2021 Summer of Interviews: Russ Baker Interview

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Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry coming to you from Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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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

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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.

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In short, if you like smooth, watered -down words to make you simply feel good, this show isn't for you.

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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

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King. Here's our host, Pastor Mike Abendroth. Welcome to No Compromise Radio, a ministry.

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My name is Mike Abendroth. And as I look outside, real time right now, I think it's

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September 24th, and the leaves are starting to change. I see out here in central

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Massachusetts, orange, red, yellow, and other colors of death.

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As you know, if you've been listening to this show, you can always contact me, info at nocompromiseradio .com.

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If you've got a question, most questions are, where can I find a good church in the area? That's probably number one on the list.

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And so today we're going to answer that question in a particular way. If you are near Amarillo, Texas, and you say,

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I need to find a good church, what would I do? So today we have a special guest online, Pastor Russ Baker.

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Welcome to No Compromise Radio Ministry. Thank you, Mike. I understood that this was supposed to be the

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Tuesday guy show that I was on. Well, what you don't know is, although it's Tuesday in real time,

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I'll post this show on Wednesday. So Russ, first tell our listeners kind of how we met, and it's fascinating with all the horrible stuff that goes on with social media and the internet.

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There are some wonderful things that happen too. Well, you know, I was first exposed to you, honestly, through the podcast and just happened to look you up on Twitter, but I've followed your tweets for quite a while.

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And I think we've had some crossing paths along the way through what is normally really best described probably as a dumpster fire of Twitter, but it just seems to attract like minds many times.

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That's right. People with psychological problems. So Russ, you've been the pastor there at Westview Christian Church.

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By the way, you can go there, listener, westviewcc .net, westviewcc .net,

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or you can type in Pastor Russ Baker, Amarillo, Texas, but you've been a pastor there since 2013.

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Tell us a little bit about how you got to this particular ministry. Well, I came here in 2013 after getting out of the military.

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I was in the Army for 10 years, kind of a back and forth deal, but I was in in the early nineties and then got out and then went back in after a 12 -year break in 2009.

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And then while I was overseas, just really, I won't say that God told me anything because He speaks through Scripture, but it was through prayer and study, and I really just came to the point where I knew that what

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I was doing was not where I needed to be and what I needed to be doing. So I got out of the military and went to the

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Moody Bible Institute and graduated and ended up back home in the same town where I grew up, so it was a pretty providential thing that God did.

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That's amazing. Tell our listeners a little bit about the military service and how you navigated being a ranger or being in the ranger regiment as a

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Christian. How does that all work? Well, that's a good question. That's why

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I get paid a lot of money. Yeah. Well, you know, it's a difficult thing to be a

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Christian in the military. That's just the honest truth of it all. When I was in the 90s,

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I wasn't a believer, and it took my mom getting brain cancer. That's actually what got me out of the military the first time.

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And while I was home, believe it or not, my dad had invited me to go to a

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Promise Keepers rally, and I went to the rally in Dallas, and it just goes to show that the

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Lord can use anything. Knowing what I know now, looking back, I think we could all say that that's the case for our walks with Christ, is that the

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Lord uses some strange things at times to get us out and get us where He wants us. So that's what happened.

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I became a believer, and it wasn't until much later I went back into the military as a

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Christian, and it was a whole different world. You see things a lot more clearly and a lot differently, and it's a struggle.

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So if you have believers, or you know people that are in the military and they're believers, they need your prayers, because it's a dark place at times.

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I don't know, Russ, because I didn't serve in the military, although my father was a Korean War veteran, do you think it's harder these days to be a

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Christian in the military? I mean, that's what I want to say, and maybe that's what I think, but I guess I could say that for anything.

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Is it harder to be a social worker as a Christian now? Is it harder to be a pastor now? I guess

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I would probably answer those things differently, but is there any truth to that? Is it just becoming more difficult because it's losing its

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Judeo -Christian foundations? Yeah, I think we could say that about all of—it's harder to be an

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American in general and be a Christian. You know, as things begin to slide, obviously the difference between light and dark becomes even greater, but there is a lot of pressure on you.

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And I think if you were a chaplain in the military, you would really feel that pressure right now to conform or they're going to run you out, which is what happens a lot of times.

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I interviewed quite a few years ago, Russ, for the National Guard chaplaincy here for the reserves in Western Massachusetts, and they basically needed somebody to come in and do some services, and I think they wanted to hire me because of counseling and maybe alcohol problems and domestic problems and things like that.

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And I was wanting to do it because I knew I could then preach the gospel to several hundred men and some ladies there, but I had to go to officer training school and other things.

