Rest in peace John MacArthur

I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. Now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award to me on that day—and not only to me, but also to all who have longed for his appearing. (2 Timothy 4:7–8)

John MacArthur, pastor of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California and a giant in the modern evangelical world, passed away on Monday, July 14th at the age of 86. I first became familiar with his name in 2005, when I was an associate pastor at another church. A neighboring church had hired a pastor out of the Master’s Seminary, which MacArthur had founded, and that pastor had, after only a short time with the church, led the church into a split and taken half of the church with him to start a new church the next town over. Not the best introduction I could have had to the MacArthur name.

Two years later, in 2007, I heard him speak for the first time. It was the heyday of what was known as the Emerging Church, and some television program had invited on MacArthur and Doug Pagitt, the pastor of Solomon’s Porch in Minneapolis and one of the faces of Emerging Christianity, to debate whether Christians could practice yoga as simply exercise, or whether by doing so, they were opening themselves up to evil spiritual forces. Pagitt believed that it was fine for Christians to practice yoga as exercise; MacArthur saw it as antithetical to Christian discipleship and spiritually dangerous. As someone who at the time was enthusiastic about the Emerging Church, I saw this as strike two against John MacArthur. Apparently, he was a narrow-minded fundamentalist preacher overseeing a seminary that was churning out arrogant and divisive pastors.

Over the past eighteen years, I grew to appreciate him much more. John MacArthur was one of the top expository preachers around, always willing to preach what he believed the Bible taught regardless of how counter-cultural it might be. By expository, I mean that his goal was to preach through a book of the Bible verse-by-verse, mining the passage for every last bit of truth that might edify his congregation. I did not listen to him regularly, but I would listen to his take on a passage on occasion, knowing that he would always present a very thorough historical, grammatical, and Biblical analysis of the text. While I did not agree with every one of his theological positions, I benefited greatly from his careful exegesis of the Biblical text. Over the 56 years he served as the head pastor of Grace Community Church, he preached through every single verse in the New Testament, and wrote a commentary on the whole Bible, along with many other books. Decades of his sermons and writings can be found on the Grace to You website.

His ministry was certainly not without controversy as well, especially when it came to questions of how his church handled women in potentially abusive marriages. And if you disagreed with his positions on issue such as women in ministry, homosexuality, or yoga for that matter, you likely found his approach very dogmatic and insensitive.

I suppose the bottom line is that, as I approach 50 years on this earth and 20 years as a senior pastor, I’ve come to realize two things. First, almost everyone’s legacy is complicated, a mix of the admirable and the dishonorable. There are many men and women of God who contributed greatly to God’s kingdom while simultaneously failing in many ways at home, their personal life, or their relationships with others. I know that for every person who has been blessed by my ministry or preaching, there are others who could tell stories about how I have hurt or disappointed them.

And secondly, I have come to realize how deserving of respect men like John MacArthur (and his wife Patricia, who is still living) are, for, despite their imperfections, they did their best to remain faithful to Jesus to the very end. At the end of the day, we sinful and imperfect men and women are all that God has to work with. But if we are willing to submit to Him whatever we may have to offer, He is full of grace and mercy and able to use us, warts and all, to bring Him glory and to bring life to others.