Phil Johnson Q and A

Welcome to No Compromise Radio a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ based on the theme in Galatians 2 verse 5 where the Apostle Paul said, But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

In short, if you like smooth, watered-down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you. By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we're called by the Divine Trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King.

Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth.

How Phil Met His Wife and Their Early Years at Moody Press

Welcome to No Compromise Radio a ministry. My name is Mike Abendroth. And before we get to our guest host today, just a quick reminder, you can still register for the Israel trip, Omaha Bible Church with Bethlehem Bible Church and No Compromise Radio ministry off to Israel and then to Jordan.

Maybe my favorite spot to go in the Holy Land is Mount Nebo, looking down on the Promised Land. That's February 17th through the 25th. You can go to nocompromiseradio .com to register. Well, we have a friend of the ministry here today with us to be interviewed, Phil Johnson.

Welcome back to No Compromise Radio.

Hey, good to be back, Mike. Good to hear from you.

Phil, I love to talk to you both on the phone, through email and on the radio because I like to ask questions of you to make sure I know what I believe. I know better than that. So Phil, I just want to ask you a variety of questions today.

I did on the Twitter feed, ask the folks, is there anything you want me to ask Phil Johnson? And a lady wrote in and she said, how did Phil meet Darlene? And so I think our listeners would like to know what's the providential story behind all that.

Oh, well, you know, I was working at Moody Press. I had recently graduated from Moody Bible Institute, and I took a job as a proofreader there and loved it so much, loved what I was doing that I decided I'd spend a few years.

I was planning to go to seminary, and I thought in between, you know, the Bible Institute and seminary, I would spend just a few years in publishing. I thought that would be good background for me. And the same year I graduated from Moody, Darlene graduated from Appalachian Bible Institute in West Virginia, and she came to work at Moody Press.

So she was a secretary there, and I met her on the day she came to work, married a year later.

Really? Now, did she come from a snake handling background or anything there?

No, it was close, but I mean, you know, sort of hillbilly Christianity, but yeah, no, she was solid theologically.

Well, I was in Kentucky a while ago, and on Sunday nights, you know, you try to get the people in to worship on Sunday nights, and, you know, spaghetti dinners are big here in New England. Well, in Kentucky, some places they have squirrel boils, free squirrel boils on Sunday night.

But with your palate, you'd probably go.

Yeah, I'd give it a try. And I understand eating squirrel brains, which some people like, can be dangerous. So I'd probably forego the brains, but the rest of the squirrel, I'd give a try to. How long have you been married now?

Almost 37 years. So Phil, I'm sure over the years at Grace Life and ministering, being a pastor to folks, you have to give marriage advice a lot. Herschel York a while ago said he's boiled down his marriage advice to shut up and be kind to one another.

Could you sum up your marriage counseling? People come in and they're Christians, they want to do the right thing, but they're just both sinful. What's kind of like a thumbnail sketch of your counseling advice?

Well, absolutely shut up and love one another is good advice. But people ask me, what's the secret to the longevity of your marriage? And mine is I married a woman who's very patient and who truly loves me.

Marriage Counseling, Submission, and Avoiding Church Splits

Okay, that's good. I just had a few questions theologically for you today, Phil, as you think through things with your church history background and how you study the history of the church. Let's talk about the Gospel Coalition.

As things run their course, of course, they've done a lot of good things. What do you think the future is going to hold for the Gospel Coalition? How long can they stay together? What will happen? Will they close?

Will there be a spinoff? What's the mark of the Gospel Coalition on evangelicalism? Just your thoughts on that.

You know, it's hard to say because it's still a little early, but it looks to me, I mean, if I had to characterize the direction and the drift of the Gospel Coalition, I wrote a blog post about this in the wake of the elephant room fiasco when one of the, I mean, James McDonald, who organized that thing, was one of their board members at the time that happened.

And it seemed to me that the response, or rather lack of response, from the Gospel Coalition was shocking. And the comment I made at the time was, they're going to need to decide which is more important, the gospel or the coalition.

And it seems to me it's towards opting for the coalition. And for that reason, if I had to predict what's going to happen based on what's happened in the past, the Gospel Coalition looks to me like the evangelical theological society, kind of designed for lay people.

And I think it's probably going to go the same direction, which means in order to broaden their constituency, they're likely to get broader.

Talking to Phil Johnson today, Phil, as you preach regularly and often from your pulpit there at Grace Church, the fellowship group, I know you teach the Old Testament, or from the Old Testament, quite a bit.

Why do you think? Just so that I don't constantly get compared unfavorably with John MacArthur, whose ministry has focused mostly in the New Testament. And so, when you deal with a New Testament passage, invariably, someone's going to compare the sermon you did in Ephesians 2 with what John MacArthur did in Ephesians 2.

