Jeff Jackson is my name. First of all, thank you so much
for this church's gracious and kind investment in us. From the
time we got here the other day, the guys out on the bicycles,
to the staff, to the teachers, to the people handing out sodas,
Man, they're just overwhelming us with kindness. See, Jeff,
now you know why I've stayed here so long. It's not fair to
be treated like this, right? They're awesome. Actually, I
have two interests. I don't know if you'll be able
to take time for both of them, but I couldn't decide between
the two, so here they are. The first is just an interest
in knowing something of the start that you got here when you came,
maybe highlighting some of the watershed times as you walked
through. I'm a young pastor just getting
started in a brand-new church and what's already... JOHN MACARTHUR,
JR.: : Let's work on that one first, okay? I'll work on that
one first, but before you ask the second one. I came here in 1969 in my twenties. The only qualification I had
was I was young. They had two pastors in a row who had died
of a heart attack. They were serious about getting
a young one. They were fully supporting both widows and who
were precious, precious ladies through the years of my ministry
here. But I really do think that that
was the way the Lord directed me. I had been working at Talbot
Seminary doing a little bit of teaching and some preaching traveling
around preaching. I got to the point where I was
preaching about 35 times a month, so I crammed a lot of preaching
into a few years before I pastored in conferences and youth speaking
in colleges, universities and things like that. And so I had
a lot of sort of practice preaching. But I wanted to pastor a church.
And there was a church in the Long Beach area that contacted
me and said, No, you're too young. But that was the very thing they
wanted here. And I had spoken at a camp to their high school
kids, and the kids all came back to the church and said, We want
John MacArthur to be our pastor because they had fun at camp.
And this is kind of an interesting thing. The first night they asked
me to come and preach here was in... I think it was around September
or October of 1968. And I came on a Sunday night
and I had spent about a month or so at Hume Lake, which is
a conference center where I was preaching all the time, and I
was studying Romans 6 and 7. intently every day trying to
understand it, just for my own edification, I was very intent
on that and I decided the first Sunday I preached here, that's
what I would do. They had me on a Sunday night and I went
over in the chapel, the little chapel over there, it wasn't
fixed up the way it is now, it had a linoleum and metal chairs
and a kitchen on the right and that was the little church and
the one little building, the nursery building was all that
was here. And I was so excited about it, I just got up and I
just preached on Romans 6. And I didn't realize it, but
I preached about an hour and 25 minutes. They were used to like 20, 30
minute sermons and I'll never forget because I came down and
I just felt like I had delivered my soul. And, you know, I wasn't
used to, you know, being confined to a time because I did a lot
of conference preaching. Anyway, I just came down and Patricia,
my wife, she looked at me and she said, Well, that's the end
of that church. I'll never forget that line, you know. Well, that's
the end of that church. And I thought I did well. And I said, Well
what? She said, Do you know how long
you preached? I said, No. And she told me. And the amazing
thing was, after the service was over, a man who was chairing
the elders, at that time the elders were kind of a confused
group, some were not even Christians, as it turned out. But anyway,
this man came to me and said, If you were our pastor, would
you do this every week? And that was the opposite reaction
we both expected. And I said, well yeah, but I
tried to be sure. They invited me back the next
week and there was a huge clock hanging in the back of the chapel. And we started over in the chapel
in those early years. I just...I didn't know what else
to do but exposit the Scripture. That's what my dad had done,
that's what I saw him do all the years of the ministry that
I...and my dad is still alive, he's 86 years old and he still
teaches the Word of God every Sunday, still has a radio program,
he's been on the air 62 years preaching the Word of God and
Voice of Calvary radio program and all I'd ever grown up with
was preaching the Word. And so I just started doing it.
I really didn't know where it would go. I never thought about a bigger
church. My prayer was, Lord, please don't let them leave because
I knew that when you get a new pastor, lots of people leave
very often. And I said, just help him to stay long enough.
And we had a Donnybrook within about a month. One of the elders
of the church, who was the church pianist and a teacher in the
largest Sunday school class, wanted me to marry his daughter
to a divorced unbeliever. And I said, I can't do that.
