How To Remain a Spiritual Pygmy (Part 1)

The Goal of the Program: Maturity in Christ

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. The rain has stopped, and we are going to have to discuss something today that is provocative. The slogan of the show is, always biblical, always provocative, always in that order.

And my goal is, as I've said, I don't know, hundreds of times now, I want to get you to think biblically. And if you don't like what I say, then look it up and correct me and study to show yourself approved.

And that's the goal here, is to get you to think biblically, critically, to use your mind. And I think the mind is, in fact, a terrible thing to waste. For years, I wasted my mind with all kinds of consumption of alcohol and drugs, etc.

And so now, whatever brain cells I have left, I want to use for the glory of Christ and his church. What I'm looking for in people is maturity. There's nothing wrong with immaturity in youthful people.

That is to say, you have a brand new baby, and you are not sad that the baby's immature when the baby's a baby. But what if that baby didn't grow? What if the baby was 12 years old, no longer a baby, but acted like a one-year-old?

There you would have a problem. So likewise in Christianity, I am not bugged, nor am I irked, nor am I sad when Christians are immature. I'm only bugged, irked, sad, disheartened when Christians who should be mature are immature.

That's the real question. So if you've been a Christian for 10 years, or 15 years, or 20 years, you ought to be mature. You ought to be mature enough to evangelize well, to disciple well, to articulate the truth of the gospel well.

You ought to be spiritually mature if you're a Christian for that long. As a matter of fact, that's one of the reasons why you want to get in a good Bible-teaching church, a Christ-centered, verse-by-verse church, because otherwise you are going to be stunted in your growth, and you are going to be retarded in your growth because the pulpit is not feeding you.

There is the mandate by the pastor to feed the sheep, and you want to be fed on Sunday mornings in a way that is your biggest meal of the week. It is a sham, and it is a shame when people go to churches and say, well, you know, Sunday morning is kind of the watered-down, felt-needs deal for seeking people and for outreach, and then we get the real meat on Tuesday nights and Wednesday nights when we study, you know, Beth Moore and Joyce Meyer.

Both of those are ladies, both of those are Bible teachers. Beth would be a Christian, although Mystic and Joyce Meyer need to get saved. But that aside, I don't want you to stay immature. I'd like you to mature, and I think it's a very biblical concept, and so today's title is going to be How to Stay Spiritually Immature.

Drink Milk Instead of Meat

How to Stay Spiritually Immature. Forever in Blue Jeans, I think, was a Neil Diamond song. How about Forever in Diapers? How about Forever in Diapers? I'll never forget Pastor Romain, Calvary Chapel. I think it was Calvary Chapel, Costa Mesa, and I remember the story that he told about a couple who came in for marriage counseling, and they were married, and the husband was throwing some fits and stomping and storming around, and he was acting immature and selfishly.

And so Romain began to address the husband, and he was the leader of the family, and he was responsible for the spiritual temperature of the family. And so he said, please come with me. The wife can stay here.

Please come with me. And they were in the church building, and it was on a Tuesday or whatever, and so not every room is open. It was darker, and they walked down the halls and went into a room, still dark.

It must have been an evening counseling session, let's say Tuesday night. And Romain picked up something and handed it to this man, placed it in this man's hand, and then turned on the light, and lo and behold, they were in the nursery, and he had a diaper in his hand.

Pastor Romain said to the man, the next time you'd like to act like a baby in front of your wife, and holler and scream and kick and yell and act like you're an infant, just stop where you are, excuse yourself, go into the bathroom, put the diaper on, take off all your clothes, put on the diaper, do what babies do in diapers, clean yourself off, take a shower, put your clothes back on, and go out and be a man to your wife.

Wow. I thought my counseling was hard. It's like the Al Mohler School of Counseling. What is your problem? One. Two. What does the Bible say about your problem? Three. Why are we here? Yikes. So how to stay spiritually immature.

We don't want you to stay immature. We're using this as a teaching tool so that you'll mature. I think I talked about this back in chapter three someplace or another, but this is just new no-co specifically for this, not in light of 1 Corinthians chapter three.

How do you stay spiritually immature? Number one, drink milk when you should be eating meat. Drink milk when you should be eating meat. I made a joke the other day about having a bottle, a baby bottle, in my office if guys came in and complained and whined like a baby, kind of probably like Pastor Romaine did.

And actually, Harrington actually gave me a bottle, not for my own self, although I sometimes act like a baby, sadly, but for other people when they want to come in and act like a baby, and they want you to affirm them in their babiness, and they want to have you stroke them in their infantile thinking, and so he said, here is a bottle that you could give to people if they come in, men, and they want to act like a baby.

