Welcome to the 2011 Shepherds
Conference. General Session 5, John MacArthur. Q&A. Now, I don't need to introduce
Phil Johnson to all of you, Mr. Pyromaniac. I know you all know him. We have
had a friendship for decades, a very close one. We are trusted
friends, but you don't know the secrets about Phil, and I'm not
going to reveal all of them now. But he has edited a number of
my books and my standard thing when I get back a chapter that
he's edited is, did I say that? And he says, no, but it needs
to be said. So I say, but that's inflammatory and no one will
know you put it in there. So you're getting me in trouble.
So I have I have had to defend this secret
co-belligerent through the years, but we've had a great friendship.
We do things like this a lot for Grace to You Radio. We make
little CDs which we distribute to our radio audience regularly
on issues like this, and we do a lot of these kinds of dialogues.
It's always a real joy, and we're going to see what comes in this
session. You know, and we do this at Grace
to You as well, and I should say this, I never prep him ahead
of time. I don't tell him what the questions
are going to be and give him an outline of where I want to
go. We just sort of freewheel it. And a few times I've gotten
you in trouble by asking. PHIL Yeah. Yeah. So I'm hoping to do that again.
Of course you are. Have you seen me fumbling with
these pages? These are...I have no idea where
this conversation is going to go, but I've got enough questions
here, I hope to keep it busy. And I want to start with some
questions that...and John doesn't like to talk about himself, and
so the one thing he always says to me before we do anything like
this is no personal questions. But John, you're coming up on
a milestone in your ministry. He's just completely disregarded. You have been in public ministry
for more than 50 years now and you've been here at Grace Church,
you're now in your 43rd year and you're planning to finish...you
mentioned this yesterday, you're planning to finish the gospel
of Mark and every time I hear you say it, you move the timetable
up. And I've been skeptical about whether you could really finish
by July, but you're going to do that this summer which will
mean that you have preached verse by verse. This is just an astonishing
accomplishment to me. You've preached verse by verse
through every verse in the New Testament. I don't know anyone
else, certainly no one else of your stature who's done that. I think it's the result of staying
in the same place a long, long time and everything being recorded
so that I can't show up and say what I already said because somebody
just listened to it this week. So it's part of being in the
same place over the long haul. That's sort of the default position.
You get there eventually if you're here long enough, but on the
positive side, This was something that I held in my heart as a
desire that I could go through every single verse of the New
Testament when I first started here immediately in 1969. That
was in my heart the hope that I would do that. I didn't know
how long I'd survive here. I'm here now, but I'm on the
backside of at least two or three times when any normal person
would have left for lots of reasons. So it's as amazing to me as it
is to anybody that the Lord let me stay here long enough to do
that. And the discipline of it was
also aided and abetted by Jerry Jenkins. signed me up early to
doing commentaries on the whole New Testament. And once I made
a sort of initial commitment to that, I knew I was going to
have to stay in the same place because I couldn't preach on
one thing and write commentaries on another portion of Scripture.
If I was going to produce a commentary, it was going to come out of the
preaching. And of course, now I've done everything but the
final chapters of Mark. And the way I've scheduled it
out, I want to finish I'm going to take a couple of months off
that the elders are allowing me, and I don't want to be like
halfway into the lead up to the crucifixion and go away for a
couple of months. As long as we're going to get
that close, we need to get the whole picture. I think our church
has already begun to enjoy the fact that I'm doing it Sunday
morning and Sunday night. The way I've laid it out, I will
finish early summer, Mark, and that'll be the whole New Testament.
Yeah, and it's amazing, I've watched up close, you talk about
the discipline that's involved and I have to say, I don't know
anyone else who can match you for persistence and discipline
and energy and that's the thing I want to ask you about. You...all
these years and you've never slowed down. Do you think your
ministry will change in any significant way once you've actually finished
the New Testament? Well, I hope not. I want to continue to be
the pastor of Grace Community Church if that's what the church
desires and the elders, and that's… I don't want to change… I need
to say this because I even heard yesterday somebody saying that
You know, when I'm done with Mark, I'm leaving. That is not
at all true. That is completely untrue. I'm
just going to take a little time off, and then I'm going to go
over to Europe to visit some of our missionaries and help
to strengthen them. And then I want to come back and do exactly
what I've always done, continue preaching the Word of God Sunday
after Sunday after Sunday, and giving leadership to the church
and the college and seminary, and everything I've always done.
So nothing from that standpoint is going to change. The only
thing that's going to change is the subject. In fact, the
question most people ask me, and they put it one of two ways,
are you planning then to preach from the Old Testament? And a
few people have even said, are you planning to preach through
the Old Testament? A lady asked me that and I said,
ma'am, look at me. I have a suggestion, you know,
I've been here I think for about two-thirds of your ministry and
you did the gospel of John before I came and before you started
on the commentary series and you did it in a different way,
taking large chunks, different way than you did the other gospels.