And the leadership said, well, you've got to do it. I mean,
he's a big giver. He's this, he's that. I said, I can't do it. I can't
do it. And we had a real important meeting, and I said, are you
going to do what the Bible says here or not? And let's decide. And
we did. And so they left and other people
left and we had that sort of normal thing that happens so
many times. And from there we began to teach
the Word, the people who loved the Word stayed. I did two things
in those early years. I preached every morning and
every Sunday morning, every Sunday night, different exposition,
different book and I'm still doing it even now. And then on
Saturday morning, the second and primary aspect of my ministry
was I took a group of men and I discipled those men for a couple
of hours every Saturday morning. I picked the guys I wanted there
and I let anybody else who wanted to come, come. And we had about
thirty men and they became the leaders of the church. We didn't
have enough money to pay them, but I would assign them ministry
areas, even though they weren't staff people, paid people, they
were lay guys, some of them were students. And I said, take this,
take that, you take children's division, you do this, you take
that. And I started to build a team in those early years and
then I poured my heart into those guys. And that was our first
real group of elders and and pastors in those early years
and we've just done the same thing all these years. I can't
really tell you why the church is the size it is. I can't really
tell you...I'm not analytical. I'm not very good in a homiletics
class because I really don't know how to explain what I do.
In fact, I remember going to Canada, Montreal and I was teaching
the first generation...the only first generation church in western
civilization is in Montreal. In the sixties they were imprisoning
Protestant missionaries because of the Catholic power. So it's
a brand new church there. And they wanted me to teach them
how to preach, and so I worked out this whole thing, taught
for a whole week and we had a Q&A at the end of the week and the first
guy up in front said, We appreciate everything you've said, but we've
listened to your tapes, why don't you do what you told us? And
they couldn't find any congruity between the way I told them to
organize things and the way I actually preached. That was a revelation to me,
too, you know. So, you know, it's been a somewhat serendipitous,
spiritually serendipitous experience to just see the Lord grow a church.
I always believed if I took care of the depth of the ministry,
God would take care of the breadth of it and I'm content to leave it with
Him. My passion is down, not out. But I want to make very
clear, I believe the church exists on this planet for one primary
reason and that's evangelism. Everything else that we do, we
could do better in heaven. Everything else. The only thing we can't
do there is evangelize. And that's the only reason I
can think I have to leave us here. And my passion is evangelism. And our church's passion. I don't
know how many five, six thousand people in our church congregation
have been trained in what we call discipleship evangelism.
Thirteen weeks? Sixteen weeks. Thirteen weeks.
Training in evangelism. That is the focal point, that
is the mission of this church and there is no other mission.
And from the very beginning it was a kind of natural evangelism
with the people you know, with the friends you know. But if
you visit this church and you fill out a visitation card and you're
in this area, you're going to get a knock on the door from
a group of people who are going to come and share Jesus Christ with you.
So we just started doing that and we've just kept doing it
and nothing really...there's no fanfare, there's no other
thing to say than that God blessed and we began to develop leaders.
Pouring my life into men, the big scene preaching to the crowd.
The smaller perspective is pouring my life into men so that I'm
surrounded by men who share the visions, understand the Word,
are motivated, gifted guys, and then you give them ministry and
let them go. So that's been kind of the way it's gone through
the years. There was in those early years, we were sort of
catching the wave on the surf of the Jesus movement. In the
early 70s, Campus Crusade was exploding. I was 75,000 people
in the Cotton Bowl. in a big Campus Crusade thing,
there were people being converted at SC, UCLA, all the campuses,
those kind of ministries were flourishing. Calvary Chapel popped
up, we got new music, new Bible translations. That was the Jesus
movement. And I think when you look back
in history, that was genuine revival. That was the real deal.
people were being converted and they were getting hungry for
the Word of God. All kinds of Christian publishers came into existence,
the proliferation of Bible translations, people started buying those Bible
covers with doves and... you remember those? And fish
signs on them. We caught the wave of that whole
thing. And then a few years after that, I would say 15 years in,
there was a real lull in that. There was a certain complacency
that came and it wasn't even the same interest in Bible exposition.
And you know, it cycles and then came some of those movements,
the charismatic movement took over and we were on the wrong
side of that deal from the get-go. And we were pretty well pilloried
and vilified because of our position on that, but we just stayed the
course and just keep teaching the truth and watch the people
eventually go in there, realize nobody's getting raised from
the dead and come back out again. Why are there 450 disabled and
handicapped people in our church? when the biggest charismatic
church in Southern California is ten minutes away. So we just
kept doing what we do and God honored His Word, and I don't
know what else to say. It's just...I never wanted to wake up at the
end of my ministry and wonder whether I built the church or He did.
