MacArthur’s courage to speak Scripture’s truth, no matter the audience, should be commended.
This is an excerpt from Remembering Your Baptism: A Sinner Saint Devotional (1517 Publishing, 2025) by Kathy Morales, pgs 74-77.

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What is most remarkable about this tale is not how clever it is, but that the original storyteller was just as greedy as the three fictional young men were.
Why would God reject from Cain what he later accepted from and mandated of his people? So as far as the material itself, neither Cain’s nor Abel’s offering was superior.
This past weekend I was celebrating my dear friend’s wedding the way I always celebrate: by working it out on the dance floor. I love to dance, though I am fairly certain now that dancing does not love me back.
Indeed, our Lord pronounced no beatitude upon the man who is loved by his wife and cherished by his children, but He does say, "Blessed are you when men cast insults at you, and persecute you, and say all kinds of evil against you falsely, on account of Me," (Mt 5:11).
I was full of pain and empty of speech, babbling like a baby who knows he hurts but can’t explain where or why or what he needs to assuage the anguish. Here was the sheer helplessness of being unable to communicate with God in this moment of deepest desperation.
I don’t need to watch a blood-soaked story on CNN or visit someone of death row to familiarize myself with the beast of depravity crouched within the human heart. I just need to look in the mirror, to stare deeply into the eyes that are a window to a soul that has journeyed down dark paths whose only illumination comes from the fires of hell.
She against whom I preached, in her unexpected response actually “preached” to me three truths I have never forgotten.
What kind of fool does what David did? What kind of fool ignores the riches spilling out of his pockets to steal the only penny a poor man has?
What I will tell you is that, despite all evidence to the contrary, despite what you think and feel and imagine, God is indeed in that dark place. You don’t know it, but he’s licking your wounds, too. And he’s keeping the deeper, blacker darkness at bay.
Let him feel the heft of stone cradled in his palm, and consider the gravity of guilt cast upon the hypocrite.
Not only does he give them a fourth chance; he risks the very life of his son in doing so. There lay three of his servants, with blackened eyes and broken bones, scarred by cuts and abrasions, and he imagines things will go better for his son?
Never are we more Hollywood than when we admit wrongdoing. Our confession is scripted, edited, practiced. Move over Brad Pitt; I’ve got this role down pat, for it’s my version of me.