Kootenai Church 2021 Equipping Conference with Phil Johnson

Well, good evening, everyone. Welcome if you're out in the foyer, please come into the main sanctuary here and find a spot at one of the tables.

All right, now that we've kind of all settled down, let's open our time here with a word of prayer. Let's bow our heads. Our Father, you are so good to us in so many ways, and you are better to us than we deserve.

You have graced us with salvation in Jesus Christ, with this place to hold this conference. You have blessed us with the fellowship that we enjoy in your

Son, and we thank you for these rich graces, and we thank you for the history of your church and the men and women who have served you and sacrificed so much and have been such godly examples throughout the ages.

We are grateful for those giants who have gone before, and we know that Spurgeon is one of those, and we pray that tonight as we give our hearts and minds in meditation upon the work that you have done in his life, that you would be glorified through what is taught here.

We pray for your grace upon Phil as he brings the message tonight that we would be instructed and that we may truly see your hand of grace and glory in the life of Charles Haddon Spurgeon.

And we pray that you would strengthen and embolden us as your servants to mimic that faithfulness and to be faithful in the times in which we live, that you may be honored in and through your church in this world and, of course, for all of eternity.

We ask this in Christ's name, amen. Well, welcome to our conference. I thought that the subject matter, the life and the legacy of Charles Spurgeon would be something of a niche subject.

So when I originally came up with the idea for a conference on the life and legacy of Charles Spurgeon, I thought,

I don't know how many people would actually be interested in going to a conference like that. I thought that it would probably be a very unique collection of people and maybe just a few people that would be interested in a conference.

But I was surprised at how fast this conference sold out, especially compared to some of the other conferences that deal with other issues that we seem to be pressing upon the church right now, like the abortion and end -of -life issues that we dealt with with Scott Klusendorf and creation evolution issues that we've dealt with in the past.

So this conference sold out quickly. Within almost three or four weeks, we had almost reached capacity of what we had set the limit for here.

I didn't know if that was because the subject matter is Charles Spurgeon, and there's so many more people who want to hear about Charles Spurgeon than I would have ever guessed, or if it's because the speaker is

Phil Johnson, or some combination of the two. It may be that the speaker is

Phil Johnson. I probably could have done a seminar or a conference on the subject of the history of the rubber eraser featuring

Phil Johnson, and he would have come up here, and we could have sold out in four weeks. So I think that people are excited to hear about Charles Spurgeon and the legacy that he has left us.

Here's just a couple of comments on the schedule of events. Tonight's Q &A that you see there in your brochure is already scripted.

I've already come up with the questions for that. There will be a Q &A tomorrow after and during the lunchtime break, and I'll explain more about that tomorrow.

When you show up tomorrow, you have some three -by -five index cards on your table, so during the morning if you think of a question that you want to have asked during the lunch

Q &A or at some point at the end of some of the sessions, then I'll have you fill that out tomorrow and bring them up to the table that I'm sitting at up here front and center.

And then we can deal with some of those questions that you might have, and we're going to start promptly tomorrow at 8 .30 a .m.

The doors will open at 7 .30, so you'll be able to come in and enjoy a little snack in the morning and some coffee before we get started.

And now I'll introduce our guest speaker, Phil Johnson. Phil Johnson is the

Executive Director of Grace to You, the radio ministry of John MacArthur. He is an elder at Grace Community Church and teaches the

Grace Life Sunday School Fellowship class along with his fellow elder, Mike Riccardi. Phil was the curator of the online

Spurgeon Archive and a contributing blogger with the Pyromaniacs blog for years.

He is the editor for John MacArthur's books and a prominent and regular preacher at Grace Community Church and the

Shepherds Conference, and is frequently heard on Christian radio. And he is the voice of John MacArthur's radio ministry, the intro and the exit to the

Grace to You broadcast. That is Phil who does that. And Phil is a frequent or was a frequent guest on Wretched Radio with Todd Friel under the two

Wretched for Radio segments. I've been listening to Phil preach for the last 20 years. I don't think that probably since 2004

I have missed a single Sunday School class that he has taught at Grace Community Church. I've certainly listened to all of his

Shepherds Conference sessions that he has taught, and I've followed his writings online, his blog, the

Pyromaniacs blog for years. And I owe part of my own love for Spurgeon to Phil Johnson.

What got me interested in Charles Spurgeon originally was listening to a set of lectures that he had given at the

Shepherds Conference years ago. And I heard him talk about the life and the conversion of Charles Spurgeon, his preaching, and I was hooked.

And so now to this very day whenever I'm preparing a message on a text of Scripture, I read any sermon that Spurgeon wrote on that or preached on that text because normally you can find something very quotable from almost anything that Spurgeon wrote.

One of my children, and I won't say which one because I don't want to embarrass her in front of her husband, but one of my children refers to Phil Johnson as her favorite preacher.

And I'm fine with that because I have the designation favorite biological father. Phil works with someone who shares a birthday with Charles Spurgeon.

Phil looks a little bit like Charles Spurgeon. And like Charles Spurgeon, Phil is a wordsmith with an immense vocabulary.

And when I came up with the idea for a conference on Charles Spurgeon, I regard, and I don't know if this is true or not,

I regard Phil Johnson as probably one of if not the world's leading expert on the subject of Charles Spurgeon.

If he's not, he's certainly high up on that list with few people ahead of him on that list and there's nobody else on that list that would have returned my email to come and speak on the subject of Phil Johnson.

So like Phil Johnson, Charles Spurgeon, sorry, yeah, Phil, like Charles Spurgeon, is a wordsmith with an immense vocabulary and it's one of the things

I appreciate about Phil. I am thankful to Phil that he introduced me to not only Charles Spurgeon but also to the word pettifogger.

Now that sounds like a swear word, but it's not. It's one of those glorious English words that like the whole

English language was created for that word, pettifogger. But mostly

I'm grateful to Phil for coming up here and for teaching us about the life and legacy of Charles Spurgeon. So please welcome

Phil Johnson. I wouldn't drive across the street to hear me.

So thank you for that. I am not one of the world's leading experts on Spurgeon, but I probably have put more of Spurgeon's preaching and writing on the internet than anybody else.

And so he's been a favorite of mine since the early 90s when

I edited a book for John MacArthur called Ashamed of the Gospel and the book was sort of,

I'll explain this as part of one of my lectures, but the book was sort of woven together with the story of the downgrade controversy, which was the huge conflict that happened at the end, the last four years of Spurgeon's life.

I think the stress of it is one of the things that contributed to his early death. And he was trying to pull

British Baptists back from the precipice of liberalism and compromise and modernism, early modernism was a huge problem.

And some of the things he said and wrote during that time were some of the most profound and insightful things about the importance of sound doctrine and theological steadfastness that I had ever read.

And that's what sparked my interest in Spurgeon. When I first got on the internet, I looked to see if there was any

Spurgeon material online. This was 1995, the World Wide Web was less than two years old.

And in all of the internet, there were only eight sermons by Spurgeon that had been transcribed and put online.

And so I took it upon myself to add as many more as I could. And so a lot of the

Spurgeon material that is there originated with my website. It became too much for me to deal with, so I donated it to a

Midwestern Baptist theological seminary in Kansas City, because they own the physical library of Spurgeon.

I'll talk about that as well. So I've washed my hands of the website, but I still love

Spurgeon, and this is really my first opportunity to talk about him in quite a long time. Tonight I want to talk about his childhood.

We're going to survey his life and ministry, and once I finished my notes for all these six sessions, the thing that struck me is how much

I have to pass over. So many things about Spurgeon that we're not even going to have time to talk about.

But I want to talk about his childhood tonight, because I think it explains a lot of who he was and what forces shaped him.

There is no one in church history who is actually comparable to him. No pastor since the apostolic era surpasses him as both a preacher and an evangelist.

There have been greater scholars, John Calvin comes to mind, and John Knox was maybe a more fierce and effective polemicist, defender of the faith.

George Whitefield was a more eminent evangelist who ministered in person,

Whitefield did, to crowds of up to 20 ,000 people on two separate continents, and it happened regularly with Whitefield.

Whitefield's fame and influence were arguably greater than Spurgeon's if you adjust for population and size and all of that.

Augustine has had, and will continue to have, a more far -reaching and longer -lasting influence than Spurgeon.

So in various ways, there are figures in church history who surpass him. But all of those men would have appreciated

Spurgeon's ministry. They probably would have highly esteemed Spurgeon himself, because he drew from every one of them, he stood on their shoulders.

And in particular, he aspired to be a preacher like George Whitefield. But the truth is,

Spurgeon could do all of those things. He was extraordinarily gifted with a whole range of genius -level aptitudes that equipped him for ministry.

So that he was a capable theologian, he was a powerful defender of the faith, he was an exceptionally fruitful evangelist.

He preached, he wrote, he taught, he was a visionary leader, he was a beloved pastor, and above all, he was a great, if not the greatest of all time, preacher.

History nicknamed him the Prince of Preachers, and it's a fitting moniker.

I don't think there's been a greater preacher who pastored such a large congregation and remained in the same place for so long a time.

John MacArthur is a close match in some ways. MacArthur and Spurgeon even share the same birthday, as he mentioned.

But MacArthur has the advantage of radio and audio recordings, and the internet, and the ease of worldwide travel, and advantages that Spurgeon never was able to utilize.

And so he remains, and always will remain, a towering figure in Baptist and evangelical history, that you can be certain that he will never be forgotten, and it's unlikely that anyone will ever surpass him in the sheer variety of ministry skills that he displayed.

You can take any individual aspect of Spurgeon's expertise, and you find people here and there who maybe could do better.

During Spurgeon's lifetime, for example, there were several superior theological writers on both sides of the

Atlantic, with keen, biblically -minded minds, men who produced textbook -level works that will last,

I think, until Christ comes. I'm thinking of men like Charles Hodge, and William Cunningham, and B .B.

Warfield, and Augustus Strong, and William Shedd, and all of those men's lives overlapped

Spurgeon. They were all contemporaries, at least for a time. You might even add

J. Gresham Machen, who was ten years old already when Spurgeon died, so that some of the best theological works

I own were written in that era by those men. None of Spurgeon's published works were as weighty or as masterful as what those men wrote, but Spurgeon's published writings outnumbered and outsold all of them.

He was doctrinally sound without ever being ponderous or pedantic.

He preached for working -class people, and not really the

Oxford and Cambridge elites, but even the Oxford and Cambridge elites listened to him appreciatively.

As a matter of fact, Spurgeon himself had no university degree. He never enrolled in college.

He produced sermons, not really scholarly works, but sermons, and yet, because all of his sermons were transcribed for publication,

Spurgeon left a body of published work that represents the single most prolific output of any

Christian in history. Now, I haven't done an exhaustive study to verify that fact, but I believe it's true that he published more words than any other

Christian author in history. He certainly sold and distributed more pages of printed text than any other

Christian author ever, and over the past hundred years or so, he has influenced millions of pastors and laymen for good.

And the current resurgence of Calvinism, even, is the fruit of his continuing influence.

His books, which are primarily collections of sermons that he preached, they were reprinted 50 years ago, and they sold briskly for decades.

