Warren Plus Muslims Equals 2 Cor 6

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.

Contending for Truth Without Backing Down

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, ministry. We have a dilemma, and that dilemma here at No Compromise Radio, ministry, is this. Do we go along to get along, or do we address certain issues? Do we contend earnestly for the once-delivered faith, as we see in the book of Jude?

Now certainly, on No Compromise Radio, do I want to be contentious for no reason? For ratings, I guess you could really strive to be Christian shock radio disc jockey if you wanted ratings and got money because your ratings were up, but I don't do this for the money, and if I did, that would be an unwise business decision.

And I don't do it for the ratings because they're too expensive to get. I think $60 ,000 or something for some Arbitron ratings or something. I am interested and fascinated always when I see how many people download certain messages or how many downloads we have, you know, built in on iTunes.

Those fascinate me because it fascinates me to see what God would do with a person who is fallible and weak, sinful yet redeemed. We—I'm not trying to pick a fight with anybody, but fights do come my way.

And then we don't want to back down. You know what? That's a bad thing to do is to back down from a fight. That actually reminds me of a song, doesn't it do? Doesn't that remind you of a song? What kind of song would that be?

Well, you know, one of the things I like about my phone is I can easily find songs on my iTunes. And so if I went to the song right here, you would easily know what it is. So let's just see if we know.

But you don't know who sings it, do you? You think it's Tom Petty, but it's not. Well, there we have it, Johnny Cash on No Compromise Radio. Actually Tom Petty, I think, was playing the guitar there. But that is Johnny Cash.

And I guess we're just rambling along, aren't we? Ramblin', R-A-M-B-L-I-N, ramblin', ramblin' guy. All right. Here's the issue. All that was just pomp and nonsense. Rick Warren builds bridge to Muslims, February 23rd, 2012.

I got this from one of my listeners' music desk. So what does music guest send me? He sends me something from the Orange County Register. And I have to say, this particular article by Jim Hinch, H-I-N-C-H, and again it's called Rick Warren builds bridge to Muslims.

I have to say this, the other day someone emailed me because I sent something out about someone. Oh, it was some Piper critique, I think, by D .G. Hart. And they didn't really like it that I somehow identified with D .G. Hart and took Piper to task.

Well, obviously God has blessed John Piper in lots of specific areas. And for me, for instance, I love his book on Romans chapter 9, Not the Defense of God. I'm looking around right now in my books, Justification of God.

It was right next to Martin Lloyd Jones. That's not a sign either. But I was very, very underwhelmed by Piper as he promoted, not just endorsed, but promoted the, I'm going to have to put parentheses in front of this, and at the end, ministry of Rick Warren.

Now, I've made occasional comments before about Rick Warren. I've been there several times, I don't know, eight times, ten times to saddle back. And when you read this article, and I'm assuming it's going to be true, since it's in the Orange County Register after all, I just, I'm almost speechless.

This is nothing new. This is not all of a sudden Warren has gone off the deep end, some kind of elephant room kind of thing. I don't know why the guys in the elephant room too didn't have him on as well.

I'm going to read you some of this and I want to know if you're mad. So see, I'm indirectly mad or maybe not mad, I should say disappointed because we have John Piper trying to promote Rick Warren's ministry when he had him on because they met at a funeral and because Rick Warren has read a lot of the Jonathan Edwards, et cetera.

And then we have The Purpose Driven Life, a horrible book, just a ghastly, macabre, menacing, ghoulish, it was a horrible book. And then Piper systematically trying to go through the book to find out anything good and take it out of context, even some of the things.

Some of the things were contradicted later in the book. And then to have a book that has no substitutionary atonement, no resurrection, pretty much all about you, even though it says it's not about you at the beginning.

And then to promote Rick Warren, have him speak, I think maybe somebody got sick and he had to do a video conference or something, but it just so galls me that people are making decisions and then their followers follow.

See that's the problem. When John Piper makes a decision, it's a free country, John can do whatever he wants. I can decide whether to listen or not. I don't usually listen to him, but once in a while I'll read one of his books.

I especially love the Swans Are Not Silent series, the Crossway series. I think that's an excellent series on old, you know, biographical sketches. It's excellent stuff. The stuff that has gone through an editor and published, most of it I really, really like.

I don't like to listen to him, but that's just a preference issue. I'm not a charismatic, I'm not into this whole racial thing. I saw the other day on the website, he's stepping down, I think 2014, so they're trying to find a new pastor.