I think it would be great if you went back because I'd love
to hear you preach from the gospels. Do John again. throw away your
original notes, do it again the way you did Matthew, and then
we'll come out. I was 8 years in Matthew, 10
years in Luke, a couple of years in John, a couple more years
in Mark. So that's 22, 23 years in those
Gospels, and they never grow old. They never, ever grow old. And you know, when you think
about that exposure to Christ, who's the theme of every single
paragraph, it's just relentlessly Christ. This has been the dominating
reality of my life. The most compelling person ever
is Christ. So I've spent 23 years preaching
through the Gospels, which means 23 years of weeks studying Christ. And then I have spent years and
years and years producing the four volumes on Matthew, the
two volumes on John, now the two volumes on Luke, and soon
to come Mark, and you add those years up, it's going to be 30
plus years that I focused on the person of Christ as revealed
in the gospels. And the most inviting suggestion
that I've had yet would be to go to the Gospel of John because
when I wrote the commentary on the Gospel of John, both of them,
I had to act as if I had never preached it because the notes
were so primitive from way back. Well, don't throw away the commentaries,
just the original notes. No, no, no, I'm not going to.
No, we wouldn't throw the commentaries away. But I'm just saying it
is the most compelling. And then when you add preaching
through Hebrews, which is the exaltation of Christ, preaching
through Colossians, which is Christ, preaching through Romans,
which is Christ. Revelation. Preaching through
Revelation twice. which is Christ in His exaltation.
You know, when Paul said we preach Christ, that's what we've done
here. And He is the most riveting,
compelling person. And we saw that, I think, even
last night. Any glimpse of Christ is potentially
transforming. It has the ability to completely
captivate and motivate and instruct. So, I don't know exactly what
I'm going to do. I'm thinking about making a sweep
through the Old Testament of Christological passages that
point to Christ, some of those mountain peak passages. So, we'll
see. But you need to pray the Lord
will give me some direction this summer as I think about what
direction it's going to go. But look, I feel better now than
I felt probably in 25 years. because I don't have any back
pain and leg pain. I had a bad knee for 50 years,
and I had this amazing surgery, and they put a new knee in, and
they put the right size in. My friend R.C. Sproul, they did
his knee and put the wrong size in. They got to redo it. Come
on, measure the thing. That is unbelievable. He's limping
around like he never had knee surgery, and I thank the Lord
that the guy You know, picked out a 10 1⁄2 and not a 12 1⁄2
and stuck it in there. Then I had a back surgery similar
to the back surgery you've had. I used to preach an hour, and
by the time the hour came, I needed to sit down because my back was
bothering me, my knee was bothering me. Now, I feel no pain, and
I could actually be dangerous in a pulpit. Amen. You know, there was only one
time in my life, Phil, when I was actually dragged out of a pulpit.
Do you know that? Yeah, I've heard about it. Only
one time in my life, and it was at the beginning of a sermon.
I'd only been talking 15 minutes, and the moderator of the meeting
came up behind me, grabbed my coat, and pulled me out of the
pulpit and said, you're done. And I said, no, no, I'm not done. He said, yes, you are done. And
he pulled me out of the pulpit, and I'll tell you what it was.
Jack Hayford at Church on the Way invited me to come to his
church to speak. to his pastor's conference. He
had a large group of Pentecostal charismatic pastors, and he wanted
me to come and speak there because he wanted me to speak on the
authority of Scripture and emphasize that. And he said, you know,
a lot of those guys read your commentaries and whatever. I
said, sure. So I spoke. Somebody, because I spoke there,
assumed that I had the baptism of the Holy Spirit. and had spoken
in tongues because that's kind of part of the price of admission,
let alone being the guest speaker. So the assumption went around
that MacArthur's had the baptism of the Spirit and spoken in tongues,
and it reached an organization called the Full Gospel Businessmen. They had a huge Southern California
event, and they invited me to come and speak. And I didn't
know any of this background. I got an invitation to come and
speak to them on the issue of tongues. Well, I thought they
wanted a correction. My assumption was they want the
truth. This is perfect. So I grabbed
Jay Letty, and I said, we're going to the full gospel businessmen
to teach them the truth about tongues. They thought I was going
to tell them about my tongues experience. Fifteen minutes into
the truth, this guy pulls me out of the pulpit and sat me
down. Now, just for the record, that was before my time, so I
didn't get you into that one. No. That was your undoing. John,
another question that people frequently ask me, and I know
the answer to this one, but I want these guys to hear how emphatic
you are. People often ask, will there come a time when you retire?
JOHN, Look, I just tell people around here, if I make sense,
leave me alone. Now the problem is going to be
when I don't make sense, I won't believe that I don't make sense.
It was a relative of yours, Douglas MacArthur, who had a famous line
where he said, age wrinkles the body, but quitting wrinkles the
soul. He shared your perspective on
retirement. Yeah, I have no interest in retirement. That's not a biblical
concept to me. Your dad preached until he was
90? He was still teaching a Bible study in his 90th year, and I
remember he said to me, I think I need to stop because I I started repeating myself, and
I said, well, you're probably right, Dad. That was a hard thing
for him. But look, I don't tell the people in the church that
my dad was clear-headed until he was 90. I mean, my goodness,
they've had me for 43 years. Do you think they want another
20? I mean, that would be like a
death sentence. But as long as I'm clear-headed,
and I have not felt as good as I do now physically in 25 years,
so I'm grateful for good health, and if I can avoid getting hit
by a truck, I'm ready to go for as long as the Lord wants me,
and this is my place, and this will always be my place. So... When you start repeating yourself,
I don't think we're going to complain about that. I want to
hear some of that stuff again. You know, there's some truth
in that. I know it's something in the back of my mind that I
don't want to preach things I've preached in the past, but even
I don't remember what I said. In a sense, we're like that.
