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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. Mike Abendroth, I'm your host. Pleased to be your host. Would it be okay to say proud to be your host? Maybe that'd be wrong to say. Today, I'd like to talk about the issue of preaching.
Preaching in today's day and age. I've been to a variety of different churches. I visit different churches when I'm on vacation or holiday. I listen to sermons from different people across the country and world regularly, almost daily, some for the edification of my own soul, others just so I can know what other people are teaching and what not to do, how not to teach.
I would regularly go to Saddleback and hear Rick Warren wax eloquently, not on the scriptures, but in some kind of psychological self-help, man-centered focus with a few Bible verses thrown in for a good backdrop, but then quick getting straight back into the self-motivational seminar on why people ought not to hurry and why they ought to clean out their garage, followed by the postlude of the secular song, Car Wash, I think written down in about 1978 to focus on next week's sermon about keeping your car clean.
So I've kind of seen it all, sat and listened to John MacArthur as my pastor for about eight years, Sunday morning, Sunday night. So I've seen the worst and I've seen the best or heard the best as God would build his church.
And today, I'd like to discuss the issue of why preaching is so important. Why is it so important? What is going on when we have someone stand up and proclaim the truth? You have folks like Ralph Waldo Emerson, here a New Englander, in the 1800s, he who said, I like the silent church before the service begins better than any preaching.
That's what our culture thinks today. And they, with John Wayne, they like God until he goes into the building. In other words, out in the golf courses, out in this forest and streams and wilderness, but they don't wanna hear about God underneath some roof where it's some corporate worship service and the gathering of the saints.
People just don't like preaching. E .J. Young said, at no time in our history has the church of God been free from the attacks of the enemy. Satan is many wild and he employs his full arsenal to undermine the people of God.
And were it possible to destroy the church. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to look at the top 20 books sold by CBD or Amazon in the Christian category or anything else to realize that lots of these people don't talk about the word.
The word is used as some kind of, like I said before, just a backdrop. You've got to sprinkle in enough Bible to call yourself Christian because there's lots of money to be made in Christian books. But when it comes to actually teaching and preaching, we are in a society today that just as soon would have people not preach.
Sadly though, I mean, I can understand the world thinking that, that preaching is passe and irrelevant and too controversial but people in the church think the same way. Up goes drama, down goes preaching.
Up goes anybody can kind of talk, it's a dialogue. Who are you to stand up there as some kind of monolithic, monological speaker? No, people say, we don't want preaching. And if you do, make it short, make it fast.
Sermons are like pie crust, the shorter, the better, Austin O'Malley said. It is not surprising that the world doesn't like preaching but I think the evangelicals are making preaching obsolete. What is the function that a clergyman performs in the world?
Ask H .L. Mencken. Answer, he gets his living by assuring idiots that he can save them from an imaginary hell. It's a business almost indistinguishable from that of a seller of snake oil for rheumatism.
Well, God only had one son and he made him a preacher and we like preaching. If you're a Christian, you ought to love preaching. You ought to say, you know, I didn't like preaching before but now I love it.
I didn't want to have people preach to me before but now I need preaching because I want to hear about God, my Savior and I'd like to have him transform my life to make me into the person who I am positionally.
I'm in Christ and I'd like to be more like Christ as I live my daily life. And if you're a Christian, you ought to love preaching. Jesus was a preacher. Matter of fact, I think somebody should probably write a book about Jesus the preacher.
Maybe they could call it Jesus Christ, the Prince of Preachers. Mark chapter 13, the gospel must be first preached to all nations according to Jesus. Paul, it was the longing of his heart to preach the gospel to you who are in Rome, Romans 1 .15.
Peter knew that people were made born again. God caused them to be born again. First Peter 1 .23, not of perishable seed but of imperishable through the living and enduring word of God. The word preached.
Peter says, this word was preached to you in verse 24 of the same chapter and it is powerful unto salvation. Therefore Paul tells Timothy, preach the word. And there is a crisis in modern day times and we have according to Rick Holland, I think is right.
He said, the church today is biblically ignorant. It is therefore spiritually immature. It is therefore morally contaminated and it is doctrinally confused. We need preaching. Verse by verse, Christ exalting expository preaching.
D .A. Carson said, it is preaching whose subject matter emerges directly and demonstrably from a passage or from some passages of scripture. He's talking about expository preaching. In other words, its content and structure demonstrably reflect what scripture says and honestly seeks to elucidate it.
