Jesus & Political Correctness (Part 4)

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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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This is Mike Abendroth. I'm glad to be your host. Some days I don't know if I'm going to be a host, but other days

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I think, you know what? The world needs to hear another opinion from another guy stuck out in the middle of nowhere.

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I'm thankful you listen. I'm thankful you suggest the show. If you go to nocompromiseradio .com,

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I think you can find every one of our archive shows, and I'm thankful for that.

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Most of the time, Monday is a sermon that I preach to Bethlehem Bible Church. You can go there, by the way, bbcchurch .org.

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Tuesdays, I'm talking to Tuesday guys, Tuesday guy most of the time. Steve Cooley. Wednesdays, I try to interview authors as much as I can or people from around the church.

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If you've got a pastor that you think I should interview, let me know. I won't guarantee it, but I might do it.

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And it depends how much coffee's on the way. And then Thursdays and Fridays, I kind of talk about, essentially these days, the show has morphed into,

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I talk about my sermon because I want to hear my words out loud. Actually, I have headphones on and the volume's pretty high, and then

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I get to hear my voice and I get to hear how it sounds as I talk about the passage, which is kind of like my preaching practice.

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So you're the guinea pigs. I know most of you know that, but that's just the way it goes.

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I think in the old days, I probably spent too much time trying to think about all this. Now, it is what it is.

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If you want to have me come speak at your church, there's a 20 -page form you can fill out at the website, nocompromisedradio .com.

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It tells you what I expect, the flight arrangements, just kidding, just kidding.

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I had heard about an evangelical leader who you would all probably know and how he requires first -class flights to go places.

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And you know what? Maybe there's a medical condition or something that I don't know about, and I would understand that.

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You've got some kind of blood clots in your leg and you need to stretch out. I get that. But anyway,

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I got on a plane from where? Newark to Tel Aviv, and I walked past first -class, there he sat.

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So hey, and maybe somebody bought him that ticket and just said, we want to bless you. So far that hasn't happened to me, but if it did, hey, fly to New Zealand and we want to bless you with a first -class flight.

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I'd say, well, that's not necessary. No, no. Somebody from the church wants to pick it up and they're happy to do it.

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They insist. Well, so, see, so I have to be careful on these things. Although it's easier just to blast away, isn't it?

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Get the howitzer out. What we're doing here for this show, technically it's

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September 7th, Saturday, 1144 AM. And I'm about ready to preach this sermon tomorrow.

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I'm about ready to preach this sermon. I just had a thought of Stephen Furtick and how he says, like some people do, you know, it's just some preaching going on here.

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You know, it's almost commending yourself while you're preaching, or in his case, motivationally speaking.

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And you just see the spiral of that particular deal.

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That's crazy. Oh, what else is happening in the news? People say Benny Hinn has repented.

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You know what? I think you should pray for Benny Hinn. And I think you should pray that God grants him repentance. Time will tell.

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And I think if you go to Justin Peter's website, you already can see that after his repentance talk,

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I don't mean Justin's, but I mean Mr. Hinn's, that in fact, he said stuff that would betray that, in my opinion.

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In my opinion. But if he did, that would be quite the turnaround.

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And I think Kosty Hinn would probably know quite a bit about all this. So when he says, I think it's a done deal.

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And every message my father preaches, my uncle preaches, is now set.

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I had something really fun happen to me. It was really sweet. I preached a sermon last week on the gospel and just 11 words that if you can get these down, it will help you when it comes to evangelism.

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We just looked at them from the book of Romans. And so we looked at, and you don't have to go in this order. You can talk about sin first, of course, like Romans does.

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But you can look and see, creator, judge, savior, that's who

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God is, who is man. We looked at the words unrighteous, sinful, and ungodly. I mean, we could have looked at helpless.

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That's in Romans chapter five. Enemy, that's in Romans chapter five.

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And then what did Christ do? We looked at representative, Romans five. Substitute, you can see that in Romans five.

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You can see that in Romans eight. And then resurrected, one, four, 425, if memory serves me.

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And then the response is believe and repent. You see repentance in two, four,

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Romans two, four. And then you see faith, of course, throughout the scriptures. And then we just went to Romans 10, believes.

