Welcome to the 2010 Shepherds
Conference. General Session No. 5. An interview
with John MacArthur. Well, this is a time of just
some Q&A with John. We've accumulated a lot of those
questions, and our conference department has put them together,
and just an opportunity to interact with you, John. And first of
all, thanks again for the Shepherds Conference and what it means
to all of us as attendees. This is truly one of the highlight
weeks of my year, and I get to hear my favorite preachers, which
is always good. So, very thankful for that. I need to say that
I'm overwhelmed every year at the exhilarating kindness and
graciousness and joy that I feel coming from all of you that come
to the conference. So it's a tremendous, energizing,
encouraging event for me. Just thank you for doing this
on our behalf. We really do. Where did it come
from? Where did the Shepherds Conference come from? In the early years of ministry
here, the Lord in His grace, we kind of caught the wave. of
the Jesus Movement, kind of the tail end of the Jesus Movement.
There was a new interest in Bible study in the seventies, in the
very early seventies. There was new translations of
the Bible. There hadn't been anything but
the King James. There were publishers popping
up all over the place. There was a new interest in personal
individual Bible study, Bible exposition. I think it was just
something the Holy Spirit was doing. We talked about the Jesus Movement.
There were masses of young students getting together in the Cotton
Bowl in Dallas, and 70,000 of them. And it was just a new movement. And our church just was at that
very point beginning, and I had a lot of ministry with young
people. And I just think it was a time when the Spirit of God
was doing something unique, and we just happened to catch the
wave. And so Grace Church exploded as kind of an expository preaching
center. which doesn't always build a church. I mean, it doesn't
always guarantee you're going to, you know, have explosive
growth, but we did. And I think there was interest
in what's making this church grow. Moody magazine came out
here and did an article on the church because it was a really
interesting phenomenon and called it the church with 900 ministers
because we had such a high level of involvement. The curiosity
was raised about what was going on, so pastors kept coming and
coming by, and it was a draining thing to try to entertain them
every day, every other day, answer all their questions. So we said,
why don't we have a conference, and maybe we can pull all the things
we're doing together and do it in a week. And so we did that,
and we… AUDIENCE MEMBER 1 Originally it's twice a year, right? AUDIENCE
MEMBER 2 Yeah, but we had so many wanting to come, we wanted to keep it…
to some degree manageable. So we eventually had two a year
and about five or six years ago, we reached a point where we thought,
you know, we can't keep this small anymore, we need to kick
open the doors and let this thing fly. And so we took a year off
and then we came back with what now exists. But it really was
just because many men were asking questions. I think at this point
now, it's not so much the questions as the camaraderie, the fellowship
the sense of unity around theology and Scripture, and we have so
much in common. But it all had its early beginnings,
I think, because men were asking the questions about what makes
the church grow. Well, speaking of that, and it's
a perfect transition into the first question that we had several
of, and that relates to last night in your discussions about
the atonement. And the question is, if that's
true, then why witness? How do we tell people God loves
them and that Jesus Christ did not die for them? Or do we tell
them that? Well, you tell them whatever
the Bible tells you to tell them. And the Bible tells you to go
into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. And
that's what you do because that's what the Scripture says. Any
tension you have between that and the nature of the atonement,
any tension you have between that and the doctrine of divine
election and predestination, any tension you feel in those
areas, I feel. I feel the same tension. I ask
the same question. I don't know that there's some
kind of quick answer to the question. I am, however, happy to concede
that God can resolve things that I can't. Really, I don't expect of you
and you shouldn't expect of me to be able to unscrew the unscrutable. You really don't think that I'm
going to solve all the vast theological dilemmas that have existed since
the Scriptures were penned. The best answer to this question
is, my brother, I feel your pain. That is the best answer to that
question. I'm not here to give you an answer,
but I will tell you this. I do not believe that Jesus died
for nobody. I believe He died for somebody.
And I believe He died specifically for those who would believe in
Him, and those who believe in Him are those who are regenerated
by the Holy Spirit based upon the eternal, sovereign, electing
purpose of God. I think His atonement was an
actual one, not a potential one. I don't think it was a general
one. I think it was a specific one. I think it was a real death
for sin. The issue here is the nature
of the atonement. Forget the dilemma. You're going
to have the dilemma no matter what you do. The dilemma is why
didn't He send everybody to heaven? The dilemma is why is there hell
and why are people going there? That is a legitimately difficult
question to ask. The only answer I can give you
is that if God purposed to do that, Romans 9, who are we to
question His purpose? If He gets glory from judgment
the way He gets glory from salvation, who are we to question that?