But one non-negotiable characteristic of expository preaching is that its subject matter emerges directly and demonstrably from scripture. Well, I think I better probably start using demonstrably more often if D .A. Carson can use it three times in those short few sentences.
We want to preach the Bible. You want the Bible preached in a way that the message from the pulpit has its source in Holy Writ, that it comes right from the Bible and it interprets the Bible in a plain, normal, literal sense.
It shows you, the preacher shows you, here's where the message came from and see, you can see that as well with clear explanation of God's authorial intent, God's intended meaning of the scripture. Well, let me talk today about some demands for preaching the Bible verse by verse in a Christ-exalting way.
Mike Abendroth here, No Compromise Radio Ministry. You can write us at info at nocompromiseradio .com or you can call the folks at WVNE in Worcester, Massachusetts. The first demand for expository Christ-exalting preacher is that the culture today demands preaching like that.
Lloyd-Jones said, the decadent eras and periods in the history of the church have always been those in which preaching has declined. And so the culture today demands this kind of preaching because there's one way to turn the culture around and that's not by throwing out all the bums in November with a whole new bunch of bums or bumettes.
That's not how you change a culture. You don't change a culture by education. We just need to make sure everybody's more educated. The culture has a problem and that problem is inside of each person and that is sin and pride and depravity and corruption.
When the church abandons her calling, preaching the word, there is going to be a problem. This is Amos 8-like. There's a famine in the land for the preaching of the word of God. There's a famine in the land.
It sounds just like our day. If you go to Amos, the euro and the dollar and the Chinese, they don't have the yen. What do they have? I don't know what they have. Money's the key to everything, Amos 8.
Hear this, you who trample the needy to do away with the humble of the land, saying, when will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain and the Sabbath that we may open the wheat market to make the bushel smaller and the shekel bigger and to cheat with dishonest scales so as to buy the helpless for money and the needy for a pair of sandals and that we may sell the refuse of the wheat.
They were biting their fingernails. They couldn't wait for Saturday to be over for the sun to go down because they've got money to make. Their God needed to be worshiped and it's hard to worship their God money on the Sabbath when you couldn't make any kind of gain.
They can't wait to raise prices, manipulate the scales because it's all about money. That's what was going on in the days of Amos. Sound familiar? And God, back in those days, like he does today through the word, tries to get the people's attention.
It's the mercy and grace of God, the compassion of God, Amos 8, 7. The Lord has sworn by the pride of Jacob, indeed, I will never forget any of their deeds. Because of this, will not the land quake and everyone who dwells in it mourn?
Indeed, all of it will rise up like the Nile and it will be tossed about and subside like the Nile of Egypt. God is not going to share his glory. God is not going to go halves on his glory. 50 -50, 59 -41, God is going to bring a calamity on the people, verse nine of Amos 8.
And it will come about in that day, declares the Lord God, that I will make the sun go down at noon and make the earth dark in broad daylight. This is going to be worse than war for the sellers and the buyers of grain.
This is going to be worse than the market crash, the stock market crash. There's going to be a complete and literal upheaval of everything, a national disruption at some cataclysmic scale. And you know, when that happens, people are sorry.
After 9 -11, people were kind of afraid, so they went to church, but it wasn't because they realized God was holy and they were sinful and Christ was exclusively the Savior. Amos 18, 10, then I shall turn your festivals into mourning and your songs into lamentation.
And I will bring sackcloth on everyone's loins and baldness on every head. And I will make it like a time of mourning for an only son. And the end of it will be like a bitter day. Well, verse 11, I just am amazed by how apropos this is to today's culture.
Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord God, when I will send a famine on the land, not a famine for bread or a thirst for water, but rather for hearing the words of the Lord. If you're going to ignore God, He's going to ignore you.
And if you don't want the word, often God in His judgment gives you what you desire. You don't want God? All right, then let's take away your access to God. A famine of the hearing of the words of the Lord.
They will want to cry out to Him, but He will not answer. Verse 12, and this is what happens today as well. When the word of God is wiped clean from money, schools, courts, churches, the people will stagger from sea to sea.
And from the North, even to the East, they will go to and fro to seek the words of the Lord, but they will not find it. Like drunks, weaving and reeling and staggering back and forth, they cannot find the word of God.