We preach and then people come back and they listen to a tape
and they say, what a great message, and it's been so long you don't
even remember. Yeah, I have the same experience. For me, it only
takes about six months. I'll hear a tape of something
I did six months ago, I said that? That's pretty good, you
know? Yeah, the only time I ever listen to an old sermon of mine
is to find out what I believe. Forty-three years here at Grace
Church, what were the most...and I know Grace Church is vastly
different now than when you came. What were the most difficult
changes you wanted to introduce when you first came to Grace
Church? I think the greatest challenge
was to see in place mature elders. dealing with the level of leadership
that was here, both in terms of Bible knowledge, in terms
of spiritual maturity, in terms of ministry knowledge and responsibility. When I came out of seminary,
I honestly had canceled out all my ecclesiological experiences. I grew up in a certain kind of
environment with my dad. I sat under professors who took
a different view of church government. I was exposed to a lot of them,
and I wound up just canceling out all the experiences. By the
time I got to the end of seminary, I started asking myself, how
do you do church biblically? and I looked for a biblical model,
and I really struggled to find one. I didn't know a church that
had elders. I didn't know one unless it was
a a kind of a classical Presbyterian church, and I knew that the kind
of elders they had weren't the kind of elders that I understood
the Bible identified. I didn't know a church that did
church discipline. I had never heard of a church
that did that. I didn't know a church that had mobilized its
laity into anything more than sort of superficial organization,
but not into spiritual ministry. I didn't know a church where
intense personal discipleship was going on, and in my study
of Scripture, Even when I was a student in college, I began
to see a depth of spiritual life and understanding and church
experience that I just never experienced. I never saw it anywhere.
So when I came out of seminary, I was really looking to find,
how do you do this? And I found an old kind of a
self-published thing called the New Testament Order for Church
and Missionary by Alexander Rattray Hay. you wouldn't even probably
know about it. In fact, it was a weird thing
because whoever printed it printed about a third of the book upside
down, and all the pages were blocked into the book wrong.
So I had to, you know, it's like an existential experience just
going to read the thing. But he was a Plymouth Brethren
guy who just kept going back to the Bible and saying, this
is how you do it in the New Testament. This is how it goes. This is
how it goes. This is what pastors do. This is what deacons do.
This is what evangelism is. And I began to construct that. So the greatest challenge for
me, because that was starting to form in my mind, was that
I knew I was launching out into something, and I saw myself as
all alone. I really didn't know anybody
that did this. I didn't have a church model,
and I knew what the New Testament said, and it was becoming more
clear to me what it was, and it was a minimalist kind of approach
to church government, not a complicated one, but it was absolutely definitive. It was not negotiable. So I felt
like I was out there on my own. I didn't really have any other
pastor friends who understood it. And at the same time, I had
a whole group of church and church leaders who I knew didn't understand
it. So the biggest challenge for
me was to exercise patience in getting there, and I knew there
was only one way I could do that, and that would be to take that
biblical ecclesiology that was forming clearly in the New Testament
and in my mind, and take a group of men, a generation of young
men, and pour that into them and grow the first group. And so that's what I did for
seven years. Yeah, now hold that thought, because I want to come
back to it and ask about how you discipled those guys and
all of that. But a couple of things first. Do you still have
that book? Yeah. I want to see that. In fact,
I'd love to photocopy it and put some excerpts on the web.
We'll do that. Because I'd love to see that,
but I never heard of it. Where was your office in those days,
by the way? It was in what's now the chapel? On the backside
of the chapel, there's a door that just opens into the patio.
That was my office. Of course, in those days, the
sign said, pastor's office. So anybody wandering around here
just banged on the door and came in, which created some very novel
experiences for me from time to time. Yeah, didn't Dino Kartsanakis... Yeah, Dino Kartsanakis came in.
Dino, you know, the piano guy who was... Yeah, I heard a bang
on my door, and there's this guy standing there, and he says,
excuse me, pastor, just driving down the street, saw your church,
and I'm trying to make a career as a piano player in churches,
be glad to play for you. And I said, well... Sure, come
on in and play a few things." Even then, it was high drama,
to watch him play the piano. But he came in and played the
piano, it was pretty good, so I had him come and play. The next thing
I knew, he was doing for, wasn't it, Catherine Kuhlman. Yeah. So, kind of put a damper on our
relationship. And the other guy, the other
guy who used to knock on my door occasionally and come in and
play for us on a Sunday night was Andre Crouch. Yeah, he lived
in this neighborhood, didn't he? Yeah, I lived in the neighborhood.
Yeah, just local neighborhood kid. If you could be transported
by time machine back to 1969 and end up in that office, what
advice would you give to yourself? Don't have a door that opens... You mean in addition to that?