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Anyway, and I said, if you're 15 or under and you give me those 11 words, I'll give you a dollar.

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And I got an email with a little three -year -old who is God, creator, judge, savior, a savior.

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Who are we? Unrighteous, sinful, and then she went on.

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So sweet. Come on, this is why I love being a pastor. Little moments like that.

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There are a lot of other moments that aren't so little. I'm not so sure about. Like, how did

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I get myself in this situation or how did these people get themselves in this situation and how complicated life is?

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And you just think, okay, Lord, help. Speaking of help, we're looking at Matthew chapter 15.

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And here's what's going on. Jesus says to worship him, to worship the father.

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There's a prescribed way to do it, and you need to have your heart in it. Would that be fair to say?

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And he goes after the Pharisees and the scribes who elevate their own traditions of cleaning hands and ceremonially being clean above the scripture.

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And they make everybody else do that. And they think deep down, they don't even have to have their heart into it.

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I mean, it's hard enough to have your heart into real worship prescribed by the Bible, let alone have your heart into worship that you made up.

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I mean, you know you made it up, so how can your heart be in it if you know it's just a bunch of extra rules?

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And so you've got to clean your hands a certain way that they said, so the demons don't get on them and other things and everything's about being clean and eating the right foods.

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Not necessarily even for foods, but touching the food then. And Jesus goes after them and rebukes them and says, let them alone.

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And the issue is what comes out of the heart. That's what defiles. It's not bad food and it's not bad hands.

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It's in fact the heart. And he exposes that as he uses his own words and uses the words from the

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Old Testament. And he is confronting them and their only recourse is they're mad and they want to kill him.

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And of course they will, but that's in the part of, that's the part of God's plan, of course, that they will, but they taking their own responsibility, they want to kill him because he's upsetting the ecclesiastical apple cart, is he not?

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They've got a monopoly on this religion of this monotheistic God. They wrongly, well, they rightly call

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Yahweh, but they don't understand it properly because with progressive revelation, we understand that God is one and three, right?

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One God, three persons, and they don't worship him rightly and they don't even know about him rightly. And then their worship is external only based on their own rules.

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Because by the way, you can do your own rules. You know, you don't really make up rules you can't do. All right. How do we worship

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God? Well, let's make up some stuff that we can't do. Let's make up some stuff that we can't do.

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That'll please him. But you make up stuff you can do.

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Wash a certain way, rinse a certain way, go a certain way, avoid a certain person.

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So now Jesus goes up and he talks to this woman up in the

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Tyre and Sidon region, right? And that woman is unclean. That woman is a

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Gentile. Of course, that woman has a bad heart like every other person outside of the Lord Jesus. But the

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Pharisees would really not like this. And you don't go around talking to these kind of ladies if you're anybody.

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If you're a man, let alone a man who's a rabbi and you say you're from God, this is not how you do things.

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And so he goes to this district of Tyre and Sidon, Matthew 15, 21. If you just tuned into this show, you need to listen to the last couple.

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And behold, a Canaanite woman from that region came out and was crying. And remember last time we ended with, she's crying over and over and over.

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In perfect tense. Have mercy on me. Have mercy on me. Have mercy on me. Have mercy on me. She's at his feet.

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Mark says, oh Lord, oh Lord, oh Lord, oh Lord, have mercy on me, oh Lord. Have mercy on me, oh

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Lord. Have mercy on me, oh Lord. And she adds in something else. She knows who this Jesus is. Son of David. Son of David.

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Son of David. Son of David. Have mercy on me, oh Lord. Son of David. Have mercy on me, oh Lord. Son of David.

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Have mercy on me, oh Lord. Son of David. That's what she's doing. And why is she saying it over and over and over and over and over and over and over?

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In perfect tense. Answer, Jesus isn't responding. She says, you know,

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Jesus, have mercy on me, oh Lord, son of David. Why? My daughter, the way you can show me mercy is to heal my daughter.

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She's severely oppressed by a demon. And the text says, but he did not answer her a word, emphatic word.

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He didn't tell her. He didn't tell her anything. So if you're picking it up and you haven't listened to the last show, or the last two or the last three, technically, here's the situation.