All of his sermons have been converted to digital data, and you can get the entire collection very cheaply, if not for free.

For about $50, you can get a disc with PDF copies of all of his sermons. And eventually, all of his sermons will be downloadable on the internet, and I'm happy to have had a hand in starting that project.

And I think Spurgeon would be delighted to know that people are using the internet to read and distribute his sermons.

He was not put off by new technologies. He's considered to be kind of an old -fashioned guy, and he was even in his lifetime, but he wasn't afraid of new technologies.

He was, I think, strangely both old -fashioned and newfangled at the same time.

And in fact, if you read many biographies of great preachers of the past, George Whitefield, for example, was similar.

Sort of old -fashioned and newfangled, Whitefield was considered something of a scandalous innovator because he preached in the open air to people, and yet at a time when deism was gaining popularity and whole churches were apostatizing because of it,

Whitefield's theology actually represented a return to orthodoxy of an earlier era.

And the same thing was true of Jonathan Edwards, who was a personal friend of Whitefield's. All of these guys were eager and happy to stay in step with the times in terms of technological advances, like travel and communications, but they were not willing to change their doctrine or adapt their principles to the shifting winds of cultural trends.

At the height of Spurgeon's popularity, an article about him was published in Vanity Fair magazine, the

British edition, this is the December 1870 issue, and the writer of that article said of Spurgeon that he extracts edification out of slang, and by slang that author meant that Spurgeon used simple words, he used the words of working -class people and commonplace expressions that anybody could understand.

He didn't craft his sermons for scholars, but he was preaching to the average person, and lots of people in Spurgeon's generation commented on this fact, that he could deliver the profoundest truths in everyday language, and Spurgeon himself gloried in that kind of communication.

He strived to teach it to his own students, and he had no patience with preachers who would purposely use language from the pulpit that the people in the pews couldn't possibly even understand.

And his book, Lectures to My Students, is a collection of his messages to ministerial students at the college he founded, he was training preachers, and in one place he tells them this,

I'm quoting, he says, I am persuaded that one reason why our working men so universally keep clear of ministers is because they abhor their artificial and unmanly ways.

If they saw us in the pulpit and out of it acting like real men and speaking naturally like honest men, they would come around us.

That's a pretty profound insight, I think, and his desire was to communicate, and he knew that stuffy, highbrow language, and especially, he mocked this frequently, effeminate mannerisms, he knew that that would not communicate well with men in his flock, and he cautioned preachers not to be effeminate.

And I'll have more to say about this when we discuss his approach to preaching, but the point here is that Spurgeon wasn't the least bit reluctant to adapt his delivery style and his language to the culture that he was ministering in.

I'm pretty sure that if he lived today, he would be using all of the tools the internet gives us to get the message out to the largest possible audience with as much force and clarity as possible, but he wasn't willing to try to contextualize the message or make the theology more in step with the times.

And in fact, a hundred years after Spurgeon, now it's been, what, 130 years since Spurgeon died, language has changed greatly, but the fact is

Spurgeon's sermons, for the most part, still convey that sort of plain language ease of understanding.

You can read the sermons. Some of his language may sound quaintly Victorian to our ears.

He used some of the King James these and those, especially in his early preaching.

He got away from that a little later, but there are these

Victorianisms buried in there, and some people read that and think maybe that he was rather old -fashioned in his language, but the fact is, even in Spurgeon's time, he was notable for making old truths clear in what was modern language and unpretentious speech, but his informality actually shocked and outraged those famous prim -Victorian sensibilities.

Preachers were not expected to use the common man's, working man's language from the pulpit, and so all the social critics and newspaper pundits wrote these blistering condemnations of his style.

I'll share some of those with you in a later session, but I just want to point out that we still today read

Spurgeon for the simple, uncluttered clarity of his message. It still comes through today, and in this, again, you see that while Spurgeon may have been keen to stay in step with the changing means of communication, he was not at all trendy when it came to the content of his doctrine.

He understood that the message that we have been commissioned to take into all the world, that can never change, and we must not try to change it, even in the name of keeping up with a changing world, but he also understood that language and technology, they do change, and we need to use language and technology to distribute the message that people will find familiar and understandable, whatever audience we're trying to reach.

You know, same reason you wouldn't go and speak Latin to a bunch of kindergarten students.

Spurgeon would obviously share the disdain we have for all the wickedness that gets broadcast on Twitter and Facebook and YouTube, but he would also believe that Christians ought to be there.

We ought to use every means, including social media, to disseminate the gospel message and to defend truths.

And what I want to do in this hour is to begin to introduce you to Spurgeon by telling you what

I can about the context of his life and times, starting from the very beginning. We'll start this hour with a look at his background and his early life, and let me start with a word about his genealogy.

The line of descent in the Spurgeon family isn't clear, but there are records of people named

Spurgeon going back at least 12 generations before Charles Spurgeon was born.

One author named William Miller Higgs investigated Spurgeon's ancestral lineage, and he published a book titled

The Spurgeon Family in 1906. That was 15 years after Spurgeon had died.

Higgs explodes some of the myths that were going around that even Spurgeon himself seemed to believe about his family background.

Spurgeon and most of his biographers say that the Spurgeon line came from Holland. Higgs says this, in all the accounts of Charles Haddon Spurgeon's life, where a short space is given to his lineage, curiously enough, a

Dutch descent is attributed to him. As a matter of fact, the writer of this little work has been quite unable to discover any proof for such a statement, certainly on his direct paternal descent.

So he traced his father's line and said, there is no evidence that his ancestors came from Holland. And he traces the

Spurgeon name back to Essex and Suffolk. Essex was the county in England where Spurgeon actually lived, and he said there were records of Spurgeons there as early as 1465.

And the early Spurgeons included a farmer, a carpenter, a common laborer, but no one prominent.

Higgs says that by the end of the 1500s, and that's just as the

Protestant Reformation is beginning to break out and come to England, Spurgeons were well distributed, he says, all over the county of Essex.

And he reproduces several pages of wills and legal documents and information from church rolls that documented the existence of people named

Spurgeon in Essex through almost four centuries prior to Charles Spurgeon.

And it's not possible to untangle the direct line of relationship between all these older Spurgeons and Charles Spurgeons, but it's not a common enough name to think that they're entirely unrelated.

And the details and lots of the records have been lost to history and courthouse fires and things like that.

But it does make it fairly certain that Spurgeon's ancestors had lived in Essex, in England, in the

UK, for at least four centuries prior to Spurgeon's birth. It's also clear that a few people in the

Spurgeon ancestry were worth noticing. They weren't famous, they weren't prominent, they're worth noticing.

One of the most interesting was a man who lived in the 17th century. This man's name was

Job Spurgeon. Spurgeon knew about him, he talked about him at times. Job Spurgeon lived six generations prior to Charles Spurgeon, which means that if he was a direct ancestor of Charles Spurgeon, he would have been

Spurgeon's great -grandfather's great -grandfather. In other words, his fourth great -grandfather.

I looked up my own genealogy to get an idea of what it would be like to go back that many generations, your great -grandfather's great -grandfather.

My fourth great -grandfathers were born in the second half of the 1700s. And one of my great -grandfathers was born on the

Potomac River in 1776, the year the country was founded. So that's a long way back.

And Spurgeon had this ancestor, Job Spurgeon, who preceded him by that far, lived more than a hundred years before the

United States was founded, in fact. The first record of Job Spurgeon comes in 1677, 99 years prior to the birth of my fourth great -grandfather.

And by then, Job Spurgeon was an adult, he was leading a religious meeting in a private home, so he was a religious man.

And by the way, those meetings had been outlawed 15 years before that.

The Reformation era in England was already beginning to draw to a close.

The Reformation had come and the Church of England had tried its best to stifle the

Reformation, and the Church of England had outlawed religious meetings led by any and all ministers who refused to subscribe to the

Book of Common Prayer. And Britain had passed a law called the Act of Uniformity in 1662.

Many of you, I think, will have heard of it because it was famous, because it officially ejected all ministers from their pulpits who dissented from the

Church of England. If they wouldn't follow the prayer book, and if they wouldn't wear priestly garments when they preached and ministered, then they were ejected from their churches.

And that was the main thing that drove so many colonists to America in those years, why so many of the original pilgrims, especially in Massachusetts, were sound and solid believers who had fled

England in search of more freedom of religion. And it also explains why the heart of evangelical conviction in England has always been outside the established church, among non -conformists, not with Anglicans.

There have been, and still are, Anglican evangelicals, but they are in the minority and they've never been the dominant force in the

Anglican church. Six years after the Act of Uniformity in 1683,

Job Spurgeon was arrested and imprisoned for attending a non -conformist religious meeting.

Higgs refers to Job Spurgeon as a Puritan, but in reality he was probably an early

Quaker, and the meeting that he was attending seems to have been a

Quaker meeting in Essex. The Quakers kept detailed records about all of their meetings, and the record of that one was preserved.

It says, and I quote, On the 22nd of the month, called July this year,

John Matthews of Harwich, Job Spurgeon of Dedham, Stephen Moore, and Stephen Arnold of Lawford, taken at a meeting, were committed to Chelmsford Jail by warrant from Justice Smith.

They were after a few weeks bailed out till Sessions, but on their appearance there on the 3rd of October, they were required to give sureties for their good behavior, which, refusing to do, they were recommitted to prison, where three of them lay upon straw about fifteen weeks in the midst of a winter remarkable for extremity of cold, but the fourth guy,

Job Spurgeon, being so weak that he was unable to lie down, sat up in a chair for the most part of that time.

That's a pretty remarkable record, isn't it? And some of that sounds familiar, doesn't it? Like what's going on in Canada right now.

Same thing, they put him in prison and said, if you'll promise not to do this again, we'll let you go free.

And they all said, we can't make that promise. So back to prison they went, in the coldest winter on record.

And that literally is everything we know about Job Spurgeon today. There's no record of baptism, no will, no census records, but we know that he spent fifteen weeks in prison during the cold of winter because he refused to pay the fine and promised that he was going to stop participating in unauthorized religious meetings.

So what we know about him is he was a man of principle, and he refused even though he was suffering with ill health in an unheated prison in one of the coldest winters on record, and it must have put him in unspeakable agony, and it probably shortened his life.

And if he recovered from this ordeal, he's never mentioned again in any surviving record of that time.

Now Charles Spurgeon knew that story, and in a sermon very near the end of Charles Spurgeon's life, he said this about it.

This is the Prince of Preachers speaking. He says, personally, when my bones have been tortured with rheumatism,

I've remembered Job Spurgeon, doubtless of my own stock, who in the

Chelmsford jail was allowed a chair because he could not lie down by reason of rheumatic pain.

He says, that Quaker's broad brim overshadows my brow. Perhaps I inherited his rheumatism, but that I do not regret if I have his stubborn faith, which will not let me yield a syllable of the truth of God.

I like that story. There's one other brush with fame in the

Spurgeon family, and it's found in the parish register of a town called

Burnham Thorpe in East England. And there on March 13th of 1769, a woman named

Elizabeth Spurgeon recorded a marriage certificate. This is a copy of it. One of the witnesses was a ten -year -old boy who signed his name at the bottom of the record, the last line with the red arrow, signed his name

Horace Nelson. And over that you see scribbled his father's handwriting, correcting the name to Horatio.

