what spurgeon sounded like because nobody thought to do it although the technology existed there are tapes of uh there's a there's a famous recording of dl moody reading the beatitudes it's fascinating to listen to it's full of static and stuff like that but nobody did that with spurgeon and what a loss to history and i thought you know people are going to be cursing me in perpetuity if we don't get as much of john on video as possible so about a decade ago i don't remember the exact year but it's been probably more than a decade maybe as much as 15 years ago we started videotaping every time john spoke at grace church and at first we tried to do it in-house we bought uh equipment and corey was the one we hired at the time he was a salaried employee on our staff to do video after a year or two we we decided no we're gonna bid the contract out and use an outside company and corey had started a video production doing it on the side so he said can i bid for the contract as well and we said of course so he did and his bid was competitive and the added value he does great work and the video quality of things we produce you can see for yourself but um the the great advantage to using corey is he can get john to to videotape special things uh at a drop of a hat whereas john you know is going to say no if some hollywood producer calls him up and say i need you to come down here and sit for a three hour video thing video is very frustrating to do as you know you have to a lot of setup and lighting and right stuff like that and uh it's it can be a waste of time but if corey calls john and says yeah we need this special video because he's a son-in-law he has a lot more pull with john even than i would getting him to do a lot of but so it's much more convenient the quality is good and so on so we pay corey's company to do it now he has a lot of overhead with equipment and personnel he doesn't videotape and edit everything himself he has a staff to pay right so the the amount of the contract does sound exorbitant if you think that's a salary that we pay directly to corey but it isn't it's a it's a fee paid to his company and then he has to support his overhead and we we review that frequently we've we've done analyses over the years it's cheaper for us to contract that out to a company than it would be to try to maintain our own staff and video equipment in-house uh he can do work on the side which evens out the cost of his overhead whereas all we're going to do is john mcarthur and it makes everything we do if we do it in-house that much more expensive so that's the reason for all of that all of that is a matter of public record the board approves that contract john mcarthur himself is not involved in the setting of the price or the even the approval of whose contract we take so when when we bid it out you know we could conceivably choose another company but i don't foresee us doing that because what we're doing right now is economical and it works well so that's why we do what we do yeah i mean there's a lot of intrinsic value just in having that real close relationship between corey and john and and convenience and all of that so it's right and an aside to that corey uh he's a very blessed man he married uh the most creative member of the macarthur family and his wife does a lot of the artwork for us as well so okay uh so it's all yeah it's all in the family and it's all in-house but we get a good product and if if anybody wants to complain about it then point out what's wrong with the product point you know try to prove that we're not getting our money's worth uh and i dare you to do that and it's it's just not the fact so to try to make that into something unsavory is it to my view just reflects a motive that is totally evil and probably rooted in bitterness and particularly when it comes from someone who has a very long record of trying to discredit john mcarthur's reputation yeah right i don't feel we owe a person like that uh answers no hard to blame you hard to blame you on that just a minute ago phil you mentioned briefly the evangelical council of financial accountability accountability that's the ecfa and that's something with which i'm familiar because it's um it's a it's an organization that uh bears some provides some accountability for evangelical ministries of various stripes and rather famously back in 2008 2009 there were some investigations congressional investigations into some of these more prominent prosperity preachers like paula white and kenneth copeland and creflo dollar undoubtedly most aptly named of the prosperity preachers careful of dollar but um famously they are not members of the ecfa and much was made in uh miss roy's article about how grace to you has withdrawn from the ecfa as well and so the prosperity preachers aren't a part of it grace to you is not a part of it so there's got to be some a common thread there right yeah absolutely that's wrong grace to you is a member of ecfa it was the church that withdrew their membership oh the church we are we are separate organizations i i felt like the article that she wrote deliberately tried to blur the distinctions between the organizations involved we're not the same as the master's university in seminary we're totally different organization right and the church is a totally different organization as well grace to you wasn't always separate from the church but in the mid 1980s we spun off and became a separate organization that confused her in that article as well too because i had made the comment that for the first 30 years of this ministry john macarthur got paid nothing and she wanted to dispute the actually she accused me of not telling the truth because she found the year we incorporated as a separate organization and she wants to count that as the beginning of our ministry but actually the ministry began the first year john was at grace community church 1969 uh when volunteers began making copies and distributing john's tapes and uh and they they elders decided to sell the tape so that they weren't losing money on the proposition they sold the tapes uh i wasn't here at the time so i'm operating from memory but i think it was about a dollar a cassette actually i think at first they set the price higher and realized they were making money and so they dropped it to a dollar and when i came to grace to you in 1983 uh the price of tapes was about a dollar one dollar per cassette and uh in the in the original decision to charge for those tapes when the ministry was part of the church some of the elders wanted