NATHAN: Everyone’s so excited that you’re here, Pastor John. It’s so good to see you. Welcome back. We’re so glad you’re here.

JOHN: Well, thank you. I had to appear so people knew I wasn’t dead. I mean, I’ve been reading about my death, and it’s highly exaggerated.

NATHAN: Along those lines, would you give everyone just an update on how you’re feeling, how things are going as you recuperate?

JOHN: How much time do you have? Maybe a summary. I was preaching here January of 2023, in the morning service, and all of a sudden, I couldn’t breathe, and I said, “I’m having trouble with my breath,” and then I went on and preached for fifty minutes. But that was the first service. In between I was told that I had probably had an AFib attack on my heart and that I was benched for the second service. So they took me to the hospital; and the upshot of that was I had four stints put in the arteries around my heart, and it was very successful. My heart is doing very well.

A few months after that, they noticed an aberrant rhythm in my heart, so they did another procedure where they run an electric wire up and shocked that—whatever that cell wants to do on its own—and it was successful. And a few months after that, maybe almost a year, the cardiologist said, “You need to have your aorta replaced.” Well, that sounded pretty serious. But they have a new procedure where they literally run a catheter up through your veins and put a new aorta in and push the old one out. It’s an amazing surgery; and they did that, and it was successful. But through all of that, I’m always trying to recover. So it’s been a long siege. And the issue that seems to have been the most difficult for me—you can probably tell by the way I’m talking—is breathing, which is sort of basic to life. So it’s been a long siege of not breathing normally.

After all of that, they put me through—I guess it was an X-ray, and they said, “You have fluid on your lungs.” And I thought, “OK, what do we do?” Well, they aspirated it five times, and it kept coming back, and then they realized they have to do a lung surgery. So that was the last one, not—just a—really, a month and a half ago, maybe. They went in, and they cleaned out my lungs and sealed up the leaks, wherever those are coming from. And the doctor said, “That was very successful.”

But the recovery from that is requiring a lot of patience, because though your lungs are delivered from whatever is in them that’s stopping them up—it’s almost like scabbing—they have to recover. And I keep telling my lungs, “Could you please move a little faster?” I’m not sure they’re hearing me. So it’s just a question of recovering from that lung surgery; and it went successfully. But again, if you’re operating with two lungs, that’s great. If you’re operating with one and a half lungs, it’s a pretty big hit. It’s a 25 percent hit on your capacity to breathe.

So the diagnosis was, you’re going to get better, but in the meantime, you have to rest. I’ve never really been good at rest, so I’ve been reading Hebrews 3 and 4, that I need to enter into rest. And I’m willing to rest as long as the Lord will let me rest. But in my heart, I want to be here. I want to continue to serve you and serve the Lord as long as I can. I think I can provide some ministry as long as my brain works. And so far, it’s holding on. At least the people around me say I haven’t lost my mind.

So I’m looking forward to whatever the Lord is going to bring. But it’s going to be another, I would guess, four to six weeks before we get to whatever the final outcome of that healing process is. And so obviously, I can’t preach because I can’t sustain that, but I apparently can sit and have a conversation, so I’m doing that. But I’m so thankful for good medical care. Look, I was fine till I was 84. I hit 84, and I went off a cliff. I don’t know what 84 did, but it’s exactly where the Lord has me and exactly where He wants me, and I’m grateful for that.

NATHAN: Well, as—

JOHN: And by the way, people say, “How are you? How are you? How are you?” I give them the same answer: Thankful.

NATHAN: Amen.

JOHN: Thankful.

NATHAN: Well, as anyone who knows you knows, even when you’re away, you are fully engaged in all of the ministry that is happening here at this church and in our family of ministries. I was wondering if maybe to start our evening you could give us some highlights of what God is doing in our church, doing through the family of ministries, here and all around the world because it’s just amazing what God’s doing, and it’s so encouraging to hear the report of it.

JOHN: You’ve noticed, Nathan, along with a lot of other leaders around here, that even when I’m supposed to be resting, I’m calling you on the phone all the time.

NATHAN: We love it. We love it. We love it.

