I had a massive pulmonary embolism just over a month ago at the pulpit. Perhaps 1 in 3 people don’t survive such a thing, especially when it is as severe as mine. I had multiple blood clots filling both lungs. I am very grateful to God to be alive and am very conscious of your love and prayers. The Lord is sustaining me. THANK YOU for your continued prayers as I make good but slow progress in my recovery. The main doctor overseeing other specialists I am seeing has said that he doesn’t need to meet with me until early July and he is very happy with the progress I am making. Of course, my full recovery cannot happen soon enough for me but I need to learn patience in this season. Truly, my times are in His hands.
My body has been through great trauma and all advice is to rest. I am doing that. I appreciate you all so very much and miss you terribly.
I hope to see you, my precious King’s Church family in the very near future in the Lord’s timing and providence. Press on brothers and sisters!
“Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth.” – 2 Timothy 2:15 KJV
Fling him into his office, tear the office sign from the door and nail up a sign, “Study.”
Take him off the mailing list. Lock him up with his books and his Bible. Slam him down on his knees before texts and broken hearts and the lives of a superficial flock and a holy God. Force him to be the one man in the community who knows about God. Throw him into the ring to box with God until he learns how short his arms are. Engage him to wrestle with God all night long and let him come out only when he’s bruised and beaten into being a blessing.
Shut his mouth forever spouting remarks. Stop his tongue forever tripping lightly over every nonessential. Require him to have something to say before he dares break the silence and bend his knees in the lonesome valley of suffering. Burn his eyes with weary study. Wreck his emotional poise with worry over his life before God. Make him exchange his pious stance for a humble walk with God and man. Make him spend and be spent for the glory of God. Rip out his telephone. Burn up his ecclesiastical success sheets.
Put water in his gas tank. Give him a Bible and tie him to the pulpit and make him preach the Word of the Living God. Test him. Quiz him. Examine him. Humiliate him for his ignorance of things divine. Shame him for his good comprehension of finances, game scores and politics. Laugh at his frustrated effort to play psychiatrist. Form a choir and raise a chant and haunt him with it night and day. Sir, we would see Jesus. And when, at last, he does enter the pulpit, ask him if he has a Word from God. If he doesn’t, then dismiss him.
Tell him you can read the morning paper. You can digest the television commentaries. You can think through the day’s superficial problems. You can manage the community’s weary fund drives. You can bless the sordid baked potatoes and green beans, ad infinitum, better than he can. Command him not to come back until he’s read and reread, written and rewritten, until he can stand up worn and forlorn and say, “Thus says the Lord.”
Break him across the board of his ill-gotten popularity. Smack him hard with his own prestige. Corner him with questions about God. Cover him with
demands for celestial wisdom and give him no escape until he’s back against the wall of the Word.
Sit down before him and listen to the only word he has left, God’s Word. Let him be totally ignorant of the down-street gossip, but give him a chapter, and order him to walk around it, camp on it, sup with it, and come at last to speak it backward and forward until all he says rings with the truth of eternity.
And when he’s burned out by the flaming Word, when he’s consumed at last by the fiery grace blazing through him, when he’s privileged to translate that truth of God to man and finally transferred from earth to Heaven, then bear him away gently, and blow a muted trumpet, and lay him down softly and place a two-edged sword on his coffin, and raise the tomb triumphant, for he was a brave soldier of the Word. And ere he died, he had become a man of God.
– Dr. John MacArthur
The Pastor in the Pulpit
“I charge thee therefore before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom; Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all long suffering and doctrine.” – 2 Timothy 4:1,2 KJV
“I call you this day to wield the sword, to hold forth the mirror, to scatter the seed, to serve the milk, to hold up the lamp, to spread the flame, to swing the hammer, to stop with the secular wisdom in the pulpit, cancel the entertainment in the church, and fire the drama team. Get rid of the silliness, unplug the colored lights, put the pulpit back in the center of the building, stand up like a man, open the Bible, lift it up, let it out, and let it fly. It is the invincible power of the inerrant Word.”