Yeah, yeah. Rephrase that question. If you
could go back to the beginning of your ministry and advise the
young John MacArthur, what's the most important piece of advice
the mature John MacArthur would give to the young John MacArthur? Well, there are so many things
that you wish you would do differently, but I think patience And I take back what I said.
There was something wonderful about this constant accessibility,
constant accessibility. Everybody came by my office.
Everybody walked in. And while it was a challenge
in my studies, and I couldn't go home because I had a wife
and four little kids. So it was pretty chaotic there. But I think
that kind of accessibility and availability, while highly demanding,
brought a reality into my life, and as Rick was saying today,
brought into my life the pastoral realm of really shepherding the
congregation of people. But I think the hardest lesson
for me, because once I get focused on where I want to go, I really
want to go there. I don't have a lot of tolerance
for all the things that restrain. I think the biggest issue for
me was just to be patient. You were talking about that when
you talked about 2 Timothy 4. You give this rebuke and this
correction and this instruction, but with not just patience, but
great patience. That is the greatest challenge
for a young person. And part of that patience comes,
you know, this is not something generic. Patience means that
I have to know where these people are because they're not all at
the same place. Patience isn't categorical, it's individual.
So I'm working with this person, this person, this elder, these
deacons, this group, this Sunday school teacher, these people.
There's an exercise of patience in every individual situation
so that I don't trample over them, I don't drag them. like
I tied them to the bumper of the car. There's a process to
move them, and I think that's the hardest thing for young men.
And that's why Paul says, don't argue, don't fight. Give instruction
patiently that God may bring about the transformation, the
repentance, and the change. I've heard you say, and I agree
with you, that that seems to be the number one cause of failure
for young men in the ministry. They go in with this gung-ho
attitude and they just can't be patient in making the changes. And again, it isn't that you
say, okay, I'm going to be patient for four years. It's not patience
with the clock. It's patience with the people
that you're dealing with so that you move them and you bring them
and you love them. That's a great distinction too.
Because I hear people say that, well, I'll be patient for two
or three years, but then... It was, I always say, maybe seven,
eight years I felt that the men in leadership started to really
understand, and they were at all different levels all the
time, but collectively they sort of all were there by about seven
or eight years. Yeah, and you're a great teacher.
Most of us can't get people moved that far in seven or eight years.
You know, look, it is a great challenge to move people. First of all, they are the product
of others who had a spiritual influence in their life, and
they don't just abandon that influence and yield it up to
the new guy. What's the secret to staying
in one place for so long? You said there were a couple
of times when you would have left. I remember one or two of those
times. Yeah, well, I didn't have any offers. See, I know that's not true.
You just didn't want to start over? No, you know, it's not
about me. I have this, and I've had this
for many, many years, just this profound attachment to this church. It is never about me, where would
I like to be, where would I like to preach, what's the weather
like somewhere else? Wouldn't it be novel to do this
and do that? I don't think of my life as any
other than here, and I don't know that I ever have. When I
say there were times when I should have left, there were times when
there was a split elder board. A whole group of them would have
been happy if I had left. In fact, they got in a five-hour
meeting wrangling with each other over me, and I left and said,
you know, I can't be here while you're having all these hassles
about me. You know, they thought I preached too long, too irrelevant,
all kinds of things on one side and the other side, and well,
we don't feel that way. So I just left the room, came
back five hours later, and nothing was resolved, and I left again.
So, it isn't that we haven't had those kind of conflicts,
and at times like that, you might say to yourself, okay, I've reached
the point now, and that was, I don't know, 15, 18 years into
the deal, but maybe this is the time to go because now I've gone
from being appreciated and embraced by all these guys to becoming
a problem for a large group of them. Maybe that's the indication
that I ought to go. I've never, ever had any interest
in any other thing, and I've never had any desire to leave
here, and that's only become stronger over the years. And
it isn't that this is where I'm comfortable. I could live anywhere
in the world. I don't care about that. This is just where God
has settled my soul, my heart. Yeah, in fact, I'm intrigued
by this because you have several other ministries that vie for
your time and attention, the Master's College, the Master's
Seminary, Grace to You, and we all put demands on you, but through
all of that, the church has always remained first in your order
of priorities. Yeah, it's sort of like the church
is my only priority, really. I don't... You've heard you say
that, that you'd be glad to be shed of all the other responsibilities,
but... Well, in a sense, all those other ministries are driven
and led on a daily basis by someone else. But this is my calling. This
is my gifting. This is what I love. I love the
church. I love shepherding the church.
All of those things could go away tomorrow, and I wouldn't
miss a step, and I wouldn't cry a tear. The Lord has brought
them along, and that's great. And once they're here, then I
have to pour my life into them to produce that which honors
the Lord at the highest level of excellence and faithfulness
to the Scripture. But I could drop all of that
tomorrow, but I could never do one of those jobs and not pastor
Grace Church. I couldn't do that. So we talk
sometimes about, well, when I'm done here, my ministry can be
through Grace to you, and I can travel around and do whatever. Really, I'd just as soon go to
heaven. I wouldn't mind that, but I don't have something in
the future of my life that says this is when I do nothing and
just kind of float around. I want to shepherd as long as
the Lord will let me because that's my heart. The discipline
of study is what I love the most about it. I love, that's the
number one thing. I love being in the same place
and having to do new passages all the time because of what
the Word does in my life. And the second thing I love is
the progress of people. I love, I mean, I've been here
long enough. This is three generations, so I love to see the impact of
the truth on the lives of people. It doesn't produce perfection,
but boy, it really, really produces change. People sometimes ask
me to speculate on who I think the next pastor of Grace Church
would be after you're gone, and I always say, I don't know, but
I hope it's some kid who's still in high school, you know? I think
you have that many years. No, I don't know about that.