JOHN: We’re getting you all together. We’ve had some wonderful meetings together. I’ve been aware of everything. And this is a situation where I almost have to follow a list, here, because I’ve never seen the hand of the Lord and greater blessing on this church in all of my life here, and that’s over half a century. It’s astonishing, just every aspect of ministry. The highest enrollment ever in history at The Master’s University—of all strange things, Wall Street Journal rating us the number one university in the United States. And this has created a massive interest. As of now, for next fall, we have 300,000 inquiries for The Master’s University that has, what, 1,200, 1,300 residential students.

NATHAN: That’s right.

JOHN: So the Lord has blessed that institution. We have so many students, we’ve had to buy twenty houses around the school; we’re eating up the neighborhood. And we’re loving the fact that the enrollment is growing. And I mean, your leadership in the seminary has produced the largest enrollment in history, over eight hundred.

NATHAN: That’s right.

JOHN: Twenty-five percent of them are internationals. This is the highest enrollment ever. You might not understand the accomplishment that was done by our scholars, led by Abner Chou in translating the Legacy Standard Bible. They did it in one year. It’s unheard of by any group of people, ever, translating an entire Bible in one year. And all six of them were part of the college and seminary, so they were basically coming from the same doctrinal perspective. And all six of them translated the whole Bible and then compared their translations together and documented all the background reasons as to why they chose the words they chose. And the result of that is a massive, massive amount of translation notes. I’ve never seen anything like it. I don’t think there’s ever been anything that I know of in the history of publication like it.

So we’re going to begin to release that with our new publishing company, and the first volume is going to be the translator’s notes from Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Acts, and then we’re going to release all of them. It will be the most detailed commentary on the entire Bible ever done. This is a monumental achievement. And we want to be known not only as a place who trains, but we want to be known as a place who provides resources, and God has given us the kind of people who can do that.

I come up with ideas now and then of things I think will bless people, and one of the things I want to do is get people into commentaries. And I’ve written commentaries; we’re working on the Old Testament now. We’ve done Zechariah, Nahum, and Jonah, and Daniel’s coming out. Not many people read commentaries, so I thought, “What if we did a series of books on the greatest chapters in the Bible, where you have kind of a commentary approach to that one chapter?” And here’s one that came out. It’s called The Triumph of Love: The Believer’s Victory over Doubt. And while that is a thematic title, it is essentially a chapter in the Bible—a great chapter, a remarkable chapter.

NATHAN: Yeah, Romans 8.

JOHN: Romans chapter 8. It’s a commentary on Romans 8 that looks at the triumph of love, Christ’s love for His own.

There’s another one in process called The Savior Who Prays, from John 17, which we all heard this morning from Josiah. And there’s another one from Daniel 9 coming out, and I can’t remember the name of it. This series is going to be manageable books on great chapters of the Bible, and I’m sure they’ll follow the path of the other things that we’ve done, in that they’ll be translated and made available to many others. Daniel 9 is Christ’s triumphs over sin and death. And these will be ready, surely, for Shepherds Conference—we think.

Oh, I know what the other one is: 1 Corinthians 15, The Triumph of the Rising. So lots of wonderful things. We also decided to do a book on the doctrines of Grace, five volumes: one volume on depravity, one on election, one on atonement, one on irresistible grace, and one on perseverance. When they’re all together, we’ll put them in a little box, and you’ll have a box of books on the doctrines of grace. It’s incredible to be able to have all the resources we need to do our own publishing. Rather than try to find a publisher, we’ve started our own publisher, and it’s the best of the best of the best. I’m so thankful for that.

And by the way, I offer a hearty amen. I wrote the book The War on Children. You know how I feel about children’s ministry, and I’m so excited to hear what Tom was saying about what’s coming up; and that’s just the beginning of it I was going to mention to you.

Herald Gandi is overseeing the Grace Academy in its third academic year. And we just hired Ryan Theule, who comes to us from vice presidency of the College of the Canyons, to oversee all education; and Grace Yang, who was a school principal down in the Bay Area, to oversee K-12 curriculum development. We’re going to develop biblical curriculum for all Christian schools. We want to provide all the resources we can for children.

And while I’m talking, while I’m doing a commercial—but so far, I haven’t spoken of anything you can buy, so it’s not really a commercial. I was handed tonight a MacArthur Study Bible in Romanian, in Romanian. Amazing. And then I was handed Biblical Doctrine in Albanian. That is just astonishing. Albanian. What is it, 1,100 pages? This is everything you need to know about sound doctrine in the Scripture, with an index.

