Session 2: Personal Q&A with Phil Johnson

Kootenai Church

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00:00

All right, everyone, we're gonna get started with our second session. So come on in and find your place again, please.

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Yeah, he said this was scripted earlier. Just so you know, he means his questions are scripted.

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I have no script, which is dangerous. Yeah. All right.

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My wife's praying. Okay, first question. Actually, before we begin, do you know anything about the history of the rubber eraser?

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No. Okay. Well, 2023 was open for a conference idea. I thought if you knew anything about that, we'd have you back.

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So tell us, first of all, how it is that you got saved, how the Lord saved you. I grew up in a liberal

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Methodist church. My parents were churchgoers. My dad was converted during World War II in the

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Navy in the Philippines and baptized there. I have a letter from the pastor who baptized him. And yet his family had been

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Methodists for years. And so they stayed in the Methodist church. And I don't think my parents were keen enough with discernment to really realize that we're not getting biblical teaching.

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It was church, you know? And what they didn't know was that in Sunday school,

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I was being taught all sorts of humanism and anti -supernatural stuff.

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We had a Sunday school teacher, I think, and she went along with our class. So I started having her in sixth grade.

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She was a woman who had an earned doctorate, I think, in psychology. And so she followed our class all the way up to the beginning of high school, teaching.

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Every Sunday, it was like we'd read a story in scripture if she ever opened the

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Bible, but she would then tell us why we shouldn't take this too seriously. And the one I remember was the man with the withered arm.

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This didn't really happen like this, she says. You're not supposed to believe what's irrational, that Jesus was able to heal this guy.

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You're supposed to learn a moral lesson from this. And I said, you tell us this, and this may seem, you know, petulant of me, but it was a real question

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I had. I said, you tell us every week why we shouldn't take this seriously. Why do we come and talk about it?

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I want to stay home and watch the NFL pregame. You know, what's the point?

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And plus, it irritated me because, I don't know, I had a friend who was a Christian.

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His dad was a Pentecostal faith healer, of all things, but he took the Bible literally.

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And so I'm hung between what I'm hearing in Sunday school and my best friend who's a

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Pentecostal, you know, faith healer guy. Somebody asked if that was

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Justin Peters he's talking about. It was in Tulsa though, and you know, Tulsa is the home of every charismatic, yeah, wing nut.

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And anyway, so that has nothing to do with it. He was enough of an influence on me that I didn't want to just discount the

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Bible, but I'm hearing this stuff in Sunday school, of all places, why you shouldn't believe it.

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And so I mouthed off to the Sunday school teacher and the pastor called me at home on Monday the next day and said,

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I need you to come and have a talk with me. And so I went to his office on Tuesday and he said, what's going on in Sunday school?

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What are you causing trouble for? And so I explained. She tells us every week that the Bible's not true.

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And he said, look, she's just trying to get you to see this rationally, intelligently. She's right.

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And this shocked me because this is the pastor telling me this. And I said, you mean none of the miracles in the

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Bible are true? And he said, no, not really. These are moral tales. He said like the man with the withered hand.

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He said he probably heard Jesus say, if your right hand offends you, cut it off. And he knew not to take that literally.

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And so he had bound his arm to his side and resolved never to use it again.

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And Jesus gave him permission to use his arm again. So he healed his withered arm.

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And I'm, I don't know what, 15, 16 years old and I'm listening to this and going, okay, that's almost credible.

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So what about when Moses parted the Red Sea? Because I'm thinking of all the miracles and I didn't know the

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Bible well enough to know more than a handful of them. And he said, that clearly didn't happen.

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You can't make water stand up like walls. And I'm like, but if it's a miracle, it's the whole point.

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You can't do it, but God can. And he's like, look, we're not supposed to be taking that literally.

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And I went through several miracles and he explained them all away the same way. And I left his office very frustrated and thought,

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I should just stay home and watch the football game, right? And I was old enough at the time, junior high or early high school that, and my mom had health problems at the time.

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So my parents gave me maybe more freedom than they would have in earlier years. And I just stopped going to church.

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They didn't try to talk me out of that. I just stopped going to church. And so for a year or a year and a half,

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I wasn't going to church. And yet I had this nagging feeling that you shouldn't just write off the

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Bible like that. And one night, I was 17 years old. I was a month away from graduating high school.

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It was April of 1971. So we just passed the 50th anniversary of this night when

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I was lying in bed, unable to go to sleep, feeling guilty for something I had done. It was a minor,

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I think I'd said something unkind to my sister and she went to bed angry with me. I just felt like a total heel, you know?

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And I thought, yeah, I left church, I'm a pagan, I need to do something spiritual.

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And you know, it's late at night, I'm in my room, nothing else to do. So I decided I'm gonna read a page of the

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Bible. That'll do it. And I had a Bible. It was one of those with a zipper cover and I kept it zipped so it would stay in mint condition.

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But I opened it up and flopped it open at random because this is the only thing

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I'd ever done with a Bible. And I hadn't even done this very often. But I looked at it like a fortune cookie. You pick a verse and what does this say to me, you know?

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And literally, that was my approach to scripture reading. And so I sort of teased it towards the back because I did know enough about the

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Bible to know that I didn't want to get into the minor prophets. So New Testament was more interesting.

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I'm looking for a New Testament verse. And I flopped it open and it opened to the first page of 1

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Corinthians, which is not where you'd send a high school kid to find the gospel, right? But I thought, first page, and I counted the pages and was disappointed at how long it was.

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But I thought, what if I read the whole book? That would make me really spiritual. So I decided to read through 1

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Corinthians. And by the time I got through chapter three, I was absolutely convinced what a pagan

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I was. Those first three chapters, Paul just assaults human wisdom.

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The wisdom of this world is foolishness with God. If anyone among you seems to be wise, let him become a fool that he may be wise.

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God's wisdom is stronger than the foolishness of men. God's foolishness is stronger than the wisdom of men. And it's just an attack on human wisdom.

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And see, my thing was politics. I was deep into politics and philosophy.

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And I thought, even if I don't go to church, God has to accept me if I learn from the best of philosophy and have humane political views and all this.

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So I was striving to be good in God's eyes, even if I didn't go to church. And here, scripture is telling me that my highest wisdom is like foolishness to God.

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And it just devastated me. And I kept reading. I remember I read all the way through chapter 12.

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I didn't actually get through the whole book. Because by the time I got to chapter 12, some of it was confusing.

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That's where it talks about speaking in tongues. And I had this Pentecostal friend who'd wanted me to do that and all that.

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But the beginning of chapter 12 is where Paul says, here's how you know the spirit of God versus another spirit.

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No one speaking by the spirit of God can say Jesus is accursed. And no one can say Jesus is

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Lord except by the Holy Spirit. Now, I didn't understand in the context what

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Paul was writing about. But the thing that came through clearly to me is that the essence of being a spiritual person would be to confess the

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Lordship of Christ, that Jesus is Lord. And I understood enough to know this means, look,

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Jesus is not looking for me to be good. He's looking for me to bow to him as Lord.

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And I made that confession that night in my bed. Jesus is Lord. And everything in my world instantly changed.

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And lots of things that providence brought to me that very week changed.

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The next day, in fact, I thought, I need a version of the Bible that I can understand better, a modern translation.

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So I went to a bookstore to see if there was a better translation. And the bookstore was in the mall. As I'm walking through the mall, a guy hands me a gospel tract.

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Nobody had ever given me a gospel tract in my life. And this was a really good tract that explained justification by faith.

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And on the back was an advertisement for an evangelistic crusade that was gonna be a citywide crusade in Tulsa, which

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I ignored the ad, but I read the tract and thought, okay, that makes sense. I mean, I'm just beginning the very start of understanding the gospel.

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And then either that night or the next night, the phone rang, and it was a guy who I barely knew.

