Steve Lawson detailing the life of John MacArthur 1/2

well we're gonna go immediately into dr. John MacArthur I was going to say one more thing about RC sprawl but because of the time I don't know how I'm gonna do this because we literally are climbing Mount Everest alright and I have so many notes here I I I'll have to figure this out once we get into this but I want to talk about I want to bring to conclusion our study by looking at dr. John MacArthur I hold him in highest regard just personally no one has influenced me for the Lord more than dr. John MacArthur my preaching has been influenced by him in many ways my manner of life and I love him dearly and I know you love him dearly and you would not be here except there is a high degree of esteem rightfully so in your heart the scripture tells us to esteem those and to honor those who lead us and feed us the Word of God and you have been privileged to be on a page of church history people will look back twenty-five fifty hundred years from now and marvel at what God did here at Grace Community Church and it all came flowing out of the preaching ministry of dr. John MacArthur it's involved all of you it's not been a one-man ministry it has been an entire church just look at Shepherd's conference with a thousand people serving and working but God used this man in such a singular way and with this being the fiftieth year of his anniversary here at the church it is only appropriate that we would bring this to the present hour with our beloved friend and Esther John McArthur it seems that in every generation there's one man who is uniquely positioned to have the dominant voice in the church in the 16th century was John Calvin 17th century John Owen 18th century Jonathan Edwards 19th century Charles Haddon Spurgeon 20th century Martyn lloyd-jones I really believe in the 21st century that it is John MacArthur who has been raised up by God in an unprecedented manner much of it as a result of technology that never existed previous but the ability that we now have to blanket the globe with the preaching of one man and so I think it would be good for us to to look at his life and for most of you here today this is your pastor a man that you know but many of you were not here 20 years ago 30 years ago 40 years ago 50 years ago many of you are more familiar with the John MacArthur of the last 5 years or or 10 years and so what I want to do is just step back and go back to the beginning and get a a walking start and just to walk through a chronology of his life and my desire is number one that you would know something about your pastor that perhaps you did not know previous and that you would grow to treasure him even more as I have grown to treasure him even more so the place to begin is as with the beginning and the years 1939 and he is a pastor's son and he is born right here in Los Angeles at st. Vincent's Hospital the firstborn son of dr. Jack and Irene MacArthur they both are of Scottish Scottish heritage and he shares the same birthday June the 19th as another very famous preacher the prince of preachers Charles Haddon Spurgeon dr. MacArthur is a fifth generation preacher it's almost as if he was set apart from the womb for this his forefathers were missionaries in Scotland and Canada and even as far as Australia and interestingly enough he is a distant cousin of General Douglas MacArthur he lived in his early years a few years in Philadelphia and Chicago you may not know as his father was an evangelist and positioned in different places carrying out an evangelistic ministry and came to Los Angeles when John was a young man his father - pastor Calvary Bible Church in Burbank I've preached there and that's where John was married that's where John grew up not very far from this church just a few exits down in Burbank and it's amazing how that this all has just happened within the same geographical location he grew up in a pastor's home and so he saw before his very eyes what it was to be a pastor it's almost like he grew up in seminary being trained for the ministry as he observed his his father he was a very hyperactive child he was always in bicycle accidents and sliding down flood drains and involved in and other activities that will not be announced here he went to Coulter Academy he was a very gifted athlete he was a great athlete in fact he played football in basketball in baseball and and ran track and so when it came time to go to college he had scholarship offers to go play at the next level in college but instead his pastor father insisted that he go to a Christian college and he went to Bob Jones Christian University in Greenville South Carolina and he said my dad wanted me to go to Bob Jones University I didn't want to go I wanted to play football baseball basketball and Bob Jones didn't have athletics close quote so he was unhappy there he felt it was legalistic there was no sports but God has a way of kind of getting someone's attention and by his own admission he really had developed kind of a bad attitude about being at Bob Jones and being forced to be there so when his freshman year is over he hopped into a car with five other students in the six of them are driving all the way across the United States to come back to Los Angeles and the cars going about 65 miles an hour and it passes a car and they get out on the shoulder and the next thing you know the car flips and the only door that opens is the door where John MacArthur is seated and he goes flying out of the car and the car continues to tumble and he's thrown out onto the asphalt and he skids for the length of a football field for for a hundred yards in fact he passed the car going down the highway and he had such burns on the back he was burned down to the bone that dr. MacArthur