Just to give you a picture of this and the resources that we have here, the MacArthur Study Bible is now available in Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, Romanian, and the notes are available in Czech and Farsi. It’s about to be released in Hebrew, in Hebrew. It is currently being translated into Burmese, Ukrainian, IsiZulu. You heard of that? It’s got to be Africa.

NATHAN: Yes, Zulu, yeah.

JOHN: I wonder how I sound in Zulu. Indonesian, Vietnamese, Armenian, Telugu (that’s Philippines), Georgian, Finnish, Swahili, Croatian, Burmese, Japanese, and Polish. Mind boggling. And Biblical Doctrine has been completed in Czech, German, Italian, Arabic, Polish, Russian, Portuguese, Korean, Spanish, Romanian, French, Albanian, as you saw there. It’s in progress in Amharic. Where is that?

NATHAN: Ethiopia.

JOHN: Ethiopia.

NATHAN: Yeah.

JOHN: Chinese, Japanese, Croatian, Hindi—thank the Lord for that—Marathi, Polish, Hebrew, and Ukrainian.

NATHAN: Amazing.

JOHN: And we’re about to launch training centers with TMAI in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Portugal, Zimbabwe, Mongolia, and Mauritius (an island off Madagascar). I can’t even grasp that. It’s beyond me.

And we just had thirty men graduate. In fact, Mark Tatlock is there right now, from a training center in a country I can’t tell you, because if they find out about it, they’ll shut them down. This is just a way to sweep across and say that these are the most amazing times. And you know, one thing I knew when I came here was God would bless His Word because He promised that. And if we took care of the Word and were faithful with the Word and took care of the depth, He would take care of the breadth. If we were faithful to His Word, He would spread out where He wanted it to go. And we’re so far beyond what we could have asked or thought.

I remember, coming out of seminary, reading Ephesians, “And now unto Him is able to do exceeding abundantly above all you can ask or think,” and I used to say, “I can think of a lot of things, and I can ask for a lot of things. How can it be beyond that?” Well, this so far surpasses that that it’s incomprehensible. And it’s not any genius in marketing, it’s that the Word is alive and powerful, and it is unleashed. We talk about that on Grace to You, right: “Unleashing God’s truth one verse at a time.” And when you unleash it in language after language after language after language, it does its work. And the growth of Grace Church and everything in it, all these ministries, I just sit in wonder because I’m not doing any of this. This is the work of the Word in the saints, reaching out and spreading their service, their love, and their faithfulness globally.

NATHAN: You mentioned the Legacy Standard, and, of course, people love that translation because it’s so good. You mentioned The MacArthur Study Bible. I know people are wondering, “Are we ever going get the MSB in the LSB?”

JOHN: I have it. I’ve distributed some of them already. It’s spectacular. They have it in a hard cover, and they have it all the way up to goatskin. So even animals are making sacrifices for this.

NATHAN: Pastor John, it really is amazing to consider the scope of ministry that God’s doing here. It is what Paul said in 1 Corinthians, “a wide-open door of opportunity for the gospel.” And yet Paul goes on in that verse to say, “There are many adversaries.” And we expect that kind of adversity when it comes from outside of the church.

But sometimes, unexpectedly, there are threats and challenges. There’s adversity that comes from inside the church, when people that we respect and trust turn out to be different than we thought they were, or at least than they profess to be. When that happens, we’re all stunned. How do we process that? How do we move past that?

JOHN: Well, I know you’re talking about Steve Lawson. And I say that with the deepest agony in my soul. But the first thing you have to understand is God is blessing this church in many, many ways, and that is one of the ways He is blessing us: to expose someone who is in a position they have no right to be in.

NATHAN: To purify the church.

JOHN: To purify the church. I mean, this is the whole point of Revelation 2 and 3, right, where the Lord sends all those letters to the churches and says, “Look, if something isn’t right in your church, you either deal with it, or I’m coming and I’m going to blow the candle out, and you’re going to be out of existence.”

I mean, the church has two options: one, get right; two, you’re done. You either deal with the sin—one of those letters basically says, “You have someone there who tolerates adultery. I’ll remove the candlestick.” It is fatal to a church to have that kind of behavior in leadership. And while none of us knew it or expected it because of the soundness of the theology, the Lord knew, and the Lord said, “For Grace Church, that’s enough. For The Master’s Seminary, that’s enough.”

