What Color is Your Parachute?

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.

Welcome to No Compromise Radio ministry. Today is Tuesday, therefore that means... No Punga Sakaar Triste. And what does that mean? Something about the tree stake, the Trident Missile?

No means don't have a sad face.

Oh, I did not know that. I thought head is cabeza, right? Yes. What is face? Triste.

Triste. You should see Steve's face. No, I'm sorry. It's cara. Cara is face, and then triste is sad. And so it's literally don't put on a sad face. Hmm. Okay.

You know what, Steve, just popped in my mind. Let's talk about this for a second, since the Spirit of God just told me to say this. Oh, look outside. There's a blue heron flying right across the studio there.

Wow. How cool is that? Bird watching on No Compromise Radio. Get the 20 gauge out.

Christian Companies and the Wisdom of Hiring Believers

Steve, we were just talking about ministries, moving ministries at the church, helping people move. And it made me think, what should be the Christian approach for using Christian companies? I think that'd be fun to talk about for a minute.

So you've got some plumbing work that needs to be done. Should you call a Christian plumber? You need some plumbing done with your saphenous veins to be put in your heart. And should you call a Christian cardiovascular surgeon?

Should you call a Christian trash company, Christian carpenters, Christian chiropractors? What's your take on all that?

Silence. You know, my take on that is I prefer, especially nowadays, you know, when I'm thinking about how I want to spend my money, I would prefer to help my brothers and sisters in Christ. I mean, all things being equal.

I'm not so sure how I would feel about the surgery thing. I think in that case, and I mean in most every case, I'm going to want whoever I think is the best. But like if it's a plumber, a carpenter, or whatever, and I know somebody who's competent who happens to be a Christian, then yeah, I'm going to hire them first, mostly not because I discriminate against those who are not Christians, but because it's going to be, you know, maybe even a time of fellowship, you know, on top of everything else.

Since God has chosen them, then you can choose them too. Sure. Electing the elect. Yeah, that's fine. But then what about passing over those other Christian plumbers who you don't choose? Oh, that's not fair.

That sounds like it's asymmetrical selection. That is not fair at all. So I think that's a good principle to start with. Principle one would be we want to help other Christians. That's helping the household of faith, you know, if that's possible to do.

Good. Second principle, let's see, how can we do this for the second principle? I think if you are naive enough—not you, Steve, but if the shoe fits— if you just see a fish symbol in the yellow pages or a dove, if you see a dove, you know they're charismatic.

But if you see a fish symbol, I don't think that's enough for me to say, Oh, they're Christians. I'll go ahead and do it. It's kind of similar to the Barna deal where, oh, you say you're a Christian. Okay, I guess you are.

Then I'll take you. I'd rather have a real Christian work on my house or a really good pagan work on my house. But I don't really want to have somebody who's in between. Right.

And, you know, the old saying, if somebody has a bumper sticker on their car—this is an old saying. I just made it up. But if somebody has a bumper sticker on the car, that doesn't necessarily indicate the contents.

You know, it's like there should be an asterisk or a disclaimer. Contents may vary.

Yeah. So when somebody's got a bumper sticker that says, you know, Eternity Smoking or Non-Smoking, that doesn't guarantee, in my mind, that the person has a valid statement of faith. Yeah.

For all we know, they could have chosen smoking. Yeah. Yeah, they could have.

That's right. So if you want to get—my personal opinion is I want to see other Christians help each other. But sometimes, in my experience—Steven, of course, experience doesn't validate the truth— but in my experience, the Christians do the schlocky job because they can use the banner of, well, we're Christians, against me.

And so they do schlock jobs.

Hmm. Like Mr. Schlock from Star Trek. Star Trek. There was actually a question I recorded Jeopardy not too long ago for—I hadn't seen it in years, but there was a question about Dr. Demento, and I thought, wow, a long time.

Yeah, that's right.

