Driven Maturity

Welcome to No Compromise Radio, my name is Mike Ebenroth. People say, why is it called a radio if it's a podcast?

Well, back in the day when we started, I don't know, 15, 16 years ago, daily radio, it was actual radio.

It all started when there was a guy who had a two -hour show, a daily show here in Worcester, Mass.,

and he was gonna go on vacation for two weeks. That's 10 shows, two hours a show, so that's 20 hours of live radio.

And he had asked me to be a guest six months prior, and he interviewed me about who knows what, ministry in Central Massachusetts.

So Tom said, will you fill in for me for those two weeks? I did, talk about scary, two hours of live radio, and maybe even some call -in stuff.

And the only way I could do it in my mind was 15 -minute segments, so that's four an hour, two hours, that's eight segments.

And so I got eight things out that I would talk about for 15 minutes at a time. And then I had to do that for 10 days, 80 segments.

I thought, how do you do that? Well, that was 15, 16 years ago, and they had asked me then to do my own show, gotta pay for it, but do your own show.

And so then it just turned into no -compromise radio. And in the day, we needed all kinds of notes and segments and everything else, wretched radio guests had it all out.

And then now we don't need so many notes, but I have some notes today. And so today on no -compromise radio,

I wanna talk about, I wanna, gonna, I would like to talk about the verse that we have on our bulletin.

We have a little bulletin, some people call them programs. Now, when you come to the church and orders of hymns and Old Testament reading,

New Testament reading, et cetera, there's our order of service, there's the liturgy. And we have some verses listed on our bulletin.

And here's one of the verses listed on the bulletin. Maybe it's only this one, maybe the following verse isn't on there, verse 29, but at least verse 28 is.

Colossians 1, verse 28, him we proclaim, talking about Jesus, warning everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom that we may present everyone mature in Christ.

That's on the bulletin. And so if people say to themselves, what's Bethlehem Bible Church all about?

What's the vision? What's the goal? What do they do? What's the modus operandi?

Is it fellowship? Is it sharing? Is it caring? Is it rock music?

Is it community? Is it a group think? Is it a good place to go find customers for Tupperware or Pampered Chef, or I don't know, what are,

Nutrisystems, do they still do that? Herbalife, I don't know what people buy and sell anymore.

What's the goal? And the goal is a proclamation of Jesus so that people mature in Christ.

That's what it's about. So if you wanna know what happens at Bethlehem Bible Church, it's gonna be songs about Jesus, songs to Jesus, scripture reading about Jesus, scripture readings that proclaim

Christ, sermons about Jesus, Colossians 1 .28.

I sometimes in the past have gone skeet shooting. And sometimes when the skeet shooter doesn't work, we have to use the ones where you throw with your arms.

And by the way, after two hours of throwing skeet, man, my arm is killing me the next day. Churches want mission statements.

Churches want vision. Churches want to have kind of, what are we shooting for? Okay, fine.

If it's like corporate America, not fine. But if it's in the church context, Colossians 1 .28 helps us to do that very thing.

Maturity, we're after the maturity. And the good news is it's told to us by God what we're after.

So it's not, what does church history say? What do creeds say necessarily? What does the vocal minority want?

What does the democratic majority want? What do the statistical experts want? What do the pragmatist want?

What does the denomination want? No, no. What does the Bible say? And we're gonna base everything on that.

So here on the show today, here's what I want you to think of. I want you to think of maturity of the saints as a goal of the church as we proclaim

Christ. That's what I'm after. So back to Colossians 1 .28, that we may present every man complete or mature in Christ.

I have a motive, I have a goal, and that is growth. Now, every time

I say that, people are gonna go, you mean you're after church growth? Yes, that is at the baseline what

I want. But you think I'm talking about numbers. I'm not talking about numbers. I'm talking about the people's growth.

That's what I'm after is your maturity, your steadfastness, your Christ likeness, your conformity to who

Jesus is. I want you to grow. I'm not after how the church grows.