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We played in an orchestra together, and we were cordial friends, but not good friends. And he said, listen, there's a citywide evangelistic crusade.

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It's the one on the back of the tract. And he says, the church I go to wants us to invite one person as a guest.

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And he said, I thought of you. And I realized instantly, he thought of me because he figures I'm a friend he can afford to lose.

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You know? Because he's stuttering around. He's not at all comfortable asking me if I want to go to this evangelistic crusade.

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But I said, yeah, I'd like to do that. And he's like, really? So I arranged to meet him.

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And we went together to this massive crusade. Should I tell you who the preacher was?

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Because it will appall you. No, no, no, go for it. Jack Van Impey. Oh, interesting.

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Back in those days, he was a fundamentalist, and he knew enough of the gospel to preach it. And this was a massive,

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Tulsa has, in the fairgrounds there, this big display center called the

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International Petroleum Exhibition. It's a big empty hall with, it's the largest, at the time, was the largest indoor space with no internal supports.

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The roof was supported from the outside with wires and stuff like, so it was a massive hall. And it was full.

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There were, I would guess, 8 ,000 people there. So this is a big deal. And Jack Van Impey preached that night a sermon on the crucifixion.

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And he started his sermon in Isaiah 53, which blew my mind.

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I didn't know enough even to bring a Bible to the thing. So my friend had this Schofield Bible, used from a fundamentalist church.

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He's sitting on his lap, and he's looking around, and he's not using it. And when Van Impey starts to quote from Isaiah 53,

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I'm like, wait a minute, that's the Old Testament. That could be talking about Jesus. But it is, it's about Jesus, and that's not really in the

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Old Testament. So I took this guy's Bible off his lap and opened it up to, I found Isaiah 53, and I'm amazed to see this is all about the crucifixion of Christ.

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And it just blew me away, but had the effect of from that day until this,

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I have never had a single doubt about whether the Bible is the inspired word of God. It just, it amazes me that anybody can read

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Psalm 22, Isaiah 53, and not understand that this is

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God's eternal plan. And he explained the way of salvation, and I became a

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Christian sometime in that week. I can't tell you whether it was when I confessed

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Jesus as Lord in my bed that night, or when I heard Van Impey talking about the meaning of the crucifixion and why

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Christ died for our sins. But I came out of that week solidly converted.

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And looked, Tulsa was a hard place to find a church in those days, because it was all Pentecostal or liberal

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Southern Baptist. But one of the guys who had sponsored this citywide crusade was a pastor who had a television program.

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And I looked up his church, and it was within a mile of where I lived. So I visited there on a

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Sunday morning, and he noticed it wasn't a great big church. So he noticed there's this high school kid dressed in a suit.

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He sought me out and said, what brings you here? And I said, I'm a new Christian. I'm looking for a church where they preach the

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Bible. And because I come from a liberal Methodist church. He said, well, you found a church that preaches the

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Bible. He says, are you baptized? So he's like solid Baptist, you know. And I said, no,

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I just came to faith in April. This was like probably June 1st.

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And he said, well, come tonight. We're having a baptismal service. I'll baptize you.

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I said, okay, and I did. So that's - Were your parents there at your baptism? No, no.

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I didn't really have the guts to tell them all that I was going through. Like I said, my mom was in and out of the hospital in those days, and a lot of stuff going on there.

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So it was a slow revelation to them that I had become a Christian. And they didn't believe it at first.

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Took quite a while for them to really see that something happened to change him. But yeah.

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And then you're after high school, what happened? Where'd you go? The first year I went to a state university in Oklahoma because I didn't know where to go.

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But that night that I was baptized, I told the pastor, look, I'd been planning to become a newspaper columnist.

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I wanted to write political opinions like William F. Buckley, you know. So I realized right away,

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I can't do that with my life. I have to serve the Lord somehow. And so somehow verbalized that to this pastor.

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He says, you need to go to a Christian college. I said, where? Because the only one I knew was Oral Roberts University in the backyard, and I didn't want to go there.

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And I knew that already. And he said, so he listed about six or seven schools, all of them fundamentalist schools, like Bible Baptist College in Springfield, Missouri, and Tennessee Temple, Bob Jones University.

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House Anderson, was that a thing at the time? It wasn't a big deal yet. This was 1971.

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I think House Anderson was probably founded in 72 or 73. But the last school he named was

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Moody Bible Institute. And it was the only one on his list that I'd ever heard of because they had the

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Moody science films, and we saw those in grade school, even in secular schools. And there was a radio broadcast on late at night that was sponsored by Moody.

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So I'd heard of it, and I said, Moody Bible Institute, is that a good school? And he said, well, that's where I graduated from.

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And I said, okay, that's where I'll go. So that's the decision -making process. Sorry, my throat is.

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We'll get some, somebody will get you some water here in a second. So it's interesting that there could be this parallel universe and a parallel timeline where Phil Johnson goes to Oral Roberts University and becomes an apologist for the continuationist movement.

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I was gonna say, I don't think that ever would've happened. If we had time, I'd tell you about my relationship with my friend whose dad was a, thank you.

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His dad was a pretty famous faith healer, Pentecostal, Assemblies of God. And the same year

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I was converted, this man, his name was William Caldwell, contracted bone cancer and a protracted illness with very painful bone cancer.

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He died about two years later, and his son, my best friend, abandoned the faith because he figured his father, who claimed to be able to heal anybody, died this lingering, painful death.

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The whole thing must be a lie, and he gave up on Christianity completely. So you went to Moody, graduated then from Moody after three years, four years?

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Both, yeah, I graduated twice from Moody. Moody has a three -year diploma. That's kinda like me,

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I took high school twice. Yeah. Moody offers a diploma that doesn't mean much, but it's three years of Bible training.

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And if you add to that 60 hours of, this was in those days, now you can earn a bachelor's degree at Moody, but it's a lot of work.

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In those days, if you wanted a bachelor's degree from Moody, you had to have 60 hours of liberal arts credits from any other accredited institution, and I'd gone to a state university the year before Moody, and so I only needed one more year, and so I decided to try one of those fundamentalist schools, and I went to Tennessee Temple for the worst year of my life, but it cured me of that sort of legalistic fundamentalism.

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So it was probably a good thing in the long run, and then went back to Moody to get my degree. They required, if you were already a graduate and trying to get a degree, you had to come for at least a summer term, so that I guess they could make sure you hadn't apostatized or whatever.

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So my plan was, go back to Chicago for the summer, finish the work on my degree, get the degree, and then

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I was gonna spend a year just working to earn money to go to seminary, because I thought

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I was training to be a pastor, and during that last summer in Chicago, I was poverty -stricken and in need of part -time employment, but I couldn't find anyone who would hire a person for six weeks, you know, obviously, that's, and I was bemoaning that fact to a friend who was a part -time proofreader at Moody Press, and she said, look,

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I'm here this summer because if I go home, they'll hire somebody to replace me, and I might not get my job back, but if you just need the job for six weeks, you could do it, and then when

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I come back, I get my job back, and she was a sweet girl. I didn't want to disappoint her, but I thought, that sounds dreadful, proofreading, but I didn't want to tell her,

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I don't want to do that, so I just said, yeah, that sounds interesting. I'll think about it, but she took it on her own initiative to make an appointment for me to interview with the editor of Moody Press.

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She made an appointment and gave it to me, and I said, okay, I'll go in, and I'm just gonna be honest with this guy, so here's how the job interview goes.

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I walked into this guy's office. His name was Les Stobie. He was the managing editor of Moody Press. I said, Mr. Stobie, here's the deal.

