A Tribute to John MacArthur, Jr, 1939-2025

I first started attending Grace Community Church my freshman year of college. A group of us drove from the University of Southern California to San Fernando Valley to attend a Sunday night service. He was preaching through First John. The churches I grew up in were of the revivalistic Baptist type in which every service was evangelistic, concluding with an altar call. That Sunday night was the first time I ever heard verse-by-verse preaching. It was dynamic, powerful, inspiring, challenging. I walked out of the service, saying to myself, “That is what a preacher is supposed to do.” His job is not to give us updates on current events, to entertain us with stories, to share his political opinions, or even to evangelize the lost, but simply to explain the Bible and apply its message. His job is to feed the sheep. I knew from that point on that whatever church I attended would feature expository preaching, and if I ever were a minister, verse-by-verse would characterize my own approach to preaching. That is to say, beginning at that point he had a direction-setting impact on my life through both the power and pattern of his ministry.

The journey to the Grace Community Church, pastored since 1969 by “Johnny Mac” (as we irreverently called him), became a weekly outing for us. We would pile into one of our cars, argue who was going to pay for the gas, and drive the 45 minutes to Roscoe Boulevard in Panorama City. None of us had an inkling about worship. We endured the “preliminaries.” We were there to hear MacArthur. His preaching was incisive yet accessible; biblical yet contemporary; deadly serious yet sprinkled with humorous insights. We loved him.

Following the service, we would drive a short distance down Roscoe to In-N-Out Burgers, order our “double-dubs” and milkshakes, and discuss, debate, and relive the sermon. A great deal of learning occurred sitting around their outside tables enjoying the cool air of Southern California. Of course none of us worried a bit about dining out on the Lord’s Day. That Sunday might be the Christian Sabbath had not yet occurred to us.

This went on week after month after year for three years. Each Sunday I walked into Grace Community one person and walked out a different person. That is how dynamic his preaching was. Each Sunday I left church with new eyes and ears, with a new outlook, new understanding, and new priorities.

During my college summers I borrowed dozens and dozens of cassette tapes from Grace Community’s lending library, particularly of MacArthur’s sermons on 1 Corinthians. I listened to them on my daily 45-minute drive to and from my summer job at Bekins Moving Van and Storage in Santa Monica. In those days this meant plugging my trusty cassette player into the cigarette lighter while straining to hear above the noise of the traffic.

My Christian pilgrimage has been shaped by a series of Christian leaders: Martin Canavan, the Baptist preacher of my youth; Mark and Sharon Neuenschwander, Fraternity Row Bible study teacher my senior year at USC; J. I. Packer and J. A. Motyer, theologians and authors at Trinity College, Bristol, England; William Still of the Gilcomston South Church of Scotland congregation in Aberdeen; James M. Baird, my pastoral guide through the post-seminary early years of ministry; and Hughes O. Old, the great historian-theologian of Reformed worship. It’s sobering to consider that all of my heroes are now deceased, less one.

John MacArthur is a member of this club. For 50 years he has been my primary model for preaching. Why have I preached verse-by-verse through Scripture, the lectio continua, for nearly 40 years, covering 50 of the 66 books of the Bible? Why are even topical sermons always based on a text of Scripture? I learned this from MacArthur. Why am I convinced that the Bible is perpetually the most relevant, most up-to-date, most thought-provoking, most challenging, most life-changing, most life-shaping book in the whole world? Because of John MacArthur. Why do I believe that the Christian message includes the call of both law and gospel, sola fide and good works, sola gratia and obedience? Because of John MacArthur. Why am I convinced that the Bible teaches both predestination and human responsibility? To a degree, because of John MacArthur, the Calvinist. Why am I willing to say unpopular things, even controversial things when it is necessary to do so? Because I heard MacArthur do so in the most helpful and clarifying ways week after week for three years. Later, from afar, I saw him throw down the gauntlet by publishing The Gospel According to Jesus in 1988, challenging the antinomian, “cheap grace” element of the dispensationalism in which he was reared and earning him the ire of the faculty of Dallas Theological Seminary, the flagship seminary of dispensationalism, and resulting in his program being dropped by the Bible Broadcasting Network. This was only the first of a number of unpopular, costly, but necessary stands he took over the years. He is my model of a principled yet not pugnacious Christian ministry, of a willingness to be faithful regardless of cost. MacArthur was an Elijah of our times.

I eventually arrived at different convictions regarding the sacraments, church government, and eschatology. I am a covenantal Presbyterian, and he was a baptistic, congregationalist (local autonomy), pre-millenialist. Yet I dedicated my expository commentary on 1, 2, 3 John (Christian Focus, 2016) to him. Why? Because no one has had a greater impact on the trajectory of my life than did “Johnny Mac.” He was my model of life-changing gospel preaching, of preaching without compromise, of preaching from “all the Scriptures.” Unknown to him, he cast a vision for me of the eternal difference a simple expository ministry could make and kindled in me the desire that maybe, perhaps one day, I might hope to do the same.

Terry L. Johnson is the Senior Minister of the Independent Presbyterian Church of Savannah, GA and the author of numerous books, most recently, The Identity and Attributes of God (Banner).