The other issue is nobody goes to hell for any other reason
than that they're guilty of sin and unbelief. How that fits,
I don't know. But there are a lot of things
I don't know. I've said this so many times. I don't even know
how my own spiritual life works. I don't. Look, Paul says in Galatians
2.20, I'm crucified with Christ, nevertheless I live, yet not
I. He didn't know either. He didn't know. So, you know, if I ask you the
question, who lives your spirit? Who lives your Christian life?
Who lives your spiritual life? Who's in charge of your spiritual
life? Well some of us are going to rise and say, well it's the
Holy Spirit. I don't really think you want to blame Him. And if it's all the Holy Spirit,
what are all the commands in the Bible about? And yet when
you...you know, you must obey and the Spirit must work and
it's the mystery of how that comes together. It's the same
issue between the security of the believer held in the Father's
hand and the necessity of perseverance of faith, of persevering faith.
It's the same issue that we have in the volitional aspects of
salvation and in the sovereign aspects. There's a sort of a
resolution in the center of that that is known only in the mind
of God. But I will not resolve the problem
of the lost. any other way than to do what
the Scripture tells me to do, and that is that the Bible affirms
to me that God loves the world. The specific people in the world,
the specific human beings, I don't know who they are. Spurgeon said,
if you'll pull up their shirts and show me an E stamped on their
back, and I know the elect, I'll limit my work to them. But since
there is no such stamp, I am committed to obey the command
to preach the gospel to every creature. And I can say to them
that the love of God has been expressed through Jesus Christ's
death on the cross and you will know and experience that love
if you put your faith in Him. And if you don't do that, you'll
perish in your sins. And Jesus said, you will perish
in your sins because you believe not on Me. I'm very comfortable
to just take the biblical aspect, but I don't think it's a good
solution to diminish the nature of the atonement and have Jesus
dying for everybody. If you say that He paid in full
the penalty for all the sins of all the world, then what is
anybody doing in hell? That's double jeopardy. That
doesn't work. So, people don't want to say that, so they say,
well He died a potentially saving death. In that sense, He died
for nobody in particular and everybody in general, and the
sinner who is depraved is the one who activates the potential
atonement. Well, that's impossible. So I just don't want to find
the answer to the dilemma of the death of Christ by diminishing
the nature of the atonement. It is a real death. for those
who died in Him. That's what the text says. I
lay down My life for My sheep, and we looked at that. So...and
it's a good...it's a good question to answer because you guys want
to be very careful in the tensions that are in this and it flows
through every major doctrine in Scripture that connects the
sinner with God. You don't want to resolve that
tension by asking philosophical questions, you always want to
live in that tension by being obedient to Scripture. But I do feel your pain because
I don't have an answer to all those questions, and I'm at times
profoundly exercised over the non-resolution because I like
to find the resolution to things. But the issue on why witness,
you wouldn't suggest bringing up the discussion of the limitations
of the atonement in a witnessing context. I think we have to be
careful what we say. I think there are unlimited benefits
tied into the atonement. You can show in the New Testament
that, you know, the expression of God's love in the atonement
is the expression of the same love that's demonstrated in common
grace. He reigns on the...you know,
it reigns on the just and the unjust. There's common grace. There's a kindness of God. There's even a salvation of God
demonstrated in a temporal way. He's the Savior of all men, temporally,
physically, in this sense that the world is full of sinners
who aren't dead. What is that? that God is saying to them, you
don't get what you deserve when you deserve it. That's My nature.
So that demonstration is there for them to see temporally. But
especially for those who believe He is the Savior of them, not
temporally and not physically. eternally and spiritually. But
He puts His saving nature on display, even in the gospel offer
and in common grace and in the withholding of judgment. So I
think we can say to sinners that God is merciful and God is compassionate
and God calls you to repent and calls you to believe and He's
offered His Son as a sacrifice for those who do. And that's
the way I would say it. You've been on staff here, the
pastor, for 40 years and had a lot of staff members come through.