was was in the hospital and in bed literally for the next three months he had to sleep facedown he couldn't allow anything to touch his back but God used that in his life just like God uses adversity in your life and in my life we don't really grow spiritually well during prosperity we usually advance to the next level in the midst of the storms of life and that was the case with dr. MacArthur and God used that to literally just shake him and to get his attention and it was it was a wake-up moment he said I realized I was not in control of my future I had survived something that shouldn't have killed me God suddenly had my undivided attention I remember saying Lord I'll do anything you want me to do he said I spent those three months drawing close to him and reading his word and reaffirming my commitment to do whatever he wanted me to do and so he went back his second year to Bob Jones really in a totally different state of mind he preached his first sermon when he went back they they drove him to a bus station in Spartanburg South Carolina and he just walks into the bus station age 19 and just starts preaching take your Bibles please and turn with no and just starts preaching there and he said the sermon was terrible I didn't know how to do it right I went there had my Bible in my hand walked into this mostly empty bus spot and as I looked around at a motley crew I started preaching a gospel message well he's now a humbled man in submission to the lordship of Christ in newer ways and at the end of his second year his father allows him to transfer back to school here to Los Angeles Pacific College which is now Azusa Pacific College and John came and played football he came here to to play football and that was really his identity he wasn't a student he wasn't a someone who was into books he was he was into the pigskin he was into football and he said when I when I was in college I didn't want to read I was a typical guy who was usually outdoors and I preferred not to be indoors reading John was a phenomenal football player he was he made little all-american honorable mention and he graduated with a degree in religion but he was so good in football the Washington Redskins wanted him to to try out in in training camp but he was the call of God upon his life and just like lloyd-jones wrestled with the call of God upon his life and no matter what the the glamour of the NFL might have been if if he had gone through that door and if he had been able to make it and at professional football it would be nothing compared to what God had planned for John MacArthur and so he followed the will of God and he knew he needed to be trained and so he went to Talbot seminary here in Los Angeles or in La Mirada California and even while he was here and were in seminary the NFL teams were still after him the Los Angeles Rams had suffered an injury injury and they they somehow made contact with dr. MacArthur would you come try out in the Cleveland Browns also came calling but he was on a path that God had marked out for him and he was at Talbot his father had walked him into Talbot and you know the story about his father introduced him to dr. charles feinberg who was the leading hebrew scholar of the school and and in many ways of his day and he took a special interest in dr. MacArthur just like John Gerstner took a special interest in RC sproule charles feinberg did with John MacArthur I mean it was obvious the giftedness in John MacArthur he became the president of the student body and he was really marked out and recognized early on dr. Feinberg asked him to preach in Chapel one day second Samuel 7 and dr. MacArthur preached the message and he thought he did pretty good you know the story and when it was over dr. Feinberg came up to him and rebuked him who scolded him and said you you missed the point of the passage and he said that continues to be in the back of my mind every time I open my Bible there is that voice of dr. feinberg get the point of the passage and so while he was there in seminary B began reading Puritan works especially Stephen Charnock the existence and attributes of God and that was entered using him to a whole new world of which he knew not of previous to this the world of reformed theology the world of Puritan theology a much more lofty knowledge of God just like God did that with RC sprawl and the holiness of God God was doing that and in dr. MacArthur and that there's something for us to learn here that at the very center of our ministry must always be a riveted focus on the greatness and the glory and the grandeur of God and that is what dr. MacArthur was was was receiving as he is reading now the this Puritan classic which is voluminous I mean it's a it's a huge volume but it was sharpening his theology is at that time he met a young lady named Patricia Smith and she was engaged to another guy you need to know that and and dr. MacArthur said to her I'd love to give you a ride in my Volkswagen and and she went for a ride and she's been on that ride ever since and he said she's she was the cutest girl I ever saw and they would eventually be married as you obviously well know when he came to do his master's thesis he had been so troubled by close friends of his who had professed Christ and who had a pasta sized who had forsaken the faith had fallen away from the Lord and he knew you couldn't lose your salvation and he he just didn't have a category for this so he did his master's thesis on Judas and and a false believer who would make a false profession of saving faith in Christ and and that would mark his ministry for the rest of his life I mean that's what the Gospel according to Jesus was all about that's what hard to believe was all about that's what all of those sermons on the narrow gate and