Surprisingly, we have lots of people who are coming to Bethlehem Bible Church through No Compromise Radio Ministry, but maybe now they'll decide not to do that. We dare you to attend this church. Drink milk when you should be eating meat.

Now, of course, if you think about a child and you say, well, you know what, I want to bulk this kid up and I want them to be a middle linebacker for the Chicago Bears football team. Let's start giving steak to the kid early on.

Well, there's going to be a problem because the kid just can't take that. They need to have their mother's milk or they need to have formula and or both, and so we don't mind babies drinking milk. Pretty soon they learn how to eat those smashed up peas and smashed up carrots, and then they move to meat products and etc.

But if you have been a Christian for a long time, you should be eating meat, and you don't need to have daily bread Christianity. If you'd like to read daily bread, I think mature Christians can. There's a nice little story, but that should just be the tip of the iceberg.

That should just be the fluff on top of everything. You need to have meat. Certainly, you don't say, if you'd like to be spiritually mature, don't say, Pastor, you know, water things down. Actually, if you'd like to stay immature, ask the pastor to preach super simple, super easy, ABCs, monosyllabic, fourth grade level.

That's what you ask the pastor to do. If you want to stay mature, do that. Write him a note. Say, Pastor, can you turn it down a little bit? Little heavy on sin, little heavy on the holiness of God, little heavy on substitutionary atonement.

I've got to know my inner self, and I've got self-actualization problems, and I'm not loving myself as I ought to, and I'd like to be stroked. I'd like to be coaxed. I'd like to be cajoled. I'd like to be like I'm the only one in the sanctuary, and you're talking to me about my needs.

After all, I go to the shrink, and that's what they do, and that's what I want you to do too. I'd like you to take me shallower. I'd like to have you do surface scratching areas. Just deal with the surface issues.

If you would like to stay immature, that's the way you should go. You should say things like this to your pastor. I don't really want any of that doctrinal preaching. That doctrinal preaching ain't no good for me.

I think I need practical things, Pastor. I need more application-oriented things. I need more relevant. After all, isn't God practical? The answer is God, by definition, is very practical in this life and in the next.

There is not anything more practical than the doctrine of God, than God himself, our great triune God. But I want you to know, and I stole this from MacArthur, that deep is better than shallow when it comes to your own personal study and when it comes to ministry from the pulpit.

We want you to grow, and part of that growth in grace includes growth in grace and knowledge. What does Peter say in 2 Peter 3? Verse 18, but grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

To him be the glory both now and to the day of eternity. Amen. ESV. You know, it's not too late for you to start learning and growing. Matter of fact, you're going to need sound doctrine. You're going to need deep doctrinal truths if you are going to overcome strong trials in your life and strong temptations that enter into your life.

And I know some of my listeners, you have lost children, and I don't know what could be more heartbreaking than losing a child. Well, little ditties from the pulpit aren't going to help. What's going to help is the pastor who preaches the full counsel of God, extolling the sovereign, generous God who controls all things and who is all wise and who never makes a mistake and who could be trusted even in times of hurt and in pain and sorrow and in bereavement.

To be bereaved means to rip. And when your soul is ripped, you can still lay your head down on the doctrine of the sovereignty of God and receive comfort and receive consoling and to have the God of all comfort.

You need to know who God is. How can God comfort you? How can God be the God of all comfort if you don't really know him that well? And it's just Jesus loves me this I know for the Bible tells me so. That is good to start, but then you need to flesh it out.

You need to have some incarnational type of doctrine, that is to say, to put some meat on the bones of the gospel that you were taught. My name is Mike Abendroth. We're No Compromise Radio, and you can always write us at info at nocompromiseradio .com.

We get lots of emailers. Lots of emailers. I think in the last week I've got emailers from the Czech Republic, and I've gotten one from Saudi Arabia. I've gotten one from, I don't know where else, but it seemed like it was around the world.

And so we want you to mature. We want you to grow up. We want you to have the growth through God's ordained means, that is the Spirit of God applying and illuminating the holy scriptures, scriptures that Paul said to the church at Thessalonica perform its work in those who believe.

And so I want you to go for the deep stuff. I want you to say to yourself, I should probably read Romans. People say, well, you don't want to study anything too difficult, and you kind of want to work your way into things.

How about Romans? I don't think that's too difficult. It is difficult, but it requires some work. It requires some study. You don't want to say, I don't like doctrinal preaching, because then you say, I don't like Romans.

I don't want you to be content to stay on milk. Congregations don't want to have the pastor go too deep, and their chant is over and over and over, take me shallower, take me shallower, take me shallower.

And that is why the pastor must not be at the beck and call of the congregational's whims, because the congregation doesn't know what they need if they are not trained. Oh, mature congregations, they know, Grace Community Church, they know.