So I try to stay out of it and just let the Word do its work.
John, we appreciate your ministry a great deal. Jerry Johnston
from Kansas City. Hey Jerry, great to see you.
I'd like to ask you to succinctly clarify your methods and position
on election and evangelism. Are you a three point or a five
point Calvinist? Not finished yet. What is your
theological position? And then considering you do not
give the public Billy Graham style invitations, is there a
biblical reason why you don't? Has your position changed as
your ministry has matured? And finally, what are the similarities or
the dissimilarities in your position and that of Charles Spurgeon?
That's it. I just want to say, I know the
Lord has His hand on you, Jerry, and He's blessed your ministry
of evangelism and I'm grateful for that. And if I could be even
mentioned in the same breath with Charles Spurgeon, I could
die and go to heaven on that one. I would say that I have not found
anything that I've read in the theology of Spurgeon that I have
a quarrel with. That doesn't mean I've read everything. I think he had a very biblical
and balanced approach to the sovereignty of God and election.
And I don't think it intruded in his evangelism at all. I think
it literally motivated it. How can I answer all of that?
I've written a lot of books and talked about those kinds of things.
I really don't like to label myself. I just like to say I
try to be biblical. and take the text as it comes. But I suppose one way to express
this is the way John Murray did when he said, in every major
doctrine of Scripture there is an apparent paradox. And I'm
not under any illusions that I can unscrew the inscrutable.
I'm not under any illusions that I can comprehend the incomprehensible.
And there are things in the Bible that to me have no human, rational
explanation. And I can show you just a little
litany of those. If I asked you who wrote the
book of Romans, what would you say? Well, immediately you come up
short, don't you? Why? Because you know Paul is the
human author, but that doesn't explain the book. Because every
word is inspired by whom? The Holy Spirit. How can it be
Paul? How can it be Paul's mind Paul's
thoughts, Paul's experience, Paul's intellect, Paul's reasoning
and every single word, the Holy Spirit, without making Paul into
a robot. But that is the incredible mystery
of inspiration. If I ask you about the security
of the believer, I can take you to passages in the Bible that
say we are secure and nothing will ever separate us, like Romans
8. I can take you to other passages like Colossians 1 that say you've
been reconciled to God if you continue in the faith. And on
the one hand you have this strong John's gospel, you know, that
no man is able to pluck them out of my hand because my Father
is greater and here we are held here and yet we have to persevere.
There is a perseverance that's one side of that coin and a security
that's the other. If I ask you about salvation... Is it a work of God? Is it only
a work of God? As Jim Packer pointed out many,
many years ago in Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God, the
first thing you do when you want somebody to be converted is pray
because you know this is a work of God. I mean, their blindness
is so profound, the God of this world has blinded their minds.
On top of that, they're spiritually dead. And who awakens the dead
heart? This is the work of God so that
when somebody is converted, we don't thank the evangelist, we
thank the Lord because it's only He that can do the work. And
yet, while He gets all the credit for doing it and He can only...He
alone can awaken the sinner and regenerate the sinner. He alone
can save and He has...He has established in eternity past
who it is that's going to believe and be saved. It is at the same
time true that the sinner is damned because he does not believe.
Jesus said in John 7, you'll die in your sins because you
believe not on Me and where I go you'll never come. Jesus said,
wanted to gather you like a hen gathers her chicks and you would
not." And he wept. I don't...I can't resolve all
that. I just...I just know that God
gets all the glory when it's righteous and man gets all the
responsibility when it's sinful. How that all works together in
the mind of God is beyond my capability. And I think another
way that I look at it If I ask a simple question, who lives
your Christian life? You can't even answer that with
a straightforward answer. If you say, I do, we might think you have a severe
theological problem because you might be a pietist, you might
be an Arminian of sort of a rank kind who believes that the whole
of your Christian life is a matter of human effort. You certainly
would fall into the bag with Charles Finney and I don't know
about you, but I'm not comfortable there. On the other hand, if
I ask you who lives your Christian life and you say God does, you
might be a quietist, you know, a let go and let God. And then
you're going to wind up with an antinomian mentality that
says, if I sin, it's not my fault, it's just my flesh, it's unredeemed
humanness, what do you expect? That to me is such a mystery
that I don't even...and that's something very intimate to me.
