Paul Washer: Is It Well With Your Soul?

There is a question every soul will answer, whether it wants to or not. The only variable is whether it answers now, with time to repent, or later, with no time at all. At this year’s Shepherds Conference at Grace Community Church in Sun Valley, evangelist Paul Washer pressed that question into a room of pastors and laymen with the bluntness of a man who has spent forty years on mission fields where eternity is not an abstraction.

The sermon was titled “Is It Well with Your Soul?” The text was 1 John 1-3. And the backdrop was the first such gathering since John MacArthur went to glory in June of 2025.

Washer opened by remembering the man who is no longer in the room. He recalled MacArthur’s kindness, his hunger to meet the poorest indigenous missionaries Washer could bring through the door, his anguish over members of his own congregation who he feared were not truly converted. Then Washer told a story that, in a culture allergic to spiritual seriousness, lands like a hammer on glass.

Visiting MacArthur as the older pastor neared the end of his life, Washer prayed for wisdom and then did what he says men rarely do for one another and should do constantly. He walked in and asked, “Dr. MacArthur, is it well with your soul? Are you reading the Word? Talk to me about your prayer life. How is your communion with Christ?”

MacArthur, Washer recounted, looked momentarily startled and then smiled, almost grateful. “I am so glad you asked.” A man who had preached the gospel for over half a century welcomed the audit. He was not offended. He was relieved. And that, more than any rhetorical flourish in the sermon that followed, is the indictment of our age.

The Question We Have Been Trained Not to Ask

Notice the strangeness of Washer’s anecdote. Two pastors, both with decades of public ministry, both with books and tapes and conferences and reputations, and the question that produces a startled look on the older man’s face is the most basic one in the Christian life. Is it well with your soul? Are you reading the Word? How is your prayer life? How is your communion with Christ?

That this should startle anyone tells you everything about the spiritual condition of the modern evangelical world. The question is not rude. It is not invasive. It is the question every shepherd is supposed to ask every sheep, and every brother is supposed to be willing to receive. Yet we have built a religious subculture in which raising it feels like a breach of etiquette. We will ask a man about his portfolio, his politics, his prostate, and his pickleball league before we will ask him whether his soul is right with God.

The cost of that silence is incalculable. Pews are filled with people who have never been examined by anyone, including themselves. They walk an aisle in 1987, sign a card, and consider the matter settled forty years later, even as their lives bear no fruit corresponding to repentance. The shepherd who declines to ask has, in effect, sworn an oath of pastoral malpractice. And the congregant who refuses to be asked has substituted comfort for assurance.

What John Actually Wrote

Washer’s text was not chosen for sentiment. The first epistle of John is a stress test for the soul. Written by the aged apostle to a church menaced by proto-gnostic teachers who claimed elevated spiritual knowledge while living however they pleased, the letter is a series of diagnostic checks. “If we say that we have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth.” “He that saith, I know him, and keepeth not his commandments, is a liar, and the truth is not in him.” “Hereby we do know that we know him, if we keep his commandments.”

The structure is repeated and deliberate. John does not say assurance comes from a moment, a card, a tear, or a memory of a moment, a card, or a tear. He says assurance comes from a life. A life that walks in the light. A life that confesses sin rather than hiding it. A life that obeys what Christ commands. A life that loves the brethren in deed and not merely in word.

This is not legalism. It is the opposite. The man who has been genuinely converted has been given a new heart that delights in what God commands. The fruit is not the root, but the fruit reveals the root. John writes, as he himself states near the end of the letter, so that believers may know that they have eternal life. The certainty he offers is real. But it is not the cheap certainty of an unexamined profession. It is the certainty of a life being conformed, slowly and stubbornly, to the image of the Son.

Why a Sermon Like This Sounds Foreign Now

One reason Washer’s question startled MacArthur, and would startle most professing Christians today, is that the prevailing American gospel has been quietly inverted over the last fifty years. The historic gospel said God is holy, man is fallen, Christ has accomplished redemption on the cross, and the appropriate response is repentance and faith resulting in a transformed life. The modern substitute says God loves you as you are, accepts you as you are, and is mostly interested in your self-actualization. Sin is rebranded as brokenness, repentance is rebranded as self-care, and sanctification is quietly dropped from the syllabus.

