Ransomware Gangs Keep Pwning Poorly Secured Remote Desktop Protocol Endpoints
In honor of World Password Day, here's a task for every organization that uses remote desktop protocol: Ensure that all of your organization's internet-facing RDP ports have a password - and that it's complex and unique.

Ransomware Gangs Keep Pwning Poorly Secured Remote Desktop Protocol Endpoints
In honor of World Password Day, here's a task for every organization that uses remote desktop protocol: Ensure that all of your organization's internet-facing RDP ports have a password - and that it's complex and unique.

Ransomware Gangs Keep Pwning Poorly Secured Remote Desktop Protocol Endpoints
In honor of World Password Day, here's a task for every organization that uses remote desktop protocol: Ensure that all of your organization's internet-facing RDP ports have a password - and that it's complex and unique.

Ransomware Gangs Keep Pwning Poorly Secured Remote Desktop Protocol Endpoints
In honor of World Password Day, here's a task for every organization that uses remote desktop protocol: Ensure that all of your organization's internet-facing RDP ports have a password - and that it's complex and unique.

Ransomware Gangs Keep Pwning Poorly Secured Remote Desktop Protocol Endpoints
In honor of World Password Day, here's a task for every organization that uses remote desktop protocol: Ensure that all of your organization's internet-facing RDP ports have a password - and that it's complex and unique.

Ransomware Gangs Keep Pwning Poorly Secured Remote Desktop Protocol Endpoints
In honor of World Password Day, here's a task for every organization that uses remote desktop protocol: Ensure that all of your organization's internet-facing RDP ports have a password - and that it's complex and unique.

Check here each week to keep up with the latest from John MacArthur's pulpit at Grace Community Church.

Check here each week to keep up with the latest from John MacArthur's pulpit at Grace Community Church.

As we look together to the Scripture, earlier in our service I read from

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In the lead-up to the Truth Matters conference in October, we will be focusing our attention on the sufficiency, authority, and clarity of Scripture. Of our previous blog series, none better embodies that emphasis than Frequently Abused Verses. The following entry from that series originally appeared on September 23, 2015. -ed.

What do your prayers sound like to other people? Are you expressing submission to the Lord and His will for your life? Or do you approach His throne with an exhaustive wish list?

If we are honest, we’re all occasionally guilty of treating God like a mystical genie or Santa Claus—as though He exists only to fulfill our requests. Often, such impertinence is the result of immature faith, spiritual short-sightedness, and unbiblical priorities. It must not be the norm.

However there are some who claim to know and love the Lord who routinely approach Him with that kind of presumptuousness, and brazenly defend it with Scripture—specifically, John 14:14, “If you ask Me anything in My name, I will do it” (other verses are similarly abused, including Matthew 21:22, Mark 11:24, and 1 John 5:15).

That verse is a particular favorite within the Word Faith movement—a subset of the charismatic church that’s home to most of the flamboyant prosperity preachers you’ve seen on TBN, along with all other proponents of charismatic “health and wealth” theology. In his book Charismatic Chaos, John MacArthur defines the movement this way:

As the name “Word Faith” implies, this movement teaches that faith is a matter of what we say more than whom we trust or what truths we embrace and affirm in our hearts. A favorite term in the Word Faith movement is “positive confession.” It refers to the Word Faith teaching that words have creative power. What you say, Word Faith teachers claim, determines everything that happens to you. Your “confessions,” that is, the things you say—especially the favors you demand of God—must all be stated positively and without wavering. Then God is required to answer. ^[1] John MacArthur, Charismatic Chaos, (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992) 281.

While there are only microscopic differences between that theology and man-centered psycho-babble like the power of positive thinking, the Word Faith movement legitimizes its lies with a lot of biblical-sounding doublespeak, and the occasional proof text wrenched from its context and twisted beyond recognition. Here’s an example noted in Charismatic Chaos: 

Positive confession teaches people that their words are determinative. God is no longer the object of faith; Word Faith devotees learn to put their faith in their own words—or as [Kenneth] Hagin bluntly puts it, “faith in [their] own faith.” Try to follow his logic as he attempts to substantiate that concept:

Did you ever stop to think about having faith in your own faith? Evidently God had faith in His faith, because He spoke the words of faith and they came to pass. Evidently Jesus had faith in His faith, because He spoke to the fig tree, and what He said came to pass.

In other words, having faith in your words is having faith in your faith.

That’s what you’ve got to learn to do to get things from God: Have faith in your faith. . . .

Word Faith believers view their positive confessions as an incantation by which they can conjure up anything they desire. “Believe it in your heart; say it with your mouth. That is the principle of faith. You can have what you say,” Kenneth Hagin claims. Quoting John 14:14 (“If you ask Me anything in My name, I will do it”), ignoring the plain implications of the phrase “in My name,” they take that verse to be an unqualified promise they can use in extorting from God whatever kind of cargo they fancy. ^[2] Charismatic Chaos, 284-285.

Worse still, Word Faith teachers reject the biblical mandate to submit their requests to the will of God, claiming that such submission is unbiblical. In his book, John MacArthur cites two examples of prosperity preachers (Fred Price and Robert Tilton) who guided their followers to pray for blessings and sow monetary seeds that exceeded their financial means. He then explains:

Note that both Price and Tilton recoil from praying, “If it be Thy will.” That is a common characteristic of Word Faith teachers. As we noted, they love to quote John 14:14, “If you ask Me anything in My name, I will do it.” But 1 John 5:14 is noticeably missing from their database: “This is the confidence which we have before Him, that, if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us” (emphasis added). Hagin goes so far as to claim that no such truth is taught in the New Testament:

Because we didn’t understand what Jesus said, and because we’ve been religiously brainwashed instead of New Testament-taught, we watered down the promises of God and tacked on something that Jesus didn’t say, and added on something else to it: “Well, He will all right if it’s His will, but it might not be His will,” people have said. And yet, you don’t find that kind of talk in the New Testament.