Last week, Wednesday, to be specific, out of nowhere, the right side of my face started hurting. Within a couple of hours, the pain level out of a possible zero being no pain to 10 being severe pain was indeed a 10. I knew something was very wrong when I looked in the mirror and saw huge swelling on the right side of my face. I couldn’t open my mouth at all. My jaw was locked and closed. I needed help and fast.
To cut a long story short, by Thursday I was visiting, two different dental facilities, and in the second was immediately told to go to the Emergency Room at a hospital as my life was in danger.
I had a CT scan. I was told I’d wait 45 minutes to an hour for the results. Actually, it took 16 hours to get the results and I was told the news that it was not an infection, but that I had a fast-growing mass on the right side of my face. Of course, I was shocked and stunned. It was clear I could easily be facing death unless this spreading mass was halted in its tracks.
Whether or not the mass was benign or cancerous, it was obviously taking over the entire right side of my face. How long would I have to live? Did I have even days to live before this took over completely? I had no idea.
I was then sent by ambulance to another hospital in downtown Phoenix where they have specialists for ear, nose, and throat issues. You can only imagine the thoughts racing through my head, especially as it was not yet determined what kind of mass it was.
I then waited a further 16 hours or so before a second doctor emerged, who had analyzed the same CT scan the other hospital radiologist and doctor had seen. He said that he disagreed with the first doctor’s view and in light of my symptoms and after taking further tests, told me I did not have a mass. He said it is a highly dangerous infection but that it was caught early. He said, “As you continue with the antibiotic treatment, I expect you to be here no longer than two or three days and out of here.”
What a relief! For more than 24 hours I thought I could be living my last few days in this world.
Brothers and sisters, it’s been quite a ride, as you might imagine, but I am home from the hospital and God willing, on the road to recovery. In total, there will be 10 days of antibiotic treatment and management for the pain.
I still have obvious swelling on the right side of my face and am in some pain as I write this. My jaw is open now enough for me to eat solid food, though it is far from normal. I still cannot open it fully. I am physically exhausted. So too is my precious wife Linda. Please pray for us. It has been very hard for her in all this as well.
I am in need of rest. The infection is still there, but hopefully over time it’s coming more and more under control.
I’m very hopeful of having the facial swelling, which is still there, come down. It’s come down some and I’m hoping it will come back to normal.
I love you very much precious brothers and sisters. Lord willing, I’ll be back in the pulpit very soon.
I thank the Lord for His great mercy to me. I am also very keenly aware of your love and prayers and thank you from the bottom of my heart. Linda and I continue to covet your continued prayers for us.
We never walk alone with our family in Christ.
In the love of the Lord Jesus,
John Samson
Psalm 118:17 – I shall not die, but I shall live, and recount the deeds of the LORD.18 The LORD has disciplined me severely, but he has not given me over to death.
Roman Catholicism has a gospel that does not give peace, because it fundamentally violates the Scriptural teaching on how one is made right with God. Rome has a false gospel that cannot save, hence, I have no reason to abandon the peace I have with God through Christ’s perfect atonement for the treadmill of Rome’s sacramental system of salvation… the person who has embraced the gospel of grace has not only landed his boat on the far side [of the Tiber River], but has torn the boat apart to use the wood as a pulpit from which to proclaim freedom in Christ to those trapped on the other shore. – Dr. James White
At his blog at www.aomin.org, Dr. White also writes:
Last week I received the following e-mail, and I felt it would be best to share my response here on the blog.
Dear Mr. White, For someone considering converting to Catholicism, what questions would you put to them in order to discern whether or not they have examined their situation sufficiently? Say, a Top 10 list. Thanks.
TOP TEN LIST
When I posted this question in our chat channel a number of folks commented that it was in fact a great question, and we started to throw out some possible answers. Here is my “Top Ten List” in response to this fine inquiry.
10. Have you listened to both sides? That is, have you done more than read Rome Sweet Home and listen to a few emotion-tugging conversion stories? Have you actually taken the time to find sound, serious responses to Rome’s claims, those offered by writers ever since the Reformation, such as Goode, Whitaker, Salmon, and modern writers? I specifically exclude from this list anything by Jack Chick and Dave Hunt.
9. Have you read an objective history of the early church? I refer to one that would explain the great diversity of viewpoints to be found in the writings of the first centuries, and that accurately explains the controversies, struggles, successes and failures of those early believers?