I think session one, the board meets with a new guy, the candidate, whoever that candidate might be, and they talk about racial reconciliation or racial harmony or something like that. It was just such a no-brainer to me.

If you've got a pastor who's got a problem with racism, then he ought not to be a pastor and to make it part of the candidating process. That's crazy. That's like when Piper goes to Los Angeles and MacArthur wants him to do his hedonism thing desiring God, and Piper wants to do racism, and MacArthur's, you know, we don't have a problem with racism at Grace Community Church.

I remember the home Bible study that I had that was underneath Grace Community Church and her elders, and really, I think white people were the minority. We had great potlucks, great pot providences. We had Cubans there.

We had Armenians, actually they weren't Armenian Armenians, they were Calvinistic Armenians who used to be Armenian Armenians. And we had, who else we had there? We had black, we had Asian, we had all kinds of people there.

It may be an issue in Minnesota, but it's not an issue in Los Angeles, and I don't think it should be an issue, we hire a new pastor here, I'm not going to have a whole session on racial reconciliation.

Why Rick Warren's Muslim Outreach Is a Theological Problem

Well, there'll be plenty of things about the ministry that I have that people don't like too, but back to this. Rick Warren builds bridge to Muslims. You know what I'd like to have? I'd like to have John Piper say, do you know, I stuck my neck out for Rick Warren, kind of friends, he's a nice guy, had him on, tried to push him, and you know, a lot of my followers now are standing up for Rick Warren, but this is ghastly.

This is ghoulish. This is not proper to do what he has done. Rick Warren builds bridge to Muslims, Orange County Register. Through the years of outreach, Saddleback Church pastor Rick Warren is part of an effort named King's Way that attempts, that's attempting, actually, this is a misspelling here on the Orange County Register, to bring evangelicals, Christians and Muslims together.

Jim Hinch, the Reverend Rick Warren, now I didn't call him Reverend, this is just, I'm just reading the article, pastor of Saddleback Church, and I'm not calling it a church, I'm just reading the article, in Lake Forest.

I'm not saying they're in a forest. And one of America's most influential Christian leaders, that is true if you think about him as a mainline Christian, has embarked on an effort to heal divisions between evangelical Christians, when did he become the spokesperson for evangelical Christians, and Muslims by partnering with Southern California mosques and proposing a set of theological principles that includes acknowledging that Christians and Muslims worship the same God.

Now if I was a Muslim, I think I'd be upset. I'd be upset with the people here who are going to try to do that. What we have is we have a liberal pastor, and we have a liberal Muslim, trying to say that we worship the same God.

I think if you ask any conservative Muslim, they would say, of course we don't worship the same God. And if you ask any conservative Christian, they in fact would do the same. I think I should probably, you know what I'm going to do, I'm going to call James White and we can have James on to talk about it, but for right now, this is just crazy.

This is 2 Corinthians chapter 6 stuff for sure, verses 14 through 18 have nothing primarily to do with do I marry an unbeliever or not, but it has everything to do with this kind of stuff. Going back to the article, the effort informally dubbed King's Way, caps years of outreach between Warren and Muslims.

Warren has broken Ramadan fasts at a Mission Viejo mosque, met Muslim leaders abroad and addressed 8 ,000 Muslims at a national convention in Washington, D .C. By the way, you can pull up that message if you'd like, and you can see what he didn't say about he didn't have a gospel of first importance.

Much different than a friend of mine who had to go to a certain country overseas, and it was a Muslim country, getting off the plane surrounded by guns to protect him because he was to instruct some of the local leaders, what does Christianity really teach?

And I'm sure my friend talked about substitution and atonement, talked about sin, talked about the Trinity, talked about the resurrection. Saddleback worshippers have invited Muslims to Christmas dinner and played interfaith soccer at a picnic in Irvine attended by more than 300 people.

Well, that's not very many. You got a church boasting of 30 ,000 or whatever the number is, 300 people. The game pitted pastors and imams against teens from both faiths. The teens won. I think we should be playing the jam, eating rifles with the Muslim comments that are there about the tie and the crest and the whole soccer issue.

The effort of prominent Christian leader to bridge what polls show is a deep rift between Muslim. I'm glad that polls show that. According to the polls, there's a big problem. Well, according to the Quran and according to the Bible, I think they don't mix.

And I think conservative Islamic people would say the same thing. Culminated in December at a dinner at Saddleback attended by 300 Muslims and members of Saddleback's congregation. I'd like to know what they ate there.

