What to expect at BBC

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.

My name is Mike Abendroth. For me, it's a Saturday morning, and it just got done raining here in New England.

Who would have figured it would rain in New England when I got back from California, northern

California? I'd say it was probably 48 at night on average there in Santa Cruz area, and maybe 70 to 80 during the day.

Pretty much perfect weather, no earthquakes for me this trip. And then I came back to Boston, and the flight was late, pouring rain, super hot, lots of humidity, tons of mosquitoes and ticks and flying leeches, but God is sovereign over this weather here, and if it was good enough for Jonathan Edwards, it's good enough for me.

You're listening to No Compromise Radio. We have a very simple premise, always biblical, always provocative, always in that order, and we seek to honor the

King of Kings, the Lord Jesus, who never compromised. I don't want to compromise, but I know

I do, so we focus on Jesus. First Timothy chapter 6 talks about the

King of Kings and the Lord of Lords. Literally, the Greek is, the King of those kinging, the

Lord of those lording. So all those who try to do their lording, Jesus is Lord over them.

Aren't you glad? Especially in an election year. And all those people trying to king, all those kinging,

He's the King over those trying to king. Well, what do we have on tap?

We have the dates down for the No Compromise Radio trip to Greece, and Patmos, and Ephesus, and I don't have them in front of me, but we've got that down.

If you want the information, you can write us at info at No Compromise Radio. We're flying out of Boston, and we would love to have you.

What else do I have here in front of me? Some people ask, what's your church service like, and I think we still have the bumper here with the wrong information on there, but hey, we're low budget here because it's quality of product.

Why does everybody use that word now? You know, the hairstylists have got good product, some excellent product.

What would you expect here at a worship service at Bethlehem Bible Church in West Boylston, just north of Worcester, 45 miles outside of Boston?

Well, at the beginning, you would expect here, or you can expect, we'll sing a hymn or two.

I can't remember, some blue hymnal. I can't remember the actual name of it, and we try to sing the first song, kind of a call to worship song.

Oh, excuse me. There'll be announcements first, then call to worship from the Psalms usually. One of the men will give a call to worship, a few short verses, and then we will have a hymn or two, and then we will have the public reading of Scripture.

Most times when I'm visiting people at their churches and I'm out of town just going from place to place,

I've noticed there's a lack of public Scripture reading and pastoral prayer.

And so my question is, in 1 Timothy chapter 4, Paul writes to Timothy, and therefore all elders, until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching.

And so we believe in a worship service. These Scriptures regulate what goes on there.

So it doesn't say, dance in a service, and you say, oh, Psalm 150 says dance.

Well, that has nothing to do with dancing in a New Testament corporate worship service. And you say, well, what about streamers?

Well, I can't even find that in Psalm 151. So we'll have public

Scripture reading, try to read chapter by chapter. We're in 1 Peter now. Chapter 4 was read last week.

Chapter 5 will be read this week. One time I read all of Jonah. You can read large sections of Scripture. And wouldn't it be a fascinating thing to compare how much

Scripture is read in the typical evangelical church versus how much

Scripture is read in a liberal Christian church, Christian small c. In other words,

Methodists, Lutherans, and even now let's move outside of Protestantism.

That's the right way to say it, Ted, is that right? Catholics tend to read more

Scripture than evangelicals. With the low liturgy, not a high liturgy, not stuffy stand -up sit -down stuff, but very low liturgy.

Maybe the band comes on, sings for a while, the pastor gets up and preaches, and that's pretty much it.

Maybe there's a few things in between here and there, special music or something. But it's fascinating to me that you'll get a lot of Scripture reading in Catholic and then

Roman Catholic and liberal Protestant churches, much more so than the typical evangelical church.

And I think that's a sad thing because I just read the verse, 1 Timothy 4, verse 13, "'Until

I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation and to teaching.'"

And so I know evangelical churches are better at preaching than either the liberals or the

Roman Catholics. But my point is, we need public Scripture reading, and if you're in a church that does public

Scripture reading, I think you should say to your pastor, thank you for the public reading of Scripture. There's just something about that.

J .C. Ryle, for instance, when Ephesians 2, 1 -10 was read, he got saved.

"'So we preach so they believe, so you hear the word of God. The word of God is alive and active, and it performs its work in those who believe, and it also is used by God to save unbelievers.'"

Just the reading of Scripture. I could go on a tangent and say if you're a street preacher and you just rail against people all the time and shout out invectives and imperatives,

I'd much rather have you just get up and start reading the Bible. Well, back to the worship service.

I like to have Bible reading at the service. Now, some people say, well, the passage I'm preaching today is

Ephesians 1, verses 3 -14, and I would say that's excellent. Great job.

I'd say that of any verse. That's a particularly good set of verses, one sentence, matter of fact.