And that ten -year -old boy grew up to be Admiral Horatio Nelson. If you've ever been to London, you've surely seen

Nelson's column. It's that massive tall pillar that stands on a pedestal in the center of Trafalgar Square with a statue of Admiral Nelson at the top.

Now again, that wedding was in 1769. Nelson grew up to be a great admiral.

He lost an arm in a battle in 1797, and then he was killed in 1805 at age 47 during the

Battle of Trafalgar near the Strait of Gibraltar just off Spain. He lost his life, but he defeated

Napoleon's navy, so this battle was a turning point that sealed

Britain's naval dominance for the remainder of the 19th century. Twenty -nine years after Admiral Nelson died, on June 19, 1834, the most famous member of the

Spurgeon clan was born in Kelvedon in Essex. The birthplace of Charles Spurgeon is a brick cottage that is still standing today.

I've been there. Today it's on a busy street. When Spurgeon was born, it was in a rural area.

Here's an interesting fact of history. Charles Spurgeon was born exactly ten days after William Carey died in India, just to help you sort of get the idea of where these people fit in church history.

Spurgeon's mother's maiden name was Eliza Jarvis. She was only 19 years old when

Charles Spurgeon was born. His father, John Spurgeon, was a 24 -year -old part -time pastor, and at the time of Charles' birth,

John Spurgeon was engaged in some kind of business during the week, working, and on Sundays he pastored an independent congregation in a town nearby called

Tollesbury. The church is still there. The town is still there. You can go there today. He later became a full -time pastor, and Charles Spurgeon's father actually outlived his famous son by ten years.

He died in 1902. Spurgeon's mother died in 1888. That was just four years before her eldest son went to glory.

But the most important influence in young Charles Spurgeon's life was that of his grandfather,

James Spurgeon. He was pastor of the church at Stambourne, which was not far but not really close either to where Spurgeon's parents lived.

It would be, if you drove there by car today, I think it would take maybe 40 minutes. And for reasons history doesn't record, it's not mentioned in any biography of Spurgeon that I've ever read, so I don't know the exact reason,

Charles Spurgeon was sent to live with his grandparents when he was only 18 months old, and he remained there until he was six years old.

Some modern people have speculated that maybe there was trouble in the Spurgeon home.

Maybe the parents didn't get along or whatever. But there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support a theory like that.

What did occur when Spurgeon was 18 months old was that his mother gave birth to the second of her children.

The second of, get this, 17 children that she had.

Nine of them died in infancy. Such were those times. And when that second child, a daughter, was born, either the mother or the daughter must have suffered from some illness or complication, and so Charles was sent to stay with his grandparents.

That stay was extended by necessity. We don't know exactly why, but the arrangement worked well for everybody involved, and James Spurgeon loved having his eldest grandson around so much that he often took

Charles with him when he made pastoral visits. And in the providence of God, those years of bonding with his grandfather set the course for the rest of his life.

Charles Spurgeon was a precocious child who began reading early.

He loved his grandfather's Puritan library, and at first he said it was the leather covers that interested him the most, but soon he found the books themselves a goldmine of wisdom and interest.

And his grandfather's library was in a dark room in the upstairs portion of the house. In those days, the number of windows in a house determined the size of real estate taxes.

That's how the crown decided to tax people. They could tell, or they thought they could tell, how valuable your house was by how many windows were there.

And so, you know, windows are abundant in mansions, and they're scarce in cottages, so someone decided to tax houses based on the number of windows, and the house in the foreground of this picture is the preacher's manse, and as you can see, it was built with lots of windows, but you could avoid the window tax by boarding up and blacking out those windows.

You had to completely plaster over them, and then they would put fake shutters and window -looking things on the outside so it still looked the same on the outside, but the windows were all boarded up and plastered over.

Spurgeon records that the law allowed eight windows free from any kind of tax, and so in order to avoid the heavy taxation, the parsonage was blocked up with several of the windows blacked out.

Spurgeon described it like this. These are his exact words. When the window tax was still in force, and many people in country houses closed half their lights by plastering them up, and then they had the plaster painted to look like window paint so that there was still the appearance of a window, though no sunlight could enter.

Well do I remember the dark rooms in my grandfather's parsonage, and my wonder that men should have to pay for the light of the sun.

So, as it turns out, James Spurgeon's library was kept in one of those darkened rooms, but that didn't deter young Charles.

He describes that room. He says, quote, it was a dark den, but it contained books, and this made it a gold mine to me.

Therein was fulfilled the promise, I will give thee the treasures of darkness. Some of these were enormous folios.

Folios are these large -sized books, and he says, as a boy could hardly lift them, he says, the old edition of their works, with their margins and old -fashioned notes, are precious to me.

It is easy to tell a real Puritan book even by its shape and by the appearance of the type.

I confess that I harbor a prejudice against nearly all new editions, and cultivate a preference for the originals, even though they wander about in sheepskins and goatskins, and it's true they bound them with sheepskin and leather, or they're shut up in the hardest of boards, it made my eyes water a short time ago to see a number of those old books in the new manse.

That's the parsonage. He says, I wonder whether some other boy will love them and live to revive that grand old divinity which will yet be to England her balm and venison.

He goes on, out of that darkened room I fetched those old authors when

I was yet a youth, and never was I happier than when in their company. Out of the present contempt into which

Puritanism has fallen, many brave hearts and true will fetch it by the help of God before many years have passed.

Those who have dobbed up the windows will yet be surprised to see heaven's light beaming on the old truth and then breaking forth from it to their own confusion.

And, you know, that wish was actually fulfilled. You've got companies like the Banner of Truth and other companies here in America republishing old

Puritan works, and there's been a revival of interest in the Puritans for at least the last 30 years.

I know that would please Spurgeon, although he says he likes the old editions better than the modern ones. I have to disagree with him there.

The old editions use the type, you know, you've seen it where S's look like F's and letters are oddly shaped, and it's a little hard to read until you get used to it.

So I do prefer the modern editions, but it was from his grandfather's library that little

Charles obtained his very first copy of Pilgrim's Progress, and that book became his lifelong favorite for all of his life.

If you ask him what's his favorite book besides Scripture that he would never want to give up, he would say, without hesitation,

Pilgrim's Progress. Before he was 10 years old, he was also reading and comprehending some of the richest theological works that had ever been written.

You think about it, Spurgeon's father and grandfather both being pastors, and he'd spent his first six years in the grandfather's house, the next four years with his father, reading their books,

Puritan works, and he himself grew up, therefore, talking and acting like a pastor and thinking like a pastor.

James Spurgeon told the story about one time when his six -year -old grandson, six years old, overheard him talking about a wayward church member,

Thomas Rhodes, that was his name, Thomas Rhodes, and he was an illiterate working man who attended the worship services at the meeting house, but he also, during the week, would hang out at the pub drinking beer and smoking a pipe, and his grandfather was complaining about the worldliness of this man, and Charles overheard him.

He says, you don't worry about old Rhodes. He says, I'll kill him for you. And a couple of days later, he came home boasting that he had killed old

Rhodes. He says, he'll never grieve my grandfather anymore. And James Spurgeon said, what do you mean?

And little Charles said, I've been about the Lord's work, that's all. And he refused to say any more about it.

Soon, Thomas Rhodes himself showed up and explained to the pastor that the little boy had come into the pub, walked through the door, gone straight up to the table where Rhodes was smoking and drinking, and he pointed his bony little finger in the old man's face and said, what doest thou here,

Elijah, sitting with the ungodly? You're a member of the church, and you're breaking your pastor's heart.

And Rhodes said, he turned and walked out, and Rhodes was angry, really angry at first, but as he thought about it, he'd come to the pastor's house to apologize.

In fact, let me read you the account of that episode from Spurgeon's autobiography.

Thomas Rhodes says, well, I did feel angry, but I knew it was all true, and I was guilty, so I put down my pipe and did not touch my beer, but I hurried away to a lonely spot and cast myself down before the

Lord, confessing my sin and begging for forgiveness, and I do know and believe the Lord in mercy has pardoned me, and now

I've come to ask you to forgive me. I'll never grieve you anymore, my dear pastor. And that incident totally turned the man's life around.

There's a note in Spurgeon's autobiography that says this about Thomas Rhodes. It says, he was one of the men of the old table pew.

That was the place where deacons sat when they were preparing to serve communion.

He says Rhodes was an active, lively little man, but quite illiterate, not much above a laborer, but he kept a pony in a cart, and he did a little buying and selling on his own account.

He was an earnest and zealous Christian, striving to be useful in every way possible to him, especially in the prayer meetings and among the young people, opening his house for Christian conversation and prayer.

He lived only about four years more, but his devotion to Christ was sustained with a cheerful confidence all the way to the end.

I love that story, because it sort of epitomizes what a precocious little child

Charles Spurgeon was. He was precocious in a lot of ways. He had unusual artistic gifts.

I'll show you that in a minute. He had a mind like a sponge, and an unusually keen memory, and a good and well -tuned sense of logic.

He was a sober -minded and industrious person, even as a young boy. At age 15, he wrote a 295 -page book called

Antichrist and Her Brood, subtitled Popery Unmasked, and that was more than a year before his actual conversion.

The book was never published, but Spurgeon kept the manuscript, and it's a decent, measured, insightful critique of Roman Catholic error.

I'll have more to say about the book in a future session, and we'll talk about the struggle and the inner turmoil that led to Charles Spurgeon's conversion.

But a lot of people have the idea that Spurgeon was an out -and -out pagan who was suddenly converted to Christ when he accidentally walked into a church to avoid a snowstorm, and that's only partly true.

It's really not the case at all, but as you can see, Christian influences shaped his thought literally from the time of his infancy.

He loved those years at Stambourne, and in fact, the last book Spurgeon ever wrote and published recounted those years at his grandfather's house.

It's a little book called Memories of Stambourne, and in the preface to that book, he says this,

The issue of this small volume will mark an epoch in my life, full of interest to my friends and solemnly instructive to myself.

In the end of May, 1891, I suffered from the virulent influenza then raging, but all thought

I had recovered, and it was judged wise that I should take a change of air.

So I went for a few days to the region near Stambourne, delighting myself in what I called my grandfather's country.

I was very happy in the generous and hearty hospitality of Mr. Gertine of Haverhill and enjoyed myself mightily, but on the

Thursday of the week, I had an overpowering headache, and I had to hurry home on Friday to go up to that chamber wherein, for three months,

I suffered beyond measure and was often between the jaws of death. Now that I trust

I am really recovering, I amused myself with arranging what had been previously prepared and issuing it from the press.

Do the timeline on that. He says he first got sick in May of 1891, and then he thought he recovered.

Then he got sick again and spent several days sequestered somewhere until he thought he truly recovered.

He actually died at the end of January the following year. So when he published this book, what he didn't know or what he didn't want to admit in writing is that his health was not improving, but it was declining.

Fewer than six months after the publication of this book, Spurgeon died in a hotel on the

French Riviera where he was trying to get relief from the bitter cold of a harsh

London winter. But it intrigues me that literally in the very last year of his life, he spent so much time fondly remembering and carefully recording the start of his life.