then and the the lordship of Christ and in repentance it all goes back to the fertile soil of these early years even while he's in seminary and and with that brilliant mind trying to sort things out and what what is the anatomy of a fake believer and so he received his his divinity degree in fact he received the charles feinberg award as the preeminent preacher in the school and he he chose to give thought about receiving a doctorate and he was encouraged to pursue a doctorate because his instructors could see he has such a brilliant mind and he's now going from being an athlete to the early forms of being a scholar and being a reader and being a very careful thinker being an exegete of the the text being an interpreter of the text but he declined to pursue a doctorate because he said he didn't want to study just dead german liberals and and and have to study things that would have no value for him whatsoever so he became an assistant pastor to his father just right around the corner at Calvary Bible Church an assistant to his his father soon Matt McArthur was born obviously I should have said earlier that he was married to Patricia of course and then Matt was born he was ordained into the is CA and he became an assistant professor at Los Angeles Bible College which has since become the Masters University so John has a long-standing connection that goes back many years back to 1965 Marcy was born and Mark was born and Talbot Seminary recognizing the giftedness in in and dr. MacArthur to stand in front of a group of people and open Bible open a Bible and to to preach because he was doing a lot of youth speaking and camps and conferences that Talbot seminary actually hired John to put him on the road and just to travel everywhere and be kind of a representative in a face for the seminary and his preaching would draw students to the seminary and so he did that and he spoke for youth for christ he spoke for Campus Crusade and he did that for about two and a half years and he said I had two and a half wonderful years there preaching all over the country as a faculty member at large I preached an average of 34 35 to 40 times a month I really had an opportunity to work on my preaching and his travel also took him to the deep south now I grew up in the deep south and he became a friend of a man african-american man named John Perkins from Mendenhall Mississippi who had come out here and he got to know him through his father's ministry and invited him to come to Mississippi and to preach to black high schools at a very segregated time and a sad time in the history of our of our country and so John went there and lived with John Perkins and his wife for some period of time and was able to to see what it was like to be an African American in the deep south and the struggles and the difficulty and the and the prejudice and John said and this is just a remarkable set of Providence's he said I'll never forget one night I was in the middle of Jackson Mississippi in the office of a man named Charles Evers Charles had had a brother named Medgar who was the first martyr of the civil rights movement Charles became the first black mayor in the south in Fayetteville Mississippi he was a friend of John's and through John I became acquainted to him and he says while he was sitting in his office a man burst through the door and said Martin Luther King has just been assassinated and so the news spread and they realized we need to get John out of here because there could really some trouble but the men said no we're going to get in a car and drive to Memphis so they got in the car drove to Memphis and went to the site where Martin Luther King was had just been assassinated and dr. MacArthur says in those days forensics were not developed to the point of protecting crime scenes so we arrived at the hotel referring to the Lorraine hotel where he had been assassinated walked up to the landing and saw the blood where Martin Luther King had had just been shot hours before by James Earl Ray I remember going to the opposite this is the building opposite the motel up to the second floor and I stood on the toilet looked out the window where Ray had shot Martin Luther King this was a very critical time crucial time after leaving while driving down a country road we were arrested and taken to jail and accused of fomenting trouble it's only unusual Providence of God I mean dr. MacArthur is there just hours after the assassination of Martin Luther King and they had a very first-hand understanding of a lot of the difficulties and the prejudice that our african-american brothers and sisters were going through there in the south by strange also said of coincidence I was in Memphis at that very time as dr. MacArthur went to to see that sight so dr. MacArthur at this point in his life is feeling a little restless just going from church to church and place to place and he's thinking about wanting to be a pastor in one church in one place and to really preach the depths of Scripture and so he said I was asking God to open a door for me now that I had preached I had a hunger for a flock of people to use this gift so I asked God in my own heart to draw me to a situation where I could have this opportunity and he was preaching at a at a youth camp and there were some youth there from Grace Community Church who came up and talked with him after some of the messages and just said we're looking for a pastor and John is 29 years at the time and knows nothing about Grace Community Church but somehow the word came back that there was this really dynamic speaker at the conference and you ought to look into him and so the the pastor search group got ahold of John and asked him to come preach a trial sermon here and at that time they were meeting over in