The word of God that says, this is who God is. This is how to have your conscience cleansed. This is how to have your guilt assuaged. This is how to live as a husband and a wife, as a worker, as a child.
God comes over to the hose of the word of God and kinks it. He turns off the hose of truth, and they stagger, and they want forgiveness. They want hope. Reminds me of Ezekiel 3 .26. God says to Ezekiel, I will make thy tongue cleave to the roof of thy mouth, and thou shall be dumb and shall not be to them a reprover, for it is a rebellious house.
I'm not gonna let the prophets preach. I'm not gonna let the people speak. You know, in the old days, in courts and in public catastrophes and in shootings and in any kind of calamities, they would bring in clergy, and clergy would soothe, and clergy would sustain, and clergy would be there.
And now, the clergy is at the bottom of the rung. They're under lawyers in the class standing of the people here in America and in the West. Ezekiel says, destruction shall come upon destruction and rumor shall be upon rumor, and they shall seek a vision from the prophet, and the law shall perish from the priest and counsel from the ancients.
People who are starving for the word of God. And when a nation rejects the Lord, then often and regularly, the Lord will give them what they want. Reminds me of Daniel, the account in Daniel, rather, with Nebuchadnezzar, and Nebuchadnezzar wanted to act like he created the kingdoms, and it was his own doing.
It was his own name, it was his own power, his own strength, his own might, his own craftiness. And God said, when you think you have a kingdom that you've come up with on your own, that's like insanity.
That's what cows do. That's what horses do. That's what other kind of animals do. And so, if you'd like to act like an animal, thinking that you created this whole thing, then there's some grass over there, and why don't you just go walk around it for a while.
Have your fingernails grow out. You could be down in all fours eating grass, and just say moo over and over and over, until you lift your eyes up to heaven and see that heaven rules, that God rules. Hymn is 813, and that day the beautiful virgins and the young men will faint from thirst.
Not because of the water, not because it's hard to get water. Remember, this is the context of thirst for the word of God. We move metaphors from hunger now to thirst, desiring, wanting this word of God.
And this is actually, when you think of thirst, it's worse than hunger. If you had to pick one, you want to be hungry or thirsty? It's much better to just be hungry because thirst is overwhelming, and you have the weak people, the needy people, and the old people, famine in the land.
Verse 14, as for those, Amos 8, who swear by the guilt of Samaria, who will say, as your God lives, Odan, as the way of Beersheba lives, they will fall again and not rise. Who are you going to go to? Every other God that you have is deaf, dumb, and blind, and they don't play a mean pinball.
They cannot be trusted. They cannot be consulted. They cannot actually talk. People will do everything to stop the Bible in today's culture, get rid of it. And what we have is a famine in the land for the word of God.
And you'd like to know what the ground of misery is here in America? I can tell you it's exactly related to the dearth of the word of God here. And I believe we're not waiting for judgment in America.
We are being judged, and the way God judges us is manifold. One of the ways is if you will not uphold biblical marriage, then let's just let the chaos begin. If you will not exalt me in the public arena, then we'll make sure there's no way for me to be found, or few ways for me to be found.
The problem again with all this is not necessarily at a national level. I don't expect believers, excuse me, unbelievers to act like believers. I don't expect people in government who aren't saved to somehow exalt the word of God.
I expect them to try to excise it, to take it away, to tax it. But this has spilled over into the evangelical church. What has happened to preaching? Rick Warren said in his book, Purpose-Driven Church, page 33, I do not believe verse-by-verse teaching through the books of the Bible is the most effective way to evangelize the unchurched.
Well, that's a problem statement, and that almost sounds like President Obama's rationale for wanting to have the mosque at ground zero. You have to dissect it, and he put certain truths there together and false views.
First of all, you're not to evangelize the unchurch at a corporate meeting. First Corinthians 14 tells us what the unchurch should do. My point is, people forget verse-by-verse preaching because it doesn't work.
That's what they're trying to say. Ken Parker, in a book called The Pastor's Church Growth Handbook, he's got a little segment there called Seven Characteristics of a Growing Church. How does a church grow?
Do you know you'll find a lot of things in that little section there, but you won't find anything about preaching because preaching doesn't grow a church. Preaching Jesus verse-by-verse actually shrinks the church, and what they mean by church is how many people attend.
