The Theological Influence of John MacArthur: A Personal Reflection

I have prayerfully decided to do a series of posts on my theological influences over the next few months. Paul says in Philippians 3:17, “Brothers, join in imitating me, and keep your eyes on those who walk according to the example you have in us.” Christianity is often caught as much as it is taught. We see its doctrine and virtues displayed through the lives of other men and women in the power of the Holy Spirit, and their example propels us onward. God gives these godly teachers and leaders in order to light the forward for many and advance the church (Eph 4:11, 12). In acknowledging the influence of mere men, we must acknowledge God, who raised them up, gifted them, sustained them, and therefore, deserves all the glory (Rom 11:36).

In my own personal experience, John MacArthur has been such an influence. For many, MacArthur is well known. Born in 1939 into a lineage that includes multiple generations of pastors, he has pastored Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, since February 9, 1969. His radio ministry, Grace to You, as of 2009, was aired on 1,502 radio outlets in thirty-four countries.[1] In addition to the radio broadcasts, his sermons are downloaded by the millions every year from the Grace to You website since they were made available free of charge in 2008. In addition to his role as pastor-teacher of Grace Church, he has served as president of The Master’s University (now Chancellor) since 1985 and The Master’s Seminary since 1986. In addition to his life of ministry, he has been married to his wife Patricia since August of 1963, and together they have four children, many grandchildren, and now great-grandchildren. As Martyn Lloyd-Jones once said about G. Campbell Morgan, at this point in his ministry MacArthur is himself an “institution.” Such has been the longevity and effectiveness of his ministry.

The Theological Influence

 Sovereign Election

John MacArthur was my first theological influence. When I was seventeen years old (2001), I read the Bible through for the first time. In this first reading through the Scriptures, I came to convictions regarding God’s sovereignty and providence over all things, including man’s salvation. Despite growing up in church and never hearing about the doctrine of sovereign election, I found the doctrine marvelous and God-glorifying. I was curious what other pastors or theologians taught these truths, and about this time, my father gave me a tape series (yes, I grew up listening to cassette tapes!) by John MacArthur called Chosen by God, which was a four-part exposition of 1 Peter 1:1. Hearing MacArthur unpack the doctrines of sovereign election with incredible clarity and conviction confirmed for me what I had seen for myself in the Scriptures. I didn’t at this point know the terminology of ‘Calvinism’ or ‘Reformed theology’; I just knew what I saw to be true in the text of Scripture itself. And MacArthur reinforced, through his teaching, this high view of God’s sovereignty. Something that I have gladly held to since then.

Lordship Salvation

I grew up in Dallas, Texas, and then in Houston, Texas. We attended Scofield Memorial Church in Dallas, which essentially functioned as a Dallas Theological Seminary church. Many Dallas Seminary professors attended the church and even taught Sunday School. At this time, some in dispensational circles taught a theology of conversion, which essentially only emphasized the mental ‘believism’ aspect of salvation—what the reformers referred to as “assent.” Essentially someone could make a ‘decision’ for Christ, never display genuine fruit, and still be considered a Christian because they had ‘believed.’ I encountered this teaching often, not just practically but also theologically. Friends in my high school taught essentially a two-stage Christianity, where you were converted to Christ and then later took a step of discipleship into a more serious Christianity. All of this did not sit right with me. I kept going back to Luke 9:23, 24 where Jesus said, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.” Jesus called for a faith, which submitted one’s life to Him.

This sounded completely different from the type of faith I was hearing taught by some, which simply said, ‘Acknowledge that Jesus died on the cross for your sins.’ When I would bring this text up in conversations, I would be accused of espousing “MacArthur’s Lordship Salvation,” After hearing the election sermons, it did not bother me in the least to be associated with MacArthur, though I became curious about what they meant by Lordship salvation. The debate drove me to read MacArthur’s 1988 classic The Gospel According to Jesus. When I started reading, I could not put the book down. I was struck by the emphasis on repentance, the new birth, and the new covenant aspects of salvation. As MacArthur pointed out, Jesus confronted the “easy believism” of His day at every juncture and demanded repentance, which essentially is a turning from a life of sin to submission to Christ as Lord (Matt 4:17; Mark 1:14). The ‘Lordship’ aspect of salvation refers to the faith that truly “trusts” Christ in the heart as both Lord and Savior, not just in mental assent. As Paul says in Romans 10:9, “[9] if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (italics added for emphasis). True faith recognizes Jesus as Lord (kurios) at the very beginning.