That's the Lord's business, right? It's been told and taught to me that if you take care of the depth of your ministry, the

Lord will take care of the breadth. So how many people attend here? How many people show up? How many services we have?

How much is giving? All that stuff. That's not the growth that I'm talking about. As a matter of fact, with our parking lot, with our building, we're pretty much maxed out.

And so why don't we go to two services? Well, the answer is because we'd have two separate churches and I think it's gonna go against the very goal of having you be mature.

I'm not after two services and two sets of giving and two this, that and the other. I'm after your growth, your maturity as the

Spirit allows you and drives you to live up to your position in Christ. That is what Paul said his goal was to the church at Colossae.

And then now every church, every person, not deacons, not elders, not just men, not just women, not just Jews, not just Gentiles, everybody, younger, older, professing

Christ, real believers. We're not after this, there's a spiritually elite and there's the insiders and only we get to know and we're gonna work on you.

No, we want every person. Matter of fact, verse 28 says every man three times, every man, every man, every man.

The new believer that walks in, the older believer that's been here for 30 years, we want them to grow, growth in Christ, maturity in Christ.

Now, when I studied that word maturity, it had some really interesting connotations to it when you go to the

Old Testament. Part of this maturity, according to the Old Testament background is that you would be complete and undivided, complete and undivided in your desire, your orientation, your beliefs to God.

Okay, so let's think about that. Double -mindedness is bad and you have your one mind on here and one mind here, you're back and forth.

Now let's make it really simple. World, fame, money, ease, hedonism, entertainment, enjoyment, obviously there's nothing wrong with entertainment and enjoyment, but if that's the worship, if that's the idol, and then over here, we're like, well,

I wanna do what God wants. So there's this competing thing, like I'm all tabbing back and forth between the world and my own spiritual walk, money and spiritual riches, and I'm always fighting.

Maturity means this among other things. I'm much more apt to the spiritual side, saying no to these other, the lust of the flesh and the pride of life and the world and hedonism and what the world is selling.

I'm saying no to that a lot more now. You wanna know how you can grow? I mean, how you recognize growth in Christ is becoming more focused single -mindedly on the things that are above.

Colossians chapter three goes on to say, set your mind on things above, not on the things that are on this earth.

Obviously you have to work. Obviously you have to pay bills. Obviously you can go out into some entertaining shows and to have some enjoyment and everything else.

But that's all in light of who you are in Christ and resting in Christ. And it's just the single -minded devoted life unto

God. That's maturity. You meet new believers and they're just still living in the world and they're living all these kind of, but the more they grow in Christ, the more it just switches over.

See where we're going? That's what maturity means, presenting people who are mature. That's what

I want as a pastor. I want growth so that you're more mature, more mature, more mature.

It's not just for select people. It's for everyone. Here's what O 'Brien, the commentator, says about this word mature.

It's used of the heart, which is holy, W -H -O -L -L -Y, turned to God.

A life wholly turned to God. Paul, in his life, wanted maturity.

And it's been said that he wouldn't settle for anything else. I want you to be mature in Christ. Well, let's think about it to make it really easy here on No Compromise Radio.

You have children. Probably many of you have children or maybe you wanna get married and have children.

What's your goal for the children? Well, I hope your goal is that they mature and that they grow up and that they can leave the house understanding how to live and they can understand who people are.

They can understand who they are. They can understand who God is. They can understand finances. They can understand people who are trying to take advantage of them and scams.

They can understand how to live, how to work, how to be on time, how to be a good neighbor, how to say, I'm sorry, how to keep a job, how to get there early, how to be punctual, how to be thankful, how to order from a restaurant, how to make a tip, how to,

I mean, see how many things that you want them to be. And when they're one year old, of course, they're not that. They're still lovable and wonderful and everything else.

But your goal is maturity, right? Your goal is I want you to be able to move out of the house and take care of yourself and raise your own family.

That's what you want. So if you think about, well, my goal for my children is for them to mature.

