Lent Lunt Lant

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. No Compromise Radio is a program dedicated to the ongoing proclamation of Jesus Christ, based on the theme in Galatians 2, verse 5, where the Apostle Paul said, �But we did not yield in subjection to them for even an hour, so that the truth of the gospel would remain with you.

In short, if you like smooth, watered-down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn�t for you. By purpose, we are first biblical, but we can also be controversial. Stay tuned for the next 25 minutes as we�re called by the divine trumpet to summon the troops for the honor and glory of her King.

Here�s our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth.

Opening Banter and Show Setup

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry. My name is Mike Abendroth and it is, it�s Monday, I think, 7 .30 p .m., just before the Patriots play. I�m trying to get some work done today so I can have some time off later this week to do a few other things.

I don�t know if I�m online here with the No Compromise Radio group or not, but I haven�t really done much on that little group for the last three or four months since I�ve been gone. But we are back and we are ready to rock when it comes to No Compromise Radio.

We let�s see, tap to invite a viewer to be in your broadcast. I guess I can�t do that, but I guess some people are watching, so that�s good. Anyway, I�m going to be recording a few shows tonight and the studio, so I thought I�d do the Todd Friel.

Todd�s got that live thing where he does the radio shows, but you can see him. I don�t really think that�s called radio if you�re doing, you know, live TV radio, so I don�t know what that�s called. Anyway, it is live here, October, and we are back from sabbatical, my wife and I and kids, and we are thrilled to be back in ministry.

I�ve been preaching through assurance of salvation as a theme, because, you know, any good church has a theme, you know, eight tightly packaged sermons with cool graphics. The show that I did just a little bit ago, we had the director�s cut.

I know that�s backwards for the Facebook people, but director�s cut, admit one, and you�ve got from Star Wars to some cool, I don�t know, is that Joe Osteen or is that The Greatest Showman? I haven�t seen it, but wouldn�t that be funny if we had The Greatest Showman with a Joe Osteen face?

Can somebody there on Facebook make me one of those? Hey, Stephen, Stephen Joseph, make me one of those, and then put a no on their face. Well, some have been asking me about books that I�ve been writing, and I�m behind on some of that, but if you ever read a book, and I know this is going to be backwards, there�s a new Christian book by Fortress Press, and I�m afraid to say the word on the radio, so I�ll just show it to you backwards.

Backwards. Not only will people write anything, people will read anything. Publishers will publish about anything. I mean, I�ve had so many books get rejected by publishers, I can�t believe they did in light of that title.

You can write me, info at nocompromiserradio .com. You can go to the website, about 2 ,000 shows, great search engine that Josh and Jonathan and Linton have put together, and so I�m hoping to have new shows Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, for the next few months, and off we go.

Lent, Catholic Abstinence Rules, and the Problem of Man-Made Religion

Well, today, here, we have United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, and this is usccb .org, so it�s legit, and these are some questions that maybe you have as No Compromise Radio listeners. At least I have them.

Why do we say that there are 40 days of Lent? When you count all the days from Ash Wednesday through Holy Saturday, there are 46. I don�t know why that strikes me so funny. That is like No Compromise funny bone right there, and they give kind of their answer.

I don�t know, maybe I�ll read the answer someday, but the question is more funny than the answer. Here�s another question. So does that mean that when we give something up for Lent, such as candy, we can have it on Sundays?

Answer. See? See, I didn�t know that. I have, let�s see, I�ve gone to, I�ve been to the Master�s Seminary and have a degree there. I�ve been to Ligonier, but I didn�t get a degree there. I think Pat stole mine.

I have to tell you a funny story about Pat, my brother. I was a DEMIN student there just auditing some classes because I already had mine from Southern, and so Pat and I were both students. Pat needed his degree and he took a class, and I think he gave some pushback in one of particular classes.

It wasn�t Sinclair Ferguson�s class or somebody like that, but something else, a little pushback. And Pat had told me about the pushback. Actually, the pushback was about R .C. Sproul, Jr., who had come in to teach a class.

The dad taught a little bit of the class, which was great, and then Jr. came in and taught a different part of the class. And so Pat said something to Ligonier about that particular class, and kind of a, you know, they ask you at the end of the semester, �What did you think of the class, and can you rate the teacher et cetera.

Teacher reviews. So here�s the funny part. Pat�s going to kill me. I�m telling you this. I got a letter from Ligonier that was addressed to Pat Ebendroth, but I think I just probably opened it because it said Ebendroth, right, so I opened it up, Ligonier.

And then there was some follow-up regarding that, and then I cut and pasted that letter and sent it to Pat, and he got nervous. Oh, I can�t tell you all the details of what I said, but I tried to make it seem like Pat was in really big, big trouble for what he said.