to pay john a royalty for the tapes that they sold 10 cents a tape or something like that and that's that's the amount i've heard 10 cents a tape which sounds like not much but when you're selling you know 10 million tapes that's a million dollars yeah uh that he he for he he decided to forgo right away he said i don't need money for my tapes y'all pay me a salary i don't want it you just distribute the tapes and keep them as cheap as possible and they did that and he didn't get any money from the sale of his tapes or the work of grace to you either when we were a division of the church or when we became a separate organization um and uh that went on for 30 years uh millions of tapes and uh he he used to laughingly make the comment that maybe he should revisit that decision maybe but uh and he could have but never did yeah and uh i mean that his goal is to to get the sermons out there and uh nothing ever made him happier than when we the staff here at grace to you without without his consent actually made the decision to uh to make when we'd gone to mp3s and people could download them over the internet uh in in 19 wait a minute no in 2008 it was it was the year of obama's first election i remember because it was the day after election day when obama was uh chosen as the president uh that's when we said look we're gonna stop charging for mp3 downloads you can download any of these as many of them as you want for free nothing we ever did made john happier than that and uh now we distribute you know millions every month if he was still getting a dime off every download you know he would be uh he would he would have more money than either you or i could figure out what to do with but whatever um so anyway he had gone for years without being paid at all uh for grace to you and uh the church paid him a salary there there's a famous story about when uh john had been here about a decade the elders decided to raise his salary as pastor and he said i don't need a raise i don't i don't want to raise forget it spend it on missions or whatever the elders consulted amongst themselves and said no the workman is worthy of his hire and we don't think you're paid enough if you don't want this money fine we're going to give it to you anyway and then we'll watch what you do with it we want to see what you do with it let's see what your stewardship is like you you can give it to missions if you want and that's pretty much what's happened over the years john is and and here's where it becomes very difficult because i can't give you details that i know about john's giving i don't want to rob him of his heavenly reward he's not going to blow a trumpet before him when he gives but he is as many people have already said in response to that hit piece that was published uh john is the most generous man of his stature that i've ever met or known or encountered and uh it's true that he gets multiple salaries because he's involved with the church embraced eu and sure until recently the university i don't i don't know if they still pay him a salary or not over there i just don't know they might uh but i and the only one i know because i work here is grace to you but i also happen to know what he does with that yeah and uh that does not that does not line his personal pockets that's really all i want to say about it but yeah uh he uses that for the lord's work and um you know as i've said repeatedly and in fact i i had a document where i had answered many of the questions that were sent to us that was available to the reporter who wrote the hit piece and she selectively quoted what helped her narrative and ignored the facts that didn't and one of the facts that absolutely doesn't help that narrative that i've made over and over again that you don't evaluate a person's stewardship based on how much money they make what size their salary is you evaluate whether they're a lover of money or not by looking at their lifestyle and uh i dare anybody to look at john macarthur's lifestyle and accuse him of extravagant living he uh he's just not an extravagant man he's an extremely generous man and you know that's really all anybody needs to know if somebody had actual facts that proved otherwise go ahead and publish it but there are no facts like that right right um you know i've been around john psalm and i've i've had a couple of opportunities to see his humility and some very unscripted things and things that have really impressed me that i've shared with you before uh but i don't know him all that well and not nearly as well as as do you and others there but i i know people who know him well and um everyone who knows him well has said exactly what you just did that he is a very very generous man with what god right within him and let me also follow up on that because the gist of of that article and some of the subsequent discussion is well the proof that he's a lover of money is in the fact that he has three houses and and collectively they're worth millions people keep saying i i don't actually know uh the value of all of all three of his houses but here's the story his house where he lives is at the other end of this valley he has lived in that house for 40 years a man who's a lover of money and who makes millions as john has on book royalties doesn't live in the same house for 40 years he builds a bigger one or whatever right john has lived in the exact same house for 40 years that's on a piece of property that as i understand it was given to him because when he lived down in the san fernando valley the most populated part of the northern half of los angeles county um because of his profile as pastor of grace church there was a stalker who was threatening one of his children one of his daughters and so someone gave him this property in a remote area there were no other houses around at the time and he built that house i don't know how much it cost but given the fact that it was built in the late 1970s and uh on property that was donated to him i'd be very surprised if you spent much more than a hundred thousand on it so the real estate listings say it's worth a million and a half right now i call that a good investment it's certainly not a it wasn't an extravagant expense on his part right what's he supposed to do look at the value of his house and say no i better move into a smaller cottage yeah but you know he's lived in the same place for 40 years that says something yeah he's preached the same church for 52 years this is not a man who's shopping around for a more extravagant lifestyle yeah the other the second