A lot of guys have questions about staff members that you
have, or they have, who are disloyal. How do you keep factions from
being, from rising up in the on your staff and your leadership
team? How does that work? I think loyalty is a byproduct. I think loyalty that comes to
me is a byproduct of my loyalty to them. You know, I love the people that
serve with me and I hope they know that. I don't want anybody
ever to live under suspicion. I don't want anybody ever to
live under distrust. I don't think people function
that way. I don't want to micromanage people. I want to give them the
freedom to fail or they'll never succeed. I'm not threatened if
somebody does something a different way than I would do it or does
it maybe in a more limited way than I think it should be done.
I'm happy to delegate that because I'm not wrapped up in the success
of the Kingdom depending upon the structure here. All I want
is good-hearted people that love Christ, that are gifted, that
are faithful, that are godly, and let them do whatever they
want to do and watch God orchestrate. You know, I go back to the Twelve
Ordinary Men, the Apostles. I mean, what were they? They
were just a bunch of no-name nobodies. And so, you know, it's
what we all are, Rick. We're just a bunch of clay pots
and I don't expect corporate standards to be fulfilled by
people. I don't expect world beaters. I take whoever God brings
around me and I think my job is to give them opportunity to
love them, to be loyal to them. I am the last guy in this church
that any member wants to come to and complain about a staff
member. because I'm not the person who welcomes that. I don't listen
very well to that. And I think you get loyalty when
you give loyalty. You get trust when you give trust.
So...but if it reaches a point where I feel a person is having
a difficult time being loyal to the team, not just to me,
probably more to the team than me. If I see a person who's a
burden to the team, then that's something that you might have
to deal with. But I think you can frustrate yourself if you
have unrealistic expectations. And I think it takes time to
build a real team. It takes time to build a really
good partner. And that means you've got to
extend your loyalty past the points of failure, past the points
where you think, you know, maybe somebody could have done it better.
And I rest in the fact that the Lord, you know, many years ago
a guy said to me, do you want to build the church? I said,
no, Jesus said He'd do that and I don't want to compete with
Him. So I'm not really...that's not my job to build the church,
so I'm not caught up in the necessity of some highly sophisticated
operation to do that. And I think...but I think there
come times, and you know this from our history, where Usually
for reasons that guys are ready to go do it on their own, they
become a little bit of an irritant because they've learned all that
they're going to learn here, and we hope they go out and are
better wherever they go than they were here. They take what
was good here and add to it and build on it. I would like to
think that guys go when they reach a level where they say,
okay, I'm being frustrated here because I'm ready to take everything
I've ever known and learned and launch. And that's always a joyful
experience for us. But I...you know, you could probably
answer that question better than I could. What do you think keeps
people...you know? Well, there's so many questions,
as much as I would like to answer that one. You've always been truthful with
me, Rick. You've always... Well, you know what? My only
footnote is to say that I was so encouraged by what you said
last night, John. I have had... There's no one I've ever talked
to about an issue or sin or judgments or questions any more receptive
to that than John. And, you know, I've gone in to
ask him a question or say, what about this? And he's made me
feel better than I should have for bringing the confrontation
because it's so hard to do. But he...I think that being approachable
has been the glue on that, so I'm very thankful for that. JOHN
HATHAWAY It's essential, Rick. It's essential. Look, I...you can't
live with some illusion that you're infallible or even anywhere
close to that. And loyalty doesn't mean you
never confront error, you never say this isn't right, you never
confront sin, you never confront weakness. Loyalty means you do
that. And I think what I've tried to ingrain in people is You need
to come to Me with an issue. What you don't need to do is
go to a whole bunch of other people and spread your discontent.
