The State of the Church: An Interview with John MacArthur

i wanna just take a moment and welcome you once again especially our online audience since this is you know technically an online only event um a few stragglers have wandered into the worship center just so you have a it's been happening a lot lately that's funnier than some of you realize uh so welcome to our q a session this afternoon uh it's always a privilege to sit with you john and and talk to you about what what you've been thinking and it's most appropriate that we're we're having this conversation for pastors at the state of the church event this is definitely a non-shepherds conference not only is it a thin crowd but there's no good snacks and the music has been terrible today um because we don't have any music so it's just not shepherd's conference it's so we long for the return of that and we're hopeful to do that in august but yeah we do have a lot to talk about from the past year the last time you were doing a q a with pastors on this stage was in march of 2020 a fateful year so i think it'd be helpful for you to walk through what that year has been like for you as pastor of grace community church your 52nd year in ministry here has been a doozy yeah i think the most unusual year of the 52 by far there are points in the first 50 where you know certain issues arose like 9 11 or the fall of jimmy swaggart or you know an earthquake and people died in southern california you sort of stop and address those things and there's a there's a long list of sermons that i have preached addressing current issues even wars and elections and things like that but nothing that has gone on for an entire year it's like we've been in a war for a year and uh so in in sort of a um a low-level spurgeon-esque effort instead of going through a book i've just had to come up with a different sermon every week for for a year um it's it's a tough thing to do but it would be tougher if there weren't such obvious widespread exigencies going on around me that needed to be addressed from scripture so that's what i've i've tried to do you you know jesus said to the pharisees you can tell the weather but you can't tell the signs of the times and i think preaching to the signs of the times is very important you can't ignore those things or people think you're out of touch and they want the word of god applied to the issues that they're facing so that's been an exciting thing to have people come with almost baited breath every week waiting to have a biblical perspective on what's going on all around them and the other thing that's been amazing is as people started to come back we were empty for the first couple of months and then people started coming back on their own and now there's this massive crowd that shows up here every sunday and they have for months and months and months and the joy is palpable as you know when we start the service they start clapping out of sheer joy and gratitude that they're able to meet without mass and social distancing and people aren't sick and nobody's dying and the plague hasn't hit us and you know the sky hasn't fallen in the city of l.a has taken us to court 12 times and they can't shut us down and they try to take away our parking instead of that the synagogue down the street gives us their hundred spaces and so we got more and the month ago they told us they were gonna take the parking lot across the wash and turn it into a homeless encampment to penalize us and i said that'd be great we just have seminary students go over there all day and evangelize all those homeless people and um so it's it's you know we've been fighting on one hand with the government but at the same time it we have been so amazingly protected they have not been able to fine us at all because they can't get past the first amendment issue of free exercise of religion until that's litigated in a court nothing else applies to us and that was kind of the the strategy so i don't know how much money mark did we put in an escrow account for the health department ten thousand how often uh well one thousand so they find us a thousand dollars per the last ten weeks uh which is fine we'll take that it goes into an escrow account they they can't get it because they haven't been able to litigate around the first amendment um the goodwill in the community is amazing because we have a new category of people called grace refugees who have poured into here from other churches that are closed and they found out that this is a church like no other church they've been to and you know the goal of our instruction is love from a pure heart and what they find is sound doctrine produces loving people so it's it's been the greatest time of church growth in the history of grace church and i think that you know you've you've been preparing for this your whole life unknowingly i mean this battle this year it's just it just so happens you're a you're a warrior you're a fighter by nature you're a guy who's always been defending and always been critiquing what what's you perceive to be a threat to the church and so now a time has come upon our church and upon the churches around the world that their freedoms are being taken away from them under the guise of public safety and and health public health whatever that is and and so how do you think that god has prepped you for this we're grateful you're here macarthur because there's not a lot of people at the forefront of this resistance well at my age it's good to be here but it's even better to know you're here so and to know you're here um yeah i don't know i don't feel like i'm engaged in any different battle than i've ever been in i just i feel like you have to do what's right and you have to be reasonable and sensible and when when our people began to realize that this this they were being lied to and that 99 of the people who get coveted and are going to be fine they didn't believe the narrative so on their own they just started coming back and coming back and coming back and um the health department at one point said they found three people who tested positive in our church and said we were i don't know they put us on a list of places where there was an outbreak three people and a couple of weeks later they removed us from that because they came back and you