Although Spurgeon's wife and secretary assembled four really wonderful volumes full of stories and illustrations, the autobiography of Charles Spurgeon, which really isn't a true autobiography that he sat down and wrote.

It's more of a scrapbook of things written by and about Spurgeon during his personal and ministerial life, and they put it all together.

But this little book, Memories of Stambourne, is also a kind of scrapbook.

If you pick it up thinking it's going to be autobiographical, you'll be disappointed because Spurgeon himself is not the focus of the book.

It's not about his childhood. It's about the place. It's about the village, the manse where Spurgeon's grandfather lived and the meeting house where his grandfather preached.

And so the book covers some of the history of that congregation with several drawn -out anecdotes and a couple of sermons.

And it's a thin book, about 80 pages in the edition I have. And the first half of the book was actually written by a fellow minister and a friend of Spurgeon's, a man named

Benjamin Beddow, and Beddow's own grandfather actually had preceded

James Spurgeon as the pastor of the congregation at Stambourne. And so he writes about the early history of Stambourne village and the church up through the era of his own grandfather's pastoral ministry there.

And then more than halfway through the book, Spurgeon takes over and he begins with a transcript of the sermon he preached at his grandfather's funeral.

That's followed by a description of the manse, the house where Spurgeon grew up as a toddler.

It was the parsonage right next to the church. And there's an extended description of the manse and the meeting house.

That's what it looks like today. All of it is very quaint. Stambourne, even to this day, is barely a wide spot in the road.

I've been there. The village where the meeting house is, the part of that village has fewer than 50 houses.

And it's all along the stretch of a single road. There are no side streets. And this chapel that is there today is not the same building

Spurgeon knew. This current building looks to me like it was probably built sometime after World War II.

And it's also considerably smaller than the building pictured in Spurgeon's autobiography.

This looks to me like it would accommodate a congregation of about 35 people. And that is a good measure,

I think, of the size of this town. The meeting house of Spurgeon's time wasn't much larger, but Spurgeon remembered it fondly.

And by the way, he drew this sketch of the meeting house. He drew that when he was 12 years old.

So that's what I mean when I say he had some rather formidable artistic abilities.

Here's what he wrote in Memories of Stambourne about the meeting house.

He says, there's the same picture bigger. It was a rare old chapel.

I wish it could have remained forever as I used to know it. Let me see if I can sketch it with my pen.

He says, when I was a boy of 12, I made this drawing of the back of the old meeting house.

So this is what it looked like from the back. He says, the pulpit was glorious as, and he puts in quotation marks, the tower of the flock.

He's describing the pulpit as an elevated platform. You know, we tend to think of the lectern or the desk on which the preacher places his notes as the pulpit.

But technically, and in the way Spurgeon spoke here, the pulpit was the raised platform, the whole area here where the pastor would stand and speak from.

That was the pulpit, usually a large raised platform with a rail around it, I guess so the preacher didn't fall off.

But Spurgeon continues, over the pulpit hung a huge sounding board.

That would be just a piece of wood at an angle so that the echo of his voice, because they didn't have amplification, his voice would be projected out towards the audience.

So it had a large sounding board. He says, I used to speculate as to what would become of grandfather if it ever dropped down on him.

He said, I imagined him like my jack in the box, and I hoped that my dear grandpapa would never be shut down and shut up in such a fashion like the jack in the box.

He says, at the back of the pulpit was a peg to hold the minister's hat, and inside, meaning inside the pulpit railing, there was room for two people because I have sat there with grandfather when quite a little boy.

So he apparently sat in the pulpit while his grandfather was preaching when he was tiny. But he says, looking at it years later, the pulpit looked too small for two people.

He continues, just below and in front of the pulpit was the table pew, that's the place where the communion was served, wherein sat the elders of the congregation, the men of gracious light and leading.

Their uncle Haddon generally stood. Haddon was the uncle he was named for. His middle name was

Haddon. And he says, Uncle Haddon gave out the hymns and the notices.

In other words, he would tell people what number of hymn they were going to sing. And he goes on then to describe the pews.

These were square shaped enclosures with doors like you see in lots of old style

New England churches. There was a balcony, he calls it a gallery, and he described how the musicians playing instruments were seated up in the gallery.

One of the things that stood out in his memory from childhood, and he describes it, was how the flute players let spit from their instruments drip down on the people below.

Just the kind of thing a little boy would watch, right? And this stuck in his mind. He writes about it six months before he dies.

And I love that he gave little details like that. It's surprising, frankly, because under Spurgeon's own leadership in the

Metropolitan Tabernacle in London, no musical instruments were ever allowed, not even an organ.

You know, when Moody came with Sankey, his singer, Sankey had this little portable organ that the

Scots called a case of whistles. And they made him take the case of whistles that he could play at the

Metropolitan Tabernacle, but only in the basement. He couldn't do it in the auditorium.

So if you wanted to hear Sankey sing in Spurgeon's Tabernacle, you had to go down in the basement to do it.

But anyway, by the way, the Metropolitan Tabernacle does have an organ today, but the organist is there just to keep the tempo and melody prominent.

That's his only role, and he is strictly forbidden to play in any ornate way.

But Spurgeon's grandfather evidently didn't have any compunction about musical instruments, and so after describing several of the woodwind instruments,

Spurgeon says there were a lot more of them. He talks about a bassoon and a double bass and a clarinet and a lot more of them, he says.

And then in all capital letters, he writes this, they could play. And he says, there's no mistake about it.

At least it was almost as certain as that other undeniable fact, our singers could sing.

And then he kind of mischievously qualifies that claim. Our singers could sing, he says.

But then he says, well, it was hearty singing. And say what you like about it. It's the heart in the singing, which is the life of the business.

Spurgeon had a deep and lasting respect for the rustic people from that village.

That's where he grew up. He loved them. He loved that environment. Here's how he described them, quote, they were real

Essex, hearty people. They loved a good sermon, and they would say, Mr. Spurgeon, I heard you well this morning.

Spurgeon says, I thought the good man had preached well, but their idea was not so much to his credit.

They judged that they had heard him well. And Spurgeon says, there's something in that different way of putting it.

At any rate, it takes from the preacher all ground of glorying in what he's done. I like that, too.

I wish people would tell me, I heard you well. There were a lot of people who could and would hear the gospel, he says, but I don't think they would have put up with anything else.

He says they were skilled at criticism. Some of them were very wise in their remarks, and some were otherwise.

That's a great play on words. Some of them were very wise, and some of them were otherwise. And then he remembers this anecdote.

He writes, well, do I remember an occasion on which the preacher had spoken on the tears?

And they said he wouldn't know a tear if he saw one. It was painful to hear a man talk so ignorant, to say that you couldn't tell weed from tears when they're growing.

That's ridiculous. Spurgeon says, these rustic critics were wrong for once, but on matters of doctrine or experience, you'd have found them quite a match for you.

And Spurgeon says, there were no doubt in Stambourne a few rough fellows who did not go to any place of worship, but those who came to the meeting house were the great majority.

And so it seems Spurgeon's grandfather was quite an effective and well -respected preacher, and most of that town came to hear him preach.

But as it is in most churches, Spurgeon says the midweek service was not so well attended.

He says of that, the prayer meetings during the week were always kept up, but at certain seasons of the year, grandfather and a few old women were all that could be relied upon.

And the grandfather, James Spurgeon, was a godly man who preached from that same pulpit in Stambourne for 54 years, and he was known especially for his evangelistic emphasis.

Spurgeon and his grandfather both had a keen sense of humor. Spurgeon recounted what his grandfather would say.

Somebody asked him how much he weighed, and his grandfather said, well, that depends on how you take me.

If I'm weighed in the balances, I am found wanting. But he says in the pulpit, they tell me

I'm heavy enough. And his influence with this sense of humor was evident on his grandson, preaching his sermon at his grandfather's funeral.

Here's what Charles Spurgeon said, and I was surprised really to find something purposely funny in a funeral sermon for his own grandfather, but he said this.

My grandfather, who is now with God, once ventured on publishing a volume of hymns.

He said, I never heard anyone speak in their favor or argue that these hymns ought to have been sung in the congregation.

In that volume, he promised a second volume, if the first should prove acceptable. We forgive him the first collection because he didn't inflict another.

He says the meaning was good, but the dear old man paid no attention to the triviality of rhyme.

We dare not quote even a verse. He says it might be among the joys of heaven for my venerated grandsire that he can now compose and sing new songs unto the

Lord. Spurgeon hastened to add that there was no problem with the doctrine in his grandfather's hymns, but he says the poetry was abominable.

Now, I need to mention that the person who practically raised little Charles and had the greatest personal and direct influence on him was his

Aunt Anne. She was the only one of Spurgeon's father's siblings who remained unmarried all of her life and lived at home, and Charles Spurgeon grew up with her like almost an older sister, and he retained warm affections for her for the rest of his life.

Once, when he visited Stambourne as an adult, she asked him a question that evidently had plagued her for all those years because she said when he was a little boy he would hide for hours at a time and they would look and they never found him, and so she wanted to know where he went during those times.

Here's how Spurgeon answers it. He said, I would get alone, but he said, where I went to the guardian angels knew but no one on earth could tell.

So when he grew up, his Aunt Anne asked him, Charles, where did you get to when you were such a little child?

We used to look everywhere for you, but we never found you until you came walking in all by yourself. Spurgeon then described to her how he would hide in one of the tombs in the church graveyard.

He says, no, I did not get into the grave, but it had a sort of altar tomb above it, and one of the side stones would move easily so that I could get inside, and then by setting the slab of stone back again,

I was enclosed in a sort of large box where nobody would dream of ever looking for me. When the time came for Spurgeon to leave his grandfather's home, it was a painful parting for both of them.

James Spurgeon comforted his grandson by telling him, you can look up at the moon tonight when you get back home in Colchester, and remember, that is the same moon

I'll be looking at from Stambourne. And Spurgeon said after that, that he never the rest of his life looked at the moon without thinking of his grandfather.

Darlene does that with our grandkids. Spurgeon continued spending holidays in his grandparents' house.

He loved to go back there, and his grandparents remained a constant influence on him. Once, his grandmother, while he lived there, offered him a penny for every

Isaac Watts hymn that he could recite perfectly. What she evidently didn't know when she made that promise was that Spurgeon had a nearly photographic memory, and so he began saying so many hymns that she reduced the reward to half a penny, but she still complained that he was reducing her to poverty.

And so his grandfather concocted a new scheme since there was a huge rat problem in those days.

He offered young Charles a shilling a dozen for all the rats he could kill, and so Spurgeon said that he gave up hymn learning for rat catching because the pay was better.

And he later spoke about the volume of those hymns that he had memorized, and he loved it because he was able to use them in his sermons.

And in fact, if you read his sermons, one thing you will note that he quotes on average two or three hymns per sermon.

He'll just break into the words of a hymn, quoted it, he didn't sing it, but many of those words had been embedded in his memory as a young boy because of the influence of his grandmother.

By the time he returned to his own parents' home at age six, he had already obtained, or his mother had already given birth to, three younger siblings, two sisters and a brother, and Charles seemed already to feel very deeply his responsibility to influence his younger siblings for good.

