Welcome to the 2004 Shepherds
Conference, General Session number 4, Questions and Answers with
John MacArthur. We have now time for a little
kind of living room dialogue, if you will, just kind of sitting
around and chatting. What does this session end at, what? Six? I don't think it ends at six.
I thought it was seven. What is it? So we have about
a little less than an hour. And the way we usually do this,
just to kind of give it a little authenticity, the idea is not
to stump the pastor, the idea is not to preach your latest
good outline, but just come up to the mic and ask your question.
Don't start with, I was born in Kansas City and then we moved
to Topeka and we don't need a lot of background. Just, you know,
I give long answers so I need short questions, you know, otherwise
we... Otherwise we don't get anywhere.
So the mics are there, they're in the middle of the main aisles
and if you just want to go over there, line up no more than say
three deep or four deep and we'll start right there. This looks
like the prevailing group over here, so we'll give them the
best run at it. Give me your name first and where you're from
and then your question. Pastor Guy Rimstead of the Kern
Valley Bible Church, Lake Isabella, California, outside of Bakersfield.
I just wanted to ask a simple question. What do you think about
the ESV version of the Scripture? Yeah, I think the English Standard
Version is very good. I think it's good scholastically. I think it's very readable. To be honest with you, I wish
it had come along a long time ago. As good as it is, it seems
to me unlikely that it will ever ascend. to have a dominant impact
because its predecessors are formidable in terms of the financing
and the market share. It's just very difficult to make
a Bible the standard Bible when it has so much competition that's
already so established and has so much financial backing. But
it's a good translation. I like the fact that it...while
it uses the manuscript family that I would prefer, upon which
the newer translations are based, it maintains some of the character
of the King James. I would say the best of it is
still there. I would encourage you guys, if you haven't already
heard this, you need to read Leland Rikin's book, The Word
of God in English. If you have any questions about
translations, in fact this should be a signed reading. Nobody should
teach or preach the Bible without reading that book. It's the Word
of God in English. We wanted to have one to give
every one of you, but they weren't available. So, the Word of God
in English, Leland Rykin, he really does lay down the very,
very essential understanding of what is a translation, what
is a dynamic translation, what is a formal equivalency translation,
what translation should you use, the strengths and weaknesses
of all of them. In my judgment, that book is the last word you
need on it and it's paperback from Crossway. But I do think
it's an excellent...excellent translation. I'm already so firmly
entrenched in the NAS which I continue to love in my preaching. And,
of course, the study Bible is done according to the the New
King James and that's because the NAS, which has been around
a long time, still can't crawl up to even two percent of the
Bible market. So when you're going to do a major study Bible,
it would be very difficult to do it on a text that's less than
two percent of the Bible market because people just don't use
that text that much. So that's the reason. Yes, sir? Dave Miller from Mount Vernon,
Washington. Dr. MacArthur, I was curious. I'm
trying to figure out how to articulate this question, but as far as
you sitting down at your desk to prepare a sermon, what role
and priority do homiletics play in your thinking at the beginning
of the outset of your sermon prep versus maybe just you not
having a homiletic agenda, but maybe sitting there before the
text and just hearing from God. And I don't even know if that
makes sense, but how does that mix in your thinking? Well, I'm a fairly bad illustration
of hermeneutics. But it doesn't seem to be a real
problem as long as you can follow where I'm going. The cleverness
of the outline, the balance of the points, the point, sub-point,
sub-point under sub-point, etc., etc., those are hooks that you
can hang a message on. But in the overriding aspect
of preaching I don't see homiletics, I mean in the simple sense of
making an outline, creating some kind of outline that has some
cleverness or some repetition, and even though I do that from
time to time, that to me comes at the very end of everything.
I think you heard a classic illustration this morning in R.C. Sproul.