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Karen wants to go home for the summer, and I need a part -time job, and she thinks it's a perfect situation, so maybe

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I could take her job part -time, but I said, I gotta be honest with you. I am a really bad speller, and I took the minimum

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English requirements in college, and I have a tendency to fall asleep when I read. I mean,

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I'm trying to make sure. I do not get this job, right? And he laughed like that and said, yeah, okay,

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I get it. He says, I'll tell Karen you came, and it's just not gonna work out. Don't call us.

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We'll call you, and I said, thanks, and walked out. It was like a three -minute interview, and that was it, and I thought, well,

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I dodged that bullet, but now I gotta find a job as a night clerk in a 7 -Eleven or something, you know?

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But 20 minutes later, he called me. I'd gone back to my dorm room, and he calls me on the phone, and he says, look,

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Phil, I thought maybe we could just let Karen go for the summer and do without her for a few weeks, and he says, so I checked, and I found out we are weeks behind with proofreading, and I need a second proofreader even if she stays here.

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He says, technically, you've applied for the job. If I have to go through personnel department and all that, and then

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I'm gonna have to, it's gonna take me weeks. I need somebody right now, and he says, you're desperate for a job.

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I'm desperate for a proofreader. He says, I'll pay you $12 an hour if you can give us three hours a day, three hours a day, $12 an hour, and I'm like, wow, because minimum wage was $3 .25

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at that time, $12? And I said, I'll do anything for 12.

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You can drive nails in my toes for 12 hours. So that's how they got me started proofreading, and he said, but I need you to start this afternoon because I've got a thing that has to get done today, so I went back over there, and they sat me down with these typeset pages and a manuscript and said, basically, this is all the instruction

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I got. You take the manuscript and read it and compare it to the typeset thing, and if there's anything that's not like it, it's supposed to be, mark it, and so it was a badly set piece of text, and so there were lots of mistakes in it, so I'm finding all these mistakes, and by the time

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I'd done it for 20 minutes, I knew this was gonna be my life. It was that dramatic. I just thought, wow, this is kind of fun.

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You know, all my life, people had said to me, you're too critical, you're a glass -half -empty kind of guy, you're always negative, why can't you be more positive, and now they are paying me $12 an hour to find other people's mistakes.

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You were born for this. I was, I was, plus, I had always had, though I told them

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I took the minimum English requirements in college, that was true, but I'd always had sort of natural literary gifts.

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I was a voracious reader as a child, and I could write pretty well. My college assignments, the writing assignments,

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I always got good grades, so I didn't think of myself as a good writer, but having edited a lot of people's writing, you know,

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I think even in high school, I had some natural writing gifts that really began to manifest themselves.

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I took an interest in words. I started reading a lot about word usage, and before the end of that summer, they promoted me to editor.

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They made me a book editor. So that was a pretty good career move for me, and shall

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I go on? How did you meet your wife? That's the next part of the story. That's right. So I'd been there for a year, and I'm the only male editor in the, in fact, when they promoted me to an editor,

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Mr. Stobie says, he says, I gotta tell you, the salary on this isn't good because it's scaled for women, and even then, that was politically incorrect, right?

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And I said, well, what's the deal with that? I mean, why is that a problem? And he says, well, it's expensive to live in Chicago.

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I said, well, it's no more expensive for a man than it is for a woman. If you can pay a woman, you can pay me.

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I'll take whatever, right? So, but I was the only man in the editorial department, and so it was kind of fun.

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I was dating all these girls, and like, what do you call it, serial dating?

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I wasn't dating any of them steadily, but take an amount, you know, and I had no social life in college.

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I had paid my way through school, and suddenly, I'm the only guy in the office.

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Darlene always jokes because these women would have Tupperware parties, and because I worked in the department, they couldn't leave me out, so I got invited to Tupperware parties, and one of the first times she ever went out with me was at a

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Tupperware party with Woody Press girls, and she thought, this guy's really fun.

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He's so sweet, and Tupperware parties, and he's talkative, and all, and after we got married, she's like, you're not at all like you were at that Tupperware party.

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So anyway, she comes to work there a year after I had started. She's the new secretary in the, was it, what's the department, production, and I didn't even know there was a new girl coming or there, but a fellow editor said to me, have you met the new girl?

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I said, there's a new girl? And he pointed. You've been to a Tupperware party with all the others. That's right. I'm like, oh, all right.

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So he pointed me towards her desk, and I went, and within five minutes,

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I was totally smitten. I was like, wow, she graduated from Appalachian Bible Institute, which is a more conservative school than Moody, and I thought, a conservative girl, that's my style, and she's pretty, and smart, and wow, and so as I was walking away from her desk,

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I thought, no, you can't let this one get away, so I did a U -turn after about six steps and said, hey, by the way, we're going to a baseball game on Saturday.

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A group of us, you wanna come? And she said, sure, and so that was it.

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We went to a Cubs game at Wrigley Field. That was our first date. There is today a brick in the sidewalk at Wrigley Field that commemorates our first date there, and it has the score of the game.

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The Cubs won, and she became kind of a lifelong Cubs fan, although she's upset with them right now, but yeah.

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If you're in our family, you can't be for any other baseball team. Yeah, we have similar.

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Yeah, she's been that way even down. You can marry outside the family team. We have a

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Seahawks fan and a Green Bay fan, but we're working on converting them. That's right. Well, in our family, you might marry somebody like that, but you better get them converted real quick.

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We don't have any grandchildren until we get this resolved. That's right.

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That's a good point. So then you meet her, you go out on a date, and next thing you know, you're married?

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It was a year to the day after I met her or so that we got married. We had a rocky romance.

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We dated for six months, and then she dumped me. Well, actually, she caught me on one of those casual dates with another girl.

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And it wasn't anything serious even. It was a college friend who had come to town for the weekend during the air show in Chicago, which is a big deal, and it draws like crowds of 2 million people up and down the lakefront, literally 2 million people.

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I'm walking in this massive crowd with this girl from Tennessee who I knew from college, and we're not even holding hands or anything.

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It wasn't like that. It was totally platonic, but who do you think I ran into in a crowd of 2 million?

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And she called me up later and said, hey, look, if you wanna date other girls and everything, that's okay with me.

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We're not going steady, but I don't wanna be part of a group. If you're gonna date other girls, just leave me out. And I'm like, well, that would mean we are going steady.

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So I said, okay, all right. And I thought, I'll call her when I'm ready to get engaged.

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And yeah, that wasn't a good move on my part. You don't wanna hear this whole story. I do wanna hear, well, they wanna hear the rest of it.

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Yeah, she refused to talk to me for the next three months. And in that time span, I accidentally quit my job.

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I threatened to quit and my boss took me up on it. It was a bluff on my part, but he took me seriously.

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And then she found out that her sister, she had moved to Chicago and was rooming with, her sister was diagnosed with very aggressive kind of terminal cancer.

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She had, the doctors gave her just three months to live. So Darlene and her sister were gonna move back to West Virginia.

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I would never see her again. And so I called her up and said, can we get together and talk?

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And she's like, no, I don't wanna talk to you. And she did that to me for two months until I, what did

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I do, cut myself with razor blades or I just pleaded with her until she finally said, all right, we'll talk.

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And so when we talked, my first words were, look, I'm gonna marry you.

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It was like that. So the running joke in our family is, I never asked her to marry me. I just told her I was gonna do it.

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And she said, okay. And how did you come to Grace Community Church and get attached with John MacArthur?

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Well, I had never heard of John MacArthur. The year we met actually, met Darlene and she and I were in the phase before she dumped me, still dating.

30:13

And John MacArthur came to Moody to be a speaker at Spiritual Emphasis Week, which is a week long series of student chapels.

30:23

And they expanded chapel from normally a half hour to that week, it's always an hour.

30:28

And it's the same speaker every day for the week and he does a series. They do it every year. And it's usually a very famous speaker.