It's a perspective, I think, which was surely the legacy of his grandfather's influence, and it made him from the start mature beyond his years.

And this was a persistent trait of Charles Spurgeon's as a young even before he was a teenager.

His hobbies were writing poetry and editing a magazine, and even then he was honing the literary skills that would make him legendary.

And so you can look at Spurgeon at any stage of his development, and what you will see is someone wise beyond his years and with an exceptionally mature outlook on life.

And even Spurgeon himself made reference to this. He knew it was unusual, he understood that, and when he was 40 years old he gave a lecture to his students titled,

Young Men. That was the title of the lecture, and he said in the lecture that he at age 40 was already an old man.

He also said this, quote, I might have been a young man at 12, but at 16

I was a sober respectable Baptist parson sitting in the chair and ruling and governing the church.

At age 16, he says, and at that period of my life when perhaps I ought to have been in the playground developing my legs and muscles which no doubt would have kept me from the gout now,

I spent my time instead at my books studying and working hard sticking to it very much to the pleasure of my schoolmaster.

And it was then at age six when he returned to his parents' home that he entered school for the very first time.

He was already obviously able to read and he'd been trained personally by his aunt and his grandfather, and so he was a gifted student and excelled except for one brief span.

The teacher was shocked when Spurgeon began to do badly in his schoolwork until it occurred to the teacher that the top student's chair was away from the fire and right next to a drafty door.

It was the most uncomfortable place in the room, so he reorganized the way the students were seated and Spurgeon's academic performance rebounded.

When he was just about 14, he and his brother James were sent to a school in a town called

Maidstone where his uncle was one of the teachers, and it was there as a very young teenager in a conversation with one of the school staff that Charles was first exposed to the

Baptist view of baptism. His grandfather was a congregationalist, practiced infant baptism, and that was the only thing

Charles had ever known. But now he's a student in an Anglican school and it's an unlikely place to embrace

Baptist beliefs, but he studied the subject from Scripture and made up his mind that if he ever experienced conversion, he would be baptized.

We'll talk about Spurgeon's remarkable conversion in our next session tomorrow.

He was still a youth when he was saved, but because of his background, steeped in the church, raised in a pastor's home, trained from childhood at the knee of an aunt who nurtured him in his spiritual growth, and a mother who prayed diligently for his soul,

Spurgeon launched into ministry almost from day one. As he said, he was converted at age 16, but before he turned 17, he was already a respectable

Baptist pastor. And the speed with which his preaching gift developed and was used by God is also really quite remarkable.

We'll talk about that in another session tomorrow, and we'll look at those lessons from his life tomorrow, but I've already gone over time, so I will stop there.

Five minutes? All right, well, I'm not going to start a new session, but any questions? I'll take spontaneous questions.

Yes, sir. The two that I say are almost essential would be

Spurgeon's autobiography, which was originally published as four volumes, large size.

If you can find the original copies of the original, they're not that expensive. I see them sold on eBay every now and then, the original volumes.

They're filled with pictures, illustrations, even some photographs and stuff. Photography existed, you know, during Spurgeon's life, so there are, it's a remarkably illustrated, like I said, kind of a scrapbook.

You must have that, and you must read it. Banner of Truth published the autobiography of Spurgeon in two volumes a few years ago, and they reorganized the chapters in a more logical fashion.

I believe everything, all the text is there, but the Banner of Truth edition leave out a lot of the photographs, so if you can find the original,

I think it's worth getting those original four volumes. They were published simultaneously in England and America.

The version I have is the American one, but it's identical to the British version, page for page, the very same.

You must have that, and then there's another, I think it's, it was originally published as six volumes on Spurgeon by G.

Holden Pike, P -I -K -E, his middle name Holden, H -O -L -D -E -N.

I think it's, sadly, it's out of print. Banner of Truth published that one in two volumes as well.

It's the only one I've ever seen, or the two -volume edition, but the two volumes are complete in that each one contains the equivalent of three original volumes, and Pike, I think, gives more personal details and better insight into Spurgeon than any other biographer who actually knew him, and then there are scores of biographies of Spurgeon.

Most of them tell the very same stories in different order, so you could almost pick any one you want. I like the most recent one.

What's it called? Hang on, I've got it on Kindle. I always forget the title.

Anyway, of the modern biographies, this is the one

I recommend. Let me find it here. Living by Revealed Truth.

I told you it's a hard title to remember. Living by Revealed Truth. It's written by Tom Nettles, who's one of the best

Baptist church historians still living, and he did some original research on Spurgeon and pulled out some facts that I'd never read anywhere else, so I recommend that book.

It's a little more, it's a little less of a biography and more of a, it's just a very readable story.

It's well written. You'll enjoy it. Living by Revealed Truth.

It's a pretty thick book, so it's pretty, you know, it's pretty exhaustive treatment of Spurgeon's life, too.

It has a picture of Spurgeon on the front, so you can't miss it. Yes, sir? Well, I didn't exactly say that.

I just said he would approve of the use of social media. I think he would say, look, any medium by which you can get the truth out, use it, but do it well.

He wouldn't approve of a lot of the stuff that's posted, even by Christians on Twitter.

He might even scold me for some of the things I've posted. I won't go into that, but I know he would say that any mass medium that can expand the scope of ministry ought to be used.

He was probably the first preacher ever whose sermons were transcribed and sent across the

Atlantic to America the day he preached them by telegraph, so you could actually read in the

New York Times on Monday morning what Spurgeon preached about yesterday, and people did it.

He was strongly anti -slavery, which made him controversial in the

South and even irritated some Northerners, so the time came when they began to edit the anti -slavery stuff out of his sermons, but the published sermons, the ones you get, were published, first of all, in England, so you'll find that in there.

He was not totally averse to politics, and politics was an important thing in his time because the social fabric was changing quickly, much like it is today, and if you had to classify him, this will surprise a lot of people, but in those days he was a liberal.

He was a liberal not in the way we think of liberals today, where today's liberals he would not approve of because they're all about moral issues, promoting abortion and other gender fluidity, and none of that would he ever approve of, but in his time, liberal meant that you were in favor of cleaning up the mess of poverty that dominated

London. If you read Dickens' novels, Dickens had a similar political slant,

I think, in that he saw the injustice of how orphanages were run, children were put to work and treated cruelly, and it was in many ways a very unhealthy society, and the

Tories of his day, what we would have called conservatives, wanted to preserve all that injustice, and he was opposed to it, so in his time he was a liberal.

I think if he lived today, well, a lot of people keep pointing this out, classic liberalism is very conservative by today's left -wing standards, so don't take the fact that he was a liberal to mean too much about where he would stand today, but that's where he fit in in those days, and he was outspoken in certain political issues.

He would voice his opinion on key elections and things like that.

Are we done? All right. Yep. Did I get through all these?

Yeah, I did. Praise to the

Lord, who has prospered your work and defended you.

Surely his goodness and mercy shall daily attend you.

Wonderful joy for the sun, for light into the sun.

Praise to the

Lord, who let all that is in me adore him.

All that has life and breath come now raise before him.

Let the unmanned sound from his people again, gladly forever adore the firstborn over all creation, far beyond imagination, all visible and invisible things.

By Christ our

King, the Godhead dwelling for you, crucified for our salvation, so incredible, indescribable

God, Lord Jesus Christ.

Once invisible, Jesus Christ, Lord all -conceiving.

Sing now, sing as one. Come and join the angels.

Come and join the song. A mellow from beginning of creation to the end of kingdom come.

Sing now, sing as one. Come and join the angels.

