A question was asked of Pastor John MacArthur about his views on expanding his ministry and here was his answer.

“Well, I think by God’s design, the deeper my commitment to Christ, the better my family likes me. You know what I’m saying?”

QUESTIONER: Yes, I do.

JOHN: “I mean, I’m a better husband and a better father and a better grandfather and a better counselor and a better spiritual guide and guardian and a better servant the more devoted I am to the Lord. So, I don’t…I can’t compartmentalize my life. I can’t say I have to study and I have to preach. And I do that and then I go over here and try to ask like a husband and go buy four books on how a husband should act. My role as a husband, my life as a husband, a father, whatever it is, a friend, is nothing more than the spillover of my life before the Lord. And so when it comes to ministry, it’s much the same. When I say I don’t concern myself with the breadth, that means I’m not…I don’t spend my time and energies trying to extend the ministry, trying to get a bigger church. I’m not spending my time to figure out ways to advertise Grace Church or ways to build up Grace Church in public image; or ways to creatively draw crowds or get money or somehow reach more people. I’m not; I never have worked hard to expand our radio into more stations and more stations and more. That has never been, in fact I haven’t given in my entire life an hour to that collectively. My concern is always to do what I need to do to rightly handle, proclaim the Word of God, live out the Word of God and make sure that the Word of God is rightly represented in the people that are around me.

It’s an old story you know, I’ve talked to young people about this. If you occupy yourself with success, you will ultimately fail. If your goal is to succeed, you will fail. If your goal is to be excellent, you will ultimately succeed. I don’t care what you’re doing. If you’re working with wood if all you want to do is ultimately succeed, you’ll ultimately fail. If what you want to do is produce something excellent, you will ultimately succeed. And that’s true spiritually. It’s…it’s…my life is spent, all my energies for the most part, are driven toward truth, understanding the truth, dealing with the truth, implementing the truth, evaluating people to pull around me, people who have tremendous responsibility around me and making sure they have the same level of commitment to the truth, making sure they stay sharp on the truth, making sure that I serve them, nurture them, help them, strengthen them, confront them if need be, though that’s a rare occasion. The same they’d do to me. That’s what I mean by spiritual excellence. All my focus goes toward the Lord and toward the truth and being the man I need to be, the preacher I need to be, the friend I need to be, the husband I need to be and what God does with that is really up to Him. But I have long ago learned that spiritual excellence is the goal, not success.

And I think I first started learning that when I was a football player. When I was a football player in my university days…football can be a very frustrating sport because you have to depend on other guys. It’s much easier to do something where you don’t have to depend on anybody else; you sort of rise and fall on your own merit. You know, like golf or something like that, nobody but you. But in football you’ve got these people and they can be very disappointing and it can be a very difficult situation. I learned several things, however, playing football. I could never determine the outcome of a game; I could only determine my own effort. I could never tell you how the game would end. I could only control my own effort. And if I gave the maximum effort that I had within me, not only would I do everything I could do to win, but I would set a tone for everybody around me. And hopefully pull them up. So even in those days when I was a captain because God was already working in me leadership responsibility, I would try to do everything I could for the sake of doing all that I could alone, but also for the sake of saying, “Guys, this is how you play the game,” and try to pull everybody to that level. All we could do is make the maximum effort. We could never determine the outcome. And that was really good to learn that.

So my responsibility became to give the maximum effort myself so that that becomes the standard for everybody around me to follow. And if I ever diminished my effort, then they would find a reason to diminish theirs. So the consummate effort then becomes the standard that others around you see. And when everybody gives that kind of effort, then you have to leave the ultimate success to God who determines outcomes. I don’t determine outcome. I can only determine effort. So that’s what I mean…does that kind of personally explain it? So, for me, it’s to be the best, to preach the best I can, to handle the Scripture the best I can, to provide for the people the best ministry I can, to provide around me the best leadership I can and then let God take it where He wants to take it.

And it’s…the wonderful thing that you can bank on in this is that the Lord’s work never returns void but it always accomplishes what He intends it to accomplish. And I’m convinced that He honors His word. I am convinced that if you’re faithful to the proclamation of His word, He’ll take you places where you never expected it to go. And…I mean, I am just boggled by what happens every single day.

I got a letter I think three years ago from a guy in England who is a pedophile, the grossest of all humans in some ways, who wrote me to tell me he was converted and delivered from this through listening to me, preach on the radio. I’ll never meet this guy this side of heaven. All his friends are in prison, they were all arrested, and he somehow missed being arrested. He couldn’t give up his pornography on his own. He had so much pornography; he had more pornography in his home, he said, than any…than I think anybody in history in England, contributing to this stuff. And he never could stay off of it until somehow he was smitten with a disease related to his sexual deviancy that made him blind. Then he wrote to tell me how the Lord had saved him and he wanted to thank me for the radio ministry that goes out of London.

Well, I can’t control that. I have absolutely no control over that. But what I can control is what I preach. And he responded to my sermon on Psalm 107, in which I told the story of a guy in our own congregation, Robert Loggerstrum, who was one of the leaders in the Gay Pride community in L.A., who was converted here on a Sunday. When I read Psalm 107, baptized right here, and I told the story on that tape and I explained the Psalm in relation to how God could deliver people from these horrible things and actually it’s an illustration, that’s like the last couple of days. But that comes regularly. And again I see time after time, day after day, the work of the word and so I know that where I want to spend my life is in the word. That’s why it’s so ridiculous for anybody in the ministry to do anything else. All these counselors that work real hard to be big and successful miss the point. In the end they fail. In the end, on the spiritual level, they fail. It’s the depth that God wants and He’ll take care of the breadth.”