And did you know Casey Kasem's still alive? I did not know that. Yeah. Still doing American Top 40? I don't know what it was, but, well, back in the day when you could—. This is Casey Kasem. Steve, I pulled the book out of my library.

It's called Barbed Arrows. Barbed Arrows by Spurgeon, Charles Haddon Spurgeon.

And see, for a minute, I just thought it was like a new comic book title, Barbed Arrows. Well, that'd be pretty good.

Yeah. I did like the—speaking of comic books, when I was doing the No Compromise Ever video, and it was Carl Truman, James White, Phil Johnson, and myself standing at the cemetery doing the videos, and then someone put the characters underneath, and I was the Hulk.

Yeah. James White was—you hold on for Carl Truman. James White was Iron Man. Phil Johnson was—who was he again? Thor. Thor, yeah. And Carl Truman, the British guy— Was Captain America.

And I just—I wrote back, and I go, I don't get it. How does the British guy get to be Captain America? Shouldn't, you know, you change the flag or whatever to the, you know, to the British flag? I thought that was pretty odd, but, you know.

In this book—. And what were you again?

I was the Hulk. Because I had some big jacket on. It was a flannel shirt jacket, but it was puffy.

Is that when you went back to drinking juice?

I looked at that, and I said, definitely, I'm back to juice. I'm back to my V8 juice and beet juice and all the other accoutrements, as D .A. Carson would say, Jean. Jean. The Jean of accoutrements. Yes, but Ted then will now email us, because Ted's some linguist or something.

He taught Noam Chomsky everything he knows. And then Ted will say, no, that's not exactly how D .A. Carson, the Canadian who's now, you know, down in America, who speaks French and all kinds of other languages, he would say it a different way.

Jean. I don't know how to do it. But in this book called Barbed Arrows, it's interesting, Steve, that it's got a little calendar piece of paper that says Sunday, 21, October 1945.

And somebody used this as a bookmark. And it's signed by Charles Haddon Spurgeon. Oh, that was 1845.

I didn't know they made these things. It looked like it was on some kind of press. That's fascinating. And here it has a quote. And these are quotes organized alphabetically by topic. So if you wanted a Charles Haddon Spurgeon quote, this is the place to go.

Okay. Or you can go to Spurgeon .org. And find probably the same thing. But here's what I like, Steve, because this will lead us into our topic. The topic here in the book is bookworm. What's a bookworm?

I think it's some kind of bug that gets inside of your... No, it's somebody who reads a lot of books.

I have many an old book in my library in which there have been bookworms. Isn't that interesting? Really? And I have sometimes amused myself with tracing a worm. Okay. That's not funny. That's bizarre.

This is like a moth is eating your cashmere sweater. And you just kind of trace it. Or one of those plexiglass ant deals that you can get across a section of the... Uh-huh. I'm going to trace it. So then, of course, Spurgeon, like Donald Gray Barnhouse a century later, he turns it into a spiritual illustration.

Are you ready for this, Steve? I don't know. My stomach's already turning. I do not know how he gets to the value originally, but being there, he eats his way into it. He bores a hole in a direct line, and sometimes I find that he dies before he gets halfway through the tome.

Spurgeon had big books. Like many a reader, right? Yep. Now and then a worm has eaten his way right through one wooden cover to another. Yes, and through the cover also. Here we go for Spurgeon now. This was a most successful bookworm.

Few of us can eat our way quite so far. I am one of the bookworms that have not got halfway into my Bible yet, but I am eating my way fast as I can. Mm. Let's just ponder that. They've got... Well, the demoral of the story for me is, or the demoral to the story, the demoral to the metanarrative, is they actually had real bookworms.

Yeah. I have thousands of books, and I don't have one with a real bookworm in it. And just think if I had a Charles Haddon Spurgeon book with his bookworm, then it would be worth a lot more in my iconoclastic mind.

I'm glad that I don't have any worms in my electronic book collection. That would be very disturbing.

The worms crawl in and the worms crawl out. Yeah. Okay, moving right along. All right, here's what we want to talk about today. I did get this email from our listener, and here's the question. It's called Clean Your Desk Tuesday.