You know, look, there are so many men who could step in as
they do regularly in this pulpit. You know, what church has the
kind of men that we have to step into the pulpit if I'm not here?
And I know I crowd the pulpit, and as long as I'm around, this
is what God's called me to do. But it's wonderful to have guys
like you to step in when I'm not here. This church would not
lack for sound teaching in the Word of God if something happened
to me. We celebrated your 40th anniversary with a sort of big
deal and one of the things we did, Grace T., you put together
a bound collection of some of your landmark sermons and for
that Sunday we invited Ian Murray to come and be the speaker and
as a tribute to you, he wrote a brief sort of overview of your
life and when we found out he had done that, we bound that
into the front of the collection of sermons we'd done. And those
books are all gone now, but I think Ian Murray had so much fun doing
that that when he found out the books were gone and all that,
he said he'd like to take that biographical sketch he wrote
and expand it into a full biography of you. And he's done that, and
that's due for release this summer. We're going to try to coordinate
that with when you finish. the New Testament and I've read
it, it's excellent. You read it because you wanted
to make sure everything was right. What is it like...what is it
like...and he doesn't agree with you on everything, he's very
gracious about it, but he doesn't agree with you on everything.
He's very fair and objective, it's a great biography. But what's
it like for you to read the story of your life through someone
else's eyes and particularly someone like Ian Murray who is
probably the greatest living Christian biographer? The greatest
fear that I have in the pastorate is that some lady in the congregation
will paint my portrait, and I'll have to hang it in the church. You've received those, haven't
you? In a sense, the second greatest fear you have is that somebody's
going to write a book about you, and you're going to have to live
with... Some flaming pyromaniac who...
Yeah, some. I've said, look, people should
not have a biography until they're dead. It's embarrassing and it's
strange, but if it was going to happen and I could choose
somebody to write it, it would be Ian Murray. There's so much
about him that I love. I can read some biographers and
I don't know what they believe. I was talking about a recent
book, a biography of another institution written by a professor,
and I couldn't tell you what the man believed about the state
of the institution and what he thought because there was no
editorializing. What I love about Murray is he can't keep himself
out of injecting what he thinks. One of my favorite lines in the
book is he says, MacArthur rarely refers to himself in his sermons
as, of course, no preacher ever should. I just love stuff like
that. Give it to him, Ian. Give it
to him. My dad used to say, beware of the preacher who's the hero
of all his own stories. I don't know why he did this. I really don't, except that I
think I'm a curiosity. It has to be a curiosity because
I'm the only I'm the only living person he's written a biography
about. He only writes about dead people. So he's never interviewed
me because you can't interview dead people. So he writes from
the perspective of collecting data. So when I read it, I didn't
have any input in it. And I just thought there are
some things that are funny, like he picks pictures of me that
are just, you'd think he'd pick some kind of preaching pose,
and he's got me in a wetsuit coming out of the surf with a
mask on. I look like James Bond arriving,
you know. Yeah, I think he actually toyed
with the idea of making that the back cover shot. You're kidding. Yeah, we talked him out of that,
but I said... You know, the two of you together
could really be dangerous. I don't know where he found that
picture, but I said, that's a brilliant find. You've got to... Yeah,
and he was so insistent. He didn't care which picture
of me in a suit or which picture of my family, but that picture
of me in a wetsuit with a mask on coming out of the water, I
don't know what it was. Maybe it's a metaphor on immersion. I'm sure that's it. It all makes
sense now. It's an honor that he would do
this, and he's a very precious guy. This is a cute story that
I'll tell you about him. He's sitting on the front row
with his wife, Jean. He is not a psalmist, but he's
a minimalist when it comes to instruments in the church. He
and I have had these conversations, and he takes me to task in the
book because I haven't done anything about the horrible state of Christian
music. He also beats me up a little
eschatology-wise, but that's good. Those are some of my favorite
parts. He's sitting on the front row,
and the orchestra's playing in worship, and the choir's singing,
and we're having a great worship. He makes a comment afterwards
that it would be so wonderful if we didn't have all those instruments. Because that, if just a piano
or something. And his wife, Jean, to whom he's
been married like 60 years, says, personally, I loved it. But then she said, I'm a Baptist. I thought, if you haven't convinced
her in 60 years of marriage, lots of luck with me. He is a charming, charming guy,
and I think his charm comes out. The two volumes of Lloyd-Jones
are just great. His stuff on Arthur Pink was
one of the most moving biographies I've ever read, but it's embarrassingly
kind of him. The Arthur Pink biography, though,
is sad in a way. It's a tragedy. Do you sort of identify with
Pink in any way? No. Yeah, he's weird, isn't he?