All right, back to the story here. Apart from the prescribed days of fast and abstinence on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday, and the days of abstinence every Friday of Lent, Catholics have traditionally chosen additional penitential practices.

I mean, do you want to do this? Penitential practices. For the whole time of Lent, these practices are disciplinary in nature and often more effective if they are continuous, i .e., kept on Sundays as well.

I mean, you want to talk about covenant of works? This is it. Perfect, perpetual, personal obedience, as we might think about with the Westminster Confession. That being said, such practices are not regulated by the Church but individual conscience.

So you can do whatever you want, in other words. Question. I understand that all the Fridays of Lent are days of abstinence from meat, but I'm not sure what is classified as meat. That is classic. That's a good question.

And after I was in California for the summer, you've got all the tofu stuff and everything else and all the people that are very particular about what they eat, what really is meat? That's a good question.

Now, what are they going to say? Abstinence laws consider that meat comes only from animals such as chickens, cows, sheep, or pigs, all of which live on land. Spencer just said Filet-O-Fish, and Stephen just said the McRib.

Would that be constituted as meat? Now, I've got a problem here, NoCo audience. Here's my problem. I normally just do radio, and I just sit here and do it, and I can do whatever I want, look around. Now I'm trying to do radio.

This is going to be for a show this week, but I'm also looking at this Facebook thing, so I don't think the radio people are going to be liking it so much. Birds are also considered meat. Abstinence does not include meat juices and liquid foods made from meat.

So hold on. I'm trying to get it. So I went to Trader Joe's today, and what did I find? I've just lost all my watchers. So I thought, you know what I'm going to do? We're going to start some kind of new diet.

So I've got the Organic Free Range Chicken Broth from Trader Joe's. That's 80 calories for that entire thing. And then if I really want to splurge, if I'm just going to do a broth day only, Trader Joe's Organic Stock Vegetable, this entire thing has 20 calories.

My wife said, you're going to drink it and be immediately hungry. So I just want you to know that broth is okay. If you are having Lent problems, Lenten problems, Holy Saturday and Ash Wednesday, broth would be okay, straight to Trader Joe's.

Thus, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops say, such foods as chicken broth, consomme, soups cooked or flavored with meat, meat gravies or sauces, as well as seasonings or condiments made from animal fat are technically not forbidden.

Why? However, moral theologians, contra-immoral theologians, contra-amoral theologians, have traditionally taught that we should abstain from all animal dry products except foods such as gelatin, could I add in Jell-O, butter, cheese and eggs, which do not have any meat taste.

Now see, where I live here in Lancaster, Massachusetts in Seventh-Day Adventist land, there's all kinds of stuff that has meat tastes. So now you're going to tell me I can't have meat on Lenten days, but I can have chicken broth, but now I can't have meat tasting things.

Fish are of a different category of animal. Salt and freshwater species of fish, amphibians, reptiles and shellfish are permitted. Here is the point. Once you go away from Scripture, i .e. Jesus declared all foods clean, right?

Once you go away from Jesus' clear words, then what happens with rules? I'll tell you what happens. They multiply. They multiply as fast as the free-range chicken broth. I just bought it because it looked like broth, it looked like ebondroth, ebon broth.

The weirdest junk mail I ever got, I ever received, was Mike Haferhorf. So I can tell when they want to blast me online, it's back to Mike Haferhorf. Let's see, somebody just said, oh, all things except pineapple pizza.

I think there are woes for that. I think if you think of Yiddish, you know, oy vey for pineapple pizza. I know Stephen would believe that, but I wouldn't. I could eat pineapple on pizza. Maybe kind of a Cajun pineapple pizza.

Maybe that would be good. Anyway, back to the point. Here's the thing. Since the work of Christ is complete, sufficient, if you think of Jesus, who was born of a woman, born under law, Galatians 4, and Jesus perfectly obeys the law, and that goes for every kind of prohibition and every kind of law for food.

And if you look at the Old Testament mosaic law, and you look at what Jews were supposed to eat and what they weren't supposed to eat, you can rest assure that Jesus ate properly. He didn't sneak. He didn't, what do we say it now if somebody's on a diet and they don't do the right thing?

He didn't cheat. He didn't think, well, it's kind of got tofu meat flavor, but it doesn't really matter, you know. It's my conscience, my individual conscience, not the law. But for Jesus, He perfectly obeys the law.

And so when it comes to eating, we get to eat whatever we want, because we rest in a perfect Savior who then dies on the cross, and when it comes to this covenant now, the New Covenant, we aren't particular people, the Israelites, that have to eat certain things a certain way.

And you want to see crazy in life? I'll show you crazy. Go back to people who go to the Old Testament and find out food laws for today. Remember the Weigh Down Diet? That was crazy. I mean, she didn't even believe, I don't think in the Trinity, you know, you have an Arian Weigh Down Diet, but all the Christians love it so much because, you know, they've got something to do.