And for Scripture reading, we're going to have that read, Ephesians 1, 3 -14. So I'll go to a church and they ask me to preach, and they'll say, what's your passage for Scripture reading today, you know, what are you preaching, because we'll read that passage.

And actually, I don't want that. They can do whatever they want, they're the leaders there. But sometimes

I want the passage not read ahead of time because I wanted them to see it be developed, and then

I want the punchline to come out in the sermon, as it were. See how much you can get away with if you just say, as it were.

So I don't do that. I don't do it for another reason, because I'd rather have something else read, because I'm surely going to read the text.

I mean, they're going to read the whole section and then talk about it. I'm going to read a pericope and talk about it. I'm going to read a paragraph and talk about it.

I'm going to read a verse and talk about it. It will be read. It will be explained. It will be used as a platform for exhortation.

Lastly, I don't want that particular passage read because I'd almost like the opposite read on occasion.

Here's what I mean, opposite. Opposite of what? Give me a frame of reference. Give me something adjacent to refer to, some referent.

Reference. If I'm going to teach a passage in James, 52 imperatives, 104 verses,

I'll probably ask the Scripture to be read from a particular passage like Romans 4 or Romans 3, something talking about justification by faith alone.

Why would I do that? Because it will then balance all the imperatives.

If there's tons of imperatives in the sermon, then it would be nice to have indicatives or statement of fact, the gospel -oriented reading to balance that out.

And actually, you can balance those messages that are full of imperatives, you can balance those out with hymns of indicative praise of what

God has done and who He is. And so, just a few thoughts on Scripture reading. If you're at a church and they don't do

Scripture reading, I think there's a nice way that you could ask your pastor, pastor, do you think we could do some public reading of Scripture?

And you could even volunteer if you're a man, as far as I'm concerned. Actually on Sunday nights here, I'm jumping ahead, so let's not do

Sunday nights. So public reading of Scripture and then a pastoral prayer. And so I try to use that passage that I've just read, actually all the elders take turns reading

Scripture. So this week it'll be me, next week it'll be the next guy, etc. There are five elders here.

I used to read it all the time and I come from a church where it's just read by the senior pastor, the lead pastor, as they say in some circles.

Lead pastor, that's one of my words I don't really like in front of a pastor, but that's okay. Maybe I don't like senior pastor either, because I'm getting older, 52 years old, that's quite old.

Do you see how many vitamins I have to take per day? But most of them are healthy, I have to admit that.

So I have the elders rotate through because I want the church to know who her leaders are and I don't want to just get up there and dominate, that's not the point.

So then there's a pastoral prayer and maybe some of the needs of the body are prayed for and then there's a song, it's either acoustic, it's acapella, it's instrumental, that's the word

I was looking for, kind of a special music song while there's an offering. And then we have

I think two contemporary songs or maybe they're even older songs with acoustic guitar, there might be a bongo here or there, maybe keyboard, some background singers.

But leading the congregation singing, not the coffee house wall of sound, volume turned up so you can't hear yourself.

I'll be honest, this is no Compromise Radio, isn't it? I've been gone for a long time this summer. I hate going to a church and I'm trying to sing worship songs to God and I can't think about God because it's so loud.

And before you tell me I'm a 52 -year -old fogey, and I am 52 years old, but I don't really think

I'm a fogey. If you saw what was on my iPod and what I listen to when I lift weights, I like it loud and I like it fast.

And if I'm on my bicycle, I'm usually listening to S. Lewis Johnson and he's neither loud nor is he fast.

But if I need some cadence work, then I'll put on something that would be quite surprising to you,

I think. Or maybe some of you wouldn't be so surprised. So it's not that I'm against loud music.

It's just time and place. And that's just the wrong time and it's the wrong place for it. And so I'd like to have them help us sing.

They are helping us sing unto the Lord. And Charlie does a great job here.

You know Charlie's voice because on Monday shows on No Compromise Radio, he is the announcer and he takes the sermons and chops them up and corrects my doctrine and then plays them on Monday.

Matter of fact, I said to Charlie a while ago, you probably know different sounds. So instead of the English beat, the ska band from the 80s, and they're still around.

I think Ranking Roger has died, but they're still around. I said, why don't you take the white stripes and put that track, that guitar track to the front of No Compromise Radio.

That makes a nice sound. So see, I'm not against music. I'm not against pop music. I'm not against rock music.

I'm just against loud rock kind of music in the worship service. It's immature. So and then there's two songs and then it's time for preaching and everything leads up to the preaching, not because I'm the preacher, but because it's the

Word of God explained and God through frail, sinful, weak preachers like me is pleased to bless

His Word as it is trumpeted forth, heralded forth. Preach the Word in season and out of season, right?