Yeah, he's just a really weird guy. No. In the first place,
I wouldn't live in a house with no electricity for a long time
like he did, and I wouldn't become a recluse. He's the evangelical
Howard Hughes. You know, he became a quirky
recluse living up on the second floor flat in a place in Scotland,
in cold, you know, anti-social. But at least he wrote. I'm glad
he did that. Well, he did. And the early stuff is the best. of his writing, and one of the
books that he wrote that had a great impact on me was this
book on spiritual growth. Really, really life-shaping for
me as a young man, Arthur Pink. You should read the biography,
though, because it's where you don't want to end up jaded and
bitter and ugly. in just becoming a recluse because
you have absorbed so many wounds. And with all that the man knew,
he didn't understand the work of God that comes through suffering.
And so he fought it until it finally destroyed him. I've already gotten you to talk
more about yourself than I've ever heard you talk. One more
question, though. You have never...part of this
personality quirk that makes you not want to talk about yourself
is you're also not very introspective. You've never seemed particularly
introspective. Is that changing as you contemplate
50 years of ministry from the other side? No. No, I...what
do you mean? No, you mean like looking back?
No, you've answered the question perfectly. I don't understand
the question. Yeah. My point. You have your own quirks, one
of which is you have not embraced new technology much at all. I
mean, you still...I don't know how many of you guys realize
this, but John still writes all his sermon notes, anything he
does on his books and all that, he still does with a fountain
pen on a pad of legal yellow paper. You don't use a computer.
But we did persuade you to get an iPhone. So you use a cell
phone that actually has email capabilities. Yes, and I can
actually read things on it. Yeah, in fact... I can't send
things, but I can read them. In fact, just to illustrate,
you guys need to hear this, just to illustrate John's technological
limitations, he'll say to me, yeah, just fax that to my cell
phone. And I go, you mean like email
you an attachment? He goes, huh? No, just, you can
fax it to my cell phone. And I finally figured out what
he meant was email him an attachment, but whatever. But when I get one of those attachments,
there's nothing there to read. Yeah, I would have to push that
little box. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But I know, and you love
grandparenthood too. Another one of your characteristics. Yeah, you're going to have a
couple. Yeah, you're going to have my third grandchild. Your
third grandchild. And Darlene, my wife is like
you. She's absolutely enthralled by grandparenthood. We were talking
about this on the way over here this morning. She can actually
name every one of your 15 grandchildren. And can you? I mean, I'm not
asking you to do it. Yeah. And if I forget them, I
can check on the computer. But I happen to know that you
actually have learned how to text with your phone so that
you can communicate with your grandchildren. This has been
just an incredibly helpful way to connect with the kids. My
grandkids text me, so I was forced to learn how to text back. I'm
a one-thumb, one-hand texter. Yeah, it's been wonderful. I
struggle to be as cryptic as they are because I spent my whole
life being verbose, so they're scrolling my text like this. But yeah, I text them, and it's
really a fun way. Yesterday, I received texts from
my grandkids, and one of my grandsons, Ty McArthur, Matt's son, is a
student at the Air Force Academy, and he's just next week finishing
his first year, and by I think it's the mid-next week, he can
be called a person because the first year, he's not a person.
And he texted me to say he was praying for me and for the Shepherds
Conference. So, you know, that's just a little
piece of his heart that comes through that text. So I texted
him back. Did you go to the Air Force Academy
and speak recently? I went, not recently, I went
to Edwards Air Force Base out here to meet with Christian people
in the brass there and some of their crack test pilots and the
people who run the programs for the Global Hawk, which is a 60,000-mile-high
jet surveillance thing. And then I met with some of the
guys that fly and work on the F-22 and the F-35, which is the
most sophisticated weapon on the planet. And the most interesting
thing about the F-35 is that all its kills die very relaxed. they told me because they have
no idea that it exists. It's a weapon that is stealth.
It can't be found by radar and things like that. But I was amazed
in interacting with these guys to find out how many of these
people in high places are Christians And we are blessed in this country
to have people in that kind of level of responsibility who really
know the Lord and see it as a platform for the gospel. I was very encouraged.
But I have spoken at military academies. I did Scripture
Day at West Point. Right, pretty incredible. The
chaplain corps and some of the leadership brass there are also
outstanding Christians. One Sunday every year, it's Scripture
Day, and they give to every entering plebe class a Bible with a brass
plate on the front of it, a little Bible with their name on it.
And they asked me to come, and they said the purpose of this
day is to lift up the Word of God. And it was a great, great
experience. The place was jammed, and they
had a beautiful kind of a ceremony, and then I was able to preach
on the power of the Word of God. You know, I counted a real joy
that there are Christian people in those areas of responsibility.
And it kind of goes with being a student there in some ways
because they're high ethically, morally, you know, they're just
a first rate kind of person. You know, they're the best and
the brightest in many ways. And many of these people are
Christian. By the way, where's Jeff Williams?
Jeff, where are you? Is Jeff here? Jeff Williams,
one of our finest and brightest NASA astronauts, twice spent
six months on the International Space Station. Jeff, thank you. And you know what? Once he was
in Moscow training, and I was in Moscow doing a pastor's conference,
and the biggest hero in Moscow was a cosmonaut or an astronaut.