know that was that was it so the lord has protected us i i couldn't have predicted that necessarily that we wouldn't have more people being ill it's gone through our congregation to whatever degree it was symptomatically or asymptomatically and we've continued to meet and so i don't think this is some miracle i just think this is looking at reality and we talked to people who knew what that reality was and i was following what the courts were saying because we were litigating it in court and the attorneys were on our defense were going into court saying look 99 of the people who who get this recovered that is not that is not a pandemic that is not a plague and so we decided that for all the all the reasons that we need which is the lord commands us to meet and to preach his truth and if people are fearful all the more reason to do that so that's what we've been doing all along and while we haven't had you know say what james coats has had taken off into in shackles into prison up in canada for whatever reason the lord has allowed me to continue to preach and even people in the health department are more supportive of our church than they are the health department they're embarrassed by what the health department's doing we we definitely are a thorn in the sight of the of the godless politicians who would want to shut us down but they haven't been able to find a way to do it yeah it's interesting to see what this year has brought out in churches and you've heard from a lot of pastors both thanking you for your stand and also from those who've asked for your help because their churches are divided in this time between mass squares anti-mass squares between those who think the church should do more or is is doing too much and so there's there's something about this era that's exposed in churches a kind of disunity a fragile sort of fellowship and what we've experienced here after being shut down for 10 weeks or whatever it was and then coming back i mean the people are just so excited about fellowship but we've experienced folks who've who've struggled with with that and we've done a lot at our church to mitigate you know for those who feel more comfortable outside if you notice there's a enormous tent in our parking lot sure um for those of you who are visiting but so so talk about the issues of unity is this is was this just something that was always in the church is there danger of disunity and this kind of exposed it or is it this particular issue why why are so many pastors struggling with divisive people in this in this time yeah well i think you get into trouble if you try to make one size fits all because there are people with reasonable fear they have comorbidities they there are other people with unreasonable fear but it's fear nonetheless so we have not heaped scorn on people who chose not to come and there's probably 700 people who haven't been back to grace church they their spots have been filled by probably three times that amount of people but we've ministered to them we've nurtured them we've kept in contact with them we've shepherded them and if there are people who who choose to wear a mask there were a few at the beginning and the more people came back and they were fine the less masks there are but we never mocked that we never wanted to make people who had reasonable or unreasonable fears feel second class or feel like they were you know not obeying the lord so uh we we just wanted people to do whatever they felt comfortable doing and if they didn't want to come back at all we still would reach out and minister to them and take food to them and do whatever we could so i think i mean that that's part of leadership is everybody grows at a different pace and everybody is not the same in terms of the same fears and the same issues in their life and we didn't want anybody to feel like there was something spiritually wrong with them if they chose a mask or chose to go out in the tent or sit out in the patio so we made all those possibilities available to them but we didn't want to dictate something that's extra biblical to our people you must wear a mask or you must not wear a mask we wouldn't go that route because our whole point is we're we're going to worship with freedom and these things are not going to define our worship they're not allowed to inform our worship and as time goes on and people keep coming and coming all that begins to change they they lose those fears they're traded in for trust and and they see everybody happy and healthy and flourishing and i remember the sunday we brought back a thousand children who hadn't been here right and um it was just an amazing day we had balloons all over the campus to welcome the children we gave them all big lollipops and kids were coming to me and thanking they didn't share the lollipops they were individual lollipops still still a germaphobe over here i mean macarthur you led the way for i mean look at look who's following you now texas is following you florida is following you louisiana i mean they're all following macarthur he called it i just think if you're going to lead you need to lead you need to get out on the front of it not the back end of it where you're standing you're operating in fear of everything the health department says you know you're lagging behind that and that just cultivates the fear among your people uh you know the the commodity that we have and it's really all we have is the truth and you could say well that's biblical truth yeah but it extends to being able to analyze reality as well so you know i wanted our people to know that the truth was not what they were being told and so from time to time i would i would tell them those statistics those kinds of things and they began to realize that um what is going on has very little to do with the bug and a whole lot to do with crushing the country for the whims of those elite who are in power to gain more power it's a weird revolution most revolutions come from the bottom up the the abused people riot this is a revolution from the top down the people at the top who have all the power want more power and so they're crushing the people even more below them uh this is a different kind of revolution yeah i think covet is a reality and um we don't want to deny it but there are lots of other