You Lived Privately How You Lived Publicly: John MacArthur and Christian Character

With many others, I am processing the death of pastor John MacArthur (1939-2025). This is not because I love evangelical celebrity culture; it is because I grew up with MacArthur’s influence all around me, and as I tried to say in this recent essay, his death feels very much like the end of an era to me. In this unique moment, tributes to the man have been pouring in, as the church of Jesus Christ shows “double honor” per Paul’s charge to an imperfect yet faithful pastor (1 Timothy 5:17).

One tribute that jumped up and bit me was not written by a known pastor or Christian leader. It was written by MacArthur’s personal trainer, a man named Jason Mazy. Before this testimony popped up online (hat tip to my sister Megan Basham), I had never heard of this man. But the short tribute Mazy shared on his Instagram account was actually quite profound, for it focused on an overlooked but super-important matter: MacArthur’s private character.

The Importance of Character

For understandable reasons, many of the reflections I’ve read about MacArthur’s ministry focus on his public gifts and public effect. This is not wrong. In God’s providence, the man was given a considerable role to play on the stage of evangelical history.

But MacArthur was far from a self-worshipping celebrity. (Read this lovely reflection along similar lines—it’s by a young woman named Madelyn Moses.) According to Mazy’s Instagram post, in the last three years of MacArthur’s life, Mazy worked closely with MacArthur. MacArthur’s legendary discipline clearly was alive and well in this partnership. Through trials and illnesses, he trained “several days a week.” This was in his eighties, we note with some amazement. Bodily training is indeed “of some value” (1 Timothy 4:8), as another warrior of Christ, Paul, once noted.

But here is the sharpest edge of that example: “You lived privately how you lived publicly,” Mazy reflects. I’m not sure you could say much more of a weighty sentence than that about a Christian leader with such a proficient record of service to Christ. If MacArthur projected maturity but behaved like a diva, Mazy would have seen it. If MacArthur preached kindness to the rafters but turned a cold shoulder to normal folks, Mazy would have felt it. If MacArthur called Christians to obey the Lordship of Jesus (as he rightly did) but lived a dissolute life in secret, Mazy might well have witnessed it.

You can fake godliness. You can put on a big show in public. You can tell everyone how to live. You can write volume after volume, tome after tome, about theology, singlehandedly exhausting printing-presses through your exploits. But if you do not know Jesus, or as a believer do not doggedly pursue the bearing of fruit in your life by the power of the Spirit, your true colors will show. It is an iron law of the cosmos.

The Grave Danger of Cold Orthodoxy

We have a problem in evangelical circles, one closely related to the sad trend of men crashing out of ministry. We have diminished the importance of character. Here is one reason why (of many): in some circles, we have defined leadership almost exclusively as holding the right views and communicating them effectively in public. We have prioritized head knowledge over heart conduct. Maturity as a Christian ends up defined by a set of ideas and—shockingly—has little to do with our spiritual life.

We must love sound doctrine. Further, we cannot fail to advocate and even contend for it (Jude 3). But Satan is always fishing in our waters. Among those who emphasize sound doctrine, Satan baits a hook with a loveless lure. In other words, he urges men in ministry to reduce the Christian faith to a set of right views.

Some swallow this lure, sadly. This warps the faith, divorcing head from heart, actions from beliefs. Maturity is no longer related to godly fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23). Maturity has little to do with actionable love of your neighbor, the second greatest commandment (Matthew 22:37).

Maturity does not interface much with whether you are consistently tender and understanding with your wife (1 Peter 3:7), whether you fight hard to not exasperate your children (Ephesians 6:3), whether you feed on God’s Word and cultivate a strong prayer life (Psalm 119:105; 1 Thessalonians 5:17), whether you serve needy people and practice hospitality (James 1:27; 1 Peter 4:9).

No, spiritual maturity has been intellectualized; it’s all head-knowledge now. It’s not about how you treat your coworkers; it’s about what confessional statement you like. It’s not about how your family is doing under your leadership; it’s about whether you’ve joined the right tribe. It’s not about how servant-minded you are; it’s about you attacking those outside of your narrow circles.

“Pure Doctrine” Legalism and the Secret Sin it Fosters

This in turn helps foster the ministry posture I call “pure doctrine” legalism. It works hand in glove with tribalism, loving only those who hold your precise doctrine. You have no framework anymore for charitable disagreement and loving debate, and no grid for “theological triage” per the brilliant insights of Carl Henry and Al Mohler. It is either “You hold the pure doctrine I and my tribe holds” or it is total righteous destruction.

