This year, four remarkable men passed away — John MacArthur, Voddie Baucham, James Dobson, and Charlie Kirk. A bold expository preacher, MacArthur defended the Lordship of Christ and the true Gospel for 56 years, refusing to close his church during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Baucham, another lion in the pulpit, championed Scripture’s teaching on the sufficiency of scripture, the centrality of the church, social justice, male headship, family-integrated churches, and much more. Dobson called Christians to prioritize and protect their family life. And Kirk — martyred at 31 — fearlessly proclaimed his faith on college campuses, urging young people to reject the world’s lies and embrace biblical manhood and womanhood. With their passing, the work now falls on us to continue. 

Thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. You know, for about 25 years we've really been calling for a revolution, a revolution of family life, a revolution of church life to return to biblical order in the church, in the family. And I remember, you know, I stood up at our national conference in 2009 on the sufficiency of Scripture, and I said, look, we believe we're in a time of emergency. And in times of emergency, it's no time to be timid. And so we still believe that for sure.

Our mission remains the same, but it's still a time of emergency. Right. And there were four remarkable men whose lives ended. They were in many ways revolutionaries. And they're not men who happened on the scene, people who embraced the doctrine of the sovereignty of God don't think anybody happens upon the scene.

These were men that God raised up for a particular purpose, to serve the people of God in their generation. Yeah, we're going to talk about four men. And the first is James Dobson. I had a front row seat on James Dobson because I was a young man in the 1970s when he was in his heyday 70s and 80s in Southern California. His broadcast focused on the family was really one of the first definitive calls for families to be families.

And we think he was a significant stepping stone to where we are today. Yeah, the whole purpose of his ministry was to get Christians to rethink family life and to prioritize it in ways in which it was being neglected and he wanted it prioritized. And so he spent his life advocating for that. Yeah, and he just died this year. Yeah, What a loss.

He was also very politically active and really fomented loss of political awareness in the United States. So, but John MacArthur, how about John MacArthur? What a Statesman, what a hero in the church. I remember reading his books. You think about Expository Preaching, his book that he wrote.

I mean, he and R.C. Sproul and Ray Steadman and others really launched a revolution in the Church of Expository Preaching. It was much, much needed. He writes this book, Ashamed of the Gospel, that shook up a lot of people. He fought so many battles.

He fought the Lordship battle, he fought strange fire, he was a warrior. Yes, I was in prep for this. I was looking up how long he had been a pastor. He became a pastor of Grace Community in 1969, pastored for 56 years. I'm 55.

That means until recently, I had never been on planet earth when John MacArthur wasn't a pastor in grace community. And that he held the line theologically and held as tenaciously to the Bible in year 56 as he did in year one in that environment is just marvelous, miraculous. Yeah. Yeah, I remember hearing him in our seminary chapel at Talbot Seminary. We went to the same seminary.

He was 15 years or 14 years ahead of me. But what a remarkable voice. You know, his battling it out during COVID was so inspiring. John MacArthur was fighting big battles, Even all the way to the latest years of his life, here's a clip of an interview that he undertook about their position on COVID. And I understand the city issued a cease and desist order and threatened the church with a daily $1, 000 fine and possible arrest.

Can you explain why you believe it's important to take the stand? What's at stake here? Well what's at stake first of all is the reality that Christ is the head of the church. Is this anything new? Don't we as believers make heroes out of people who stood against tyrants throughout church history?

This started in the book of Acts when they told the apostles not to preach. And the apostles said, you judge whether we obey God or men. That should be obvious to you. So this is nothing new for the church. It's new in our country.

Faithful churches, faithful pastors, have always realized Jesus Christ is Lord and head of his church. We follow him. Wonderfully, the Constitution allows us that privilege and demands that our leaders protect that privilege. I think we need to remember that John MacArthur fought the last battle of his life in his eighties And he rose up like a lion, and then he died just a few years later. That is vintage John MacArthur, the words of scripture on his lips.

It didn't matter to him that he was on national television. He was quoting the book of Acts. And really the legacy of his ministry is the legacy of the sufficiency of scripture. So he had a very broad ministry in that way. We're sort of more focused on a single category, but really to us, it's the same matter, only focused on church and family life, but the sufficiency of Scripture.

