JM: Internet Photo

When you are young, “on fire” for the Lord, and passionately “in love,” zeal accompanies you almost everywhere.

That was me around 2013!

I had been part of a church that started well, but spiritually spiraled. We are talking about overnights that turned into identifying “cat spirits” and demon exorcisms that went on all week long, as if Jesus’s sacrifice never meant anything; church members that changed names because they considered their family names associated with curses; and tongue speaking that left many feeling inferior among the redeemed (or did they know they’d been?)

A part of me had long been disturbed by this phenomenon but couldn’t put a finger on what was wrong. After all, questioning spiritual things would quickly get you identified with a “spirit of rebellion.”

So I badly needed a biblical voice, and you don’t want to know how I felt when I landed on an older man who spoke of the sufficient Bible for “everything pertaining to godliness.” (2 Pet 1:3) With such veracity he explained the finished work of Christ in ways no threats of generational curses intimidated anymore. His name was John MacArthur.

A missionary friend had invited me to their home to take it all in. I did, without retreat! With each verse he exegeted, decades of fear-based animalistic teaching fell off me like dandruff!

In his landmark series Charismatic Chaos (as if to immediately throw me in the deep end), John unleashed Biblical explanations on almost every page of the New Testament, expositing how the complete work of Christ was enough for a believer in ways that satisfied beyond fears of curses, water spirits, spirit husbands, and the entire dangerous spectrum of deliverance theology.

John often spoke unapologetically and gave me terminology to understand the euphoria I often observed in church. and yet often felt eerie about, yet couldn’t summon biblical courage to assert and help other timid souls escape, including myself.

Can a Christian be cursed? Need you worry about your parents’ witchcraft? Who is a pastor? What is prophecy? John specifically pointed at the mushrooming excesses of the charismatic movement and how they contradicted the biblical understanding of salvation by faith alone, through faith alone, as the Bible alone teaches.

By God’s grace, I was concurrently smitten. because I knew the woman I wanted to marry needed to have this part of her spirituality sorted too. We worked on that together, thanks to John’s take-no-prisoner teaching.

So for the weeks my 2012 girlfriend (now wife) didn’t make it for the ‘deep end’ teachings, Rhionah often walked back into her Complex Hall room to find full manuscripts delivered by yours truly of vested interests. Perhaps in the spirit of “being equally “yoked”—perhaps. I’d neatly slid them under her door.

Rhionah and I are still living in the world John spoke into with such fierceness and clarity 10 years ago, with many we know still caught in the enslaving shallows of deliverance theology and “easy believism” (another word John taught me).

Event after event, man-centered teachings and prosperity messaging sway young believers into experiences that have nothing to do with biblical truth, and the rise of self-styled apostles and prophets we are still counting, too. The discipleship task looms. Not to mention faith healers who hobnob with the politically powerful to hoodwink the masses. Just like in Jeremiah’s time, “healing the wounds of the people lightly.” (Jer 6:14)

Wounded, yet Spirit-bought people still walk into our churches every day, and we just offer lights, cameras, and theories instead of the word explained in its context. Soon we wonder why we are 80 percent Christian, yet still rank on global corruption indexes.

This is the world John has left us. For decades, he, albeit imperfectly, tried to speak God’s truth into it; now the onus is on us to run in our lanes with such courage and fierceness for the sake of God’s word that remains when the “grass withers and the flowers fall.” (Isaiah 40:8)

You ran your fierce race, John. Now. Lord, help us clarify ours.