If you were looking for an outline to write down, you didn't find
one. But you had absolutely no problem knowing where he was
going. And I think there's an element of surprise with him,
if not shock. There's something to be said
for not knowing where he's going because he takes you places that
you can't believe you've just been taken, you know. He's great at setting you up
for the unexpected indictment, isn't he? So being clear is critical. And for me, homiletics means
how do I get this down in a progression of thought that is clear? An
outline, some kind of structure helps. It particularly helps
me because I think that way. It helps people to kind of get
back in again if they drift out cause you keep reiterating what
those points might be. But at the end of the process is when
homiletics come into play to me. I'm looking at Greek structure,
I'm looking at interpretation, I'm looking at trying to find
the main theme of this section of Scripture and at the end,
once I've understood the flow and the main idea and how the
main idea is built, the last piece of that is to stick an
outline on it. And I make an effort at that,
in all honesty, but very often I come up with a pretty good
outline for a sermon but I get into preaching it and it turns
into a six-week series with a fairly well hacked up outline, but still
as long as people can follow the flow and the progression. And I use an outline only to
crystallize an idea that's central to the section that I'm dealing
with. So it really comes at the very end. It makes me nervous
when somebody comes up with an outline first. because then you're
going to wind up, you know, trying to find some way to push the...this
is classic sort of imposing your thoughts
on the text. sort of deductive approach. Well
a lot of times it depends upon how difficult the text is, how
familiar I am with the text. But in order to be true to my
own self and my commitment to the Word of God, I always start
my sermons on Tuesday. Because I don't do Saturday specials
and I don't know what's going to come in the week, as you guys
don't know what's going to come in the week, and it's really
important for me to get a running start on whatever time it takes.
But it's basically a day. It's basically one day to do
the spade work. And if I don't get started until
halfway through Tuesday, it might be halfway through Wednesday.
And that's a rough draft kind of thing that has to then be
turned into a final form of say eight or ten half-sheet pages
that I take into the pulpit and eventually file in a notebook
somewhere. So it's a day to do that work. So that's two days
a week and I still don't have the final form. which is probably
another half a day each. So it's at least a three full
day week and that would...that could run, well I mean, twenty-four
hours for that kind of work, thirty hours for that kind of
work sometimes, depending upon what's involved. And I know that
not all my sermons sound like they took that much preparation,
but I will promise you this, that's a fair observation because
I am finding that I preach about maybe at the most a fourth or
a third of what I've learned. I'm way outside that sermon. That sermon is way inside what
I know. And that's the way it is because
I study a text to go as far and as wide as I can with the text. Preaching isn't what really energizes
me. Preaching doesn't really drive
me. If I had to give up something, I'd give up preaching before
I'd give up studying because to me the thrill is to go into
the Word of God and to see the thing unfold and to discover
the riches that are there. And it's always more than I can
preach. If I were just asked to prepare
a sermon and all I did was get up and say only what I knew to
say, the process might take a little less time. But it's the well
that makes it rich because you never know in a moment of desperation
when something is going to rise to the top and be the best thing
ever and you hadn't planned to say it. That's the adventure
of preaching. I'm amazed at things I say. Do you have that experience?
And you say to yourself, Where did that come from? I never thought
of that before. There's a level of energy in preaching. There's
a level of energy at which things just fly out and it's...you know,
you get those kind of wows every once in a while. And it's not
that you're stopping and thinking about it and so forth and so
forth and so forth. Somebody once told me they preferred
to be translated by a translator because then they could stop
and think about everything while he was translating it. I said,
I don't ever want to stop and think about what I'm going to
say. Because there's a certain...it's just how the human mind works,
but a certain flow of truth, a certain intensity of thinking
and a working of the Spirit of God that when you have more than
you've got on your paper and you have more than you've thought
about, there's a dynamic that works and things synthesize in
your mind and become clear and out they come. So all that to
say I do more than I need to just put together a sermon. Hola, Pastor MacArthur. Mi nombre
es Alberto y vengo de la Iglesia Bautista Nueva Vida de Phoenix,
Arizona. Tengo mi pregunta acerca, si me puede dar un resumen breve
de por qué el bautismo de niños no es bíblico y si usted está
en contra de la apologética clásica. Mi español es muy poquito. He
was asking if you have the gift of interpretation. I'm sorry, I had to do that.
And obviously you do, so that's all we need. Okay, his first
question, this is Pastor Albert from the Phoenix area and he's
asking why infant baptism, if you could give a brief explanation.
Why what? Why infant baptism is not biblical. Well it's not biblical because
it's not in the Bible. It's not there. Now I have made my statement on infant
baptism in of all strange places at the Ligonier Conference in a discussion with R.C. Sproul. And I took the biblical
side and he took the other side. And I said, I'll do it, I'll
do it, only under one condition and that is I go first. I go
first cause I wanted to...I didn't want to have to answer his arguments,
I wanted him to deal with mine. And then we had forty-five minutes
of discussion. I would suggest to our brother that he get that...get
those tapes from Ligonier. Can you hablo ingles? Poquito? Yeah. If you can understand
a little bit of English. and get those tapes, that would
really be a great help to you. But the simple bottom line is,
there is no such thing as infant baptism in the Bible. And the
leap is...among those who advocate infant baptism, the leap is from
circumcision as an Old Testament sign of the covenant that God
made with Israel as a national entity, to baptism. being the
new sign of the covenant with the covenant people marking their
covenant children. The problem with that is, that's
not in the Bible either. There is no passage anywhere
in the Bible that makes any connection between circumcision and baptism,
or circumcision and infant baptism. So that too is an assumption.