Clean Your Desk Tuesday. Uh-huh. How about a show called Cultural Differences and Unity in Christ? You could go into detail about how, especially in this area, when you're a Christian, cultural differences are put to the side for the sake of fellowship and unity.

So I don't want to do a whole show on that, Steve, but I would like to address it because we like to serve our emailers and our callers and radio station hosts and everyone else. We live to serve. Yeah, we live to serve.

So how do we put aside cultural differences to fellowship together? What would you say?

Well, I'd say that there's obviously something that transcends whatever cultural differences we may have, and that would be that we're all brothers and sisters in Christ. I get, you know, I think I'm encouraged by the fact, and you've mentioned this before, but our church is increasingly growing in color.

Now, we don't have anything on our website that says, you know, we're a diverse church. We cherish diversity. We don't have any of that kind of stuff. But I think it is good, especially when you live in an area that has a multitude of ethnicities and cultural backgrounds and everything like that, that you draw from that community.

What I don't understand is the idea of having a church based on, you know, we're going to be a church where only people from Hong Kong go or only people from, you know, Senegal or only people, I don't even understand that.

I don't think that is a biblical concept at all. We're to reflect the area around us, not to be, you know, kind of separatist.

So, Steve, I totally agree. If we're in Iceland and people everywhere in that church look Icelandic, they don't have a problem with other races because if they say to themselves, you know, we don't have any black people at the church, well, you've got a problem.

No, we don't have a problem because we have a church up in Alaska and it's all Eskimos who attend Eskimo Bible Church and they all look Eskimo-ish. I don't think there's a problem. But wouldn't there be a...

Is that a real word?

Easy for you to say. Easy for you to correct me. I speak for a living. Is that a real word, Eskimo-ish?

No, but I think my point is clear that if you're in the inner city and you're in Harlem and the only people that show up are black people, then I don't have a problem. But if you're at a place in an urban area or a suburb where there's all kinds of different people who live in that town but your church is only white, then you might ask yourself the question, am I portraying a white Republican Jesus from the pulpit?

Right.

And I mean, that'd be a valid question. You know, I mean, your church should reflect the people around the area. Why? Because God's saving people of all races and he's doing his work everywhere. But I mean, it would be wrong, like you said, if a church were not to reflect the population around it.

I mean, if you're in Japan, you would expect most of your church to be Japanese. You know, you would be a little shocked if you went to Tokyo Baptist Church and, you know, they were all African American or they're all white or, you know, something like that.

Now, there could be a reason for it. It could be the only service in English, you know, for miles and miles. So that would be valid. But other than that, it would be a little difficult to understand.

If someone called and said, I'd like to attend Bethlehem Bible Church, are you racially diverse? Well, what I would say is, yes, we are. And I think we're more diverse than West Boylston is. But why would you ask that question?

Because even if we're all white people at the church, we worship a Jew. We're worshiping a Jewish godman. Right? His mother was Jewish. He had no father. He had a stepfather, of course, Joseph. But we worship a Jew.

And so it doesn't matter. James 2 is clear. My brothers, show no partiality as you hold the faith in our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord of glory. So interpretively, when you look at Jesus Christ, the transfigured God on that mountain, I don't think James was thinking, do you know what?

Your eyes are a little more set back than mine. John, your skin's a little darker than mine. Peter was going, well, you know what? My eyebrows are better than yours. My chin sticks out farther than yours.

Do you think Peter was saying any of that? Because compared to the Lord of glory, we are nothing. We are no ones. We are all image bearers because of Christ Jesus' creation. And we should respond because He saves all kinds of people, Jews and Gentiles, in every stripe.

And people are up in heaven now. All different kinds of colors on earth. And when they get the resurrected bodies, I guess they'll be, you know, that's a good question. When you get your resurrected body, do you still retain the lack of pigment in your skin?

I have no idea. But you know what? I don't think we're going to be very consumed by any of that.