If you ask me who lives your Christian life, here is my answer.
I work, like Paul said to the Colossians, I work and labor
and strive and in the end it's God working in me. I think the
question is probably best answered by Galatians. I am crucified
with Christ, nevertheless, what? Yet not I." See, Paul didn't
understand either. I mean, this is what John Murray
meant when he said every major doctrine has an apparent paradox. It's not a true paradox because
it's not a true contradiction in the mind of God. It's only
the limitation of our mental capacity. If you ask me, do I
believe that the Bible teaches election? Absolutely. Absolutely. Everywhere, all over the pages
of Scripture that is indicated. And how else could anybody be
converted unless the Lord awakened his heart and brought conviction
and granted faith and salvation? If you ask me, do sinners go
to hell because they're not chosen? The answer is no, they go to
hell because they don't believe. And I am content to maintain
those. In the end, if you ask me about the atonement, I will
say, I believe the atonement is sufficient for the whole world. That is, if the whole world believed,
you wouldn't need another atonement. But it is in the end efficient
only to those who believe. Spurgeon was criticized for his
view of election and I think on one occasion he said, somebody
said to him, why don't you just preach to the elect? And he said,
well if you'll pull up their shirt tails so I can see if they have
an E stamped on their back, I will. So the bottom line The bottom
line is, we are told, we are commanded to go into the whole
world and preach the gospel. And I'm telling you, we do that
because of the love of Christ and we do that because we are
compelled by the Spirit of God and we do that because we know
what the taste of fruit is like in our spiritual mouths and there's
nothing as exhilarating and joyous as seeing people come to Christ.
That's a passion with me. That's a passion. And the reason,
I'm not trying to avoid the question, but as soon as I say I'm a five-point
Calvinist, somebody's assumption of what that is kicks in. I think John Calvin got it right,
I'll put it that way. But if you want to read an interesting
John Calvin, get out of the little tulip acrostic and move away
from the Institutes and read his commentaries and you will
find passage after passage after passage where he recognizes that
apparent paradox. And he's strong on human volition
and moral accountability of the sinner and all those kinds of
things. Calvin's commentaries, as all true exegetical, expositional
studies do, find that magnificent God-ordained balance between
those things that are otherwise inscrutable to us. Does that
help? Now what's making me nervous
is Ian Murray's down here writing all this down. I just want to
come out in the next book on the right side. I'll tell you, I was in...here's
a little anecdote. I was in Geneva not long ago. I stood up on...I
stood in John Calvin's pulpit where he preached and I tell
you, the tears flowed. great noble soul who did truly
understand redemption. He really understood it. And
sometimes he is not fairly treated by those who are ignorant of
the height and depth and length and breadth of his biblical work. So. Question has two parts. First... What's your name? Daryl
Ferguson. Why do you think women were permitted
in the New Testament to prophesy but not to teach? JOHN, Why do
I think that? I'm wondering if you have an
idea why. We're talking about the daughters
of Philip. And 1 Corinthians 11, where it seemed to be okay
with Paul if they prophesied as long as they had their head
covered. I would answer that question
the same way I would answer the Old Testament question. Well
what about Deborah giving a prophecy? What about Huldah giving a prophecy? There were times when apparently
a woman spoke for God. Even in the Psalms it says, A
great host are the women who publish the good news. That's a form
of proclamation. Prophecy I think we might over-qualify
or over-classify. And the idea of prophecy is not
some official, formal preaching in every case. It may be simply
passing on the truth of God. Prophemy means to stand and speak.