It's all assumptions, basically. And I try to to point that out
in that series. It would be good for you to get
that. If you have any questions about it, ask one of the staff around
here, they can get it for you. Okay? Good. Aaron Mills, New Song Church,
Imperial Beach, California. I was wondering, what would be
the best way to take a congregational run church and convert it to
an elder run church? Very, very slowly. Look, the
Lord has already proven that He's worked through many kinds
of organization, okay? When we talk about an elder-led
church, and we're not really talking about an elder-run church
because that word smacks of sort of hierarchy
and lording it over and that's not the idea. But if you think
about it, the only way you could ever lead a church, the only
way you could ever lead Any church, any time, legitimately would
be through elders. It's the only way because elders
or pastors, overseers, bishops, whatever term you want to use,
they are the preachers and the teachers, right? They must be
didaktikos , skilled teachers. They feed and lead the flock.
So any church knows that they have to be led by pastors. They have to be led by teachers. He's given to the church apostles,
prophets, evangelists, teaching pastors for the perfecting of
the saints, for the work of the ministry so the body can be built
up, and so forth. That's why I think it's such
a strange thing that when you talk about elder rule to people,
they look at it as if it's some kind of foreign thing imported
into the church. There isn't any other way to
lead a church. Christ is the head of the church, right? We
all agree that Christ is the head of the church. He mediates His
rule through whoever teaches His Word, right? That's what
we do. Every church is only and can
only be led by those who are the under-shepherds of Christ
who give to the church the truth that Christ has deposited in
the once for all delivered to the saints faith, the Scriptures.
So every true believer understands that the church is led by the
Word of God and therefore whoever teaches them the Word of God
leads the church. All churches should understand that. So I
just don't...I think we can overstate our case when we start talking
about how we're going to structure. I really don't think anybody,
any reasonable Christian person is going to fight the fact that
they have to be led by the people who know the Word of God, who
are called and gifted. Then it becomes a question of
how fast do you force a different structure on them? Because it
isn't that they resist the structure, it's that they resist the disposition...dispossession
of their power. It's about power, always, always,
always, always. And what you might not think
is a significant position, somebody thinks is very significant and
that somebody is whoever is there. Whoever is in charge of moving
Chair A over here thinks that's an important position. So what
you're really dealing with is the resistance that people have
to losing their position, their sort of self-defining little
base of power. And people sometimes react violently
to that. So you have to approach them on the reasonableness of
this, that it is reasonable that the church be led by those who
are gifted to teach and preach. The church can't be ruled by
the congregation, they're the ones who are supposed to submit
and learn. It can't be ruled by the deacons, they're the ones
who are to submit and serve. So I think you have to start
with clarity and how it all works out and structures out, you need
to be as patient as patients can be so that people eventually
come under the sense of obligation joyfully, eagerly, willingly
to the Scripture and then the structure itself will come rather
easily. I think a lot of young guys go
out to churches, they know all these things, they know how it
ought to be and they try to force the structure down the throats
of the people and they create literally a revolution because
they anger the people who have been in positions of importance.
It also surfaces carnal people in leadership, even unconverted
people. When I came to Grace Church many
years ago, we had unconverted elders. We had everything here.
We had, I think, I don't know, nine boards, something like that
and one was an elder board and some of them didn't know the
Lord. And then talking about...when I started talking about what
an elder should be, they got angry. It was not...it was not
many weeks before we had some real problems here. because they
could see that they were being exposed as being in a place they
shouldn't be. So that's okay, it's just be
very patient with the structure, with the final structure. Just
work toward teaching the people that they need to be under the
leadership of those who teach the Word of God, who are gifted
to do that. And, of course, you have to model
the impact of that and the effectiveness of that in your own life as well. Grant Smith, Calvary Chapel Milpitas. I have noticed or it seems that
our word definitions and language structure has been under attack. And the example I would like
to offer is with this movie, The Passion of Christ, and how
the Bible warrants on imagery and uses of imagery. And it seems
that I just cannot get any of my peers to accept the literal
meaning of the word imagery or images. So could you give me
your thoughts, sir? Yeah, I mean, there's been a
lot of discussion about whether or not a film is a violation
of the Second Commandment. That's what you're talking about.