Come and join the song. Oh of the darkest day

Christ on the road to Calvary, tried by sinful men, torn and beaten and this the power of Christ became sin for us took the blame for the least and forgiven you have a pain written on your face bearing the awesome weight of sin every bitter thought every evil deed crown stained brown the daylight flicks as its maker bows his head curtain torn in two dead are raised to life finish the victory cry we stay we stay all right everyone we're going to get started with our second session so come on in and find your place again please yeah he said this was scripted earlier just so you know he means his questions are scripted i have no script which is dangerous yeah all right praying um okay first question actually before we begin do you know anything about the history of the rubber eraser no okay well 2023 was open for a conference idea i thought if you knew if you knew anything about that we'd have you back so tell us first of all how it is that you got saved how the lord saved you i grew up in a liberal methodist church my parents were churchgoers my dad was converted in during world war ii in the navy in the philippines and baptized there i have a yet his family had been 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 it was church you know and what they didn't know was that in sunday school i was being taught all sorts of humanism and anti -supernatural stuff we had a sunday school teacher one i think and she went along with our class so i started having her in sixth grade she was a woman who had an earned doctorate i think in psychology and uh so she followed our class like all the way up to the beginning of high school teaching every sunday it was like we'd read a story in scripture if if she ever opened the 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 arm this didn't really happen like this she says you're not supposed to believe uh what's irrational that jesus was able to heal this guy 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 i had i said you tell us every week why we shouldn't take this seriously why do we come and talk about it i want to stay home and watch the nfl pregame you know what's the point and plus it irritated me because i don't know i i had a friend who was a christian his dad was a pentecostal faith healer of all things uh but he took the bible literally and and so i'm hung between what i'm hearing in sunday school and my best friend who's a pentecostal you know faith healer guy no somebody asked if that was justin peters he's talking about it was in tulsa though and you know tulsa is the home of every charismatic yeah wingnut and anyway so that has nothing to do with he was enough of an influence on me that i i didn't want to just discount the bible but i'm hearing this stuff in sunday school of all places why you shouldn't believe it and so i mouthed off to the teacher and the pastor called me at home on monday the next day and said i need you to come and have a talk with me and so i went to his office on tuesday and and uh he said what's what's going on in sunday school what do you what are you causing trouble for and so i explained she tells us every week that the bible's not true and he said look she's just trying to get you to see this rationally intelligently she's right and this shocked me because this is the pastor telling me this and i said you mean none of the miracles in the bible are true and he said no not really these are moral tales he said like the man with the withered hand he said he probably heard jesus say if your right hand offends you cut it off and he knew not to take that literally and so he had bound his arm and to his side and resolved never to use it again and jesus gave him permission to use his arm again so he healed his withered arm and you know i'm i don't know what 15 16 years old and and i'm listening to this and going okay that's that's almost credible so what about when moses parted the red sea because i'm thinking of all the miracles and i didn't know the bible well enough to know more than a handful of them and he said that clearly didn't happen you can't make water stand up like walls and i'm like but but if it's a miracle it's the it's the whole point you can't do it but god can he's like look we're not supposed to be taking that literally and and i went through several miracles and he explained them all away the same way and i left his office very frustrated and thought 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 so my parents gave me maybe more freedom than they would have in earlier years and i just stopped going to church they didn't 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 i wasn't going to church and yet i had this nagging feeling that you shouldn't just write off the bible like that and one night i was 17 years old i was a month away from graduating high school uh it was april of 1971 so we just passed the 50th anniversary of this night when i was lying in bed unable to go to sleep feeling guilty for something i had done it was a minor i think i'd said something unkind to my sister and she went to bed angry with me and i just felt like a total heel you know and i thought yeah i left church i'm a pagan i need to do something spiritual and you know it's late at night i'm in my room nothing else to do so i decided i'm going to read a page of the 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 uh but i opened it up and flopped it open at random because this is the only thing i'd ever done with the bible 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 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 bible to know that i didn't want to get into the minor prophets so new testament was more interesting i'm looking for a new testament verse and i flopped it open and it opened to the first page of first 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 but i thought what if i read the whole book that would make me really spiritual so i decided to read through first corinthians and by the time i got through chapter three i was absolutely convinced what a pagan i was that's those first three chapters paul just assaults human wisdom 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 god's wisdom is stronger than the foolishness of men god's foolishness is stronger than the wisdom of men and it's just attack on human wisdom and human and see my thing was politics i i was deep into politics and philosophy and i thought you know even if i don't go to church god has to accept me if i learn from the best of uh philosophy and and uh and and have you know humane political views and and all this i was striving to be good in god's eyes even if i didn't go to church and in here scripture is telling me that my highest wisdom is like foolishness to god and uh it just devastated me and i kept reading i remember i read all the way through chapter 12 i didn't actually get through the whole book because by the time i got to chapter 12 some of it was confusing that's where it talks about speaking in tongues and i had this pentecostal friend who wanted me to do that and all that but in the beginning of chapter 12 is where paul says uh here's here's how you know uh the spirit of the spirit of god versus another spirit no one speaking by the spirit of god can say jesus is accursed and no one can say jesus is lord except by the holy spirit now i didn't understand in the context what 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 lordship of christ that jesus is lord and i understood enough to know this means look jesus is is not looking for me to be good he's looking for me to bow to him as lord and i made that confession that night in my bed jesus is lord uh and everything in my world instantly changed and lots of things that providence brought to me that very week changed the next day in fact i thought i need a version of the bible that i can understand better a modern translation 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 nobody had ever given me a gospel tract in my life and this was a really good track that explained justification by faith and on the back was an advertisement for an evangelistic crusade that was going to be a city -wide crusade in tulsa which 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 and then either that night or the next night the phone rang and it was a guy who i barely knew we played in an orchestra together and you know we were cordial friends but not good friends and he said uh listen there's a city -wide evangelistic crusade it's the one on the back of the track and he says the church i go to uh wants us to invite one person as a guest 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 because he's he's stuttering around he's not at all comfortable asking me if i want to go to this evangelistic crusade but i said yeah i'd like to do that and he's like really so i arranged to meet and we went together to this this massive crusade should i tell you who the preacher was because it will appall you no no don't go for it jack van impy oh interesting back in those days he was a fundamentalist and he knew enough of the gospel to preach it and uh this was a massive tulsa has in the fairgrounds there this big display center called the international petroleum exhibition it's a big empty hall with uh it's the largest at the time was the largest indoor space with no internal supports it was the roof was supported from the outside with wires and stuff like so it was massive hall and it was full there were i would guess eight thousand people there so this is a big deal and jack van impy preached that night a sermon on the crucifixion and he started his sermon in isaiah 53 which blew my mind i didn't know enough even to bring a bible to the thing so my friend had this scofield bible used from a fundamentalist church he's sitting on his lap and he's looking around and he's not using it and when vanipy starts to quote from isaiah 53 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 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 and uh it just blew me away but had the effect of from that day until this i have never had a single doubt about whether the bible was the inspired word of god it just it amazes me that anybody can read psalm 22 isaiah 53 and not understand that this is you know god's eternal plan and he explained the way of salvation i became a christian sometime in that week i can't tell you whether it was when i confessed jesus as lord in my bed that night or when i heard you know vanipy talking about the meaning of the crucifixion and why christ died for our sins i came out of that week you know solidly converted and uh looked tulsa was a hard place to find a church in those days because it's all pentecostal or liberal southern baptist but one of the guys who had sponsored this city -wide crusade was a pastor who had a television program and i looked up his church and it was within a mile of where i lived so i visited there on a 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 uh 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 bible and because i come from a liberal methodist church he said well you found a church that preaches the bible he says are you baptized so he's like solid baptist you know and i said no i just came to faith in april this was like probably june 1st and uh he said well come tonight we're having a baptismal service i'll baptize you i said okay and i did so that's where your parents are your baptism no no i didn't really have the guts to tell them all that i was going through like i said my mom was uh in and out of the hospital in those days and a lot of stuff going on there so it was a slow revelation to them that i had become a christian and they didn't believe it at first uh took took quite a while for them to really see that yeah something happened to change him um but yeah and then you're after high school what happened where'd you go um the first year i went to a state university in oklahoma because i didn't know where to go but that night that i was baptized i told the pastor look i i i i'd been planning to become a newspaper columnist i wanted to write political opinions like william f buckley you know and uh so i i realized right away i can't do that with my life i have to serve the lord somehow and so somehow verbalize that to this pastor he says you need to go to a christian college i said where the only one i knew was oral roberts university in the backyard and i didn't want to go there and and i knew that already and he said so he listed about six or seven schools all of them fundamentalist schools like uh bible baptist college in springfield missouri and tennessee temple bob jones university house anderson was that a thing at the time it wasn't it wasn't a big deal yet okay this was 1971 i think hyles anderson was probably founded in 72 or 73 so but the last school he named was moody bible institute and it was the only one on his list that i had ever heard of because they had the 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 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 and i said okay that's where i'll go so that's the decision making process is sorry my throat is we'll get some somebody will get you some water here 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 i was gonna say that i don't think that ever would have happened if we had time i'd tell you about my relationship with my friend whose dad was a thank you his dad was a pretty famous faith healer pentecostal assemblies of god and the same year i was converted uh this man his name was william caldwell uh contracted bone cancer and a protracted illness with very painful bone cancer 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 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 both uh yeah i graduated twice from moody moody has a three -year diploma that's kind of like me i took high school twice yeah moody offers a diploma that doesn't mean much but it's three years of bible training and if you add to that 60 hours of uh this was in in those days now you can earn a bachelor's degree at moody but 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 uh for the worst year of my life but it cured me of that sort of legalistic fundamentalism so it was probably a good thing in the long run and then went back to moody to get my degree they required if if you 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 so my plan was go back to chicago for the summer finish the work on my degree get the degree and then i was going to spend a year just working to earn money to go to seminary because i thought i was training to be a pastor and during that last summer in chicago i i was poverty stricken and 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'm i'm was bemoaning that fact to a friend who was a part -time proofreader at moody press and she said look i i'm here this summer because if i go home they'll hire somebody to replace me and i won't might not get my job back but if you just need the job for six weeks you could do it and then when i come back i get my job back and and she was a sweet girl i didn't want to disappoint her but i thought that sounds dreadful proofreading and uh but i didn't want to tell her i don't want to do that so i just said yeah that sounds interesting i'll think about it and but she took it on on her own initiative to make an appointment for me to interview with the editor of moody press she made an appointment gave it to me and i said okay i'll go in and i'm just going to be honest with this guy so here's how the job interview goes 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 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 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 english requirements in college and i have a tendency to fall asleep when i read i mean i i'm trying to make sure i do not get this job right and he he laughed like that and said yeah okay i get it he says i'll tell karen you came and it's just not going to work out uh you know don't call us 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 i dodged that bullet but now i got to find a job as a night clerk in a 7 -eleven or something you know and 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 phil he says i thought you know maybe we could just let karen go for the summer and do without her for a few weeks and 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 he says technically you've applied for the job if i have to go through personnel department and all that and 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 i'm desperate for proofreader he says i'll pay you twelve dollars an hour if you can give us three days three hours a day three hours a day twelve dollars an hour and i'm like wow because minimum wage was three dollars and 25 cents at that time twelve dollars and i said i'll do anything for 12 you can drive nails in my toes 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 sat me down with these typeset pages and a manuscript and said basically this is all the instruction i got you you take the manuscript and read it and compare it to the typeset thing and if there's anything that's not like it's supposed to be mark it and so it was a badly set you know piece of text and so there were lots of mistakes in it so i'm finding all these mistakes and by the time i'd done it for 20 minutes i knew this was going to be my life it was like that dramatic i just thought wow this is kind of fun 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 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 you were born for this i was i was plus i had always had though i told him i took the english requirements in college that was true but i'd always had sort of natural literary gifts i was a voracious reader as a child and i could write pretty well i my college assignments the writing assignments 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 i i think even in high school i i had some natural writing gifts that really began to manifest themselves i took an interest in words i started reading a lot about word usage and and before the end of that summer they promoted me to editor it made me a book editor so that was a pretty good career move for me and uh uh shall 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 um and i'm i'm the only male editor in the fact when they promoted me to an editor uh mr stobie says uh 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 and i said well what's the deal with that you know i mean why is that a problem and he says well it's expensive to live in chicago 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 you know i'll i'll take whatever right so uh so i but i was the only man in the editorial department and so it was kind of fun i was dating all these girls and and like what do you call it serial dating i i wasn't dating any of them steadily