The Pope and Evangelicals

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.

Coffee, Show Setup, and Radio Banter

My name is Mike Abendroth and after that large Pete's Coffee, I'm starting to wake up. It's nothing like actually going to a Pete's Coffee retail spot and then having maybe a house coffee with an add-a-shot of espresso.

Maybe a little stevier in there. Now last show, I was trying to cover the Christianity Today stuff because it's interesting to me, and if you have a radio show that is a daily show, then you've got to come up with topics, right?

So topics have to come to you. I do have folks like Ryan. He sends me stuff. Who else? Andrew sends me stuff. He sends it to Todd Friel too, but I like it when it's sent to the first person is info at No Compromise Radio and then ideas at Wretched.

That's the way it should be, in that order. Always No Compromise, always Wretched Radio, always in that order. And I'm talking to Todd Friel regularly, and I usually say something like this, Hey Todd, we need to get—hey Todd, stop stalking me.

I usually say Todd. We need to do something together. Wretched Radio, and I will grant that they are bigger, they have more influence, they have more listeners, they have more followers, they have more Facebook friends.

I grant that. But our theology's better. See, isn't that the way it goes? The more pure your theology, the smaller your influence. Isn't that how that—that's just the way it works. That's an equation.

Driving or on the ship from Greece over to Turkey a couple months ago with my daughter and some other folks from Bethlehem Bible Church and some No Compromise listeners. They said that island over there is where Pythagorea, Pythagorea, Pythagoreum, Pythagoras was born.

Wow. Hi. How are you? A-squared, B-squared. Oh, funny. So anyway, my name is Mike Abendroth, this is No Compromise Radio, and I said to Todd, we need a Wretched Compromise Productions. Something together that we would do.

Wretched Radio, No Compromise, a Wretched Compromise. And it could be tongue-in-cheek, a veritable irony, a slant to the whole thing. Then I realized that he got the gig for Strange Fire. Can you imagine going to be the—I don't know what he's going to do—moderate, speak, lead, direct at the Strange Fire conference at Grace Community Church?

That'd be pretty good. That'd be pretty good. I don't know how he got that gig, but I bet you it's through Phil Johnson. And so, I can't even speak at the Master's Seminary chapel. I have preached from John MacArthur's pulpit, though, one time.

And it was 12 o 'clock at night, Sunday night, so still the Lord's Day, and I was a janitor, and you're having to clean up the sanctuary. And so I told the other janitors to sit down in the front row, and I was going to give my message.

You know, MacArthur's pulpit, it moves up and down because if there's something on the platform there, let's say special music or baptisms or something else where you have to see behind the pulpit, because the pulpit is a behemoth.

It is huge. It shows the gravitas and the importance of—the Word of God is central in this church. That's where your eyes gravitate towards. And when you see it move up and down for the first time, wow.

And so we would all stand up in John's pulpit, but it wasn't during Sunday. I never got close to him. He was at nighttime as a janitor. Steve Wetmore and I, and who else was a janitor at the time? I'm not sure.

My brother's associate pastor, Chris Peterson, he was probably involved somehow. I don't know. He was probably telling me I shouldn't do it. I think I'm old enough to be Chris's dad. So anyway, I have preached in that pulpit before, but how Todd gets in there, I don't know.

But I think Todd's going to be forever now associated with the Strange Fire Conference, and my guess is MacArthur's going to call out charismatics of the extreme kind, of course, but even he's going to challenge the conservative charismatics in the line of Wayne Grudem, John Piper, C .J. Mahaney, I don't know, Sam Storm, somebody like that.

I'm not sure. So the five-point charismatics. Okay. Well, a wretched compromise. So send your ideas to First Info No Compromise Radio, then Ideas at Wretched, I don't know their exact email, something like that.

And then say, hey, this is what we think you guys should do. We need a wretched, we need a bus. That would be the celebrity Christianity. He's a bus. Here's a wretched compromise bus, and we drive around, and I don't know what we do.

Pope Francis, Evangelicals, and the Problem of Mixed Messages

Argentina's pastors love Pope Francis. See, how'd that come out of anywhere? This is in the gleanings, May 13th, Christianity Today, Lecrae on the cover. Argentina, the first Roman Catholic pope from the Americas, has won strong praise from evangelical leaders in Argentina.