I think there has to be weariness with the Lord. I think He has to be sick of superficial church worship. One of the downsides of not being here every Sunday morning is the agony of watching church on TV and the frivolity and silliness and superficiality, the pragmatic movement. We all talk about pragmatism over the last thirty, forty years. Church is becoming pragmatic, trying to entertain unbelievers. I think there’s a weariness with God with that.

And some of those pragmatic churches—the ones that maybe had the greatest amount of influence, like Hillsong; or the one in Dallas, Robert Morris’ church, which is right across the road from Tom Pennington’s faithful church, Countryside Bible. The Lord is turning the spotlight on and saying, “That’s enough. That’s enough.” And unfaithful leaders are being exposed, as they should be. And while we would wish that it had never happened to us, we would be foolish to think that there wouldn’t be an effort made by the Enemy to plant in this church someone who could have a corrupting influence while apparently having a positive influence.

That’s the subtly of Satan. And it almost seems to me that you would have to have somebody like that here, because we wouldn’t take the kind of leadership that other churches take, to rise to this pulpit. Your theology has to be sound, and everything about you, as far as we know it, to be supporting that theology. So if we were going to have that, that’s the kind of person it would be.

But again, as we get closer to the end, I think the Lord is purifying His church, and I’m so thankful for that. My heart and soul aches for Steve; obviously, a friend. I don’t love him any less than I’ve loved him for twenty-five years. I don’t know how you preach past your conscience unless it’s completely scarred over. But I pray constantly. In fact, I find myself almost every night praying for him at some point in the middle of the night.

So—but the Lord has favored us. He wants a pure church. I mean, the first instruction in the Bible for the church is if somebody sins, go to him, right, Matthew 18. And ultimately if they don’t repent, tell the church. Tell the church. Paul said, “I want to present to the Lord a pure and chaste bride.” Sometimes we know the sin, and we can deal with it. Sometimes we don’t know the sin, and the Lord has to bring it out. But while my heart is crushed for the sinner, it is grateful for the Savior who is purifying His church.

NATHAN: Along with that emphasis on purity, I know, with our pastoral leadership team over the last several weeks, you’ve really been emphasizing the priority of unity. So I wanted to ask you, when you think about Grace Community Church and what it means to be unified in Christ, why is that such an important priority, and how can we as members of this church pursue that biblical calling?

JOHN: Well, of course, we all heard this morning in John 17 that there is a spiritually organic unity. We’re all one in Christ, right? And that ought to play out in how we live our lives.

Just coming off that incident we were just talking about, when the church is so severely wounded, it’s like an animal. When that animal is severely wounded, all the predators will move in for the kill. And what I noticed online was as soon as this thing was exposed, those people who resent and hate and attack Grace Church all the time ramped up their attack, and they started coming after us; and you can’t let that happen.

So, you were there, right, in my house. We got together for two or three hours, and we said, “This is where we take our stand. This is where we love each other, we support each other, we uphold each other, we deal honestly with each other as leaders. We’ve got to circle the wagons, we’ve got to link our arms, we’ve got to make sure the chain is unbroken, because when we’re exposed like that, all the enemies are going to come at us with a vengeance; and if they can pit us against each other, they can do some real damage.” And I said, “The damage is done. No more. We’re going to be faithful to each other and faithful to Christ in our loving of each other.”

None of us is perfect. We all have to concede, right, something—sometimes a lot of things, I guess particularly to me. But the Lord wants us to be unified. I love this: “in the perfect bond of peace.” Peace with each other, the perfect bond of love. So we’ve got to find a way to close ranks and not let the wound be an opening for enemies to attack our integrity or to pump lies about us out onto the Internet. We’ve got to be faithful to each other.

I think in leadership, the faithfulness that you’re required to demonstrate to the people is going to be developed at that leadership level. So this was a wake-up call to all of us—first of all, to do some self-examination, right, in our own lives, and then to say, “I’m going to love and care for everybody.” I’ve been talking about: You’ve got to consider everybody more important than yourself, every ministry more important than yours. That’s Philippians 2, right?

So it was a blow. It was a massive blow. But what was meant for evil, I think the Lord uses for good, and the good coming out of it is we rally, we increase our love for each other, we embrace each other, we strengthen each other, we work on each other’s weaknesses, and we become stronger for it. And when there’s strength in unity, there will be strength through the whole community of saints.