But my life is open, my door is open. ADAMS By the way, going
the other way, you've often talked about how disgruntled people
try to attach that to a weak leader and the disloyalty that
sows in the team. Yeah, I've told the elders many
times through the years, the only time you have a mutiny in a church
is when dissident people can attach their dissidence to a
weak leader in the church, and they'll find an elder, or they'll
find a staff member, and this gives validity to their grievances. And once they can lock on or
latch on to somebody in the primary role of leadership, now you do
have a mutiny going on. Now you've got a real issue because
they've got clout now because they can say, Elder so-and-so
agrees, this is the view of Pastor so-and-so, and this makes their
dissent more marketable, which is what dissenting people inevitably
want to do. But if you've got an unbroken chain of loyalty
at the highest level where you can't get into that chain and
you can't get a solo operation or a couple of guys to buy into
the dissonance, and by that I don't mean that there's blind loyalty
among those men, there's got to be openness and honesty and
forthright confrontation in that group and that's what makes it
so strong because they know that real issues can be dealt with
there and nobody's going to hide anything. This is a question
that we've been talking about in staff...pastoral staff meetings
lately. Should the pastoral staff shepherd
non-members who are regular attendees different than they do the actual
members? JOHN, Yeah, this is really a huge question. I personally
believe in church membership, and I think it's clear in the
Scriptures that there was such a thing. And I don't think it's
a vague issue. I think on the day of Pentecost,
somebody counted. that there were approximately
3,000 people, or the Holy Spirit revealed it, but more likely
somebody counted. And then a few chapters later, I think it's
the fourth chapter, they're talking about 5,000 were added to the
church. I think they knew who those people
were. And the primary way they knew
was when they were added to the church, they were baptized. They
were baptized. Another one of the issues I have
with infant baptism is it doesn't tell you anything about who's
in the church. A believer's baptism is clearly an indication you're
in the church. And it's the point of demarcation,
it's the point of separation, it's the point that you die in
Christ and you rise to newness of life and you now associate
with a new community that is inside the Kingdom of God and
you have been prior to that outside. And I think public baptism, open
public baptism was tantamount to demarcation. publicly, openly
aligning yourself with the church and coming under, in the New
Testament era, coming under apostolic authority, coming under elder
authority, pastoral authority. You do read in the book of Acts
how that when a believer went from one city to the next, he
would take a letter with him to commend him to the church
that he went to. I grew up in an environment where
that was done. You either joined a church by baptism or by letter,
and that was the way it was always done. What we have now in this
freewheeling kind of independent entrepreneurial approach to Christianity
is It's people who claim to be Christians who...many of whom
have never made a public confession of Jesus Christ in baptism and
who have no thought of joining a church so that they actually
come under the care and the shelter of an elder and are accountable
and minister to and cared for and shepherded by those elders.
We have tried through the years. to emphasize membership. You
know this. Periodically I'll preach a sermon. And just to
give you an illustration, I did this a few years ago and 1,400
people joined our church in one day because we were just collecting
people, collecting people from all over everywhere. And I said,
look, you know, you need to belong. And if you haven't been baptized,
you need to be baptized. And we were… I mean, we were just… filling
a drain in the baptistry, you know, day after day as we were
processing all these people through. And we keep reminding them and
every...so often I go back and I talk about church membership
and show them how important it is and belonging and identifying
and being baptized and being a part of the church. And that
just seems to me to be absolutely foundational. So I think in your
churches, you need to do that. You need to baptize believers
and being baptized is the first step of obedience for a believer
and it is the public confession that they are now visibly not
only joined to Christ but joined to those who are Christ's and
they're part of the church. And now you have accountability
and responsibility for them. So we pair up baptism with church
membership. I have to keep fighting all the
time to tighten that up. Even so, having said that, it is the
nature of evangelicalism today that we have these people who
just keep coming to the church as you do to your church who
have neither been baptized or joined. And so we have this category
called non-member attenders, non-member regular attenders.
Like we could change that. It could be regular disobedient
non-members. I keep saying to these people,
you know, so I just exercised my papal authority and pronounced
You'll like this, I pronounced a baptism amnesty. And I said,
look, for all you people who have been disobedient, you haven't
been baptized and you're coming to this church and you haven't
made an open declaration, you know, people worry me who don't
want to make that commitment because I'm afraid they don't
want that kind of scrutiny that's going to come into their lives.
But anyway, I told them, those of you who have put it off and
put it off and now it's embarrassing, we're going to have a baptism
amnesty and just to get you done, we won't make you give a long
testimony, we'll have representative testimonies and we'll just put
you through the water, right? And so we're going to do that. We just...and that's tantamount
to church membership. Now once they've identified with
the church, then it's clear church discipline issues, shepherding
issues, really clear. And you know, the benefits are
immense. It's...you know, it's not a threat. It's not painful. But what...but the issues that
you're bringing up come up when you have people who come to the
church regularly and have needs. What do we do? have spiritual
needs, how do we deal with them? Are a problem a sin problem,
confronted with sin, now we have a discipline issue, what do we
do with that? And it's a challenging thing,
but we have determined that being a non-member does not exclude
someone from church discipline. So I know there are some who
take a different view. Mark Dever in his church essentially
says, we do not confront people who are not members. And we had
this discussion a couple of days ago on the phone, and I said,
well, you know, if you're in the body of Christ and you're
in the church You're potentially an evil influence in the church
if you profess Christ. And if you sin, you need to be
confronted in the church. So the first couple of steps
of discipline which is Christians confronting Christians, that's
going to happen whether you're a member or a non-member. So
we're not going to cut that off at the point that you won't repent.
