Hi friend, this is Carl Miller and you've tuned to Grace to You, the Bible teaching ministry of John MacArthur. For more than five decades, John was the pastor-teacher of Grace Community Church in Los Angeles, California. And he was Grace to U's one and only Bible teacher for that entire time. Grace to U continues to be the media ministry of John MacArthur. During John's decades of studying, preaching and teaching the Word of God, some consistent themes in his pulpit ministry have been clearly seen.
Call them distinctives of John's ministry, an outworking of his commitment to clear, authoritative, God breathed Scripture. John MacArthur recently went to heaven, and the leadership of Grace to You thought it would only be the right thing to bring you a number of messages that highlight some of John's ministry distinctives. It would be impossible in such a short time to cover all the key themes, but we wanted to hit some of the most significant ones. Today's message is a good example.
So follow along now on Grace to You. Here's John MacArthur to help you better understand his lifetime commitment to pulpit ministry in the message called Five Reasons to Preach the Word. Preach the word. Be ready. in season and out of season.
Reprove, rebuke. Exhort with great patience. and instruction. That brief verse defines biblical ministry in one central command. Preach the word.
Along with that, you could add 1 Timothy. Three where pastors and overseers and elders are to be didacticos in the Greek, skilled in teaching and preaching. We are to preach the word skillfully. That is our calling. And this verse is definitive as few others.
of that calling because it speaks so concisely and precisely. Preach the word. Now, you will notice that the Apostle Paul adds the time and the tone here. the time in season and out of season. We could debate what that means.
But if I can lead you to a very simple conclusion Whatever he may have had in mind specifically about in-season and out-of-season. It is only possible to either be in season or out of season. Therefore it means all the time. preach the word all the time. There is no time when we change That commission.
No chi no time. When that Method of ministry is set aside for something else. Preaching the word is to be done all the time. The tone is given also in the verse. There is a negative aspect of reproving and rebuking, and that is we take the truth of the Word of God and we confront error and sin.
And then there is the positive side. We take the truth of God and we exhort with great patience and we instruct. Negatively, we confront error and sin. Positively, we teach sound doctrine. and godly living.
We exhort people to be obedient to the word, and we have great patience. in allowing them the time to develop maturity. in their obedience. Very simple verse. Preach the word.
All the time. both with a negative and confrontative Aspect by which we confront error and sin, and a positive one by which we instruct in sound doctrine. and call people to holy obedience. If every word of God is true, and every word of God is pure, as Scripture says, and every word of God is food, then every word of God is to be proclaimed. People today are starving for God's Word.
But they don't know it. They're starving, they're hungry, they're reaching out, they're grasping. They realize the vacancies in their life, the hollow places, the shallow places, the lack of insight, the lack of understanding. They cannot solve the problems and dilemmas of life. They are starving for God's word, and they do not know it and are being offered a lot of.
Substitutes. that don't help. God has ordained that his word be brought to them. that His word alone can feed them. And the delivery method.
is through preaching. How shall they hear? Paul said. without A preacher. Martin Luther said, the highest worship of God.
is the preaching of the word. That's true. Because God is revealed through His Word. Therefore, preaching His Word is preaching His character and His will, and that. defines him in true terms and exalts him as he is to be exalted.
Our mandate then comes not from the culture, it comes from heaven. It is the God of heaven who has mandated us through the pages of Scripture to preach the word, to preach every word, and to bring to starving souls. The only food that feeds And that is the truth of God. We understand that command. But I don't want to just leave it at that.
Because surrounding this verse is a potent portion of scripture. That gives us five compelling reasons why we must obey this divine mandate. Five compelling reasons why we must obey this divine mandate. Let's go back to chapter 3. Verse 1.
and identify the first of these five. The concise and clear, unmistakable. Unequivocal command to preach the word is supported by five compelling realities. that become for us strong motivation. And each of these five is very potent.
Each of them could stand alone in being enough motivation for a man to preach the word of God. Together They provide a formidable set of motivations Like no other text of scripture. Number one. We are to preach the word because of the danger of the seasons. because of the danger of the seasons.