And you have, in the case of Aquila and Priscilla, teaching
Apollos to perfect him in an understanding of the way, the
gospel, because he was really an Old Testament saint. So I
would say that there have been times when God uses women, and
even today continue to be a great host of women who publish the
good news. I would think it a terrible thing to assume that women couldn't
or shouldn't do that. What prevails is you never have
in the Old Testament any woman with an ongoing prophetic ministry. You have Elijah, predominantly
Elisha, you have Samuel, you have Moses, but you don't have
anybody in that section of Scripture that's a woman with an ongoing
prophetic ministry. You come into the major prophets
and the minor prophets and you have all those prophetic books
at the end of the Old Testament and none of them are women. And
you don't have any illustration of a woman with an ongoing prophetic
ministry. You come into the New Testament
and the Lord chooses twelve apostles who are to be the proclaimers
of the gospel and there's no woman there. And when the Lord
chose the books of the Old Testament to be written and the books of
the New Testament to be written, they were all written by men. And
when it comes down to the elders in the New Testament, an elder
has to be a one-woman man. And a woman can't be that. So, I mean, that is not to say
that God doesn't want women to proclaim His truth. ANTHONY Well,
the other part of the question is, do you think it's appropriate
and does that have any implications for whether or not it's appropriate
for a woman to do Scripture readings during a worship service? JOHN Well, let's start where
I can be definitive in my own mind. I don't think a woman should
ever preach or teach men. I mean, I permit not a woman
to teach. What does that really mean? That's
what it says. Well, doesn't that make women
second class? No. They're delivered from that by
childbearing if they continue in faith and love and godliness. To understand how God balances
that, I look at my children and I've preached to my children
all my life. And I'll tell you this, my greatest
joy in life is the salvation of my four kids. I mean, is there
anything like that? Is there anything better than
that? And now I'm watching them raise their eleven little grandkids
and you'll see them up here from time to time running up and hugging
Papa. It's a deep affection. I have
the M&Ms. I'm not stupid. But I look at my children and I thank God for their salvation. I thank God for the grace. I forget where I was going with
that, I got so emotional thinking about it. But what was that point
you were trying to help me make? I don't know how I got off on
those kids, but this is what is called a senior
moment. Anyway, I was making a really
great bridge, I just got lost. My point, to make the point,
I'm trying to say I really don't see a place for a woman to preach
because it's so clear. Oh, I know what I was going to
say. Those four kids, strong Christians, they've heard me
preach all their life long. When they have a deep spiritual
hunger in their heart, guess who they go to? They don't want
a sermon. They go to Patricia every time.
And that's because she nurtured them. And that was her God-given
responsibility. I think, you know, women...we
stop having women teach children here at junior high. level and
we start bringing men into the life of the kids here. As far
as a woman reading Scripture, I mean, I don't think that's
a biblical issue. I don't think it's forbidden in the Scripture
for that to happen. I don't think I can make a rule about something
that's not indicated in Scripture. Is it done here? No. And the reason is it's not done
here is we do take a strong sort of male position here, just in
general. And I think our people, while
they wouldn't... I don't think they would be offended
by it, they sort of expect to be led by the elders and the
pastors, especially in worship. In a home Bible study, women
read the Scripture all the time. In a small group, in a fellowship
group, probably in some of our Sunday school groups, they might
sit around the table and read Scripture like that. But not
in the service itself. And you know, It's been my sense
that, and we've done this through the years, whoever preaches reads
the Scripture, because that's part of the ministry of the day.
If you're going to preach, you're going to read the Scripture and
you're going to pray the pastoral prayer, because it's your service
to shepherd the people. Okay? Thank you. My name is Scott
Tomlinson. I'd like your thoughts, John,
on when it's appropriate and how you should lead a church
out of a denomination that's drifting theologically. I've
been involved with this denomination about 16 years and we're starting
to ordain women and the charismatic movement, open theism and church
growth movement. And my district executive thinks
that I should resign rather than give our church a bad attitude
towards this denomination. And I think it's my responsibility
to protect my sheep from this theological error. Well, I can
only answer that in a personal sense. You have a responsibility. before God to protect your sheep. To abandon your sheep is not
right. And if you're going to be a true
shepherd, one of two things is going to happen. You're going
to stay there, and you're going to pull that whole thing out, or you're
going to leave and take your sheep with you. Because to walk away
from them and leave them there to the wolves Paul couldn't handle
that. He said in Acts 20, he said,
I know after my departure, grievous wolves are going to come in and
tear you up, and it's tearing me up. So I think you've got to realize
that God has put you there. Like Steve Lawson said, you've
been called to a place and to a flock. You can't say to them,
well, hey, I'm leaving and let the wolves get to you. And let
me tell you something, you have no responsibility before God
to hang on to an apostatizing organization. None. There's no virtue in that. And all you can do is deal with what
you've got.