the chapel that was the the worship center at the time and so John preached a sermon on Romans six and seven I mean if you can even imagine preaching Romans seven coming in having maybe some idea that this might be a future home and he preached an hour and a half and a harbinger of things to come and and and after it was over they got in the car to leave and Patricia said to him have you lost your mind they'll never call you to be their pastor but obviously God had another plan and the depth of his teaching and preaching connected with the pulpit committee and so at night in January of nineteen nineteen sixty nine they called dr. John MacArthur to come be the pastor of this church and he's been here ever since fifty years later and the very first sermon that he preached was on February the 9th 1969 and it was is amazing it's from Matthew 7:21 223 not everyone who says to me Lord Lord shall enter the kingdom of heaven but he who does the will of my father who is in heaven many will say to me in that day Lord Lord did we not prophesy in your name and cast out demons in your name and performed many wondrous works in your name and I will say unto them and that day depart from me you who work iniquity I never knew you that was his first sermon I mean he was like he just like hit the ground running and so the title of the sermon was how to play church and he said the first time I stepped into a pulpit at Grace I wanted to confront the fact that the church had false and true believers mixed together close quote so I mean he is bold and courageous with the truth and so that sermon began with these words these are his opening words as pastor fifty years ago the true Church of Jesus Christ is not a religious institution which welcomes everybody it is the body of Jesus Christ sent apart unto God uniquely married and wedded to the same Christ redeemed by faith and no one outside of that faith redemption can be a part of the church for that is the requirement of the church and it is our task of the people in a preacher to warn those who have not received Christ to warn them in love but to warn them nonetheless how they are in danger of the terror of the Lord that's the first paragraph I'm sure that in this church right here there are people who come who do not know Jesus Christ in a personal vital way I am convinced that because of the size of the congregation this morning there are some sitting right here in this audience who have come to church many times but who do not know Jesus Christ it is my conviction conviction that before we as a church can move together as a body as a unit we must become a unit and the only way we can ever be united and become one as Christ prayed that we might be is when we are all real in Christ close quote so that was just a powerful beginning of his preaching lordship and the narrow gate and the narrow path and few that be that shall find it as he bent with the elders as he began his his ministry he said I wanted then to give me at least 30 hours a week to study he said it at first they must have thought I was a slow reader that I needed 30 hours he said at first they were a little concerned that seemed like a lot of time I wanted that because I believed that if I read Ephesians 4 properly pastored teachers are given to the church for the perfecting of the Saints and the perfecting of the Saints comes about through the Word of God so the tool is the word and I had to spend time in the word so I set apart basically 15 hours for each of the two messages that I would give on Sunday remember his quote you worry about the depth of your ministry let God worry about the breadth of your ministry you see there are too many preachers today here trying to fill the building but they never filled the pulpit John MacArthur was focused on filling the pulpit and letting God fill the building so he did all of the duties he's the only pastor here in this church originally he said it was a heavy load he said what you may have met anticipate and what really happens are two different things I found myself being called to the hospital called two homes where there were deaths and counseling people he said I set up the tables and the chairs for the women's meetings I used to clean out the bathrooms on Saturdays preparing for Sunday and make sure the windows were clean and the ushers were ready I mean he was doing what every small church pastor would would do you're just a one-man SWAT team yeah you're just having to be omnipresent and and and be everywhere and do everything but he said I see my first my calling first of all is to know God in my life as a pursuit all right he said I see my calling first of all to know God in my life as a pursuit to know God I frankly do not study the Bible to get a sermon he would say I study the Bible in order to know God and out of the depth of a knowledge of God flows the sermon I said I have an insatiable hunger to know what the Bible means I have to know what the Bible says and what it means by what it says so that I can know how I can live to glorify God he said the ministry must be the overflow of the relationship that I have with the Lord and so he became a very diligent student and studier of the Word of God he was extremely disciplined in the word he said I always begin by reading the whole book referring to the book in the Bible it is imperative for the exposure to be familiar with the overall message and flow of the book he said I read commentaries I read introductions to to these books I would ask myself what is the primary meaning of this passage what are the main headings what about subordinate points he would do a detail analysis he said of the words and the grammar he said he would have to bridge the gaps of language meaning from Greek or Hebrew to English