June 4, 2025 Show with John Samson on “God’s Merciful Providence & the Ministry of Angels”

Live from historic downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, home of founding father James Wilson, 19th century hymn writer George Duffield, 19th century gospel minister George Norcross, and sports legend Jim Thorpe.

It's Iron Sharpens Iron. This is a radio platform in which pastors, Christian scholars, and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today. Proverbs chapter 27 verse 17 tells us iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed with whom we converse and directed to have a view in conversation to make one another wiser and better. It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next two hours, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

And now, here's your host, Chris Arnson.

Good afternoon, Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth, who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com. This is Chris Arnson, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Wednesday on this fourth day of June 2025.

I'm absolutely thrilled to have a returning guest today who's a dear friend of mine and who has been a supporter of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, a wonderful brother in Christ, and in fact, not only am I glad that he is on the program today, I'm glad that he's on the planet Earth, because the church here on Earth was almost robbed of his presence not long ago, which is why he hasn't been on the program for quite some time.

I'm speaking of John Sampson. He is an author, and he is the pastor of King's Church in Peoria, Arizona, which is a Reformed Baptist congregation, and today we're going to be addressing God's merciful providence in John's life, especially recently.

If we have time, we'll also discuss, perhaps briefly, the ministry of angels, but it's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, my dear friend, Pastor John Sampson.

Great to be with you, Chris, as always.

Well, why don't you give our listeners more details about King's Church in Peoria, Arizona?

Well, as you said, we're a Reformed Baptist congregation. It started out just in our home, and we are just thrilled to have some great folk with us of all kinds of ages, and I happen to be one of the two elders that we have right now.

We're looking to grow that and grow our leadership, but we're thrilled with what the Lord has done thus far.

Amen. And if anybody wants more details on this fine congregation, go to kingschurchaz .com. Well why don't you start with letting our listeners know exactly what happened to you while actually in the middle of a sermon, while standing behind the pulpit at your church, and I can't remember exactly what date this was, but tell us that as well.

A Childhood Marked by Suffering and Providence

Yeah, if I would, I would ask if I could go back a while and relate a story, because it has relevance, and it concerns a young Christian lady of 18 years of age in York, England. She was born in Malta.

She had Irish parents. She was engaged to be married to a really bright young man in the British military, and the plan was that after the war was over, they would both serve the Lord as missionaries together, wherever he would lead them.

Then he was sent over to France on D-Day, that's June 6, 1944. The young man was thrust into the battle for the city of Caen in Normandy, France, and tragically, just weeks afterward, on July 10, 1944, he was killed by one of the enemy's bullets.

On hearing the news of her fiancé's death, this young lady was obviously just devastated. Grief obviously filled her heart. While attending church services there in York for the next several months, she'd actually hear of dramatic testimonies of divine protection.

Loved ones returned home, recounting the stories. All these returning soldiers were protected from great imminent danger. Many of these soldiers were very, very conscious of the Lord's direct intervention in keeping them alive, and yet this young lady had to live on, knowing the man she loved wasn't coming home.

Of course, question after question plagued her mind. Nothing that was said to her seemed to ease the pain and grief. Those hostile, those haunting questions continued on and on and on relentlessly. One day she rushed into her bedroom, flung herself down on the bed in great grief, as she often did, and then something very dramatic and life-changing happened.

She recounts that the Lord himself appeared to this young lady. The brightness of his glory filled the room, and he didn't say a word, but in that moment he stretched out his hand to her, and she was totally caught up with the look in his eyes.

She beheld the greatest love and compassion in the world. All her questions subsided, and he smiled at her. Her heart's cry was answered by one look into his eyes, full of unspeakable love. Many may doubt that story, but that was her story, and then this young lady very rarely talks of that, that incident.

However, when she does, only with close family and friends, tears welled up in her eyes as she recounted the grace she found in Christ. That story continues because at the same time, a Welsh military man was stationed in the same city of York in England, brought up as a Roman Catholic.