Preaching Christ Jesus crucified and resurrected actually builds the church, doesn't it? It strengthens the church. It matures the church. It conforms the church to Christ himself, but it also weeds out those wannabes, those looky-loos, looky-louettes, who come and say, well, you know what?
I just wanna be pacified. I'm good, and I just need a little religion, and it's not even really from me. It's from my kids. I gotta bring my kids, and it's the right thing to do, and I like virtue, I like morality, and so we bring the kids, but when Christ comes along and destroys morality, destroys virtue, destroys self-piety, it makes those kind of people uncomfortable, and they leave, and so the church growth gurus say, well, that actually doesn't help church growth because their definition of a church is wrong, and their definition of growth is wrong.
They don't think of maturation of the saints. They think of sheer numbers. That's what they want, sheer numbers, and related to numbers is money. Related to numbers is money. Why do you think these churches that go out there today and plant pick affluent places?
No, there's some that don't, but most of them pick affluent, upscale, waspy kind of white places, whether it's Saddleback or whether it's Willow Creek. That's where they pick because who wants, you know, you gotta be cool, and you gotta go for the money.
Who wants to pick some place that's down and out where the scum might be and the dregs might be? Robert Schuller talks about being successful as a pastor. There are three things that you should do if you want to be an successful pastor, and how much do you think in the Pastor Church Growth Handbook with Schuller's chapter talks about preaching?
I think you would be right, nothing. Charles Mylander does not mention the pulpit at all in the same book, How to Build High Morale in Your Church. Will Arnn says in the same book, Pastor's Church Handgrowth, The Pastor's Church Growth Handbook, page 12.
Unfortunately, many churches in choosing a pastor place greatest priority on the man's ability to preach. Certainly, congregations are entitled to prepared and well-delivered messages. Yet sermon delivery represents a very small portion of the pastor's total work week.
Indications are that the sermon by itself is a relatively minor factor in the growth of the church. How then should its pastor spend his time to have the greatest effect in church growth, end quote. I flew on Virgin Air a while ago.
I brought a barf bag with me just because those are good to have. You never know when you might need a barf bag. Actually, in California, I think I got food poisoning, and I wish I would have had a barf bag then because it was retching, it was regurgitation major.
I wish I had that bag right now because reading those kind of comments, it makes me wanna throw up. It makes me want to projectile vomit. It is sad. Yet it is the judgment of God. Churches, if you don't want Christ exalting verse by verse preaching, okay, we'll take it away.
And then if you've gotta have some preaching, let's just limit the preaching. One prominent seeker-sensitive preacher said, limit your preaching to roughly 20 minutes because boomers don't have much time to spare.
And don't forget to keep your messages light and informal, liberally sprinkling them with humor and personal anecdotes. Ah, well, you understand why it happens. Preaching Christ, he's exclusively the Savior.
Well, that's kind of narrow. Yeah, that is kind of narrow. Jesus said in Matthew 7, enter the narrow gate. Say, well, that's too outspoken. Well, Jesus is outspoken enough that the disciples even said, that is a very difficult saying.
Oh, that's too divisive. Yes, it is. It divides truth from error and sheep from goats. And it divides those people who say, I want entertainment versus I want to be edified. It divides the people that want holiness instead of happiness.
And the list goes on and on and on. The time will come when unfaithful congregations will not endure sound doctrine, but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths.
2 Timothy 4, verses 3 and 4. Our culture could be described by Hosea 4, 6. My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Because you have rejected knowledge, I also will reject you from being my priest.
Since you have forgotten the law of your Lord, I also will forget your children. I think there's a principle there. I know that doesn't apply directly to the culture today in America. I get that. But I do think the principle is there.
People are being destroyed by lack of knowledge. And if you want to reject knowledge, then I'll reject giving you knowledge. The consequence of sin is more sin. So if you've got a pastor who preaches the Bible verse by verse in a Christ exalting way, praise the Lord for that pastor.
That is a gift from God. He's a gift from God. And maybe you should go say thank you, keep it up, turn it up. Well, I had some demands today for what preaching should be and why there needs to be preaching.
And I think I had seven demands.
We got to one. We'll do the next one next time. God bless. 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 six. We're right on route 110 in West Boylston. You can check us out online at bbchurch .org or by phone at 508 -835 -3400.
The thoughts and opinions expressed on No Compromise Radio do not necessarily reflect those of WVNE its staff or management.