challenges in life where we face the reality of death without doing so much damage right and i mean you've been prophetic in talking about how these lockdowns are not only ineffective but they destroy livelihoods and they've caused a lot of problems meanwhile well we're all facing this year there's also been this massive racial surge of discussion of injustice of systemic racism this has become maybe even you know alongside of the covid thing the huge national narrative and you started talking about this in 2018 i think was when you start started to address critical theory and it was then that i think only university students were talking about it but you saw it creeping into the church early on so why don't we also include that into the the wonderful experience that 2020 has been well yeah i uh i think when you standardize indictments and guilt based upon anyone's ethnicity or color or anything like that that's that's not related to reality so um i reject all of that is there injustice in the world of course that's why the kingdom of righteousness isn't going to come until the righteous king gets here but again what i was trying to say earlier this morning is you can't fix it only christ can fix it but along the way we can fix the hearts and souls of the people who are caught up in all the injustice of the world by bringing them the gospel of christ so we have to rescue people one soul at a time we can't change societal structure there's plenty plenty of evidence of the corruption of the crt and neo-marxism and i mentioned offhand it comes from philosophers from 300 years ago were godless christless immoral people who devised all of these things but i but in the original reaction i did a series on ezekiel 18 because i wanted to point out that the heart and soul of the the gospel starts with one's understanding of guilt and it's not collective guilt and it's not racial guilt it's personal guilt and if you take people off the hook for their own sinfulness you you cut them off from the gospel yeah so it's very important that people don't get away with blaming some uh some problem in their life on what somebody did to their grand great grandfather 200 years ago but part of the trend is to make everybody into a victim we talk about that a lot victimology and um the the scripture would say you're not a victim of anything but your own corruption well sure we all have to deal with the difficulties and being treated unkindly and unfairly and but in the end of the day god's going to hold you responsible for your sin you're not going to be responsible for something your ancestor did you're not going to be able to blame the the the weaknesses and failures of your life on some something passed down to you in some kind of identity so i i just thought that if people will always try to make an excuse for being the way they are and the lord never lets them do that yeah it's it's mark's gospel it's not what goes into the man that defiles him it's what comes out of the man that defiles him you you if you were all alone in the world you'd be defiled yeah you don't need any history to be defiled you are defiled and that's where the gospel has to start mac you've been addressing things that other pastors i think are scared to talk about at times because there's so much tension and there's so many headlines about these things and you've been remarkably consistent you've acknowledged all throughout that racism is a terrible evil that it's the sin of of partiality in james ii or malice or strife various other you know manifestations of that but you've also made it very clear that that critical theory especially as it's embraced by christians or syncretized with with christianity as vicious and identity politics are problematic and you've talked about the marxist roots and that this isn't going to remove the stain of racism this isn't going to transform human hearts you've made that really clear why is this so attractive to evangelicals why do they why are they why do they think that this may have something for them that's going to help them is it is it because of evangelism is it because why why is this because for for a long time they've been drinking the kool-aid of thinking you need to win over the culture in order to bring people to christ whether it's um truncating the gospel or creating a inoffensive message whether it's joel osteen standing up and saying god exists for one purpose and that is to fulfill your dreams that that's a message you can sell to a whole bunch of sinners because it has no offensive character in it so i think pragmatism has taken over the church to such a degree that people actually assume that you can't reach people um unless you somehow bridge whatever there is that stands in the way of uh of the gospel and the assumption is uh for some people it could be um that they don't like the style so they don't like the music so they don't like a talking head so let's do some cool things and we'll bridge that way for other people they got all these racial issues and because they relate them to maybe christianity in some way we we've got to build the bridge across the racial divide we've got to confront the social issues um the the church is what i was saying this morning the church has always always been sucked into the lie that somehow there is in the world a way that the kingdom of darkness can help the kingdom of light and i think i don't think people do this knowing they're getting seduced i think they do it thinking it's going to access the gospel what does access the gospel is love on a personal level and i would never advocate anything less than that and compassion and sympathy and understanding when jesus came into the world it was obvious to him that people suffered and that's why he healed people and that's why he fed hungry people and he was showing the compassion of god toward those who suffer physically and i think that's a reasonable thing so we reach out to those people but that's not the gospel the the gospel is the gospel of salvation by faith in christ repentance and faith in christ when when the church gets too involved in that then you get the social gospel which destroyed all the denominations and and has now just essentially destroyed evangelicalism current evangelicalism is uh it has no relationship to the