Chapter 3, verse 1. But realize this. Paul tells Timothy. That in the last days, and the last days began when the Messiah came the first time. My little children, John, said it is the last time.
Christ appeared once in the end of the age. It is the end of the age. It is the last days. They began when Jesus came. And in the last days, difficult times will come.
Difficult times is the phrase that I want you to grasp for a moment. Actually, it could be translated seasons rather than times. It's not clock time and it's not calendar time. It's the Greek word kairos, which means seasons or epochs or movements. And the word difficult is really the word dangerous.
It could even be translated and is savage. Savage seasons will come. Dangerous times will come. Perilous times, as some translations have translated it. They threaten the truth.
They threaten the gospel. They threaten the church. And according to verse 13, if you'll drop down to verse 13. They will increase in severity. Because evil men and impostors will proceed from bad to worse.
Deceiving and being deceived. From the beginning of the last days until Jesus comes, there will be an escalating severity and an escalating frequency. of these dangerous epochs. We're talking about movements here. Ethics.
They began When Jesus came and started the church in relation to the preaching of the gospel, and they have continued and continued. Cumulatively. They don't come and go, they come and stay, and then more come and stay, and more come and more come. And so there is greater danger now than there's ever been. in the sense of having accumulated these damnable epics.
They define for us the danger. that threatens the life of the church and threatens the truth. Let me tell you something folks. This is a formidable war out there. A formidable Set of fortresses according to the terminology of 2 Corinthians 10.
We're for the destruction of fortresses. These are very, very well-designed, strong fortifications, ideological fortifications that must come smashing down. In order to do that, It takes some very skilled men. It's not easy to be discerning in our time. It's not easy to understand the issues that face us.
It's not easy to bring the appropriate portion of Scripture to bear upon these imminent dangers all around us. And most of Christianity really doesn't care. But we do. All of these dangers accumulating, mingling, worsening, and with it a lack of discernment in the church and a disdain for discernment and a growing disdain for doctrine.
Now Paul starting in verse 2 defines a little bit more about these dangerous seasons in general descriptions of the people that are behind them and the people that get involved in them. They are lovers of self, they are lovers of money, boastful, arrogant, revilers, disobedient to parents, ungrateful, unholy, unloving, irreconcilable, malicious gossips without self-control, brutal, haters of good, treacherous, reckless, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.
Now if you stood up and applied that list. to anybody today, it would be seriously politically incorrect, wouldn't it? I mean, way beyond that. Can you imagine someone confronting someone in error and just going through that list? It reminds me of Jesus' approach.
How well would it work today? He went up to the religious leaders of his day who were in error. And he said, you snakes. You vipers. You dogs.
You filthy, stinking, wretched tombs painted white. Pretty direct stuff. These dangerous people are described here as to the absence of any virtue or character. They are the instruments of Satan that produce these great dangers. Verse 5 sort of sums up they have a form of godliness.
The outward form. The face that they want to portray is of godliness. But what is absent Is power. They don't have the power of God because they don't know God. You avoid those kinds of people.
They come into households and they get in there today through media means and as well as personally. And they target women who are designed by God to be protected by faithful men. They captivate those weak women weighed down with sins, led on by various impulses, and they teach them. And they're always learning, but they never come to know what? The truth.
Just like Janice and Jambras, two of the magicians in Egypt, opposed Moses, these men opposed the truth. They are men of depraved mind. And they should be rejected. There's Paul's description of the people who are behind these dangerous seasons and the people who get caught up in them. Dangerous seasons.
Men of corrupt mind, opposers of the truth. Beloved, we need men who can go into the fray, men who can go into the battle, who understand the word of God clearly. Let me tell you something. Satan's deceptions are not without subtlety. Do you understand that?
It's not always obvious on the surface. What's really going on? It takes formidable men. It takes men who understand the word of God clearly, carefully. It takes men who understand the issues of their time.