But it gives me an opportunity to emphasize how important real
belonging is. But it does raise issues. But
we've just taken the broadest ground we could and just say
we want to serve You, we want to care for You. When I go to
a hospital, I don't say, I know You're dying, but are You a member? So we wouldn't say that in that
environment, so we're not going to say that in a confrontation
of sin situation either. Shifting gears, a couple of questions
about your thoughts in your book on slaves of Christ. And one question is, do you think
that there will ever be a translation that gets that right in the future?
What's inhibiting… ? TODD PURDUM There is a translation that got
it right. It's the Holman Christian Standard Bible. It's a Southern
Baptist Bible. And the J. Adams New Testament
translation and the old Goodspeed translation. You know what I'm
hoping? That this book will turn up the heat. Tell them about
the book. Well, were you here...you guys
were here last...was it last year I did a thing on slaves
of Christ? I'm sorry, right. Two years ago? Okay, I never
know, but... So I started thinking about that,
and the more I thought about it, the more I realized the paradigm
is just so powerful. And so I've been thinking about
writing a book on the doctrines of grace, a book on salvation,
and I just began to see that the whole way you understand
salvation is needlessly limited if you don't understand the slave
paradigm. If you understand that we are slaves of Christ, then
the concept of being chosen, being purchased out of the slave
market of sin, being redeemed with a price, You know, being
made a slave and then adopted as a son, being provided for,
rewarded, you know, everything. My God supplies all your needs.
That's slave talk. I mean, all of it. The slave
was disciplined. The slave had no rights. He yielded
them all up. Deny yourself, follow me. I mean,
all the New Testament is just loaded with this stuff. And so
we decided to...I wanted to frame the doctrines of grace in a slave
perspective. So I told Thomas Nelson about
it and they kept saying, well we're not going to use that word
in the title, or in the subtitle. I said, wait a minute, this is
a book about a conspiracy to hide the concept of slave. What's wrong with this picture
here?" So you want me to do that while I'm exposing the conspiracy?
You want me to participate in the conspiracy on the cover and
then expose it on the inside? No, I don't think so. So, they said, well, we went
with focus groups and we did the research and we can't use
the word, can't use the word. So I said, well, I sent a little
email. We can always go to another publisher. And so I got this email. The next email I saw said, well,
we've reconsidered and we've come up with a title. This is
the final title. We think that the right title
is Slave. That is the title of the book.
They can't beat them, join them. I mean, they just jumped in with
both feet. So in January, the book called
Slave will come out. And I don't know what, I'm sure
the cover will have some woe-begone guy in shackles, but no, that's
not really it. But I'm excited about that. I think that's a provocative
title. And the book is really dynamic. We're working… Nathan
Busenitz is helping me with it and doing a tremendous job and
working through all of the elements of the Doctrine of Grace from
a doctrinal series that I've preached through the years and
tying it all in to this concept of slave. It's just… it's just
really shattering old concepts, so it's a real groundbreaking
thing. January, is that right? January. In your first session,
you mentioned that validation of the culture happens when we
import the culture's style into the church. How do you define
style? That's a real difficult question because just about everything
that the church does reflects to some degree a style, even
a style of music of a certain era. So you have to be very careful
about that. You know, I don't mind people
wearing clothes that are somewhat up to date when they come to
church. I'm not talking about that. I
don't mind, you know, women putting on makeup and doing their hair,
and men wearing reasonably sensible clothes. I don't mind music in
the church that is Beautiful music, we have one dominating
principle here in our music, in our worship, that the words
and the lyrics be God-honoring and that the style not be so
much an association with that which is worldly that it detracts
from the integrity of the words. But the other element is, and
where you have to go with this, is you don't want to import things
that are representative of the basis of the culture. I mean,
I don't want to stand up in a pulpit and look gothic. Why? Because gothic isn't beautiful,
it has nothing to do with the refinement that it's in the culture,
it has nothing to do with the best of the society, everything
to do with the worst of it. I don't want to preach in a black
t-shirt with a skull on it. Why? Is that the only… You know,
I tell you, I went to a church, a church with a couple thousand
people in it, and the music guy, I'm telling you, he was a freak. He had...what is that thing where
you do this, you know, down the middle, grease, spike? No, not
a mohawk. This is a...I know what a mohawk
is, you know. It's a weird thing, you know. The guy was weird and he was
up there and I was...and I was looking around at people, you
know, had, you know, button-down shirts and khakis and I'm thinking,
you know, if the guy wanted to identify with the congregation,
You know, he had gone to the Ralph Lauren store. What is this? You don't need to import the
basest kind of sex, drugs, deviation into this place. I don't even
think the people in there identified with that. So what I'm talking
about is reaching down to the lowest level of the culture.
