“So I’ve been reading [in] Hebrews 3 and 4 that I need to enter into rest, and I’m willing to rest as long as the Lord will let me rest,” MacArthur said. “But in my heart, I want to be here. I want to continue to serve you and serve the Lord as long as I can.”
MacArthur predicted that he would be ready to preach in four to six weeks.
John MacArthur Discusses Steven Lawson’s Moral Failure
Busenitz asked MacArthur how GCC can process and move past an “adversity that comes from inside the church when people that we respect and trust turn out to be different than we thought they were, or at least than they profess to be?”
“I know you’re talking about Steve Lawson, and I say that with the deepest agony in my soul,” MacArthur responded. “The first thing you have to understand is [that] God is blessing this church in many, many ways. And that is one of the ways he is blessing us: to expose someone who is in a position they have no right to be in to purify the church.”
“It is fatal to a church to have that kind of behavior in leadership, and while none of us knew it or expected it because of the soundness of the theology, the Lord knew,” MacArthur continued, “and the Lord said, ‘For Grace Church, that’s enough. For the Master’s Seminary, that’s enough.'”
MacArthur said he believes God is exposing “unfaithful leaders” like Lawson and Robert Morris because God has had “enough.”
“And while we would wish that it had never happened to us,” MacArthur explained, “we would be foolish to think that there wouldn’t be an effort made by the enemy to plant in this church someone who could have a corrupting influence while apparently having a positive influence. That’s the subtlety of Satan.”
“You know, as we get closer to the end, I think the Lord is purifying his church, and I’m so thankful for that,” MacArthur said. “My heart and soul aches for Steve, obviously, a friend.” MacArthur said that he still loves Lawson as he has “loved him for 25 years.”
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MacArthur said that he doesn’t know how Lawson “preached past [his] conscience unless it’s completely scarred over…I pray constantly, in fact, I find myself almost every night praying for him in some point in the middle of the night.”
“Sometimes, we know the sin and we can deal with it,” MacArthur said, but other times, “we don’t know the sin, and the Lord has to bring it out. But while my heart is crushed for the sinner, it is grateful for the Savior who is purifying his church.”
Correction: A previous version of this article said that Sunday was Oct. 21, instead of Oct. 20.