And you know it's going to pale by comparison. So, the Old Testament is...

Why do you think it is, Phil, that so many false teachers, though, are people that maybe they're not false teachers, but they're just teaching kooky things. They immediately go to the Old Testament and they start spiritualizing it.

What lends itself... Why does the Old Testament lend itself for that kind of kooky spiritualization? Is it because we know the New Testament better, or why do these Beth Moores of the world go there often?

That's a good question, and I hadn't really considered that. But yeah, I would guess it's probably because their listeners are not as familiar. It's not as the content. It isn't as straightforwardly didactic.

A lot of it is historical or poetic. And so, it is more subject to interpretation than just the straightforward didactic material you get in, say, 1 and 2 Timothy. So, if you're going to be a Bible twister, it seems to me the Old Testament is probably a little easier.

Well, one of my all-time favorite Phil Johnson sermons has to do with Korah and his rebellion. And so, if our listeners want to pull that up, Phil Johnson, The Rebellion of Korah, I think they'd be encouraged and scared, I think, too.

Thank you. That's a dangerous sermon. I've stopped preaching that if I'm a guest speaker in anybody else's pulpit, because invariably someone will come to me and say, Our pastor asked you to do that, and you know what's going on in our church, or you wouldn't have said all those things.

Because the pattern of rebellion there is so commonplace that people always assume that you know what's going on in their situation. In fact, I've never preached that in a situation where I knew there was trouble in a church, but it always seems to Korah and his team of rebels, what goes on in the typical church, people see themselves in that.

Well, Phil, you preached that here at Bethlehem Bible Church several years ago, and we weren't going through trouble, but we had been through trouble five or eight years prior to that, and someone came to visit that night from the old trouble issue, and they thought I had set them up.

Yeah, that's what I mean. It's become almost predictable that that's going to happen. So literally, I have stopped doing that message when I'm a guest in someone else's pulpit.

Phil, regarding that subject and getting along in a local church and loving one another and submission, any insights for our listeners? You are a theologian in your own right, an excellent author, and I look up to you theologically.

I'm sure many times you've had to say to yourself, John MacArthur's, you know, the boss at Grace to You, or he's the senior pastor. I disagree, but here's what submission is. Here's how I go along in a godly way.

What's your strategy for doing that so other people could learn? How do godly men come under one another and submit in a way that glorifies the kingdom?

Yeah, and I'm in an easy situation, because honestly, in 32 years that I've been here at Grace Church, that kind of situation rarely comes up. And my relationship with John is such that I can go directly to him and say, you know, I disagree with this, and we can talk it through.

That makes it easier. I've also been in situations in my first ministry, actually. I worked under a pastor who didn't want to hear any kind of complaint or disagreement or dissent. And that erupted in the wake of my leaving.

I got blamed for a lot of the problems there. I learned a lot from that and a lot of negative lessons, you know, that make me so fearful of causing trouble or causing a church split. Because having been through that, I'd have to say, when you're at the vortex of a church split, the pains of that are equal to or worse than a death in the family.

And so I so much loathe the idea of a split in the church or disharmony in the fellowship of God's people that, you know, strong incentive to bend over backwards to avoid any situations like that.

S. Lewis Johnson, Christ-Centered Preaching, and the Danger of Celebrity

Phil, I know you've been a fan, been blessed by S. Lewis Johnson's ministry over the years. Tell our listeners a little bit about who S. Lewis Johnson was, why you and men like MacArthur like to listen to him.

It's almost like we've lost this voice, S. Lewis Johnson, and I want our, especially our younger listeners to appreciate him. And if I say he's good, they might listen. But if you say God blessed him, they'll listen for sure.

Well, it's true, and he, I would say, is one of the standout—if you made a list of, you know, my five favorite preachers from the 20th century, he would be one of them. And in fact, he'd probably be in the top three, along with John MacArthur and Martin Lloyd-Jones.

He was such a careful and meticulous, a passionate preacher without being, you know, wild-eyed and frenetic. But he had this way that is really unparalleled, an ability to blend theological instruction with biblical exposition.

He drew his doctrine straight from the text, and he had an uncanny way of making the doctrine clear. I always draw a difficult text from the Testament where, you know, I can't quite figure out what this is supposed to mean, how to interpret it.

He's the first person I go to to help.

Probably the neat thing for me was when I was talking to his daughter, Grace Johnson Monroe, she would tell me stories about her father, Lewis, and how she would go up to the room to go talk with him, and she'd open the door, and there he'd be on his knees praying and praying for the people.