And here's Jeff sitting on the front row. I said, let me introduce
you to my friend, the astronaut. Man, they didn't know what hit
them, those pastors. That was really fun to have Jeff
there. That reminds me, actually, of
another peculiarity of yours. For someone who is as prolific
as you are as an author, you're a radio speaker, all those things
that elevate your profile, you do very little travel, really. Only occasionally do you speak
at a large conference or go here or go there to speak. you know, maybe more than four
or five times in the past decade where you've spoken on a Sunday
in another church besides Grace. I know that's deliberate on your
part. Is that a philosophical thing? Is that something you
would...is that advice you would give to other pastors to say,
stay in your own pulpit as much as you can? Maybe give me a bigger
context for that. I don't think I left the state
of California in the first 10 years of my ministry here. Wow.
I think the first time I left the state of California to go
somewhere, I went to Chicago to a Moody Pastors Conference,
and it was the first time I'd ever been to a pastors conference.
Wow. I think it was a dozen or more
years before I ever went to speak outside the state of California
anyplace. I just feel like this is my place, and these are the
people God has given me. A lot of my travel over the years
has been international because I have been compelled to see
the things that are precious to me spread. And it kind of
works. I've done a lot of international
travel because people would hear a tape or read a book that was
translated and they say, would you come, would you come. We've
never heard this. We want to be taught. And so
I go and eventually, you know, they say, can you do a leadership
conference, a pastor's conference? And it's a trip and another trip.
And eventually, can you send us more guys? And we start sending
other guys from our staff or seminary or whatever. And then
it becomes a training center and it just goes. I feel that
if I'm going to go somewhere, it's not to make an event successful. I know why people invite me to
events around the country. I get it. It's because there's
a certain attraction for a certain... It used to be we did conferences
In the early years, even at Moody, there'd be three speakers for
a week. Now there are 35 so that everybody's niche gets represented
and you pull people from everywhere. It's just a different kind of
climate. But I've tried through the years to go places where
I felt I was really strategic. where I was saying more than
what I said in the message. For a few years it was T4G and
I was trying to say that there are things at the core of what
we believe that are bigger than the differences. Many years going
to the R.C. Sproul's conferences in Ligonier
because I wanted to communicate to the evangelical church at
large that Reformed theology was not the private domain of
Presbyterians. And you know, one time I did
a debate with R.C. on baptism, on infant baptism. And I learned something out of
that. The crowd was on my side, and what I realized was that
a third of the people there were Reformed, and the other two-thirds
were emerging Baptists and Pentecostals and Independents. And nothing
would make me happier than to get those people who didn't know
the sound doctrine moved over. So I had a bigger kind of perspective
than just giving a message in that environment. I wanted to
be a part of the heart and soul of sound, reformed theology,
and soteriology, and all of that. And by doing that, I think I
helped people who maybe thought that if you were a Baptist or
an evangelical or a fundamentalist, independent, that was another
world for you. And so I was doing more than
just making a trip and giving a message. So I don't have any
interest in going to this thing and that thing and the other
thing and speaking in churches here and there and everywhere,
especially now with electronic stuff. People can download anything. So if you want to hear a sermon,
you can do that. And I'm still that way. I just
took one trip recently. Well, a couple of them. I went
to Angola Prison, which is one of the real highlight experiences
of my life. I'm going to go back, and they
want me to come back. It's the only prison in America that has
a seminary in it, and about 30 churches have been planted inside
the prison because of the guys that are being produced in the
seminary in the prison. And it's a maximum security prison. Ninety-five
percent of them are lifers. They'll die there. It's an amazing
story. And then I just went to Charleston,
South Carolina because I met an African American Anglican
priest who heard me speak on the slave. He and his wife were
there, and when I introduced the subject, he was fidgety. What's he doing? He's going to
talk on slave. And by the time I got done with
the message, this man said to me, that's the most liberating
message I have ever heard in my entire life. He said, this
is the Reverend Dr. Dallas Wilson, Charleston, South
Carolina. He said, my whole life, this
cloud of slavery, the word slavery hung over my head in an ominous
fashion because of the past American slave trade. And all the African-American
people bear the weight of the burden of this past. And he said,
when I understood the biblical concept of slave, the Word was
redeemed. The Word was redeemed, and I
was delivered from that. And he said, this is the greatest
message I've ever heard. So I said, would you come to Charleston
to my African-American Anglican parish, St. John's, and we'll
have a conference on slave in the east side of Charleston in
the African-American community. And I said, absolutely. And Associated
Press called me the week before I went and said, aren't you afraid
to do this? And I said, what do you know that I don't know? I went, and it was absolutely
just an incredibly wonderful, encouraging experience. Just
a small little chapel. Hadn't been a church in 60 years.