And, you know, that's the evangelicals' problem. Instead of walking by faith in Jesus, the just shall live by faith, Habakkuk 2, Romans 1, Hebrews chapter 10, I believe, Galatians 3, Romans 1, did I already say Romans 1?

Galatians 3, did I already say that? Of course. The just shall live by faith, faith in Jesus, the perfect representative, and then He dies on the cross, He's raised from the dead, and He, Jesus, says you can eat anything you want.

And now I can't eat certain things, and I have to suffer, and then once you go beyond, Jesus declares all foods clean, then you get law. It's law after law after law after law, and then what if I'm flying and I'm on TWA?

I think somebody told me TWA used to be owned by Roman Catholics. If it was not that one, it was a different one, and there had to be certain kind of food laws for the Friday, and then what if you're flying to New Zealand and you're going back in time, how would that work?

If you leave Los Angeles, Pacific Standard Time, and you fly to New Zealand, you're going ahead two days, so you're going forward in time. If then you're in New Zealand and you fly to Los Angeles, I think I flew on a Friday afternoon from New Zealand, and we flew 13 hours, and when I got to Los Angeles, I think it was Friday morning, so we just went and had breakfast again.

The second you go away from Scripture, this is a general principle as well, not just for food. The second you go away from the clear teachings of Scripture, then you're going to get rule upon rule upon rule.

You look at L .N .G. White and the Seventh-day Adventist, it is rule after rule after rule, excuse me, and so eat what you want for Lent, and shame on Matt Chandler and these kind of guys that go around and say, well, this is what we're going to do for Lenten practices.

My friend Jack O 'Leary, he had to go to Ash Wednesday service when he was a kid, and then he needed to sneak out of the house on that Wednesday, and so he told his mom, I'm going to go to Ash Wednesday service, and he goes out and runs around with his buddies and parties and girls and all those things, and he said he was on his way home, and he realized, Spencer, what if your church hosts a pig roast?

Asking for a friend. Well, then, I guess the obvious is there to answer, and what was I just saying? Spencer, I cannot believe you work for No Compromise Radio, and you ask me these questions and now I can't answer them.

But anyway, back to the whole thing. Once you start adding rules, it's trouble. Rule upon rule upon rule, but people love rules. Why? Here's why we love rules. Because we can externally obey those rules and say we did the rules.

You don't have to have any motive, you don't have to have a motivation, you don't have to say, well, you know what, I'm loving God from my heart, I'm doing this to honor the Lord Jesus in light of what He's done for me, in light of who He is.

I want to honor Him, and I want to respond to Him rightly. If anybody could love me like this, then I want to respond properly. I would gladly do this. But the motives here, we don't even have to question those motives.

We just do the thing. And so if we don't eat the right kind of food or we eat the right kind of food, we're fine. I mean, give me Ezekiel 4 bread, do you like Ezekiel 4 bread? Maybe toasted, it wouldn't be bad, but, you know, just read Ezekiel 4, and you're not going to go back to the Old Testament and say, well, you know, I want these different ingredients.

How many different ingredients? It's smelt and mullet and mellet. You have to wear a mullet. But it's cooked over what? Human dung. So anyway, don't go back to the Old Testament and find all these food laws.

Eat whatever you want, enjoy yourself, and say, to God be the glory. He gave me these taste buds. I can taste salt and sweet. I can taste sour. I can taste...I had twice last week, I had Vietnamese pho.

Is that how you call it? Pho? It seemed like it was noodle soup, but it wasn't. That would be French. No, this was P-H-O. And I had it twice last week. It was so good. And they put on, you know, there's big basil leaves and jalapeno peppers sliced fresh and sprouts and a bunch of chicken and I got, the second time, some rare cooked beef that was put in there.

I like pho so much, even somebody on Sunday, I get gifts as a pastor, sometimes they're not very nice gifts, but I get gifts and somebody came up and said, I've made some homemade pho for you. And this was going to be three times in a week for pho.

And I just think the taste and the smells, that's just like our Lord. When you think about God, you ask Him for wisdom in James 1, He gives wisdom generously. He's not, you know, tight-fisted with His liberality, He just loves to give.

And when you think about that with the Lord Jesus Christ, don't ever think about the Father in heaven as the God who must be pacified and He does not like sinners until the work of Christ is done. And somehow the Father's mad and the Son's loving, the Son, you know, talks the Father into loving people.

Remember that God, Romans 8, 32, did not spare His Son, His own Son, His most present, most prized, personal Son. He sent His Son. That's the Father sending the Son because He loved us. He loved the Son, too, He loves the Holy Spirit, but He loves us.