Hagin has also written, “It is unscriptural to pray, ‘If it is the will of God.’ When you put an ‘if’ in your prayer, you are praying in doubt.” ^[3] Charismatic Chaos, 287.

Such blatant disregard for God’s will ought to trigger spiritual alarms and offend the consciences of everyone who truly knows and loves the Lord.

Certainly that wasn’t the attitude Christ commended to His disciples when He first spoke the words in John 14:14. In fact, as John MacArthur explains, the presumption of positive confession is a direct contradiction of Christ’s instruction in the upper room.

Jesus’ disciples had left everything and were completely without resources. Without their Master, they would be all alone in a hostile world. Yet, He assured them, they did not need to worry about any of their needs. The gap between Him and them would be closed instantly whenever they prayed. Even though He would be absent, they would have access to all His supplies.

That is not carte blanche for every whim of the flesh. There’s a qualifying statement repeated twice. He doesn’t say, “I’ll give you absolutely anything you ask for,” but rather, “I’ll do what you ask in My name.” That does not mean we can simply tack the words, “in-Jesus’-name-amen” on the end of our prayers and expect the answers we want every time. Neither is it a special formula or abracadabra that will magically guarantee the granting of our every wish.

The name of Jesus stands for all that He is. Throughout Scripture, God’s names are the same as His attributes. When Isaiah prophesied that Messiah would be called “Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace” (Isaiah 9:6), he was not listing actual names, but rather giving an overview of Messiah’s character. “I am who I am,” the name revealed to Moses in Exodus 3:14, is as much an affirmation of God’s eternal nature as it is a name by which He is to be called.

Therefore, praying in the name of Jesus is more than merely mentioning His name at the end of our prayers. If we are truly praying in Jesus’ name, we will pray only for that which is consistent with His perfect character, and for that which will bring glory to Him. It implies an acknowledgement of all that He has done and a submission to His will. ^[4] John MacArthur, The Upper Room (The Woodlands, TX: Kress Biblical Resources, 2014) 95-96.

God does not intend for His people to use His Son’s name as an incantation for material blessings—that’s nothing more than blasphemy. The whole point of praying in the name of Jesus is that we are submitting ourselves—and our requests—to Him and His will.

If anything, following Christ’s instructions in John 14:14 should break us of the kind of materialism that leads to such blasphemous abuse of His promise. As John MacArthur explains:

What praying in Jesus’ name really means is that we should pray as if our Lord Himself were doing the asking. We approach the throne of the Father in full identification with the Son, seeking only what He would seek. When we pray with that perspective, we begin to pray for the things that really matter, and we eliminate selfish requests. ^[5] The Upper Room, 96.

If God’s people affirm the inerrancy of Scripture—that the Bible is without flaw—along with the authority of Scripture—that it speaks conclusively on all matters of Christian life and practice—why do we also need to affirm the sufficiency of Scripture? Is that theological distinction redundant? Why does the sufficiency of Scripture matter outside of theological academia? Why would Grace to You make that topic the focus of the upcoming Truth Matters conference?

We recently put those questions to Phil Johnson—our executive director and one of the keynote speakers at Truth Matters. This is what he had to say.

Registration for Truth Matters is now closed. However, we will be streaming every session of the conference. So even if you did not reserve a spot in advance, we hope you will join us remotely for this rich time of Bible teaching and worship. Watch this space for more details on the livestream in the days ahead.

Many professing believers in the church today won’t read anything other than the Bible, and refuse to listen to someone else interpret and preach the Word. Some even argue that the doctrine of biblical sufficiency vindicates their hermit-like Christian existence. But does the sufficiency of Scripture nullify the value of Christian scholarship or the need for Christian fellowship?

The sufficiency of Scripture is a doctrinal hill to die on, even if it doesn’t seem like a contested battleground today. But God’s people need to understand that while biblical sufficiency itself is not often assaulted overtly, it is often implicitly in the crosshairs. So what are these subtle attacks, and how should Christians respond to them?

Today the shelves of Christian bookstores sag under the weight of devotionals, guidebooks, and manuals purporting to help you hear and understand what God has to say to you personally. Wildly popular books like Experiencing God and Jesus Calling encourage believers to look beyond the confines of Scripture for fresh words from God.

Biblical sufficiency has been the heartbeat of John MacArthur’s teaching—he has continually used Scripture to interpret, defend, and illustrate itself throughout his five decades of ministry. With the conference fast approaching, we recently asked John why he remains so relentless in his defense of the absolute sufficiency of Scripture.

We should be grateful for the Reformers’ accomplishments—they recovered precious biblical doctrines, and many of them died defending those essential gospel truths. But our response should go beyond mere remembrance. We recently asked John MacArthur how those lessons from the past should influence the true church today. Here’s what he had to say:

But any time you deal with the doctrine of God’s sovereignty, it sparks an inevitable question. It’s a very important question, dealing with a specific aspect of God’s sovereignty and how it relates to His grace in election. In fact, it’s probably the most pervasive question in the minds of those who are in the process of embracing the doctrines of grace.

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