30:36

So it's really worth going to. And if you were an employee, not a student, they would let you take an hour off your work with pay and go down to student chapel and listen in.

30:47

And so we had permission to do that. But I had some manuscripts I was working on that were tight deadlines.

30:53

And I read the flyer they sent out and I don't even know this guy. I never heard of him,

30:58

John MacArthur. So I wasn't gonna go. And I shared an office with another guy. He came in that morning and he said, hey, are you gonna go down there to the student chapel?

31:08

And I said, who was that guy again? And so he reads the flyer to me. He says, this is

31:13

John MacArthur. He's a fifth generation pastor. He pastors Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California.

31:19

And today he's speaking on God's will for your life. And I said, no way I'm gonna go to that.

31:25

I said, God's will for your life? I said, that's what everybody who comes to Moody speaks about.

31:32

Somebody oughta clue Junior in. I said,

31:37

I'm not inclined to go hear a guy whose claim to fame is he's somebody's son.

31:44

Fifth generation pastor, Junior, nah. And so he says, well, you're in a good mood today.

31:50

And he leaves. 30 seconds later, she pokes her head in the door and says,

31:55

I'm going down to student chapel. Were you gonna come? And I said, yeah, I'm just on my way. So the sound booth in, this was

32:06

Torrey Gray Auditorium at Moody, the sound booth is up in the balcony and kind of towards the back. And we sat behind the sound booth because I wasn't intending to take this seriously.

32:16

I just wanted to be with her for a free hour, you know? But the minute

32:22

John MacArthur opened his mouth, I just thought, I have never heard a guy preach with that level of clarity, that depth of biblical content.

32:33

And it was crystal clear. I mean, I had said to the guy I share the office with, he's not gonna say anything

32:38

I've never heard, you know. But I thought, wow, I mean, this is a new perspective. This is a fresh treatment of how to discern

32:47

God's will that was more clear and more clearly biblical than anything I had ever heard.

32:53

It's his famous message called God's will is not lost. That's what he preached that day. It's been made into a book called

32:59

Found God's Will. So it's one of John's best known messages. And ironically, it's one of the few important messages from John MacArthur that's not a biblical exposition.

33:09

He doesn't go through a passage. He takes the topic and basically looks at everything scripture says about it and puts it all together.

33:18

It was just profound. And I remember thinking, wow, I have never heard a guy speak like that. And he was young and articulate.

33:26

Why have I never heard of this guy? He's better than most of the guys they bring in for this. And I thought, I'm glad she dragged me off to this.

33:34

And so this was before cassette tape messages were real popular or whatever.

33:41

But a friend of mine, my best friend, who was then and still is pastor of a church in Clearwater, Florida, I said, have you ever heard this guy

33:52

John MacArthur? And I said, yeah, I went to hear him at Moody one time.

33:58

He was the best speaker I've ever heard. He said, well, you know, all his sermons are on cassette tape and we have them in our church library.

34:06

I'll send you some. So he starts sending me tapes of John. And those were the very first cassettes.

34:11

I always joke that the first cassettes I ever listened to from Grace to you were bootleg tapes. But, and then when

34:20

Darlene and I got married, on our honeymoon, we went to Florida and we talked about, you know, what are we gonna do in the future?

34:29

And how long do we wanna live, you know, two blocks from Wrigley Field? You can't really raise kids in a neighborhood like that.

34:36

And so we decided, because I was by then, like I said, I'd accidentally quit my job.

34:41

I was doing freelance work, mostly for Moody Press. The only thing they saved by firing me was the benefits package.

34:50

And they were not still paying me to work really on my own time, which meant I could live anywhere in the country and do what

34:56

I'm doing. And so we moved to Florida to be part of this church where my friend was.

35:03

And the week we moved to the Tampa Bay area, Grace to you, the radio broadcast, premiered its first ever nationwide broadcast on three stations in the country,

35:16

Tampa, Tulsa, and Baltimore, which I have no connection to, but it's odd to me still that I lived in Tampa.

35:23

I was from Tulsa. And those were two of the first three stations Grace to you was on. So I began listening from day one.

35:30

And I think I must have been one of the first 50 people on the Grace to you mailing list. I immediately wrote in and started getting the material and subscribed to all the tapes from Grace Church.

35:42

Just began to listen to John every opportunity I got, just absorbed everything.

35:48

And I never heard him speak without thinking. I mean, even the very first time I heard him when Darlene was there in Moody's Chapel, one of my first thought was, why haven't

36:00

I heard from this guy? And he needs to be writing books. This stuff is, this material needs to be preserved in printed, published form.

36:09

He needs an editor, you know? That's what I used to think. And I would fantasize about, wow, that would be so great.

36:16

But he lived in California and I was living in Florida. And there was no prayer that we would ever get together.

36:24

I had no way of meeting him and no, I'm not the sort of groupie who would even seek out an opportunity like that.

36:30

I just thought, wow, that would be so great. But my plan still was to be a pastor. I was assistant pastor in a

36:37

Florida church at the time. Shortly after we moved there, a church in the area hired me to be their assistant pastor.

36:44

So that's what I was doing, listening to John. And one day, Moody Press called.

36:49

It was Jerry Jenkins who wrote the Left Behind series. He was the vice president in charge of publishing at Moody at the time.

36:56

He called me up and said, look, Phil, I wonder if you'd be interested in something we're about to launch.

37:04

It'll be the biggest textbook project we've ever done. We wanna do a series of commentaries through the entire

37:10

New Testament and based on John MacArthur's preaching. So if you know

37:17

John MacArthur, we wanna turn his sermons into commentaries. Are you interested?

37:22

I said, yeah. So he says, we also need an acquisitions editor and I want you to apply for that job.

37:32

And I said, well, that's probably out, but I'm definitely interested in working on the MacArthur Project.

37:38

So he says, we'll come back here to Chicago on August 19th, I think it was, and we're gonna have a meeting with John MacArthur.

37:45

So that's where I met him. The first time was at the original meeting that Moody Press sponsored with a group of editors to talk about the potential of the

37:53

MacArthur New Testament Commentary Series, which of course now is complete. It took 35 years to get through it.

38:00

When Jerry first proposed the idea to me, he said, this is a huge project, biggest thing we've ever done.

38:07

It's probably gonna take 10 years to finish. And he thought, like, that's the biggest idea he could have about it, you know?

38:15

And their original idea was to use several editors so they could get it done faster, but what they didn't account for was that John still has to preach through half the

38:23

New Testament, and he doesn't do it at that speed, you know? So, and the irony is, of all of John's published works, the one thing

38:34

I've never actually done much work on is that commentary series. Other editors have done most of it, but at the end of that meeting,

38:42

I hadn't said much in the meeting. We'd all introduced ourselves, so I didn't have to introduce myself to John, but I sort of walked over to him while everybody was eating a punch and cookies, and I said, you know,

38:53

I listen to you every day on the radio, and I said, I'm a youth pastor, assistant pastor, dealing with a lot of kids who

38:59

I don't believe are genuinely converted, but, you know, I have a war, running war with their parents to convince them that your child is not saved and he needs the gospel.

39:10

I said, you need to do a book on the lordship issue, lordship salvation, because this was a big deal in Florida, especially.

39:17

And he brightened immediately and said, I want to do a book on that. He said,

39:22

I even have a title in mind, The Gospel According to Jesus. And I said, I remember saying, yeah, we'll have to work on the title, but you have to do that book.

39:34

And he said, I didn't know he knew as much about what was going on at Moody Press, but he was on the board at Moody at the time.

39:40

So he said, look, I know Moody wants you to be their acquisitions editor. If they hire you in that role, you call me and I'll make that a

39:48

Moody Press book, because he said, I've never found a publisher who's interested in the topic.

39:53

You're the first person in publishing who's ever shown any interest in it, but I really want to do it.