Think about John 3, 16, for God so loved the world, we're talking about for God the Father so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son. Never think about the triune God in a way that makes, you know, the Father is full of wrath and the Son's full of love and one pacifies the other because you'd be thinking wrongly.

And God gives wisdom generously, He pardons generously, and then He gives us this whole world to just enjoy. When you say, you know, the world is your oyster, it's true, everything that you can just have.

Why? Because the most pressing need that you have, standing before a thrice holy God with a perfect life, the most pressing need that you have has already been done by another, and you get credit for it simply by faith, simply by trusting in Jesus, and of course your sins for when you've broken those laws are also paid for.

But all that's done, so you can just enjoy life, you can, I don't care if you want to be weird and you want to have a bunch of, you know, Velveeta cheese goo on fake crackers, enjoy yourself. Or if you want to have, you know, sophistication in your life and have faux all the time, I'll probably get an email, I don't even know how to say the word.

We had a pretzel contest here at the Church on Sunday night. I only knew one person who didn't like the idea, for kind of theological reasons, because of the pretzel and the monk and, you know, the triune God and all that stuff.

We had a pretzel contest and it was so fun. I wonder maybe if pretzels are forbidden by Lenten practices, according here to this United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. Because here when it says, birds are also considered meat, abstinence does not include meat juices, but you are supposed to be very careful of things that taste like meat, but aren't really made with meat.

Remember here, which do not have any meat taste. So here's my question. How could you have butter and cheese and eggs that have a meat taste? What would the meat taste taste like? I don't quite understand that.

This lady right here, Meg, she just said, I drink Diet Coke to the glory of God and enjoy every sip while she still has an esophagus. No, Meg, I think what's happened is you, you know, your mind has been so altered by aspartame and such that you don't even know what you're talking about.

I enjoy every sip until it drools out of my mouth. But think about it, friends. When you sit down and have a nice dinner with your family, and you contemplate about how much God has given you, and you don't have the Damocles sword of judgment hanging over you, the most important thing has been dealt with, and that is you're standing before God.

It's been accomplished by another. And so then you can just eat, and you can have a hamburger, and you can have sushi, and you can have Diet Cokes, whatever you want. And then we get this kind of stuff, and what's worse than the Lenten practices that essentially deny Christ's substitutionary, perfect, satisfactory death?

Evangelical Reformed Leaders and the Danger of Rule-Making

Well, what's the problem? Well, here's the problem. It says, Steve Cooley is watching. Steve, you're supposed to be here! It's Monday! This thing says I can wave. What's wave? You waved. Bring them on camera.

Bring Steve on camera. Okay, let's see if we can do this. This is not going to work very well for the radio show that I'm recording, but it says, okay, bring them on camera. I just pushed it. Add. Not adding.

Okay. But anyway, there's only one thing worse than the Lenten stuff, and that is the evangelical Protestant so-called Reformed Bible teachers, i .e., Matt Chandler, who promote this nonsense. I mean, this is incredible.

This is right here, right? I know it's backwards, but it's this book by Fortress Press that I said I would never say the name again on radio. I've done 2 ,000 radio shows and never said that word on the radio show.

I've said scoobalon before, but I haven't said that. It's crazy. Now, back to this questions and answers. We've got to wrap up the show here. Are there exemptions other than for age from the requirement to fast on Ash Wednesday and Good Friday?

I wouldn't be thinking that's so good. Well, we do have a few. Pregnant or nursing women, and in all cases, common sense should prevail, and ill persons should not further jeopardize their health by fasting.

I just sound like I was from Nebraska. Jeopardize. See, they just make it up as they go along. This is David Byrne of the Talking Heads. They make it up as they go along. This is essentially spiritual reefer madness, and if you can just control what people do, you never have to worry about motives, because you just do these things and you're fine.

And, you know, while we could probably get pretty convicted as evangelicals if we have our quiet time, if we pray, if we do things, we never have to worry about our motives yet. We should think about those as well, and I think the best motives come from a good contemplation through the four gospels of the person and work of Jesus Christ.

Closing Remarks and Ministry Information

So my name's Mike Ebenroth. This is No Compromise Radio. Somebody gave me this shirt here. I've got a kid who goes to this school, Masters University, so I'm trying to wear the free stuff today, because it is cold out.

You can write me, info at nocompromiseradio .com, and here's what I'm going to do. I think I've got enough battery power for one more show on this Facebook deal, so I'm going to wrap this up for the radio show and come back on Facebook Live momentarily.

No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Ebenroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston. Bethlehem Bible Church is a Bible-teaching church firmly committed to unleashing the life-transforming power of God's Word through verse-by-verse exposition of the sacred text.

Please come and join us. Our service times are Sunday morning at 1015 and in the evening at 6. We're right on Route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbcchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.