house that i know that's not far from here is a sort of getaway that john goes to when he needs to be alone to to study when he needs to get away from the phone in the office and those of us who constantly are asking him to videotape and stuff like that for riding projects and stuff like that he's it's i would guess 50 miles from the grace to you office towards ventura another that's the next the next sizable town north of l.a uh and that's the one that this article says it's only 11 miles from the beach you know i can show you homeless people that live closer to the beach than that that's that's that's not a short walk to the beach you know right and it could easily say it's a half mile from a strip mall in a 7-eleven it it's it's this is not a mansion it's a in fact i think the real estate listings on it again i'm going from memory so so it's something like three bedrooms and two bathrooms this is not this is not a luxury home right uh in fact i think it's a condominium but i i'm not even sure about that the third one is a uh uh basically a cabin in the woods it's uh it's a nice cabin it's a it's got several bedrooms because john built it so that his entire family can use it as a vacation getaway on some property that again was given to him two acres in uh colorado and uh i've not been there i haven't seen it i don't know i'm told that the picture that was published with the hit piece is not a picture of the actual place that's not the right room the house that's shown in that picture is not john's cabin they keep referring to it as his ranch because i think the ownership of it is uh something like circle m ranch or some something like that that signifies macarthur family and my understanding is that it's jointly owned or or uh set up so that the ownership of it will pass to jointly to his four children so it's it's part of his inheritance to his children it's not again not a a luxury place it's a it's a once a year getaway and that's where john goes in the summer when he needs to get out of the state and away from again those of us who demand his time he usually spends i don't know five to six weeks during the summer uh there where he catches up on his reading and and um it tries to relax and spend time with his wife it's not an unreasonable expense and it certainly isn't an extravagant thing i don't know what he makes on book royalties it's not as much as he's worth certainly i wouldn't keep that money in exchange for him uh and he doesn't use it to to spend lavishly on himself but if he wants to have a place to be able to get away get out of state with his whole family with a bedroom enough for everybody in the family then i don't begrudge him that and i don't think it's an extravagance and to try to make it sound like he's you know shopping around for bigger mansions all the time is to totally misrepresent john mcarthur it's been completely unfair to him and those who follow his teaching i think generally know is another reason that i haven't felt obliged to answer every question that's thrown at me on twitter but uh because i think people who uh who listen to john teach and have listened for years in many cases they know how deeply he gets into scripture they know that this is not a man who's spending his spare time only on leisure or uh living an extravagant lifestyle because he's in it for himself uh that's as far from john mcarthur as anything i know yeah indeed indeed oh thank you for that phil that's that's really helpful um that sheds a lot of light and it's again proverbs 18 17 the first to plead his case seems right i mean the way this all of this has been presented boy it makes it makes a really compelling argument the first depleted seems right i said i don't answer the tweets but i do read some of them and the one that's stuck out at me as the the most hypocritical was a guy who i i don't know and i've never interacted with him on twitter but his his little picture is a picture of his own uh recreational boat it's a very expensive chris craft and uh you know he he in his profile it says something about his voting hobby and all of that and he's he's scolding john mcarthur for his extravagance and i'm thinking you know as far as i know john doesn't own i think the only recreational vehicle he has is a push mower and this guy this guy with an expensive wooden boat is scolding john for his lavish lifestyle it's just so full of hypocrisy not only that the woman who who uh who wrote the hit piece uh if you if you do the math on her house look it up on the real estate figures it is public knowledge uh her house is is within a hundred square feet of the same size as john same numbers same number of bedrooms and bathrooms as john's house so i don't i don't really know what the burr under her saddle is about but yeah there you go yeah and and speaking of of that with her house being within 100 square feet and public knowledge did you dox her docs is not even a term i even knew the meaning of until about a year ago but did what's the skinny on that yeah apparently i did i mean and i'm sorry for that clumsiness or whatever but i it's a kind of a long story she had written me uh she had actually written someone in our ministry a list of questions about a year ago and he passed it on to me because he was too busy to do it and so i began to answer her questions they were questions about finances and grace to you and stuff like that i actually have the written sheet that i i've written all her answers and then she sent another sort of accusatory one of her one of her hallmarks is she'll send a list of questions and say i need your answers by you know noon tomorrow because i'm going to go to print with this with this story uh which i don't respond well to blackmail and that's when i wrote back to her and said look i i had prepared an answer to all your questions but now i've i've looked you up online i see that all you've ever written about john mcarthur has been an attempt to discredit him uh and so i'm not going to answer your questions and furthermore nobody else from our ministry is ever going to answer any questions you have don't bother sending questions like these again you're going to write a story you just go ahead and do it but if you're a real investigative reporter you ought to know that some of these facts are available online and uh so that was the letter i wrote her originally you know i had i'd answered her questions and i wrote her this other letter and i decided finally just going to email it off to her so i emailed it off to her but i still have a copy of