evangelicalism of 10 years ago because of the social justice issue and the evangelicalism of 10 years ago had little connection to the evangelicalism of 15 years before that because pragmatism hadn't come in so there's always the temptation to cross the divide between the kingdom of light and the kingdom of darkness and borrow things from the kingdom of darkness that think you that you think are going to aid you i mean jerry falwell believed that right that he believed that um you know if we're going to reach the world we've got to have a christian president a christian congress and a christian senate that has nothing to do with the kingdom of god and what you do in terms of social change lobbying hard and fast for social change and giving too much of your time to that has nothing to do with the kingdom of god that's why paul said we preached christ and him crucified there's a singularity in our focus we we do it with love and compassion that's i think what's so remarkable what we said this morning is you were talking about separation and maybe some people are used to hearing that word on the lips of the fundamentalists you know the their separation is boycott disengage move to the woods you know that that's not the kind of separation you're talking about you're talking about engaging with the truth and only the truth it's a separation from their methods and tools and right exactly it's it's not the classic second degree third degree separation i don't cooperate with people who cooperate with liberals i don't cooperate with people who cooperate with people who cooperate with people who cooperate with liberals and you know fourth degree separation that is not what it is it is thinking that there's anything in the darkness that's going to help the light anything we have everything we need here in the book and in the power of the holy spirit and if we're faithful to that the work of the kingdom advances it's without being conscious of all these crazy identities it's amazing how the church grows and our church looks like los angeles this looks like l.a because the lord is saving people from every tongue tribe and nation in l.a and this is how the church looks and we don't we don't play the race card in any sense but the lord draws his people together and that's i think what was so clarifying about this morning is is you're talking about the kingdom is exclusive to the cross and not only does it accompany suffering that there's not a way to mitigate that from what we're doing right and that was the other main point i was trying to make was that if you're if you try to remove the offense you're doing the devil's work right and that's what peter was saying you don't need to die you would you just usually the the triumph the victory the the path to the crown is the cross if any man will come after me let him deny himself take up his cross follow me that's assumed all to live godly in this present generation will suffer that's it's that's assumed because you're confronting people as jesus said and telling them that their deeds are evil and they hate you because you tell them their deeds are evil the first thing you want to say to a person is that when you introduce the gospel is that you want to tell them they need to repent for their sin that's where you start you need to tell them inform them of the danger they're in and the fact that they need to repent of their sin and then you want to tell them about the gospel and if they repent and believe they'll be forgiven and they'll escape the judgment of god and an abundant life will be theirs so everything has to start with that and if you've got people who don't take responsibility for their own condition and their own sin you're cutting them off at the front end of the gospel yeah so what i'm hearing you say is i think the same thing that you've been known for your whole ministry whether it's talking about a government overreach in our weird orwellian society or whether it's crt infiltrating the church or whether it's back to your battle against uh psychology and integration of that into christian counseling i mean you've always been saying that the scripture is all we need the sufficiency of scripture it seems to be the theme throughout is that also i mean it tied into tied into all the battles you fought that's are you a one string guitar macarthur is that yeah there's no question about that i have no other source i have no other i have nothing to offer i have nothing in me that's intuitive that rises to the level of scripture you know once i get outside of this book i'm i'm wandering in la la land so it isn't just this book but it's this book rightly divided and correctly interpreted and it it drives that every er every human need and every problem and offers the divine solution so without necessarily of you know sort of addressing every single problem by name you teach the word of god and the word of god builds up the saints and they become strong in their spiritual life and walking in the spirit and that that sort of takes care of all the specific issues so like uh i don't know that i could say this with same conviction 50 years ago but after a half a century of teaching the word of god to a congregation and seeing what it does it has exceeded anything i could ever have imagined and now i'm beginning to teach the fourth generation here right so i've seen the work of the word and as i said earlier the goal of our instruction is love from a pure heart and that's what you get sound doctrine produces a pure heart which produces a loving people um it takes a while to see that flourish you know in a group this large but that's that's exactly what we've seen and i'm not oblivious to the issues in the world i mean we live in the world it's not like i have to people say to me what do you read to get in touch with what's going on in the world i don't have to i don't have to read anything it's just it comes at me i can't fight it off but occasionally i do read those kinds of things and you're aware of what's going on but the answers are all the same you go back to the word of god are you foreseeing this issue the current issue being something that's going to split evangelicalism is evangelicalism originally we're going to do the conference theme on reclaiming evangelicalism why don't you give