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It didn't work out, but I have to say I wish I could have that pedigree to have some military background and service to understand some of these things in a better way.

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Russ, if we came to your fellowship on a Sunday, Westview Christian Church, what would we expect?

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And I ask the question because so many churches are like, well, here's what we expect, come as you are, dress casual, latte bar in the front, you know, this is what we're known for.

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If you had to tell listeners, they live in Amarillo, they're going to show up, what would they expect?

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Because I think you'll answer that question differently than you can dress casually and have a coffee.

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Yeah, we are probably going the opposite direction of what you're saying.

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Sorry to interrupt you, go ahead. We do have coffee, but we don't have a coffee bar. If you come for Sunday school, you can have a cup of coffee, but no, we started off, this church began as an independent

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Christian church out of the Campbellite movement, and it's really funny because I heard you interview another pastor several years ago that had a similar story.

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We are a reforming church, and over the last seven years, we've gone from a small church that wanted to be like all of the megachurches around, doing all of the relevant seeker stuff that you would find in a normal church, to now one that is a 1689 confessional reformed

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Baptist church that really, we've gone back to hymnals, we've ejected all of the media, you know, it's really, you know,

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I would just, you would expect to sing the word, hear the word preached, you know, we worship through all of the normal means that God would give us, the

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Lord's Supper, giving just your average, well I say average, it's not average anymore but just your normal reformed church is really what you would expect to find if you came here.

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Russ, I've found over the years that people want to have maybe some type of, with an advertising background, a hook, or this is the catch, or here's how we are unique, and I regularly remind my wife, you know, our vision statement, we don't really have a vision statement, it's

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Colossians 1, 28 and 29, and we're going to proclaim Christ, we're going to do it every week, and these are just normal means of grace, and just simple things, and preaching of the word, and baptism, and Lord's Supper, and prayer, and singing just like you said, and then the next week we'll get together again if we're alive, and we sing the

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Lord's praises again, and do you think that some young people now are seeing that kind of style, that liturgy, they're finding that more attractive after they've seen the 30 minutes of a rock concert and a 20 minute

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Ted Pep talk, do you think they find this attractive, the real Christians? Well, you know,

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I think real Christians are always going to find that attractive, but you know, it seems, and this is what we're seeing here in our area, is that so many people are disillusioned with just the vapidness of what you would get in a normal service.

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I mean, why would they come to hear us sing something that the world can do much better than we can do?

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Instead, what we would rather give them is the one thing that the Church has that the world doesn't, and that's the gospel.

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That's so crucial for our listeners to hear. We try to become like the world all too often to try to woo people in, and then of course when they get here, they realize that Hollywood or Broadway or Nashville can do it a lot better, and then what do we do?

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But just like you said, Pastor Russ, there's something that the world can't do and refuses to do, and that is to talk about the riches of Christ Jesus and the great prophet, priest, and king.

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Right? Absolutely. Go ahead, I'm sorry. Oh, I'm sorry, I cut you off.

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No, no, I'm just looking at your website, and so one of the things I do, and I've tried to teach the people here at No Compromise Radio, and even the folks that attend here at Bethlehem Bible Church, if you ever go out of town and you're trying to find a church, the first thing

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I like to say to my family, and I want them to realize, and I'm trying to teach to others, is we never get up on a

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Sunday, I mean, short of we're in a Middle Eastern country or something, are we going to go to church today and worship the

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Lord Jesus? The question is, from the kids when they were little, where are we going to go? Not, are we going to go, but where are we going to go?

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And then it expands to, I look at the website and maybe look at someone's theological education, and in your case,

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Moody and RTS, Reformed Theological Seminary, and the very next thing I look at is what they're preaching through now.

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And so I like to ask people, you know, what's your pastor preaching through now? And usually they'll say things like, well, he's doing like a three -part series on heaven and hell, but he'll be back into Colossians soon, and they almost make an excuse maybe for his topical message.

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You're in the book of Daniel now, and according to the website here, has it taken you 70 weeks to preach through Daniel?

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It has not taken me, although we are in the second half of chapter 9 this week, and so we will be talking about 70 weeks, and I'm sure it's at this point that, you know,

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Kirk Cameron will make his appearance and then disappearance, so. Russ, tell our listeners a little bit about your strategy for those, not the later chapters, eschatological chapters, but let's talk about those first chapters, and you think about all the dare to be a

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Daniel stuff, and Daniel, this man of moral resolve and character certainly, and you see the

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Old Testament speak highly of Daniel. How do you preach Daniel 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 for,

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I don't know how many weeks you preached it, it seemed like it was about eight or so, and not just give people, you ought to be honest like Daniel, you ought to have courage like Daniel, you ought to be bold like Daniel, you ought to, whatever it is.