And what I loved is when I talked to the daughter, she affirmed the fact that what he was in the pulpit, that is, a man trying to preach Christ Jesus and Him crucified, lived in light of that cross and lived a godly life at home.

And so that was encouraging to me.

Yeah, I never got to meet him, and I wish I had. Our paths crossed a few times, but we never actually got to meet face-to-face. But my impression of him is that he was just such a gentle and truly godly soul.

I wish I could be like that. All right, Phil, this is out of left field. When was the last time you were down at church on the way?

You know, I've never been there. You haven't? No, I've lived here for like 30 years, and I've never attended a service there. I should go there sometime when I've got nothing else to do.

Well, you don't know this about me, but when I first started dating Kim, she was a conservative Baptist, at least in her background. Her foster father was a pastor, but she was ready for something else, so she was attending church on the way.

And so I attended for quite a few weeks to try to get the girl. That's why I went. Tell us, Phil. I've never been there. What are you thinking that the next issue in evangelicalism will be? I know there's going to be the big Inerrancy Conference at Grace Church.

Is that the issue on the horizon? What do you think we're going to have to face so we can study and buckle down to make sure we don't cave into the next ism or schism?

Yeah, well, you know, there are all around, and they all do point back, ultimately, to the authority and inerrancy of Scripture. And I really, I would like it for it to be. I think there needs to be a fresh discussion and debate on that issue.

Do you think, with the Strange Fire Conference, do you think the response of some of the Charismatics has kind of dialed back a little bit? It seemed to me that they were very, I don't know, reactionary with some of their critique at the beginning, almost like they weren't listening to what you all were saying.

Is the response to Strange Fire still been kind of outrageous, or has it died down some?

Well, you know, I have probably got not the most objective, you know, perspective on that, because I read all the mail that comes into Grace to You. And this is from our constituents and people we've influenced.

And the vast majority of it is just overwhelmingly positive. But, of course, I hear and watch and see online and in discussions with Charismatic friends, I get some of the negative feedback as well. And my impression is exactly what you said, that they aren't hearing what we're saying.

They want the discussion to be about cessationism. That's really all they want to talk about. Constantly pour forth from that movement. And even the most vocal critics from the beginning of the spoken antagonists around Strange Fire, people like Michael Brown and the 12 months, they've done everything possible to substantiate what our concerns were.

I mean, Michael Brown, whose first complaint was, you paint us with a broad brush. You're putting us all together. The next thing I knew within two months, he was he was on Benny. Someone who can do that can legitimately complain that he's being unfairly lumped together with the abuses you see on people like Benny Hinn.

Phil, speaking of the correspondence, what's the funniest response to the whole Strange Fire thing? Was there one that just got you laughing and just it was just bizarro world?

I just don't remember the substance of it. Yeah, and it probably wouldn't be appropriate for me to read it on on your radio broadcast. But yeah, I got a couple of humorous, a couple of doozies, things like that.

Yeah.

Humility, Celebrity, and the Future of Evangelicalism

How about thinking through the issue of you're not a celebrity, but God has given you a platform, a breadth of ministry and extension. It seems like you're preaching all over the world now and many conferences.

What goes through your mind to make sure you you don't buy your own press? I mean, how do you how does a Christian man or woman walk humbly before the Lord? I want to know for lots of reasons because I don't want to be too proud, prideful either.

But what goes through your mind? So you don't default to celebrity. I need Evian water at the airport.

You know, I don't know. I'm I'm I'm more frightened of celebrity than enthralled by it. I if I had my preference would stay in the shadows and and let someone else take both the credit and the blame for whatever I do.

Well, there's more probably more blame than credit. And so it balances out in my favor if I if I don't get too much publicity.

So no green M &Ms required or anything for Phil Johnson? Yeah, no, no. All right. How about tell me if you think this analysis is correct. As I just look at men who have large ministries that the Lord is blessed.

You know, a lot of these young guys, they have huge ministries now because of social media, because they have a good advertising department. They are flashy. But I look back at, let's say, John MacArthur.

And, you know, did anybody really know who he was until gospel? According to Jesus came out, he had labored faithfully behind the scenes, not trying to make a name for himself just to preach. So by the time the large platform came to John by, in my mind, divine providence, John had enough maturity and elders around him and friends like you to make sure he didn't buy into this whole celebrity culture.

Is that the right? Am I thinking that rightly? Or is there more involved in the process? There probably is more involved.

It's hard to analyze. John has friends and family and a wife who helped to keep him humble. But also, I think he's an extraordinary person. And extraordinary in the sense that he's not sort of blown away with his own celebrity.