the letter that i it was it was verbatim what i sent her in the email so i scanned it put it online and uh yeah it had her address uh which you can find just about anybody's address yeah well you know she'd spent all this time uh criticizing john and putting pictures of his house and the location she doxed him as well so you know i figure her address is public information i it didn't occur to me to take it down but as soon as she complained i mean the minute she complained which was like 10 minutes after i put it up there i think uh i blurted out so it's it's blurred uh you can't you can't read her address now but she has not let go of the fact that she was doxxed she's she's gonna milk it for victimhood and uh that has been the thing even though what i actually posted proved that she had facts that did not support her narrative and she published anyway she's shoved all that aside to spend the last two weeks complaining that she got doxed after she had doxxed john mcarthur so yeah i mean it's not it's not you shouldn't dox people but uh i've i'd always considered doxing being the release of private information and stuff and her her address is public you do a search google search for her name even now and her address comes up on the first page so yeah um so yeah yeah okay all right so sorry to have created the problem i'm mostly sorry that i gave her an excuse to divert from the actual point which is that her hit piece wasn't even honest because she didn't deal with all the facts that she had yeah you know and john mcarthur's house being worth whatever it said 1.5 million i'm surprised it's not worth more than that if it was built in the 1970s i mean my goodness yeah honestly and in the neighborhood it's in it which used to be a remote area but now there are there are some some very impressive mansions out there uh the neighborhood alone probably raises the the property value but um yeah i was i was surprised as well i would have guessed that it's worth more than that yeah you know she went after me for my house as well uh and uh for my salary and she's complaining that uh you know that i'm i'm making a killing off whatever you've seen my lifestyle so you know this uh uh i don't know that you've ever been to my house but my house is 1900 square feet it is it is not a mansion and although if you look it up you can find my address on on google as well yeah uh it's pretty easy to find out where i live you look it up it says it's a four bedroom house actually we have three bedrooms and a loft that could be used as a bedroom if you put a hammock in there but our bedrooms are so small that if you have anything other than a twin size bed you can't get any other foot furniture in the room so so this is not luxury living where i'm at this is california and i was in california uh for uh let's see 20 years before i was even able to put a down payment on a condominium wow and and so i raised my kids in a in a 1300 foot condominium and uh about the time my eldest graduated from high school we were able to put a down payment on a house and that's when we moved to where we're at now at the time grace to you because i've been there for 20 years and uh in 10 intended to stay another 20 which i have done uh so i've been here nearly 40 years when it was obvious look this is my career this is my life and i live in a tiny condominium the board graciously said look we want to help you get into a real house and so they gave me a loan that was forgivable over time they said if you really stay the next five years we will forgive this loan uh one-fifth at a time over the next five years and so they keep making a lot of noise of the fact that i got a 50 000 loan from the board and that was forgivable and and they did forgive it because i i stayed all those years and i'm grateful for that but i see that as uh you know i'm very grateful for that it's not the kind of thing i would announce to the public but but since it is public i just want to say i'm very grateful for that i see that as a token of the lord's blessing to me and my family yeah and uh i shame on anybody who would see it any other way yeah and if you own a business and you have somebody who's working for you and devoted their life to you and you have the means to help them out like that and you don't do it then shame on you for that as well absolutely amen amen to that absolutely well phil if if we could turn corners here just a little bit change direction um yes let's do i'm tired of talking about money no kidding no kidding um so uh another controversy that's a couple years old now but i figured since i i had this opportunity with you um you know back in 2019 much was made of uh this article that came out i don't remember the name of the person who wrote it but um anyway said that john mcarthur's claim of being with charles evers who is the brother of medgar evers who had been killed i think back in 63 but in any way in 1968 uh john says that he was with charles evers in jackson mississippi not far from where i'm from and uh the the night that martin luther king jr was assassinated and did then they they drove up from jackson to memphis which was about a three three and a half hour drive and and within uh so within a few hours john said he was there at the lorraine motel and saw even where james earl ray shot martin luther king jr and uh so anyway it's a story that he's told and and some people have tried to discredit that so is there anything regarding that yeah yeah i'm glad you asked me about that as well because i think this doesn't get enough publicity uh that's a story john has been telling for years it's not something he made up in 2019 and you know suddenly that became part of his life's tale i've heard that going back years i don't know how public he's been with it but but i knew about that for for years he uh he was ministering at the time with john perkins who is a black civil rights leader but more than that a minister a gospel minister who ministers in the black community and john perkins was led to christ by john's father and so john spent a couple of summers i i i don't i don't actually know every fact related to this i don't know if it was more than one summer but i know he spent time going through the south preaching the gospel in black communities with john perkins and they were he was there he was in mississippi when the martin luther king assassination took place they did drive up to memphis and stand on the balcony and at the lorraine hotel where where king was assassinated the only thing i'm not sure about and and you know