In that climate, asking a man whether it is well with his soul sounds almost rude. It implies that one’s soul might not be well. It implies that there is a standard outside the self by which one’s interior life can be measured. It implies, finally, that another human being has both the standing and the responsibility to inquire. None of those implications survive in a culture that has made the autonomous self the final arbiter of all spiritual claims.

Washer’s sermon, and the conference it served, is a refusal of that inversion. Grace Community Church, under MacArthur for more than five decades and now without him, has been one of the most stubborn holdouts against the seeker-driven, therapy-flavored, market-tested American religion that has hollowed out so much of the evangelical world.

The Shepherds Conference exists to train men to preach the Word and examine souls. That is precisely what Washer modeled in the anecdote about MacArthur and precisely what he was urging the men in the room to do for their own congregations.

The Pastoral Friendship We No Longer Have

There is something deeper here than a sermon outline. Washer described an exchange between two men who genuinely loved each other and who therefore could ask each other the hardest questions in the world. The contemporary church has, by and large, lost that. We have small groups where everyone shares prayer requests about traffic and in-laws. We have accountability partners who ask whether the other looked at anything sinful online but rarely whether the other prayed yesterday. We have pastors who counsel everyone except each other.

What Washer offered MacArthur was a gift, and MacArthur received it as one. Not the gift of flattery. Not the gift of a reassuring pat. The gift of a brother willing to risk discomfort to find out whether his friend was ready to meet the Lord.

The book of James reminds believers that “he which converteth the sinner from the error of his way shall save a soul from death, and shall hide a multitude of sins.” The principle applies even when the man being asked is a faithful pastor of fifty years. Souls, even sanctified ones, need brothers who care enough to ask.

The Question That Will Be Asked

The cultural moment in which this sermon was preached is not incidental. America in 2026 is a country where suicide rates remain high, where loneliness is the diagnosed epidemic, where young men describe themselves as religious nones in record numbers, and where the institutions that once mediated meaning are collapsing in plain sight. People are not unwell because they lack content. They are unwell because no one has asked them the question their soul is groaning to be asked.

The book of Hebrews puts the matter plainly. “It is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment.”

The question Washer asked MacArthur is the question the Judge will ask every human being who has ever lived. There is no exemption. There is no opt-out. There is no policy update that will allow one to remain comfortably ambiguous about it. The question will be answered. The only mercy on offer is that it can be answered now, before God Himself asks it, by examining oneself honestly and casting oneself on the finished work of Christ.

MacArthur, by Washer’s account, answered the question with a smile because he had been answering it for sixty years. The question was familiar terrain. The reading, the praying, the trusting were not new disciplines summoned for the deathbed. They were the texture of a life. That is the only kind of answer worth giving, and it cannot be assembled on short notice.

What the Living Should Do With This

The application of Washer’s sermon is not complicated. Read 1 John, slowly, and let the apostle examine the reader. Confess what is uncovered. Ask the question Washer asked MacArthur of oneself first, and then of the people whom one is supposed to love. Be willing to be asked. Be willing to receive the question without flinching, even if the answer reveals work to be done.

And for the men charged with shepherding, the lesson is sharper still. Conferences, books, podcasts, and platforms are not the measure of a ministry. The measure is whether the men in one’s pews can answer Washer’s question with the unforced smile MacArthur gave him. If they cannot, no amount of programming will rescue them. Only the Word, only the Spirit, only the persistent, unsentimental, faithful application of the gospel to the soul will do.

The prophet Jeremiah recorded the Lord saying, “Ye shall seek me, and find me, when ye shall search for me with all your heart.” Washer’s sermon was an invitation to that kind of searching. The men who heard it owe their congregations the same invitation. And every reader who encounters the question for himself owes his soul an honest answer.

Is it well with your soul? The question will be asked. Better now than later.