At the dinner, Abraham Muhlenberg, a pastor, Saddleback pastor in charge of interfaith outreach. I wonder how much money they waste on that, just paying the pastor. And Jihad Turk, director of religious affairs at a mosque in Los Angeles, introduced Kingsway as a path to end the 1400 years of misunderstanding between Muslims and Christians.

Yeah, it's just a misunderstanding, you know, those crusades and such. It's just a misunderstanding. We actually worship the same God. And, you know, we should probably play football together and it'll be the teens against the leaders.

How's that? Please. The men presented a document they co-authored outlining points of agreement between Islam and Christianity. The document affirms that Christians and Muslims believe in one God and share two central commandments, love of God and love of neighbor.

Help me, Obi-Wan, you're my only hope. The document also commits both faiths to three goals. Making friends with one another, eating rifles, building peace, probably works with the global peace deal that Warren's got, and working on shared social service projects.

The document quotes side by side verses from the Bible and Koran to illustrate its claims. Oh, so now maybe we'll have a new purpose driven Koran. We agree we wouldn't try to evangelize each other, said Turk.

We'd witness to each other, but it would be out of love thy neighbor, not focused on conversion. Well, I'm glad that he says that. I think he's supposed to try to convert, but I'll speak more for the Christians.

We have something called the Great Commission, and I know ultimately the Great Commission was when God the Father sent the Son and the Son willingly went. But in Matthew chapter 28, verses 16 through 20, what we commonly call the Great Commission, we are to make disciples of all nations by going, baptizing and teaching.

And Jesus said, and lo, I'm with you always, even at the end of the age. Luke chapter 24, we are to proclaim forgiveness, repentance to all nations. That's what we're supposed to do. We're supposed to talk about the substitutionary death of Christ Jesus.

We're supposed to talk about his life, and his words, and his resurrection, and what the apostles say about the doctrine of substitutionary atonement. That's what we're supposed to talk about, Jesus as representative, Jesus as substitute.

Rejecting Chrislam and the Call to Separation

Goes on to say, Warren has faced criticism from some evangelicals for his outreach to Muslims. Yeah, that's true. Late last year, he issued a statement flatly denying rumors that he promulgates what critics term chrislam, emerging of Islam and Christianity.

The rumor is 100 false. Warren wrote at pastors .com, a website he founded that provides practical advice for church leaders, which is an appalling site, by the way. It's moralistic. Goulash is what it is.

How did I get the word goulash? I was thinking about ghoulish, ghastly, macabre, menacing, multi-faith. My life and ministry are built on the truth that Jesus is the only way, and our inerrant Bible is our only true authority.

Well, that's not true. You may say it because you know exactly what to say. Rick Warren's not stupid. When he talks to Michael Horton about the five souls of the Reformation and affirming monergism, and then he meets John Piper, and so what does he talk about right away when he meets Piper?

He knows Piper's into Edwards, and so he talks about Edwards. I've read all the Yale edition works of Edwards. He knows what to do. And so this is not because he's ignorant, he's just caught up in something.

You know, I don't really want to give Billy Graham a pass on some of these issues that he's had over the years as he's gotten older about who goes to heaven and who doesn't, but I don't think Billy Graham would have an issue with saying, you know, this is not, we don't believe in the same God.

I hope he wouldn't do that. Makes me want to think about what Franklin Graham's been doing lately, too, in the news, but I'll just have to keep going. Polls show that evangelicals are 30 more likely than other Christians to hold a negative view of Islam, according to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life.

Polls also show that evangelicals overwhelmingly favor converting Muslims to Christianity and are more likely to believe that Islam encourages violence. I don't know if you have noticed this, but God likes variety.

Warren told an audience of 8 ,000 Muslims at Washington, D .C. convention in 2009. People of all beliefs can be and discuss and yes, even disagree without demeaning or debasing each other. Well, finally, I've read something that I agree with.

I think it's quite natural and manly and normal to just talk to people and say, well, I agree with that. I disagree with that. That's not what I'm slamming here. I think that many evangelicals feel a mandate to convert people to Christianity, said Goulbord, who is Gwen Goulbord, ordained Episcopal priest and co-founder of Los Angeles.

We would not have to make headway if one side was trying to convert the other, she said. Now she said it might be possible to include evangelicals in her group's work. Turk said the relationship between Saddleback and Muslims, though still in its infancy, has already produced results.

People at the dinner in December were talking about the bonds they formed and they were crying. Both sides realized they shared misconceptions about each other's faith. It's hard to know what Christianity is when you go there.

