The following "Question" was asked by a member of the congregation at Grace Community Church in Panorama City, California, and "Answered" by their pastor, John MacArthur Jr. It was transcribed from the tape, GC 70-23, titled "Questions and Answers--Part 51."  A copy of the tape can be obtained by writing, Word of Grace, P.O. Box 4000, Panorama City, CA 91412 or by dialing toll free 1-800-55-GRACE. Copyright 2001 by John MacArthur Jr., All Rights Reserved.

Question

Answer

Well, I think by God’s design, the deeper my commitment to Christ, the better my family likes me. I mean, I’m a better husband, and a better father, and a better grandfather, and a better counselor, and a better spiritual guide and guardian, and a better servant, the more devoted I am to the Lord. So, I can’t compartmentalize my life. I can’t say, “I have to study and I have to preach” and I do that and then I go over here and try to act like a husband and go buy four books on how a husband should act. My role as a husband, my life as a husband, a father, or whatever it is…a friend…is nothing more than the spillover of my life before the Lord.

And so when it comes to ministry, it is much the same. When I say I don’t concern myself with the breadth, that means that I don’t spend my time and energies trying to extend the ministry, trying to get a bigger church. I’m not spending my time trying to figure out ways to advertise Grace Church or ways to build up Grace Church in the public image or ways to creatively draw crowds or get money or somehow reach more people. I never have worked hard to expand our radio into more stations and more stations and more. In fact, I haven’t given in my entire life an hour to that, collectively! My concern is always to do what I need to do to rightly handle, proclaim the Word of God, live out the Word of God, and make sure that the Word of God is rightly represented in the people that are around me.

It’s an old story and I talk to young people about this: if you occupy yourself with success, you will ultimately fail. If your goal is to succeed, you will fail. If your goal is to be excellent, you will ultimately succeed. I don’t care what you’re doing. If you’re working with wood, if all you want to do is succeed, you’ll ultimately fail. If what you want to do is produce something excellent, you will ultimately succeed. And that’s true spiritually.

My life is spent--all my energies for the most part are driven toward truth: understanding the truth, dealing with the truth, implementing the truth; evaluating people--to pull around me--people who have tremendous responsibility around me, and making sure they have the same level of commitment to the truth; making sure they stay sharp on the truth; making sure that I serve them, nurture them, help them, strengthen them, confront them if need be, though that’s a rare occasion (the same they do to me)--that’s what I mean by spiritual excellence. All my focus goes toward the Lord and toward the truth and being the man I need to be, the preacher I need to be, the friend I need to be, the husband I need to be, and what God does with that is really up to him.

But I have long ago learned that spiritual excellence is the goal, not success. I think I first started learning that when I was a football player. When I was a football player in my university days…football can be a very frustrating sport because you have to depend on other guys. It’s much easier to do something that you don’t have to depend on anybody else; you sort of rise and fall on your own merit, you know, like golf or something like that. There’s nobody but you. But in football, you’ve got these people and they can be very disappointing and it can be a very difficult situation.

I learned several things, however, playing football: I could never determine the outcome of a game. I could only determine my own effort. I could never tell you how the game would end. I could only control my own effort. And if I gave the maximum effort that I had within me, not only would I do everything I could do to win, but I would set a tone for everybody around me and hopefully pull them up. So even in those days when I was the captain (because God was already working in me leadership responsibility), I would try to do everything I could for the sake of doing all that I could alone, but also for the sake of saying, “Guys, this is how you play the game” and try to pull everybody to that level.

All we could do is make the maximum effort. We could never determine the outcome. And that was really good to learn that.

So my responsibility became to give the maximum effort myself so that that becomes the standard for everybody around me to follow, and if I ever diminished my effort, then they would find a reason to diminish theirs. And so, the consummate effort then becomes the standard that others around you see. When everybody gives that kind of effort, then you have to leave the ultimate success to God who determines outcomes--I don’t determine outcomes. I can only determine effort.

So does that kind of personally explain it? So for me it’s to be the best--to preach the best I can, to handle the Scripture the best I can, to provide for the people the best ministry I can, to provide around me the best leadership I can, and then let God take it where He wants to take it.

You know, the wonderful that you can bank on in this is that the Lord’s Word never returns void, but it always accomplishes what He intends it to accomplish and I am convinced that He honors his Word. I am convinced that if you’re faithful to the proclamation of his Word, He’ll take it places where you never expected it to go and, I mean, I am just boggled by what happens every single day. I got a letter I think three days ago from a guy in England who is a pedophile, the grossest of all humans in some ways, who wrote me to tell me he was converted and delivered from this through listening to me preach on the radio. I’ll never meet this guy this side of heaven. All his friends are in prison--they were all arrested--and he somehow missed being arrested. He couldn’t give up his pornography on his own. He had so much pornography--he had more pornography in his home, he said, than I think anybody in history, in England, contributing to this stuff. He never could stay off of it until somehow he was smitten with a disease related to his sexual deviancy that made him blind. Then he wrote to tell me how the Lord had saved him and he wanted to thank me for the radio ministry that goes out of London.

Well, I can’t control that! I mean, I have absolutely no control over that. But what I can control is what I preach. He responded to my sermon on Psalm 107, in which I told the story of a guy in our own congregation, Robert Lagerstrom, who was one of the leaders in the Gay Pride community in L.A. who was converted here on a Sunday when I read Psalm 107 and baptized right here. I told the story on that tape and I explained the Psalm in relation to how God could deliver people from these horrible things.

I mean, that’s just an illustration. That’s like the last couple of days, but that comes regularly. Again, I see time after time, day after day, the work of the Word and so I know that where I want to spend my life is in the Word. That’s why it’s so ridiculous for anybody in the ministry to do anything else. All these pastors that work real hard to be big and successful miss the point; in the end, they fail--in the end, on the spiritual level, they fail. It’s the depth that God wants and He’ll take care of the breadth.

Added to Bible Bulletin Board's "MacArthur’s Questions and Answers" by:

Tony Capoccia
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