But you need to grow up when it comes to your spiritual maturity. And if you are already 70 years old, and you're a baby in Christ, and you should have been a grown man in Christ, as you know, 1 John talks about children, young men, and fathers.

There is growth in Christianity. And so the children, they just know da-da. They just know that they're saved. They have known the Father because God has made himself known to them. The young men, they wield the word, and they are not overcome by Satan and his strategies anymore.

And then the fathers are very intimate with God the Father. And so make today the day that you begin to say, Lord, increase my understanding. Lord, increase my appetite for deeper things. Lord, help me understand Christology, study of Christ, soteriology, study of salvation.

These are going to be the doctrines that you'll think about forever and ever and ever and ever and ever and ever in heaven. So you might as well get a good grasp on them. Now, how to stay spiritually mature?

Make Church About Yourself

Well, one, drink milk when you should be eating meat. Number two, you should think church services and church people should revolve around you and what you personally like. It's all about you. If you haven't watched Brian Regan, the comedian on YouTube, you ought to, because he's got that I Walked on the Moon skit at the dinner party skit.

And for the most part, I think he's clean and he's funny. You have to use your mind if you're not going to just throw out a bunch of swear words. And I think he says something about Captain U-Planet.

It's all about you. I wonder if I could have him on as a guest on No Compromise Radio. Here's what the immature person does. They say things like, what can the church do for me? Where can I, how can they meet my needs?

I should pick a church how they can serve my family through youth ministry and through women's ministry. Now, I want a good youth ministry. I want a good women's ministry, but that's not how you pick the church.

That's how a spiritually immature person picks the church. By the way, I sometimes am glad people pick Bethlehem Bible Church for some of those reasons, but then I can get it into their noggin through the pulpit that that's not the reason why they should pick their next church, or they should stay at this church for what reason?

Because of the preaching of the Word. It's all about the Word. As MacArthur said, how do they handle the book? That is the question. I read in the Dallas Morning News, quote, shortly before the benediction at Fellowship of Las Colinas last Sunday, the pastor made a gridiron move wearing Troy Aikman's jersey.

That would be the Dallas Cowboys quarterback, Super Bowl winning quarterback of several teams ago. The pastor made a gridiron move wearing Troy Aikman's jersey, some baggy pants and athletic shoes. The Reverend Barry Young deftly threw a football across a row of seats.

He threw it to Michael Wood, who was honored for bringing six friends to church. Oh, I wish I could make this stuff up. I wish I could make it up. If you'd like to stay spiritually mature, then pick a church like that, a lame brain church that just says, we're a social club, but we'd like to tax write off, and we'd like to make ourselves feel good, so we'll say we're a church, even though it's nothing but a fellowship group.

Because if you don't proclaim the sovereign grace of God Almighty through the great high priest Jesus Christ, the only mediator who, through his life and substitutionary death confirmed by the resurrection, is the stairway to heaven, then there's no other hope.

It is just fun and games after that. It should be amazing. It should be something else, some kind of benefit to it. But you don't want to stay immature, so don't think that the church should revolve around you.

Have you ever thought about this? If you go to a new church and you see some obvious holes in the ministry of that church, some obvious deficits, some problem areas, some things they don't do very well, would it ever dawn on you to think, maybe I'm here to help plug up some of those holes?

Instead of complaining about it, and griping about it, and whining about it, and putting your finger in your mouth and sucking your thumb really, really hard, then you should say to yourself, hmm, I see that they don't really have a hospitality ministry, and they do preach the word here, and maybe, Lord, if you would allow the leaders to let me, and would you allow me to have the grace to do it, I would like to start a hospitality ministry because our church needs to be more hospitable.

That's a much better way. You should pick churches that preach the word of God. As a matter of fact, you should pick churches that preach the word of God but need other people. As a matter of fact, if you go to a church and they don't need you because they've got all the ministries, they have every ministry done, and they have every ministry done perfectly, you're not needed.

Don't go there. Now, of course, they don't have them done perfectly, but you know my point. If the church is on all cylinders, running on all cylinders, then why should you go? But you should go to a church that preaches the word of God, exclaims that Christ alone is Lord, and exhorts people to believe in that risen Lord.

Then you should say, you know, I'm here to help. It's why husbands and wives, when people say in marriage pre-marital counseling, we're so compatible. I'm thinking, you don't have any idea because you are very incompatible.

Everything about a man and a woman going to be married are incompatible. You have some same interests now, and your main interests are each other, and I get all that, but you'll soon learn that if you were completely compatible, completely alike, completely similar in agreement on all things, then you wouldn't need each other.