MacArthur demonstrates from John 3:1-12, in Jesus’s encounter with Nicodemus, that salvation experientially is a supernatural experience that begins with the ‘new birth.’ His point in emphasizing the new birth is that all true Christians are born again, and therefore will submit to Christ as Lord and ultimately bear fruit (Matt 13:23; Mark 4:20). The ‘obedience of faith’ that is brought about through the new birth is an act of the sovereign power of God in their lives, therefore it is of grace (Rom 1:5; 1:16). Furthermore, the new covenant aspect of salvation demands that we understand that we are purchased by Christ’s blood. As MacArthur points out, Christ owns those whom He has purchased. We are His “bond-servants,” and He is our Lord. This New Covenant reality is one of the fundamental identities of the Christian (see Romans 6). Therefore, to deny Christ’s Lordship over every believer is to seriously misunderstand the covenant nature of salvation. MacArthur’s stand against easy-believism served as a wake-up call for much of evangelicalism to really go back to the Bible to understand biblical conversion. For many, an understanding of the biblical doctrines of regeneration, repentance, and Christ’s Lordship was recovered as a result of the ‘Lordship controversy.’

God-Centered Theology

I must also add that MacArthur served as my gateway into God-centered theology. After reading The Gospel According to Jesus, I read The Ultimate Priority, which serves as a call to a God-centered life lives for God’s glory. It is a book about the ‘priority of worship’ in the life of every believer. MacArthur says, “The believer should be dedicated to the activity of worship, consumed with a desire to use every moment of his life to devote himself to doing good, sharing, and praising God.”[2] God used the book to begin a God-entranced journey that would eventually lead to Reformers, Puritans, and God-centered preachers like Jonathan Edwards, John Owen, John Calvin, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, and many others (those will be visited in later posts). But I must credit this journey beginning with MacArthur. 

MacArthur’s Preaching Ministry

Perhaps just as pivotal in my life in terms of theology has been MacArthur’s influence as a preacher and teacher of God’s Word. If I could characterize what makes him so effective as a preacher, it would be his relentless drive to explain what the biblical text means. He doesn’t just tell you what the text says but makes a great effort to show you what it means in its historical and theological context. He does this with great conviction and faith—faith that what he is saying is the absolute truth. In his classic book on preaching, Between Two Worlds, John Stott exhorts the preacher to bridge the gap between the ancient and modern worlds. MacArthur achieves this ideal by taking you directly into the ancient, historical world so that the meaning of what is being said by the biblical author begins to come to life in your mind. As a key part of this process, he uses Scripture to explain Scripture (Analogia Scripturae). As the London Confession says, “The infallible rule of interpretation of scripture is the scripture itself . . .” (2LCF 1.9). In so doing, this gives great clarity and persuasiveness to his position. Since Scripture has one divine Author, MacArthur’s preaching takes on divine authority by rifling off supporting Scriptures. God speaks through His Word, and because MacArthur marshals so much Scripture to his defense, one has the distinct sense that God is speaking through MacArthur.

There is one other aspect of MacArthur’s preaching that must be mentioned. An aspect that Martyn Lloyd-Jones called the most important element of all. In his last lecture on preaching at Westminster Seminary in 1969, he began by saying, “I have kept and reserved to this last lecture what is, after all, the greatest essential in connection with preaching, and that is the unction and the anointing of the Holy Spirit.”[3] What ultimately makes MacArthur such a great preacher is the anointing of the Holy Spirit. This point was pressed home to me in a powerful way at the 2022 Shepherd’s Conference. On the last day of the conference, and as a guest of John’s son, Mark, whom I am blessed to call a friend, Nate Pickowicz, Dustin Benge, and I had the opportunity to spend a few minutes with MacArthur in his study before the final evening sermon. When he came upstairs, he seemed tired from the day. He was kind and magnanimous but breathing heavily from the stairwell. He had already spoken several times that morning—a daunting schedule for any person, much more a man in his eighties. In my mind, I wondered for a moment how he would have the energy to preach again in the concluding service that evening. My fears, however, were easily dispelled that evening. I witnessed something that to me seemed quite astounding in the evening service. MacArthur seemed like a man ten or fifteen years younger, such was his energy. He was preaching on ‘Spiritual Transformation’ from Colossians 3, and he was taken up in his subject. The passion was there. The clarity was there. The unction was there. I realized then, in that moment, that the critical element in MacArthur’s preaching, in addition to his method of explaining Scripture with Scripture, is the ministry and unction of the Holy Spirit. No, he does not erupt as a Voddie Bauchum or a Martyn Lloyd-Jones did, but the power is felt through the alacrity and precision of his words as he explains the biblical text with authority. The Holy Spirit, all the while applying the truth to your thoughts and affections. It is ultimately the unction of the Holy Spirit which has made him a great preacher.