But it's not just hometown pride. Pope Francis' election has been an answer to our prayers, said Norberto Zarago, co-leader of Buenos Aires Council of Pastors. Now, when I read Buenos Aires, why do I want to sing Eres Tu?

It's a different kind of Eres, but Eres Tu, Eres Tu. He's impressed by former Archbishop Jorge Mario Bergoglio's passion for prayer and church unity. So, before I make a comment, international evangelist and Argentine native Luis Palau expects a papacy that will make Catholic-slash-evangelical relations easier and lessen tensions.

And lessen tensions, that's what it says. Not lessen tensions, but it will lessen tensions. Given Francis' moral convictions and biblical faith. Now, friends, what is happening? Have you lost your minds?

Now, where do you begin? Well, I could understand hometown pride. If the next pope is elected, and that pope hails from Worcester, Massachusetts, okay, I would say, wow, the pope came from Worcester. How?

Let's see, what's Worcester known for? Goddard Space Labs, biomedical engineering, Bob Cousy lives here, there's some comedian, Dennis Leary. He's from here. What else is Worcester known for? Something, Velcro was invented here, maybe.

Jet propulsions. Now, Worcester isn't known for much, but of course, you just don't have to drive very far before you get to Walden Pond and Lexington and Concord. So, anyway, I could understand the hometown pride.

Wow, Roman Catholic pope elected from Scranton, Pennsylvania. Okay, I get that part. I understand it. And you know what? I also will have to say that if an evangelical leader was quoted, maybe they're only taking a small quote.

Maybe this evangelical leader went on to say, the Roman Catholic Church, even though they say they believe in Jesus and the resurrection, their view of salvation is completely different than ours. I want nothing best but the best for my Roman Catholic friends.

I have family members who are Roman Catholic. I have friends who are Roman Catholic. I want the best for them. I want salvation for them. I want the Lord Jesus of the Bible to forgive them by grace alone, through faith alone, through the Spirit of God's work alone, right, to God's glory alone, the Bible alone.

That's okay. I want the best for my Roman Catholic friends, too. My grandmother was Roman Catholic. I wanted the best for her. She was a neat lady, a dear lady, but she needed to have her sins forgiven, and sacrament of baptism can't do that.

Mass can't do that. She needed to be confronted by the Jesus of the Bible, the one of whom Romans 3, 4, and 5 talks about justification by the imputed righteousness, to reckon, to impute, to credit to one's account.

That is the Greek word for get the Latin Vulgate of the third century, go back to the original, and that is to say imputed, not infused. She needed to be clothed with the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ.

I love my grandmother. Her name was Nona Anderson. What a neat lady. I could cry about her if I think about it very much, just because I miss her. And so for someone to say we want the best for our Catholic friends, and that's fine, apropos, right, righteous.

I understand that, but when he says he's an answer to our prayers, what does that mean? We've been praying for a pope that's from our hometown. Okay, answered prayer, check. We've been praying for a pope that would say the Roman Catholic system of the traditions and the magisterium and heirs in Trent needs to be abandoned, and we need to go back to the Bible, ad fontes, back to the sources, the Bible alone.

Martin Luther was right. That'd be a good prayer for a Roman Catholic pope. The new pope, we want them to believe in justification by faith alone. The Bible is sufficient, authoritative. I'm not going to sit ex cathedra.

All the riches of Rome are secondary to the purity of Rome's doctrine, and we need to go back to the Bible and abandon all this other stuff. Now, if the pope wants to do the poor stuff, fine, whatever.

I don't want opulence in Rome either when there are a lot of hurting people out there, but I have to subordinate my desires for social needs and social justice and redistribution of the wealth of Rome to doctrine.

It doesn't matter what Rome does if they don't clean their house theologically, and short of God's supernatural intervention, it's not going to happen. You meet the boss, he's the same as the old boss.

And so for evangelical leaders to say that he's an answer to prayer, I think it's at minimal misguided. And then it shouldn't surprise us that Argentine native Luis Palau expects a papacy will lessen the tensions.

Friends, it's okay to have tensions because doctrine matters. It's not okay to be rude and crude and mean and unduly offensive, but if I sit down with you and you say, you like the Yankees and I like the Giants, or Red Sox, or something like that, there's a way to disagree and to argue without a quarrel breaking out.