And it takes men who have a holy courage, who are willing to step into the battle and identify the enemy and assault the enemy. graciously, but assault the enemy relentlessly with the truth. Paul says in 2 Corinthians 10: Our job is to smash fortresses, ideological fortresses, and to bring everybody captive there into obedience to Christ. We want to set free the captives held in the fortresses that these. Dangerous epics.
have erected. We're called to guard the truth. We're called to preach the truth. We can't do either if we don't understand the truth. There's a second reason why they must preach the word, not only because of the danger of the seasons, and the word is the only thing that cuts through the air, but secondly, because of the devotion of the saints.
Because of the devotion of the saints. Go down to verse. Ten. But you followed my teaching, conduct, purpose, faith, patience, love, perseverance, persecutions, and sufferings. Timothy, you followed me.
You were my disciple, and I went through the patterns of ministry for you. You saw my ministry duty. And what was my ministry duty? Teaching and living. You saw how I taught it and I lived it.
That's integrity. And then he says in verse 10, and you saw my purpose, my focus. The man was focused, relentlessly focused, on the responsibility he had to proclaim the truth. And you saw my faith, better faithfulness. Faithful to that purpose and patient to see it fulfilled and loving toward the people and toward God and persevering in the face of persecution and suffering.
You saw how I ministered, Paul said. You saw the way I did it. Then verse 14.
However, continue in the things you've learned. and become convinced of knowing from whom You've learned them. Who? from me. What is he saying to Timothy?
Timothy, just do exactly what I told you to do. Just do exactly what I told you to do. You know, that's so important. Everybody today wants to reinvent ministry. Have you noticed?
Paul just says, Will you do it just exactly the way I told you to do it? Down in verse 17, he calls Timothy the man of God. That's a technical term. Used only twice in the New Testament, both times of Timothy, used over 70 times in the Old Testament, every time it means a preacher. Every time it's used, it means a preacher.
Timothy, look, you're just another man of God. There's a long, long line of these men of God. Series of men of Been called by God, gifted by God to proclaim His truth. You're just one in the long line. You can't get out of step.
You can't go your way, invent your own approach. You're just one long, one in the long line of men who were called to preach the word. It's what you do. That's how I look at my own life. When I was a little guy something before my 10th birthday.
My grandfather, who was a faithful preacher of the Word of God. All through his ministry. Right up until his death, he was on his deathbed at his home. My father was there, and I was there. And my father said to him, Dad, is there anything you want?
He was dying of cancer. at a just a few years older than I am now. And he said, is there anything you want, Dad? He said to him, Yes, I want to preach one more time. I want to preach one more time.
He's on his deathbed, all racked with cancer. And he wanted to preach one more time.
Well, what had happened was he had prepared a sermon he hadn't preached. That's hard to handle, folks. That's fire in your bones. You need to get rid of it. And interestingly, he had prepared a sermon on heaven.
and never preached it. He died. Without ever preaching.
So, my dad took his notes, which he had written out on the sermon, printed them all up, and passed it out to everybody at the funeral.
So, my grandfather preached on heaven from heaven. That had a tremendous effect on me as a young boy. What a faithful man. Right down to the last breath. All he wanted to do was preach the word one more time.
I don't want to be any different than that. I don't want to do anything differently than that. And the same was true with my father. He was an example to my father, who, all through his ministry life, did nothing but preach the word. That's all he did.
Preach the word. And as I said earlier, when he gave me my first Bible after I was called to the ministry and I went off to begin my studies, he wrote in the fly leaf, preach the word. Eventually, I went away to seminary, and I went to Talbot Seminary because I wanted to study with Dr. Charles Feinberg. And Dr.
Feinberg was the most brilliant Bible scholar I ever knew anything about. He had an incredible mind. And he loved the word of God and he read through it four times a year, and he was just absolutely fanatical about every word of God, and about inerrancy, and about inspiration, and about the word being true, and preach the word. And he's the man I wanted to have influenced my life. I don't want to do it differently.
I want to do it like he did it. I don't want to do any different. I just want to do what faithful men have done. I want to do what godly prophets did. I want to do what godly apostles did.