This young man had a dramatic conversion to Christ while serving in the British Army in Gibraltar. In understanding the gospel, this young man came out of the Roman Catholic system, facing the hostility of his family, and then trained to serve British forces as a military chaplain, and very much an evangelist.

He saw countless men come to Christ while serving in France and Belgium for an 18-month period. People were coming to Christ in the hundreds every week. Now, one day this young man was preaching in the city of York, and his eyes fixed on a certain young lady, the lady I just related to you.

The two began to court each other, married soon after. Years of married life passed, and the hope of having a child grew stronger and stronger. Not knowing that they so wanted a child yet, time was marching on.

Seventeen years of marriage came and went. No child was coming. Just when it looked like all hope was gone, the young lady became pregnant. What joy that must have been with that news. Two weeks before due date, the baby was coming.

Complications ensued, with the afterbirth coming first and the mother losing a whole lot of blood. The mother wasn't doing well at all. The little baby was fighting for its life. Once born, the little one was whisked away into an oxygen tent, where every gasping breath was a severe struggle.

Years later, the father wrote these words. I have them written down. I remember when I was called to the hospital, where my son lay near to death. When he saw me, he reached out desperately toward me.

I could do nothing. He was in an oxygen tent. The doctor gave me a knowing and sympathizing look and shook her head. The lad was dying. He continued on. I found a corner where I prayed. I thanked God for the joy that boy had brought into my life, for the privilege of having responsibility for his welfare, be it just for a very short time.

I told God how much that child meant to me and added, but really he belonged to you all the time. Lord, I commend him to your safekeeping. He means more than life to me, Lord. But though you take him, I'll love you still and will praise you all my days.

And then he writes, that I learned later, many years later, was a sacrifice of praise. Cutting to the chase, here's the story. Both the mother and the young child survived. In fact, the child grew to be a robust baby boy, gained all of his babyhood milestones early.

Then at age 13 months, he began to develop a cough, which became persistent. The doctor diagnosed it as croup. Every night, between 8 and 9 p .m., and 11 and midnight, 5 a .m., 4 a .m., the boy would just cough with every breath he took.

The mother tried medicine, hot drinks each time, hoping for some measure of relief. The whole household tried to catch some sleep until the next coughing bout began. So that was life. Every fall, every autumn, the boy was rushed to hospital to be in an oxygen tent to recover from these severe breathing and coughing bouts.

On his return home, the parents had to keep an electric kettle boiling in his bedroom all night to help with these croup attacks. From September to May, from age 3 to 7, the boy wasn't allowed to play outside.

His mother had to invent paper and pencil games to keep him amused. At age 4, he had surgery to have his tonsils cut, removed, so it would help. But there was no respite until age 7, when continual prayer was answered.

Later on, this boy became so robust, though, that he played soccer, played in the soccer team at school, later in that Chester City schoolboys team. At the age of 14 and 15, he was a top scorer. He once scored nine goals in a game.

His coaches were seeking to help him become a professional soccer player. The Lord had a different path for him, though. Because today, he serves the Lord as a minister of the gospel. And I'm sure you'll agree in hearing all that, he's a trophy of God's grace.

Why do I tell you all this? Why do I tell you this, Chris? Well, let me give you the names of the two parents in the story. The lady's name is Muriel Grace McNamara. The man's name is Reverend Redvers Joseph Samson.

The lady is my mother, and the man is my father. So their story is my story, too.

Wow.

I haven't got to your question, but that's the background. I'm very, very aware that the Lord has sustained my life even before this last year. And that's the background for talking about this last year.

Praise God. Well, now move to the more recent past.

Yes.

Where you are standing behind the pulpit. I don't know how long you were into the sermon that Sunday, but tell us about it. And tell us the date as well.

A Near-Death Experience in the Pulpit

Okay. What happened was, backing up about three weeks before that, I had a swelling on the right side of my face. And within 20 minutes of it, I was in pain. Within three hours of it, I was in horrendous pain and had to go to hospital with it.

And it was obviously assessed. And after x-rays were taken, I was told I was dealing with a very fast-growing mass. It was taking over my face. And I was told, and that was kind of the surmisings. I had maybe three or five days to live.