I don't think so. Steve, this is a big pet peeve of mine because we all should worship, whether we are from India or from Madagascar or from Canada or from America. We all worship the same Savior, Christ Jesus.

And if I could use the terminology, He was colorblind. He didn't care if people were Samaritans, if they were women, if they were Jews, if they were centurions. He didn't care.

So why do we care? Yeah, and I'm going to be a little edgy. I'm sorry if this offends anyone, but I don't go for titles of churches like First African Methodist Episcopalian whatever or, you know, I know there are some churches that are Chinese.

I know that there are a lot of ethnic groups that actually have their name in the church. And I'm like, I don't get it. In light of, you know, Galatians chapter 3 where it says there is neither Jew nor Greek, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And I just think, okay, it would be the equivalent in the first century A .D. of saying First Slave Baptist Church of, you know, First Greek, First Jewish Church. That whole idea would just be anathema.

They wouldn't have thought that way at all, nor should we. First male church. Yeah, I mean, yeah, we're going to separate by race or by sex or by—all those things would be wrong. And so why anybody would want to do that today, I have absolutely no idea.

But it doesn't reflect the unity that we ought to have in Christ.

So, Steve, let's now push the envelope all the way to the edge. This concept of Christ dying for all kinds of people and the body of Christ containing Jews and Gentiles and what you talked about in Galatians chapter 3 should make Americans who want to hoist some huge American flag and put it on the stage or platform.

So that's what you see. You see the pulpit and the drum set and then the American flag.

First American Baptist Church.

Do you know when some people see the flag and you know what it's like to travel overseas and if you're in Germany or the Czech Republic or India, many, many people there think of America as imperialistic, as war-hungry, all kinds of things they think about America.

They like American people, but they don't like America. And so America isn't perfect. I love the country and I'm glad I live in a free country. My father served the country. I mean, I think I'm patriotic generally.

But that doesn't mean that when I worship Christ Jesus, I've got to have a— I'm going to say this is going to sound really bad— a stupid American flag up in front of the congregation, that means absolutely nothing.

Stars and stripes forever, yes, but not in every place in front of the pulpit. You know, here's a hymn.

Maybe I'll write this one. It'll be called Stars and Stripes in Heaven. I mean, are we going to be flocking behind the banner of the United States in heaven?

Now, when I first got to Bethlehem Bible Church, it was 1997 and there was a big flag. I think there was a couple of them. You had the Awana flag. You had the Christian flag and the American flag. And then I moved them to the back.

And I think they're still in the back someplace because every Awana, they've got to have them. So I think you could probably find an American flag here in the church if you looked hard enough. I haven't seen it in the back lately.

But then I got people who were really mad because I moved the American flag and therefore I was anti-American. I didn't care about the vets. I didn't care about those people who lost their lives and all these other things.

And somebody even wrote to John MacArthur saying one of your seminary students has moved the flag to the back, and that is sacrilegious. That's like stomping on the flag with Jane Fonda at, you know, Tiananmen Square.

I have a rhetorical question, then I have something I want to say about this other thing. But my rhetorical question was, did Jesus commission the Christian flag? But the other— I think that's found in Ezekiel.

But the other thing is, I don't get into fights. But it would take all of my restraint if you started telling me that I don't love this country. I was in the Army. My wife was in the Navy. My son was in the Marine Corps.

My dad was in the Navy. My grandfather was in the Army. I mean, you just go—my brother was in the Air Force. You could just go right down the line. And, you know, so don't tell me that. And I'm as American-loving as anybody you're going to find.

But there's a difference. Do I love America more than I love Christ? I think, you know, people ought not to conflate those two things, and they ought not to have the wrong priorities about those things.

I love the United States. I would give my life for the United States. But if you're going to ask me what my priority is, my priority is always going to be the Lord Jesus Christ, because George Washington is not going to judge me for what I do on Judgment Day.