but taking them out you know and and i had no social life in college i had paid my way through school and and and suddenly i'm the only guy in the office darlene always jokes because these women would have tupperware parties and because i worked in the department they couldn't leave me out so so i got invited to tupperware parties and one of one of the first times she ever went out with me was at a tupperware party with movie press girls and she thought this guy's really fun he's 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 so anyway she comes to work there a year after i had started uh she's the new secretary in the was it what's the department of production and um 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 i said there's a new girl and uh you've been to a tupperware party with all the others that's right i'm like oh all right so so he pointed me towards her desk and i went and uh within five minutes 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 she's pretty and smart and wow and so as i was walking away from her desk 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 a group of us you want to come and she said sure and so that was it 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 uh it has the score of the game the cubs won and uh and she became kind of a lifelong cubs fan although she's upset with them right now but uh yeah if you're in our family you can't be for any other baseball team yeah we have similar yeah she's been that way even you can marry based outside the family team we have a 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 we don't have any grandchildren until we get this resolved that's right that's a good good so then uh you you meet her you go out on a date and next day it was a year to the day after i met her so that we got married we had a rocky romance we dated for six months and then she dumped me well actually she caught me on one of those casual dates with another girl and it wasn't any it wasn't anything serious even i as a college friend who had come to town for the weekend during the air show in chicago which is big deal and it draws like crowds of two million people up and down the lakefront literally two million people 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 it wasn't like that it was totally platonic but who do you think i ran into in a crowd of two million and she called me up later and said hey look if you want to date other girls and everything that's okay with me we're not going steady but i don't want to be part of a group if you're going to date other girls just leave me out and i'm like well that would mean we are going steady so i said okay all right and i thought i'll call her when i'm ready to get engaged and uh yeah that wasn't a good move on my part you don't want to hear this whole story i do want well they want to hear the rest of it yeah she refused to talk to me for the next three months and in that time span i accidentally quit my job i threatened to quit and my boss took me up on it i was a bluff on my part but he took me seriously and uh and then she found out that her sister who she had moved to chicago and was rooming with her sister was diagnosed with very aggressive kind of terminal cancer she had the doctors gave her just three months to live so darlene and her sister were going to move back to west virginia i would never see her again and uh so i called her up and said can we get together and talk and she's like no i don't want to talk to you and she did that to me for two months until i i what did i do cut myself with razor blades or or i just pleaded with her until she finally said all right we'll talk and so when we talked my first words were look i'm gonna marry you 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 and she said okay and how did you come to grace community church and get a get uh attached with john mccarthur well i had never heard of john mccarthur uh the year we met actually met darlene and she and i were in the phase before she dumped me uh still dating and uh and john mccarthur came to moody to be a speaker at spiritual emphasis week which is a week -long series of student chapels and they expanded chapel from normally a half hour to that week it's always an hour and it's the same speaker every every day for the week and he does a series they do it every year and it's usually a very famous speaker uh 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 and so we had permission to do that but i had some manuscripts i was working on that were tight deadlines and and i i read the flyer they sent out and i i don't even know this guy i never heard of him john mccarthur so i wasn't going to go and i shared an office with another guy he came in that morning and he said hey are you going to go down there to the student chapel and i said who was that guy again and so he reads the flyer to me he says this is john mccarthur he's a fifth generation pastor he pastors grace community church in sun valley california and today he's speaking on god's will for your life and i said no way i'm going to go to that i said god's will for your life i said that's what everybody who comes to moody speaks about somebody ought to clue junior in i said i'm not i'm not inclined to go hear a guy whose claim to fame is he's somebody's son you know fifth generation pastor junior not and so he says well you're in a good mood today and he leaves 30 seconds later she pokes her head in the door and says i'm going down to student chapel were you going to come and i said yeah i'm just on my way so the sound booth in this was tory gray auditorium at moody the sound booth is up in the and kind of towards the back and we sat behind the sound booth because i wasn't intending to take this seriously i just wanted to be with her for a free hour you know but the minute john mccarthur opened his mouth i just thought i have never heard a guy preach with that level of clarity that depth of biblical content and it was crystal clear i mean i had said to the guy i share the office with he's not going to say anything 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 god's will that was more clear and more clearly biblical than anything i had ever heard 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 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 mccarthur that's not a biblical exposition he doesn't go through a passage he takes the topic and and basically looks at everything scripture says about it and puts it all together it was just profound and i remember thinking wow i have never heard a guy speak like that he was young and and articulate 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 uh and so this was before cassette tape messages were real popular or whatever but uh a friend of mine uh my best friend uh who is was then and still is pastor of a church in clearwater florida i said have you ever heard this guy john mccarthur and i said yeah i went to hear him at moody one time he was the best speaker i've ever heard he said well you know all his sermons are on cassette tape and and we have them in our church library i'll send you some so he starts sending me tapes of john and those were the very first cassettes i always joke that the first cassettes i ever listened to from grace to you were bootleg tapes but uh and then when darlene and i got married we on our honeymoon we went to florida and we talked about you know what what are we going to do in the future and how long do we want to live you know two blocks from wrigley field you can't really raise kids in a neighborhood like that and so we decided because i was by then i like i said i'd accidentally quit my job i was doing freelance work mostly for moody press uh the only thing they saved by firing me was the benefits package 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 i'm doing and so we moved to florida to be part of this church where my friend was 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 tampa tulsa and baltimore which i have no connection to but it's odd to me still that i lived in tampa i was from tulsa and those are two of the first three stations grace to you was on so i began listening from day one 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 and started getting the material and and subscribed to all the tapes from grace church just began to listen to john every opportunity i got just absorbed everything and i never heard him speak without thinking i mean even the very first time i heard him when darlene was there in in moody's chapel one of my first thought was why haven't i heard from this guy and he needs to be writing books this stuff is this material needs to be preserved and printed published form he needs an editor you know that's what i used to think and and i would fantasize about wow that would be so great but he lived in california and i was living in florida and there was no prayer that we would ever you know get together 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 it just i just thought wow that would be so great but i my plan still was to be a pastor i was assistant pastor in a florida church at the time shortly after we moved there a church in the area hired me to be their assistant pastor so that's what i was doing listening to john and one day moody press called it was jerry jenkins who wrote you know the left behind series he was the vice president in charge of publishing at moody at the time he called me up and said look phil um i wonder if you'd be interested in something we're about to launch it'll be the biggest textbook project we've ever done we want to do a series of commentaries through the entire new testament uh and and based on john macarthur's preaching uh so if you know john macarthur we want to turn his sermons into commentaries are you interested i said uh yeah so he says we also need a acquisitions editor and uh and i want you to apply for that job and i said well that's probably out but i'm definitely interested in working on the macarthur project so he says we'll come back here to chicago on august 19th i think it was and we're going to have a meeting with john macarthur 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 macarthur new testament commentary series which of course now is complete it took 35 years to get through it when jerry first proposed the idea to me he said this is a huge project biggest thing we've ever done it's probably going to take 10 years to finish and he thought like that's the biggest idea he could have about it you know 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 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 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 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 i was eating the punch and cookies and i said you know i listen to you every day on the radio and i said i'm a youth pastor assistant pastor dealing with a lot of 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 i said you need to do a book on the lordship issue lordship salvation because this was a big deal in florida especially and he brightened immediately and said i i want to do a book on that he said 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 you have to do that book 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 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 moody press book because he said i've i've never found a publisher who's interested in the topic you're the first person in publishing who's ever you know shown any interest in it but i really want to do it so moody hired me to be their acquisitions editor darlene and i moved back to florida and or back from florida to chicago in 81 and i spent the next year well the first thing i did the first day on the job was write a contract for the gospel according to jesus and sent it off to john there's there's another long story about why that's not a moody press book after all but it was conceived at moody press and contracted with them and that was the original plan but i spent the next year working on a smaller book the ultimate priority which has been retitled worship with the subtitle the ultimate priority one of the longest in print books by john macarthur that was the first one i edited for him and just took his sermons and put them in print format and then he goes through it and re -edits that the way he wants and then it goes off to the publisher so it shortens the process for him it's a little more labor intensive for the editor it's a lot more labor intensive for the editor but the the products i think have been good the books are great and when he saw my work he liked it almost from the start 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 this was 1983 the very beginning of 1983 january of 1983 you should quit your job come to work for me and i said okay and he said no i'm serious and i said yes so am i and uh and that was in january that was the end of january 25th january 25th by march 1st darlene and i were in california we'd moved there and have been there ever since so we're coming up on our what is it 38th anniversary yeah and did he offer you a job as executive director agrees to you no in fact i i i had actually said these words to darlene uh i would so much love to be sitting under john's teaching and editing his books that i'd take a job you know shining shoes if it paid the bills in order to live close to grace church he could have hired me to do anything if he'd offered me a job as janitor i would have said yes but he just wanted an editor nearby so he said he said look the opening we have right now is at grace to you the radio ministry says you probably don't want to 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 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 but i 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 it's like what i was born to do and what is your job at grace to you other than editing john's books i am the executive director now uh when i came there grace to you the radio broadcast was a small department within grace church it was self supporting so they weren't using uh grace church's budget to they had a separate budget and it was totally supported by listener income but it was a division of the church it was under the oversight of the elders and there was another department a larger department that produced the cassette tapes 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 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 and second of all it didn't make sense for this ministry that had by then nearly four million dollar annual budget to be under the elders oversight when we had maybe 10 minutes a month on the elders agenda we needed closer accountability and closer oversight and better advice on how to grow a radio ministry and all that 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 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 but 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 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 and you are an elder at the church as well as executive director so so we still have this very strong tie with the church but it's separate from the church i'm not an employee of the church and not in in any way accountable to anybody at the church other than you know john and the elders that are on our board and yeah accountable to the to the elders of the church in my role as a lay pastor at grace church the church doesn't pay me anything but i pastor one of the large adult fellowships there so it's perfect for me i mean i i trained to be a pastor and i am pastoring but i don't need to be a senior pastor and um you know i have opportunities to preach and write and pretty much whatever i want to do it's like i said i've i've felt for years like the lord just made me to do what he the role he brought me into and do you edit all of john's books or you have other people that work with that with you on that no i i've for years edited the vast majority of the the non -commentaries his adult non -fiction books um 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 that like that's like the maximum i could possibly do so for years we for several years we did some smaller books that we had other editors at grace to you sort of put together when you read them you can tell they're of a different style than john's books normally are um for the past what three or four years my eldest son 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 jeremiah and he would want me to stress that he is not the charismatic prophet named jeremiah johnson but the other jeremiah johnson nor is he the rugged mountain man jeremiah johnson yeah that's right but he uh he inherited my you know way with words i guess and the ability to write and edit material sort of just comes naturally to him and so he started doing some of john's books about four or five years ago and john loves his work i 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 and i'm i'm thrilled to see my son doing you know basically what i did so yeah your other kids oh we have three sons three all our kids were boys jeremiah is the eldest uh and he's married but has no children uh and he and his wife both go to grace church uh he's on staff at grace to you my second son is jedediah he's a an accountant a cpa and he is business partners with the chairman of the board of elders at our church and he's he and his wife still go to grace church they they met each other as students at the master's college during a semester where they studied in israel so they met in israel and she's from virginia originally and um now they have four children perfect kids and all cubs fans devoted cubs fans all of them and yeah they would not hesitate to tell you that they're they're well trained and then my youngest son jonathan is a police officer stationed in hollywood he's at the hollywood division of lapd uh and uh he and his his wife is suzy her dad was a pastor on staff at grace when 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 and um they have three kids and live within walking distance of us and they all go to grace church as well so the entire extended family is at church on sunday uh it's like the best ever and it's the reason darlene and i haven't moved to idaho we're not we're not going to leave the grandkids i'm gonna circle back to your police officer son at the end if we have time because i want you to talk about um a recent event that okay tell me about the other day spurgeon was committed to the doctrines of grace which we call calvinism when did you come to those convictions yourself um was grace community church always known for your commitment to those reform doctrines or has there been a development over time how much have you influenced grace how much has grace influenced you you know all of that the um yeah those are great questions and the answer to both questions about grace church and me is that we