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Jesus deals with the Pharisees and he exposes what's really in their heart. And what's in their heart is sexual immorality, murder, slander, and everything that they were, who they were.

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And so they can go around saying they're, they're, they're, they're doing proper washing with their hands, but on the inside, they're, they want to kill

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Jesus. And they're probably using their position to sleep with other ladies or they're thinking about it or whatever.

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Jesus exposes that and they're mad. Now what we're going to have is another lady who the

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Pharisees thinks unclean. Let's see what's in her heart. And how do you get to the heart?

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Well, this is Jesus. This is how he's doing it. And so you cannot think with modern terms and you're just looking at this in a cursory kind of glancing fashion.

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You've got to think about what's going on. Whatever Jesus does is right. Whatever he's doing is for a purpose.

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He's the King. Matthew talks about this. He's the great King. He's the great Messiah. He, in fact, actually is the

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Lord. She knew that. He is the son of David. She knew that. And he's the one that can give mercy.

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She knows that. Jesus isn't being rude. He's not sinning.

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He's not doing anything wrong. This is calculated. Jesus doesn't just make it up as he goes along.

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To quote David Byrne, why is he doing this? Because he's going to show us what's in her heart.

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Now, here's how I want you to think about it. When you evangelize someone, or even yourself, let's just use yourself.

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Let's use myself. Me, myself, and I. When people came to me and tried to tell me how sinful

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I was so that I need a Savior, I got pretty mad about that.

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I was offended. Who are you to tell me, right? That's the

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Pharisees. What's in the heart? I mean, I can go to church, and I can dress up, and I can wear a nice tie, and I know public etiquette.

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But it wasn't until the Spirit of God was working, when someone would come up to me and say, you're more sinful than you originally thought, that I would then say,

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I know. You've offended God more than you've ever considered.

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I know. You deserve to go to hell. I know.

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I agree. There's different responses, and of course, the star of the story here isn't this woman.

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You may think that it's going to be the woman. She's just as bad in light of Adam's sin in the fall, an original sin, and consequently then her own sinful nature.

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There's nothing good in her. I mean, she would have out of the heart flows the same thing. But something's happened to her.

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And when something's happened to you, you respond differently. Instead of, who do you think you are for talking to me that way about me?

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It turns into, you're right. I know. That's what we're looking at here on No Compromise Radio with this woman.

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He's not talking to her. Commentators fall all over themselves. Why was

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Jesus not answering? Because he's not sent to the Gentiles, and so he doesn't want to have any dealings with them.

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Because he wants to strengthen her faith, and he's going to just wait it out and see what she does.

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He wants to highlight that he's going to answer the prayer of a Gentile, et cetera. Well, I don't know about what those guys do, but for them, it might get worse before it gets better when it comes to Jesus, how he's treating this lady in their minds.

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He finally answers, because remember, the disciples are like, hey, Jesus, would you do something? Because now she's shouting at us.

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She knows we're your followers, and now she's shouting at us, Jesus, do something. Send her away.

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She's crying out after us. In other words, heal her.

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Come on, just get it over with, heal her, and let's get on our way. Tell her no, something.

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He answered. Here's what Jesus is going to say, oh, I'm sorry. By the way, you're not going to hear that from Jesus.

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Oh, please forgive me. You're not going to hear that from Jesus. There's a prayer Jesus won't pray, and that's,

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Father, forgive me. Jesus answered. What do you think he's going to say?

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Demon come out? I was only sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.

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Golly. After all that shouting, after all that yelling,

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Lord, have mercy on me, son of David, my daughter, and now you're going to give us this kind of politically incorrect deal about Jews?

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First words, I was only sent to the lost sheep of Israel. Bang. Man.

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And the language of being sent, listen, this is a divine mission. You look at the Gospel of John, sent, sent, sent, sent.

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When was he sent? In eternity past. Who sent him? The Father. Who's energizing his ministry?

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The Spirit. We're talking about the covenant of redemption here, language that I was sent. I was born in 1960.

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Jesus was sent. He arrives, the arrival. Maybe we could call him, his birth, the arrival.

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As a matter of fact, I'm going to write that down, that was pretty good. The arrival. I think I have a YouTube on that, the arrival.