Right. I just don't see it that way, personally. I don't see
a fixed idol in a film situation. If God wanted to present the
gospel on video, He had given us a video. He gave us a book.
And a book freezes truth, freezes it to be analyzed and synthesized
and evaluated and compared and studied. And that, I think, is far and
away the appropriate design. I have never believed that film
is the way to present the gospel effectively. I've gone against
the grain of the Jesus film for years and years and years. Having
people somewhere in a third world look up at the side of a white
wall in their village and watch this unfolding story of Jesus
and feel sympathy for Him and asking them if they want Jesus
to take them to heaven and raise their hands does not constitute
enough of an understanding of the gospel to be converted. And
then to say millions and millions and millions of people have done
this is meaningless. I think that there has to be
an understanding of the meaning of these events. So I don't have
a problem with the image, I don't have a problem with that. I don't
even have a problem with a picture of Jesus in a children's book
or something. I don't worship that image, we
don't worship that image. That's not an idol. I'm not a
hard liner on that. But I...just going on from there,
with regard to the passion, and I was invited down to see the
passion at Mel Gibson's studio early on with some of the staff
guys here. How many of you have seen it,
by the way? Put your hands up just so we know what we're talking
about. Okay. So you know. And it...in some ways, you know,
it's got an upside and a downside. The upside is... More people
now have been exposed to this story of Jesus Christ in His
death and in His resurrection, which is in there at the end,
importantly, probably than ever in very vivid, memorable terms. That's the upside. The upside
is whatever Mel Gibson's theology may or may not be, whatever his
avowed Catholic convictions might be. Mel Gibson notwithstanding,
and a lot of reviews I read about the thing deal with what Mel
Gibson believes. Notwithstanding all of that, it is the most riveting,
compelling, dramatic, unforgettable picture of the suffering of Jesus
Christ that the world has ever seen. And secondly, it does make
it clear that He was dying for our sins. It starts with Isaiah
53 and it repeats enough passages, including John 6. eating His flesh and drinking
His blood to get the message across that He died for our sins
and even the pundits on TV say, well we all killed Him, we all
killed Him, we all killed Him, He died for our sins. That gets
across. So the way I approach that is
I...we haven't recommended that our church run and see the movie.
We haven't...we're not having bulletins with inserts from the
Passion. We haven't done that. But what
it has done is raised the level of the public discourse
concerning Jesus Christ to the height that I've never seen in
my life. I mean, there are more people using the name Jesus on
TV than ever...ever in discussion of this film. So in the providences
of God, at the end of the day, here's an
opportunity for us to step in and say, okay, you saw the film,
here's the true message. Didn't we give you that little
book on the murder of Jesus today? I mean, that's my response. I
was supposed to be on Larry King last Monday to talk about that
film and it got kiboshed and I turned on to see who was there
instead of me. And it was those people from
American Idol. And I said, an idol again, an
idol has replaced Christ. I think what R.C. said this morning
is what I've been saying also, is that Jesus is not the only
person who suffered like that physically, right? Thousands
of people suffered like that physically. Some people suffer
worse than that physically. There are stories of torture
through the centuries that are certainly the equal of that. The profound suffering of Jesus
had to do with Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani , you know, my God,
my God, why have You forsaken me? But how are You going to
depict that? So there it is, there's the film, take it for
what it is, people are seeing it, move in, take the opportunity
to give them the truth of the gospel. That's what we need to
do. This is like a cultural gift
to us, right? I mean, somebody is throwing
you a pass, catch it. Okay? All right. Daryl Ferguson, Louisville,
Colorado. I understand the elders at Grace
don't drink alcohol at all. And my question is, where else
do you apply that standard for deacons and teachers and other
ministry leaders and why do you have the standard? We don't have
a law here that says you can't drink alcohol at all. But our
elders collectively have never done that. To my knowledge, even
when I came. And our position on that has
not been that that's church standard to which we hold anybody who
wants to be in this church, or be a member of this church, etc.,
etc., or do anything in this church, or serve in this church,
etc., etc., etc. We've never...we've never done that. But we have
taken the position that we take and it isn't something that's
written down, it isn't something that's like a by-law, it's the
collective sensibility that we have that we just want to take
the high ground. Understanding the potential danger
of this. Understanding the horrors of alcoholism, we don't ever
want to be in a position to set any kind of a standard that someone
in following could wind up in disaster. That's a heavy responsibility. That's a heavy responsibility.
