I met John MacArthur only once. I was in physical proximity to him a handful of times, mostly at conferences and once at his church a few years ago, when the Southern Baptist Convention was in the area. But one time, at an event in East Tennessee, I was able to pass through a line of people queued up to shake his hand. And shake his hand, I did.

Even though I didn’t know him personally, and he certainly didn’t know me, I can honestly say that only a few other people have had a more profound impact on my life and thinking than Dr. MacArthur.

Many of my peers and fellow pastors will relate to this perspective. I’m from the Young, Restless, and Reformed generation, and, while thankfully I am only one of those things now, many of us met Dr. MacArthur the same way: Through his sermons, publishing, and media content. 

And yet, according to the Fifth Commandment, Dr. MacArthur is a kind of father to me and many others. What follows will be my attempt to honor him as such.

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Life is filled with voices that guide us, not so much through their physical presence, but through the power of their words and the strength of their character. Dr. MacArthur was (and still is) just that kind of man, the kind whose writing, speaking, and moral example became a beacon of guidance in my life.

I don’t much care for much of what comes from Ian Morgan Cron, but he did produce an excellent quote in his memoir that applies here: “A boy needs a father to show him how to be in the world. He needs to be given swagger, taught how to read a map so that he can recognize the roads that lead to life and the paths that lead to death, how to know what love requires, and where to find steel in the heart when life makes demands on us that are greater than we think we can endure.” 

Although Dr. MacArthur was not my father by lineal descent, and I suspect he wouldn’t have cared for Cron’s comment about swagger, his words and actions provided me with a concrete example of how to navigate many of life’s complexities with courage and integrity. If I can substitute “confidence in God’s Word” for swagger, then the description becomes perfect. Both his public teaching and personal character have been something like a North Star guiding people like me – people whose names he would never know during his mortal life – through uncharted waters.

I said I met Dr. MacArthur only once. That’s not entirely accurate. I only met him in person once. But I actually met him first through his expository ministry when I was a boy. My home church was wonderful, even if different from my understanding of what a church should be now that I’m grown. Those people gave me the gospel, encouraged me to believe it, and to order my life around the Lordship of Jesus Christ. They also taught me to value expository preaching, and as a result, I met John MacArthur. 

A lady in our church, who led Kay Arthur-style studies with the women, passed some of MacArthur’s New Testament commentaries to my mom. By my older teenage years, our church had identified a potential giftedness for vocational ministry in me. As I considered that possibility, my desire to understand the Scripture more fully grew. I found one of those commentaries at our house and began reading. The fundamental truth of who Dr. MacArthur was and, I trust, is even more so now, leapt off the page. This was a man who knew Scripture, believed it was the highest guide to Christian life, and took pains to explain it carefully with the expectation it would be obeyed.

And it was there that I found my first disagreement with Dr. MacArthur.

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You see, my home church was not Calvinist. I should probably write that as “Not Calvinist,” because it was certainly true of me. You have likely heard the same arguments I would have used against the position, so I won’t repeat them here. To put it mildly, I expressed my objections forcefully. A friend, a bit further down the same path I didn’t realize I was walking at the time, became my rhetorical sparring partner, and my rhetoric was sharp. My own memories surprise me in hindsight; I remember at one point standing in the hallway at a youth camp facility, telling my friend (who was also reading MacArthur as hungrily as I was) that the God of Calvinism was a “rapist.”

Looking back on my younger years, I tell people I avoided Cage Stage Calvinism because I recall just how deeply I hated it. And I never hated it more than ten minutes before I became a Calvinist. 

What led to the embrace of the position? It was Dr. MacArthur’s clear, unapologetic teaching of Scripture. I know that not everyone reading this will embrace Calvinism and thus will reject the idea that Scripture clearly teaches it. However, I must say that, for me, how Dr. MacArthur presented the argument — not so much as an apologist for Calvinism, but as an expositor — was what led me to see my loathing for Calvinism and my commitment to obey the Word of God as being in real conflict. Eventually, at least in my estimation, Dr. MacArthur’s articulation of what God’s Word said won me over. C.S. Lewis wrote in his autobiography that when he became a theist, he was “the most dejected and reluctant convert in all of England.” Something like that played out in my own life as I read Dr. MacArthur’s commentaries.

In a very real way, reading Dr. MacArthur also became a gateway to the life of the mind for me. Those New Testament commentaries were the launching point for so many of the interests that define me today. Through Dr. MacArthur, I was introduced to church history, particularly the Puritans. I developed a love for the doctrines of the faith, which led me into Systematic Theology and the Baptist tradition. Even my interest in philosophy, the history of the West, the pursuit of virtue in the classical sense, and my appetite for the esoteric first came alive while reading those commentaries. 

The people and events he referenced became a bibliography for me, and I began to read about those references he mentioned. His high view of Scripture bolstered my own, and his model of all truth, found in any discrete field, ultimately serving the glorification of Christ, was a framework I caught from Dr. MacArthur. He also taught me to love the church, to see it as grand and dignified as the Bride of Christ, and this view helped insulate me against the fashionable disdain for the church that has marked the evangelical era of my adult years. 