a bridge the cult the the culture gap the geography gap the history gap and he would say this I love this statement the meaning of Scripture is the scripture and until you have the meaning of Scripture all you have is black print on white paper and so he he he set the course for his pulpit ministry to put his hand on the finger on the live nerve of the text and to know what is the authorial intent of this text what does God mean by what God says in this passage of Scripture and he began to follow a path much like Mark Martin lloyd-jones took rather than being more devotional John MacArthur became more doctrinal more theological as a result of his exegetical studies and so dr. MacArthur would would say people's ears may be itching for anything but sound doctrine but the faithful pastor will defy the spirit of the age and will boldly preach the truth anyway and is preaching and teaching it should be the pastor's sole objective to enlighten his congregation in doctrine that protects and preserves their spiritual health authentic Christianity is concern first and foremost with truth the Christian faith is not primarily about feelings although deep feelings will surely result from the impact of truth on the heart our hearts it's not about human relationships even though relationship for the main focus in many of today's evangelical pulpits biblical Christianity is all about truth close quote so therein is a very accurate estimate of the focused expository preaching of John MacArthur he's a theological expositor always finding the doctrine in a passage and this is exactly what Martin lloyd-jones was saying though the two never met and and MacArthur had never heard lloyd jones say this but Lloyd Jones was asked what is preaching it is theology on fire that's exactly what John MacArthur had come to it is it is doctrine it is theology these men on opposite sides of the Atlantic yet meeting in the middle with this common commitment and this was needed for the ministry of this church to lay a foundation because the two previous pastors had been Methodist pastors they were very Wesleyan in their theology they were very Arminian in their theology they're very semi-pelagianism so dr. MacArthur understood I've got to relay the foundation here with sound doctrine with a God centered focus on theology and so in these early years he preached in 1969 he preached through Romans just very quickly and he preached through Ephesians just very quickly and as well as Habakkuk and 1st and 2nd Peter he preached on Wednesday nights back in those days he preached through the first 75 Psalms a psalm at a time tragically nobody recorded the one night sermons and on Saturday mornings over here and in in this building he began to meet with men on Saturday morning and to teach them theology and to teach them the authority of Scripture and just unplanned people wanted to have a copy of what he just had preached and so the tape ministry and it was called word of grace back then which has now become grace to you begin taping the ministries and early on they would sell like a hundred copies of a tape per week but a new foundation was being laid here at Grace Community Church and it wasn't without difficulty and it wasn't without challenges and one in particular there was one of the elders of this church wanted John to marry his daughter in this church to a man who was an unbeliever and so this was a test this is a test for twenty nine thirty year-old young man are you going to please this fellow elder and not rock the boat or are you going to stand on the truth and stand on principle and as we all would know John MacArthur he has a Word of God man he's going to stand for the truth and he refused to to marry this this believer to an unbeliever well that's spread around the church just like it spreads around any other Church I mean there was the the grace fine even back then and yeah I don't see I know about these things and and so the men Sunday school class actually boycotted John MacArthur they would go to Sunday School and have their old man's sunny school class but they would refuse to come into the worship service and they would just stand out here in which the the courtyard and like a bunch of little babies just just pouting because they they weren't getting their way and so very soon MacArthur went into that Sunday school class and said you men are carnal and you need to submit to the authority of the Word of God and it was an early test which way will this church go what will it be will it be what and when an elder wants or what the Bible wants and praise God we now have elders in this church who all stand on the Word of God and want what the Word of God wants but it wasn't that way in the beginning and praise God we have have a have a pastor who even way back then would not go with the flow would not go with the popular thing to do even if it meant that an entire sunday-school class would just pick it outside and boycott and refuse to come into the preaching of the word of God you know many times God brings tests into our lives to test our faith to see if we really believe what we believe it's easy to believe what you believe when you're just with everyone else who believes what you believe in s what you know when you're preaching to the choir but what do you believe when people do not affirm what you believe will you hold to your convictions or will you melt and crumble well John MacArthur would not melt and crumble and it was the grace of God at work within him Philippians 2:13 for it is God it was at work within you both to will and to work for his good pleasure and that should be an encouragement to all of us here today because it's God who is at work within you as well too willing to work for his good pleasure and His grace