NATHAN: Building on that theme of unity, 1 Corinthians 12 describes the church as the body of Christ, and we’re all individually members of that body. When we think about our role as members in this local body, what does it look like practically, in terms of service and stewardship and sacrifice? What does it look like practically, for us to be fully invested and fully engaged in the ministry here?

JOHN: One, be here, right? Be here. This is your life, and the Word is your food. You don’t live by bread alone; you live by what? Every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. Be here because that’s what you’re going to hear every time you walk in the door or in somebody’s home for a Bible study or in one of the rooms around here. Be here. Serve here. Identify gifts, talents, spiritual abilities as the Spirit of God has given you—find a way to use them.

Love here. Express your love to those around you in a thousand ways. And I think love is best expressed in one another, right? Pray for one another, exhort one another, encourage one another, all the many one-anothers of the New Testament.

And then I would say, sacrificially give. We’ve had a lot of new people come to Grace in the last couple of years—I don’t know what the numbers are, two thousand, something like that, new people from the COVID era. And I don’t know that everybody that’s come that’s new. I know I haven’t had an opportunity to teach them on biblical giving, and that’s starting to show up in the giving in our church.

While the Lord is sustaining us, the blessing on this church is pressing us across the planet. And it’s going to take a new commitment on the part of everyone to invest in that. And the Lord—the principle is this: Whatever you sow, you—what?

NATHAN: Reap.

JOHN: Yeah, you can’t lose. And Paul says that you also can’t out-give the Lord. When you give to Him, He returns it.

So, like the Macedonians who gave out of their poverty—they trusted God to replenish when they were willing to be sacrificial. I just hope the giving here—because we don’t have any other way than the giving of our people to support all that’s happening. I hope that the Lord will graciously lay on the part of all of us to sustain what’s—

I don’t think this is going to slow down because everywhere we go, every time we plant the Word of God in some school or some nation or some corps of pastors, it’s just a start, and then they want more and they want more; and that’s why we just keep translating and translating and translating, and sending missionaries and developing all these additional ministries. And then these countries that we’re working in are sending their kids back to The Master’s University. And whereas they normally wouldn’t have the money, we have donors giving to the university at such a massive level, we’re able to scholarship these kids with a global scholarship fund from all over the world.

So how do we sustain that going forward?

So I am concerned that all of us—I don’t think people resist that; I just don’t think they always understand how absolutely critical it is.

NATHAN: When you were here in June, preaching, you were preaching through a series in the book of Revelation, and I wanted to give you an opportunity to kind of let people know what your plan is for that series, and then I have a question specifically related to that series.

JOHN: Well, it’s been four months, so I think the Lord has stalled the Second Coming for four months. No. I don’t think there’s a glitch in the plan.

My plan would be—if I can get permission from Patricia and the doctor—to pick up the Revelation series on Sunday night. I don’t know that I can go two sermons on Sunday morning. And maybe a month from now I’ll be able to do that, if I can get enough strength. But that would be the idea: that we could pick up the Revelation series on Sunday night. Is that what you were driving at?

NATHAN: Yeah, that’s it. And we look at the world around us. We look at the world around us, we see developments in technology, we hear about things like artificial intelligence, we read the news about conflict in the Middle East, war between Israel and Iran, and then we look at what the Bible foretells in the book of Revelation, and it seems like these things are almost unfolding before our very eyes. Help us understand how we should be thinking as those who, it seems like, are living in the very last days of the end of the age.

JOHN: Well, everything points to the features that are part of the final end. The whole focus of the world is on Israel. And when I say the world—when you get into the book of Revelation and you realize that all the nations of the world are going to come at Israel, or a coalition of nations, how—I mean, if you look back a hundred years, you’d say, “How could that ever happen?” Now you have the expanse of Islam all over the planet, and the hatred for the Jews, then, is now global. And so this is part of amassing a world against Israel, and that’s the picture to come. So if you think that what’s going on in Israel is going to end, what you’re seeing now is just skirmishes compared to the massive war of Armageddon that is going to come at the time that our Lord returns; and when He returns, He will end that war and establish His kingdom.

So things—it might get a little better, politically, for Israel if Israel wins the immediate war with Hamas, the Hezbollah, and the Houthis. I mean, it could be a few years of reprieve. But the hatred is so profound, so deep, so embedded, so broad spread, and so ingrained in all the education system of Islam that the next generation of terrorists is just being trained from the time they’re five years old and up. So knocking off the head of a terrorist means nothing; let’s just move up, everybody; and it’s going to stay like this until the very end.