For all of this, I am immeasurably thankful. It is a gift from Christ, but it came through the faithful obedience to his task carried out by Dr. MacArthur.

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All of what I am describing, as well as the broad work Dr. MacArthur undertook, stemmed directly from his pulpit ministry. I would be remiss, though, if I neglected his books; specifically, Ashamed of the Gospel: When the Church Becomes Like the World, which was a kind of epiphany for me. Although it was published in 1993, I read it much later, sometime around 2006. By then, I had taken my first vocational ministry job and also worked part-time at a Lifeway Christian bookstore. By that point, my ambitions and interests had led me to engagement with the broader evangelical world, and what I found was very disheartening. 

The pragmatism of Rick Warren dominated that world. While I felt a visceral dissatisfaction with what I saw, I wasn’t able to clearly articulate my gut-level opposition to it. At that time, the Emergent Church was the topic du jour, and I recognized it as a development of Warren-style attractionalism (a paradigm that would show itself again when Woke Christianity foisted itself on evangelicalism). Nonetheless, my objections were inchoate and instinctive.

It was at this point that I came across Ashamed of the Gospel – maybe, although not entirely likely, on a Lifeway shelf – and the light bulb turned on for me. MacArthur showed me that Scripture provided believers with the framework to understand the trend-chasing, world-honoring Christianity of Warren (and Hybels, Andy Stanley, McLaren, etc.), as the counterfeit it was, and gave me clarity about the nature of my discontent. MacArthur provided me with a framework for understanding the movement’s underlying embarrassment of the gospel, the faith, and ultimately, our Lord. This insight, the sine qua non of attractional Christianity, has been an incredibly durable help to me as I met the Stetzers, Greears, and Kendis of my adult years. 

MacArthur’s call to an unapologetic commitment to honor Christ by honoring His Word cut through the fog of the moment’s fashions and gave me a way forward. I also learned from him, through the brief biography of Spurgeon at the end of Ashamed of the Gospel, not to be surprised when breaking with the fashions of the moment carried real cost, and to trust the Lord to give vindication as He saw fit.

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Dr. MacArthur has also been a balm to me in the most significant crises of my life. One of the regretful aspects of my formative years is that the Christianity I learned as a child was unduly tied to decisionism. I don’t despise my evangelical heritage on the sawdust trail or even the altar call of my childhood church. It is good to call people to respond to the preaching of the word. Nonetheless, and without any intention on the part of the leaders of the churches and revivals I attended as an older child, the lesson I took to heart was that salvation was dependent on the sincerity with which I prayed for the salvation that Christ alone could provide. 

Since I was converted as a young man, the great weight of specific sins I have committed in life came after my conversion, and the weight of guilt brought by those sins left me often praying again, in desperate hope that this time I would be sincere enough to ease my conscience. It was Dr. MacArthur whom I first heard say that the sureness of our salvation was not in our sincerity but rather in the ability and character of the one to whom we prayed. Even after learning this precious lesson from him, I have spent many sleepless nights reading his sermons as I wrestled with my conscience, and I did so because I knew Dr. MacArthur would faithfully tell me the truth from Scripture about my condition. In that way, I owe a debt of gratitude not just to Dr. MacArthur but also to those who built and maintain the Grace to You website. 

Similarly, during the turmoil in the earliest days of the COVID scare, trying to lead my family and church faithfully in days that felt so uncertain, I often returned to Dr. MacArthur’s sermons during restless nights as I pondered over what specific choices had to be made in light of God’s self-revelation in Scripture. His bold stand to defy COVID tyranny and exert Christ’s authority over both church and state was like steel in my spine during the madness of 2020.

As I write these words, my office still contains CDs of Dr. MacArthur’s sermons that I received for free in the mail in the days before smartphones, YouTube, and podcasts. I don’t know that I’ll listen again, at least not to that particular media, but I also won’t be getting rid of them. They feel like family heirlooms.

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I feel like I know Dr. MacArthur’s mind well enough to know that we do not agree on everything. I suppose I am arrogant enough to believe that on some topics, I have seen more clearly than he has. I’ve often told my friends that if Dr. MacArthur were standing in front of me, telling me that every consistent Calvinist must be a Dispensationalist, I would think, “That’s not quite true.” Outwardly, though? I know I would say, “Thank you, Dr. MacArthur. I appreciate you telling me that.” And I would mean it.

So what does one say upon the passing of a father that meant so much to you, but who never knew your name? I think one thing we say is, “Glory to Christ, what wonderful gifts he gives to men.” And indeed, they are gifts, given from Christ to the church.

Dr. MacArthur’s mind was a gift. His spine was a gift. His voice was a gift. And his obedience to Christ’s calling on his life was a gift, the kind that God is pleased to give in a way that cascades down to many more than the original recipient. 

Thank God for John MacArthur—a father in the faith to me, and millions more.