A Testimony of Scripture’s Power: An Unpublished Excerpt from an Interview with John MacArthur

For the past four years, Austin Duncan and the MacArthur Center for Expository Preaching team have recorded more than 20 hours of interviews with John MacArthur for the center’s top-rated podcast. In these interviews, John goes behind-the-scenes of his ministry, his approach to preaching, his friendships, theological battles, times of suffering, and much more.

John has shared so much wisdom, the hardest part has been deciding what not to include in the podcast. Below is a short but profound excerpt that the MacArthur Center team has never published. It’s from the first interview for the podcast back in the summer of 2020, nearly a year before season one launched.

This is how John responded after hearing a recording of his first sermon at Grace Community Church on February 9, 1969.

Since that first sermon, it's been my conviction that everything I would want to accomplish, whether it's encouragement or indictment, would come at people from the text. The thing you have to preserve in a long-range ministry is the sense that you love your people. If you are harsh or beat up on people, make statements that sound like you're angry at them, you make it very difficult to build a long-lasting relationship of love with your people.

But if you just open the Word and let the Word do the work, it's amazing how powerfully you can indict and how powerfully you can comfort people from Scripture. I think that’s what was so effective about that first sermon [back in 1969]. It’s direct, but it's not directed towards the people in my congregation, even though I knew there were unconverted people, even unconverted leaders in the church.

Instead, the sermon is directed towards a problem that is timeless, that every church faces. And in addressing that problem, there’s not 25 seconds before you get to the text of Scripture. And after reading Scripture, I’m praying for God's help. And then I’m just trying to get the people into the world of Matthew. I want them to hear from Jesus, not me. I don’t want them to argue with me. I want them to be accountable to what the Lord has said.

If pastors could only get this picture. They may be clever in what they say, but if they’re depending on their cleverness, they are trying to accomplish something with the weakest of all possible weapons and they’re shunning the real power, which is in the text of Scripture. It alone comes with the full force of the spirit of God empowering it. The Word unleashed comes with genuine spiritual power and does whatever it's intending to do. No man can do that.

If you’re a pastor, you may be clever. People might like listening to you, but there's an impotence in what you have to say. Even if at some point you say something that's true, it's from you. It has no authority. So, you have to put on some kind of show to keep them attached to you rather than the word of God. It's amazing. Over a half a century, I’ve seen how fiercely direct the Bible is. And yet over 50 years into this thing, you have this love bond between a shepherd who has done nothing but take the word of God and shoot it like arrows at the hearts of people for half a century. And they love you for doing it.

Through the John MacArthur Charitable Trust, the MacArthur Center is capturing the history of John’s preaching and using it to instruct, strengthen, and encourage pastors everywhere. Thank you for your support that’s providing invaluable resources for those who shepherd God’s people with God’s truth.