Pastor: Is Your Holiness a Priority?

What Pragmatism Has Caused

There's diminishing interest in holiness and godliness among this generation of younger pastors because of pragmatism. There now have been several decades of basic pragmatism invading the church so that success is more related to style, methodology, creativity, and sometimes natural gifts—an effective communicator, a winsome personality, and all of that.

There's a measure of superficial success when you're a good communicator, when you're a cool guy. You can affect people, you can impact the crowd, and you can hold them and keep them entertained. So, you can be “successful” in a human sense without godliness. But that's a superficial kind of success.

Sanctification

John MacArthur

Veteran pastor John MacArthur makes the case that Jesus’s passion for his people is sanctification and encourages pastors to revolve their ministry around the increasing sanctification of their members through preaching and discipleship.

A Demise in Godliness

One of the legacies of this move toward pragmatism has been the demise of an interest in godliness and virtue. It's related to the fact that instead of men spending hours and hours and hours in the word of God to prepare to preach and speak, they spend hours reading other things, learning culture, and figuring out clever ways to communicate.

You can be “successful” in a human sense without godliness. But that's a superficial kind of success.

Again, it's about style. It's even about preaching antics. So, pastors are not products of the deep understanding of the word of God. Jesus said in John 17:17, “Sanctify them by thy truth. Thy word is truth.” Unless you're embedded in the word of God consistently and regularly, there's not going to be the production of the kind of holiness that God blesses in real, supernatural ways.

John MacArthur is the author of Sanctification: God‘s Passion for His People.

John MacArthur is the pastor-teacher of Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, California, where he has served since 1969. He is known around the world for his verse-by-verse expository preaching and his pulpit ministry via his daily radio program, Grace to You. He has also written or edited nearly four hundred books and study guides. MacArthur is chancellor emeritus of the Master’s Seminary and Master’s University. He and his wife, Patricia, live in Southern California and have four grown children.