i don't trust my own memory of what happened in 1968 i in fact was recently uh i was in a marching band that did these contests and stuff so we traveled all around and uh i had this vague i had this what i thought was a vivid memory of uh of a thing we did in 1968 or 69 in winnipeg canada and i recently had the means to look up the facts on it from some newspaper archives and and discovered in reading re-reading the news accounts of that day that i had compressed some things in my mind that weren't right and i i think it's possible john john has compressed the timeline of those events in his mind but he absolutely did go with john perkins and this team to memphis and stand on the on the balcony of the lorraine hotel he says within hours i think it might have actually been within 48 hours or 72 hours after the assassination it was right afterwards and john describes how the blood stains were still on the balcony uh and that's a that's a matter of historical fact in fact uh i i read one story that uh that i'm eager to sort of find the facts on this one but that in order to preserve some of the stuff people in the area had actually cut that piece of concrete with the blood stain out and moved it removed it uh and it's been replaced where it originally was at the lorraine hotel and covered up with plexiglas so that you can see the blood stain apparently even until today there's an article online that's titled something like the again this is from memory but something like the blood stain that won't go away or something like that now you can read about the facts of that but anyway john describes that he describes how he was in the room where uh james earl ray shot the fatal bullet uh here's how i know john's memory on it isn't isn't you know exactly precise in every detail because he says he stood on the toilet from where or are you he's he was in the room where the toilet was that james earl ray stood on when he shot martin luther king the fact is he was standing in the bathtub there is a toilet right next to it but he was he was standing in the back there's a little facts like that that i think john remembers but the fact is he was there and there are other eyewitnesses who will verify that one of them is the president of shasta i think it's called shasta bible college okay so let me let me read this this is the president of shasta bible college his name is david nicholas he was part of that team that uh that john was with when he was when all of that happened and he's written a fairly um thorough account of that summer with john perkins i say fairly thorough it's a letter he wrote a a lengthy letter to his constituents uh and describes some of the same uh events that john described when i saw this letter i took john and said do you remember this guy and john goes oh yeah i remember we went to college together uh so and he mentions that he was there john was there they went to the assassination site and all that so he tells the same story john does is it confirming eyewitness testimony i which i have sent to some of these people who are insistent on uh you know calling john a liar and all that is this brett detweiler guy who puts stuff out all the time and uh uh you know they they simply ignore any testimony that would corroborate john mcarthur's account and cite the testimony of people who say they don't remember john being there as if somehow that's proof that john macarthur is lying about this right uh it's not a lie uh he may have he may have some incidental details wrong but i think we all have fuzzy uh the the details of our memories from 50 years ago are tend to be a little bit fuzzy yeah that's more than 50 years ago isn't it that's that's 53 now 53 years ago yeah so yeah before i was even born i mean so that's a long time ago yeah yeah well i remember that i remember the event and uh i remember that week what i was doing but uh you know how how how detailed i could be with regard to the specifics is pretty questionable yeah and it's perfectly understandable yeah so if you wanted to if you wanted to pick apart john's story and say no it this couldn't have been hours later well it depends on what you count by hours if it was 72 hours later it actually yeah that's credible and in fact the photographs of the balcony of the lorraine hotel within days after the assassination loaded with people looking and seeing and wanting to visit these and putting up plaques and flowers and stuff like that i've got a ton of those pictures yeah um so yeah and you know i found it so ironic that that some of these folks that are so going after some of them not all but some of them are are to varying degrees influenced by the social justice movement and and they're they're far more concerned about the minutia of the details of of john's account that night with that event than they are with the fact that he was in the deep south in the 1960s purposefully preaching the gospel to black people i mean that like i'd say that's a a tad more significant than uh the minutia of the the details of what happened that night yeah i agree he was arrested for it right well yeah arrested uh in fact this letter i'll i'll put the letter from this president of uh shasta bible college online uh so that you can link to it and your people can read it uh because he talks about the fact that they were stopped by this sheriff in mendenhall mississippi who arrested them and and john was apparently driving the car these are details john doesn't tell in his version of it that he was driving the car that's why he was the one arrested and but the sheriff the sheriff's beef was the fact that there's these white guys running around with you know black civil rights leaders preaching in churches and stuff like that and uh it wasn't that john broke any traffic laws but he happened to be driving without his wallet uh so he didn't have his driver's license on him apparently and so uh they threw him in the clink for the night and uh john says that he did have money in his pocket and the sheriff just kept all that that'll be your fine i'll just i'll just take whatever you got yeah it sounds like one of those old movies you know in the heat of the night and uh you could see this guy sort of thumping his hand with a with a night stick and threatening john yeah it's an interesting story i i wrote about it maybe 15 years ago on my blog uh because john had told this story and liggin duncan picked it up somewhere and repeated it and uh so i wrote about it and the headline on my blog i just put john macarthur arrested in mississippi and