And so I'll do everything I need to, to help them to do that. Then you understand gospel ministry.

I want you to be mature. And so how do I get you to be mature? That end determines the means.

The goal determines how to. And so what we want is mature Christians.

What you should want is to be maturing. Lord, please mature me. Because mature Christians disciple, mature

Christians evangelize, mature Christians train other Christians, mature Christians give sacrificially, mature

Christians use their spiritual gifts, mature Christians confront, mature Christians sing, mature

Christians come alongside to encourage, mature Christians attend worship service, mature Christians.

I mean, the list goes on and on and on. That's what Paul is after. Paul is after maturity.

I think of Ephesians chapter four, he says something similarly. God gives pastors and teachers and others for the equipping of the saints for the work of service to the building up of the body of Christ.

Maturity is the goal of the church. Maturity and growth is the goal of the church.

Ephesians goes on to say, until we attain the unity of faith and the knowledge of the son of God to a mature man.

Okay, now let's think about this. If maturity is the goal, then entertainment can't be the goal.

I wanna entertain people, that's the goal is I want them to have a good time. No, no, maturity. So everything I do in light of that is toward that goal.

If you have a goal, you work toward that. If your goal is to lose eight pounds that you gained between Thanksgiving and Valentine's day.

Sound familiar? I'm eight pounds heavier than I was on the day before Thanksgiving of last year.

Now, when you wear baggy clothes and you're a guy, you can kind of hide it, but I'm eight pounds heavier. If my goal, humanly speaking, when it comes to weight is to lose eight pounds, then

I've got to think about the end goal and the means to get there. And the means to get there can't be fish and chips every day.

It can't be, well, who cares about the gym? It can't be, well, you know what? I'm just gonna drink 4 ,000 calories a day because I like Coke.

It just can't be those things. And so my goal is to lose weight. I line up my activities and my actions and my thoughts in light of that goal.

So that pastor's desire to say, you know what? My goal is to make everything relevant.

My goal is to get people to come in off the street and feel good here. My goal is to build a large church.

My goal is to have a lot of rich people giving money. My goal, see, we're already deviated.

I think of Spurgeon when he wrote that article, feeding sheep are amusing goats. Is the goal entertainment?

Is the goal consumerism? Spurgeon said, had Christ introduced more of the bright and pleasant elements into his mission, he would have been more popular.

But because of the searching nature of his teaching, many turned away. I do not hear Jesus say, run after these people,

Peter, and tell them we have a different style of service tomorrow. Something short and attractive with little preaching.

We will have a pleasant evening for the people. Tell them they'll be sure to enjoy it. Be quick,

Peter. We must get people in here somehow. Then Spurgeon said,

Jesus pitied sinners, sighed and weeped over them, but never sought to amuse them.

Boyce said, instead of me fitting religion, I found a religion to fit me. So think about this.

Do you know we have worship services that I would consider ordinary?

That I would consider to some degree boring? That I would consider to some degree routine?

What do I mean by that? Regular corporate worship is regulated by God's word with singing and praying and giving and preaching and baptism and the

Lord's supper, et cetera. And it is to be consistent. It is to be regular.

And now here's something I want you to understand. Old Testament worship. Think about it.

Tabernacle or temple. I want you to think of smoke. I want you to think of incense.

I want you to think of the smells. I want you to think of the colors and the pomegranate in embroidered purple pomegranates, blue pomegranates.

I want you to think of the sounds and the trumpets and the singing and the priest and the sacrifices and the gold and the marble and the temple and the brilliance and God creating men to build these things in a special way, giving them spiritual gifts to do it.

And it was all sensual. It was all tactile. It was all to the touch, smell, sight, sounds, everything, the temple, it was beautiful.

Now, what do we have? It's interesting. The veil is ripped from top to bottom when

Jesus dies. And now instead of marble and gold, we have bread, we have wine slash juice, we have water and we have paper for our

Bibles. That's it. That's it. Remember the people in the book of Hebrews, suffering for their faith, persecuted for their faith, losing their homes and maybe their lives for their faith.

