From the day I sensed the call of God into full-time ministry, the driving passion of my life has been simply to understand God’s Word and then to make it understandable to others. All my pastoral energies—in my preaching, shepherding, teaching, writing, and even visitation—are focused on that one goal. Every aspect of my work is simply a means to that end.
I have never aspired to be known as either an academic theologian or a distinguished clergyman. I simply want to know what the Word of God means and to make it known to others. That insatiable craving is what has motivated me from the beginning of my ministry.
Although I have often dealt with theological questions and doctrinal controversies in my writing and preaching, I have never done so from a merely academic or polemic perspective. I certainly have never done so out of a love of debate. Again, the only compelling factor for me has been a burning desire to understand God’s Word accurately and teach it with precision.
When it comes to discerning the truth of God, popular opinion, conventional wisdom, and the latest “scholarship” of cynics are of no concern to me whatsoever. Even the question of whether some point of doctrine fits with this or that historic tradition matters little to me. I simply want to understand what the Bible means by what it says.
It is my conviction that the Bible is not difficult for the believing heart to understand. And the more I understand, the more unshakable is my conviction that the Bible is the living, authoritative, inerrant Word of God. It has this remarkable effect on me: the more I study it, the more I hunger to know. So God’s Word is not only the thing that satisfies my appetite, but it also arouses an even deeper hunger for more.
Sharing that hunger with others has always been the supreme joy of my heart as a pastor. To that end, I devoted two years to the production of a new study Bible. That project was the greatest undertaking of my life, and one of the most profitable tasks I have ever embarked upon. Like never before, it put me in touch with “unleashing God’s truth, one verse at a time.”
As a follow-up to the release of the study Bible, I assembled the volume you now hold in your hands. The material summarizes more than thirty years of my writing and preaching ministry. These chapters comprise the heart of what I have taught about God’s Word, how to study it, and how to discern its meaning for yourself. Some of these chapters have been published in various formats, but they are brought together here in a new volume.
My prayer is that this book will be helpful to you as you seek to feed your own appetite for knowing and understanding the Word of God.
—John MacArthur