This was taking over my body. They said it was a mass. And I said, well, that's strange. I never go to mass. But it was a misdiagnosis. It was an infection. But it had laid me up in a hospital bed. And because of that, I wasn't active.

I was in a bed most of the time. Fast forward. That was February of 2024. Fast forward to March. And I was behind the pulpit, actually about to start this service. I hadn't got to the sermon part. I was about to give the announcements.

And it was right behind the pulpit. So I was in full view of everybody. And I wasn't able to catch my breath. And my wife looked at me and could see something was wrong. I said, are you okay? And I said, no.

And that's the last thing I remember for a little while. I clapped. What was amazing was people on the front row saw something was wrong and came and caught me before I fell.

Wow.

And immediately my wife cried out, is there a doctor in the house? And a doctor did, in fact, come forward along with, I thought it was just one. In fact, I was corrected on this just a week or so ago.

But it was actually two daughter nurses who happened to be there. Both the doctor and the two nurses, his daughters were visiting from Minnesota the night before that incident. He found our church online at kingschurchaz .com, decided to come visit.

Now, a male nurse was about to administer CPR on me. He obviously thought I was gone. I was basically dead there. But the doctor laid me out and just held up his hand and said, no, let's just wait. That action, Chris, that action saved my life.

Because my lungs were filled with blood clots. If I had CPR, inevitably the clots would have gone straight to my brain and killed me. Anyway, I went on to hospital where, again, I was misdiagnosed as having had a heart attack.

My heart was under stress in the middle of all this, but it wasn't a heart attack. And because I was misdiagnosed, they were planning on me having a procedure for the heart. I was 10 minutes away from that procedure when another doctor burst into the room, the hospital room, asked me a series of questions and then said, I'm stopping your procedure.

I'm calling for x-rays of your lungs. Now, a few minutes later, a nurse walked into the room, asked me if I was ready for the procedure. I said, it's been canceled. She said, no, it's not. We haven't heard that.

I said, please, please go check with the doctor. The doctor hadn't yet got the message out. He was still typing. So the message hadn't been received as yet. Well, she checked. And indeed, now the message was received that he'd sent, and I didn't have the procedure.

Again, this action of the doctor saved my life because the procedure would undoubtedly have killed me. I'd have died on the operating table. The doctor would tell me later that it was his day off, but he felt compelled to come into work at the hospital that day.

I've had a number of conversations with him later and just thanked him again for all he did. So in saying this and telling this story to someone just recently, I told the man all of this, and his reaction was quite intriguing to me.

He said, obviously, angels are watching over you. And I was intrigued by that because I hadn't mentioned God, I hadn't mentioned angels, but that's where his mind went immediately. By the way, just to finish that, what I had actually suffered was what is called a saddle pulmonary embolism.

Pulmonary embolisms are not good, but the saddle is often a widow-maker, they call it. You don't often survive that. And it's equally, maybe even worse than a heart attack. There's supposed to be a two-year recovery.

I've noticed afterwards I would be jerking involuntarily. I never really understood PTSD. I've obviously encountered it. I'm a pastor, I deal with people in the storms of life, and people often deal with things that they've gone through, and it affects them for years and even decades.

But I've never really understood it until now because I would be watching a video on YouTube about saddle pulmonary embolism, and it would be a three or five-minute video, and I would start jerking.

My subconscious mind realized that's what I dealt with and couldn't handle it. I would just be wanting to get to church. I'm a pastor. I love church. I love the people. I love being with them. But I'd be on my way to church, and it's as if my body knows that's the place where bad things happen, and I would start jerking, and my wife would have to turn the car around.

It was many weeks before I could sit in a church service. The actual idea of preaching was far from me. I honestly didn't know if I'd ever preach again, and didn't know because I'd be in the service, and then I'd have to leave.

My body would just start jerking. I didn't want to be the cause of anxiety for folk around me, and I physically couldn't handle it. So just very, very grateful to God, as you can imagine, for my life being preserved, and that's the story, Chris.