apparently that headline gave everybody heart attacks yeah but whatever yeah that's awesome well uh turning yet another corner for another and this is a much older uh controversy but i feel i get i get emails pretty regularly and i see comments from people john mcarthur teaches that you can take the mark of the beast and still be saved and then you know that is definitive proof that he is a heretic and leading millions of people down the primro primrose path to hell so since we have you here i'm becoming very experienced in answering this question because it comes up a lot not to interrupt you i have a document actually that i've made with your article and fred butler's article and i've put that in a document whenever any time i get an email like that i just attach that document and send it off like here you go read this fred probably has a better answer even than mine more thorough and stuff but basically here's the story years ago years ago i think this is the 1970s it was a long time ago in a q a someone asked john if if someone during the great tribulation takes the mark of the beast and then later repents of it is that a forgivable sin and john said yeah because jesus says in matthew 12 all manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven men except the blasphemy against the holy spirit and he's he's he's actually pointing at some pharisees who had just accused him of doing miracles in the power of of the devil uh that was the blasphemy against the holy spirit and if all other sins and blasphemies are forgivable then yeah if you repent after having taken the if you genuinely repent after having you know somebody who takes the mark in ignorance and then repents theoretically could be forgiven it's a hypothetical that you know frankly if i were john and probably john in his in his older years would would say it's a hypothetical i don't know i'm not going to answer but yeah you know based on what jesus said that all manner of sin and blasphemy is forgivable the answer is yeah if you genuinely repent of that it's not an unpardonable sin uh i don't know that anyone who takes the mark of the beast will repent because it does seem to me that there's a a deliberate act of renouncing god and worshiping the beast involved in taking but i don't know i don't even know what the mark of the beast is a lot of people today assume that it's an rfid chip that's going to be injected into you through a covet 19 uh inoculation right i mean that is that is probably the dominant view today and i actually have a a uh an email from a woman who wrote and said i heard john mcarthur say go ahead and take the rfid chip you're gonna be okay i heard him say that she heard it that that's what john said go ahead and take the rfid chip uh that's how ridiculous this gets uh uh so for the record i just want to say john macarthur does not think you should take the mark of the beast right if you wake up someday and find out it's on you repent yeah amen amen and you as you said it's a hypothetical it was a a question that he responded to in a q a nearly 40 years ago or whatever and and people want to brand him as a heretic for that yeah they want to make it like he's teaching this doctrine yeah right i think he's i think he's addressed that question maybe twice in his whole ministry once when the person first asked it and a second time when i asked him is that really what you said and what's the context and he explained it to me other than that i doubt that it's ever crossed his mind more than three times yeah yeah and those three times would be because somebody wrote and asked him about it right you know it's certainly not something he teaches uh like i mean the impression some of his adversaries want to give us that he's going out there saying no go ahead and take the market beast it's going to be okay that's ridiculous yeah he's probably practically got it on a bumper sticker on his car take the mark right and and you know that's that was the answer he gave in in a q a if you want to really know the heart of what john mcarthur says about the end times and the mark of the beast and how how we ought to respond to or recognize the antichrist listen to where he exegetes those passages and he's not saying or doing anything that would encourage anyone to take the mark of the beast yeah go to his commentary see what he says about it i mean absolutely well phil thank you brother and thank you for your time this has been really helpful uh i've learned some stuff so uh thank you very very much and i appreciate you appreciate your friendship your ministry thank you you know i'm enough of the cynic myself to know that when this gets out there uh it's just going to stir up those cockroaches that love to come with negative stuff and at me on twitter so this may cost me my twitter account i have to get rid of it just so i don't have to deal all that with all that stuff but thank you for asking those questions you know with an intent of actually wanting to hear answers rather than absolutely looking for things you can nitpick i appreciate that yeah absolutely phil well i appreciate you too brother sure do and and uh i know you can't go into any depth here but uh is it the expectation as as far as as far as you guys know out there that shepherd's conference will be rescheduled reschedule at some point later this year or is that the hope yeah all i can say is i i that is that is the hope of the people who make that decision i'm not part of that people again often don't really understand the grasp of the fact that grace church is a separate for race to you the conference is grace church's conference it's not ours i'm not involved in either the planning or discussions of any of this stuff uh but the inklings i've gotten from the shepherds conference team is that they are right now as you and i speak uh it's what tuesday uh right after presidents day uh they've spent most of the day looking for uh a time where they can reschedule and working out the logistics of what that will entail it's difficult because in the evangelical world there's you know a lot of big conferences and they do try not to intrude on one another's territory we wouldn't purposely schedule uh a redo of the shepherds conference uh in a way that would be a threat to g3 or you know ligonier or whatever and when you take the year and squeeze it down into just six months it's kind of hard to schedule all of those conferences right so whether they're going to be able to reschedule it or not i don't know i'm a little skeptical personally but i don't have any