And the rest of the world, in the book of Revelation, joins against Israel. Once the church is taken out, the rest of the world will take the side of those who try to destroy Israel. You might not like to hear that, but that’s—and you see the inklings of that now, in the continual fomenting anti-Semitism that provides an ideology for a global hatred of Jews that will burst out in the final war.

At the same time, we pray for the salvation of the Jews. We have to understand that they rejected their Savior, they rejected their Messiah, they crucified their Messiah. There’s no good outcome. There’s no good outcome. They’re without God in the world. They’re without a Redeemer and a Savior. And yet the Lord, while continuing to allow His judgment, forces to do what they do with all unbelievers, has a heart for Israel and is rescuing some of the Jews in the church, and will one day save the whole nation. So He will both punish and preserve, which is, again—it’s why we’re in Israel, right? We’re translating all these books, MacArthur Study Bible into Hebrew. We’re at the Jerusalem College of the Bible, right?

NATHAN: Yeah, Israel College of the Bible.

JOHN: Israel College of the Bible. We’re part of the faculty, training people there. We’re working with pastors there. The gospel is going forth there. Jewish people are being saved and converted. So at the same time, God is punishing a disobedient and unbelieving nation. He is calling out Jews and Gentiles to salvation; and one day He will bring salvation to all Israel, but not until there’s a purging.

So, the attention of the world being on Israel, you have to understand, what are the odds that in an open, random situation, we would be at this point in human history and the whole world’s focus would be on Israel? But that’s exactly what the Bible says. This is the most dramatic evidence of biblical prophecy that we could possibly point to, and all the features are there. Other things that are going to be true of the end time: lawlessness. Even in our coming election, people are trying to figure out what to do about lawlessness. So there are other things.

But I think the focus on Israel—we pray for the salvation of Jewish people; we go there. I’ve been there. Our books are being translated. The book on Isaiah 53, The Gospel According to God, was translated by the people in Israel; and interestingly enough, when they translated it, Isaiah 53, “He was wounded for our transgressions,” that text, the first place they distributed it was in the prisons to Jewish prisoners. So the gospel is going into the land of Israel. People are being converted, churches are growing, pastures are flourishing. But the same reality has to be recognized: that judgment is coming, and it’s going to focus on Israel in the end.

NATHAN: You mentioned the upcoming election. I know that’s something that is on everyone’s mind, with just three weeks left—less than three weeks. You wrote the book a number of years ago Why Government Can’t Save You. Shepherd us a little bit, shepherd our hearts, because it’s difficult not to become anxious when we think about what maybe could happen in November. So help us think through how do we approach this and . . .

JOHN: Well, the other day, Kamala Harris said, “This is the most election ever.” So . . . And then in a meeting somebody cried out, “Jesus is Lord.” Did you see that? Somebody said, “Jesus is Lord,” and she immediately said, “You’re in the wrong place.” What else do you need to know? Jesus is not Lord in that place.

Now, I’m not saying that Jesus is not Lord over the universe. I’m not saying that Jesus is more Lord over the Republicans. But I’m saying He’s not there, not when you kill babies and mutilate children and destroy marriage.

So the simple thing in this kind of election is you can’t be on that side. You take the best of—maybe not the best choices; you take the best: Who’s going to do the most? Or you could do it negatively: Who would do the most damage to the family? Who would do the most damage to children? Who would do the most damage to the culture? Who would do the most damage to morality? Who would put us in a most insecure and unsafe position, when government is designed to protect law-abiding people and punish evildoers?

I mean, it’s a clear-cut choice. It’s not—are the Republicans everything they should be? Of course not. But you vote, in a sense, preventatively, to stop something, to stop the rampage and the thievery that goes on in a redistribution of people’s resources—because if you don’t work, you don’t eat.

So that’s the best that can be said about an election. We’re not electing a pastor or pastors or elders or church leaders. I think it comes down to one dominating thing: Who would keep us and our children most safe—safe from the encroachment of enemies, terrorists, immorality, corruption, child-mutilators, criminals—because that’s government’s role: to protect those who do good and punish those who do evil. So who is most likely to do that? Who has the clearest sense of justice and righteousness?

Is it all that it should be? No. But there’s a pretty clear distinction in this particular election. I don’t think it’s hard.

