My History with Preaching with a Special Focus on John MacArthur

Right now I'm preaching through Acts on Sunday mornings, the second time for me.  Last Sunday, I finished the body of Peter's sermon in Acts 2.  Peter is a good example of preaching in Acts 2.  He was taught well by his Teacher.  Preachers should well consider what Peter did on the Day of Pentecost and how he did it.

My first sermon was in 1976, my Freshmen year in high school.  I knew I would be a preacher in 1977.  I wanted to preach.  There was no mystical, bright light, shudder blowing experience.  It was a desire.  It started with hearing preaching.

I became an enthusiast or devotee of preaching.  I took pages of notes on most sermons I heard.  I became convinced that that a true preacher, an actual preacher, preached what scripture said.  I enjoyed the analysis of different sermons or some that perhaps were only speeches.  I began to conclude what I liked and didn't like.  The liked became smaller and the didn't like became much bigger.  I was more discerning of a bad sermon.

When I was in high school through college, I heard preaching most days, most of the time more than once every day.  It wasn't until the end of college that I began to understand what right preaching was, and even now I'm far different as a preacher than I was then.  I had heard expository sermons, not many in college.  However, I started to listen to radio preachers.  Some of them did exposition of texts.

I was preparing to exegete.  I started Greek in high school, two years, majored in biblical languages in college, took languages all four years, kept them up in three years of graduate school.  I heard several preachers on the radio who also referred to original languages.  I heard J. Vernon McGee, Chuck Swindoll, D. James Kennedy, and John MacArthur.  I read W. A. Criswell, Warren Wiersbe, and Haddon Robinson.  I bought exegetical and expository commentaries.

My favorite of what I heard was John MacArthur.  I listened to him a lot.  I thought what MacArthur did was close to what preaching should be.  I didn't have all the same beliefs as him.  He wasn't strong enough as a preacher.  However, he had a lot of influence on me, because I wasn't hearing anyone else who preached like him.  I was very open minded to MacArthur.  He impacted me a lot, but I didn't follow him in my belief and in practice, just in the type of preaching a preacher should do.

What's different between what I did and do than MacArthur?  He has become more strong in his preaching through the years, but he doesn't make strong applications.  He does very little in the way of strong applications.  He leaves too much to the listener in the way of applying what the passages say.  He gives a good example of how to go about explaining what a passage says.  His process is good.  He would say, I believe, that he mainly leaves the application to the Holy Spirit, while I believe that the Holy Spirit Himself wants the preacher to make that application.  This is a major difference between evangelical preaching and separatist preaching.

MacArthur is not a separatist.  He has a wrong view on the church.  He has become more and more Calvinistic in all the years I have heard or read him.  He doesn't believe in the perfect preservation of scripture.  His church is worldly.

I ask myself if MacArthur overall has done more damage than good.  It's hard, because I think he has had a major good impact overall.  God has used him.  However, I think the bad has outweighed the good.  I attribute his numbers and his influence to compromise.  His permissiveness and lack of separation have allowed for a lot of the wrong belief and practice that even he himself is against.  He has produced weak people, men much weaker than himself, and with permission.  When Jesus said, by their fruits ye shall know them, he was speaking of the fruit of a teacher's work.  MacArthur's fruit is weakness.

I heard Swindoll often when I was young too, but I couldn't stick with listening to him.  He turned me off to him.  His emphasis was too much on the communication, the craft, and cleverness in preaching, not enough on the Word of God itself.

MacArthur was different than Swindoll.  He centered on the words of scripture.  I'm happy for all the good that has come through John MacArthur.  I'm thankful for what his preaching did for me.  If someone could take the good without the bad, he could be a help to them, like he was me.  I can't recommend him because of his bad influence.  I still read him myself, but I always put a strong disclaimer on him for reading of him by others.  Many times I wouldn't even mention him, because I was afraid of the result for someone who wasn't settled in his belief and practice.

I know someone could become stronger than what he was, if he started in some weaker form of evangelicalism to move toward the conservative evangelicalism of MacArthur.  However, in general, even though he is a good model for important aspects of the right kind of preaching of God's Word, people, who start stronger than MacArthur and then begin listening to him and follow in his path, will become weaker and weaker.  A lot of fundamentalists were at one time much stronger than they are today and they took their path leftward by listening to MacArthur.

The most important trait for a biblical preacher, I believe, is courage.  He has to preach and apply exactly what God says in His Word.  This includes following through in leading in the discipline of the practice of God's Word.  There are some unpopular parts to scripture and those have to be represented just like God expects and like the original authors meant when they wrote them.  The application can't be conformed to what will allow to keep the bigger crowd of people.  A preacher is not doing his job if he doesn't take the application and practice of the passage all the way to its end.