insider knowledge other than to tell you yes they definitely want this to be a postponement and not a cancellation and i think there will be news about when and whether they can reschedule it this year uh probably before you even get this podcast posted so your question may be answered by someone other than me by the time you put this up but i honestly don't know any more than you do about the timing and logistics of it other than the fact that they definitely want to reschedule sure in the meantime i think they are offering refunds to everybody who registered so uh yeah that's another question people keep asking they're going to refund all those registrations and the answer is yes obviously yeah uh or if they can reschedule uh they'll probably give you the option to uh to just let it ride over to and and you'll be pre-registered for the conference whenever it is right but again i'm speaking as an outsider i'm not speaking with the authority of shepherd's conference itself sure and and speaking of the conference you know i've been to several of those and uh they they always give away tons of books tons of books and and grace to you gives away a lot of its resources as well doesn't it yeah that's that's something else we should talk about with uh with regard to whether john mcarthur is a greed monger or or a gracious person i just look at the record of grace to you if you've been on grace to use mailing list for the past 20 years you probably haven't had to purchase any new books by john mcarthur because when he comes out with a new book we generally buy a quantity of those and give them away and john mcarthur waves his royalty from the publisher on any books we do that with that's one of the ecfa requirements you can't make money personally off fundraising efforts you know that your organization does so we couldn't if we use a book uh with john to uh to attract interest of our donors or to say thank you to them for their support or or whatever message you want to attach to it if we are giving away a book to donors uh he cannot make any any royalties on that so we give away you know 30 000 copies of a book uh i don't think you can assume he would have sold 30 000 copies of but there a lot of those are are given to people who otherwise would buy the book and he simply waves his royalties on it and he's never complained about that or i mean he wants to do it so um that's just that's become such a part of our ministry that we give everything away that we can we love doing that and we have no no intention to stop and the day this month this ministry actually gets more interested in money than we are in ministry i'm out of here yeah amen amen to that well phil before i let you go one other question uh with all that the church has been through with all the you know the publicity and the litigation and the opposition that you've had from the city and county and state government how's john doing how's he holding up through all of this seems pretty good to me i mean he's he's i think 15 years older than i am he's in his 80s i'm 67 is about 14 or 15 years older than me and uh he seems like he's 15 or 16 years younger than me he certainly has more energy than i do and uh it's hard to keep up with him uh and i don't think he's been one bit discouraged by uh any of the any of the uh pressure that he's received because of his response to the quarantine and restrictions on churches and all that if anything it's energized him and um so you can see that yeah you can see that in the effects so that your gray search hasn't slowed down at all in the midst of the covet we've had to change our schedule and we only have one morning service instead of two but um it's still a thriving uh hive of ministry and another interesting thing about that speaking of money and offerings and all that we have not actually taken up a collection since the quarantine began there nobody's passed the plate or we actually have these bags that get passed instead of plates because if you drop it it's not as noisy you know so that's why you have the bags okay that makes sense yeah you've seen those huh yeah so they uh those bags have not been passed for almost a year now and yet uh the people of grace church have continued to support the ministry at levels that that are actually above what you would ever expect above what we budgeted for so financially uh the covid stuff hasn't really been a threat to to our existence what we feel threatened by and of course we we trust the lord for his that his power exceeds that of anyone who would try to stop us but what what is threatening from a human point of view is the increased government pressure that you feel uh they want to they want to limit what the church can do and tell you how you can meet when you can meet whether you can sing all those sorts of things and when that started i think all of us said we can put up with this for two weeks or a month if it at the worst but a year later i i would think most christians would be saying wait a minute i mean how is this imminent threat to life and limb when right now i don't know anybody who is seriously ill with the virus i don't know anybody who's tested positive for the virus for several weeks uh and yet uh we are still hampered and we can't even have the shepherds conference so yeah uh that that feels like a a kind of government encroachment and um our prayer of course is that the the gospel will have full reign anyway and regardless of what restrictions the government might impose on us it's not going to silence the the word or the ministry of the gospel and jesus himself said even the gates of hell aren't going to prevail against the church so as his kingdom continues to be built uh in an ironic way it seems like the covid crisis has actually furthered that and we're grateful for that yeah i know there's been a lot of people that i've i've talked to pastors all over the country and there's a lot of people who are looking for churches that have not shut down and they're looking for churches to take a stand and preach the truth and a lot of churches have grown because of that this covets brought a lot of new faces into a lot of different churches i'm at one right now as a matter of fact so yeah now you get that there's so many churches shut down around us that we have had a massive influx of new people that we're meeting saying i'm coming here because our church not only are they not meeting they're not really there's there's really no light at the end of their tunnel they're going to stay closed in perpetuity it seems yeah yeah there