What God Did Through John MacArthur: A Testimony
Well Done, My Good and Faithful Servant
It was November of 2007, and I was a 21-year-old troublemaker who had committed my fair share of sins. Even though both sides of my family had religious backgrounds (Catholic and Protestant), I was not raised in the church. So the last thing one would have ever expected was for me to be falling asleep listening to a sermon, but that is what I was doing. Someone had recommended I listen to a particular sermon, so I downloaded it on my iPod before bed, thinking I would fall asleep quickly. Except I didn’t fall asleep. I couldn’t. I had stumbled upon an exposition of 2 Corinthians 5:19-21 by John MacArthur.
In classic MacArthur fashion, his exposition of the passage was deep and kept me awake. I heard, for the first time, that I needed a perfect righteousness to enter heaven. I knew that I was far from a perfect man, but I believed God would weigh my good and bad in the balance (even though my bad outweighed any good I had done anyway). The Lord, through the preaching of His Word, had created in me a fear of falling into the hands of the living God. It was then that MacArthur proceeded to unfold the glorious gospel of double imputation. The answer to my problem was found in 2 Corinthians 5:21:
For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
MacArthur preached right to my soul, noting that on the cross, Jesus took my sin and bore the wrath of the living God on my behalf. And in return, I was given Christ’s righteousness. It was through repentance and faith in Christ that I would be made legally righteous, and God would complete his saving work in my life through the Holy Spirit. I didn’t sleep that night. Instead, I listened to the sermon again. That night, I placed my faith in Jesus Christ and began a lifelong journey of walking in repentance.
It’s been nearly 18 years, and since then, my theology has shifted quite a bit away from Dr. MacArthur’s. He was a Baptist and a self-described “leaky dispensationalist,” and I am a confessional Presbyterian minister. Because of this, there were times I found myself smiling and shaking my head—like when he claimed that all Calvinists should be premillennialists or that Christians “lose down here.”
Nonetheless, my affection never changed for the man. He was a faithful servant and expositor of the Word of God and did not waver in his convictions. Because of this, there were many more occasions where I agreed with him and was thankful for his leadership—like when he stood for biblical truth on Larry King Live against an array of opponents, or when he pushed back against cultural pressures by not bowing to the woke agenda and taking on the State of California for their hypocritical Covid policies.
John MacArthur’s commitment to Scripture was unmatched in his generation. He believed in the Holy Spirit’s power to convert the hardest of hearts by the Word of God. And that is exactly what happened to me. God used the foolishness of preaching—the foolishness of an older man preaching to a hard-hearted 21-year-old— to drive me to repentance. No glitz, no theatrics, no accommodations, no seeker-sensitive methods. Just the simple exposition of the Word of God.
Now that preacher is in glory, receiving his reward for 56 years of faithful ministry and fighting for the truth. I am thankful for what the Lord did through John MacArthur. I can only pray that I will be half the minister he was.