I'm happy to take what's beautiful, what's dignified, what's classy,
and we all understand that. That's not hard to figure out.
That's not hard to figure out. People say, you know, you're
still wearing a suit and a tie. Why? Look, the more I cover up, the
better. I mean, there was a day when I
could preach in a t-shirt, you know, but that is gone. There's a certain kind of music
that's timeless. You sang hymns today. They had nothing to do
with this culture. People have been singing those
things forever, and they're timeless because they're classic. They're
not connected to culture, let alone the worst of the culture.
And the more timeless something is, the more I like it, and the
more I like it because I just can't chase every new fad. Special group of people, I know
we have some here. Can you provide any advice to bivocational pastors,
time management between counseling, preaching, family commitments,
etc.? ? You know, it's the same old thing.
People ask me all the time, how do you manage everything? I don't
know. I just, you know, you just have to, you know, ask God for
special grace and do your best at it. I think for a bivocational
pastor, I mean, let's try to be fair with guys like that.
You're not going to be able to do the work that a seminary-trained
guy who has a staff is going to be able to do. You're not
going to be able to spend thirty hours sitting in your office poking around
in primary sources and racing up and down the Internet and
getting ten times more stuff than you need and filtering it
down. I just think you need to find
good resources that you can trust. To help you get to the meaning
of the text and the heart of the text and then trust the Spirit
of God to activate your heart and your soul when you get into
the pulpit, just give it the best you can. Find the people
you trust. Don't kick yourself around the
block all the time because you haven't read 25 commentaries
on every passage or, you know, parsed every verb or done some
kind of diagrammatical analysis of everything. Just get the best
shot you can at it and pour out your heart with the best understanding
of the text that's available to you. Give your people as much
of your life as you can, but not to the sacrifice of the time
you need to prepare because the best you have to give is in the
pulpit. You know, it's...I'm going to talk about that a little
bit tomorrow night. We have to be sympathetic. We have to be
compassionate. We have to be engaged in people's lives. We
have to be available. We have to be touchable. We have
to be accessible. And that goes for me, too, even in a large
church. So, the battle is for all of us is the same. But I
would say to a bivocational pastor, you know, just find some sources
you trust and lean on them. You might only read a couple
of commentaries on a passage and get some good helps like
treasury scripture knowledge where you can chase around the
Bible and take a phrase and find it explained in other passages
and just get some good tools and work with those. It doesn't
have to be profound. It just has to be right. It doesn't
have to be novel. It just has to be right. It just
has to be correct. Take advantage of the guys that
have done some of the hard work for you and get...you might...Jim
Roskopp on our seminary faculty wrote an annotated bibliography
of commentaries and gives you a good shot at getting the best
and the most helpful. How many bivocational pastors
are here? Just raise your hand, really. Wow. Thank you, guys,
for what you do. Amen. What does the Bible say about
deaconesses? JOHN, I think deacon...deacon
is a word that can refer to a man or a woman. Phoebe in Romans
16 was a deacon. It's a servant. I don't think
it's an official group. I don't think it constitutes
a body, a voting body, an entity. I think it's just servants in
the church. I think it's an unofficial designation of people who serve
in the church. So the question really is, what is the role that
women should have in serving in a church? And the answer to
that is Titus, right? Older women teaching younger
women to love their husbands, be keepers at home, caring for
the widows. We have...I don't know, how many
people do we have that would be identified in our churches
in the category of deacon, men and women? Well, probably 800
plus. Eight hundred plus. It's not some kind of group that
meets together and constitutes a board. In the New Testament,
it's just...it's the word for servant is all it is. It's a
servant of the church and whatever those ministries are that women
do, that's...that's...that would be a deacon-esque kind of service,
I would think, just like the men who serve. The elders lead,
deacons serve. They are recognized servants
of the church. I suppose the...one specific model of that would
be the widow that the church takes on support of. What widow
do we support according to 1 Timothy? The ones that have washed the
saints' feet and, you know, it goes down and gives you a whole
list of things they've done, raised their children and those kind
of women that have done the things that benefit the church and that
benefit their families and that would be...that Women serving
in that way in the church would fit into that category of servants
in the church. I don't see it as an official
designation. I don't see it as authority or
leadership in any sense. It's service. Maybe just a couple
more. I think this is a great question,
John. What...if you're looking for a church, you're a pastor
looking for a church, the question is, would you accept a pastor
at a church whose doctrinal statement does not uphold Calvinistic theology? You name whatever theology that
you hold to. JOHN HATHAWAY Sure. Where do you draw the line? JOHN
HATHAWAY I would. I did. I mean, this was essentially
a church started by a Methodist Arminian. So I just said, let
me at it. I mean, I'm not looking for the
church that doesn't need me. I think you have to ask yourself,
of course the problem is they might not take you. But, you
know, you can talk about it. You know, guys go in and say,
this is what I believe. Do you believe this? Here's my doctrinal statement.