is sufficient to enable us to do everything within the will of God and so that was kind of the rocky beginning here at Grace Community but the hard soil has to be plowed up has to be busted up before it can become fertile in order to receive the seed of the word so this leads us to the 1970s that was 1969 see I told you this is going to be a challenge huh so I'm gonna have to fly through this but 1970 we begin an extraordinary decade that establishes the pulpit of this church as the most important function in this church to preach the Word of God dr. MacArthur began to preach you know verse by verse three books in the Bible which is the the genius of his of his preaching he said preaching must be expositional setting forth as clearly systematically and completely as possible the truth of God's Word and only those truths he says it's the only legitimate way to preach well this so infected the life of the people that the people of Grace Community Church began to live with a confident faith in the Lord and they began to go out into the surrounding community and wherever it was that the Lord had placed them to live and to evangelize until their neighbors and their family and their workmates about about Jesus Christ so they would they would gather for worship and they would scatter to witness and they that the witness was was blanketed the area dr. MacArthur says a church that evangelizes 365 days a year is better than a church which has a week of revival meetings once a year and so the church began to grow in fact grace community doubled in size for many years in a row just think about that it was an exponential growth in the newspaper was very curious the LA Times they want to know what's going on down here at Grace Community Church and the reporter asked dr. MacArthur do you have a desire to build the church and he responded no I have absolutely no desire to build the church that's not my job jesus said I will build my church and I would rather not compete with Jesus so I'll let him do his job and his job is to build the church I simply want to follow him to do that through me in a small way in one location well as the church is just rapidly now expanding and growing exactly one year later 1970 is the first educational building and then in 1972 the Family Center and I guess we're kind of in the family center and the church is growing so big out of the the chapel that they meet here and it there's not just one service there's two services then there are three services on Sunday morning here in the in the family center and the church is just exploding and ministries are just popping up lagos Institute was birthed in 1971 to give education kind of like Ligonier something halfway in between Sunday School and seminary a halfway there it's more than sunny school but it's less than seminary it's exactly what Ligonier was doing that's exactly what lagos Institute was designed to do and interestingly enough this conference is hosted by Lagos Institute and the the bookstore open it was called the book Shack yeah the book Shack and I yeah there that there's the book Shack it is very appropriately named and like the book outhouse there's something you know and so everything is just happening the the blessing of God is upon this place and it's evident and it's it's growing and it's it's blossoming and then the the tape outreach is is just growing and it becomes grace to you and Moody monthly comes and does a story on Grace Community Church and they discover the whole church is ministering the whole church is serving this isn't just John MacArthur if it's the whole church and so the name of the article was the church with 900 members first ministers the church with 900 ministers everyone saw themselves as a servant the Lord and put their shoulder the plow and had a ministry and they were carrying it out and then dr. MacArthur did the made the radical decision to implement church discipline everybody told him you'll kill the church you'll destroy the church nobody does Church discipline these days well they were wrong and Grace Community Church followed the Word of God and and you must actually live a life that is congruent with your profession of faith in Jesus Christ you just can't live like the devil and be a member of this church and by exercising church discipline rather than kill the church the church began to grow even more because of the purity of the of the flock and so dr. MacArthur is recognized he's given an honorary Doctorate they move into three services in this building he's given a second doctorate honorary Doctorate from Talbot Theological Seminary and it becomes obvious I mean we're at three services in here we can't go to any more services in here will kill the preacher and and so the the Worship Center was built and Bert Michelson who's here today oversaw that whole project god bless him for his service to this church and it became a sanctuary that held 3,000 people it's a few smaller now because people are larger today I'm just a truth teller it was a wide load and so so it's now more like 2,600 people depending on who those people are so he's asked to join the International Council on biblical inerrancy I've already talked about that under dr. Sproul he's being recognized around the country as this young brilliant articulate passionate Kreacher the Word of God if you ever if you've ever heard any of those old tapes by John MacArthur it'll blow dry your hair I'm telling you I mean he has come in full force he's talking so fast that when I was a young man starting in the ministry I would you know mail my little check out here and a month later I'd get these little cassette tapes that would show up and I'd put a little tape player and I would have you know start stop start stop and transcribe the