Paul is solemnly charging Timothy to do that very thing, especially in light of the times, especially in light of the judge,

King Jesus, who judges the living and the dead. And Paul is telling Timothy, preach the

Word, the World. Preach the Word. I was thinking about another word, herald, herald and world, and word got all conflated.

Preach the Word in season and out of season. When you want to, when you don't.

When they want to hear it, when they don't. In good seasons and bad seasons, literally.

Preach the Word. Reprove. This is sin. Rebuke. Rebuke. You're doing this sin, or if you are, stop it.

And exhort, where we get the word paraclete, to come alongside of comfort with great patience and doctrine, our instruction.

We know the time's coming when they're not going to want to endure such doctrinal teaching.

So after that, we sing a hymn, and one of the main reasons we sing a hymn afterward, maybe if we run out of time, we wouldn't sing a hymn.

And by the way, this is a shortened version of the service now, because we have service at 8 .30 and at 11, with adult

Sunday school and every other kind of Sunday school at 10 o 'clock. We just don't have enough time to get everything in, to have two services in the morning.

So I'll preach 45 -50 minutes max now on Sunday morning, and then after that it's a hymn that sometimes goes along with the message, or the exhortation found in the message, or the topic of the message, if I can plan it right, but sometimes

I don't say what I actually think I was going to say, especially at the end of the sermon. And so one of the reasons why we sing after the sermon is because there's a paradigm you'll see in Scripture that's often repeated, and it's revelation, response.

So you can just put a little arrow in between, revelation, arrow, response. So when

God reveals Himself to us through His Word, of course natural revelation works as well, but specifically here,

His Word between Genesis and Revelation. When you hear from God's Word, and you learn from Him, and you learn about Him, and you hear what

He has done in the person and work of Christ Jesus, and how we are in Christ and united with Christ, you want to respond.

Hallelujah! Thank you! Singing praises unto God for what He has done and who

He is. And so I want the congregation to be able to do something after the sermon, and so it is appropriate,

I believe, to sing a hymn. So that's Sunday morning at Bethlehem Bible Church. I guess that's our liturgy, if you will.

And then Sunday night's a little bit different. Sunday night is we have one of the men, one of the laymen, get up and welcome the church and read a passage and then pray.

And the reason why I do that is because I want some laymen to be involved in discipleship and leading and teaching.

It's not that hard to read, it's not that hard to read out loud, but it gets harder to read out loud if you're in front of people.

And then it's the most hard to read out loud in front of people when you're standing in the pulpit and it is the word of the living

God. So that's a good exercise for these men. It's more than an exercise, of course, but it is an exercise for the men.

And then we have our friend Mark Schaefer get up and lead songs. Pick your favorite hymn for about 15 to 17 minutes, and then

I'll get up and preach for about an hour. And then we'll sing one final hymn, Revelation, Response, and then there'll be a prayer.

And then ice cream, of course. Not all the time, but sometimes we have ice cream afterwards. And there's a paradigm for that too,

Revelation, Response, Thanksgiving via taste buds. That's the new.

It was actually, only the Anabaptists had that, but they were persecuted and killed for many reasons.

I don't know if they were persecuted and killed for that. I don't think they probably had ice cream back in those days, but maybe there were some

Anabaptists in Finland. Okay, no Compromise Radio today. We're just talking about worship services because I walked into the church building today and saw our bulletin.

Some people call it a program, and here's what's going on here today. And here's what we're going to do.

And so that's pretty much what we do. You can go around the world. I've been around the world, and there have been different liturgies, but typically the liturgies are comprised of preaching the

Word, singing the Word, praying the Word. Those are pretty much the three.

Now, there are other things that the congregation can do as an act of worship. Give money to the

Lord's work. Church discipline is done not by the congregation, but they're charged to do something about it if they're told.

Baptism, Lord's Supper, those are all included, some more regularly than others.

So, that is what we do here at the local church service, and so you can ask yourself the question.

When you go to a church, what don't they do? So if I were going to look at Bethlehem Bible Church, what don't they do on a

Sunday? Well, let's just talk about this in a little no -compromise style. What don't

I see? Well, I don't see a dance team. I don't have anything against dancing.

I even for my wife, for a gift to my wife years ago, ten lessons ballroom dancing, and we had a great time.

It was super fun. I was a total klutz. I have three left feet, all from Nebraska.

And so, that was a lot of fun. I'm not against dancing, and again, I'm not against rock music per se.

You know, I don't have this deal where I put a bunch of rock music in front of a plant and it kills the plant, therefore it kills your brain cells.

Some rock music I am against. All right, so we don't have dancing, and we don't have girls with streamers going up and down the aisles.

I don't know what their revelation response, I don't know what that is, but I went to the

Anaheim Vineyard years ago when John Wimber was still alive, and that's pretty much how the church service started.