You know, come on, take a challenge, right? I mean, go in there and
teach the Word and see what God might do to change the things
that need to be changed. And be patient and love those
people and they're not going to roll over for you. I mean,
come on, they've got history, they've got background. And,
you know, what the biggest problem you're going to have when you
go into a church that's had a little bit of a different theology, philosophy, ministry,
or something greatly different is that you're going to instantly
expose the people who have been the champions of all of that
in the past. So whoever the board members were that believed that
way, whoever the teachers are that taught that way, all of
a sudden, phew! I mean, they're exposed as having been in error.
And how they handle that is the key to whether you're going to
survive. If they rise up like deatrophies and want to have
the preeminence, they'll make life so miserable for you there
you may not survive it. So find who they are and love
them to death. Love the socks off those people
and be very patient with those people and try to endear yourself
to them. But...no, look, we can't just
keep going round and round in musical chairs in churches that
believe everything we believe. You know, people said that to
me earlier in my ministry, why did you speak there and why did you
speak over there? And I said, I'm just following the lead of
Bob Jones. Bob Jones, yeah, he told me one day he'd go to Vatican
if the Pope didn't tell him what to say. I'm not talking about the golfer,
by the way, I'm talking about the other Bob Jones. But I've
always said, you know, what is a greater challenge than to go
into a church that's saying we need help? And go in there in
a sweet and gracious and patient, in the meekness and gentleness
of Christ fashion. You go in there and chant. I
mean, what was Paul doing? Even though Paul was the founder
of his churches, in most cases, he had to go back and correct
things all the time in those churches, all the time. They
weren't things related to church tradition, they were things related
to pagan tradition that were hanging on. But that's what we
do, you know, that's what we do. We chase after the wandering
sheep and we bind up the wounded and the broken and we fix them.
And I think that's the joy of ministry and when you get on
the other side of all of that, You're just thankful for what
you've seen the Lord do. So I wouldn't hesitate on that.
And I wouldn't necessarily go in and dump everything I believe
on a poor group of people who haven't got an idea about some
of these things. I mean, you go into a pulpit committee and
all they want is a pastor that will love them and accept them
and embrace them and help them grow spiritually and help them
have an impact in the community. And you don't want to hit them
in the side of the head with a limited atonement kind of speech, really. That's just not sensible. Give
them time to absorb the fact that they can trust you before
they're going to trust you for things that dramatically affect
how they've thought in the past. You need to earn that trust.
But the one thing you do want to say is, I'm coming to teach
the Bible and let's agree that whatever the Word tells us to
do, that's where we're going. First of all, there's a thousand
thank yous for the free downloads on Grace to You, so I thank you
for that. That basically was an easy decision. Nobody was buying them. Well, regarding the trajectory
of your pulpit, the question is, what's after Mark? What's
after Mark? What's after Mark? I don't know. Do you have any good suggestions,
Rick? Come on. Some lady said to me, dear lady,
she kind of walked up to me, older lady, she said, Pastor,
when you're done with the New Testament, are you going to do
the whole Old Testament? I said, you will never know,
man. I'm not sure at this point. I have some ideas in my mind
of what I'd like to do.