And they were tempted to go back. We want the visual. We want the sensual.

We want the aural. We want all this stuff. We wanna go back. I mean, plus we won't get persecuted. Let's just go back.

We're just sitting in a basement. We're in a catacomb, we're in a cave and we're getting persecuted. And all we have is

Jesus. And the writer says, yes, that's all you have is Jesus. That's all you need.

That's all you need. You want the flash. You want the entertainment. You want the visual. That's all gone.

It's done. And God made sure with the exclamation point on it's 70 AD, it's destroyed. There's no going back.

So isn't it fascinating? You go to some of these temples, excuse me, these tabernacles, excuse me, these great churches, the

Vatican. And it's just all this gold and it's wonder. I do like walking into a church and having tall ceilings.

And I'm like, wow, God is transcendent. But with all the stained glass and all the gold and everything else, it's almost like these churches are trying to go back to the

Old Testament, go back to the tabernacle, go back to the temple to say, that's the focus. When the focus is some broken down guy who's 65 years old gets up in the pulpit and says,

I'm gonna tell you about who Jesus is. Cause that's the way you're going to get mature. That's the way you're going to grow.

The goal is growth. And the way to growth is Colossians 128, Him we proclaim.

If you have Jesus, you have everything. If you don't have Jesus, you've got nothing, even though it's gold and silver and smells and marble and everything else.

I feel like I'm gone to preach in Mario. That's what I feel like. If the goal is to get unbelievers to attend, then you got to kind of water it down a little bit.

Don't so offend them. Figure out, go take the survey of the community and say, what would you like in a church service?

And we'll do that. See how crazy that is? If the goal is maturation of the saints, an unbeliever, if they walk in, be nice to them, show them where the restroom is, show them where the nursery is, greet them, hand them a

Bible, please sit here. But do you think I'm gonna change the worship service because an unbeliever doesn't like it?

No, no, no. I'm after the maturation of the saints. I'm after people in the pews, not the visitors.

If the goal is, I want you to feel good, then just don't talk about satisfaction of wrath and propitiation and sin and sin bearing.

And you got to kill the lamb in place of the family during Passover, all these other things. If the goal is social time, you know what?

I'm mainly after community is what people will say. We want community. Okay. By the way, you get community as a by -product as we do these other things, but that's not why you come.

That's not why you're here. That's not why, you know what? Oh, I'll go there because there's a lot of people that look just like me and act like me and talk like me because I've got a different background and I've got skin color and I've got heritage and I've got background of all these kinds of things.

No, no. By the way, and I know this is prideful in one sense. So I'll try not to make it that way.

I looked at the demographics for West Boylston, Massachusetts. And last time

I looked out of a town of like 7 ,000 people, 8 ,000 that were in, it said something like 97 % white.

And like a few Indians and a few blacks or something like that, 97%.

Okay. I mean, there's only one race, the human race. I don't care what you look like, but that's what it said.

If you come to the church here to worship on a Sunday, will you find 97 % white people?

It's fascinating. There are a lot of white people, that's true. But you won't find 97 and you won't find 99 and you won't find a hundred.

Why? I have no idea. I preach Jesus Christ and all kinds of people come.

All different backgrounds come, all different kinds of, well, we speak this as a primary language and we come from Puerto Rico and we come from Brazil and we come from Worcester and we come from,

I don't know where they come from and nor do I care. And actually it makes the food better because we finally have some spices around here because the

Worcester food is bland. Here's Worcester salsa, tomatoes chopped up.

Here's Worcester hot salsa, tomatoes chopped up with a couple onions in there. I mean,

I want some, if I want spicy food, I wanna make sure

I've got something to wash it down with because my mouth is on fire. All that to say, our goal is to proclaim

Christ. And when we do that, the saints mature. And people that wanna learn and wanna come to hear about Jesus, they show up and then they drive.