You wouldn't need each other, and so it's the same thing in a local church, and so how do you stay spiritually mature? Is hop from church to church to church to church with a big me, I, me, and mine. The unholy trinity, me, myself, and I, and when people come to our church, and I said, well, where'd you come from?

And they tell me, how long have you been there? Well, I find out they've been going from church to church to church to church. I know the church that I pastor is just next in the long line of, we're babies.

We want things to revolve around us, and so we go to a church, and then when people don't fall all over themselves to serve us, and to please us, and to stroke us, then we're going to leave. And friends, if that's the way you think about things, by the way, this is Mike Abendroth, No Compromise Radio Ministry, WVNE 760.

We also are, there's some folks that are playing around with trying to get us on some satellite channels and stuff like that, so maybe it won't be exclusive anymore for WVNE. But anyway, what we're doing is talking about spiritual immaturity.

So if you're at a church and you think it's all about you, then I've got news for you. The church is about Jesus Christ. Of course there should be one another's. Of course people should minister to Jesus Christ by ministering to you.

Of course that should happen. Well, I have a slogan around here that if Jesus is enough, you'll like Bethlehem Bible Church. If the preaching of God's Word is enough, you'll like it. And if you come for any other reason, you're probably not going to like it because the focus, the pinnacle, the Mount Everest, the precipice, everything that revolves around here is God speaking to us through the proclaimed Word.

And when you preach the Word, you will be preaching Christ Jesus because He is everywhere, Luke 24, John chapter 5. So if you say you want to stay spiritually immature, then just keep going to find churches that meet your needs.

You would never, by the way, walk into a king's throne room 2 ,000 years ago, 3 ,000 years ago, 6 ,000 years ago, or if you found a king today, I think Saudi Arabia still has a king, for that matter, you could go walk into the England's area to meet the queen.

You would not talk about yourself if you had any clue at all. Maybe you would in front of Queen Elizabeth, but you wouldn't back in the days of King Ahasuerus and King Nebuchadnezzar. You would never talk about yourself.

And I'm here today to talk to you, King, and try to figure out what I need from you. No, you would never say that. You just don't understand God as a king, if that's the focus. Matter of fact, I think somebody should probably write a book about Jesus as the king, understanding God as a king, because then it would be easier to work through some of these things.

Oh, I just wrote that book. Actually, I don't know when day one is going to publish it. It should be out within the next month or two. Maybe the fall, I'm not exactly sure, but it's done, typeset, ready to go.

I'd like to call it King, regarding King Jesus, but it's actually going to be called the Sovereignty and Supremacy of King Jesus. So there you have it. There's my promo. There's my plug. There's my YouPlanet.

My Cave and Drought Mystery YouPlanet. It's all about you. So if you'd like to stay immature, just say to yourself, that church exists for me. When I walk in, I figure everybody should be dropping all their stuff.

Here's what I do. When I go to the corporate worship service after the church service, I do say hello to a lot of different people, but I'm mainly trying to track down the visitors because I want to say hi to them.

I want to go out of my way to say, I'm going to not say hi to my friends right now. I'm going to go try to serve other people. I think that'd be good for you to do. After the service, say to your friends, you know, we'll talk in a little bit, but let's scout out, let's scope out the new people.

We have a cookie ministry. So if you're a visitor, we give you a bag of cookies and we, I don't know how many cookies, six or 12 or something like that. And it's got a little Bible verse on the outside, not about cookies, but probably about some gift or God is great or something like that.

And what we do then is I say to myself, anybody who's got a bag of cookies, they must be a visitor. And then I can hone in on them. I can target practice on them and say, all right, I'm going to find them.

And we give them a Bible and, you know, or a book or something like that and some stuff about the church. So why don't you do that? Why don't you say it's not about you? Worship service isn't about you.

And by the way, even when it comes to salvation, it's not primarily about us. It's about the Father giving a love gift to the Son, people, the church, God's chosen elect that the Son goes and rescues and redeems and conforms to His own image, the image of Himself, the Son, and then hands back those ones that He has redeemed through the power of the Spirit of God back to the Father.

And so it's all about an inter-Trinitarian love gift. That's what salvation is primarily. Now, secondarily, God does in fact love us and there's a personal love that God has for us. I get it. But if you want to talk about crazy love, you ought to talk about the Trinitarian love for one another.

That would be the crazy love. It would be secondary love, but that kind of book just doesn't sell. Secondary love just doesn't seem to sell. Mike Ebendroth, No Compromise Radio Ministry. How do you stay spiritually immature?

Well, you don't want to. So go find yourself a Bible-teaching church and go pour your heart out and your life out in service of Jesus the King by serving others.

Stay Away from the World and Stay in the Church

No Compromise Radio with Pastor Mike Ebendroth 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.