If you want me to quote a Roman Catholic, I will. G. K. Chesterton once said that the worst part about a quarrel is that it stops an argument. It's good to argue. It's good to debate. It's good to say, how can what you say about going to heaven, which is the most important question in all the world, how am I right with God?

How do I get to heaven? How can I be forgiven? Let's argue that. Let's debate that. Because here's the thing, I know it's postmodernism. I know it's a lack of desire for propositional truth and everything else, but we both can't be right if we both disagree on something.

See? You can't both be right. Now, both could be wrong. One could be right. The other could be wrong. The other could be wrong. The other could be right. But you can't both be right, so the tensions don't need to be lessened because here is a fact, a bald-faced fact.

Rome doesn't change their views. Now, maybe the way that they're promoted and the different spokesperson and the way that it comes across in media, it seems like they're more of a mediating position, but does Trent still hold to be true?

The answer is yes. Is the catechism still true? Yes. Vatican II? Yes. So, until Rome changes those things, there's actually a difference between Protestants and Roman Catholics. That's just the way it is.

Now, Roman Catholics want Protestants to abandon their Protestantism like Jason Spelman and Stellman and go to Rome. And Protestants want, that is, Bible-teaching Protestants, not mainline liberal Lutherans and Methodists and mainline Episcopalians, etc.

Did I say etc? I meant etc. But there's a reason, there's a tension. And Luis Palau is so watered down in his evangelicalism. He does these big, you know, crusades and he doesn't even really know what to say.

He goes to town and he went to town in Santa Cruz, his folks ahead of time, and let's get all the evangelical churches together, raise money, I'll come in, I'll go down to the boardwalk, I'll bring Sixpence and the Richer in, the band, the evangelical band, and we'll have them do a concert for free.

And then they'll sing their song, Kiss Me. This is all true, by the way. They'll sing Kiss Me, and then after Kiss Me is over and the other songs, then Palau got up and said, Jesus wants to kiss you, in faith.

By faith. Then when people come up to the altar calls, or they come up to the beach boardwalk thing, Santa Cruz beach boardwalk, they have a lot of good bands there in the summer there for free. You can go see, I don't know you ever want to go see.

And then we'll have them fill out forms, we'll have people maybe from your own churches who are designated as counselors, guidance folks, and then send them to your churches, including Roman Catholic churches too.

And so most churches went in for that. The church that I attend, First Baptist San Lorenzo Valley, did not, and then they were ostracized in the community because they didn't go along with the Luis Palau thing.

And I think that's Trinity Bible now, is that the name of it? Felton, California. Steve Watkins there is an excellent Bible teacher. So anyway, then years later, they want to come back and all the local churches said no, because no one came to our churches.

So even pragmatically, we don't want to do this. And so the point to all this is Luis Palau doesn't know, and I'm sure he wants to lessen the tensions. I would like tensions lessened as well, but it's going to come on truths, on the truth of, or on the heels of truth.

Easy for me to say. That is to say, if you want to abandon your doctrine of infused righteousness, Rome, great. If you want to abandon the Mass, great. But see, that's not going to happen. And then what do people do when they don't have an argument for something?

You're mean, you're rude, you're unloving. That's Catholic bashing. No, okay, let's do the no compromise style. I'm going to bash the Protestants. Shame on Luis Palau, and shame on whoever this other guy's name is.

What's his name? Jorge. Shame on Jorge Bergoglio. Just because the guy is from Argentina, now you're all happy? You watch. You watch what happens. Anyway, my name's Mike Gabin, you're on this no compromise radio, and we're on our rants.

Church Giving, Shepherding, and Whether Pastors Should Know Amounts

So, anyway, we've got the new Christianity Today here, May 2013. It says, under discussion topics in the current debate, compiled by Ruth Moon. Page 16, should pastors know how much church members give?

And then they have one, two, three, four, five, six people with a little blurb, a little paragraph on what their viewpoint is. And similarly to the Master Seminary Chapel slash Grace Church, I haven't got an invite there.

I haven't got an invite from Christianity Today to be under discussion either. Should pastors know how much church members give? Well, I want you to know that I don't know what people give at Bethlehem Bible Church, but I want to.

When I first got here, I was the only person around the church office most of the days, and if I get mail and I open it up, oh, there's a check from someone in there, and then I would go, oh, I don't need to know that information.