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I'm only sent to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. I came on a mission.

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The mission isn't to the Greeks in Athens. It's not to the Italians in Rome. It's not to these big cities.

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It's not up here to the Gentile area, to the Syrians, to those who are in modern day Lebanon now.

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It's the lost sheep. God sent me. Now, what's her response?

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I'm calling the ACLU. I'm calling CNN. I'm boycotting

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Chick -fil -A. What are those people doing, by the way? I saw that Toronto deal where they're laying down.

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I think you need, I think if it's some kind of place that's open for business, you shouldn't be able to lay in the front of the entrance with your leg kind of over, blocking people.

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I mean, if I had a grandma and I'm trying to get her in there, I would be tempted to do something, to make room.

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I would probably first ask the police, but you can just, you kind of see where that's going.

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Anyway, what's her response? The response of the Pharisees to Jesus' words were offended, mad.

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Maybe they'd think in terms of today, hate speech. I mean, he called them blind guides.

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He said, let them alone. He said, in vain they worship me. He said, their heart's far from me.

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No wonder they killed him. When you evangelize people and they're not ready because the spirit of God isn't working in their hearts, when you finally get to it, they're offended.

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Your life means nothing. Your life is actually negative when it comes to earning God's favor and pleasure and righteousness.

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Oh no, you've fallen short, friend. What's her response? What's the lady's response?

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Is she mad? Jesus is going to show us what's in the heart because he's been working on that heart.

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But she came and she knelt before him saying, Lord, help me. And that good?

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That is interesting. Lord, I have a need. You owe me?

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No. You're the Messiah. I'm worshiping you. I know you give pity to people.

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I know you give mercy to people. You're Lord over everything, including Lord over the demon.

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And you are the divine Messiah talked about in the Old Testament that was for Israel.

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Maybe she doesn't know about Gentiles yet and how he's going to save not just Jews. But I've got a daughter and you're the

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Messiah. And I think you could help me. Lord, help. What do you think

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Jesus is going to do? Whatever he does, it's right. Because it's going to get worse before it gets better.

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From the human perspective, wow, what is going on here?

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And he answered, sorry, no. Commentators say this is a harsh tone.

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This is a harsh word. Other people are thinking, you know what, he's winking when he says it.

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Kind of just a little smile. He answered, it is not right to take the children's bread and throw it to the dogs.

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You're a dog. This is a test.

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Yeah, but you know, there are the dogs that are out there in the street and there's a house dog.

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It's more like a house dog. Does that make you feel better? It wouldn't make me feel better.

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You're a dog. Dog. The tone and the look with which a thing is said makes all the difference.

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Even a thing which seems hard can be said with a disarming smile. We can call a friend an old villain or a rascal with a smile and a tone which takes all the sting out of it, which fills it with affection.

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We can be quite sure that the smile on Jesus' face and the compassion in his eyes robbed the words of all insult and bitterness.

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Said one, no, no, no, no, no.

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You don't have to try to defend Jesus. He's showing what's in her heart and the offense that the

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Pharisees had is not an offense in her eyes because the spirit of God is working and she's got the right object of faith and she believes and she's repented and she sees him and when you see

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God for who he is and you see yourself for who you are, you realize that you don't deserve grace and that it's true.

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I am unrighteous. I'm an enemy. I'm helpless. I'm sinful. I deserve to go to hell, but God has had mercy on me.

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The King has had mercy on me. It's beautiful. It's beautiful.

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Okay. Call me a dog. This has nothing to do with brutality of Jesus.

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This is how a heart responds that's been worked on by God. When Lydia's heart's been opened, there's a difference.

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This has nothing to do with cruelty, being cruel, patriarchal, harsh, no,

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I'm sent to the lost sheep of Israel and it's not right for me to take the children's bread, toss it to the dogs.

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Wow. And how did she respond? I have to, I have more to say, but I got to finish up.

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And she said, yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master's table.

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Then he said to her, after she's called him Lord three times, a woman great as your faith that is in the object,

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Jesus, be it done for you as you desire. And her daughter was healed instantly. That's amazing.

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Jesus, the heart surgeon. 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 six. We're right on route 110 in West Boylston.

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