us a sneak peek of kind of what you're thinking about the future of evangelicalism is it going to be woke and not woke or how's this going to work um evangelicalism is such a big tent now i don't know that it means anything rc i used to talk about that rc sprole and we both agreed we needed a new name and um you know we threw around a bunch of names from time to time and he finally came up with imputationists and i said that's not going to work people think we cut off their limbs right so sperl didn't make a lot of mistakes but that was one of them yeah so so we decided we decided we had the conversation with you and maybe we should come up with a new name and we said well let's see take another run that was the idea another run at saving evangelicalism as a term um but it's it's hard it's hard to define it because the world sees it as a very broad term that includes everything from joel osteen to ravi zacharias so i don't want to be in that group right i don't really want to be in that group so give me a new name give me a new group um but you love the evangel of it yeah that's that's what you're saying is that's the only thing that's going to change right this the hearts of the people in this world is that so that's why i don't want to let go of it it's a better word than fundamentalist you know no fun too much damn and not enough mental that doesn't really you know that word is that although it is used in in scripture it uh it has been polluted with the narrowness and pharisees and all that right but the evangel is the evangel yuan gelidzo the preached the gospel so we decided to try to hang on to that word and see if we could purify it i noticed last week that tabiti and you wheelie did an interview with the guy and said for the first time he's announcing that he's no longer an evangelical because evangelicalism is not woke enough for him so you have that extreme where a guy wants to abandon evangelicalism altogether because it's not woke enough and then you've got joel osteen who's another breed of cat who's an evangelical and then you you've got everything from a to z in there so what we were thinking of doing was reclaiming the sort of biblical definitions of evangelical and again going back to an evangelical as somebody who preaches the gospel that comes out of the word of god and is committed to the authority and inerrancy of scripture and these are the people who are going to be driven by the word not by the world they're going to be driven by the scriptures and they're willing to pay the price for it you talked a little bit about our our dear brother james coates and other alumni you know have contacted you that have experienced significant persecution uh tim cantrell in south africa i know that you've been in touch with him and talk a little bit about how this commitment to to evangelism to to you angelia you know this is the gospel commitment uh let's talk about some of the the manifestations of suffering these brothers are enduring well it was an interesting thing that was an article came out in the alberta media that the same prison that james coats is in they released a convicted sex offender yeah child molester and the police put out a bulletin that was in the newspapers that they were convinced that when he got out of jail he'd do it again so they kept james they've kept james locked up in prison who's a preacher of the gospel and they've led a child molester loose um um so while they want to attribute this as to some health issue the truth of the matter is there is hostility toward the gospel and that's that's inevitable if you're faithful james is faithful and so this is inevitable um and the lord has used it to double or triple the size of his church while he's in prison that's incredible yeah so people are people you know i i've i think i wrote an article for the daily wire that just popped up yesterday um along the lines of maybe the the kind of pop christianity era is over because the persecution is going to get ramped up um if they pass the equality act which is likely if not now soon we're we're all going to be you know in violation of the law if we don't have lgbtq access to everything we do um and a whole lot of other you know things what they've done is criminalize righteousness and legalize sin yeah so everything is so flipped in the world that we can't navigate this world without violating the law that means that christianity is is not going to be popular people are going to pay a price to be a christian and that means that there's no sense of pretending to be one i mean what's the value why would you pretend to be a christian if people resented christianity so it has a way of sort of filtering the hypocrites out so i think in that sense it's it's a plus it's a positive thing i i can't i was listening to joel osteen the other day just for a few minutes on television making promises that were absolute lies he was just saying you can you'll be this and do this and you can do this and and you know people are locked up with masks on and they can't go anywhere and he's telling them they can become anything they want and their dreams can become fulfilled it just sounded stupid just plain stupid and people know it's not true so i i think the phony stuff the you know all the prophets who prophesied the election of trump and all the healers there was a healer out here sunday out at the driveway we all coming in said jesus heals jesus heals and i said you know why isn't he over at the hospital yeah nobody's sick here but there's a whole hospital two blocks away where people are sick so the the the superficial phoniness in the the serious times like this uh when people are asking really profound questions and there's an elevation in suicide and mental illness and all that i just don't know how that flies in the future i don't know how that survives as persecution ramps up it purifies the church and i think this is a great time to be alive if people are faithful to proclaim the gospel if you're stuck on the woke end of this thing you what you have to say is about as useless as reading a phone book yeah you that daily wire article two things one it always blows my mind whenever you come in and say i was listening to charles stanley this morning or i was watching joel osteen macarthur why do you do that to