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I mean, that has to be part of it, I'm sure, but how do you frame it in a Christian fashion since the book of Daniel is not found in the

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New Testament? Well, that's another good question. You know, we looked at Daniel, and really all of Scripture, we would say is

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Christian Scripture, Christ is the center of all of it, it all points to him and speaks of him and glorifies him, but you know, when you look at even the first six chapters of Daniel, you have to be thinking what's the point, and the point is that God is in control, that God is sovereign over all things, and he's working all things to their appropriate end, which, you know, ultimately is wrapped up in Christ, and so that was really how we tackled the beginning, even though, you know, we would look at Daniel and say, there are things there that are good things for us to emulate, but, you know,

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Daniel's not the hero of the story. It's interesting, I regularly critique sermons, my own, others, sometimes for different seminaries, sometimes friends will email me and say, hey, can you take a look at this, and have a website sermoncritique .com,

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that I would do it for people, I heard that website's down for a second, I have to fix that, but someone emailed me recently a sermon, and I watched it, and it was from the

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Old Testament, and I thought they did a really good job in terms of talking about that particular passage in the

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Old Testament context, but they never took a step back and thought about how does this passage in Isaiah fit in the redemptive flow of all

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Scripture, and I said to the person, because he asked me a question, and I've tried to help him over the years,

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I said, actually, King James fundamentalists talk more about Jesus than you did in the sermon, talking to that student, and I said, if you don't talk about Jesus, you might as well be a rabbi, and your sermon was essentially a rabbinic sermon,

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I love you, but that was a fail, no Jesus, no good news, it was law, and it was scolding, policeman not shepherd, and then

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I said, does anybody have any good news, do you, then tell me, and I sent that to him, and he actually responded back with thank you, and I said, well, that's a manly response, but it is difficult these days for so many people to want to talk about the

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Lord Jesus in the Old Testament, do you think there's a reason for that? Well, honestly, if you look at where most of your seminary,

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I don't know, it seems that the popularity of, and I know

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I'm going to get you in trouble here, the popularity of dispensationalism over the last 30, 40, 50 years has really spurred people into this whole idea of first reading, second reading, where we have to go back and read these

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Scriptures totally devoid of Christ, and then only then can we come at what is the

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Christological meaning, and I think when we do that, we simply fail to understand that God is the author of all the

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Scriptures, and when we see the apostolic commentary on those things, it should point us right back to Christ, even in the

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Old, if He's not truly the God of all of Scripture, then is He God at all is the question that I would have.

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I agree, Russ, and when I'm preaching through Hebrews, I just watch what the writer does in that sermon of his, and how these

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Old Testament Psalms that we would not think, that maybe Moody would not teach us to say these are

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Messianic Psalms, yet that's the way the writer of Hebrews sees them. For instance,

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Psalm 102, he uses that to talk about the Lord Jesus, or Psalm 45,

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Psalm 89, and the list goes on. I mean, chapter 2 of Psalms and 22 and 110, those are more obvious, but I really have appreciated the direction of pastors like you who are making sure that you're going to talk about the

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Lord Jesus, and to me, I could even use the S. Lewis Johnson approach, and I remember him talking once from Psalm 32 about blessed is the man to whom the

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Lord does not count or reckon or impute sins.

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And then Lewis said, you know what, I don't think this is technically a Messianic Psalm, but everything in this Psalm reminds me of my

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Messiah and what He's done, and turn your Bibles to Romans 4, and off he went. It's not that hard.

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Even for my dispensationalist friends, I want to tell them, okay, do duty, diligence to the

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Old Testament setting, and then just tell me, okay, I'm not going to find Jesus in the verse, but I'm going to make sure

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He's in the passage. I would even appreciate it if they did that, wouldn't you? Yeah, absolutely. One of the biggest things that I had to learn was to get out of that mode, and really,

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I'm really thankful for guys like you, for a lot of the older dead guys that are now you know, these great commentaries that we read, but we have a group of pastors even here in Amarillo called the

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Amarillo Reform Fellowship, and it's a lot of Reformed, like -minded guys that we do the same thing that you're talking about.

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We try to sharpen one another, and it has really been a benefit to my own preaching throughout the years.

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How about the Amarillo Reform Fellowship? Are there funny kind of jokes about that acronym or anything like that?

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The jokes get made. They do. That's part of the catch.

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It's easy to remember if you just say ARF. So Russ, when I first moved here to New England, they had a

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New England Reformed Fellowship, NERF, and of course I thought of NERF guns and stuff like that, and I remember hearing

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Tom Nettles come speaking at a conference, and Dr. Nettles got up and said, well,

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I'm glad this is not New England Reformed dogmatics. And there was a pause, but then people finally got the joke after that.