Praise God, and what a series of merciful acts of God's providence, all simultaneous. Yeah. Or should I say one after the other is what I meant to say.

This original doctor at the church service, we've not heard from him either before or since.

Wow.

It was a one-time deal that he was there with his two doctor nurses, and his action there saved my life. Just amazing, just amazing.

Well, praise God for that, and we have to go to our first commercial break, and when we come back, we will talk more about God's merciful providence. If anybody has a question, submit it to ChrisArnson at gmail .com, C-H-R-I-S-A-R-N-Z-E-N at gmail .com.

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So visit royaldiadem .com today and mention Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. We're now back with Pastor John Sampson of King's Church in Peoria, Arizona. We were just hearing about a series of amazing, mind-blowing acts of God's merciful providence that saved John's life, not only as an infant many years ago, but also just recently.

And John has this, especially this recent near-death experience. Well, actually, you were technically revived out of a state of death. How has this impacted your faith?

Providence, Common Grace, and Renewed Gospel Urgency

Well, it's obviously a confirmation of all, I believe. But it seems to be a remarkable story in the sense of its effect on others. They can't help but see the hand of God in it, even if I don't mention the name of God.

So I've used it often in conversations. But in my own heart, it's just very, very clear to me. I'm alive. Every breath is because of the grace, the mercy of God. And we have a theological name category for that called common grace.

And it shouldn't be common in the sense of cheap. It's common in that everybody alive gets it. We get this grace of being alive because God didn't have to cause us to live through the night, any of us, last night.

And here we are. And so I'm very, very aware that life itself is a gift. And it's certainly pressed upon me. And I certainly want to live my life for something beyond this life and live for the glory of God.

And you know how you can have a spring cleaning in your house and it can get the dust out. Certainly that's done that in my life. There's these incidents of just renewing my resolve. I want to live for the glory of God.

I don't always achieve that, of course. I'm a sinner. Thank God for the righteousness of Christ. Imputed to me, my standing before God is because of Him alone. I'm very, very, very aware that every day I live is a gift.

Praise God. And has anything become, as a result of this, challenging to anything that you perhaps were overlooking, neglecting in your way of demonstrating your faith, in your way of thinking, in your theology?

I mean, even people who have near-pristine theology, as much as one can have on the planet Earth when we're still plagued with sin, we can have a tendency to unintentionally diminish how personal our relationship with God is.

And we may know the Scriptures about Him caring more about us than sparrows that fall to the ground. And we may know the Scriptures about His counting the hairs on our heads, but very often those things do not profoundly impact us.

And we kind of, especially those of us who hear preaching a lot, sound preaching, and we read the Scriptures, sometimes it could be taken for granted, become commonplace, and we are not revved up or excited about it.

But is there anything that you were challenged by, and perhaps even did it change anything in you?

I think in a certain way, in a certain sense, yes, in that I don't think if you were to take, for example, sermons I preached before this last year and then sermons today, you'd sense much of a difference.

Maybe you would, I don't know, but it's just a greater resolve. Everyone I talk to, everyone I preach before, when sermons are put on the Internet, on YouTube, they go out and who knows who will hear that.

I want every sermon to have the gospel. There's no guarantee that people will be alive six hours from the sermon. And there's just a greater resolve. What really irks me is when I hear Christian so-called messages without the gospel, and there's no urgency.

In many churches, though they would be doctrinally sound at times, you can look on the website and they pass all of the sniff test of a good statement of faith. But you go to the service or you listen in to the service and the message is, would you try Jesus?

Give him a try for 30 days or come back next week. We'll talk more about this as we continue this series. I just don't see that in the scriptures, that there's such a lack of urgency. And I think there's just a greater resolve.

Get this gospel right and get this gospel out. And there's a renewed sense. My wife says of me, I'm a street preacher behind the pulpit, and though I love to exegete the text and go into the depths of my studies to make sure I'm getting the text right, I want to make sure that in every sermon someone can bring someone to church and they know they're going to hear the gospel.