NATHAN: Pastor John, our church is in a context, here in Southern California, where, of all the states in the United States, we’re in one of the most progressive, one of the most leftist. And of course in years past, you’ve led us in taking a strong stand against government encroachment, government interference. Where does that courage come from, to be able to stand up to government and declare to government, really, in the words of Acts 5, “We must obey God rather than men”?

JOHN: That comes from conviction, and that conviction comes from revelation. Why did I take the stand I did in the COVID thing? Because I didn’t care what happened in the world; we weren’t going to close the church. I mean, if the bubonic plague came through town, we wouldn’t close the church; we’d figure out whatever we need to do to keep it open because the desperation would require that the church be more visible and more available.

So to me, when the government says, “Shut down the church,” I say, “Sorry, you’re out of your realm; you’re out of your zone. My kingdom is not of this world.” The kingdom of heaven has its own structure and its own commands and its own role to play in its own order.

Now, that doesn’t mean that if there’s a real Black Death pouring through a community, we’d gather everybody in a room and test God. But I—and maybe this sounds strange—but I knew we needed to be open. Somebody had said on the Internet, I was reading the other day, “Well, MacArthur even waited four weeks before he made that decision.” No, I didn’t. I knew the day the mandate came that we were going to be open. But we have elders in this church, and I’m not the king of the church. So it took us a few weeks to get the elders to understand we needed to stay open; and then we did. And God honored that, right?

The health department in LA published it on their website that there was no outbreak of COVID at Grace Community Church. And of course not, because we’re all sharing each other’s germs. It’s like kindergarten here. And I also knew that, because I was examining the realities, I also knew they weren’t telling the truth about the models of what was going to happen, which turned out to be true, and so many lies and lies about the fact that there wasn’t any remedy for it, or lies about the vaccine and its effects.

But for me, it wasn’t just understanding some of those things. Those are kind of corollary to the fact that the church has to be the church. We take our orders from heaven, and we let the Lord decide the outcome. And He was mighty, and He was gracious to us.

I think it’s a general principle that courage comes from conviction, and that courage is connected to—it’s connected to—let’s put it another way. Cowardice is connected to fear. Sometimes people don’t want to take a stand because they’ve got something to hide. We had nothing to hide. And I think it’s when your life is an open book, and you say, “Come at me, examine me, look at my life, scrutinize me. I have nothing to hide, nothing to fear; I put myself in God’s hands,” and let Him do what He will.

If a spiritual leader is, I guess, fearful, it might be because there’s something in his life he doesn’t want to be known; so you don’t expose yourself to the possibility that it could be known or that the Lord could chasten you. I’m not saying we’re talking about perfection, but it’s the faithful heart that demonstrates courage and fidelity to Scripture and leaves the results with the Lord.

NATHAN: Amen. Next week, along these same lines, next week is Grace for the Children Sunday. We look at what’s happening in our world around us. And there’s certainly massive components of our culture that are following the downward spiral of Romans 1. And I know we have a lot of young families in our church, and they want to be courageous parents who raise their children with conviction. Pastor John, give us some words of hope when it comes to thinking about the next generation in light of the direction our culture is going.

JOHN: Well, the only hope is the church because everything else is going to corrupt them. I mean, everything. Education is going to corrupt them, entertainment is going to corrupt them, media is going to corrupt them; and the further up the education ladder they go, the more powerful the corruption is. So this is a time, I think, of—at least in my lifetime, of all the times that I’ve seen, where we can’t let this culture have our kids, because they want to do damage. They want to do damage, I mean, collectively. I’m not saying every individual situation is that way, or every individual school is that way. But I can only say that as a parent, I’m responsible for the education of my children; and in this culture, handing them over to the secular world to do that is a high-risk act. It’s a high-risk act.

That’s why we’re doing what we do here, whether it’s VBS, or—and we spend a lot of money and time and energy and volunteer work to make that special for the kids, whether it’s children’s ministry, whether it’s Sunday morning, Sunday night, Adventure Club, whatever it is, or all of our schools that we’re now developing. We want Grace Church to be a haven for the family and a place where kids can grow up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

How do you raise your child in the nurture and admonition of the Lord? That’s a mandate for parents; that’s not an option. You have to do that. So where is that going to happen? Well, obviously it ought to happen in the home, but you want to make sure you don’t counter what you’re doing in the home by exposing those defenseless minds to something that’s just doing all the damage by confusing the child as to what the reality is. So I think it’s a time that churches have to step up and really care for the children.