came to the doctrines of grace gradually over time uh i was saved out of the methodist church and uh i wouldn't have thought that i was taught much doctrine but it's kind of ingrained into you as a methodist uh certain arminian principles that human free will you know is all important so the idea of free will seemed important to me when i first became a christian the first time i ever heard of arminianism and calvinism was that night that i met with the pastor who baptized me and he he you know heard my testimony made sure i was genuinely saved and and then asked me do you have any questions and i said i just have one question that is this now that i'm a believer and i have eternal life do is there anything 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 he says we we teach that salvation is forever eternal life by definition is eternal he said but that's the old debate between calvinists and arminians and 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 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 and found this religious encyclopedia and looked up armenian and that didn't make any sense so i thought calvinism and i looked up calvinism and that's what showed me the proper spelling for arminian so i looked that up and read it and as i read the five points i thought well 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 and uh so when i went to moody by my second year as a christian there were a number of students there who were you know calvinists and you know how young calvin's college age calvinists are that's all they ever talk about and there was a group of these guys in my in the room next to me in the dorm who would hold court every night i was my interest was evangelism you know i'm like i was in church for 17 years before i heard the gospel people need to hear this so i was doing a lot of public evangelism street evangelism passing out tracks just encountering tourists on the street and giving them the gospel and and i love doing that and so these guys next to me they loved sitting around in the dorm room talking about the doctrines of grace there's a place for both you know but as a new christian i didn't think that was all that important i remember going into the room one night to borrow a pencil or something like that it was didn't go in there to be hostile but i realized you guys are sitting around here talking about predestination you know yeah it's important i said you know what if you all had come out evangelizing with us there'd be a whole lot more elect people so that's the kind of smart aleck i was you know as a new christian and they were very patient with me and explained you know and and through those years at moody i became more and more i mean you can't study the gospel of john and not see that jesus was a calvinist he kept he keeps saying calvinistic things in the gospel of john of all places and and um so uh yeah as he says to the disciples you didn't choose me i chose you and i'm like sounds like calvinism and and just gradually my defenses began the more i studied scripture just like that pastor had told me the more i studied scripture the more i would understand it and i did 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 you're dead in trespasses and sins and i had always thought for me the the real hurdle is limited atonement you know that's 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 and ephesians 2 but god raised you up and suddenly it became clear to me that it was god who initiated and accomplished my salvation none of it hinged on me that's the whole point of ephesians 2 and and by grace you save through faith that not of yourselves it's a gift of god and then it goes on to say even the good works you do were prepared beforehand by god that you should walk in them you can't get through a meaningful study of ephesians 2 and not understand that god is sovereign in salvation and somewhere in in at that point it was john sermons on ephesians 2 that made me suddenly realize everything i'd ever rejected about calvinism i really needed to study a second time and embrace it and so i began to read more puritan literature i wasn't even really a fan of spurgeon's at that point but spurgeon called calvinism the gospel he equated the two and was bold in his in his defense of calvin right he was and i don't think he means what some people today think he means when he says 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 what he's saying is that the truth that lies at the heart of calvinism salvation is of the 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 it doesn't mean that if you don't understand or embrace calvinism you haven't really believed the gospel he wasn't saying that because spurgeon was pretty clear he had arminian friends and and fellow ministers whom he respected and and he defended john wesley who was an arminian uh but i think he's right when he says by what he means 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 you have an almost ubiquitous presence online and twitter facebook you're hanging around in the wrong districts of the internet yeah the pyromaniacs blog etc and whenever john is attacked you always seem to be the only elder that anybody in in cyberland hears from you are the most virulent the most vocal the most out front of all the other elders at grace community church is that a role that is assigned to you or is that one no nobody's ever asked me to in fact i i i expect if you if we could get the elders of grace church here and pull 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 john himself might even say that so so no nobody's prompted me to do that or encouraged me to do but i i i i see and i was an early adopter on the internet i i was on the internet in 1995 before most people had ever heard of it and so i see how important it is and how much discussion goes on there and and seriously i do make an effort not to jump into every argument or whatever but when i see someone just relentlessly attacking a doctrine that i love or a person that i love and nobody's answering i can't i can't stifle myself i i will answer in many ways you have almost been the mouthpiece of the board of elders at grace community church don't don't say that at grace it'll probably kick me out at least that's it from the people in the cheap seats that's what it looks like it's yeah nobody nobody at grace wants me to happen i don't want that role frankly all right what what are your hobbies outside of grace community church and grace to you do i have any darlene i i my grandkids yeah that's about it my grandkids and that would be what you do to relax as well yeah i i'm a as when it comes to music i'm a listener i love classical music i love box cantatas stuff that nobody else listens to so i'll put on headphones and blast my ears with johan sebastian bach you know who was a lutheran but a lot of what he wrote was some of the greatest sacred music ever uh so i'm a music listener which doesn't get me any exercise i uh i i used to run uh yeah i used to run marathon distances 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 uh he asked me when we came up here to sit down are these steps normal height of steps because these seemed really hard to get up you need a banister for an old guy like me but no i ran justin can make it up here just fine i saw that i was ashamed when i realized how easy it was to the top yeah i know he did 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 yeah i ran and completed the first chicago marathon okay in fact i ran this marathon and uh and darlene was at the finish line waiting to hug me and give me a cup of water 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 yeah gotcha oh yeah long ago okay no i know i kept running for years but i injured my knee in this is something i'm really ashamed of i injured my knee in a t -ball game with my kids where they decided for some reason to let the parents bat once and i hit this slow roller that i didn't think i was gonna beat out 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 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 so i've had a knee with no um you know what do you call them things in it it's not nothing holding it together and it also broke a bunch of the cartilage off so this knee has needed to be replaced for about five years and i just don't have time to do it 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 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 well even 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 i have any new material to say i everything you're going to hear me say is already available in published works and there's so many of them uh you're going to hear a lot of things you've never heard before but that doesn't mean they haven't been published before just so much material out there on spurgeon that i'm 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 metropolitan tabernacle i've actually had the privilege of doing some of that uh i have i have photographs of the last letters spurgeon wrote to his congregation during the months before he died handwritten letters uh and they keep them in a file there at the met tab and uh they they let me have this file one evening to photograph it all i i've been this is something i don't boast about much but one of the my favorite accomplishments in life is i i was able to speak at the metropolitan tabernacle in london spurgeon's church about six times uh the pastor there um called me up out of the blue around the year 2000 or so and he had read an article i wrote on hyper calvinism and he said um this is the clearest best treatment of the subject i've seen and we want to put it in the sword in the trowel magazine that was the magazine spurgeon founded and do we have your could we get your permission to do that i said uh yeah and he said and while i got you on the phone he said we have this conference every summer called the school of theology uh and we usually bring up one speaker over from america 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 i said are you serious you know you know me okay and so he invited me over there and they liked me i guess because he invited me back six times and the last time i spoke there well i'll mention this in one of my things the last time i spoke there uh was in july of july 7th of night of 2005 or yeah 2005 which was the day terrorists blew up london underground exploded bombs on buses and it was a coordinated attack about several bombs throughout the city and those bombs went off while i was in the pulpit of spurgeon's church doing their summer conference 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 if you've ever been to london you know that that doesn't happen but the place was deserted for the next three days we were fortunate to get back home um but that was the last time i spoke there um they they they i told you that in my message that they don't allow musical instruments other than an organ they're very particular about music and worship music and what's appropriate to sing and what's not and uh 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 and he thought that's it i can't have him back to speak anymore so that was the last time yeah so i love the place and i love he's he's actually a great preacher um and uh you know he started pastoring that church the same year john mcarthur started at grace church so there's a parallel there and when when he started as pastor the 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 and uh so they they called him there to basically revive the church and he's he's done brilliantly the church now is standing room only every sunday and it's a great place the gospel is preached clearly there it's one of the few churches in the world he tells me there are others it's the only church i know of that has faithfully proclaimed the gospel for 350 years or longer wow and uh and it's never never drifted into liberalism or heresy it's as orthodox today as it was during spurgeon's time that's an amazing record for an inner city church uh and i love the place and i love the people there but we do have different ideas about what's appropriate in worship i have a book titled what's eating jonah and you did publish a booklet isn't it it's you did publish a book well i didn't publish it that was a series of sermons i preached and uh i did it in india during one of my summers there and uh grace to you has an office in india and our office staff there said can we can we publish these in our newsletter like serially so they took these messages and published one each month in their newsletter and lots of people were asking for permanent copies so they compiled them all in this little book uh and they said what do you want to title it and a friend of mine jokingly said you know jonah you should call it what's eating jonah so i said that's a great title actually 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 there are two major ones in india uh what's eating jonah and uh another book on the life and times of elijah it'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 you're both out of print i'm assuming i think so yeah and then um in italy i i taught in a seminary in italy for nearly a decade every year we'd go over and it was a marathon session a week long i would teach eight hours a day through all of systematic theology in a week and it would be translated into italian and um and i did some series over there i did one on the 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 so i books in italian books in india never published a book in the united states and i have no ambition to do so what is the retirement plan of phil johnson and john mcarthur you know if you said the word retirement to john he would probably take offense i don't think he has any intention of retiring uh he is he he is a fifth generation pastor and as far back as i've heard in his family his father his grandfather all of them preached right up until they died and i think john has every intention of doing that so assuming let's say john mcarthur dies next month who is going to take over grace community church there currently is no clear -cut plan i i i don't i don't know if there's anyone on staff who's stupid enough to do it because whoever steps into that role after john is going to you know find it very difficult to the expectations have been set pretty high uh so i don't know i i don't know and i just hope it doesn't happen i i think it's quite realized eventually it's going to happen i realize it will eventually happen but john's father uh was 90 years old when he died and he preached his last sermon a month before that so uh and john's stronger and better health i think than his dad was it's conceivable 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 he's 82 right now so if he lived to be 95 i would expect him as long as he's got his mind he always says look when i start making no sense pull me out of the pulpit you know tell me it's over because he says i'm not i won't know it and i'm not going to make that decision myself but uh but i have to say that the sermons he has preached in the past year and a half especially in the wake of the covid crisis and all that some of the best most memorable sermons he's ever produced and people are going to be listening to those if the 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 and it's similar pattern with john uh so if he goes on another decade i'll be pleased i i would like it you know if i don't have to be here when the question comes up who's who is going to take his place because you know i i just don't know i my vote at the moment if we had to pick a guy would be for mike riccardi but he's very young and uh you know he how many of you know who mike riccardi is if you listen to mike riccardi's messages yeah good number mike and phil co shepherd the large adult sunday school group at grace community church and mike is an excellent expositor a very good preacher um whatever happened to wretched for radio it was too wretched for too wretched for radio i don't uh well when we stopped doing it uh todd called it a hiatus uh he didn't say how long he expected it to be on hiatus but he was starting a new television broadcast the road trip to truth road trip to truth uh which has been wildly successful and taken a lot of his creative time and energies the podcast we did was was pretty labor intensive because we would record it on two mics me in california him in atlanta i 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 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 and um so it was labor intensive uh there was always the 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 going to talk about so i was always you know like really nervous if he asks me something and i get myself in trouble and fortunately that never really happened on a large scale so uh i loved it he loved it i think it may come back but it's totally up to him it's his product and uh his prerogative whether we do it again or not um he still we still talk all the time where he he texted me a series of texts yesterday uh and in fact i'm on the board of his ministry so we we still have a lot of interaction we just don't put it on the radio anymore or on the podcast uh which is kind of you know i miss it a little bit but it's also a big relief not to not to have to worry 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 took heard about the middle of the night and and the media and what happened with that yeah because this is an example i think of how the media have deliberately sort of stirred up anti -police sentiment he called me at 1 a .m

and said uh i've been in another shooting he 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 uh in a parking garage in long beach and it was such a grisly scene they they it was on the radio all day that day 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 uh he tried to change his bloody clothes by borrowing clothes from an uncle the uncle called and said he's up in this valley and the recall 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 but because it was all over the radio all morning that this guy he was eastern european white guy who had butchered his wife uh it was totally non -controversial it was a great thing you know so he calls me at 1 a .m

several months ago and said uh yeah 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 um i said what happened he said well this guy was brandishing a bayonet and aimed it at one of the police one of the female police officers 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 he was you know sort of guarding this guy and when this guy raised his rifle to shoot at a police officer he had to shoot so it's 1 a .m

and i thought okay how do i find out what's going on 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 and uh so i don't think i got back to sleep that night but at 4 a .m