39:59

So Moody hired me to be their acquisitions editor. Darlene and I moved back to Florida or back from Florida to Chicago in 81.

40:08

And I spent the next year, well, the first thing I did the first day on the job was write a contract for the

40:14

Gospel According to Jesus and send it off to John. There's another long story about why that's not a

40:21

Moody Press book after all, but it was conceived at Moody Press and contracted with them.

40:27

And that was the original plan. But I spent the next year working on a smaller book,

40:34

The Ultimate Priority, which has been retitled Worship with the subtitle The Ultimate Priority, one of the longest in print books by John MacArthur.

40:42

That was the first one I edited for him. And just took his sermons and put them in print format.

40:49

And then he goes through it and re -edits that the way he wants. And then it goes off to the publisher.

40:54

So it shortens the process for him. It's a little more labor intensive for the editor.

41:00

It's a lot more labor intensive for the editor, but the products I think have been good.

41:05

The books are great. And when he saw my work, he liked it almost from the start.

41:11

And so when the book was finished and he was reading it, he just looked up from the manuscript and said to me, you should quit your job at Moody Press and come to work for me.

41:21

This was 1983, the very beginning of 1983, January of 1983.

41:26

You should quit your job, come to work for me. And I said, okay. And he said, no,

41:32

I'm serious. And I said, yeah, so am I. And that was in January.

41:37

That was the end of January 25th, January 25th. By March 1st, Darlene and I were in California.

41:44

We'd moved there and have been there ever since. So we're coming up on our, what is it, 38th anniversary?

41:52

Yeah. And did he offer you a job as executive director at Grace to you? No, in fact,

41:58

I had actually said these words to Darlene. I would so much love to be sitting under John's teaching and editing his books that I'd take a job, shining shoes if it paid the bills in order to live close to Grace Church.

42:17

He could have hired me to do anything. If he'd offered me a job as janitor, I would have said yes.

42:23

But he just wanted an editor nearby. So he said, look, the opening we have right now is at Grace to you, the radio ministry.

42:31

He says, you probably don't wanna stay there, but that's a way to get you in. We'll hire you for the radio ministry, answering mail, answering the questions that listeners sent in.

42:43

We can hire you to do that. And then when it's possible for you to transition into some other more pastoral role, we'll do that.

42:51

But, and so I said, sure, I'll do it. And as it turned out, I've stayed at Grace to you all these 38 years and wouldn't change it.

42:59

It's like what I was born to do. And what is your job at Grace to you other than editing

43:04

John's books? I am the executive director now. When I came there, Grace to you, the radio broadcast was a small department within Grace Church.

43:15

It was self -supporting. So they weren't using Grace Church's budget.

43:21

They had a separate budget and it was totally supported by listener income, but it was a division of the church.

43:27

It was under the oversight of the elders. And there was another department, a larger department that produced the cassette tapes.

43:33

So there was a tape ministry and the radio ministry, and they actually existed in separate buildings. But obviously they're doing a lot of the same things.

43:43

It's the tape ministry that supplies the material for the radio ministry. There's so much back and forth. It didn't make sense, first of all, to keep them separate.

43:50

And second of all, it didn't make sense for this ministry that had by then nearly $4 million annual budget to be under the elders' oversight when we had maybe 10 minutes a month on the elders' agenda.

44:06

We needed closer accountability and closer oversight and better advice on how to grow a radio ministry and all that.

44:13

So I suggested that we combine the two departments, spin it off, make it a separate organization with a board maybe constituted by the elders, maybe still accountable to the elders, but a separate board of our own.

44:28

And that's what they did. And that's really how we exist even today. Well, our board is larger and the ministry itself is much larger.

44:39

So we spun off and became a, what do you call it, a parachurch organization, but under the oversight of these elders, still at least spiritually.

44:50

And in fact, to work at Grace to You, you require to be a member of Grace Church. We wouldn't hire somebody who's not a member of the church.

44:58

And you are an elder at the church as well as an executive director. So we still have this very strong tie with the church, but it's separate from the church.

45:05

I'm not an employee of the church and not in any way accountable to anybody at the church other than John and the elders that are on our board.

45:14

And yeah, accountable to the elders of the church in my role as a lay pastor at Grace Church.

45:22

The church doesn't pay me anything, but I pastor one of the large adult fellowships there.

45:28

So it's perfect for me. I mean, I trained to be a pastor and I am pastoring, but I don't need to be a senior pastor.

45:36

And I have opportunities to preach and write and pretty much whatever

45:43

I wanna do. It's like I said, I've felt for years the Lord just made me to do the role he brought me into.

45:52

And do you edit all of John's books or do you have other people that work with you on that? No, I've for years edited the vast majority of the non -commentaries, his adult nonfiction books.

46:08

There came a time when there were just too many book projects for one person to do. I can only edit maybe two books a year.

46:17

That's like the maximum I could possibly do. So for several years, we did some smaller books that we had other editors at Grace TU sort of put together.

46:28

When you read them, you can tell they're of a different style than John's books normally are. For the past, what, three or four years, my eldest son,

46:39

Jeremiah. I skipped over this question. Do you have kids and what do they do? So why don't you? Yeah, well, my eldest son is

46:45

Jeremiah and he would want me to stress that he is not the charismatic prophet named

46:51

Jeremiah Johnson, but the other Jeremiah Johnson. Nor is the rugged mountain man,

46:56

Jeremiah Johnson. Yeah, that's right. But he inherited my way with words,

47:04

I guess. And the ability to write and edit material sort of just comes naturally to him.

47:10

And so he started doing some of John's books about four or five years ago. And John loves his work.

47:17

I think truth is John likes his work better than he liked mine, which is good for me. It takes all those deadlines and stress off my shoulders and I'm thrilled to see my son doing basically what

47:30

I did. So yeah. Your other kids? Oh, we have three sons.

47:36

All our kids were boys. Jeremiah is the eldest and he's married, but has no children.

47:43

And he and his wife both go to Grace Church. He's on staff at Grace TU. My second son is

47:50

Jedediah. He's an accountant, a CPA, and he is business partners with the chairman of the board of elders at our church.

47:58

And he and his wife still go to Grace Church. They met each other as students at the master's college during a semester where they studied in Israel.

48:07

So they met in Israel and she's from Virginia originally. And now they have four children, perfect kids.

48:18

And yeah. All Cubs fans? Devoted Cubs fans, all of them.

48:25

And yeah, they would not hesitate to tell you that. They're well -trained. And then my youngest son,

48:33

Jonathan, is a police officer stationed in Hollywood. He's at the Hollywood division at LAPD.

48:41

And he and his wife is Susie. Her dad was a pastor on staff at Grace when

48:47

I came. He now pastors a church in Marysville, Washington, north of Seattle. And she grew up there and she's a musician, a really skilled pianist.

48:57

And they have three kids and live within walking distance of us.

49:03

And they all go to Grace Church as well. So the entire extended family is at church on Sunday.

49:10

It's like the best ever. And it's the reason Darlene and I haven't moved to Idaho. Because we're not gonna leave the grandkids.

49:19

I'm gonna circle back to your police officer son at the end if we have time, because I want you to talk about a recent event that you were telling me about the other day.

49:28

Spurgeon was committed to the doctrines of grace, which we call Calvinism. When did you come to those convictions yourself?

49:36

Was Grace Community Church always known for your commitment to those reform doctrines? Or has there been a development over time?

49:43

How much have you influenced grace? How much has grace influenced you? You know, all of that. The, yeah, those are great questions.

49:51

And the answer to both questions about Grace Church and me is that we came to the doctrines of grace gradually over time.

49:58

I was saved out of the Methodist Church and I wouldn't have thought that I was taught much doctrine, but it's kind of ingrained into you as a

50:07

Methodist, certain Arminian principles, that human free will, you know, is all important.