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Pastor Russ, tell me about your family. I know you're married, and what about your kids and all that?

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What are they doing? Well, I am married. I've been married for, well, over 20 years now.

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I have two kids. Both of them are not kids anymore. I have a 30 -year -old son who he and his wife, they do travel nursing, and they're actually out in California right now, and then

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I have another son who just got out of the military and is actually a personal trainer.

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So does he train you at all? In our background. Okay, good. Well, years ago when

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I went to go preach for my friend in Kansas, Eric Mason, he lived out in the middle of the Dust Bowl area, and there's no way to fly there.

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And so I flew to Denver, then into Amarillo, and rented a car and drove from Amarillo up through Texas, and then through the panhandle of Oklahoma into Kansas.

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And so I didn't know you were there. I could have stopped and said hello. You could have. You should have.

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I found it funny when I was driving through Amarillo. I thought it was very interesting kind of geography and stuff like that.

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Very interesting compared to New England. And then the closer I got to this small town, Huton, I think it's called,

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Kansas. I'm trying to remember his, Pastor Mason's church,

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Redeemer maybe, something like that. Anyway, everybody started waving to me. I could just see, you know, they're holding onto the steering wheel, and they just put their hand up like, hello.

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And I thought maybe they were signaling something to me, like, you're not welcome here. But I realize they're just trying to be nice and waving.

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We don't do that here in New England, or in the Bronx. What are you going to preach after? Yeah, I've never been out to the east coast except for the south part of the east coast.

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But yeah, Amarillo is a pretty similar thing. You'll see people waving at you, and you'll wonder if you know those people or not.

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But it's a pretty friendly place to live. The panhandle is, I'm sure, very similar to Kansas and Oklahoma as well.

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There you go. How about coming up here? You could come to our R. Scott Clark conference coming up in October.

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That'd be probably fun. It would be good. Are you guys going to send your Gulfstream down to pick me up?

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Yeah. Well, I'm working on that. The Patreon giving for is low, like always.

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Go ahead. Well, you know what you're supposed to do is claim that and then hold on to it by faith, and it'll happen for you.

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It is interesting. Two people in the last several weeks have come to me on the church grounds here, and they've been visiting, and they have said their background is

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WordFaith stuff, and it's fascinating to me. Both were older, and of course, it's hard to be in WordFaith stuff when you're older because your body's breaking down.

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Your friends and relatives are sick and die. There's all kinds of problems. I mean, I think it's a 22 -year -old person's game.

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How older people stay in it, I don't know, but no jet streams around here.

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So we're 22 minutes in. I've got two and a half minutes left. Russ, if I put you on the spot and did maybe that nine marks thing back in the old days when

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I loved nine marks, and Debra would ask the question, can you give me the gospel in 60 seconds, what would you say?

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Gospel in 60 seconds. Or less, whatever. No, you know, obviously, we all know this as people.

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When we look around, we see that God is holy. We know this because all of creation declares the glory of God, and yet we know instinctively, and all of us know this, that there is something wrong with us, and that something wrong is sin, and the

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Spirit is ever convicting the world of sin. And so it leaves us with a problem, and the problem is how can

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God be holy and man be sinful, and there still be this fellowship and relationship between man and God, and so we would say, well, there can't be.

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The only thing that man justly deserves is the wrath of God, but God so loved us that He didn't leave us in that situation, and instead provided a solution to our problem, and that solution was

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Christ Jesus, who being fully God, took on human flesh, and took on a human nature, became the

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God -man, and offered Himself as a sacrifice for sin in our place, and in that great exchange gives us the righteousness that He merited by His own active obedience, and reconciles us to God through faith in Christ.

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So that would be the gospel in shorthand that I would offer up to you. Amen. Well, I'm glad to hear about things like meriting righteousness.

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I think we come from a background where that's not around, and of course, I know and you teach and regularly believe that the

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Lord Jesus, after He died, was raised from the dead. Amen? Absolutely. Amen. Well, if you live in the

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Amarillo area, and you're looking for a church, and you want verse -by -verse teaching,

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Christ exalted every single Sunday, even in the book of Daniel, I want you to go to Pastor Russ Baker, pull up Westview Christian Church, listen to a few sermons, see if you like him, and then you kind of know what you're getting into ahead of time.

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Pastor Russ, I thank you for your ministry, friendship, I'm glad I got to meet you over social media, and I hope one day we can meet face -to -face.

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Absolutely, that'd be great, Mike, I appreciate it. No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Abendroth is a production of Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston.

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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.

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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.

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You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.