Because if somebody gives a million dollars, then you kind of, you know, you ingratiate yourself to them, and you're there for their kid's tonsillectomy. But if somebody doesn't give any money and their kid's got an appendectomy, you don't show up to the hospital, and, you know, I don't want to be involved with all that.

It's just not good for you to do. So I've always tried to take the high road. Someone says, oh, after the service, I forgot to give this to the offering for the Lord's work, and here, take it. I always say, well, here, there's a deacon over there, give it to them.

I don't want to have any of the money going through me. I don't want to know. I do know the totals, that is to say, if the budget is $500 ,000 and we're at $490 ,000, then I know that kind of information, but I don't know how much people give.

Before, people are elders or deacons, and we have our interview process, and we're asking all kinds of questions about their relationship with their wife and sound doctrine and what do you believe about the atonement.

There could be a hundred different questions we ask them. Are you a Mason? Do you like Pete's coffee? There are very, very crucial questions to ask. I usually ask, if I were to look at your giving, would you be an example of a sacrificial giver?

I don't even look, but I ask them if I were to look, and I have yet to look, and they would say either yes or no. One particular man said, yes, by the grace of God, I'm a sacrificial giver, and the only thing is I just always give cash, so you don't really know how much I give because I don't get the thing at the end of the year saying, here's your tax deduction if you'd like to claim it.

But if you'd like me to start putting my name on my giving, I'd be willing to do it. I thought, you know what, that's a classy answer, very classy. But I said, no, not needed. I just want to make sure you're sacrificial and you're giving because that's part of leadership.

There's no 10 percent, there's no tie, there's no Malachi 3, gun put to the head of people proverbially because you're robbing God if you don't, you know, tithe as an Israelite. But should they know? I've always thought that the church leaders shouldn't know.

That is to say that the elders shouldn't know, just so we don't have any of those things involved. But there is a resurgence of some folks saying it's a good way to shepherd people, if you know, because people's spirituality is directly tied to their giving.

And so when someone—this is their argument, I haven't read all these here, just the main question— if someone gives generously and regularly and sacrificially and cheerfully in 2 Corinthians 8 and 9 kind of ways because of all that the Lord has done for them, and then they stop giving, then if the pastors were flagged on that, they could say, well, is everything okay?

Oh, yeah, I got laid off. Okay, now you can minister to them. Well, I'm really struggling with such and such, then you can minister to them. I don't like the way the leaders spend the money anymore, and I stop giving.

I'm spending money at the casino instead. I mean, there could be a thousand different ways, and it's a good way to flag the leadership so they know what's going on in the lives of people. So that is the other argument, and I haven't been swayed over to that position, but I don't know.

And so for those of you that give to No Compromise Radio, I guess we just got a check in the mail the other day. I don't know how much you give, or I don't want to know. That's not my point, because it's impossible to give money to this ministry, because I don't want to be begging for money.

Let's just read one. There's a yes side and a no side, and then kind of the Middle East. The yes side said, Jim Shepard, Generis, CEO. This notion of pastors not knowing how much people give is a recent development born out of a materialistic, individualistic society.

As a pastor, you're the doctor of the congregation. You've got to be looking at diagnostic information, and there's none better than financial giving. And that is a very good diagnostic tool, I have to admit.

No, here on the other side, Michael Emerson, sociologist, Rice University. No, the temptation to play favorites, to cater to the biggest giver's wishes, and to ignore the less than faithful givers is great.

Not knowing what people actually give avoids these temptations. Other church leaders should be responsible for biblically encouraging more sacrificial giving. So, I don't know where you stand, but when it comes to giving, you should give to the Lord, and you should give for the Lord.

You should give sacrificially, generously, in light of what God has done for you. And you know what? If the leaders look, let them look. If they don't look, then honor it either way. I wouldn't freak out one way or the other.

I'm not trying to say we're going to start looking at Bethlehem Bible Church, but I'm just saying we don't look. But if we did, I wonder what we would find. That's a good question. If I looked at your giving the last few years, I wonder what we would find.

Well, my name is Mike Abendroth. This is No Compromise Radio. I'm glad to be your host. You can write us at info at nocompromiseradio .com. If you've got a question, comment, concern, or you can write Steve at TuesdayGuideNoCompromiseradio .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 WV &E, its staff, or management.