50:14

So the idea of free will seemed important to me when I first became a Christian. The first time

50:20

I ever heard of Arminianism and Calvinism was that night that I met with the pastor who baptized me.

50:27

And he, you know, heard my testimony, made sure I was genuinely saved, and then asked me, do you have any questions?

50:35

And I said, I just have one question, and that is this. Now that I'm a believer and I have eternal life, is there anything

50:42

I could do to lose it? Do I need to fear that I might, you know, fall away or whatever? And he goes, oh, he says, you'll understand that the more you trust scripture.

50:52

He says, we teach that salvation is forever. Eternal life, by definition, is eternal. He said, but that's the old debate between Calvinists and Arminians.

51:01

You don't need to know all of that right now. And that was pretty much all he said, but it stuck in my mind,

51:07

Armenians, you know? And so that first year in college, I remember going to the, this is secular university, went to the church or the school library and found this religious encyclopedia and looked up Arminian, and that didn't make any sense.

51:24

So I thought Calvinism, and I looked up Calvinism, and that's what showed me the proper spelling for Arminian.

51:31

So I looked that up and read it, and as I read the five points, I thought, well,

51:36

I agree with the Armenians, you know, on four of those five points. So I came into, you know, faith as a believer with the only one of the five points that I actually believed was eternal security because of that pastor's influence.

51:55

And so when I went to Moody, at my second year as a Christian, there were a number of students there who were, you know,

52:04

Calvinists, and you know how young Calvinists, college -age Calvinists are, that's all they ever talk about. And there was a group of these guys in the room next to me in the dorm who would hold court every night.

52:16

I was, my interest was evangelism, you know? I'm like, I was in church for 17 years before I heard the gospel.

52:23

People need to hear this. So I was doing a lot of public evangelism, street evangelism, passing out tracts, just encountering tourists on the street and giving them the gospel, and I loved doing that.

52:37

And so these guys next to me, they loved sitting around in the dorm room talking about the doctrines of grace.

52:44

There's a place for both, you know, but as a new Christian, I didn't think that was all that important.

52:49

I remember going into their room one night to borrow a pencil or something like that. I didn't go in there to be hostile, but I realized, you guys are sitting around here talking about predestination, you know?

53:00

Yeah, it's important. I said, you know what? If y 'all had come out evangelizing with us, there'd be a whole lot more elect people.

53:09

So that's the kind of smart aleck I was, as a new Christian. And they were very patient with me and explained, you know, and through those years at Moody, I became more and more,

53:21

I mean, you can't study the Gospel of John and not see that Jesus was a Calvinist. He kept, he keeps saying

53:28

Calvinistic things in the Gospel of John, of all places. And so, yeah, as he says to the disciples, you didn't choose me,

53:39

I chose you. And I'm like, sounds like Calvinism. And just gradually, my defenses began, the more

53:47

I studied scripture, just like that pastor had told me, the more I studied scripture, the more I would understand it, and I did.

53:53

But it wasn't until after I'd graduated, after I'd been in ministry for a few years, I listened to John MacArthur's teaching on Ephesians 2.

54:02

You're dead in trespasses and sins. And I had always thought, for me, the real hurdle is limited atonement.

54:09

You know, that's the stumbling block for me. The reality was, and I didn't even understand it, was that I hadn't really, with my heart, embraced the truth of total depravity, that we are dead in our trespasses and sins.

54:24

And Ephesians 2, but God raised you up. And suddenly, it became clear to me that it was

54:32

God who initiated and accomplished my salvation. None of it hinged on me.

54:38

That's the whole point of Ephesians 2. And by grace you're saved through faith, that not of yourselves, it's a gift of God, not of works.

54:44

And then he goes on to say, even the good works you do were prepared beforehand by God that you should walk in them.

54:50

You can't get through a meaningful study of Ephesians 2 and not understand that God is sovereign in salvation.

54:58

And somewhere at that point, it was John's sermons on Ephesians 2 that made me suddenly realize everything

55:08

I'd ever rejected about Calvinism, I really needed to study a second time and embrace it.

55:15

And so I began to read more Puritan literature. I wasn't even really a fan of Spurgeon's at that point.

55:24

Spurgeon called Calvinism the gospel. He equated the two and was bold in his defense of Calvin.

55:31

Right, he was. And I don't think he means what some people today think he means when he says

55:36

Calvinism is the gospel. He's not saying that if you're not a Calvinist, you're not a Christian or you haven't understood the guy.

55:42

What he's saying is that the truth that lies at the heart of Calvinism, salvation is of the

55:47

Lord. That's the core of Calvinism. That's also the heart of the gospel. So Calvinism is simply the distilled essence of gospel truth.

55:56

It doesn't mean that if you don't understand or embrace Calvinism, you haven't really believed the gospel.

56:02

He wasn't saying that because Spurgeon was pretty clear. He had Arminian friends and fellow ministers whom he respected and he defended

56:11

John Wesley who was an Arminian. But I think he's right when he says, by what he means,

56:18

Calvinism is the gospel, that salvation is of the Lord. That's the heart of gospel truth. Of all the elders at Grace Community Church, you are probably the most well -known outside of John.

56:29

You have an almost ubiquitous presence online in Twitter, Facebook. You're hanging around in the wrong districts of the internet.

56:37

Yeah, the Pyromaniacs blog, et cetera. And whenever John is attacked, you always seem to be the only elder that anybody in Cyberland hears from.

56:48

You are the most virulent, the most vocal, the most out front of all the other elders at Grace Community Church.

56:56

Is that a role that is assigned to you or is that one? No, nobody's ever asked me to.

57:02

In fact, I expect if we could get the elders of Grace Church here and poll them, the vast majority of them would say they probably would think it would be a good idea if I'd tone it down a little bit.

57:15

John himself might even say that. So no, nobody's prompted me to do that or encouraged me to.

57:21

But I see, and I was an early adopter on the internet. I was on the internet in 1995 before most people had ever heard of it.

57:31

And so I see how important it is and how much discussion goes on there. And seriously,

57:39

I do make an effort not to jump into every argument or whatever. But when

57:45

I see someone just relentlessly attacking a doctrine that I love or a person that I love and nobody's answering,

57:53

I can't stifle myself. I will answer. In many ways, you have almost been the mouthpiece of the

58:01

Board of Elders at Grace Community Church. Don't say that at Grace, it'll probably kick me out. At least that's it.

58:08

From the people in the cheap seats, that's what it looks like. Yeah, nobody at Grace wants me to have that role.

58:15

I don't want that role, frankly. All right, what are your hobbies outside of Grace Community Church and Grace to You?

58:21

Do I have any, Darlene? My grandkids, yeah, that's about it, my grandkids.

58:27

And that would be what you do to relax as well? Yeah, when it comes to music, I'm a listener.

58:32

I love classical music. I love Bach's cantatas, stuff that nobody else listens to.

58:39

So I'll put on headphones and blast my ears with Johann Sebastian Bach, who was a

58:45

Lutheran, but a lot of what he wrote was some of the greatest sacred music ever. So I'm a music listener, which doesn't get me any exercise.

58:56

I used to run. Yeah, I used to run marathon distances.

59:01

You would not know that to look at me today. And I tore up my knees, so I can't run anymore. I can hardly get up the steps, but.

59:09

He asked me when we came up here, he said, now, are these steps normal height of steps? Yeah, because these seemed really hard to get up.

59:14

You need a banister for an old guy like me. But no, I ran. Justin can make it up here just fine.

59:22

Yeah. I saw that, I was ashamed when I realized how easy it was for him. He beat you to the top. Yeah, I know he did.

59:29

All right, tell me something that's true about yourself that most people who see you online and know you just from the internet and what they see of you online and listen to your preaching that would surprise them.