I was very perplexed because I didn't know what the streamer deal was about. I didn't know whether to look or not because they were pretty much 16 -year -old girls with form -fitting dresses on that were low -cut, dancing around.

Sometimes I go to weddings, and if I am officiating the wedding, then

I'll say to people, if I don't trust them especially, well, I shouldn't say that if I don't trust them.

If I really, really know them well, I might not say it. But nine times out of ten, I'll say, I'd like to see a picture of the dress for the bride, and I'd like to see pictures of the, what do they call, the bridesmaid's dresses.

And you say, man, that guy is hardcore. No, I'm not hardcore. They're just, these days, sometimes it's even hard to find a dress that's appropriate.

Try shopping for your girls appropriate dresses for school, and that's very difficult to do.

But anyway, people sometimes just have no clue. They lose their mind when it comes to weddings, and I don't want you to be embarrassed.

It's a worship service. It's a worship service, and so dress appropriately.

Of course I want the bride to look pretty. Of course I want the groom to look handsome. Of course

I want the bridesmaids to look ugly to make the bride look more beautiful. Did I just say that? I said that, but I was just kidding.

Although sometimes I see those bridesmaids' dresses, and I think, I think that was planned somehow. So, but I'd like, you know,

I'm all for being attractive, but I'm not for risque. And so, you know, there's a time and a place, and so if the bride wants a low -cut dress, then it needs to be covered up, and she can do whatever she wants later with her husband appropriately in a

God -ordained fashion. I mean, that's obvious, isn't it? So what don't they do?

Well, what you won't find at Bethlehem Bible Church is you won't find an altar call. I will call people to believe in the

Lord Jesus Christ, but I don't have to have an altar call. And the big reason we don't do altar calls is that there's no altar.

Why? Because Jesus was already slain once for all. See Hebrews 2. See Hebrews 9. See Hebrews 10.

See other passages. First Peter chapter 3. So we don't have an altar call, and you say, well, okay,

I know there's no altar in a church, but you can still call people up the front to make a decision. No. I can call you to make a decision right where you're sitting right now.

Like Spurgeon said, don't move an inch. Like S. Lewis says, I want you to have no rest in your soul until you find rest in Christ Jesus and His forgiving work.

So we don't do altar calls because I'm not an Arminian, and I'm not a Finian, and I'm not one who believes that we should use unbiblical means to get what

I think most people have as good motives regarding the ends. There's no altar calls. Wesley didn't even do altar calls.

Study altar calls sometimes, pull up an old show, and you'll see what's going on there. Does it mean you're a heretic if you do altar calls?

No, but I don't think you're thinking through the issues. Lots of times it's just used for pastors so they feel better that somebody responded to the message.

I don't know who responds to the message. Sometimes people say, that was a great message, and I think another sermon lost. Other times people think

I was convicting. Some people say, I've been thinking about that all week. Other times I don't know anything about it, but I know the

Spirit is working because that is the promise of God found in His Word. What don't they do?

Well, we do have a time of giving money to the Lord's work as an act of worship.

Some churches don't do that. They'll say, you know what, put something in the back. There's a little envelope back there. But I think they wrongly think through this issue because I think they're saying to themselves, we don't want to seem money hungry.

That's good. We don't want to seem greedy. We don't want to have unbelievers visit and think we're all about money.

I get all that, except it's a worship service for the Lord as He calls believers to come and worship.

Unbelievers are welcome guests, but they're not worshipers, they're blasphemers. And so for them to put one and one together and make it equal three spiritually, oh, they're taking an offering, they're all after the money, that would be a wrong deduction.

So I think there should be a collection given, and I think we could extrapolate 1 Corinthians chapter 16 to prove the point.

So today on No Compromise Radio, we've talked a lot about worship services. There's a lot of room for cultural differences.

Think about it. Paul, writing to Timothy and Titus, he could have said, this is the worship service.

This is exactly what you do. It could have been like the tabernacle. This is what you do. This is how often you do it. This is who does it, but we have much more basic, generic parameters.

You can go to India and go to three -hour services, you could have three -hour services here, it could be 50 minutes, not really long time to preach and sing, but you get my point.

So today on No Compromise Radio, it would behoove me to then say, if you're a local listener and you don't have a good

Bible teaching church, 830 and 11 o 'clock are services, Sunday school in between for adults as well.

Steve does a good job, Steve and other men teaching the adults. And then Sunday night at 6 p .m. If you don't have a service at night, you can just come to our worship service anyway.

I'm not trying to steal any sheep. 6 p .m. My name is Mike Abendroth. You can write us at info at nocompromiseradio .com

and pull us up our NoCoEver video. God bless you. 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 WVNE, its staff or management.