By Jules Gomes, The Stream.
Jules Gomes pays tribute to the preacher who had a huge impact on his faith and ministry
I will forever be indebted and grateful to the two “Johns” who fostered in me a strong passion and a disciplined approach to biblical preaching.
One was the Reverend Dr. John Stott, an Anglican pastor in England who is celebrated as one of the greatest biblical expositors of the twentieth century. I was heartbroken when Uncle John, as we affectionately called him, died in 2011.
Uncle John’s book I Believe in Preaching revolutionized my pulpit ministry. It was on the top of my reading list for students when I taught homiletics at Protestant and Catholic seminaries. In the era of cassette tapes, my goal was to listen to every sermon Uncle John had preached.
I remember playing Uncle John’s sermon on tape as the climax of a homiletics course at a Catholic seminary in India. I will never forget the stunned response of the seminarians. “We’ve never heard preaching like this,” they told me. “Can you help us to preach like John Stott?”
But my students often acknowledged they weren’t really well acquainted with the Bible. “How do we get to know every book of the Bible?” they asked. My response was to recommend the other John — the American John — the Reverend Dr. John Fullerton MacArthur, Jr., who passed into glory yesterday at the age of 86.
MacArthur’s Ministry Goes Global
I was introduced to MacArthur’s voluminous output of sermons and books when I was a student at the Union Biblical Seminary in Pune, India. After graduating, I realized I still had a long way to go in exploring the Bible from Genesis to Revelation.