59:38

Yeah, I ran and completed the first Chicago marathon. Okay. In fact, I ran this marathon and Darlene was at the finish line waiting to hug me and give me a cup of water.

59:49

And then I think it was like two days later that she broke up with me for good. Oh, so it was that long ago.

59:56

Yeah. Gotcha. Oh yeah, long ago. No, I kept running for years, but I injured my knee in, this is something

01:00:04

I'm really ashamed of. I injured my knee in a T -ball game with my kids. They decided for some reason to let the parents bat once.

01:00:13

And I hit this slow roller that I didn't think I was gonna beat out.

01:00:19

And so I ran as fast as I could. And that last step to first base, I overextended, my foot caught on the bag and my knee bent backwards.

01:00:29

And it tore every, you know, my ACL and every other thing in there. And in those days, they didn't even bother to fix it.

01:00:37

So I've had a knee with no, you know, what do you call them? Things in it.

01:00:43

It's not, nothing holding it together. And it also broke a bunch of the cartilage off.

01:00:49

So this knee has needed to be replaced for about five years. And I just don't have time to do it.

01:00:55

But sometime within the next year, I've got to get a knee replacement. Do you have any plans to write a book of your own?

01:01:02

No. What about taking, this is something, somebody asked me this during the break. What about taking the stuff that you've done on Spurgeon, these sessions, turning it into a book?

01:01:11

Well, two things about that. Two reasons I wouldn't do that. One is there's so many books out there on Spurgeon, and I don't think

01:01:18

I have any new material to say. Everything you're going to hear me say is already available in published works.

01:01:26

And there's so many of them. You're gonna hear a lot of things you've never heard before, but that doesn't mean they haven't been published before.

01:01:33

There's just so much material out there on Spurgeon that I'm not enough of a scholar to really want to, you'd have to go to England and dig through the archives of the

01:01:46

Metropolitan Tabernacle. I've actually had the privilege of doing some of that. I have photographs of the last letters

01:01:55

Spurgeon wrote to his congregation during the months before he died, handwritten letters.

01:02:02

And they keep them in a file there at the Met tab, and they let me have this file one evening to photograph it all.

01:02:10

I've been, this is something I don't boast about much, but one of my favorite accomplishments in life is

01:02:19

I was able to speak at the Metropolitan Tabernacle in London, Spurgeon's Church, about six times.

01:02:26

The pastor there called me up out of the blue around the year 2000 or so, and he had read an article

01:02:34

I wrote on hyper -Calvinism. And he said, this is the clearest, best treatment of the subject

01:02:40

I've seen, and we want to put it in the Sword and the Trowel magazine. That was the magazine Spurgeon founded.

01:02:46

And could we get your permission to do that? I said, yeah. And he said, and while I've got you on the phone, he said, we have this conference every summer called the

01:02:57

School of Theology, and we usually bring up one speaker over from America.

01:03:03

Would you like to be our speaker this year? And he'd never heard me speak. I don't know why they asked me to come, but I said, are you serious?

01:03:12

You know me? And so he invited me over there, and they liked me,

01:03:19

I guess, because he invited me back six times. And the last time I spoke there, well,

01:03:25

I'll mention this in one of my things. The last time I spoke there was in July 7th of 2005.

01:03:35

Yeah, 2005, which was the day terrorists blew up the London Underground, exploded bombs on buses, and it was a coordinated attack about several bombs throughout the city.

01:03:47

And those bombs went off while I was in the pulpit of Spurgeon's church doing their summer conference.

01:03:54

And it shut down London for days. I mean, you could walk through the streets of London. There wasn't a car or a person.

01:04:01

If you've ever been to London, you know that that doesn't happen. But the place was deserted for the next three days.

01:04:06

We were fortunate to get back home. But that was the last time I spoke there.

01:04:15

I told you that in my message that they don't allow musical instruments other than an organ.

01:04:24

They're very particular about music and worship music and what's appropriate to sing and what's not.

01:04:30

And the pastor saw a video of the music at Grace Church, or a picture of me speaking in Grace Life, and there was a set of drums behind me while I was speaking.

01:04:41

And he thought, that's it, I can't have him back to speak anymore. That was the last time?

01:04:46

Yeah. So, but I love the place. And I love, he's actually a great preacher.

01:04:56

And he started pastoring that church the same year John MacArthur started at Grace Church.

01:05:02

So there's a parallel there. And when he started as pastor, the

01:05:09

Metropolitan Tabernacle had gone down to, I think he told me once there were like 18 families. It was a dying church, and he was a church planter.

01:05:18

And so they called him there to basically revive the church.

01:05:24

And he's done brilliantly. The church now is standing room only every Sunday, and it's a great place.

01:05:32

The gospel is preached clearly there. It's one of the few churches in the world. He tells me there are others.

01:05:40

It's the only church I know of that has faithfully proclaimed the gospel for 350 years or longer.

01:05:46

Wow. And it's never drifted into liberalism or heresy.

01:05:52

It's as orthodox today as it was during Spurgeon's time. That's an amazing record for an inner city church.

01:05:59

And I love the place, and I love the people there. But we do have different ideas about what's appropriate in worship.

01:06:07

I have a book titled, What's Eating Jonah? And you did publish a book.

01:06:13

You have a booklet, isn't it? You did publish a book. Well, I didn't publish it. That was a series of sermons

01:06:19

I preached. And I did it in India during one of my summers there.

01:06:24

And Grace TU has an office in India. And our office staff there said, can we publish these in our newsletter, like serially?

01:06:34

So they took these messages and published one each month in their newsletter. And lots of people were asking for permanent copies.

01:06:40

So they compiled them all in this little book. And they said, what do you want to title it? And a friend of mine jokingly said,

01:06:47

Jonah, you should call it, What's Eating Jonah? So I said, that's a great title, actually.

01:06:53

So they published the book. It's one of maybe five or six books that have been published from my material, all of them overseas.

01:07:03

There are two major ones in India, What's Eating Jonah? And another book on the life and times of Elijah.

01:07:11

That's even, it's a bigger, better book, actually. If you don't have a copy of that, I'll see if I can get you one. They're both out of print,

01:07:16

I'm assuming? I think so, yeah. And then in Italy, I taught in a seminary in Italy for nearly a decade.

01:07:27

Every year we'd go over, it was a marathon session. A week long, I would teach eight hours a day through all of systematic theology in a week.

01:07:35

And it would be translated into Italian. And I did some series over there.

01:07:40

I did one on the history of heresy, one on, I can't even remember them all, but there are at least three or four sermon series that they compiled and published in Italian.

01:07:53

So I have books in Italian, books in India, never published a book in the United States, and I have no ambition to do so.

01:08:00

What is the retirement plan of Phil Johnson and John MacArthur? You know, if you said the word retirement to John, he would probably take offense.

01:08:10

I don't think he has any intention of retiring. He is a fifth generation pastor.

01:08:15

And as far back as I've heard in his family, his father, his grandfather, all of them preached right up until they died.

01:08:23

And I think John has every intention of doing that. So assuming, let's say

01:08:28

John MacArthur dies next month, who is going to take over Grace Community Church?

01:08:35

There currently is no clear -cut plan. I don't know if there's anyone on staff who's stupid enough to do it.

01:08:42

No. Because whoever steps into that role after John is gonna find it very difficult to fill his shoes.

01:08:49

The expectations have been set pretty high. So I don't know. I don't know.

01:08:56

And I just hope it doesn't happen. I think it's quite possible. You realize eventually it's going to happen. I realize it will eventually happen.

01:09:01

But John's father was 90 years old when he died, and he preached his last sermon a month before that.

01:09:08

So, and John's stronger and better health, I think, than his dad was. It's conceivable,

01:09:14

I wouldn't put money on it, but it is conceivable that he could continue to be pastor at Grace Church for most of the next decade.

