A Tribute to John MacArthur (1939-2025)

“I am a Christian, therefore I am a complementarian.
I believe the Bible, therefore I am a complementarian.”
–John MacArthur

Earlier this evening we all received the sad news that Pastor John MacArthur had passed away at the age of 86. While most will rightly remember Dr. MacArthur as a faithful verse-by-verse preacher and prolific author, I want to honor him as well for being a faithful complementarian and a member of the original board of reference for CBMW. Moreover, he was among the original signatories of the Nashville Statement, which CBMW published in 2017.

For me personally, it is impossible to overstate the enormous influence that Dr. MacArthur has had in my own life. When I was in college, I was one of those who had drunk deeply of the false gospel of easy-believism. I had somewhere along the way absorbed the idea that Jesus saves some people but doesn’t become their Lord. Thus, there were some Christians whose lives had been transformed by the grace of Christ, but there were other Christians who still lived just as carnally as they did before they were “saved.” These worldly Christians were still real Christians. They just didn’t want to follow Christ.

This anemic view of the gospel even affected the way I evangelized. I will never forget sitting in a dorm room and having a conversation with a fraternity brother about the gospel and exhorting him to believe in it. But he didn’t want to. He understood everything I was saying about Jesus being crucified and raised for sinners and about sin and judgment and heaven and hell. I don’t even think that he denied any of it to be true. He thought it all sounded fine. But when I asked him whether he wanted to give his life to Christ, he said that he just didn’t want to do that. I told him that he didn’t need to have a desire to follow Christ. If he would just “repeat this prayer after me,” God would bring the desire to follow Jesus later. I actually told the guy that he could follow Jesus even if he didn’t want to.

At some point after that, I got my hands on Dr. MacArthur’s book The Gospel according to Jesus, and it was absolutely epoch-making for me and my understanding of the gospel. I learned that if the faith that saved you didn’t change you, then it didn’t really save you. I learned that the gospel is the power of God unto salvation. That power not only brings a person to faith but also powerfully sanctifies him through the Holy Spirit. I learned that an untransformed life is evidence that regeneration has never taken place.

This was all brand new to me, but it changed the way that I read and understood the Bible. You cannot receive Christ as Savior only. You must receive him as Savior and Lord, or you won’t receive him at all. I learned all of this through Dr. MacArthur’s careful, lucid exposition of Scripture in that book, and it absolutely changed my life.

I thank God for Pastor John MacArthur. He has been a great gift not only to me but also to countless others over the decades. We will all miss him so much. I already do.

In 2016, Dr. MacArthur offered some reflections about marriage and family at the 2016 CBMW pre-conference at T4G. It is the source for the quotation at the top of this post. The video is below.