There is no middle ground in such a posture. Without knowing it, this is a legalistic stance. By this I mean that it removes all gray areas and room for disagreement from the Christian faith. It binds people to your precise formulations, your belief statement, your interpretation of a given passage. It causes you to work less as a shepherd and more as a member of the shock troops of a theological militia.

Such a climate can easily create a side-door into leadership for double-minded men. Such individuals are one man in public and another man in private. The public figure seems godly and edifying; the private individual is a different person altogether. Without knowing it, there is a secret agent in the body of Christ, a leader working against the purposes of God. It is not all that hard to have a Judas among us, it seems.

This, it turns out, is the unfortunate rule regarding godless character: it’s of little importance until it’s of the utmost importance. What I mean is this: you can downplay the importance of grace-shaped character for a long time. But eventually, a person’s true colors will show. When they do, wreckage all through their life will also emerge, like a hurricane trail that was somehow hidden from view.

Then, in that moment, that lack of character will not only matter. It will be everything. The game will be over. The season of joy and partnership in the gospel will end. The bonds built will fray. All because of a factor that once seemed of little importance—but was actually, in God’s economy, of the utmost importance.

Encouraged by Godly Character

All of which leads us back to John MacArthur. The testimony from his personal trainer rings in my ears, as it will in many others. This is not a lesser tribute than those from known pastors and leaders. No, MacArthur’s personal character was just as important as his gifting in ministry, evident as that was. In fact, we can sharpen the point: MacArthur’s character was more important than his vocational abilities.

Simply put, it is very encouraging to hear that a famous Christian conducted himself in a godly way in private. According to Mazy, MacArthur was kind. He was humble. He didn’t bloviate about how famous he was. (Mazy had no idea who MacArthur was for a while, in fact.) He was gracious to answer many questions even as he did his daily exercises. You lived privately how you lived publicly. Not many better sentences you could write about a Christian than this.

I might also say a quick word about how normal MacArthur sounds in the tribute by his trainer. There might be something there for the current and rising generation of preachers and teachers and leaders to mark. We all have our own quirks and weaknesses, but perhaps we can do our small part to tweak evangelical culture. MacArthur does not come off as a high-strung diva; he comes off as unfussy, unpretentious, unconcerned about how people think about him (in a good way).

Brothers, We Are Not Professionals

All of this reminds me of what MacArthur’s dear friend John Piper said so well many years ago of men in ministry: we are not professionals. If God has given us the magnificent gift of laboring in ministry in some form, we are only servants. We are not high and mighty. We are definitely not celebrities, though some men may in God’s providence become well-known. We are just doormen in the house of God. We point people in, in to where a gracious Father sits, waiting for all his well-loved children to come home.

We need to have godly character as preachers and teachers of the Word. This is non-essential. We should emphasize this in seminaries, colleges, and especially local churches, which are the true laboratories of future ministry workers. We need to redouble our focus on character, or in some cases, reactivate it. We cannot separate heart from mind; we cannot turn out double-sided men who are one person in public and another thing entirely in private.

Here is some good news to note: the power that forms godly character is not in us. The same power that saved us is the power that sanctifies us (Philippians 1:6). It is all in Jesus Christ. We can rest in this truth, drinking deeply from it (Matthew 11:29). This power flows without hesitation or limit from the Holy Spirit. It is a grace gift, prepared for us from eternity past, by our loving heavenly Father.

We are not responsible for digging up depths of mercy each morning. God renews and refreshes us every single day with showers of his favor and blessing. From there, we do our part. We put our boots on. We wash our face and pray for goodness and kiss our wife and hug our kids. Then, we go to work. We go to work vocationally, but more than this, we go to work spiritually. We seek, minute by minute, to develop godly character.

Conclusion

The tribute shared about our brother John MacArthur inspires this kind of commitment. He was no perfect man, but we seek to imitate him as he imitated Christ (1 Corinthians 11:1). Even as we feel his absence keenly, we pray to emulate him, and be the same man in private that we are in public.

If we are, it may be that when we ourselves go to glory, someone we knew on a daily basis, someone we never asked to remember us publicly, someone who saw us in our thoroughly normal moments, someone who met us the morning after a difficult medical procedure when pain gripped us like a barnacle, someone who saw us when we had just received stinging online criticism, may write, in words that are as simple as they are profound:

You lived privately how you lived publicly.