01:09:22

He's 82 right now? So if he lived to be 95, I would expect him, as long as he's got his mind.

01:09:29

He always says, look, when I start making no sense, pull me out of the pulpit. Tell me it's over.

01:09:36

Because he says, I won't know it, and I'm not gonna make that decision myself. But I have to say that the sermons he has preached in the past year and a half, especially in the wake of the

01:09:48

COVID crisis and all that, some of the best, most memorable sermons he's ever produced, and people are gonna be listening to those if the

01:09:58

Lord doesn't come back 150 years from now, just like we read Spurgeon sermons from the downgrade and think those sermons he preached when he was in poor health at the end of his life are some of Spurgeon's best sermons ever.

01:10:12

And it's similar pattern with John. So if he goes on another decade,

01:10:17

I'll be pleased. I would like it if I don't have to be here when the question comes up, who is gonna take his place?

01:10:26

Because, you know, I just don't know. My vote at the moment, if we had to pick a guy, would be for Mike Riccardi, but he's very young, and, you know, he's -

01:10:39

How many of you know who Mike Riccardi is? Have you listened to Mike Riccardi's messages? Yeah, a good number. Mike and Phil co -shepherd the large adult

01:10:48

Sunday school group at Grace Community Church, and Mike is an excellent expositor, a very good preacher.

01:10:54

Whatever happened to Too Wretched for Radio? It was Too Wretched for Too Wretched for Radio. I don't, well, when we stopped doing it,

01:11:05

Todd called it a hiatus. He didn't say how long he expected it to be on hiatus, but he was starting a new television broadcast, the

01:11:14

Road Trip to Truth, which has been wildly successful and taken a lot of his creative time and energy.

01:11:22

The podcast we did was pretty labor intensive because we would record it on two mics, me in California, him in Atlanta.

01:11:33

I was in the Grace To You studio, he was in his studio, and we'd hook up by FaceTime so we could see each other, but it was only sound recording.

01:11:42

And then a sound engineer would have to put those together so that it sounded basically like we were in the same room, but we weren't.

01:11:49

And so it was labor intensive. There was always the danger that we would get ourselves in trouble because that was literally unscripted, and in fact, he refused to tell me ahead of time what we were gonna talk about.

01:12:06

So I was always really nervous if he asks me something and I get myself in trouble.

01:12:13

And fortunately, that never really happened on a large scale. So I loved it, he loved it.

01:12:19

I think it may come back, but it's totally up to him. It's his product and his prerogative whether we do it again or not.

01:12:28

He still, we still talk all the time, or he texted me a series of texts yesterday.

01:12:34

And in fact, I'm on the board of his ministry. So we still have a lot of interaction. We just don't put it on the radio anymore or on the podcast, which is kind of,

01:12:44

I miss it a little bit, but it's also a big relief not to have to worry.

01:12:50

I get myself in enough trouble on Twitter. Yeah. Okay, one, we're over time, but can you tell us about your son and the incident that happened most recently that you heard about in the middle of the night and the media and what happened with that?

01:13:07

Yeah, because this is an example, I think, of how the media have deliberately sort of stirred up anti -police sentiment.

01:13:16

He called me at 1 a .m. and said, I've been in another shooting. He had been in a shooting a few years before where it was, that one was totally non -controversial because he had to shoot a guy who that morning had butchered his wife in a parking garage in Long Beach.

01:13:36

And it was such a grisly scene. It was on the radio all day that day.

01:13:41

They had roped off all of Long Beach to try to catch this guy. He somehow got out of the police barricades and found his way up to our valley, and he tried to change his bloody clothes by borrowing clothes from an uncle.

01:13:56

The uncle called and said, he's up in this valley. And the call went out on the radio. My son was in a car and saw this guy right away, and so they confronted him and ultimately had to shoot him.

01:14:08

But because it was all over the radio all morning that this guy, he was an Eastern European white guy who had butchered his wife, it was totally non -controversial.

01:14:18

It was a great thing. So he calls me at 1 a .m. several months ago and said, yeah,

01:14:23

I've been in another shooting. And he says, you'll probably see this on the news, but I'm okay, don't worry about it. And I said, what happened?

01:14:31

He said, well, this guy was brandishing a bayonet and aimed it at one of the female police officers.

01:14:40

And my son, who's one of the few LAPD guys, or one of a limited number of LAPD guys who are trained to use a rifle, and he had his rifle, and he was sort of guarding this guy.

01:14:54

And when this guy raised his rifle to shoot at a police officer, he had to shoot him.

01:15:00

So it was 1 a .m. and I thought, okay, how do I find out what's going on?

01:15:07

My first thought was, the first place you'll read about this is on Twitter. So I did a search for Hollywood LAPD Twitter, and sure enough, somebody had already posted on Twitter a picture of the corpse of the guy.

01:15:20

And so I don't think I got back to sleep that night, but at 4 a .m., the L .A. local news comes on.

01:15:27

And it's all over the news. Police in Hollywood shot a man. It's unclear what happened.

01:15:33

They said, the reports are that the man was carrying a piece of metal and the police shot him.

01:15:40

And then a police - Technically true. It was technically true. And in fact, then they interviewed a spokesperson from the

01:15:48

LAPD, a woman whose job it is to talk to reporters, and she also is calling it a piece of metal.

01:15:56

He was carrying a piece of metal, and we'll do a full investigation. And it sounds like she's accusatory, you know?

01:16:04

And I'm thinking, they're trying to drum up a controversy here. The police shot an unarmed man because he was carrying a piece of metal or whatever.

01:16:13

And this was on every 15 minutes, they do a live report. They're standing out in front of this guy's apartment doing these live reports, and in the middle of one of the reports, the guy's girlfriend comes out of the apartment.

01:16:27

And they know who she is, so they pull her into the live broadcast and say, your boyfriend was shot by the police here.

01:16:34

Can you tell us what happened? And she said, yeah, I warned him. He left the apartment with his bayonet.

01:16:40

He's got this rifle. I told him, you're gonna go out there and get shot. He got what he deserved. So the guy's girlfriend sort of saved our bacon, you know?

01:16:51

And the odd thing was, after that, the rest of the morning, you try to get news on it, and they weren't even reporting on the story anymore.

01:17:00

It wasn't worth reporting on the story unless they were gonna be able to stir up a controversy about the police.

01:17:06

So that really irritated me, and this sort of thing concerns me about his career with the police, especially in the environment today, that there are people who will try to make any kind of situation look bad for the police.

01:17:23

And yeah, I would hate to see his life ruined or his reputation even spoiled by some fool's report like that.

01:17:31

You can do a righteous thing, a righteous thing, and ruin your life over it. Yeah, he saved that police officer's life by shooting that guy.

01:17:40

The bayonet was not only a bayonet, it was loaded with a live round.

01:17:46

If he had shot it and aimed correctly, he would have hit the other police officer.

01:17:52

So it was all investigated, and I've seen the final police report. There's a picture of the rifle there with the bayonet on it, and it doesn't look like a piece of metal to me.

01:18:01

You know, looks like the barrel of a rifle with a bayonet affixed, you know? Well, that's it. That's all the questions

01:18:07

I have for Phil, so give him a round of applause for his time tonight. Appreciate that. And we will start again tomorrow morning at 8 .30.

01:18:19

You can feel free to leave your books or Bibles or anything that you want where you're sitting. You can leave your stuff here.

01:18:25

The place will be locked up, and doors will open tomorrow morning at 7 .30. Have a good evening, everyone. ♪

01:19:04

The earth has yielded its increase ♪ ♪

01:19:11

God, our God shall bless us ♪ ♪ God shall bless us ♪ ♪

01:19:19

Let all the ends of the earth fear him ♪ ♪