When I first went to Saddleback 20 years ago, 15 years ago, I heard it was a watered down version. But I have to be honest, I heard what would be known as the gospel. Good news. Christ died for us, raised from the dead, that he would address sin.

But then it just turned into this moralism, therapeutic moralistic deism, governmental view of the atonement. When I was there, I heard and it was very, very sad. We would go out to the Shepherds Conference and have Christ-centered, God-exalting preaching all week.

And then Saturday, 4 .30 in the afternoon, we would drive down to Saddleback and we would listen to gobbledygook. We would listen to the gruel of moralism coming from Rick Warren. And here it says, we did a quiz at the Christmas dinner, Turk said, asking basic questions about Islam or Christianity with the scriptures, the Koran or the Bible.

And both sides were missing it. It is an education for everyone. Barakat said he continues to know Warren as a man who literally loves his neighbor. He now calls me his Muslim brother, Barakat said. It all started with a friendship.

2 Corinthians 6 and the Gospel Response to Muslims

Where's Johnny Cash when I need him? Where's Joe Strummer when I need him? Aye, aye, aye, aye. Let me just read to you 2 Corinthians 6, verses 14 through 18. Do not be unequally yoked with unbelievers.

For what partnership has righteousness with lawlessness? Question two. Or what fellowship has light with darkness? Question three. What accord has Christ with Belial? Question four. Or what portion does a believer share with an unbeliever?

Question five. What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God, as God said. I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them and I will be their God and they shall be my people.

Therefore, go out from their midst and be separate from them, says the Lord, and touch no unclean thing. Then I will welcome you and I will be a father to you and you shall be sons and daughters to me, says the Lord Almighty.

Since we have these promises, beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from every defilement of body and spirit, bringing holiness to completion in the fear of God. 2 Corinthians chapter 6, all the way up through chapter 7, verse 1.

6, 14 to 7, 1. Rick Warren does not speak for evangelical Christians. He should not speak for you. He doesn't speak for me. And I wish John Piper would come out and say, that was a real blunder for me to go try to promote this guy's ministry because he is interfaith.

He does do exactly what 2 Corinthians chapter 6 says not to do. I personally want the fellowship of the triune God. And if I don't get fellowship with Warren or Piper, for that matter, then I have to suffer for that.

I don't believe in second degree separation. I'm not a fighting fundamentalist. I'm saying that we are going to watch this issue play out with Muslims and Rick Warren. And it's not going to be good. It's not going to get any better.

It's just worse and worse and worse. You have just two, you have two different religions. And it's not the conservatives who are saying this is good. It's the liberals on both sides. I don't think you're going to go to Iran and talk to an imam who is conservative and say that this is a good idea.

And likewise, I don't think you're going to hear from John MacArthur saying, and I'm not saying John MacArthur is equivalent to an imam. That's not what I'm trying to say. John is not going to think that this is any good.

And so I think most of us know that Rick Warren has fallen off the theological deep end long ago and compromise leads to more compromise. But why couldn't Piper see that? Why didn't he know that before, before he asked him to come to his Desiring God conference?

And I'd like to know, I can't sit down and talk with a guy, but is it the same issue as the Elephant Room men with James MacDonald and his sons inviting T .D. Jakes? And the platform just gets bigger and the platform just gets bigger.

We at No Compromise Radio, we don't want to have a tiny disagreement with someone and then say, well, we're going to cut you off from our theological camp and we can't have you around. We don't want to.

We don't want to do that at all. I'm friends with infant Baptist people, as long as they don't believe it's regenerational, and they are friends with me, even though I'm Baptistic and we have to dunk people after conversion.

But on No Compromise Radio, we believe that we need to stand up for the gospel by preaching it to Muslims in love. That's what we have to do. We have to preach to Muslims in love, the gospel. And as they hear the gospel, the good news that Christ alone can forgive sins committed against the Creator God, that Jesus Christ assuaged the wrath of God due by His holy and just law to all sin breakers, all of creation, that you can have forgiveness found in Christ alone.

And your response to this gospel is repent, believe, follow Christ Jesus. That's the response. It's not to get together to have a soccer game. I'm in favor of having soccer games, but I'm not going to grab our church and just say, let's have another mosque down the street and we'll have a soccer game together.

No, if my kids play soccer against some Seventh Adventist or some Muslim or somebody else, that's fine. They could be on the team as well. This is group associations saying we are now Christians associating with other Christians or other people who we don't even have to say are Christians.

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No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth 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.

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