I want to do what godly preachers and evangelists and pastors and missionaries have done through the years. And I'm telling you something, folks. I am astonished at the boldness of people today, people in ministry who will discard the God-ordained. scripturally mandated pattern and invent their own. What audacity!
Who do you think you are? What astonishing pride that is.
So, preach the word because of the danger of the season and because of the devotion of the saints who came before you. Just get in line. Take the baton and run your lap. Thirdly, We preach the word because of the dynamic of the scripture. We preach the word because of the dynamic of the scripture.
Verse 15. Timothy, you know, from childhood, from brefus, from infancy, when you were a baby in your mother's arms. From infancy, you have known the sacred writing. That's a Greek... Jewish term referring to the Old Testament.
Hierogramaton. You've known the Old Testament, which is able to give you the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith, which is in Christ Jesus. Timothy was raised under Jewish influence in his family, though his parents were Jew and Gentile. One was Jew and one was Gentile. He had still the influence.
Uh uh Jewish. In his family and of the Old Testament law. And he says, You know from a child that the law prepared you for the gospel. That was the point. The Jews used to claim that their children drank in the law of God with their mother's milk, and it was so imprinted on their hearts and minds that they would sooner forget their names than forget God's law.
The law was the tutor that led to Christ. And Timothy had been raised on the sacred writings of the Old Testament, and he had been given the wisdom so that when the gospel was preached, it unfolded and he understood it, because the understanding of the Old Testament law prepared him for it. Bottom line, he's saying you know that the word of God has the power to save. It has the power to lead you to salvation. What else would you preach?
It's sharper than any two-edged sword. 1 Peter 1:23. What does Peter say? It couldn't be more clear. You have been born again through the living and abiding word of God.
It is the power of the word that produces salvation. It is the word of God which converts the soul, Psalm 19:7 says. When you understand that the word is the power that converts the soul, you preach the word. If you don't preach the word, you don't believe that no matter what you say. It is not only the source of salvation, it is the source of sanctification.
Look at verses 16 and 17. All scripture is inspired by God and profitable for doctrine, reproof, correction, training in righteousness, that the man of God and everyone who follows his pattern may be perfect or complete, equipped for every good work. It is the power of the word that saves. It is the power of the word that sanctifies. It provides doctrine.
It reproves error and sin. It sets upright and then trains in the path of righteousness. That's the sequence. You lay a foundation of doctrine, it reproves error and sin, then you correct that. That literally means in the Greek to make someone upright who has fallen down.
You pick them back up, correct their error and their iniquity, and then put them in the path of righteousness, train them to live an obedient life. The word does that. The word makes the man of God and everybody who follows his pattern complete. It prepares them spiritually. This is what we call the sufficiency of the scripture.
It completely saves, completely sanctifies. It sanctifies and saves those at the highest level of calling, that is, the preacher, the man of God. and makes it possible for him to be an example of godliness that everybody else can follow. It is sufficient to save and sanctify all. And what else would you use?
I can't. Fathom why anyone would use anything other than the word that saves and the word that sanctifies. And only the word.
Well, let me give you the fourth. We preach the word because of the danger of the seasons, the devotion of the saints, the dynamic of the scripture, and the demand of the sovereign. The demand of the sovereign. Look at chapter 4, verse 1. This is a frightening verse.
This verse strikes me with holy fear, I confess. It is a terrifying verse. This verse. Helps me to understand why John Knox, before he ascended the pulpit to preach, fell on his face and burst forth, his biographer says, in abundant tears out of fear. The fear of preaching.
and misrepresenting the truth. The fear of divine scrutiny. Listen to verse one. I solemnly charge you. In the presence of God.
Even of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by his appearing in his kingdom, preach the word. Pretty serious. I solemnly charge you means a dead serious command. Paul is dead serious here. I command you.
with all solemnity, with all seriousness. My friend, he says, you are under the scrutiny of the God. who is Jesus Christ, who is the judge. And he will judge all who are alive and all who have died. And I think it's best to see the Greek as even the Lord Jesus Christ since he is introduced as the judge in the verse.