8. Have you looked carefully at the claims of Rome in a historical light, specifically, have you examined her claims regarding the “unanimous consent” of the Fathers, and all the evidence that exists that stands contrary not only to the universal claims of the Papacy but especially to the concept of Papal Infallibility? How do you explain, consistently, the history of the early church in light of modern claims made by Rome? How do you explain such things as the Pornocracy and the Babylonian Captivity of the Church without assuming the truthfulness of the very system you are embracing?
7. Have you applied the same standards to the testing of Rome’s ultimate claims of authority that Roman Catholic apologists use to attack sola scriptura? How do you explain the fact that Rome’s answers to her own objections are circular? For example, if she claims you need the Church to establish an infallible canon, how does that actually answer the question, since you now have to ask how Rome comes to have this infallible knowledge. Or if it is argued that sola scriptura produces anarchy, why doesn’t Rome’s magisterium produce unanimity and harmony? And if someone claims there are 33,000 denominations due to sola scriptura, since that outrageous number has been debunked repeatedly (see Eric Svendsen’s Upon This Slippery Rock for full documentation), have you asked them why they are so dishonest and sloppy with their research?
6. Have you read the Papal Syllabus of Errors and Indulgentiarum Doctrina? Can anyone read the description of grace found in the latter document and pretend for even a moment that is the doctrine of grace Paul taught to the Romans?
5. Have you seriously considered the ramifications of Rome’s doctrine of sin, forgiveness, eternal and temporal punishments, purgatory, the treasury of merit, transubstantiation, sacramental priesthood, and indulgences? Have you seriously worked through compelling and relevant biblical texts like Ephesians 2, Romans 3-5, Galatians 1-2, Hebrews 7-10 and all of John 6, in light of Roman teaching?
4. Have you pondered what it means to embrace a system that teaches you can approach the sacrifice of Christ thousands of times in your life and yet you can die impure, and, in fact, even die an enemy of God, though you came to the cross over and over again? And have you pondered what it means that though the historical teachings of Rome on these issues are easily identifiable, the vast majority of Roman Catholics today, including priests, bishops, and scholars, don’t believe these things anymore?
3. Have you considered what it means to proclaim a human being the Holy Father (that’s a divine name, used by Jesus only of His Father) and the Vicar of Christ (that’s the Holy Spirit)? Do you really find anything in Scripture whatsoever that would lead you to believe it was Christ’s will that a bishop in a city hundreds of miles away in Rome would not only be the head of His church but would be treated as a king upon earth, bowed down to and treated the way the Roman Pontiff is treated?
2. Have you considered how completely unbiblical and a-historical is the entire complex of doctrines and dogmas related to Mary? Do you seriously believe the Apostles taught that Mary was immaculately conceived, and that she was a perpetual virgin (so that she traveled about Palestine with a group of young men who were not her sons, but were Jesus’ cousins, or half-brothers (children of a previous marriage of Joseph), or the like? Do you really believe that dogmas defined nearly 2,000 years after the birth of Christ represent the actual teachings of the Apostles? Are you aware that such doctrines as perpetual virginity and bodily assumption have their origin in gnosticism, not Christianity, and have no foundation in apostolic doctrine or practice? How do you explain how it is you must believe these things de fide, by faith, when generations of Christians lived and died without ever even having heard of such things?
And the number 1 question I would ask of such a person is: if you claim to have once embraced the gospel of grace, whereby you confessed that your sole standing before a thrice-holy God was the seamless garment of the imputed righteousness of Christ, so that you claimed no merit of your own, no mixture of other merit with the perfect righteousness of Christ, but that you stood full and complete in Him and in Him alone, at true peace with God because there is no place in the universe safer from the wrath of God than in Christ, upon what possible grounds could you come to embrace a system that at its very heart denies you the peace that is found in a perfect Savior who accomplishes the Father’s will and a Spirit who cannot fail but to bring that work to fruition in the life of God’s elect?
Do you really believe that the endless cycle of sacramental forgiveness to which you will now commit yourself can provide you the peace that the perfect righteousness of Christ cannot?