And I know to some degree people think that's cultural. I mean,
I've been to pastors' conferences in other countries in the world
where there's wine all over the table...pastors' conference. But there's a cultural
relationship there. And if you go to Russia, if you
drink, you can't...you couldn't be a pastor, right, Sergei? You
can't even be a member of a church, you can't even be baptized if
you smoke. I told them one time, Sergei
was my translator, I told them Spurgeon smoked. They were aghast
because they had a book on Spurgeon and they liked it. And after this long discussion,
this guy stood up and said, ìYeah, but he repented before he died.î But the point is, weíve just
taken the high ground. We say, ìWe donít have to drink.
Thereís nothing compelling about that. There are lots of options.
We donít want to set a standard that someone in following may
stumble into sin.î You know, itís the old story, ìIf food
or drink makes my brother stumble, itís fine. I want to stay away
from that.î Okay? Hello, my name is David Mora,
I'm a student at Practical Bible College, a senior. My question
for you is, is the New Perspective on Paul dangerous? Yes, the New
Perspective on Paul is extremely dangerous because it attempts
literally to discard all understanding of the doctrine of justification
since the Reformation. N.T. Wright and these others
who have plunged into this field want to remove the legal metaphor
from the New Testament. They want to wipe out the concept
of justification as we have understood it. and redefine justification
in completely different terms, eliminating forensic justification,
eliminating imputed forensic righteousness. They want a Catholic
kind of justification which is some kind of process that goes
on in your life. Anything that assaults the doctrine
of justification strikes a blow at what the Reformation recovered
and our understanding of of the New Testament. It is a very serious
issue. It is a wholesale reinvention
of all of our understanding of the book of Romans. And you know,
it may be just the way I think, but I find things like that so
audacious that they shock me. I mean, I've said before, if
I ever come up with something that is different then the historic
doctrine which the church has believed and proclaimed for years,
get me out of the pulpit. I am dangerous. The idea that
only now with my arrival have we discovered the truth is an
affront to God and to the church and to the work of the Holy Spirit
in illumination and to all that have come before me. For somebody
to come along now and say we've had it wrong all the way along
the line, this is more of that...more of that inclusive Anglicanism
that just wants to widen everything out to get everybody in. And it is dangerous, that new
perspective is very dangerous. There's a lot of good material
being written on that. It's along the line of the openness of God.
Who in the world would ever have the audacity to rise up in this
era and say, by the way, everybody, we've been wrong about God all
along, He's clueless about what's coming. Who would say such an
audacious thing? Who would fly in the face of
all the divines of all the centuries? who truly understood the character
of God. So I think it is audacious, I think it is dangerous, yeah. In other words, it's another
ECT revisited? Yeah, it's just another way...it's
another way to include people who never understood the doctrine
of justification, who just sort of belong in the flow somewhere. I've talked to people in the
Anglican Church and, you know, There's something in there, I
don't know what it is, it's in the...I don't know whether it's
in the Anglican baptism water or what, but when they...when
they get it, they want to believe that if you're in the church,
you're in the Kingdom. If you're in the system, you're
in the Kingdom. And so they just keep pushing the thing wider
and wider. I've been to England, I've been in conferences there
and I get asked that question. Last time I was there, do you
think Lloyd-Jones was right to say that those who believe in
the gospel should leave the Anglican church? I was asked that question
before by five thousand people, by an Anglican. And I said, Yeah,
I think he was right. You asked me, I said, I think
he was right. And then I went on to discuss
it and it was an interesting discussion, but I don't know
what it is, but there's this breadth, this width and you see
it...I see it repeatedly coming out in the things that these
people say who on the one hand appear to be evangelical like
N.T. Wright, but then on the other hand turn Wright around,
you can write a great tome on the resurrection, turn Wright
around and question the doctrine of justification which essentially
is at the heart of Protestant theology. So, our time is gone
and we're going to do this again on Saturday. Sorry, guys, unless
there's somebody with a very short question, we'll hold it
till Saturday and we'll start with you guys that are there,
okay? You know, this is always a little bit of a risk because
I don't know whether the questions are helpful to you or not, but
we've learned through the years that it's a good way to kind
of just get to know each other, so I appreciate those of you
who came and asked your questions. That concludes this recording.
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