messages it would take one of his sermons would become three of my sermons okay because he's talking so fast and he but he was just electrifying in his passionate preaching and so God's hand is is is upon the work and upon the ministry and everything is exploding and it all comes back to his commitment to the Word of God God will honor the man who honors his word it won't always end up like this there are many pastors who will always pastor smaller churches and are just as faithful to the Word of God but it's just that it's in the sovereignty of God that God chose to blow the doors off this place and that there would be an exponential growth so that it would be a ministry to churches around the world and so that's what took place here and people took these cassette tapes and it was found out in Baltimore Maryland on the other side of the continent that somebody was took this tape to the radio station and just like put it in a cassette tape and with like a little microphone and began to play john macarthur messages on the radio in a very non-professional non-technical way and grace doesn't even know this macarthur doesn't even know this but that is the birth of the grace to you radio ministry it's just something God did I mean it wasn't like ten men got together in a room and this is our strategy to try to reach the world I mean God was dealing the deck and it's just something that God established from the very beginning that was 1978-1979 Clayton herb comes to be the minister of music and in 1979 as things are exploding there's internal conflict again and you just need to know this there was a staff rebellion there was jealousy among the other staff over John's popularity John's success and it was rubbing some of the staff members in the wrong way and people are wanting to talk to John not wanting to talk to them and he comes to the staff meeting and says I just want you to know you're some of the best friends I've ever had and they said to him if you think we're your friends you've got another thing coming they took it to the elders and John had to dismiss himself from the elders meeting and went down the hall and was was gone for three hours to let the elders sort it out and in the end they affirmed John's leadership and affirmed the carnality of these other men it's known as black Tuesday around here and I think in some ways that that is always in the back of John's mind because he values loyalty and allegiance well in this decade of the 1970s if you can put that up hee hee I made a list of all the sermons he preached all the series that he preached and all the books that he preached yeah so so so here we go Gospel of John 78 sermons acts 103 sermons Hebrews 43 superiority of Christ 7 second coming of Christ 23 sermons Galatians 24 is the Bible reliable 12 God Satan in angels 9 first Corinthians 81 sermons Colossians 23 Zechariah 19 the charismatic movement 12 spiritual boot camp for Ephesians 60 sermons Gospel of Matthew 226 and Daniel 31 I mean he strapped himself into the pulpit of Grace Community Church and he just preached and preached and preached and preached and the people came and came and came and the people were saved and saved and saved and they were sanctified and they grew and and and it was something that only God could have done he began to write books and I've just made a list this is in the 1970s of of the books that that that he wrote and in these books you can see the list there there's no need for me to read all of these titles but you can see all of these titles and it's just becoming obvious that the hand of God is upon his his ministry this would be enough this would be more just the 1970s this would be more than just almost any pastor could ever dream of happening through their life in ministry but it's only the launching pad for what is to follow let me take us through the 80s and then we'll take a break okay if you're looking a little tired okay just as I nothing personal you're just looking a little tired so let's start the 1980s John McArthur Grace Community Church the 1980s his ministry is deepening there there's an expanding outreach by 1980 so he's only been here 11 years the grace the grace community I mean grace T who produced its one millionth tape I mean that that's just unbelievable and by 1981 it was two million tapes so in just one year it doubled and then in 1984 it was 5 million tapes I mean the point of comparison I'm up now to in my lifetime there have been 17 tapes have been bought of my sermons okay and 15 of those were by my mother okay so just to put this in perspective so John McArthur has got five billion tapes by 1984 most of you weren't even born by 1984 and and so this thing is so expanding that grace to you when I first came out here in 1982 the tapes were sold right over here in that little tiny house well or it's not even a house it's like it looks like a book Shack you know it's just a tiny little thing they had to move to another location just because the production was so demanding and in the the members of grace volunteered to make the tapes and so this is like a family operation and mailing out these these tapes and in 1980 Shepherds conference started so it started with less than two hundred men and and meeting over here in the chapel and I graduated from seminary in 1980 and I remember in 1982 one of the elders in our church said to me I ought to come out here for a Shepherd's conference so I remember flying out here in 1982 and landing at LAX Airport first person I met was a higher accretion or trying to witness to me but coming here to the Shepherd's conference and meeting over there and there's only 200 of us and but hearing dr. MacArthur preach this is like nothing I've ever heard in my life this is so biblical this is so right this