I know you and I both feel like we're standing on his shoulders and sort of carrying that overriding banner into this specific category. Yeah, because everything that the Bible says about the church and the family is an expositional matter and John MacArthur was fearless. It seemed like he didn't really care what people thought. He really cared what the Bible said and he wasn't embarrassed about it. What a blessing as an example for all of us.

Yeah, he was an amazing content generating machine. You pointed out a few of his most popular books in your favorites, but he wrote over 150 books. And so he was a tremendously fruitful minister. Yeah. Yeah.

You know also too very near the end of his life he was fighting the social justice movement in evangelicalism. The gospel is not finding a need and fixing it. The Gospel is not solving a social problem. The Gospel is not social justice. That's not the Gospel.

The Gospel is we're all headed to eternal punishment in hell, conscious punishment out of the presence of God forever. But God has provided a rescue through the death and resurrection of his son, Jesus Christ. You're not talking about the gospel. You're talking about sin, repentance, Jesus Christ dying, rising again, and faith in Him. That's the gospel.

It's very easy to pile stuff on top of the gospel and then even eliminate the real gospel. I love that about John MacArthur. He believed in a simple gospel, and the gospel is simple, and he waged war against confusing potential implications of the gospel with the gospel itself. What was so beautiful about John MacArthur was his steady, consistent reliance on the Word of God. What an inspiring man he was.

Amen to that. And his legacy is not over, but boy, we sure miss him. For sure. Also, we miss Vodi Bakum. Vodi Bakum, one of the most powerful preachers ever.

I remember Page Patterson told me, probably in 2000, maybe 1999, he told me that Vodou Bakham was gonna be the greatest preacher in the Southern Baptist Convention. And I think that proved out to be true, but he was resolute. There was zero ambiguity in his preaching. So unusual. There was so much to appreciate about his preaching.

Yeah. Just the way he went about things and his personal identity allowed him to touch sacred cows in ways that other people either wouldn't or couldn't. And especially in the category of race, He was able to sort of critique things in the black community that others couldn't critique. But he was merciless on things that he saw that aren't right and needed to be addressed. And he was unafraid to address them.

Everywhere I go in America or beyond, people tell me about Family Driven Faith, the book that he wrote. There are two chapters in here on family integrated churches. He spread the message, the true message of family integrated churches more than anybody, I think, in the world. But he was such a defender of the faith. He wrote that book on what he must be really caused fathers to rethink how they were dealing with their daughters.

He wrote that book Fault Lines out of the social justice movement. But he was able to wisely position himself really on the front lines of the cultural conflict. Scott, one of the things he's best known for is establishing that the Bible is actually the revelation of truth from God in heaven, that the actual author of the Bible is God himself. And so here's a clip about that. It happened just like you said it would happen.

We're there in class. It was a biology class. They're bringing up something. They're talking about some evolutionary stuff. And I just, I don't know, next thing I knew, my hand was in the air, and I said something.

And he goes, well, you know, why do you object to this? And I said, the Bible. And, you know, she goes, I knew it didn't happen, but I could see him salivating in my mind, just like you said, you know. His eyes just got all big, and then he just questioned me, you know, why do you believe the Bible? And so I just gave him the answer that she gave.

So she looked at a professor and she said, I choose to believe the Bible because it's a reliable collection of historical documents written by eyewitnesses during the lifetime of other eyewitnesses. They report supernatural events that took place in fulfillment of specific prophecies and claim that their writings are divine rather than human in origin. And so the professor said, I'll have to get back to you. Yeah, that's classic. You know, Vody was a defender of sola scriptura.

He was a defender of expository preaching. He was a defender of family discipleship. He was a defender of homeschooling. He was a defender of male headship in the home and in the church. He was a defender of family-integrated churches.

He was a defender of life. He went to all kinds of meetings and spoke very clearly about the problem of abortion. And he was a defender of historic confessional Christianity. Praise God for Vodi Bakum. Absolutely.

One of the things you see in that clip is He's got a great sense of humor. He used that in his preaching. Now, sometimes when preachers use their sense of humor, it makes their preaching light, but no one would ever accuse Vody of that. His preaching wasn't light at all. It was very substantive.