are there as you know you know this as well as i there are some churches across the country that i'd be happy to see clothes no kidding i know a lot of the ones that are shut down you're thinking man that's great that's right well i saw you i saw i watched your entire what was it a four-hour video on all the failed prophecies did you do that whole thing wow i went through it start to finish i came home from work one day put it on and stayed with it until you finally shut it down and and uh really i just thought yeah i mean it's actually very encouraging to see that kind of uh hypocrisy in shenanigans exposed so clearly i don't know how people like that can make a comeback from their own failed prophecies but they always seem to somehow and there's a lot of gullible people out there but every time there's a wave of something like this it helps it you know after strange fire conference when has that been now almost five years ago oh no that was 2013. so it's been eight years ago really yeah yeah october yeah but to this day you probably have the same experience i do that to this day everywhere i go i just spoke at a conference down in san bernardino this week and met at least six different people who told me i used to be a charismatic but strange fire helped me see the conference helped me see the the fo the fallacy of that and uh and i left the movement i see that everywhere and and you know thankfully people who leave the movement but because of strange fire seem to find their way into churches where the gospel is taught the bible's believed and then they begin to thrive spiritually and it's like they see that as another life the old life the the charismatic superstition absolutely so maybe we'll have another wave of that yeah yeah lord willing i hope so i can honestly tell you that since the strange fire conference i have never preached at a single location anywhere in the world where i have not had people come up to me and tell me how much they were impacted by that conference yeah it is it is amazing isn't it striking i i was saying that for two years or so i you and i spoke at a couple of subsequent conferences i probably told you that everywhere i go literally everywhere i go and to this day that has not slacked off i cannot think of a conference i've spoken at anywhere since strange fire where i haven't run into somebody who says you know i found you and i found this church because of strange fire we were locked away in the charismatic movement until then so i know that's still bearing fruit and uh you know if anybody's watching this who hasn't seen the strange fire messages do a google search and find them and especially watch justin's stuff it's great oh well i don't know about that but uh it was an honor to be a part of it and uh any is there any discussion at all of a of a strange fire too i heard someone say you need to call it holy smokes or something yeah that was my proposal oh is that yours okay yeah but um yes people ask about that all the time as well uh it's just a question of finding time with the with the shepherds conference being postponed and there was supposed to be a conference on puritan puritanism with joel b right that also got shifted to next year i think and so right now here at grace to you grace to you was a sponsor of strange fire it's like the shepherds conference but different organization puts it on and all that right and so we're looking for an opportunity to do the next conference from grace to you and um it looks to me like that's not going to be any sooner than 2023 so that's still two years away yeah uh if you can hold out that long it'll be a 10-year anniversary so that's right it will it would we have to do it then i i hear that and in fact i've got the pastor of this church that's sitting right next to me he's going yeah he's i hear that all the time people are always asking me is there going to be another strange fire is there going to be a strange fire too people are asking me that constantly so i well there's been a lot of developments in the last eight years and uh you know two years from now there will be even more yeah well you covered it in that four hour video so uh that'll that that should save people until 2023 maybe yeah all right well i'd love to see it happen i would even if i'm not looking at it i would be there with bells on just to attend it thanks justin thanks phil appreciate you brother yep good to see you you as well well there you go dear ones i hope that this video was helpful and encouraging for you as it was for me and i want to express my appreciation again to phil for taking time out of his day to do this for us i think it was very very helpful and and i also hope that this will serve as a sobering reminder to all of us about not being so quick to believe everything that we read on the internet or to believe every rumor that we hear because oftentimes what is being portrayed on the internet is quite far removed from reality and the sad reality is is that there are a lot of people out there who simply want to make a name for themselves for going after faithful men who have some public platform and in trying to bring them down that's just the sad reality but i am very very grateful john if you happen to be watching this video i want to say to you how profoundly grateful my wife kathy and i both are for your ministry and i hope that this encourages you in some way to know uh when you hear me say that i've been all over the world and i see the good fruit being born by your ministry in the ministry of grace community church and grace to you to see it everywhere i go i'm so very grateful for our faithful shepherds out there for you john and for so many others so many countless thousands of other faithful men who are out there laboring away in the word uh rightly dividing god's word of truth faithfully shepherding their own little flocks um i'm an evangelist i travel and preach and teach i'm not a pastor but i have a tremendous amount of respect and appreciation for all of our faithful shepherds out there and uh so john thank you and dear ones thank you for watching this video and until our next time together may the grace of our lord jesus christ the love of god and the fellowship of his holy spirit be with you all you

Channel: Justin Peters Ministries

Views: 302,477

Rating: 4.7694016 out of 5

Keywords: John MacArthur, mark of the beast, mlk jr., lifestyle, Phil Johnson, prosperity, millionaire, controversy

Id: fwY1odwtnuc

Length: 82min 12sec (4932 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 17 2021