John MacArthur: Servant of the Word and Flock by Ian Murray

I have listened to John MacArthur through his Grace To You radio and internet broadcasts for years, so when I received this book from Grace To You I was intrigued to learn a little more about the man behind the preaching.

This book was not hard to read, and took me very little time to get through, but for the most part the book left me sort of empty as a response. The writing seemed a bit disjointed and disconnected from the subject. We learn very little about the man, and the author spends more time discussing certain sermons that John MacArthur has preached, or topics from Christianity that John has spent his ministry preaching on.

To me this seemed more like a contrived work, where a fan is given very limited access to the subject, and in essence, is handed a file of public records, and left to his own devices in how to contrive the story. Perhaps the most interesting part of the book for me was the account of John MacArthur's trip to Southeast Asia. Details from India are rather interesting, but I came out of that account thinking that here were some spoiled Americans who were too spoiled in their ways to reach the people of India.

If you are trying to get a deeper sense of what drives John MacArthur, and to understand his ministry at the core, I don't feel I really received that here, as everything was left very sanitized, and kept at arms length. But perhaps that was intentional from the subjects perspective.

I am left to ponder whether John MacArthur's approach to ministry is what Jesus Christ had in mind for us here on earth. Stay in one place for your entire life, and never leave a 10 square mile stretch of land from where you were born. Granted, the author is careful to emphasize how MacArthur's radio ministry has touched millions of lives throughout the world. Perhaps that tells us all we need to know about how John MacArthur is being used by Christ in this lifetime.

Unfortunately, unlike the New Testament account of the life of Jesus Christ, we don't see the blood, sweat and tears of John MacArthur's life written about here.