They drive farther. Should they be driving from Haverhill? No. Connecticut?

No. Springfield? No. No, they shouldn't be driving that far because there should be all kinds of churches that say, you know what?

Our main goal is maturation of the people and the way to get that is to talk to them about who

Jesus is. For many reasons, you become like the one you worship. If you worship money, you become greedy.

If you worship Jesus, you become more like Him because you're focused on Him, thinking about Him, Spirit of God changing you.

The right purpose of every church, the right vision statement of every church is maturation of people,

God's people. And the right method is proclaiming Christ, Him we proclaim.

Even interesting in the original language and word order, we announce Him is how

I would say it, but Him we proclaim. So we have this emphasis that it's Him. It's all about Jesus.

I say it all the time. If you like to hear about Jesus, you'll like this church. If you don't, you won't stay.

It's like another sermon about Jesus. Yep, that's right. Another sermon about Jesus. One pastor said, if Satan really took over a city, you probably know this, it's famous.

Barnhouse said the bars would close, no alcohol would be sold. There'd be happy marriages, well -behaved children, no crime.

And here's the punchline. And everyone would be in church on Sunday where Christ is not preached.

How do you get mature people? You gotta talk about who Jesus is. And when I say Jesus, I mean, the

Father sends the Son and the Father and the Son send the Spirit. Gregory's right. When I say one part, one member of the

Trinity, I said part, excuse the heresy, one member of the Trinity, one person of the

Trinity. I mean, all. You say the one, you mean the three. You say the three, you mean the one.

There's only one God. Luther said, we always preach Christ, the true

God and man. This may seem a limited and monotonous subject, likely to soon be exhausted, but we are never at the end of it.

Like again, another sermon about Jesus? Yes, another sermon about Jesus.

Spurgeon preached a sermon and the lady said,

Mr. Spurgeon, if Christ loves me like that, he'll never hear the last of it. I realized he loves me that much that I'm gonna respond with praise.

2 Corinthians 4, for what we proclaim is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord. So it's not about me, it's about the

Lord Jesus and how he disarms the rulers and authorities and how he, the last

Adam, lives and dies and is raised from the dead. It's not about philosophy.

It's not about experience. It's not about psychology. It's not about sociology. It's not about political activism.

It's not about charismatic experiences. It's not about casting out Satan. It's not about doing the dead fly up front, getting slain in the spirit.

No, him we proclaim. And when you proclaim him, the church grows. It matures.

You might lose people. I'm not talking about numbers. I'm not talking about people in the pews, nickels and noses.

I'm not talking about, you preach Jesus and sometimes people leave, but mature people is what you're after.

So if that's the goal, I have to have everything in line with that. And in the middle of everything, it says

Colossians 1, 28, warning, teaching with all wisdom. So we warn everyone, we teach everyone with all wisdom that everyone may be mature in Christ.

So this is formalized shepherding. This is, all right, what am I after? God's given me the goal, maturity.

God's given me the person to preach to give us that maturity. And then he also tells me in the meantime,

I'm also to be warning and teaching, admonishing, correcting behavior. This is what we just talked about last week on the show here, reproving, rebuking, exhorting with great patience and doctrine.

So my name is Mike Abendroth. This is the No Compromise Radio Ministry. Why do we not call it a podcast?

Well, because I don't even think the word podcast was invented 15 years ago when we started.

Why don't I call it pods? Because I'm too old to call it a pod. When I hear the word pod,

I think of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. That show that was essentially about communism, how somebody wakes up, they look exactly like this person that you were married to and then they are completely different.

They're commies now, Invasion of the Body Snatchers. And so they just take over, pod people. So I don't listen to pods because that means my wife would be a communist.

That's essentially what that means. And so you can write me, mikeatnocompromiseradio .com. Mario has been doing a great job.

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And don't forget, Law Gospel, A Primer, an easy book to understand law gospel. And Cancer's Not Your Shepherd are the two books that I've written recently that maybe would help your friends.