They rebuilt it and restored it. They put out a program on
the concept of slave, and the front graphic was a pile of chains
like they'd been taken off a prisoner. So it was very bold. It was sponsored
by the Anglican Church of South Carolina. They opened the doors
and the head bishop came and some of his cohorts sat on the
front row, absorbed it, professed true love to Christ and a true
faith in the gospel. I mean, that's not my usual bailiwick,
but those kinds of things. Those are really important to
step into that kind of environment. I love the paradox in the way
he said that, because this is a message reminding us that we
are slaves of Christ, and he said that's the most liberating
message ever. And so he wrote the endorsement
on the back of the book, Slave. Yeah, so things like that, powerful
experiences for me because I feel like I'm reaching in where maybe
nobody else is going to go and where I can do something to encourage
those people. And that's the beginning. It
always is the beginning. Going there once is only the
beginning. Going to Angola once is only the beginning. The guys
in Angola said, okay, we have study books in the Bible College
Seminary. If you go to this seminary, there's
like 200 guys in this seminary. They've produced 150 graduates,
and they learn Greek and Hebrew. The first question I was asked
when I went to the Bible study, the Bible class at Angola, the
first guy gets up, and he's a neo-Nazi with swastikas up his neck and
a shaved head, and he asked me, he said, I just want to know
your view of tradutionism. Tradutionism. Man, you know,
that's the whole discussion of how the sin nature is passed
on. I mean, they were so deep into
Romans. They're talking about traditionism. These are ex-neo-Nazi
murderers and rapists, but it's only the beginning.
So they say we have books, but when we graduate, we have to
leave. the wing where the institute is, and then we have to go pastor
our churches, and we don't have any libraries in our churches.
So could you talk to the warden about getting us a library of
study books so we can prepare our sermons? Because they only
have little tiny lockers there." So I was sitting with the warden.
I said, now, warden, you've got all these preachers you've trained
down here, but they're going out, and you've planted churches
all over this prison, 30 of them. And they don't have any books
to study, and so I said, "'Warden, if you'll find a room somewhere,
we'll get the books.'" So the warden said, he said to one of
his guys, "'What about that R14 over here or whatever?' And so
they've designated a room. And each of those pastors can
have two four-hour blocks a week to go to that place and do their
study, and we've gathered the whole library and senate there
for them. So everything is the beginning
of something. I guess, in a sense, you want
to go to those kind of strategic places where you know that you're
not just the speaker, but you're the arrow point, and that there's
a lot of resources behind that once the doors open. All right,
I'm running out of time, I'm halfway through the first of
seven pages of questions I had for you. So let me go back to
the thing I said I would go back to. PHIL You're not running out
of time, you are. JOHN I realize that. But I promised
I'd come back to one thing, so I'll ask you one last question
and that is about those early years when you were more hands-on
in every way with the shepherding and all, and you discipled young
men. I want you to talk about that
and also be really honest because I know the fact is some of those
guys who you were most hands-on in the early years with have
gone out and some of them are no longer even in the ministry,
others are deliberately pursuing philosophies of ministry that
are pretty much as antithetical to you as possible. Talk about
the time you invested in that, how you think that was valuable,
how you think maybe you could have done it differently and
just the... the sort of tension that exists
in the fact that you have so many guys from those early years
who really aren't with you anymore. Then you have other guys who
came here, I'm thinking of guys like Tom Pennington and Lance
Quinn who came here with much of their pastoral training already
under their belts who have done more to maybe further your legacy
than some of those guys you invested more hands-on time and what do
you think of all of that and what is your perspective on the
best ways, the most effective ways to disciple young men for
leadership? I have to start by saying I didn't
know any resource for doing that at all. I didn't know any. I
didn't have a body of work personally that I could say, take this.
So I had the minimal bag of tools. I said, let's go through doctrine.
So for seven years, we just started with theology proper, prolegomena,
theology proper, doctrine of Scripture, and I just took them
through what I knew and did the personal things in their
lives and interacted with them and nurtured them. I don't know
that at that point I really had formulated a fully defined philosophy
of ministry, but it was definitely emerging. It definitely was. I just think the difference now
for me would be if I were discipling men now, I would be able to pull
together a cohesive structure for what would be right. Look,
let's end where we probably should. Grace Advance. I said last night,
we're going to take guys and put them three months through
this academy. I know exactly what they need
to know now. and it's against the backdrop
of all the stuff that's corrupting. How can I say it? Since the way to go wasn't defined,
the attacks weren't defined. But as these guys took what I
gave them and got out, they got drawn off, some of them, not
all of them, but some of them got drawn off into other philosophies
of ministries and meandered. Most of them stayed committed
to an authoritative view of Scripture and some level of expository
preaching, but I think the church always better defines itself
when it has weathered the attacks. And so we're in a position now
to have a philosophy of ministry that's hammered out and against,
you know, it's been hit with all the hammers, and it's now
what it should be. I think we have a So we can say
to these young guys in the summer if they come to the academy,
this is what you need to know about this and this and this,
and this is a biblical philosophy of ministry with all the component
elements in it. And you know the options because
they're all over the place. One of the most interesting things
in my life is to see that I was at one point in my life simply
trying to figure out a biblical philosophy of ministry, and I've
spent the last few years trying to defend it against an absolutely
unrelenting onslaught of stuff. It's just a different time. Well,
thanks. I've got probably four more hours of questions like
that, so we'll do this again one of these days. Lord, we're
so grateful for Your goodness and we thank You for all that
we've been able to learn and celebrate this week. We pray
for Your blessing on the rest of the week and on the food in
the hour to come. In Jesus' name, amen. please visit ShepherdsConference.org.