Many people are remembering Pastor John MacArthur this week .. people who knew him well. I didn’t know him well, but I did have the privilege of having lunch with him many years ago – so I’ll share that short story.

Pastor MacArthur was a featured speaker at one of the Moody Pastor’s Conferences I attended in the late 1970s. He was nine years older than me and had already served Grace Community Church in California for about nine years when we met. He would go on to become one of the best-known expository Bible teachers of the 20th and 21st centuries.

I was deeply impressed with his ability to explain the great truths of Scripture and wanted to thank him personally. Another pastor and I approached Pastor MacArthur after his preaching session at Moody and invited him to join us for lunch. He kindly accepted. We spent about an hour together talking about our mutual love for Jesus Christ and the Word of God as we ate together. I don’t remember everything he said during lunch, but I do remember his deep desire to see young pastors like myself commit themselves to expository teaching and preaching. He was concerned that pastors were taking churches in the wrong direction by focusing on things other than God’s Word.

Pastor MacArthur was right then and he has been right about that in the decades that followed. He was a trustee at Moody and later started The Master’s College (now University) and The Master’s Seminary. Educating pastors how to teach and preach God’s Word was one of his great passions. He shared that with me during lunch and spent his life fulfilling that passion.

His example looms large in my mind and heart to this day. The ‘church’ is in even worse condition a half-century later as pastors have neglected their primary duties of feeding and protecting God’s people.

I will forever treasure those moments of having lunch with Pastor MacArthur. His words emphasized something I felt deeply in my soul – the importance of expository preaching and teaching. The time he invested in me and thousands of other Bible teachers and preachers through the years was dedicated to the glory of God and the Truth of His Word. I look forward to having lunch with Pastor MacArthur again one day – around the Heavenly table of our Lord.

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