yourself is it does it just fuel you do you turn on tbn for a second is it just kind of is it like kind of a red bull for you uh yeah i think it just kind of charges me up okay because you were you were lacking that passion you know so i'm glad that you found something that would motivate your your fight uh okay sorry that wasn't a real question here's here's the real question so i'm looking at that daily wire article and and that's one of many opportunities and we'll highlight some of those things that have come as a result of this this lockdown and and our stand to keep our church open there's been so many opportunities at our church and then nationally for you but daily wire articles are one of those and those are getting a lot of a lot of people reading those that haven't read us before so this is one of the lines you put in there scripture says it's a mark of apostasy when preachers cater to people who will not tolerate sound biblical teaching but demand to have their ears tickled with half-truths and fables it's a great sentence is that the state of preaching today yeah for the most part i think that's that's the popular preaching i can't say that in every case but the media dominate the media is dominated the religious media is dominated by absolutely useless preaching that can be defined that way it's very hard to find any serious handling of scripture in media forms of christianity in mega churches as such uh yeah and i think um underlying that look it's a simple thing to to say but if you're a preacher you preach what you have the most confidence in because you're trying to persuade people and if you have most confidence in the scripture you're you're a preacher of the bible if you have most confidence in yourself you preach yourself it doesn't take it doesn't take much discernment to listen to a guy and know if he's making it up as he goes they make it sound biblical by finding a scripture they can use as a pretext and jumping off of it and not explaining the scripture but using it as a pretext for some other idea but no yeah i mean i'm serious in saying that the problem in evangelicalism at this point is if you said to the average non-believer what is an evangelical the names they would give you would all be rejected by you you'd say well well no no not that guy not that guy uh not this for i said to some some people some time ago i said i don't know if it weren't for jesus i don't know if i could sell evangelical christianity to anybody yeah but if it had to depend on the on the lineup you know the popular lineup you've got some of them that are up to their eyeballs in politics in washington and that irritates the daylights out of all the democrat sinners on their way to hell and you've got some of them who are narcissistic self-promoters and that irritates any people with any sense of propriety and humility and where do you find just the the truth coming through so it it's um it's not that it isn't out there it's just that it it's not it's not as visual it's not to say that there aren't faithful pastors in lots of places but the form of evangelicalism that comes across in the dominant media is a misrepresentation of scripture well there's a big difference between expository preaching and preachers who say the bible says you don't like it when guys say the bible says no i don't don't don't tell me what the bible says let the bible say it yeah which i mean this you read us the whole book of exodus this morning so you are modeling that you don't just reference well exodus says we should be separate now you you proved it yeah well i don't i don't like and i hear preachers say that the the bible says this the bible says that why would i believe you let the bible say it but you're not going to let the bible say it unless you expose it it's good why should i believe you you can say the bible says but how do i know the bible says so that's one big step removed from what you ought to be doing you ought to be letting the bible speak and in expository not only reading it that's why you're supposed to read the scripture but explaining the meaning of the text lets the bible speak i mean when you were listening this morning to second corinthians 6 14 to 7 1 who was talking to you me or was god speaking through his word as you unpack that text god speaks that is far different than me saying the bible says you guys ought to be separated that's that has no authority that has no power uh let let god say in his own words and that's your commitment has been just to follow up on that i hear preachers say the bible says the bible says the bible says and that's putting way too much weight on the preacher don't tell me that how do i know how do i know that this this is an assumed authority good it's also a sign of laziness because it's hard work to let the bible speak yeah training preachers is your legacy you've invested your life not only in the hard work of preaching from this pulpit but you've entrusted that work to to men represented by these guys here by are more than a thousand graduates from the master seminary and you've poured your life into to teaching guys to preach to entrusting to them and i think one of the things that you've been saying a lot lately is you want to see more reproduction of faithfulness as you look at your the decade that you're in of your life and have all these decades of faithfulness and of investing in men encourage the guys here today that they need to be doing this as well talk about your passion for training men for investing in men for raising up more bible preachers well what comes to my mind is the illustration i mentioned to you that a few weeks ago i have a new little great-grandson he's the latest edition of john mcarthur john owen macarthur and he's 14 months and he made his first tour around grace church on a sunday he just got to walking and so he started at the fountain and he's going all the way around the building after church dodging people's legs and grabbing a pant leg to hold himself up while his dad was trailing him and seeing where he's going and somebody said to me oh my goodness that little boy it's what a sad thing that had to be born into this time but the world is badly uh as bad off as it is and i said no this is the time that god designed him for this is his time this is our