the first time i read john macarthur

when i was a teenager i used to google “free christian stuff.”
i’d put my name in for anything - purity magazines, teen bibles, faithbook posters, those little “how to talk to your friends about jesus” pamphlets. if it was free and christian, i wanted it. mail made the world feel real when you live on an island.

one time i requested a free bible without realizing it was mormon, and a couple weeks later two sister missionaries actually showed up at our front door having travelled from the deep south to deliver it by hand and were asking for me by name.
i was mortifieddddd - but, i guess that’s what i get for handing my address to every christian website in 2000-whatever.

another time a plain envelope came from grace to you.
inside was a small paperback. in the first chapter, there was a line that burned itself in to my brain - something like:

“murderers, adulterers, the ungodly, women who preach, homosexuals.”

i wasn’t out yet, and i was already doing ministry stuff, so it didn’t hit like “he hates me," it was more like: oh. some people actually say it like that.
the paonl wasn’t affirming by any means, but it also wasn’t blunt. people got distanced and quietly erased. no one said it out loud.
so, seeing it in a real book from a well-known pastor made something click. this isn’t just a verse people politely dodge. it’s a whole school of thought, like, whole theologies are built on this.

later, in bible college caf debates - wesleyan vs baptist vs pentecostal and then the very reformed ones - i’d think about that line. it was the purest version of what they were saying, just without the nice-church tone. i’d already seen it in the wild, for free.

now the line functions as a marker. when someone says “we just believe in biblical truth,”
my brain goes: okay, which version? the “we love everyone” one, or the “murderers, adulterers, women who preach, homosexuals” one?
cause, i’ve seen the second one mailed to a 13-year-old.

1939–2025
john macarthur died.
the sentence didn’t.