He doesn't have that, you know, he doesn't seem to think more highly of himself than he ought to think. And I think that's an unusual characteristic for someone who is as well-known and influential as he is.

The tendency when you attain a little fame is that you start to collect people around you who tell you what you want to hear. And so you start to think you're right all the time because everybody close to me agrees with me.

And how can, you know, this is, I think, one of the problems with American politics at the moment. That men in power surround themselves with people who tell them what they want to hear, who think like they think.

And so they can't envision anyone ever even disagreeing with them.

Christ-Centered Preaching and the Right Way to Read the Old Testament

Talking to Phil Johnson today, and grace to you, and at Grace Community Church. Phil, just probably four or five minutes left. I just have all these questions that I am curious about, and I think our listeners would want to know as well.

Are we too Christ-centered in our preaching now? It's a funny thing to ask. Maybe there's, you know, could there ever be too much Christ in a sermon? But is there too much gospel-centered movement? What's the balance?

What are your thoughts on Christ-centered preaching? I mean, I want to be determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, even him crucified as well. But you know the question that I'm asking.

Yeah, amen, and it's a good question.

It's a great question, in fact. I understand what people mean when they express the concern that Christ-centered, gospel-centered ministry has become too prominent. Because I think what they really chafe against is people who are in an attempt to get Christ into text, and Spurgeon who said, you know, from any text in Scripture, there is a direct pathway to Christ and the gospel.

And I want to find that road. It doesn't mean that the gospel itself is inherent in the text I'm preaching, or that if I'm preaching on, say, you know, David and Goliath, I somehow have to make, you know, an element of the story symbolic of Christ and the crucifixion.

That's not the point. But from wherever I am in Scripture out to Christ, because all Scripture does ultimately point to Christ, I need to find what that route is, and not just, you know, stop with the Ten Commandments, but show what it is that Ten Commandments are trying to point to.

And they do point to Christ.

Right. Phil, do you think it'd be fair to say not every text with minutia talks about who Jesus is, but in every sermon we should talk about Jesus?

Yeah, that would be my perspective.

Okay. I'm thinking of James, and here, James, I believe 104 verses, 52 imperatives. It doesn't say anything about Jesus in terms of his redemption or resurrection. But I think the context of what many think is a sermon would be in a Christian worship service.

And so you could have Isaiah 53 read, you could have songs about the redemption of Christ sung, and so the setting is Christian.

Right. Yeah. And the problem is not that we're too Christ-centered. It's that people are trying to be Christ-centered in the wrong way. They're taking the wrong methodology, and they've misunderstood what it means to be Christ-centered.

They've misunderstood what Jesus meant when he said, Moses wrote of me.

Robert Dabney, the Well-Meant Offer, and Theological Reading

All right. Just a couple of word association, you know, last minute here, Phil. Robert Dabney.

He's one of my favorite theological writers. In fact, I would say he probably is my favorite because of his clarity and the depth and all that. But he had some severe problems in that. And in fact, his whole reputation has been tainted by the fact that he was a Southern Presbyterian who favored slavery and went to his grave arguing.

Even after the Civil War, his side lost the Civil War to Stonewall Jackson. And a great theologian, but a lousy politician. The problem that American slavery had become.

Well, Phil, I, on your recommendation, read Dabney's Systematic Theology. I think it started with your recommendation of how do we understand the gospel call going out to people who are not elect and the indiscriminate call and all these things.

And so I read the Systematic Theology. And, you know, you're right with the slavery issue, but most of the stuff that he talks about, deeply devotional. He reminded me of Calvin in the sense that it was academic, but devotionally academic.

So I was glad to read it.

Yeah, in fact, the Systematic Theology is really just the notes he taught his theology classes from. It's kind of an outline of Systematic Theology more than a thoroughly reasoned treatment. My favorite works of his was originally published as a four-volume set called Discussions.

Discussions of, I forget the longer title, but it's been republished in three volumes by the Banner of Truth called Discussions of Robert Dabney or something like that. And they took out all the pro-slavery stuff.

That's why it's down from four volumes to three. Perfect. He has an article there where he discusses that very issue that you talked about. How do we understand the well-meant offer of salvation in light of the doctrine of election?

And he gives the best thorough explanation of that question I've ever seen.

Talking to Phil Johnson today. Phil, 24 and a half minutes goes by quickly. Thank you for stopping in. I'm glad you're on our team. And I just appreciate you and your ministry and how over the Lord, over the years he's just given you faithfulness.

So thanks for being on No Compromise Radio.

Hey, that's mutual. Thanks for having me. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life-transforming power of God's Word through verse-by-verse exposition of the sacred text.

Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 10 .15 and in the evening at 6. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

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