time we've come to the kingdom for just this time as this this is not a time for weakness this is a time for strength um and i tell the the students at the seminary the same thing this is your time step up yeah but it's not a time for cowards it's it's it's time for for men who are willing to contend earnestly for the faith but do it with grace and love and uh and compassion and kindness um i i don't think i i just think weak preachers are going to have a hard time one of the challenges i've had through my whole ministry is trying to help the church and pastors get the gospel right the gospel according to jesus according to the apostles according to paul according to god ashamed of the gospel always in a lot of books calling the church back to biblical fidelity and faithfulness and it seemed to me always an uphill climb because you could be so successful if you were if your theology was bad and even your gospel was bad you could still be very successful you could have a mega church um i'm not sure that's going to be the same in the future i i'm not sure you can pull off a fake kind of christianity for two reasons reason number one is is um that i don't think people are going to attach to that i think life is more serious than that nor do they want to be persecuted for something that's superficial and secondly it's hard to hide with the internet um even i i i get hammered and beat up by all kinds of things that aren't true on the internet and i said to some guys the other day i said do you think if the apostle paul was alive today he'd be he'd be attacked by social media the apostle paul absolutely well absolutely he was attacked but by whatever mechanisms they had then he's always defending himself against these people who say he has a secret hidden life of shame shame he's in it for the money he's falsified his converts he doesn't have the credentials from jerusalem i mean he suffered all of that people forsook him people criticized him they added pain to his chains philippians 1. if if paul was alive today he would be the most attacked christian on social media because that's what the devil uses so you have to expect that but it takes it takes some courage and conviction not to defend yourselves but to let your life be its own defense and to be faithful to preach the truth um this is a time for people who don't compromise and we've seen that in james coats and others like him who are saying look you do what you will if you let me out he's like john bunyan they told bunyan you can walk out of the jail if you don't preach and they told james the same thing he said i'll go right back to the church and preach so this is and again guys this is your time because god brought you to the kingdom for just such time as this so step up and be the man you need to be that's good and open your church amen mac we've seen god's faithfulness in this last year in our local church in bringing people to faith in christ we're seeing people come forward in in baptism we're adding members to the church and it's been i mean a lot of work for for our pastors and elders to to meet all these people and and be with you know fun interview them get to know them help them plug in and that's been a real joy for us some people refugees but some people just you know hurting and looking for hope and so that's been one of the great fruitful evidences of god's grace among us this last year there's also been some projects that we've worked on and one that i know you want to talk to the guys about there's a there's a translation of the bible that you i think you need to explain it to the guys yeah i'm i'm holding in my hand the the first product which is the new testament psalms and proverbs the legacy standard version um legacy standard bible uh so how did this come about well yeah the nas which i've used for years the the people at the lochman foundation decided they want to do an update on the nas to the nas 2020 from the nas 95 so 25 years later they they were going to release it i think it may be available now they sent some copies of it to me and said we want you to take a look at this and see what you think and i read it and i said no we could never use this could never use it um it it followed the the path of almost all modern translations and it went in the direction of the reader it was reader sensitive so they were altering words and phrases to accommodate shifts in language and what the reader's understanding might be so there's only two ways you can go in translation you need to go forward to the reader and so you keep changing it because you're chasing the vernacular of the reader or you go back to the writer and the only correct way to translate the bible is to go back to the source and go to the authorial intent it's it's not the job of the translator to produce a text that accommodates the reader the bridge between the original author and therefore the original text and the reader is the preacher and the teacher that's what we do i don't want somebody taking the text and altering it to accommodate a reader that's that's wrong to start with so when i saw the nas going in that direction i we made a plea to the lachman foundation we let us do a version of this that goes back even more uh carefully and thoughtfully and tightly to the original text yeah and they granted us the permission to do it and it's incredible dr abner chow and faculty at the seminary and the university six scholars worked one year and and did it all in one year that's an epic epic work never never heard of anything like that being done in a year and it i think it's the best english translation it's ever been and not because of them but because of the process they went through massive massive amount of materials behind every verse that they researched to get it right so a translation should be a window on the original and it shouldn't be a stained glass window shouldn't be opaque shouldn't be fancied up it's just a window on the original this is that yeah as close as it can get give some examples of some of the things that they'll see in a translation like this one that they wouldn't see in in say another there's lots of translations in english what makes this one well this one is distinct immediately because in in exodus 3 15 god says my name is yahweh my name is i am and that