Praise God. It is no surprise to those who know you well like I do, and I've even discussed this with you as a major part of your testimony on this program in the past. But for those of you who do not know this, it may shock you, but before Pastor John was a confessional Reformed Baptist, he was a word of faith Pentecostal heretic.

He was not only a pastor in that very dangerous, false theological system of word of faith, but he was a pastor and a talk show host. And so he has come quite away from that past and has come to discover, fall in love with, and boldly proclaim the doctrines of sovereign grace.

But one of the things that I have noticed over the years when it comes to my brethren in Christ who are sovereign grace believing like you and I, sometimes we perhaps take our cessationism too far to the point when we are asking God in prayer for anything that we are in urgent need of, whether it is a health crisis, perhaps we have a terminal illness, perhaps someone we love has a terminal illness, perhaps it could be a whole host of other things.

The thing that we have to be careful about in our cessationism is not to diminish an optimism in expecting God to answer our prayers as we are praying for these requests. Now, at the same time, we always have to be focused on the fact that whatever the Lord's will is, is the best for us.

But at the same time, we can't use that as an excuse to just be totally neutral on whether God will answer our prayer. Am I making sense here, John? And what are your thoughts on that?

I couldn't agree more. Yeah, we need to ramp up our expectation while resting in the sovereignty of God. That's the balance I see in Scripture of pray with expectation, pray to the God who reigns. I mean, many of the objections people have to where you and I would be regarding God's sovereignty is they say, well, if God is sovereign, why pray?

And my answer, and it's the answer of others who know the Scriptures, is we only pray because he's sovereign. He's big enough to change these circumstances. He will get his will done as we pray to him.

And he's ordained not only the ends, but the means. His ends will be accomplished. That's the God of the Bible. God doesn't try. A friend of mine, Jim Osman, wrote a book, God Doesn't Try. God isn't trying to do anything.

He's not trying to speak. He has spoken. He's not trying. Jesus isn't trying to build his church. He said, I will. I will build my church. He's not trying to get his will done. The God of the Bible, Isaiah 46, his counsel shall stand.

He will achieve all his good pleasure. But we don't know what the good pleasure is. And that's revealed in Providence every day we live. And I couldn't agree more. We need to ramp up our expectations.

We pray to a God who has everything under control. The winds and the seas still obey him, from little five-mile-an-hour winds that we feel on our face to tsunamis that rip islands apart. God is the God of the waves, the winds, the seas, the earth.

The earth is the Lord's and he does what he wills. And we can pray to a God who has our best interest at heart. And many times it is that he releases us and relieves us. And sometimes it isn't. The Lord gives, the Lord takes.

Blessed be the name of the Lord. But let's remember, he also gives as well as takes away.

Amen. Well, we have Stacy in Lloyd Harbor, Long Island, New York. And Stacy says, knowing of your Word of Faith Pentecostal background, can you explain your own thoughts on your mother's vision? Yeah, that's a very good question because cessationists usually fall into two categories when it comes to hearing stories like that.

They either say, there's no way if you believe in Sola Scriptura that that actually happened, or they'll just shrug their shoulders and say, I don't know. In fact, I very often am in that latter category.

I just don't know what to say. Yeah. What do you say about that?

Good question. Because it's my mother, I've never known her to lie to me, to my face. The fact that the way she talked about it was very different from the normal thing. Oh, the Lord just showed me this.

The Lord appeared to me and said this. You know, there's just this casualness about it all. It's like, yeah, I met with the mailman last night and he told me this and that. There's no reverence and awe.

And the way my mother spoke about it was very deeply impactful. Scripturally, I obviously hold to Sola Scriptura. The Bible is sufficient. I also believe in the sovereignty of God. And Jesus is Lord now, Lord of heaven and the earth.

And the Bible says that he's retained in heaven until he comes again. But he's also Lord in the sense of he can walk on the earth and he's not violating some outward command that he's under obligation.

Jesus appeared to Paul after the resurrection. And he has, I think, perfect liberty to do what he wishes in the earth. And it could well be his purpose at very rare times. I think it would be very rare, but I believe he can appear.