And he actually used humor to make a point, just like in that clip. And so nobody could drive home a point like Bodhi. Humor with a hammer blow. That's exactly right. Yeah, absolutely.

He was so uncompromising and so inspiring. He was a little bit like George Whitefield. People envied the way he would say things. You know, who is that actor who said, if I could only say the word oh, like George Whitefield. I think a lot of us thought, If we could only talk like Vodi Bakum, you know, we could actually get through to people.

The world would be a better place. Yeah, that's right. Here's a young Vodi. You know, it's interesting. Family is almost a forgotten concept in our culture.

It's been so devalued in our culture. A lot of people are upset about the gay marriage debate and about the, you know, the civil unions debate. When the fact of the matter is, this is merely a progression. We have so devalued family that this is just a logical next step. Family has virtually no meaning in our culture anymore, and people don't know how to talk about family, let alone to operate within the context of a family.

We're not raising young men who desire to be husbands. We're not raising young women who desire to be wives or mothers. We're not raising young women at all. We're just raising men who happen to be biologically capable of having children basically when it comes to our young girls. And so when you are raising a culture who doesn't understand what family is, who doesn't see the family as a meaningful goal, it makes sense that we would then have young couples and young parents who have very little idea what it means to fill these roles.

Well, now we're beginning to see the fruit of it. And we're seeing 70 to 88% of our young people walk away from the faith by the end of their freshman year in college, you know, those who are raising Christian homes, and people are turning around and they're shaking their fist and they're saying, why? Well, because we dropped the ball on the most foundational and fundamental institution that God has given us. When we're wrong on family, we'll be wrong on the church. We'll be wrong on the government.

We'll be wrong in general. And so we've seen a systemic breakdown at the most fundamental and foundational level. And that's why there's a need for this seismic shift in the area of family. So that was young Vody, but older Vody didn't sound any different. In other words, that is a core message that he championed as long as he was a minister and a public preacher.

Yeah, that was probably around the time that I met him right there. But just think about how clear he was to put his finger in the wound of America, a broken family, and then you get a broken church, and then you get a broken church and then you get a broken nation. And in that clip he actually says a number of very controversial things, but he says it in the votey way. And so, votey was good at taking on touchy topics and just speaking with a clarity that sort of debarbed them in a way. Yeah and make your jaw drop and say what have we been doing?

Yeah. Yeah and so Jason there was a very very young revolutionary voice that we lost this year, Charlie Kirk. Oh, he was a revolutionary for sure. Yeah, and he was saying things that a lot of us have been saying for many, many years, but he said them so clearly, so well. But he said them on college campuses where you're not allowed to say any of it.

Yeah, that's amazing. So he's a martyr. He's not just a person who was murdered. He was murdered for distinctively Christian beliefs that are things that we embraced. And if you're going to kill people for believing those things, we would have to be in the sights of those guns too.

And so, why did he die? He died for those Christian beliefs. He wasn't afraid to name names and identify institutions that were corrupting America. Like this book that he wrote, The College Scam, How America's Universities Are Bankrupting and Brainwashing Away the Future of America's Youth. Well, that's no way to get on the good side of the liberal movement in America.

But he spoke on manhood, womanhood, having children. Music, the woke revolution, he was a lot like Vodi Bakham in that sense, except he did it just in a little bit different way. Yeah. He was in a different stream of theology and would think different about church practice than the things that we're advancing. So in that way, he's different than John MacArthur and Vodi Bakham, but there are many things to appreciate about the things that he spent his few years doing.

He was a man who would actually go on college campus and defend homeschooling. Here's a clip of that. What do you say to those that are against homeschooling? Well, They can apply for a job from you in ten years from now. You're going to be more polite, smarter, wiser, happier, More direction, more purpose, less corrupted, more understanding, more battle-ready, better prepared, less confused, more biblical, more grounded, more Christ-like.

If you are homeschooling, homeschool your kids. If you can, homeschool your kids. If they're scorning you or they're saying bad things to you, blessed are you who are persecuted in my name, it says James 1 5. So I'm a big fan of homeschooling. By the way, it used to be all the homeschool kids were quote-unquote weird.