We're preaching under the scrutiny of the omniscient, holy judge. I agree with Paul in 1 Corinthians 4, who said, It's a small thing what you think of me. And I say that with all love to you. I can't build my sense of. Faithfulness on whether you like my sermon.
I can't build on whether you don't like my sermon. I appreciate your commendations. I cherish them. I appreciate your criticisms. I cherish them.
But in the end, I want to preach to honor the one who is the judge, right? And in the end, it He's going to reveal the secret things of the heart. He's going to give the reward to those who are worthy of it, and only his judgment really matters. Lastly. This whole matter of Preaching the word, not only because of the danger of the seasons, the devotion of the saints, the dynamic of the scripture, the demand of the sovereign, but lastly, this is really important because of the deceptiveness of the sensual.
because of the deceptiveness of the sensual. The great enemy of the Word of God. Is anything outside the Word of God? The word of Satan, the word of demons, the word of man. And we are living in very dangerous seasons, concocted by seducing spirits and hypocritical liars, propagated by false teachers.
And here's what makes them successful. Look at verses 3 and 4. The time will come, and it does, it just cycles through all of church history when they will not endure sound doctrine. People don't want to hear sound doctrine.
Sound means healthy, whole, wholesome. They don't want wholesome teaching. They don't want the sound, solid word. They just want to have their ears tickled. That's all they want.
They're driven by the sensual, not the cognitive. They're not interested in truth. They're not interested in theology. All they want is ear-tickling sensations. That's what they want.
They refuse to hear the great truth that saves and the great truth that sanctifies. And according to chapter 2, verse 16, they would rather hear worldly empty chatter that produces ungodliness and spreads like gangrene. We're in such a season now. They tell us of being Doctrinal being Clear about the Word of God is divisive, unloving, prideful. The prevailing mood, I should say, in the world of postmodern Western culture is that everybody determines truth for himself, and everyone's opinion is as valid as everybody else's opinion, and there's no room for.
absolute authoritative doctrine. You know, you look at the evangelical church. Here we are fighting all of this. Peripheral stuff. and given away everything at the heart that defines our whole faith.
This is suicide. Not going to be any church to fight anything. If we don't preserve the truth, The ability to distinguish between false and true is absolutely critical. Can't speak truth, can't guard truth. If you can't understand truth.
You're listening to Grace to You with John MacArthur. I'm Carl Miller. In today's special program, we've showcased one of the distinctive themes from John's 56 years of Bible teaching ministry. The title of the lesson, Five Reasons to Preach the Word.
Well friend, as we remember the life and legacy of John MacArthur, we continue to find comfort and strength in the knowledge that John is now rejoicing in the presence of his Savior. And hopefully, you'll be encouraged to know that for however long God sustains grace to you, through the support of his people, we'll be here unleashing God's truth one verse at a time. And this ministry will always and only feature the Bible teaching of John MacArthur. Speaking of being encouraged, we've been so encouraged by the notes that we've received from many friends like you. And if you have a story about how God has used grace to you in your life, we'd love to hear it.
It doesn't have to be anything long. If John's Bible teaching has made a difference in your life, let us know that when you contact us today. Reach us by email, letters at gty.org. Again, that address, letters at gty.org. Using the regular mail right to GraceTU, Post Office Box 4000.
Panorama City, California, nine one four one two. If you prefer, you can call our special remembrance phone line. It's 661-295-6288. You can record a message letting us know how John's teaching has strengthened your walk with Christ. You can also express your condolences to the MacArthur family.
Leave your message on the remembrance phone line at 661-1. 295-6288. And again, if you've benefited from John's verse-by-verse Bible teaching, let us know when you contact us. Thanks, too, for praying for John's family, for the congregation of the Grace Community Church, for the team at this radio station, and for the staff of Grace to You. Your prayers are crucial.
In fact, taking us before the throne of grace really is the most important way you can support us. Thanks for your prayers. And now, on behalf of the entire Grace to You staff, I'm your host, Carl Meller, inviting you to join us for another half hour of Unleashing God's Truth one verse at a time on the next Grace to You.