I notice since I’ve not been always able to come to church recently—which I hate—but as I watch other churches, I see no children. I see no children. I don’t see anybody, frankly, because the lights are all turned out, and blue lights are flashing all over the place, and people are jumping around like on a pogo stick, singing seven-eleven choruses: seven words eleven times. But aside from that, I see no children.

Where are the children? I keep asking, “Where are the children?” This is some kind of an emotional bath, a form of escape and entertainment for immature adults. But where are the children? And I think the sobriety of the life right now as we look at it for a believing family is, “What can I do to make sure my children are properly taught in the nurture and admonition of the Lord?”—whatever that investment requires. And certainly, Grace Church is here to do that. And we can take you from the cradle of the grave now, from kindergarten to a PhD, right, every step along the way.

NATHAN: Yeah. A PhD isn’t always the grave, just to clarify.

JOHN: I’m glad you made that connection. It’s close.

NATHAN: Yes.

Pastor John, a final question as we wrap up our time. This month of October has been our month of prayer, and so many of our people have been faithfully praying daily, throughout the month together. We just had a 24-hour day of prayer on Friday, all the way till Saturday. Would you give us some of the priorities that we should be praying for when we pray for our church? As we pray for our church, what are the things we should be prioritizing?

JOHN: The thing that I go back to are the words of Paul in Ephesians, “Pray for the free course of the word, pray that the word will continue to go forth with power.” And that was Paul’s prayer request. After all the armor and all the defensive things, he said, “Pray for the word to have free course.”

Pray for avenues, highways and byways and channels and pathways for the truth. That’s what we’re talking about all night tonight. Whether it’s in a seminary, a university, a children’s ministry, or church services, or global missions, or radio, or television, or the Internet, just pray that the Lord will just open up new—constantly new pathways for the truth. Just pray that.

And then I think to pray that the Lord, as an individual, the Lord will put you in a place where you can participate in the kingdom that is advancing. Somehow you want to get into some of those pathways. You want to be a part of that. You don’t want to be a spectator, you want to get on board because the exhilarating realities of life are all bound up in seeing the work of God firsthand, seeing what He’s doing because you’re there, you’re part of it.

I’ve often thought, “If somebody’s ill, the Lord may decide to heal them.” If I haven’t prayed for them, I get no joy out of that because I wasn’t a part of it. But if, on the other hand, I had prayed faithfully for the healing of someone and they were healed, then the joy is multiplied because I see that God’s sovereign will embraced my means, my prayers.

So find ways to get in the pathways where the truth of the gospel and the glory of divine revelation is moving forward. And if you do that in every possible way—you can do it from what we talked about earlier (service, ministry, giving, sacrifice, whatever it is), just get in the pathways where the Word is moving through the world. That’s my prayer for you. And I think when people are involved like that, they don’t get caught up in petty squabbles. There’s too much at stake. It’s too important. The ministry transcends our pettiness.

So yes, love one another. That’s the primary thing. Love is the bond of peace, and that’s what ties us all together. So loving each other, find the pathway to the advancement of the gospel and the kingdom where you can be a part and a partner in the expansion of that kingdom ministry. That’s the most fulfilling thing in life. And obviously, pray for the salvation of the lost.

NATHAN: Yeah. Well, Pastor John—

JOHN: Did I get any of the questions right?

NATHAN: Thank you so much. This was great. Well, Mike Bohr is going to come in just a moment to lead us in a closing song. But Pastor John, would you be willing to close us in a word of prayer?

JOHN: Yeah. Father, I thank You for Nathan. I thank You for his life and leadership at The Master’s Seminary and every area of this kingdom that he touches. Thank You for the other leaders and elders and pastors and faithful people. Thank You for this blessed congregation and all who serve and love, and all who are in the way of the work of the kingdom. Bless them. Fill their lives with joy. And Lord, we do pray that You’ll sustain our love and our unity, and that You’ll give us a greater passion for the salvation of the lost and a greater desire to use our gifts and talents and financial resources for the advancement of the kingdom so that we may be laying up both treasure in heaven as well as winning friends for eternity. That’s our prayer. We pray in Christ’s name. Amen.

NATHAN: Amen.