No, no, no. The homeschool kids are wise. The homeschool kids, they're going to be the ones that are going to be running the society. My money's on the homeschool kids. Yeah, so who's saying things like that to the masses?

Who's saying things like that to the political rulers of our society. Charlie Kirk was unafraid to say it. That is the opposite of preaching to the choir. Right. He was also waging war against the feminist movement, really perhaps one of the most dangerous things that's ever happened in American history and really is destroying the basic fabric of authority in in our land But check this clip the biggest thing is this more young women need to get married at a younger age and start having kids.

The single woman issue is one of the biggest issues faced in the civilization. We have more single women in the early 30s that are the most depressed, suicidal, anxious, lonely in America's history because there's a biological clock that's going off and they realize that they're not going to be able to have kids and that they're not as desirable in the dating market or in the dating pool. And so they start to lash out on the rest of society. Project the siren song of modernity and have lots of kids. It's okay to be a stay-at-home mom.

In fact, we need a lot of stay-at-home moms. And a lot of women want to be stay-at-home moms, and we have miserable women because we've been shuffling them into a corporate wasteland when in reality a lot of them don't find a lot of passion or fulfillment in that line of work. And who can blame them? Scott, think of who he's talking to there. He's talking to at least 50% of the audience are women who are on the front end of the delusion.

What do I mean by that? They're in a place where promises are being made to them that will never be kept. And they're believing those promises. And he's coming to contradict that and say, 10 years from now, so many of you are going to find that the things that were told to you are simply not true, and you're completely not fulfilled by them, and you're wishing you had gone down another track. Hey, this is what we need is people in our lives who will tell us 10 years earlier, you're on a track that's not taking you where you think it's taking you.

Absolutely. Absolutely. So these four revolutionaries, James Dobson, John MacArthur, Voti Bakum, and Charlie Kirk, well, here's the deal. The revolution is not over. And it really falls to the rest of us to keep pressing on the most critical matters that face our society.

And we are, we, from the beginning, we've been calling for a revolution, and we don't wanna move the needle 10 degrees, we wanna move it 100 degrees. And because the revolution that's necessary in the church and the family is so critical. You know, we're getting ready to publish a book that has never been published before, Family Religion Revived by Philip Goodwin. That's not going to be the title. But here's what he says.

Little of Christ will survive in public if Christianity is suffocated in homes. And so we don't think the revolution is over for the reforming of church and family life. And that's what we're dedicating ourselves to in the coming years. Scott, on the 10 degrees. So I mean, I think you and I both thank God for this.

Your efforts, our efforts have moved the dial 10 degrees. Things are different now than they were. People are thinking differently about segregating the ages. People are thinking differently about the pitfalls of youth ministry. One consequence of that is that in some ways we've been invited into polite society, meaning people don't rage against us like they used to rage against us 20 years ago.

Hey, we don't want to be content with that. We don't want to stop at 10 degrees. We want to put the pedal down and see not a tweak, but a revolution, because we're still both convinced that things are not well in the modern American church. Far from well, and things are still urgent. Yeah, but I will tell you one thing that is so encouraging right now.

Who are the men who are planting family-integrated churches? It's young pastors. They're in their 30s. They're in their 40s. Who are the voices that are really calling for a true return to the full-orbed structure of manhood and womanhood in the church and home and in the civil government.

It's young pastors. Who's calling out the woke movement of our times? It's young pastors. And they're going far beyond the compromises of the early century. So I'm really thankful for that.

I've never seen so many of them. And like, you know, we're being invited all over this country to just teach people how to be married and how to raise their kids. That's because you have a younger generation that's hungry, hungry to walk in the ways of the Lord. Yeah, praise the Lord for that. That's a quiet revolution.

That's a quiet revolution. And thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. Hey, please come and meet us at our national conference, May 7 through 9, Ridgecrest, North Carolina. We have a pre-conference for pastors, a pre-conference for singles, and also one of the things we're going to add into this conference is a really neat luncheon for women during that conference. Hope to see you there at Ridgecrest.

Found this resource helpful, we encourage you to check out ChurchandFamilyLife.com.