is so true and so Shepherds conference began and I mean you know the rest of the story I mean we had over 4,000 people here just you know a month ago and from all over the world all 50 states and the year before last we had 67 nations represented here and when you stand up to preach it's like you're in the UN as their translators in two different languages well it all started just just right over there in the the little chapel and John MacArthur just being faithful to the Word of God to teach the Word of God grace school started here things are just happening and and grace to you is growing so fast that satellite offices are beginning to pop up around the world just spontaneously in Singapore and New Zealand and South Africa and in Canada and in Australia that the ministry of this pulpit is just going around the world and this is like 1981 before things are really ramped up and and going John B is asked to serve on the board at Moody Bible and he does and he completes an 8-year study of Matthew and in 1986 he becomes the president of the Masters College or 1985 and in 1986 the Masters seminary and it's at this time that he writes that provocative book the Gospel according to Jesus III I think it should be renamed the shot heard around the world and John to dr. McCarthy let me just read you a couple quotes the Gospel according to Jesus was part of the early movement that eventually blossomed into the reformed movement because this is an essential part of reformed theology he says salvation is the work of God and is a complete work and his work encompasses repentance and confession of Jesus as Lord and Submission and an obedient heart and loving the Lord that's all the work of salvation what they had come up with referring to those who are of a non lordship non repentance persuasion what they had come up with was a truncated superficial kind of salvation that didn't really meet the minimum for a real salvation when God says he works repentance in the heart he works submission into the heart he brings about a confession of Jesus as Lord and a willingness to obey and a love for the Lord in a in a transform life that was all the work of God and to pull anything out of that was a frontal attack on the true gospel and an attack on the sovereign saving work of God so so dr. MacArthur is entering the fray of this battle to uphold the glory of God and do you know that that's exactly what John Calvin did in the Reformation after he was run out of Geneva after only two years in 1538 he he goes to to Strasbourg and he's called upon to to write a defense for the Reformation against the Roman Catholic Church and where Luther began with the doctrine of justification by faith alone to uphold the true gospel John Calvin went to an even higher mountain peak to the glory of God which is over justification by faith and John Calvin attacked the the the Catholic Church that they robbed god of his glory that they desecrate the glory of God by their man-centered approach to earning your own salvation well what was burning in Calvin's soul was burning in John MacArthur's soul and he understood that it was an attack on the true sovereign saving work of God and his glory and the idea that you can ask Jesus to be your savior and save you from hell and then live any way you want that's antinomianism it's an overstatement of grace it's almost like God celebrates your sin because it lets him put his grace on display now there's so much to be said and time does not permit but but John just he is he is mr. valiant for the faith he is a contender for the faith and and he took on this issue but God used his stance to protect the period of the gospel but God also used it to allowed him to allow him to have an an even greater expanse of influence for the Word of God and then at the same time he wrote a book called the charismatic s' and as Patricia once said can't you ever write a book that everyone likes and so he in living out here and you know as it's been called la-la-land living out here where the whole charismatic movement was birthed and started John had to address this issue here and what she did wonderfully and in the book the charismatic switch then became charismatic chaos and so during this decade of the 80s he finishes Matthew he does Romans a hundred and twenty four sermons tree worship in fact one of the first Shepherd's conferences as I came to that had just come off the shelf and ultimate priority was the book anatomy of a church that was one of the Shepherd's conferences that I first came to that's 1983 true worship 1982 first Timothy James you can see it on the screen heaven second Timothy Philippians first Peter spiritual growth seven steps spiritual stability whatever happened to the holy spirit and then put up the books that he wrote the books that he wrote in the 1980s this is going to take several PowerPoint slides I just want to impress you with how productive he was in generating not only expository sermons but flowing out of his expository sermons are these books and these books are going far and wide and he is in the process of becoming the leading influencer for expository preaching in the world

Channel: Caleb Bass

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Keywords: steven lawson, steve lawson, steve lawson john macarthur, john macarthur biography, life and ministry of john macarthur, 50 years grace community church, john macarthur sermon, steven lawson sermon, legacy of john macarthur, john macarthur memoirs, rc sproul, martyn lloyd jones, men who rocked the world, steven lawson lecture, steven lawson teaching, expository preaching, greatest preachers, best preachers, best sermons, caleb bass

Id: FK1CSaXkHMg

Length: 59min 41sec (3581 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 03 2020