Well, Steve, if we had flags in the church, here's what I would like. I'd like to have a flag up in the church, if we had a bigger sanctuary, for every country that had a missionary that was supported by a Bethlehem Bible Church.

That would be great. And so we could have, you know, and we could put Israel's flag up so you remember to pray for Israel, America's flag up because, you know, remember to pray for America. But in terms of coming to the church, and I pledge allegiance and all these other things and the flag, I want Christ to be—Christ is transnational.

Christ is, can I say, multi-ethnic in terms of his effect? Supra-ethnic. Yeah, absolutely. Above ethnic. Absolutely. So when it comes to cultural differences, I think Americans need to say to themselves, well, they could be really jerky and just always run around saying, oh, everybody's got to speak English in our country.

You've got to be legally, you know, here, blah, blah, blah. Okay, those are arguments for another day. But I do think we should go out of our way. If a minority group, let's say there are some Asians here going to school and now they attend the church that we pastor, shouldn't we go out of our way to try to make them feel at home, to make them feel comfortable, to make them feel assimilated?

When I go to Germany and I'm the only guy speaking English and people are nice to me, I'm happy.

The stumbling block is to be the cross, not the American flag. And, you know, I just think, let's just imagine we were in another country, maybe in a country where they oppress Christianity. We're going to go to China where, you know, nominally, I don't know how many Christians there are.

They say that there are tens of millions. Well, okay. But officially, Christianity is really not permitted. The state churches are really super weak and everything else. And so we're going to go there and we're going to put up a Chinese communist flag, you know, where they

I mean, what would that be? Or during World War II, we're going to put the Nazi flag in the front of our church. Why? Because we're Germans. Therefore, we have to have the Nazi flag here. And it's not

I'm not equating the United States flag with any of those other things. Here's you know, the point we're simply trying to make is do we want to introduce additional obstacles to the gospel that ought not to be there?

Well, if you look at the catacombs in Rome, you'll find the American flag. It just only has 48 stars. Who knew? Who knew? Steve, Christ died for all kinds of people. We want to serve all kinds of people.

All kinds of people should be on our elder board in terms of qualified men, right? It shouldn't just be, oh, we only can pick white people. Wasp. They have to be wasps.

Protestant I do go for, though. Yeah, Protestant is very good. And if you're not a Protestant, we can do a show on that, you know.

How about getting to know other people and the Eastern folks versus the Western folks and their ideas of time and when they show up and how they relate to people and how they have people over to their home and do those kind of things.

We should be cognizant of that, right?

Yep. Okay. All those kind of things. I mean, we've got a large in this area, fairly large Brazilian population. So we need to be somewhat aware of that and even what language. Oh, you speak Spanish?

You're from Brazil. Do you speak Spanish?

Portuguese. How about this, Steve? Let's end on this high note. Isn't it great that no matter where you come from or what your skin color is like or what sex you are, that when you really are regenerated by the Spirit of God, God plants in you a love for other Christians?

And I can go to Poland and meet a Christian or I can go to Africa and meet a Christian and those people and I are bound together by the love that the Lord has for us and then our response to Him.

That's right. I mean, you know, wherever you go, Kuwait, Australia, whatever country you want to name, if somebody really loves the Lord and you love the Lord, there's a bond there that cannot be broken and transcends any kind of national difference.

I remember singing Great Is Thy Faithfulness in India in a hot YMCA building at a worship service and I just thought, this is a charismatic moment for me. This is as good as it gets, singing with other people I don't even know about and we're all singing about Christ Jesus.

And then in Zambia, everybody's black except me. I'm white and nobody could have cared less because our focus was on Jesus, the risen Savior, who was the Jewish God-man.

But at least you did bring an American flag to post up front.

I know. I know. So today, we're talking a little bit about cultural differences and we can enjoy cultural differences. You can enjoy your own kind of food if you'd like. That's fine, but you want to love other Christians because Jesus died for all kinds of people.

And we'll keep them to the very end.

Www .nocompromise .com.

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 bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.

The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE, its staff, or management.