is to be my memorial name in other words god's saying that's the name i want you to remember and and there's no english bible that includes that so you read lord adonai and then you read the lord lord which is really yahweh adonai two different words but both translated lord one uppercase one lowercase so they've obliterated the covenant name of god i am that i am which is it's god saying i want you to know my name i want you to know my name my name is not allah my name is not any other name my name is yahweh i am meaning the eternally existing one the the first cause the sovereign one and when you read the psalms it's jarring actually to read that but as for me my prayer is to you o yahweh that's his covenant name by which he wants us to know him uh oh god in the abundance of your lovingkindness answer me with the truth of your salvation answer me o yahweh for your lovingkindness is good and yahweh appears 6800 times in the old testament that's god's covenant name that's his intimate name by which he wants to be known not generic lord but yahweh other other words that you've preached about and written about that yeah the dear lust in the new testament the word for slave appears there are many other things that that are incredibly carefully crafted in this translation words are translated with a kind of consistency that lets you link them together and there are illustrations hundreds and hundreds of illustrations of that there'll be some material made available where those things can be seen um it's been basically sort of critiqued by many many scholars and i think maybe i heard today 10 000 suggestions have been made and considered they've considered 10 000 external suggestions from readers that they might want to apply and they've gone through fastidiously with those so i guess the good news is they arrived today so we're going to give every one of you who are here one of these it's um yeah it's a beautiful addition it's uh it's produced in uh netherlands uh the finest kind of paper and uh it's got a we wanted a manly one so it's got a cowhide cover kind of looks like a saddle and there were quite a number of italian cows that gave up their life because we got the leather from italy so when you go out i think is that right mark yeah when you go out the door there's one for each of you and it's that we call it the shepherd's testament it has a little shepherd's rod on the front uh i've carried one of these uh of an nas with the new testament psalms and proverbs with me for years and years and so that's why i wanted this to be the first one yeah and you've been reading from it at church lately yeah i heard you i heard i heard me too but i don't think they can can you hear me yeah no it's back so the bibles are outside on tables and there is a there's a website legacy standard uh bible you can go to that and you'll see a lot of information lsbible.org you can order more we also have some available in the both book stores the package they can you can buy them so you can get one today these these new testament psalms and proverbs they're on sale for 35 dollars so only one per per person but if you um you know want one for your your friend your wife your son you gotta get them their own at the bookstore so the people online i'm sorry we have nothing for you uh this is just for the three or four that are here yes yes you're getting good at this macarthur mac what else has happened this year um that you're thanking god for and what encouragement do you have for these men uh well again i i think um i think we have the greatest opportunity that i've seen in my entire lifetime for the gospel because there are so many means by which we can disseminate it and while there's the same opportunity for all that is evil and all that is wicked uh the truth can can also penetrate the world in ways that it never could in the past this is the greatest revival of sound doctrine in in world history it's over the globe everywhere um and the the truth of the word of god is basically being heard every second of every day by millions of people around the globe so this is a great great great opportunity and i think if if i were a young pastor in these days i i would be ecstatic to think about coming to the kingdom for a time like this it's like paul said when he talked about ephesus there's a wide open door but there are many adversaries yeah so the door is open but you're going to have to you know fight the good fight but these are the these are the best of times um there's a there's a level of desperation with people there's almost a there's almost kind of a i don't know an eschatological angst in people there's almost like a feeling like things are are getting worse and they'll never get better there's a kind of hopelessness whatever the american dream was people are seeing that being stolen from them and even the people who have acquired certain things found the emptiness of that and what exacerbates that is that the complete disintegration of all meaningful relationships in marriage and family those are the things that secure people and give them love and hope and happiness and even on a temporal level and with the complete destruction of the family by the lgbtq people um women you know going around who've killed their babies in their wombs who are fraught with guilt i mean this is a completely dis-membered culture from the standpoint of human relations and that level of desperation needs the truth not stupid positive thinking messages that don't help and they they really um they really never satisfy so i think for the we know the truth does and so preaching the truth we we are the most important people in the world so go for it awesome thank you macarthur i know that i speak on behalf of of everyone here that we're grateful for you we s we love to stand with you we love you we're we're grateful for your influence on our lives and ministries so thank you for your time with us this afternoon it's always a pleasure you

Channel: Grace to You

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Keywords: John MacArthur, Bible, Preaching, Christianity, Expository, Exposition, Sermon, Jesus, Christ, Grace to You

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Length: 59min 22sec (3562 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 29 2021