The Call to Ministry

There are several other elements I must relate about my spiritual indebtedness to MacArthur regarding my own call and vision for ministry before closing. During my senior year, about the same time as the aforementioned “Lordship debate” I was having with other Christians, I would come home from football practice every evening, eat dinner with my family, and then I would try to time it where I would wash the dinner dishes during the 6:30 p.m. Grace to You radio broadcast. I often found I was more in tune with the message than the dishes I was supposed to be washing and drying! But I distinctly remember one evening, a constraining witness of the Holy Spirit upon me, as I listened to the broadcast, that God was calling me to do that—to teach and exposit the Bible for God’s people. It is hard to explain the sensation, but I remember precisely where I was when I experienced it. The word constraining is one of the only words by which I can describe it. It was “constraining” in the sense that I realized that I could not ultimately do anything else in my life but this. I cannot remember what MacArthur was preaching about that evening, but that did not matter as much as what he was doing. He was heralding the text. Explaining it with all of his passion. This was what God was calling me to do.

The Call to Faithfulness

There is one other aspect of MacArthur’s ministry that I must mention (though I could mention many more), but I would say that one of the defining themes of his ministry is a call to faithfulness to Christ above everything else. In a world of church growth gurus and seeker-sensitive nonsense, MacArthur, like A. W. Tozer, has served as a voice in the wilderness calling the church to biblical fidelity rather than worldly pragmatic schemes. There is a quote I have heard him use several times that encapsulates this principle: “You take care of the depth of your ministry, and God will take care of the breadth of your ministry.” That’s an Apostle Paul-like statement. Paul said, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth” (1 Cor 3:6). What God demands from His servants is not “numbers,” but faithfulness (1 Cor 4:2). There are “in seasons” and “out of seasons” throughout ministry (2 Tim 4:2). Some have a ministry of Jeremiah while others have a ministry of Paul. But the success of any ministry is not gauged by man, but by Christ (Gal 1:10). 

If I might share one more story to press this point home. I went with a fellow pastor from Texas to the 2019 Shepherd’s Conference. The theme of the entire conference was “Faithful.” And MacArthur’s final sermon was entitled “Faithful to the End.” It was a lengthy exposition of 1 Corinthians 9 and 10 on “disqualification from ministry.” There were warnings, yes. But what hit home was MacArthur’s emphasis on the faithfulness of God to see you through to the end. He quoted Psalm 124:1–2, “If it had not been the LORD who was on our side—let Israel now say—if it had  not been the LORD who was on our side when people rose up against us…” He reiterated, “I am not super spiritual.” What had carried him through to the end was the faithfulness of God! If God had been faithful to him, He would be faithful to all those whom He calls. Such is His steadfast love and mercy. He ended with a prayer over the men present that none in the room would be “disqualified.” The Spirit’s power was genuinely felt amongst the 3,000 in the room. At that moment, there was an abiding sense of God’s faithfulness to see you through to the end. After the closing hymn, the fellow pastor I was attending with and I walked out of the auditorium silently. That evening we were driving down near San Diego to stay with my friend’s family for the weekend. We hardly said a word to each other until we passed Disneyland in Anaheim going south. Such was the power of that moment. Deep in our hearts was a desire for faithfulness. To see the race through to the end.

There is much more that could be said about John MacArthur. Certainly, he is a mere man. But he is a mere man whom God has mightily used for God’s own glory (2 Cor 4:7). May God give him many more years of faithful life and ministry. And may many follow in his footsteps.

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[1] Iain H. Murray, John MacArthur: Servant of the Word and Flock (Edinburgh, UK ; Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 2011), 160.

[2] John MacArthur, The Ultimate Priority (Chicago, IL: Moody Press, 1983), 16.

[3] D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1971), 304.